Sex with 007: Daniel Craig’s James Bond and the reconstruction of masculine sexuality

by: Lisa Hill & Karen Brooks , September 12, 2018

Introduction

In Skyfall (Mendes 2012), the third film in which Daniel Craig plays the British superspy James Bond, the villain Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem) poses a question to his nemesis. He asks: ‘Is there any of the old 007 left?’ In relation to the critical and commercial success the rebooted franchise has enjoyed with Craig in the lead role (Skyfall alone has garnered five Oscar nominations and earned over a billion dollars worldwide), this is a question worth considering. As Jonathan Murray observes, ‘James Bond remains The Spy Who Dogs Us, the hardest-bitten, longest-toothed survivor in cinema history’. (2017: 247) Despite or perhaps because of his politically incorrect ‘sexist, heterosexist, jingoistic, xenophobic and racist’ character (Chapman 1999:13), Bond continues to accrue admiration, condemnation, popularity and financial success. Yet the Craig-era Bond eschews much of what typified the ‘old’ 007s. While embracing some of the attributes of his predecessors, Craig’s incarnation is defined by a liminality that challenges conventional binaries, including good/bad, right/wrong, past/present, east/west, masculine/feminine, digital/analogue and heterosexuality/homosexuality. Responding to broader social, cultural, gendered and sexual contexts, both within the film series and beyond, Craig’s Bond offers a reconstructed masculinity that is not only Janus-faced — looking to past incarnations of the role while also acknowledging contemporary audience sensibilities and shifting sexual and gendered behaviours — but a version of masculine sexuality that is multiple and fluid as well. Through an exploration of sexual imagery and the representation of sex acts in the franchise’s four latest features, Casino Royale (Campbell 2006), Quantum of Solace (Forster 2008), Skyfall (2012) and Spectre (Mendes 2015), this article argues that while grounded in past presentations, Craig’s Bond is a more complex and socio-culturally relevant epitome of contemporary masculinity. The four films’ relationship with current social and sexual politics is considered, and the franchise’s shifting focus from the female body to the male body — specifically Bond’s — as visual spectacle and the object of the gaze is explored. The paper then looks at Bond’s relationships with the Bond Girls, his sexual liaisons, and his clearly sexualised, homoerotic encounters with men in the latest films to determine the extent to which masculinity and masculine sexuality are remodelled and the degree to which Craig’s interpretation of 007 adheres to, defies or even breaks down long-established tropes and binaries.

The man with the Midas touch

The longest running franchise in film history, there are 24 instalments to date in Eon Productions’ James Bond series spanning 55 years, with six different actors in the titular role and a further two films outside the series. The British spy was created by Ian Fleming in 1952 and featured in 12 books and two short story collections before being brought to the screen in 1962 with Sean Connery in Dr No. Since then, Bond has survived the Cold War, the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the sexual revolution, feminism, the technological revolution and global terrorism, and in doing so serves as a historical and cultural marker of social and sexual politics. For Bennett and Woollacott, Bond functions as ‘a moving sign of the times … a figure capable of taking up and articulating quite different and even contradictory cultural and ideological values’. (1987: 19, emphasis added) This is seen not only in how the context of the films reflect the western world’s geo-political stance and concerns of the day, but how Bond characterises and responds to sexuality, gender and identity in a rapidly changing world. (Black 2005; Chapman 1999; Dodds 2003, 2005, 2012; Lindner 2003 & 2009) As Jeremy Black states, ‘Bond provides a fascinating source for changing views about the world’. (2017: xii)

When Judi Dench’s M tells Bond in GoldenEye (Campbell 1995), ‘I think you’re a sexist, misogynist dinosaur. A relic of the Cold War’, she acknowledges the discrepancy between notions of a conventionally hegemonic Bond and the changing world in which he must now operate. Introducing Dench as the first female M — regarded by some as ‘a symbol of representational change within the Bond universe’ (Krainitzki, 2014: 35) —and Pierce Brosnan as Bond, GoldenEye was released after a six-year hiatus for the franchise and sought to reinvigorate the series. (Hines 2018: 183) However, M’s words also suggest a certain self-reflexivity on the part of the franchise that ultimately foreshadows more significant changes ahead — for both the character of Bond and the franchise. With the introduction of Craig, not only was Bond brought into the twenty-first century, but with a wink and a nod to long-term fans, his character was also imbued with the qualities that made him a lauded popular culture and hegemonic masculine figure in the first place. By returning to Fleming’s first novel, the film Casino Royale ‘transports the audience back to the beginning, to witness the making of the spy’. (Cox 2013: 184) Yet for Lisa Funnell (2011a), consideration of Craig’s Bond in terms of fidelity to Fleming needs to be tempered with the Hollywood models of heroic masculinity and traditional screen presentations of Bond with which the film engages. Cited as a revisionist text, Lindner observes that Craig’s first outing ‘is not just a revising of 007, it is also a reimagining, a reintroduction, a re-evaluation, a reinvention and a renewal’. (2009: 7)

Sex, sexuality and gender are defining characteristics for the British secret agent, which function narratively to demonstrate personal and professional power. Susan Burgess (2015: 233) contends there have been three fundamental shifts in the representation of masculinity across the Bond film series: the first pairs traditionally aggressive masculinity with passive femininity; the second starts to see masculinity challenged by more aggressive femininity; and the third reframes gender and sexuality through more equally distributed power between men and women, demonstrable vulnerability in masculinity, and resistance to the earlier ‘othering’ of homosexuality. Basing her argument on a broader civil rights narrative, Burgess’s approach somewhat simplifies the varied, nuanced and multiple presentations of gender and sexuality in each of the 24 official Bond films and the scope of scholarly attention paid to them. (see Brabazon 1999; Caplen 2010; Dodds 2014; Funnell 2011a, 2011b, 2015; Lindner 2003) However, this alignment speaks to a wider shift in the Western sociocultural climate Bond inhabits and the sexual politics against which the films can be read.

