Queer re-view: No Time To Die

James Bond is dead! But only in a literal sense. With classical parallels aplenty, No Time To Die secures Bond’s place in the pantheon of queer heroes, making a myth out of 007 by turning him into a being we recognise as human - whoever we might be.

If this is your first time reading a re-view on LicenceToQueer.com I recommend you read this first.

This article is also available as a podcast, wherever you get podcasts.

“The name’s Bond… Flaming Bond?”

James Bond is not dead. I don’t mean that I’m in denial - that used to be my whole thing but I don’t really go in for it anymore. So I’m definitely not clutching at the straw that there’s some way he escaped from being blown to smithereens by those ballistic missiles. And I don’t mean that he’s in some form of afterlife, with his soul transported somewhere ethereal (although the white light-suffused imagery of the final act allows for those interpretations). I’m not making a claim for Bond being alive in the sense that he lives on after his death because he unintentionally passed on his genetic material in the form of a child.

I mean in the sense of a myth.

The film’s title is not a misnomer. As epically upsetting as Bond’s death is, memories of him are alive in all of us, queer and non-queer alike. And like a myth, we get to choose the version - or versions - of Bond we want to remember and whose example we want to follow.

“I'm going to tell you a story about a man. His name was Bond, James Bond.”

By the film’s final frames, Bond’s atoms have been spread far and wide, his energy repurposed. And although he may not have elevated to Heaven in my conception (more on this momentarily…), he has transcended the mortal plane by becoming what he was always close to becoming in life, but could not quite manage while he was still breathing: a Greek myth.

Many queers love Greek myths. And it’s little wonder: they provide an alternative to the overbearingly heteronormative narratives we’re born and raised on, at least where I’m coming from, here in Britain. We live in a predominantly Christian culture, which of course has its own mythology from which many draw meaning and seek guidance on how to live their lives. These include Licence To Queer writer Kathleen Jowitt, who wrestled with reconciling the queer/Bond fan/Christian components of her identity and emerged victorious.

But many of us struggle to see ourselves represented in religious texts so instead cast our gaze back a couple of thousand years.

Introducing the 1996 Folio edition of Robert Graves’ Greek Myths, Kenneth McLeish nails the appeal of Greek myths, both for the Ancient Greeks themselves and for those of us who are drawn to them thousands of years down the line:

“They put people in touch not only with one another’s mind but with those of their forbears and ancestors; they validated each present moment.”

For those seeking validation outside the mainstream, Greek myths can be a source of inspiration and consolation. Full of stories of same sex attraction and challenges to gender norms, queer people can turn to them when conventional narratives let us down. McLeish argues that the Greek myths “offered not so much answers to particular questions as ways of beginning to think about answers”. When you’re queer, the answers are never as clear. Often, we have to write our own script. And classical myths sometimes provide an alternative place to start.

A distinctly homoerotic sculpture of Heracles ‘subjugating’ the target of his 10th labour, Cacus. Photo taken outside the entrance to Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, by the author.

I can’t claim to have had a classical education but I was able to opt into studying GCSE Latin at my comprehensive (US: high) school. My Latin lessons were the only ones where there was ever a reference made to men loving men in even a vaguely positive way. It’s not like my teacher could really avoid bringing it up: it was right there, in the texts! The Romans were only slightly less enthusiastic than the Greeks about same sex love and wrote about it in their own literature, as well as the stories, poems and plays they translated from Greek. Although the proscriptions of Section 28 forbade my teacher from reassuring us that this it was okay to be gay, she at least didn’t shy away from having us read aloud the parts of the texts which acknowledged that gay men existed. Many of my classmates who chose Latin GCSE have subsequently come out as gay. Although none of us were out at the time, we were so starved of any recognition in the rest of the curriculum we clung on to whatever we could find (achieving a GCSE in Latin was a nice bonus).

Because myths reflect a society’s collective unconscious, they tell us a great about that society. Even so, it would be a mistake to surmise that the almost ubiquitous pansexuality we read about in the Greek’s foundational myths reflected a halcyon era of free love. While sex between men was more ‘free’ than it was for many subsequent periods of history, there were rules in Greek society regarding who could put what in whom. And, as Greek homosexuality expert James Davidson has pointed out, attitudes to homosexuals were hardly homogenous across Ancient Greece: some of the micro-states which made up what we think of nowadays as a ‘country’ were more free-loving than others, a bit like nowadays, with some cities and states being more tolerant than others.

Gay history does not just belong in a museum. The author at the Acropolis Museum, Athens.

How genuinely tolerant the Ancient Greeks were is a big source of contention for scholars. We can only go on what has been passed down to us and, as so often in queer history, most of the good stuff doesn’t get written about. Even so, anyone with even a smidge of a classical education will have, at some point, encountered sex between men. In a famous semi-fictional example, E.M. Forster’s semi-autobiographical novel Maurice (which he started writing in 1913 but which was not published until after his death in 1971), students at Cambridge University (Bond’s sometime alma mater) reading Plato’s Symposium are told by their professor to omit all mention of same sex love when translating aloud (Plato was gay, so it gets mentioned A LOT). They are taught to swap out all descriptions of man love with the phrase “the unspeakable vice of the Greeks”, suggesting that gay sex was ‘a thing’ unique to Greek society. Is it any wonder that generations of queer men have flocked to Greek myths, seeking validation there and sometimes (as with Robert Graves and, more recently, Stephen Fry) penning their own translations?

Idealised or close to reality? A late 19th Century depiction of Ancient Greek romance by Paul Avril aka Édouard-Henri Avril

Fleming’s Bond had a classical education, admittedly one that didn’t stick. The obituary Fleming gives him in You Only Live Twice calls his career at Eton “undistinguished” and his standout achievements at his next school were chiefly sporting, reflecting Fleming’s own academic record. Commensurate with this, earlier in the same novel, Bond mocks himself for not being well-versed in poetry: according to Bond, his education was “Mostly in Latin and Greek… absolutely no help in ordering a cup of coffee in Rome or Athens after I’d left school.” And in the previous novel, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Marc-Ange Draco politely teases Bond for not recognising the classical Greek phrase for ‘top secret’, concluding that Bond’s education was “incomplete”.

Rather than identifying Bond himself with mythological figures, Fleming explicitly identifies his hero with real historical personages, albeit those whose exploits have been mythologised (and sometimes, sadly, misappropriated for nationalistic purposes). Realising the scale of the caper in Goldfinger, Bond steels himself to accomplish his task by framing himself as both Henry V (as mythologised by Shakespeare) and St. George: “Once more into the breach, dear friends! This time it really was St George and the dragon.”

Bond is again compared with St. George in You Only Live Twice when Tiger Tanaka offers him encouragement for his suicide mission by asking him:

“Bondo-san, does it not amuse you to think of that foolish dragon dozing all unsuspecting in his castle while St. George comes silently riding towards his lair across the waves?”

England’s national saint barely warrants a mention in the films. He gives his name to the British spy ship (of Maltese origin) which sinks near the start of For Your Eyes Only. But the films do contain many allusions to classical mythology: Honey rising out of the ocean like Venus/Aphrodite; Tracy conning Blofeld into thinking of her as happily stolen-away Helen of Troy; Stromberg borrowing the name of his amphibious lair from Plato; Melina identifying herself with Elektra who also lends her name to The World Is Not Enough’s vengeful villain; Trevelyan adopting the name of a two-faced Roman god; and many more. The general rule here though is not for Bond himself to be associated with mythological models.

We do get a hint that a few well-known phrases from Ancient languages might have stuck from Bond’s school days. In Spectre, for instance, he uses the Latin proverb “Tempus fugit” to warn Madeleine/the audience about the forthcoming explosion without giving the game away to Blofeld.

Amidst the many references to myths in No Time To Die, we get a reference to the superman himself, Heracles (more accurately Herakles in Ancient Greek and more commonly rendered as Hercules because the Romans basically remixed everything the Greeks did and they were never that original). Naming the ultimate threat, a nanobot bioweapon, after Heracles, the most archetypal of fictional heroes, is a clear signal from the writers that they intented to put Bond in a mythological frame. There are some who say we’re defined by the manner in which we die and the manner of Heracles’ death certainly has striking parallels with Bond’s. Both men are poisoned before choosing to end their pain by being immolated.

Hercules Tearing the Burning Robe, c.1634 by Francisco de Zurbaran

But it’s not just their deaths they have in common. Heracles wouldn’t be Heracles without his heroic deeds, just as Bond is only authentically Bond when he has something to fight against. When most people think about Heracles they think about the events leading up to his death: his Twelve Labours, completed at the behest of King Eurystheus. Heracles’ motivations for agreeing to do the king’s bidding varies depending on which version you read, although a popular retelling is that Heracles did it because he was in love with the king. It’s not the only time Heracles experiences same sex attraction. Writing nearly two millennia ago, Plutarch wrote that, “It would be a task too great to enumerate the amours of Hercules; but among the rest, Iolaus [a male companion] is honored and adored to this day by many, because he is thought to have been the darling of that hero; and upon his tomb it is that lovers plight their troths and make reciprocal vows of their affection.” There’s something very sweet imagining gay and bisexual couples pledging their love to each other over the tomb of a fictional character. Maybe we’ll end up doing the same at the final resting place of Bond in years to come? (Although Bond being more ‘rest in (millions of) pieces’ than ‘rest in peace’ might make this a somewhat underwhelming pilgrimage).

