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Barker’s commentary is just post hoc rationalization to appease feminist seethe following the movie.
From a lipstick feminist perspective, the takeaway is that Bear—as a low status male—had no right to wish for anything, much less be deserved of having a wish of his come true (even if accidental and mangled).
Bear should have read the One Wish Willow’s mind and known what would have happened. Failing that and after making the wish, he should have immediately recognized his wrongdoing and should have been hyperagentic and competent enough to just Figure It Out and undo whatever the One Wish Willow did. No, instead the clueless “Nice Guy” chose to rape Nikki with the One Wish Willow’s help.
Just have the emotional intelligence to recognize when a supernatural, possibly omnipotent force is up to no good and Do the Bear Minimum in defeating it to go back to accepting your fate as a low status male. Ugh, it’s that easy—why can’t men just get it? The bar is on the floor. This is why women choose the animal bear.
The wish itself is just window-dressing.
James Bond or Jason Bourne are an idealized, fantasized version of real spies/special forces soldiers. They are a convenient vehicle to show action scenes and maybe share some ideas about terrorism, conspiracies, state secrets, geopolitical issues etc.
In the same manner, having a man 'cause' a woman to be crazy allows to show what a crazy woman looks like, and give some words of caution about it.
Notice how in this real life setting you have a woman having multiple meltdowns in public and nobody really reacts whatsoever? Notice how the friend group is at best cursorily inquiring if the man is taking advantage of the crazy woman?
The message of the movie is possibly that a crazy woman will ruin your life, perhaps drive you to suicide and nobody will save you. The director is pretty clever for finding something that resonates with viewers and getting away with it.
I’d say James Bond was more the idealized, fantasized person you’re thinking of in that case. Not to dump on James Bond movies, but Jason Bourne was more the realism counterpart to what you got with Bond. A world where the police aren’t completely stupid and incompetent and the rest of the world the character inhabits doesn’t drop away or become indifferent to the plot.
Movies don’t stem from a vacuum. They emerge out of the cultural milieu and trends people respond and react to. I’d have thought movies like Citizen Vigilante were a clear indicator of this. Watch Mehdi Hasan lose his mind and become butthurt over it, and becoming more emotional than even Piers Morgan was glorious to watch. Stick to criticizing Israel homie, because it’s what you’re good at.
I’ve dealt with and certainly know “crazy” women. Depending on how you want to define it, but they’re definitely unhinged for sure. When I was a teenager there was a girl I was friends with in high school that wanted to have sex with me, in her car, parked right outside her ex-boyfriend’s house; in the fucking hood of all places. Are you fucking insane? We were active with each other but I nope’d out of that situation. And I’ve got a few handful of examples of similar experiences with girls I’ve dealt with who were equally eccentric. When I was living out of state with my girlfriend at the time, there were multiple instances of looks both of us got (or rather her) while we were on the street and out doing things. Physically, she was a complete knockout of a woman. She was in volleyball in high school and other extracurricular sports, was in shape, had a huge bust of a chest, very attractive face and eyes, and converted to Islam at a later point in her life. But we had a very long history together, we knew each other, our friend’s and family’s, etc. Ironically, my closest friends didn’t like her, the ones more on the periphery did; and most of my family didn’t like her either (not for her religious views at all but for her personality which they viewed as unbecoming of a woman; they viewed her as stuck up and someone who didn’t know her place; my younger female cousin and her even got into a real nasty argument at one point) but were respectful, even before we got our own place together and she was living with us, before we moved.
