I would argue that superheroes are a different beast, especially the so-far portrayed Marvel heroes. Their moral code is definitely different from the anti-heroes which have become so popular in the last two decades.
Also, they do inhabit a fantasy universe which makes the decision to follow a moral code much easier. In fact, in the Marvel universe there is mainly a good vs evil approach.
But given a moral code is about pushing a binary good vs evil narrative onto a world that isnāt binary, isnāt keeping it in a fantasy world the only way to tell such a morality tale without declaring cultural superiority?
The fact Craig and Moore (the actor, if not his scripts) do at least feel slightly bad about killing, rather than the executioner at the behest of Her Majesty of Connery and Brosnan era, who just keeps killing every time heās told to without a second thought, makes Craigās era more optimistic in that regard than what came before. Mās speech about having a licence to kill, is also a licence not to kill, springs to mind. I see that bit in Casino Royale as Bond making an emotional judgement, but one based on reason; knowing the consequences of his loss. Vesper pushes it off as ego, but Felix recognises that rage, because heās feeling it himself as heās ābleeding chipsā and has come to the same conclusion as Bond, that itās better to work outside your remit than let a man, who will aid killers so as to line his own pockets, pay for deaths of hundreds more, just walk away.
Yes - and no. The moral code I would be referring to is not about cultural superiority. Unless one wants to call morality always the product of a certain culture and therefore changeable.
Well argued - but that was not the point of this discussion as far as I understand it.
The argument was about the way Bond was portrayed by Craig and what oddjobbies called ādangerous unpredictabilityā. Even if CraigBond feels ābad about the killingā it does not make him more moral than Connery or Brosnan. Both, IMO, do not appear to be emotionally troubled and full of rage. Therefore they do not appear to me as being dangerously unpredictable. Craig does, and the question, I think, was about that kind of character being more attractive today and therefore something the next Bond should also have or not.
Marvelās success stems to a large extend from its universal appeal. Itās one of the very very few occasions these days where both sides of the divide can actually find themselves sitting side by side in the theatre - also because the adult part of the audience is often middle aged and can actually remember times when this wasnāt extraordinary but the norm.
The underlying moral code - or perhaps better the message since āmoral codeā is almost too high a concept - is still one that dates back to the 40s of last century, as Art Spiegelman reflected in his recent piece. In this sense, the continuing success, dating back now over ten years and almost 20 if we include Spider-Man and X-Men, is at once predictable - the longing for simpler, happier times - and surprising, since its topicality is present without being spelled out. The heroes on the screen fight for everybody in the audience.
Oh, certainly not more moral (though Iām aware, as weāre saying this, being moral is a moving goal post, as what is declared immoral to some is just living to others, morality always seems to me as a method of judgment to a group or individuals chosen standards) but, Iād say the unpredictable nature is not being presented as an attractive quality, more itās intended to present Bond as a fallible human, and thus relatable āLook, he makes colossally stupid decisions too!ā
But is it, though? Does the majority experience CraigBond as a fallible human? Or do most people in the audience accept him (now) as the blunt instrument, the guy who rather punches and behaves ālike usā? When in contrast his predecessors were always removed from the audience because they were part of an upper class, a more sophisticated expert of the high security force, a debonair man of the world?
It seems to me that this is what the Craig era decisively stripped away: now itĀ“s someone from the working class who might enjoy the high class living but who remains someone who is ādown to earthā and follows his instincts rather than orders, thereby indeed getting dangerously unpredictable.
But is even that new or Craig exclusive? Bond has his own sense of right and wrong that he will follow above all else, the Craig era makes more use of it on a regular basis, but Dalton did too (and Bond in both film and book of OHMSS), arguably Licence To Kill is entirely based on it, heās not dangerously unpredictable, he just puts his own judgment above that of others, so actually heās highly predictable in how heās likely to react in any given situation.