It is important to note that the films of Craig’s Bond are not overtly reformist texts, but they are reactive ones. While the contemporary films include moments that hark back to earlier Bonds in the presentation of conventionally aggressive masculinity and sexualised femininity, Craig’s ascension to the role in Casino Royale saw a marked shift in boundaries around gender, sexuality and the representation of sex. By introducing Craig through a remake of the first Bond novel — what Robert Arnett (2009: 2) refers to as an origin tale akin to a superhero franchise — Craig’s Bond offers not only a clear recalibration of idealised masculinity, but one invested in continuity and change. From the pre-credit opening scenes of Casino Royale, Craig’s Bond is defined by a brutal physicality. The audience is taken back to basics in both the sociocultural and historical sense with the use of black and white footage in the scene in the men’s toilets at Karachi cricket ground where Bond is shown earning his 00 status and pays further witness to his reliance on physical strength, agility and resilience with hand-to-hand combat on top of a crane over a building site in Madagascar. But this conventionally physical masculinity sits alongside exposed vulnerabilities — physical vulnerabilities signified by apparent bodily injuries accompanied by weariness and, as the film progresses, emotional ones made visible through his love for (and loss of) Vesper Lynd. (Brooks & Hill 2015; Cunningham & Gabri 2009; Johnson 2009) Moreover, the contemporary Bond’s focus on physicality and reframed sexuality is further highlighted by inverting the male gaze and, instead of locating the so-called ‘Bond Girls’ as sites of sexual desire, positioning Craig’s body as spectacle and a locus of sexual longing.

For Our Eyes Only: Bond as (sexual) spectacle

Toby Miller notes that a filmic focus on Bond’s physical form is not new: ‘From the first, Connery was the object of the gaze’. (2009: 238) However, the treatment of Craig’s body in the recent films not only foregrounds it as a visual spectacle, but inscribes it with sex and desire. For Funnell (2011a: 466), Craig’s Bond represents a hybridisation of Bond with the Bond Girl archetype. She argues that while Lynd functions as a romantic interest in Casino Royale, her ties to the villainous Yusef and ultimate betrayal of Bond exclude her from fulfilling the traditional Bond Girl role. To reconcile the imbalance Funnell attributes this role to the equivocal figure of Bond himself, feminising him in the process:

Bond and the Bond Girl have been merged into a single figure … Aligned with Hollywood models of masculinity, the conflation of Craig’s contradictory body presents him as physical, heroic and thus masculine while engaged in action, and feminized through youth, spectacle and passivity to the gaze when disengaged from physical activity. (2011a: 466)

Consideration of the widely discussed scene towards the end of Casino Royale where Bond emerges from the ocean in a style reminiscent of Ursula Andress in Dr No and Halle Berry in Die Another Day (see Brooks & Hill 2015; Cox 2014; Funnell 2011a; Mercer 2013), supports this reading. The intertextual allusion locates Bond as sexual spectacle, and the reversal of roles — Bond in a scant swimsuit being watched by a fully clothed Lynd on the beach — makes him the object of the female gaze.

Examining Craig as a male sex symbol, John Mercer identifies the ocean scene as a defining point for the Bond franchise and for Craig ‘as an object of erotic investment’. (2013: 81) He notes how Andress and Berry’s sequences in earlier films, draw on a cinematic rhetoric that positions them as highly eroticised and fantastical scenarios, where a literal ‘vision of beauty’ is offered to the audience. Within the context of the visual repertoire of Bond films, the sequence unambiguously speaks of the tantalising promise of sex. (Mercer 2013: 82)

The imagery of Craig in Casino Royale is therefore operating within an already established Bond trope. In the context of their respective narratives, Andress and Berry’s characters are being watched by Bond — a clearly male point of view — so when Craig’s Bond is the one being watched, Funnell argues that the film transposes Lynd’s (female) gaze onto the audience. Moreover, Mercer identifies an earlier, similarly composed scene that introduces Solange to the narrative (the camera lingers on Craig as he emerges from the ocean and briefly exchanges looks with Solange), and wide circulation of ‘the publicity image of the swimwear-clad Craig from this scene’ as complicating the gaze in terms of gender or sexual specificity. (2013: 83) Whether the object of a female (heterosexual) or male (hetero/homosexual) gaze, the fetishisation of Craig’s body in Casino Royale ‘both illustrates and opens up a way into thinking about the rather ephemeral and essentially enigmatic nature of sexual desire as it is articulated in cultural artefacts … and the tensions and ambiguities that this figure [the male sex symbol] exposes’. (Mercer 2013: 83)

