For His Eyes Only Part 2

From Russia with Love emerged in a contemporaneous context of hope and fear, Western glamor and political violence. This particular Fleming novel became attached to the excitement of the Kennedys, not just because of the imprimatur that President John F. Kennedy gave it after he declared it to be one of his favorite books (Rubin 35). Its youthful, optimistic, s.e.xy, cosmopolitan tone fit in well with the Camelot glamor; one newspaper columnist even compared the scene in the opening of the book depicting a "naked man [...] splayed out on his face beside the swimming pool" with some recent "swimming pool escapes" of Bobby Kennedy (Miller, "Letter" 6). Fear reemerged when the president was a.s.sa.s.sinated soon after the film's US release and it was discovered that Lee Harvey Oswald liked this novel too and had checked it out from a New Orleans public library in the summer of 1962 ("Oswald" 1; Powledge 21).

But the self-affirming trope of the beautiful, fas.h.i.+onable, and consumerist (read: Western) Soviet woman proved potent and the phrase "from Russia with love" stuck and tantalized that desire, and not just fears, could emanate from the Soviet Union. This was soon affirmed with a Playboy expose, "The Girls of Russia and the Iron Curtain Countries," in March 1964. Not simply a photo spread, the article offered advice on traveling behind the iron curtain to find beautiful women, with tips on where to meet them and how to find prost.i.tutes. The country apparently now brimmed with various "chickniks" who offered "soft, yielding womanliness," with none of the pesky drawbacks of Western women such as "the edgy compet.i.tiveness of their American career-girl sisters" ("The Girls" 116). Also, there was no reason to be put off by their occasional manly occupations: The image of the husky Stakhanovite la.s.s who could drive a tractor as well as any man is fading fast in the U.S.S.R. Not because girls don't drive tractors anymore, but because today the inroads of make-up, perfume, beauty parlors, and uplift bras can be seen-and-appreciated-everywhere. (ibid. 116) The work might be "unfeminine" but the women were not; the article stresses the traditional advantages of such women, echoing the paternalism that the films embedded into the discourse: "These girls may handle a rivet or a shovel all day, but when they look up meltingly into a man's eyes, there's no doubt as to who they think is the most" (ibid.). Plus, the country offered free, legal state abortions, letting men off the hook in case s.e.xual contact occurred and pregnancy ensued.

The phrase "from Russia with love" was attached to various campaigns, some by the Soviets, especially surprising given the attack on Bond novels from communist countries (Lenoir BR56). The vodka Stolichnaya was introduced to Americans in 1965 with the advertising slogan, "From Russia with Ice" ("From Russia" 4). The Soviet amba.s.sador to the United Nations, Nikolai Fedorenko, brought love from Russia too by slinging the phrase on the Merv Griffin Show and at a gala reception for the U.N.'s 20th anniversary in San Francisco (Teltsch 8, Grant 172). Many performers recorded the theme song in 1964 and 1965, including Jane Morgan, the Village Stompers, Matt Monroe, Ray Martin and His Orchestra, and the Roland Shaw Orchestra. Christian Dior created a "From Russia with Love" theater coat, "pre-Revolution inspired" ("Fall Fas.h.i.+on" 6) and from Lowell, Ma.s.sachusetts to Kingsport, Tennessee organizers promoted fas.h.i.+on shows with the phrase: no "shabby manginess" here ("'In' Fas.h.i.+ons" 2d; "The Young Generation" 2). Most bizarrely, papers pushed a recipe for a "From Russia with Love" dip-the chili sauce made it red-along with other suggestions for a teen spy party such as "goldfingers" and "Fort Knox punch" ("Teen Spy Party" 11, "This Party" 5).

Although pleasing images of desirable bodies helped to erode Cold War Manichaeism and at the same time buffered patriarchy, they worked on a terrain that still gave great advantage to the West, as the tasty vodka and fas.h.i.+onable coats made clear. By reconstructing the Soviet woman from a mannish drudge to a Western consumerist beauty, fictions like From Russia, with Love focused on desires that could best be fulfilled by capitalism. Even the one Russian consumer good that entered the US, vodka, acknowledged this. Back home it was a Russian staple, as common as black bread; in the pull of the rich American market it was transformed into a highly desirable consumer good-a luxury item, "something of a status symbol," priced considerably higher than domestic vodka ("From Russia" 4). In addition, the new Soviet woman was not simply a literary trope; the Soviet Union was changing and devoting more resources to fas.h.i.+on. But Western observers were all too ready to read this as either a nascent Westernization or a creation of a demand that could not be met by the regime. As Susan Reid explains: Accounts of "the Russians'" consumption patterns [...] reflected western fascination with this newly rediscovered human species and rendered them less threatening. a.s.suming that she, in particular, was motivated by fundamentally the same needs and desires as American women, reporters predicted that once Russian women's consumerist instincts were aroused their demands would spiral out of control. (223) Romanova herself feared that she would lose control. While being spirited West, she grotesquely conflates women as s.e.xual objects with women as avatars of consumerism, and rea.s.sures male readers that the proper balance between the two will be maintained: Since I came out of Russia I am all stomach. [...] You won't let me get too fat James. You won't let me get so fat that I am no use for making love? You will have to be careful, or I shall just eat all day long and sleep. You will beat me if I eat too much? (169) In this moment she offers an apt and concise summary of her central position in Western fantasies of s.e.x, paternalism, patriarchy, consumerism, and Cold War triumph.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.

Thank you to Liisa Franzen for editorial a.s.sistance and Sharon Miyagawa for research a.s.sistance with this chapter.

NOTES.

1 Reference to the Signet publication of the novel.

2 Emphasis is in the original.

CHAPTER 5.

"THE OLD WAYS ARE BEST"

The Colonization of Women of Color in Bond Films Travis L. Wagner James Bond is privileged. He is granted unprecedented access to the world and his violent actions are sanctioned by his "00" status. More importantly, he is never labeled an outsider in his films; he is not marginalized, stereotyped, and overlooked based on his social locations. As a white, cisgender, heteros.e.xual, upper middle cla.s.sed, able-bodied, and Western/British man, Bond "operate[s] within a wide comfort zone" that "grants [him] the cultural authority to make judgments about others and to have those judgments stick" (Johnson, "The Social" 19). Constructed to encounter the world through a binary lens, Bond is able to judge Others and create a "reality" in which those who do not share in his privilege hold little significance (ibid. 15-20). Bond shows little remorse for the people he uses to complete his missions and his indifference towards them should render him an unlikeable character. However, Bond is an iconic hero who is featured in the longest running film franchise in history. As a cultural concept, Bond has successfully managed to acclimate to the changing social and political issues of the time, while being presented as the unattainable pinnacle of cool. And yet, it is this very coolness that allows for Bond's oppressive colonizing and patriarchal behaviors to remain unchecked.