I would disagree. He is (or was) mostly interested in destroying the villainĀ“s scheme. Even DaltonBond did make all of his own decisions based on the higher goal of bringing the bad guys to justice.
CraigBond is following orders in CR, too, but he has no problem killing and shooting people before he can question them or find another solution (from the PTS onwards, he is a pretty reckless guy and delighting in it, while even Dalton was always conflicted about his brutality).
And all films in the Craig era stress his bluntness, creating havoc wherever he goes, with M chastising him āyou had no authority - none!ā. Dalton, in LTK, doesnāt have the authority either - but he is aware of that and offers his resignation. And since the whole story is not just revenge for Leiter but also about taking down the drug lord who can escape the other authorities, we are always assured - even through Q visiting him - that Bond kind of follows another mission.
In contrast, CraigBond seems to enjoy being a 00 - but he cares a lot less about his orders than the previous Bonds and follows his private goals rather than those of his superiors. They also align with the higher goal of bringing the big baddie to justice. But they all seem to be also part of his own personal problems.
Maybe this is what sets the Craig era apart: his Bond is always personally entangled with the villain. Therefore everything he does seems to become a private war in which he considers his superiors more of a hindrance and therefore dismisses them when he feels like it.
But his Bond would disagree, once bringing him in was not an option he decided āOne less bomb maker in the world would be a good thingā which is in line with how he is as far back as Goldfinger, he puts his own judgment above Mās orders.
I note Brosnanās does it several times as well, The World Is Not Enough most prominently, BBās interpretation of Bond perhaps?
Tbh, I donāt want to see it for Bond 7, but mostly because I think they should avoid similarities with Craig as much as possible, especially as weaknesses of each new Bond has been when theyāve imitated their immediate predecessor.
Iām trying to remember when weāve seen that. Not picking a fight here, Iām really trying. Thereās that great moment in CR after the fight in the stairwell, when he looks himself in the mirror, all covered in blood, and thinksā¦what?..weāre left to fill in the blanks, but I always took it as, āWhat have I become?ā Which I guess is close to, āI feel bad about killing those guysā but could just as easily be, āI had a lot more fun just now than Iād like to admit. What does that make me?ā
This is where I always get lost with Craigās Bond: sometimes I think he revels in violence and mayhem and his one great act of genius was to seek official sanction for his murderous tendencies, otherwise heād be serving a life sentence somewhere. Other times I think heās maybe haunted by the choices heās made and canāt remember exactly how he got so far down the rabbit hole. But either way, itās 99% internalized. The actor and his directors seem to be going for a āless is more,ā Nimoy-Spock approach, where weāre supposed to look at a largely stoic, implacable visage and somehow intuit what turmoil is going on beneath the surface. Iād argue it doesnāt always work (if ever).
My personal preference is to believe that Craigās Bond (who I still connect in no way to any screen or literary Bonds who preceded him) is a man with deep psychological scars who finds release in physical violence but has at least enough of a moral center to have directed those energies in support of his country. In occasional moments of lucidity and inner candor, he sees what heās become and it horrifies him, but heās already in too deep to get out, and anyway he knows himself well enough to know āstepping awayā can only last so long; violence is his drug, and even as he craves it, he hates himself for needing it. His stoic (robotic) demeanor is a construct; heās trying to project the image of someone who canāt be hurt, because he doesnāt care. And yet as time goes on, the facade becomes more of a reality; it gets harder to feel or care, and he really is turning into a killing machine. So next time he looks in the mirror all bloodied, heās even more disturbed to find even less humanity staring back, but he has no other course but to double down, again. And then Madeleine comes along and he sees an exit, so he tries to take it, with the one woman who (thanks to her family history) knows exactly what he is, and accepts him anyway. Unfortunately, Craig and Seydoux have zero chemistry and the script botches the romance, but between the lines I think I see whatās intended. Which will make it all the sadder when heās pulled back into his old world next time out.
But I just made all that up in my head, to stay interested. If thatās what theyāre going for ā and maybe it isnāt ā it took a lot of effort from me to help them get there.
