Three Vixens, Three Deaths, One Bond

 

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.