The painful truth about our love affair with Bond

Many of the memorable scenes in the movies are direct, Freudian renderings of castration fantasies

As they are saying down your local multiplex, Bond. Is. Back. Endless amounts of penis-shaped weaponry and the return of that temporarily abandoned phallic symbol, the cigar; a plot to take over the world; smutty double entendres, and every five minutes, a panorama of some exotic city over the legend "Kazakhstan". Miss Moneypenny will say "Oh, James"; Q will say "Now pay attention, 007"; the villain will say "Goodbye, Mr Bond" and the world will be saved so that Eliza Manningham-Buller can carry on running it. Triff.

Actually, it's not so much a case of Bond being back as Bond never having gone away in the first place. By now, the series is so firmly embedded in the collective imagination – and I read somewhere that a quarter of the world's population has now seen at least one James Bond movie – that, like the Carry On series, it hardly needs to be topped up with new episodes such as Die Another Day. Surely every cineaste can without effort summon up a dozen iconic moments from the films: Rosa Klebb's knife-tipped shoes; Jill Masterson being gilded to death; the castrating laser beam and the divine line "No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die"; Oddjob's bowler hat, the collapsing bridge over the piranha tank, and too many others to count.

But in another sense, Bond never went away because, both in the books and, more lavishly, in the films, his world corresponds with shocking directness with the black heart of the sexual imagination. It is quite appalling how many of the really memorable scenes are direct, Freudian renderings of castration fantasies, from Ursula Andress's famous entrance out of the sea wielding a knife onwards. The most elaborate and enjoyable is at the beginning of You Only Live Twice. The film, scripted by Roald Dahl and bearing a majestic theme tune by John Barry, is the best of all the series, and begins in fine, psychological style; a space shuttle is swallowed up by a devouring mouth of a larger vessel, cutting off a hapless astronaut's umbilical lifeline and casting him into space in a grotesque inversion of giving birth.

We love them, I think, because they have a dream-like quality, dealing in symbols and wish-fulfilment and not at all in plausibility. That's true about the books, as well – the speed with which Fleming wrote Casino Royale, it's often been said, is evidence of a well of subconscious desire. Global and local realities occasionally intrude in the form of a female Prime Minister, the Cold War, renegade terrorist groups or the acknowledgement that M, these days, may not necessarily be a man. But no one really cares. They are most truthful when they produce images, however preposterous, of male sexual desire and dreams of fabulous, uninterrupted sadism.

These will not date, though lots of aspects have, and the early episodes now have a fascinating period charm. They rest on the assumption that the audience is probably not going to go to any of these exotic places and doesn't imagine that many of those devices Q thinks up are ever going to be commonplace parts of our lives. (No, dear, not the exploding fountain pen). Recently, I was struck by the strange, Zen-like way the camera freezes whenever anyone gets into a lift in From Russia With Love, before realising that, of course, the old double-doored lift with a hand-cranked grill would have been all that the audience would have known.

And, as time goes on, it does start to seem as if the movies are in some ways less unrealistic than one might have thought. We've learnt in recent years that many officers of the security services really have behaved like renegades within the service, just as Bond does. And if those reckless plans to destroy cities and hold the Western World to ransom once seemed enjoyable froth and no more, I think they start to seem plausible since 11 September 2001. Osama bin Laden in his headquarters in a hollowed-out mountain in Afghanistan or Yemen, bringing off "spectaculars," as the IRA used to call them, on the most appalling scale may have studied the Bond movies. Some attacks imagined by Bond movies, indeed, such as firing mortars at MI6 headquarters, have subsequently been attempted in real life.

They certainly have something to say, although probably less than they used to; they define, as the most vulgar art has a knack of doing, the dreams and paranoia of a particular moment in history. Of course, they are disgraceful, and sometimes, as in the dismal Roger Moore period, hopeless as well. But in conscious and unconscious ways, they can be interesting, and never more interesting than if one asks oneself: "Why, exactly, am I enjoying this ocean of bilge so much?" Because you do enjoy it, when it works. Of course you do, even if you would rather not. I would never trust anyone who claimed that they were bored by Goldfinger.

p.hensher@independent.co.uk