The Woman with the Golden Gun

An insight into the various roles of women in the James Bond franchise, and why a female Bond is not necessarily the right way to combat the typical misogyny and lack of diversity seen in them.

WARNING SPOILERS AHEAD

With the latest iteration in the James Bond saga, No Time to Die, at last hitting cinemas in late September, the inevitable question of Daniel Craig’s successor resurfaced. Various names have been thrown around, from Henry Cavill to Idris Elba. Amongst these, there has also been talk of a female bond replacement as a way to buck the trend – much like the newest Dr Who, played by Jodie Whittaker, in BBC One’s latest season.

This comes following the increasing emergence of roles for women in the Bond franchise, whereby they do not merely exist as sex objects, conforming with one of the three archetypes seen throughout the books and films; Roald Dahl, who wrote the screenplay for You Only Live Twice, stated that “you use three different girls and Bond has them all. No more and no less”. Thus, the three Bond girls encountered are the sacrificial lamb, the femme fatale, and the heroine. The former, best exemplified by Shirley Easton’s Jill Masterson in Goldfinger (1964), is a woman who falls for Bond, before dying, used in terms of narrative as a way of motivating him to complete his mission: “Girl number one is violently pro-Bond. She stays around roughly the first reel of the picture. Then, she is bumped off by the enemy, preferably in Bond’s arms. In bed or not in bed? Wherever [the writer] likes, so long as it’s in good taste.”

“Girl number two is anti-Bond. She works for the enemy and stays around for the middle third of the picture. She must capture Bond, and Bond must save himself by bowling her over with sheer sexual magnetism. This girl should also be bumped off, preferably in an original fashion.” This figure is easily recognisable from other media, having originated around the 1940s and 50s, where, following a period of war, men feared that women had gained too much

THE WOMAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN

By Isabel Clarke

The Girl with the Golden Gun is a photograph by Loriental Photography power while they were away fighting, leading to worries about female infidelity, materialism, career ambition, and sexuality. In typical femme fatale fashion, she is either revealed to not be bad deep down after all - so becomes “good” and teams up with Bond, helping him to foil the villain’s master plan in the end (look to Pussy Galore of Goldfinger) – or alternatively, she meets a typically gory end often midway through the action as a punishment for committing the ultimate sin against Bond: sleeping with him before betraying him to their evil masters. The femme fatale is yet another obstacle for us to watch Bond overcome, either through violence or his own charisma.

Often acting as a foil to the femme fatale, the heroine is the classic Bond girl, who allies with Bond and assists him over the course of the movie; “Girl number three is violently pro-Bond. She occupies the final third of the picture, and she must on no account be killed. Nor must she permit Bond to take any lecherous liberties with her until the very end of the story. We’ll keep that for the fade-out.” These women are the closest to being Bond’s equal, and though they may not save Bond as he saves them, they are there to help him at the crucial moment, sometimes going head-to-head with the femme fatale in combat and ultimately defeating her. Heroines are shown to be morally pure, and their withholding of Bond’s ‘lecherous liberties’ until the denouement turns them into a sort of prize, marking what seems like the “happy ending” whereby good triumphs evil – or at least until the next movie, where both Bond’s nemesis and romantic interest of the previous film are disregarded in favour of an exciting new replacement.

The original Bond girl of Ian Fleming’s first novel, Casino Royale (published in 1953), Vesper Lynd, is actually seen to exemplify all three archetypes in one; in the book, Vesper works as a personal assistant to Head of section S in MI6, and is lent to Bond to assist him in his mission to bankrupt Le Chiffre. However, the plot twist is that she is really a double agent working for the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, ordered to lure Bond into a trap having been blackmailed by SMERSH (whom Le Chiffre works for). Similarly in the 2006 screen adaptation, we see Vesper betraying Bond by secretly working for the terrorist organisation Quantum after being blackmailed to keep her lover alive. Her name ‘Vesper Lynd’ (translating to evening in Latin) has even been theorised to reflect her inevitable duplicity by being a pun on ‘West Berlin’, signifying her divided loyalties as a double agent under Soviet control. In the novel, she dies by committing suicide, leaving a

note for Bond admitting to her treachery and love, and in the film, she resigns herself to a fate of drowning, as she - in typical action movie style - locks herself in a lift of a sinking building, destroyed by explosions. Despite his cold detached façade following her death, in both the book and film (‘The job is done, and the b***h is dead’), it is evident that Bond still retained feelings for Vesper; in the fourth novel, Diamonds Are Forever, Bond skips the song ‘La Vie En Rose’ – a song closely associated with Vesper in Casino Royale – ‘because it has memories for him’, and then in the tenth, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, it is revealed that Bond makes an annual trip to visit Vesper’s grave – as we see him doing at the start of No Time to Die. Thus, we see the depiction of the original Bond girl as a heroine who matches Bond, betrays him, and eventually dies to motivate him to continue his career as 007.

