The enduring appeal of the Bond film franchise can be attributed in part to the staging of familiar elements that are recalled with each new entry in the series: the image of the man in the gun barrel, the ordering of a martini, the hero’s self-identification as “Bond. James Bond,” and so on. At the same time, the series has been continuously responding to the changing circumstances of the world it represents in fantasy form. From the outset, the films signaled a partial withdrawal from the Cold War context in which Ian Fleming’s Bond was born, eschewing SMERSH, a Soviet counter-spy organization, in favor of SPECTRE, an unaligned haven for megalomaniacs. The films have since adjusted to the end of the Cold War, collapse of the Soviet Union, and emergence of global terrorism. Changes have also been required in the area of sexual politics, as the sexism of the Bond novels was woven into the fabric of the films they inspired, as the term “Bond Girl” clearly indicates. However, the series has also featured, albeit on its margins, a limited critique of its own prevailing sexist ethos. The arrival of Judi Dench in the role of M in GoldenEye (Martin Campbell 1995) was a remarkable innovation and arguably an explicit attempt to confront the Bond series’ fraught relationship with feminism in the 1990s. This chapter maps the transformation of M as well as the Bond/M relationship at this crucial point in the series and considers Dench’s M in relation to her novel and film predecessors. The introduction of a female M brings to the fore a new emphasis on female authority as the films work to situate Bond in a world where a woman in a position of power might be greeted with something other than contempt.
All representations of Bond, from Fleming’s onward, are characterized by a tension between the agent’s heroic individuality and his obedience to the government from whence his license to kill derives. The royal authority behind the famous license is never more than a dim presence in either the novel or films. Rather, the fullest visible embodiment of that licensing authority is M. Thus, the Bond/M nexus is the site where the shifting relationship between official authority and its secret agent has been most precisely defined, and where that inevitable tension comes most clearly into view, from the hints of unruliness apparent in
Dr. No (Terence Young 1962) to the open conflict of
Licence to Kill (John Glen 1989), in which M revokes Bond’s “00” status, only to have him turn rogue and pursue his revenge plot anyways.
Fleming’s M can be every bit as grumpy as his screen equivalents, but his absolute authority is never questioned, though his subordinates may inwardly rail against it. M bears a heavy burden of responsibility, and he does it well. He is firmly rooted in a pre-war world of Empire with a clear social distinction and deference to (masculine) authority, but it never occurs to Fleming’s Bond that these institutions and values are un-hip or that his superior is a bit of a fuddy-duddy. 007’s relationship with M is severely strained at times, but it is arguably the most important love relationship in Fleming’s books. In
Diamonds Are Forever (1956)
1 Bond explains to Tiffany Case that he is “almost married already. To a man. Name begins with M” (246). His greatest moments of satisfaction in his work come not from the royal or public recognition he avoids, but from seeing approval in “the weatherbeaten face he knew so well and which held so much of his loyalty” (
Moonraker 1955, 15). The final chapter of
Moonraker includes the following moment shared by the two men: “M gave one of the rare smiles that lit up his face with quick brightness and warmth. Bond smiled back. They understood the things that had to be left unsaid” (242). A similar moment occurs in the closing pages of
The Man with the Golden Gun (1965), where Bond fails to conceal his pleasure at M’s commendation (196). For Fleming’s Bond, nobody does it better than M.
