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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Even as a preteen girl, I knew that Ian Fleming's James Bond was a vulnerable guy -- and his creator, an equal-opportunity voyeur.
May 1, 2000 | Believe it or not, James Bond had a childhood. In Ian Fleming's "On Her Majesty's Secret Service," the seaside promenade of Royale-les-Eaux reminds Bond of "the velvet feel of the hot powder sand ... of the swimming and swimming and swimming through the dancing waves -- always in those days, it seemed, lit with sunshine -- and then the infuriating, inevitable, 'time to come out.' It was all there, his own childhood, spread out before him to have another look at. What a long time ago they were, those spade-and-bucket days! How far he had come since the freckles and the Cadbury milk-chocolate Flakes and the fizzy lemonade."
I, too, had a childhood. There was lemonade and hot powder sand and all the usual stuff. But it ended in 1979 -- the same year I discovered 007 and his license to kill. I was 12, desperate for pantyhose and fuzzy velour shirts, enamored of white roller skates with shiny blue wheels. After school, I used to throw myself down in the small space between the back of the couch and the stereo, turn the Kinks up loud and read about James Bond. I started with 1953's "Casino Royale," Fleming's first novel, and barreled my way through "Doctor No," "You Only Live Twice," "The Spy Who Loved Me" and all the rest.
James Chapman, author of the smart new book "Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films," points out that reviewers have largely reviled Fleming's novels as sadistic, sexist schoolboy fantasies. The majority of literary critics locate the books' appeal in their propagation of an ideology of almost imperialist British supremacy. And Chapman himself notes that the irony and humor in the character's film incarnation are noticeably lacking from the books.
Why then, would an American preteen girl (whose other favorite authors were Judy Blume and S.E. Hinton) read Fleming? I didn't like other espionage novels. International politics bored me silly. The books weren't funny, and by all rights I should have been alienated by what critics call their voyeuristic sexism. For example, Honeychile Rider, the heroine of "Doctor No," playfully throws her naked body against Bond as they stew in the villain's luxury spa/prison. "Honey," Bond tells her, "get into that bath before I spank you." She obeys, pouting, "You've got to wash me. I don't know what to do. You've got to show me." Infantilized, stupidly ignorant of the danger of her situation and as horny as hell, Honey epitomizes all that any budding feminist should detest.
Nonetheless, sex is interesting to an adolescent girl, whether it's sexist sex or not, and certainly Fleming's eroticism was part of the books' appeal for me. The author once said that the target of his stories lies "somewhere between the solar plexus and, well, the upper thigh." Still, I don't think the relatively infrequent moments of nudity and arousal would have been enough to make me love James Bond novels if the heterosexual male gaze were really as pernicious and pervasive as the critics say -- and as it is in the movies. The films portray the dominant Bond, if not the definitive one, and it's hard for most people to read the books without images of Sean Connery or Pierce Brosnan in their heads. And in the movies, Bond is a hypermasculine spy whose lustful eyes rove over bodacious female bodies, filmed through the vehicle of a camera that does likewise.
In contrast, Fleming is an equal-opportunity voyeur -- a point lost on most critics. His sensual catalogs of men's bodies easily equal those of women's. An example, from "Thunderball": "In contrast to the hard, slow-moving brown eyes, the mouth, with its thick, rather down-curled lips, belonged to a satyr ... the muscles bulged under the exquisitely cut shark-skin jacket. An aid to his athletic prowess were his hands. They were almost twice the normal size ... Largo was an adventurer, a predator on the herd."
In "From Russia With Love," SMERSH's psychopathic head executioner is receiving a massage. The masseuse tries to analyze her "instinctive horror for the finest body she [has] ever seen" as she rubs him in the sunlight by a pool: "She poured about a tablespoon full [of oil] on to the small furry plateau at the base of the man's spine, flexed her fingers and bent forward again. This embryo tail of golden down above the cleft of the buttocks -- in a lover it would have been gay, exciting, but on this man it was somehow bestial ... she shifted her hands on down to the two mounds of the gluteal muscles." The description lasts for four pages.
Fleming also describes cars and meals with much of the same erotic charge. In "Secret Service": "A low white two-seater, a Lancia Flaminia Zagato Spyder with its hood down, tore past him, cut in cheekily across his bonnet and pulled away, the sexy boom of its twin exhausts echoing back from the border of trees." To Bond, a pair of exhaust pipes is as sensual as a dish of crabmeat, which is as sensual as a pair of breasts.