In her a.n.a.lysis of Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino 1994), bell hooks notes that the film relies on what she terms "white cool"-a high level of suave cynicism that masks various forms of prejudice (Reel 47). This concept can be applied to an a.n.a.lysis of the Bond franchise. By stripping away the veneer of the debonair hero, Bond is revealed to be a colonizing agent that invades the s.p.a.ce of women of color in order to ensure his own interests. The notion that Bond is an oppressive force is nothing new to the cultural rhetoric surrounding the icon. The franchise has long been criticized for its s.e.xist treatment of women, who are presented as one night stands, damsels in distress, and even human s.h.i.+elds. Scholars have also examined how Bond is positioned as a colonizing force in the franchise. What appears to be missing in these critical discussions is a consideration of the ways in which s.e.xism, racism, and colonialism interrelate and how the intersection of these systems of oppression inform Bond's privileged status in the narrative. When Bond a.s.serts his "Britishness," he often does so as a white man who exercises regional superiority over non-white women. In order to examine the politics of representation at work in the franchise, one must consider the intersectionality of social ident.i.ties and their corresponding forms of oppression.

Intersectionality is based on the notion that various socially constructed ident.i.ty categories intersect on multiple levels, and that "the system of representation, and not one category, is responsible for the experience of social inequality" (Funnell, Warrior 4). A person is afforded or denied privileges based on interlocking ident.i.ty categories such as gender, race, and cla.s.s, among others. For example, a white woman might be marginalized by her gender while still privileged by her race. Her experience of oppression is different than a black woman whose experience of s.e.xism is informed by racism (Hulko 44-5). It is important to consider the intersection of gender and race in the Bond franchise. While some scholars "begrudgingly" acknowledge that Bond is less degrading to women in newer films than in the past (Willman, "The Politics" 351), they fail to account for the manner with which Bond a.s.serts racial privilege over women of color, an aspect that structures the narrative of Skyfall (Sam Mendes 2012). For the first time, Moneypenny is portrayed by a woman of color and is featured as an ally agent a.s.sisting Bond in the field. The progressive nature of her depiction is quickly undermined when Moneypenny's bullet provides a nearly fatal wound to Bond, suggesting that her place in the field is ill-advised. While Skyfall foregrounds the problems that emerge from feminine failings-the competency of an aging M as the head of M16 and the performance of Moneypenny as a field agent-Moneypenny, as a non-white woman, appears to be denied the leniency and mobility that is afforded to M.

It is this problem of intersecting ident.i.ties and systems of oppression that allows Bond to maintain colonial privilege over women of color. While Bond has been called out on his chauvinism by white women like M, there are no parallel instances in which a woman of color challenges Bond with any credible authority that does not result in her dismissal. Bond moves through the world as a colonizing agent who has learned to appropriate and acknowledge his privilege over the Other on a cursory level, never allowing equal standing to a person who is disadvantaged socially by more than one ident.i.ty category (e.g. gender and race). This essay looks at the relations.h.i.+p between Bond, as a privileged white colonial figure, and the women of color he interacts with in various films from Dr. No (Terence Young 1962) to Skyfall. While Bond interfaces with various women of color, this chapter focuses on Bond's interaction with black women who range from primary to secondary characters. It explores how racial stereotypes are mobilized in the representation of black women and how their treatment by Bond in the narrative is exemplary of the politics of representation at work in the franchise, with Bond colonizing such cultural a.s.sumptions to reaffirm and entrench his privilege.

SILENCING WOMEN OF COLOR IN THE CONNERY ERA.

It is fitting that Dr. No begins the filmic Bond franchise as it addresses colonization within its Jamaican setting. Jeremy Black suggests that this film is not about the experiences of those living in the newly decolonized s.p.a.ce, but one where Bond stifles the attempt of villain Dr. No to "doom" Bond's "decadent civilization" (96). Reading Dr. No in such a way allows viewers to see Bond not as a character entering into the recently decolonized s.p.a.ce as an aid, but as an agent who a.s.sumes innate colonial privilege. The opening moments of Dr. No depict a group of blind Jamaican men engaging in the a.s.sa.s.sination of a British secret agent whose a.s.sumption about their blind servility leads to his demise. This moment reaffirms the trope of the colonized subject as animalistic, verified through the song "Three Blind Mice." According to the film, Jamaica is still in great need of colonial authority, leading to Bond's a.s.signment there. His presence is mirrored by his American counterpart, Felix Leiter, who is first shown standing on the second floor of the Jamaican airport watching the locals below and waiting for Bond to arrive. Through the use of doubling, the film presents the impression that Bond, like Leiter, can stand above non-normative bodies and gaze upon them in condemnation. More importantly, it presents the impression that the "binary opposition between colonizer and colonized is not easily reversed" in the Bond franchise (Sharpe 101).

One of Bond's first interactions with a woman of color in Dr. No set the tone for future encounters. Early in the film, he asks an older Jamaican woman for directions. Although Bond is known for his ability to seduce every woman he meets, he sheds the charm and politely requests the information. The woman does not speak but simply gestures in the appropriate direction. Her silence can be read as a measured response to Bond and his hyper-colonial privilege. While a person might be wary to speak to someone in a position of social/cultural authority, there is also a danger in silence, which denies the a.s.sumption that safety comes from not speaking. Audre Lorde argues that silence "will not protect" persons who are Othered by society, and particularly women of color, whose voices are especially lacking in the "language" of culture (40-2). Silence, though seemingly safe, affirms an Othered ident.i.ty and internalizes social oppression, which is far more dangerous than speaking out against privileged forces, fearing them to be too powerful to conquer (ibid. 42). Here, the woman remains silent in the presence of Bond, perhaps realizing the immediacy of his request or fearing to speak in the face of authority.

Dr. No exemplifies the oppositional dichotomies of colonial rhetoric in which positive qualities attributed to the (white) self are contrasted with opposite/negative qualities of the (non-white) Other (Goldie 232-3). This is reflected in the casting of a white woman, Honey Ryder played by Ursula Andress, as the loyal helpmate of Bond while a black woman, the unnamed photographer played by Marguerite LeWars, is presented as untrustworthy and villainous. Unlike Ryder, who meets Bond by chance on a beach, the photographer has prior knowledge of Bond's whereabouts and waits for him to leave the airport. She is, however, unsuccessful in getting his picture. Later, while Ryder is invited to accompany Bond on his mission, the photographer proves to be a nuisance as she tracks Bond down to a club where he is having dinner with Leiter and Quarrel. Although she manages to get her shot, she is apprehended and interrogated by Bond. Contrary to the faith Bond has in Ryder, Bond distrusts the photographer and requests that her claim be verified by the club owner. As the first film in the franchise, Dr. No establishes problematic politics of representation through its contrasting of the white and black femininity.

