Rush Limbaugh and his 'black Bond' outrage
By Anthony Zurcher, Editor, Echo Chambers
29 December 2014
Could Idris Elba be the next James Bond, despite Rush Limbaugh's misgivings?
The prospect of Idris Elba eventually replacing Daniel Craig as the next James Bond went from hypothetical internet speculation to something more substantial last week, when the Daily Beast uncovered an interesting nugget in the piles of hacked Sony emails.
"Idris should be the next Bond," Sony Pictures chair Amy Pascal wrote, reportedly to a fellow studio executive.
That was enough to set conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh into a tizzy. Bond, he said on his radio programme last week, has a distinct ethnic profile that Mr Elba, who is black, doesn't fit.
"But the franchise needs to get with it, right?" he continued. "The franchise needs to get hip. The franchise needs to get with the 21st Century. That's right. We had 50 years of white Bonds because Bond is white. Bond was never black."
Limbaugh said that casting Mr Elba as Bond would be equivalent to having George Clooney play Barack Obama or Kelsey Grammar in the role of Nelson Mandela (although he acknowledged the difference between actual people and fictional characters).
Elba responded with humour - "Isn't 007 supposed to [be] handsome?" he tweeted, including a photograph of him looking rather goofy in a knit cap - but some commentators reacted with flashes of anger that would make 007 proud.
"Is there no end to the injustices faced by professional reverse-racism victim Rush Limbaugh?" asks Gawker's Hudson Hongo.
The Daily Beast's Dean Obeidallah saysLimbaugh's comments were "definitely" racist. "How else do you describe the notion that certain roles should be labelled as 'whites only'?" he asks.
He writes that fictitious characters should be able to change with the times - including having black Bonds, black Santa Clauses, black orphan Annies, black Captain Americas and similar re-imagining of beloved icons.
"However, to the right, if the character they love was originally white, then they should stay white forever," he says. "They view any updating of a character's skin colour to reflect our nation's changing demographics - and to open up primo roles to non-white actors, who've spent plenty enough decades playing servants and sharecroppers and so on - as a sacrilege."
Others wondered just how important Bond's back story really is to the iconic character.
The Daily Mail's Hanna Flint notes that author Ian Fleming didn't create Bond's Scottish heritage until after the first film, Dr No, was released with Scottish actor Sean Connery in the lead role.
"When writing You Only Live Twice, the spy's parents were given as Andrew Bond, from the village of Glencoe, Scotland, and Monique Delacroix, from the canton of Vaud, Switzerland, to fit with Connery's interpretation of the role," she says.
Rush Limbaugh says Idris Elba as James Bond is as absurd as George Clooney playing Barack Obama.
In fact, the Guardian's Ben Child points out, Connery has been the only Scot to play the role in the franchise's 50-year history.
http://m.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-30594460