“Continuity and change” James Chapman notes “perfectly describes the nature of the Bond series which constantly strives to maintain a balance between familiarity and tradition on the one hand and variation and innovation on the other” (Licence 196). This explains the process by which the Bond series traverses cultural, social, and technological developments. This chapter will examine how the car in Bond films serves as an object that reflects changing ideas about the role of women and technology. I will examine three similar scenes in which Bond receives a new car from Q—in Goldfinger (Guy Hamilton 1964), The Spy Who Loved Me (Lewis Gilbert 1977), and Tomorrow Never Dies (Roger Spottiswoode 1997)—and trace the change in gender ideologies within them as the series registers broader social transformations in technology and gender. In addition, I will examine the role of women in a number of car chase scenes. I will argue that this strategy of balancing tradition with innovation is necessarily conservative in nature—while change is allowed, it facilitates a limitation of more substantial transformations in gender representation (ibid. 39).
The car is a compelling case study as it is bound up in a broader gendered ideology of technology, particularly in the earlier part of the twentieth century. According to Sean O’Connell, the car arrived “at a time of great controversy over the issue of women’s role in society, with the debate over women’s suffrage raging” (45). As a result, the woman driver emerged as “a powerful symbol of potential equality” given that “the driver’s seat was seen as a naturally male position” (ibid. 45). Sarah Redshaw notes that cars are not only gendered “but the relationship between the car and the gender of the driver has important cultural and social implications” (9). Car cultures tend to exclude women, even though women have historically played a role in inventing cars and automotive technology (ibid. 19). Redshaw argues that male dominance is even evident in the design of cars: “Men have […] generated technology which suits male ideas of power, use and form, and these ideas have in turn been ‘baked’ into the technology” (35). This sentiment is echoed by Deborah Clarke who notes that women often feel patronized and/or intimidated by dealers when purchasing their cars or by mechanics when servicing their vehicles. More importantly, she contends that automobile advertising commonly links the car with the female body. This further genders car culture by “promising men control over speed and women” (1). Despite the fact that women buy more than half of the cars in the US, there are relatively few female race car drivers or mechanics, and female sales associates at car dealerships remain a distinct minority (ibid. 2).
The interior of the car has been a site of struggle for female equality. Yet, as O’Connell notes, “the car’s association with the engineering industry implanted the car in a world of masculine language of engineers and entrepreneurs” (45). The car is coded masculine, especially when technical knowledge is involved. The passenger seat was typically reserved for the woman and the driver’s seat for the man with a vast amount of rhetorical work expended on making these roles seem natural and incontestable (ibid. 46-51). It is into a fictionalized version of this male dominated space that the Bond car chase appears first in the novels and then, from 1962, in the series of films.
However, the gender/car axis should not only be read in terms of its technical aspects. Deborah Lupton has gone so far as to describe a car’s interior as being womb-like (60), leading Jim Conley to note that cars are labeled as an ambiguous gendered space: “cars have sometimes been seen as androgynous with an external masculine side counterpoised to have an internal feminine one” (40). Cars are often given female names and referred to with feminine pronouns. The car is also a symbol of consumerism. As Daniel Miller argues, “clear gender divisions in car use might be viewed as much as an unusual foray by males into an otherwise female-dominated world of consumption as a struggle by females to prevent their exclusion from an arena of consumption associated with male technological issues” (29). The car, then, is a complex cultural phenomenon. At once, the car is an artefact, a space, and a consumer product. A variety of cultural discourses envision the interior of the car as feminine, masculine, or neuter. The car’s exterior absorbs multiple social and cultural meanings relating to gender, many of them contradictory, at any given time or place. These meanings also change over time. By employing cars in a central position for 50 years, Bond films navigate this complicated field and, at crucial times, use the multiple meanings of cars to negotiate broader changes in gender ideologies.
1962-71: CONNERY, LAZENBY, AND THE “PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE” ERA OF GENDER IDEOLOGY
Bond’s car functions as a work-place object, especially before the Roger Moore era. Unlike the overtones of connoisseurship in the way that Bond selects food and drink, the car is presented to Bond as an object for work by the narration of the scenes in Q Branch. This has the effect of shutting down the overtly consumerist aspects of the car and emphasizing instead the technological ones.