I think they are, and I welcome all of that. In contrast, at least until very recently the DC films very much followed the model of the ādangerously unpredictableā heroā¦basically sociopaths in capesā¦and the fact that Marvel has taken another tack would, Iād argue, suggest that audiences are more than done with āheroes with feet of clayā. And maybe thatāll push Bond in the right direction, as well.
Maybe, but count me as someone who prefers heroes that operate in a fantasy world. Spider-Man, Batman and, yes, James Bond do not live in the āreal worldā and any attempts to shoe-horn them in, with whatever notions of āmoral ambiguityā or what have you, are laughable. There is no Craig entry any less ridiculous at its core than any Moore entry. If we have a choice between Marvel heroes cavorting about in jaunty good-humor fighting clearly defined battles of good vs evil or, on the other hand, Superman for instance sulking about in a depressing world where society distrusts him, Batman wants to kill him and his own adopted father tells him that helping other people basically isnāt worth the trouble, then Iāll take unabashed but fun silliness over soul-killing, pretentious nihilism any day.
That said, itās worth noting that Marvelās ālightā approach to heroes still makes one concession to hard-ass, movie-hero convention: with the exception of Spider-Man, they all have no qualms about killing villains.
A terrific post here. Very interesting insight into what could well be Bondās character and - as a bonus - I agree with you that they should be more fantasy-oriented too.
On the fantasy matter: I agree that these things donāt exist in our world and, as such, should be fun and escapist (cardinal sins, it seems, to some filmmakers). I love Batman, but heās a guy who dresses up as a little flying rodent, despite the fact that 1) he canāt fly, 2) is six foot tall and 3) is human. Trying to fit that into the real world is an interesting thought experiment, but the Nolan films are all kinds of ridiculous.
Die Another Day was just a bit too much on the fantasy side of things - the invisible car, Gravesās Robo Cop suit and oriental-to-caucasian make-over being the three most jarring elements, I think. But Eon neednāt have gone that far. Sometimes, I think they are like a little child at a party who gets just a little too excited. OHMSS, FYEO and CR are attempts at self-flagellation - āIām sorry, I know we overdid it last time, and I promise to be more grown-up nowā. Iād love them to do another one which is less serious and dour, and Iād but the very first one in line to see it, but such a film should be on the level of GE or LALD.
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Given that āmoral codeā in the eyes of some, those actually in power in the United States, would have you and your husband go through gay conversion therapy, itās good that society now tries to push the concept of the individual, rather than judging themselves only by rules often decided by church and state.
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Yes and no. The concept of the individual endowed with rights that cannot be infringed by church or state is great, and a triumph of Western culture. But the binary of the individual vs. society it has given rise to can (and has) devolve(d) into the assertion of rights based on personal desire (which is in some ways a crude description of the crisis facing Western culture todayāthe rise of libertarianism). CraigBond is a perfect LibertarianBond who (as you note):
The assertion and demand for the validation of a personal sense of right and wrong can be as destructive to society as the authoritarian impulses of church and state. As you note, the world is not binary, but to endow all individuals with equal status to counterbalance state authority leads to the hyper-individualism which plagues todayās world (for me it is still an open question whether the atomization of culture is a bug or feature of Classical Liberalism, i.e., is where we find ourselves today the natural endpoint of taking the tenets of Classical Liberalism to their logical conclusion).
I agree, but in making Bond relatable in this fashion, the film also (if unintentionally) makes the unpredictable nature legitimate. If the only atonement for the bad action is feeling guilty about it, that is not much of a price to pay (especially when compared to the price paid by the the person subjected to the unpredictable danger). Culturally, we are seeing the rise of a shaming/call-out culture as it becomes ever more apparent that people have learned how to live with guilt (which by definition should be so disabling that a person would never again commit the act that brought about such a feeling). In todayās world, the guilt a person may experience after committing a particular action is no longer strong enough to prevent a repetition of that action (the goal of a guilt culture). People have come to believe that acts of shaming may be more effective in curbing harmful behavior.
