007's Masculine Mystique

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Raymond Chandler famously suggested that Bond was “what every man would like to be and what every woman would like to have between her sheets.” This is generally perceived to mean that men want to be Bond because he daringly saves the world from megalomaniacal madmen while bedding women who lust after him because he’s dangerous. But what if all of this were just cover? What if men wanted to be Bond because secretly—or maybe not so secretly—they wanted to be less neutered, more decisive, more graceful under pressure, more accountable, and less postmodern?

Occasionally interesting (the para above) and provocative analysis of James Bond in The American Conservative of all places.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/007s-masculine-mystique/

Well perhaps worryingly and tellingly..... I am pretty much in tune with that analysis.

To my mind a key change in the Bab's era of Bond is a contempt for the character and a contempt for this kind of perception. There is a desire to make it something else today and keyed with a teen demographic of semi-autistic self obsessed pretentious wannabes (as I politely and sympathetically consider them) this and other franchises become laden by a world that similarly hates them, inflicting soap like melodrama and contrived misery to counter any sense of dignity or honour they might otherwise warrant. Our fantasy's are increasingly guilt trips we dare not admit because no one trusts the simple ability to separate fact from fantasy any more.

I agree with most of that piece, with the exception of this paragraph, where the writer's own backward politics seep in and he begins to rant.

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Where Valentine’s contemporaries took to the trenches, the young men of today’s Britain riot in the streets.  That’s what a half-century of self-entitlement does to a society: it takes the backbone out of people while simultaneously giving them notions of grandeur. This makes them malleable. Make enough people malleable and you can make them, en masse, believe in any fancy or whim. Want to know why gay marriage is inevitable? Because today’s man, coerced into believing in his own emasculation, would introduce himself to a lesbian named Pussy Galore by saying: “I respect your lifestyle choice.” When James Bond met a lesbian named Pussy Galore, he slept with her.

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There's so much social welfare today that people have forgotten what it is to make their own decisions rather than to leave them to others.

Didn't expect Connery to be a proto-Thatcherite.

A fine article. The element of "old school" in Bond is indeed one of the things which set him apart from his cookie-cutter, gun-toting contemporaries.

Did anyone else think Brozza was too skinny in Goldeneye?

Pretty boy yes, but didn't look good otherwise in his pool scenes.

Brozza is the most feminine Bond I can imagine and that's not a good thing.

Babs should have put him in a dress not Craig - I might've gone for him in a club in Thailand.

lachesis wrote:

To my mind a key change in the Bab's era of Bond is a contempt for the character and a contempt for this kind of perception. There is a desire to make it something else today .....

BINGO! Spot on.

Babs Coltrane will never admit this because she probably hasn't consciously admitted it to herself, but she and her Hollywood friends see Bond as a problem: he's white, male, and heterosexual (and nominally Christian), and thus like all white, male, heterosexuals, he's at the root of all the problems, ills, and plagues of the world. Bond is somebody that needs fixing. Why do I say that?

Because if Babs and Amy were really serious about gender equality (as Babs has claimed, including using Dench and Craig for that atrocious EQUALS video on YouTube), they could easily have spun off the Bond series into any number of new films with new characters that included women and/or colored people. For example: EON considered spin-off films with Jinx and Wai-Lin in lead, starring roles, but both projects never fully materialized. Why? Had they done so back then, they could have finally gotten back to being trend setters instead of trend followers. Now, every film franchise is spinning off characters into solo films, and "universe building" is big business. If EON tries to do it now they'll look like followers. But that's not why they didn't make spin-off movies; that's not why they haven't created the adventures of 003 (female 00-agent) or 009 (gay 00-agent) or 002 (black 00-agent) or prequel stories about Q or M.....etc...

The real reason why such spin-off movies will probably never occur is not because they may be creatively problematic or because they might not make money (I think they would); the real reason these films don't get made is because the goal and the aim isn't to bring these minority players into characters/personages of their own, but it is simply to change the essence, the very nature of who 007 is. It's why we get feminist drivel nonsense like Lea Seydoux claiming Bond is more "feminine" in SPECTRE. It's why Babs Coltrane puts 007 in a dress and has M pummel him repeatedly with spurious data about how 'women do 2/3rds of the world's work, but only make 10 cents for every dollar a man makes' (or some other nonsense). It's why Amy Paschal even allows and entertains the idea that Idris Elba could ever play James Bond. It's why a hint was dropped in SKYFALL that Bond may have done something sexual with a dude in his past.