Over the last two centuries, like most queer personalities from classical antiquity, Heracles has been subjected to straight-washing. Even today, it’s rare to see him depicted in popular media as having both male and female lovers. On the very rare occasions when he is shown as being bisexual, such as in Marvel comics, executives have taken pains to point out that he only has hooks up with men (including A-lister Wolverine) in an alternate universe.

Whereas acolytes of continuity might whinge that alternate universes are ‘not canon’, students of myth know that having multiple versions of a character does not render any iteration any less valid than any other.

By inducting Bond into the pantheon of mythical heroes, No Time To Die encourages us - even more than before - to consider the character’s possibilities. But remember: this is hardly his first time.

In the Being James Bond documentary released ahead of No Time To Die, Barbara Broccoli revealed the behind the scenes controversy provoked by Bond’s “What makes you think it’s my first time?” line from Skyfall: "I remember we were told to cut that line by the studio and we said no, no, no. We resisted." While Daniel Craig’s assertion from 2012 that ​​"I don't see the world in sexual divisions” has been read by some as a denial of Bond’s apparent bisexuality, it scans better in hindsight if you take it Hellenistically. ‘Bisexual’ is a modern label and one which the Ancient Greeks would not have been familiar with. Craig - and presumably his Bond - does not see the divisions, the implication being that, if he met the right person or found himself in the right situation, his 007 would be up for anything - or anyone. If we need a label, ‘Pansexual’ would be more appropriate.

Bond and Heracles are known as much for their fighting as their loving. Most of Hercules’ Twelve Labours amount to kill or capture missions. On the kill list: the many-headed Hydra, the Nemean Lion, some man-eating birds. And his capture quests include bringing home the golden hind and the girdle of the Queen of the Amazons. Compare this with the setups in Craig’s films, while alternate between kill/capture: Casino Royale begins with two kills and then a post-titles capture of a bombmaker (that turns into a kill when the bombmaker proves to be somewhat slippery and tries to hide in an embassy); Quantum of Solace starts in media res (a narrative device going back as far as Homer’s Odyssey) with a captured Mr White already in the boot of Bond’s Aston Martin; a hard drive is the object of Bond’s quest in Skyfall and Sciarra is the target marked for death in Spectre. Incidentally, the Labour of Heracles that tends to get forgotten about - and for which there is no equivalent in Bond - is Heracles having to clean out some stables, the added complication being that the faeces is poisoned. Even so, it doesn’t seem especially challenging compared with the others, although it is significantly less glamorous.

Both of these men of action are prone to bouts of mental ill-health and throw themselves (or are thrown by others) into death-defying acts of derring-do to stave boredom, or worse. In Heracles’ case, he embarks on the Twelve Labours to expiate the guilt he feels after a fit of madness in him killing his own family. In Bond’s case, he receives (from Felix Leiter) a hero’s call to adventure. But it’s still his choice to go.

Well before the rockets rain down on Bond, he’s already on his way to mythhood. Despite never having met Bond, Logan Ash has heard all about his exploits and describes himself as a “fan”. As much as Nomi tries to downplay her awe at being in the presence of a living legend, there’s a reason she chooses that Double-0 number (see Allies, below). When Q meets Bond for the first time in years he exclaims “So you’re not dead”, suggesting that, although gone, Bond has not been forgotten and people have continued to talk about him, hypothesising about his fate (maybe there was an office sweepstake?). The only person oblivious to Bond’s mythical status is the MI6 security guard, whose own security clearance does not, presumably, make him privy to knowledge of the 00-Section. Maybe he wasn’t looped into the e-mails?

Myths were historically passed on orally, which partly explains why there are so many different versions. Without a written version to codify the story, it can be more easily altered depending on the needs of the audience or the whim of the storyteller. Which rather begs the question: when Madeleine comes to tell Mathilde the story of her father, which version will she choose to tell?

Because I have, for more than half of my life to date, had to live two lives simultaneously - my straight-acting self and my real gay self - I am a seasoned practitioner of what George Orwell termed doublethink: the holding of two apparently contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accepting (to an extent) both. Perhaps this is why, when it comes to appraising long-running fictional narratives, I have never felt weighed down by continuity. For me, Bond is a palimpsest, a piece of paper (or, if we were in Ancient Greece, a wax tablet) which has been reused time and again with traces of earlier versions showing through.

It’s not merely a case of Craig’s Bond existing in a separate era from Connery, Moore, et al. No Time To Die doubles down on the callbacks, which range from a cigar (Delectados) last smoked in Die Another Day to portraits of the preceding Ms. This goes way beyond the nostalgia on display in films such as Skyfall. It’s intended to draw our attention to the myth-making in process.

Alan J. Porter identifies at least 28 canonical James Bonds (which he acknowledges as a conservative estimate). Any new incarnation does not completely erase what has come before. Bond is a permanent fixture on the cultural landscape because of this impermanence. Like a mythological figure, he is adapted to fit the demands of the audience. Like a mythological figure, there is no definitive version of the character: even during an actor’s tenure different iterations exist simultaneously in other media (video games, comic books, etc). Like a mythological character, Bond’s sexuality is open to possibilities and probably better seen through the prism of a classical civilisation.

Seeing Bond in Ancient terms is nothing new. Kingsley Amis did this as early as 1965 (in his The James Bond Dossier, three years before penning his own contribution to the myth, continuation novel Colonel Sun). Writing about Bond’s defeat of Blofeld in Fleming’s You Only Live Twice (the book which No Time To Die draws from most), Amis made explicit the parallels between Bond and mythical heroes:

“Perhaps we shouldn’t complain too vociferously if he defeats the wizard only by virtue of being lucky and brave and — comparatively — righteous. His mythical forebears frequently had little more on their side than that.”

As Bond silently works out whether he is going to answer the mythical hero’s call to adventure, there’s an extraordinarily lengthy shot of him staring out at the horizon. One gets the feeling he has been mulling it over all night. What is it that drives Bond to get back in the game? Loyalty to his friend Leiter? Duty to queen and country? Or does he come to a realisation that he is sick of pretending to be someone he is not. In the Jamaica scenes, one senses that - as idyllic as everything appears - he’s not himself. Nomi, sitting on Bond’s bed, says to the retired agent: “You’re a man who only has time to kill, nothing to live for.”

In Fleming’s books, the real enemy comes from within. ‘Accidie’ (another word and idea with a Greek origin) the lethal lethargy which saps one of the will to do anything, synonymous with depression since Ancient Greek times. Although this is never identified by name in the films (it was in an early draft of The Living Daylights but didn’t make it into the film), it has been portrayed throughout the Craig era, most notably in Quantum of Solace (channelling his ennui into a reckless killing spree) and Skyfall (distracting himself with scorpion-roulette, heavy-drinking and disappointing sex makes it clear he’s not “enjoying death”).

The only cure for accidie is, according to Fleming, to look death in the face.

“The function of man is to live, not to exist.”

In the course of No Time To Die, Bond is fatally infected, attacked by people who want him dead and seriously considers throwing his life away when he cannot imagine a better future. No wonder I found the film so affecting! 

I used to think being gay would be the death of me.

In my childhood (the 80s and 90s), HIV was a death sentence. My teachers, family and everyone on TV said it was the case. I can vividly recall, following the death of Freddie Mercury, a close family member announcing that Freddie Mercury wouldn’t have died if he hadn’t been gay. I was nine years old at the time and I knew I was gay. I also knew I would one day die, like Freddie, of AIDS.

I’m not alone in this. I belong, according to gay psychology expert Walt Odets, to the generation of gay men who were “primed from childhood with significant anxiety about being gay and having gay sex”. Although people of my age weren’t out and about in gay communities during the initial peak of the HIV crisis, we “often feel psychologically like survivors of childhood and adolescent trauma” as a result of absorbing “the frightening association between gay men, AIDS, and horrible, disfiguring death”.

To compound this, in my teenage years, I became very aware of the sometimes fatal violence directed at gay people. Whenever violence targeted at gay people appeared on news bulletins I would try to look away. I was, of course, horrified at what had happened to people like me: the images of the bodies being removed after the Admiral Duncan bombing stick with me to this day. But I was also not wanting to be seen paying too much attention to the story for fear that someone would realise I was like those people on the screen.

In my early twenties, I was obsessed with thoughts of killing myself: it was the only way out if I didn’t want to harm the people I loved. I wasn’t aware of the statistics then: those which show how gay and bisexual men in many societies are four times more likely to kill themselves than straight men. But not knowing the statistics would not have stopped my becoming one.

People find it hard to talk about suicide, so it was a brave (and very Fleming) creative choice to announce it as a thematic concern of No Time To Die during the pre-titles sequence.

In the square, with Primo hammering heavy rounds into the splintering window of the DB5, Bond knows that the glass will not hold for much longer. Madeleine implores Bond to act: “I’d rather die than you think I’d be[tray you]....” What’s left unspoken is he feels the same. He knows that moments after Madeleine is shot in the head, he will face the same fate. He would rather die than face an empty future, because he’s lived that life and he thought he would never have to go back to it. It sets up the finale beautifully, where he is faced with the same choice. As he leads Madeleine and Mathilde to safety, he is still wrestling with resetting his mental model of how he sees himself. He tells Nomi “They’re my… family”, whispering the final word as if he can’t quite believe it himself.