Further ambiguity is established when Bond is being shaved by Miss Moneypenny in Skyfall. In a sexually suggestive and dominant pose, Moneypenny straddles Bond, holds a phallic cut-throat razor to his neck and demands subordination. This is something he gives willingly by offering his face to her blade/phallus, but not before he attempts to wrest back control, utilising sex as the weapon (he tries to undo Moneypenny’s top in an effort to disarm her). In past films sex often made Bond vulnerable, providing a ‘necessary curtailment of phallic power’ (Bennett & Woollacott 1987: 227): in this instance he seeks to restrict hers and reinstate his. Slapping his hand away and brandishing her weapon (the razor) Moneypenny acknowledges this is ‘the tricky part’ and resumes her ministrations muttering, ‘Old dog. New tricks.’ In doing so, she restores her control of the moment while simultaneously articulating both the binary opposition (old and new) and ambiguities their presence in that one moment creates. No longer is Bond’s masculinity entirely contingent on a subordinate feminine counterpart he must sexually conquer in order to win the day. On the contrary, by adopting a subservient position himself — physically as he is shaved and professionally as he is reprimanded about inappropriate behaviour by the possessor of a phallic and sharp instrument — Bond, the blunt one, is curtailed. And yet because he retains his masculinity through the audience’s awareness of his body and the brute strength they know he possesses, he becomes a liminal figure.

Throughout Casino Royale and later, in Quantum of Solace, Skyfall and Spectre, there are other ways in which Craig’s Bond is feminised. His partially clothed body (usually his taut torso) is offered for scopophilic pleasure and audience consumption, again inverting the traditional male gaze and feminising the subject. More often the recipient of female sexual attention, with few exceptions (for example, Strawberry Fields, Severine, Lucia in Spectre, an unnamed woman in Skyfall — all of whom he beds) he is portrayed in a sexually passive role, his body on display, enjoying or indifferent to the sexual attention the woman is providing. Craig’s Bond’s demonstration of masculinity is no longer contingent on being the sexual aggressor; nor is he sexually irresistible the moment he encounters a woman as Lynd in Casino Royale, Montez in Quantum and Swann in Spectre establish. They all initially, or completely, resist him. Earlier Bond movies relied on women’s (eventual) capitulation (famously, even lesbian Pussy Galore) to validate the spy’s hypermasculinity, virility, heterosexuality and, in a cinematic sleight of hand, his nationalism and patriotism as well. (see Bennett & Woollacott 1987; Black 2005; Chapman 1999; Lindner 2003) The ‘phallic power’ Bond once wielded so readily in bed and many other places is now firmly in his pants. Interestingly, this does not throw his masculinity into question so much as indicate its fluidity: he is at once a beautiful, masculine commodity inscribed with ruthless muscularity, white imperialism, secrets and sex, but also a site of feminine longing and display. This is particularly relevant in the scenes Bond shares with his effete male villains (discussed further below), but also apparent in Craig’s Bond’s sex scenes with various Bond Girls.

Nobody Does It Better: Bond and the sex act

In Cinema’s Sex Acts, Linda Williams interrogates sexual explicitness in film and makes the broad claim that American audiences ‘have a hard time separating relatively explicit sex in movies from what seems to be the totally explicit sex of pornography’. (2014: 9) While her discussion focuses on ‘relatively explicit’ films such as Blue is the Warmest Color (2013) and Stranger by the Lake (2013), it affirms Hollywood’s continued aversion to the overt depiction of sex on screen. (Williams 2014) Despite the sexual prowess of its protagonist and a heavy reliance on sexual innuendo, the Bond franchise largely adheres to this convention, trading on what Tanya Krzywinska (2006) identifies as the seductive promise. When it comes to sex with 007, much more is implied than seen. To do this, the Bond films rely on a number of cinematic conventions with which audiences are already familiar. These include continuity editing, where characters are shown engaging in foreplay and then with a dissolve or soft edit, exhibiting post-coital behaviours — an ellipsis that allows audiences to ‘fill in the blanks’ or ‘project in the gap their own personally tailored fantasy’. (Krzywinska 2006: 29) The films similarly use obscured imagery, such as a hot tub full of bubbles (A View to a Kill [Glen 1985]), steamed up shower screens (Thunderball  (1965) & Skyfall) or sheer curtains (Die Another Day) to show physical intimacy while preserving modesty (and avoiding an R rating). Yet they have also developed their own codes and conventions. Many Bond films include a shot of Bond unzipping a woman’s dress with a slow tilt down to reveal her naked back (typically Bond remains fully clothed), or a dog’s eye view medium close-up of two sets of legs and dropped towels/robes. And as Funnell and Dodds (2015: 126) observe the accompanying soundtrack to sex scenes in Bond films signal the style of encounter. Romantic music is played in scenes with Bond Girls (e.g., use of ‘All Time High’ in Octopussy [Glen 1983]), whereas female villains often have no music accompanying their sexual encounters with Bond (e.g., Bond with Xenia Onatopp in GoldenEye). This not only marks differences in the ‘goodness’ of the female characters, but the difference between ‘making love’ and sex. (Funnell & Dodds 2015: 126)

