by Laurie Penny
Nobody is saying that Bond isn’t fun. On top of all the explosions and wacky gadgets, the Sean Connery-era Bond movies are so mind-blowingly sexist that they are hilarious. The revamped films aren’t much better – the last time we saw Bond, he was watching a villain tie up his sex-slave lover, place a glass of Scotch on her head as the camera aimed at her cleavage, then shoot her just to prove how evil he was. Bond’s verdict? ‘Waste of good Scotch.’ Again, gross enough to be funny: until you remember that this is the guy we are supposed to be rooting for. It is possible to watch the films ironically but it is hard to sustain a rigorous internal critique when the scenery is blowing up and Dr No must be stopped at all costs. Ultimately, it is terribly difficult to sustain an ironic erection. To do so involves a kind of anxiety that the men and boys of the twenty-first century know very well.
The new Bond films work because they tackle that anxiety head-on. The director Sam Mendes told Empire magazine that 2012’s Skyfall – the highest-grossing Bond film in history – was about ageing, uncertainty and loss and that this dynamic forces itself through the action scenes, the ridiculous firefights, the awesome bit in which the train carriage packed with explosives ploughs through someone’s ceiling just because they had the budget. Daniel Craig has not been given enough credit for taking a character who was a cardboard throwback even in the 1960s and playing him straight: as a wall-eyed, traumatised thug, a protagonist who is two-dimensional precisely because he is empty inside.
Craig animates the automaton that is Bond by asking just what it would take to make a person behave in this horrific way – and like any piece of well-done puppetry, the effect is sinister. Daniel Craig is the Bond we deserve, a Bond who takes seriously the job of embodying a savage yearning for a lost fantasy of the 1950s. It is about masculinity, yes, but also about Britishness, about whiteness and about heterosexuality, about the loss of certainty in all of these in a changing world.
That is why I agree with Roger Moore that Bond cannot be played by a woman or a person of colour, except in pastiche – Bond’s whiteness and maleness are as much a part of who he is as the gadgets and the sharp suits and the romantic alcoholism. Indeed, these are almost all of who he is. Bond is anxious twentieth-century masculinity incarnate, a relic of twentieth-century power struggling to come to terms with its own irrelevance, still fighting cartoon Cold War villains as the planet burns – which is what gives the films their melancholy beauty.
The franchise is dripping with camp nostalgia for a time that never really was, a time when men could be real men, which meant that they were allowed to hurt whoever they wanted and still get away with it. It’s right up there in the job description: licence to kill. Bond is the kind of hero he is because he is allowed to do anything he wants to anyone he likes, from harassment to outright murder, all while wearing snappy suits and driving cool cars and getting every single one of the girls, for a rather suspicious value of ‘getting’. He may be a dangerous sociopath, but he’s our dangerous sociopath, so of course we’re rooting for him, because damn, look at the other guy. He’s got an eyepatch. And a cat. And he dresses like your granddad if your granddad was the weird judge off Project Runway.
The ‘licence to kill’ thing always bothered me – on a logistical level as much as an ethical one. Before the opening credits even roll, Bond has usually caused enough mayhem to keep some poor desk clerk occupied in paperwork for a year.
Whose job is it to follow Bond around with a stack of forms and a can of disinfectant, explaining his behaviour to grieving widows and elderly parents who don’t understand why their daughter has been petrified in gold paint by goons and left to die in a hotel room by some sleazeball she’s just met? Presumably the job falls to Moneypenny, who seems unaccountably upset that she never gets a shot at Bond, despite the fact that ‘Bond girl’ is a career in which ‘work–life balance’ is extremely awkward to negotiate.
