james bond should stay dead
BAIT, meta-commentaries, co-option of the black experience, imperial super-spies
While Roxana Hadidi’s review of Bait observes how the dramedy series “resuscitates the much-debated question of whether a POC actor should play James Bond”, her use of the abbreviation resuscitates a debate of its own.
It is no secret that speculation of a nonwhite Bond has been embedded in the cultural memory by way of Idris Elba and while granted; 2024’s Monkey Man drifted the British Gujarati heart-throb Dev Patel into the gravitational pull—it is inexact, perhaps even disingenuous, to conflate this “much-debated question” as a broadly POC experience when it has been noticeably asked of, and distinctly sustained, by black British actors. (CC: Damson Idris, Aaron Pierre, Regé-Jean Page).
There is a mean-spirited version of this essay that exploits this distinction by nunchucking banal representation politics to argue that Bait’s core premise is problematic because it appropriates a black anecdotal experience and reupholster it as South Asian via its protagonist, Shahjehan Latif. With enough rage-bait seasoning, it could probably incite the type of culture war discourse that always goes triple-platinum in the Malebolge formerly known as Twitter.
But such an essay would require investment in the perspective that the show would be better, more accurate, or more compelling if it were explored by a creator with a black face rather than a brown one, and the concluding paragraph of one of my essays from 2021 articulates why that framing isn’t particularly appealing:
No Time to Die is a fitting end for Daniel Craig. He brought an emotional dimension to the role that hasn’t been explored before him, yet his tenure ends at a time where western society is noticeably shifting, confronted with the social harms of yesteryear and debating drastic steps such as abolishing the police. James Bond mobilises against his rogues gallery of maimed villains who want to thwart the existing superpowers but when it comes the banality of everyday evil—of climate change threatening the future of our species, of income inequality that leads to mistaking overpopulation with over-consumption, of a white supremacist structure that has split the planet into 1st, 2nd and 3rd worlds, of ableism that discards those not in peak physical condition or attractiveness as unproductive and/or immoral, and so many other ways that the world is battered and broken—Bond is never dispatched. Because he exists to preserve the status quo. There are many questions about what should be next for Bond. Can a woman writer redeem him? Should he be a black man? Can Bond be a woman? As Lashana Lynch ends No Time to Die with the 007 title in her grasp, there seems to be far more pressing questions to ask: In the slow march towards a more equal world—is there even a necessity for a British imperial super-spy or a culture that venerates him? Does the status quo Bond has upheld for so long need upholding? Does James Bond even need to exist at all?
The most laughable part of Anglocentrism is how desperately it claws for immortality; founding its supremacy through slaughter and theft, cobbling laws together to protect its spoils and working multilaterally to keep reselling the illusion that a dominance wrought by such barbaric violence can remain perched safely at the top of the world forever.
Borrowing from rina nicolae’s above anthropological diagram of kissing circles, we can glean that Bond drifts between the white space of entertainment and tradition, flirting with ritual in the sense that he’s the cinematic equivalent of a statue; a quasi-religious symbol of reverence erected to invoke fond memories of a mythologised past that a great many will pilgrimage to the movie theatre to see, built with hardy materials intent on prolonging anglophilic power-fantasies across any arduous ravines of time.
Speculation of his race produces a metronomic binary in the public consciousness where a Bond with black skin represents novel progressivism and a Bond with white skin represents classic traditionalism. But the binary doesn’t exist. The much-debated question of a nonwhite Bond is just a thin slice of a much rounder effort to decide how much the 007 statue needs to shape-shift to increase the odds of itself, and the anglocentric dominance it represents, of lasting forever. The option to let Daniel Craig’s Bond stay dead is so unconscionable that the British production company that has licensed the franchise since the 1960s relinquished creative control to Amazon MGM just to survive the changing tides.