In line with Burgess’s (2015) identification of marked shifts in the representation of masculinity and the findings of Neuendorf et. al’s (2010) content analysis of the portrayal of women in Bond films, the number of encounters, style of sex and way it is depicted onscreen changes across the various Bonds and eras. In the earlier films with Connery and Moore, Bond is the sexual aggressor and the women quickly submit to his charms — most commonly Bond takes them in his arms, lays them down as they sigh a wistful ‘Oh James’, then they start to kiss. With Dalton and Brosnan, the number of sexual partners in each film is reduced (something former Bond, Roger Moore [2012: 58], attributes to the HIV/AIDS crisis of the mid-1980s), but the level of sexual activity for female characters increases (Nuendorf et. al 2010: 754) and the style of sex depicted is more varied in terms of sexual positions and who is cast as the instigator. Sex scenes are also longer, and while sex acts remain obscured, there is more foreplay, more vocalisation, and the female body is more overtly on display. Sex continues to feature in contemporary Bond films, but there are distinct changes in what and who is seen with Craig in the role.

In terms of frequency, there are fewer sex scenes in Craig’s four films than those of any previous Bond. He sleeps with two women in Casino Royale, Skyfall and Spectre, and only one in Quantum. The most explicit sex scene is a very short one that takes place on a Turkish beach during the early part of Skyfall when Bond is an inactive agent, presumed dead, with an unnamed woman (credited as ‘Bond’s lover’). The setting is stripped back (a makeshift hut on the beach), Bond is also stripped back (rough and scruffy), and so is the sex. There is no speaking, minimal underscore, and the longest shot in the scene is a slow zoom in on the couple lying on the bed post-coitus: both are clothed, although Bond is shirtless. Centre screen and directly lit, the camera lingers on Bond’s bare torso, which is further emphasised by the following shot of his mirrored reflection shaving. As Jeremy Black (2006: 109) notes, such scenes typically serve a purpose:

Bond’s sexual appeal is … frequently important in terms of plot, where it is often instrumental in ensuring the ‘tipping point’ from failure to success, as in the films Goldfinger and Thunderball. More generally, his successful sexuality is also a release from other aspects of the story, offering a variety of pace, scene and characterization, as well as an important source of humour, and sometimes pathos, and a crucial support to the notion of his competence.

The Skyfall scene contributes to the characterisation of Bond — dislocated from his role as a highly trained and capable spy, the scene reflects a rawness and recklessness — but does not advance the plot. As such, it points to a shift in the role of sex and sexual appeal in the franchise: sex is less about humour and displaying the female form, and more about Bond’s emotional state, motivations, vulnerability and, to a certain extent, ownership of sexualised masculinity through a focus on his corporeality. Moreover, sex appeal gets separated out as part of his professional toolkit. For example, where earlier films effectively suspend the narrative or action to play out sex scenes, Craig’s Bond continues to exhibit and utilise sex appeal (through a clearly foregrounded celebration of the male body), but the narrative retains focus on the action and plot. As Funnell (2011a: 462) argues in relation to Casino Royale and his intimate scene with Solange:

Emphasis is placed on Daniel Craig’s exposed muscular torso rather than his sexuality, libido, and conquest. For instance, when Bond attempts to extract information from Solange (Caterina Murino) in his suite at the club, a fully clothed Solange places Bond on his back, opens his shirt and proceeds to kiss his bare chest, slowly moving out of the frame as she works her way down his body … This sexually charged image is highly suggestive of fellatio and represents her literal attraction to Bond’s phallus, aligning her with other women attracted to Bond throughout the film series.

Instead of culminating in sex, the scene ends with Bond ordering room service for one and cuts to him following Demetrius into Miami. Implied is that the pursuit of Demetrius takes priority over sex with Solange. Similarly, in the opening sequence of Spectre the camera tracks a costumed Bond walking hand-in-hand with a woman through the crowded Day of the Dead parade in Mexico City into a hotel and up to a hotel room. He kisses the woman and immediately goes out the window onto the roof to set up surveillance on Sciarra who is in an adjoining hotel. In both cases it is the promise of sex, rather than the depiction of it, that drives the action, intimating but without delivering and maintaining the ‘romance’ of sex (with Bond) with audiences.

However, it is in his sexual encounters with Lynd that Craig’s Bond most clearly disrupts the hegemonic masculinity historically symbolised by his character, and redefines masculine sexuality. In Casino Royale Bond is shockingly tortured by Le Chiffre who seeks to destroy his genitals (phallus), demonstrating the understanding that Bond’s maleness, masculinity and everything that makes him publicly and privately desirable resides there. Le Chiffre ultimately fails, and while Bond might require treatment, healing, bed rest and recuperation on an island, his masculinity is never in doubt. Aware of the damage his body has sustained, Lynd states, ‘If all that was left of you was your smile and your little finger, you’d still be more of a man than anyone I know’. Having exposed his physical capability and, more importantly, emotional vulnerability through his relationship with Lynd, Craig’s Bond embodies a heroic masculinity not seen before in a Bond film. Not content to accept he does not need phallic power to prove himself, Bond reclaims it – albeit in diminutive but no less potent form — when he replies to Lynd, ‘That’s because you know what I can do with my little finger’. Thus, Craig’s Bond reassures audiences, through sexualised humour, that while masculinity appears to be dismantled and diminished, this is illusionary, as buried within are the foundations of traditional, hegemonic ideals. Katharine Cox (2014: 193) proposes that:

Vesper’s reading of his masculinity and the innuendo he ascribes to it suggest that pleasure is diffuse and located throughout the body. The little finger replaces the penis as object of desire and in doing so offers a fragmented and queer reading of sexual pleasure.

