Queer re-view: Octopussy
It’s not just the zeros that are double in Octopussy, a film queerly obsessed with doppelgängers. We see double when it comes to Fabergé eggs, identical knife-throwers, uncanny clowns and female cult members who share more than a passing resemblance. And let’s not forget Double-0 Seven himself of course. But it’s the titular character’s lesbian utopia that steals the show.
If this is your first time reading a re-view on LicenceToQueer.com I recommend you read this first.
‘Inspired by Octopussy’ by Herring & Haggis
“The name’s Bond, Flaming Bond.”
Doubles have long been associated with queerness, well before 007 arrived on the scene. Hitchcock made a career out of unsettling his audience by challenging society’s fixed ideas of identity. He employed doubles throughout his films, right from his silent days through to widely-hailed masterpieces like Rebecca, Psycho and Vertigo. He realised the power of putting two characters on screen who could be mixed up (all the wrong man stories, including Bond progenitor North By Northwest) or having an onscreen character double a character we never see (the first Mrs de Winter, Norman Bates’s mother, the real Madeleine Esler). Many of Hitchcock’s films have queer appeal because of this doubling. In the words of academic Ilha Desterro, doubling “introduces a difference that disturbs the order”.
Perhaps drawing attention to similarities makes us question how things might be different.
Bond films have exploited this tension since the very beginning. In Dr. No, Bond doubles himself with pillows to fool Dent into shooting his six, the scene many credit with doing most to establish the character. The pleasure comes from Bond resolving the tension, reabsorbing his double back into himself and showing Dent - and the audience - he’s not to be messed with: he’s a singular entity who is not averse to doubling himself to get the upper hand. The beginning of From Russia With Love plays with doubles too, convincing the audience that Bond is dead before it’s revealed that the corpse is not Bond but an ineffective, anonymous SPECTRE agent wearing a mask. A more credible double for Bond is the one walking into the distance: Donald ‘Red’ Grant, the one we know will return later in the film.
Goldfinger amps up the doubles with the Masterston sisters. They are basically interchangeable and visually similar, both performing the same narrative function and both ending up dead, ostensibly because they act against Goldfinger. But one can’t shake the feeling it’s their doubleness (rather than their double-crossing) which marks them out for death, something they have in common with many queer characters. The novel underscores the point by making Tilly a lesbian.
Lesbianism and doubling go hand in hand in film history, right up to recent films such as Mulholland Drive and Black Swan, where the lovers’ appearances are intentionally similar. Olu Jenzen identifies lesbian doppelgangers as a trope which is not exclusive to cinema, finding “attraction based on sameness is a staple romantic convention in lesbian fiction” as well. Jenzen believes “The figure of the lovers as doubles… evokes a feeling of uncanny repetition as well as a sensation of an uncanny threat to the boundaries of the proper categories of the self and the other.” While the Mastersons are not lovers, they do evoke a feeling of “uncanny repetition”.
This feeling of uncanniness is evoked mere moments into Octopussy, with Bond impersonating an Argentinian colonel (“You’re a Toro too”). The whole pre-title sequence is a showcase for doubling of another kind; despite the South American foliage, it’s endearingly clear that an airbase in the UK (RAF Northolt) is standing in for somewhere more exotic. That Bond’s Acrostar jet is concealed behind a horse’s… behind is the icing on the cake. Everything is masquerading as something else.
By itself, this would not be remarkable: Bond often dons disguises and sneaks around places. That’s kind of the job description of a spy. But Octopussy pushes doubleness to extremes. The post-titles sequence where 009, dressed as a clown, is murdered, is made even more unsettling by the killers being identical twins. The ‘uncanniness’ of identical twins has been exploited in the horror genre, most famously in The Shining. That we do not know 009’s identity until he is identified as an agent by M in a subsequent scene also adds to the uncanniness: we had no idea who the clown was and now we are surprised and unsetlled that a Double-0, someone with Bond’s rank, would disguise himself as such.
In the finale, when Bond himself takes on a clown persona reminiscent of 009’s, we are reminded his colleague’s fate and this heightens the tension. I have long held in low estimation anyone who tries to disparage Octopussy by deriding Bond’s clown disguise. It’s actually a very clever strategy for bringing together the film's overarching thematic obsession with duality and doubleness. That it’s ridiculous is the point: no one will take a clown seriously, even when all of their lives are at stake. One feels that Hitchcock would have appreciated its perversity.
