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Never get why people get so bothered by this:
-she's a former prostitute - not a current one.
-In the Fleming books Bond has visited brothels (in YOLT he and Tiger visit one when Bond is in Tokyo)
-Bond has had sex with "abused women" before (namely Lupe in LTK, Andrea in TMWTGG and Tracy in OHMSS).
-It was meutal consent (she wanted him and he wanted her - unlike Camile she offered sex to him on a plate).
So the scars of childhood disappear immediately, the moment you are no longer a sex slave? I think this is the common misconception that people have on this forum. Oh she isn't a prozzy anymore, so it's fine. If you're going to bring up that one of your key character's is a sex slave, you can't then treat the subject matter without absolute frivolity.
This was 1964, not 2012. See above.
Again, the Bond of old. DC's Bond is a 21st century character. Do you remember when women weren't allowed to vote, or hold positions of power in government. It's was a man's world once, it's not so much anymore and Bond should adapt like the rest of us.
Again, I think you're missing the point. You meet a girl in a bar, she offers you sex but you're aware of her sexual past. A past that has huge psychological repercussions, do you engage with her that very same night? Only if you're an utter 'see you next Tuesday' and I never feel DC's Bond was that.
Hell, we're not even allowed to see DC smoke but he's allowed to treat 'damaged goods' with such disdain. It was a misstep.
Maybe Bond should start calling Felix a negro in the next film?
It's about morals and ethics, not the psychological state of mind Bond is in. Anyway, very few people seem to understand.
Were these people employed by a psychotic ex-MI6 agent, who continued to abuse them both physically and mentally until their inevitable death. Get a grip. I've met many sex workers, my girlfriend directed a documentary on the subject in Thailand, but I'd love to have your rose tinted view of the world, it would make the memories a lot easier to bear.
It's heavy stuff to mention in a Bond film, they should have left it out, it served no purpose other than to make Bond look like a morally bankrupt individual.
It is heavy stuff to deal with but I think it holds a natural place within the world of Bond, primarily because it always has and furthermore, there was nothing wrong with the scene at all. We'll have to clearly agree to disagree.
I didn't say this though did I? I said given the circumstances, I felt it was ethically wrong for Bond to do what he did. What you've outlined above is why I feel it's too heavy for something like Bond to deal with. It didn't add anything to the story mentioning her background, it just made her a more tragic, exploited figure. Like you say though, we'll have to agree to disagree.
A weird and slightly gross sequence in the film, that didn't really need to be there.
If they wanted to give her that back story, they could and should have handled it differently.
Personally, I think Fleming -- if he were still alive -- would have liked the Severine sub-plot since it is a mixture of the motives of the literary Solitaire in Live and Let Die and Tatiana in From Russia With Love. In Fleming's writings, females often manipulate Bond to lure him into danger. In a sense, Severine is a very Fleming-esque female with ulterior motives. The only difference is that, if Fleming wrote Skyfall as a novel, Severine would have ultimately fallen in love with Bond after their bargain was struck. Specifically, between their sexual interlude on the boat and her death, Fleming would have inserted a scene in which she professed her sudden love for Bond.
Furthermore, Fleming also would have approved of Severine's traumatic sexual past and Bond having sex with her anyway. After all, Tiffany Case had been gang-raped, Honeychile Ryder was raped by an overseer, etc. Fleming's Bond was always drawn to sexually-abused women.
Bond didn't need that incentive - he really wanted to get to Silva anyway. Sex was not needed as a bargaining tool.
Bond didn't need incentive through sex though. He got on the boat not to sleep with her, but because he knew Severine was leading him to Silva, the focus of his mission. His mission demanded that he get at Silva by any means, and this opportunity was perfect to him. Therefore, he didn't need any incentive to go to Silva through passage on the boat, and sex was just a bonus on the way to his island.