This notion is taken even further when eager to culminate their desire (and to prove his phallus still works; also, to recoup his heterosexuality after being violated by a man), Bond and Lynd burst into his hospital room, instruments and gadgets falling and shattering as they seek to unite. The sex happens off-camera, but not before audiences are aware that this is what is occurring — a passionate climax, amidst the instruments of Bond’s recovery and a more sanitised place than the usual locales. This is Bond the man, not Bond the spy, an identity reinforced by him sending his resignation to M in the following scenes. While love is fleeting for Bond, and arguably framed by queer pleasure and tarnished by betrayal and sacrifice, sex suggests his hegemonic masculine armour is restored.

You Only Live Twice: ageing, unplanned obsolescence, masculinity and sex

The focus on age, redundancy, obsolescence and death dominate Skyfall and Spectre. They gesture to the declining role of M and the professional (in)efficiencies of MI6, the people working within it and the precarious position they hold operating ‘in the shadows’, but arguably to the crumbling edifice of masculinity as well. Scene after scene in Craig’s Bond films find the spy battling for supremacy, if not his life, in dilapidated buildings/locations — from the construction site at the opening of Casino Royale, the old motel room in L’Amercain in Quantum, the bowels of the ancient city of Sienna, the deserted, tumbledown island occupied by Silva, his family’s ruined ancestral home and chapel in Skyfall, to the destroyed buildings in Mexico and MI6’s headquarters in London. (for further discussion of construction zones and the derelict MI6 building, see Funnell & Dodds 2017) Once more, old ways and old people battle for relevancy. They might be defunct and devalued, but as Bond and his brand of masculinity and masculine sexuality asserts over and over, they are not yet irrelevant. The once traditional masculine world view has a place (otherwise, why continue the franchise?), but only when modified and rendered recognisably fluid, adaptable and thus applicable. It is no coincidence then, that in a film preoccupied with relevance, ageing and obsolescence, Bond finally sleeps with a more mature woman (Lucia Sciarra played by Monica Bellucci, who at 50 years is the oldest Bond conquest). Bellucci’s casting reportedly ‘caused more fuss than any other character in the history of the 007 franchise’ (Manelis 2015), even though her screen time was so brief. Arguably, this points to society’s obsession with ageing (women) and sexuality rather than Bond’s. Disliking the focus on her chronology, Bellucci responded, ‘I’m too mature to be a Bond Girl. I say Bond Lady. Bond Woman’. (Vivarelli 2017)

Like Skyfall, Spectre firmly focuses on an ageing Bond – one who, like the organisation he works for, is perceived as increasingly antediluvian, principally now his champion, M, is dead. The focus on ‘older characters as obsolete individuals, who are easily replaceable … reinforces the binary opposition between old and young’ (Krainitzki 2014: 38); and as Krainitzki points out, ‘in a culture obsessed with youth, old will inevitably be the devalued term’. (2014: 37) Having Bond enjoy sex with a woman his own age not only disrupts the binaries between old/new and youth/age, but inverts the value ascribed to the terms, even temporarily. In real life and on celluloid, Bond, Lucia and the actors playing their roles are imbued with sensuality and sexuality, and shown as far from sexually or culturally redundant. Their sex scene in Spectre is more conventional, harkening back to Bond films from last century with a focus on Lucia’s body over Bond’s and seduction techniques reminiscent of Bond’s spy-ancestors. Pushing her against a mirror before kissing her and unzipping her dress to reveal a naked back, the scene cuts to him getting dressed to leave as Lucia, sitting on the bed with post-coital dishevelment and disappointment inscribed upon her face, looks utterly sensual and sated in a black corset and stockings.

While his sexual interactions with age-appropriate Lucia break new ground for Bond, they also tread and bed familiar old ones (he still uses her to extract information). It is not until Bond encounters Dr Madeline Swann later in the same film that the Bond Girl once more comes to the fore. In doing so, she challenges Bond’s brand of masculinity and throws his intentions into turmoil. As has been threatened across the entire series of Craig films, the Bond Girl is now obsolete; she has grown into, as Bellucci suggested, the Bond Woman.

