The Tragedy of The World Is Not Enough: Shakespeare and a Sewer of Misogyny

by 007hertzrumble | Mar 25, 2014 | #Bond_age_ Project, The World Is Not Enough

This is the 19th essay in a 24-part series about the James Bond cinemas co-created by Sundog Lit. I encourage everyone to read the other essays, comment and join in on the conversation about not only the films themselves, but cinematic trends, political and other external influences on the series’ tone and direction.

Of [In]human #Bond_age_ #19: The Tragedy of The World Is Not Enough: Shakespeare and a Sewer of Misogyny

by James David Patrick

“Something is very wrong with the way American women are trying to live their lives today… [T]he problems and satisfaction of their lives, mine, and the way our education has contributed to them, simply did not fit the image of the modern American woman as she was written about in women’s magazines, studies and analyzed in classrooms and clinics, praised and damned in a ceaseless barrage of words ever since the end of World War Two. There was a strange discrepancy between the reality of our lives as women and the image to which we were trying to conform, the image that I came to call the feminine mystique.”

-Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

“There’s daggers in men’s smiles.”

-William Shakespeare, Macbeth Act II, Sc. III

There’s a temptation to reduce The World Is Not Enough and Die Another Day into one ghastly entity, a turn of the century mistake. I even considered distilling both films into one entry in the #Bond_age_ essay project, focusing on how pandering to the audience through nostalgia and cinematic shorthand can go ever so horribly wrong. I thought this would save sanity. Doing so, however, would be a disservice to TWINE and a marginalization of the DAD’s scourge of terror. First of all, I owe myself a full essay to vent my frustrations, to detail the ways in which Die Another Day curdles the entire Brosnan era and tarnishes Bond for a whole generation of fans. Second, in order to fully appreciate (and perhaps loathe) the ways in which The World Is Not Enough both uses and abuses the Bond formula, we must use a scalpel to peel back the layers of rabble and hyperbole and cut right to the gooey innards. Only then can we dissect what makes that movie tick, what makes it at once more interesting and more loathsome than the average mid- (or bottom-) tier Bond movie.

I first confronted the issue of feminism in James Bond in my discussion about the rape of Pussy Galore in Goldfinger. Ultimately I concluded that the treatment of Pussy Galore was born out of the confused sexual politics of the early 1960’s and the Bond filmmakers’ need to up the titillation factor with each successive Bond film. Again, I stress this does not excuse the questionable abuse, merely provide context and history that could produce a narrative miscalculation, a miscalculation that appears to our eyes brutish and Cro-Magnon. In the 48 years since Goldfinger, the James Bond series has received more than its share of criticism for the treatment and hypersexualization of women, some of it fair, some of it shortsighted and cribbed from hearsay and reputation.

Women threw themselves at Connery after merely a glance, even when they played pro-active roles in the drama. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service remains an outlier – Bond giving himself wholly to a strong, independent woman who also happens to save his skin. Moore had to work (slightly) harder at his womanizing – a quip and a seductive eyebrow. During the Moore years, the series even attempted to place a few of Bond’s female counterparts as de facto equals, in between the 1970’s serial bimboism, of course. Bond became a one-woman (per movie) monogamist during the Dalton years, a direct result of the newly widespread fear of AIDS. GoldenEye presented a mission statement on the ways women would be treated in the Brosnan years – strong, independent, occasionally in-charge, and skeptical of James Bond’s charms. Flash forward four years to The World Is Not Enough and the certainty of this thesis becomes murky and confused, like the enveloping darkness of the facepalm through which you’re forced to watch every line spoken by Dr. Christmas Jones. (more…)