Dr. No (1962)
ALEX
Is this masculinity? Bond gambling, Bond drinking, Bond wearing a bowler hat when it suits him, carrying a pistol. Seducing beautiful women, when it amuses him. Certainly it’s a masculinity I can get behind when he walks into the wolves’ den while remaining calm, collected, awake and aware. When he admits to Honey Ryder how scared he is, even as they’re escorted to meet the villain himself. When he keeps his cool though under attack, while his allies panic.
This is only a rarefied brand of masculinity though, defined by author Ian Fleming to highlight high stakes, danger, gambling, and the Walther PPK pistol. A more universal masculinity can be seen in Bond’s local Jamaican ally Quarrel, who goes toe to toe alongside him against a military tank using nothing but handguns. Quarrel is superstitiously terrified of this machine, which has been painted as a dragon specifically to play up the local legends and fears, but he helps Bond attack it anyway. He could’ve run away; he stood his ground.
JADE
The Femme Fatale traditionally cannot have a heroic ending; because she is a vicious villain for whom the writers imagine no redemption, she usually dies. The Femme Fatale in Dr. No, Miss Taro, does not have a violent death, she is simply whisked off screen, as a trap Bond expertly avoided. The next woman to arrive in Bond’s adventure is Honey Ryder, emerging out of the ocean like Venus. She tells her own tale of avenging rape by putting a poisonous spider in the bed of her rapist. In this way, Honey Ryder represents a positive iteration of that Femme Fatale figure: the woman who can kill. She can be a black widow when she needs to be. Ryder’s story works because it reveals the power of choice, that a woman can be more than either deadly or helpless, either vulnerable or vicious. She became her own hero when she needed to be.
Still, the Bond girl is not as good as Bond. With Bond as the lead, the writers have the opportunity to show a real development within him (not that they ever really do). For the feminine, changes and developments are not expressed through the arcs of single individuals but rather by multiple individual women used as symbols of a development into a better relationship with The Feminine as such. While 10 year old me adored Honey Ryder, 25 year old me cannot be too invested in her. She is not a fully realized character; she is a stationary object within Bond's psyche.
ALEX
Tragically, most of the characters remain stationary throughout this film, existentially speaking. Ryder even devolves, presenting a woman of Valkyrie-level self-determination, before promptly falling into a trap that only Bond can rescue her from. True masculinity could be defined then as the opposite of remaining stationary: the ability to choose change, and then achieve it. This is a virtue available to all people, at all stages of development. Quarrel is the only character in Dr. No to illustrate this, and it was clearly by accident on the part of the screenwriters, otherwise he would have met a more glorious and less bloody end.
JADE
How should we write about this movie? Maybe we should shoot guns, have a car chase, hunt down a Cold War villain and shoot him in his sleep. Then sip a cool martini in the lobby of a swanky hotel. But none of those classic Bond bits mean anything without a mission you believe in. Bond’s mission in this movie just doesn't convince me. Bond himself does not convince me. As much as I like collecting shells on a beach, I don’t yearn to be like Ryder, nor like any of these characters. It strikes me that a Bond film feels more fantastical than Dune, and the Lynch films we’ve watched, maybe even more than The Green Knight. And that’s because Bond always keeps his cool. He is so unaffected, and so I am unaffected. This is the opposite of the essence of life!
Perhaps Bond has too much of the masculine. He is all action, all direction, all go go go, and playing it cool. He never pauses, reflects, dreams, feels. In current Bond films, this is the goal: to show us what makes Bond tick, so we see the moody, thoughtful side of the hero.
ALEX
He always keeps his cool, is never in conflict, and remains essentially the same. This would be fine if written into proper relationship with his allies, Quarrel and Ryder, if they each had valid parts to play in the mission. Almost all the characters stay themselves and do not grow, and so the moral progression must ideally be in the mind of the screenwriters, who use these chessboard-piece characters to cast a spell upon the audience, to place opposing characters in the same rooms, in order to illustrate a more transcendent principle that will then unite the inevitable conflict. Dr. No, Bond, Honey Ryder, the chinese femme fatale Miss Taro, Bond’s ally Quarrel, are all aspects of the screenwriter’s psyche, turned by cinema into aspects of the audience’s psyche.
This is the context in which it is valuable to portray a hero that remains always heroic. If it can be illustrated in art, it can also be experienced within yourself: the steadfast You, the clear-eyed You, who presents a positive route of action even while your inner fears and inner adversaries wreak havoc on the emotions. I return again to the missed opportunity of Quarrel: amidst a pantheon of untouchable, unchanging principles (Bond, Dr. No, Ryder, etc.) he is the most human, and acts then as a proxy for the audience himself. Incorporating him into Bond’s final victory as a vital though humble ingredient would make the whole play more believable and relatable.
JADE
Static characters as aspects in the audience’s psyche! That’s cool. Though this method would still require the conflicts to be sufficiently gripping, and the cinematography more entrancing. Sure, Bond’s always saving the world or whatever, but after he completes a mission, the world looks exactly the same as when they started.
What’s needed here is a Romantic vision of man, which may require a woman’s direction. A director may well choose to tell the tale of a warrior, a hero, but a good director does so through the eyes of a lover, with the rose colored lenses of a lover's eyes. Perhaps this image of Heroic Man would appear far more entrancing through the female gaze. A female director, focusing on the best within man, would know what images to linger on, which aspects of the Bond persona are most lovable, most desirable. A woman can see the best of a man better than he himself can.