Bond's reprimand of the photographer has further implications due to the relational nature of the colonizer, who is often perceived of as a paternal figure, to the colonized subject, who is often infantilized by being viewed as a child. As Jo-Ann Wallace notes, the child trope in colonialism presents an allegory for a subject that needs to be educated or corrected (173). Although Bond condemns the actions of the photographer, he leaves the more physical act of twisting her arm to Quarrel, a black male whose own Otherness as a colonized body suggests that he can act out in a more physical and barbaric way. When the woman yells out in pain, Bond responds with "tell us and he will stop," a statement that clearly indicates that he is in charge of the situation and Quarrel is doing his bidding. Bond's chastising of the photographer is detached from the s.e.xual banter that typically occurs in his relations with white women; here the photographer is Othered as black woman and colonial child.

SUPPRESSING THE SUBALTERN IN THE MOORE ERA.

Roger Moore took Bond in a new direction, interpreting the character as a debonair gentleman and wry humorist. According to Chapman, the films starring Moore attempt to transition the franchise post-Connery while remaining in line with "popular tastes" (Licence, 123). To write off the Moore films because of their humor is misguided; under the veil of laughter, Bond moves through a new series of colonized s.p.a.ces, each with new problems for the black women he meets. Live and Let Die (Guy Hamilton 1973) finds Bond in the criminal underworld of Harlem, a place not a.s.sociated with colonization given its American locale. There he meets Solitaire, whose ability to foresee the future using tarot cards is central to Bond's navigation of Harlem. This renders Solitaire, the white British female, a key panoptic figure for a s.p.a.ce in which she is wholly privileged and adored.

According to the narrative, Solitaire's power is rooted in her chast.i.ty. The film explicitly contrasts her white purity with the moral ambiguity of Rosie Carver, a black American ally agent tasked with aiding Bond on his mission. Carver is, in fact, working for Kananga and her connection to his syndicate is established culturally through her belief in and fear of voodoo traditions. This works to connect her character to the other black women who appear during the voodoo ritual numbers, their bodies highly s.e.xualized while performing radicalized versions of religious acts. Carver is arguably depicted as a Jezebel, a racial stereotype that has historically been employed in the cultural depictions of black women. This stereotype emphasizes the s.e.xual allure, appet.i.te, and availability of black women (Beaulieu 475). What makes this construct particularly troubling in Live and Let Die is that black female s.e.xuality is being defined solely in relation to the white colonial man. For example, Bond has s.e.x with Carver and then discovers a tarot card with the Queen of Hearts upside down. Carver explains to Bond, who is lying beside her, that the card signifies deceit and perversity. Bond immediately becomes suspicious of Carver, hovers over her with his gun drawn, and threatens to kill her if she is being deceitful. In this moment, Bond stakes a claim on the body of Carver by demonstrating that he can and will overpower her. While the film emphasizes the virginal nature of Solitaire, there is no mention of Carver's s.e.xual status. The presumption that Carver is already s.e.xually active draws further attention to her representation as a Jezebel in the film.

Through the contrasting of white and black femininity, Live and Let Die demonstrates how Bond's privilege operates in a s.p.a.ce of unwarranted access. The film presents a double standard in which Bond's seduction of Carver is justified (within a colonial context) while Kananga's desire to sleep with Solitaire (to rid her of her powers) is deemed a threat; the white man is granted access to all bodies despite their color while the black man can only have access to other bodies of color. The film foregrounds the notion that only the white man can partake in interracial encounters, which may come by way of colonizing endeavors. Gina Marchetti notes a similar situation in the representation of s.e.xual contact between white and Asian characters in Hollywood films. While the white man can sleep with the Asian woman, the Asian man is deemed a threat to the purity of the white woman: "the rape of the white woman becomes a metaphor for the threat posed to Western culture as well as a rationalization for Euroamerican imperial ventures in Asia" (Marchetti 3). The same perception informs the interaction between black men and white women in Cla.s.sical Hollywood films, which "exploit melodramatic possibilities" while sidestepping racial oppressions (Ardizzone 94). In Live and Let Die, Bond is not only privileged in his s.e.xual access to Carver but also is set up as a (colonial) hero for saving Solitaire from the "s.e.xually-potent black man" by sleeping with her first.

In the first three decades of the franchise, Bond interacts with various women of color, most of whom serve as lovers and helpers. It is not until A View to a Kill (John Glen 1985) that Bond's power and privilege are challenged by a woman of color. May Day, played by Grace Jones, is a muscular black woman who serves as the primary henchperson of Max Zorin. As Yvonne Tasker argues, Jones and other black female action heroes who evoke "animality" through their aggressive actions propagate a troubling conflation of "self-confidence," "arrogance," and the "a.s.sertion of s.e.xuality" (Spectacular 21-2). Such a portrayal occurs in View to a Kill by way of May Day, who is presented as being physically strong and s.e.xually alluring. Although she serves as an enigma in the series (Funnell, "Negotiating" 205), reading May Day as a revolutionary character that overcomes Bond (and his privilege) overlooks her positioning in the film as a subaltern. In her article "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak considers how the colonized body becomes silenced by a colonial presence, and even physically removed from a s.p.a.ce. She notes that in the case of the post-colonized subject, there is a removal of a "nostalgia for that lost origin," which has been consumed and regurgitated to reflect a colonial "consciousness." The bodies featured in postcolonial s.p.a.ces are not literally silenced, but are affected by what they "cannot say," because language no longer affords the opportunity (Spivak 82). While Spivak suggests that such removals occur in all Subject/Other relations.h.i.+ps, it is especially challenging for women of color in a post-colonial context. As a result, May Day can be read as a distinct postcolonial subaltern Other, as she lacks a history, as well as a language, for which to create such a narrative.

Although May Day is incredibly strong, her presence in the film is constantly defined in relation to her boss and lover Zorin, a white man who possesses tremendous wealth. It is Zorin and not May Day who is presented as the primary villain and an equal to Bond based on their shared privilege. As a subaltern, May Day decidedly lacks a voice for most of the film, often resorting to brutish, violent feats of strength to express her thoughts, all the while reinforcing the colonial rhetoric of the Other as a beast. For May Day, physical actions trump verbal expressions, and this is most notable in her s.e.xual encounter with Bond, where she silently disrobes and jumps into bed with him. May Day's compliance with Bond's request positions her as a subaltern whose desires or objections are never clearly voiced. After being betrayed by Zorin, May Day sacrifices her life in order to thwart his plan to flood Silicon Valley. In the last of only a few lines of dialogue, May Day asks Bond to "get Zorin," a statement that reveals her lack of capacity to overcome the colonial force herself. Ultimately, Zorin can only be defeated by Bond, a white Western man of equal social status.

BROSNAN AND THE ILLUSION OF A POST-FEMINIST VOICE.

