If your real life feels like a story that’s already written, what do you do when you don’t like what you’re reading? Do you take control or surrender? Brosnan’s fairytale adventure arrived at an interesting time in my life...

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

‘Inspired by Tomorrow Never Dies’ by Herring & Haggis

“The name’s Bond, Flaming Bond?”

“Real Men, you see, idolize James Bond. Their ultimate fantasy is to be sitting in Monte Carlo with Ursula Andress and a million dollars in chips. They long to stare Goldfinger in the eye and say ‘Banco!’ or ‘Pass me the shoe’ - despite having no idea what these phrases mean. The important thing is that they understand no James Bond movie would be complete without them.”

- Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche (1982) by Bruce Feirstein, screenwriter of Tomorrow Never Dies

James Bond has long been held up as an idol for men to aspire to and many have put the idea that ‘all men want to be him and women want to be with him’ into more or less pithy statements.

Perhaps the most widely cited variant is the one that appeared in The Sunday Times in 1963: 'James Bond is what every man would like to be, and what every woman would like between her sheets.’

It’s a declaration that always irked me, right from when I read it for the first time as a kid on the back of my dad’s Pan paperback edition of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. There is the presumption here that ‘every woman’ is heterosexual and, by implication, ‘every man’ is too. Fleming himself did not beat around the bush, declaring that his books were written with “warm-blooded heterosexuals” in mind as his ideal readers.

So where does that leave the rest of us wanting to escape into the fantasy, fairytale world of Bond when the real world gets unbearable?

Pretty much where the heterosexuals are, I would argue. James Bond is, to use Bruce Feirstein’s phrase, the “ultimate fantasy”, something that none of us can ever become, much as we might want to. Not being a heterosexual is only one of many potential barriers, the very long list of which also includes: not knowing the different vintages of Champagne by taste alone; not being an expert in perfume; not knowing how to tie a bow tie; lacking the skill to drive like a maniac without endangering civilian lives; not being able to smoke seventy cigarettes a day or drink half a bottle of gin before engaging in hand-to-hand combat, etc, etc.

You may think some of these things are more important for the character than others. I suspect that many people would place in the ‘less than essential’ pile those attributes that they’re not personally very good at. I’m no different: I consider being able to hold one’s drink far more of a Bondian quality than being able to convincingly hold a woman in a romantic clinch. Perhaps. Okay, I’m just lying to myself. But we all do it - that is Feirstein’s point: Bond is not a Real Man. The entire enterprise of trying to be a Real Man (however you define it) is doomed to failure.

Feirstein published his famous book, Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, in 1982, the year I was born. Across a collection of short, satirical pieces, he lampooned the ridiculous efforts men go to in order to be seen as Real Men. As a riposte, the Bond filmmakers wryly had Bond make a quiche in A View To A Kill, three years later. Fast forward a decade, and Feirstein was making important contributions to the final drafts of GoldenEye, including a lot of Bond’s dialogue. He even reuses a gag from his book. When Bond meets Jack Wade for the first time and employs a recognition code to establish his identity (see my re-view of From Russia With Love for a analysis of their queer significance). Still suspicious, Bond asks to see the tattoo on Wade’s bottom which includes the name of his third wife: Muffy, a name Feirstein used as a punchline thirteen years before.

Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche was a bestseller upon release and I imagine there were some readers who took longer than they probably should have to realise that Feirstein’s had his tongue firmly in his cheek. The same kind of people, maybe, who might read Chuck Palahnuik’s Fight Club (or watch David Fincher’s film adaptation) and think it presents a model for reclaiming one’s masculinity (which is very worrying!).

More than many other Bond films, Tomorrow Never Dies presents us with plenty of opportunities to step back to see him as a fantasy figure - an actor in his own story. This provides audiences, not just straight men, with the space they require to project themselves on to Bond. This starts from the very beginning.

It’s not the first time the pre-credits sequence has teased the ‘big reveal’ of Bond but it is the first time we see the action from the point of view of on screen audience: M and Colin Salmon’s Robinson, who are watching Bond blow up a terrorist arms bazaar halfway around the world on a live stream. For most of the pre-credits we are watching them watch Bond. Even if we are not consciously aware of it, the effect is to keep up at a distance and make us evaluate what is happening - as viewers. Robinson even provides a running expositional commentary, as if we are watching a sporting event or a DVD commentary. We delight in watching Bond blow up a whole mountainside of terrorists while sitting back comfortably in our chairs, like everyone in the MI6 situation room, at a safe distance. By giving the characters codenames from a game of chess, it invites us to see them as archetypes. ‘Black King’ Admiral Roebuck is portrayed as the archetypal Real Man of the kind lampooned in Feirstein’s book, a bluff non-nonsense military figure. Although we know that M is not afraid to send men off to die, here she is the voice of moderation, perhaps even a female dove to Roebuck’s hawk - but only because she has complete faith in 007. Although she isn’t given a codename we presume she would be the ‘Queen’ - but on whose side? Black or white? Presumably white because of Bond’s ‘White Knight’ status. Although not in shining armour, he arrives just in the nick of time, like a heroic archetype from a fairytale.

In 1928, Vladimir Propp published a highly influential analysis of Russian folktales and identified eight common character types - archetypal figures that appear in most narratives: the hero, the helper, the villain, the false hero, the donor, the dispatcher, the princess and the princess’s father. His theory can be applied to almost any story, not just Russian folktales or fairytales. Bond movies fit the bill perfectly.

The outcome of Bond’s pre-titles mission is never in doubt, except briefly when the camera feed is interrupted by the explosion from the cruise missile. Staying with M/Robinson’s point of view, we feel their anxiety, until we cut back to Bond’s plane emerging, improbably, from the fireball. Significantly, it’s this portion, which really takes us on a flight of fantasy with Bond ejecting his co-pilot into the cockpit of another plane, which is solely from Bond’s point of view. We get several such moments where we indulge in the sheer joy of living Bond’s outrageous fantasy life (particularly in the car chase where Bond’s joy is contagious).

