Prelims

Half Title

From Blofeld to Moneypenny: Gender in James Bond

Title Page

From Blofeld to Moneypenny: Gender in James Bond

AN EDITED COLLECTION BY STEVEN GERRARD

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Copyright

Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2020

Editorial matter and selection © Steven Gerrard 2020. All chapters © their respective authors 2020.

Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-83867-163-1 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-83867-165-5 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-83867-166-2 (Epub)

Dedication

One day, many years ago, my sadly missed colleague Liz came bounding into my office beaming with happiness. In her shaking hands she held two pieces of paper. The first was a handwritten letter from Mary Goodnight, herself, Ms Britt Ekland, and told of her days working on The Man with the Golden Gun. The second letter was from Ms Barbara Broccoli, the head of the James Bond family. In it, she wrote of her father Cubby’s love of Bond, how the women were portrayed in Eon Productions Bond films, and what they had coming up for the future. When I read these two beautifully crafted letters, my heart leapt. Liz cried, and so did I. Her thesis about the portrayal of women in Bond films was a corker.

The first film I saw in the pictures was Live and Let Die when I was three years old. I was taken by my Uncle Perry on its first release at The Scala Cinema, Merthyr Tydfil in 1973. I consider this an excellent introduction to watching films on ‘the big telly’, and which has violence, sex, mayhem and drug running at its core. And that was just the cinema we were in! My maternal gran loved James Bond movies, and I will never forget the sight of her laughing so much that she fell off the couch at the moment when the roof of Bond’s London double decker bus in Live and Let Die gets sliced off and crashes onto a chasing police car which then careers into a pond. No wonder I love this particular movie so much. My mum, a real-life M, keeps us all on the straight and narrow. And then there is Q … my dad, who always goes to see the new Bond films with me on their day of release.

Sean, George, Roger, Timothy, Pierce and Daniel … you are my heroes.

Bondians. Every one of them.

Contents

About the Contributors

Charlotte Allen’s major topics of study and research include: television, film, food writing, celebrity studies and fan studies. She has published and presented work on a wide range of topics including Food writing and gender politics, Jamie Oliver’s attempts at inspiring changes to food culture, Idris Elba as a Renaissance man for the twenty-first century, the Imperfectly Perfect Feminism of Parks and Recreation, and Matriarchal food cultures. Her PhD: ‘Cooks and Chefs: Gender in Modern British Food Writing’ looked at gendered writing, celebrity and food cultures in the UK and is currently being redrafted for publication as a book. She currently works at The University of Wollongong teaching Media and Communications.

Octavio Aragão is a Cultural Historian and holds a PhD in Visual Arts Fine Arts, along with an MA in History of Art, both of which were awarded from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. After being Adjunct Professor at Federal University of Espirito Santo, he is now Adjunct Professor at the Communication School at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He is the author of three science fiction novels: A Mão Que Cria (2006), Reis de Todos os Mundos Possíveis (2013) and A Mão Que Pune – 1890 (2018), plus two graphic novels, Para Tudo se Acabar na Quarta-Feira (2011) and Psicopompo (scheduled for January 2020).

Helena Bassil-Morozow is a Cultural Philosopher, Media and Film Scholar, and Academic Writer whose many publications include Tim Burton: The Monster and the Crowd (Routledge, 2010), The Trickster in Contemporary Film (Routledge, 2011), The Trickster and the System: Identity and Agency in Contemporary Society (Routledge, 2014), Jungian Film Studies: The Essential Guide (Routledge, 2016; co-authored with Luke Hockley) and Jungian Theory for Storytellers (Routledge, 2018).

Dean Bowman is studying a PhD at the University of East Anglia exploring the extent to which industry structures constrain the types of stories that can be told. He also teaches games studies and cultural studies at Norwich University of the Arts. He has a forthcoming book chapter in the edited collection Rerolling Board Games by McFarland Press and on the gamer persona of Jason Statham for Manchester University Press.

James Chapman is a Professor of Film Studies at the University of Leicester and Editor of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. He is a cultural historian specialising in British cinema and television and his most recent books are Contemporary British Television Drama (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), Hitchcock and the Spy Film: Authorship, Genre and National Cinema (I. B. Tauris, 2018), A New History of British Documentary (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Swashbucklers: The Costume Adventure Series (Manchester University Press, 2015). He has been a James Bond fan(atic) since seeing The Spy Who Loved Me in 1977. His book Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films (I. B. Tauris, 1999) was described by SFX magazine as ‘intelligent, ludicrous, [and] a bit snobbish. Bit like Bond, really’.

Llewella Chapman is an Associate Tutor at the University of East Anglia. She has recently passed her PhD titled ‘Representing Henry’s Royal Palace: The Relationship between Film, Television and Hampton Court Palace’, and is under contract with Bloomsbury to write a monograph titled Fashioning James Bond: Costume, Gender and Identity in the World of 007.