By the Brosnan era, a considerable lapse between films has afforded Bond time to catch up with the social world around him, perhaps lessening his position as an oppressive figure and taking into consideration a changing understanding of social norms where AIDS virus fatalities, transnational political landscapes, and contemporary "political correctness" might necessitate a Bond who "stress[es] s.e.xual responsibility (Black 160-1). In GoldenEye (Martin Campbell 1995), M, played by Judi Dench, criticizes Bond during their first meeting. Calling him a "s.e.xist, misogynist dinosaur," she affirms that Bond has long enjoyed male privilege, providing the film with a guise of reduced s.e.xism. Jim Leach notes that M's "feminist attacks" do not undermine Bond's oppressive nature, but only add irony as M continually encourages Bond to exploit women for personal gain, such as in Tomorrow Never Dies (Roger Spottiswoode 1997) when she instructs Bond to sleep with Paris Carver and "pump her for information." Leach suggests that the filmmakers likely included M's criticism in the dialogue to show their awareness of this issue ("Bond" 253) but do little to change Bond's conduct with women. When considering Bond as an oppressive figure, awareness does not equate to criticism or a suggestion that his privilege has been revoked. While Bond may be culturally aware of his misogyny, no one suggests that his colonial authority is a cause for concern. There is no M equivalent to suggest that he is, say, an imperialist caveman.

While the colonial misogyny apparent in Die Another Day (Lee Tamahori 2002) is not as blatant, it is certainly as insidious. Viewers are first introduced to Bond Girl Jinx through the male gaze, as Bond views her emerging from the water through binoculars, a homage to the introduction of Honey Ryder in Dr. No. Although both women are framed in terms of their attractiveness and Bond's desire for them, they are represented differently in their films. Norma Manatu notes that while white women in film are often presented as delicate and pure, black women are "viewed as symbols of s.e.xual excess" and culturally ascribed with a high degree of "s.e.xual wantonness" (19). After meeting Ryder, Bond spends the remainder of the film getting to know her and even hears about her tragic backstory. In comparison, he quickly jumps into bed with Jinx after minimal conversation and their s.e.xual encounter is quite heated. Die Another Day has one of the longest and most graphic s.e.x scenes in the franchise, and although Halle Berry is a multiracial actor her character evokes the s.e.xual excess bemoaned by Manatu. Yet Bond, in his colonizing ways, eventually overpowers Jinx and controls the s.e.xual encounter. Jinx becomes not a point of challenge to Bond as patriarchal colonizer, but another body to exploit, making the final scene of the film, one of the most problematic in the entire franchise.

The film examines the manufacturing and sale of synthetic blood diamonds. Bond is tasked with obtaining the diamonds and suppressing the various villains tied to their production. With the aid of Jinx, he is able to complete his mission and the two hide away in order to share some intimate time. In the final scene, Jinx can be seen laying on her back with Bond hovering over her. Bond then dumps the diamonds onto the semi-naked body of Jinx and her reaction is clearly one of elation. The implications of this scene are troubling, especially in light of the fact that the blood diamond trade in Africa is rooted in colonialism, violence, and genocide. The encounter between Bond and Jinx takes on even greater significance as it reproduces power dynamics that reflect the intersection of gender, race, and s.e.xuality in relation to a clearly problematic context. The fact that the film opens and closes with these s.e.xual encounters detracts from any empowerment her character might seem to have. Jinx's reconst.i.tution of troubling black s.e.xuality affirms the presence of Bond's privilege that remains wildly unchecked. Awareness might be an element in the newer works of Bond, but it extends only to a brief acknowledgement of gender oppression, and as it stands Bond remains a privileged male of colonial means.

CRAIG AND THE FUTURE.

Skyfall reintroduces the character Moneypenny in the franchise. Played by Naomie Harris, Moneypenny is revisioned as both a field agent and a black woman. The film opens with Moneypenny accompanying Bond on a mission. Not only does she fail to kill Bond's attacker but she accidently shoots him in the process, believing that she has killed him. From the outset, Skyfall presents the impression that Bond is a superior agent to Moneypenny. What is also clear is that this incident helps to reaffirm Bond as a patriarchal, colonial figure whose privilege affords him access to everything, including second chances. Bond is given the opportunity to reaffirm his status as hero. He is privileged with such liberties as a field agent that he can choose to return to the field even if he is discouraged or not sanctioned to do so. In comparison, Moneypenny is denied the chance to prove herself and become a successful M16 field agent. She is incapable of validation and chooses the post-colonial s.p.a.ce of silence in a desk job, serving the narrative and historical advancement of Bond and MI6 at the expense of creating her own ident.i.ty. In the most telling scene of the film, Moneypenny provides Bond with a "close shave," a figurative reference to the opening moments of her shooting Bond that also acknowledges her literal act of cleaning up the disheveled hero. Moneypenny helps Bond return to his suave, "cool" self, internalizing her own colonization in the face of Bond's privileged body. Through her diminis.h.i.+ng position in the narrative, Moneypenny is gradually rendered immobile and reminds viewers, as Manatu does, that cinema is void of "black socio-political heroines" that also happen to be women (42).

Although the character of Bond has evolved over a 50-year period with different actors playing the t.i.tle role, his position as a colonial oppressor remains unchanged and this defines his encounters with women of color who lack the ability to challenge their oppression (by Bond). Black women, especially those with a clear colonized past, are marginalized by Bond's "coolness." His suave yet cynical worldview, which frames the narratives, works to silence and disempower them because to question such a heroic figure like Bond would be to undermine a sense of hegemony that grows weaker in a post-colonial global framework. It would seem that the more illogical a figure like Bond becomes, the more illogical his colonial s.e.xism becomes, so that by Skyfall an unseen force almost wills Moneypenny to fail at her task, while also raising Bond from the dead. Bond claims the non-fictional Sir Thomas Bond's family motto Orbis non sufficit, (The World Is Not Enough) because as a white, colonial male he has the entire world, yet quests to consume more, often at the expense of black women and colonized bodies. As evident in Skyfall, Bond is more privileged than ever.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

The author would like to thank Matthew Buzzell, Ashley Blewer, Mary Baskin-Waters, and Lisa Funnell for their guidance on the writing of this chapter.

CHAPTER 6.

BOND'S BIT ON THE SIDE Race, Exoticism and the Bond "Fluffer" Character Charles Burnetts For every woman that shares the final scene, and bed, with James Bond in the eroticized denouement of a Bond film, there is always another that didn't get quite as "lucky". She may have had intimate relations with Bond earlier in the film but is nevertheless forgotten by the time he has finished his mission and claimed his "prize"-the Bond Girl. This chapter examines the women that Bond seduces in the middle-portion of the Bond film; the ones he beds but who also conveniently disappear by the end of the film. Like "fluffers" in the p.o.r.n industry, they keep the male "agent" aroused until the primary s.e.xual object, the Bond Girl, arrives at which point they disappear off-screen. While many of these women work for the villain, they also lack the sociocultural status of their boss in economic, cultural and/or racial terms, and serve as a cosmetic veneer that obscures their boss' nefarious schemes as legitimate business activities. When such characters do disappear, Bond and/or his arch-nemesis appear complicit in their situations, having profited from these women as powerful men operating within a patriarchal economy.