Near the beginning of No Time To Die, Madeleine sees Bond reacting involuntarily to the sound of fireworks, as if it were gunfire. She tells him “you can’t help looking over your shoulder”. She doesn’t believe him when he denies it and neither do we. He’s still fighting his programming.

By the end of the film, we’re presented with a Bond who could escape from Safin’s island if he wanted to. But an empty world, devoid of the meaning he has created for himself, holds no allure for him. Having found something worth living for, in the process finding out who he really is, he chooses to die. No Time To Die turns Bond into a tragic hero.

Whether by my own hand or just - somehow - ceasing to exist, there have been several times in my life where I would have welcomed a premature end with open arms. On multiple occasions, calling in an airstrike would have been preferable to summoning the reserves to carry on. 

But for the last decade or so, I have cultivated a healthy fear of death. I feel it most acutely when I am at my happiest. I see this as a good thing because it means I want to be here. It means, like Bond, I have something to live for. 

Nomi to Bond: “You’re a man who only has time to kill, nothing to live for.”

Safin to Bond: “Life is all about leaving something behind, isn’t it?”

None of us has all the time in the world. And as an atheist, I believe we only live once. This is not something I am especially happy about. Like most human beings, I have a fear of death, which is somewhat irrational when I stop to think about it. After all, what do I have to fear if all that I am will cease to exist mere minutes after my heart has stopped pumping? I certainly don’t dread what Shakespeare (in Hamlet) calls the “undiscovered country”. I’m not going anywhere but here. I usually end up rationalising it to myself that what I really fear is missing out on stuff. But really, it will always remain an irrational fear, something which is instinctive: the imperative to survive.

If you believe in some form of afterlife, then I fully respect that. In truth, I envy you. It’s a cruel irony that the solace offered by many religions (through afterlife, resurrection, soul transference, etc) is not on the table for many queer people. While a growing number of religions are becoming more accepting of queer people, research (e.g. Pew Research Center, 2019) continues to suggest that queer people are substantially less likely to believe in God/gods, all the while spending almost as much time thinking about the meaning and purpose of life. So very crudely, some of us are left pondering a void which, if we were straight, would be more likely to be filled with religious beliefs. While there is definitely something liberating about searching for your own meaning in the universe it can get exhausting at times. No wonder the same studies also show lesbian, gay and bisexual people feel a sense of spiritual peace and well-being far less frequently than straight people. For many of us, it can be difficult to quell that feeling that there is something missing in our lives. And queer people are more likely to be doubly denied: not only are the comforts of religious belief harder to come by but so are the comforts of knowing you will pass on your genes in the form of children.

There are many reasons people choose to have children. Evolutionary Biologist Mark Elgar argues that it’s unhelpful to view the compulsion to bear babies as either biologically inbuilt or as a social construct - as with most things, it’s a combination of both: “The so-called “biological clock”, then, may be ticking to a social key.”

Just after the release of Quantum of Solace, director Marc Forster told New York magazine that a child was originally at the heart of that film’s story. Perhaps Bond finding Vesper’s child would have been a source of solace, even temporarily. The revelation that was reported as ‘How James Bond nearly became a father’, even though the idea - originating with writer Paul Haggis - was to have Bond turn his back on the orphan, an action which would have been especially cruel considering Bond himself lost his parents at an early age. The identity of the father would presumably have been a mystery with Bond himself - who was with Vesper for nowhere near nine months - being ruled out. 

Had the idea survived and morphed into Bond taking care of the child in some capacity, this would have readily lent itself to a queer reading: rather than navigate the minefield of surrogacy, many gay prospective gay dads choose to adopt.

Would it have mattered if it turned out that Mathilde was not biologically Bond’s? Not long after meeting Mathilde, Bond slips effortlessly into the role of parent, preparing her breakfast and cradling her protectively as they try to escape Safin’s men in the forest. This imagery in particular was perhaps intended as a riposte to tabloid personality Piers Morgan (and those who share his troglodytic views) who made out that 007 had been “emasculated” when he posted a photo of Daniel Craig carrying his baby daughter in a papoose. Craig’s Knives Out co-star Chris Evans saw right through Morgan, posting on twitter that “Any man who wastes time quantifying masculinity is terrified on the inside.”

Evans was right of course. While the urge to have children is not entirely inbuilt, the nurturing instinct is. Many men who protest that this is ‘woman’s work’ are fighting their natures. They are abetted in their protestations by the paucity of positive mainstream media portrayals of men nurturing children, at least in Western cinema. Bond’s cradling of Mathilde in the forest recalled to my mind the shootout in the hospital in John Woo’s 1992 Hong Kong action classic Hard Boiled. While holding a newborn baby (which he has rescued from the melee), Chow Yun-Fat’s character takes out several armed men while singing sweetly to the baby tucked protectively into the crook of his arm.

The images of Yun-Fat holding a baby in one arm and gun in the other were widely used to publicise the film. Can we imagine similar imagery used to market a movie to US and UK audiences? The fear would be that pairing an action star with a child would lead people to think the film was a comedy. As gloriously Camp as Hard Boiled may be at times (as with most John Woo movies, it thrives on pushing things to excess), the shootout in the hospital sequence is one of the most tense and serious in the film. It bears comparison with the Norway escape scene in No Time To Die, the stakes heightened by Bond clutching a child for dear life.

The hormone Oxytocin, which is released during and after pregnancy in order to bonding mother with child, can also be triggered - by humans of any gender - by forming relationships. This does not have to be parent-child relationships. The theme of ‘found family’ runs through all of Craig’s Bond films and he has found himself, despite his lone wolf pretentions, surrounded by an ever-increasing support network, which he has come to rely on just as much as they rely on him. 

Crucially, when Bond is about to cease existing, it’s the reactions of this chosen MI6 family (see Allies, below), which manipulate my emotions just as much as the confirmation that Bond has succeeded in passing on his genes, including the recessive genes responsible for his distinctive irises.

Yes, “she does have your eyes”, but what about all of the other people Bond has left behind?

I once believed I would live a very lonely adult life because of something I could not change about myself. In that way, I thought I was like Bond. Interviewed for the No Time To Die podcast, Barbara Broccoli spoke aloud thoughts that I had going around in my head for decades:

“Bond has always been unable to have a family because he could never put himself in a situation where a villain could threaten the lives of his family. That’s why he’s always just been a singular person, because he can always give up his own life.”

The difference between Bond and me was my nemesis was not an external threat but a part of myself. Thoughts of giving up my own life came easily because I thought I would spend most of my life having no one to stay alive for.

I’m so happy I was wrong.

I don’t have - or want to have - my own kids and I don’t have faith, but I don’t need either to live a meaningful life.

I’ve lost track of the number of straight men who have told me they envy gay men because there’s not as much pressure to conform and ‘settle down’ in a relationship. In some ways, James Bond idealises not getting attached. Fleming did, after all, bring Bond to life in a bid to quell his own anxiety about ‘settling down’. You could argue No Time To Die poses a threat to this fantasy. Or you could say it opens up possibilities because there are many types of relationship. I know which one I’m going with.

I have, ultimately, found meaning in the people I have surrounded myself with, including my family (chosen and otherwise). Being a teacher, I have impacted the lives of thousands of young people (many of who are now in their thirties themselves with their own children - how did that happen?!). It’s in our nature to nurture. If I wasn’t capable of nurturing, I wouldn’t be very good at my job.

Writing and maintaining this website is an nurturing act: I want to put something out there which helps queer people feel less alone and people who aren’t queer understand where we’re coming from.

While I won’t leave my genes behind, I will leave behind a legacy of another kind. I have no delusions of grandeur but I know I will live on in, even in a modest way, in other people’s memories. My skills may die with my body but they will also survive, long after I’m gone.

When my blue eyes finally dim, I hope I can look back with my mind’s eye and feel that I have lived my life to its fullest - and not wasted my time.

Friends of 00-Dorothy: Allies

007’s recent adventures have placed him at the centre of an ever-expanding ‘found family’. That is, ‘Individuals who are not biologically or legally related who deliberately choose to support and nurture each other like family.’ (Definition from The Queens’ English: The LGBTQIA+ Dictionary of Lingo and Colloquial Expressions). No Time To Die welcomes a significant new addition to the MI6 family.

Is 007 really just a number? Nomi has more in common with the previous incumbent than she would care to admit. For a start, she’s arguably coded as queer, beginning with her somewhat masculine clothing. Her Roger Moore-homaging safari suit is one of her best lewks, described by designer Tom Ford as having a ‘masculine fit’. Bond Suits’ Matt Spaiser comments: “The roped sleeve heads contribute to the masculine look, but it overall does not have wide shoulders, which is the defining aspect of a masculine fit. However, the jacket’s mid-hip length is traditionally part of a feminine fit, and the jacket is neatly tailored to Nomi’s body, preventing her from looking androgynous.”

Not that there’s anything unappealing with androgyny of course: as Dr Llewella Chapman explores in Fashioning James Bond, many of the most memorable Bond women (Vesper, Dench’s M, May Day) and men (including Bond himself) have wardrobes which would not inappropriately be labelled as ‘non-binary’. Is Nomi wearing masculine clothing to overcompensate for not being taken seriously in a male-dominated workplace? Possibly. Or maybe she just doesn’t like girly things all that much. When she bumps into Madeleine in the bathroom ahead of the interview with Blofeld, she expresses contempt at Madeleine’s need to spray herself with perfume. “I’ll be outside when you’re done with your… important preparation.”

