No Time to Die
A licence to Shill
I am a good wife, so I went to the Bond film with my husband. I am a feminist, but I’ll let you in on a secret; I don’t actually find it offensive that blokes like a playboy archetype who is irresistible to women, is deadly, has the best toys in the universe, and is improbably competent at a wide range of tasks. I have made unfashionable peace with masculine commercialised fantasies.
In a world where porn is promoting the choking of women, music videos pretend that empowerment looks like prostitution, and the word “woman” itself can never be used to refer to the people whose bodies are organised around the bearing of children, I think it’s okay that men want to be rich, stylish, bulletproof and have women faint with desire when they don a dinner jacket.
If you read the “academic” papers on violence against women that are produced by the richest organisations in the world, which I have, they will tell you that the key driver of male violence against women is “gender inequity”. Apparently, we will not stop violence by addressing violent porn and making shelters single sex; instead, we must culturally program men to see women as the same as them.
One of the ways we will achieve the noble goal of “gender equity” is by “primary prevention”. Primary prevention is the seizing of the means of cultural production by very rich and very powerful people so they can re-engineer archetypes and stereotypes in line with best practice. I am not making this up, this is the nonsense ideology of intersectional feminism.
Now, what about Mr. Bond? First, the parts of the film I liked. In these non-traveling times, I have enjoyed films with beautiful scenery, well-cut garments on perfectly toned human bodies, and the spectacle of cars that few of us can afford, screaming through the streets we are no longer allowed to visit. Some of this was delivered for my $11 movie ticket and three hours of my life that I spent on “No Time to Die”.
As we entered the theatre my husband told me that this was “the last one”. Under the sad title “No time to die” I then watched the public strangulation of the playboy archetype in the guise of sticking it to the patriarchy, but ever so quietly and with the subtlety of a boiling frog. After all, there are plenty of guns, bravado, and masculinity in the last James Bond film. The new Bond has echoes of the old Bond, he is still irresistibly handsome, deadly and in possession of the very best toys a boy could want, it is just that his testicles are in a jar on the desk of our reigning cultural masters.
But there is more to the castration of Bond than meets the eye. Bond in “No Time to Die” does not have casual sex, he is in love with one woman and produces a girl offspring. He is a deeply sensitive tortured human. He is probably tortured by his sixty years of getting away with murder and endless casual sex with impossibly beautiful women.
Early in the film, we are made aware of how they will keep the franchise lining their pockets when Bond finally goes to the feminist hell, he so richly deserves. There is a new 007. Lashana Lynch as Nomi, is attractive without being a classic “bond girl”, she dresses in a gender-neutral way, and she wears rectangular glasses that are not an accidental reference to the eternally cool Grace Jones.
Just like Kentucky Fried Chicken rebranded to KFC, James Bond is rebranding to his number, 007, what the borg call a “designation”. When the means of cultural production are fully captured, archetypes will be assigned. What was, in the past, a masculine archetype, produced for the entertainment of regular slobs who dream impossible dreams, is now a gender-neutral amalgam. Men can have porn that includes choking trafficked women from third world countries, but God forbid if he can have a fantasy about walking around white, powerful, and improbably competent.
The new 007 is not a woman, but a gender-neutral figure in the guise of a cool black woman. 007 is no more real than James Bond was, but we need to ask what her point is, who’s fantasy is she? Because although Bond may have been the fantasy of some women, he was primarily the fantasy of regular men. As an enduringly successful product, Bond’s customer was working and middle-class men.
Nomi in No Time to Die is a perfect study in the struggle between the democratic market for culture and the way capital is being taken hold of by the new left, or what is being called “woke”. I won’t say it is unprecedented because new cultural production is beginning to look like the stifled scripts of the 50’s under a different hegemony. Nomi is the unhappy compromise many of us are getting used to.
This is a major spoiler alert, but the key to the film comes in the final scenes. In the finale of the film, Bond is momentarily given back the 007 mantle from the beautiful strong-looking black woman(Naomi). Fatally wounded, Bond is still breathtakingly sexy in his grandfather shirt, suspenders, and leather gloves. His last act as 007 is to sacrifice his life so that the woman he loves and the girl child they created can live. He has to die so that the new cultural archetype of 007 can be manufactured and resurrected from his ashes. But Bond doesn’t die a playboy, he dies a Christ. Unlike the stifling propaganda Hollywood produced in the 1950’s the new Hollywood doesn’t point to you to a religion, they are your religion.
Bond was already an invention, but his ascendancy as the ultimate masculine playboy archetype came from the market, it was in this way democratic. They say there are three things that tell the truth, children, drunks, and leggings. I want to add to this, the market. Hollywood has currently a stranglehold on the market and can produce this kind of top-down rubbish that we have to watch because it is better than the other absolute shite they pump out.
But the sacrifice of Bond as a playboy archetype is mere penance that is demanded for the multi-billion-dollar porn industry that lines more pockets than Bond ever will. An industry involving the trafficking and degradation of the poorest women on the planet. An industry that we can re-brand as powerful, by people who were too noble to tolerate a testosterone-fuelled fantasy regular guys can enjoy after a hard day at work.
The reference to Grace Jones in the rectangular glasses donned by the new 007 is no accident. Gender non confirming characters like Jones are perfect to appropriate in the myth that our cultural masters are democratising gender. But some of us remember when Grace Jones was being dressed by the most brilliant gay men in the world. When market-driven cultural production was already pushing boundaries in gender and sexuality.
Now the means of cultural production have been captured by those who are going to make men better, you can be assured the new 007 will be “queer”. “Queer” and “equity” are not democratisation but the appropriation of the culture of gay, feminine, masculine and black people by corporations and governments, who hand them back to us in rubbish like this film and the insipid propaganda that now comes from the most corrupt people on the planet.
The Christ-Bond had to die so that 007 could live as a manufactured cultural instruction to the classes of people who once dared to dream through their own masculine and feminine archetypes in the entertainment they pay for.
After the film, my husband asked me if I enjoyed it, a truly good wife may have lied, but I simply said, “not much”. He may have thought that was because I am a feminist, and he’d be right.