Fleming’s novels and the early films are not far removed from each other: the first film, 1962’s
Dr. No, adapted Fleming’s 1958 novel, and the next three films were based on books published in 1957 (
From Russia, with Love), 1959 (
Goldfinger), and 1961 (
Thunderball). However, in bringing Fleming’s 1950s spy to 1960s screens, producers felt the need to reconstitute this relationship by placing some ironic distance between Bond and his boss. In the films, Bond’s meetings with his superior have largely been comic scenes whose function is to distance 007, the “hero of modernisation” (Bennett and Woollacott,
Bond 19), from the office-bound establishment man who sends him on his missions. The basic pattern was set in
Dr. No: in the outer office, Bond is flirtatious with Miss Moneypenny, M’s secretary, who is complicit in the game. Their playful moment is interrupted by a buzzer and signal light above the leather-covered door, an abrupt summons into M’s (Bernard Lee) inner sanctum. From the start, M’s tone is marked by a rudeness apparently licensed by his authority. Bond stands before his superior’s desk until he is told to sit. M replies to Bond’s polite “Good evening, sir,” with a brusque “It happens to be 3:00 a.m.,” never looking up from some important bit of paper on which he is scribbling. In the space of minutes, M outlines the situation and informs Bond that he is booked on the next plane to Kingston at 7:00 a.m. Throughout the encounter, M’s tone is authoritarian: he speaks in imperatives—“Take off your jacket. Give me your gun”—and feels no need to introduce a third man who enters carrying a new gun, a Walther PPK, which Bond does not want, but which M requires him to take in place of his preferred Beretta. When he is dismissed by M, Bond quietly retrieves his old gun, only to have his attempt thwarted by M—who, again, does not bother to look up as he calmly reasserts his authority. Back in Moneypenny’s office, Bond opens his mouth to continue their flirtation, only to be silenced by the apparently omniscient M, who calls through on the intercom instructing her to “forget the usual repartee.” In a final rebellious gesture before he departs, Bond hands the unwanted Walther to Moneypenny and bids her “
ciao.”
Dr. No introduces a comic quality to the Bond/M encounter that becomes more prevalent over time. Connery’s Bond is careful to appear respectful of M’s authority, but he is inwardly playfully rebellious against it. The generational difference between the two men is emphasized, and viewers are invited to view that difference through the ironic perspective of the younger man, Bond, along with his co-conspirator, Moneypenny. By Live and Let Die (Guy Hamilton 1973), this comedy has come fully into view. Here, the initial meeting between Bond (Roger Moore) and M (Bernard Lee) unfolds as bedroom farce, with M arriving unannounced at Bond’s apartment in the early morning, prompting Moneypenny to collude with 007 to spare M a vision of Bond’s naked female companion—which might, presumably, finish the old fellow off. The scene flirts with the broad humor of Carry On Spying (Gerald Thomas 1964) or The Benny Hill Show (1955-89), and the joke unfolds at the expense of M and his implicitly delicate, Victorian sensibilities.
The defiance in these encounters between the government agent and his spymaster amplifies the insistent, heroic individuality of the literary 007, a quality that reveals something of the anachronistic nature of Fleming’s portrait of a Cold War spy. As many have observed, Bond is something of a throwback to the early twentieth century world of the imperial thriller, a figure reminiscent of John Buchan’s Richard Hannay or Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond. Michael Denning and others have noted that the imperial thriller had its roots in the imperial adventure stories of the later nineteenth century, and it carried on the heroic tradition of those ripping yarns, featuring a lone man or an intrepid band of male adventurers whose secret doings change the course of history. In his study of the British spy thriller, Denning locates this recurring narrative pattern in a broad historical context. Borrowing from Georg Lukács’ account of the modernist novel, Denning suggests that the spy novel offers a magical solution to our sense as individuals that we are enveloped by historical forces too great to control or even comprehend. The spy becomes “the link between the actions of an individual […] and the world historical fate of nations and empires […] The secret
agent returns human
agency to a world which seems less and less the product of human action” (
Cover 14).
2 At the same time, “an incomprehensible political situation” is re-imagined in terms of “the ethical categories of masculine romance, the battle of hero and villain becoming one between Good and Evil, the forces of light and the forces of darkness” (14). The Bond mythos is rooted in the tradition of masculine romance. From time to time, Fleming explicitly equates his hero with England’s dragon-slaying knight, St. George and the irony that is usually present at those moments does not quite undo the comparison. Bond battles monsters (Blofeld, Dr. No, Goldfinger) at nearly impossible odds, and he always wins.
