Sexuality in Bond Films Moving Forward

The Chief of the SIS is appointed by the Foreign Secretary, so to answer what Dalton was saying, it technically could be anybody of any experience, but the age has usually been someone in their 50’s.

In regards to Andrew Scott in Spectre - again, since that position is appointed, he wouldn’t have just taken over that position.

So if they wanted to go that route? They could get away with it.

As it should be.

If it’s possible to have M be younger than Bond, as it appears to be, that’s still not something I have any interest in seeing them explore in the films.

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Technically we’ve already seen it with Sean Connery and Edward Fox in Never Say Never Again (Connery was 7 years older).

I’m not for it either but I also can’t say anybody took much notice of it. M was his superior and it came off fine.

I think the idea was for them to use the age difference to explore some kind of different dynamic between Bond and M, like we just did with the Bond and M as a mother-figure thing over Craig’s first three films. That’s what I’m not in favor of, but if they just went ahead and cast an actor who was younger than the Bond actor because he or she was right for the part, then fine, but doing so just to force some kind of interplay between the two characters would ring hollow and would take the films further in the wrong direction when it comes to the periphery characters.

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I liked the balance of Q being begrudging with Craig’s Bond but also a friend. His scepticism or annoyance soon morphs into an appreciation of the situation. Going behind M’s back on a regular basis to help out Bond isn’t realistic, but I do find it charming - the line about Bond staying at Q’s house for example. Harris’ Moneypenny is genuinely nice, and I feel like she cared about Bond on a deep level. Her concern about him during the island infiltration emphasises this: “which one’s Bond?”

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I must disagree Dustin. The very fact that queerness does not “add meaning or depth to the characters or their actions” is the point/victory Being queer should be depicted as being as unexceptional as being non-queer.

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Certainly times have changed. I certainly have no problem with Bond being gay or having gay characters to interact with.

Now onto sexual innuendo…

I worked in an office in England between 1999 and 2003. There was a lot of sexual innuendo between colleagues, including the women. I don’t think you hear as much now and you have to be more careful these days, as those not taking part but only listening might take offence.

Has it gone completely? No. Has flirting at office parties gone? Definitely not. I’ve seen a number of my colleagues begin relationships from casual sex to dating all the way to marriage and kids with work colleagues.

Do women ask men out on dates? Yes.

So what does all this mean? I think the Bond movies should reflect real life. So let’s have some harmless sexual innuendo (maybe a couple of gags), but maybe let’s have a female character seduce Bond, rather than the other way round.

As my wife says, “I wouldn’t mind having a go at seducing James Bond!”

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Agreed - but this was referring to the earlier discussion of giving Q’s boyfriend a deeper role, not the fact that it’s mentioned at all. As was my example from TINKER TAILOR, though that perhaps needs the context of the longer review I took this from. You can read this here.

I’d be okay with a male Moneypenny. That’s probably one of the few things left they could do with the role to make it interesting. Caroline Bliss didn’t do much, and Samantha Bond was fine, but you’d have to do more with the character to improve upon what Naomie Harris brought to the role

I feel like we already had that with Villiers.

Right?

They could go that route again, I guess. I know I’m in the minority on this, but I’d be perfectly fine with EON cutting some of the periphery characters like Q and Moneypenny from the franchise. Neither character has really resonated with me since their first recast.

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They could substitute the character but Moneypenny is female, and I’d prefer her to remain so. It would be gutless to avoid male-female dynamics altogether rather than finding ways to make them work.

It really begs the question: what needs to be kept as it was?

Is it still a Bond film without certain characters?

It only takes Bond for a Bond film to be a Bond film.

We’ve already seen test cases of this in the franchise. All of the periphery characters have been absent from at least one film and things were still able to carry on. At least one of the films where this happened is viewed as one of the best in the entire franchise (CR).

What they’ve done with the films as of late is tried to veer them more into the Mission: Impossible territory with Bond being in constant contact, and part of, a team.