Bait aids this survival. There is a scene in Goldeneye where Judi Dench’s M calls Pierce Brosnan’s Bond, “a sexist, misogynistic dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War”, the self-aware critique shoehorned inside the film is like when Eminem dissed himself in the final rap battle at the end of 8 mile. Inoculating yourself from attack by attacking yourself with unusual candour is how you win—you get to live to die another day. Bait is the racialised version of Judi Dench’s feminist insert. Fatimah Asghar reflects on how it contrasts with Donald Glover’s Atlanta:
“What I loved about Atlanta, was that structurally, the show presented a bait and switch. It hooked audiences with a pilot that tricked us into thinking the show would go one way, but then pushed against that. Donald Glover has talked about Trojan Horsing the show past the executives, because they knew that executives wouldn’t let a show like theirs exist on air. Unfortunately, Bait seems like the exact kind of show white executives want on air, because it holds up a status quo while giving a dated and underbaked racial argument.”1
Bait wants to be transgressive but it is Amazon-sanctioned, it wants to make a point but is bound by contractual obligation to deliver that point in a way that benefits the franchise, it wants you to recognise Shah’s tête-à-têtes with a talking pig’s head surrealistically portray the psychological unravelling of a British Pakistani actor plagued by familial tensions, intracommunal collisions and the grander impositions of white ideals but, in the process, displays a constant willingness to entertain James Bond as a white mythology worth unravelling over.
It wants to say something but that “something” is suspiciously committed to satirising sell-outs; whether it’s Sid, the protestor-influencer who cares more about social media clout than his activist cause or Yasmin, the cultural critic ex-girlfriend who pens a Guardian essay entitled No, Shah Latif, We Don’t Need a Brown Bond and claims Shah would “be white” if he took the job before its revealed that she’s moving to Argentina with her new white boyfriend named Oliver Winthrop.
Any character shown with principles is revealed to be a hypocrite and it’s depressingly nihilistic—not because “selling out” is morally incorrigible but because it is nauseatingly common, to be a nonwhite immigrant in the heart of empire means to make concessions every single day; the tongues we must bite, the trespasses we must let slide and it would’ve been nice if a show like Bait, that positioned itself as a tongue-in-cheek uppercut to a white relic, could’ve provided some thoughtful reprieve from, or challenge to, those daily forfeitures. Instead, the “sell-outs” end up communicating an almost conservative cynicism that treats anyone with even a whiff of radical politics as frauds concealing their own selfish wants.
Bait wants to have its cake and eat it while it gets to complain that it doesn’t even like cake, its desire to disrupt is stunted at the level of superficial provocation where the cinematic shots of a Muslim Bond will undoubtedly piss off Reform voters but its sense of self beyond this provocation feels ambiguous in a way that seeks to conceal more than it seeks to dig and uncover; and the end result is a well-produced, highly-stylised rust removal service for the monument of Bond dressed up as an introspective meta-commentary.
There’d be little point in pursuing the argument that Bait should be a black show just because its core premise has been borrowed from black actors’ experiences when it wouldn’t be compelling to watch a black brit dust off a Bond statue either. But while Bait is concerned with agonising over how it looks in the mirror for whiteness, it conversely, doesn’t seem concerned with blackness very much at all. It’d be melodramatic to say the show is antagonistic of blackness. Rather, it transgresses ever-so-slightly—with subtle extractive conflations and convenient erasures that add the arithmetic of black (british) life enduring a continuum of transactions that arc towards loss. This is no more apparent than in the name of the series itself.
“Bait” originates from black british english; its elasticity as a word is reflective of how black languages across the diaspora—from pidgin to patois to ebonics*—remix english to give it more prismatic dimensions. (CC: “ Sunn m'Cheaux on the habitual be”). “Bait” can mean: annoying in a particularly transparent way (don’t be bait), derogatorily obvious (that’s bait), to expose (don’t bait me out) and generally, denotes being outed in a manner that is embarrassing. It is a term inexorably linked to the early renaissance of UK grime music.