However, Denning’s yoking of the secret agent to the notion of “agency” also brings to light the potentially self-contradictory meaning of the word “agent.” An agent may be an efficient cause, a prime mover, a significant and autonomous force in the world; this is clearly what Richard Hannay and his companions are, as is Bond in the guise of St. George. However, an agent may also be someone who acts on another’s behalf (“agent” n.p.)—as a deputy, emissary or instrument of an absent figure who is the true bearer of power and authority, such as a real-estate agent, for instance. In short, the word “agent” may connote both autonomy as well as its effective opposite, instrumentality. For all his masculine heroics, even 007 cannot be entirely isolated from this threat of instrumentality—he is, after all, not only a secret agent, but a secret servant.
During a tense face-to-face encounter in
Casino Royale (Martin Campbell 2006), M (Judi Dench) refers disparagingly to 007 (Daniel Craig) as “a blunt instrument,” attempting to bring the unruly 007 to heel by emphasizing her authority over him. This phrase belongs to Fleming and points toward the author’s own divided conception of his famous spy. Andrew Lycett suggests that Fleming had “not worked out whether Bond was a ‘blunt instrument’, as he had often claimed, or a mythical hero” (402). Fleming also described his intention to create “an ordinary character to whom extraordinary things happen,” rather than “a paragon or a freak. I wanted him to be an entirely anonymous instrument and let the action of the book carry him along” (qtd. in Fishman 13). It is not surprising, then, that metaphors suggesting the instrumentality of her Majesty’s secret servant recur in Fleming’s novels. In the climactic scene of
You Only Live Twice (1964), Bond’s arch-enemy Blofeld taunts him with the accusation that he is “a common thug, a blunt instrument wielded by dolts in high places” (246). Related passages from other novels indicate that Blofeld’s insult is not entirely unfounded. In
The Man with the Golden Gun (1965), M thinks, “James Bond, if aimed straight at a known target […] was a supremely effective firing piece” (26). Earlier, in
From Russia, with Love, Fleming’s narrator describes M’s telephone summons as “the signal that had fired him, like a loaded projectile, across the world to some distant target of M’s choosing” (134). The phallic simile is particularly apt in this case, since Bond is about to be dispatched to Istanbul “to pimp for England” (148)—this is his own sardonic description of his assignment, which involves seducing and escorting a Russian agent who has supposedly fallen in love with him and is willing to turn over a coveted Soviet cypher machine if Bond accompanies her. It is clearly M who is in possession of the phallus here—he is the big gun who fires the projectile Bond across the world. As if to underscore the point, as Bond departs, M remarks, “It’s up to you to see that you
do come up to her expectations” (143). Bond is a hero of romance, certainly, but his individual agency is always under pressure from the state authority that directs and licenses his actions, an authority represented throughout the series by M.
This phallic contest, which structures both the novels and the films, becomes complicated with the arrival of a woman, Dame Judi Dench, in the role of M beginning with 1995’s GoldenEye. Dench enters the revived franchise—on hiatus since 1989 and also featuring a new actor, Pierce Brosnan, in the lead role—unable to fit into the established masculine dynamic in any of its forms (father/son, headmaster/schoolboy) and threatening to loosen state authority from its familiar, masculine moorings. Initially hostile to the sexist ethos that has always been a defining feature of the series, Dench’s M is a new figure of modernization and feminist critique whose presence reveals an attempt to accomplish a very difficult end: to balance continuity with change and secure a place for credible female authority within the insistently masculine mythos of Bond.