The problem with the way we watch Bond is not that Bond is a killer. I rather like films about serial killers, those gory thrillers that seduce you into rooting for the twisted anti-hero over the good guy. The problem with Bond is that he is supposed to be the good guy. He is a borderline rapist who is employed by the government to murder people – and yet he is not an anti-hero. He is just a hero. If your child said they wanted to grow up to be just like Hannibal Lecter, you would be worried. Somehow Bond gets a pass and, come Hallowe’en, a legion of little boys will be dressing as 007 with the full support of their doting parents. Bond is a hero for no other reason than that he is on our side, which is how most Western nations and particularly the British come to terms with their particular legacy of horror – with a quiet embarrassment that nonetheless knows how to defend itself by force.
The dilemma of James Bond is a pantomime version of the dilemma facing most men who grew up watching the films and wondering what it would be like to be that guy, whom everybody seems to love not in spite of the awful things he does but because of them. In real life, anyone who behaved even slightly like James Bond would be ostracised, arrested, or both. And that is the problem. Bond is still supposed to be a hero but if you knew him in real life, you would be warning all your friends not to invite him to their parties. That disconnect follows men home from the cinema and into their daily lives, because most of the behaviours that are supposed to make you a hero – the things you are still supposed to do if you want to be a strong, respected, manly man – also make you an unqualified arsehole.
That is why James Bond isn’t evil. James Bond, more than anything, is a tragic figure and his tragedy is the tragedy of white, imperialist masculinity in the twenty-first century. It is a tragedy of irrelevance that becomes all the more poignant and painful in the retelling. It cannot last for ever and it must not last for ever – but while it does I’ll thank you to pass me the popcorn.
COMMODITY FEMINISM
In the late 1920s, not many women smoked. To do so in public was seen as unladylike, a signal of promiscuity and general naughtiness. So the American Tobacco Company hired Edward Bernays, the man now known as ‘the father of public relations’, to find a way of selling cigarettes to women. The first feminist wave was still in full, frilly-hatted swing and Bernays realised that women’s desire for independence could be manipulated for profit.
Bernays let it be known that during the Easter Sunday Parade of 1929, a group of suffragettes would be lighting ‘torches of freedom’, and arranged for photographers to be on standby. On cue, in the middle of the parade, a gang of hired models produced packets of cigarettes and sparked up. The images were distributed around the world.
It worked like a dream. In 1923 women purchased only 5 per cent of all cigarettes sold but by 1935 that had increased to 18 per cent. Almost instantly, cigarettes became associated with empowerment. It was perhaps the first time feminism was appropriated to sell us things we don’t need; it wouldn’t be the last. I’m writing this with an e-cigarette in my hand, by the way. It isn’t very empowering.
Capitalism has a way of cannibalising its own dissent. The endless weary suggestions that we need to ‘rebrand’ feminism miss how women’s liberation – particularly when gently pried away from its more radical, anti-family, anti-racist, anti-capitalist tendencies – has long been used to sell everything from cheap perfume to vibrators. From Revlon’s Charlie adverts, marketing chain-store scent to the ‘new women’ of the 1970s, to the more recent Dove ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’ (which shows how we can make ourselves feel better about the psychosocial terrorism of the beauty ideal by rubbing in a bit of body lotion), every groundswell of idealism has salesmen scampering in its wake.
Recently an advert produced by Snickers in Australia featured construction workers shouting feminist statements. ‘You want to hear a filthy word?’ they yell from their scaffolding. ‘Gender bias!’
The advert’s punchline – ‘You’re not yourself when you’re hungry’ – manages to be offensive on a number of levels, not least by implying that manual labourers in their na
tural state are rude, aggressive boors. As was quickly observed, if this is how men behave when they haven’t eaten cheap chocolate there’s a good argument for never feeding them again.
Advertising is one of the sites where profound cultural battles are played out in public. Posters selling cosmetic surgery appear far more rarely on the London Underground since they began to be defaced and stickered over with messages about sexism and self-image. Naturally, I’d never do anything like that, because that would be destruction of property. So if you’re reading this and thinking of doing a bit of subvertising, I’d encourage you to scrawl slogans only over any posters you may own, any billboards you may own, and the walls of any public buildings or bus shelters you may own.
