A gay James Bond? The hypothesis was raised on September 3, during the presentation in Venice of Queerthe latest from Luca Guadagnino. On the podium, Daniel Craig, the sixth James Bond in the cinema and perhaps the best (with permission, of course, from Sean Connery) in the character’s more than 60-year history. At his side, Guadagnino, the man who has taken the British actor out of his comfort zone by offering him the first openly gay role of his career.
Following one of the Italian filmmaker’s reflections on representativeness, sexual diversity and resistance to conventions, a journalist asked whether it would be possible to conceive, at this point, of an Agent 007 in love with another man. Craig accepted the question with a skeptical smile, shrugged his shoulders and drained his glass of water. Guadagnino entered the fray with amused reluctance: “Guys, let’s be adults: we cannot know James Bond’s inner desires. That said, the answer is no, and the only important thing is that James resolves his missions in an appropriate manner.”
The images of the press conference had a notable impact on social networks. There were those who accused the author of the question of engaging in journalism. woke or the one who warned, we will never know if completely seriously, of the existence of an “obvious” gay subtext in the performances of George Lazenby, Timothy Dalton or Craig himself. Even the one who claimed that the producers of the saga were corrupting the character and “burying the cinema”, as if the gay James Bond thing was a project already in progress and not just the whim of a reporter determined to give a little pep to a press conference that was turning out to be rather insipid.
A book (always) open
Some media also joined in the improvised controversy and, thus, the journalist, scriptwriter and activist Paco Tomás He insisted very little then the obvious: Bond is not real, he is a fictional character who, moreover, is not closed or fully determined, because he is still immersed in an evolutionary process that began many years ago and is still ongoing. He could be “as gay as Harry Potter, Indiana Jones or Superman” if those responsible for any of these franchises decided to give it a twist. queerin whole or in part, to its characters. Something that has already happened, for example, with SpongeBob, Lokihe Barbie Ken either Batman.
In Bond’s case, a consistent twist with the past would be to make him bisexual, because there is evidence of his frequent sexual escapades or episodes of erotic tension (almost always resolved) with female characters such as Vesper Lynd, Pussy Galore, Wai Lin, Tiffany Case, Holly Goodhead or Paris Carver. But a timely reboot We could, why not, reset the counter to zero and take a look at the unpublished 007 from a parallel dimension, as happened in the past with Spider Man or Caesar, the messianic leader of the Planet of the Apes. The creation of fictions is one of the games that best tolerates someone breaking the rules.
Zing Tjeng, iNews columnist, brings another point of view: “Some LGBT people like me are starting to get a little fed up with the lack of imagination involved in issues like this. Why does the on-screen representation of communities like ours necessarily have to go through reboots “Of traditional franchises in which the sexual orientation of some of the characters is changed?” Why does no one consider, Tjeng concludes with righteous indignation, creating future gay icons from scratch instead of persisting in routinely recycling the old white, masculine and heteronormative archetypes by adding a twist towards diversity that no one appreciates and no one asks for?
Maggie Baska adds an interesting nuance in an article in Pink News. Rather than giving it an artificial patina queer For a character who may not need it, why not give the role of Agent 007 to an LGBT actor or actress? Baska wrote her article a few months ago, shortly after it was made public that the most likely candidate to become the next James Bond was Aaron Taylor-Johnson. That is, another white, heterosexual and British man, the sixth in a row (Lazenby was Australian). In that context, the journalist advocated bringing diversity not necessarily (or not only) to the scripts, but to the castings, and proposed up to 13 different candidates, from Elliot Page to Billy Porter, Kristen Stewart or Colman Domingo, all queer, five of them black and four women. If James Bond is one of the royal lineages of the acting world, why can the heir to the crown only be a light-skinned man who sleeps with women?
Hoagy Carmichael’s spy brother
There is no doubt that Ian Fleming, the creator of the character, conceived James Bond as a heterosexual man approaching middle age, although not as the alpha male, serial seducer, who would come later, largely thanks to the cinema. Already in the first novel, Casino Royalehad the secret agent accompanied by a sidekick, Vesper Lynd, who would end up becoming his sexual partner and the target of his affections.
It is curious to note that Fleming, who was 45 in 1953 when the novel was published, imagined Bond as a cross between his own image and that of the American singer-songwriter Hoagy Carmichael. That is, an old-fashioned dandy, endowed with a certain elegance but rather conventional and circumspect in appearance. The characteristics that made Bond exceptional from the start were his icy efficiency, his lack of scruples, his patriotism and his fondness for a dry Martini, not his sex appeal.
Bond has known TV Parodies (with Barry Nelson) or cinematographic and has passed through the hands of a large number of performers, scriptwriters, producers or directors, not to mention the necessary adjustment to sociocultural changes and public expectations that have been taking place generation after generation. In a certain sense, it is like the Sagrada Familia, a work in progress in permanent drift, never fully crystallized. A creature of such hybrid and elusive identity that one could almost argue that it lacks identity.
Those who have been up in arms in recent years when they read that the next Bond could end up being an Afro-British actor, like Idris Elba, or a woman, like Lashana Lynch, are concerned about preserving the purity of a character who was almost never pure. Connery’s exquisite and carnal 007 has little in common with the worldly charm of Pierce Brosnan, the much more tortuous and cynical version of Roger Moore or the crude and stoic one of Daniel Craig. The elasticity of the character is virtually infinite. He can be stretched or twisted at will without breaking. He never had a completely defined comfort zone (or coherence zone), so it is almost impossible to get him out of it.
A Bond fresh out of the closet could be as functional and as suggestive as the cowboys homosexuals of Brokeback Mountain In 2005, many people wanted to see an insult to the memory of John Wayne, when in reality they did more to broaden, enrich and democratise his legacy. Bond in love with another man is conceivable, it could have an artistic and narrative meaning and it is likely that the public (or at least part of the public) would end up accepting it naturally. Although it might not be amiss to ask, with Zing Tjeng, Maggie Baska and perhaps Daniel Craig himself, to what extent something like this is necessary.
#starting #fed #lack #imagination #eternal #debate #James #Bond #gay