But for significant sections of Tomorrow Never Dies, we are not Bond: there are more than the usual number of scenes where Bond himself is absent but people - allies, villains and girls (see below) - are talking about him. In Feirstein’s first draft, this starts right from the get-go in the MI6 situation room:

Although the script of Tomorrow Never Dies was, famously, being re-written on set by Feirstein, the overall structure and many of his characters and situations from the first draft make their way onto the screen. Crucially, so does the subtly ironic, performative tone.

In gender studies and queer theory, academics often speak about people ‘performing’ roles. There is something very performative about Brosnan’s Bond, particularly in Tomorrow Never Dies. Some claim he’s an amalgamation of Connery and Moore, without a strong identity of his own. This frustrates some fans - but I find it liberating. It makes me feel I can be James Bond even though I am, in many ways, very different from him. It’s all a performance and he’s putting it on as much as I am.

I have no doubt that my feeling partly stems at least in part from my having been very conscious of the making of the Brosnan films. I was thirteen when GoldenEye was released and I lapped up all the behind the scenes documentaries, making of books, magazine articles, etc. Whereas when I first saw the films Connery, Lazenby, Moore and Dalton they were already in the can; complete films. I had no knowledge of the artifice required to make the finished product.

According to Feirstein’s best-selling tongue-in-cheek book, the ultimate fantasy of the Real Man is to have an attractive girl by his side as he trades barbs with the villain across a casino table. Real Bond Fans will read Feirstein’s description and either smile at his intentional conflation of different Bond films (Ursula Andress and Goldfinger!) or not see the funny side (perhaps unintentionally channelling Alan Partridge: “Stop getting Bond wrong!”). I would hope most would fall into the former camp.

Are there any people who watch Bond films completely unironically? I doubt it, but I know some people take it far more seriously than me and lament the ‘campy’ aspects of particular films.

That’s not to say that Tomorrow Never Dies isn’t sincere in certain scenes, particularly those between Bond and Paris (see Girls, below). Everyone has a different camp/sincere threshold but for me, Tomorrow Never Dies strikes the perfect balance.

Feirstein’s portrayal of the Bond character occupies a liminal space: it’s respectful of traditions but not afraid to play with them.

He signals this from Bond’s first appearance, berating a thug for his “filthy habit” despite recently being a smoker himself. Bond last had a cigratte in Licence To Kill and it was not a foregone conclusion that Bond had given up. An early version of the scene in Bond’s Hamburg hotel room had him lighting up to relax after escaping from Carver’s thugs. Brosnan channels the wry hypocrisy of someone who doesn’t always practise what they preach into his first line of dialogue.

There is no casino scene in this film, although the same could be said of many Bond movies. The absence is always filled with a barbed exchange between Bond and the villain, their barely disguised mutual loathing cloaked with civility. Tomorrow Never Dies’ verbal swordplay between Bond and Carver at the latter’s Hamburg launch party is one of the finest examples, with Bond provoking Carver using innuendo-laden statements (“I’d be lost at sea… adrift.”)

Another gentle subversion is the girl being not on Bond’s arm but the villain’s, although this is something of a Bond tradition in itself (Thunderball, Live and Let Die, Licence To Kill, etc). And before we met Paris we know she was once involved with Bond and, soon after meeting her, we know she will decide to go to bed with him again very shortly. Note that, although coerced by her husband, it is ultimately Paris’s decision to go back to Bond and Bond tries to turn her away. Are these the actions of a ‘Real Man’?

Tomorrow Never Dies gives us a 007 who is less of a ‘sexist, misogynist dinosaur’ than the version we saw in GoldenEye. For anyone who isn’t content with signing up to all of the damaging male stereotypes that make up the Real Man archetype, Tomorrow Never Dies’ Bond presents a figure it might be worth our time idolising: someone who we might actually want to be.

The Bond of Tomorrow Never Dies is a fantasy, but he’s also partly grounded in reality. He’s a role model for anyone who opposes the narrative that others are trying to write for them. While he begrudgingly goes along with M’s plan to dig up the dirt on Carver by rekindling the past passion with Carver’s wife, he resists all of Carver’s efforts to control him. Even when posing as a banker at the media mogul’s party he rankles at the idea of being ‘collected’ like the others Carver refers to. Carver tries to stage Bond’s death as a suicide, a narrative he rejects by shooting his would-be-murderer through the temple at point blank range. Later, Carver will try to literally write Bond’s obituary live, while he’s in the room. Bond breaks out of the room and shows how little he cares for Carver’s attempts to control him by tearing in half the giant poster of his face: the ultimate insult to a narcissistic egomaniac intent on getting his face plastered on every screen in the world. It’s a brilliantly totemic moment for this iteration of Bond, telling us a lot about his values: what he stands for and what he will not tolerate. It’s also a rallying call for any queer person who is seeking to reject the repressive, heteronormative narrative society forces upon us.

And although, like in many fairy stories, Bond ends up ‘happy ever after’, let’s not forget that such tales were originally formulated as warnings. The moral of Tomorrow Never Dies is: be yourself, not the ‘Real Man’, or anything else others tell you to be.

Friends of 00-Dorothy: 007’s Allies

“Family matters, but sometimes chosen family matters more.” Blair and Puckall (2015)

There’s something about Bond that is incompatible with the traditional idea of family. Like many queer people, he has to go out and find his own.

The sad reality for many LGBTQ+ people around the world is that coming out as one’s true self means cutting themselves off from their biological families. Quite how any parent severs ties with their child because of their sexual orientation or gender identity is mind-boggling to me, although I’d be lying if I said I didn’t harbour a small, not insignificant, fear that I would be thrown out by my parents when I came out. This was a part of my reasoning for waiting until I was financially independent: at least I would be able to rent a place to live if things went south. Maybe this was a delaying tactic on my part because I cringed when I typed those last few sentences and, in hindsight, it was utterly ridiculous that I ever thought this. But for many LGBTQ+ people it’s not ridiculous - it’s their reality, even in so-called ‘progressive’ countries like the USA and the UK. In the case of the latter, nearly a quarter of the homeless people living in my (and Bond’s) home nation identify as LGBTQ, with ‘familial rejection’ being cited as a leading cause.