Writing’s on the Wall: the changing role of Bond Girls and masculinity/sexuality

Bond’s relationship with women has been the source of both popular and academic interest throughout the franchise’s history. The enduring appeal of the British agent is often cited as being that of a man every woman wants and every man wants to be – both inherently grounded in sexual allure and prowess. There is no doubt the British agent enjoys sex with women outside using them to manipulate and extract information. They further function in texts to allow Bond ‘to establish an alibi, to convince women to help him, to help women move to the side of good, and to enrage the villain’. (Garland 2010: 180) But as Roger Moore (2012: 52) observes in his commentary of the franchise’s 50-year history, engaging in sex with Bond is statistically dangerous. According to Roald Dahl, who penned the screenplay for You Only Live Twice (1967), there is an established formula:

‘You put in three girls’, the producers said, ‘girl number one is pro-Bond. She stays around roughly for 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 and usually captures him, and he has to save himself by knocking her out with his sexual charm and power. She gets killed in an original (usually grisly) fashion mid-way through the film. The third girl will manage to survive to the end of the film.’ (cited in Moore 2012: 52)

Analyses of the Bond Girls (Caplen 2010; D’Abo and Cork 2003; Funnell 2011a, 2015; Garland 2010), Judi Dench’s M (Dodds 2014; Funnell 2015; Krainitzki 2014; Pua 2017), and the unique position of Moneypenny (Brabazon 1999, Shaw 2015) explore the various roles women play in relation to Bond and the films’ and characters’ broader sociocultural meaning. Early films tended to create conflict between Bond and ‘his girls’ that was later resolved in bed, while the more contemporary films arouse sexual tension through ‘increasingly complex female roles as equals, superiors, and enemies’. (Garland, 2010: 184) While some instances of transgression of the fairly steady formula are identified, there is consensus that Bond films predominantly work to maintain clear gender binaries through conventional depictions of masculinity and femininity. This is primarily done through sexual encounters, which are sites where heteronormativity prevails. Garland claims women in the early films define ‘masculine perceptions of Bond’ through his sexual conquest of them functioning as a ‘culmination of tension in a grand reassertion of masculinity and femininity’; an emphasis only altered in later instalments with changing public and private roles for women (such as a female M and the character Wai Lin in Tomorrow Never Dies), and recognition of ‘Bond’s greater emotional vulnerability’. (2010: 181, 183)

Nowhere is this more apparent than Casino Royale and the character of Lynd who, beyond any Bond Girl to date, inhabits dual identities and purposes. Lynd is simultaneously both Bond Girl and villain. She is dangerous, sexually desirable and professionally capable; moving fluidly between the two primary Bond female roles, she blurs boundaries and, in the process, alters audience expectations — of her and 007. Lynd’s character marks a metamorphosis in the meaning and purpose of those paternalistically called ‘Bond Girls’, signifying a change in the portrayal of Bond as well and how his masculinity and sexual desirability are connoted. Directly addressing previously-established conventions on their first meeting, Lynd challenges Craig’s Bond: ‘You think of women as disposable pleasures rather than meaningful pursuits’. Controlling the money Bond stakes in the central poker game and saving his life with the timely application of a defibrillator when poisoned by Le Chiffre’s girlfriend, Lynd is shown to be Bond’s professional equal. Moreover, the depth of their relationship elucidates an emotional vulnerability in Bond not previously seen in the franchise.

The relationship between Lynd and Bond builds slowly and peaks with his proclamation of love and desire to give up being an agent. While this alone contravenes expectations, it is the betrayal by Lynd, her death, and his subsequent drive for revenge that brings about — and defines — the reconstructed masculinity Craig’s Bond comes to represent. Garland argues that as Lynd segues from Bond Girl to villain and back again, she transforms into ‘an ideologically contested site’ and ‘index for the changing ideological structure of Bond and the Bond films’. (2010: 181) In the third act of Casino Royale, not only has Bond sent M his resignation, he ignores professional instructions in his burning desire to avenge Lynd’s death and punish those responsible, including her boyfriend — motivation that forms the basis of the next film, Quantum. Arguably, this fluidity and challenge to oeuvre conventions is carried beyond Quantum and into the following two films as well, as the ghost of Lynd, the revenge Bond seeks and what she came to mean to him personally, haunts the narratives. (see  Cox 2013: 185)

In Quantum Bond joins forces with Camille Montes, a former Bolivian agent, to not only enact his own vengeance, but help her achieve her own. For the first time, sexual tension dissipates over and above action and purpose. Mutual trust and respect develops as Montes and Bond set out to destroy the general who killed Camille’s family, Dominic Greene, and his empire. Then again in Skyfall, heterosexual congress serves little to no purpose except to portray a displaced and cold Bond. In this film Bond’s female colleague Moneypenny, and boss, M, play pivotal roles and his relationships with them highlight both his masculinity and the integral part women play in defining it. No longer Bond Girls but active participants with a great deal at stake, Moneypenny and M put duty and professionalism first. However, duty is blurred when Silva enters the fray, calls M a ‘bad mummy’ and aligns himself with Bond as another hard-done-by son. Essentially ‘brothers’, one is out to win ‘Mummy’s’ approval by protecting her; the other, in an Oedipal gesture, to destroy the maternal figure he loves/despises.

Inseparable from country, M is Britain incarnate. She is the ‘mother country’ personified, an aged, imperial ruin, swiftly being overtaken by younger, globally-orientated, technologically advanced peers/nations, encapsulated in the figures of Mallory and Q. Dying in Bond’s arms in an inverse pieta with Bond as a maternal signifier (Brooks & Hill, 2016: 125), M’s exit points towards ‘a return to an ideological past, with a particular mode of representation’ (Kranitizki 2014: 38), primarily in the form of a male M (Mallory) and Moneypenny deskbound. But M’s death signals a great deal more than that. Bond has proven he is a changed man. No longer driven solely by libidinous urges, understanding that women are pivotal to his masculine and professional self beyond their sexual worth, his masculinity, while still harkening back to older models (like his beloved Aston Martin) is broader, more flexible and fluid, constantly challenging reductive definitions while at the same time playfully reasserting them.

