November 1, 2020

Content warning: sexualized violence

On Halloween 2020, a retired actor named Sir Sean Connery went to meet the great casting director in the sky, at the ripe old age of 90. His passing has been mourned by most fans of James Bond, our current lead for both number and percentage of dead girlfriends. For it was Sean Connery, rest his soul, who originated James Bond on-screen, way back in the halcyon days of 1962.

Yes, it was Connery who first whirled to fire at the camera in an opening sequence:

... who first tossed his hat to Miss Moneypenny and jokingly resisted her advances:

... who originated the running gag of delaying travel plans for sex:

... and who, of course, introduced himself to Sylvia Trench (Eunice Gayson) as "Bond, James Bond."

As most obituaries for Connery have noted, his performance in the role is A Legend™, the standard against which all others are measured. In fact, actors auditioning to play 007 are required to imitate him, specifically by playing "their version" of a love scene that he nailed in From Russia With Love.

As some of those obits have admitted, however, Connery's 6-film run as James Bond looks problematic in hindsight. The BBC said "his Bond is now a museum piece; the portrayal of women impossibly dated. The action scenes are still thrilling, but the sex too often bordered on the non-consensual."

It is the opinion of DFGRR that that is putting it politely. So we'd like to take this moment to look back at Connery-Bond's era and what it meant for the women around him.

The Stats

Connery-Bond had 20 separate Bond girls over the course of his 6 canonical movie appearances, 25% of whom die. If one breaks down the mortality rate by actor, surprisingly enough, Connery is in fourth place, behind Daniel Craig (40%), George Lazenby (33%), and Pierce Brosnan (31%). The low percentage may be a reflection of how many more movies Connery-Bond appeared in. However, as the following bar chart shows, Connery-Bond is also not first for total number of dead girlfriends. That dubious honor belongs to Roger Moore's Bond.

At first blush, therefore, it may well seem that Connery-Bond isn't all that bad for the Bond girls.

Nevertheless, when it comes to cavalier acceptance of these deaths, Connery-Bond takes the cake. Connery-Bond simply does not get upset when a woman dies, regardless of how intimately he knew her or how directly he caused her death.

You may well be wondering, "Do any Bonds get upset when someone dies?" And the answer is yes: Lazenby-Bond (On Her Majesty's Secret Service) and Dalton-Bond (Licence to Kill) both weep on screen. Craig-Bond howls in grief while attempting CPR on a dead girlfriend in Casino Royale. In The World is Not Enough, Brosnan-Bond caresses the corpse of a woman he's just shot (in the most open show of remorse Eon Productions has ever filmed). And Moore-Bond, for all his faults, at least has the decency to take flowers to his wife's grave in For Your Eyes Only.

What does Connery-Bond do? Well, sometimes he calls his CIA contact, Felix Leiter, and says, "Get over here right away. The girl's dead."

. . . and then has to correct Felix on which girl he means, because the girl dead in his bed tonight is different than the one he was out with this afternoon.

Other times, he throws a woman into the line of fire to save his own skin:

. . . and makes a witty pun while dropping her body off at a stranger's table.

On one memorable occasion, when he wakes up to find his bedmate has been assassinated in her sleep, he carries on a perfectly calm conversation while in bed with her corpse:

One could easily tag the entire Connery-Bond filmography with "not pictured: grief."

To be fair, James Bond has a solid, textually-established reason for being quite comfortable with violent deaths. That reason is: he himself commits most of them. If you mix in the fact that Connery-Bond is implied to be a veteran of World War II, add a dash of Stereotypically Stiff Upper Lip, gently shake (don't stir) the Generational Expectations of Masculinity, and pour the mix over the Conventions of the 1960s Action Genre, you'll get a proper Cocktail of Repressed Emotions.

So our next question needs to be, "Is Connery-Bond more callous about gender-based violence than he is about violence in general?" And the answer is yes, thanks to...

The Consent Problem

For Connery-Bond, sex happens quickly, and with very little preamble. For example, remember when Bond reported "the girl's dead", above? Well, he met that "girl" when he broke into her hotel room, caught her helping her boss cheat at cards, threatened her boss, and took her to bed without further conversation. Because why should there be any need to discuss this, or even introduce himself?

