Bond, Bait, and the Trap of Representation

Riz Ahmed’s Bait dismantles the fantasy of the “Brown Bond,” exposing the cost of entry into Britain’s cultural myth, and questioning whether escape is even possible

GQ’s September 2018 cover featured Riz Ahmed alongside the headline “The first brown Bond?” He has been living inside that question ever since. Bait, his new Amazon series, is the answer he couldn’t give in an interview. It tells the story of Shah, a Pakistani-British actor of middling success and enormous ambition, and his pursuit of the most iconic role in British cinema. It is a show about a man accused of selling out, made by a man who has spent years sidestepping exactly that accusation.

Ahmed once wrote “the reality of Britain is vibrant multiculturalism, but the myth we export is an all-white world of lords and ladies.” Bait is about the gap between those two things and what happens when a man from multicultural London tries to squeeze himself into the myth. We are living, on both sides of the Atlantic, through a period of accelerating nativism: Reform rising, ballooning Islamophobia, the ever-increasing normalisation of anti-immigrant rhetoric... There has rarely been a more urgent moment to tell these stories. Whether urgency is enough is a different question.

In The Good Immigrant, Ahmed described three stages of representation for ethnic minorities. Stage one: the two-dimensional stereotype: minicab driver, terrorist, cornershop owner. It tightens the necklace. Stage two: the subversive portrayal, still on “ethnic” terrain but aiming to challenge the clichés. It loosens the necklace. Stage three: the promised land, where you play a character whose story is not intrinsically linked to his race. “There, my name might even be Dave. In this place, there is no necklace.”

Bait is deliberately caught between stages two and three. More precisely, it interrogates whether stage three is even possible and asks, if it is, whether it’s desirable. Whether it is, in fact, a trap. Bond is the purest expression of this dilemma: the pinnacle of British cinematic aspiration, a franchise that, as the Patrick Stewart-voiced pig’s head reminds Shah, sells “watches, cars, and the British secret service.” Shah’s reply cuts to the heart of it: “I guess I just always thought I was someone who represents us to them, not fucking them to us.” The tragedy is that he can no longer tell the difference. In one scene, he offers to take down “the videos of [him] online fucking pissing on the British flag.” He has been too willing, for too long, to sand down his edges to fit the role.

The title earns its intelligence. In London slang, bait means obvious, naff, conspicuous, the person who can’t keep it cool. In its older sense, it means lure, food for the trap. Shah is both: too visible to disappear into the role, and too hungry to refuse it.

Much of the cultural territory Bait covers is familiar. The slippage between Urdu, Arabic, MLE, and RP is beautifully rendered, but it’s well-documented terrain, explored by Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith, and, for that matter, Man Like Mobeen, the show that made Guz Khan a star. The “one in, one out” logic of the British film industry is a tale as old as Equity cards: the Dev Patel mistaken-identity gag, the carefully placed cameos from Himesh Patel, Nabhaan Rizwan, Sagar Radia… the show knows exactly what it’s doing with these. The racist hate, while real and necessary to depict, draws from a catalogue of online slurs and childhood skinheads familiar from dozens of British-Asian narratives. The sell-out anxiety, too (seen in Yasmin’s line that Shah “joins a long line of brown men who think that, by becoming our oppressor, he’s somehow liberating all of us”), is a critique with a long and distinguished history.

Bait knows all this. The question is what it does with it.

What it does is refuse the grammar. The standard register for the South Asian-British protagonist is wronged dignity. Shah is given none of that. He is selfish, unreliable, hollow at the centre, so thoroughly colonised by his own aspiration that he passes off dialogue from his acting roles as his own thoughts. At a gala, he disowns Zulfi (Khan), his oldest friend, to appease the establishment guests. Moments after beginning a speech of anti-colonial sentiment, he tackles an actual anti-colonial protester to the ground, becoming the enforcement arm of the very institution he was just critiquing. Shah is not allowed the grace of being right and good simultaneously.

His internalised racism is dramatised through the pig’s head (a Yorick’s skull-cum-shoulder-devil, voiced by Patrick Stewart), which externalises Shah’s mental architecture. The pig’s head calls the mosque “Taliban HQ” and its worshipers “savage little ewoks.” These are Shah’s own thoughts, routed through a borrowed symbol of anti-Muslim violence. Internalised racism is difficult to dramatise without either condemning or excusing; Bait does neither, and simply holds it up for inspection. The chase sequence that follows a visit to the mosque - skinheads, a protester, Muslim uncles accusing him of being Mossad, an auntie insisting he’s not Dev Patel - culminates in Bond-Shah hunting the real Shah through the streets. His enemy is his own ambition. This is psychologically more sophisticated than almost anything in the British-Asian canon, which tends to locate the problem outside its protagonist.

The representational critique is equally precise. A dream sequence sees Shah’s agent Felicia (Weruche Opia) inform him that “making a difference means paying minimal tax, maybe you buy a couple of holiday homes, you can hire a few assistants who look just like you,” a surgical dismantling of what representation has been distorted into. This from the man who coined the Riz Test. Ahmed is parodying his own public discourse, undercutting his own persona, and he knows it. When Shah tries to justify the Bond role to Yasmin (phenomenally embodied by Ritu Arya) - “if I played him, he wouldn’t be white,” she replies without hesitation: “Yeah, but you would be.” The logic of the institution deracinates him before he can deracinate the role.

Around the show, Ahmed told GQ that his life felt “like it was taking place in completely different genres at the same time.” Bait’s formal answer to this is tonal multiplication: family sitcom, spy thriller, surrealist nightmare, operating simultaneously. The soundtrack, featuring Jorja Smith, Arooj Aftab, Jai Paul, SOPHIE…, refuses to settle into a single cultural location, which is its own kind of argument. South Asian-British life is not one genre.

Whether the show resolves its argument is another matter. The ending, Shah receiving the Bond role and puncturing the audition with “The name’s Shahjehan,” is satisfying in the moment but somewhat evasive in retrospect. He asserts his identity at the exact moment of institutional capture. The structural critique the show has spent six episodes building, that the institution co-opts regardless of what you say at the podium, is not answered by this gesture. The show risks letting itself off its own hook.

Ahmed told Esquire that his ambition was honesty rather than novelty: “if we can be honest about who we are, that might empower and give others confidence to do the same.” This is admirable. But the show critiques the machinery of representation while inevitably functioning as representation. It cannot fully escape the logic it interrogates, and it doesn’t quite reckon with that contradiction, which is perhaps the one honest thing it refuses to say aloud.

The question “does it say anything new?” is, as Bait would recognise, a symptom of the very problem it diagnoses. It is the demand that South Asian artists in Britain perpetually justify their presence, do cultural work, and carry the weight of a community’s story. But it is also a necessary question, because it is the question Shah is asking himself, and because any show made by a Brown British artist today will be received as representation whether or not it wants to be.

Bait is a diagnosis of Shah, of Ahmed, of an industry, of what “making it” costs and what it means. Its intelligence lies in its refusal of comfort: Shah is not vindicated, representation is not celebrated, the Brown Bond is not straightforwardly a victory. The show bites the hand that feeds it, though it leaves Amazon, footing the entire bill, conspicuously out of the crossfire.

At the end of it all, Bait says: The name’s Shahjehan. Make of that what you will.