Jenna StockerHere we are in an age where we’ve busted the things of the old world and our beliefs and our understanding of it, and supplanted them with a husk of civilization. Nothing embodies our slow march to the enshittification of our time more than what’s happening in popular culture. And whatever you think you understand about the plunging trajectory of this flaming bin of safety commodification, blasé conformism, and dead-eye purge of excitement and thrill, it is clearly defined in one man: Bond, James Bond.
The longest-running film franchise based on the spy-thriller novels by Ian Fleming is in the final stages of selecting its next protagonist, and let me tell you, I’m not impressed.
Of course, I come from a place that lived squarely in the “before times” when men were unabashedly men and “woke” was a thing you did in the morning or maybe at noontime after enjoying a harmless night with actual people in an actual social setting where there was smoking, drinking, flirting, and even gambling.
But we’ve seemed to transfer the morality of sinlessness into a social-justice crusade against everything Bond was about. And society is poorer because of it.
“Toxic masculinity” has made the rounds, hot on the lips of every liberal arts college, womyn’s studies master’s program, and — proving its legitimacy as one of the more stupid and vapid social contagions in a long list of what modern feminism has done to the male-female relationship — the pages of such serious and studious periodicals like Cosmopolitan, Teen Vogue, and Vanity Fair.
Then, in the trickle-down empowerment economy, #MeToo became the currency of the social climbers, grifters, and general feminist bitches who were upset that they were home alone on Saturday nights. The patriarchy must be stomped, and Bond became just another man-target in the Karen wars of the 21st century.
It’s a miracle Daniel Craig — the latest on-screen embodiment of the British superspy — lasted as long as he did. But his rugged demeanor and machismo had to be tempered with some underlying trauma and vulnerabilities that gave him a pass where the previous Bonds would not. And do not. It would be silly to pretend that Bond could carry on, untouched, by today’s perpetual reckoning and iconoclasm. The director of “No Time to Die,” the 25th installment of the film franchise, Cary Joji Fukunaga, explained as much to The Hollywood Reporter:
Is it Thunderball or Goldfinger where, like, basically Sean Connery’s character rapes a woman?” Fukunaga asks. “She’s like ‘No, no, no,’ and he’s like, ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ That wouldn’t fly today.
Fukunaga welcomed Phoebe Waller-Bridge (the “Fleabag” creator and noted She-woman Man Hater) to the scriptwriting team, signaling that Bond’s manhood was on the chopping block:
Perhaps the biggest hurdle for the film was bringing its globe-trotting lothario into Hollywood’s post-#MeToo reality. After all, No Time to Die began development in 2016, before the industry embarked on a period of self-reflection in the wake of Harvey Weinstein’s downfall for predatory behavior. Though Craig’s oeuvre puts a greater emphasis on the quality of drinks than the quantity of women, the history of Bond includes casual misogyny and worse.
I’m not aware of any fans of the franchise, or anyone who is even peripherally familiar with it, who walk away from one of the films thinking, “Gosh, these Bond films are spectacular action productions, but they could really use more female equity and empowerment.” So of course, in Hollywoodland, where every -ism imaginable is projected onto the American consumer, they take this on as a “problem” to be solved. “You can’t change Bond overnight into a different person. But you can definitely change the world around him and the way he has to function in that world. It’s a story about a white man as a spy in this world, but you have to be willing to lean in and do the work to make the female characters more than just contrivances,” Fukunaga says.
In this sense, James Bond isn’t a man of international intrigue, excitement, adventure, and sexual desire. He’s dangerous — and those very qualities that make him terminally dangerous to a society that shuns anything adjacently masculine, which, lobbing a grenade into the oppo feminist trenches mid-Karen War — are just what we need to blow up a culture drunk on its own androgyny and cheap sex sexlessness.
Sorry, gals, but your very cris de coeur is how we got here. After women’s liberation and touting promiscuity as freedom and prostitution and pornography as honorable sex work, and righteous indignation at one Shane Gillis joke (spot the lie, though!), the champions of feminist theory are big mad that James Bond sleeps with women and makes sexual innuendo part of his fictional repertoire. Yes folks, we’re talking about a fictional character.
To Bond’s creator, Fleming, this wouldn’t be a big surprise. But the evolution of his hero might be. And the OG Bond, Sean Connery, is being unfairly maligned by our backward-jeering progressive cultural gatekeepers.
“I never liked James Bond. I never liked the way women were in James Bond. The whole concept of James Bond is drenched and born out of profound sexism,” Helen Mirren ninny-splained, proving that escapism and fun just aren’t meant for some people. Fortunately, former Bond star Pierce Brosnan weighed in, defending 007. “Yes, there’s a certain agreement there. But there’s a certain world and room to move within the proscenium arch of what [Bond creator and author] Ian Fleming put down. So there’s always going to be conflict.”
Bond isn’t a problem to be solved. Bond is an icon. Connery’s portrayal in particular is a bulwark against the degradation of masculinity.
Connery played Bond starting with 1962’s “Dr. No,” and his portrayal was so striking that Fleming later revised his Bond novels to better conform to the Connery image. There is a reason his Bond will be the one by which all others are measured, feminism be damned, and it is in his swagger, composure, wit, cool confidence, and the demeanor of a dangerous man in physicality, intelligence, and sexual magnetism. The “problem” his haters have is confusing this with being “toxic.” And just like everything else related to romance, sex, men and women, and relationships, the feminist mystique is on a mission to eradicate any semblance of these things in society, assuring us that masculine and feminine is a zero-sum game rather than a balance.
What Connery’s Bond does in the six films in which he starred is simplify the natural roles between the sexes, good and evil, honor and dishonor, and between sophistication and charm and repulsive vulgarity. Bond may have been a bit brash and debonair, but he wasn’t vulgar. He could imply sexual tension without being explicit or tawdry. Much of that was because of Connery. And Bond was never a true-to-life biography, but an escape into the world of intrigue, desire, adventure, thrill, and danger.
A new Bond film is in the works, directed by Denis Villeneuve (“Dune”, “Blade Runner 2049”) with a new super-spy leading man. The odds-on markets have narrowed the list to a few possibilities, and I have my preference (I will withhold it so I don’t unfairly sway the casting director or film executives), but in the end, modern portrayals might be doomed before the cameras roll. Instead of staying true to Fleming’s vision and Bond’s essence, the franchise has recently bent the knee to a modern ideology that treats masculinity and anything tied to is as problematic. So we might get an action film, but will it be a “Bond” film? Not if we can no longer separate fantasy and entertainment from moralizing and “doing the work.”
In Fleming’s “Goldfinger,” Bond’s masculinity has more than persuasive power. It ends as Bond looks into (criminal lesbian) Pussy Galore’s “deep blue-violet eyes that were no longer hard … He bent and kissed them lightly. He said, ‘They told me you only liked women’. She said, ‘I never met a man before.’”
Fleming insisted when he wrote a response to a critic that Galore “only needed the right man to come along and perform the laying on of hands in order to cure her psycho-pathological malady.”
Connery could do it; will the new Bond be able to save us, too?
.png)
.png)