Bond dons a significantly above average number of disguises in Octopussy: colonel; corpse; circus labourer; clown. And let’s not forget crocodile and gorilla. Once described, lyrically, as “like a shark, he looks for trouble”, 007 is a top predator because of his ability to blend in. As Ilha do Desterro observes:
An insect that mimics a leaf does so not to meld with the vegetable state of its surrounding milieu, but to reenter the higher realm of predatory animal warfare on a new footing. Mimickry, according to Lacan, is camouflage. It constitutes a war zone. There is a power inherent in the false: the positive power of ruse, the power to gain a strategic advantage by masking one's life force.
By this yardstick, Bond is a powerful force to be reckoned with in Octopussy, chameleonically shifting his identity to suit the situation. While some of these identities are outlandishly comic, his cover story when crossing into East Germany is parodically prosaic, reflecting the utilitarian reputation of the Communist-controlled state: M tells him he’s “Charles Moreton, manufacturer's representative from Leeds, visiting furniture factories.” Bet he’s fun at parties.
Perhaps the most significant doubling is that of Bond with Octopussy. When she tells Bond “We’re two of a kind” she does so as a prelude to her sales pitch: “There are vast rewards for a man of your talents willing to take risks.” It’s the archetypal villain seduction routine again, except this time it ends in a physical consummation. Bond is not so sure they’re on the same page, being adamant he is “not for hire”. It’s when Octopussy refuses to apologise for what she is that Bond concurs with her (“You’re right. We are two of a kind.”) and they fall into each others’ arms. Octopussy is someone Bond can be more himself with; she provides a brief respite from all the disguises, although he does still conceal information from her - and lets her believe him to be dead, eaten by a crocodile. Hardly the foundations of a solid relationship.
Right up the final scene, Bond is dissembling: he pretends to have a broken leg to infiltrate Octopussy’s ship and/or give his employers a reason he cannot return to work. A doubly useful excuse.
Friends of 00-Dorothy: 007’s Allies
There are even two Moneypennys! Well, sort of. Moneypenny tells her young new assistant, Penelope Smallbone, that a bunch of flowers is all she’ll get from Bond. If I interpret her correctly, 007 only likes big bones. Such a size queen.
MI6’s resident art expert (who knew they had such a thing?) Jim Fanning is a queer fish - and a style inspiration to me personally, as my #JimFanningFriday tradition on Instagram and Twitter attests. The eminently flappable Fanning is a conflation of two (another double!) characters in Fleming’s short story The Property of a Lady, a story which originally appeared in a Sotheby’s publication before it was added to the Octopussy collection. In the Property story, Bond is accompanied to the auction by Kenneth Snowman, who was a real life expert on Fabergé eggs. Described somewhat blandly as a “good-looking, very well-dressed man of about forty”, Snowman gives Bond his wife’s ticket to the auction so he can accompany him and complete his mission: unmasking a spy. I will try not to read too much into Bond being a good-looking man’s date for the afternoon. You can draw your own conclusions.
The film Fanning is a lot closer to the story’s Dr Fanshawe, who Bond sums up as “something literary, a critic perhaps, a bachelor - possibly with homosexual tendencies”. Note the ‘something’, which others Fanshawe as less than human. Curiously, the feeling is mutual: Fleming has Fanshawe touch Bond’s hand only briefly and Fanshawe reacts as if he has “touched paws with a Gila monster” (poisonous lizard). Both Fanshawe and Bond recognise the otherness in each other: they move in separate worlds. Fanshawe is also “foppishly” dressed and Fleming delights in describing his clothing in detail. He’s a far more memorable character than Snowman and a clearer inspiration for Jim Fanning, who ia arguably coded as queer in his clothing, mannerisms and speech (he witheringly describes what Khan has to sell as “marginal qualities from dubious sources”). He’s also a bachelor, shown by him not wearing a wedding ring. When Bond comments on Magda’s beauty, Fanning berates him, telling him to “stick to the business in hand”. Fanning’s mind is on the mission, not the stunningly attractive woman who makes everyone else’s head turn when she enters a room.
KGB boss General Gogol is painted as more of an ally than an antagonist, even more clearly than he was in For Your Eyes Only. He’s well on his way to switching sides entirely, come The Living Daylights.
When Bond meets Vijay, Universal Exports’ ‘special expediter’ in India, he’s playing with his asp in public. The public nature of their encounter means they must use a coded exchange of the kind we see throughout Bond films. Such codes allow secret business to be conducted openly and have been employed by gay men at various points in history, especially at times when it was illegal to be gay. Gay men even had their own secret language, Polari, which continued up until the 1970s (some are trying to keep it alive today). Queer codes keep cropping up in Bond and I have explored them several times, most fully in my re-view of From Russia With Love, a film released at a time when gay men really did have to be mindful of prying ears.