Even the most challenging advertising usually plays on trends and ideas that are current in the mainstream. The co-option of basic feminist sentiments by the hawkers of cheap chocolate and panty liners clearly demonstrates that a cultural shift has taken place – yet the stark juxtaposition of these ever-so-slightly challenging adverts with the everyday wall of airbrushed limbs draped over cars, credit cards and the telephone numbers of payday loan companies signals just how far we have to go.
The trouble is that, while progressive ideas can be used to spice up a confectionery campaign, social justice itself is a hard sell. The kind of feminist change that will make a material difference to the lives of millions, the kind of feminist change growing numbers of ordinary people are getting interested in, is about far more than body image. It’s about changing the way women (and, by extension, everyone else) get to live and love and work. It’s about boring, unsexy, structural problems such as domestic work and unpaid labour, racism and income inequality. It’s about freeing us to live lives in which we are more than how we look, what we buy and what we have to sell.
The activists of what is now being spoken of as feminism’s ‘fourth wave’ – digital, intersectional, globally connected and mad as hell – are good at branding, and increasingly confident in getting their message out. The iconography of injustice has altered in the Internet age and viral moments, popular hashtags, catchy videos and slogans are being used to promote ideas that are more challenging than anything mainstream advertising has yet thought of.
There is nothing wrong with a bit of showmanship. Nor is using feminist ideas to sell chocolate and cosmetics a bad thing.
But there are some ideas that will remain challenging and disturbing, however you dress them up. You can’t walk into a shop and buy a torch of freedom – you can only light a fire yourself, and pass it on.
LITTLE ORPHAN NELLIE
In 1893, the celebrated reporter Nellie Bly went to visit Emma Goldman in prison. The young anarchist provocateur was held in the first Manhattan jail to be called the Tombs; it was built on the wreck of an old swamp and stank of rot and faeces. The two women had both grown up in poverty and obscurity, and found fame, if not fortune, by writing about the conditions suffered by women and the working poor. But while Bly was lauded for circling the globe in only a fetching checked travelling cloak, Goldman was locked up for incitement to riot. Bly was one of the few journalists to show Goldman any sympathy and the first to understand her importance as a cultural figure. In Bly’s piece, Goldman is permitted to speak her truth at length, along with some girly chat about clothes of the frivolous sort that Goldman would never have stooped to in her own writings. These are the details that never make it into the manifestos but nevertheless make the politics a hundred times more human.
The reporter mentions Goldman’s precocious talent – she is barely twenty-five – and lists the six languages she can speak and write. We are invited to be impressed. Then Bly comes to the matter of marriage and whether Goldman believes it to be a universal good, the ultimate balm of a woman’s life:
‘I was married,’ she said, with a little sigh, ‘when I was scarcely seventeen. I suffered – let me say no more about that. I believe in the marriage of affection. That is the only true marriage. If two people care for each other they have a right to live together so long as that love exists. When it is dead what base immorality for them still to keep together! Oh, I tell you the marriage ceremony is a terrible thing!’
No counter-argument is offered, or even entertained. Bly agrees with Goldman but cannot say so directly. To do so would not have been in character, at least not the character as whom she made her living.
Some people seem born to break down walls. Nellie Bly was born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in Pennsylvania in 1864. She was the thirteenth of fifteen children and, following the early loss of her father and her mother’s remarriage to, and scandalous divorce from, a mean drunk, she struggled to find teaching work. Her first break in journalism came when she sent an excoriating letter to the Pittsburg Dispatch, responding to an article about ‘What Girls Are Good For’ – marriage, motherhood and obscurity, according to the original columnist, whose name is lost to history. ‘If girls were boys quickly it would be said: start them where they will, they can, if ambitious, win a name and fortune,’ wrote Bly, then twenty. ‘Gather up the real smart girls, pull them out of the mire, give them a shove up the ladder of life, and be amply repaid.’ She signed her letter as ‘Orphan Girl’.