At the time of GoldenEye’s release, much was made of the casting of a woman, and a highly regarded actor, in the role of Bond’s superior, and the filmmakers followed through with a deeply ambivalent attempt to address some well-founded feminist concerns, most notably by having Dench’s M blast Bond as a “sexist, misogynist dinosaur” in their first private meeting. GoldenEye’s explicit condemnation of Bond’s sexism is one of several features intended to bring the franchise into a more comfortable alignment with the contemporary world. The film self-consciously looks backward to the series’ history, while also stressing its own novelty and currency. It begins in familiar territory with an expected cold opening, but the scene’s spectacular quality signals the filmmakers’ acknowledgment that the action-film game has intensified in the six years since Licence to Kill was released: Bond bungee-jumps his way into a Soviet chemical weapons facility, causes some impressive mayhem, and makes an impossible mid-air leap from a motorcycle to an airplane en route back to England.
A cluster of early scenes suggests a new interest in turning a critical eye on the series’ uneasy relationship with feminism, but the resulting message is mixed at best. In the sequence immediately following the credits, Bond, behind the wheel of an Aston Martin DB5, tells a woman sent to evaluate him that he has “no problem with female authority,” but his words are heavily ironic, and there is little indication that her authority poses any challenge to his own. Her evaluation of him gives way to his seduction of her: “James, you’re incorrigible. What am I going to do with you?” Variations on this question have been posed repeatedly in the series, and the answer is well known. Arguably more interesting, in terms of this ambivalent attempt at feminist critique, is a conversation between Bond and Moneypenny, where their anticipated flirtation takes an unaccustomed turn—into a joking suggestion by Moneypenny that Bond’s conduct “could qualify as sexual harassment.” The remark is unmistakably ironic: the penalty, she adds, is that “someday you have to make good on your innuendoes.” Still, the phrase is a remarkable one to hear in a Bond film, an indication, Tara Brabazon suggests, that “the power imbalance between them is narrowing” (494). Perhaps less cause for optimism is afforded, however, by the “playful” workplace harassment perpetrated by the considerably less suave Boris Grishenko on Natalya Simonova. The two are computer programmers at an isolated Russian space weapons control center whose relationship is characterized by adolescent, sexist pranks and comments on his part, and a mixture of patient indulgence and mild irritation on hers.
The introduction of Dench’s M follows these scenes, which serve to establish a context of feminist critique, however partial—but the explicit critique voiced by M herself is also muddled in that it cannot be extricated from the film’s ambivalent representation of other striking manifestations of change that invite a mixed—or openly negative—response. Of all the film’s innovations, surely the casting of a woman as Bond’s superior is the most dramatic, and its strongest claim to having embraced, if only tentatively, a more progressive stance with respect to women. When Russian gangster Valentin Zukovsky taunts Bond, he suggests that, in the modern world, 007 is an anachronism and the British Secret Service is poised somewhere between irrelevance and absurdity—adding, to his minions’ amusement, “I hear the new M is a lady.” Turning a spotlight on her gender, Zukovsky implies that the eccentricity of a “lady” M is symptomatic of a more general malaise at MI6, and his view is shared to a significant degree by Bond himself. Significantly, though, M’s newness resides not only in her being a woman, but in her being a representative of the increasing bureaucratization of the secret service, in which clueless desk-jockeys now wield authority over knowledgeable and competent field agents such as 007. Paul Stock contends that the introduction of Dench is arguably less remarkable for the fact of her being a woman than for the character’s make-over into “the evil queen of numbers,” a bean-counting bureaucrat no longer bound in any obvious way to the pre-war world of the Empire. Gone is the old imperial flavor of “Universal Exports”; in its place is the new, hyper-modern SIS headquarters at Vauxhall Cross. Where M’s office had always been a miniature naval museum—“a cluttered antique shop, and heart of Empire” (226), in Stock’s words—it is now anonymously modern. “The Admiral,” he concludes, “[has] been replaced by an accountant” (226).