While many queer people are rejected by their families, Bond has no biological family, and any attempt to saddle him with one rarely ends well. His canonical son in the novels lasted the length of one short story. There are some who have a soft spot for the James Bond Jnr. animated series starring his nephew, although I wasn’t the right age to form a nostalgic association. Even giving Bond an adopted brother feels a bad fit. And making said brother his arch enemy Blofeld pushes the whole enterprise close to soap opera (rather than Greek tragedy, which was presumably the aim of the filmmakers).

Bond is an orphan, like many fictional characters before him (much of Charles Dickens’ output) and since (Harry Potter, teen-Bond Alex Rider). Orphaning your character is, according to John Mullan, “fictionally useful” because it means the character will have to find their own way in the world.

Part of finding your way means finding your family - we all have to do it. We don’t get through life by relying on just our blood relations, whatever our circumstances. We build up networks of friends and acquaintances, both personal and professional. Some we trust more than others. Some we love more than others. We all do it, whether we’re queer or not, and James Bond is no exception.

Fleming maintained repeatedly in interviews and in his works that Bond works alone, ignoring the fact that he supplies him with ample sidekicks - in the first novel alone, he has Mathis, Leiter and Vesper. The latter’s betrayal effectively ‘teaches’ Bond that others are not to be trusted, something that is more explicitly explored in the 2006 film adaptation. But if it was supposed to be a lesson, it’s not one Bond learns very well.

I find it life-affirming that Bond finds his family wherever he goes. True, many of the people he’s on first name terms with are bartenders and concierges so you could argue that it’s their job to get to know him. But there always seems more to it than that. To quote a line from the well-known theme tune to a beloved sitcom: Sometimes you wanna go / Where everybody knows your name (even if it does somewhat limit Bond’s efficacy as a SECRET agent).

Undermining Bond’s trust in people, even allies, is the fact that he usually knows more about them than they do about him. He’s read up about them in a dossier handed to him by M. But what turn out to be his closest friendships often come out of the blue, right from the introduction of Felix Leiter in Dr. No. Wai Lin also fits into this mould, although she breaks out of it in most other regards. For a start, the Chinese Secret Service’s best agent is both Bond’s professional ally and Bond girl (providing me with a good excuse for me to write about her twice in this piece!).

Like his relationship with Leiter, Bond’s friendship/allyship with Wai Lin’s begins with outright hostility and rivalry. Bond is completely in the dark: he doesn’t even recognise her as someone in his profession during their first encounter at Carver’s party. Bond doesn’t like being caught on the backfoot and, when he encounters her a second encounter time breaking into Carver’s lab, his annoyance at not having seen through her is palpable. He wryly refers back to her earlier cover as a journalist, asking Wai Lin if she is “Looking for a news story?” while holding a gun to her head.

And yet, Bond rapidly forms a very close attachment to Wai Lin following their ‘bonding experience’ escaping from Carver’s headquarters. This is something she resists initially, leaving Bond handcuffed to a water pipe (“I work alone”). Bond is the more loving one - and the more immediately trusting one. Although he tries to play it cool (“I thought we might link up?”), it’s readily apparent that he needs her more than she needs him.

Without Wai Lin, Bond would be pretty lonely in the second half of the film. She’s what queer audiences might recognise as his chosen or found family. His BFF. He’s cut off from his usual sources of support, halfway around the world. His alienation is made explicit by his thwarted attempt to take responsibility for warning their governments when he sees the keyboard, Chinese characters staring back at him.

This scene in Wai Lin’s base of operations is pivotal for positioning her as not only ‘the girl’ but also an ally - and more.

Wai Lin herself inhabits the role of at least four of Propp’s eight character types (see discussion above): the hero, the princess (right at the end when she slips into a more traditional damsel role), the helper and the donor (she gives Bond his new gun and watch). She could also be seen as a ‘false hero’ in reverse (instead of appearing to be trustworthy and betraying bond she pursues the opposite trajectory) and even (though this might be a stretch) the ‘princess’s father’: she effectively stands in for the whole Chinese nation, just as Bond stands in for Britain.

This highlights a fundamental difference between Wai Lin and Bond however: she has no wider support network. Bond has a ‘dispatcher’ (M) as well as several helpers (Moneypenny, Robinson) and a donor (Q). Whereas Wai Lin has… Bond?

Despite her earlier assertion to Bond that she works alone, we might presume that Wai Lin has a whole team, or chosen family, of people working with her off screen. It certainly would fit with a Western viewer’s assumption about traditional (heteronormative) Chinese family values and the lack of individualism we associate with conventional Communist ideology, even if Wai Lin herself is, in some ways, unconventional (“I don’t even had a little red book”). But depicting Wai Lin’s own team of allies would have protracted the running time and might have threatened Bond’s pre-eminence as the ‘role’ (something the filmmakers seemed less afraid of doing when showing Jinx’s ‘dispatcher’, Damien Falco, in Die Another Day).

Whether we imagine them to be there or not, not seeing Wai Lin’s allies makes her seem very self-sufficient next to Bond. His chosen family are constantly watching over him - quite literally in the pre-credits sequence where his movements are tracked (see discussion above). This surveillance aspect is pushed to extremes in the Craig era, especially Casino Royale (where he’s essentially microchipped, like an errant family pet) and Spectre (the ‘smart blood’ tracking which he persuades Q to turn off).

In Tomorrow Never Dies, Bond is positioned as the wayward member of the MI6 family. He may be the ‘White Knight’ but he’s also the black sheep, the little brother or nephew who gets away with murder because you can’t be cross at him for too long. But it’s not murder than concerns his MI6 family in this story - it’s his use of his other weapon. Once again, Bond’s penis is called upon to save the day, with M insisting he ‘pump’ the villain’s wife for information.

