By Alice Evans
Attentive listeners will have heard Alice mention that she has a Fabled planned for this year’s Spotlight Series – well whilst doing the research for that Alice found herself re-watching No Time to Die and couldn’t help herself…
Spoilers incoming!
You’ve seen him, whether you grew up with Connery or Craig, preferred Goldfinger to GoldenEye, you’ve probably seen a bond film with a disabled villain, even if it’s just a hapless henchman and not the big bad living under a volcano.
The latest James Bond film, No Time to Die, came out almost fifty years after the first one, Dr. No, and yet both films boast the same trope about disabled characters and, in an attempt to uplift those end-of-summer-is-it-September-already? blues, I’m going to spend the next few hundred words telling you about the way this trope is presented in NTTD (you’ll have to wait to hear my thoughts on Dr. No!)
It is a trope that’s as old as cinema itself, the villain who’s inner evil is visually reflected in his
disabled body. We’ve already talked about Richard III’s crooked back on this show (If you haven’t
heard our on-location History Lesson you can find it here: ) but today I want to talk about another icon of disability representation, one that is so deeply engrained and strongly linked with a particular franchise that it feels like a parody of itself: the “disfigured” bond villain.
And this is probably because one of the villans in the latest Bond is, in many ways, the seed from which all the criminal mastermind with a penchant for one-liners was born. Blofeld, played in the Daniel Craig Bond films by Christoph Waltz, is a recurring character throughout the entire Bond lineage and across his various depictions ticks everyone of the following Bond villain tropes:
Heavy German/Eastern European accent
Secret lair
Bald head
Maniacal laugh
Bizarre plans for world domination (or similar villainous antics)
Lap cat
That’s right, if it was parodied in the Austin Powers movies, Blofeld has done it. And more than one of the depictions of this character includes facial scarring – which may well be why this, along with all the other things in the above list, has become such a common feature of Bond baddies.
Waltz’s Blofeld gets his scars as part of a direct conflict with Bond himself, although interestingly the scarring doesn’t seem to particularly contribute to Blofelds (already significant) hatred of Bond.
However, Rami Malek, the other bad guy in this particular film (because one villain isn’t enough for this unnecessarily over-complicated movie…), wears his rai·son d’être on his actual face. Scarred during the assassination of the rest of his family Malek’s character, Lyutsifer Safin, is seeking revenge on Spectre (the secret criminal organisation headed up by Blofeld) as well as Bond and, you know, all the rest of humanity.
And this is basically all there is to Safin. He’s played really well by Malek – he’s subtle but
threatening in a way that anyone who’s actually been threatened, by say a boss or a teacher, would recognise. Holding their power over you like an axe ready to fall at any moment, but the story and character development doesn’t give the portrayal anywhere to go. So when Mathilde manages to escape his clutches and run back to her mother, what should have felt like a poignant missed opportunity to recreate the family dynamic he lost (albeit in a mad-scientist sort of way) just falls down with a brief glance back over the shoulder and shrug.
And this poor characterisation is one of the (numerous) issues with this trope of disability as a
signifier of evil; it just doesn’t go anywhere. It’s one dimensional and dismisses the complexities of the human personality and experience. Like, even quirky tech-nerd Q is more fleshed out than Safin and frankly it’s unacceptable for a huge, million-dollar franchise like Bond to still be falling back on this kind of lazy story telling.
Look, I’m not saying film makers can’t ever have a disabled villain again, I’d just like to see one who is more than just the sum of his disabled body. Not to mention one that’s played by someone who actually lives with that disability…
During the research for this piece I cam across an interesting point about the Bond movies that I think is indicative of the problem faced by the disabled community when it comes to representation.
Bond was built on racist stereotypes and misogyny, like for decades that was his whole deal. But the Craig reboot has actively been trying to combat that, including women in the writing and production team and uplifting BAME characters, like Moneypenny for example, but disabled characters are still getting the same treatment they got back in 1962; charicatures and underdeveloped stories. You could remove Safin’s scars and literally tell the same story, they exist purely for the exploitatitive,
freakery of disability, they serve no purpose other than to offend millions of viewers.
So where do we go from here? Who knows, we don’t even know who will be stepping in to replace Daniel Craig, never mind what the rest of the cast or story is going to look like. I can’t say I have particularly high hopes though…
Sources: James Bond: Disability campaigners call for end to ‘outdated trope’ of villains with facial disfigurements | The Independent
No Time To Die’s Safin is a scarred villain in a lazy move (digitalspy.com)
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