The latest James Bond theme song has been released, and I’ve had to put myself on suicide watch. Is it too much to ask from a Bond film to offer us some sex, snobbery, and sadism, as the world’s favorite secret agent romps across Europe, bedding dangerous women, wearing great suits, and killing enemies with cold-hearted satisfaction? Apparently, it is! As we won’t be getting any of that in the latest installment of the franchise, No Time To Die. In the Current Year, 007 is outmoded and unnecessary and has been replaced by a smart-talking Black lady. And who could blame Mi6, as Bond has become a sad, demoralized shell of man, dumped and betrayed by his gf and barely keeping it together. All of this is encapsulated in the boring and depressing title song, performed by Gen-Z avatar Billie Eilish. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe
The latest James Bond theme song has been released, and I've had to put myself on suicide watch.
Is it too much to ask from a Bond film to offer us some sex, snobbery, and sadism, as the world's favorite secret agent romps across Europe, vetting dangerous women, wearing great suits, and killing enemies with cold-hearted satisfaction?
Apparently, it is, as we won't be getting any of that in the latest installment of the franchise, No Time to Die.
In the current year, 007 is outmoded and unnecessary and has been replaced by a smart-talking black lady.
And who could blame MI6, as Bond has become a sad, demoralized shell of a man, dumped and betrayed by his GF and barely keeping it together.
All of this is encapsulated in the boring and depressing title song performed by Gen Z Avatar.
So, this week, on Valentine's Day, we were given a gift from Eon, Everything or Nothing, the family-run enterprise that produces the James Bond films.
It was the latest James Bond music.
And whatever you think about the song, No Time to Die, I don't think the song is actually that bad.
There's some things about it that I like.
It's kind of catchy in some places, maybe.
It does really tell us where this franchise is.
And in that sense, as a wildly popular franchise, it kind of tells us where we are right now as a, you know...
Global community of people who would watch this kind of film.
James Bond is, of course, at least historically, a man who is modern, certainly sexually liberated.
He's sensual.
He likes the finer things in life.
He's the kind of man that would wear a Rolex Submariner in a tuxedo in the 1960s, which is almost kind of the opposite of what it means now.
That was a tool watch for a deep-sea diver worn with a tuxedo.
It's the badass in a tux, the cultured thug, you could say.
And he is that.
Fantastical vision of itself after the war, of being a secret agent, kind of saving the world.
The Empire still exists, but it exists in a clandestine manner.
He was all of those things.
He was certainly an archetype of manhood, although he was always a kind of broken man.
Someone who, in the novels, would occasionally be a little depressed, alcoholic, never could settle down.
but was still a man's man, in the words of numerous people, including Steven Spielberg.
He's the man that every woman wants to sleep with, and he's the man that every man wants to be.
Maybe in a boyish way, but nevertheless, he is who we want to be.
And I think it's telling that the Bond music itself is basically something that Kind of hates itself or has to apologize about itself.
Something that is deeply broken and mopey and sad.
You know, just because I have read these books, James Bond can sometimes get a little sad in the novels.
But that's not his M.O. That is not who he is.
He pulls himself out of his depression and goes and kicks ass.
But this seems to be this weird way of this James Bond is now a figure with this soft music sung by either female singers or gay men singing in falsetto, as with the last theme song, about how brokenhearted he is, how he's betrayed by his lost love, and so on.
I think this song might actually be kind of better than the last one.
If there is something worse than having a black James Bond, It is having a song like Writings on the Wall, in which it's sung by a man from the perspective of James Bond, beautifully, but it's sung in falsetto, talking about, I want to feel love into my heart, like this kind of crap.
I mean, it is, that's some kind of man sings like that, but James Bond does not.
And so, anyway, I think this whole thing is telling, and it kind of gives us an excuse to talk about the whole world of James Bond, which I always find fun.
So, Keith, what were some of your impressions of the Billie Eilish big number?
It wasn't exactly Goldfinger.
Well, I thought you were going to ask me what my favorite Bond movie is, which is a question I want to put back on you, actually.
Okay.
Well, I'll ask you first.
What's your favorite Bond movie?