The Bond films emerged during a decade of great social upheaval in relation to technology. As noted by Chapman, “It was a decade in which technology and technological progress came to the fore” (Licence 94). The early Bond films reflect and comment on this growth, weaving technology into the emerging formula for the Bond films. Goldfinger, in particular, does two important things for the discourse on gender and technology. First, it loads the car that Bond drives, the Aston Martin DB5, with hi-tech modifications, which allow him to easily out-drive his competition. Second, it makes a star of the car as the Aston Martin became a transcendental symbol of the Bond franchise. This car also appears in the pre-credit sequence of the next film, Thunderball (Terence Young 1965). It went on tour across Europe and North America to promote both films at premiers, motor shows, and on television. Lavish descriptions of the modifications made to the car filled reviews, newspaper features, and television spots. In fact, the fame of the DB5 outlived its usefulness as a promotional tool for Goldfinger and Thunderball as specific films, contributing instead to a trend in which Bond’s car becomes a major part of the Bond film formula. Aston Martins have appeared in 10 films to date and continue to appear in the series, often to surround a new and untested actor in the Bond role with familiarity and tradition—Lazenby, Brosnan, Dalton and Craig all drove Aston Martins in their inaugural outings as Bond. Moreover, the Aston Martin DB5 reappears in Skyfall (Sam Mendes 2012) to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the series just as the Aston Martin Vanquish helped to commemorate the fortieth anniversary in Die Another Day (Lee Tamahori 2002).
Given the range of modifications to the car, the film presents the impression that it will take about an hour for Q to brief Bond on how all the components work. The scene fades into the next, suggesting that we only hear the first part of his lecture. This narrative strategy builds expectation for when the modifications—oil slick, machine guns, smoke screen, and ejector seat—will be used and works against the idea that Bond has a natural or intuitive relationship with the car. Instead, seeing Bond learn how to use the DB5 with its modifications plays into the idea that Bond’s relationship with technology falls within the sphere of work and merit rather than the world of leisure. In this context, driving the car and using its modifications is something that must be learned and not something for which Bond has a natural talent.
By linking Bond’s car so closely to the discourse on technology, however, it becomes bound up in a related press debate about gadgets. While Chapman notes that technology becomes a focus for Bond critics from
Goldfinger onwards (Chapman,
Licence 94), what has been overlooked is the way in which the use of gadgets was often read (by those same critics) as a
reliance on technology, something that undermined Bond’s self-sufficiency. As Dilys Powell puts it, “Bond himself is faintly diminished by an excess of contraptions which never leave him at a loss. Mechanical ingenuity undermines human resource” (33). Human, in this patriarchal context, denotes men and male experience stands in for all human experience through a process Dale Spender calls “male as norm” (2). Anxieties surrounding technology at this time fundamentally challenge what it meant to be a man.
From Goldfinger on, sports cars become part of the iconography of the Bond film. Moreover, cars are used to anchor meanings associated with Bond Girls. Muscle cars (such as Ford Mustangs and Mercury Cougars), which tend to be the most “openly phallic” (Roof 81), are often owned and driven by women in this era. Indeed, one of the most proficient pieces of driving by any Bond Girl, in any era, appears in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (Peter Hunt 1969). This film sees Tracy di Vicenzo rescue Bond from the SPECTRE abettors who are pursing him. She is played by Diana Rigg, who starred as Emma Peel in the British action TV series The Avengers from 1965 to 1968 and who, according to Marc O’Day, encapsulated “the paradigm of the independent action heroine” (225). The chase takes place with Bond in the passenger seat and di Vicenzo at the wheel of her Mercury Cougar. She outdrives two others cars on snow-covered roads and outmaneuvers several others taking part in an ice track derby. Bennett argues that, in this period, Bond:
facilitated an ideological shift from […] one set of gender identities to another whilst preserving a degree of continuity between the two. An ideal popular hero, he was both ‘progressive’, a sounding-board for change, yet also conservative, limiting change within clearly defined boundaries. (39)
This display, while somewhat progressive in its representations, is carefully limited in terms of its gender ideologies to avoid wider change. Tracy di Vicenzo is the only character to marry Bond and so the driving spectacle is partly an audition for her worthiness for that role. While the spectacle of di Vicenzo’s driving skill does progress the narrative, it ultimately ends with her being shot in the head in the passenger seat of 007’s Aston Martin DBS. If di Vicenzo had been driving the car things may have turned out differently.
