Sleep, allegedly murdered by Macbeth.

I’ve been extremely lucky with sleep over the last few months, not that I’m boasting about it, but this week seems to have tipped into a frenzy of late night reading, as I am not sure when that particular combination of joy and mild wilful self-harm will return to my life after the baby has moved from … indoors to … outdoors.*

*Is this a disgusting way to describe it?

ANYWAY!

There’s something interesting about staying up late doing a thing that will definitely take the edge off your peak effectiveness tomorrow - because you’re doing the thing you can only do half asleep late at night (work is off the table) instead of the things you ought to be doing tomorrow. You feel like you’re rebelling against your more sensible self. I can’t side-step this borderline euphoric defiance against my inner adult by promising to (for example), read the silly book tomorrow. That doesn’t work. It has to be, like a gift of jewellery, needless, sacrificial, expensive, beautiful.

Speaking of expensive! The new James Bond movie is out, and I had to write jokes about it for the News Quiz so I know that the debate has re-emerged about whether there should be a girl Bond or a Bond Of Colour. I think this is a fairly pointless debate (they will do whatever they think will make the most money) but also the debate reveals something profound about the way we understand success. Or I think it does.

The idea that success can only look like what has been successful before is a very limiting way to think, particularly if you’re someone who’s suffered within ‘the system’ trying to win by the model laid out by the system. Is this too big a deal to make of James Bond? Possibly. Is it too complicated to try to think about at 3am? Yes. Am I going to do it anyway? Didn’t we just discuss the joys of mild recklessness at odd hours of the night?

Like, to start, Bond is different than the eponymous PhD in Doctor Who (these debates often overlap, which is why I mention it). That’s a character who’s canonically just a being in an interchangeable humanoid shell. Bond is a particular character, and that character is… pretty bloody horrible, really.

And horrible in ways that are quite tied up in his cultural identity and specific backstory (orphaned, bonded to the state-as-mother, given the trappings of aristocracy at the cost of family in a boarding school cum assassin training situation). It does make a difference that he’s a white man, and the damage done to him in his childhood, his upbringing, his trauma, the ways he masks it and the ways that he takes revenge for it (on villains and women) are all pretty specific to the kinds of privileges and invisibility that identity status brings.

I often really enjoy cross-gender or colour-blind casting, and think it can add dimension to characters that were just sort of defaulted into a particular gender or race. But…

I just don’t get the push for a Lady Bond. The character, (though lots of fun to watch) is a deeply antisocial serial murderer with a taste for low puns over the bodies of his victims and a pathologically exploitative occasionally violent misogynist. And not to get essentialist about it, but a lot of his flaws are very much about the toxicity of militarised masculinity and hereditary British institutional trauma and class and privilege and emotional repression. To translate those flaws into another vessel is to write a completely new character. Which, okay, but why not just do that, then? Write a new character.

Bond is ‘cool’ and has ‘cool stuff’, he’s supremely competent in a skill set that is almost entirely incompatible with happiness, and the most interesting takes on Bond touch on or give glimpses into how truly mental a person with his life experiences would be.**

I don’t think people want a female Bond or a black Bond, they just want the authority and status and legitimacy conferred by the 007 legacy. They want someone who is as famous and beloved as Bond, but isn’t that character. Which is fair enough. The weight of history and the benefit of the doubt that comes with the repeated success of a franchise is a huge deal. Which is an understandable thing to want, but to get it by just … superimposing X on the template is not a big step forward. It’s trickle down cultural economics. You can’t overturn patriarchal mores by insisting on being accepted and applauded by the patriarchy. It feels like a shortcut up the ladder, but is ultimately self defeating, because isn’t the goal to build more ladders, and stairs, and general upward-helping structures?

What we really want is cool successful action franchises lead by a range of different kinds of people.

I’d have way more time for spin-off movies within the Bond universe, with other 00# characters, which could square that circle - leveraging the weight of the franchise without trying to rewrite history. In the same way, we want to use the power of existing power structures to open up more ways of attaining power, rather than modelling all success on the template of prior victory.

I don’t know if this is trying to have a bet both ways, but I DO want to see the ways a different 00 with a different personality would negotiate their way through saving the world. How does a woman or POC cope with bond villains and hench-people? What disguises are available to you if you’re trying to assassinate a high up politician. You’re not just walking into the casino in a tux and relying on the invisibility of assumed wealth. Do you befriend the bikini clad seductress or seduce the man with the metal teeth? We KNOW what Bond does in those circumstances.

If you don’t think of how you’d win instead of how Bond would win, in a broader social sense, you end up with successful women in business who look like women emulating (or legitimately embodying, if they’ve managed to escape female socialisation/biological norms and it’s just how they roll) traditionally masculine qualities because ruthless testosterone and cutthroat winner-takes-all killer wolf tactics have worked in the past, but we never ask the question of whether that’s ACTUALLY the best way to run a business or a society, whether there are other human (coded feminine) qualities we could derive value from and attribute value to or if it’s just a habit hangover we have from the days when you needed to take and hold power with a sword.

What happens when people of oppressed groups can’t conceive of a model for success that doesn’t involve cosplaying as the oppressors is the same oppression in a different hat. It doesn’t really matter if it has a new face, or if it is being done unwillingly or ironically or sarcastically.

Anyway, too much thinking at stupid o’clock, and I don’t know if any of it is coherent. Also, in real life I’m very easily pleased by things and am looking forward to watching the new Bond, and playing Spot The Product Placement, as well as ‘best pun about this horrible murder’. Both fun games for different eras of Bond.

Xxx

A

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As always, if you like any of my things, please do share them around. It is the biggest thing that makes a difference, particularly in lockdown and when I can’t be out and about hustling for gigs. Following me on social media or leaving nice reviews on various platforms etc. also makes a difference, because the people that commission things do look at those numbers when they’re picking people for stuff. (whether they should or not.)

** I’m a big believer in the idea that fictional characters ought to be complicated and flawed and the idea that lead characters should be aspirational and represent role models is a bit weird and gross. I empathise much more with a flawed character than a hashtag GirlBoss character, because I’ve never been that confident and sassy, and also I think I would hate it and it would be obnoxious in real life.