Made for Action?
Boys with toys! Although he’s been made into a doll repeatedly, James Bond is more than a mere action figure. Patriarchy can be harmful to men as well as women and Bond has helped many boys navigate a society where being on the receiving end of violence or dealing it out oneself is often seen a rite of passage. Having had his own childhood memories triggered by watching - of all things - the Barbie movie, Craig Gent explores what else Bond can teach us about being a man in the real world.
I was as surprised as anyone that Greta Gerwig’s Barbie gave me a sense of loss for something I didn’t know I wanted.
Reactions among my female friends to the highest grossing film of 2023 ranged from the profound (“I cried four times”, “I sobbed through the credits”) to the exasperated (“Cried at what! Hasn’t anybody ever seen a piece of media about women before??”) and even the indignant (“Where was the scissoring?!”). But I accept that reactions to the film are inevitably bound up with whether you actually played with Barbies yourself, what they meant to you, and indeed what you did with them.
And while the film is a testament to capitalism’s ability to accommodate seemingly any critiques against it, it nonetheless made me wonder what it would be like to see a film about my own childhood toys speaking to me as an adult across space and time.
As a boy growing up in the mid-90s in England, I played with Action Man – the British answer to America’s GI Joe, an action figure (definitely not a doll) that had been relaunched by Hasbro in 1993. Although undoubtedly less iconic than Barbie globally, even as a child I was aware of Action Man’s standing within the imaginary of British boyhood. The toy was first launched in the 60s. By the 70s he was equipped with ‘gripping hands’ and moveable ‘eagle eyes’ and he continued to dominate the boys’ toy market until 1984, when he was somewhat inexplicably retired.
In 1998, and well aware of its own iconography, Hasbro’s Action Man joined forces with that other British icon – James Bond 007 – to launch a set of Tomorrow Never Dies and Thunderball special edition action figures, followed a year later by GoldenEye and The Spy Who Loved Me dolls, and again in 2000 by The World Is Not Enough and You Only Live Twice editions, the latter complete with Commander Bond’s full naval regalia.
While Barbie’s Ken (played by Ryan Gosling) is confused by his job simply being ‘beach’, Action Man bore no such concerns. With roles like ‘battle force’, ‘ninja kick’, ‘cannon assault’ and ‘mission extreme’, equivocation was not in Action Man’s constitution. It was fitting, then, that Ian Fleming’s own ‘man of action’ should be given a range of his own. Action Man’s coiffed hair, a comma of which hangs over the eyebrow, and long facial scar even matched Fleming’s description of the spy – although it was perhaps ironic that Bond’s tuxedo, short shorts and flared yellow ski suit seemed, if anything, quaint compared with Action Man’s usual image as a battle-hardened mercenary brought to life via an apparent predilection for extreme sports.
Like Ken, Barbie’s existential quandary is summed up in the title of Billie Eilish’s soundtrack song: What Was I Made For? As Barbie progresses from Barbie-Land into the real world and back again, she finds – like America Ferrera’s Gloria, and other real-world women in the film and audience – that she cannot do right for doing wrong. Instead, she finds herself trapped in the paradoxes of gender, with its conflicting roles and expectations, and grappling with a crisis of self-actualisation as a result.
Ken’s own crisis of self-actualisation, meanwhile, is temporarily alleviated by his discovery of patriarchy, even if his relationship to it is as about as one-dimensional and vapid as the character himself. And yet Action Man’s relationship to gender is somehow even less complex than Ken’s. Indeed, Action Man never had to question what he was made for. He is tough, resilient, masculine, violent. The clue is in the name. If Barbie had thought she was showing girls that they could be anything, achieve anything, by the time I was born, Action Man had primarily succeeded in showing boys they could be no fewer than 100 different types of soldier.
It makes sense that the first historical Bond brought to life in Action Man form by Hasbro was the Bond of Thunderball. As Licence to Queer editor David Lowbridge-Ellis wrote in his queer re-view of the film, the last minute change of title song to the one sung by Tom Jones and penned by Don Black portrayed Bond as a single-minded, hypermasculine figure, with none of the nuanced gendering of the prior choice, Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
He always runs while others walk.
He acts while other men just talk...
His days of asking are all gone;
His fight goes on, and on, and on.
If being a ‘man of action’ sounds exhausting, it’s because it is. Margot Robbie’s Barbie is horrified to learn that in the real world she has made girls feel bad at least as much as she has made them feel good, with her unobtainable proportions, unattainable lifestyle, and all-round ‘perfect’ presentation. In that sense, it shouldn’t really be a surprise that Action Man, like Barbie, also made many boys feel good and bad in equal measure. Aside from his ripped abs, disproportionate shoulders and bulging muscles, Action Man taught you above all that you were made and destined for physical violence – something that may well feel good until it confronts you in the world.
We don’t often talk about how highly one’s propensity for physical violence – real, imagined, lacking or otherwise – is a feature of manhood, and navigating what it means to be a man in the world. How so much interaction between men – especially strangers – in the world hinges on the perception of the other’s ability to ‘handle himself’ physically.
I am not a violent man, and have never wished to carry myself like one. But at 6’5” (and broadly ‘straight-passing’), I have been called ‘big man’ by strangers all my adult life, either as an acknowledgment of my perceived physical dominance or by way of a challenge against that same perception. Where I live, a neighbourhood where street assaults and stabbings are sadly common, groups of men who gather on the street will give me a free pass to walk past them where they will find reason to make goading comments to smaller male friends, and women say they feel safe walking with me. Yet on a Saturday night in the city centre, nine times out of ten a man will make the decision to try to start a physical fight with me for no reason whatsoever. I have been squared up to, punched, groped, spat on, had a bottle waved in my face, and more. Whatever my wishes to be left alone, it is a fight that goes on, and on, and on.
