How James Bond Can Fix the Crisis in Masculinity

Here's what I'd do if I owned the 007 franchise

James Bond has defeated evil villains for more than seventy years. But he may have met his match in Jeff Bezos, who now has total control over the superspy’s fate.

Bond fans have responded with much wailing and gnashing of teeth. They’re treating this like a death sentence.

Bezos even got depicted as a Bond villain by The Hollywood Reporter. It described Amazon as “the sprawling global syndicate run by the bald-headed, rocket-building billionaire Ernst Stavro Bezos.”

Ouch! That’s gotta hurt.

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The stakes are certainly high. The Bond franchise has generated more than $7 billion in ticket sales, but it desperately needs to reinvent itself—and it’s not clear what James Bond even looks like anymore.

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So many movie franchises featuring heroic males have collapsed in recent years. Johnny Depp couldn’t fix the Lone Ranger franchise and may have derailed the Pirates of the Caribbean gravy train too. Tarzan hasn’t swung from a tree in a major film in almost a decade. After his last screen failure, G.I. Joe got the Hollywood equivalent of a court martial.

Even Indiana Jones seems headed to extinction.

Those are horrible numbers—and I haven’t even adjusted them for inflation. In today’s dollars, the first Indiana Jones film would have sold more than $1.3 billion in tickets.

In other words, this franchise has declined 70%. That’s what a dying business looks like.

One false move from Bezos, and 007 will meet the same fate.

There’s no easy solution for these franchises. If they update their hero too much, fans complain and boycott. If they keep things too much the same, the results feel out-of-touch—and a different group grumbles and protests.

Is there any place for James Bond in this environment?

Even before Amazon stepped in, you could feel exhaustion in the franchise. Daniel Craig gave 007 a new jolt of juice with his arrival in 2006—he saved the brand, in my opinion. But the Bond films still felt old—everything was darker, heavier, and filled with foreboding and a fatalistic acceptance of inevitable decline.

There’s a reason why five of the last dozen Bond films have used the word die or kill in the title. These movies are infused with what Freud called thanatos—the death instinct.

It’s so palpable that when James Bond was actually killed in the most recent installment—oddly entitled No Time to Die—fans didn’t complain.

It felt inevitable. Let’s put the poor bloke out of his misery.

And now four years have gone by—with no sign of a James Bond resurrection. That’s an eternity in Hollywood time.

But Amazon can’t afford to bury this money-maker—they rely on successful Bond offerings even more than the Treasury Department. So 007 must be reborn in some new guise.

But what do you do with James Bond in an age when masculinity is a problem, not an opportunity?

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I take this matter seriously. At an early age I was taught this simple truth—repeated to me endlessly by older males.

Sometimes a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

But what exactly does a man gotta do nowadays?

I’ve spent the last few months doing a deep dive into books, movies, TV series, and various studies on contemporary masculinity. And they are a hot mess.

If these are indicators of contemporary dude-ness, James Bond is finished. There’s no place for him in the current day.

For a start, I bought a stack of novels by young male writers who are redefining manhood in the current day. I was looking for insights, but all I got was an education in contemporary dysfunction and pathology.

I won’t even mention the names of the authors and books. I certainly don’t want to recommend them. Even worse, I’m ashamed to admit I read them.

The characters are a sad assortment of wimps, losers, wannabes, incels, nerds, simps, scroll-and-swipers, round-the-clock gamers, wankers, and half-baked hipsters. I couldn’t find anything resembling a role model for a young man today.

Here’s a typical passage:

At lunch one day, two of his male co-workers offer unsolicited dating advice.…He’s too honest and available, not aggressive enough—friend-zone shit they say unironically. Don’t be a fucking pussy is all! You gotta challenge them, be a puzzle for them to work out, that’s how girls’ brains work, it’s evolution. They offer grotesquely specific advice about eye contact and hair touching. Learn palmistry, they say, bitches love getting their palms read….

These books—which I soon abandoned and consigned to the flames—were filled with this stuff.

Is this the New Male? Should James Bond really learn palmistry?

Not long ago, agent 007 would take one look at this ragtag crew, and just walk away. Even exercising his license to kill would be a waste of time.

But here’s a bigger question: What does any 18-year-old male do in this environment? If James Bond can play a role in solving that problem, he will have earned his salary—and maybe even sell some tickets at the box office.