This chapter aims to explore how the fluffer character is set up as a commodity in the narrative to be exploited by Bond and/or the villain. Although the pleasures she affords are ephemeral and short-lived, they also signal different, and sometimes unconventional, desires than those represented by the Bond Girl. As a temporary character, the fluffer must be both eye-catching and invisible, indeterminacies that reveal a more unstable regime of desire in Bond than usually a.s.sumed. While the fluffer is more visibly exploited and disposable than the Bond Girl, such secondary characters also make visible certain s.e.xual and racial pleasures that are otherwise repressed by the Bond film, not least in terms of its established adherences to heteronormative s.e.xual pleasure and (neo)colonialist positionings of the foreign Other.

This chapter focuses on the preponderance of black fluffer characters in the franchise, in what amounts to a particularly resilient racial exoticism in mainstream cinema. Such exoticism not only demonstrates the Bond film's reification and adaptation to post-colonial discourse and contemporary multiculturalism, but also speaks to the intersectional dimensions of the franchise's problematic gender politics. The chapter focuses specifically on the way in which a fluffer typology sits in tension with contemporary mandates for "positive" representation. It shows how the gendered exoticism of various films invite readings that go against the grain, yielding insights with respect to Bond and his pleasures that slip through the matrix of both heteronormative desire and Western hegemony. This is most notable in the casting of Grace Jones as May Day in A View To a Kill (John Glen 1985), who embodies aspects of both the "animalistic s.e.xuality" of a colonizing white male fantasy (hooks, Black 69) and a hyper-masculinity that threatens to destabilize Bond's s.e.xual politics. I argue that May Day serves as a high-watermark for the fluffer character, and, true to her name, as a kind of emergency distress signal with respect to the Bond film's racial and gender politics. Such problematics persist, despite a marked sophistication in the way race is managed by recent iterations of the franchise, not least in the casting of Halle Berry as Bond Girl Jinx in Die Another Day (Lee Tamahori 2002) and, perhaps the ultimate coup, the casting of a black Miss Moneypenny in Skyfall (Sam Mendes 2012).

BOND GIRL/BOND FLUFFER.

The Bond films work on a definitive contrast between the primary Bond Girl and secondary, or "fluffer", female characters, a division mapped consistently to differentials of cla.s.s, nationality, and race. The Bond Girl is coded as a good fit for Bond as borne out by the number of times she turns out to share his profession as secret agent (e.g. Tatiana Romanova in From Russia with Love [Terence Young 1963], Anya Amasova in The Spy Who Loved Me [Lewis Gilbert 1977], Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale [Martin Campbell 2006]). In order to serve as Bond's "prize at the end of the dangerous road" (127), as Ian Fleming notes of Solitaire in Live and Let Die (1954), she fulfils the criteria of superior physical beauty and the promise of feminine virtue and pa.s.sivity, just as she effectively learns the lesson of her necessary dependence on a good man to get her out of trouble. This undermining of female agency is, for Christine Bold, particularly p.r.o.nounced in the Bond films compared to Fleming's novels, specifically in the way they "limit women's initiatives" at the same time as they "represent desirable women as unknowing, helpless dupes" (178). For Lisa Funnell, however, the Bond Girl's significance in the films comes by virtue of her "strong and intimate relations.h.i.+p with Bond" ("I Know" 464). Funnell describes the Bond Girl as the "nonrecurring lead female protagonist" in each film who "functions as the romantic interest and heroic ally of James Bond" (ibid. 464). As such, the particular distinctiveness of the Bond Girl resides in her comparison with other women in the series.

Bond's fluffer characters are marked by a disposability that distinguishes them from the Bond Girl. They also signify alternatives to the Bond Girl's pa.s.sivity and powerlessness, enjoying a wider spectrum of agency for the limited time they are on screen. While the Bond Girl is usually kept in close physical and emotional proximity to the villain, the fluffer holds her own in the physical world of espionage. In both s.e.xual and spatial terms, the fluffer characters "get around". They are often adept pilots (Helga Brandt in You Only Live Twice [Lewis Gilbert 1967]) or highly able combatants (Bambi and Thumper in Diamonds Are Forever [Guy Hamilton 1971]). As long as they are not too close to Bond or the villain, such characters appear, according to Bold, as particularly professionalized and "efficient women" (171), in many ways supporting the national structures and inst.i.tutional matrices that Bond either defends or infiltrates.

While some fluffer characters seem to enjoy greater agency than the Bond Girl, their representation is still undermined by the gender politics at work in the franchise. In her discussion of female villainy in the 1960s, Funnell notes that the "Bad Girls" seem to be accorded a greater level of freedom and movement in their films when compared to the Bond Girls who are positioned in the traditional role of damsel in distress ("Negotiating" 200-2). This agency, however, is somewhat undercut by what Laura Mulvey describes as the "to-be-looked-at-ness" of women on screen ("Visual" 837). The representation of Bad Girls centers on their image and how it plays into Bond's "male gaze." In a similar way, fluffers are set up as objects of desire regardless of whether they are genuinely attracted to Bond and/or have orders to manipulate him. As a result, their agency is undermined by the fact that their ident.i.ties are derived through their relations.h.i.+ps with men in the series.

HENCHWOMEN AND FLUFFERS.

The relative agency of fluffer characters is complicated by the fact that many of these women answer to the villain. Such subordination is both cla.s.s and race-determined, and made particularly apparent with regards to the black women that emerge in the franchise in the beginning of the 1970s. The first black female character in the Bond franchise, Thumper (Trina Parks), in Diamonds are Forever, is merely a henchperson for Blofeld, whose sole purpose is to fight Bond alongside her partner Bambi. As young women in an early era Bond film, Bambi and Thumper are certainly s.e.xualized by way of revealing costumes and the suggestion of lesbianism. However, they are positioned differently in the narrative than Bond Girl Tiffany Case and fluffer Plenty O'Toole. Not only are Thumper and her colleague equated with the animal characters from Disney's animated feature Bambi (James Algar et al. 1942), but the duo are positioned at the lower end of the social scale-lackeys that serve as physical obstacles that Bond must overcome to achieve his mission goals.

Thumper serves as a template for the representation of black female characters in the franchise. Although Thumper is dark skinned, she is also presented with a more masculine image and gender expression when compared to the white Bond Girl Case and the fluffer O'Toole. Race intersects in powerful ways with gender and appears to signal a different configuration for Bond's black fluffer characters. Thumper shares much in common with Rosie Carver (Gloria Hendry), Bond's first black love-interest who appears in Live and Let Die (Guy Hamilton 1973). Carver ostensibly represents a "positive" image of black femininity; she is a CIA agent brought in to a.s.sist Bond in his investigation of Dr. Kananga's business affairs in San Monique. Much like the white Bond Girl Solitaire, Carver initially rejects Bond's s.e.xual advances and adheres to the warning issued by her boss, Felix Leiter. Her initial rejection signals a morality that runs counter to neo-colonialist constructions of libidinous black femininity while at the same time indicates the requisite heteros.e.xual desire for their union once the time is right.