Now I know what you're thinking: "it played differently in the 60s." Sure, it probably did. In 1964, there was no such thing as affirmative consent; there was a cure for syphilis; nobody had discovered HIV/AIDS yet; and James Bond was capable of bowling over any woman. So good old Double-O 7 had a license to fuck, freely and often. But by modern standards, this whole situation absolutely screams "STIs" and "dubious consent" and "power differential."

So, yes, the BBC is correct to say that "sex bordered on the non-consensual" in Connery-Bond's films. What the BBC is missing, however, is a recognition of the fact that Connery-Bond also went right across that border and clear into sexual-assault territory.

**Content warning alert**

In 1965's Thunderball, Connery-Bond raped Nurse Pat Fearing (Molly Peters) at a health spa.

If I know my audience, you're either about to tell me "no he didn't," or ask "what's Thunderball?" So let me lay out the facts.

1. Bond is at a health spa.
2. He recognizes that another patient, Count Lippe, is a member of SPECTRE.
3. Nurse Fearing hooks Bond into a spinal traction machine (a treatment for back pain at the time.)
4. Lippe sets the machine to its highest setting, hoping to kill Bond.
5. Fearing realizes something is wrong with the machine and rescues Bond. Afraid that she's the one who accidentally set it to the highest setting, she begs him not to tell her boss.
6. Bond - who knows full well that that was an assassination attempt - says: 

Bond: Well, I, I suppose my silence could have a price.

Pat Fearing: You don't mean - oh, no.

Bond: Oh, yes!

So, to recap, Bond is blackmailing her over something he knows she didn't do. She thinks she's guilty of malpractice, and is desperate to save her career. She does not say yes, in any way, shape, or form, before he drags her into a sauna and pulls her uniform off. In fact, her last word is "no."

I invite you to judge this scene for yourself:

I believe you'll agree that this is not "borderline" or "dubious consent." This is Bond blackmailing a woman into sex acts. In other words, it's rape. Maybe 1965 audiences wouldn't have said so, but 2020 audiences absolutely do.

We should say so, too, because the first step to overcoming normalized rape in pop culture is admitting that we have, in fact, normalized rape in pop culture. If we choose not to name that fact, we run the risk of falling into the trap that one Metro journalist fell into when Molly Peters died:

But watch that clip again: she doesn't strip. She is stripped of clothing by James Bond. Assuming the author of that obit has seen Thunderball, their decision to use the active voice is a decision to overlook the unpleasant details of that scene in favor of reminding us that people get naked during it. This grammatical chicanery lumps that scene in with other sex scenes performed by other Bond girls, when in fact it isn't a sex scene at all. It's a rape scene.

Keep in mind, Thunderball isn't an obscure movie or a flop that nobody saw. It was the third highest-grossing movie of 1965. Yes. What does it say about 1960s perceptions of sexual assault that a major motion picture could have a rape committed by the hero in minute 17, and nobody remarked on it?

More to the point, what does it say about 21st-century perceptions that this scene came up in all of Molly Peters's obituaries, but not any of Sean Connery's?

Not great things, huh?

And speaking of things that didn't make it into the obituary...

Intimate Partner Violence

James Bond is not ashamed to hit a woman, that much is clear.

Somewhere around 1975, he did stop slapping women, but he's definitely comfortable shoving, fighting, or even shooting women to this very day. And, in-universe, that occasionally makes sense: if a female assassin or Soviet agent or CIA/KGB double-agent attacks Bond, he probably should fight back, because he's the main character and needs to stay alive. But the Connery era featured far less justifiable situations, in which Bond slapped women for such minor crimes as (checks notes) not knowing the information he wanted, being annoyingly present when he wanted to have some "man talk," or standing in the same room as him, all of which you can see in the following supercut:

Those scenes are uncomfortable to watch, at best, and they get downright excruciating when you look at the reality subtext. You see, during promotion for the aforementioned Thunderball, Sean Connery gave an interview to Playboy in which he was asked, "How do you feel about roughing up a woman, as Bond sometimes has to do?" And he said:

I don’t think there is anything particularly wrong about hitting a woman — although I don’t recommend doing it in the same way that you’d hit a man. An openhanded slap is justified — if all other alternatives fail and there has been plenty of warning. If a woman is a bitch, or hysterical, or bloody-minded continually, then I’d do it.