Like his Head of Station Sadruddin, who greets Bond as a somewhat stereotypical ‘native’ soliciting for tourist custom (”Taxi. Please be comfortable.”), Vijay conceals his true identity. He masquerades as a tennis pro, a delightful metatextual nod to actor Vijay Amriitraj’s substantive profession.
Q is having trouble keeping it up when Bond first makes contact in India, although he appears to have overcome his erectile dysfunction when he arrives by balloon in the finale, landing in the middle of Octopussy’s army of leotard-clad cult members.
Shady Characters: Villains
General Orlov is stark raving bonkers. Gogol diagnoses him as paranoid but it’s pathological narcissism which drives his thirst for conquest. He dies happy, thinking he will soon be a hero of the Soviet Union. He has channelled all of his erotic energies into planning a “lightning thrust” into Europe. Seeing the map turn red is the only thing that will slake his thirst - and secure his name in the history books. Narcissism has always been associated with queerness because self-love is essentially a form of non-reproductive sexuality. In Bond films, it’s particularly prevalent in military figures (see my discussion of narcissism in The Living Daylights). While he is courteous to his collaborators, including Octopussy (“Au revoir, dear lady”), he has no real feeling towards anyone. Perhaps a bit of decadence might have done him the world of good.
Kamal Khan is one of the most mannered villains in the Bond pantheon, which doesn’t make him queer per se: we get to be rude if we want to. At times, he is somewhat effete. Is this queer coding or just actor Louis Jourdan’s default mode of delivery? For Licence to Queer reader Alex Miller, “the Backgammon scene is basically a big flirting session” between him and Bond. Later, he tells Octopussy he wants to “take care” of Bond “personally”, although presumably not in the same sense she proceeds to take care of him. One might be tempted to read something into Kamal being the only man allowed on Octopussy’s island. Does he not count as a man in her eyes? And, as SoMrHarris observes, “he is frequently around beautiful women which he clearly has no personal interests in”. While the screenplay does not reveal why he was exiled from Afghanistan, a role playing game in the 90s elaborated on his criminal origins - he started early - which may have contributed. He doesn’t appear to have sexual skeletons in the closet, even if he does keep corpses in his pantry.
While staying as Kamal’s prisoner, Bond asks Gobinda into his room for a nightcap but he’s not having any of it. What a pity. The only reason Kamal’s right hand man might get intimate with Bond would be to do to his nethers what he did to those Backgammon dice (yet another instance of castration anxiety, see Goldfinger and Casino Royale in particular). Gobinda is fiercely loyal to Kamal, who he calls ‘excellency’, and this loyalty leads him to his doom. For writer James Cullen, the lengths Gobinda goes to for Kamal, including clinging to the edge of a plane, “go beyond mere loyalty”. He clearly disdains “girls selling themselves”, though it’s not clear whether he abhors sexy girls, prostitution or his men being so easily distracted. Maybe all three. Who knows though: had he lived and found something more constructive to do with his life, maybe he would have been a proud wearer of a rainbow turban.
As identical twins, the knife-throwing assassins Mishka and Grishka are the ultimate double act. As we saw with Bond (above), putting two characters on screen who resemble each other carries a queer frisson because of the implication of autoeroticism. In other words, it brings to mind the idea of having sex with oneself. I’m not, of course, suggesting the two brothers are lovers! There’s nothing to suggest their sexual orientation in the film. In real life, identical twins don’t always have the same orientation, although studies suggest it is likelier than not. A brilliant feat of composition and editing conceals the fact that 009 is facing off against identical twins in the post-titles action sequence: just as he thinks he’s safe, another one appears behind him!
The shoe is on the other foot when Bond faces off against the surviving brother on the top of the train: he mistakes Bond, in his red and black circus outfit, as his sibling. The chase through the woods intentionally evokes the 009 sequence and the double nature of the scene is made explicit in the dialogue (“And this… for my brother.” / “And that’s for 009”). That Octopussy is full of such moments of satisfying symmetry is probably one of the reasons it is such a hit with hardcore Bond fans.
You go gurrrls!
Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns identifies a streak of sisterhood running through the first three Bond films of the 1980s. This is particularly strong in Octopussy with its titular figure being the leader of (to quote the handwritten notes made by Sadruddin) “an old secret order of female bandits and smugglers”. Octopussy herself tells Bond that she “revived the old Octopus cult” by recruiting directionless girls “all over Southeast Asia”, providing them with “sisterhood and a way of life”.Whether you call it an order or a cult, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns sees the community founded and fostered by Octopussy as “A nod to the emergence of separatist communities” in the real world of the 1970s. In many places around the world, including India, some second-wave feminists became fed up with mainstream, patriarchal society and formed women-only communities. Berns is careful to note that “not all separatists were lesbians” but many were, with lesbianism becoming “a way to dedicate oneself more fully to feminism”.