Anyway when we lived together in our apartment one day we had to go to the AutoZone to get a part for her car. She had a white Hyundai that was a beater and we had a lot of money saved for her to get a new car, but she wanted to keep it going awhile longer while we continued to save more. We were younger but weren’t strangers to standing on our own two feet before. We go inside, get the item and when we went to pay for it, the white guy behind the register who was probably middle age by my standards, tried asking her out and for her number, while I was right in front of him (didn’t know who he imagined I was). She just smirked and looked over at me and I just calmly said “That’s cute. She’s in a relationship.” And he had a surprised look on his face, we got our stuff and left and laughed a bit when we got outside. But then, we had to actually do the labor to fix the car part. Well she had a brilliant idea. She called someone she knew in the area (a young guy, probably our age at that time who was a mechanic), to see about fixing it. In his off hours, he comes over to our apartment still in his mechanic suit, while the car was parked right in front of the apartment, jacks the car up and does about two and a half hours work of labor (for free) and changes the part out, probably lowkey hoping he’d earn his way into her good graces and hoping he’d have gotten laid, despite telling him beforehand that we were together. This guy coaxed himself out of probably $750.00 on his “hopes and dreams.” And there were other experiences we had as well. In a restaurant once, in an apparel store. You see first hand how attractive women always get lowkey inundated with subtle (and not so subtle) advances of men who are trying everything they can because the want to fuck you. But she was also a bit “unhinged” at times. We had sex on the beach once and got surrounded by 6 people who started watching us because we just happened to get in the moment. This was all at 1am, and it was instigated with her making the first move. Looking back at everything in retrospect, you could say she was “crazy” if you want; I just think she had an exotic flair for things at times.
The James Bond from the books was a lot sadder. The violent and sexual wish fulfillment are still there, but Fleming was a lot more realistic about the consequences. He understands how sad Bond’s life and failure to connect with women are. In the books, the girl doesn’t just conveniently disappear at the beginning of the next movie. Fleming actually goes into exactly why the relationship ended up failing, usually because Bond is an emotional cripple. Sometimes because a hunky American Marine stole her heart, the wanker. The fact that he has no wife or children at 40 weighs on him.
And book Bond is just as effective a killer as his movie counterpart, but he takes a lot less pleasure in it. One of the books opens with ten pages of Bond brooding over a cartel sicario he had just had to stab. This man was trying to gut him like a pig, but taking his life still really bothers Bond.
Maybe this because the books were written by a real womanizing killer.
I’ve also heard the Bond of the books were quite different from his cinematic incarnation. Never read the books so I can’t say. Of all the Bond actors, is there one that comes closer to Fleming’s representation on him more than the others?
None of them really capture Bond’s attitude to violence right. Maybe Brosnan, but his Bond is very guarded and opaque so it’s hard to tell. Physically, Timothy Dalton, he’s the spitting image of the portrait Fleming commissioned of Bond. In terms of his complicated relationship with women being closest to the books, your best bets are Casino Royale, or On Her Majesty’s Secret Secret Service. Many here will say From Russia With Love but I’ve never liked it for some reason. Ironically, I think the movie Bonds do really nail how book Bond would have interacted with a female superior: cold professionalism shot through with a hurt little boy looking for his mother.
Dalton stuck in my mind as I was writing the previous comment. A lot of people thought he was terrible but I thought he was one of the best. Connery is still in the forefront of most people’s minds, but I always thought he was intellectually clumsy and aloof a lot of the time. Dalton captured the darker and more pointed aspect of things that I always felt Bond’s character should have been. Brosnan was good too. Lazenby I have vague memories of but people have said he was one of the best ones too.
Maybe I’m just one of those guys with odd cinematic preference. I was also someone who thought First Contact was the best Star Wars film and Deep Space 9 was one of the best Star Trek shows of all time. I preferred it over TNG (which I also loved). Sisko was an excellent character and I thought a lot of the content was top tier (and yes I’m aware of how fledgling it was among the audience), but I think most people were just dead wrong about it.
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This is the same bullshit way of thinking about the movie that your opponents use; they dismiss One Wish Willow as an agentic force that deserves part of the blame for the film's events because it's "just an allegory for" men controlling women. You've gotta handle stories at least a little bit literally.
I mean I don't claim to know what the director had in mind making the movie, but if I were a director trying to sell a movie showing a crazy BPD girlfriend and graphic physical violence against a woman, I'd try to give the impression that there's some kind of feminist message.
I'm not a horror fan as I can't make myself vulnerable enough to be scared on behalf of fictional characters, but I liked the story and appreciated the dark comedy throughout.
I think it'd have been interesting if there was a plausible doubt that the magic worked at all. Story would have been more subtle and maybe not worked as well as it did.
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