It’s a rare instance of Nomi appearing anything other than supremely confident. She’s highly adept at spycraft, especially when it comes to changing her appearance and speech style. Her chameleonic codeswitching from Jamaican patois to the Queen’s English (and back again) shows her identity to be somewhat fluid and adaptable to whatever situation she finds herself in.

Another highly capable agent - and one who has seemingly overcome whatever hang ups she may once have had about being a woman in a man’s world - Paloma is a gift for all audiences, but especially gay men. Because gay men are so rarely represented in a positive way on screen, a gay man often identifies with female characters because he is - according to José Esteban Muñoz - "writing his way into the mainstream culture in which his own story could never be told.”

The emodiment of queer wish-fulfilment, Paloma is completely at home in her chosen milieu, taking expertly aimed shots while spinning around on the floor in a black crepe dress.

From Paloma’s first meeting with Bond (in a bar the cinematographer confirms was lit to resemble Nighthawks, the most famous painting of repressed gay artist Edward Hopper) to their fond farewell in an alleyway, the whole Cuba sequence is like a segment from an anarchic screwball comedy or a musical. Both are genres where women are afforded greater opportunities to shine, often running rings around the men, and which, as a consequence, carry queer overtones.

Amidst the slickly choreographed chaos, is there a hint of insecurity? Shortly after meeting Bond, Paloma proudly tells him she has had three weeks training. But why even bring this up? Had Bond’s Cuba contact been male, would he have felt compelled to outline his credentials?

What is frequently referred to nowadays as ‘Imposter Syndrome’ has its origins in a 1978 paper by psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes:

“The term impostor phenomenon is used to designate an internal experience of intellectual phonies, which appears to be particularly prevalent and intense among a select sample of high achieving women. Certain early family dynamics and later introjection of societal sex-role stereotyping appear to contribute significantly to the development of the impostor phenomenon. Despite outstanding academic and professional accomplishments, women who experience the imposter phenomenon persist in believing that they are really not bright and have fooled anyone who thinks otherwise.”

High achieving women are especially prone to downplaying their achievements. Sometimes, as we appear to have in Paloma’s case, this means preemptively managing others’ expectations of them. It’s only after Paloma has demonstrated to Bond how truly capable she is that she caveats her statement by telling him, a professional with years of training in the tank, that her own training was three weeks “more or less”. This could indicate that she was not being completely honest with Bond in the first place; perhaps she had a longer period of training than she’s happy to admit. However, the wide-eyed innocence with which De Armas’ injects her line delivery suggests to me that she is telling the truth: she is an exceptionally high achieving woman, a born agent, who doesn’t feel like an imposter, despite the societal stereotyping she must have faced - and continues to face.

For queer audiences, she’s an empowerment fantasy. The self-shaming that most queer people experience from early childhood translates to a lack of self-esteem in adulthood and a persistent feeling of not being good enough. In a blog entitled ‘Imposter Syndrome’ on the Stonewall website, Pete Mercer, mused:

“I can’t help wondering whether being gay, lesbian, bi or trans might actually be perfect training ground for espionage? After all, we’re raised to be experts in self-editing, reticence and deception.”

While a cracking spy in most regards (or at least one who’s really good at the physical side of the job), Paloma does not self-edit, is not reticent and doesn’t seek to deceive. She’s refreshingly upfront for a spy, being open with Bond about nerves being the reason she forgot the silly recognition code before dragging him into a wine cellar and taking off his clothes.

The joy that queer people experience when we watch Paloma doing her thing with apparent ease - after a downed Martini has settled the nerves, something which we can aaaallllll relate to - is the joy we wish we could experience for ourselves if we lived in a world which saw queerness as more of a blessing than a curse.

As the sacrificial lamb of No Time To Die, Felix Leiter occupies the space often filled by queer characters (see: the still prevalent Bury The Gays trope). His death is the excuse Bond needs to get out of retirement.

As with their earlier encounters in Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, the dialogue between Bond and Felix is endearingly homoerotic (writers of ‘Jalix’ (James/Felix) slash fiction will not be disappointed). Felix tells James “I’m not just a pretty face” before pleading that he needs him. When Felix implores Bond to “at least take my number”, Bond tells him “I’ve got your number.” We’ll bet you have!

Just before their boat blows up, Bond says “You know Felix, we really need to stop meeting like…”, his sentence left incomplete by the blast.

For the first time, Felix refers to a family that he has to get back to - but we are cautioned against taking at face value any personal information he reveals. Putting a brave face on what he knows will likely be his end, he downplays the danger he and Bond are in, equating their dire circumstance with a (fabricated?) childhood experience: “Like back when I was a kid, on the shrimp boat.” Bond responds that “You’re from Milwaukee.” Felix doesn’t deny it outright (“I thought I made that up.”), suggesting even he’s not sure who is the real Felix Leiter anymore. How much of what he has told Bond (throughout their mostly offscreen relationship) has been the truth?  Is he from Texas (like Fleming’s Leiter), Langley (home of the CIA), New Orleans (from the connotation of ‘shrimp boat’), Milwaukee, or somewhere else entirely?

Like his ‘brother’ Bond, Felix’s family is a found one. He’s not that particular about calling somewhere home. His most meaningful connection is with a spy from another country. It seems a wasted opportunity to not have the two men kiss just before Felix dies.

When Bond finally lets him go, Felix floats away. There’s a strong visual resemblance (in the figure movement, lighting, framing and blocking) to Vesper’s final moments. It is, perhaps, for Bond and the audience, intended to be a trigger for a flash of involuntary memory (see Madeleine in Girls, below).

Licence To Queer reader Kendall Blanc comments: “In the queer communities I know, found family and romantic interests are not mutually exclusive. So while there’s a brotherly-bond between Bond and Felix, that doesn’t cancel out any attraction. If anything, that emotional connection and trust would only embolden the attraction, in my opinion.

“I’m also thinking a lot about water usually representing rebirth. When I’ve lost loved ones some of the hardest parts have been accepting that losing that person has turned me into a new person. I’ve been reborn, while they’ve died, and now they won’t know this new iteration of me. So there’s that new grief on top of mourning their loss.”

M stands for Mallory, but it may as well stand for misguided, myopic and… mysterious? He certainly had a secret he really didn’t want to come bursting out of his closet. When Moneypenny enters his office unannounced to tell him about the Heracles lab being compromised, he says he already knows about it. He inexplicably jumps off the sofa looking guilty, throwing down his phone, almost as if he’s been caught red-handed (as it were) doing something that is usually frowned upon in the workplace...

M’s gender and sexual orientation are up for debate once again, certainly according to his two double-0 sevens. It’s not exactly a surprise to hear the one who’s retired call him “darling” down the phone. After all, Bond had always been an outrageous flirt! But it’s perhaps more surprising that the new incumbent refers to M as “mother”. Unlike Bond, Nomi doesn’t do this in Mallory’s earshot. Instead, after grabbing back Obruchev, she tells the duplicitous scientist, “I’m taking you back to mother, darling.” This is probably just intended to be more flirty 00-banter but it made me think back to an earlier spy film featuring Ralph Fiennes, 1998’s The Avengers, which included among its characters a male head of British Intelligence called Mother.

If M is Mother, it would seem logical to see Moneypenny as Bond’s sister, and this dynamic has been at play before, most notably in Tomorrow Never Dies. But Moneypenny in No Time To Die is more like the gay best friend. Again, this isn’t exactly the first time Moneypenny has taken on GBF attributes but it is the first time she’s been the confidant to two - and possibly three - queer men.

The first is Bond (obviously), with who she appears (in Skyfall and Spectre) to have had a shortlived and/or on-and-off ‘friends with benefits’ sexual relationship. The second is Q, who is surprised to see her through his keyhole being accompanied by Bond - and especially because he has a male date arriving imminently (a third gay acquaintance for Moneypenny? Do the MI6 crew and their partners ever go out for cocktails together?). Rather unhelpfully for Q’s love life, Bond and Moneypenny don’t take the hint, staying for as long as it takes Q to solve the nanobot mystery, helping themselves to his expensive bottle of Saint Emilion as he does all the hard work. This is a wonderful scene, not least because it outs Q in a relatively nonchalant way. Don’t get me wrong: this is very far from an anti-climax. After two films where Q’s queer-coding has not exactly been subtle but still irritatingly deniable, it’s a massive relief to finally have an openly gay or bisexual character in a Bond movie who isn’t a bad guy. 

It would not have been enough to show a devoted cat dad sipping Earl Grey in his pyjamas. We wanted confirmation and we got it. And anyone who says it’s still deniable (“he” might just be a friend, right?) is overlooking how Q adjusts his hair as he heads down his hallway to the door, a bundle of nerves and anticipation. A nice touch is that the bottle of wine is a later vintage of the same wine which Bond shares with Vesper in Casino Royale and exactly the same vintage as the one on the train in Spectre. While this might be a happy accident of product placement, it could also be taken as an indication (to those who know their wines) that something seriously romantic is about to go down in Q’s apartment. 