1973-85: ROGER MOORE AND THE “REACTIONARY” ERA
The next time Q instructs Bond on how to use his gadget-laden car is in
The Spy Who Loved Me. In this film, however, the car has been actively reconfigured to align an affinity for machines and technology with the basic requirements of heroic masculinity. Femininity is positioned to take on the role formerly occupied by Bond—that of the professional who, while unable to operate on pure talent and intuition alone, achieves results through hard work. Bennett describes this process of representing women as “more straightforwardly reactionary” than earlier Bond films where women were less prominent and less directly in competition with Bond in professional terms. For Bennett “the main ideological work accomplished in the films of this period is that of a ‘putting-back-into-place’ of women who carry their independence and liberation ‘too far’” (39). Bennett argues that, by giving more emphasis to certain female characters but still showing them to be insufficient in matching Bond’s talents in the end, the adjustment masks a reactionary step that seems progressive on the surface, by giving particular Bond Girls larger roles in their narratives, but ultimately subordinates them as the films conclude.
Major Amasova (codenamed agent XXX to echo agent 007 but with extra sexualized and almost pornographic connotations) is a Soviet/Eastern female counterpart to the British/Western male Bond. The East and West are repeatedly mirrored throughout the film, for instance through a corresponding chain of command with matching red telephones. By adopting and adapting the trope of the way a Bondian hero is introduced (particularly by mimicking the leisure-bound and sexually-active way Moore’s Bond was first introduced in Live and Let Die [Guy Hamilton 1973]), Amasova is shown to be Bond’s counterpart, the USSR’s best agent using the same measures.
These mirrored characters, however, are clearly gendered—the UK’s best agent is a man (007) and the USSR’s best agent is a woman (XXX)—and the characteristics associated with Bond in the film seem to be privileged over those associated with Amasova. Technology, and in particular the gadget-laden car, plays a pivotal role assigning these gendered roles. By showing that men and women use machines differently, The Spy Who Loved Me aligns the intuitive use of technology with Bond as a basic requirement of heroic masculinity. For example, midway through the film Q arrives in Sardinia with a new Lotus sports car for Bond. Much like the Q Branch initiation scene in Goldfinger, Q tries to explain the special modifications he had made to the car but, after parking Amasova in the passenger seat, Bond simply drives off without listening to any of the guidance. He is still able to use the car and all its modifications perfectly, even as it transitions into a submersible. This is markedly different from the lengthy tutorial Q gives Bond in Goldfinger where the scene fades out as Q explains the range of modifications his department has made to the Aston Martin.
In comparison, Amasova does not possess this natural ability and her attempts at mastering technology render her an inferior agent. At the pyramids in Egypt, for example, Amasova is in the driver’s seat as she tries to start a van so the pair can escape from Jaws. Bond, who is in the passenger seat, comments wryly upon “women drivers” as she struggles to find the right key to put in the ignition and to get the vehicle in gear. Amasova does, however, get the hang of driving the van in time and uses it to pin Jaws against a wall. Over the course of the film, Bond and Amasova develop an almost adversarial relationship by trying to constantly one-up each other. This ultimately works to Bond’s advantage since most of these challenges entail the use of technology and Bond appears to be superior to Amasova in this respect. Their respective abilities with cars and technology are vital to the way in which their relationship becomes hierarchical.
The Spy Who Loved Me presents a remarkable shift in the meanings associated with technology and gadgetry compared to previous Bond films. Chapman argues that the film changes the emphasis in the franchise from adventure and espionage, with an emphasis on Bond’s relationship with the villain, to spectacle and romance with a focus on Bond’s connection with the Bond Girl (Licence 158). The presence of agent XXX as a romantic lead gives a new emphasis to women in the way that Bond’s masculinity is adjusted. The implication is that understanding how high-technology works takes time, effort, and learning. Towards the end of the underwater scene, it turns out that Amasova can work the car too but, as she explains, she can only do so because she studied the blueprints of it. XXX can work the modified car but without intuition and flair. This repositions Amasova into a professional role, much more in keeping with meritocratic discourse that distinguished Connery’s Bond from the character’s origins in the talented amateur gentleman era of Edwardian adventure fiction (Spicer 65-79; Chapman, “Bond” 130-1). At this time, however, the professional role is marked as second best to Bond’s more leisure-bound, intuitive approach to heroism.