I thoroughly agree and would have written much the same thing. What she does is basically no different than Andrea Anders offering her favors and access to the Solex agitator to Bond because she wants Scaramanga dead. If we learned anything about Severine in her altogether too brief appearance, it's that she is a user. She knows she is a beautiful woman and knows how to use her sexual prowess to her advantage. She used sex to get Silva to use his power and connections to take her away from her life of prostitution. Now she fears Silva and knows that her life is in danger when she no longer becomes useful to him, so she strikes a similar deal with Bond in the hopes that he can kill Silva like he did Patrice. As long as he can get on the boat, of course. This isn't demeaning from her point of view, it's simply something she has done before that has worked for her. And it is absolutely consensual and she does like Bond as most women do.
Fleming would have loved the Severine character, especially the iconic sort of way she was introduced, hair blowing in the breeze. I recognized this immediately the moment her background was revealed by Bond at the Macao casino, this was classic Fleming yet another subtle nod to past Bond films that also recognized this. If they had wanted to, they could have written Severine as having brought Bond to Silva out of loyalty because he showed between Patrice and the casino that he was very dangerous and could cause Silva's plan to fail. She decided that before she did, she wanted to have sex with Bond much like Fiona Volpe and Helga Brandt. And then she realizes she has fallen for him past the deal she made and winds up helping him defeat Silva before ending up in bed with him again in the end, much like Fleming would have written.
Like Scaramanga says, "A mistress cannot serve two masters", and that is why he kills her, he knows she has betrayed him. Plus he has this odd way of dealing with "redundancy".
Thanks Brady, your posts on the subject have also been spot on :)
Thanks for your post. However, for those of us who found the scene distasteful, it's just an opinion. Spelling out it's relationship to Fleming in fine detail doesn't change the fact that some of us would prefer an updated Bond who doesn't go around acting like a 1950's cardboard cut out. Like I mentioned earlier, I wouldn't want Bond calling Felix a negro, by the same token I don't need him sleeping with disenfranchised women, whether they ask for it or not. Fleming is a great source of inspiration but there are many aspects of Bond that have outgrown his influence and so they should. I'm sorry if that's hard to take for some of the old school.
And let's not forget Honey Ryder, who was raped as a child, or at least as a teenager. I never heard anyone complaining about it.
And that's why I don't want Brannagh near a Bond film.
Looking at the last two films, we had some very fresh ideas, starting with Camille. But Ludovico trumps your opinion in my book. No one complained about these things before, now this is a problem? You can not like it if you want to, but Bond has forever used disenfranchised women, and they him as well. I would have much preferred the very hot Ms. Marlohe and her character to have survived and seen shagging some more with Bond in bed at the end, so if you'd have liked this too then you understand. But this isn't what we were given, so let's not take out the violin here and act like Bond took advantage of a poor little former child prostitute with a wing down because it doesn't jibe with one's view of reality. She knew what she was doing. The usury was mutual. And ultimately, Fleming will always be in the picture because of Cubby's long standing to this day theory about "when in doubt" what should be done.
No because, to my knowledge, Bond never actually hit anyone in the books. That was only the films.
I suppose it's a case of how much you want Bond to retain his "sexist, mysoginist" ways. Personally I wouldn't put it past "old Bond" (i.e. Flemings Bond) doing a similar thing. He was quite willing to sleep with a lesbian who had been abused by her father as a child and Severine represented the typical "girl with a wing down" character the books and the films use.
Personally I felt more uncomfortable watching Rog get it on with Fiona Fulliton in a hot-tub than I ever did during the love scene in Skyfall.
I guess that this is just a sign of the times. In our wish to condemn sex abuse, and to ensure they are always seen as the victim and never as "asking for it", we sometimes go too far the other way and deny that the woman many years later may have free will to have consensual sex or to use her body to exploit others. Perhaps in the future, this will seen to be condescending
This^
She was a former prostitute not current.
Agreed with both of you. That reaction to MP from the anti-SF lobby always irked me too. Sometimes the job you thought you wanted doesn't turn out to be the job you want, even if you are good at it. I thought MP was fine as a novice field agent, but then you turn her role in the book and film series upside down by continuing with it past a certain point. Her explanation and guilt towards nearly killing Bond, having to mix it up in the casino, the courtroom shooting, some people would not want all the drama in their life and her decision had nothing whatsoever to do with sexism or misogynism, as she made it perfectly clear that she alone made the decision.