Wickham Clayton is a Lecturer in Film History and Theory at the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham, UK. He is an Editor of The Bible Onscreen in the New Millennium: New Heart and New Spirit (2020), and Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film (2015) and Co-editor of Screening Twilight: Critical Approaches to a Cinematic Phenomenon (2014). His work focusses on film form and aesthetics, film genre (with some specialisation in horror), cognition and the Biblical epic.

Steven Gerrard is a Reader in Film at Northern Film School, Leeds Beckett University. He has written extensively for We Belong Dead Publications and Hemlock’s Dark Side Magazine on all-things horror. He has written two monographs: The Carry On Films, which looks at the films through an academic eye; and, The Modern British Horror Film, that systematically analyses how post-millennium texts such as F and Mum & Dad reflect a fractured British society. He is an Instigator and Co-editor of Crank It Up: Jason Statham – Star! and also Co-editor of Emerald Publishing’s Gender in Contemporary Horror series. In his spare time, he longs to be either Status Quo’s rhythm guitarist or the new Doctor Who. He’ll have a long wait.

Claire Hines is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at Solent University, UK. Her research and publications focus on sexuality, gender, fantasy and James Bond in the contexts of American and British cultures. She is the Author of The Playboy and James Bond (Manchester University Press, 2018), the Editor of Fan Phenomena: James Bond (Intellect, 2015), and she has contributed to a number of collections about Bond.

Stephanie Jones is a Lecturer in Film, Television and Media at Aberystwyth University, UK and Editorial Assistant for the journal Media History. She is the Author of several chapters and articles on gender and the James Bond phenomenon.

Natalie Le Clue is a PhD candidate and Lecturer currently teaching in the Department of Media and Communication at Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Her research focusses on television studies with a particular emphasis on fan studies, fairy tale mythology and elements new media. She is an Avid Researcher and Media Practitioner and is currently in the process of formulating several pieces for academic publication. She currently holds a Master’s of Arts in Media Studies (Research).

Jennie Lewis-Vidler teaches at the University of Portsmouth and was previously a Karten Doctoral Outreach Fellow for the Parkes Institute in the University of Southampton. The Parkes Institute is one of the world’s leading centres for the study of Jewish and non-Jewish relations. She is interested in British racial, ethnic and national identity, the representation of masculinity in sports such as boxing, and British fascism, primarily the British Union of Fascists. Her PhD thesis titled ‘Traveller, Boxer and Fascist: The Identities of Joe Beckett’. It is a case study on the former 1920s heavyweight champion and how his career in boxing and later fascism represented masculinity and identity in Britain in the twentieth century.

Renee Middlemost is a Lecturer in Communication and Media at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Her research focusses on fan/audience participatory practices and how these intersect with celebrity and popular culture. Her recent work has been published in Celebrity Studies; M/C Journal, the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture. She is the Co-founder of FSN Australasia and a Co-editor of Participations.

Shelley O’Brien is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Sheffield Hallam University. She gained an MPhil in 2000, entitled Body-Horror Movies: Their Emergence and Evolution. She lectures on horror cinema; film music and sound; cult and exploitation cinema; and supervises MA by Research and PhD students. She has published work on killer priests in film; Herschell Gordon Lewis and Tobe Hooper; the music of Goblin in Argento’s Profondo Rosso; Brian De Palma’s Blow Out; and a chapter on music function in the Crank films starring Jason Statham. Conference paper topics include torture porn, cult cinema, soundscaping in horror, the film music of Riz Ortolani and rape/revenge movies.

Robert Shail is a Professor of Film at the Northern Film School and Director of Research in the School of Film, Music and Performing Arts at Leeds Beckett University. He has written widely on post-war British cinema, often focussing on male stars and representations of masculinity. His more recent work on children’s media has included essays on the origins of comic books in the UK and on gender in comic book characters such as Beryl the Peril.

Janelle Vermaak is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media and Communication at the Nelson Mandela University in South Africa, and teaches in a varied range of disciplines including, but not limited to, Scriptwriting, Film Studies, Communication Studies and Written Communication. Her primary research interests include fan studies, film studies and television studies. The topic of her PhD was understanding fans of the Alien film franchise, and is currently writing a number of works for publication.

Melanie Williams is a Reader in Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia. She is the Co-author of Transformation and Tradition in 1960s British Cinema (EUP, 2019), and Author of Female Stars of British Cinema: The Women in Question (EUP, 2017) and David Lean (MUP, 2014), as well as Author of numerous articles on British cinema. She has also Co-edited Sixties British Cinema Reconsidered (EUP, forthcoming), Shane Meadows: Critical Essays (EUP, 2013), Ealing Revisited (BFI, 2012), Mamma Mia! The Movie: Exploring a Cultural Phenomenon (I B Tauris, 2012) and British Women’s Cinema (Routledge, 2009).

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been at all possible without the encouragement, help and patience of Helen Beddow and Charlotte ‘Charlie’ Wilson at Emerald Publishing. My eternal thanks go to them for their unswerving support for this project. They have been the M and Moneypenny to this project. The writers of this tome also get my eternal thanks for working beyond the call of duty in seeing this collection come to fruition – now we are all a part of the crazy world of James Bond.