While it remains a commonplace to picture the 1950s as an era of consensus and conformity that was, among other things, a time Before Feminism (a stereotype that endures in such films as Olivia Wilde's
Don't Worry Darling) the reality is that contemporary-seeming arguments over gender, and its depiction in popular culture, were very much a part of the scene--and it worth remembering that James Bond, years before the first film was even shot, was not exempt from those controversies. Indeed, Bond's creator Ian Fleming was so conscious of being called out for his treatment of the matter that he
wrote a letter to the Manchester Guardian answering his detractors in 1959--timing I suspect was not unrelated to how that very year's novel
Goldfinger dealt with the matter in especially explicit fashion, most obviously in the sexuality of Tilly Masterson and Pussy Galore, though Fleming's narration had something to say of Bond's view of the matter. This was "that Tilly . . . was one of those girls whose hormones had got mixed up," and that he thought it "a direct consequence of giving votes to women and 'sex equality,'" fifty years of which "emancipation" produced a situation in which
feminine qualities were dying out or being transferred to the males . . . The result was a herd of unhappy sexual misfits--barren and full of frustrations, the women wanting to dominate and the men to be nannied.
I bring all this up as a reminder that the culture wars did not begin with Patrick Buchanan's declaration, or for that matter "the '60s" that liberals lionize and conservatives lament, but seem to have been with us for at least as long as anyone likely to be reading this has been alive--and, again, that James Bond was never outside those culture wars. Still,
there is no denying that the time allotted to those wars has grown immensely, and looking back it seems to me that we can register a difference not merely between the treatment of Bond today and Bond in Fleming's time, but even Bond in 2021 and Bond in 2006.
I distinctly remember that when the reboot of the series first appeared in the form of
Casino Royale it was divisive--such that researching
The Many Lives and Deaths of James Bond I went through page after page after page of reviews on the Internet Movie Data Base which allotted the movie either eight stars-plus, or merely a single star, viewers loving it--or hating it. One of the undeniable aspects of the overhaul was how, noticeable in spite of the series already having decades of concessions to feminism behind it, that movie's treatment of gender, and especially its having gone from indulging the "male gaze" to attacking it with a movie where the women stayed covered up, while Bond wasn't, with this particularly conspicuous in the gender-switching of Honey Rider's famous emerging-from-the-sea sequence in
Dr. No, and then the prolonged torture scene. While their views were generally not given any time in a media hugely enthusiastic about the reboot, and this aspect of it in particular, many disliked it intensely. Many of them saw politics playing its part in that. But I am not sure I ever got a sense of that dislike as consciously political in the way that, for example, so much of the chatter seen in the run-up to the debut of
No Time to Die was--this kind of reaction yet to become so conscious and so intense as it now is in a period in which it seems that the release of just about every movie is a battle in the culture war.
7 comments:
I fear Daniel Craig may be the last of the Bonds. As us espionage illuminati know too well, Ian Fleming isn’t around to write another “Trout Memo” or choose the next 007! He has not only eulogised and promoted the "espionage industry" but he has also spread so much disinformation about that industry that even MI6 would have been proud of the dissemination of so much fake news. Maybe the Bond legacy is finally coming to an end notwithstanding the recent publication of Anthony Horowitz’s With a Mind to Kill, particularly after Daniel Craig's au revoir in No Time To Die.
We think the anti-Bond era is now being firmly established in literature and on the screen. Raw noir anti-Bond espionage masterpieces are on the ascent. Len Deighton's classic The Ipcress File has been rejuvenated by John Hodge with Joe Cole aspiring to take on Michael Caine and of course there are plenty of Slow Horses ridden by Bad Actors too.
Then there's Edward Burlington in The Burlington Files series by Bill Fairclough, a real spy (MI6 codename JJ) who disavowed Ian Fleming for his epic disservice to the espionage fraternity. After all, Fleming single-handedly transformed MI6 into a mythical quasi-religious cult that spawned a knight in shining armour numbered 007 who could regularly save the planet from spinning out of orbit.
Last but not least, the final nail in wee Jimmy Bond's coffin has been hammered in by Jackson Lamb. Mick Herron's anti-Bond sentiments combine lethally with the sardonic humour of the Slough House series to unreservedly mock not just Bond but also British Intelligence which has lived too long off the overly ripe fruits Fleming left to rot! Time for a fresh start based on a real spy so best read Beyond Enkription in The Burlington Files series by ex-spook Bill Fairclough.
Hi MI6. Thanks for writing.
I think it fair to say that anti-Bonds have been around since even before Bond appeared on the scene. (I think of figures like Somerset Maugham's Ashenden, which was actually an influence on Bond, as well as Eric Ambler tales like The Dark Frontier.)
Are they getting the upper hand these days, though? It's plausible they are doing so in print--and "prestige"-type TV (in which the new Ipcress File would seem to be includable). Film would be another story, however. Bond-type adventures are still the natural material for big splashy theatrical blockbusters, with, I think, the more significant commercial competition for Bond to be found in, for instance, Fast & Furious, which increasingly went Bondian. (Indeed, one of the characters explicitly remarked the parallel in the sixth film, and the movies seem to have stuck with that tendency, the Hobbs & Shaw spin-off included.) One can say the same of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (which has plenty of spy types, with an Iron Man, for example, a not un-Bond-like figure, and X-Men: First Class even giving us a retro '60s-era spy adventure).
But I do think that the success of Fast and Furious, Marvel, etc. is itself one of those signs that the 007 franchise, which can seem to have been slowing down for a long time (even as other franchises turn into Shared Universes with multiple releases in a single year, we've been getting one Bond movie every four years, compared with the one every two in the old days), may not be offering much anytime soon, and even starting to fade away. Too many others are delivering the same sorts of thrills as the big-screen Bond, and even making more money at it--all as the Bond series gets further and further removed from its origins, and everyone seems to be running out of ideas that would make work done according to what is now an old format seem fresh and new.
Fascinating, erudite and interesting ... Our main gripe is that hundreds of millions of adults think much of what Bond doses is what real spies really do! As the differences between facts, fictions and fakes blur more every year that passes, many billions of people probably no longer care!
I certainly appreciate the gripe--while, I have to admit, finding it at least a little less astonishing that people think what Indiana Jones does is what archaeologists actually do. Which is all the more ironic given that what Indiana Jones does was imagined in the first place as basically what James Bond does, so we're in that weird situation where somebody who does what a spy doesn't actually do is thought to be doing what archaeologists actually do but in actuality don't do . . .
And I think you're right about audience disinterest in the fact, and even disinterest in the disinterest. Point this out about any line of endeavor--for instance, besides spying, computer programming, or engineering, or teaching, or writing--and they'll say "But that's just fiction! No one believes that"--even as they go on getting all their information from that fiction because they can't be bothered to crack open a book.
Archeology is a first class comparison which we won't forget! Thanks
You are most welcome. And thank you again for writing!
Thanks
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