Some young guys are so desperate that they turn to influencers like Andrew Tate, recently censored on Spotify for his “degree course” on “pimping hoes.” (I’m not making this up—although I wish I were.)

But I’m not much more sympathetic to the contrary extreme, namely those advising young males to accept a life of scraping and bowing and apologizing for the inescapable toxic dudeness embedded in their DNA.

Agent Bond, can you help us? What does a man gotta do?

As a next step in my research, I spent many painful hours surveying the social media accounts of male influencers, who offer lots of advice online. But they come across as even more insecure than the nerds and gamers—constantly obsessing over their image, their pose, their pickup lines, their strutting and preening.

I can’t imagine James Bond following their lead either. They might serve as second-tier villains—but only as thugs-for-hire or part of an entourage. Even a Bond villain has to have some self-respect, no?

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In desperation, I started asking other people what they would do if they owned the James Bond franchise.

Here was one suggestion from a friend:

They should just make James Bond movies the same as before. Screw the critics and naysayers. Bond should drink, gamble, seduce, shoot bad guys, and drive over the speed limit—end of story.

If they do that, they’ll make boatloads of money. Moviegoers don’t want a low testosterone 007. He was born to be a badass.

I don’t have any problem with a badass Bond—but can we really pretend that nothing has changed since 1953?

Another trusted source gave me a very different answer—and offered a useful clue in how Bond might thrive in modern society without losing his cojones to a Bezos-operated laser.

There’s one person in Hollywood who has actually figured out a different formula for modern masculinity. And it works. I’m talking about Taylor Sheridan—just look at Yellowstone, Landman, and his other shows.

His heroes are tough and rugged, but they also have deep loyalties—to their core values, their family, their community. They will break the rules, and even do bad things, but only for these higher causes.

These are men on a mission. They are men who make sacrifices—and they’re not frivolous or narcissistic.

We allow them to be manly because we trust their allegiance to things that really matter.

I’ve watched enough of Sheridan’s work to understand this formula for masculinity. His male heroes are usually middle-aged or older (but still with sex appeal). Above all, they are survivors who have endured great pain—but they haven’t been broken by it.

It’s just made them tougher. It’s made them more formidable.

But the key thing is how they do their job. James Bond could learn from that—but so could lots of other men out there seeking direction in a confused world.

If I could give young guys just one piece of advice it would relate to this connection between a man’s inner life and his actions in the world. I would take them aside, sit them down, and tell them the following.

HERE IT COMES….TED’S ADVICE ON MASCULINITY:

Here’s the one big thing that movies and TV shows will never tell you about masculinity. But you need to learn it.

A man achieves happiness in life by delivering on his responsibilities. You have no idea how important this one thing will be to your mental health, your sense of self-worth, your relationships, and your ability to find meaning and purpose in your life.

I’m talking about your responsibilities to your family, your colleagues, your teammates, your friends, your communities and groups, your country—and even to total strangers. (Yes, you have responsibilities to them, too.)

But above all I’m talking about your responsibility to yourself. And when I say you owe something to yourself, I mean your higher image of who you should be.

Living up to these demands is what makes a man happy. It’s also what makes him manly.

A real man goes out into the world and gets things done in order to fulfill these obligations. And this is where traditional masculine values come in—toughness, perseverance, endurance, vitality, ruggedness, and all the rest.

If you figure this out, everything else will fall into place.

And that’s how I would rebuild James Bond for the modern day.

He would have give up some things. I’d eliminate the casual sadism, the flippancy, the irony, the cynicism. Daniel Craig made a start on this with his portrayal, but I’d push for even more distance from the frivolous Bond attitudes of yore.

And we need to do something about the incessant womanizing. I’m not asking for a celibate James Bond—but conquest should not be such an obsession when he meets a lady. That fixation actually seems to cover a neurosis or insecurity.

So I’d let James Bond charm and seduce, but with a little more loyalty. It might even be time for 007 to find a wife.

C’mon James. Everybody has to grow up, sooner or later.

But even if he stays single and on the prowl, Bond needs to be a man of character—trustworthy, solid, noble, decent.

If he sticks to that, he can be as badass as ever. He can have the fast cars and gadgets and martinis and that endless supply of well-pressed tuxedos.

Even better, he might serve as a role model for young men. And they very much need one right now.