I guess the UK is rather racist, too…or at least that portion of the country that reads the Daily Mail. There is some idle speculation that maybe someday in some distant future some Sony executive might like to explore the idea of hiring Idris Elba to play the role of James Bond — it’s really even more tentative than that implies, because Daniel Craig is apparently under contract to do a few more — and look at how Daily Mail readers reacted to that hint of a possibility.
(click for a more readable size)
For the people who are complaining that they’d never get away with casting a white person as Martin Luther King: yeah, that’s because King was a real person, while James Bond is a fictional palimpsest for a variety of Western anxieties about the Cold War and manliness. It is right and proper that each generation’s incarnation of the spy should reflect that generation’s concerns. Daniel Craig is playing him as a weary, disillusioned warrior, and the recent entirely white Bonds are radically different from the cocky cocksman played by Sean Connery. If you’re going to complain about purity and loyalty to Ian Fleming’s vision, Skyfall was a deep betrayal.
For the people complaining that they’d never get away with casting a white person as Shaft: that’s a more interesting comparison, because Shaft is also fictional. But the appeal of Shaft was that he portrayed a member of an oppressed minority as a strong character, with a largely black cast and a black sensibility in a sea of cookie-cutter white detective stories. A Shaft with a swaggering, macho white guy in the lead? It would just be like a hundred other crime movies. It wouldn’t be Shaft without that tension of the character breaking social taboos.
For the people complaining that Fleming wrote Bond as a Scottish guy: been to Scotland? There are black people there who were born in the country and have as thick a brogue as the red-haired guy in a kilt with a bottle of Irn Bru in one hand and a caber in the other.
For the people complaining about Quvenzhané Wallis being cast as Little Orphan Annie: get over yourselves. It’s another fictional character.
For the people whining about “PC”: what would be politically correct is to define these characters by the color of their skin, just because that’s what the majority has always expected, that their entertainment should always be presented by characters who look exactly like they do. It is not PC to consider that both Quvenzhané Wallis and Idris Elba are excellent actors who would bring something fresh and interesting to roles that have otherwise grown tired with repetition.
Frankly I would freaking love to see Idris Elba as Bond. He’s a fantastic actor with a lot of class and charm, and a very strong screen presence. If I had *any* concern about his casting it would be his age, but then again 42 isn’t really that old. I mean, Daniel Craig was 38 when he starred in Casino Royale, and he was the “young, rookie” Bond in that movie.
It’s similar to a discussion I had with a friend over Benedict Cumberbatch’s potential casting as Doctor Strange; not only is he *yet another white guy* who’s cast as a hero (who isn’t necessarily white in the canon anyway) but he’s also a gigantic asshole in many ways in real life. In fact, we came to the conclusion that Lana Parilla would make a way, WAY better Doctor Strange, as an arrogant yet vulnerable magic user-it’s basically the role she plays as Regina in Once Upon a Time anyway.
I would love to see a female James Bond. I wonder if the reaction to that idea would be worse. I think heads would explode if it were a black woman.
It’s almost like a bingo card. Third column, second down … racism and misogyny. Nice.
They consider the (white) race of a fictional character sacred…. okay…
That MLK comparison is so stupid. I’d be opposed to a black man playing Bond if Bond was a character fighting for equal treatment of white people in a fictional country where black people were oppressing white people.
Good grief…
Well, let’s see. Casino Royale was published in ’53, and Bond was portrayed as being thirty-something. I demand that the next actor to play Bond be at least ninety-five years old.
If they ever cast him, I will become a Bond fan again.
Also, a black woman as Bond? I think my head would explode – from all the goodness. Especially if she doesn’t play into your typical cis/straight boxes, too.
Hint: If you are a member of a dominant majority group and that group is overrepresented in movies and media and you complain about any fictional character being portrayed by a minority actor, then you’re a racist, full stop. Seek counseling.
Also, there’s actually a very popular fan theory that “James Bond” is a codename, and it and the “007” title are passed from agent to agent as they retire or die.
@Daz – The going theory among many Bond fans is that “James Bond” is a code name and it’s recycled. Whoever the biggest bad ass in MI6 at any given time is gets the designation “007” and the code name “James Bond”. Connery’s Bond, therefore, was not the same person as Craig’s, or any in between.
I have to say, while I think a Elba would make a great Bond, I feel like a woman as Bond would be a much more interesting way of turning the whole thing on its head, given Bond’s long history of sexism. Then we could have some eye candy Bond boy instead of a Bond girl. But maybe rq’s suggestion is best. Let’s cast a black woman and make the maximum number of heads explode.
If we’re casting a black woman as Bond, I suggest Zoe Saldana. She already has significant action and geek cred, and is known for kicking ass in her movies.
gussnarp #8:
So basically, he just mislaid the TARDIS?
@7 and @8: The only problem with that theory, from my nitpicky nerd point-of-view, is that Roger Moore’s Bond is seen mourning at the grave of Tracy, but Tracy married George Lazenby’s Bond, not Moore’s. So if they’re different people, why would Moore care?
/i’m such a dork
So many people showing their racist asses. Of course Elba is only being considered for the sake of diversity. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with him being a capable actor.
I especially love the one 2nd from the bottom on the far right: “They won’t be happy until the only white guys in films are the bad guys.” Because that’s actually in danger of happening.
Race is set in stone and it simply unacceptable for there to be any deviation from the lilly white character that existed in previous versions of the story, the original media the story was based, or entirely in our fucking imaginations (see: Rue from the Hunger Games, who was NOT white, but people flipped their shit about her not being a white person anyway).
Remember, we live in post-racial societies. Racism doesn’t really exist anymore. Just a thing for fringe elements, like Neo-Nazis. Like, race doesn’t even matter anymore! Except when it comes to “white” fictional characters, then it REALLY fucking matters.
@UnknownEric: Some might say that On Her Majesty’s Secret Service never happened, much like Star Wars 1-3 never happened. I really should see that movie again, I’ve heard some people loved it, and my opinion on it was formed when I was far too young to qualify.
Other explanations: Maybe the grave isn’t the same Tracy as was married to Lazenby.
Maybe Moore’s Bond knew Lazenby’s Bond, and his wife, and Bond’s don’t get a marked grave so they’re actually both in there (after all, Moore’s Bond would have at one point become Bond, then lost the title back to Connery’s Bond, so it would make sense that they know each other).
Maybe this is all an ad hoc rationalization, or only counts from say, the Timothy Dalton era onwards, as that could be considered a reboot and the beginning of the modern period.
I suspect the real complaint is against Daddy Warbucks. Nothing upsets the racists like a successful, rich black man.
Or rather, Connery lost it to Lazenby then got it back. Making myself look like a noob here.
Well, fiction is supposed to be an escape from reality. Why would you want a film that reflected reality so closely?
I love Idris Elba and hate Bond movies, so I’m not sure how to feel about this.
If we’re talking about “subverting old tropes”, how about rebooting Bond to more accurately reflect the world of MI6? Instead of saving the world without mussing his suit, Bond is shown helping CIA goons torture people at a joint CIA/MI6 black site in Diego Garcia.
The thing about the casting of Quvenzhané Wallis as Annie is that it is brilliant, culturally.
When the original “Little Orphan Annie” stories came out (the 1920s), red hair was seen as ugly and undesirable. Annie’s hair marked her as “other” and made her unadoptable. Circumstances and fashion have changed.
Who is now overrepresented amongst unadopted foster children? Children of color, especially black children.
A modern-day Annie must therefore be black, if the cachet of why Annie is stuck without a “forever home” is to be maintained.
@Esteleth (#20) – That’s basically how I felt when I heard the news. It’s such a no-brainer. Of course a modern Annie is black.
How upset are these same people about Christian Bale playing Moses?
@Saad (#22): From what I’ve seen of racists on the internet, they think Moses was white. Or that he was Jewish, but you really couldn’t possibly tell the difference between an iron age Jew and a modern European, because interbreeding.
“A black James Bond!? PREPOSTEROUS!!!! I am so angry right now, I am gonna have to pray for White Blue-Eyed Anglo-Saxon Jesus to smite these filthy blasphemers!”
Tells you all you need to know about the Daily Fail and it’s readers.
In terms of plot holes, “Roger Moore visited Tracy’s grave” is much smaller than “James Bond 007 physically looks like a completely different person, despite interacting with people who knew him previously”
Honestly, Skyfall was the bigger hole in the theory, since going to his family estate establishes a personal history, and then his parents’ graves actually say Bond on them.
gussnarp #23:
Apparently, post-flood Jews were supposed to be actually white; no real distinction between them and European-whiteyness existed, except a sun-engendered tan. If you can stand to wade through it, this might shed some light on the, erm, for want of a better word, ‘reasoning.’ (To skip all the pre-flood stuff, Search for ‘second section.’)
hmmm, this is very reminiscent of similar arguments (on io9.com) about the race/sex of Doctor Who, with little teases about Bond being Who himself, knowhatimean, snick snick. There was much fury about WHY Doctor ALWAYS be a White Man, regeneration means anything is possible, as evidenced by his “apparent age” versus actual age. (Hartnell, Doctor #1, was oldman, Smith, Docotor #11 was essentially adolescent) So there have been endless convos about black or female or black female doctors for the next one. Moffat, the current showrunner for Doctor Who, has acknowledged that a female Doctor is entirely possible, not forbidden at all.