There is plenty in the film to indicate that Octopussy’s organisation is lesbian-centric, starting with its name. As Berns notes: “The film suggests these women are lesbians via the root word “pussy”. This is arguably complicated by Octopussy’s revelation that her nickname was given to her by her father. Some sources allege that Octopussy’s birth name is Octavia Charlotte Smythe but this never appears in the film. Instead, she uses Octopussy throughout.
What kind of parent would give their child a name loaded with such sexual connotations? The character does not seem to bear her father any ill-will however. And it’s entirely feasible that she took an innocent-sounding pet name and decided to ‘own’ it, in the same way that some queer people adopt a more risque-sounding persona, especially queer people who move into the public gaze. The famous drag performer Divine, muse of filmmaker John Waters, whose real name was the rather more prosaic Harris Glenn Milstead, once declared “You always change your name when you’re in the show business”. Octopussy is not just in the jewellery smuggling business; she tells Bond she has diversified into “shipping, hotels, carnivals and circuses”. While we only see the last of these in the film, her Octopussy branding appearing on the sides of circus tents and circus train carriages, we get a clear idea that she is proud of her name and all it stands for: the link with her father; the business she has built from the ground; her sexual life and, possibly, her sexual orientation - and that of everyone branded with an Octopussy tattoo, such as Magda.
Both Magda and Octopussy, who Berns finds in many ways interchangeable (more doubling), sleep with Bond “in order to demonstrate their conversion back to heterosexuality”. Berns draws the comparison with the similarly problematic way that the more obviously queer-coded Pussy Galore is ‘converted’ in Goldfinger. The comparisons don’t stop there though. Pussy Galore famously tells Goldfinger that she intends to buy a private island, hang up a "no trespassing" and “go back to nature”, which presumably means she will walk around naked whenever she feels like it. Whereas Galore gives up on her dream by saving the day, Octopussy has already achieved it before the action of the film commences. She has a similarly low tolerance of trespassers and does indeed walk around naked whenever she feels like it. The difference is she does not mind being seen naked by other women.
Octopussy’s lesbian utopia is of course a straight man’s fantasy, rather than something explicitly feminist, acknowledged by the film itself when Q tells Vijay that Bond venturing onto an island “populated exclusively by women” means they won’t see him until the next day. Moreover, we are told that Octopussy’s island palace is “floating”. In many cultures, ‘floating’ carries connotations of female sexuality seen through men’s eyes; in Jonathan Swift’s famous 18th Century satire Gulliver’s Travels for instance, the floating island Laputa is populated by women who are sexually adventurous even though the men are not. And for centuries, a metaphorical ‘floating world’ culture of pleasure-seeking permeated the red-light districts of what we now refer to as Tokyo, frequented by men seeking sex.
It’s quite possible to see Bond and Q floating in by hot-air balloon in the film’s finale as two men on a sexual adventure. Yes, it’s Kamal’s Palace they’re infiltrating but, by this point, Octopussy’s crew have almost taken the place over. The girls’ fussing over Q (“We haven’t time for that. Later perhaps.”) is played for laughs in the style of a Carry On film. I doubt we’re intended to take this as as a bunch of sexually-frustrated women finally getting to grips with a ‘real man’. It hardly has the same energy of Timothy Dalton dropping-in at the start of The Living Daylights.
The word lesbian itself comes from the name of an island: the Greek island of Lesbos, whose most famous resident was the poet Sappho. More than two thousand years ago, Sappho wrote verse about her love for other women and was revered in her time, as well as in the present day. It’s possible to see Octopussy as a spiritual descendant of Sappho.
Perhaps it’s fitting that Fleming, not exactly a fan of lesbians, frequently associates octopuses and other cephalopods with villainy: in Casino Royale he describes Le Chiffre as watching Bond like “an octopus under a rock”; in Dr. No Bond must face off against a giant squid; in Thunderball, Bond has to suppress his revulsion when he encounters a hundred octopuses (“disgusting nightmare”) while searching for the sunken bomber; later in the same novel, villain Largo tries to attack Bond by sticking an octopus to his mask; and in the Octopussy short story itself, it’s an Octopus that finally does for the suicidal Major Dexter Smythe, a detail omitted from the film’s screenplay. Throughout the films, of course, octopuses are the symbol of SPECTRE and in the Bond video game From Russia With Love, the organisation is actually renamed (due to rights conflicts) Octopus.
