A conversation about the Bond franchise…a franchise that will most likely continue but which technically no longer exists due to the fact that James Bond was killed at the end of No Time To Die. Here’s how I put it earlier today:
HE: “’They’ (franchise caretakers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson) killed James Bond in order to placate the wokester tyrannicals. HE HAD TO DIE for his decades of prowling, women-devouring chauvinism (which peaked during the Sean Connery-George Lazenby period and had actually started to wane with Roger Moore, who was too courtly and light-hearted to be a GENUINELY CALLOUS CHAUVINIST) and especially to signify that that kind of iconic power and dominance (brawny, martini-sipping white guy with a special license to kill anyone) had come to an end. THE STATEMENT HAD TO BE MADE.
Friendo: “I actually predict that Broccoli & Co. are going to bring Bond back as a defiant white man who is more sexual than Craig’s Bond was in the end. The series needs that, and I think they know it.”
HE: “But they killed the character — a British secret service agent who came into being in the early ’50s in the early Ian Fleming books, and who ruled as a superstar movie character for six decades (Dr. No to No Time To Die). How can they bring him back except in a prequel world?”
Friendo: “They can start the series over — in either a prequel world or a contemporary world — with a snap of their fingers. They can do whatever they want. I mean, the last Spider-Man movie featured all three of the actors who had played Spider-Man — a complete shattering of any sort of logical, cohesive, spherical Spider-realm. Who says this stuff has to perfectly parse? The Craig series was self-contained — a kind of five-film mythology. Why not just launch another series like that? Having said all that, I would LOVE it if they went early-‘60s period with it. That could be amazing, and they could bring the sex back.”
HE: “Yes, they can ‘do what they want’, but if they can REALLY do whatever the fuck they want, why did they kill him in the first place? What for? THEY ENDED THE MAN’S LIFE, and they’re gonna come right back in a couple of years with a new James Bond film like nothing happened in No Time To Die? If they’re going to do that, why did they kill ‘James Bond’? It makes no practical sense. It makes no sense at all. It was crazy.
“Unless (and this is my central point) they killed him as a symbolic sacrificial offering to the Secret Order of Woke Tyrannicals. A symbolic acknowledgment that, in the words of Kaye Corleone in The Godfather Part II, “all of this must end.”
“Broccoli didn’t need a signed demand letter from Woke Central, hand-delivered by courier — she knew that the time had come in the culture to kill this symbol of male dominance and omnipotence…that this decades-old symbol of brawny, ruling-class, white-guy power and close-to-unstoppable potency had to be stilled and snuffed out to make room for the new ruling order of women, wokester absolutists, Pete Meisel-type guys, POCs, LGBTQs and David Chappelle-hating trans activists.
“It’s not just that white guys need to share and surrender power and give up the old brutish ways of doing things — it’s also that white guys, to acknowledge their malignancy and to make up for their centuries of sinful plundering, need to sit in the back of the bus or, better yet, slit their own throats. This, finally, is what the killing of James Bond signified.”