It is through his relationship with Swann in Spectre, the daughter of Mr White, the man responsible for the death of not only many agents but Bond’s former love Lynd, this reconstructed masculinity that challenges and embraces hegemonic traits becomes apparent. Eschewing her father and what he represents, Swann has determined her own path outside patriarchal and masculine constructs. Clever, resourceful and unafraid, she initially refuses Bond’s offer of help, and it is not until circumstances thrust her into his company that she understands he needs her aid as much as any he is offering her. They are on a level playing field until the climax of the film where Bond is forced to rescue her from the booby-trapped MI5 building. Along with Bond driving off beside the beautiful Swann in the rebuilt Aston Martin, it would be easy to read the final scenes as a return to old form(ulas). But like the car, Bond is remade. The last time the car was whole M sat in Swann’s seat, and there is a sense in which Swann is both Lynd and M — daughter of Bond’s ongoing nemesis, holder of his heart and, like M, external conscience and mentor — goading, questioning his motives and emotional state, all while supporting his actions. Of all the Bond Girls, Swann is the one acknowledged by Blofeld as the ‘only one who could have understood him’ — a quality M was regarded to possess as well. Bond may have met his female equivalent in other films, but a sexually desirable and occasionally vulnerable woman who understands him and has no urge to see him change has remained elusive. The daughter of an assassin, courageous, intelligent and capable, psychologist Swann is more than Bond’s equal. After attempting to teach her to use a gun (a skill she chooses not to use), Bond watches her effortlessly disarm the weapon. ‘I don’t have to teach you anything, do I?’ ‘No,’ replies Swann, ‘I can look after myself.’

Bennett and Woollacott argue that early Bond films use sex as a strategy for placing women who were already ‘too greatly emancipated’ in the real world back into ‘a properly subalterned position in relation to men’. (1987: 232) Craig’s Bond Women require no such positioning. On the contrary, they possess an agency beyond their sexual desirability to the spy and Bond’s masculinity and (hetero)sexuality is no longer contingent on bedding them. It is left to the men in the Craig films to threaten and disrupt Bond’s identity, primarily through challenges to his heterosexuality and thus conventional hegemonic masculinity.

The Men With The Golden Guns: Bond and men

When Swann asks Bond why he chose the life of a paid assassin, he replies he was not sure he ever had a choice. Like women’s roles in the past, men too were confined to rigid definitions and representations of what it meant to be masculine. By simultaneously challenging and upholding traditional forms of masculinity, Craig’s Bond is liminal. This is particularly evident in his relationship with the villains of the franchise: Le Chiffre, Dominic Greene, Mr White, Raoul Silva and Ernst Blofeld. Throughout the Bond franchise, the villains reveal themselves as possessed of a variety of deformities – their external physical differences denote interior monstrosities and skewed moralities, as well as a lack of ethics — so it is no surprise to find Craig’s Bond’s villains are also either misshapen or devoid of a moral compass. Le Chiffre bleeds from a tear duct, Silva’s face is ravaged from swallowing cyanide, and Greene, White and Blofeld are exposed as greedy psychopaths who treat others as disposable.

The most interesting villains, and ones who pose more than a threat to Bond’s corporeality, are those who deviate from heteronormative practices. For Funnell and Dodds,

[t]he Bond franchise also uses sexuality to contrast the (hetero)normative sexuality of Bond with the sexual aberrance of his opponents. In the early Bond films homosexuality was perceived and presented as a form of sexual deviance. This problematic impression worked to equate homosexuality with notions of criminality and moral impropriety and rendered these villains in the franchise more deplorable. (2015: 127)

Importantly, while the Bond villains in contemporary films are not ‘othered’ on the basis of homosexuality (Brooks & Hill 2015), they still attempt to threaten Bond’s assignment and ultimately his heterosexuality and masculinity. Arguably, they fail at both: Craig’s Bond succeeds in fulfilling his mission, and there is a sense he embraces alternate sexualities as an aspect of masculinity as well. The one thing Craig’s Bond villains have in common is that they are all effete. Surrounded by henchmen, beautiful women, wealth and weapons, they nonetheless rarely engage with Bond except to torture or verbally threaten him, their whispery, soft and feminised voices functioning contrapuntally to the viciousness they inflict. Neither are they seen interacting in a sexual or even sensual fashion with the women at their sides — except for a brief kiss (Severine and Silva in Skyfall; Greene and Camille in Quantum, Le Chiffre and Valenka in Casino Royale). In other words, their masculinity is contingent on their ability to wield power and threaten Bond’s status quo. Their sexuality, however, appears fluid if not suggestively aberrant from heteronormativity.

