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Yes it’s quite hard to sustain consistently. Accents are a great divider and also a class signifier in the UK.
So I've heard. How broadly is the RP English used throughout the population, and how much does it relate to social class?
I'm terrible at noticing differences in dialects with the English, though. For example, there is an old episode of 8 Out of 10 Cats playing on TV in the background now, and even though I know Jon Richardson is a Northerner, I can't really tell much difference between his accent and Jimmy Carr's accent (and he's from London).
Race is the class divider in the USA. And African Americans do have a distinctly different accent then that of whites.
English English is pretty standardised these days with far fewer local words and phrases - but they do persist.
RP basically means you’re middle class and above in terms of class. You can be middle class and have a regional accent but your accent is much more likely to be toned down. The upper classes all basically speak RP though. Scotland and Wales are different but have their l own class related accents. Posh Edinburgh is a very soft type of Scottish accent - effectively Scotland’s version of RP, while working class Glaswegian is practically incomprehensible to anyone outside the city.
You should watch My Fair Lady.
Maybe I should! Always found the dialects and social class "system" in England a bit difficult to pin point (except for the very obvious examples). I only became aware of the Posh Edinburgh accent though an episode of QI some years ago:
I, and many others, may have issues with Eon at the moment, but they at least would never let that happen.
I agree. We'd end up with Bond as a codename played by whoever is the flavor of the month.
I can almost certainly see Eon or any producer wanting to go down the 'black Bond' route. I mean, just look at the publicity the Idris Elba rumours have had this week. There hasn't been this much heat surrounding a Bond rumour for over a decade.
Casting a black actor is a great marketing tool. Bond would be in the international debate sphere for years. Donald Trump would probably even find time to tweet about it.
There are a couple of great candidates for the role working today.
Beyond Idris...
I see potential in Sope Dirisu
I tend to reply 'Well, if you love him so much where were you when his last 2 movies tanked?'
Very true.
Besides, if we're going to take advice from Twitter, we might as well support Trump and Brexit.
Oh wait.
Elba I can go for...just. He's got the goods apart from skin colour and age.
This other fellow you posted? No way Jose! No can do!
I've been seeing quite a bit of publicity about this recently. His tweet has certainly caught people's attention, even though he clarified his remark.
In fairness, I don't think too many people have seen many of Craig's films outside of Bond either (and particularly the last few), so once someone is in the tux, they're pretty much set even if they can't carry other films. Well, unless they're Dalton that is, poor chap.
And to be quite honest, regardless of the hype it would generate, it would not be worth the sacrifice. Before long you would have other character traits being changed to suit new "fans" who want them to be adjusted to fit more modern sensibilities.
Edit: Of course, I know Bond's character has been adjusted and updated for contemporary times throughout the years, but I'm not talking about minor details. I'm talking more about fundamentals.
I'm a huge Bond fan, and I want a black actor to play the role. Your argument is moot.
Film franchises can guarantee on fans turning up. It's the casual moviegoer that they rely on. On an economic basis, any producer wants to entice new fans to the series. Remember we were all 'new fans' once. Eon want to ensure when the current generation of Bond fans die out, there are a whole host of new people that continue watching these films.
Fundamentally, that means Eon have to make good films to ensure the series continues and hope that they keep their current audience happy and entice more in.
As we have witnessed over the last few days, the public want a black Bond in a huge way. In particular, they want Idris. This isn's to say the public haven't been wrong before. But its a win/win situation for Idris. They get a big box office and get heralded for being progressive.
If Eon move quickly enough, they could have a box office smash on their hands. It's a shame that Craig decided to come back when an Idris Elba/Danny Boyle film could have been in the offering.
Those are good points. Many people I know who feel Elba would be perfect for the role are casual movie goers who have only seen one or two recent Bond films. They are vaguely familiar with Bond. Ask them what their favorite Roger film is and you wouldn't get a solid answer.
They are only into whatever is popular at the moment, rather than a franchise or character's history.
