I’ll admit it, I would probably watch an entire TV series that was just about James Bond’s housekeeper. Did you not know he has one? Oh, well, let me tell you about May, this funny lady who looks after Bond’s apartment in the original novels. She’s Scottish. She’s old. She knows how to cook an egg. Aren’t you riveted? Don’t you want an entire show just about May? Here’s the thing, as a Bond nerd I do want a show about May, Miss Moneypenny, or M’s random friends. I also love Kim Sherwood’s Double-O books, all about agents in the world of Bond who aren’t Bond. If there was a Marvel-like build-out of the world Bond (which arguably, in print, there has been for decades) I’d be all in.
But, I, a Bond nerd, should not be calling the shots. And based on a new explosive report in the Wall Street Journal, the person who should be calling those Bond shots is the same woman who has been running things since the 1990s. To put it succinctly, if you think Amazon is right and Barbara Broccoli is wrong, you know nothing about how art is made or why good things are good.
According to the aforementioned WSJ exposé, with excellent and incisive reporting from Erich Schwartzel and Jessica Toonkel, Amazon brass wants to expand the James Bond brand into a sprawling franchise, complete with spinoffs about Miss Moneypenny, TV series, and perhaps, alternate Bonds, including a female James Bond. Additionally, apparently, Broccoli was offended when one Amazon boss, reportedly Jennifer Salke, referred to Bond as “content,” and bristled when a staff member said, “I have to be honest, I don’t think James Bond’s a hero.”
First of all, whether you think James Bond is a hero, or progressive, or not, is hardly relevant to the art of the films. Critics often like to suggest that retro-Bond’s sexist behaviors were acceptable in a bygone era, but this is a fallacy that misunderstands the phenomenon more broadly. Ian Fleming’s books (which are sometimes tamer than the films in terms of sexism) were often attacked in the 1950s for being provocative and “vulgar.” Even in his supposed heyday, James Bond was controversial because, on some level, James Bond should be a kind of lightning rod for culture. He’s not supposed to be squeaky clean; the character Fleming created on the page and that Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli refined for the cinema, is a study in extremes, a specific examination of masculinity that is neither heroic nor evil. As Fleming said in one of the last interviews before the end of his life in 1964: “Bond is detached, he’s disengaged… But he’s a believable man—around whom I try to weave a great web of excitement and fantasy.”