James Bond 007 and the Name of the Order
29
who had come of age and would be ‘coming out’ for the first
time. There would be fights over these and blood would be
shed, but in the end the officer’s quarters would settle down
for another month of communal life, each officer with his
woman to look after his needs. (197)
Or as in Goldfi nger where the sexual needs of the help as well as the means to
relieve them are equally kept in mind by Goldfinger himself: “They are well
paid and well fed and housed. When they want women, street women are
brought down from London, well remunerated for their services and sent back”
(171-2).
Honeychile’s project of becoming a call girl in Dr. No represents a more
individualized type of prostitution: ‘“ I thought I’d be a call girl.’ She said it as
she might have said ‘nurse’ or ‘secretary’” (Dr. No, 157), and so does the dialog
between Bond and the barmaid of the Kingston brothel in The Man With the
Golden Gun, which discusses openly the physical merits of the available girls:
‘There’s Sarah up there now. Care to meet up with her?’
‘Not today, thanks. It’s too hot. But you only have one at a
time?’
‘There’s Lindy, but she’s engaged. She’s a big girl. If you like
them big, she’ll be free in half an hour’. (60)
In the films, sex is represented in a much lighter manner, and the first
visualization of the archetypical Bond girl, namely Ursula Andress as Honey
Rider walking out of the sea in Dr. No, set the tone for most future
representations. Sexuality and sexual tensions have been stereotypified for mass
consumption, and it is no surprise that this very scene was recycled in the last of
the Brosnan installments, when Bond watches Jinx, played by Halle Berry,
emerge from the water, just as Honey Rider did in Dr. No. Both Honey Rider
and Jinx succumb to 007’s charm but neither of them ever considers a possible
career in prostitution.
In The Man With the Golden Gun film adaptation, the Jamaican brothel has
become a Lebanese cabaret and the prostitute is a belly dancer from France who
has indeed relatively loose morals but is still not a working girl of the type
evoked in the novel. Later in the film, the business of sex is clearly indicated,
although never shown, by the presence of scantily dressed hostesses, with whom
James Bond has no direct contact. It is therefore a sanitized vision of sex which
prevails in the films, and sexual tension is usually concentrated around the main
characters: protagonist and antagonist. Nevertheless, it is safe to conclude that
whether directly expressed in the text or spectacularly denoted in the films, a
strong, convincing sexual activity on the part of 007 is required as a functional
element of the narrative syntagm.
Undying courage and sexual tension are hence two necessary components
of the James Bond narrative syntagm, as pervasive as they are fundamental in
both the novels and the films, and they can be related semiotically to the sign