Heavy Bondage: Women, Villains, and Plots

After these first five minutes of outrageous violence, callous fun, and bland self-mockery, the tone is so firmly set that the film could get away with almost anything ....
- Monthly Film Bulletin, reviewing Goldfinger (December 1964)

Femmes, Fatale and Otherwise

Ian Fleming strikes me as not having been a very nice man in some ways. All commentators seem to agree that the racism, sexism, and all the other -isms in the Bond books come directly from Fleming's own personality. The movies have mostly managed to mute the racism - if you don't think so, try the originals - but they haven't done a lot to temper the sexism.

My ideal Bond woman is one who gives back as good as she gets. Bond, even Brosnan's Bond, is a bit of a jerk - he needs to be slapped around a bit. The ideal Bond woman is intelligent, capable of looking after herself, doesn't fall for his malarkey, and doesn't get into bed with him until she's sure that she's not just a routine lay - that he's not just going after her because he can.

There have been a number of these in the Bond oeuvre. There have not been nearly enough. One of the best of the typical candidates, Natalya Simonova (Goldeneye), not only is a capable hacker and survivor, but gives Bond backtalk all the way to the end of the film.

"Do you destroy every vehicle you get into?" »

She disapproves of his profession (correctly) as nothing but "boys with toys" trying their best to kill each other. It's about time someone put some downbeat notes as a counterpoint to all the rah-rah bloodshed in Bond films. Makes you guiltily aware of what you're cheering. Wai Lin, in Tomorrow Never Dies, is in some respects even better. She doesn't give Bond as much hell, but that is because she is a fellow professional; she is capable of interacting with Bond as an equal without needing to belabor the point. (It takes him a while to figure it out, but she knows it from the beginning.)

Usually, though, the Bond writers cop out. Anya Amasova (The Spy Who Loved Me) is exceedingly capable in the first two-thirds of the movie and goes limp at the end. Holly Goodhead (Moonraker) doesn't even last that long. And we won't discuss Christmas Jones (The World Is Not Enough), the least believable nuclear physicist ever depicted on film.

Some of this may not be the fault of sexism, though. The big problem is that superhero thing again. Ultimately there can only be one hero in these films and Bond must not only save the day, but the damsel. This means that somewhere around the final act, no matter how capable she has been before that, the damsel is inevitably called upon to fall into distress. Maybe it's less of a letdown to portray the woman as a bimbo from the beginning - at least that way we do not get the inevitable disappointment as she goes all fluttery. Wai Lin is pretty much the only Bond woman who doesn't cop out at any point, but even she does eventually need a rescue. It's in the contract.

The best-portrayed Bond woman ever is, of course, Tracy di Vicenzo (On Her Majesty's Secret Service), but she is not like the others. She doesn't actually show her capable nature (except in a scene where she does some hot-shot driving), but she is the woman who actively rejects Bond the most strongly. He has to actually court her, and it is pleasant indeed to see ... and, once he wins her, he goes further with her than any woman in the Bond canon before or since. She may be the only one of the women that Bond actually loves. She is truly a special case - but then, all of OHMSS is a special case.

There's a persistent belief that the Bond women got stronger once Barbara Broccoli, producer Albert Broccoli's daughter, took over the Bond stewardship (with her stepbrother Michael Wilson), about the same time that the Brosnan regime began. But this could also be due to the desire to change the shape and tone of the Bond movies which came in at the same time - there were a lot of "new broom" changes around then. One never knows, but for whatever reason, the four Brosnan films definitely have the best-written females, as a whole, in the series to date.

Diabolical Masterminds

On Her Majesty's Secret Service came out the year after I was born. I didn't see it until years later. I didn't see any of these films at the time they actually came out until The Spy Who Loved Me, when I was nine. (From then on I have managed to see each of them at first run.)

