Just a few weeks ago, I sat staring at my TV screen, anxiously awaiting the results of the 2012 presidential election. Flipping periodically through the channels, I watched Fox News as Bill O’Reilly rationalized exit poll results, lamenting: “It’s a changing country. The demographics are changing. It’s not a traditional America anymore. … The white establishment is now the minority.”

Knowing Fox News’ and O’Reilly’s ideologies, this sentiment was not terribly surprising. However, this week, as I sat staring at a movie screen, anxiously awaiting James Bond’s latest exploits, I was shocked to realize the film’s message was nearly the same as O’Reilly’s.

Throughout the movie, Bond fights against change: his aging body, new technology, shifting roles of women in society and the workplace and the changing demographics of the film’s Anglo-American world. (While Bond is obviously a British franchise, the film had an American-owned production company, two American distributors, an American writer, American producers and a director whose first feature film was American Beauty.)

The movie is obsessed with proving “the old way is better” and rejects encroaching challenges to “traditional” worldviews. Skyfall rejects fancy-schmancy technology such as computers and shames the new Q, a software wunderkind. As Bond informs the young Q, “Youth is no guarantee of innovation.”

Skyfall rejects the idea of women having equal status in the workplace. At the beginning of the film, Bond works with a female field agent and under a female MI6 director. By the end of the narrative, the director has been killed off — replaced by a man — and the field agent has been demoted to a secretary position.

And Skyfall rejects homosexuality and minorities in the same breath, portraying the arch villain, Raoul Silva, as a deranged Hispanic computer hacker. (A minor villain is ostensibly Arab and hostile fighters are largely Asian or black.) Silva has both inner and outer deformities. On the outside, Silva’s face and jaw are disfigured by a botched suicide attempt. On the inside, Silva is both gay and a crazy murderer. But since the villain is the only gay character in the film, these two traits are presented as synonymous.

At the end of the movie, Bond and the “old way,” symbolized by his aging childhood manor, are literally under siege by a largely nonwhite army of cyberterrorists. As if this metaphor wasn’t heavy-handed enough, the finale is dragged out into a nearby church — the oldest “old way” in the book — where Silva is killed, and, presumably, sent straight to hell.

Just before the credits roll, we see Bond on a rooftop with the red, white and blue Union Jack unfurling behind him. “Don’t worry,” the film seems to say. “Bond is here to protect traditional Anglo-Americans from the scary minorities.”

I often hear pundits on Fox News complain about the liberal messages Hollywood sends to kids. But I wonder how they felt watching Skyfall. For a second there, I thought someone was projecting Fox News in the movie theater.

Josh Tarr is a sophomore American studies and history major. He can be reached at jtarr1@terpmail.umd.edu.