This is turning out to be more fun than the actual topic, so down the rabbit hole we go.
Context matters. You entirely decontextualized the killing and has adventures as if they existed in a vacuum.
Yeah, I did.
I did that on purpose though, because I don't think it matters all that much. James Bond is fictional, and a fiction writer has complete control over the context.
Being told that a character had to kill people to save his family might change the emotion you feel, but at the end of the day a writer created that family, a writer chose to put that family in danger and create a situation in which the character in question had to kill to save them, and they did it for you (the audience) because they thought you would find that story entertaining. The family is just a convenience put into this story to create a situation where this character is "allowed" to kill.
The fact that James Bond only kills people to save the world isn't really significant to the argument I was making. The world never had to be in danger at all, the writer chose to put the world in danger to create a situation where James Bond would have to kill people to save it
because that's what you wanted to see. You didn't want to see James Bond save the world by giving an impassioned speech to the UN about the impact of climate change. You wanted to see him kill and fuck, and to have it be okay because it's saving the world.
Like, there's a bunch of stuff in any story that you're not really meant to think too hard about, because it gets in the way of the fantasy. You're not meant to think about whether the people James Bond kills have their own lives, or whether they have their own hopes and dreams or whether they have people who love them or depend on them. You're not meant to think too hard about whether any of the women James Bond has sex with have any of their own desires or expectations of this relationship, or when the topic of contraception comes up in these encounters, or whether the implied massive age gap is going to pose any kind of problem. Parodies like Austin Powers and the early seasons of Archer built recurring jokes out of simply pointing out the aspects of James Bond that you're not supposed to think about.
It's what makes him even better, he's not only the best field agent but he's also irresistibly charming. Who wouldn't want to be charming and attractive?
So this is a fun aside... What features of this character would you say are charming?
He tends to be played by moderately good looking actors, but so are most people in these films. The film industry is full of good looking men.
But the character himself, as someone who doesn't like these films, is comical. To me, it's like that one guy you played D&D with who had absolutely no social skills but rolled a bard with really high charisma and persuasion and proceeded to try and seduce every female NPC by rolling dice.
But I find that really interesting, because you're absolutely correct. We're meant to believe that this guy is incredibly charming, that he has some special skill or ability. This is often emphasized in the narrative by having the women he meets seem initially indifferent or hostile. What's being said here is that the ability to have sex with women is a technique. James Bond is just so good at being charming that he inevitably wins all the women he meets over into having sex with him despite a complete lack of emotional intimacy. It's the logic of pick-up artistry, which is worrying because pick up artistry is far less about being "charming" as it is about being psychologically manipulative.
In reality, of course, women are people whose sexual attraction is based largely on their own preferences. You can't just make every woman you meet want to have sex with you. It doesn't matter how charming you think you are, it matters what that person wants and is looking for. For some reason, our culture seems to have a particular problem wrapping its collective head around the idea that women consenting or not consenting to sex is not an achievement or failure on the part of men, it's a choice women make for themselves.
If you don't think a masculine fantasy and propaganda for authoritarian policing are two different things you need to get your head out of the gutter.
They're not the same thing, which is why I used two different terms to describe them. There is considerable overlap between them, however, and I think you could make a compelling historical argument that they have a shared point of origin.
And i am not necessarily saying that every message sent out by James Bond movies is good, one can indeed have complaints about how it idealizes the MI6 and what it does. But that doesn't change the fact people don't idealize James Bond just because "he kills and has sex" and that you cannot leave out the most obvious virtue James Bond has; that he fights for good and saves the world.
Of course I can, because I don't think it's relevant. You said it yourself, MI6 in Bond films is not the real MI6. The fact that James Bond fights for good and saves the world is a contrivance put there by the writer, if not a deliberate form of propaganda. It relies on us not thinking about a bunch of stuff that we absolutely would have to think about if James Bond was a real person. The context in which James Bond is allowed to kill and fuck his way around the world while still being a cool awesome good guy is artificial, it was created specifically to allow that to happen.
I'm hesitant to make this comparison because I know people are going to read too much into it, but if we look at a rape revenge film like
I Spit On Your Grave, you could come away with the conclusion that it was an anti-rape film. However, we all kind of know that's not true. We know that this film exists because people (men specifically)
wanted to see a woman being raped. That's why the film spends so long graphically showing the rape. The revenge part, the murder of all the rapists, is a convenience so that the men watching the film don't have to feel bad about enjoying watching a woman being raped. It provides a moral context in which it is okay to watch that, because we're acknowledging on some level that rape is bad (even if we want to watch it).
And I think you're reading all this as a criticism (and okay, in the case of rape revenge films it absolutely is, that shit's fucking creepy) but ultimately, films have no responsibility to cater to our highest and most worthy impulses. Films can be a way of dealing with stuff that we don't want to admit or acknowledge that we feel. My personal favourite films are all horror films, films that are specifically based on triggering an empathetic reaction to situations that would be horrible if they actually happened. As someone who has lived a life that is in some ways traumatic and horrifying in its own way, film can be a way of dealing with difficult emotions through the medium of fantasy.
The fact that James Bond is a masculine power fantasy, the fact that he reflects views that men sometimes have about violence, sex and relationships that are kind of dodgy if you really think about how they apply to reality is not in and of itself a criticism of the films, if anything it's a reflection of the psychology and fantasies of the audience and the culture that produces them. Even as someone who doesn't like Bond films, I find them weirdly fascinating for exactly that reason. I think they're deeply insightful, and they are providing an outlet for something that a lot of people actually feel on some level. That is why I bring them up, and it's also why I deliberately chose to ignore the elements that make that fantasy feel comfortable and safe, because at the end of the day none of that changes what it fundamentally is. None of it changes what is actually being shown on the screen.