My attachment to the James Bond character took root in the early 1970s.
That by way of original stories written by Ian Fleming — back when the best of what was worth reading meant ink on paper. If the first of among this had been his 1959 novel Goldfinger, this would be the place to note that. While certainly among them, Doctor No rather more dominantly stands out in my mind today as I look back on those days.
No doubt the part where Agent 007 dispatches bad guys by burying them in mountains of sh** had something to do with it (and reveals something about my maturity in those days).
Around that same time, my grandfather bought or traded for a Hamilton Pulsar identical to the one worn on screen by Roger Moore in Live and Let Die. Papa Deaton had a dedication to precision timekeepers born of stories from his youth where trains collided on shared tracks due to improperly synchronized pocket watches and experience in adulthood on military hardware production lines running apace to win World War II.
This begat for me an inextricable result of “James Bond watches” that defined a bit of me when I went off to college a decade later. More particularly, I remember taking part in the setup of what was then called a networked computer bulletin board system for remote collaboration; our lofty goal was to definitively identify the Seiko watch models issued by Q-Branch for field deployments in movies The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker.
Later still in my life, progressively available LaserDiscs and Betamax tapes and DVDs and Blu-ray offerings spelled convenient and unlimited opportunities to every James Bond movie ever made, with new ones added within a year and then less of theatrical release. The Internet spawned all sorts of “forums” dedicated to one or the other, along with “experts” eager to serve as ambassadors who’d bridge the divides.
And none of it was fun anymore.
Part of that was unquestionably because the Internet was what it was always destined to become. Those “forums” pre-dated so many of the brand name social media platforms that addict people today. They also revealed the essence of what the vast majority of those platforms are today.
But another part is reflected in imagery that comes to mind from a description of Gulliver during his voyage to Brobdingnag, examining the most spectacular breast in that land — from the perspective of the tiny person that he was among them. No beauty can hold its position against ever more granular scrutiny.
Here alone I must confess that too much of the luster has gone from my interest in James Bond watches, for having too intensely searched for, discovered, and finally revealed so many of their secrets.
Thus I am afraid that the work of identifying and applying any ultimate “Goldfinger Standard” may have the unintended and certainly undesired result of costing Goldfinger too much of its well-deserved luster as a motion picture.
