Personally, I don't think Bond is bi.
The issues with Bond are that he’s uniformly portrayed by white men who are only portrayed sleeping and slapping women. Give us a Bond who sleeps and slaps men with the same abandon that he does women, and interest in Bond movies will go through the roof. And:
An intelligence agency that only employs straight male secret agents is an intelligence agency doomed to fail from the start. I have to hope someday that the Broccoli family grows a spine someday and shows us a Bond who is a woman, being just as much of an arrogant slut as Sean Connery’s Bond. They did a great job with that Bond, and certainly that’s a desirable archetype! It’s just gotten boring and overplayed to see that leading Bond role manner only played by the same boring and overplayed white men for decades now.
There was a scene in The Americans where the husband and wife Soviet agents talked about / reminisced about their training. And that to the Soviets, sexuality was just another tool in the box. If you're seducing for the job, what does it matter? The husband was taught about seducing men, and the wife women, as much as the opposite sex (this is not an attempt to simplify / reduce sexuality, just how it is portrayed in the show).
Anyone tries to kill me, it's all good.
Did you watch the video? The flaps on the face had nothing to do with “sexuality”. It was Bond slapping women to get information out of them.
The nut smasher
> Mads Mikkelsen says 'Casino Royale' director told him and Daniel Craig to stop improvising during a nude torture scene
It turns out that the actors tried to advance the needle here, and make it into a psych torture and have it be more than just a basic rudimentary beating! But no, “it’s a Bond movie”, sigh, and so what could have been a deeply uncomfortable and memorable scene was neither.
Bond slapping people is about power and control fantasies. Bond was created at a time when women were finally wielding power of their own again in modern culture, and showed what was appealing to the men whose desires preceded the rise of women having power independent of men. Decades have passed since that moment in time, but Bond has remained fixed in stone, with only the barest concessions to reality, using women just as he always has - that is, needlessly different from how he uses men, without any cause other than stereotypes inherited from the 1950s.
The power fantasy of Bond is that Bond is a high-functioning sociopath, who has no problem using people for whatever meets their needs and then discarding them utterly. That power fantasy used to be the exclusive privilege of straight white men. That is no longer the case. Seeing all Bonds be straight white guys who only slap women is boring. That power fantasy is played out and dull and on its way out. I don't care if some Bonds are straight white dudebros, but it sure would be a lot more in character if they slapped everyone – and it sure would be a lot more in character if some of them slept with non-women on screen — and it sure would be a lot more in character if some of them weren't white.
Asking an intelligence agency to stop sending people to hit people for information is nonsensical. Only showing people reacting by providing the information is also nonsensical. There are quite enough people out there that would bust out laughing at that attempt, not to mention a few that would outright try to bite his hand off the next time he swung at them. I do respect that the mores of the time were afraid to show Bond actually punching a woman, but with all due respect, that was, rounding up, about a hundred years ago. Intelligence agencies have moved ahead with the times. Yes, I pointedly mean that Bond should be doing just as worse to the women as to the men, when it comes to getting information — whether that's slaps, punches, CBT, or buying them champagne and getting their shirt off.
There's a lot of us waiting in the wings to see the exact Bond power fantasy portrayed in that slapcut, by people that we can imagine ourselves being. Generic white guy #12 is not going to qualify, no matter how cool he is. (And let's face it: Foghorn Leghorn is a much better detective than Bond anyways.) Focusing on slapping is a distraction from the real problem: Bond was created, and has been maintained since, as a sociopathic power fantasy for straight white men alone. Until that broadens to represent that exact fantasy for others, I see little hope for the future of the franchise.
Don't change Bond-the-sociopath. Just remove the artificial restrictions on Bond's skin color and gender, and who he slaps, hits, flirts, and sleeps with.
I worry sometimes we're headed for a situation where media and stories are almost whitewashed. There are some fandoms I'm into where fans go through past books and raise issues where "isn't this character being a bully here" and the answer is kind of... but they're also a kid at that point and kids do say mean things ... that's reality.
The problem with all this “modernisation” (what a euphemism) stuff going on in entertainment is that you’re trying to transform and change existing characters and franchises.
It’s just a money grab to capitalise on existing characters with existing fan bases.
Inevitably it’s ruined. Bond fans aren’t watching Bond movies thinking “this is sexist”. LoTR fans aren’t reading a fantasy series with influences from Christianity and a white guys experience in WWI thinking “we need more representation of people of colour and genders”.
The solution to this is also trivial: Forget all the old stuff. Write new characters and stories. Or build fans for modern works.
We’re already seen this done: Avatar (not the blue alien one), Dragon Prince, Wheel of Time.
This "modernization" of characters is failing in most franchises because it alienates the old viewers without doing much for new ones. It creates Frankensteins that please nobody, typical "by committee" designs.
Instead of changing Bond, Amazon should be trying to create a new Bond that will capture the current generation's imagination like the old Bond did decades ago.
What I'm saying is that my (male) tastes have modernized, that the male tastes that made old Bonds popular are tastes I find gross and unrealistic today, and I don't feel like I'm alone.
They did not do so well with modernizing any of Bond’s skin color, gender, or bedroom scene co-stars; nor did they portray him assaulting women for information like he would men.
Being masculine in unrealistic way is part of the fun. Just the same as cars with machine guns in the hood or wrist watch with laser cutting through things.
It is like nagging that in Star Wars explosions in space have sound and are not like actual explosions that would happen in space…
Now, you can argue that formula for Bond was unique, and what differentiates him from Bourne or Reacher, and worth keeping for that reason. But against that, you have the fact that I and a lot of other viewers find the Playboy lifestyle to be a really silly and distasteful fantasy that seems uniquely laughable now, and far harder to suspend disbelief for than generic action hero stunts.
Being able to pick up hot women is totally not cool?
My theory is fantasy about killing people is OK because it doesn’t happen - no one is really facing situations where they would have to be in „for life or death” fight.
Being around opposite sex or having actual sex happens and it is tough on people who feel less attractive or feeling inadequate - and feeling inadequate happens awfully often and people don’t want hot movie star to remind the about their shortcomings.
Where are you in this collage? <https://imgur.com/0gL4oxd>
Bond is a holistic character. He’s whole life is a male fantasy. He’s suave , has an awesome job, cars, adventure, fights, etc. MI is just doubling down on the action and adventure part highlighting the physical capabilities of the main character. You don’t really care about his personality (perfect role for Tom Cruise imo)
In any case, I feel like it’s become normal to characterize all masculinity as toxic and statements like yours is kind of like the “people who say only bad guys worry about privacy” to put a HN tech spin on it. You allowing and excusing it in a way and I feel like it’s a slippery slope
This push to "modernize" Bond is regressive once you realize male desire has not changed and thus there is nothing to modernize. Depictions of a cool spy dude getting beautiful women to fall for him is not "sexist" and not in need of modernization.
More generally the "modernization" angle is all about making the films which appeal to both men and women, which is a losing proposition for Bond which is fundamentally a franchise for men. You are always going to create a more compelling piece of content by tailoring it to a specific group, and the vast gulf in the sorts of content men and women tend to enjoy (generalization of course with many exceptions, but generally true nonetheless) means any bridge spanning that gap will be flimsy and weak.