Fans of the 00Q ‘ship (and who in their right mind isn’t a fan by this point?) will barely be able to contain their joy at hearing - from M no less - that Bond has been staying with Q in the latter’s apartment since returning to London. They will also probably struggle to contain their emotions in the finale, participaly when Q refers to Bond by his first name for the first time: “For Christ’s sake James, just get off the island.”

There are several subtle winks to the audience that there may be something more between Q and Bond. Q’s gadget, which Bond and Nomi use to map Safin’s base and relay the map back to Q flying above them on his RAF C-17, is nicknamed Q.Dar, a cheeky wink at gaydar. Bond is represented on Q’s readout by a Psi symbol also known as a trident (Q translates for those not so well-versed in Greek). For those in the know, this ramps up the Greek tragedy feel of the finale, and arguably ramps up the homoerotic tension.

Has Q assigned Bond this symbol knowingly?

The trident symbol is, on a surface level, used to denote Bond as representative of Britain, consistent with the imagery of statues of Britannia in the pre-titles sequence. Britannia has been the personification of the British nation since at least the 2nd Century, where she appeared on Roman coins. And her symbolic power has gained significant currency in the last couple of centuries, appearing on modern coinage and making annual appearances in hands of winners at the BRIT Awards, where her figure forms the statuette.

The Roman invaders of Britain gave Britannia a trident to hold because of the island nation’s nautical heritage, which is appropriate for Bond as well, signifying his own naval heritage. By the time the Romans created Britannia, a trident was already synonymous with the sea: it’s likely the Romans just appropriated the trident from the hands of the Greek god Poseidon (who they assimiliated into their culture as Neptune). Like most Greek mythological figures, Poseidon was pansexual. Amongst his male lovers was Pelops, the inspiration for the Olympic games.

In a similar way to Bond using a snippet of Latin as a code in Spectre (see Bond, above), Q’s use of the Psi/trident to represent Bond could be read as a secret code passing between just the two of them (and members of the audience who are in the know). I may be projecting here, but I can’t escape the feeling that the idea was to suggest more than a professional relationship between the two men.

If all this is coming across as me making a big deal out of a very tiny detail, remember that having Q represent Bond with a symbol which carries Greek/queer connotations was a choice on the part of the writers and, a result, would have led to a string of meetings and days of special effects work to bring the Psi/trident to life on the screen. The writers may not even have been consciously aware of the connotations, but it doesn’t make any difference. Whether by accident or design, it’s there on screen and if that means we’re appropriating something that isn’t intended to be ‘ours’ then I’m sure you’ll forgive us. After all, queer people are well trained at poring over scant evidence in order to find ourselves represented in the historical and cultural record. Secret codes have been a part of gay life for millennia, even more so than they have been for spies, so some of us are more attuned to detecting them than others.

Whether queer or not, we - the audience - are all invitied to see Bond through Q’s eyes in his final moments. From the point of view of Q, we watch 007’s vital signs flatline on the screen. No wonder this is the moment which breaks me, emotionally, whenever I watch the film.

Just before the missiles arrive, Q is the addressee of Bond’s immortal words from the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

In the earlier film, the words are ostensibly addressed to an anonymous patrolman, but really they’re for the unhearing ears of Tracy and Bond, who is trying to talk himself into controlling his emotion. In No Time To Die, they’re used - almost verbatim - to reassure 007’s beloved quartermaster: “It’s all right Q. It’s all all right.”

Shady Characters: Villains

With a found family like Bond’s, who needs relatives, even adopted ones? There’s certainly no love lost on his estranged and strangely besotted brother, Blofeld. He refers to Bond as “My sweet James” and teases him for being “always so very very sensitive”. Christoph Waltz’s dialogue is some of the shadiest and most effete (“We all cry on our birthday.”) we’ve had from any Bond villain since Charles Gray’s portrayal of Blofeld. An easy read is that Blofeld is simply jealous of Bond’s happiness in the arms of another: “I wanted to give you an empty world, like the world you gave me.”

A pair of brothers being at each others’ throats (here, quite literally) is at the heart of many cultures’ founding myths (Cain and Abel; Osiris and Set; Romulus and Remus), further placing the characters and events of No Time To Die in a classical framework, with its attendant queer possibilities (see discussion of Bond, above).

This might not sound like the most original insight, but there’s something not quite right with Lyutsifer Safin. On paper, he has several of the qualities which might lead queer viewers to empathise with him. For a start, he has a traumatised past to rival Bond’s own (as Bond acknowledges: “We both know what it feels like to have everything taken from us before we’re in the fight.”). Safin is also obsessed with someone who can never love him back (“Anyone we touch, we are their curse” - we’ve all felt like this, right?). He maintains his aims are progressive: “I want the world to evolve. Yet you want it to stay the same.” His base of operations occupies a liminal space (an island in disputed waters between Japan and Russia) and features possibly the most baroque lair of all the Bond villains (loooooove what you’ve done with your father’s poison garden dahhhhling). Name-wise, Lyutsifer is almost indistinguishable from Lucifer, a queer figure since at least Milton’s Paradise Lost and possibly as far back as the Bible. Like many Bond villains, he has a very pronounced scar, which makes him Other. He even has a gay man’s fondness for theatrical fancy dress. But Noh Noh Noh - unlike many previous Bond villains, we just cannot connect with him on a queer level. Or at least I cannot.

What holds me back from empathising with Safin is his willingness to use a weapon which could be used to wipe out specific groups of people. While all Bond villains do not put a high price on human lives, they are usually indiscriminate in their killing: Goldfinger thinks nothing of wiping out the entire populace of Fort Knox: whoever the bystanders may be, they are simply in the way. Carl Stromberg wants to irradiate practically everybody, regardless of their nationality or ethnicity. It’s never clear exactly who Lyutsifer Safin intends to ‘clean up’ in order to make the world “tidier” but there are indications that he intends to sell the technology to the highest bidder, perhaps someone with genocidal intentions.

Safin’s nanobots could be used to ‘cleanse’ populations of people which powerful individuals consider to be undesirable. Whole races, genders and sexual orientations could be wiped out… in theory.

Back in the 1990s, there had been widely-publicised claims that there was a single Gay Gene. This has now been reappraised as an oversimplification. In 2019, the largest-scale investigation to date into whether homosexuality has a genetic basis concluded that genetic factors definitely do play a role in someone being predominantly same sex attracted, with the caveat that biology (what happens inside the womb) and environment also have an influence. 

The truth is, there’s still a lot we don’t know. The genetic differences that have been observed so far are relatively small. Even so, we must always question the motivations of scientists in this field: some of them are gay themselves and are intrigued about why they are so. A terrifying prospect is a less ethical scientist seeking to find out the cause of homosexuality so it can be pathologised, treated as an illness or even eradicated, if it was politically expedient to do so. Or if the scientist in question disliked a group with shared genetic traits.

Soon after we meet Valdo Obruchev, he has a choice to make. Primo asks him to select a colleague to help him open the safe containing Heracles. Of the two colleagues he works most closely with, he chooses the white man over the asian woman. Is Obruchev both a racist AND a misogynist? Although the white man does die, he at least gets to live for a couple more minutes than the others, who are unceremoniously machine-gunned while on their knees: images which uncomfortably recall the mass execution scenes in Holocaust documentaries and dramas.

Despite his Russian name, Obruchev is a modern take on the Nazi scientists who received amnesties for their horrendous crimes and were given new lives in the United States, USSR and other countries following the Second World War. The competing powers were so eager to get their hands on their technologies - from rocketry to nerve agents - that they overlooked the reprehensible pasts of people who had committed atrocities in the name of scientific progress. It’s not the first time the Bond series has featured such a character: Dr. Carl Mortner in A View To A Kill was a Nazi geneticist who experimented on pregnant women in concentration camps. According to his significantly expanded biography for the James Bond table-top role-playing game, he escaped punishment for his wartime crimes due to the Soviets snaffling him away so he could apply his findings on steroid-enhancement to their athletes.

A possible real-life model for Obruchev was a Danish Nazi, Dr Carl Værnet, who escaped the Nuremburg trials despite spending the War experimenting on gay men in a bid to ‘cure’ homosexuality. The methods he employed included inserting tubes in the groin which injected bursts of testosterone (which, needless to say, had no impact whatsoever besides killing some of the participants). Although information about Værnet has been hard to come by, the persistence of gay rights activist Peter Tatchell paid off in 2015 when he discovered conclusive proof that the mad scientist had escaped the Nuremburg trials because of the assistance of Dutch and British authorities. He escaped to live in Argentina and he continued his work into the eradication of homosexuality.

Sadly, Værnet was not a one off. Many scientists took advantage of the Nazis’ licence to experiment on homosexuals. Of the up to 15,000 homosexual men sent to concentration camps by the Nazis, most of these died, sometimes as a result of being castrated or otherwise abused.

The pink triangle the Nazis forced gay men to wear has now been reclaimed by the gay community. Image copyright Vangardist magazine

Whether these scientists were motivated by genuine hatred of a stigmatised group or their intellectual pride is not clear from the patchy - and often redacted - historical record. With Obruchev, it’s likely a mix of both.

He is immensely proud of the technological terror he has constructed but he also seems to take pleasure in the idea of being able to wipe out what he sees as a section of the population he views as lesser. 

He tells Nomi:

“I have a good vial for your people. Good for West African diaspora. It can be a good thing. You know, I do not need a laboratory to exterminate your entire race from the face of the Earth.”

