This is brilliant! You really hit the nail on the head. Bait felt incredibly disingenuous and unfortunately speaks to a wider pattern of South Asians on TV that attempt to buy into the White establishment whilst exploiting Blackness, Black cultural movements and revolutionary politics as their "in." Ahmed is notorious for not saying the quiet part out loud and a lot of his original work and music is predicated on appropriating stereotypes used against Black people to fuel his own racial existentialism.
You know I was reluctant to zero in on Ahmed’s particular history of political blackness and racial politics largely because I thought it’d be impossible to do without it appearing like a hit-piece, which I’m not super interested in doing, but after reading your comment, I think it would’ve been helpful to contextualise Bait by exploring his activism and social justice more deeply. I honestly might edit my essay to do this tbh.
There’s this weird neoliberalism hanging over James Bond (and other spy movies of the last 20 years). They signpost these movies as if they’re critiquing the status quo (The government is always vaguely bad in a very distant way, they might even have one or two corrupt diplomats 😳) but their real complaint seems to be that the UK/US is too bureaucratic to do good old fashioned imperialism any more.
Daniel Craig as James Bond seemed to “go rogue” more and more with every movie, in the most recent part he’s not even working for the government for most of it. I wonder if that’s their way of trying to deal with this problem, but where does that leave a new Bond- are they going to write a script where James Bond joins MI6 for 5 minutes and then goes rogue, always acting in the interests of Queen and Empire anyway?
Modern James Bond kind of reminds me of that first Iron Man movie, where he disobeys the “out of touch government” and just does the exact thing they wanted to do in the Middle East but using this Palantir fantasy technology which can perfectly tell terrorists from hostages and so everything works out.
The big dream of these movies is that there is someone who can come along and do imperialism perfectly. This dream is a lie and that’s why they don’t have anything new to say.
I’ve seen a lot of people online saying the next James Bond should be a period piece set in the 60s with “no politics”, and if that isn’t a sign of the recent shift (Both in the US and more widely) towards a more unashamed imperialism and desire to undo even the false consciousness of neoliberalism, then I don’t know what is.
This is brilliant! You really hit the nail on the head. Bait felt incredibly disingenuous and unfortunately speaks to a wider pattern of South Asians on TV that attempt to buy into the White establishment whilst exploiting Blackness, Black cultural movements and revolutionary politics as their "in." Ahmed is notorious for not saying the quiet part out loud and a lot of his original work and music is predicated on appropriating stereotypes used against Black people to fuel his own racial existentialism.
You know I was reluctant to zero in on Ahmed’s particular history of political blackness and racial politics largely because I thought it’d be impossible to do without it appearing like a hit-piece, which I’m not super interested in doing, but after reading your comment, I think it would’ve been helpful to contextualise Bait by exploring his activism and social justice more deeply. I honestly might edit my essay to do this tbh.
There’s this weird neoliberalism hanging over James Bond (and other spy movies of the last 20 years). They signpost these movies as if they’re critiquing the status quo (The government is always vaguely bad in a very distant way, they might even have one or two corrupt diplomats 😳) but their real complaint seems to be that the UK/US is too bureaucratic to do good old fashioned imperialism any more.
Daniel Craig as James Bond seemed to “go rogue” more and more with every movie, in the most recent part he’s not even working for the government for most of it. I wonder if that’s their way of trying to deal with this problem, but where does that leave a new Bond- are they going to write a script where James Bond joins MI6 for 5 minutes and then goes rogue, always acting in the interests of Queen and Empire anyway?
Modern James Bond kind of reminds me of that first Iron Man movie, where he disobeys the “out of touch government” and just does the exact thing they wanted to do in the Middle East but using this Palantir fantasy technology which can perfectly tell terrorists from hostages and so everything works out.
The big dream of these movies is that there is someone who can come along and do imperialism perfectly. This dream is a lie and that’s why they don’t have anything new to say.
I’ve seen a lot of people online saying the next James Bond should be a period piece set in the 60s with “no politics”, and if that isn’t a sign of the recent shift (Both in the US and more widely) towards a more unashamed imperialism and desire to undo even the false consciousness of neoliberalism, then I don’t know what is.
Bond is a relic of pulp novels and short stories, all of which were based on the imperial fantasies of racists like Robert E Howard and HP Lovecraft.
Contemporarily, pulp fiction was considered borderline pornography and dishonorable to be involved in.
Phenomenal