Bonding With the Female Gaze

So, I've had the flu the last week or so, and have therefore spent a number of afternoons and evenings splayed out on the ol' couch. Rather than watch reruns of The Hills or What Not To Wear, I've been watching Casino Royale. Over and over and over.

The process goes something like this: I turn on the movie, watch for about 20 minutes, fall asleep for a few hours, wake up, restart the movie around the point where I fell asleep, watch for about 20 minutes, fall asleep. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The effect of this lucid dreaming, repetitious, Bond-infused sleep is that I've had some pretty deep thoughts about this movie. Here it is people, my epiphany: Casino Royale (and especially Martin Cambell's direction) recasts the male gaze. The respective gazes of the camera, the audience, and the characters in the film are all firmly placed on the body of James Bond throughout the film.

Now, I'm not the first to point out that Daniel Craig is man candy. This is well documented.

But what Casino Royale does (IMHO) that is such a break from other Bond films, and other American films for that matter, is replace the sexualized "Bond Girl" with a sexualized Bond himself. At every turn in the film, we as viewers are asked to consider Bond's body; from the gruesome torture scene which involves is manly bits to the attention the script and camera pay to the superior tailoring of his suits, the film demands that we consider Bond's physical presence.

Craig's body also persistently upstages the body of Bond Girl Eva Green. In the scene where Bond finds Vesper crying in her ball gown in the shower, his shirt is the article of clothing that becomes translucent as it's soaked by the water, revealing his skin beneath. In the "love scenes" (a troubling euphemism if ever there was one), his body is not only more plainly visible than hers, but it is also clearly featured by the cameras and lighting as the sexualized presence in the scene.

And, of course, we are all familiar with the image of a dripping-wet Craig emerging from the ocean in his teeny blue bathing suit. For many of us, it recalls Ursula Andress' famous "Dr. No Bikini" and later Halle Berry's homage to Andress in the 2002 Bond film Die Another Day. The Bond Girl in the bikini has become a cultural signpost, telling us who to desire and for which attributes. Which is why I am so intent on giving the filmmakers responsible for Casino Royale their due.

It's no accident that in a film that has worked so deliberately to focus on the physical, sexual presence of its principal character would mimic the iconic image of the Bond bathing suit scene. This film is not only actively shifting its gaze, but telling us as viewers to shift ours as well. As the origin story of the character of James Bond, Casino Royale reminds us throughout that Bond is not the polished, suave super-spy we've come to know embodied in the slimmer, more refined incarnations of Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan. This is the gauche, graceless, all-thumbs Bond. This is Daniel Craig. And so in order to convince us that Bond is green and untested, his body has been pushed to the forefront of this film: hypersexualized, animalized, and virile.