Aside from their rather unsubtle names (Pussy Galore and Xenia Onatopp to name a few), the Bond girls all seem to possess various traits in common, what with all conforming to male appointed beauty standards and all being roughly the same age; a typical Bond girl is in her early to mid-twenties, roughly 10 years younger than Bond, who seemingly remains in his mid-thirties for the duration of the novels which were written by Fleming over roughly 13 years (1953-1966). The youngest partner of Bond’s is Mariko Ichiban, the 18-year-old masseuse whom he sleeps with in You Only Live Twice, and the eldest is Galore, whom Bond speculates is in her mid-30s. Also, it seems that frequently, the Bond girls’ previous experiences with men have not been positive, with many actually having been victims of sexual violence – such as Tiffany Case (Diamonds Are Forever) who was raped by a gang as a teenager, and Honey Ryder (Dr No) who was beaten and raped also as a teenager, and Pussy Galore who was abused by her uncle at age 12. It is only when James Bond comes along that they are saved from the alienation they felt towards men - sure enough, Galore even goes so far as to switch sexuality.

It is clear that the James Bond universe exists as a fantasy world of the male gaze (one needs only to look to the opening montage of a Bond film to understand what I mean), women are frequently treated as objects with their entire personas revolving around their existence for Bond’s pleasure. They are depicted as wearing either an elegant evening gown or a bikini and knife with very few alternatives in between. Yet, for both men and women, it seems Bond girls exemplify the epitome of a sort of glamourous coolness, in looks reticent of Old Hollywood charm. So why is it that despite this obvious misogynistic depiction of the ideal woman, that women still idealise the Bond girls? Why does the media still have this infatuation with the femme fatale in particular? Is it that we are still trapped within the male gaze ourselves? Or alternatively, it could be due to the fact that despite the clear-cut role for females in the Bond universe, they still were shown to possess a high level of independence – in Fleming’s novels, many Bond girls have some sort of independent job or even career; Vesper Lynd, Tatiana Romanova, Mary Ann Russel, and Mary Goodnight all worked within law-enforcement or intelligence, which, at the time of writing, would have been considered inappropriate for women. Even those with more traditional or glamourous jobs were shown to have an independent outlook on life. There is certainly something admirable about the Bond girls, be it their perfect elegance or the power they possess in comparison to women of Fleming’s contemporary period.

Despite everything, aspects of the Bond girls are arguably widely empowering; several are shown to display obvious signs of inner turmoil, and/or have suffered traumatic pasts. Thus, they demonstrate great strength against adversity – be that their own internal conflicts, or literal life-or-death situations where they almost die at the hands of some deranged villain with a shark tank. Bond girls - specifically the femme fatale figures - rebel against typical connotations of women as submissive and inferior, possessing a skill and cunning to rival Bond’s own. Though they are servants to the main enemy, they exist as formidable opposers in their own right, and more often than not, give Bond a run for his money. Their power lies in embracing their femininity rather than rejecting it, such that they are able to then use it as a weapon against the most notorious spy in Britain, if not, the world.

Nevertheless, it is evident that all Bond women from back in the day required a great many changes, in order to keep up with the ever-increasing influence of feminism. It is not enough to give a girl a tragic backstory and stick her in a gorgeous gown to distract us from the reality that these characters lacked relatability for the growing female audience, who wished to see more assertive roles for the Bond girls, where they saved themselves, as opposed to always playing the damsel in distress. Fortunately, the most recent reincarnation of Bond, played by Daniel Craig, has brought with it some much needed improvements to the characters we know and love.

First played by Bernard Lee in Dr No, the 1995 film GoldenEye, Dame Judi Dench broke tradition by playing Bond’s superior M, a role written as and played previously by a man. It is in this film, that M delivers the iconic line condemning Bond as a ‘sexist, misogynist dinosaur’ and ‘a relic of the Cold War’:

M: You don’t like me, Bond. You don't like my methods. You think I'm an accountant, a bean counter more interested in my numbers than your instincts.

BOND: The thought had occurred to me.

M: Good, because I think you're a sexist, misogynist dinosaur. A relic of the Cold War, whose boyish charms, though wasted on me, obviously appealed to that young woman I sent out to evaluate you.

BOND: Point taken.