The other day JAMES BOND RADIO's Tom Sears had an interview on TalkSport.com discussing Elba and Bond. The interviewer came across as someone who completely believed whatever is posted on Twitter or facebook, and most likely has never seen a Bond film all the way thru outside, say, CR. She believed the recent rumor about Barbara Broccoli and seemed to think Elba was more or less a done deal until Tom mentioned Barbara really wouldn't be seriously talking about someone else in the role while Craig is still Bond. She didn't want to hear the truth as right now it's popular to speculate on Elba becoming the next Bond.
I said a huge number, not all. So it's not moot in the slightest. And I stand by that, having seen it with my own eyes and had conversations with at least a dozen of these people online in the last couple of days.
A generation of Bond fans has arguably died out already in the series lifetime, yet people still turned up in droves to watch both Skyfall and Spectre. The changes you are asking for are moot and are rather dismissive of the pulling power that the brand has already. People aren't going to stop watching Bond films if he stays the white man he has always been. It's a very small, vocal minority that wants Bond to be black, and an even smaller one calling for a woman; and again, a large chunk of them haven't been to a Bond film before now, and yet we're doing okay without them. The other casual fans aren't going anywhere.
The key to Bond's longevity, as it has always been, is in the storytelling. Change the story, not the character. As you say, the key is making good films. They can do that without such a huge fundamental change.
And again, all you reference is box-office and hype, nothing about the effect it could have in the future once we've opened the door to the character's race being changed.
The argument is moot anyway, Elba won't be Bond. He's said so himself.
That seems to be the consensus I'm getting online, too. Many would argue that it's irrelevant as to where the wishes are coming from - there are people who have a wish for a black James Bond and that's just how it is. But I would hope that Barbara Broccoli would not take any notice of them, because they're not really fans of the character - it's just a thing they want to see happen for progressive reasons.
Progression is great until it's regressive, and it would be massively regressive for the character to be altered in such a big way.
Correct. Minor adjustments, adopting popular trends to some controllable extent, fine. But a total makeover has never happened, one might argue not even when Peter Sellers played "a version" of James Bond.
I like pizza. A multitude of small variations exist but in the end you need dough, tomatoes, cheese and perhaps some pepperoni and you've got the backbone of almost every pizza. I also like ice cream. Now, if I were to combine my two favourites and put ice cream on my pizza, surely the result would no longer qualify as a pizza. So why would I want to ruin two good things by smashing them together?
I like Elba, despite the fact that many films, including that recent THE DARK TOWER projectile of vomit, don't quite know how to serve him well. He can be a spy, get his own spy franchise and be loved by us all as an alternative to Bond. Cruise built such a successful spy series, Damon and Greengrass built such a successful spy-ish series. We're definitely not "spied out" yet so Idris, go for it, man! You've got the physique, the charm, the acting skills. Imagine someone had yelled "TOM CRUISE" for Bond in '94. We'd all have gone insane, I'm sure. But many of us couldn't be happier with Cruise as Ethan Hunt, a character he's made almost as legendary as the cinematic Bond at this point. Well done! Elbe, or other black, Asian, Arab, ... actors, are more than welcome to kick their own series into gears, but James Bond is not a black man or a woman.
The James Bond universe is a delicate microcosmos of specific characteristics which aren't just "small details" but the very things that have shaped it and continue to hold it strong. The look of things has always been a big deal for Bond, including, most literally, the look of Bond himself. "But surely skin colour doesn't matter", you say. But then, it really does. It's neither racist nor even overtly purist to want to keep Bond the obvious Western Caucasian just as much as it isn't racist to demand a black actor for the part of Lando Calrissian. I still want to recognise Bond, just like I want to recognise pizza when I eat it. That doesn't mean I don't like ice cream, though. So damn the whole PC crowd for suggesting that I'm a crazy White Power kinda guy, simply because I fail to spot the vacuum in white Bondlike males which forces us to start looking elsewhere.