True. But CR was an origin story, and I hope there won’t be another to introduce the next Bond.

Then it will be against the expectation and the tradition not to have Moneypenny and Q. Tanner I could do without.

Leiter? only necessary if Bond really has a mission that involves Leiter a lot.

I don’t think it really matters that it was an origin story. One of the film’s major strengths is its focus on Bond, rather than having multiple focuses around the MI6 home offices. Instead of having to rely on others to help him, he gets a lot of the legwork and detective work done on his own. This was, quite honestly, refreshing. It was so at the time and now, given how involved we’ve seen EON make the non-Bond characters, even more so now.

There’s nothing wrong with upsetting expectations and traditions. It worked for CR, it worked the other times they had to do it in the franchise. It could be argued that, for the new fans that Daniel Craig has brought to the franchise (and there are many), losing Tanner would be as big of a deal as either Moneypenny or Q. Perhaps more so since he appears in more of Craig’s films than the others.

Which has always been the case, and I don’t think there has been a film in which Leiter doesn’t appear where people left the cinema saying, “well, it wasn’t a true Bond film because Felix didn’t show up”.

But can he with the tech available now? Wouldn’t the audience be, “hey, where are the ear pieces? Smart blood?”

“We don’t really go in for that anymore.”

Never mind.

Bond, M, Moneypenny and Q - that is the cast of characters which Bond films probably need to be recognized as a Bond film.

Bond alone, with M like in CR and QOS can work, too - but it is a small step to generic action hero then.

Imagine Sherlock Holmes without Watson, Superman without Lois Lane, Batman without Alfred.

Possible. But… something‘s missing.

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In my view Tanner as a character in Eon’s films was never quite depicted as that ‘best friend of Bond in the service’. We first see him briefing Bond in M’s stead because Bernard Lee couldn’t take up his role again. So that friend Bond supposedly had came across as one of Whitehall’s stuffy bureaucrats and the part never quite recovered from that first impression.

Michael Kitchen shared a brief moment of camaraderie with Brosnan in GOLDENEYE. But this aside the role is entirely superfluous, perhaps also because it wasn’t vastly important in the books either.

Can be dropped without much impact.

Moneypenny went through a considerable expansion of her backstory, which also seems like reasonably good human resources policy: having a trained field agent as a last bulwark to the Head of Service, able to defend against intruders with force.

The more traditional parts of her duties, typing, organising M’s schedule and so on, all that could be outsourced to office software and devices. Who knows, in future films Moneypenny could be the name of a program.

Not a necessary character for a Bond film - unless they want to further pursue the MI road and counter with ‘team-007’ even more than they already did.

Problem with this approach is, it’s not actually good in operational terms.

Why?

Well, for one thing it’s bound to impair on attention and alertness of your agent if they constantly have their masters’ voices niggling in their ear with this and that while they try to wrestle with a guy one head taller than they are for a gun.

But the more important reason is Bond’s - or any 00’s - raison d’être itself: deniability. Agents are not fly-by-wire toys but expected to act independently, on their own discretion and judgement. And the Ms, Cs, Ministers/Secretaries of State/Interior/Defense/Defence are neither expected to direct them by joystick, nor is it desirable they do.

Also, their pay grade ordinarily is somewhat generous for them to spend their days playing Rogue Agent on a multi-billion encrypted real-time government satellite link. And we’re not even talking about boards of enquiry or memoirs yet, where temptations to tell-all (or more) might reveal unsavoury details the public usually prefers not to hear about.

Cinematically, that device is of course great to give desk jockey characters a part of the action, acting as trigger when they say ‘Take the bloody shot!’ A means to infuse drama and tension when an agent acts on direct orders and immediately is confronted with the consequences of their actions.

But all that isn’t really the core of the Bond theme. Which is that this character does the things a government - a sane government - doesn’t want to know about.

All my rambling above largely missing the point of the thread, of course.

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