The implications are terrifying. No wonder Nomi decides then and there that it’s time for Obruchev to take an acid bath (“Do you know what time it is? Time to die.”). Personally, I fist pump the air whenever I watch her push him off the ledge. There’s nothing more satisfying than seeing a vile eugenicist hoist with their own petard.

Admittedly, a close second in the schadenfraude stakes is a villain having their head explode because their electronic eye is subjected to a short-range pulse of electromagnetic radiation. Poor Primo: he never suspected his queer eye would be the end of him.

Primo is not the only one-eyed villain to be one of Bond’s final targets in a recent mission. In Casino Royale, Bond’s final hurdle to reaching Vesper is the cyloptic Gettler. There are several cyclopes in Greek mythology but the most famous one is Polyphemus (often portrayed as gay) who Odysseus blinds in order to escape and resume his mission to return home. Bond killing Primo supplies a satisfying Homeric circularity to Craig’s Bond era. The writer of The Iliad and The Odyssey would have probably enjoyed No Time To Die.

Logan Ash is queer coded through his twinky appearance (a pretty blonde boy with inane grin) and sibilant vocalisations (“I was sssuch a big fan of hissss.”). But he’s dressed like a Mormon. Who’s going to break it to him that Mormons are not very welcoming to those of a homosexual persuasion? Nevertheless, because of this prohibition, intimacy between Mormons of the same sex is a popular fetish for both gay men and lesbians. Incidentally, Bond’s comparing Logan with the characters from hit show Book of Mormon means he ticks another box in ‘stereotypical gay man’ column: he evidently loves a bit of musical theatre.

You go gurls!

Bond to Madeleine: “Where did you go to… today, by the water?”

Once upon a time, flashbacks didn’t happen in Bond films. As a statement of intent, the Craig-era began with one. While the first shots of Casino Royale’s black and white pre-credits sequence established Bond arriving in the cover of darkness to kill a ‘bent’ MI6 station chief, it is quickly revealed that this is to be Bond’s second kill: the first has already happened. It’s a bold move which does more than tell the story in a stylish way. It also sets up the principal thematic concern that runs through all of Craig’s Bond films. Namely, whether you can let go of the past.

So it’s entirely fitting that the final film of the Craig-era also begins with a flashback, albeit one that is unannounced as a flashback unless you recall a snippet of dialogue from Spectre (or can date a film by its outmoded mobile phones and episodes of Wallace and Gromit).

This time, however, it’s not Bond who is the subject of the flashback, but the woman who will come to mean so much to him.

Back in 2015, in an interview with the Daily Mail to promote Spectre, Lea Seydoux nailed her character’s limitations as a fully-fleshed out character: “Madeleine Swann is a catalyst for change. She helps Bond open the mystery so it is revealed.” Seydoux’s comments frame her Swann as a sort of plot device, the “catalyst” which disrupts the narrative equilibrium, speeding Bond from one point to another. And it’s certainly true that this is how Madeleine was positioned in Spectre: it was Bond’s story and she was along for the ride. Compare this with On Her Majesty’s Secret Service which feels like Tracy’s story with Bond as the plot catalyst. 

A transformation of some kind is at the heart of most narratives and, while Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service makes a significant change in his life by deciding to get married, he’s still fundamentally the same person by the end. Marriage does not alter him. After being attacked by Blofeld and Bunt, his first thought is to chase after them - the mission comes first! - not check on the well-being of his wife. And it’s Tracy’s transformation we remember - and sob about - as We Have All The Time In The World starts up on the soundtrack: Tracy entered the narrative attempting to bring her life to a premature end and dies while looking hopefully to the future. Hers is the tragic outcome.

By the end of Spectre, Madeleine was the same at the end as she was when we were first introduced to her midway through the film. She remained aloof and unknowable. We still didn’t really have any idea who she was or what made her tick. 

Madeleine’s most intriguing character development occurred - as it often does - on a train. The mirroring of the equivalent scene in Casino Royale reinforced the unpalatable idea that she was a stand-in for Vesper, a comparison which made us question whether Bond was truly in love with this person or if he was just trying to relive the past. It kept Madeleine at a distance from us; she was an abstract idea rather than someone we could connect with on a human level. 

Reinforcing her abstraction was her name. In the same 2015 Daily Mail interview for the earlier film, in which she described Swann as a ‘catalyst’, Seydoux revealed the origin of her character’s nomenclature:

'Her name is, of course, a nod to Marcel Proust. In Proust’s Swann’s Way, the opening book of Remembrance Of Things Past, the madeleine sponge cake has the potential to evoke powerful memories. The name has been chosen deliberately for this film.”

I’ll confess that this is something I had missed at the time of Spectre’s release. Perhaps because, in all honesty, I had been putting off reading Proust because of its reputation for being inaccessible. But watching No Time To Die for the first time finally gave me the kick (catalyst!) I needed to give it a try - and I was glad I did. It’s clear to see why Madeleine Swann’s name is a nod to Proust. 

Marcel Proust was never openly out as gay but he was understood to be by almost everyone who knew him and this was confirmed after his death by his contemporaries. Proust went to great lengths to preserve his honour. When a reviewer (who was probably also gay) tried to out him, Proust challenged him to a duel. Proust missed and his adversary’s gun misfired - clearly neither had time to die. 

Proust famously told his friend and confidant Andre Gide that “One can say anything so long as one does not say ‘I.’”. For this reason, Proust sometimes prefers the third person, especially when writing about homosexuality. The short stories Proust wrote in secret as a young man, in which he tried to process his homosexuality more openly than in his published works, portray his sexuality as being like, in the words of the publisher who put them in print over a hundred years after they were written, a “curse”. (And if you think that’s a long, convoluted sentence, that’s nothing on Proust!)

But Remembrance of Things Past is mostly in the first person and the unnamed narrator is widely referred to as ‘Marcel’ by critics. As I read the first volume of the Proust’s opus (my edition was translated as the more Fleming-like In Search Of Lost Time) it was obvious to me that the ‘I’ narrator was queer. Not only does ‘I’ tick several of the stereotypical boxes (sensitive, mother-obsessed) but he also looks at everything with ‘different’ eyes, his askance observations making you question even the most quotidian elements of life. A highlight for me was his rhapsodic description of eating asparagus, a description of Epicurean proportions which might have found its way into one of the foodier Fleming books. Much as Fleming delighted in describing food, he would have stopped short of relating the smell of Bond’s pee several hours after eating the asparagus. But Proust is not afraid to go there, stating that the act of peeing out asparagus changes his “chamber pot into a jar of perfume”, which is stretching it a bit in my view.

Like many gay men, closeted or otherwise, Proust spent a long time re-examining his past. Many of us are traumatised by the self-shaming that occurs from early childhood. The thinly-veiled autobiography that constitutes Remembrance Of Things Past runs to more than 4,000 pages (and people say my articles are long!). The book is typically published in seven volumes and it’s the first volume which gives Madeleine her name: The Way By Swann’s (or, as Seydoux says, Swann’s Way). Swann is the surname of a character whose love story forms a novella within the novel, told in the third person. At its core, this part is about a man falling in love with a woman who betrays him, recalling to mind Vesper. It may also be what’s playing on Bond’s mind when he mistakenly distrusts Madeleine, fearful of the past repeating.

Proust is chiefly known, even by those who have never read any, for writing about involuntary memory, whereby something ordinary triggers recollections of the past. When people describe something as “Proustian”, that’s usually what they’re getting at. There is very little of this ‘Proustian’ sensibility in the world of Bond. Until the Craig-era, Bond lived almost-exclusively in the present. Even in the Fleming novels, we rarely get much in the way of backstory beyond the occasional callback. A stark exception is On Her Majesty’s Secret Service which opens with Bond reflecting - for two whole pages - on his childhood, his memories triggered by a trip to the seaside. Significantly the episode occurs in Northern France, the setting for Remembrance of Things Past: is this Fleming nodding in the geographical and stylistic direction of Proust? Specifically, Bond begins On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in Royale-les-Eaux, the setting for Casino Royale and therefore a place which holds uncomfortable memories for him. It’s soon revealed that Bond is there to intentionally evoke memories of the past, by visiting Vesper’s grave. This is not involuntary memory: Bond is actively seeking it out.

In No Time To Die, it’s Madeleine who leads Bond to Vesper’s grave, a significant shift beyond being a mere plot contrivance (‘how else did Spectre know Bond would be there?’ is the question that eats away at Bond, setting up the rest of the film). Blofeld may have claimed in Spectre to be the author of all Bond’s pain, but it’s Madeleine who has taken up the pen in No Time To Die - the difference being she wants him to confront his past and find peace with it, allowing them to write a new future together. No wonder she is named in honour of things created by a writer as past-obsessed as Proust.

But all of this still does little to elevate Madeleine beyond the position of ‘catalyst’ for Bond. If we go back again, in a Proustian fashion, to the train scene from Spectre, we find that this contains that film’s most intriguing glimpse into Madeleine’s psyche:

“A man once came to our house to kill my father. He didn't know I was upstairs playing in my bedroom. Or that Papa kept a Beretta Nine-millimeter under the sink with the bleach. That's why I hate guns.”

Choosing to begin No Time To Die with a depiction of these traumatic events repositions Swann, putting her front and centre, which is just where she needs to be if we are to buy Bond’s transformation into someone who would rather die than be without the people he loves. 

