James Bond and the Culture Wars
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 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.
Originally published at https://raritania.blogspot.com.