Here, we see Bond’s producers acknowledging his nature as a culmination of the male gaze of a post war period, and thus a level of knowingness which recognises that Bond is essentially a product of the early days of mass consumerism. Suave, sophisticated, and chauvinistic, James Bond is ruthless... yet not as ruthless as Dench’s M – she is cold, calculating and driven, and, relying on a different set of feminine tropes, she illuminates Bond’s essence as a grown-up disobedient child. It is an interesting marrying of qualities seen here; on one hand M could be interpreted as the demonised figure of ‘spinster’ as opposed to ‘seductress’, being career-driven and uncaring. However, as the character has been suggested to display subtle maternal overtones towards both Bond and Silva (the villain in Skyfall who previously worked for MI6), and as there have actually been brief references to M’s family throughout the films – in GoldenEye, she responds to Tanner calling her the ‘Evil Queen of Numbers’ by saying “If I want sarcasm, Mr Tanner, I’ll talk to my children, thank you very much”, and in the 2012 film Skyfall, she is revealed to be a widow – M actually subverts this ‘spinster’ role with her persona of a woman in a position of high power, yet still having a family and not forsaking traditional feminine characteristics entirely. M is shown to be highly intelligent, acting with the caution and strategy required of the Head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, and thus exposing Bond’s impulsive decision making, and his rather narcissistic belief that he and he alone will be the one to save the day – as demonstrated in GoldenEye when she tells Bond “If you think for one moment I don't have the balls to send a man out to die, your instincts are dead wrong. I have no compunction about sending you to your death. But, I won't do it on a whim. Even with your cavalier attitude towards life.” She possesses immense power and authority over her male counterparts, once again holding a position in a male-dominated workplace, yet this time she as a Bond woman is permitted to excel far beyond the ranks of secretary. But ultimately, she could be said to take on the role of the sacrificial lamb as she dies in Bond’s arms at the end of Skyfall.

Miss Moneypenny too is granted an updated twist on the original portrayal, whereby her core identity, as established in earlier films, was that she was pining after Bond, but forced to forsake her feelings as she has made the decision to be a professional – this we see in the novel Thunderball (1961), where Fleming writes that she ‘often dreamed hopelessly about Bond’. Today’s Eve Moneypenny (played by Naomie Harris) has a social life outside her work, and plays a far more active role in the overall narrative, actually shooting bond (accidentally) on M’s orders in Skyfall. Alongside Moneypenny, the newest films have given us various other strong female characters in the likes of Eva Green’s Vesper - who saves Bond’s life in the famous Casino scene (a refreshing change from Bond saving his female counterparts), Leá Seydoux’s Madeline Swann – who is more developed female character, and one who actually sticks around for the next film, and Lashana Lynch’s Nomi – with whom we see a black woman taking on the title of 007. Of her role, Lynch has said in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar “I didn’t want to waste an opportunity when it came to what Nomi might represent. I searched for at least one moment in the script where Black audience members would nod their heads, tutting at the reality but glad to see their real life represented. In every project I am part of, no matter the budget or genre, the Black experience that I’m presenting needs to be 100 per cent authentic.”

So, to return to the initial question: in light of the changes to women’s roles in the franchise, could the next James Bond be female - a Jane Bond if you will? To this, I answer yes, she could. However, whether this female Bond would be a good thing is an entirely different question. It seems the virulent debate as to Bond’s gender is non-negotiable; Bond is a character hinged on traditional concepts of masculinity – he is a lone-wolf, who seduces women as part of his mission, and moves through an apparently endless string of lovers as he jets around the world, fighting evil in a particularly male-gaze-apparent way, such that the entire spectacle becomes, to some extent, an elaborate male fantasy. While Craig’s James Bond has undoubtedly taken steps towards a more modern man, demonstrating a far softer side to the character than has previously been seen with the original Sean Connery, the fact still remains that at Bond’s core he is a womaniser with narcissistic tendencies and a saviour complex, and, after all, was written to be a man.

In the novel Casino Royale, there are various examples of blatant misogyny from Bond, where he showcases his true opinions regarding the role of women:

‘Women were for recreation. On a job, they got in the way and fogged things up with sex and hurt feelings and all the emotional baggage they carried around. One had to look out for them and take care of them.’

“These blithering women who thought they could do a man's work. Why the hell couldn't they stay at home and mind their pots and pans and stick to their frocks and gossip and leave men's work to the men.”

Then, he takes it a step further by making various sinister references to rape: in Casino Royale (1953), when musing on Vesper Lynd, Bond remarks on how ‘the conquest of her body, because of the central privacy in her, would have the sweet tang of rape’. Then again in From Russia with Love (1957) he muses that ‘all women long want to be swept off their feet. In their dreams they long to be slung over a man’s shoulder and taken into a cave and raped. […]. Women like their men to be heroes’, and similarly in The Spy Who Loved Me (1962) he says ‘All women love semi-rape. They love to be taken. It was his sweet brutality against my bruised body that made his act of love so piercingly wonderful’.