…
Last year, at Xmas of course, wasn’t FauxNoise making noises about Black Santa Clauses not representing Actual/Real Santa Claus??
.
And now the noise about Annie. Complain that Annie is being played by a real, 3 dimensional person, with eyes with pupils even, blah blah blah. Complainers; Annie is a FICTIONAL Character, the only characteristic firmly stated in that fiction is the sex and age of Annie. Never heard of artistic interpretation?
I understand the goal of any piece of fiction is to make the characters “come to life”, “more real than real”. And when watching theatre or movies, “suspension of disbelief”. Seems to me these complainers have gone too far with those suggestions. They’ve made Bond an actual/real person, and totally suspended any ability to disbelieve anything about the Bond stories/movies.
May I suggest Christopher Lee?
Yeah, that. Bond has moved through a few decades without aging. Hair and eye colour has changed but don’t you dare change the skin colour!
Also, Idris Elba rocks. Every role should be case with Idris Elba. There should be more than one Idris Elba.
I go a little bit beyond “James Bond is title passed down from agent to agent” theory. I think James Bond is an archtype and as such timeless and ethereal. The movies aren’t really connected with each other (with the exception of the latest bunch which was a break from tradition) so they could have recast everyone in every movie and it wouldn’t make a difference. Bond is more like “Robin Hood” or “Dr.Who” or “Batman”, a fictional character people adapt to reflect their current times. So go ahead, make him African, female, transgendered, whatever as long as the character is sophisticated, confident, gets cool gadgets, and has to fight an over the top villain in a bunch of exotic locations. And if the villain gets killed in some ironic way, all the better.
@karpad (#26):
Damn it. I was really enjoying this theory without overthinking it too much.
@Daz (#27):
Well, that explains lily white Jesus, I guess.
No, I don’t think I can. I don’t think I want to know…
This is not “politically correct,” Mailers. If it was, you would not be offended by it either. The definition of political correctness is something which offends nobody, not something which offends conservatives.
Idris is a great actor. Bond is a great part. Could work. I would love to see the foam and spittle erupt from UKIP!
Nah. “Political correctness” is what plain old decency gets called when you want to be an asshole.
Judi Dench isn’t a man.
Alverant:
So… he’s a member of the Maiar, sent to Arda by Eru Ilúvatar to… what?
Giliell:
I’m with you there. The main problem with Prometheus was that Chalize Theron wasn’t Idris Elba.
Meanwhile, over at Exodus: Gods & Kings…
Oh, you shoulda seen it when someone suggested a black Peter Parker…
@29, Giliell
I think we can safely draw the line at a Bond Villain crossing over to play 007.
On the opposite end of escapism, I just had an idea for a Bond plot: MI6 has been having a terrible streak of failed missions. Bond is given a mission based on bad intelligence and narrowly escapes with his life after giving the wrong counter-sign or something. He returns to base and starts his own investigation to find out what went wrong. He discovers his mission’s information was obtained though a gimmicky interrogation device with torture implements and a bogus lie detector. The torturers are actually double-agents bent on discrediting MI6 and aiding their enemies. Their victims are innocent civilian scapegoats coerced into telling convenient lies that appeal to the wishful thinking of the torturers’ superiors. Death trap escape scene is instead Bond resisting torture and figuring out how the supposed lie detector really works so that he can discredit the device in front of a higher up who decides to personally observe the interrogation because one of the top agents is under suspicion. Bonus points if the lie detector is based on the same false premises as the polygraph.
Even JB would have to beware the red-haired guy holding a caber in one hand.
>blockquote>Also, there’s actually a very popular fan theory that “James Bond” is a codename, and it and the “007” title are passed from agent to agent as they retire or die.
As has been seen on screen with M and Q, and probably someone else I’ve forgotten about. (Tangentially, did anyone else find the final scene of Skyfall a bit “Don’t worry, fans, M is a dude in braces again!”)
While we’re speculating, Roger Moore wept at Tracy’s grave and Daniel Craig visited the Bonds’ graves because MI6 insists that the new James Bond really get into character in order to maintain the charade.
Also, not one of the post-Connery Bonds has been played with a Scottish accent (I haven’t looked up the actors, but the characters certainly haven’t been played that way.) I don’t remember seeing any Mailheads complaining when their hero was made English.
My ideal Bond mashup would be to have Robert DeNiro as Bond, with a script by Charles Stross. In it, Bond has realized that he’s just a faceless cog in a vast machine of empire, and decides to go out with a bang in one final encounter with an evil villain played by Helen Mirren. As the showdown looms we learn that Bond has been manipulating the mechanisms of the secret service against itself; the attacks and enemy actions were carried out by agents who thought they were following legitimate MI-6 orders. We discover that Mirren is an actress who thinks she’s making a movie and the entire thing is just Bond’s big self-justifying departure from the scene. The movie ends when Bond, who has now assumed near-dictatorial emergency powers, suffers a minor stroke and forgets what he’s been doing all along and (in an oblique reference to James Angleton) becomes an orchid grower.
Or, maybe I just subconsciously lifted all of that from G.K.Chesterton’s “The man who was thursday.” Hell, just do a bond-ian re-make of that gem and we’re good. Hollywood, are you listening?
Essential listening
http://youtu.be/5eBT6OSr1TI
Which fictional, continuing, classically-British character will first be portrayed by a non-white female (non-British?) actor: James Bond or The Doctor (Doctor Who)?
Oh, and speaking as a lifelong Edinburger, anyone seen on the High Street with a kilt, a caber and a can of Irn-Bru is probably either an American tourist or an English student flogging their Fringe show.
I think it would be fantastic. Even if Skyfall kinda messed up the idea that Bond is a code name and not a real name, you could easily ret-con it, but perhaps better yet just don’t explain it at all. Bond is black. ‘Nuff said. Why is skin color the be all, end all of differences? Daniel Craig looks nothing like Pierce Brosnan, but we didn’t need some new theory to explain why Bond was suddenly blond. Why do we need it for a change in skin color? Why is THAT such a hindrance to the suspension of disbelief?
@nich (#49): Archetype, code name, whatever, leave it as a discussion point for the audience and never explain it. As you say, there are plenty of things in Bond movies harder to believe than Bond suddenly being black.
I think the only reason I’m against Idris Elba playing James Bond is because I kind of think he’d make a great Doctor (though, admittedly, I also want to see a woman play the Doctor, and I don’t know which I want first… ooh! A woman of color!).
But there is… James Bond isn’t a code-name, despite the popular fan theory, because there’s a continuity between the various Bonds that wouldn’t exist if they were all different people. As far as I understand it, 007 is the code-name and James Bond is the actual person. Ian Flemming wrote him that way, after all. And Bond, unlike the Doctor, can’t regenerate.
Of course, maybe the movies changed that and I’ve failed to pick up on it. And to be fair, I can think of a lot of women actors and actors of color (and women actors of color… and even trans actors, actually) who could play an amazing 007 (or James Bond, as it were), so…
Alanis Morissette and Morgan Freeman have both played God in movies.
Why not James Bond?
This is almost a word-for-word conversation I had recently over the hiring of Michael B. Jordan to play Johnny Storm in the up-coming Fantastic Four reboot. Personally I think he’ll do well since he’s a good actor, though I admit I’m not a big FF fan. Their first point was claiming it was the exact same as getting a white actor to portray Barrack Obama. When I pointed out the difference being one was a fictional character and the other a real life one they moved on to having non-white fictional characters played by white actors.
As with the Shaft example, characters like Black Panther (the example they used) have their race tied in with the character. Outside of the fact that when they were created (just as now for the most part) white was the default, neither James Bond not Johnny Storm do. At the very least they don’t to the extent that Shaft or Black Panther do. Given that both Shaft and Black Panther were created specifically to be black, it’s harder to justify them being portrayed by actors who aren’t black.
… so on with the change.
You know what… fuck the whole “James Bond is a person and a human being who can’t regenerate” crap. I’ve been making that argument and now, in practice, it doesn’t matter. If they cast Idris Elba, or…
Ooh! Here’s some names:
Carmen Ejogo
Ashley Madekwe
Gugu Mbatha-Raw
Sophie Okonedo
Zawe Ashton
Antonia Thomas
Lenora Crichlow
Thandie Newton
Angel Coulby
Marianne Jean-Baptiste
I would watch those 007 films like they were going out of style.
