The silly Bonds and the serious Bonds
For many, it may seem there are two types of James Bond films.
One type consists of the the entries that focus on the spy stuff, the action or psychology of Bond. We may, in the interest of brevity, call these the serious Bonds.
The other type consists of the entries that instead are fun, adventurous and don’t take themselves too seriously. Here I’ll call them the camp Bonds.
Don’t get too hung up on the labels. I’ll get back to them in a little bit. What’s important is what they mean, and why there are two types of Bond films. Or maybe there aren’t…
A rough* division would perhaps look something like this:
* Many titles can be put in both columns, and your mileage may vary a bit on where each film is placed. That is, however, not a weakness of this hypothesis, but in fact one of the main points, as we’ll see.
I’ve been around the James Bond fandom long enough, but also the casual viewers to know that most of them feel that one of these columns much more represents the True Tone™ of the Bond films. They look upon the Bond films from the other column as less Bondian. Thus, for viewers in…