Wow. OK. I could try to analyze this quote - discussing what he likely meant by "hysterical or bloody-minded," questioning the division between "openhanded slaps" and other types of hitting - but frankly I think it speaks for itself. Sean Connery endorsed the idea that it was OK to smack your partner as long as you gave her "plenty of warning," in the pages of a national magazine, as part of the promotional tour for a movie that was heavily marketed towards teenage boys.

Let's just sit with that for a minute.

Not a great message, huh?

I'm sure it's pure coincidence that this interview came out the same year that Connery (allegedly) knocked his wife unconscious because she danced with someone else at a party.

In the 55 years since that Playboy interview, Connery was given at least 4 opportunities to repudiate it, and he never did. Most famously, in 1987 he had a heated exchange with Barbara Walters:

Connery: And I haven’t changed my opinion.

Walters: You haven’t?

Connery: No. Not at all.

Walters: You think it’s good to slap a woman?

Connery: No I don’t think it’s good —

Walters: You don’t think it’s bad though.

Connery: I don’t think it’s that bad. I think that it depends entirely on the circumstances and if it merits it, yeah.

Walters: And what would merit it?

Connery: Well, if you have tried everything else, and women are pretty good at this, that they can’t leave it alone. They don’t — they want to have the last word. And you give them the last word but they’re not happy with the last word. They want to say it again and get into a really provocative situation. Then I think it’s absolutely right.

I'll give you another quick minute to sit with that one.

Phew. OK. Right now you might be thinking, "wow, this guy's just like Harvey Weinstein." But unlike Weinstein, Connery didn't hide his violent tendencies towards women behind the trappings of money, power, or fame. In fact, he didn't hide them at all! When that Barbara Walters interview aired on national television, he owned what he had said. He was almost proud of it.

Again, maybe you're thinking "it played differently in the 80s." But no. The 1980s were the decade when the US started taking intimate partner violence seriously, through such helpful measures as mandating that police arrest domestic abusers, and making it illegal for a man to rape his wife. By 1987, the idea that one should strike one's wife because "she's not happy with the last word" shouldn't have been an acceptable idea to express on national television. That interview probably should've ended Connery's career.

It did not.

Instead, he chugged along for another 16 years before retirement, playing iconic heroes like Henry Jones Sr.:

Captain Ramius of Red October:

And Alcatraz escapee John Mason:

The Legacy

So the obvious question is, who kept giving roles to a man who advocated for violence against women, in the 1990s?!

The answer is as frightening as it is obvious: James Bond fans!

You see, Steven Spielberg, director and producer of Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, had previously applied to direct a Bond movie - twice. Similarly, John McTiernan of The Hunt For Red October was the subject of longstanding rumors that he would direct a Brosnan-era Bond film. Finally, The Rock was directed by Michael Bay, who is still gushing about how intimidated he was when he directed the legendary Sean Connery, and much he learned from him, and how Connery's influence helped soothe the studio when Rock went overbudget, and how Connery was just the best thing ever to happen to action movies.

During the era when Connery was making films with all these 007 superfans, the Bond franchise actually tried to distance itself from the Connery-era misogyny, for example by making Judi Dench the new M.

Meanwhile, though, Connery was free to schlep his sexist, misogynist, dinosaur-like opinions straight into the 21st century, because thanks to his run as Bond, he was A Legend™. One could even suggest that his proud confessions of wife-slapping were overlooked because, in a way, nobody expected any better behavior from James Bond. In short, Sean Connery was a monster of the Bond franchise's making. 

“Bond’s been evolving along with all the other men in the world. Some have just gotten there more quickly than others.” - Barbara Broccoli, 2020, Variety

Sean Connery the man has passed into a higher judgment now. Sean Connery the Legend™, however, lives on in the minds and memories of all the fans who've watched his movies, plus the new fans he'll gain now that so many of his movies are available for streaming. That means that we will need to reckon with the legacy of his popularity, today and in the future. We need to be able to admit that, even though he was a good actor, he was far too proud of doing bad things to be considered a good person. And when we, or our children, watch Last Crusade or Goldfinger, we need to keep his problems as part of the narrative.

By the same token, we need to be able to say that the Bond movies aren't innocent fun, although some of us enjoy them very much. That franchise has contributed to normalization of rape and intimate partner violence. While it's made some amends and taken steps to provide a better influence, it still has a lot of work to do.