Owing to M’s close association with a new order of accountancy, statistics, and inexpert “experts,” the obvious hostility that greets her in her introductory scenes cannot be attributed exclusively, or even primarily, to her being a woman in a position of authority in the traditionally male-dominated world of espionage and counter-terrorism. What might otherwise be read as mere antifeminist resentment is instead mingled with a resistance to a dangerous, creeping bureaucratization. The first encounter between Brosnan’s Bond and Dench’s M bears some similarity to that of Connery’s and Lee’s in
Dr. No in its pairing of an annoyed, older authority figure with a subordinate who is not entirely so. However, the differences, beginning with M’s gender, are noteworthy: the encounter takes place not in M’s private office but in an MI6 situation room whose other occupants, save one woman glimpsed briefly in the back of one shot, are male, and M must face the barely submerged disapproval of not one man but a like-minded pair, Bond and Bill Tanner, while other men in the room listen with clear interest. Also, M, though officially at the helm, is new on the job, not yet well established, and associated with a suspect new order at MI6 of which neither of these seasoned agents approves. The narrative form undermines her as well: her entrance into the film is cued by Tanner’s disparaging reference not only to “the evil Queen of numbers,” but also to her having misjudged in not allowing Bond to play a “hunch” that turned out to be correct. She enters the room as Tanner speaks, out of clear view, and is revealed to Tanner and the film’s viewers at the same moment, when Bond’s subtle throat-clearing provides a late warning as to her presence—so the audience is invited to share with Bond some pleasure in the embarrassing moment. The one person left out of the conspiratorial circle is the stone-faced M. Tanner, slightly disheveled, his collar open and tie askew, looks like a discomfited schoolboy, and the dialogue casts him as such and her as the humorless teacher who has overheard what the children say when she steps out of the classroom: “You were saying?” is Dench’s inauspicious first line of dialogue as M. Tanner sputters an incoherent reply, to which M responds, “Good, because if I want sarcasm, Mister Tanner, I’ll talk to my children, thank you very much.” This is authority, but of the sort that demands obedience in the absence of respect.
The antipathy that marks Bond’s exchanges with M is barely suppressed in this first scene and erupts during their private conversation shortly thereafter. M voices both Bond’s objection to her—that she is “an accountant, a bean-counter, more interested in my numbers than your instincts”—and hers to him: that he is, among other things, a “sexist, misogynist dinosaur.” Her accusation asserts a hitherto unspoken feminist interpretation of the hostile atmosphere surrounding her at MI6, shifting attention from her offending association with “numbers” to the specifically gendered nature of the epithet “evil queen.” While there is much evidence to support her interpretation, though, it is not one that the film itself is keen to sustain. After all, he is James Bond; his hunches are proved correct and her statistical analyses are not. A simple camera movement in their first scene together subtly but clearly indicates the film’s affirmation of Bond as the necessary masculine hero in a troubled world, regardless of developments in either feminism or statistical analysis: as GoldenEye’s electro-magnetic pulse is released and the surveillance screen goes blank, a shallow-focus close-up of M’s concerned face gives way, via a pan right and an upward tilt that gradually moves her down and out of the frame, to a close-up of Bond, front and center. The diagonal movement is necessitated by Brosnan’s greater stature, but it also conveys Bond’s greater importance in the world of the film. Having registered her complaint, M bows out after these two scenes. The battle and the victory will be his, and the reward—in the form of another Bond girl, Natalya Simonova—will confirm once again that the “boyish charm” disdained by M is better appreciated by younger women.
Dench’s role in GoldenEye as the new M—the “lady” M—is a thankless one that carries the burden of innovation in a series with over three decades’ worth of beloved tradition. Brosnan was, of course, every bit as new to the series as Dench at the time of the film’s release, but he wears the tuxedoes, wields the weapons, and espouses the traditional values of masculine heroism with an ease that she cannot match in her performance of her role. The M template is less accommodating to her than the Bond one is to him. Where Brosnan can prompt memories of his precursors, from Connery through Dalton, the unsmiling M recalls less favorable figures from the past: the aberrant female villains Rosa Klebb and Irma Bunt. Lisa Funnell’s description of those characters as “short, stocky, middle-aged white women who are conservatively dressed and appear androgynous in their films,” with their hair “cut short to emphasize age over aesthetics” (“Negotiating” 203) might well be applied to Dench’s M in her debut.