@違う I can’t envisage James Bond as God, but if Q gets to play St. P, then maybe ;-)
I’ll just leave these here…
British agent ‘Fifi’
Special Operations Executive ‘Fifi’
From the first article again:
I would love to see Zhang Ziyi as Bond.
And this: World War II Resistance Heroine, Savior of Thousands, Dies at 98
A final thought to contradict myself… what if they cast different 007s? Would people be against a different name with the 007 code?
And to contradict myself yet again, I realize I’d still be fine with a non-white and/or non-male actor playing James Bond.
Idris Elba is charisma personified and would make a fantastic Bond, but there are also a lot of amazing actors of color out there who just haven’t had the chance to get as high of a profile as him because of racism and limited opportunities. I’d like to see all of these “default white” fictional people get cast as non-white. And the “default male” fictional people getting cast as other genders. And the “default straight”…
Humanity is vast and amazing. It’s absurd to default to straight white cis men as our fictional icons time and time again.
“Bond… Jane Bond.”
NateHevens: as someone who grew up with Bond films and books (not proud, just saying) I’d accept a different name with the same code number, though I’d take a hit in the nostalgia doing it. It still could be done, and I think inasmuch as there even still *is* a Bond fandom, we’d get over it, especially in the current age of reboots.
When Daniel Craig was cast as Bond, fans complained because he wasn’t tall or dark enough for the role. “James Blond” headlines everywhere. Nobody’s complaining about him NOW.
Marcus Ranum:
Fuck no! If Hollywood discovers Stross, I want a Laundry movie first!
Seven of Mine: Shrieking Feminist Harpy wrote:
Thinking back to the recent white good guys, and the recent white bad guys, and I’m not sure that’s a big problem. Thor would be way worse without Tom Hiddleston in the role of Loki, but Chris Hemsworth is a “meh” actor. Heath Ledger was an amazing Joker, but Christian Bale was little more than a personality-free generic growler in The Dark Knight. Shia LaBeouf was perfectly horrible in every Transformers movie he has ever been in. I should be protecting the whiteness of these terrible protagonists, why exactly?
also in Bond trivia, I’m sure I recall reading in one of the Fleming books that James Bond inherited the vacant 007 number after a previous agent 007 had died with it. I’m not finding a source, but if that is correct, then having the code number passed on would in fact be true to the original canon.
@47 – Who will win.
Non-white? sure, go for it. IIRC Romana was even a bluish ‘alien’ when she was trying out different regenerations before becominh Lalla Ward.
Non-male? sure, go for it(Although this is a much greater stretch. Will Susan call him Grandmother?)
Non-UK? I NAME THEE HERETIC!!!!!! That just wouldn’t be cricket.
Pteryxx, if you want maximum right-wing head-splodey value from wartime SOE heroes, I give you Noor Inayat Khan, an Indian Muslim woman who was posthumously awarded the George Cross.
“Subverting old tropes”?
If there were a convention that the hero of a certain kind of story has to be a white male, that would be a trope, and one worthy of being subverted. That James Bond (in all of Ian Fleming’s books) is a white male is not a trope, it is a fact.
How would we feel if a purported sequel of the Harry Potter movies showed him as black?
All of this over rather over the top Cold War era pop culture celebration of violent maintenance of the state.
Part of me wants to ask: ‘How do these people manage to give a shit about James Bond?’ But then I realize this is not a fair question, nor is it one which these commenters would even understand. People care about fictional heroes of movies and that’s the way it is.
I suspect quite a lot of people from India, Pakistan, and other places — excluding Oz, there’s alien Time Lord (or bumbling spook, whichever we’re snarking about), and then there’s alien — will wonder what took so long…
Is it just me or does the gay, vegetarian, sober, violence-hating family-man spy movie from the bottom corner sound fantastic? One of those dorky everyman becomes a spy comedies that I probably shouldn’t like but do anyway.
I remember being very excited during Skyfall, because I hadn’t followed any of the promotional materials and I thought the plot was leading to an interesting resolution: Daniel Craig retires as “James Bond”, taking over for M (although I didn’t foresee Judi Dench’s character’s death), and Naomie Harris would take over as “Jane Bond” for a new trilogy, mirroring the first (becoming a “00” in the first movie as in Casino Royale, so on and so forth… under the wing of the old “Bond”)
It was just too perfect – a somewhat rookie spy, cool and collected and very able to stand up to the previous “Bond”, a neat new “hook” for a somewhat played-out format of movie, so on and so forth…
I realized that wasn’t going to happen when they ended up on the old Bond estate, establishing (for the time being) that “Bond” isn’t just a code-name like “M”, but man, I would have bought all the tickets to that new hypothetical trilogy.
aziraphale, #67
Just fine. Even if I was a Harry Potter fan.
Personally, I’d much rather see something new to go with new faces. Old franchise is old; Bond stereotype is overused. Surely someone, somewhere must still be capable of coming up with something fresh? I guess there’s not much room on the big screen for spies who aren’t actually generic action heroes, but I’d like to think that the medium hasn’t totally calcified!
That said, to pick from a random comment above, the notion of Zhang Ziyi as a vodka-drinking sociopathic ladykiller is an intriguing one.
aziraphale @ 67:
I wouldn’t have a problem with it. I was one of those people uncomfortable with the overwhelming whiteness of the books and movies, though.
Jeremy@53 – the thing is, though, if you make Johnny Storm black, you have to make Sue black too, because they’re siblings. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t make Sue black, just that they have to match.
It wouldn’t be Shaft without that tension of the character breaking social taboos.
Here’s an idea: A white and gay and/or atheist Shaft in the south. (Basically, the idea would be to make this white Shaft a minority in some regard…maybe make the character female as well?)
It would be interesting to propose a movie where a black actor plays the son of James Bond, James Bond II, inheritor of the position of 007, and see what happens. I suspect some people wouldn’t be much happier.
dannysichel @76
the thing is, though, if you make Johnny Storm black, you have to make Sue black too, because they’re siblings.
Ever heard of adoption? Maybe they’re just siblings in that regards. ;p
It is for some values of “PC”, I guess it is. For right wingers, “PC” has come to mean anything that seems liberal. To those folks, black versions of previously white heroes are “PC”.
The white men were happy to have the part of Jesus Christ -a palestinian brown man -played by a sort of blond white Apollo lookalike. So what’s the problem?
As far as Potter goes a lot of people were upset that Blaise Zabini turned out to be black instead of the blond white guy they thought he was, even though that was Rowling’s intent in the first place. Some were also upset that he turned out to be a black guy instead of a white woman they assumed he was because of the name Blaise.
dannysichel @ 76:
They have to match? Really? You’re completely unaware of interracial marriages and families, aren’t you?
By the bye PZ, James Bond is not justa spy, with his licence to kill he is really a secret policeman; Stasi anyone?
timgueguen @ 82:
I find Rowling’s intentions suspect. Sure, after the fact (all books and movies), this character was black, that character was gay. It might have been nice if more characters had been something other than mainstream white hetero in the books and movies.
As far as the casting of Sue and Johnny Storm goes comic book artist/writer, and often asshat, John Byrne made some rather unpleasant comments about Jessica Alba being cast as Sue Storm. Apparent women with tan complexions and blond hair remind Byrne of prostitutes.
Oops, should have mentioned that Alba was Sue Storm in the previous batch of FF films.
Particularly if it was something like the 40th HP movie in the 7th rebooted series and all the others already had different white actors playing Harry.
I think that the Bond Archetype, such that it is, is an archetype of power. So in that sense it is consistent that the character be a white male.
And in the same sense it makes making him something else ,at last once, a very good idea!
Also, adoption!
If Hollywood discovers Stross, I want a Laundry movie first!
That was my subversive plot!! If Stross did a Bond movie you’d do well to just call him Bob Howard. :)
As I recall, Fleming started out writing Bond as an Englishman; it was only the success of Sean Connery as Bond that prompted him to retcon Bond as a Scot.
For myself, I was entertaining the idea a while ago of Lucy Liu as Bond, mostly as a way to make the suckier bits of You Only Live Twice suck a little less (Liu wouldn’t need atrociously bad make-up to pose as a Japanese, and wouldn’t be inclined to take Tiger Tanaka’s misogyny at face value; also, her Japanese accent is a little more convincing than Connery’s).
I thoroughly hate ret-conning, however I bow to the reality that a character who has been around for decades (at least) and has moved way beyond the original concept of the character has to be changed IF that character is not being kept in the original period.
Hence, Steve Rogers/Captain America has to be white because that history of the character is still using that original history. Nick Fury is no longer the sarge from the WW II Howling Commandos so he does not have to be white. James Bond, as shown now, is nowhere near what the original was like and can be changed, the same with Annie.
