The last time I went to see a James Bond movie, I remember my primary sensation being one of boredom. There were some moderately diverting gadgets and car chases. There was a bit filmed in a casino. Judi Dench was good. There was the obligatory sex-in-a-bathroom shot where a female hand was pressed ecstatically against a misted-up shower panel to symbolise orgasm by way of Radox. But, other than that, I left the cinema feeling, well, a bit meh.
I didn’t particularly mind. I don’t watch James Bond films for great artistic stimulation. I watch them in a spirit of mild affection and nostalgia. They remind me of lazy Saturday afternoons during the Christmas holidays as a child, when the most diverting thing on one of the four flickering channels at our disposal (yes, kids: four; and we couldn’t pause live television either; and we had to hunt our own food and stuff) was George Lazenby slaloming down the ski slopes in tight blue salopettes.
I continue to watch them now because the Bond films still contain occasional moments of self-referential fun and because Daniel Craig looks good in a pair of tiny swimming shorts. And, before you ask: yes, I’m fine with objectifying his pectorals because for years 007 has been lasciviously ogling women with names like Pussy Galore and Xenia Onatopp and Gagging Forit (OK, I made that last one up, but you get my drift) and it seems only fair to redress the balance somewhat.
Of course the Bond films contain sexist elements. Many of the female characters remain boringly two-dimensional and exist purely to serve as an embodiment of some clapped-out male fantasy. But this is part of 007’s schtick: he is a secret agent fuelled by testosterone and martini. He never pretended to be a metrosexual who took out the bins and emptied the dishwasher.
Every now and then, someone claims there should be a female Bond. Last week, it was the turn of actor Eleanor Matsuura who plays an MI5 agent in the new film adaptation of the hugely popular Spooks TV series. “Please! I want there to be a female James Bond,” she said, “I want there to be a female Doctor Who. Wouldn’t it be fantastic? We’ve a long way to go, but the landscape is changing. People are starting to not want the same old formula.”
Really? I don’t want a female James Bond. I don’t see the point of it. Bond was written as a man, by a man, emerging from the original books as a product of the 1950s and of his fictional background (public school toff sent down from Eton for trying to shag a maid etc.)
Through the years, Bond has become a ridiculously overblown caricature of himself and therein lies part of the appeal: we are aware, while watching a Bond movie, how archly ridiculous the whole thing is. Unlike Doctor Who, a science-fiction character capable of regenerating in any form, Bond is conceptually a real man. You might as well say you want to see a Harriet Potter or relaunch the X-Men franchise as XX-Women to reflect female sex chromosomes.
Besides, shouldn’t women be aiming for something a bit higher? Why should we bother with James Bond when we could be writing new scripts with our own kick-ass female protagonists?
It shows a paucity of ambition for female actors to lobby to play a misogynist fictional hero, created by a man for a predominantly male audience in an era when women were seen as little more than bits of secretarial fluff. Wouldn’t it be better to come up with something new, something which refuses to play by the old rules, rather than simply slotting ourselves uncomfortably into a dated format that is fundamentally pretty silly anyway?
Let’s invent new heroines rather than superimposing ourselves on old male ones.
Anyway, I’d miss Daniel Craig in his swimming trunks.
A monkey named Charlotte
Oh, you know how it is when you’ve just had a baby: the sleep deprivation, the night-feeds, the nappy-changing, the endless laundry, the nipple rash, the Japanese zoo wanting to name a monkey after your newborn.
Sorry, hang on a sec. A Japanese zoo wanting to name a monkey after your newborn? Well, yes actually. That’s exactly what happened last week when the Takasakiyama Natural Zoological Garden announced they would be christening a macaque monkey “Charlotte” after the newest addition to the royal family.
Apparently there had been a public ballot and “Charlotte” took the majority of the vote at the last minute, even though all the polling up to that point had pointed to an uneasy coalition between several different Christian names and at some point Paddy Ashdown said he’d eat a marzipan hat. I’m pretty sure that’s what happened anyway.
But then, there was an outcry from Japanese members of the public, who felt the decision was disrespectful and who flooded the zoo switchboard with complaints, asking how they would react if a member of the Japanese imperial family were named after a ridiculous British creature like, say, a badger or an otter or one of those squirrels that keeps digging up and eating the crocus bulbs.
What these well-meaning people couldn’t realise was that, in the UK, we love animals so much that having one named after us seems a perfectly reasonable life ambition. We are a nation of obsessive anthropomorphisers.
How else to explain our collective wonderment at Hypno-Dog, the canine equivalent of Paul McKenna, who appeared on Britain’s Got Talent and supposedly put Simon Cowell in a trance? Or the popularity of #DogsInPollingStations – a series of photos of, yes, dogs in polling stations, which rapidly became an internet meme on election day.
Or the fact that all you have to do in Britain to get as many Twitter followers as Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga combined is to post a constant stream of endearing cat videos?
Luckily, the zoo saw sense. The monkey will be called Charlotte after all. A commemorative plate is surely only a matter of time.