Far from lingering on sex scenes with women, Craig’s films appear to concentrate on the violent intimacy between men. Referring to Fleming’s novels, Alex Adams contends ‘the torture scenes are unsettling precisely because they are based on intimacy with men: villains who are marked as sexually excessive and ideologically unacceptable’. (2017: 138) Whether it is the life and death hold between Demetrius and Bond in Casino Royale as they try to penetrate each other with a perpendicular knife at the exhibition Body Worlds in Miami, or Blofeld in Spectre smiling while he remotely violates his ‘brother’ with needles, Craig’s Bond and the villains ‘share an intimacy that borders on eroticism and the banter between them resembles flirting’. (Cox 2013: 193)

However, when Bond is tortured by Le Chiffre in Casino Royale relations between them go well beyond flirting, becoming a parody of sexual intercourse replete with orgiastic cries of pleasure. Bond is stripped naked and tied to a seatless chair so his genitals are exposed. Sweating, Le Chiffre removes his shirt and states his intention of leaving little ‘to identify you as a man’, but first makes a point of admiring Bond’s physicality. ‘Wow,’ he says. ‘You’ve taken good care of your body.’ Similarly, in Skyfall Bond engages in sexual banter with Silva, who caresses Bond’s exposed chest and grips and strokes his thighs, all while Bond is tied to a chair. Bond challenges assumptions about his own sexuality when Silva makes references to fellatio. Lauren Spungen (2017) compares the scene between Colonel Rosa Klebb and Tatiana Romanova in From Russia with Love (1963) to the scene between Silva and Bond in terms of the establishment of dominance by an ‘aggressor’. Spungen dismisses the suggestion of bisexuality (‘What makes you think this is my first time?) as unlikely: ‘Rather, his out-of-character retort seems to simply mirror Bond’s usual playful, yet strategic banter with his enemy’. (2017: 14) Likewise, Funnell and Dodds read Silva’s sexual advances as ‘rooting the Craig era films in the problematic representational politics of the Connery era films’. (2015: 127) While these are diverse ways of interpreting Bond’s response to homosexual and homoerotic overtures, another is to read Bond’s responses as challenging assumptions about his heteronormativity and accepting that perhaps the agent is, after all, polymorphous and fluid in his masculinity and sexual identity. (Brooks & Hill 2015: 124) As with the torture scene in Casino Royale, cinematic components in the scene with Silva in Skyfall support a clear fetishisation of Craig’s body and visual cues of seduction, including smiles and exchanged looks.

Like Bellucci in the role of Lucia, the choice of Javier Bardem for Silva is significant. Gallagher argues that throughout his career, ‘sexual charisma underwrites Bardem’s presentation even in films that remove his characters from the sexual economy’. (2014: 111) Although his ‘good looks’ are masked by a disfigured face and disturbed psychopathy, he is overtly sexual in Skyfall. Yet, Bond embraces and subverts Silva’s playfulness and suggestiveness, allowing him to escape his (sexual) clutches, to then become victim to another man who wishes, above all, to violate him with phallic instruments: his other ‘brother’, Blofeld. Not only does Blofeld seek to destroy Bond, he is intent on ruining his entire life by erasing his memories, which includes those that make him the masculine superspy and saviour of queen and country he is. Obsessed with the ‘cuckoo’ in his family’s nest, Blofeld dedicates his entire being and wealth to the destruction of all Bond holds dear. He tells Bond, ‘A pattern developed: you interfered in my world and I interfered in yours. Or did you think it was coincidence that all the women in your life ended up dead?’

In Casino Royale, the plot to blow up an aircraft that is foiled by Bond is identified by the codename ‘ellipsis’. An ellipsis marks an omission from speech or writing, assuming words are superfluous and context will provide meaning. Like the before and after sex imagery in Bond’s conventionally heterosexual sex scenes (which assume the audience understands what happens in-between), the intimate scenes between Bond and the men who seek to terminate him function as ellipses that both reassert his masculinity and challenge heteronormative assumptions about 007. Thus, through cinematic ellipsis – what is not said/seen between characters, imagery and verbal banter – one can read Bond as challenging the notion of what constitutes contemporary masculine sexuality.

Conclusion

Whether it is through his representation as spectacle, locus of desire and longing, his relationship with male and female characters or dialogue, Craig’s Bond represents a shift in the construction and presentations of masculinity and masculine sexuality. His engagement with homoeroticism throws into question a stable or even desired heterosexuality linked as it is with a reductive hegemonic masculinity. Unlike the Bond of series past, Craig-era Bond almost revels in his physical and, more importantly, emotional vulnerability. Able to love and allow himself to be loved, sex has become more than a tool in his politically incorrect arsenal. It is an expression of deep affection, a (temporary) shedding of the masculine armour he dons. While sex is still deployed both for pleasure and professional gain, it is no longer what shakes or stirs Bond to action. Not afraid of or intimidated by intimacy — with professional, capable women (not only girls) or men — there is a maturity to Bond, a sense of a man in the process of becoming rather than a fixed signifier of the times; of a particular kind of masculinity. Feminised, masculinised, the object of the gaze and male admiration and sexual advances, Craig’s Bond embraces it all by acknowledging extant binaries and most often, disrupting them. As Cox argues, ‘Bond is repeatedly viewed as ambiguous, as scenes of masculinity are juxtaposed with extended and repeated tropes and metaphors associated with femininity’. (2013: 188) Where there was once a time the writing was on the wall for ‘old’ James Bond, with all his ambiguity, fluidity and change, masculine convention demonstrated by Craig’s Bond affirms that nobody does it better.