Moggie @62: Please, no! If Hollywood does The Laundry Files, they’d make Bob Howard American and remove his aversion to guns. Also, explosions, lots of explosions.
Regarding the new FF movie- honestly, it doesn’t matter what race they choose for the heroes because the movie sounds like it’s going to horribly suck based on what they say they’re doing with Dr Doom.
Though honestly I think Mr Fantastic might be the most interesting of the FF for a change of race (unless they made him a nerdy Asian stereotype).
Pteryzz @ #61:
Same. I’d love to see 007 movies with someone other than a James Bond with the 007 codename. That would be incredible.
Unfortunately, I think part of the reason nobody’s complaining now is because he’s still a straight, white, cis-gendered male.
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ck, the Irate Lump @ #63
I really have to disagree. I thought Bale was an amazing Batman and a very good Bruce Wayne. While I have a heck of a lot of problems with Rises (it really should have been two films, not one), the Dark Knight trilogy is my favorite set of Batman films ever released.
———————————————
jd142 @ #65:
A weird regeneration sequence, that, but agreed.
Considering that the question of just who Susan was is quite common amongst fandom and even fans who started with the show when Hartnell was the Doctor aren’t very sure themselves (was Susan really his granddaughter or did she just call him “grandfather” for some reason or another), I don’t think that’s much of a problem.
The question of whether or not the Doctor should be played by a woman goes much deeper than that (into some misogyny, sadly).
You can see the whole saga of whether or not there should be a female Doctor here on Gallifrey Base. There’s 756 replies as of my posting this. And it’s a growing topic. You’ll see posts that infuriate you and posts that make you happy. I even show up myself multiple times, as I’m a cheerleader for Doctors who are not white and/or not male and/or not straight and/or so on.
I don’t mind the Doctor not being from the UK. I just don’t want the Doctor to be a USian (that is, a North American from the US). I’m fine with the Doctor being from anywhere else around the world. One of the things I love about the show is that it is NOT a US show, and I want it to stay that way.
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dannysichel @ #76:
So you’ve not heard of adoption or interracial marriages, then?
Iyeska @ 85
Pretty sure Zabini was described as black within the books. Not that that absolves her of anything. There’s a great slam poem about Cho Chang and what a stereotype she is. The token Asian kid is in the nerd house. “Cho” and “Chang” are both Korean surnames while the character is supposed to be Chinese. It’s pretty scathing.
That’s the thing that always baffles me when talking to people about “casting white guys in traditionally non-white non-male roles”, they seem to think being ‘white male’ is a defining characteristic of most roles. Because of sexism and racism, however, most roles filled by non-whites and women are given that characteristic as a defining part of the role.
Black Panther, for example, is defined as a role filled by a black person (gender doesn’t matter for the character).
Wonder Woman can be filled by anything BUT strictly cis-male. I presume anything within the area of Greece, but that does include parts of Africa.
Iron Man? No reason to be white or black. Superman? He’s an alien, doesn’t matter what color he is. I can’t think of a single white male role that is defined by their color. Gender might need some reworking, but they already have Superwoman, just make her the main protagonist.
Per Johnny Storm, I won’t even give people an explanation for his skin color. Just throw him in the role and let the fans figure it out. No reason to waste screen time pandering to racist nerds.
Don’t really care about James Bond, but I would be really excited to see a non-traditional actor play Doctor Who.
PS: I did manage to think of a role that would be a fictional person, but should be filled by a white person. Slave Owners in Pre-Civil War America. That’s a damning thought….
aziraphale:
“It is an absolute FACT that this fictional character has trait X”.
Fiction doesn’t have absolute facts. The facts in fiction are subject to change. Artistic license, etc.
Once they reboot the Harry Potter movie franchise at least two more times over the course of a few more decades, then we can talk.
In addition: Is every single Bond movie a faithful adaptation of the books? Because last I checked the Bond movie universe is barely consistent with itself, and ALSO has significant departures from the books (depending on the movie in question).
As far as I’m concerned, the only real problem with there being a black Bond is that a few of the films (most especially the Pierce Brosnan ones) have lampshaded the idea of Bond being a somewhat misogynistic dinosaur of a bygone era, when MI6 was an old boys club – which wouldn’t really fit in with him being a black guy (and would fit in with Bond being a woman of any colour even less). However, even that is hardly an insurmountable problem, given how many changes and retcons there have been throughout the Bond series so far, especially as the first Daniel Craig one was a sort of reboot, based on the very first Bond book.
Seven of Mine:
As it should be. The movies reeked of tokenism, it was cringe-worthy, to say the least (as did the books – you got the sense that the occasional non-stock character was hastily tossed in with little thought). Long days ago, I commented to Mister that Hogwarts was whiter than North Dakota.
aziraphale:
Who’s this “we”, and does it include black viewers?
Among those for whom the appeal of Harry Potter is “he’s just like me, but with magic powers!”, some of the white ones would be disappointed, while some of the black ones would be pleased. Do you think the former matter more than the latter?
The interesting thing about getting in a huff about characters in books especially not being white: I have found that most books rarely ever explicitly say that a white character is white. Because it is presumed default. You will usually be hinted in some way that characters of other races are other races, or you will be explicitly told. But everyone else? You will rarely ever be told that they are white, because I’m sure the author would rarely see the point in such an exercise. People will just presume that they are white until proven otherwise.
anteprepro:
Since Ian Fleming died in 1964, I think it’s safe to say that much of both the technology and the politics portrayed in the films is a long way from the books. But OMG we can’t have a bit of melanin!
aziraphale @ 67
There’s nothing about the story that necessitates Harry being white. I wouldn’t give a shit.
Yes, a series of books that began publishing in the early fucking 50s. God forbid we subvert 60 year old tropes by casting a woman or a black man or a gay man in the role. HE’S NOT GAY-MES BOND, AMIRIGHT???
*mind blown* :-)
There is such a convention. It just hasn’t been spelled out, because many people – like you – haven’t noticed.
周 Zhōu and 张 Zhāng most assuredly are Chinese surnames… though I bet both of them have spread to Korea; Kim is 金 Jīn.
Oh, I forgot: there’s the term Daily Heil.
MODEST PROPOSAL: No matter who you are or in what medium you’re using to express yourself, if you use the term ‘politically correct’ in any way, you MUST explain what you mean by it. Because, honestly, I haven’t a freakin’ clue, and it seems that everyone uses it to mean something else. While I know the etymology, I always thought it was a slur suggesting that people who were considerate and careful and tried to understand other people’s perspectives and found ways to not use racist or sexist terms to describe other people were in fact being DISHONEST and mealy-mouthed and spineless, hiding their true assholery under a fake veneer of decency. Thus the corollary, being ‘Politically Incorrect’ was the hero’s choice: Unabashed and proud of their bigotry and willful ignorance; they said whatever the hell they wanted, and while it may not be ‘pc’, at least they’re being honest.
@loopyj (#108) Well, that’s probably kinder than my current approach, which is if you’re using the term “politically correct” then fuck you, you have no actual argument and you’re probably a racist/sexist/xenophobe/homophobe/transphobe! (not you you, the hypothetical you using “politically correct”).
aziraphale #67
Don’t see where it changes the story any.
NateHevens
Because he’s a respected elder person? That’s the usual reason for addressing someone one isn’t related to as grandfather/grandmother.
cswella
Or a Nazi officer, or a ranking official in the Raj…I’m not helping, am I?
I see no reason why Bond has to be a boringly conventional, and always fit so snugly into the cis/het white male chauvanist mold of ‘heroism’. Idris Elba would make an incredible Bond, being an immensely talented actor that might actually be able to bring some depth and nuance to a typically pretty two dimensional character.
Of course, maximum right wing head-explode-age would require something more than just casting a Black actor as Bond, however talented that actor might be. I can imagine a gay male Bond, or a woman Bond, or a trans* person Bond allowing for ridiculously oversexualised Bond boy-toys in the vein of the heinously misogynist ‘Bond girls’ of the franchise thus far. That alone would cause frothing apoplectic fits among the UK right wingers, but you could go even further still. What if Bond was retconned as a young, Black woman agent in the modern intelligence services who becomes aware of the full extend of UK complicity in ‘extraordinary rendition’ flights and calloboration with CIA torture programmes, and determines that it is in the public interest that the full facts come to light?
Bond as whistle blower. Bond as a principled woman who refuses to cover up the crimes of their government, who puts common humanity and humanist ethics before queen and country, and exposes corruption on both side of the Atlantic, being forced to go on the run to do so, dodging attempts to apprehend and/or kill her launched by the very agencies who once employed her, those agencies acting with the full support of government and a representative cast of fictional equivalents of the usual rightwing talking head suspects (parodies of Faux News and the Daily Heil practically write themselves here). For once, the very empowered elites of our society are cast as the villains they, for the most part, actually are.