I think MooreBond is pretty well-entangled with Drax and Scaramanga, but in both cases that entanglement plays out within a larger context of mission, and the missionās ethics are the determining ones. Even with their more comic tones, MooreBond films portray him as an agent of the state who is carrying out a mission during which he has the license to kill if he believes it necessary to do so. As you say: neither ConneryBond nor MooreBond seem emotionally troubled or full of rage (and the better films play with this fact). CraigBond seems to have been recruited for his rage, and over the course of the films it is refined until he is the RobotBond of SPECTRE (where he rejects being a state assassin). It will be interesting to see what justifications are given in NTTD for Bond becoming a murderer again.
Thatās Bond in all his forms, very much a quality he got from Fleming.
You do discuss very interesting concept, one I wouldnāt call a crisis, as itās not new, itās the history of humanity. Yes, even the quality of just shouting your views gives them validation as a form of governance is not new. Iām Northern Irish, that IS how our country has been ārunā for decades, and we were not the first by a long stretch. Basically, humanity the species will take any concept and twist it into itās most barbaric form; state, church, individualityā¦as a species we are not exactly nice.
ā¦channeling Hopkinsā Dr. Ford from Westworld there.
but I digress. The āwhat kind of monster is okay to be aspirationalā is possibly way too big a conversation to have, particularly on a thread called Who do you want for Bond 7
Out of curiosity, for anyone, why is Craig being classed as a murder in waiting when the rest are just as guilty of gunning down people? Craig actually has the lowest kill count of the 6, and he, at no point, has pumped six bullets casually into an unarmed man, or had an odd tendency to need to kiss a female corpse when he seeās them.
I believe itās because, like the actors I mentioned (McQueen and Cagney in particular) he has such a dynamic screen presence, a danger about him, as there was in Cagney - the grapefruit sequence in Public Enemy, the punch in Junior Bonner. CraigBond looks like he could hurt you in real life, something no Bond since Connery has been able to convincingly convey ( although ConneryBond was wrapped in such fantastical elements, the audience, in the same sense as a Brecht play, are made acutely aware that this is a performance. CraigBond, whilst still being fantasy the audience are invited to suspend disbelief and believe fully in CraigBondsā world.
Each Bond, in my opinion, has there own thing that seeps out of them and hits the audience at a visceral level this is not the only" thing " but itās what drives their performanceā¦
Connery - sexual charisma
Lazenby - earnest gravitas
Moore - charming decency
Dalton- stoic professionalism
Brosnan - melancholic wit ( I really want to say IRISH but only another Irish person will get it so thatās as close as I can get it.)
Craig - dangerous insolence
Soā¦us?
Pretty much yes ! It was once described to me as constant guilt for seeing the glass half full.
Weāre Irish, we ask whatās in the glass
Thatās Brosnanās performance in a nutshell.
Thereās something about being a people that so prize language and the ability to speak, to tell a story , that lost their language being naturally melancholic.
I think for all his cheeky asides and one liners Brosnanās performance always has that sadness in him.
I would say that it is the history of humanity since the Enlightenment and the emergence of classical liberal thinking. What we are living through now is the greatest intensification yet of the sovereignty of the self, which the advances of the 20th century accelerated. The sense of a person being embedded in a social matrix of ethics and obligation has never been weaker in Western culture (with those who express any sense of loss or desire for its revival being deemed [in America] as deplorablesāthere may be a British counterpart).
What is interesting is that this condition is bemoaned on both the right and the left, though the alleviations/solutions proposed from each side are often different (though there seems to be agreement on the fact that capitalism bears some of the blame).
I agree that it is thread incongruous, but I love the way you phrased it-wittily summing up the new questions being asked across society.
I loved your entire list, but this perfectly captures how I feel about MooreBond and why I am so fond of him.