As a way of redressing Live and Let Die's problematic appropriation of 1970s Blaxploitation films, Carver serves ostensibly as a Bond Girl in the way she initially signifies deferred pleasure. The film is also troubling in the way that it envisages a black criminal conspiracy to turn America into a nation of heroin addicts by adhering to a combination of black nationalism and Voodoo superst.i.tion. With an axis of control coordinated between a fictional Caribbean Island, New Orleans, and Harlem, the story demonizes black ident.i.ty from the ground up. Aside from a male black CIA agent that comes to Bond's aid, Carver appears as a rare exception in moral terms. It is not surprising when Carver is revealed to be a double agent working for Dr. Kananga. The first clue to this ident.i.ty comes with her terror at seeing a hat with chicken feathers laid on her bed, moments after she resists Bond's s.e.xual advances. Understanding the symbol as a Voodoo death threat, Carver's professionalism is undermined by her fear and implicit belief in the Other's exoticized culture-recognizing it to be that of her own. Signifying an incomplete conversion to the CIA and Bond's regime of facts, Carver's failure to embody Bond's atheist cynicism reveals a residual black ident.i.ty that renders her suspect. What is also telling is the timing of the hat's appearance, moments after she rebuffs Bond's s.e.xual advances. Carver is revealed to be a believer of a black ideology (coded criminal) while being threatened for her refusal to act on her heteros.e.xual desire by accepting intimacy with Bond.

Carver adheres to the schemata posed by bell hooks in relation to the Western subject's yearning for the "primitive". Embodied by such figures as Bond, Western subjectivity longs to re-integrate with the Other in the name of a contemporary pluralism that repudiates the white supremacist racism of the past. For hooks, such inclusions are betrayed by residual mechanisms of consumption and fetish, where the "dark Other" remains nostalgically fixed to ideas of "nature" and prelapsarian "harmony". She writes: It is precisely that longing for the pleasure that has led the white west to sustain a romantic fantasy of the "primitive" and the concrete search for a real primitive paradise, whether that location be a country or a body, a dark continent or dark flesh, perceived as the perfect embodiment of that possibility. (Black 27) Such longings for the exotic seem to inform much of what is seen in the sequences a.n.a.lyzed above, whereby both a "dark continent" and "dark flesh" retain aspects of a stereotyped primitivism. Live and Let Die primitivizes its key locations of black community in America and the Caribbean at the same time as Carver is re-inscribed as a believer of Voodoo; this allows Bond to maintain his difference while being permitted the pleasures of an exotic commodity. Moreover, the film presents a double standard that centers on race and nationality: while Kananga's desire for the white Bond Girl Solitaire is framed in terms of the "overs.e.xualized" black male and his misogynistic abuse of power, Bond's desire for both black and white women becomes naturalized as the right of the white colonial male.

PERFORMING THE PRIMITIVE.

The black fluffer's agency is ambiguously split between aspects of racial alterity and cla.s.sical femininity, both understood in terms of the black female body's positioning within an economy of colonizing male desire. From the short hair of most of the black women a.n.a.lyzed in this chapter to their slender athleticism, the black fluffer character is often presented as being more physically boyish and toned than the Bond Girl. May Day (Grace Jones) in A View to a Kill is paradigmatic in such respects, representing an ideal of athleticism, aggression, and strength that dominates not only her childlike employer/lover Max Zorin, but Bond himself throughout the film. May Day also narratively and spatially upstages her conventionally beautiful and white Bond Girl counterpart Stacey Sutton, only to be made scarce and then finally removed like other fluffer characters in the film's latter half.

As if to register her resistance to the fluffer mantle imposed on her by the film's eventual privileging of Sutton, May Day dominates the first half of the film in narrative, s.e.xual, and spatial terms. In at least two sequences, Bond's surveillance of Sutton is disrupted by the entrance of May Day into his field of vision, motioning for him to turn away and mind his own business. Bond's cla.s.sical (white) male gaze, trained voyeuristically again on a "woman as image", is disrupted here by May Day, a woman of color, who turns the gaze upon Bond himself. Such gender instabilities inevitably extend to the bedroom, where Bond is uncharacteristically dominated by her, a submissiveness on his part that the film struggles to contain. Motivated by Zorin's discovery that he is absent from his bedroom, Bond improvises a seduction of May Day by pretending to have been waiting for her in her bed. Bond performs a colonialist desire for the Other, to which May Day responds with an equivalent level of familiarity. Saying nothing to Bond other than "What is there to say?" May Day frames the encounter as an over-determined conquest between historic colonizer and oppressed, an interaction for which nothing needs to be said. Once in bed, however, May Day upturns Bond so that she's on top, her dominance of him redressing its historical corollary; she, with her short hair, muscular frame, and display of masculine strength sits astride a surprised, yet happily resigned, Bond. Such reversal is crudely undermined by the soundtrack as a romantic rendering of the film's main theme switches to a lone trumpet's intoning of a mournful "G.o.d Save the Queen" as Bond and May Day kiss. It is here that the spectator must be reminded that Bond is doing this for queen and country only.

A more severe s.e.xual agency is permitted to May Day here, invoking parallels with aspects of "third-wave" feminism that Lisa Funnell writes of in relation to Bond's "Bad Girl" characters of the 1980s ("Negotiating" 204-6). May Day's active, masculinized approach to Bond adheres also to the "wild animalistic s.e.xuality" discussed by bell hooks (Black 69), a key corollary to misogynist constructions of the black female body as commodity and "prost.i.tute". In a comparable discussion of Tina Turner's s.e.xual agency, hooks writes: "This tough black woman has no time for woman bonding, she is out to 'catch.' [...] Rather than being a pleasure-based eroticism, it is ruthless, violent; it is about women using s.e.xual power to do violence to the male Other" (ibid. 68-9). Such aspects of "s.e.xual agency," undercut by racist/misogynist constructions of toughness and male unpleasure, clearly demarcate fluffer characters like May Day from her primary, and usually white, counterparts. As a "hunter" (ibid. 68), borne out by her various a.s.sa.s.sinations of men in the film, May Day signifies the more active black s.e.xuality that is problematically aligned with the black prost.i.tute and the latter's cynical reduction of s.e.x and her body to commodity, for whom "s.e.xual service" is "for money and power" while "pleasure is secondary" (ibid. 69).

May Day is far more predatory than Rosie Carver and possesses a more active form of s.e.xual agency. At the same time, the performance of Grace Jones parodies such constructions, betraying an awareness of the "hunter" typology. While Live and Let Die seems content to position its racial inclusivity in terms of a Westerner's taste for the exotic and foreign, A View to a Kill is notably self-reflexive about its racial biases, especially in its foregrounding of genetics and the breeding of humans and racehorses. With a sub-plot that revolves around Zorin's engineering of horses through medical tampering, and Zorin's own breeding by a n.a.z.i doctor in a wartime concentration camp, the film relates questions of racial purity closely linked to issues of persecution, commodification, and the global marketplace. Although not much is said of May Day's background, her a.s.sociation with Zorin allow for comparisons with him as a genetically-modified commodity or "perfect" racial Other. Just as Zorin is slurred by a KGB agent as a "biological experiment" and "physiological freak", May Day attacks the agent with a superhuman display of strength as she picks him up and throws him to the ground. If Zorin turns out to be, in all likelihood, a Jew, tampered with to embody the Aryan ideal of n.a.z.i ideology, similar a.s.sumptions seem invited here with respect to May Day in her embodiment of an enhanced black masculinity. In both cases, signs of racial purity serve as prized commodities in a volatile global marketplace, with the problematic caveat that such extremes of white and black ident.i.ty risk going "rogue", compared to the racially normative Bond, or indeed the ideologically h.o.m.ogenous, yet anachronistic, KGB.

