Take a look at the 40-second video that precedes this article. Done? OK, now I have an important question I have to ask you: how is this not the most desirable classic car of all time?
By “this,” I mean Aston Martin’s Continuation of the 1964 DB5, the car Sean Connery — James Bond himself — made famous in Goldfinger. Replete with machine guns (fake, of course), bulletproof rear shield (don’t count on it), and that rear sprayer thing (now shooting out water rather than oil, for obvious reasons), it is as faithful a replication of the “most famous car in the world” — the film producers’ label when the original two cars were shown at the 1964 New York World’s Fair — as legally allowed. It is, save perhaps for the outright lethality, as close as any non-fiction human will ever get to being “licenced to kill.”
Yet, when I offered up an update on the Continuation to our news editor — the first one just rolled out of Newport Pagnell — he dismissed the whole thing as unable to generate any online traction (that’s “clickbait” to you and I). My appeal to the grand poo-bah, Driving’s own managing editor, barely mustered a “meh.”
“Aston Martin is so yesterday,” said the man who pays the bills.
And he’s exactly right. Aston Martin — certainly this Aston Martin — is so yesterday. In fact, that’s why it’s so important to me and not him. The Q’d-out DB5 may have had a huge part in my yesterdays, but it was just bit player in his.
Nostalgia is hardly an exact science — as late as the 17th century, it was considered a mental disorder to be eradicated so soldiers wouldn’t yearn so much to return home — but the one thing on which everyone agrees is that sentimentality is a wistfulness germinated in youth. To paraphrase Aristotle, give me a child between 13 and 25, and I will show you his future remembrances.
Like music, it seems, the cars first aspired to in our youth leave the most lasting impressions. Whether it’s as Mark Joseph Stern, writing in Slate, says that “the more we like a song, the more we get treated to neurochemical bliss,” or the fact that James Bond got Pussy Galore, that with which we make a committed memory trace in our youth is likely to rule the reminisces of our future.
I worship motorcycles much more than cars and, seemingly proof in the pudding, I am stuck in the narrowest of nostalgic eras, the past with which I seemingly long to reconnect stretching from just 1981 to 1983. I don’t know if it’s because by that time, I was almost on the cusp of affording the superbikes of that era and so I could at least pretend to own one, or whether while studying for my B.Eng., their technology appealed to my burgeoning engineering ambitions.
Whatever the case, I own a 1982 Honda CB1100RC, long for the 1981 Laverda RGS1000 I so stupidly sold and, quite literally last night, bought a 1983 CX650 Turbo — or at least I clicked on the “Buy Now” button — on a whim I still don’t quite understand. Everything I covet comes from that seemingly incongruously narrow window — thank God there wasn’t a 1983 Kawasaki GPZ1100 on sale last night, or else there’d be bikes in my bedroom — motorcycles of any other generation, even those but a year older or newer, hold no special place in my commemoration of the past. Nostalgia, despite its seemingly nebulous origins, can be pinpoint precise in its historic demarcation.
And even though I don’t get nearly as dewy-eyed about cars, I can remember precisely where I was when I saw Goldfinger for the first time. My northern Quebec hometown had no English theatre, and English TV programming consisted of The Friendly Giant, Don Messer’s Jubilee, and Hockey Night in Canada, so I didn’t see 007 take on Oddjob until I went to university. But since I was only 15 — and still very much impressionable — Sean Connery’s conquest of Jill Masterson didn’t fall on deaf ears. Being a devotee of all things internally combusted — and, again, barely 15 years old — I assumed it was all because of the DB5. That our managing and news editors don’t worship at the altar of the DB5 — and guys, just so you know, the Corgi toy replica of the Silver Birch Aston was the best-selling toy of 1964 — has less to do with an absence of nostalgia than simply different car, different girl.
If one talks to men of a certain vintage, James Bond — the Sean Connery version, at least — represents whom we, as boys, wanted to be when we grew up. That, as adolescents, some of us mistook the car and not the man as the reason he was so cool — and by cool we meant he got, say it after me because it’s a proper name, Pussy Galore — remains irrelevant, even though we are now (hopefully) smart enough to realize there’s more to life than a double-overhead cam straight-six engine and twin machine guns.
Actually, we’re not. As pathetic as it may seem, pretty much every owner of a classic car has a self-image of himself behind the wheel of the classic he covets. That this perception does not jive with bald, paunchy reality matters not a whit. Such images were, says the science of nostalgia, burned into our synapses a long time since, and the pitiful amount of self-realization the typical male possesses is powerless to shut it down. Get behind the wheel of a Goldfinger DB5 and you are James Bond, machine guns, bulletproof shield and all.
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July 10, 2020 at 05:00PM
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Motor Mouth: From Nostalgia With Love - Driving
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