It has to be Goldfinger, I think.
Okay.
Because it has so many iconic elements.
It is the iconic Bond movie, I think.
I was very fond of the Casino Royale, you know, the first Craig instantiation.
What about yourself?
Goldfinger's not my favorite one, even though I like watching it and it has those iconic elements.
And I like...
In the book, Pussy Galore is a lesbian.
And that's hinted explicitly.
That's hinted at in the movie.
That she hangs out with women in this high-flying acrobatics act and so on.
And then Bond takes her for a role in the hay, quite literally.
And, you know, kind of, you know, I think right in the 21st century it's viewed as a little bit rapey.
But, you know, he asserts his...
His will over her and kind of wins her over and makes her good.
In the book, at the end of it, she is a lesbian.
In the final lines, it's kind of like...
You know, how can I be a lesbian when I'm in bed with James Bond?
So, you know, Fleming, much like Ed Dutton, had a weird fascination with homosexuality.
It was in his head a lot.
But he's always writing about lesbians and, you know, weird deviancy and things like that.
But I think the movie kind of has a few too many kind of plot holes and it's a little bit clanky.
So my favorite Bond movie...
I have a few that I really like.
I certainly like Casino Royale.
I thought that was a great kind of modern Bond movie.
I don't really care for the Pierce Brosnan films.
But my favorite Bond movie is On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the one starring George Lazenby.
Is that the one where he gets married?
Yes, and then she promptly dies.
So it's kind of a, whether you think of that as a tragedy or as the ultimate fantasy where, you know, Bond never really wanted to be bourgeois.
He always wanted to work for Her Majesty's Secret Service, and so maybe it wasn't all that bad.
Before the modern Daniel Craig ones, that was kind of the first time they sort of humanized Bond, wasn't it?
Yes.
And Lazenby did it well.
Lazenby was a male model and in this kind of swashbuckling Australian guy.
And these stories you hear about him, he was just totally out of control, you know, drinking, sex, you know, all that kind of stuff.
But...
He was actually a pretty good actor, and he did humanize Bond, and you do feel for him, and that is the kind of tragic brokenness of the Bond character, is that he can't ultimately be middle class.
The Bond films and books are like a fantasy of the middle class, where it's like, I have this boring job, but I wish I were out.
Driving fast cars and wearing cool clothes and killing bad guys and bedding all these hot, exotic, dangerous women.
But then Bond's fantasy is to be middle class.
So his fantasy is, oh, I think I'm actually just going to give it up and leave the Secret Service.
Settle down and have some kids and kind of be boring in a way.
But that was taken away from him.
But the movie has everything.
It's got Blofeld.
It's got a great plot.
It has Christmas.
It has skiing.
It's a very 60s film in terms of what they're wearing and so on.
And I guess I kind of like to be a little contrarian and like the one that's forgotten by others.
Do you think Lazenby is the best Bond then?
I mean, I ultimately don't.
It's hard to beat Connery.
But, yeah, I mean, Connery is so iconic that literally everyone...
I mean, I don't think there's a single person who says, oh, I don't think he was that good in the role.
Obviously, he was perfect.
He's rough, but then in a suit.
I do have a...
The only one that I don't like is actually Piers Brosnan.
I think he's a bad actor, and I don't...
I really have a very strong soft spot for Roger Moore.
Maybe that was because when I was a kid, watching these over and over on VHS tapes, I was watching a lot of Roger Moore films, and I liked them.
But I like Moore because he just owned the camp.
He didn't try to be Connery.
And when he did try to be Connery, it didn't quite work.
So he just was Roger Moore, and he basically told the audience, This is going to be a little bit silly.
Yeah, look, I'm James Bond.
No one can believe this, but I'm a fun guy.
And they just kind of owned it.
And I do like those films, and I have a soft spot for them.
Roger Moore is very English, somehow.
I'd predict that he'd be Dutton's favorite Bond, I think.
Well, Dutton would describe, he's like, he was a man's man.
He was like, no.
He'd be talking about how great the 80s was with Thatcher and Roger Moore.
Yeah.
But I do like him.
I think he's just more fun.
