Book contents
6 - Paradoxical Masculinity: James Bond, Icon of Failure
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2020
Summary
Abstract
The James Bond films enact dilemmas posed by the paradoxical, split subjectivity of male spies under capitalism. Success and failure, sophistication and ignorance, knowledge and class, gender and sexuality, commercial targeting and viewing pleasure jumble together in a complex amalgam. A weird mix of hyper-bourgeois individualist, technocrat, and empty signifier, 007 can never relax, never truly know who he is, beyond being a shifting sign of impermanent state labor. His masculinity incarnates these paradoxes: often derided and celebrated for his brutality, Bond exemplifies less-than-conventional forms of life in his sexuality and identity.
Keywords: James Bond; masculinity; capitalism; hegemony; metrosexual; split subjectivity
This chapter contends that far from being the alpha and omega of the latter-day Hollywood macho man, James Bond has been in the vanguard of weak, commodified male beauty, and compensation for its loss: a mythic imbrication of sex, secrets, and the risible but welcome slide from an Empire to a Commonwealth of Nations. It is odd to suggest that Bond's masculinity is a paradox—that he might be an icon of failure. After all, we are told that 007 is “fit, sensual, technical, memorializing, and calculating […] thrilling audiences in sensual stories of seduction, revelation, and calculation” (Funnell and Dodds 2015, 123). Ian Fleming boasted that he wrote the novels for “red-blooded, heterosexual adults” (South Bank Show 2008) and that “all history is sex and violence” (Desert Island Discs 1963). The story lines have led latter-day statistical mavens to count the number of women 007 sleeps with in each film (described as “conquests”) alongside the number of martinis downed by each lead actor (Young 2019). And consider the instructions that Roald Dahl received for the screenplay to You Only Live Twice (UK: Lewis Gilbert, 1967):
Three girls. No more and no less. Girl number one is pre-Bond. She stays around roughly through the first reel of the picture. Then she is bumped off by the enemy, preferably in Bond's arms. […] Girl number two is anti- Bond. She works for the enemy and stays throughout the middle third of the picture. She must capture Bond, and Bond must save himself by bowling her over with sheer sexual magnetism. The girl should also be bumped off, preferably in an original fashion. […] Girl number three is violently pro-Bond. She occupies the final third of the picture, and she must on no account be killed (Dahl 1967).
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- The Cultural Life of James BondSpecters of 007, pp. 125 - 148Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020