THE McCOLUMN: On Bond's New Woman

In the latest Bond film, “Casino Royale,” James’ dame du jour presents an unfamiliarly prickly exterior, mounted atop armor as thick as the new Bond’s skull. In contrast to Daniel Craig’s cuboid appearance, Eva Green, who plays Vesper Lynd, looks remarkably like a pale rose—beautiful, but chilling. She rarely relinquishes control of a scene, digging her thorns deep into the film and filling holes in the spongy plot with a deep well of anger, love, and all that lies in between.

No other Bond woman has displayed such emotional complexity, although a few have come close. Pussy Galore threw a few feminist punches in “Goldfinger,” but eventually succumbed to the irresistible aura of 007—then rendered as a debonair playboy by Sean Connery. Craig’s Bond is less suave and more sardonic; Green’s Vesper also has barbs aplenty up her masculine suit jacket sleeves to sling back at her nemesis and future lover.

She lays bare one of the fundamental problems with the 007 franchise: the dispensing of emotional platitudes solely to trap women between white hotel sheets. Of course, Bond’s reputation precedes him, so at one point Vesper says, “It wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine that you think of women as disposable pleasures rather than meaningful pursuits.”

Vesper is a completely different kind of woman. Compared to the transparent hotties that populated earlier 007 films, she is as complex as the red wine she and Bond share at their first meeting. The other femmes seem to have conflicting sexual and emotional maturities, perpetually a breath away from ripping off designer dresses while simultaneously enjoying the psychological naïveté of four-year-olds.

Vesper appears to be the first of Bond’s love interests to have graduated from Pampers to Playtex. As Anthony Lane aptly put it in the New Yorker, “One thing she definitely is not is a Bond girl. Vesper is a Bond woman.” It is strange that the first Bond femme we can feel true sympathy for is one who is, herself, expressly unsympathetic.

“Casino Royale” debunks most 007 conventions with pleasure, including the pinball-bumper array of women off which James bounces and the resultant bevy of female conquests. Craig scores only once in the film, and even then it’s not made with the traditional smile or joke resulting (in more recent films) in a gruesomely long sex scene. Bond does make it with Vesper, but only after nearly an hour of psychological sparring.

On the train where the two first meet, Bond observes that Vesper’s “beauty is a problem” and that she “overcompensates by wearing slightly masculine clothing.” She counters with a postulation about Bond’s lower-class background, and finishes with the aforementioned remark about the shallow nature of his sexual proclivities. Is this Fleming, or Freudian Analysis 101?

“Casino Royale” is a little of both, as it turns out. Eventually their game of emotional chess gives way to the film’s interminable poker match, punctuated with gunplay and torture portrayed in more graphic terms than usual for a Bond flick. These convulsions eventually break through the pair’s thick armor and allow them to see what’s at each other’s core: a mirror image. The two are the same insofar as Darcy and Elizabeth from Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” are both stubborn and conceited. Bond and Vesper cling to their self-defense mechanisms, leery of betraying deficiencies they both have in spades.

Evasion gives way to passion only after a pair of piercing traumas. In the first, Vesper witnesses a brutal fight between Bond and two African freedom fighters, during which her lover-to-be kills his assailants with unrestrained brutality and enlists her to help dispose of the bodies. Later, Bond returns to their suite to find her sobbing and quaking in the shower, paralyzed by the savagery she has just witnessed.

The most brutal moment in the movie is a gruelingly long torture scene in which Bond literally has his balls flogged. He evinces a similar level of emotional rawness, reduced to screams and rantings that grow crazier with each blow. The couple’s admission of love comes two scenes later, when Vesper tends to the recovering 007. She tries to express her newfound feelings in spite of her harsh demeanor: “If all that was left of you was your smile and your little finger, you’d still be more of a man than anyone I’ve ever met.”

The film becomes awkwardly fuzzy when it tries to describe what exactly Vesper finds attractive in Bond. The writers make it clear that underneath their abrasive defenses, there is some kind of animal magnetism that draws Bond and Vesper together. Before their first earnest kiss, he says, “I have no armor left. You’ve stripped it from me. Whatever is left of me, whatever I am, I’m yours.”

Their relationship grows so strong that 007 tenders his resignation. For the franchise itself to survive, however, an unfortunate deus ex machina ends the affair. But before it’s over, we get to see it grow into what is by far the most emotionally complex relationship a Bond woman has participated in, and perhaps the only one of which she is a primary architect. That the filmmakers have to take almost half an hour to fully explore its depths recalls one of Vesper’s defining quips: “I’m afraid I’m a complicated woman.”

—Columnist Kyle L. K. McAuley can be reached at kmcauley@fas.harvard.edu