It's funny looking back.
A lot of those movies would go down really badly.
By the time he finished, I think he was in his late 50s or his early 60s when he was in there.
He's still bedding women in the early 20s.
Andy's snowboarding.
He's like a 60-year-old man who invents snowboarding.
I don't even know if snowboarding was in View to a Kill in 1985.
He went snowboarding right after he got out of bed with a younger woman as well.
Using a log cabin.
You're conflating.
So in Spy Who Loved Me, he's in a log cabin with a Russian or something, and then she calls on him.
Okay, that's like the opening scene.
Yeah.
And then in A View to a Kill, in 1985, he's searching for a lost locket with a microchip or some MacGuffin of some kind.
And then he invents the sport of snowboarding.
I mean, I think that's actually true.
And then he ends up in a little submarine, and there's some Swedish gal that he beds.
Yeah, she's working for the Secret Service, but she's like 23, and he's 60, and whatever.
That's how it goes.
But yeah, I mean, I love those films.
I think Craig is good in the sense that he actually is pretty accurate towards Fleming's concept of Bond.
Fleming's concept of Bond was, as a blunt instrument, someone who was modern, even kind of American in a way.
You know, he didn't really imagine Roger Moore.
It probably would have been someone a little bit more like Craig, someone who has a little bit more of a darkness, more brutal.
Famously, he hated Connery for the role at first, didn't he?
He hated him, and then he actually kind of liked him.
So he was against it.
I'm forgetting the person.
Who was the person who played...
Grand Moth Tarkin in Star Wars is an English actor.
You know what I'm talking about.
I think he died recently.
I think he was Fleming's choice, if I were to go back on it.
With Connery, he did ultimately embrace Connery.
There's this notion that...
What is his name?
Cullen?
Ian Cullen?
I can't remember his name.
He's a good English actor.
There's this notion that Fleming made Bond Scottish or half-Scottish due to the fact that Connery was in the role.
But that isn't necessarily true.
I mean, if James Bond was Fleming's fantasy of himself and Fleming has a Scottish background.
So, anyway, it all...
It all worked.
But I like those, and I like a silly Roger Moore movie like Moonraker.
I think Moonraker is a great film.
It is campy, but every scene works.
And I think the villain is obviously totally outlandish, a mass-murdering eugenicist, and so on.
I think it's a hilarious film.
So I kind of like them all.
In their own way, with the exception of the Brosnan era, which I just don't really care for.
But Craig is kind of like, he got the brokenness of Bond, which is very real, but then it's almost been taken too far in the sense that...
Cheesy in places to the point where it didn't seem to fit Bond.
They were trying to make it too impactful.
Yes.
It was pretentious due to the fact that Sam Mendes directed it.
And it became this sad Bond who's weeping over his mother, M, Judi Dench and so on.
And so at the end of it, it's almost like Bond is holding a Bond.
As we know in the formula, at the end of a Bond movie, he's with some chick in a boat or underneath the parachute.
In this one, he's holding Judi Dench in a church who's dead.
It was just a weird...
Bond girl scene.
That was the closing scene of the film.
Effectively, there's a little bit of an epilogue there.
But, you know, I think, to get back at it, I think that...
I think that Daniel Craig has never made a Bond movie in the sense that he's always been rebooting the Bond franchise.
And then once Sam Mendes got involved, he directed Skyfall and Spectre, there's been all this anxiety about being Bond.
And so when you go back to Casino Royale, comparing that theme song to...
This theme song that we just got.
I mean, it's just night and day.
I mean, the theme song was sung by Chris Cornell in Casino Royale, who's this, you know, 90s Soundgarden frontman, like 90s alt-rock, you know, kind of saying like, the coldest blood runs through my veins.
You know my name.
So it was cool and badass and brutal.
And then you get this like weepy, like, I can't believe I've been betrayed again.
I'm so sad.
How can I go on?
There's just no time to die.
And it's just a total reversal.
I guess what I was getting at with Craig is that they brought in this blunt instrument.
So he's this guy who's brutal and effective, but kind of out of control and uncouth.
And then you...
Make him James Bond.
