What do you think of casting Emma Watson as the next James Bond?
08.06.2025 00:20
… HOWEVER RELUCTANTLY.’
‘JAMES BOND WILL RETURN.
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.
Is it true that most Indian men are gay and they just hide their feelings?
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.
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.)
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.
World Boxing apologizes for naming Olympic champion Imane Khelif in sex test policy - NBC News
Fine. But actually, the Bond films don’t do this.
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!
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.
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.
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.
In the end, the Bond films are dreams of power.
How would you spank me if I had been sent home from a school camp because of my poor behavior?
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.
Now: things are not always the same as their origins.
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.
Screen time and physical activity habits linked to adolescent stress and depression - PsyPost
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.
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.
It’s time to end this fantasy. Let’s move on to other stories.
What type of narcissist cheats more and gets pleasure out of hurting you, even if they're married?
But as the years went by, and society changed, so Bond changed.
Without that, he’s just a straight white male dude running around killing people.
Now, this is where we get into a rather tiresome debate about representation.
We've Finally Seen The Skyscraper Tsunami That Shook Earth For 9 Days - ScienceAlert
I don’t want anyone to be the next James Bond. I think the franchise needs to end.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Wells Fargo Stock Rises as Fed Lifts Asset Cap After 7 Years - Barron's
But he is a fictional character who is being presented as if he is something for the male viewer to aspire to.
Daniel Craig’s version represented, in my view, Bond’s crisis of masculinity.
I like Emma Watson. I think she’s a good sort and a decent actor.
South Korea’s Venus-focused cubesat advances as larger missions face NASA cuts - SpaceNews
So then, the Bond movies become a study of a middle-aged man experiencing limited job satisfaction.
I can see the end title card now.
Yes, he is. Sean Connery didn’t actually non-consensually kiss Molly Peters. They were acting.
The U.S. hasn’t seen a new confirmed human bird flu case in nearly 4 months — why? - Yahoo