masan, on 04 December 2012 - 09:54 PM, said:
.
Correct me if i'm wrong but I think Cougar's main point originally was that Idris Elba would not make a good Bond, something he argued at length with Amph and something I agree with ( way too tall and cumbersome).
Interpreting his following comments as thinly veiled racism is pushing it. .
Also, shoo Abyss shoo !
I just bought popcorn.
polishgenius, on 04 December 2012 - 10:31 PM, said:
There's nothing wrong with 'don't get me wrong'. It's hardly 'no offense but' which can only ever be followed by something that might cause offence.
Like this:
No offence, but the vehemence of your reaction to this topic is making you come off as a few guppies short of an aquarium.
I appreciate that you feel strongly about the subject, but if you're going to refuse to engage into what was until now a sharp but civilised (and, let's be honest here, finished) argument, then just don't engage.
the majority of the Bond-shouldn't-be-black opinion came from people making pretty reasoned arguments based on social perceptions,
Aiming the majority of your bile at Cougar just because he happened to be the one arguing with you now helps even less, since probably out of every person in this topic his arguments are furthest from 'Bond should be white because I am'.
stone monkey, on 04 December 2012 - 10:59 PM, said:
Implying that Cougar is to any degree racist is probably the worst case of laughable in the history of ridiculous that I've ever seen.
tbh I'm of the opinion that the kind of super-dickish, upper-middle-class British sense of entitlement and arrogance that Bond embodies (it's practically Victorian when you get down to it) can only, in the socio-political sense, be done by a white actor at the moment. I can't imagine a black actor being able to carry it off; there's too much of the baggage of Empire involved, the character so obviously believes that he was born and bred to be HM Government's unanswerable arm in the world, riding roughshod over diverse contemptible foreigners at will. Speaking as a black Briton, I think our relationship with Britishness, both felt and perceived, is slightly more complicated and, more importantly, conflicted than that. I'd argue that the character would actually seem even more ridiculous than he already does (which is going some) if a black actor played him as is.
So much as it would be refreshing to see such an icon of muscular white masculinity portrayed by a black actor, I don't think it would fly.
You are all perfectly correct in criticizing my tone, language, and insinuations against Cougar. He annoyed me with the "don't call people idiots".
And, by not actually going to the end of the conversation I did not realize that I was necroing a topic. I was scrolling down the front page of the forum, the title caught my eye, I opened it, started reading, and got pissed me off. I do apologize for the necro.
So I posted what I did and got reactions. (Was not my intent to troll, but that is essentially what I did. Apologies for that as well.)
In my 3rd post I point out the three different discussions taking place in the thread.
The first two are valid discussion points. Neither of which would interest me for long really. It is the third which is entangled in the other two that bothers me.
Which is why I asked Cougar the questions I did. I actually would like to know if he thinks that their is an equivalence between the argument that
a fictional character HAS to be the same race as written/portrayed because that's what the author intended
and
the character is white and therefore has to be white.
There were more than one person in the latter category. Cougar being pissy because I called one of them an idiot while he was apparently just fine with not calling out racism when it's baldly proclaimed is a bit strange.
Also, for the record, I do not think Cougar is racist. Don't get me wrong, no offence intended, with all due respect, to be honest, at the end of the day the following does make me think that his thought process is something along the lines of "yes, theoretically a black actor could do it, I just don't think there are any black actors from the right socio-economic background to do so now. Maybe in a few years."
Cougar, on 15 November 2012 - 04:06 PM, said:
I think, in all seriousness, there are two interrelated questions here: could Elba do bond and could a black guy do bond? I'd have to say no and yes respectively.
Elba couldn't, in my NSHO. The reason for this being I don't think he could pull off the things Bond needs to be. Bond must be British, but with an RP accent. I've no idea whether it comes across to North Americans, but Elba is well spoken, Southern English, but not what we'd call RP. RP can be accented with Scots, or Irish or Welsh as has been demonstrated by Connery, Brosnan and Dalton, but he can't sound too common. Second, you have to believe that Bond is quite posh, has come through the British public school system and has a certain upper middle-class insousance to him. Fundamentally, I don't feel Elba would pull that off. He could manage the action hero, SBS side of things that Bond has, but not the Oxford knot, champagne cocktail job.
None of those requirements exclude a black actor. I'm struggling to think of a black actor up to the job, but if anyone's ever seen Rugby pundity Jerremy 'Jezebel' Guscott, you'd know that there is nothing unreasonable about an elegant, public school type English black chap.
That is uncomfortably close to an applicant being told "We just don't think you'd fit in with our atmosphere at this firm. Have you considered applying at ..."
"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." - Viktor Frankl