On Fri, Jul 1, 2022 at 9:23 PM PGage <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, 1 Jul 2022 at 9:57 AM Tom Wolper <[email protected]> wrote: > >> The more I think of Bond, both in the novels and the movies, the less I >> like him. I'll grant there's a limit to how much we can judge characters >> from another era by today's standards but Bond is drawn to appeal to >> adolescent boys. He embodies the worst of white attitudes at the end of the >> colonial era and he is an out-and-out misogynist. >> > I now I am supposed to agree with you about this, but I don’t. The western > world was racist, misogynist and imperialistic in the 1960s. That sucked. I > was a kid in that decade, and even I knew that’s how it was, and how much > it sucked - I didn’t need Twitter in the second decade of the 21st century > to enlightenment me. But I don’t expect the cultural products from the mid > century to be censored or bowdlerized, not just because that would mar the > product, but because it would also cover up the fact of the transgressive > customs. See recent thread on the Julia Child mini series. > > I am a huge fan of Le Carre’, who is positioned as the anti Bond, but I > find I can enjoy both. I am not a fan of the Roger Moore era, but the Bonds > that followed were increasingly less chauvinistic, and even somewhat less > ethnocentric. > > The idea of a small group of intelligence service officers who are allowed > to make crucial life and death decisions affecting international relations > with potentially catastrophic consequences is I think an inherently > interesting set-up, and while Bond may not be as cynical and world weary as > George Smiley, he often knows enough to be almost as distrustful of his own > side, and of careerist conformity and ass kissing, as he is of the other > side. That’s not bad. >
I'm not going to tell people what they should and should not enjoy. I have been developing these thoughts about the Bond franchise but I haven't shared them and I see my argument needs work so I'll be less of a scold. The thing I have become aware of, mostly watching European movies in the time of lockdown, is that there were films being made that went against Bond's world. Maybe they never made it beyond art theaters and college towns. If I'm sensitive to anything in this, it's not the existence of Bond movies, it's the idea that the movies are good clean fun and shouldn't be evaluated. Le Carré seems to me for adults in a way Bond is for teenage boys. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tvornottv/CAJE-FiHgxB8gisr6_t7175zM1r3dkazS04c7SGOxth2oTLH4ZA%40mail.gmail.com.