Judi Dench’s M is frequently seen as a maternal figure, both implicitly and (in the case of Skyfall) explicitly. But here, the feeling is less blood-relation and more found family. The implications of a mother ordering her son to seduce someone are a little discomfiting to say the least. And if M were to be his mother figure, that would make it doubly uncomfortable when the daughter figure - Moneypenny - doubles down on M’s ‘pumping’ remark: “You’ll just have to decide how much pumping is needed James.”

Whereas in GoldenEye, M and Moneypenny were disapproving of his womanising, there’s no hint of censure here. His relationship with Paris has only become “public knowledge” because Moneypenny has gossiped to M about it.

Across her four film tenure, Samantha Bond’s Moneypenny increasingly challenges heteronormativity by steadfastly refusing to consider a relationship with Bond but use him for sex. He is her friend with benefits, not the other way around. She never gives Bond an easy ride: it’s made very clear that he will be made to work for it. And the references to masturbation in the next two films show that she’s more satisified reliving her memories than getting entangled with the emotional trainwreck that is 007. In Tomorrow Never Dies, she signs off her urgent call to Bond with a five-star review presumably borne of first-hand experience: “You always were a cunning linguist James.”

In a moment that could have easily hit the cutting room floor (but I’m eternally grateful that it didn’t) Moneypenny gets off the phone and spins around to see M.

Moneypenny: Don’t ask.

M: Don’t tell.

‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ was official policy in the US military from 1993 until 2011. The full phrase, coined by, a military sociologist was “don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue, and don’t harass.” You could serve in the military if you were queer, just as long as you didn’t tell anyone about it. By invoking what was, in 1997, a very zeitgeisty term, the filmmakers make it clear that Bond’s sexual adventures are widely known about but not official policy. Although M’s and Moneypenny’s ‘pumping’ metaphor is a thinly-veiled euphemism, it’s still a euphemism.

How many families employ euphemisms when talking about their queer children’s real lives, in order to cover them up? He’s not his boyfriend, he’s his ‘friend’. It’s not her girlfriend she lives with, she’s her ‘roommate’. She’s a ‘tomboy’, and so on.

Fortunately, although Bond is positioned as the black sheep of the MI6 family, his family seem to care for him and support him a great deal. This extends to Robinson, who seems genuinely concerned for Bond’s welfare (“Get the hell out of there.”). Robinson is a Bill Tanner replacement, played by the wonderful Colin Salmon. Despite Salmon’s limited screentime (and expositional role), he and Bond share a similar chemistry to the Tanners of the Brosnan and Craig eras: colleagues who also play the occasional round of golf and go for drinks on a Friday after work (or a late morning in the back of M’s limousine!). Is it fraternal or something more?

Crotchety uncle Q (the quintessential ‘donor’ in Propp’s taxonomy) is less tolerant of Bond’s “sordid escapades”, which provokes Bond into needling him further by making the car (a “she”) respond to his “touch”. Q wishes Bond would “grow up” and, by implication, settle down.

Rounding out the found family reunion is CIA buddy Jack Wade. In GoldenEye he was a ‘helper’ but here he’s more of a ‘donor’, providing Bond with the necessary equipment - parachute and oxygen cylinders. But unlike Q, he’s less conservatively-minded, taking the time to quip about the asphyxiating nature of marriage.

Today, marriage is still only legally possible between people of the same sex in fewer than a sixth of the world’s countries. In 1997, it was none. You don’t have to be married to have a family of course - you don’t even have to be ‘in a relationship’ with someone. The research I quoted at the beginning of this section by Blair and Puckall sums up the importance for many of being able to choose one’s family:

Results indicate that individuals in same-sex relationships often perceive less social support for their relationships from parents than friends, that they place more value on relationship approval from friends, or chosen family, and that they are less likely to end a relationship based on parental disapproval, compared to those in mixed-sex relationships.

More than any Bond film up until this point, Tomorrow Never Dies presents a Bond who has found and chosen his family. In the absence of biological support structures, Bond has found people who understand him and tolerate his behaviour, to a lesser or greater degree.

Shady characters: Villains

Elliot Carver does not appear on many people’s Top Ten Best Villains lists. One of those people who refuses to put Carver on his list is my friend John. Throughout our last three years of school (we both finished sixth form in 2000), John seemed determined to threaten our relationship with his repeated insistence that Carver is a really weak villain whose evil scheme makes no sense. Yes, that was the kind of school playground debate we engaged in. We were so cool. In the end, John decided that the best course of action was to change the subject whenever it came up as I would very much dig my heels in and offer a passionate (some of our friends, if you were to ask them, may even say unnecessarily vitriolic) defence. That John went on to train as a journalist when we left school, three years after Tomorrow Never Dies’ release, is a beautiful irony - or maybe his hostility towards Carver was because of his own belief in the purity of the printed word, which Carver sullies at every opportunity. We’re both still very close today, mostly because he stays quiet whenever the topic of villainy in a movie made more than twenty years ago arises in conversation (which it does with surprising frequency, thanks to me). Our respective spouses, John’s wife and my husband, are moderating influences. But every so often, I cannot overcome the urge to launch into a steadfast defence of Elliot Carver as BEST BOND VILLAIN.

So, if you want a flavour of the diatribe I have inflicted on my friend over the years, then read on.

Elliott Carver is a brilliant villain because he’s the opposite of everything Bond is. I’m not the only one who thinks this (see John - I was right!). According to Steven Woodward, in his essay The Arch Archenemies of Bond, “A hero takes shape only in relation to his enemies” and, by this yardstick, this makes Carver a “serious adversary” for Bond. If only this essay had been available to me when I was in school, I would have had even stronger convictions and won the argument hands down.

Carver is not the ‘dark reflection of 007’ character-type (Scaramanga, Trevelyan, etc). He’s 007’s antonym. Bond is adept with words but relatively taciturn. Carver is verbose. His quips and innuendos aside, Bond’s actions often speak louder than his words but Carver’s weapons are (as he observes himself) his words (and “satellites are the new artillery”). Bond is an improviser whereas Carver is a schemer who is constantly irritated by Bond getting in the way of his plans. Bond takes genuine pleasure in women but Carver is only interested in being seen with them. Carver’s wife Paris is a trophy wife and, in his eyes, a trophy that Bond has already ‘won’ and then returned to claim again.

