For His Eyes Only: The Women of James Bond

The casting of Judi Dench as M, the high-ranking government official and administrative Head of MI6, in the Bond franchise helped revise the character; M shifted away from the curt, cold, and crusty admiral of Ian Fleming’s original novels, played by Bernard Lee and Robert Brown in the official Eon films, and was presented as an explicitly maternal figure. A successful stage actress, but with few cinema credits, Dench was the first female performer to be cast as Bond’s institutional authority, upturning the male-dominated tradition by grafting new familial dynamics onto the hitherto all-male Bond-M relation. Tony Garland observes that in Dench’s debut in GoldenEye (Martin Campbell 1995), “M combines condemnation that extends beyond the criticism of a senior manager with an almost maternal concern: after telling Bond she has no compunction to send him to his death, she tells him to come back alive” (184-5). The matriarchal coding of M consolidated throughout the Pierce Brosnan era (1995-2002) has accelerated since the Irish actor’s departure from the role. The reboot of the Bond franchise with Casino Royale (Martin Campbell 2006) has continued to spotlight the maternal vicissitudes of the Bond-M relationship. Since Daniel Craig inherited the role of Bond, 007 has emerged as a greater conduit through which the maternal qualities of M have been rendered visible. As a result, M lives up to “the connotations associated with her initial M, [and] has officially become Bond’s mother” (Savoye 55).

With Dench being the only cast member carried over from the Brosnan era, M has been envisaged through an increasingly maternal lens across this contemporary revisionist Bond period, perhaps prompted by the greater age gap between Dench and Craig (34 years) than the actress shared with Brosnan (19 years) during his tenure. The increased agency and mobility of M across the Craig era films has further contributed to her textual figuration as a surrogate mother to Bond. Paul Stock argues that in Bernard Lee’s portrayal of the character, for example, M “seldom leaves” the confines of the office in his defense of the boundaries of the nation (217). Being relocated away from the secure, stable office space diminishes ex-admiral M’s authority and ability to successfully participate in the preservation of the Empire. In comparison, Dench’s M is rarely protected by the leather-padded, soundproofed door behind which lies the “administrative core of the British secret service” (Stock 215). In Casino Royale, and again in Quantum of Solace (Marc Forster 2008), it is Bond’s unsanctioned access into M’s private sphere and their verbal jousting away from the office space that provides a glimpse into his female boss’s domestic milieu. Increasingly marked by her home space, Dench’s M has been repeatedly associated with the trappings of domesticity. Glimpsed in her nightgown and shown sleeping alongside her husband, it is Craig’s second outing as 007, Quantum of Solace, that most forcefully awards spectators unprecedented admittance into M’s “motherliness.”

The more substantial engagement in the Craig era with M’s home space (not seen since On Her Majesty’s Secret Service [Peter Hunt 1969]) counterpoints to the fleeting glimpses of Bond’s own domestic context across the franchise. Yet the increasingly frequent visits to M’s home by Craig’s Bond also recall those moments whereby M has interfered into Bond’s personal sphere, not least M’s nocturnal house-call to 007’s flat in Live and Let Die (Guy Hamilton 1973) that inadvertently catches Bond in a romantic tryst. But in both Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, it is now Bond who actively collapses the distinction between domestic and administrative spaces in ways that strengthen Bond-M’s familial dynamic. Discussing Bond’s infiltration of M’s modern penthouse in Casino Royale, Katharine Cox notes that “Like a mother, she scolds him for his arrogance and immaturity, and chastises him for flaunting the boundaries of the relationship” (6). If M’s intervention into Bond’s personal space cements his fatherly relationship to Bond, then it is the reverse intrusion of Bond into M’s home in the more recent Craig era films that renders her connection to Bond as increasingly motherly.

The plotting of the Bond-M relationship from professional to familial has, however, gained particular momentum in Skyfall (Sam Mendes 2012), a film that relocates the orphaned 007 to the center of such mounting (M)otherly attitudes. Not only does Bond once more intrude into M’s domestic realm, but he also actively brings her to his childhood home, the eponymous Skyfall Lodge. The narrative of Skyfall leans heavily on Bond’s origin story, with a pronounced emphasis on 007’s lack of biological parents as the film recalls the events leading up to Bond being orphaned. The stress placed upon Bond’s ancestry allows the film to further develop the Bond-M relationship in son/mother terms, as M is strongly positioned as his adoptive mother. M becomes symbolically rooted within Bond’s personal history; she is associated both with his deceased mother, another “M”—Monique Delacroix—and father, whose identity, like the Head of M16, is manifest through initials—A.B. Yet Bond is not the only character in Skyfall who lays claim to M as his mother, as she is subject to the threats, matricidal in nature and tone, of ex-MI6 agent Raoul Silva. Silva refers to M as “Mummy” and “Mother” throughout the film, and he competes with Bond like a jealous brother for the attentions and affections of their surrogate mother.