And I think that's an interesting character arc.
And so at the end of Casino Real, he shoots a guy in the kneecap who's this big wig in a Spectre-like organization.
He says, I'm Bond, James Bond.
And there you are.
It's been rebooted.
But then you go to the next one, Quantum of Solace, and it's like full-on Jason Bourne.
Bond is this just broken...
Guy who can, you know, can't really bed women.
I think he beds one.
He doesn't have sex with the main lead protagonist.
They're all just these broken characters.
And then you get to Skyfall, and he's already a has-been.
So he hasn't ever made a Bond movie yet, and yet he's been treated as a has-been, and all the new diversity hires in MI6 are kind of saying, like, oh, can we teach this old dog new tricks?
We need to get rid of the whole double O section.
We can't have any form of James Bond because we now have humane surveillance done by a Soros group or something like that.
So there's this weird aspect with Craig and with Eon that they can't make a Bond film.
And now we've reached a point where they still can't make one.
So many people People have been asking, whenever I'll occasionally listen to a Bond podcast or something, they'll ask for like, we just want a formulaic Bond film.
We want him to go into M's office, he gets sent on a mission, there's a bad guy, he beds two to three women, and it's colorful and fun and exciting.
And they can't do that.
And in No Time to Die, again, it's about...
Personal betrayals.
He's retired.
He's rogue.
He can't simply do his job.
And I think it's expressive of this on two levels.
First off, this deep anxiety about Bond existing in this world is this kind of 20th century avatar.
But then also, I think the subversion engaged in by Sam Mendes as a subversive director.
There's kind of an irony there as well.
At the same time where there's so few original ideas coming out of Hollywood and everything is a reboot or a remake of something from the 70s or 80s, the Bond franchise, which was the one franchise that all the audience wants really is a carbon copy of the Bond formula.
It's the one franchise where they won't give that and they're trying to come up with this sort of character.
They'll bring it in a different direction, but then ultimately the only thing that they can actually do is they bring him on the The character he has to go on, and then they just reverse it, because there's no other direction to go.
It's like, why else do you do it, Bond?
At the same time, yeah, they're filling the diversity around the character of James Bond.
I don't know if they ever go to a black or female James Bond.
I think that might be a step too fair, at least for the next one, anyway.
But Billie Eilish is kind of a good representation.
Billie Eilish is kind of a...
She's like a pure simulacra.
Billie Eilish is like...
She talks about coming from nothing and growing up poor, even though she was homeschooled and her parents were musicians and all her siblings were homeschooled and they were musicians.
It seems like an upper-middle-class background.
She has this East Coast accent.
She dresses like a...
I noted this.
I'm sure other people have as well, but when she accepted her Grammy, she was speaking like an African-American woman from Brooklyn.
But I'm like, you're a white girl from California.
You shouldn't talk like that.
Yeah, and she wears baggy clothes, baggy track suits.
She wears big hoop earrings, big acrylic nails.
So she's this weird sort of copy of...
Parts of black and Latino culture.
And then at the same time, she represents this like sort of Zoomer hopelessness that seems to be popular now among that age group, even though there's no authenticity there.
You know, there's no, you know, her background story is kind of fake.
So it's like, you know, where is this hopelessness coming from?
It's, you know, it's just...
The Bond movie, Hollywood itself is becoming kind of a, it's like third stage simulacra.
It's like, you know, there's not even a resemblance now to the archetypes that these came from originally.
I mean, like, you know, they're going to keep rebooting the Star Wars movies and the last Star Wars movie, I mean, it's one of those things.
No, I don't think anyone would be good.
There's been so many sci-fi flops the last few years.
Even the last Blade Runner flopped.
I don't think anyone would be going to a franchise like Star Wars if it wasn't for the feeling of the continuation from the original story.
But the reason the original franchise was popular was because it had good characters, because it had a good story arc, because it was the Hero of a Thousand Faces retold or whatever.
But no one in Hollywood is capable of redoing that.
I think we're kind of seeing film as pure technique now.
This move to algorithms and doing things according to what Lull would call technique, the one best way.
Everything is economic rationality.