Thus, while we could take a characteristically unpleasant character and solve the issue of diversity by placing a woman in the role, it seems, if I may be so bold as to say, a pathetic solution; to attempt to combat issues within society by simply doing a gender-swap does not really achieve anything. This Jane Bond would not bring to the role the same essence of character (excluding the racist, misogynist part), and therefore be regarded less highly than the previous Bonds. She would not have the same influence as a role model for men as cisgender heterosexual Bonds do, and thus Bond’s potential to be a didactic character would be null and void – by presenting us with a conventional Bond, who retains his integral manly traits, yet who is good-hearted,

respecting women and being accepting of our more diverse society, we can provide a better example for people, especially those who don’t see the franchise as a fake fantasy to indulge in rather than to emulate. With a changing societal outlook, we can also start to see Bond as this flawed figure, an example of how not to act at times, which seems more beneficial than completely obliterating the presence of the male after any call to update a character.

Nonetheless, there is still the need present for a true female equivalent; instead of merely shoving a woman into a man’s role, there should be more female characters written to conform to the female gaze, having been written as a woman by a woman. This is where the wonderful Paloma, of the latest Bond installation, No Time to Die, comes in. Though only appearing for around 10 minutes of screen time, Paloma (played by Ana de Armas) stole the show with her innocent charm and hardcore combat skills – not to mention her sly sense of humour, quickly establishing herself as the most likeable character, as well as a perfectly capable counterpart of Bond. In an interview with Vogue, costume designer for No Time to Die, Suttirat Larlarb comments on Paloma’s character saying “We could’ve done a jumpsuit with fantastic boots, but she’s the most capable recruit and can do anything James can do – only in heels and elegant dress”. Paloma is iconic and without a doubt the best role model in Bond history – she demonstrates how fashion and ability can go hand in hand, a fact various works of literature like to negate; wearing beautiful clothes does not correlate with competency, nor do they always exist as a hinderance when it comes to fighting. Paloma empowers women by showing that femininity does not make one less strong, rather I would argue she is far more powerful through the way she unexpectedly tears down bad guys in a stunning gown by Michael di Sordo, Chopard diamonds, and 4-inch silver Aquazurra high-heels, and looking absolutely fabulous while doing so. Larlarb even added that “whenever [she does] a film with a stunt department, the women are always asked to pull off these incredible stunts in stilettos while the men come in and say that their [flat] boots are too tight”. Paloma is not just a temporary accomplice whom Bond flirts or sleeps with, her character is so well developed in such short space a time, that it seems almost definite that she was set up for something greater than a tiny cameo in a movie series. Perhaps she will be the female character we are looking for?

Yet it must be noted that despite this widespread contention surrounding the next Bond’s gender, in actual fact, it turns out that the ‘Jane Bond’ debate isn’t a new one, as a woman was considered for the starring role in the superspy’s very first movie outing way back in the 1950s; back in 1955, when filmmaker Gregory Ratoff acquired the film rights to Casino Royale from Ian Fleming, he and writer Lorenzo Semple Jr reportedly seriously considered actress Susan Hayward as 007. Speaking to the Daily Record in 2012, Semple recalled how “Frankly, [they] thought that James Bond was kind of unbelievable” and “even kind of stupid, so we thought the solution was to make Bond a woman, ‘Jane Bond’, if you will”. He continued by saying how “Gregory announced one day, ‘We’ll get Susie Hayward. I dated her when she was a $75-a-week actress, so she owes me one’ “. Nevertheless, Hayward turned down the opportunity and Sean Connery instead became the first James Bond in the 1962 film Dr No, which Semple did admit was a good choice.

This really does beg the question, what would Bond be like if we had got a female Bond from the beginning? Would it really have worked, and would Jane Bond enjoy the same mass popularity James does today? One thing is certain: we can never know for sure what public reaction would’ve been. All we know is that James Bond as a literary figure was a man, and that now a female Bond would be out of place. Instead, we should carry on with the steady progression of development, whereby the Bond girls enjoy roles where they work alongside Bond, in equal alliances, as opposed to the inferior, sexualised versions we have seen previously. This it seems is being done well, and there is much hope for the future of the Bond universe, even if it is not necessarily through James himself. As in the words of Bond girl Leá Seydoux, when asked if a female bond is something she’s like to see:

“James Bond is James Bond. But I would love to see a female character like James Bond and I’m sure that will happen”.