While M is increasingly presented as a maternal figure, her character is far more multifaceted and complex. This chapter aims to interrogate the Bond-M relationship by exploring how M also functions as a Bond Girl in the Craig era films. Central to the ideology of the series, the Bond Girl character type has been strikingly absent, or at least notably decentered, in the reboot trilogy, as Casino Royale focuses predominantly on the early career of Bond and the acquisition of his double-O status. But Skyfall’s portrayal of M seems to evoke Umberto Eco’s structuralist analysis of Bond women in Fleming’s novels, where the narratives end as 007 “rests from his great efforts in the arms of the woman, though he is destined to lose her” (qtd. in Bondanella 63). This chapter argues that the narrative agency and formal presentation of M throughout Skyfall develops her affiliation with Bond in a manner traditionally reserved for 007’s female conquests, in particular the secret agent’s ill-fated monogamous relationships with the Bond Girl and especially Tracy di Vicenzo (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) and Vesper Lynd (Casino Royale). Skyfall cues a terminal exchange of M’s characteristics (dominant, knowledgeable, moderated, recurring) with several Bond Girl qualities (dominated by villain, rescued, possessed, transient). M’s alignment with the Bond Girl archetype ultimately works to overwhelm her matriarchal coding, conflating and collapsing the Bond-M and Bond-Women relationships that Eco argues structure the Bond narratives. It is this irresolvable tension between M’s maternal weight and her iconography as “lover” that instigates the character’s demise in Skyfall, and marks the culmination of Dench’s seven films and 17 years in the role.

M AS “ENGLISH PARTNER”

Framed by the shifting cultural attitudes towards women and sex, contemporary Bond films have been enlivened by a cycle of increasingly progressive female protagonists. Jeremy Black acknowledges how “the women in the recent films have been achievers, rather than the emotional victims of the novels,” adding that there is a “wider sense that attitudes to the role and position of women had changed” (160). Despite Vesper Lynd’s accusation that Bond merely views women “as disposable pleasures rather than meaningful pursuits” in Casino Royale, the franchise has paired him with visibly empowered allies as the series has progressed.

In their examination of gender in series, Colleen M. Tremonte and Linda Racioppi argue that the presence of Dench’s M is foundational to this pantheon of new Bond femininity as the series maneuvers away from discourses of misogyny and chauvinism (195-6). They discuss the characterization of Bond Girls Natalya Simonova in GoldenEye, Wai Lin in Tomorrow Never Dies (Roger Spottiswoode 1997), Christmas Jones in The World is Not Enough (Michael Apted 1999) and Jinx in Die Another Day (Lee Tamahori 2002) directly in relation to M: like M, each of these women “possesses official or professional capabilities that not only help Bond defeat the enemy but that reflect contemporary gender politics” (ibid. 187). Tremonte and Racioppi identify a connection between Dench’s M and the Bond Girl archetype developed in the Brosnan era, a blueprint founded on M’s service as a government agent (in the mold of Lin and Jinx) and a sustained techno-literacy (shared by Simonova, Lin and Jones).

The revisionist trilogy—Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, and Skyfall—reintroduces, reworks, and at times even conflates many of the generic Bond conventions, not least within the mobilization of familiar Bondian identities. In her examination of Casino Royale, Lisa Funnell notes a displacement of the Bond Girl as the locus of “visual spectacle,” arguing that the muscular body of Craig’s Bond becomes the object of desire implicated firmly within a scopic regime usually reserved for Bond’s heterosexual desires (“I Know” 456). Cox has similarly elaborated on what she sees as the merging of Bond with Bond Girl iconography, spotlighting Casino Royale’s “mannish women and womanish men” (8). She argues “it is Bond’s physique that is being viewed and evaluated, at the expense of the Bond ‘girl’” (9). Such feminization of a heroic male taps into the lack of a “hegemonic masculinity,” and the pluralizing of male identities, within a contemporary postfeminist culture, which manifest in a Bond franchise shaping 007 to be polysemous in his gender signifiers (Hamad 1).

