FINALLY, a decision has been made. Sense has been seen.
The woman behind James Bond has entered the prickly debate surrounding whether or not the character can ever be played by a female actor and has made it clear that no, it cannot. Bond is a man, and he will continue to be a man, played by men.
“He can be of any colour, but he is male,” Barbara Broccoli, the producer who has been at the helm of the Bond movie franchise for 25 years, told Variety. “I believe we should be creating new characters for women. I’m not particularly interested in taking a male character and having a woman play it. I think women are far more interesting than that.”
Broccoli’s comments have sparked delight and disapproval in almost equal measure, but I’m with her.
Bond is, in the words of M when played by Judi Dench, the first woman to inhabit the role – “a sexist, misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War, whose boorish charm is wasted on me.”
In 1958, The New Statesmen, reviewing Fleming’s Dr No, said Bond summed up “the sadism of a schoolboy bully, the mechanical two-dimensional sex-longings of a frustrated adolescent, and the crude, snob-cravings of a suburban adult.”
More recent characterisations, such as Daniel Craig’s, have dialled down the inappropriateness of his behaviour towards women, but look back at some of the Sean Connery movies and I defy you not to feel queasy.
Watching them with my sons, I felt distinctly uncomfortable, and I’m sure they were fairly fed up with my horrified interjections of ‘you know NEVER to treat a woman like that, don’t you?’ every ten minutes.
I am not suggesting misogynistic characters should never be seen on film; nor am I calling for a ban on Bond – that’s never going to happen anyway, the movies make too much money.
My issue with 007 is that he is always portrayed as the hero - in that famous phrase attributed to Raymond Chandler, the man every man wants to be and every woman wants to be with; a sexy super-spy who always wins the day ad gets the girl (bleugh), shaken-not-stirred Martini in hand, dubious and decidedly anti-heroic attitudes towards women firmly swept under the carpet.
Rather than spending so much time and energy trying to win this hand-me-down role for women, we should just create better ones, tell our own stories and leave Bond firmly behind.
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