If you are of a certain age when you took driving education courses in high school, they likely showed bloody films of auto accidents in class, explicit images of corpses and injured people as they were removed from the wreckage. These films were meant as a shock treatment, hopefully piercing the veil of teenage invincibility and instilling a a little caution behind the wheel. No one really knows if they worked, but if you saw these films in school you remember them.

Hell’s Highway is the story of Highway Safety Films Inc, the people that produced these safety movies, and many other training film you are unlikely to have seen. This documentary is not for the squeamish. It replays several graphic scenes from these movies, scenes of real death, real injury, and real agony. However if you can tolerate these bis, it is a fascinating exploration of the people and their mission. It is a time capsule of how things used to work, and how we used to think. I was never bored and found this movie engrossing.

This short little essay will have some slight spoilers for the newest Bond film, ‘Skyfall,’ so precede if you don’t mind that minor aspect of my prattling.

James bond has been around for quite a while, the novel that started the franchise, Casino Royale was published in 1953 and inspired film spanning from 1962 with ‘Dr. No’ to this year’s entry ‘Skyfall’. The world has been through a lot of changes over those decades. Enemies have vanished from the globe – Soviet what? — and technology has made earlier gee-whiz gadget seem down right Neolithic. Bond as a character has made a few adaptation with the changing times. The man’s man drinking and sleeping his way through a bevy of beauties has become a colder character, less given to quips when killed. However it is one exchange, one line in ‘Skyfall’ that shows that the world has truly changed and Bond along with it.

In the film Bond has been captured by bad guy Silva and finds himself tied, again, to chair. This time he’s allowed to keep his clothes, unlike that unsetting scene from 2006’s Casino Royale. Silva, carrying a fair amount of personal animosity for Bond and his boss M, tries to upset his captive with some very explicit homoerotic foreplay. The scenes is sexually charged and suddenly changes when Bond says, “What makes you think this is my first time?” (And a million fanfics are born)

Either Bond lied to throw off Silva’s game, or Bond’s sexually experience is wider than what has been traditionally represented. No matter which is ‘true’, how meaningless that term is for any fiction, the importance is massive.

For most of American culture, historically effeminate natures, and homosexuality has been associated with this, have been seen as weak and unmanly. To be a man in western culture, certainly for the twentieth century, has meant to be strong and to be heterosexual without and wavering. (Or as they put it in the satire Rustler’s Rhapsody to be a good guy you had to be ‘a confident heterosexual.’ heterosexual was not enough)

If Bond is lying, he’s open and accepting enough to have people think he might have had trysts with other men. He doesn’t see it as something that weakens his standing as an alpha male. If it is true, he’s accepting that his tastes, or at least experiences, in bed as only one aspect to who he is and that there is nothing shameful in open mindedness.

What is more interesting is that the filmmakers were willing to go there. It’s one thing for an art house release to have male characters of non-standard sexual orientation, or secondary characters in major films, but to have your principle action stare, a defining action hero of the last 50 years identified that way would have been just a few years ago forbidden.  It simply would not have been prudent to risk all that money by inviting the controversy that the character might have had sex with another man. Unimportant to the story, lose it and save the box office would have been the commandment from the studio. Not in ‘Skyfall.’

We are in a different world now. A more open a more accepting world. I welcome it.