Some Teasing

So we're just a few short, bad-tempered months away from the release of Skyfall and, look, here is the teaser trailer!

Trailers are silly things and best not taken too seriously. Teaser trailers are even sillier and I'm not going to dissect this one in order to fill space (see here or here if you really have to). But we can at least get a sense of the mood and atmosphere of the actual movie from these snippets. Skyfall would appear to be much like Craig's Bond: hard as nails, cool-as-you-like, utterly badass and, yet, possessing an inner frailty. I completely can't wait.

What I am already fed up with is comments along the lines of "oh, it can't be any worse than Quantum of Solace!" which I find lying around on YouTube comments, Twitter and in online newspaper blogs. Firstly, QOS is a brilliant Bond film. I expect. It certainly was the last time I watched it anyway. And, secondly, the only people who can think that QOS is a bad Bond film are people who have successfully managed to erase the incredible awfulness of Die Another Day from their minds. Or, here's a horrifying thought, maybe there are people who liked DAD?

Here's Tim Stanley, writing for the online edition of the Daily Telegraph:

"Sorry, but Bond ain’t Bond unless he’s flying into space with a Russian minx called Tatyana Innerthigh on a deadly mission to kill a fat bald man with a cat." 

Oh, good grief. Look, I like Roger Moore's films and I admire his non-interpretation of the character of James Bond - but to claim that the camp, '70s version is definitive is utter twaddle. Fleming's books are nothing at all like those films and are, instead, more faithfully realised by, say, FRWL or LTK (yes, really) and Casino Royale.

"Connery and Moore played their parts in an age when character trumped looks and women were encouraged to find a man attractive well into his seventies. They might have had prostate trouble, but they also had wit and charm. And we, the heterosexual men for whom these movies are made, could watch them and aspire to be them."

Hang on. Did he just say "we, the heterosexual men for whom these movies are made"? That's a bit, odd, isn't it? Especially as he seems to only like the camp ones. And Craig is hardly charmless. I'd say he exudes it, rather like the growl from under the bonnet of an idling DB5.

"Gentlemen, Bond has been stolen from us and redesigned to appeal to women. In order to keep the men glued to their seats, the producers throw in lashings of sadistic violence. Without innuendo, Bond has thus become violent feminine porn." 

To which I have to say what on Earth is wrong with violent feminine porn anyway? But really, although tongue in cheek (possibly), this is a blinkered and entitled point of view. Mr Stanley seems to feel that men have been betrayed because women have been given Daniel Craig to drool over instead of making do with a wheezy geriatric Bond. It's not my place to say, but I doubt gay men are annoyed by the marriage of gritty violence and rock-hard abs. And perhaps women got fed up having to make do with men who merely aspired to be Roger Moore? Mr Stanley derides Craig's physique ("an absurd body that no human being could replicate") and yet it doesn't appear to occur to him that this is how women might have felt about ALL the women in Bond films since Ursula bloody Andress? Either way, Mr Stanley seems to be uncomfortable with the attention Craig's body has received from women (let alone men). Perhaps it isn't so much that men have been let down, but that women's expectations have gone up, and rightly so.

There is an ongoing conflict within the Bond films, between the camp, jokey versions and Fleming's cold bastard. The pendulum will swing back and forth but he continues to be an aspirational figure for men and women, straight and gay. The idea that Bond is rightfully the cultural property of heterosexual men is appalling. It has also never been true.

I have in front of me a 1965 reprinting of On Her Majesty's Secret Service. On the back is a blurb quote from the Sunday Times, from a review of the original publication in 1963:

"James Bond is what every man would like to be, and what every woman would like between the sheets."

It's still a little old-fashioned, but it makes the point that Bond is for everyone. Luckily, with twenty-three movies, nearly twice as many novels, and a rising tally of video games, these days there are plenty of different versions of Bond to choose from.

Mr Stanley is quite within his rights to choose whichever Bond he is least uncomfortable with.