One of my favourite sequences in the whole film is Carver being presented with the evidence of his wife’s betrayal. He already knew she was lying, but this didn’t seem to perturb him more than professionally (“you’re a terrible liar dear”). When Gupta plays Carver the recording of Paris asking if Bond still keeps a gun under his pillow, the betrayal kicks Carver right in his manhood. It’s a brilliantly economical piece of storytelling and character development. Carver becomes fixated on Bond’s gun, as it were, telling Gupta to play the audio clip again. And again.

The gun is both Bond as a man (penis substitute) and Bond as a secret agent (a tool of his trade).

The gun line is a double blow to Carver. His organisation, and by extension, himself, has failed to dispatch a professional threat. The last thing Carver ever wants is to be beaten by the competition - his end game is securing a broadcasting monopoly after all. But the gun is also a personal failure: Carver knows he cannot compete with Bond’s virility in the bedroom.

Carver displays little in the way of sexual attraction towards Paris, underscored - quite literally with David Arnold’s foreboding music - in the scene where he leans in to kiss her.

Whereas cinematic convention dictates that we move in closer when a couple lock lips, here the filmmakers do the opposite: they pull back. His ominpresent giant visage looks on disapprovingly from the far right of the frame. The cut signifies that this is something we should not be taking any pleasure in. It’s utterly unromantic. In fact, it’s an interrogation. The last thing Carver says before leaning in is “Barely?”, following up her comment that she “barely” knows Bond. He’s ‘pumping’ Paris for information. Bond does the same thing in the very next scene but, this time, we are encouraged to condone it (lush music score, close-ups).

This whole sequence of five scenes is unique to Bond. The film crosscuts from between Carver and Bond:

Carver kissing/coercing Paris
Paris arriving in Bond’s hotel room
Carver with Gupta, torturing himself with the “gun” line
Paris leaving Bond’s hotel room as the sun comes up
Carver sitting in alone in the Hamburg studio, presumably until dawn

Viewed by itself, the preceding scene where Paris and Bond reconnect in his hotel room (2) is clearly from Bond’s point of view - we see him looking towards the door as he downs shots of Smirnoff, as is the morning after scene (4) as he watches Paris get dressed. But the Bond/Paris scenes are sandwiched between shots of Carver (3, 5). It’s therefore not too much of a stretch to reframe the Paris/Bond love-making as images from inside Carver’s mind: what he imagines to be happening with his wife in Bond’s hotel room. No wonder he looks so wretched.

One of the things that makes cinema such an endlessly fascinating art form to me is the sequencing of shots and how editing manipulates audiences. In the early decades of cinema, Lev Kuleshov observed that cutting from one image to another caused the audience to fill in the blanks and establish a relationship between the two. The idea might sound basic to us because it is: it’s the basis of modern film editing. But the medium was barely a couple of decades old by this point. The effect is especially pronounced if you cut to a second image and then return to the first, which is what is arguably happening in this sequence:

It’s rare in the Bond series to have time alone with the villain. Such moments are dangerous: they invite us to feel sympathy or empathy, or at least to understand their point of view.

I don’t feel any sympathy for Carver. He’s such a strong villain because his actions are utterly reprehensible. But he’s also a strong villain because I understand his motivation, as irrational as it appears to be at first glance. Looking at it in the cold light of day, Carver’s plan is crazy. In her essay on media ethics as seen through the lens of Tomorrow Never Dies, Lorna Veraldi agrees: Carver starting World War III “for cable rights” means he has definitely “crossed the fine line between genius and insanity”. But, she argues, it’s not that far removed from reality. She sees Carver as “the perfect post Cold War villain” for Bond because, in his “self-absorbed soul” she finds the “exaggerated model of the thoroughly modern media mogul”.

The key phrase here is “self-absorbed”. I have never felt sympathetic towards Carver, even when I was an angry, closeted teenager. But I could definitely see where he was coming from. Like many queer people, I was introspective. Even when I didn’t want to look inside myself, scared of what I might find there, scared of what I might have to, one day, give a name to, where else was there to look?

Soul-searching comes with the queer territory - What’s wrong with me? Why am I different to everyone else? Will I ever be happy? - so excuse us if we come across as a little self-absorbed.

Carver is more than a little self-absorbed. He’s by a long stretch the most narcissistic of the Bond villains, a trait which always carries connotations of queerness (see my discussion in The Living Daylights queer re-view). Carver is pathologically narcissistic. Even though he knows it’s unwise to hold Wai Lin hostage on the foredeck of his stealth ship, he cannot stop himself: “It’s my business Mr Gupta. I like an audience.”

At the launch of his new network he’s surrounded by hundreds of people and giant images of his own face. For Bond (hardly a stranger to narcissism himself) it’s too much.

Bond: Carver must feel at home in a room like this.

Wai Lin: It’s nice to talk to the world.

I have always found Wai Lin’s line a curiosity. Is it merely banter with Bond or does it represent the increasingly outward-facing political stance of the Chinese government, in contrast with Bond’s (and the British government’s) increasingly inward-facing, parochial world view? If anything, this aspect of the film has only become more relevant as time has passed. Carver sees himself as above what he sees as petty nationalistic squabbling. He only disregards national boundaries but exploits the world powers’ territorial sensitivities.

Whether Wai Lin’s line is banter or political commentary, Bond is not impressed with Carver’s relentless self-promotion. When he and Wai Lin are both being taken to Carver’s new headquarters in Ho Chi Minh City, again adorned with a giant poster of his face, Bond derisively suggests Carver has “developed an edifice complex”.

And there he goes and brings psychology into it.