1995-2002: PIERCE BROSNAN AS “TECHNOLOGICAL MAESTRO”
The Brosnan era further repositions the connotations of masculinity and femininity in relation to technology so that the feminine Other bolsters the naturalness of Bond’s instinctive way with machines. Tomorrow Never Dies is a film that exemplifies the ways in which Bond’s relationship with motor vehicles has been reframed. Early in the film, Bond arrives in Hamburg to pick up his new BMW 750iL. Q steps into the frame dressed as a car hire rep replete with a bright red jacket. Another tutorial takes place, but one quite unlike Goldfinger or The Spy Who Loved Me. Bond is able to operate the car remotely with spontaneous skill much more precisely than its inventor, Q. This contrast is achieved, in part, by gendering the way in which Bond interacts with the car. During the briefing, it is revealed that the car’s onboard computer has a female voice, which not only humanizes the way in which Bond interfaces with the technology but feminizes it as well. The voice, perhaps fitting of a BMW, has a German accent and Brosnan’s reaction indicates that the commanding tone is sexy too. Q instructs Bond on how to use the car’s mobile phone remote control but is able only to elicit jerky movements from the vehicle. Bond takes the control and, referring to the car with feminine pronouns, says “let’s see how she responds to my touch eh Q?” Bond is not only able to bring forth much smoother movements in the car, but manages to perform quite complicated maneuvers instinctively.
Martin Willis has argued that Brosnan’s tenure “illuminates a fascinating reinvention of James Bond as a technological maestro” (152). While this also happened with some success 20 years earlier in
The Spy Who Loved Me, the Brosnan era films seem to make a virtue of reinventing technology as a place for the display of Bond’s instinct for machines—but with a different set of comic and sexual inflections. According to Willis, “Bond’s role is to uphold the central position of the capitalist nation-state in the face of a technoculture that threatens to dismantle it […] Bond’s aptitude reconfigures the relationship between the technological object and the ‘user’ of that object” because it is clear that Bond has mastery over it (153). Expanding on this, I would argue that there is an important gendered aspect to the way technology is presented where Bond, instead of standing in for the nation state as Willis has it, stands as a symbol of masculinity, in part through the way he interacts with technology given a feminine interface. In addition, the scene intervenes to change the connotations of gadgets compared to previous set pieces of this type.
While Willis is correct that Bond is shown to be a maestro in his use of machines, the film also conveys the impression that Bond’s expertise with technology has been repositioned through contrast with a feminine Other. When performing a complex maneuver with the car, Bond sends it hurtling towards the place where he and Q are standing. He hits the brakes and the car’s front bumper comes to a stop only inches away from them at crotch level, marking another way in which the technology is coded as feminine (here as a blatant, and comically knowing, threat to Bond’s phallic power). The feminine is folded into the technology itself and rendered part of how Bond masters it. As Willis puts it: “Brosnan’s Bond is not simply extending his sexuality through technology, he is transferring that sexuality from his own body onto the hardware itself” (156). In order to wrestle the connotations of the gadget from the fundamental meaning-making power of the distinction between man and machine, the feminine must be conjured up to complicate the axis allowing Bond to seduce the machine into his power as he would a woman. The BMW, as with many Bond women, ends up paying the price for Bond’s seduction with its life—it is destroyed when Bond sends it through a storefront window.
Bond’s relationship with motor vehicles is complicated by the fact that he is paired with a strong female agent in
Tomorrow Never Dies. Wai Lin is played by Hong Kong action star Michelle Yeoh who, according to Lisa Funnell, “offers a new image of Asian femininity that is based on physical abilities and achievements” (
Warrior 43). Much like Amasova, Lin develops a competitive relationship with Bond that is played out during their mission together. Where they differ, however, is in the way in which their effectiveness as agents is measured in relation to technology.
Tomorrow Never Dies features a daring motor cycle chase through the streets of Saigon. Bond and Lin ride the motorcycle while handcuffed together, and their success in this endeavor depends on their ability to work together (rather than one-upmanship). Interestingly, this is their only collective encounter with motor vehicles, leaving Bond’s relationship with car culture relatively intact.