The mere suggestion would cause UKIP members and many Conservatives to go into anaphylactic shock, which would make the project a worthwhile endeavour in and of itself.
Moment of pedantry …. ‘Subverting a trope’ is setting up a trope so the audience think they know what’s coming next and then not carrying it through. Giving the role of James Bond to Idris Elba is not a subversion of the trope if the character and story is played straight otherwise.
Anna turning away from Cristof at the last moment to sacrifice herself for her sister was a subversion of a trope.
Connery: 1.89m
Lazenby: 1.88m
Moore: 1.85m
Dalton: 1.88m
Brosnan: 1.88m
…Craig: 1.78m
Whilst I appreciate the wishy-washy, lefty-liberal world in which we now live, surely 007 was at least 6’/1.85m tall when the books are written and has been tall ever since. I don’t see Dennis Rodman playing a little person actor in a remake of Under the Rainbow, and if they were, there’d be an uproar.
Clearly someone needs to be fired for this unjust, PC hiring of Craig!
Also, for those who don’t pay much attention to James Bond, but grew up in a household that watched Handegg, there has not, in fact, yet been a black James Bond. It turns out that Roger Craig and Daniel Craig are actually different people.
Crip Dyke, we live in a world where Tom Cruise has played Jack Reacher, who wikipedia describes thus: “Reacher is 6’5″ tall (1.96 m) with a 50-inch chest, and weighing between 220 and 250 pounds (100–115 kg)”.
I have to disagree a bit. ames Bond is a relic of the British Empire and Cold War with all the baggage this implies. A Blunt instrument wielded by SIS, with license to kill. He’s a sexist, misogynist dinosaur about as far from Politically Correct as you can get. Oh, you could have non-caucasian men or women of any ethnicity as 00-agent, possibly even inheriting the famous 007 code, but that won’t be James Bond. That’s something which simply doesn’t fit the character archetype.
cswella @97: Jim Rhodes, a black man, has worn the Iron Man suit and identity. Especially during periods when Tony Stark was ‘off the wagon’. Also, Iron Man can’t be a woman. It’s in the name. If Pepper Potts ever gets the job, it’s going to be an Iron Woman or something.
Wonder Woman: She’s a woman, period. That’s again straight in the name. Color’s a secondary position, as is her sexuality, but the fact that she’s daughter of the queen and hails from island with no men is, again, at the core of the character. As is the lasso that forces someone bound with it to speak the truth or bracelets used to deflect bullets.
Ps. Some blacks did own slaves in antebellum US South. It’s a piece of history not often mentioned. Homo homini lupus applies to all ethnicities…
I have been thinking about the people on the thread discussing the possibility of Dr Who regenerating as a woman, and it occurs to me that, if the character keeps the core personality, sense of identity and (one assumes) sexuality of the earleir incarnations of the Doctor, could that also make a hypothetical woman Doctor the first openly gay Doctor? That would offer almost limitless opportunities to take homophobes and transphobes to task in the fiction.
Or alternatively, if the Doctor regenerates as a woman but is primarily attracted to men, might that imply that the Doctor may have been bisexual all along? Or at least that Timelords have a far more complex relationship with sexuality than most of the more reactionary Who fans would be comfortable with?
It strikes me as something of a win/win scenario when it comes to driving bigots up the wall, so long as it is handled intelligently and sensitively, and preferably by a woman lead writer.
mirrorfield@115:
Nope. It’s never been mentioned. Thank you for your contribution.
@aziraphale, #67:
Awesome.
Not least because you could finally do the perfect representation of Harry’s scar glowing lightning-yellow/gold against the dark-chocolate skin of Our Hero’s forehead. And you wouldn’t have to have him constantly pull his hair back either. Of course, for the set-up, you could have him dreaded-out, a roots-rocker from Hammersmith-Palais. After the scar-reveal early in Philosopher’s Stone, you just have him get better at pulling the dreads back. Then you could have him go natural, maybe 6″ of ‘fro, for the adolescent, I-hate-you-adults-who-never-treat-me-like-an-adult-when-I-fought-Voldy-at-11-and-I’m-already-14, middle-section books (at least Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix). In Half-Blood Prince he could get several cuts representing his reconciliation with Dumbledore, then falling in love with Ginny, then shaving when Dumbledore dies. A couple months later, when Deathly hollows gets going, he gets a lean, sculpted ‘do fitting his new predatory determination. As the (pair of) movie(s) goes on, you’d see that he has a wizard-portrait-style animation in his hair that responds to his mood, giving an excellent avenue for exposition without mood-interrupting narration or momentum-interrupting exposition.
I’ve LONG thought that HP should have been Black.
But, y’know, I can wait for “HP and the Stone of the Wiz” for all that. I’m not about to dictate artistic choices to Rowling or anyone else.
@mirrorfield:
Or, y’know, Rescue.
@moggie:
Moggie, sarastic satire of ridiculously racist statements.
Sarcastic satire of ridiculously racist statements, Moggie.
mirrorfield:
Right. So, you are adamantly against the all the tech/vehicles and such in the movies, right? Because while times change, Bond must not! This sort of attitude is archaic and irrelevant.
CD @ 118:
In the awesome reboot, I’d love to see Dumbledore portrayed with at least his love of wearing purple velvet suits intact. (I forget the book, um…Half Blood Prince maybe, where a younger Dumbledore is described with long, auburn hair, wearing a purple velvet suit.)
@Mirrorfield 115
What about a transgender male? Would that fit in your definitions of man? And what would be wrong with someone who identifies as female taking the mantle of ‘Iron Man’? Why would it have to change unless the person who took the role wanted it to change? Pepper Potts could most definitely use the same name, if she liked, and it would fit because that’s the name the world identifies with.
Jim Rhodes has taken the suit sometimes, this is something to disprove my point? I don’t get your point.
So again, she can’t be anything other than cis-female? Why not? Transgender women could easily take the name of Wonder Woman. Why wouldn’t they?
Oh really? I take that back! Shit, sorry, didn’t mean to paint white male landowners as the norm when referring to slave owners. My bad.
Hey, did you know some females think feminism and misogyny don’t exist? Guess that means they’re right!
I wonder if the same people would be up in arms about Michael B Jordan being cast as Johnny/Human Torch in the new Fantastic Four movie. That’s a well-loved property that’s almost as old as Bond and IIRC Johnny’s always been a white dude.
Once Craig’s tenure is over, I’d love to see the studios cast Elba – mainly because he’d rule at being Bond, but in no small part because of the unhinged, militant dummy-spitting that would ensue across the White Supremasphere. It’d be a thing of rare beauty.
Having never read a Bond novel, or watched a Bond film, I don’t have much to contribute here. However, I can point out that W.S. Baring-Gould, in his biography of Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: A life of the world’s first consulting detective, revealed that the original M was Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock’s smarter brother.
I would like to see the next James Bond be a white guy as he was written. The only consideration should be the ability to find an actor cooler than Idris Elba.
Ah.
Well I guess it has to be Idris Elba after all.
Hank_Says:
This was discussed upthread – we were told people must match, like furniture. As for FF, I don’t care what they do with it, the last movies were fairly awful. The more they shake it up, the better.
There is.
The convention is that the generic default hero, if there is no specific narrative reason to be otherwise, is a white male.
Whilst I fink I understand where yer coming from, I wouldn’t be quite so dogmatic about it. For instance, an Irish actor raised in USAlienstaini, or a First Nations actor. This seems to be a confusion between character and actor?
Definite confusion between character and actor.
The main problem with Prometheus was… that it was ever made in the first place.
I just saw it last night. Surfing channels and just tripped across it. I’m a sci fi junkie so I stopped surfing. Big mistake. It was one long train wreck. After Blade Runner, Alien, and a bunch of other Ridley Scott films, I had expected more. Much more. Really a spectacularly bad movie. Good visuals, but a plot line more at home on an amateur channel on YouTube (a *really* amateur channel). MST3K-worthy. And now I see he’s working on Prometheus 2. Kill me now before I happen to stumble across that one on basic cable in a couple years.
If you really want to mess with hardcore “Character X MUST be a Y!” people, start a movie series based on Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius:
“Hey, what’s that poster for?”
“It’s for the new Jerry Cornelius film.”
“What are you talking about? Jerry Cornelius isn’t a black guy! He’s white.”
“Oh, in this film he is. In the next one there’s rumours he’ll become a woman about halfways through.”
Regarding Annie: If you’re taking a story written to be set in the 1930s and bring it forward to 2014, you’ve already altered the fabric of the story enough that any of the other details can change too. It’s stupid to complain about a change of skin colour if you’re not going to also complain that it’s not set during the Great Depression.