Point being, by the time I got around to seeing the Connery movies which were seminal for other Bond fans, Ernst Stavro Blofeld was already a joke to me, a cliche. Even though Austin Powers wasn't even a gleam in Mike Myers' eye in 1977, Blofeld had already become Dr. Evil. I cannot take Blofeld seriously as a villain (at least not in the films).

« "If we destroy Kansas the world may not hear about it for years."

I never have been able to. Most of my peers, whether they know it or not, have never been able to. In a very real way, someone who was born after 1962 is incapable of watching a Bond movie the way someone did in 1962. That day is permanently past.

Filmmakers walk a fine line with Bond villains. If they are too obviously big, if their schemes are too grandiose, then they become cartoons immediately. If, on the other hand, their schemes are not grandiose enough, then we wonder what Bond is doing wasting his time with them. As noted above, when M wants some "plain, solid work" out of Bond, the work he has in mind is a routine diamond smuggling investigation which Bond feels is beneath him. Perhaps the audience does as well. (It could have been worse; they could have followed the book. See the comments under Diamonds Are Forever.)

To this end, my favorite villains are the ones who walk the line in the middle - Mr. Big, Scaramanga, Hugo Drax. A lot of people don't like Drax. I think he's genuinely sinister (he's even better in the book). He's certainly a lot better than the movie they built around him (Moonraker). Scaramanga (The Man With the Golden Gun) is probably the ultimate Bond villain - he knows that Bond is not too different from him (a highly-paid assassin) and he rubs Bond's face in it. Pity that he, too, is not used in better material.

Bond vs Bond

As you read the comments on individual films in the pages which follow, you'll notice that I comment on the differences between the films and the books (when there's any sort of connection between the two, that is). You may wonder why I pay attention to the Bond books at all, especially since the films had stopped paying more than lip service to them even before they ran out of Fleming titles to use.

The answer is that these books are still, to my surprise as much as anyone else's, surprisingly good reading (yes, -isms notwithstanding). As I write this, they have recently been reissued in a Penguin softcover edition with wonderfully sensationalist new cover art. I hope that a new generation opens these books, expecting the worst, and finds them shockingly compelling - and thus the legend will live on.

Honestly, the films have done damage to the books, to an extent - they've created a false expectation that large chunks of the books are garbage, simply because large chunks of the films are. In fact, the books deserve better treatment than that (although some are very dated now).

That the books have merit shouldn't be a surprise to anyone; why do you imagine there was such interest in turning the books into a film franchise in the first place?

He's Planning To Do WHAT?

It is important to remember that the film Bond, unlike the book Bond, is intrinsically unbelievable. He does not behave in any way like a real spy - or government hitman - would. Of course not. That would not be at all interesting to watch. In fact, the main reason some of the films deviate so far from the Fleming plots is that what reads well does not necessarily play well on the screen. (More on this at On Her Majesty's Secret Service.) So it seems wrong to demand any sort of believability in a Bond film. What I do demand is consistency.

I think Bond films must have internal logic. That is, once you swallow the Big Lie - that any of this could be taking place at all - you should not have to swallow any other major improbabilities along the way. Of course Bond is a lucky sonofabitch, to get away with what he does; this is a given, and that takes no further suspension of belief. But that's about all the slack I'm prepared to cut.

A continuity hole is a continuity hole. If we have Bond using a weapon that was thrown to the bottom of the Atlantic last we saw, then this is a problem; that's not allowed even in Bond's universe. The script should have shown us how we got from point A to B to C at all times. (There is one fairly well-known case where the script did show us something and it got cut, leaving a mystery. See Diamonds Are Forever.)

In general, a problem with latter-day Bond films is that they really do seem to want to turn Bond into a superhero and suspend all disbelief. Perhaps the producers and writers believe their audience is jaded; perhaps it's the lure of the special effects; I don't know. But I do believe that in a world where Bond can have an invisible car, all bets are off, and suddenly a large part of the thrill is gone. I don't want to see a movie about Superman.

And now, the films.

Next page: Dr. No