The
World Is Not Enough
features a singular moment that graces Pierce Brosnan’s portrayal of James
Bond. When Elektra King ignores his warning (“You couldn’t kill me. You’d miss
me”) and tells Renard to dive the nuclear submarine to proceed with their plan,
he shoots her at point-blank range, killing her instantly. “I never miss,” he
says quickly before caressing her forehead and jumping off after the submarine.
None of the other actors could have balanced this blend of vulnerability and
determination as effectively as he did. He has a moment of pity, but then he
carries on.
This scene is generally
celebrated among Bond fans. Director Michael Apted even said he was glad test
audiences understood Bond did what he had to do, because he didn’t have another
way to end their romance. Nevertheless, there are some who still argue that
this scene weakens Ian Fleming’s secret agent, basically because Bond “wouldn’t
have cried for a villainess.”
This isn’t quite right. Casino
Royale ends with the protagonist shocked and saddened to find Vesper’s
lifeless body on her bed, along with a written confession that she worked for
the Russians. Bond experiences a mix of feelings: his eyes are wet (he had
romantic plans with her), but he quickly shoves those thoughts aside and
focuses on her betrayal of England, reporting that “3030 was a double” and “the
bitch is dead now.” Villainesses don’t abound in Fleming’s books, and the femme
fatale type is largely a tradition initiated by Fiona Volpe in the 1965 film
adaptation of Thunderball, although the first film of the series, Dr
No, included a minor female villain in the seductress Miss Taro – a
character highly expanded from the source material to become a love interest
setting a trap for 007.
Fast-forward to GoldenEye
in 1995: we are introduced to the last of the franchise’s classic femme
fatales, Xenia Onatopp. Played by Dutch model and actress Famke Janssen,
Onatopp is a former Soviet fighter pilot who also worked for the KGB, or so
John Gardner tells us in the film’s novelization. Like Bond, she uses seduction
as a weapon, but unlike him, she kills her victims during the sexual act,
strangling them with her thighs, and she possesses a sadistic personality that
makes her relish killing in every form. This can be observed in the way she
yells orgasmically as she guns down the Severnaya technicians and officers
before stealing the title satellite weapon, which is her way of sexualizing a
macabre act. GoldenEye establishes
Janssen’s character as morally broken, destructive and devilish; a living
manifestation of lust, in many ways. Unlike someone like Elektra King, for
example, she has zero redeemable qualities in what it comes to seeing the side
of right and virtue – a striking contrast with the heroine of this adventure,
Natalya Simonova, who is clever and resilient but also innocent and angelical.
This is why Bond dedicates her one of his trademark one-liners when he finally
defeats her: “She did always enjoy a good squeeze,” he says after her body is
catapulted toward the fork of a tree and crushed there. The first vixen of the
Brosnan era elevates to PG-13 limits a dark attitude and psychological profile
we had previously seen in Thunderball
with Fiona Volpe or with Fatima Blush in Never
Say Never Again.
The second villain in the
universe of Brosnan’s Bond is Elektra King, played by Sophie Marceau in 1999’s The World Is Not Enough. She is a
different kind of vixen compared to Xenia and those who preceded her. While
Onatopp or Volpe were proud of being evil and enjoyed committing atrocities
while working for a man or organization behind them, Elektra has a wicked sense
of justice where she doesn’t see herself as a villain. She sees herself as
someone who is delivering justice for a cause, much like Alec Trevelyan in GoldenEye.
Elektra was the daughter of
British oil tycoon Sir Robert King and a Muslim woman whose family discovered
oil near Baku. After marrying her, Sir Robert took over the family company and
ran the business (a potential case of the “glass ceiling”). Prior to the events
of The World Is Not Enough, the
terrorist Renard kidnapped Elektra and demanded a ransom of over three million
pounds. M, a close friend of Sir Robert, advised him not to pay the ransom so
that Renard would be stalled and 009 could kill him. Before 009 completed the
mission, Elektra escaped captivity. M’s agent eventually found Renard and shot
him. The terrorist survived the bullet but was now slowly dying and losing his
senses.
Shortly after the film begins, Sir
Robert is killed by a homemade explosive device inside MI6 headquarters. Bond
concludes that Renard is behind this and, not content with humiliating British
Intelligence and eliminating the oil tycoon, believes he will go after Elektra
next. What Bond and the public ignore at this point is that it was Elektra who,
in complicity with her captor, eliminated her father. She resented him for not
paying her ransom, and she also believed he had stolen her mother’s empire. Now
she wants to deliver justice in her name. Her plan involves using the reactor
of a nuclear submarine under the Bosphorus to destroy Istanbul, making her
pipeline the only oil resource for the region in the coming decades.
Marceau’s character doesn’t
flinch before shooting down Valentin Zukovsky or before ordering the death of
her technicians to abduct M. Elektra runs the show. She acts like a mastermind,
disposing of assets and using her innocence to ensnare Bond, Renard, and M. She
reaches M through her connection to Sir Robert, worrying her into thinking
“she’s next” when 007 leaves in the middle of the night to follow a clue and
causes her to leave her safe location at MI6. She manipulates Renard, who has
desired her since the moment he kidnapped her (in the novelization, Raymond
Benson details how much the terrorist suffered from being unloved by the
opposite sex), but she sees him merely as a means to an end. She also makes
Bond doubt himself–when he confronts her about her potential complicity with
Renard and suggests she is suffering from “Stockholm syndrome,” she explodes
and slaps him. More than that, moments after the accusation, she informs him
that Renard has struck against a control center for her pipeline and killed
several employees before placing a bomb inside one of the ducts. “Now do you
believe me?” she asks him in front of everyone.