Within the self-enclosed world of the Bond series, however, M’s occupation of Bond Girl territory brings into relief how character signifiers are altogether more shifting and shifty in Craig-era Bond. M represents another merging of typical Bondian roles, and the conflation between traditional Bond characters (in this case the heroic ally and romantic interest). Indeed, the characterization of M in Skyfall is heavily informed by Bond Girl iconography. M is located squarely at the center of the narrative as Bond’s primary female relationship. Bond does not develop a deep emotional attachment to any of the women who appear sporadically throughout the film: an unnamed sexual conquest who appears briefly on screen, Severine who dies at the hands of Silva midway through the film, and Moneypenny who disappears from the narrative for prolonged periods of time. In Skyfall, then, it appears as though many of the Bond Girl characteristics, which have been fragmented and redistributed in the Craig era, have been (re)assigned to the figure of M. If, as Funnell argues, the Bond Girl is defined by the deep and intimate relationship she develops with Bond (“From English” 63), then M (and not these other women) is positioned as the Bond Girl of the film.

The emergent status of M as a potential hybrid figuration of Mother and Bond Girl is further borne out by Funnell’s analysis charting the trajectory in representations of Bond Girls. Funnell argues that Bond Girls first emerged under the guise of the Anglicized sidekick role or “English Partner,” a character type closely allied to the franchise’s roots as a British imperialist spy thriller (“From English” 63). Running contrary to the discourses of international diversity that generically marks the exoticism of the Bond Girl archetype, Funnell promotes a model of Bond femininity that, through particular casting choices and dubbing practices, align early Bond Girl(s) “with English culture and present her as an English protagonist working alongside Bond” (ibid. 64-6). This template of the “English Partner” prevailed during the Connery and Lazenby eras (1962-69), before it gave way to the “American Sidekick” period of Connery, Moore and Dalton (1971-89) and the “American Action Hero” (1995-2002) phase of the Brosnan era, embodied by women who match Bond intellectually and physically (ibid. 77). The partnering of Craig with Dench in Skyfall evokes something of the British “male-female team” that inaugurated the Bond franchise, serving to re-establish an English national and cultural identity between Bond and his Bond Girl.

Skyfall certainly taps into the mythology of Britishness typically surrounding 007, demonstrating a strong patriotic allegiance as it negotiates its own home-grown British identity. At several junctures, the film regularly trades on the reproducible and culturally familiar iconography of a London hitherto unseen in the franchise, from governmental Whitehall and the Houses of Parliament to the interior of the National Gallery on the North-West side of Trafalgar Square for the Bond-Q exchange. Yet it is ultimately M’s Britishness, rather than that of Bond, which is most at stake in Skyfall, in a manner that reinforces the view of M as Bond’s “English Partner.” Indeed, part of Silva’s cyber-terrorist plot involves co-opting M into the Queen Mother: an image that intertextually references Dench’s earlier screen roles as the head of sovereign state in Mrs. Brown (John Madden 1997) and Shakespeare in Love (John Madden 1998). M’s pervasive “Britishness” in Skyfall is further registered through two complementary sequences involving the Union Jack flag, whose appearances play across the poles of life and death. First, as M stands solemnly over the bodies of those killed in the explosion at MI6, a row of flags are draped over the coffins in what is a macabre portrayal of the character’s associations with nationhood. Second, the Union Jack forms part of the decorative design of the porcelain bulldog, a keepsake that resides on M’s office desk but which is ultimately bequeathed to Bond by M following her death. A symbol of the dogged determination of Britons during World War II, the porcelain dog was manufactured by the notable English pottery company, Royal Doulton. The durability of the figurine, as it is passed from M to Bond via Moneypenny against the sun-drenched London skyline, works to reconcile M as Bond’s “English Partner” through their shared association to the nation. So just as Bond travels with M “back in time” to Skyfall Lodge in his Aston Martin DB5 (introduced in Goldfinger [Guy Hamilton 1964]), the film’s portrayal of M maps out the Bond Girl’s own origin story too, and transports the franchise back to its own English roots.

“THE BITCH IS DEAD.” TRANSIENCE, ROMANCE AND THE FINAL CLINCH