Bond Characters and their Families?
Dovy
Posts: 206MI6 Agent
When I saw the Defense Minister offer M regards to her children, it made me wonder how we could have seen family integrated into the Bond world. We see that the major characters have no family at all. Bond, Moneypenny, M, Q....no spouses (Tracy was a wife for one day). The villains also seemed to be without family as well. One can only wonder about the family background of each of them. Even Greene, Blofeld, Goldfinger and Scaramanga had parents, siblings etc. .And although I haven't gotten there yet I have read that Bond and Blofeld are "family." But I mean family in a "normal" sense.....
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It should be integral to the formula of successful Bond-movies…“don‘t bring the topic family into the movie, it works only in the rarest cases“.
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The villains also seemed to be without family as well.
What?! Elliot Carver had a wife in Paris Carver, Elektra King had her father in Sir Robert King (the one that died in the PTS), Gustav Graves had his father (a North Korean General whom he killed at the ending and getting his medals).
Safin had his family as well, his parents, that's his main motive in NTTD, avenging the death of his parents.
Scaramanga also had his family mentioned by Bond in a briefing through a great detail: "Born in the circus. Father - the Ringmaster, possibly Cuban. Mother - English, a snake charmer."
The villains had their families mentioned or shown at once, not sure about the MI6 staffs, barring Bond, of course.
We see M's husband (fast asleep) in CR06, he says a line (off screen) in QoS, and she says he's died by the time of SF. She mentions her children in GE.
Q mentions "the kids" in DAF.
Edit - and of course there's also CR67, which positively abounds in families of MI6 staff 😁.
The lack of children in Bond films (until very recently of course) has kind of been a bit odd. You'd have thought one or two would have cropped up over the years. Bibi's probably the closest we got.
Also, is Carver the only villain to have been married? That's kind of odd in itself. Very few of them even have partners: Zorin, Scaramanga, Sanchez to some extent, Le Chiffre barely. I wouldn't mind a husband and wife pair of villains, something like that.
One or two children do crop up...
...in the same movie barely minutes apart! 😁
I thought we had enough of characters' family in Craig's tenure?
Don't mistake the loudest moaners for consensus 😉
That's a risk, yes. It's hard to know for sure what the majority of members' opinion is without a poll that most reply to.
Bond tried to get married and it didnt work out: killed within minutes by one of Bond's enemies.
in Fleming's Moonraker he discusses why marriage is a security risk for a secret agent, I'm sure the employers are picking agents who don't have any attachments. Remember how Vesper was manipulated by blackmail, threats to her boyfriend. Though after the next book Bond does try living with Tiffany Case for a full year and that doesn't work out either, for less dramatic reasons. Bond is good at picking up chicks, lousy at long term relationships. No doubt why he prefers married women.
The villains are all disfunctional humans in one way or another, I'm not surprised they cant form normal relationships. Fleming always gives a chapters backstory explaining just how psychologically abnormal each of these baddies is, and why. I'm sure if any of the bad guys or good guys could form normal relationships. , theyd be happy staying at home raising kids and having dinner parties, they would not be motivated to take such risks in the battle between Good and Evil.
The villains are all disfunctional humans in one way or another, I'm not surprised they cant form normal relationships. Fleming always gives a chapters backstory explaining just how psychologically abnormal each of these baddies is, and why.
So we could safely say that the some of the Bond villains in the films were a bit realistic than those in the novels?
From what I've read, disfunctional seemed like some sort of Moore Era Bond villains to me, abnormal, whether physically or psychologically.
I'm sure if any of the bad guys or good guys could form normal relationships. , theyd be happy staying at home raising kids and having dinner parties, they would not be motivated to take such risks in the battle between Good and Evil.
But the films proved that even those bad guys with a families tend to be evil too, but they're more in the moral territory, think of Safin avenging his parents but later turned into greed, or Elliot Carver who killed his wife because he prioritize power, in some ways, their attitudes seemed more real to me, because that makes them more realistically evil, greed.
I'm for one who'd liked to see a Bond villain with a family, or at least a child.
Barring the Moore Era Villains and Blofeld, I think the films portrayed villains more realistically than how they're portrayed in the books, think of Sanchez (a man whose doing what he's doing because drugs was his business, does he have a choice?), Trevelyan, Silva, or even Gustav Graves (a prodigal son).
They all have some sense of moral ambiguity.
They have reasons for doing what they're doing, not just a mentally deranged villain planning to dominate the world (of course the Moore Era Villains were this).
Think of Goldfinger's plot in both book and film, the book portrayed him more as a mentally deranged Gold addict guy who just wants Gold, but the film portrayed him more as a businessman whose willing to do all things to monopolize his business, to give more money to his Gold business, more realistic.
The films gave those villains reasonable motives and not just through psychology, or representation of symbolism.
So the thing is, they could still have a family while doing some evil things, the films proved it.