Freud would say Carver is all ‘ego’ (he’s obsessed with how he’s seen by others) and very little ‘id’ (he doesn’t appear to have much in the way of an animalistic, primitive, instinctual side). With a couple of notable exceptions, he manages to keep the lid on his emotions. Bond shutting off the power to his press conference causes him to fire his head of PR on the spot (“get out of my sight”). But such impetuousness is rare. It’s only when Bond has blown a hole in Carver’s stealth boat, seriously threatening his scheme, that he finally starts yelling to “get those fires out” before telling Stamper to “kill those bastards”. Even then, he’s well-mannered, prefacing the order to his henchman with a “Will you please…”.

Keeping a lid on one’s emotions before they eventually erupt is another queer trait - necessitated by keeping a secret from the world because you worry what others will think. Even as Carver’s ship burns and Bond/Wai Lin-orchestrated chaos is going on around him, he stands and watches, the fires reflected in his spectacles, his rage simmering but not boiling over.

He’s sexually restrained too, even in front of his blazingly hot wife. Carver’s coldness is heightened by his white hair and him being framed frequently with blue light, notably in his Hamburg studio and in his other performance space, his stealth boat.

When Bond sleeps with his wife, Carver is jealous of Bond. That much is obvious. But is this jealousy merely that of a husband knowing his wife is having sex with another man? Unlikely. Bond correctly surmises that Paris has been sent to his hotel room by Carver. Carver’s jealousy stems from his inability to take pleasure in the simple things, like being intimate with another person.

Carver’s only real joy is controlling the minds of other people. When he first meets Wai Lin, his first impulse is to employ her, to bring her into his world. Carver even seeks to find a purpose for Bond in his organisation when he thinks he’s deceased. When he taunts Wai Lin by telling her that Bond’s body is sinking to the bottom of the sea he takes great relish in declaring: “He’s my new Anchorman!”

When it comes to manipulating people’s bodies, he’s largely uninterested. He intends to delegate torturing Bond to Stamper, admittedly while singling out not just Bond’s heart but his “genitals” as targets for Stamper’s chakra implements. But again, this is not merely revenge for Bond sleeping with Paris. Sensing this, Bond hits Carver where it really hurts and describes his TV shows as “torture enough”.

This isn’t the first time Bond has professed a dislike of mass media. For example, in You Only Live Twice he complains about being forced to watch TV, although he does this mostly to get the upper hand on Blofeld. It’s of course ironic for Bond to take this stance considering that you don’t get a better example of a global media brand than James Bond himself. If Elliott Carver were real, he could only dream of attaining the international reach of Ian Fleming’s creation and ensuing cinematic icon. But one of the reasons I find Carver such a compelling villain is because of what he represents: oppressive homogeneity.

In his 1951 book White Collar: The American Middle Classes the sociologist C. Wright Mills took aim at the mass media of his age:

Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media and nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.

The reference to ‘commercial jazz’ aside (the phrase ‘pop music’ not having been coined yet) this could have been written in the late 90s, when Tomorrow Never Dies was released. Add ‘social media’ to the list and it could be written today.

While everyone being “equal” might sound utopian, Mills was not being complimentary when he used the phrase “common denominator” to describe the mass media. Mills cited an earlier scholar, Milton Klonsky, who observed that popular media created archetypes to which consumers felt social pressure to conform. He also cited sociologist Edward Ross who stated that rejecting mass culture would be an act of ‘self mutilation’; to cut yourself off from mass media would be to “alienate portions of one’s self”.

Media imagery is powerful, and across this site I have explored at length the power on screen representation - or lack thereof. Heteronormativity, the idea that the only normal and natural relationship is between one cisgendered man and one cisgendered woman, existed well before TV was invented. But the mass media boom of the 20th Century led to a shutting down of possibilities.

Imagine a world where Carver had managed to carry out his evil scheme. After the war between the UK and China, would he stop there? Of course he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t be satisfied until his was the only voice. He’s a dictator. He’s Big Brother. I had recently finished reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four when I saw Tomorrow Never Dies for the first time, a novel which was fuel to my angst-ridden bonfire of a soul. It’s not difficult to imagine a dystopic future with Carver’s face looming from every screen, watching us as we are forced to watch him. Perhaps audiences in 1997 struggled to see where Carver’s plan would lead him. Watching the film now, he’s even more terrifying. Tapping away one-handedly at lightning speed we can see him now as the template for today’s keyboard warrior, seeking to control what other people think. Within the pantheon of Bond villains, he’s a progenitor of Skyfall’s Silva: not much of a physical threat but someone who can get inside your computer - and from thence inside your head.

The real enemy of Tomorrow Never Dies is the possibility that we will all be forced to be the same - or whatever a mad media mogul halfway around the world wants us to be so they can make more money. The history of totalitarian governments has taught us, there is rarely room for people who are different. The same may be said of many multinational businesses, who are only now reaching the tipping point where they can, in some markets, make more profit by being inclusive than exclusive.

A number of books and academic papers about the media have taken Tomorrow Never Dies seriously as an exemplum of unethical media conduct. In the introduction to the 2012 edition of his Encyclopedia of Media and Communication Marcel Danesi spotlighted Tomorrow Never Dies as one of two popular films from the late 1990s that provides “remarkable insight into the state of the contemporary world”. The other film he cites is The Matrix, a more explicit depiction of a dystopian nightmare set ‘after the fall’ of mankind. It’s a film which has been re-evaluated extensively as queer allegory, in part because of the trans identities of the directors.

Tomorrow Never Dies is not a queer allegory but its villain’s plan may carry more of an implied threat for queer viewers. It makes no difference than Carver himself has many of traits that queer people can identify with. Let’s not forget that despite rounding up and murdering thousands of homosexuals, there were plenty of gays in the Nazi high command.

Deliciously camp and physically unimposing he might be, but Carver is a real adversary for Bond. Anyone who disagrees can see me after school. Not that I’ll fight you or anything like that. But I’ll happily talk you through my reasoned argument until you bend to my way of thinking.

There are, of course, occasions where the words are not enough and you need some muscle to get the job done. Fortunately, Stamper has muscles in abundance. And they look especially impressive in a tight t-shirt. Fortunately for many gay male and bisexual viewers, Stamper also has these in abundance.

Stamper puts the hench in henchman.