In an echo of the opening of Fleming’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, it’s Madeleine’s, rather than Bond’s, memories which are triggered by spending time at the seaside. On emerging from the water, Bond senses Madeleine’s mind has been wandering elsewhere. Her pleasant dip on a sun-drenched shore could not be more different to her harrowing experience as a teenager, drowning beneath a thick layer of ice while being shot at by her mother’s murderer, but it becomes clear to us that her childhood memory was triggered by her time in the water. 

Being drowned and shot at is a far cry from having your memories triggered, as does Proust’s narrator, by dipping a small cake in a cup of tea. The sponge cake incident that Seydoux refers to in her interview occurs nearly 50 pages in to Swann’s Way. [In Seydoux’s defence it is the ‘opening’ in relative terms - it’s only just over 1% through the novel as a whole after all].

Proust writes:

“I carried to my lips a spoonful of tea in which I had let soften a piece of madeleine. But at the very instant when the mouthful of tea mixed with cake-crumbs touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening in me. A delicious pleasure had invaded me… It had immediately made the vicissitudes of life unimportant to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory, acting in the same way love acts… I had ceased to feel I was mediocre, contingent, mortal.”

Proust beautifully conveys how a very specific taste can powerfully recall memories, as if we are reliving them.

Proust’s narrator continues:

“And suddenly the memory appeared. The taste was the taste of the little madeleine which on Sunday mornings… my Aunt Leonie would give me after dipping it in her infusion of tea or lime-blossom.” 

His whole childhood emerges “town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea”.

For Proust’s narrator, the memories triggered are predominantly happy recollections of childhood, in dramatic contrast to Madeleine’s recall of her horrifying first meeting with Safin. 

From Bond’s pillow talk questioning of Madeleine about where she went in the water, it’s evident that she has been doing her utmost to repress her memories of the masked man, the irony being that she has already told Bond half of her story in Spectre. It’s the half that she hasn’t told which is eating away at her: that the man she shot with her father’s Beretta also saved her life and she is therefore beholden to him. Repression and telling half-truths are familiar bedfellows for queer people. The more Madeleine withholds her truth from Bond, the more she earns our sympathy.

Her second meeting with Safin cruelly forces her to confront her truth, his Noh mask that she shattered while defending herself being the aide memoire which triggers her painful memories. However, facing up to your past can also kickstart the healing process. In Spectre, she told Bond that it was her shooting at a man who came to their house that led her to disliking guns. In No Time To Die, when she and Bond (the latter holding their child) come under attack from Safin and his henchman in the Norwegian forest, it’s Madeleine who defends the family by shooting dead the first attacker who gets close to killing them.

It’s fun to imagine what Proust would make of Madeleine, the pistol-packing mama influenced by his writing. Although the First World War forms a backdrop to the later volumes of Remembrance of Things Past, guns do not feature prominently in Proust. You’d think he could at least have snuck in a duelling scene, considering his personal experience! Then again, it might have stood out like a sore thumb in an otherwise down-to-earth novel.

On the flip-side, there’s a scene which stands out a little sore thumb-like in No Time To Die. I would argue it only makes sense if you are aware of the Proust connotations of Madeleine’s name. Just prior to Bond and Madeleine being reunited on Safin’s island, Madeleine is being forced to drink tea, with Primo compelling her to drink on Safin’s orders. Madeleine’s comments lead us to believe that the tea may be poisoned, but it’s not certain. Does Safin want to kill her? Or is the act of drinking tea supposed to imply that - like Proust’s narrator - it will bring back Madeleine’s memories in full flood, including the memories of Safin saving her as a child, therefore bonding her to him more fully? Juxtaposed with the action histrionics of Bond and Nomi, it’s a wonderfully weird low-key scene, even with its Ken Adam-inspired low key-lit set (an homage to Adam’s oft-imitated war room from Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove).

Seydoux’s assertion around the time of Spectre that Madeleine’s name was chosen specifically “to evoke powerful memories” makes out that her role in that film was merely to recall Bond’s memories of Vesper. But her actions in No Time To Die suggest that she was intended to be so much more.

You can’t get a man with a gun? No Time To Die begs to disagree. Madeleine’s taking up a pistol to defend what is most precious to her almost makes up for the irksome lack of agency the character displayed as she was dragged along by Bond as he (but not she) shot their way out of Blofeld’s compound in Spectre. 

Just because of who she is, the daughter of Mr White, Madeleine Swann is fated to be trapped by her past. Whether you look at it from Bond’s or Blofeld’s perspective, she will always be a daughter of Spectre. Queer people can relate: the things that have happened to us, through no fault of our own but just because of who we are, bind us to people and places we might wish to leave behind. But as long as we carry around our memories, we will never be completely free.

Camp (as Dr Christmas Jones)

One of the first things we hear in No Time To Die is Dans La Ville Endormie, performed by gay icon Dalida in 1968. The lyrics of the song and the tragically shortened life of the artist singing them arguably foreshadow Bond’s death. [This was explored in full on this website, prior to the film’s release, by Läne Bonertz]

Matera is picture postcard perfection. Nowhere looks that beautiful in real life (the filmmakers scooped up all the unsightly plastic chairs outside cafes to make sure of this). It is, in the words of Susan Sontag, simply ‘too much’ - and therefore splendidly Camp.

The Proustian quality of the film is reflected in the main titles. Beginning with the pop art dots from the opening of Dr. No, it doesn’t take long for faces from the past to return. Bond representation as a fractured porcelain figure recalls the Bulldog that survived the explosion of M’s office in Skyfall (the Royal Doulton original is glimpsed briefly, peeking out of a box in Bond’s garage). The statue of Britannia (see Q, in Allies, above) is explicitly identified with Bond, with the blood on her face in the same place Safin will scratch Bond. It also self-referentially mirrors the destruction of Communist statues and symbols in GoldenEye’s title sequence, the first set of titles to be designed by Daniel Kleinman. Postmodern? Iconoclastic? Whatever else we might call it, it’s Camp.

Billie Eilish’s title song might resonate with queer audiences who have been sadly rejected by those family and/or friends who they thought might be allies but found they were not supportive when they came out  (“You were never on my side… Now you'll never see me cry”.) Eilish herself has been accused of queer-baiting for her video to Lost Cause, which featured her kissing a girl in a vaguely Sapphic slumber party. To her credit, Eilish herself has refused to be pinned down to a particular sexual orientation arguing that it’s nobody’s business. My personal favourite cover of the song is performed by non-binary pansexual artist Plexxaglass.

Those keeping track of the floral motif that runs through this film might make something of the species of plant Madeleine keeps in her office: it’s a foxglove, an extract of which was used in Casino Royale to poison Bond’s Martini. It might be a coincidence, or it might be a fourth wall-breaking wink for those who are really paying attention.

Bond is his typical flirty self in No Time To Die - with people of all genders. Craig even taps Obruchev on the bum as he gets into the seaplane. Obruchev is passed around from person to person. “Where is he?” Paloma asks, as they try to extricate him from Cuba. Bond likens their situation to a relationship, with the new 007 having snatched him away: “He left me… for somebody else.”

Who loves short shorts? Bond does! In all seriousness (well, semi-seriousness), what better attire can there be for spending a leisurely day on your boat catching red snappers? Just remember to put your tackle away when you’re finished James.

The Spectre party looks like an absolute hoot. There’s definitely a queer frisson to the whole affair, with some of the partygoers engaged in what looks like furry fun and others getting into some good old-fashioned S&M. Fleming would have loved it.

Safin’s surname translates - from French - as ‘his end’. Appropriate for the man who causes Bond’s demise or just a little too on the nose? 

“Blofeld’s eyeball unlocked”, the line of expositional dialogue heard as Q tinkers with the captured ocular device, is Camp at its purest. As is Bond’s bizarre approach to interrogating Blofeld. That whole sequence would have earned the admiration of Susan Sontag, culminating as it does in Bond’s soap operaish bellow of “Die, Blofeld, Die!”. Pure Camp. Pure gold.

Queer icons come in many forms. More than fifty years after her turbulent life came to a tragically early end, Judy Garland still sets the template, embodying a spirit that remains unyielding in the face of life’s slings and arrows. Could we come to love an inanimate object in the same way? I speak, of course, of Dou Dou, who stands by Bond (or, rather, remains tightly tucked in his braces) as they are both blown to smithereens. If the entirely imaginary Babadook can become a queer icon, why not a stuffed toy rabbit? Actually, I’m not even sure it’s supposed to be a rabbit. Perchance a mythological creature? If truth be told, I don’t really hold any strong views about what happens with Bond 26 but I do know Dou Dou needs a spin-off movie of its/his/her/their own. 

Queer verdict: 005 (Out of a possible 007)

If the success of the mission depends on us breaking free from the bondage of the past, then so be it. More iconoclastic than reverential, No Time To Die triumphs as a landmark of queer cinema because it doesn’t relent at opening up possibilities for the audience. Craig gave us a version of Bond who was always looking over his shoulder: literally, figuratively… sometimes involuntarily. In No Time To Die, he also gave us a role model: someone who was afeared of change, but went and did it anyway. It’s all right queers. It’s all all right.