Much like The Spy Who Loved Me, Bond and his counterpart are representative of wider oppositions in terms of geography (Britain and China), ideology (capitalism and communism), and gender (man and woman). In the motorcycle chase and the scenes that follow, Bond is shown to have a markedly less intuitive talent for technology than with the remote controlled car. For example, Bond follows Lin to her home only to discover that it is her secret spy den and the Chinese equivalent of Q Branch. In a light-hearted scene, Bond is the butt of several sight gags in which technologically enhanced objects act as booby-traps and threaten his life. Bond then tells Lin that he will send a message to his government, only to discover the keyboards is labeled with Chinese characters rather than the English alphabet. This moment offers a contradiction to a scene in You Only Live Twice (Lewis Gilbert 1967) where Bond tells Moneypenny that he has a first class degree in “Oriental Languages.” In Tomorrow Never Dies, however, Bond is presented as a fish out of water in East Asia. In 1997, the year the film was released, Britain had returned Hong Kong to Chinese rule, signaling a familiar Bondian theme of loss-of-Empire. In this new geopolitical context, Bond requires help in navigating his way through East Asia. Through the motorcycle sequence, Bond and Lin learn how to cooperate with each other and pool their resources.
Tomorrow Never Dies offers a reasonably progressive view on women and technology through the character of Lin. As Funnell argues, Lin provides an image of the Bond Girl that is less sexualized and more masculinized (Warrior 42); even though romance and spectacle are still foregrounded, Lin is not used as a foil for displaying Bond’s almost superhuman talent with technology in the way that Amasova was. Rather, this film heralds a return to the conservatism of the 1960s, progressive on the surface, sounding out new representations within carefully limited boundaries. Lin embodies the world of professionalism in spying, much as Amasova did 20 years earlier, but this approach is not positioned as second best through the use of automotive technology.
This adjustment in the late 1990s—i.e. letting the Bond Girl competently control a vehicle—might have signaled progress if subsequent Bond films had kept technology at the forefront of the Bond myth. Instead, following the infamous invisible car in
Die Another Day, the car enhanced with gadgets beyond day-to-day technology has been largely absent from the Bond series from
Casino Royale (Martin Campbell 2006) onwards. Gender identities have been played out in relation to Bond’s muscular body that returned the franchise “back to basics” and marked a “reboot” for the series (Chapman,
Licence 241). There has been a shift in masculinity from a libido-based heroism (prominent in Bond films from 1962 to 2002) to muscular masculinity (Funnell, “I Know” 462). If the heroic model has changed from the reboot onwards, then so too have the ways in which Bond’s masculinity is inscribed through his interaction with women and technology.
The role of gadgets in the reboot is heavily reduced. Q is missing from Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace (Marc Forster 2008) but appears in Skyfall to make jokes about the expectation of hi-tech gadgets. The cars of this era are not modified with special technology and there is no corresponding Q tutorial. Yet motor vehicles continue to reflect discourses on gender, sometimes excluding Bond women, and emphasizing differences between men. In Casino Royale, Bond is mistaken for a valet by a hotel patron and entrusted with his Range Rover. Bond uses this opportunity to distract hotel security by ramming the car into a barrier and setting off several car alarms, but not before demonstrating his mastery of the vehicle by parking it using a complex steering maneuver.
While Bond still interacts with women in his films, the Bond Girl has also been transformed in the Craig era. Women tend to impede Bond’s goals or endanger his life with their negligence in this period. Casino Royale’s crashing motif is repeated when Bond flips his car in order to avoid hitting Vesper Lynd who is tied up and lying down on the road; she functions as an obstacle to Bond who is trying to capture the villain in his newly acquired Aston Martin. In Skyfall, Moneypenny conducts fieldwork with Bond and is positioned in the driver’s seat of a Land Rover. She accidentally shoots Bond during their mission and her mistake leads to her demotion to a desk job. In addition, M is positioned as a Bond Girl in the film (Krainitzki 38). Like di Vicenzo, M takes the perilous passenger seat in Bond’s enhanced Aston Martin DB5 from Goldfinger; in the final scenes, M is killed, the car is destroyed, and Bond mourns his loss.
With the destruction of Goldfinger’s iconic car, the franchise leaves open the question as to how women and cars will be mobilized in configuring Bond’s masculinity in the future. Cars function as a reminder that human beings want to exceed the limits of their humanity—to travel further and faster than the body allows. Technology could play a role in helping to level the playing field between men and women as agents in the Bond franchise, opening up an opportunity for highly progressive representations. As Craig ages, will Bond’s rebooted brand of muscular heroism be enhanced by technology? Will women return to mitigate this process by making the affinity between boys and their toys seem natural? Only time will tell.