Like black americans, black brits have historically suffered from what we can call “a mimetic desire of coolness” which manifests linguistically as the youth cultures of other racial communities—Pakistani, Turkish, Albanian, Polish and even bog-standard British—end up enveloping black vernaculars into their own, everyday speech.
After years of being pejoratively named “roadman slang”, black british english has recently undergone a sanitisation process resulting in the emergence of the linguistic category: Multicultural London English (MLE):
The misidentification of Black British English as MLE minimises the cultural value and influence of Black heritage in modern-day Britain. BBE was formed exclusively and independently through the Black British experience. By stating words like “wagwarn” have multicultural roots, this discredits its Jamaican origins. The mere usage of words from other languages like “Kettle” – a Cockney word for watches, that has been further used and popularised by BBE Speakers does not justify the naming of BBE as multicultural London English or slang. Instead, this shows that BBE mirrors the established linguistic norms of borrowing terminology from other languages known as cognates, which can be seen within White Mainstream English in words such as ‘café, which is originally a French word. — Statement from Black Learning Achievement and Mental Health
Bait’s title borrows from black british english. Bait’s premise borrows from the public backlash against Idris Elba. These experiences of black sociality are used as kindling in a manner that is reminiscent of political blackness—an umbrella identity like “people of colour” that socially organised African, Caribbean and Asian diasporic communities in 1970/80s britain into a unified, anti-racist bloc. Kehinde Andrews elaborates:
Political blackness was meant to be a strategic essentialism that united those who experienced racial discrimination. However, the concept was flawed from the outset, misunderstanding the complex nature of racism and rooted in a perspective of non-whiteism that normalized whiteness… This is not an argument for abandoning collaboration in the struggles of different ethnic minority groups; rather it is a case against the unnecessary and counterproductive mobilization of a catch-all term that is incapable of building the widespread, grassroots unity it desires. Perhaps the most serious flaw in the British context is that the wish to avoid disunity between ethnic minority groups has meant that political blackness has delegitimized Blackness rooted in a connection to the African Diaspora.2
Where Bait borrows from black british culture and it is probably intended as nod in solidarity, it ends up appearing a lot more like extraction that is only made stranger by a scene in episode 3, where Shah’s mother Tahira interrupts a meeting between Shah and his agent, Felicia. After discovering his agent is black, his mother proceeds to say to him in Urdu, you never told me your agent is a black lady. Except the words “black lady” are clearly audible in English. Shah shoos away his mother to leave and apologises before saying, “but you are a black lady, though”. Felicia responds, “I know.”
The scene feels like it is trying to reach for a confession of how anti-blackness lingers in the older, diasporic Pakistani generation but the scene falls flat; it is not funny enough to justify its own existence, Felicia probably doesn’t speaks Urdu nor does she have the privilege of reading subtitles thus she has no idea what was said about her, there’s a cringe factor from the only black person on the show enduring a racial comment about her in a foreign language. The exchange adds nothing, just a stray, anti-black hair.
There is a tendency in the United Kingdom for black and brown immigrants to affirm their Britishness vigorously. To plant their feet like a flagpoles and declare that they belong here. I always wonder if the need for emphasis comes more from pride or fear. Pride in belonging, pride in being British or pride in surviving in Britain. Fear of being othered, fear of being treated less-than-British, fear of being ousted from Britain. I wonder what ratio of pride to fear drove Idris Elba to accept an OBE. I wonder what ratios drove Benjamin Zephaniah to decline his.
Bait appears unsure of its own ratio.
There is a version of the series that begins with an insufferably, self-absorbed pursuit of the James Bond mantle that progresses into Shah making slow-turns towards his beautifully complicated community, towards fixing familial fractures, towards reconciling with lost loves, towards rediscovering a self that isn’t a husk. Truthfully, that is the version of Bait that I was hoping to see. One that buries Bond; not in ambiguous layers of muddled satire but in a banal rejection in the mythology of him.