What The? (Again)

Daniel Craig gives us another reason people pay actors to say other people's words and why we should pretty much ignore them when they say their own.

Mr. Craig thinks the company that makes the James Bond movies ought to let the premiere double-naught spy of all time have a gay relationship to add to his endless series of lady conquests. Modern audiences, he says, wouldn't "blink an eye," and the move would "modernise" Bond. Well, maybe or maybe not. But I'd say this. A comment that talks about how to modernize or make more realistic such an obviously artificial character as James Bond is hard to take seriously. John Le Carre wrote realistic spy novels. Len Deighton wrote realistic spy novels. Ian Fleming wrote adventure stories that featured a "spy."

Spies, especially modern ones, dig through information and sift through files and listen to microphones and use a whole lot more brains than bullets. le Carre details how much espionage work involves gaming and puzzle-solving against the other side. Deighton offers a good glimpse of how an intelligence agency is also a government bureaucracy and often behaves as such.

Now, I'm a big Bond fan, and I love how Casino Royale toned down the gadgetry-mania that let Roger Moore overstay his welcome and ruined the last two Pierce Brosnan editions. In spite of the endless poker game in the middle, Royale ranks as one of the best Bond films of the long series. But a realistic Bond or, in Craig's words, a "modernised" Bond would probably spend more time at a listening post or in front of a computer than he would in bed with a dangerous fatale, be it femme or homme.

So let's keep him the anachronistic misogynist cartoon character that he has always been, shall we? Best to leave be that which need not be shaken, so that nothing untoward might be stirred.