Their Name’s Bxnd. Jxmxs Bxnd.

The director of the new James Bond film, No Time to Die, has let us know he disapproves of the historical Bond. The New York Post:

“Is it Thunderball or Goldfinger where, like, basically Sean Connery’s character rapes a woman?” Cary Fukunaga asked . . . “She’s like, ‘No, no, no,’ and he’s like, ‘Yes, yes, yes,’” Fukunaga, 44, said.

That was then. Now our values are different: If a plus-sized actress wanted to have her way with Bond, he would be required to perform. It would be fat-phobic to refuse.

Of course Bond is archaic. The very idea of a highly competent, serious intelligence agency that protects national interests seems quaint, at least to those of us in the West. A white guy who does secret-missiony things to preserve the stability of Western nations is just an exercise in justifying the colonialist order, no? There was that scene in Casino Royale where Bond really got worked over, and you hear bones crack — talk about your white fragility. But Bond endures, because he embodies necessary things.

Everyone has a favorite, and mine is my first. My father took me to see You Only Live Twice. I think he was trying to show me the ways of the world. I was bookish and plump, and he might have thought I would stop reading comics and eating cinnamon rolls if I realized the attractive options open to men who were stylish, ingenious, and legally permitted to kill the enemies of the state. The opportunities to indulge these attributes were not altogether common in Fargo, N.D., but perhaps I would have my eyes opened to the wider world.

It was the most exhilarating movie I had ever seen. Previously I had been allowed various Don Knotts capers, or big-screen comedy romps like It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Which Is Mad, and Did We Mention It Is Mad. Now and then, a rote Disney flick where Kurt Russell helps a cat get home, or a German economy car saves the day. Bond . . . well, this was grown-up.

And terrifying. There’s a scene where the Japanese secret-service chief “Tiger” Tanaka is discussing the fate of a tourist who had inadvertently taken a picture of SPECTRE’s suspected base; he notes that she “was liquidated.” I took that literally and for the rest of the movie lived in dread of seeing someone converted into fluid and draining into a grate on the floor.

I forgot all about that when someone was eaten by piranhas, which was even worse. Blofeld, the villain, kept the nibbly fish in a pool in his private office. It had a bridge that would collapse if he pressed a button on the floor with his well-polished Italian shoe. Nowadays we might wonder how Blofeld explained his office requirements to the architect.

“I want a button, here, I can press, to make anyone on the bridge fall into the pond.”

“Ha ha, great! Nice gag!”

Blofeld, stroking cat: “I do not gag, Mr. Adam.”

“No of course not. But about that pond. We can’t tie the pumps into the mains because of the particular pH level your fish require, so it’ll have to have its own supply. This means a separate, parallel water system, and that’s going to add to the cost of the project. Plus, you’ve got condensation issues, and that’s going to corrode the mechanism that brings the bridge segments back together.”

“Money is no object.”

You could tell Blofeld didn’t have to answer to anyone in SPECTRE, because some green-eyeshade type might have looked at the item in the bid for “piranhas execution pool with remote-operated bridge mechanism” and flagged it for review.

He would have been the first to test it out.

Anyway. I did not get the message that women should be skeletonized by thrashing aquatic carnivores because of poor job performance, so maybe Bond movies aren’t as influential as some think.

The old days of swank Bond are long gone. The modern series is worthy; Daniel Craig has an unruffled precision that summons up the classic Bond, and he adds a bit more steel than Connery had. But for the rest of our days we will have an endless debate about whether Bond should be a woman next, or black, or both, or biracial and gender-fluid. Their name’s Bxnd. Jxmxs Bxnd.

The answer, of course, is no. That would be Scottish erasure. Another British secret agent who’s not a white male would be fine. They just can’t use the Bond inheritance. Make someone new! We’ll watch. But that’s not enough: The old characters have to be remade by a form of cultural parasitism that burrows into the host and consumes it completely. I was watching the new Apple TV version of Foundation, the venerated Asimov sci-fi epic, and was actually surprised that the psychohistorian Hari Seldon wasn’t played by Whoopi Goldberg.

It is important that everyone realize that the past was bad, and there’s nothing to be learned from it. The past exists only to give the good people something to tut-tut about. You simply can’t say “I like a James Bond movie” without the room falling silent, waiting for your qualification.

“Although of course it suffers from an archaic viewpoint on lesbianism, and of course the entire concept of gadget-based extralegal assassination is, how shall we say, Putinesque.”

Sighs of relief: He’s one of us. Then you can say, “It’s much like The Handmaid’s Tale, with its ancient conceptions of gender. Men can give birth as well. I think it should be remade with the cast of the L.A. Lakers.”