No, for you see, it's not the rest of the world that needs to step up and take responsibility for their own fortunes; for the way they are perceived; for the opportunities they create and the successes they enjoy. No, instead, it is Bond who must change and it is Babs Coltrane and her largely irrelevant, put-out-to-pasture, neutered, locked-in-the-basement stepbrother, Michael G. Wilson, who are going to make sure that Bond atones for the sin of being straight, white and male by getting in touch with his feminine side; by admitting his bi-curiousity; by understanding the lives and struggles of black African-American colored persons of color by instead being PLAYED by a black African-American colored person of color.

Didn't Fleming often put Bond through dire situations as a way of "punishing" the character? I swear, if Fleming had never written the torture scene in CR and that it was something the filmmakers would came up with, you'd accuse them of showing contempt over Bond's character by beating his manhood. Fleming often tried to emphasize that Bond is not a good person and that he shouldn't be a man to admire, only that he's a man you'd want on your side. He's a bastard, but he's OUR bastard. So when M criticizes Bond's character, it's not actually out of line. That whole book TSWLM was made to make clear to young readers of that.

Makeshift Python wrote:

Didn't Fleming often put Bond through dire situations as a way of "punishing" the character? I swear, if Fleming had never written the torture scene in CR and that it was something the filmmakers would came up with, you'd accuse them of showing contempt over Bond's character by beating his manhood. Fleming often tried to emphasize that Bond is not a good person and that he shouldn't be a man to admire, only that he's a man you'd want on your side. He's a bastard, but he's OUR bastard. So when M criticizes Bond's character, it's not actually out of line. That whole book TSWLM was made to make clear to young readers of that.

Very well said! Yet as a Bond fan from a very young age I can't help but admire him in many ways.

Makeshift Python wrote:

Didn't Fleming often put Bond through dire situations as a way of "punishing" the character? I swear, if Fleming had never written the torture scene in CR and that it was something the filmmakers would came up with, you'd accuse them of showing contempt over Bond's character by beating his manhood. Fleming often tried to emphasize that Bond is not a good person and that he shouldn't be a man to admire, only that he's a man you'd want on your side. He's a bastard, but he's OUR bastard. So when M criticizes Bond's character, it's not actually out of line. That whole book TSWLM was made to make clear to young readers of that.

I apologimize. I must've missed the book where Fleming has Bond put on high heel shoes, a dress, and a platinum blonde-wig and has a woman off-screen berate him like a little school boy with ridicurous "facts" such as: "Every year 70 million girls are deprived of even a basic education and a staggering 60 million are sexually assaulted on the way to school". Excuse me, but what the fudge does that have to do with 007? Is he somehow to carry the burden for all the evil and injustice committed in the world?

When Babs Coltrane-Broccoli has Dench's M scold Bond because women only own 1% of the world's land, that ***ABSOLUTELY IS OUT OF LINE**** !!!!

The EQUALS video may not be official cannon, but it speaks VOLUMES about the way Babs Coltrane-Broccoli thinks and what her view of 007 really is. She whored out the character in the worst possible way in order to get a little street cred in the "womyn's rights" movement, but on the other hand gladly accepts our billions of box office dollars for a character's on-screen success that I believe she latently hates and resents.

I don't care for that silly ad. What's representative of Bond is the films and novels. It's about as much canon as those credit card ads with Brosnan as Bond.

Makeshift Python wrote:

I don't care for that silly ad. What's representative of Bond is the films and novels. It's about as much canon as those credit card ads with Brosnan as Bond.

"Silly"? Mmmmmmkay.

Look Python, Babs and her friends aren't exactly hiding what they are trying to do with 007. They're on record. That "silly" little ad is nothing of the sort. But I digress. I have warned and warned and warned everyone about what Babs Coltrane and Neuter-Boy are doing to the series, and I can warn no more. I'm exhausted.

