From the twitter feed today, “Cast Idris Elba as James Bond Already” from The Daily Beast. Oddly, this was an article from over a year ago; I suppose it’s a slow news day and they’re recycling content, perhaps inspired by today’s reports that Daniel Craig has signed on for another Bond film.
The article reports that Craig had rejected playing the character in any more Bond films, and
a red carpet’s worth of Britain’s most genetically blessed males are more than eager to obtain a license to kill. . . .
Others don’t need to campaign so aggressively. The world’s Bond fans are doing the legwork for them. Enter Idris Elba, who has been appropriately dubbed “The People’s Bond.” . . .
And, with such a public demand for Elba to take on the role, thus becoming the first black James Bond, the unasked question is: What will happen if he does?
The article then goes on to talk about the significance of the “first black Bond” as if it’s just as extraordinary and trailblazing as the “first black astronaut” or the like.
Now, I don’t know if this just shows my lack of popular culture knowledge, but I had to google Elba — here’s the Wikipedia page, here’s the IMDB entry — to find out who he is. Performances that I’ve seen/heard include Heimdall in the Thor/Avengers movies, Krall in Star Trek Beyond, voices in Zootopia and The Jungle Book, and a character in Pacific Rim. (With respect to the last of these films, yes, it was a DVD rented at the kids’ behest.) Where he ranks on the spectrum of A-list actors I can’t tell, and likewise whether he’d have those characteristics that make for a believable Bond actor (suave ladies’ man and action hero), or whether people have latched onto him because he’s both black and British, I don’t know.
But it does raise interesting questions, and I’m not really even offering answers so much as inviting readers to discuss.
Is it important to the James Bond movie to preserve some continuity with the original Ian Fleming character, who, given the time the books were set in, most certainly would not have been black, but would have been ethnically British? Or is it needed in order to preserve continuity in the character’s backstory (in Skyfall, after all, the action takes place at the family estate)?
Or is James Bond more of a genre than a character, so that, to fit properly in the franchise, the character need only have the characteristics of James Bond, and the movie need only have the general structure of a Bond movie (Q, M, Moneypenny, and a villain who is planning to destroy the world)? Certainly, Daniel Craig is a wholly different Bond than Roger Moore, say, grim and serious rather than treating world-saving as a sort of side gig to the primary endeavor of seducing women.
And if Bond is white because the “real” Bond (of the novels) is white, that is one more way in which it’s simply impossible for black, or Asian or Hispanics actors to be represented fully in proportion to their numbers among the American population, when movies are set not just in the present day but in the past. Which is itself another way in which it’s simply not possible to achieve this hoped-for world of perfect, utopian-level “social justice” in terms of, as they say, “diversity and inclusion.”
Image: from Pixabay; https://pixabay.com/en/james-bond-spy-movie-bond-james-2114038/ Because I don’t have a good enough understanding of “fair use” and how it applies to using a James Bond or Idris Elba image and I’m not in the mood for figuring it out.
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