MODERN BOND.

The enhanced complexity of A View to a Kill can be explained, in part, by the fact that it was produced 12 years after Live and Let Die, and might reflect key developments in ident.i.ty politics in the intervening years. The same seems to be true with respect to the Bond films produced in the last 20 years starring Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig. The racial dimensions of Bond's fluffer characters has undergone further change, albeit not altogether unproblematically. If the casting of Naomie Harris as Miss Moneypenny in Skyfall serves as the ultimate upending of a.s.sociations in Bond between England and an officious whiteness, its precedent comes with the character of Jinx (Halle Berry) in Die Another Day, who survives the film and is bedded by Bond at its finale. As if to underline the use of a woman of color as Bond's primary conquest, the film uses an unprecedentedly big-name actor in the casting of Oscar-winner Berry. The film is quite emphatic as to the saliency of her character as the primary "prize" for Bond. Unlike Carver, Jinx serves as a genuine NSA agent who remains faithful to both her agency and Bond, driven by their shared strategic goals. Promotional materials surrounding the film moreover highlight Jinx's introductory scene, where she emerges from the sea in a bikini, a homage to the now mythical scene in Dr. No (Terence Young 1962) where the first Bond Girl, Honey Ryder, made her entrance beheld within Bond's subjective point-of-view. As if acknowledging its own anachronisms with regards to race and the Bond Girl, the franchise deploys a self-conscious imagery of unveiling, or even of birth, as Berry emerges from the water. In this was.h.i.+ng away of prejudice, the franchise seems to signal a fresh start to Bond's treatment of race, rhetoric that is imitated almost exactly in Casino Royale, where Bond's own body emerges from the sea as an unveiling not only of its new star, Daniel Craig, but also of the franchise's foregrounding of Bond's eroticized body for visual pleasure.

Jinx represents a significant s.h.i.+ft in the franchise's racial politics, representing the long-deferred arrival of a black woman as the Bond Girl. Berry's multiracial heritage becomes significant here, being both more light-skinned and curvaceous than her black predecessors, and Jinx aligns more closely to the Bond Girl typology. She adheres also to characteristics of other 1990s Bond Girls who, as Funnell notes, represent s.h.i.+fts from a "sidekick" persona to the more self-sufficient "American Action Hero Bond Girl" figures ("I Know" 485) that seduce Bond as much as he seduces them. Comparisons are invited between Jinx and her key foil, Miranda Frost, a treacherous British spy that turns on MI6 and Bond. In the first half of the film, Frost masquerades as a Bond Girl and when in this mode she is presented as a particularly over-determined candidate for Bond's final girl. Her bedroom scene with Bond, midway through the film, is dominated by an over-stated whiteness in dress, decor, and lighting. Frost is also s.e.xually pa.s.sive and trusted by Bond, allowing him to take the lead on a bed of ice, their intimacy contrasted sharply with the hot and steamy scene between Bond and Jinx. Frost's "cold" betrayal is made more dramatic at a particularly sophisticated level, with the film's lulling of the spectator into the franchise's more traditional gender politics, only to resolutely undermine those terms.

Jinx successfully escapes the fluffer persona, her s.e.xuality initially contrasted to "whiter" forms of desire and trust, only to be finally repositioned and validated as genuinely "warm" in relation to Bond. Echoes of May Day and Rosie Carver nevertheless complicate such validation. The film foregrounds Jinx's dominance of Bond in bed. Like May Day, Jinx positions herself on top of Bond and when they kiss her silhouetted tongue is clearly visible-this graphic image contrasts with the overly romanticized lovemaking scenes featured in a Bond film. Moreover, like both Carver and May Day, Jinx sleeps with Bond early on in the film and their encounter requires little seduction. She is situated less as an object consonant with the labor of Bond's investigations. Parallels between Jinx and Carver are signaled furthermore by questions levelled at Jinx by Bond with regards to her name and its connotations of "bad luck", echoing the anxieties featured in Live and Let Die particularly in regards to the treatment of Voodoo culture and the film's mystifications of black ident.i.ty. If Bond's distrust of women is officially uninfluenced by race, the playful foregrounding of luck and the supernatural in these comments seem marked again by the possibility of unnatural, demonic powers at play when Bond encounters a black woman.

While the positioning of Jinx as a heroic partner to Bond helps to neutralize the racial stereotypes of black women featured in the franchise, such reminders qualify the sense to which Jinx fully adheres to the Bond Girl typology. These qualifications seem reinforced by a depiction of intimacy between Bond and Moneypenny that precedes the coupling of Bond and Jinx. In a highly unusual turn for the franchise, the audience is treated to a kiss between Bond and Moneypenny, only for it to be revealed as Moneypenny's fantasy envisaged through Q's virtual reality device. As playfully self-conscious and innuendo-laden as the film becomes here, the scene is also tantalizingly excessive in its latent fantasy of return to a topos of white hetero-normativity. In its own cheeky foregrounding of the virtual, the film equivocates here what is expected from a Bond bedroom scene, contrasting the cla.s.sically pa.s.sive seduction of Moneypenny with the modern s.e.xual agency, and latent savagery, of Jinx.

BLACK MONEYPENNY.

The casting of black actor Naomie Harris as Moneypenny in Skyfall can be considered the ultimate renegotiation of the franchise's racial politics, prefigured by the casting of black actor Jeffrey Wright as Felix Leiter from Casino Royale onwards. On many levels, Skyfall domesticates and nationalizes a black woman to a greater extent than any other Bond film in the franchise's history. Moneypenny represents that which is closest to Bond, his sense of self and nationality, in her embodiment of loyal English femininity that has seemed to always allude/repulse him, or she symbolizes that which must continue to be forever deferred in the economy of Bond's pleasure, a horizon of female Otherness at home that must never be fully incorporated. Tara Brabazon argues that Moneypenny is "the b.i.t.c.h, rather than the love, of Bond's life" and "is not only Britain's last line of defence, but feminism's first foothold of attack" (496).

Moneypenny can be read another way, as the crucial secondary character whose exceptionality to the usual conventions of the Bond fluffer character seems very much to prove the rule. Neither yearning for a romantic attachment with Bond nor foreign to the idea of having him s.e.xually, Moneypenny emerges as the woman with the upper hand on Bond, who is always safely ensconced at home, and whose heteros.e.xual desire for him is never in question. Harris and Craig's sensual scene by firelight in Skyfall, where she shaves him with a cut-throat razor, comes crucially before her ident.i.ty as Moneypenny is revealed, where she turns out to be a would-be Bond herself, only to eventually change her mind in heeding Bond's advice that the job's "not for everybody." It is only here, at the point of her a.s.suming the position of "Moneypenny", that another woman of color is integrated into the feminism that is more usually the preserve of her white counterparts.