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If you really must try and keep Bond in some semblance of a single universe, rather than isolated sets of movies, just consider Daniel Craig a partial reboot. The films all tell “true” Bond stories, but not in chronological order, and adapted to the time period they were shown. They previous films are stories of Bonds after Craig; he is the original Bond (hence Skyfall and his family name). When the actor moves on, explicitly kill him off in his last film, and have MI6 set a policy of codenaming the person filling the 007 post “James Bond” as a memorial to their best agent (though he’d better do something incredible in that film to earn it). It would be hard to argue against Idris Elba stepping in under those circumstances…
I’d actually really like to see a formal handover of the role at the end of an actor’s tenure, be it due to retirement, death, or even defection. It would tie the films together into a solid narrative that the previous generation of films didn’t manage.
And it could lead to some interesting lampshading down the track when the best qualified agent to fill the role is a woman. Imagine this line at the end of a Bond film:
♫ BA DA — BOOM, BA DA — BOOM, BA DA BADAADA ♫
Crip Dyke @ 119: Exactly my point.
Iyeska @ 121: One of the defining characteristics of James Bond, at least in all movies, is that he gets to play with latest government toys at the outer limits of technologically plausible. In 1960 this meant such improbable things as wireless telephone that fit in a car and pager. These days it’s car with active camouflage. Or simply a palmprint-keyed pistol. The Character doesn’t change, the tech toys do.
csweila @ 123: Because maleness has always been part of the character, inside or outside the armor. The Suit was originally created and worn by a genius playboy (ex)arms-dealer, who’s also a notorious womanizer and diehard capitalist, who loaned it to his best friend and reclaimed it after dealing his own problems.
Wonder Woman has no inner conflict with her femininity, physiologically or psychologically. She’s a woman from island of women, which makes her something of an outsider to “man’s world” (which was …bit more patriarchal in 1941 when the character was created than today). Transgender doesn’t fit her character.
You could build interesting and popular TG superhero(ine) characters and you could build kickass female characters who wear powered armor. With luck, they could archieve great popularity and success. But none of them could be Wonder Woman or Iron Man; those characters are already defined. As is James Bond.
On the converse, there is no reason why Captain America (NOT Steve Rogers) could not be reimagined as a woman or black man. Cap is something of a personification of national ideal, a character who is fundamentally loyal to (and only loyal to) Liberty and American Dream. Someone who can be killed, but never broken. His (or her) primary opponent is a personification of diametrically opposed ideology (Red Skull, the perfect Nazi.) Thus, Cap’s mantle could be worn (and shield wielded by) a man or a woman.
Btw: Harry Potter being black would have not been a problem. Skin color is distinctly a low-significance feature for the character.
But apparently is not for James Bond cuz…reasons?
I was actually hoping for Idris Elba to be cast as Batman in the Batman/Superman movie over Ben Affleck.
As is Captain America and Harry Potter? Though I see you wrote a bunch of…stuff or whatever it is up there, you don’t really seem to have any criteria for choosing when it is OK to reimagine a character and when it isn’t beyond “Meh, I’m OK with that…”
Iron Man can’t be a woman in the same way that Samus Aran couldn’t be a woman.
You could have a Tanya Stark creating a suit that doesn’t overemphasise her breasts and hips* and the media assumes that the person behind the suit is a man, like gamers assumed that Samus Aran was a guy in a suit, only to have their head explode when the real identity of Iron Man comes out.
You could even have it so that Tanya Stark reveals that she is the woman behind the suit because the media thinks the person behind it is a guy she has a rivalry with and she can’t bear him getting the credit (make it part of the plot so that the media thinks the bad guy is Iron Man). It seems in character for Stark to hate someone getting the credit for something they did.
* because she’s designing it for practicality, not for a male fantasy, and if you design a metal exoskeleton the added layer above the skin will smooth out most of the sexual dimorphisms.
Gregory Greenwood @ 116
Of course Dr. Who could be bisexual! Captain Jack was/is omni-sexual, and there didn’t seem to be a problem with that.
I would think that a Time Lord, being an alien, could quite easily be omni-sexual.
It’s also telling that the only iconic fictional character they could think of that was portrayed as black… was Shaft.
Shaft is not just an iconic character; he is considered a black icon.
James Bond is the Iconic British Spy, not a “white icon”.
Within the Bond movies, he has a CIA equivilent, one Felix Leiter. The two of them have worked together on several occasions, with Felix always being played by a different actor. I don’t recall any outrage when Jeffrey Wright (who, unlike previous Felix Leiters, is black) was cast for Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace.
Second column, second down:
Even though he has been portrayed by THIRTEEN FUCKING ACTORS, but so long as the skin remains white he’s ‘the same man’? Literally defining James Bond by skin colour and nothing else.
mirrorfield 113
The character, in this case, being a suave, charming sociopathic adrenaline junkie with a high sex drive who works for an agency that provides an excuse to exercise those traits. Nothing about the archetype relates to gender or ethnicity.
Which of those are exclusively male traits? Are you claiming that there aren’t genius women? Rich women? Promiscuous women? Alcoholic women? Capitalist women? What do you think your point is here?
You’re a bit behind the times, old bean. Captain America is a black man these days.
For example. (Though due to circumstances, the heroine can’t just come out and say it in this story.)
rq @5:
Wait, what? A change of complexion transforms crap to non-crap? How does that work?
Pretty sure it’s Idris Elba that has that effect, not his complexion.
Rob Grigjanis @ 144
A
change of complexionbrilliantly talented, suave actor transforms crap to non-crap.Kagato @145 and The Mellow Monkey @146: OK, so the brilliantosity of Elba will somehow inspire the Bond screenwriters to write something interesting. How does that work?
To be clear: I think Elba as Bond is a great idea. And pissing off Daily Mail readers is a bonus. But it doesn’t magically transform a crappy franchise to a less crappy one, no matter the talent or suavity.
Anyway, he’s an Arsenal supporter, so you know..
All those above pining for a woman James Bond are hereby encouraged to see the first Casino Royale, in which the original hobnobbed-with-Lenin James Bond (David Niven) assigns practically everyone in British Intelligence the code name of “James Bond”, including Ursula Andress (the earliest “Bond Girl” in Dr. No).
Able was I….
I wonder where all these commenters were a few years back when Patrick Stewart played the lead in an otherwise all-black production of Othello.
Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden @ 118
That sounds great! If more Hollywood directors and casting agents thought the way you do, I might actually watch more movies.
It’d also totally recontextualise the bit in early on in Philosopher’s Stone where Petunia Dursley insists Harry get a “proper” haircut, which he hates, and his hair is all grown back the next morning.
Pretty sure it’s the daily mail. That rag is full of nutty nonsense.
aziraphale (#67)
As is all too common in fantasy, one of the major themes of the series is racism, only with white people as stand-ins for real-world people of color. A black Harry Potter would go a little ways towards mending that bit of flagrant absurdity.
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dannysichel (#76)
There are plenty of siblings of different races out there in reality, either by adoption or remarriage. Or they’re mixed and one can “pass” as totally white while the other can’t. I’m just mad they cast Kate Mara for Sue. Mara has all of 1.5 facial expressions and can’t act for shit. Samira Wiley would have been a much better choice. Wiley and Jordan look like they could be full siblings and Wiley’s a great actress.
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Dalillama (#142)
Also, Thor is a woman now. So neener neener neener to all the sticklers.
I had to look up “lampshading: it’s preemptively pasting over plot holes.
Quick note on the Doctor’s sexuality:
The Doctor was actually portrayed as asexual for the vast majority of the show (contrary to what was shown in School Reunion, Sarah Jane Smith was never actually portrayed as being attracted to the Doctor when she starred opposite Tom Baker). The TV Movie attempted to add some sexuality, but it was largely one-sided (Grace fell for him, and while they did show them kissing, whether the Doctor was actually attracted to her is a bit… ambiguous… until the kiss, anyways). Eccleston is where that became more of a thing, though it was still ambiguous (after all, he only kissed Rose to save her from the Time Energy). It was Tennant where the Doctor as a sexual being first became an overt thing, and so far that’s actually been rather unique to Tennant. Matt Smith made him sort-of sexually naive (though Matt Smith himself said the Doctor is asexual, so that’s how he tried to portray him given the writing), and I so far can’t tell how they’re portraying his sexuality with Capaldi (although he does apparently seriously find someone sexy in the upcoming Christmas special, though most don’t think it’s Clara because it’s said that we’ll be surprised by who it is… some think he finds Santa sexy).
So, if the Doctor changes genders, it’d be more in line with the character over the whole 51-year tenure to have her be asexual, or at least not overtly sexual like Tennant was. And to be honest, I’d rather them go with asexual over “manic pixie dream girl”, personally, but that’s just me (actually, that’s why, as much as I want a woman playing the Doctor, I really don’t want Moffat to be the one to do it… I’d love it if the next showrunner, or at least the next head writer, was a woman, and it was done under her).