But the paradox is that it doesn't actually lead to a maximum in an artistic endeavour like film.
There's this phenomenon people talk about where you watch a...
It's a super CGI movie, something like The New Godzillas or something.
The CGI that looks the most real is somehow less satisfying to people because there's some intuition that it's not real.
When it's something like an 80s Jurassic World and maybe it's not CGI, or the original Star Wars, something like the Yoda that was a puppet, even though it doesn't look as real as the CGI.
It's somehow more satisfying.
But this move to film is pure technique.
You're just getting simulacra of simulacra.
You have cast picked by quotas.
Everything in Star Wars, if you were to watch the last Star Wars, I think even a child watching that would feel that there's something lacking.
There's just something about the art of storytelling.
When it's created in this way and when it's coming out of Hollywood boardrooms and algorithms, You can just feel that something is lacking.
There's not the bear there, you know?
Yeah, I totally agree.
And there's so much being thrown up against the wall.
In the last Star Wars, I can't even tell you the plot because there's just all these little twists and turns and just everything is...
Pitched up against the wall.
And none of it, at least in my mind, sticks, really.
But yeah, it's interesting.
I mean, one thing that I was thinking about is the kind of deconstructive quality to Marvel films.
And Marvel is the new Star Wars.
I mean, this is having the most effect on the minds of teenagers in the United States and in Europe and around the world, really.
China in ways that we probably don't even understand.
But those films are really deconstructive.
And what I mean by that is that it's kind of a self-aware...
Like, self-parody that's going on.
And so you'll have the occasional one that's a little more serious.
Like, one that I saw that, which I actually kind of liked, was Captain America Winter Soldier, where it's kind of about spies, and it was darker.
And obviously there's a lot of sadness in these, you know, in-game, everyone's depressed because, you know, half the population's gone and stuff like that.
But ultimately, it's about kind of zany, self-aware humor.
So it's like Thor.
Can you believe that I'm a Nordic god holding a hammer fighting space aliens?
This is hilarious.
You've got a bow and arrow?
What's going on here?
The Iron Man, he's all about quipping and playing with things.
It's this self-aware joke where you're allowed to joke with it, and that allows the audience to appreciate it and like it.
It's precisely because they're not taking it that seriously.
And so it's kind of deconstructing comic book movies in this self-aware way.
And I think that the films that have gone against that have not done as well.
There's been the Nolan Batman film where everything was real and grounded.
But the James Bond franchise is the most successful franchise of all time, but it's not really as current, and it's clearly not as confident, and everyone's going to love this.
It's getting kind of more anachronistic and kind of niche.
And for older people, and it's dark and dour and sad, and so on.
Zack Snyder's Batman v Superman was this attempt to take these characters really seriously.
What would it be like if Superman were in the world today?
Well, actually, Batman might have to kill him.
These kind of actually disturbing things.
And that one was a flop, and everyone hated it, and so on.
The way to get it right is self-aware, deconstructive, and even a bit nihilistic.
The film Kingsman, which did that for the James Bond franchise, it was a parody of the James Bond franchise.
It was successful on a much lower budget and has been popular and so on precisely because it just let its hair out and was like a Marvel movie.
You know, flying through the air, you know, doing karate in midair.
I mean, it was totally unbelievable.
John Wick was a big breakout franchise the last few years.
That was such a break with the mold as well.
There's no irony whatsoever.
It's just a simple story.
The bad guys kill this guy's dog and he goes on a fucking rampage.
There's no self-referential like, oh, this is the bit where I killed the bad guys.
It's just old school.
But yeah, that's definitely becoming a problem for...
But even the John Wick franchise is totally incredible.
I mean, he's doing headshots to 20 guys in a room and getting shot himself and surviving and flying through the air and all this kind of stuff.
They kind of have to make it unbelievable.
It still has to be kind of hyper-real.
Yeah.
It still has to be kind of a hyper-real version of an 80s action movie where it just takes an element of it to the absolute extreme.
And you kind of, you know, you enjoy that, that orgy of violence of one particular aspect of the older form.
