Pleasure and the Bond Films

Abstract

It is frequently suggested in critical accounts of the products of high culture that they are inherently more fascinating not only aesthetically but in their complexity, whereas the products of mass or popular culture are conceived of as essentially simple appealing as it were to a lowest common denominator in human taste. To a large extent, the views of the producers of the Bond films appear to confirm this. The Bond films are easily referred to as ‘formula’ pictures. This notion of popular fiction, however, poses certain problems in that it ignores the extent to which texts can only be read and understood in terms of their position in different regimes of inter-textuality. This was an issue brought home to us with considerable force when we first began to discuss the Bond novels and films in detail and discovered with some surprise that our own responses, activated as they were by our positions in differently gendered reading formations, could differ very greatly in relation to the same incidents in the same texts. This suggests that popular fiction can, indeed, be expected to activate or sometimes establish different reading formations and that, in this sense, the texts of popular fiction are usually quite complex.

‘We don’t want to have Bond to dinner or to go golfing with Bond or talk to Bond. We want to be Bond.’—Kingsley Amis¹

‘Bond, like myself, is a male chauvinist pig. All my life I’ve been trying to get women out of brassieres and pants.’—Roger Moore²

‘Why do the millions keep flocking to 007’s exploits? No offense to Roger Moore, it’s not the gadgets, it’s the girls.’—Maude Adams³