The editor, George Madden, was so impressed that he offered her a job. Because women’s writing was considered unseemly, Madden decided that Cochran should have a pen name. He took ‘Nellie Bly’ from a minstrel song: a white man bestowing on a white girl a name created by a white man for a fictional black serving girl. From the start, Cochran – now Bly – was caught between the stories men wanted to tell about girls and the stories girls would tell for themselves, ‘given the chance’. Bly is now remembered less for the stories she wrote than for the stories that sprouted up around her. Maureen Corrigan notes in the introduction to the new Penguin edition of Bly’s collected journalism that Nellie Bly has become ‘a headline, not an author’. Her femaleness is phrased now, as it was in her day, as a fascination; the editorial furniture, neatly preserved in the Penguin edition, sells her in the manner in which Victorian circuses might advertise a travelling freak show: See this Young Girl Write Hard-Hitting Stories Just Like a Man!
Bly racked up a lot of firsts in her meteoric career. Just a year after being hired by the Dispatch, she had left for New York, where the first mass-circulation newspapers were being printed, wangled a job at the World, and made her name with ‘stunt’ reporting. She was to become the most celebrated reporter of her age, at a time when journalists did not expect to become household names. Bly was also the first decoy to allow the patriarchal press to feel really good about itself for allowing a little woman into the big boys’ club.
‘Gonzo’ journalism is now read as a macho practice: turn up somewhere ripped and stoned and undercover and immerse yourself in a culture or practice, then write viscerally, from the brain and the gut. In fact, women were doing it first. Bly was just twenty-one when she got herself committed to Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum to report on the dispiriting conditions suffered by the inmates there: the beatings, the starvation, the cold. Her feature in the World drew public attention to the plight of the mentally unwell in the US and led to some limited reforms.
From the start, Bly is a natural writer. Her voice is caustic and confident, lilting effortlessly between the gush and private wonder of a schoolgirl’s diary and the rigour of the most celebrated political reporters of her time. Bly was a celebrity, working at a time when a revolution in newspaper technology had coincided with a surge of interest in women’s liberation. She was the right face for the right time. The fact that she was also tremendously talented in the literary and practical craft of journalism was at once the whole point and somewhat beside it.
By the time she headed out on her infamous round-the-world dash, attempting to circle the globe in fewer than the eighty days described in Jules Verne’s novel, she was already famous. ‘Strong Men Might Well Shrink From the Fatigues and Anxieties Cheerfully Faced by This Young American Girl’, cries
her home paper’s report, preserved in this edition, describing how the wind ruffled Bly’s ‘fair young cheeks’. Bly made her deadline and was greeted by cheering crowds in New York. The resulting column series, which became a book, is not about the world at all. Rather, it’s about Nellie Bly, the mannish young woman, the myth. We hear more about the outfits she was wearing than her impressions of the nations she glimpses out of the dining cars of cross-country sleeper trains.
The round-the-world dash is by far the weakest part of Bly’s oeuvre as presented in the Penguin collection. For a start, the speed at which the young reporter is travelling means that she barely has time to speak to anybody at all or to dig into the flesh of a place as she does in her undercover work. She is utterly focused on beating the self-imposed deadline, as if to miss it were to sacrifice her carefully built credibility. Bly sees the countries she visits mostly through train windows and the portholes of ships, and she sketches the people who actually live there in hasty and often racist caricatures.
As a young provincial reporter, Bly went to Mexico and wrote without sentiment or stereotype of the lives she saw there. In four short pages you get the starkness of inequality, the taste of a fresh tortilla, the gentleness of strangers. ‘The women, like other women, sometimes cry, doubtless for very good cause, and the men stop to console them,’ she observes.
On her round-the-world trip, Bly has no time for such nuance. The inhabitants of Aden, then a British colony, are simply ‘black people of many different tribes’ and ‘little naked children’ who ‘ran after us for miles, touching their foreheads humbly and crying for money’. That language, like Bly’s legend, is dressed in an outfit of patriotism. She is always that Plucky American Girl who can dash around the globe, trotting out the hasty racial stereotypes as well as any puffed-up British colonial officer.
