First, pardon my delay in responding–work became a little more intense.
While being a victim of child sex trafficking is a snippet of information in terms of it being one character aspect among many, it also has far more significance in a character’s life (if that character is making any claims to verisimilitude) than saying she was born in Canarsie. Childhood sex abuse has a profound effect on the subsequent life of a person and will affect most (if not all) of her “other facets and motivations.” If Severine’s abuse is to be taken as more than “trauma signaling,” then I would agree that another backstory should have been used since, as your analysis notes, the narrative needed a conflicted character.
Which is fine in a Bond film working on the level of fantasy/myth. But the Craig Bond films want more than myth/fantasy–they want to add reality while still holding onto the fantasy/myth elements. An audience member can feel like Evelyn Mulwray in the last reel of CHINATOWN: “It’s fantasy! It’s reality! It’s fantasy! It’s reality! It’s fantasy and it’s reality!”
Bond films have worked perfectly where audience involvement was achieved through engaging action and spectacle. The Craig Bonds went for greater involvement through increased audience identification with the characters. On one hand, this approach was an answer to the critique that women were objectified/diminished in earlier films. But the cure also brought its own problems since while characters were fleshed out, it was only to a certain degree, so that depth was sometimes signaled rather than provided. It is the old problem of trying to ride two horses with one butt.
What I am referring to is the general objectification of women that goes on in Bond movies (though there is some nice male eye candy in one of the Brosnan Bonds, but I cannot at the moment recall which one). Not that Bond movies were alone in this practice. We know how women, people of color, and queers (to name just three groups) were generally depicted in films as existing to be at the service of the hetero white male protagonist. In the Hollywood films of the 1920’s and 1930’s (especially pre-Code films), there are some great exceptions, e.g., THE DIVORCEE (1930) and EX-LADY (1933), but in these and other cases you find that women were involved in writing the scripts and shaping the female characters. Women’s involvement as writers and (more significantly) directors diminished once the Hayes Code was instituted, resulting in greater rigidity and stratification in the way studios were operated. Dorothy Arzner was the only woman in the DGA until her retirement, followed by Ida Lupino in the 1950’s. But that was it until the 1970’s. What constituted accepted/standard film narrative was determined by men for decades. There were some exceptions: Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Fred Zinnemann created three-dimensional female characters who exhibited autonomy, and Douglas Sirk filmed scripts he was handed in such a way as to turn them on their head, but these were rare exceptions.
Not entirely. There are things that the films do which are consistent, observable elements of the works.
I agree. There is the interesting exception of Cad Bond in TMWTGG–a dead end, but at least Hamilton carried the conceit through the whole film, making for an interesting take on the character. One of the other egregious examples is the rape-the-lesbian-out-of-Pussy-Galore scene in GOLDFINGER, but there again Hamilton’s distancing mise en scene/editing does good work.
But in addition to how Bond acts in the films is how women are presented therein. Within the movies many objects are presented as aspirational items, the possession of which represent achieving Bond status. For example, Manuela in MR sits on the sofa, reveals some leg, and offers herself to Bond as if she were one of the suite’s amenities. Women being ready and willing to be conquered is part of the Bond universe. There are women who resist, but ultimately they too are won (or forced) over.
Agreed, but what I was asking members of this community was “how Bond’s behavior with women affected them.” Or to put it another way: how did they initially react to the films’ presentation of women and if and how that reaction has changed over the years.