References

Amis, K (1965) The James Bond Dossier. London: Jonathan Cape

Being James Bond: The Daniel Craig Story [2021]. Film. Directed by Bailie Walsh. MGM.

Blaylock, S (2021) ‘Were there gays in the Nazi ranks? Sex in the Third Reich’ and ‘Ancient Greek Homosexuality and Pederasty’. Episodes of The History of Gay Sex podcast. Available at: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-history-of-gay-sex/id1552648542

Cantarella, E (1992) Bisexuality in the Ancient World London: Yale University Press

Chapman, L (2021) Fashioning James Bond: Costume, gender and identity in the world of 007.  London: Bloomsbury

Clance, P.R. and Imes, S (1978) ‘The Imposter Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention’ Psychotherapy Theory, Research and Practice Volume 15, #3, Fall 1978. Available at: https://www.paulineroseclance.com/pdf/ip_high_achieving_women.pdf 

Conrad, P and Markens, D (2001) ‘Constructing the 'gay gene' in the news: optimism and skepticism in the US and British press.’ Health Vol. 5, No. 3, Special Issue: Medical Innovation and Public Knowledge (July 2001) Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26646440 

Davidson, J (2007) ‘Mad About The Boy.’ The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/nov/10/history.society

Dyer, R (2004) Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, 2nd edition. London: Routledge

Elgar, M (2015) ‘Maternal instinct and biology: evolution ensures we want sex, not babies.’  The Conversation. Available at: https://theconversation.com/maternal-instinct-and-biology-evolution-ensures-we-want-sex-not-babies-46622

Flood, A (2019) ‘Lost Proust stories of homosexual love finally published.’ The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/08/lost-proust-stories-homosexual-love-masterpiece-le-mysterieux-correspondant 

Fry, S (2017) Mythos. London: Michael Joseph

Graves, R (1955) The Greek Myths. London: Penguin

Han, E and O’Mahoney, J (2018) British Colonialism and the Criminalization of Homosexuality: Queens, Crime and Empire London: Routledge

by Enze Han (Author), Joseph O’Mahoney (Author)

Hill, L (2008) ‘How James Bond Nearly Became a Father’ Vulture (New York magazine). Available at: https://www.vulture.com/2008/11/how_james_bond_nearly_became_a.html 

Hottes, T.S. et al. (2016) ‘Lifetime Prevalence of Suicide Attempts Among Sexual Minority Adults by Study Sampling Strategies: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.’ American Journal of Public Health 106, e1_e12. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2016.303088 

Kaiser, J (2019) ‘Genetics may explain up to 25% of same-sex behavior, giant analysis reveals.’ Science. Available at: https://www.science.org/content/article/genetics-may-explain-25-same-sex-behavior-giant-analysis-reveals 

Lewis, D (2016) ‘Why the U.S. Government Brought Nazi Scientists to America After World War II.’ Smithsonian Magazine. Available at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-us-government-brought-nazi-scientists-america-after-world-war-ii-180961110/ 

Mercer, P (2015) ‘Imposter Syndrome.’ Stonewall. Available at: https://www.stonewall.org.uk/node/21875 

Muñoz, J.E. (1999) Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

No Time To Die: The Official James Bond Podcast (2021) ‘The Secrets of No Time To Die’ 10th December 2021 Available at: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-secrets-of-making-no-time-to-die/id1532875925?i=1000544498013

Odets, W (2019) Out of the Shadows: The Psychology of Gay Men’s Lives London: Penguin

Orwell, G (1949) Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Sacker and Warburg

Plutarch. Amatorius (William Goodwin edition) The Perseus Catalog. Available at: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2008.01.0314%3Asection%3D17

Porter, A.J. ‘Why is that Aston Martin there? - Continuity in the world of Bond’ in The James Bond Lexicon by Alan J. Porter and Gillian J. Porter. White Rocket Books

Pew Research Center. (2015) ‘America’s Changing Religious Landscape.’ Available at: https://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/  

Pew Research Center (2019) Lesbian, gay and bisexual Americans are less religious than straight adults by traditional measures. Available at: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/24/lesbian-gay-and-bisexual-americans-are-less-religious-than-straight-adults-by-traditional-measures/

Proust, M (1913)  In Search of Lost Time: The Way by Swann’s. London: Penguin

Röll, W (1996) ‘Homosexual inmates in the Buchenwald Concentration Camp.’ Journal of Homosexuality. 1996;31(4):1-28. Available at: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8905527/ 

Salisbury, M (2021) No Time To Die - The Making of The Film. London: Titan Books

Shepherd, L (2015) ‘Marvel's diversity problem continues as once bisexual character Hercules confirmed straight.’ The Independent. Available at https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/marvel-s-diversity-problem-continues-as-once-bisexual-character-hercules-confirmed-straight-10435249.html 

Sheratte, C (2021) ‘The impact of marginalisation on the imposter phenomenon in the workplace.’ Green Park Available at: https://www.green-park.co.uk/news/the-impact-of-marginalisation-on-the-imposter-phenomenon-in-the-workplace/s233915/ 

Spaiser, M (2021). ‘Nomi’s Tom Ford Safari Jacket in No Time to Die.’ Bond Suits Available at: https://www.bondsuits.com/nomis-tom-ford-safari-jacket-in-no-time-to-die/

Tatchell, P (2015) ‘The Nazi doctor who experimented on gay people – and Britain helped to escape justice.’ The Guardian Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/05/nazi-doctor-gay-people-carl-vaernet-escaped-justice-danish 

Wilde, J (2015) ‘’I told Sam Mendes he'd be a hero with women for casting me': Monica Bellucci on seducing Bond... at 50.’ The Daily Mail. Available at: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/event/article-2960446/Monica-Bellucci-seducing-Bond-50.html 

Read more!

If you would like to read more about the topics explored in this queer re-review, you may find the following Licence To Queer articles of interest. All go into their subject matter at much greater depth than even this lengthy article would allow. Also, I didn’t want to retread in detail anything that had already been featured on the site.

For my ‘off the cuff’ initial thoughts on No Time To Die, 24 hours after seeing the film, here they are in podcast form: https://www.licencetoqueer.com/blog/no-time-to-die-off-the-cuff. A lot of the ideas I explore in this queer re-view were starting to be formed in a less formalised manner here. Also, you get to hear me nearly cry several times!

Encouraged by Craig Gent’s example, I really ‘went there’ with the personal parts of this queer re-view. You can read Craig’s excellent piece on No Time To Die (and Bond in general) here: https://www.licencetoqueer.com/blog/no-crying-shame

The found family theme is pushed to its apotheosis in No Time To Die. My analysis of this trend across Bond and modern franchise cinema: https://www.licencetoqueer.com/blog/no-time-for-family?rq=family

My queer re-view of Dr. No is a companion piece to this one in many ways. There’s a reason I tackled Dr. No just before I saw No Time To Die - I suspected there may be some circularity and I was right! Some common ground includes: Bond’s mix of masculine and feminine qualities; gay signs and signals, including the science behind gaydar; Otherness in villains; the queer meanings of Bond entering a villain’s lair.

My queer re-view of You Only Live Twice deals with suicide as a theme in Bond fiction and in real life in detail. It contains useful links which I implore you to use if you are having suicidal thoughts, as I once did.

Self-shaming underpins the Craig era and I explored it across my queer re-views of Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, especially the latter.

Sam Rogers joins the dots between disposable Bond girls and gay characters who typically meet a similar fate on screen: https://www.licencetoqueer.com/blog/bury-your-bond-girls?

Back in November of 2020, I speculated what it would be like for Q to come out in No Time To Die. How much of it did I get right? Read on and see: https://www.licencetoqueer.com/blog/q-is-for-queer?

Felix’s masculinity and sexuality are always under the microscope: https://www.licencetoqueer.com/blog/keep-the-fruit

M’s bisexual possibilities are examined by Kathleen Jowitt: https://www.licencetoqueer.com/blog/what-makes-you-think-this-is-the-first-time-assumption-possibility-and-bisexuality-in-bond

Kathleen wittily and insightfully explores Bond and religion from her queer Anglican perspective: https://www.licencetoqueer.com/blog/that-or-the-priesthood-bonds-queer-calling?rq=jowitt

I had never even heard to Dalida until Läne Bonertz introduced me to her in his article.

My article about Camp will help you ‘get’ where I’m coming from when I write about this much-misunderstood concept.

I make reference to several important episodes in 20th/21st Century queer history which are more fully explained here: https://www.licencetoqueer.com/blog/007-decades-of-lgbtq-history 

Special thanks to…

Tom Mason who first signposted me to the Madeleine Swann/Proust connection. 

Kendall Blanc for not only validating my interpretation of Felix but taking it to the next level.

Edward Biddulph for pointing out the translation of ‘Sa Fin’ and giving me hit thoughts (which turned into a whole article) about the foodiest Fleming books.

Dr Lisa Funnell for concurring that Paloma should be counted among the Allies rather than the Girls.

Jack Lugo, on whose Bond & Banter podcast I am a regular guest. His roundtable discussion of No Time To Die with him, me, Bill Koenig, Shayla Miller and fellow gay Bond fan Justin Valero helped me to give shape to particular thoughts about the film.

Just as I was about to hit ‘Publish’ on this article, my husband Antony reminded me that we’ve had a Nazi geneticist in Bond before - in his favourite Bond film no less. Thank you darling for making this queer re-view even longer than it already was.