graphic by brian jean
Ordering a martini is an art — one that, when mastered, allows you entry into the secret world of adulthood. The classic drink is definitive, composed of decisions more than it is of alcohol. Gin or vodka? Dry or wet? Up or neat? The first time I ordered a martini I was 20 and only wanted the cocktail to make myself seem older than I was in a room full of strange men.
“Anything to drink?” the waiter at the hotel bar had asked. The room was dark enough that the drink menu had become illegible. I thought for a moment to make sure that my words came out in the right order. I knew my naivety and nerves could cause my tongue to fail me. “A gin martini, straight-up and shaken, thanks.” I don’t know why I felt the need to ask for the drink shaken — I didn’t even know what it meant at the time. I just knew that James Bond always ordered his martinis “shaken, not stirred,” and if it worked for him, then it would work for me.
I was 6 years old the first time that I watched a Bond movie. I remember this because the next year, for my seventh birthday, I asked for night-vision spy goggles and toy handguns. Turning “007” for me was a mark of greatness and accomplishment — it was not just another year of my life. In hindsight, I was far too young to be watching movies that alluded to vaginas and women who were cheekily named after sex positions, but my parents doubted my ability to catch on to the innuendos. That being said, the dialogue and gender dynamics of these films are hardly innuendos — the movies are like a wet towel dripping with sex.
Bond — James Bond, the suave womanizer that flew jet packs and drove tricked-out convertibles — was cool and oozed confidence. As a child who craved attention from adults and as a young woman who desired the male gaze, I didn’t know if I wanted to be the man or be someone that the man might want one day. It’s easy to become transfixed by masculine attention when you don’t know any better, and at such a young age, I certainly didn’t.
“Dr. No” was the first film in the multi-billion dollar franchise and the first of the Bond movies that I had watched. I remember almost nothing about the plot save for the image of Ursula Andress rising from the water like Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus.” It became ingrained in my mind from the moment that I saw it. Andress was a Greek goddess clad in a skimpy bikini with wet hair, and Sean Connery’s Bond looked at her with such intrigue and hunger. I didn’t know what sexual attraction was at the time but for some reason I felt the compulsory need to rewind the scene so I could watch it over and over again.
Growing up with the Bond movies playing in the background informed much of my young worldview, for better or for worse. I witnessed the charisma and wit that Connery, Roger Moore and Daniel Craig exuded in their performances of the character and claimed it for myself. At recess with friends or while playing in the backyard with my sister, I insisted on pretending to be spies or surveilling the neighborhood. My devotion to the British spy brought a sense of adventure to my life and allowed me to share something with my father. I hold great appreciation for the series and the role that it has had in my life. “No Time to Die” was even the first film that I saw at a movie theater when I moved to New York. But the Bond movies have also established a hierarchy of beauty and power that would control me throughout my teens and early twenties.
My disdain for my body began the usual way, in the locker room just before gym class. As I changed into a shapeless PE kit and tied up my running shoes, I glimpsed at the other girls’ stomachs and legs and began to wonder why mine didn’t look the same way. Tears were shed and meals were skipped because my body didn’t meet the standards that the television had set. As I got older, the desire for the “perfect body” became more intense. I learned what types of bodies boys were attracted to and tried to make myself look that way. More than anything I wanted to be looked at the way that Bond girls were looked at by the man himself.
The British espionage movies — along with most other mainstream media franchises — had conditioned me to believe that beauty looked a certain way. If you weren’t tall, tan and toned, then you weren’t worth a man’s time. It didn’t help that the cinematography of the Bond films took its time to show off the sensuality of the “ideal” female form and produce desire within viewers. Laura Mulvey, an accredited feminist film theorist writes, “In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Women displayed as sexual object is the leit-motiff of erotic spectacle.”
In “Goldfinger,” Shirley Eaton plays a Bond girl who is killed then covered head to toe in gold paint. Even in death, her character is viewed by the camera as an alluring sex object. Her deceased body is completely nude; only her buttocks are shielded from the camera lens by a measly throw pillow. Furthermore, the objectifying opening credits of almost all Bond films typically allude to the naked female form or abstract sex acts, such as the sequence in “Live and Let Die.” As Paul McCartney and Wings’ rock song plays in the background, bare naked women dance across the screen in shadow while fireworks and flames erupt from the background, producing orgasmic imagery.
In an article about Hollywood’s failure of women, Sara Israelsen-Hartley writes, “viewing sexualized images of women can cause depression, low self-esteem and eating disorders among young women, but they also serve as glaring reminders of the power of media to shape culture and define how men and women see women, both by marginalizing them and objectifying them.” Media has undeniable power in the way that people view themselves and make decisions in their lives. Though I may turn to a Bond movie every once in a while for mindless fun and campiness, I cannot deny the power that such a monumental film entity has had upon generations of young men and women.
The cinematography and gendered power dynamics within the film reinforce traditional values, such as that women are merely an aesthetic asset to men and can be dominated or deserted at any moment if the male so chooses. Bond girls are replaceable in the films; they are objects no different than a new Aston Martin or fancy watch that is updated with every addition to the franchise. Media historian and part-time faculty member at the Gallatin School at New York University Moya Luckett writes, “Bond Girls risk rapid obsolescence, their value embedded in a temporality that quickly assigns them to history, just like Bond’s other accessories.” These women become outdated caricatures of the time that they existed while, despite his own seriality, Bond remains timeless.
The Bond movies will always represent Hollywood’s propensity toward colonialism, classism, sexism and a plethora of other -isms. The character is inherently problematic: a well-off, white bachelor working under an imperialist institution with a tendency toward chauvinism. With talks of Aaron Taylor-Johnson taking the chalice from Craig, it seems like the franchise is still far off from any significant positive changes in terms of diversity and equity.
Some, like Vogue’s Raven Smith, don’t have a desire to change the formulaic but controversial ingredients that have made the franchise so timeless. “I’m simply not convinced I need my Bond modernized. I like the hammy puns. I like the Spectres and the Skyfalls. I like the Bassey ballads. I like the espionage. Do we really need every enjoyable thing woken up?”
I get where she is coming from, I really do. The Bond movies, especially the older ones, are so ridiculously over-sexualized and misogynistic that they almost become slapstick comedies. They are endlessly entertaining and quite charming, but I would be remiss to say that a little change isn’t desperately needed — and not the “tiptoeing up the stairs” kind of change that Phoebe Waller-Bridge incited as a co-writer on “No Time to Die,” but bounding leaps of revolution that both acknowledge and rupture the troubling history of misogyny within the most time-honored film tradition.