At her core, Elektra King remains
both a victim and someone who has chosen the devil’s path to conduct her life.
This is why Bond partially feels sad about her death and about having to kill
her. That gesture of caressing her dead body is more like a wish that her soul
might be healed. She resembles someone who took the wrong path because her
surroundings failed her, rather than someone who became deliberately perverse.
Deep down, this is the story of a girl who vindicated her mother and rejected
her father, who treated her life and integrity like another business
transaction–he used the ransom money to buy a classified report identifying
terrorists who targeted his pipeline.
We can see a subtler specimen of
this archetype in Miranda Frost, played by Rosamund Pike in Die Another Day. An MI6 agent, Frost was
assigned to investigate the industrialist Gustav Graves while posing as his
publicist. She is also an Olympic fencer who won the gold medal in Sydney two
years before the main events of the film. In reality, Miranda’s loyalty remains
with Graves’ alter ego, Colonel Moon, a North Korean officer involved in the
trade of conflict diamonds and weapons of mass destruction. During the
pre-credits sequence of Die Another Day,
Bond is assigned to eliminate Moon while posing as a diamond dealer, but
Miranda –working as his mole inside MI6– blows his cover by tipping the colonel
off about Bond taking the place of the buyer who was visiting him. After a long
battle on top of a hovercraft, 007 believes he has succeeded in eliminating
Moon; but fourteen months (and a couple of beatings in a North Korean prison)
later, he realizes Moon is alive and well and has undergone DNA replacement
therapy to look like a British citizen: Gustav Graves.
Miranda Frost used her work at
MI6 to facilitate Moon’s resurrection as Graves and to divert suspicion from
him. Both knew each other from the time they were members of the fencing team
at Harvard. Frost has an obsession with winning at all costs, and Moon arranged
a drug overdose for the woman meant to be her rival. When her competitor died,
Miranda won by default. Since then, in the words of Benson, she gave him her “undying
loyalty.”
While Elektra King was blinded by
her own revisionist sense of justice, Miranda was bitten by the bug of ambition
and greed. Her story shares a parallel with a much-discussed subject in the
post-9/11 era, where young Westerners were co-opted by “Axis of Evil” extremist
cells to conspire against their countries, becoming the end point of a pipeline
that frequently resulted in a terrorist attack. In Die Another Day, we see a strange connection between a young
British woman and a North Korean leader, both conspiring against the West.
Unlike his relationship with
Elektra, Bond’s encounters with Miranda are distant and cold, somewhat
emotionally detached. Their lovemaking scene even pays ironic tribute to the
woman’s surname. Not entirely ironically, upon learning of her betrayal, Bond
tells Moon/Graves that her sex is “the coldest weapon of all.”
Nevertheless, something
interesting happens during the climax of the film aboard the Antonov. Miranda
fights with Jinx, Halle Berry’s NSA agent, and kills her. As the jet is
engulfed in flames, Bond goes to find Jinx after having successfully shredded
Graves on the aircraft’s turbine. He comes across Miranda’s dead body with a
dagger crossing her heart. In one of Brosnan’s most overlooked moments as Bond,
he kneels down next to the woman’s body and adopts a reflective expression,
with a faint hint of hidden sadness in his eyes. The moment is broken by Jinx’s
one-liner: “I think I broke her heart.” This is interesting because one-liners
after an enemy’s death are usually a trademark of Bond action (as happened after
the death of Xenia), but instead, it’s the good girl who delivers it, and Bond
adopts a mournful expression instead.
Why would Bond be sad to see
Miranda Frost dead if she was the one who gave him away in North Korea?
The most plausible answer lies in
the age gap between the two. Pierce Brosnan was 48 when cameras first rolled on
Die Another Day, and Rosamund Pike
was 23–although Frost’s birth year, as per her onscreen dossier, is 1973,
making her 29 years old. What we see here is an ageing (not necessarily “old”)
and experienced Bond feeling sorry for the way a young woman got “carried away
by the gale of the world,” to use a Flemingian expression. He may be a
professional and understand that, in his line of duty, people get killed, but
at the same time he can’t stop being human and dedicating a moment to lament
the spiral of ambition that took a young woman to her death. Considering this
was (unfortunately) Brosnan’s final movie as Bond, it gives his era a
particular gravitas by making him slightly older and wiser than he was in GoldenEye, where he still joked about a
vixen’s death.
And once again, swapping a
sardonic one-liner for an expression of lament further underlines the different
types of “bad women” these three characters represent. He allows himself to
crack a joke at Xenia’s death because he knew she was evil, sadistic, and
perverse. But he feels differently about Elektra and Miranda, who represent
cases of pure souls becoming corrupted and taking a path of sin.
Did you enjoy this article? Look for more in-depth analysis of this subject in my books The Bond of The Millennium, The World of GoldenEye and Straight Up, With A Twist. You can get them on Amazon (affiliate links used) and DRM-Free at ZOOM Platform.
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