What do you think of casting Emma Watson as the next James Bond?

The Bond of the novels wasn’t always so grabby. In the original Moonraker, at one point, Bond and the novel’s resident sexy woman character Gala Brand (a police officer) go swimming in their underwear, but that’s as sexy as things get. The next thing they know, the bad guys blow up part of a chalk cliff above them, and Bond gets them out of the way of the rockfall just in time, but their remaining clothes get torn off.

So, is a Bond who isn’t someone who we are being enticed to admire, still Bond? What is the nature of the thrill we are supposed to get from him?

James Bond was a creation of the mid-20th century, invented by a man who was born in 1908. He was supposed to be a blunt instrument, a rather characterless killing machine who nevertheless had some vulnerabilities, as dramatised in the first novel, Casino Royale, in which he fell in love with his assistant agent and was heartbroken to discover that she was a double.

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Bond only makes sense if he has this huge government organisation backing him up, supplying him with intel and gadgets and cool cars, and legitimating all the mook-slaughtering he does. (Did you count all the dead bodies in the casino shootout scene in No Time to Die? I didn’t.)

They certainly present a series of images of masculinity, but no man now can or should get away with behaving towards women the way Connery’s Bond does. In Thunderball he literally sexually assaults Patricia Fearing, grabbing her and kissing her when she obviously wishes he didn’t, and then later, more or less muscles her into the steam room and undresses her.

Daniel Craig’s version represented, in my view, Bond’s crisis of masculinity.

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It can be argued that the Bond films project a positive image of (straight, white) masculinity, and (straight, white) men need such things, otherwise they might… I dunno, vanish, or something, as if masculinity is like Tinkerbell, only there as long as people believe in it, and so they serve a purpose.

Now, the typical response from the male viewer who feels that it’s somehow unfair to point this out is usually B-but he’s a fictional character!

It’s time to end this fantasy. Let’s move on to other stories.

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Yes, he is. Sean Connery didn’t actually non-consensually kiss Molly Peters. They were acting.

In the end, the Bond films are dreams of power.

In spite of this, Bond neither appreciates Gala’s nudity nor makes a suggestive remark; they’re both too busy throwing up from shock and chalk dust ingestion. At the end of the book, she’s off to marry her policeman fiancé and he’s on with the next case. No sex, not even a regretful, would-that-things-had-been-otherwise kiss.

After a series of tumors, woman’s odd-looking tongue explains everything - Ars Technica

By the time Bond was on the screen, he had metamorphosed into something more complex: a more humorous, more roguish figure, heavily influenced by Sean Connery’s screen presence, which was so influential that Fleming retconned Bond to be half-Scottish and half-Swiss so as to account for his accent.

… HOWEVER RELUCTANTLY.’

Indeed, if she’d not been immune to him, we would have lacked respect for her, I think, just as if Ana de Armas as Paloma had needed rescuing by him, the way countless Bond girls have done for decades (honourable exception: Carey Lowell in Licence to Kill), she would have been far less fun. I greatly enjoyed Paloma’s combat pragmatism: hitting her enemies with her gun when she’d run out of ammunition, kicking the shit out of them when they’re down, and then flinging herself at them, knocking them over and shooting them with their own dropped guns.

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I like Emma Watson. I think she’s a good sort and a decent actor.

But he is a fictional character who is being presented as if he is something for the male viewer to aspire to.

I can see the end title card now.

Hello, I have a question about astral projection. I started to get interested in this a little while after my mum passed in april. I thought I may be able to see her and speak with her if I managed to achieve astral projection. Since this interest, every time i sleep on my back I go into sleep paralysis. However, I cant progress into astral projection because it is very scary for me as I feel like I'm suffocating when this happens. I panic and force myself to wake up. This only ever happened about once a year before this. It sometimes lasts a long time. This has happened about 3 times per week since my mum died, as mentioned on a previous post. I no longer try to go into it anymore(due to the suffocating feeling), but it still happens. I read that sleep paralysis is the pathway to astral projection. Why has this started to happen so frequently since simply taking an interest in it? Is this connected to the afterlife? I am concerned about it as I now cannot seem to stop this happening. Could it be my mum trying to communicate? Im asking due to more knowledge around this in this group.

So then, the Bond movies become a study of a middle-aged man experiencing limited job satisfaction.

This is hardly an original take. But Craig was the first Bond who behaved as though he didn’t want to be 007. This is a Bond who, when Silva starts getting rather ambiguously hot and heavy with him and remarks ‘First time for everything, yes?’, replies ‘What makes you think this is my first time?’ Impossible to imagine Connery doing that.

Without that, he’s just a straight white male dude running around killing people.

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Now: things are not always the same as their origins.

But how long can we go on having a Bond who doubts himself? The Bond of the books didn’t have the imagination to seriously doubt himself. He got depressed when his wife got killed, and he got brainwashed when the Russkies captured him, but he never seriously doubts whether he should be doing this or not. He just accepts that a certain jadedness is part of the job.

See, I just don’t know what Bond is good for, if he isn’t a sexy, charming bastard; and the thing about being a sexy, charming bastard these days is that you come across as merely a bastard.

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I don’t want anyone to be the next James Bond. I think the franchise needs to end.

Now, this is where we get into a rather tiresome debate about representation.

If we turn back the clock and pretend like it’s 1964, that would be a disgraceful failure of imagination. Make Bond Great Again. I don’t want to watch that, and I think only a shrill cohort of idiot male chauvinists want to watch that. A Bond who is doggedly masculine in an old-school way, in the teeth of a changed world, is just an asshole.

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Like, You wish you were this cool, don’t you? You wish you were so irresistible that the woman who fought you off ten minutes ago changes her mind, and lets you fuck her in the steam room.

Fine. But actually, the Bond films don’t do this.

Roger Moore’s version was meaner towards women (Moore himself disliked this, but there wasn’t much he could do about it) but the stories became more campy, so it didn’t seem that serious. Timothy Dalton’s version was angry and vengeful and dark, but the films became, for those reasons, less entertaining.

Why do people turn a blind eye to bad behaviour if someone is very good looking? Whereas if someone is ugly, they get harshly judged for everything?

But as the years went by, and society changed, so Bond changed.

Connery had all the original character’s emotional unavailability, but overlaid it with a shiny veneer of laconic charm. He was an aspirational figure: someone who white straight men were encouraged to want to be like. In the words of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, he took down bad guys and looked good doing it.

The sexy and charming parts are blithely and rightly ignored, the way Lashana Lynch in No Time To Die was immune to the charms of Daniel Craig.

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Pierce Brosnan’s version was the first one in which the franchise itself took shots at Bond’s persona, with Judi Dench’s M calling him a ‘sexist, misogynist dinosaur’. The Brosnan Bond differed in his character according to what scene he was in; sometimes he was more dark and brooding, at other time he was all charm and martinis and quips.

‘JAMES BOND WILL RETURN.

Edit: That last bit’s not actually correct. Bond does force a kiss on Gala, before the cliff gets blown up on them, and she is not pleased about it.

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