The Projector 56: Quarantine Bonding (Patreon)

by Stevie Kuenn

This installment of The Projector is written by a special guest Patreon subscriber.

Hello Projector readers! Keith Phipps, your normal newsletter author, last night realized that he forgot to write this week’s newsletter and I, $5 Patreon supporter and conveniently Keith’s wife, remarked that I could just do it for him, since content strategy is what I do for a living.

So here we are. Think of this week’s newsletter as when Michelle goes on Fallon and talks about how Barack eats seven almonds as a snack every night or doesn’t match his socks together or whatever. 

Each year, on New Year’s Day, Keith and I watch a Bond movie together. We used to watch whatever movie we felt like watching on New Year’s Day. One year we had a friend over, and began talking about Octopussy, as one does, and our friend tried to play it cool and said something like, “Well, if you’ve seen one Bond movie, you’ve seen them all.” It was then clear that this friend had never seen Octopussy, which (spoiler alert for a 37-year-old movie, I guess) begins with Roger Moore flying out of a horse’s butt and ends with him in a clown costume holding a nuclear warhead. 

So we watched Octopussy and a tradition was born. 

This year, Keith turned to me on Jan. 1 and said, “Why don’t we make this a project?,” because obviously watching every Nic Cage movie in a year and hosting this here podcast aren’t project enough for this man. Plus, there was a new one due this year and I thought it’d be fun to catch up before it came out in April (or, as it turned out, July or November, or never as it may be). We began with Dr. No on Jan. 1 and we are now hitting the Roger Moore era that one half of this household erroneously claims as the best Bond*. 

Watching the series again in order forced us to challenge the opinions we’d previously held about the movies themselves. Connery is outstanding in Dr. No, which could be held up against the Craig era in terms of modernity and grittiness, but his performance across six films descends into quips and casual misogyny faster than you remember. You Only Live Twice is truly terrible and also super racist (and not coincidentally, written by Roald Dahl). It also becomes obvious that Connery’s Bond is the beneficiary of luck and not actually that good at his job. George Lazenby is better than you remember and yes, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is the best of the classic era, yes, mostly because of Diana Rigg (RIP). Roger Moore’s Bond is the most competent when it comes to spycraft to date. He also embraces the silly side of these movies better than any other Bond, whether he’s using a firetruck as a weapon in A View to A Kill, hopping over alligators in Live and Let Die or anything he does in any given minute in Octopussy.

It’s also complicated to process through the lens of today, particularly our current moment. It is easy to say “times have changed,” but the imperialism, racism and misogyny are hard to watch, over and over again in contrast with fizzy dialogue, underwater action sequences, fantastic wardrobes and luxurious location shoots. Live and Let Die is particularly egregious, with horrifying setpieces built around spectacularly bigoted voodoo depictions, culminating in a Caribbean country’s prime minister leading a conspiracy to take down both the British empire and American democracy by giving away heroin for free. In fifteen years, Timothy Dalton’s Bond will partner with the Mujahideen, our eternally beloved allies, to stop a rogue Russian general. Bond may stay the same age (roughly) but we keep getting older, and it’s hard to square how the world was with how the world is. 

Yet we’re still watching. Maybe it’s the promise of how the series evolved in the Craig era, where Bond is not just a badass, but shows vulnerability and complexity as he works in a world where women and people of color are not just props, but his superiors and equals. Maybe it’s because there’s some comfort in the ridiculousness we see on screen, especially as our quarantine stretches beyond its sixth month. Maybe it’s just nice to have a project to distract us from the projects around us. Maybe, just maybe, it’s the promise of seeing Roger Moore fly from a horse’s butt again. 

Anyway, thanks for indulging this. Keith is insisting on providing reading links for the week, so back to your regularly scheduled programming. Another spoiler alert: an upcoming episode features a film that Scott Tobias once described to me as a “hilarious comedy,” leading me after watching it to wonder if Scott has ever experienced laughter. 

*It’s Craig. Sorry. But not sorry. 

Stevie Kuenn is the marketing director of the Pat Tillman Foundation and lives in Chicago, Illinois. She's also Keith's wife. You may know her from Twitter, where she occasionally joins Film Twitter discourse and routinely votes for Twin Peaks: The Return in the Definitive and Canon Greatest Movie of All Time poll because you vulgarians allowed Hard Boiled to get knocked out. 

Keith again. As usual, thanks again for subscribing. And we hope you enjoy you're enjoying our Charlie Kaufman double episode. Some last-minute, COVID-19-related release date changes have forced us to scramble a bit, so look for a bonus episode of some kind in the main feed next week. But we've got a pretty fun (well, fun's not the right word) pairing already in the can and we're excited about the next few we've got plotted out. 

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