Although it’s never mentioned in the film, the character’s first name is Richard. So he’s literally Dick Stamper. Is this a case similar to ‘Strawberry Fields’ in Quantum of Solace where the filmmakers could not bring themselves to use such an on-the-nose name, despite it being scripted? Stamper certainly has a fascination with phallic objects, starting with his sea drill, which he uses to penetrate a British warship and spill seamen everywhere. Then he uses a gigantic gun to mop up the remaining seamen.

If it sounds like I’m reading too much into this, I recommend the work of Theo van Leeuwen and Gunther Kress who are semioticians who specialise in reading media images. There’s a reason behind every design decision, even if it’s unconscious on the part of the creators. Advertisers exploit associations of particular shapes. Cylinders, for instance, have been proven to attract men (straight and otherwise) to buying products, such as beer. Men are (as if we needed research to point this out!) obsessed with things shaped like penises.

So next time you watch Tomorrow Never Dies, try not to see the sea drill as an extension of Carver’s/Stamper’s penises. Go on - give it a try! That Carver is killed by his own oversized toy is a delectable irony with a plethora of Freudian possibilities.

Like his boss, Stamper gets his jollies in unconventional ways. He welcomes the opportunity to administer an agonising death on 007 by probing his seven chakra points with pointy implements, including Bond’s genitals. It’s not the first time they’ve faced the chop but, with the exception of 2006’s Casino Royale, it’s the only time a villain seems to be looking forward to a one-on-one with Bond’s boys.

Stamper appears to feel no pain himself and grins with glee when Bond stabs him in the chest. It’s an idea that will be more fully realised with Renard in The World Is Not Enough. The only warmth he exhibits is towards other men, including the sea drill operator who he pats on the shoulder.

But Stamper is all about the daddies: Carver of course (who treats him like a dog some of the time, but you can’t help who you fall in love with) and Doctor Kaufman: “He was like a father to me”. When he’s facing his own death and planning to take Bond with him, he grunts the names of dead men (“For Carver. For Kaufman.”). Stamper has nothing left worth living for, so why not die avenging his daddies.

Lorna Veraldi labels Stamper an “icy, buff blonde”. As I have explored elsewhere, particularly with For Your Eyes Only, blondeness often equates to queer in the world of 007. Stamper’s hair is bleached blonde, something stereotypically associated with gay men. In 2019, Out magazine declared that ‘The heteros have discovered platinum blonde’, suggesting that this was now within the domain of the metrosexual (to use the term coined by gay male academic Mark Simpson in 1994).

One of Stamper’s eyes is blue and one is brown. It is a subtle way of furthering ‘othering’ the character. The technical name for this naturally occurring phenomenon is ‘heterochromia’. It’s the only hetero thing about Stamper.

Tellingly, when Carver goads Bond by announcing to his whole stealth ship that Bond “can’t resist any woman in my possession” there’s a cut away to a reaction shot of Stamper, who is shown to be sneering at Bond’s unremarkable weakness for women.

As Stamper’s mentor, Doctor Kaufman has taught the muscled hunk everything he knows. Stamper is described as a ‘protege’ of Kaufman. The word has historically carried sexual connotations, often suggesting a traditionally female role in relation to the male mentor. Kaufman himself tells Bond that his hobbies include torturing people. Presumably he carries a travel-sized version of the chakra implements with him at all times. He certainly knows more about sadism than he does mobile phones.

Far more tech savvy is Henry Gupta who appears to have conventional sexual tastes judging by the pornography Bond finds in his safe. Although attitudes towards onanism are generally more accepting than they have been historically (particularly for men), sex with oneself isn’t strictly heteronormative as there’s no relationship involved with someone of the opposite sex.

You go gurls!

Writing at the time of Tomorrow Never Dies’ release, journalist Sarah Gristwood questioned whether ”Bond is losing his virility while the girls are gaining power?”

Bond, of course, loses nothing by a woman being as good as him in a fight, even when the woman is played by Michelle Yeoh. There’s a superb moment when Wai Lin has taken down a whole room full of enemy agents, leaving just the one for Bond to finish off. “I could have taken care of him,” she says, and we believe her. The enemy agents are played by Jackie Chan’s stunt team. It was rumoured that no other stunt team would perform with her, knowing what she was capable of.

Bond himself did not feel threatened, with Pierce Brosnan regularly referring to Wai Lin as “the female James Bond” in interviews. Wai Lin has been an inspiration to so many, including Dr 007 herself, Lisa Funnell. Funnell notes that while Wai Lin does have her agency stripped back in the final scenes, audiences are still left with the impression that she might be a “superior secret agent” to Bond. Funnell also notes that she is absolved of the responsibility of satisfying the straight male gaze because Paris (see below) gets that out of the way in the first half of the film. Even when she and Bond are showering in the street, it’s Bond (showing off Brosnan’s almost-Connery-impressive hairy chest) that is the main, centrally-framed subject of the camera’s gaze.

Nevertheless, you can’t get away from the fact that Michelle Yeoh would not have been cast had she not only been very capable but also a very attractive woman. She won the Miss Malaysia beauty pageant at the age of 20 after all. Jing Yang persuasively argues that the film occupies a middle ground in its depiction of a Chinese woman being romanced by a white westerner. On the one hand, it’s regressive with “the rather clichéd ending of Bond's romantic conquest of Lin in Tomorrow” which “maintains the order of the familiar, comfortable world for Western audiences”. But it’s also progressive because of its “empowerment of the Chinese woman” and therefore creates a space where “contemporary audiences can insert themselves”.

How about queer audiences? Can they insert themselves into the character? Non-binary Bond fan Zina Hutton “swoons” over Wai Lin while agreeing with Brosnan that Wai Lin is at least Bond’s “equal” and concludes that she may even be a “better agent than he is.”

Part of the pleasure of Tomorrow Never Dies, for those with a less fragile conception of masculinity at least, is Wai Lin constantly outmatching and outwitting Bond. Bond is comically out of his depth in the scene in her base of operations.