On top of that, Time Lord society was never really portrayed as sexual. Yeah, they had families and such, but there are fan theories suggesting that Time Lord children were grown in test tubes, not birthed.
So yeah… the Doctor actually being sexual is mainly a Russel T. Davies invention, and largely unique to David Tennant specifically (some fan theories, based upon a comment by the War Doctor in “Day of the Doctor”, suggest that Tennant and Smith were the Doctor having a midlife crisis, and were perhaps trying to be human; hence, Tennant’s Doctor’s sexuality and Smith’s Doctor’s almost child-like naivety).
Anyways… we return to your regularly scheduled topic…
#67
And movies never ever differ in any details from books so we’re stuck I guess.
Right, becauseHarry Potter is so much more serious than James Bond.
I do have to disagree on your reasoning for opposing a white MLK or Mandela. Any actor playing a real person is going to have differences physically, I think it’s problematic to say that race is such a significant line that it can’t be crossed there. Rather, in those cases, the actions of the people were heavily tied into race and it plays a huge part in the story, which wouldn’t really make sense if they were white. That’s the bigger reason. Otherwise it would be fine.
This is the same reason that while a black Bond would he fine, a female one could be a problem. While race isn’t a key aspect of the Bond stories and can be changed without issue, his womanizing and sexual innuendo are key features which would be affected by changing the gender (well I guess women can have those traits too and might be interesting but I think it would probably come out as quite a different character).
Better annalogies for the commenters to have used would be characters played by black actors where there race wasn’t really a key characteristic of the character. In that case playing them with a white person would he fine (for instance if they were to remake Lucy with a white guy as the professor it wouldn’t be an issue).
As a white guy, if they were to make a biopic of my life and cast a black actor who otherwise was a good representation of me, I’d have no problem with it.
The full phrase is “hanging a lampshade on it”.
TV Tropes (Abandon all hope, ye who enter here):
I think that “Bond”/”007” isn’t a person’s name, but a job title that passes from agent to agent. Thus, a black, female, or otherwise not-white-cisgendered-heterosexual-male would be perfectly acceptable.
I love this idea.. :3
nich @ 134: Relic of the British Empire and Cold War, remember? Anyway, you could replace James Bond with someone female or of non-caucasian ethnicity (might even be overdue), but you never could reimagine him as anything other than white male.
Juiet @ 137: “Samus surprise” worked exactly because the character hadn’t been defined in that area and Samus is Samus. Iron Man is Iron Man. As I said, you can have female heroine wearing a powered armor. You can even have one who’s obfuscating her gender. But Iron Man is a man and that’s as much part of the character as power armor.
A. Noyd@ 153: I’ve not followed Cap’s latest exploits, but the point stands. Also, I have serious doubts about Thor’s current incarnation lasting. Thor is another hero who’s kinda defined by being a scandinavian male.
Reimagining can work. Old characters can be reimagined as different from their origins. However, each character has a core identity which defines him or her. If you change that core, you don’t have a reimagined character, you have another character entirely. That core identity can include defined gender, sexuality, skin color, ethnicity, whatever… Or it can be defined by altogether different items, making aforementioned features mutable. Which means that there are characters who can be reimagined regarding those features and there are characters who cannot be. James Bond, Iron Man and Wonder Woman belong to the latter category.
A. Noid
There’s a family here with 4 kids. the mum’s biracial. I have no clue if her curent white partner is the father of any or all her kids, but the kids look like this:
Oldest girl: white, straight bown hair. Facial features of an average white person.
Second girl: reads white when with her white sister or grandma. Slightly curled blonde-brown hair. “Tan” skin and a cute button for a nose. Reads biracial when together with her mum and her younger brothers.
Which takes me to the boys: Like peas in a pot, read black or biracial, except that one of them has blonde curls. So if I can see a family like this in backwater Germany then people living in places where black people are much more common should be fucking used to them.
+++
Oh, and all the “but Bond is that sexist manly-man dude, how could he be a woman?” whiner: Did you recently watch some old Bond movies? That Bond is not a sexist womanizer, that Bond is a fucking rapist. What he does to the majority of the women is not seducing them, it’s sexually assaulting them (but of course once they’ve been pinned to the bed by sheer force and kissed and groped against their will they totally like it). Compare that to the newer Bonds where that sort of shit simply doesn’t fly anymore. And then tell me again that Bond is still the same.
Oh, I also remember how they were whining about Craig portraying a Bond who actually had to work for keeping in shape, who was kind of constrained by his body…
+++
Also, white people can whine “racism” until they’re purple in the face (at which point we’d finally know who those mysterious purple people are they’re totally not racist against), but replacing a formerly white (straight, male, cis or any of these combinations) character with a PoC is NOT the same as the other way round.
White man saving the world is the great western monomyth, the one that’s at the foundation of white male hegemony. Women and people of colour have been written out of fiction and history. Our books and stories are much whiter and more male than history ever was. And even when a story occasionally stars a PoC, it gets white-washed as soon as the story gets a mainstream adaptation (Exodus, anybody?)
So, stop whining and move over to make some space. You’re like that dude on the bus who sits with his legs so far apart he’s using up two spaces while a third one is occupied by his bag
mirrorfield #161:
To quote Charles Stross:
So yeah, by all means let’s keep Bond properly realistic. Have him report to GCHQ first thing Monday morning, to begin his new, exciting job, analysing email traffic. He should drop in on Q and pick up his shiny new desktop calculator on the way in.
Or we could admit that Bond has always been an escapist fantasy which has mutated to fit the times, and that the color of his skin has no bearing on his ability to zoom around the world blowing shit up in the name of protecting peaceful society.
Dalillama, Schmott Guy @ 142
The traits aren’t inherently gendered, but they’re certainly culturally associated with masculinity. I think it’d be fascinating to explore Bond-as-a-woman as compared to Bond-as-a-man. We could see how people (and I’m including myself here) react to the exact same attitudes and behaviours in a slightly different context. How do people perceive murder and mayhem coming from a woman compared to from a man? How about the promiscuity? The patriotism of the “my country, right or wrong” kind? Do they find the character more or less sympathetic?
So yeah, I’d be interested to see a Jane Bond movie, just to see peoples’ reactions, my own included.
Apparently Lara Croft never happened…
karmacat #2: Many years ago, when asked if she would like to play a Bond girl, Lucy Lawless reportedly said: “It wouldn’t suit me at all. I’d want to be James Bond.” Perhaps a lesbian or bisexual Jane Bond? Who is not too young to be believable. Sounds good to me.
(Incidentally, I might mention that Tarja Turunen’s songs “In for a Kill” and “Deliverance” would be fitting musical accompaniment for a Bond film, IMO.)
The new Miss Moneypenny is Naomi Harris who is Caribbean. I suppose it’s a start.
I do agree with the comment “PATHETIC PC WORLD”, their computers are over priced, you can never find a member of staff and if you do they never have the slightest idea how to help….
…wait. What?! Oh okay. Given Mail readers are the sorts who tended to think the Black and White Minstrel Show was just good fun, surely it’d would be fine for Iris Elba to play Bond as long as he ‘whites up’ for the role?
Well, that was strange. . .
All I did was blockquote the Charles Stross citation by Daz @163, and append this:
See also: spyness (read all the way down to the bottom right)
Huh. So the link wasn’t the problem, I guess.
I would love to see a female James Bond. I wonder if the reaction to that idea would be worse. I think heads would explode if it were a black woman.
And the explosions would be even more spectacular depending on who this black Bond — male or female — had casual sex with. Either way, the primitive tribalistic racial-purity freakouts would be of Biblical proportions.
No, fergl100,
Moneypenny is hardly in a position of power. Her only job is to lust after Bond. Hardly an improvement to cast a person of colour in the role. A man, perhaps.
mirrorfield@161:
OOOOHHHHH. I totally forgot your previous nonsensical reason for declaring James Bond’s gender and race sacrosanct. Thank you for reminding me. But apparently the same rah rah patriotism embodied by Captain America means you can reimagine him as anything you want because Liberty and the American Dream and words. The character is almost literally a relic of Second World War Greatest Generation-y bullshit which isn’t exactly known for its “political correctness” but hey, let’s make him a gay black guy!
Again, you have NO real reasons for why you think certain characters always have to stay the same, and certain characters do not beyond “Meh, seems OK with me…” no matter how many five dollar words you dress your opinions in.
Who was the black actress who was kicking ass and taking names in 28 Days Later? I could see her as a Bond type…
fergl100@167 and Sili@174:
Ack! I looked it up and did not realize she is the actress mentioned by fergl100. I hereby second Sili. Why waste an actress with action movie cred in the role of the fucking secretary who fawns over Bond? Thumbs down.
Rob @144
The Mellow Monkey basically said it, but I also think that casting a different sort of actor might actually inspire some different kind of writing.
