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Yes. For me.
Mileage varies.
Agreed. Very well put, @timmer. I am in agreement on how some could see Bond as taking advantage of the vulnerable former sex worker Severine. Further proof then, if any were needed, that my thesis that the film Bond is sometimes caddish in behaviour (especially Moore Bond in LALD) still holds up to scrutiny.
I'd say you're right on that, too.
Low road tax due to environmental considerings (QoS).
Hence, it's a joke.
It does make me laugh the amount of people who have a real problem with the shower scene in SF. Yet most of Bond's previous misogyny seems to go unmentioned (in particular in TB when Bond literally blackmails Pat Fearing into having sex with him in order to maintain his silence)
OH.
Take a look at yourself in the mirror, Sebastian. Ridicule yourself before you even think about hating on Skyfall or any other James Bond film, for that matter.
My God, it's almost as bad as Lee Tamahori coming out and criticizing Skyfall.
The distinction that persons are reacting to is that SEVERINE IS A SLAVE, not a former, but in the very present current context
No one cares about Bond's so-called misogyny other than the femisistas, but they are nuts, with their own whacked agenda, so who cares.
btw the Fearing seduction doesn't compare. Bond simply saw a smooth opening and pounced. It was all in good fun. There was no serious suggestion that he was going to "blackmail" her. The two had been flirting for days. The two-way flirt signals were unmistakable to both of them.
Of course Bond is a womaniser, and he's known to consort with prostitutes too, but this Severine scenario is new territory, even for Bond.
The scenario doesn't need be condemned per se. One can see things from Bond's pov, but it shouldn't schock us fanboys when members of the general public, reviewers, etc, find it unsettling.
I think it's fair comment. I think it would be more offputting if everyone gave him a free pass here.
And if we want to look to Fleming, Fleming's Bond, who was fully aware of Tiffany's sexually traumatized past, was handsoff when it came to bedding her.
They didn't get down to business until she gave him a firm invite, very late in the novel.
Mind you we could argue that Severine had set the table for Bond too, what with the champagne and romance set-up, all laid out for him when Bond found his way into her cabin. However this doesn't change the fact she was a slave, seemingly desperate to do anything to get out of her hopeless situation, including sleeping with whatever man might help her get out.
Actually there is precedent sort of, with Bond and Andrea in Golden Gun, the film. Moore blithely sleeps with her, although he does consider her to be femme fatale at that point, in Fiona Volpe, Helga Brandt territory, so he doens't give a crap.
Severine however is not enemy to Bond and he knows it. She wants out. The irony here is that Andrea was in a serious gangster moll predicament and was trying to get out, but Bond hadn't figured that out, at least not initially.
So the parallel with Severine is there in that sense, even if Andrea was never actually a slave, but it keeps coming back to the slave thing.
ie, Andrea presumably hooked up with Scaramanga for the thrill of it, and then like Lupe and Domino and others caught in the gangster-moll life, realized that she had become trapped. They made their bed, so to speak. Even Paris Carver in TND, fits this mold.
But with Severine, it keeps coming back to the slave thing. From what we know, she didn't choose this life. She is SLAVE.
And from what we know of Fleming's Bond, Bond of Skyfall, might also have had some second thoughts, had Severine lived and he had time to pause and reflect
So how do you distinguish between what's plain wrong and what's "all in good fun"?
Easy to say that about the scene in TB as it was nearly half a century ago and may seem timid today.
Always reminds me of this:
What it would have looked like had M been able to shoot a few of Silva's henchmen at her age? Utterly ridiculous. In Star Trek Nemesis, when Picard shoots around a whole battalion of badguys, it looks just as dumb, for the same reason: Patrick Stewart was getting old and it looked like something out of Rambo. Judi Dench is now elderly, she was never pictured as a former military person. As not all members of MI6, or even not all of the Cs in the history of SIS, have a military background.
And superwomen in fiction are often male fantasies.