It’s a similar dynamic to that of Anya and Bond in The Spy Who Loved Me, but Wai Lin is even more focused on the mission than her Russian counterpart. Even Bond awakens to the idea that a woman can be better than him, telling Stamper at the climax to “Never argue with a woman; they’re always right.”

The idea of having Bond briefly reunite with an old flame was in the earliest drafts of the Tomorrow Never Dies screenplay. However, although Paris was her name from the very beginning, a lot changed besides, including how Bond feels running into her again. In the early drafts, she’s the one who is slapped by Bond, a retrograde move in 1997. She’s much more of a victim with little agency compared with the version who appears on screen. True, she’s this film’s sacrificial victim and easily meets the criteria for the ‘Bury the Bond girls’ trope. But she’s a very memorable presence considering her limited screen time.

The casting of Teri Hatcher meant the character came with a lot of baggage. Hatcher was most famous for playing another female character who registers strongly, despite the threat of being constantly upstaged by the male lead. In Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, her character not only gets to appear in the title first but also steals most scenes. Even though Dean Cain was quite easy on the eye and doubtless responsible for many gay male and bisexual awakenings, his Superman could never compete with Hatcher’s Lois. Following Tomorrow Never Dies, her enduring gay appeal can be placed at the door of Desperate Housewives.

The scene where she seduces Bond in his hotel room was clearly shot with a straight male gaze, although others are, of course, entitled to enjoy it. It’s one of the steamiest scenes in any of the Bond films - even a gay man like me recognises that.

I have a vivid memory of being with my family at the football club my dad was a member of and seeing this clip played on a TV film programme just prior to the film’s release in cinemas. Although my dad had singularly failed to inculcate a love of football in me, he had more success with Bond. In the pre-internet age, I ate up any Bond coverage on TV wherever I could find it. I wasn’t the only one watching the clip in the clubhouse. Half of the football club turned to the small corner TV to watch Pierce Brosnan drop Teri Hatcher’s dress to the floor, revealing just lingerie. There were a few of the sort of comments you might expect from a room of football playing men seeing a scantily clad woman appear on TV, but nothing untoward. Except for one man that was. He was more vocal than the others. His approving words would probably not be appropriate in the age of #MeToo. Everyone else went quiet. It was a painful silence, as if something had been left unspoken. On the way home, my mom and dad discussed what he’d said. My dad said, without any malice, that everyone thought he could be gay and that was why he sometimes said things like that, as if he was try to prove something. This stayed with me and I think of it everytime I watch this scene.

Hatcher claims to have taken the role of Paris Carver to fulfil her husband’s Real Man fantasy of sleeping with a Bond girl. One presumes he was not disappointed with the end result.

Camp (as Dr. Christmas Jones)

Not choosing a title song co-written by a gay man (David McAlmont) and performed by an out and proud lesbian (k.d. lang) is one of the biggest missed opportunities in Bond history.

Don’t get me wrong, the Sheryl Crow song does work for me - on both aesthetic and queer levels. Although the lyrics are presumably from Paris’s point of view, they speak for anyone who has pined for forbidden love, the revelation of which might backfire spectacularly (“It’s so deadly my dear / the power of having you near” is a highlight for me).

But Surrender, used over the closing credits, is a queer masterpiece that encapsulates, and even elevates, the themes of the film, both in a dramatic and musical sense. I didn’t know performer k.d. lang was gay when I first heard the song, but the lyrics spoke to me right from the first listen on the soundtrack CD.

Like many Bond songs, it’s a sexualised power fantasy, most likely from a villain’s point of view:

I’ll tease and tantalize with every line

Till you are mine

The villain in this case in Carver. If we take this as Carver addressing Bond, it opens up lots of possibilities. Speaking of which...

Whatever you’re after

Trust me, I’ll deliver

You’ll relish the world that I create

The song speaks of a world that can be controlled and shaped using the power of words. The song is very strong even on the page, so does it matter than k.d. lang is queer? It matters to Hanna Hanra. Interviewing lang in 2019, she describes her as a “sapphic north star” in the 1990s, pointing the way for people like Hanra herself who didn’t see heterosexuality on their horizon. Just imagine the impact of having lang, rather than Crow, featured in the promotional music video for Tomorrow Never Dies.

When Carver welcomes Bond and Wai Lin to Ho Chi Minh City (“Welcome to Saigon), this is a fourth wall breaking moment: Jonathan Pryce referencing his long-running role in the stage musical Miss Saigon. A more obvious example, that existed as early as Feirstein’s first draft, is Carver’s death being scripted by M along the lines of the real life Robert Maxwell.

There are some deliriously enjoyable camp moments which almost take the film into parody territory: the plane’s ejector seat hitting the enemy fuselage in exactly the right place; the couple whose coitus is interrupted by Bond and Wai Lin crashing through their roof on a motorbike; and my personal favourite: the rocket launching man who flamboyantly cartwheels out of the way when Bond’s BMW is coming towards him.

Tomorrow Never Dies has a significantly above average number of Hot Bond Boys With Bit Parts, right from the get go with the otter-ish enemy pilots in the pre-credits through to several of Carver’s goons on the stealth ship. But for the greatest concentration of male beauty you need go no further than the HMS Devonshire sequence. It’s so crammed with eye candy that, on my first viewing, I fleetingly considered joining the Royal Navy. Don’t ask, don’t tell indeed.

Several of the ill-fated crew went on to big things, including a frequent object of my gay male gaze: Gerard Butler. I’ll confess that, more than once, I have dreamed of his character (credited as ‘Leading Seaman’) surviving the sinking of the Devonshire and the shooting of the survivors and going to live on a deserted island in the South China Sea, where he’s been waiting for me ever since. I’m coming to get you Leading Seaman!

Queer verdict: 004 (out of a possible 007)

One of the fastest films of the franchise, Tomorrow Never Dies zips from one set piece to another, so it’s easy to miss some very queer subtext. James Bond may be an archetypal fairytale hero, but he rejects attempts to make him conform. Like with one of Carver’s headlines, it pays to read between the lines.

Queer re-view: Tomorrow Never Dies