Communism was frequently depicted as an octopus in propaganda well into the 20th Century, some of which Fleming might have been familiar with. Or perhaps Fleming, as experienced a diver as he was, was horrified by what he didn’t understand. In the words of Dr Daana Staaf, an expert in cephalopod biology, squid sex is “weird”, especially when it comes to female squid. Or more specifically: “The female squid’s roles in copulation and fertilization remain opaque. It’s time to give squid ladies some respect!” I never really know where the research for these queer re-views is going to take me when I begin them. Suffice to say, for this one, I have learned more about squid sex than I am probably comfortable with. And I’m pretty broad-minded. And yes, I know a squid is not quite the same thing as an octopus but I’ve saved you from that. Let’s just say that, like some species of spider, male octopuses have a hard time not being eaten after copulation. The female is definitely deadlier than the male.
In an influential paper 1956 paper, a psychoanalyst claimed that an octopus should be seen, unconsciously, as a vaginal object with male (penetrating, overpowering) characteristics attached - its tentacles being clear phallic symbols. Intriguingly, the only time the film of Octopussy uses octopuses as a threat is when Kamal’s hired thugs break into Octopussy’s palace and one ends up with her signature blue and yellow pet sucking on his face. It’s a shot reminiscent of Alien, perhaps an intentional call back to the male-rape sexual horror of that film, released only four years before. Is the octopus on the man’s face supposed to tap into straight male fears of women (or gay men) overpowering them? The sound effect added certainly seems to suggest there’s more going on than merely meets the eyes. Let this be a warning to any straight men trespassing in a female, queer space.
Bond trespasses by disguising himself as a crocodile. According to some experts, the crocodile was the ultimate symbol - for Western colonialists - of ‘otherness’, in part because of its sexuality, which Victorians perceived to be deviant (clearly, they hadn’t got around to looking into squid or octopuses in any detail!). I would argue that Bond’s crocodile submarine in Octopussy is an extension of this. For the audience, a crocodile is initially discomfiting. But it’s quickly established that Bond is inside and it’s nothing to worry about. What about the occupants of Octopussy island though? Would they view this phallic object as a threat to their homonormative existence? When Octopussy and her girls watch Bond apparently being consumed by the crocodile, it might be their worst fears being realised.
Octopussy tells Bond that she has no country and seems proud of that fact. Perhaps owing to the circumstances of her father’s death, she has cut herself off from patriarchal (and by extension, heteronormative) authority. But her island is her country, over which she has sovereignty - and she will defend it, violently, when necessary.
An island, especially a floating one, would ordinarily qualify as a liminal space - a transitional space with many comings and goings. This film has more than its fair share of liminal spaces: at the time of filming, ownership of the Falklands Islands was being contested between UK and Argentina (depicted, albeit unnamed in the pre-titles sequence); the legacy of the British Empire overhangs the India sequences and there are several border crossings between East and West Germany. But Octopussy’s island does not feel liminal - it feels more permanent. Even though the final scene occurs on a boat (things don’t get more liminal than that) we are clearly in Octopussy’s domain: a safe space for her, where she feels at home
Camp (as Dr. Christmas Jones)
Artist Adam (aka @lowbellstudio) says that the lyrics to All Time High “play to the idea of romantic/sexual discovery very deliberately. But considering the queer angle I like the positivity it paints that discovery with (“my heart was telling me lies, for you they're true”) while still acknowledging that maybe there's a struggle for acceptance (‘we'll take on the world and wait’).”
The opening titles feature a particularly aesthetically-pleasing segment which features the colouring of the bisexual pride flag (created in 1998). It’s the part where Maurice Binder’s name pops up.
The part of the Tuk-Tuk chase where the crowd watch the action as if watching a tennis match (complete with ball-thwacking sound effects) is a Camp treat. And that’s even before the camel does a double take!
This film’s Hot Bond Boys With Bit Parts include a very hot cop and an unfortunate Russian soldier who Bond shoots in the face.
Inexplicably, “Das ist mein auto!” does not get the same love as “My car! My car!” from A View To A Kill.
Kamal Khan’s logo features a tiger holding (with no opposable thumbs?!) a scimitar. Amazing. As soon as I noticed this I, of course, HAD to have it on a t-shirt.
For lovers of classic film noir, there’s a Double Indemnity homage when Kamal and Gobinda cannot start their car. In the 1944 Billy Wilder film it’s a man and a woman trying to escape from dumping a dead body - the woman’s husband - who start to panic when the engine won’t turn over. Kamal and Gobinda are in a similar position, leaving the scene of the crime, having just ‘done the dirty’ by leaving an atomic bomb to go off. Maybe there is something between those two after all?