Fortunately, none of Dench’s six subsequent appearances in the series cast her quite so firmly in the trying role of the standard-bearer for innovation. The Bond/M tension remains, as it must, but her second film, Tomorrow Never Dies (Roger Spottiswoode 1997), aligned her more closely with 007 in opposition to the clueless button-pushers, represented in this film by Admiral Roebuck, and that pattern has generally repeated since. When the series was effectively restarted in 2006 with Casino Royale, Dench’s M became the primary link between the old continuity and the new, and our first sight of her in that film is of a furious woman storming through the tall doorway of an elegant “Committee Room” in Whitehall where some unnamed committee (“a bunch of self-righteous, arse-covering prigs,” as M describes them) has apparently hauled her onto the carpet because one of her agents, Bond (Daniel Craig), has just killed a man and set off an explosion in a foreign embassy. Dench’s final film in the series, Skyfall (Sam Mendes 2012) is nearly as much hers as it is Craig’s, and it presents her as a venerable figure of authority—not only respected, but loved, especially by Bond, now explicitly cast in the role of surrogate son. This maternal role—embodying a wholly feminine form of authority—is paired with those of unlikely action hero, as she finds herself in the midst of one fire fight after another, and also spokesperson for the nation, as she delivers an eloquent defense of the shadowy work of the SIS in a post-imperial England. An odd little table ornament, a Royal Doulton bulldog draped in the Union flag, is the emblem of Churchillian resolve she bequeaths to Bond after her death, and which he recognizes as her directive to keep calm and carry on.
If the promises of this most recent film are kept, he will carry on in a world that has restored many of the familiar landmarks jettisoned from the past few entries in the series, including Q and Moneypenny, who begins the film at Bond’s side as a field agent and ends it situated behind a secretarial desk outside the office of the new M, Gareth Mallory. The adjoining door, with its leather padding, is immediately recognizable as a replica of the one Sean Connery and subsequent Bonds walked through en route to the old-fashioned, masculine sanctum of M prior to the innovations of
GoldenEye— and that office has also been carefully restored, down to the wall sconces, fireplace, floor globe, and a naval painting that recalls Trafalgar and Britain’s days as a great world power. Outside the story world, Bond’s accentuated use of the title “M” in the film’s final moment is a revelation; within that world, it signals his warm acceptance of his new superior, a former SAS man still sporting an arm sling after being hit by a bullet while trying to protect his predecessor. The film’s penultimate shot depicts the two men standing, facing each other across M’s old-fashioned wooden desk with the old naval painting clearly visible in the background. After some brief, friendly banter that brings a rare smile to Bond’s face, M turns to business, dropping a folder marked “top secret” on the desk as he says, “So, 007, lots to be done. Are you ready to go back to work?” Bond replies, his face now conveying a respectful seriousness, “With pleasure…M. With pleasure,” as the familiar 007 theme introduces the end credits. The moment could not be more different from the initial encounters between Brosnan’s Bond and Dench’s M in
GoldenEye. Rather, the tone is reminiscent of a Fleming portrait of the spy with his spymaster: “M gave one of the rare smiles that lit up his face with quick brightness and warmth. Bond smiled back. They understood the things that had to be left unsaid” (
Moonraker 242). Among the things left unsaid in the final scene of
Skyfall is that it marks the end of an extended experiment testing the possibility of a woman exercising authority over a man whose exploits embody a valued fantasy of masculine heroism and autonomy. The gradual revelations of these final scenes, capped by Bond’s identifying his new, male superior as “M” in the film’s final line, have the effect of bringing us back to a treasured, familiar, and unequivocally masculine place.
NOTES