Yes, but it was all part of an older idea that actually originated with Lois Maxwell that I alluded to on this forum in a thread. It's time for this idea to be used now just like the helicopter tree-cutters were originally meant for GE but eventually turned up in TWINE instead. There are no original ideas under the sun as someone said.
As for Faulks' own effort, when I tried to read Devil May Care, when it was published, I never reached chapter 4. It rubbed me up the wrong way, but i'm determined to see it through to the end when I get to it in my Bondathon.
Yes, it is unreadable. Strange coming from Sebastian Faulks but I think he rather thought the task of writing a James Bond novel below him.
Absolutely!
Well, I think Skyfall is the better film, though I do need to really re-watch the Craig era in my DVD box-set before I can decide with any finality.
Some of us use something like a Sense of Ethics. It is not that dificult, you just have to have it!
That's a funny vid. :)) Thanks for that. Seducing girls has nothing to do with ethics though.
But the vid helps illustrate the distinction betweeen what's "wrong," and what's in good fun, or what can be considered a welcomed advance.
The Bond in that vid is not getting a green-light signal from the girl, but he persists anyway. He's an oaf. But guys do this all the time and wonder why they get rejected.
The tried and true seduction dance though, requires first and foremost that the girl give the guy the green light. This is basic stuff that goes back to the caveman days, I'm sure. ie not all men had to grab their women by the hair and drag them off. Some I'm sure came willingly. :x
Men should never move until they see green-for-go. Guys basically have to earn the green light, essentially by having their sh*t together, and causing the girl to take notice. Having your "stuff together" can take many forms (smartest geek in the lab or even likeable geek in the lab, you don't have to be alpha-Bond) but something's got to be going on at least, to cause the femme to be interested, at which point she will send a go-signal. The signal can take many forms though.
Challenge here for the smooth male, is to recognize the green light when they get it, which is not as easy as it seems.
Just as frustrating for men, not to mention women, is a failure on men's part to recognize the green-light when they get it. This usually comes down to a male confidence issue or lack of experience with the feminine wiles.
So to conclude this basic seduction-101 lecture ;) , the smooth-operator male, not only has to have his stuff together sufficiently that he can attract women, but just as importantly he needs to be able to recognize the green lights, and know when he is good to proceed.
Bond has the dance down pat. He both manages to attract the girls and recognize all the green lights that get flashed at him.
The rest of us mere mortals have to work a little harder to trigger the green lights.
Patricia Fearing practically had a big green traffic-light on her forehead. Even Pussy was signalling green in Goldfinger's barn, by the time Bond made his move. The proof is in the easy relaxed submission.
But if Bond tried to move on a red light, he'd be rebuffed too, just like the guy in the cartoon video. Cartoon-guy only ultimately gets his way by using strong-arm tactics. The woman isn't actually interested or seduced.
The same ethics as Bond?
As Flemings Bond that is. You know the Guy who saw his creation as a kind of Knight in a shiny armour.
It would appear so. Several people have said to me that they didn't care too much for the shower scene and the shooting scene, both of which of course involved Severine in them.
You mean the guy who created a knight in shining armour that paid prostitutes for sex?
Yes, and these statements to me came from non-Bond fans - just regular film-goers. Quite an indictment on this film, it would seem.
Consensual sex in shower = BAD. Cold blooded murder throughout = GOOD.
I have a piece to write giving Fleming authority for the William Tell scene in SF.
It is just as I already wrote about that Sense of Ethics. You just have to have it. There is really nothing else to say (or write, for that matter).
The first half of John Gardner's novels are good reads I think and pretty good Bond novels. Atleast up until 1987 which is when Scorpius was published. I think that that was his last good Bond novel. The ones that came after ranged from disappointing to average. There were parts of the others like Win Lose or Die that had some isolated good scenes.
Raymond Benson's books put Bond in interesting colourful situations but he can't or atleast couldn't write particularly well which certainly hindered my enjoyment. I thought he brought back too many of the characters from the Fleming books too. Well, I'm not specifically against this but I think he gave them too big a roles.
Well, yes, for many the dividing line in terms of quality was between the 1980s and the 1990s John Gardner James Bond novels.