Et in the end – be careful, mega-spoiler -, James Bond, he dies. But let’s start from the beginning: the other night I went to see To die can wait with my eldest son. The film, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, hit theaters on October 6 in France, becoming the biggest hit of the year and the highest-grossing feature film of the pandemic era, grossing $ 733 million in the world. We can easily understand the reason for this craze: after Casino Royale (2006), Quantum of Solace (2008), Sky Fall (2012) and Spectrum (2015), this is the last lap of Daniel Craig, who will have impressed his ways of testosterone sphinx on the British spy. But how was the blue-eyed actor going to leave the stage?
So here we are sitting in the third row to try to get an answer to this question, my son plunging his hand into a bucket of popcorn, like an oracle in the entrails of a chicken. If I take particular pleasure in discovering the new adventures of the most stylish secret agent of MI6, it is because this saga has always functioned in reverse mirror compared to my own paternity (which is less the case with Snow Queen). The daily life of James Bond is a bit the reverse of my life as a daron. While he investigates the stunts on motorbikes all over the world, multiplies the conquests and empties vodkas-Martini (with a shaker, not with a spoon), I go shopping at Monoprix, I insist that my children finish their compote (with the spoon, eh, not with the fingers), and I prepare myself mentally for the ritual pizza evening on Friday evening, where I will try not to exceed 50 centilitres of beer, in order to avoid the headache on the following day.
The screen lights up. Even if James Bond meets very tight specifications, the post- # metoo context in which he finds himself gives a new meaning to his character. The one who for a long time embodied the idea of the masculine plume, to the point of excess, now seems to condense on his own all the “flaws” (sexism, alcoholism, Don Juanism) that the time no longer supports. Even in the fictional universe, this alpha male posture is contested today. As proof, the replacement for James Bond, who symbolically recovered her double zero number, is a black woman who does not understand why so many of them have swooned over this block of retrograde muscles with pony breath. We must face the facts, symbolically, James Bond is not far from the sinking (which makes him eminently sympathetic) and, while he is preparing to save the world for the umpteenth time, we almost expect to see a badass teenager appear throwing him a thunderous: “OK Boomeur, we didn’t see you much during the climate marches!” ”
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