‘I’m such a feminist,” Helen Mirren told Saga magazine, but there are some jobs a woman can’t do. To be precise: “You can’t have a woman [as James Bond]. It just doesn’t work. James Bond has to be James Bond, otherwise it becomes something else.”
Mirren is starring opposite Pierce Brosnan in the film adaptation of Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club, in which they both play amateur sleuths in a care home. Happily, that is a unisex job. Brosnan might also describe himself as “such a feminist” – he has never said so explicitly, but in 2019, he said a female Bond would be “exhilarating”. However, he’s now back on team men, saying: “I’m so excited to see the next man come on the stage and to see a whole new exuberance and life for this character.” Exhilaration, excitement, exuberance: all qualities I don’t think I’ve ever seen in any Bond, across the great gamut of maleness, from Connery to Craig. But who am I to judge? Whenever 007 gets a new pen that can poison someone from 50 paces, the thrill racing through his veins might be implied by his slightly less stern visage. Truly, masculinity is an unknowable frontier.
A couple of things, before we hand the franchise over to Amazon, who bought it for more than $1bn earlier this year. The essential qualities of Bond are as follows: he can kill on command without conscience, except when he has a conscience; he is patriotic; he is irresistible to women; he favours discreetly tailored, monochrome clothing; he can drink neat spirits without becoming intoxicated; and he always introduces himself in reverse order, to people who tend to already know his name. None of this screams “man”, except perhaps the patriotism, if you understand emotionally charged nationalism as a drumbeat of the patriarchy. Having said that, women can serve the patriarchy just as well as men – look at Mirren. Sorry, that is totally uncalled for: her feminist membership cannot be revoked, at least not on the basis of her Bond opinions, since that would be handing 007 too much power in the realm of gender.
On a separate point: is Bond a feminist, and if he is, does that mean it’s fine for him to remain a man in perpetuity? It’s a tricky one. His value system has changed so much over the 25 films, from his early “lovable chauvinist” years to his late “anguished quester after the truth of the self” iteration, a lesser person than myself might think the masculine ideal had itself gone on a journey since it first put on a dinner jacket in 1962. That, however, is a fruitless line of analysis, since if we were to take James Bond as too literal a representation of the changing social expectations of men, we’d have to conclude that they can be any which way, so long as they’re prepared to take out a minor dictator with piano wire and have a disregard for due process.
Arguably more important than any of that is what the Amazon takeover will do to the franchise, given the semi-recent history of the tech company – it invented an AI recruitment tool in 2018 that effectively trained itself to prefer male candidates; it was shown to have embedded sexism in its sports coverage, after Alexa didn’t know what a Lioness was; and, according to employees, it has an office culture in which you’re never not at work, which automatically excludes sane people – and come on, a lot of those are going to be women. Does this sound like a safe pair of hands to take over the management of a fictional character whose arc we would hope is going to continue to bend towards gender justice? Not really, but at the same time, if Amazon did spring a female Bond on the world, and used that as feminist-washing, proof in perpetuity that none of the sexist algorithms were created deliberately, well, that would be quite annoying.
Nobody overreact, but surely what this moment in history is crying out for is a gender-fluid Bond.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
• Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
