NO SPY GAMES
Is 007’s number finally up?
SMERSH and Scaramanga couldn’t do it, and neither could Oddjob or Sir Hugo Drax. But are millennials about to succeed where those others failed – and kill off James Bond?
In 2016, a YouTuber named Guru Kid uploaded a compilation of scenes from Bond movies that showed 007 forcing himself on women, or exploiting their vulnerabilities in order to get his leg over.
Earlier this year that video went viral, co-opted as evidence for the prosecution in Bond’s trial by social media, as Ian Fleming’s creation was charged retrospectively with breaking the new post-Weinstein laws of appropriate behaviour.
How can a generation who are reportedly forswearing the pleasures of sex and alcohol have any interest in a hero who can’t go five minutes without indulging in one or the other, or both? In truth, I suspect the puritanism of millennials is exaggerated, but the Bond brand does seem to have sprung one or two toxic leaks.
Anthony Horowitz may be about to get gunk on his hands, then, as he publishes a new James Bond novel, Forever and a Day.
It follows his successful reboot of the franchise with Trigger Mortis (2015), but a lot has changed in the past three years. “There is an awareness in my mind that we live in an age in which people are very quick to take offence,” Horowitz tells me when we meet in his London office.
“Since the last book, that has got – I don’t know what adjective to use – worse? More dangerous? It has become more apparent, more evident.”
Forever and a Day is a prequel to Fleming’s novels that sees Bond in France on his first ever mission as 007, and makes use of a treatment Fleming wrote for a TV series that was never made.
Writing a new Bond book must present its author with a dilemma: there is surely a strong temptation to make excuses for the priapic Bond or smooth away his rough edges, and yet the merest whiff of political correctness in a Bond novel would be enough to kill it stone dead.
Even the language is full of treacherous potholes. “When I’m talking about Bond in public I never ever use the words ‘Bond girl,’” Horowitz tells me. “That objectifies women and is now offensive. Although it’s hard to find an alternative: ‘Bond’s female associates’ does sound a little bit dry.”
As a Bond fan, I worry about the spy’s future, precisely because it’s so hard to dissociate it from his past.
Nods to the Sean Connery-Roger Moore era occur repeatedly in the recent Bond films, but those older movies have become harder to enjoy in the age of #MeToo and #Time’sUp. Does this ruthless seducer actually amount to anything more than a projection of the values of an industry dominated by Weinsteinian executives who saw women as commodities? The evidence is there in Technicolor: James Bond, whether pinning down struggling women or popping up uninvited in their bathrooms, is a sex pest.
Next time we watch him spreadeagled at Goldfinger’s mercy as the laser inches its way up between his legs, we may boo rather than cheer when it fails to slice into this tool of the patriarchy.
Eon Productions, the company behind the franchise, has been canny enough to tone down the sexism of the films: when Daniel Craig emerged from the sea in his budgie-smugglers in Casino Royale, (2006) that signalled farewell to the earlier films’ fondness for lingering shots of nubile women that seem now to recall nothing so much as home videos shot by a pervy uncle at a family barbecue.
In 2012’s Skyfall, Bond was even shacked up with a woman for several days in Scotland without laying a finger on her; yes, it was “M” and she was knocking 80, but that would hardly have stopped him in the old days.
What worries me more, though, is the fate of the books: the 12 novels and numerous short stories that Fleming wrote in a blaze of productivity in the dozen years before his death in 1964. There is much to deprecate in these works, but there is more than enough on the credit side to spare the author from damnation.
Forever and a Day by Anthony Horowitz is out on May 31 — The Daily Telegraph