But, yeah, I remember reading a book by Zizek where he talked about that, that irony now is, it's completely lost its original function in that.
he actually used the example of the original Shrek movie, because we're kind of used to it now in children's movies that there's all this sort of adult humor and little subtle ironic quips.
But Shrek was kind of the first movie to do that.
But he talks about how at the end of the day, when you look through Shrek, it's basically a telling of the same old story.
The hero rescues the princess from the dragon, blah, blah, blah.
And that basically these constant self-referential quips that it's basically given the audience permission to enjoy it.
you know We can't just enjoy it for what it is.
We have to be given the permission.
Laughing at that makes a signal that we're aware we're in on the joke with the director.
We're not passively sitting here.
We're not getting into this story.
We're not sincerely getting involved with these fake characters.
We know it's all fake.
But then at the same time, I remember being at a show on the Last Avengers and there was all these bug people around me crying at one of the scenes.
I'm like, what is this?
Five minutes earlier, they're laughing at the actors pointing out that this is all fake or whatever.
And then they're so super invested in it at the same time.
It is bizarre.
But no one can quite pull it off like Marvel.
I mean, they tried that in the Star Wars movie.
Not in the last Star Wars movie, because they realized it hadn't worked.
But in The Force Awakens, they tried inserting that humor and the one after, and it just didn't really land.
I think Marvel has kind of poisoned the well.
And Deadpool really took that to an extreme.
Yes.
The whole point of Deadpool was just completely attack the entire medium of superhero movies.
Just everything just...
Went under the attack of just complete deconstructive irony upon irony, you know?
Yeah.
And that's almost where this ends up.
Yeah.
How do you go past Deadpool?
Yeah.
What do you do after Deadpool?
Right.
And I think Eon, because they want to protect their brand, and so they realize that this is just a printing press, the James Bond franchise, that a family owns.
It's actually really unique.
And they can not only sell movies, they can sell cologne.
And so they want to protect the brand, so they're not going to go in for the outright zaniness.
And so the only way they can go is towards sadness, because that's kind of adult and mature.
It's kind of my take on it.
But, um, but yeah, I think in a different, in a, in a way that Marvel has poisoned the well and kind of destroyed the possibility of doing a comic book movie that's actually serious.
And maybe, maybe our viewers find that very prospect stupid or something, which is, you know, fair enough, but, um, you can't do that now.
Zack Snyder's tried and he's been kicked out, um, yeah.
I think with Sam Mendes post-James Bond, I don't know if James Bond will ever get his balls back.
I just, you know, it would be actually really dramatic if you had him as a non-broken, self-confident, you know, swashbuckler.
That would be something totally new, and I'm not sure they can even go there, you know, for the next 20 years or so.
But it is interesting.
You do see that.
I guess Fast and the Furious is an interesting franchise because that is the minority franchise.
Whites are like token whites.
I actually kind of like those movies.
I'll see them when I'm on a plane or just when I want to just check out or something.
But they kind of just are what they are.
They're just total surface, like no...
Pretense towards seriousness and just like bizarre, you know, driving a car from one building to another building.
I mean, just totally ridiculous.
But I almost kind of like it.
But I think in a way the...
The non-whites are able to be self-confident in a way that a white James Bond can't.
In this kind of ironic way, if Idris Elba ever were given the James Bond role, I bet he would actually be more of a Connery or Roger Moore figure.
There wouldn't be that anxiety about being outmoded and displaced.
Or, you know, how can you even do this in this day and age?
Blah, blah, blah.
He would just do it.
And people would kind of buy it.
It would have that, like...
It would have that bad conscience removed from the franchise.
Although, I would...
I like Idris Elba, actually, but, you know.
I guess I'm too much of a conservative reactionary to accept the Black Bond, but whatever.
Yeah, it is that question.
I mean, where are they going to go from this one if it's Craig's last?
Because, yeah, I mean, they had the arc of him becoming Bond, and then they just kind of took it apart.
It doesn't seem like they'll ever be able to go back to that sort of formulaic every Bond movie following the same pattern.
So is it just going to be like constant character development and sort of inquiry into who is James Bond?
Yes.
His wife is going to die over and over again and betray him.