In Friday’s Entertainment Weekly, Danel Craig — the new Casino Royale 007 guy with the blond hair and the boxer’s face — has been quoted as saying that “if I went onto the internet and started looking at what some people were saying about me — which, sadly, I have done — it would drive me insane.”
This is a very queer sentence — a suppositional “if” that turns into a blunt admission that leads back to a conditional “would”.
Craig then says that the old-school, pot-bellied, going-online-in-their- parent’s-basement 007 fans “hate me….they don’t think I’m right for the role. It’s as simple as that. They’re passionate about it, which I understand, but I do wish they’d reserve judgment.”
Ahhh, but Craig is right for the role because he’s got that cold-streak thing, and because he’s not the sort to toss off those lame little Roger Moore-like 007 quips, which bozo Bond producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli couldn’t divest themselves of.
It doesn’t matter, of course, because the Bond movies are dead. There are milllions who will pay to see Casino Royale when it comes out later this year, but we’re living in a Matt Damon, Paul Greengrass and Jason Bourne world. They own the rough-and-tumble secret-agent realm of 2006 and into the foreseeable future, and that’s that.
That said, Craig sound as if he hasn’t been around online verymuch. Online posters are extremely passionate about everyone and everything — it doesn’t matter who or what the topic may be. If you’re being discussed by onliners, you’ll be dissed and then some. You’ll be poked, punched, mocked, bitch-slapped, humiliated and disembowled.
The internet community is actually one of the healthiest places to hang these days because at least everyone’s rage is being openly expressed. A few years ago I asked a psychologist from Pacific Palisades what was the most common malady he noticed among all his patients over the years. “Oh, that’s easy,” he said. “Suppressed rage. That’s the #1 thing that everyone is not dealing with, and which is causing more problems than anything else.”