Also, I’m tired of seeing broody, angsty white guys on the screen. Want something else for a change – and yes, perhaps it is something as superficial as a change in complexion. Also, Idris Elba. Dude. That’s no Daniel Craig of the craggy brood and inscrutably pained eyes. There are movies worth watching (and being a fan of) for the actors in them. :)
re: Harry Potter being black– I think all the canonical details actually work very well with James Potter being black and Lily Potter being white. Harry as the mixed-race child, being raised by his racist white aunt who has absolutely no idea what to do with his hair. I think she explicitly expresses frustration at the way it “sticks up” and won’t just lie all nice and flat and orderly. And, of course, it makes all the Aryan/pureblood parallels in the story work that much better. (Thinking about it… are there any explicitly non-white Death Eaters? Blaise Zabini was in Slytherin, but I don’t remember if he actually joined Voldemort’s “side” at any point.)
@Mirrorfield:
Still not seeing any concrete reasons why they couldn’t be moved along the gender spectrum. You’re just flat out declaring these traits to be specifically cis-male or cis-female.
Tony Stark could come out as a transgendered male, his father having paid for the operation when Tony was younger.
Why wouldn’t the island of women take in a little boy who was rejected by his family for identifying as a female, and using the magic they have, give her the body she wants?
Your definitions not only show your narrow mindedness, but your lack of creativity.
rq @178: Fair enough. I’ve just had a strong aversion to the franchise since seeing the early Bond films as a kid. I see the value of diversification, but you couldn’t get me to watch any more, no matter who they put in the lead. Now, if they did a remake of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold…
Nich and Sili
Miss Moneypenny is one of the well known characters in the franchise. The fact she has turned from white to black shows that it can be done even with well known characters. I take your point about the roll.
Maybe a black M?
fergl100:
Eh, I’d prefer no going around the issue, a black woman as bond would be terrific. Gina Torres would be perfect.
Seconding all of this.
Snoof
And?
About the same, for my part. I’ve encountered quite a few female characters who share those traits. Take a look at, say, Captain Kara “Starbuck” Thrace from the Battlestar Galactica remake.
Rob Grigjanis
Or The Ipcress File
@161
Speak for yourself, dear. Apparently many people can and do.
I don’t disagree. But the burden, I think, is on those to demonstrate that being white is indeed, a defining characteristic of James Bond. I don’t think anyone has come close to providing a convincing argument. “relic of British Empire and the cold war” and “old boy’s club” is the best anyone has come up, which I’d accept if Bond films where specifically set in the 1950s, but in modern setting I have no problem with a black man being part of either of those.
Um, wasn’t James Bond in the books middle-aged and out of shape and somewhat externally boring in appearance? Or am I thinking of someone else?
woozy @186:
No, Fleming presented him as a ‘man of action’. Maybe you’re thinking of George Smiley, John le Carré’s creation.
The only argument that could be made that James Bond was white is that Ian Flemming originally modeled him after David Niven, then retconned him to be more like Sean Connery when those films took off.
Historical footnote: Ian Fleming did not develop his Bond character out of whole cloth, even that of the imperial Union Jack.
One of his primary inspirations – particularly concerning Bond’s gambling/drinking/womanizing proclivities so central to the first JB novel, Casino Royale – came from adventures of the real-life double agent Dusko Popov, a Yugoslavian rogue purportedly spying for the Germans in WWII while passing along everything to the Brits.
Popov, who apparently actually enjoyed a legendary break-the-bank night at the casino in Monaco, had such a libido he got the code name “Tricycle” from his appetite for threesomes. Berlin assigned him to snoop around in the US in 1941, so MI6 duly asked the US for permission to run an operation on the west side of the pond. J. Edgar Hoover would have none of it, due to both turf-guarding and his own personal prejudices against Slavs and sexual hedonists, which may have ended up changing history. Had Hoover paid a little more attention, and worked at connecting some dots, it might have sunk in that Popov’s orders mattered – something about reconnoitering a place called Pearl Harbor…
Anyway, Bond’s ethnicity has always had some flexibility.
Pierce R. Butler @189: Sidney Reilly was another inspiration, both for Fleming and a rather good TV miniseries. Lovely Shostakovich theme music.
Gah! Sorry. Niven was who Flemming wanted to play Bond. Got that one wrong…
Apparently, the name came from an American ornithologist. Flemming liked it because it was both dull and masculine.
I found this to be an interesting read regarding the origins of James Bond.
And it definitely invalidates my earlier “argument” (put in quotes because I didn’t intend for my earlier comment to be seen as if I specifically was making the argument, because I’m all for a person of color playing Bond… I think I failed at getting that across, though).
This is apparently how Flemming envisioned Bond.
Raging Bee @ 173: I’d also love to see “Jane Bond” movie with black actress. The Origin story basically writes itself: Bastard Daughter of the legendary “old man” (now either retired or died violently(*)), with her own (nevertheless effective) way of doing things in more modern Britain. Handing down the torch to younger generation, if you will. Add tension on generational-, racial-, sexual- and other lines as desired… (“But we’re all in this For Queen and Country, aren’t we?”)
Unfortunately EON et al. are probably too cowardly to mess with the formula “too much”…
(*) Original explanation for Bond’s drinking, IIRC, was that he didn’t care about his health: As a 00-agent he’d most probably die violently before reaching retirement age.
Around the time of “Casino Royale”, there was talk of Chiwetel Ejiofor being the next Bond, but that died down with the success of Craig’s movies. I also remember that people thought it was “daring” to have Craig as the first blonde Bond. 9_9 It was interesting, however, to have Bond not react at all in “Skyfall” when Raoul Silva felt up Bond’s legs in a sexual way. Craig’s Bond responded as if to say, “I’ve done this before, it doesn’t bother me.”
It’s hinted in some Bond movies that Bond isn’t a single person, but rather a series of spies with the same code name (which would be utterly ridiculous in the real world, more ridiculous than Bond movies…). It’s entirely within the setting of the movies to have a Bond be black, Indian, Asian, or of any other extraction.
Yes, but didn’t one of the Craig films establish that Bond was his family name? Granted, that could mean anything. It could be retconned to say he was related to the other Bonds, but that would still suggest a family lineage, of sorts.
The continuity of the latest Bond films is really strange, though. Casino Royale was supposed to be Bond’s origin story, accept that Judi Dench played “M”, which sort of suggested that it happened after Die Another Day.
None of this means that Bond can’t be played by someone who isn’t a straight, white, cis-gendered male, though.
It just suggests that continuity in the Bond films is about the same as Doctor Who continuity, which is to say that there isn’t much continuity at all…
Kagato @143:
Thanks. I hadn’t heard of it and I quite enjoyed it.
mirrorfield @161:
The “Samus surprise” is not for the audience, it is for in universe watchers.
Did you really think that when I said “the media assumes that the person behind the suit is a man” I meant this universe’s media as opposed to the media in the universe of that Iron Man’s version?
And being slowly killed by shrapnel going towards is heart is as much part of the character as power armor… oh wait, no it isn’t, Iron Man is still Iron Man even with a brain tumor instead of shrapnel, as in Ultimate Iron Man.
If you narrowed your claim that Tony Stark is a man in Earth-616 then I’d agree with you, but given that the Marvel Universe is composed of many alternate sub-universes there is nothing that prevents the Iron Man from a few of those universes to be women.
But even in Earth-616 you could have a woman becoming Iron Man. It wouldn’t be the first time that another person took on the mantle of a superhero (as already noted in this thread).
Your whole argument seems to boil down to “it’s the way it’s always been so it’s the only way it ever can be”, which kinda reminds me of this xkcd cartoon. Repetition with variation happens all the time because we’re all different.
Look, I can understand that you wouldn’t accept a woman as Iron Man because you think its alter ego’s gender is super duper important, and I expect plenty other people wouldn’t accept it either, and I wouldn’t accept an Iron Man without a powered flight suit, but your lack of acceptance is not a valid argument for why its gender is supposedly crucial to the character.
To add to Julien’s response to this:
Prepare to have your brain asplode: Thor is a woman now! In the Marvel Universe no less! Thor, who was a buddy of Iron Man in a recent Marvel Movie; Thor is a woman, with no linguistic suffixes, such as Thorress, nor Thorrette, nor even Miss Thor, nor Thor-Woman; just plain Thor, And picking up Hammer didn’t turn a woman into Thor; only Thor can pick up that Hammer, so in order to pick up that hammer: She is Thor. full stop.
Um, no. Only someone who’s worthy of the power can pick up the hammer. This is hardly the first time that a female character has had this power and it’s certainly not going to be the last time.
I’m a little late to reply because it has taken me a few days to get my ftb account set up. I wanted to recommend a book I love that features James Bond’s lesbian sister, Jane.
It’s called Kiss the Girls and Make Them Spy, and here is the blurb from GoodReads.