For once, I side with people who use the slippery slope argument. Because we COULD ridicule this thing into the extreme. If skin colour, a very sensitive thing in Fleming's days, no longer matters, and if gender follows suit, then I guess Catwoman could be played by a man, Zorro might as well be a blonde, Eastern European albino, Don Corleone could be played by Jackie Chan,... Hey, Frodo Baggins could be played by Sir Anthony Hopkins... I wouldn't want to be ageist, after all.
Is this what is to become of our film industry after the invasion of prequels, sequels, sidequels, reboots, remakes, ...? Hybrids of incompatible actors and roles just for the sake of stirring things up again? Because count me out then.
Nowadays, the spy game has more potential than ever.
Bourne is played out. The only major superspies left are Bond and Hunt, both white men. There is a large gap in the market for a black spy or any other spy or action star played by a POC. You can be sure that if we can spot it, someone else will have too. It will happen, and I'm sure it'll be good. And I look forward to the competition.
Not too be too picky or pedantic, but to include Pepperoni as a "backbone" to "almost every pizza" is quite extraordinary! :O ;)
And in fact what ingredients you use as topping is not essential to make it a pizza, as long ås the structure remains the same. So a pizza containing ice cream would still be a pizza. A very weird pizza... but still a pizza ;)
To claim any ownership to the definition of what makes Bond Bond, is a bit dangerous. There are far too many character traits and opinions to give a definite, objective answer. If you say Bond can never have dark skin because Fleming created him in a certain way, you also give ground to those who say he can never ever be blond. Yet again, Fleming's Bond had a scar on his face. And he drove Bentley, not Aston Martin... And his staple drink was Champagne, not Martinis... (I could go on...) Depending on point of view one could say skin colour is just as "minor" a "tweak" as any of the other alterations.
In a way it is the same existential crisis we have with religion. Our information is based on old texts with an almost holy status. However which details from these texts that should be regarded as definitive rules (holy if you like), and which are "less important", is actually more or less subjective.
Bond is Anglo Saxon. His ancestry is white Northern European. The six Bond actors are of similar background, (I don't know about Lazenby but I assume white Australians have some European extraction). Idris Elba is of African Caribbean ancestry. The origins are different.
As mentioned, none of the movie Bonds drove Fleming's car of choice: a Bentley; none had the cheek scar but these are cosmetic changes. The ancestry of Bond is not a cosmetic, superficial consideration. A black actor will change an established fact. We will have to come to terms with the reinvention that Bond's ancestry is *not* white Anglo Saxon. Bond's parents cannot be white if Bond is black. Ian Fleming told us Bond's father, Andrew Bond, was Scottish, born in Glencoe, Scotland. Bond's mother, Monique Delacroix, was Swiss. They were white Europeans.
If Elba or another black actor become Bond then EON are dismissing Fleming's Bond. You can argue Roger Moore's Bond was nothing like Fleming's Bond but you can watch Moore's Bond and believe his parents were white European.
If a black actor becomes Bond then I'd prefer if it's a full reboot of the character. The producers could say "this is a new 00 agent given the identity of James Bond." That would be a controversial route to go, but if we're told this is not Ian Fleming's James Bond, it's a new man taking on the name and persona of Bond, (perhaps the original Bond had retired or died), I think it's easier to accept a black actor as 007.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Fleming actually ever made a remark concerning the race of Bond's parents. Yes, they were scottish and swiss, but do they have to be "white Anglo Saxons" specifically? Not really...
By the same logic, is it mandatory that all actors that play Bond have a scottish accent?
Standing Ovation!!!
Ultimately it is subjective as you note. At least it has been since Connery and Moore decided to play the character differently from when they started (which they both did towards the end of their tenure - leaning away from the literary interpretation). So the character changes predated Craig, who in turn doesn't look like Bond to me, even though his performances have embodied the character.
I just would rather they not go here, especially if their opinions and desires are motivated by some social justice perspective.
Why change for the sake of change? That's my view on this anyway.
No, because he didn't only grow up in Scotland. Bond became multiligual by travelling in his youth. His accent would realistically be further diluted by his time in Kent after his parents died.
Why would he need to specify that his parents were as white as himself? He probably didn t intend his books to be read by particularly daft readers.