Would you find the ad "silly" if Babs used Bond to promote and sympathize with "traditional marriage" organizations and/or legislation that bans same-sex marriage? If Bond did a PSA for a right-to-life, anti-abortino organization, would you still find the ad "silly"?

Babs is using Bond like a $20 French whore to push her social agenda on the rest of us. But whatever. Bring it on!

Gravity's Silhouette wrote:

I must've missed the book where Fleming has Bond put on high heel shoes, a dress, and a platinum blonde-wig and has a woman off-screen berate him like a little school boy with ridicurous "facts" such as: "Every year 70 million girls are deprived of even a basic education and a staggering 60 million are sexually assaulted on the way to school". Excuse me, but what the fudge does that have to do with 007? Is he somehow to carry the burden for all the evil and injustice committed in the world?

I think you're spot-on with this. I'm not sure where people got the idea that James Bond must act as some type of humanitarian worker or women's rights activist.

Control wrote:

Gravity's Silhouette wrote:

I must've missed the book where Fleming has Bond put on high heel shoes, a dress, and a platinum blonde-wig and has a woman off-screen berate him like a little school boy with ridicurous "facts" such as: "Every year 70 million girls are deprived of even a basic education and a staggering 60 million are sexually assaulted on the way to school". Excuse me, but what the fudge does that have to do with 007? Is he somehow to carry the burden for all the evil and injustice committed in the world?

I think you're spot-on with this. I'm not sure where people got the idea that James Bond must act as some type of humanitarian worker or women's rights activist.

Well, the "people" didn't get the idea that Bond should be a hack for any of the modern "progressive" or "liberal" social causes; it was Babs Coltrane-Broccoli's idea, and she's been forcing upon the audience things they haven't asked for. Would certain people on this board be okay with Babs using Bond to do a public service announcement praising stricter border control and the rapid increasing of deportation of illegals back to Central America? A 007 that supports defining marriage as between one man and one woman? What about using 007 to campaign for the right to life of unborn children?  

Having Bond shill for a Visa card or Coca Cola may lower the prestige of the series slightly, but it doesn't insert Bond into real-world political controversies where he has no business being. It's another example of Hollywood power players thinking we give a rat's ass about the political and social issues that they find important. Great! You want to promote gender equality? I'm all for it, just do it on your own dime and don't hijack my beloved child-hood hero to use as a front-man for the social change you seem to think we all want. *EARN* people's interest in your causes by working to engage people intellectually with the facts; don't' ride 007's coattails because you think it will get you a few more eyeballs to your YouTube video or a few more donations to your SuperPAC. It's laziness, pure and simple.

As Python did accurately say, Bond is a BASTARD, but he's OUR BASTARD. Key phrase: "OUR BASTARD". While Babs may have legal ownership of James Bond, he is owned in the hearts and minds of billions of fans worldwide, and it is WE who should be calling the creative shots, telling her what we want from the series. We have, but she refuses to listen. It is our hundred of millions of dollars in box office ticket sales that make her legal stakeholder-status in Bond worth anything.

Bond is a blunt instrument; used to cut through red-tape and get things done. He does the work we don't have the guts to do ourselves. He puts his life on the line every mission to save the world and for that, he's allowed to have his attitudes about life, death, women, and drink. He's earned it. Babs has not. She inherited the empire her father and Saltzman put together, and while she's got a great track record of success starting with Goldeneye, power has gone to her head and clouded her judgement. She should eat a little humble pie and get back to entertaining us instead of trying to edumicate us and indoctrinate us.

I agree with the misuse of Bond in the ad, I just don't care because it's just an ad. Unless the films have Bond quitting the service so that he can join parades and sing on stage with Bono, I really don't care. Why do we have to dredge up such a discussion that was done to death three years ago? I understood the frustration at the time because Bond was going through a hiatus and there were still sour feelings after QUANTUM, but haven't we moved on from that?

If SKYFALL proved anything, Bond's not changing for the world. From what I understand, it was something of an issue of CARTE BLANCHE trying to make Bond more likable by taking away those traits of his that would make him unlikable and human (I've yet to read it).