Bond thread for your Sunday. (originally at BMD)

There’s a recurring complaint about the Daniel Craig era, that Bond goes rogue too often in these films.

They’re not wrong, and I get the frustration, but for perspective here’s the pre-Craig films in which 007 has acted against or at least independent of M’s orders:

Goldfinger

Thunderball

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

The Living Daylights

Licence To Kill

Die Another Day

The only 007 with a clean record here is Roger Moore. The fact is, going rogue has been a staple of Bond since Ian Fleming was writing him. (M even asks Bond go off-book and off-duty to kill the scum who murdered M’s friends in the Fleming short story “For Your Eyes Only”.)

People also forget that going rogue - or acting independently, at any rate - was kind of Bond’s initial selling point. That “license to kill” was a big part of his appeal. He was a hero representing the establishment, sure, but one with autonomy.

To the middle-class schlubs reading the books and going to the movies, Bond’s 00 status meant answering to no one, in a postwar climate where men went from answering to parents, to answering to commanding officers, to answering to bosses at work.

Bond had no parents, was done serving in the military, and traveled the world with a goddamn MURDER PASS. At its core, the appeal of Bond was that he did whatever the fuck he wanted.

So acting on his own has always been Bond’s thing. Yet you see folks online clamoring for a Bond film in which he “just gets his orders and go on a proper mission.” But having him do that in 2020 has become, well, tricky.

We for the most part don’t trust the institutions giving Bond those orders these days (just ask Jason Bourne), so the screenwriters have had to navigate an action hero who is, essentially, a tool of the corrupt establishment.

For me, part of the fun is watching how they navigate that; SKYFALL turned the dilemma into its theme and Silva (a villain created specifically by the unsentimental machine which Bond serves) feeds a film-long question that 007 is asking himself about the life he’s chosen.

SPECTRE kind of punted it, but the idea that the evil organization Bond is chasing has shadowy tentacles inside Whitehall itself - was an intriguing one.

One hopes for more creative solutions to “how do we get around the fact that Bond is working for the Actual Bad Guys,” but as of the last three films, the writers have been content with Bond converting his colleagues to his cause. In the real world, it's a different battle.

There’s an ugly truth I’ve recognized in Bond fandom, and it’s that some of those folks crying out for a “proper mission” really do want Bond to be their shining, xenophobic, conservative (and absolutely white) knight.

Here’s a Twitter bio I ran into recently:

That user at one point questions Rachel Weisz’ “Jew propaganda” (mind, his header photo is Rachel Weisz’ husband), and has concerns about white genocide.

So that can take some air out of one’s enthusiasm for the franchise.

But in a way it makes me even more sad that I won’t live to see what comes next. Because this stuff is a death rattle. Bond fans can pine for the way it used to be all they want, but since 1962 this franchise has looked forward. (NEW! NEW! NEW!)

Jet packs, GPS, smart blood. It's always been about holding up the silhouette of 007 against the here-and-five-minutes-from-now.

After these shrieking dinosaurs sink into the tar pits, a new generation of 007 fans will become creators, and will continue to re-contextualize these stories.

That evolution is ultimately what makes long-running IPs like Bond interesting, maybe even important.

End of thread!