Harris' casting in such respects expresses a profound ambiguity in regards to how far the franchise has come with regards to gender and race. While the franchise has professed itself flexible in terms of each-with the casting of a female M and a black Felix Leiter-the structures of domination and power defined for Bond and black women remain subject to issues of desire and control. The contours of the fluffer character outlined above allow us to see how gender is divided in the Bond universe between cla.s.sical forms of femininity and a more fetis.h.i.+zed typology of masculinized agency and liberated s.e.xuality. Although these secondary characters "service" Bond in order to distract him from more dangerous or damaging preoccupations, they also reveal the extent to which Bond is willingly manipulated by his own methods of seduction and gameplay. They foreground the ways in which Bond himself is willingly positioned as both consumer and commodity within larger economies of exchange and capital. At the same time, and often in racially codified ways, they signify s.e.xualities that lie outside the mandatory heteros.e.xuality that must be restored by the Bond mission, positions that are nevertheless scrutinized and fetis.h.i.+zed by the interrogatory gaze and fantasy of Bond and his loyal audiences. The Bond "fluffer" is at once a commodity and a point of otherness, correlating inevitably with modes of s.e.xual and moral deviance that require regulation within the Bond film's narrative economy. The question remains therefore as to how the Bond film can truly modernize given the constraints inherited by the franchise, or whether its ident.i.ty politics will eventually require us to live and let it die.

CHAPTER 7.

THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION.

Disciplining and Domesticating Miss Moneypenny in Skyfall Kristen Shaw In the opening scene of Skyfall (Sam Mendes 2012), James Bond, played by Daniel Craig, moves from a dark entryway into the crowded streets of Istanbul. A car pulls up and he steps inside, temporarily a pa.s.senger rather than the instigator of the action. Here, audiences are introduced to Eve, played by Naomie Harris, the character who is revealed to be Miss Moneypenny, M's iconic secretary, at the conclusion of the film. With Bond in tow, Moneypenny chases a black car through crowded streets, knocking off one side view mirror in the process, to which Bond casually quips, "It's alright, weren't using it." When the other side view mirror is destroyed moments later, Moneypenny quips back, "I wasn't using that one, either." Moneypenny's playful repartee with Bond is reflected in her ability, throughout the remainder of this scene, to keep up with the action as they navigate cramped Turkish streets. The image of Moneypenny as an action hero eclipses her traditional representation as M's secretary and the doting admirer of Bond. This initial representation of Moneypenny suggests that twenty-first century audiences of the Bond franchise will be provided with a positive representation of a black woman with agency and power to match Bond's own.

The climax of this scene, however, demonstrates that Moneypenny's aggressive agency is out of place and unwelcome within this action narrative. As the chase progresses, Bond ends up engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the mercenary Patrice on top of a moving train with Moneypenny following alongside in her vehicle. Moneypenny remains in contact with M at MI6, reporting the events as they occur. When the road ends, Moneypenny exits her Jeep and prepares to take a shot at Bond's a.s.sailant, warning M that "she may have a shot, [but] it's not clean." Despite the risk, M orders Moneypenny to shoot and she accidentally hits Bond, sending him plummeting into the river below.

Moneypenny's bad shot initiates a narrative s.h.i.+ft that repositions her as a transgressor of the system rather than a proper agent; the presence of a powerful black woman at the center of the action narrative exceeds the conventions of the genre and poses a threat to its representational codes. The initial depiction of Moneypenny as not only being "in" on the action but also capable of keeping pace with Bond threatens the framework of the action genre, which is predominantly coded as a white, masculine, and heteros.e.xual s.p.a.ce. Moneypenny's bad shot literally challenges the prowess of Bond as the idealized white male hero, but this moment also signals her transgression of conventional narrative codes that demand women and racialized "Others" remain on the periphery, rather than at the center, of the action. Throughout Skyfall, Moneypenny is made to pay for her "bad shot" by engaging in a series of disciplinary interpellations that (re)articulate her "proper place" and effectively transform her from Bond's equal to a supportive sidekick. Insofar as the film demands that Moneypenny be repositioned and disciplined to understand her "proper place," the film's narrative signals a broader inability on the part of action cinema to renegotiate representations of traditionally marginalized ident.i.ties and to integrate racial and gendered "Others" into the center of the action.

MONEYPENNY'S "BAD SHOT": PENETRATING BOND'S BODY Recent a.n.a.lyses of Casino Royale (Martin Campbell 2006) and Quantum of Solace (Marc Forster 2008) emphasize the specularisation of Bond's body, which becomes a visual guarantee of the ascendency and power of the post-Cold War British nation. Colleen M. Tremonte and Linda Racioppi argue that Bond's body becomes an "object of the gaze" in Casino Royale that reverses an objectifying gaze that has focused solely on women (191). This specularisation, according to Lisa Funnell, represents a s.h.i.+ft away from the "British lover tradition" and towards a more Hollywood mode of muscular masculinity in which "Bond's body, rather than his libido, [becomes] the new locus of masculinity" ("Negotiating" 208). Where Skyfall differs is the extent to which Bond's body is revealed as vulnerable. For as Klaus Dodds notes, Skyfall is the first Bond film that visualizes Bond's aging and vulnerable body (121). This is clearly evident in the opening credits, which depict Bond's body being pulled downward through the water by a woman's hand and absorbed into a black pit that emerges from the riverbed. Clouds of blood transform the screen and images of Bond as a shooting target marred with bleeding bullet holes reinforce his vulnerability.

By focusing on the weakness of Bond's body in the t.i.tle sequence, the film draws a connection between the relative health of Bond and the strength of the British nation. As Dodds notes, it is Bond's vulnerable body that "offers an opportunity to link his eventual rehabilitation to that of the national security state" (122). This focus enables Skyfall to establish a narrative of reconst.i.tution, in which Bond must undergo a series of trials that enable him to a.s.sert his corporeal superiority. Bond's resurrection as a virile action hero is linked to the ability of Britain to retain its power in an increasingly volatile and uncontrollable geopolitical climate (ibid. 120). If, as Moneypenny notes, Bond can be seen as an "old dog with new tricks," Britain, too, must undergo a similar narrative reconst.i.tution in order to maintain its representation as experienced and strong, its body politic bolstered by the traditional virtues embodied in the British bulldog that sits on M's desk.

In this sense, the focus on the revival of Bond's fit and hypermasculine body throughout the film reiterates the proper gender relations const.i.tutive of a "healthy" British nation. Although women and people of color are not necessarily barred from this sphere, they are fundamentally conceptualized as "out of place" (Woollacott 110) and require a reorientation that resit