I was 18 when, for a time, I had decided it would be a good idea to join the army. There was a strange interregnum for LGBT people at that point: the Labour government had stopped banning LGBT people from joining the armed forces in 2000, but it would not be until 2016 that homosexual acts would be repealed as grounds for discharge. Being young and not even really knowing the rules, I put my application in anyway.
Like Action Man, the British army tells you that you can be lots of different type of soldier. At my first officer selection weekend, a range of tests culminated in an interview with a Major. He told me I had come last of my cohort in the fitness assessment – something that could be improved, but I’d never make a paratrooper – but first in the mental reasoning exams. It suited me: I had wanted to be the most James Bond type of soldier I could be, naturally, so when the Major asked if I had a unit in mind I proudly told him I wanted to join the Intelligence Corps.
He nodded, and then, before I could leave he asked me what I would be willing to do to be a soldier. Very bluntly, he asked me if I would be prepared to kill. I said I would, in the heat of battle, if it was for my comrades. Then he asked me if I would be prepared to die. I said yes.
Are these the futures Action Man would have wanted for me, had he come – like Barbie – from Action Man-Land to the real world, before turning back again? What lessons would he have learnt from his time here?
I wondered about this and more on my drive home from seeing Barbie at cinema. What would be the Action Man movie’s equivalent of Depression Barbie? Insecurity Action Man? Disproportionately-inclined-to-suicide Action Man? Margot Robbie’s character, Stereotypical Barbie, realises there is something wrong with the veneer of femininity she upholds when she keeps thinking about dying. I wondered what a malfunctioning Stereotypical Action Man would think about. Being laughed at?
As amusing as the thought was for a moment, and even if – Barbie having struck a chord with some female friends – I really did want my own Action Man movie, perhaps led by Gerwig’s partner, Noah Baumbach, it obviously missed the point.
It may not be true that there are no films about women, as my exasperated friend would hasten to remind fellow viewers, but it is true that films about men are inescapable in the way films about women are. Few films about men are as inescapable as the James Bond films, whether because of their ubiquity on British television or the unique anticipation surrounding new casting announcements, let alone the fanfare of their releases and anniversaries. Even detractors and the indifferent feel they at least have a sense of James Bond, of what he’s about, and what he’s for. He carries a gun. He’s a spy. A womaniser. A man of action.
Do we not, then, already have a set of Action Man films in the James Bond series? I very well understand why some viewers would think yes, even if – as I’ve written previously for Licence to Queer – I prefer to think of Bond as embodying a more complex sort of masculinity than is sometimes attributed to him.
It is a common misunderstanding of the sociological concept of socialisation that it is something which mainly happens in childhood. It is true that we learn fundamental principles of what it means to ‘be’ a man or woman in society during childhood, but there are also aspects of gender that are largely inaccessible to children. Propensity for violence is a good one. Displays of violence among boys may be written off as ‘boys with toys’, but for many young men and older teenage boys, being assaulted or threatened with violence by a stranger is almost a rite of passage. And many people, men and women, will decide what sort of man they think you are based on what you do about it. In a darkly comedic moment upon her first steps into the real world, Barbie similarly notes an undertone of sexual violence in the way men look at her – a sexually-inflected rite of passage described by many women as part of the transition from girlhood.
Being such a significant part of our culture, films shape how we imagine gender, and how we ourselves communicate it. I will admit that the times I feel most uneasy in the Bond community are when people boast a radically different interpretation of 007’s masculinity from my own, for example seeing his womanising as wholly unproblematic, or even something to be venerated or ‘restored’ to the real world, the latter in particular betraying a juvenile frustration that a world of fiction is not our own. While I myself want to be the person – the type of man – who lives and lets live, there remains a part of me that is called back to my teenage (and thankfully brief) antipathy for Bond, at the height of my own sexual and political awakening.
All of which makes me wonder what I would want from a Bond film that took a lesson from Barbie. Set aside matters of tone, intertextuality or humour. Would a Bond who stood against toxic masculinity even work? For what it’s worth, I doubt it. Nor do I seriously believe we need an Action Man film. The idea of one being developed by the creatives behind Da Ali G Show and Paddington 2, when I learnt of it whilst writing this article, actually fills me with dread. But I do long to see the complexities of manhood displayed on screen more often than we are used to. It is commonly noted that patriarchy is harmful to men too; it is less often articulated how.
If I have one recurring dream in my life, one dream that I can remember having all the way back to childhood. It is a dream of being in a situation that depends on my ability to throw a punch. Try as I might, the punch is just not hard enough. Like Billie Eilish in the video to What Was I Made For?, I begin to unravel, unable to recover the situation. When I wake up, just as in Eilish’s lyrics, I don’t know how to feel.
Stories of men of action will readily tell us that men have feelings too. This is not new ground, least of all in the Bond canon. Before Daniel Craig’s Casino Royale came George Lazenby’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Before Fleming’s novel On Her Majesty’s Secret Service came Fleming’s ending of Moonraker. But not knowing how to feel – insecurity, inadequacy, the unease with which men are forced to navigate (rather than merely engage in) violence – this is part of the male experience too. People like to say Bond is a male fantasy. But what if instead of being made for action, he was made for us?
Craig Gent is a bisexual Bond fan and film writer based in Leeds, Yorkshire. By night he blogs at Alone on the Front Row and tweets at @aloneinthefrontrow. By day he is a problem eliminator with Novara Media. He is currently writing a book on the politics of digital media.
