What do you think of casting Emma Watson as the next James Bond?
08.06.2025 00:01
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?
Fine. But actually, the Bond films don’t do this.
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.
What are some ways to drive women crazy while many men don't know?
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.
It’s time to end this fantasy. Let’s move on to other stories.
But he is a fictional character who is being presented as if he is something for the male viewer to aspire to.
Scientists uncover key role of thyroid hormones in fear memory formation - PsyPost
… HOWEVER RELUCTANTLY.’
Daniel Craig’s version represented, in my view, Bond’s crisis of masculinity.
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.
Now, this is where we get into a rather tiresome debate about representation.
I like Emma Watson. I think she’s a good sort and a decent actor.
I don’t want anyone to be the next James Bond. I think the franchise needs to end.
But as the years went by, and society changed, so Bond changed.
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.
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.
23andMe Sets New Auction With $305 Million New Bid From Ex-CEO - Bloomberg
So then, the Bond movies become a study of a middle-aged man experiencing limited job satisfaction.
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.
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.
What did Chandrashekhar Azad say about Hinduism during a podcast?
I can see the end title card now.
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.
In the end, the Bond films are dreams of power.
USA roster: 15 MLS players called for 2025 Concacaf Gold Cup - MLSsoccer.com
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.
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.
Yes, he is. Sean Connery didn’t actually non-consensually kiss Molly Peters. They were acting.
The #1 Snack for Better Gut Health, Recommended by a Gastroenterologist - AOL.com
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.
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.)
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.
President Trump kicked Zelensky out of the White House. Is it over for a deal?
‘JAMES BOND WILL RETURN.
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 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.
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.
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.
I’m 17 and looking for a girl. What do I do?
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.
Now: things are not always the same as their origins.
Without that, he’s just a straight white male dude running around killing people.
Amazon planning $10B investment in North Carolina for data center and AI campus - AP News