I was trying to respond to a message on Signal but I got a message that there was not enough space on my iPhone to open the app. So I had to find some old videos of the kid to delete and decide if I wanted to remove a few other apps I wasn’t actively using. Then I got a Facebook Messenger DM to respond to. As I was typing a response, another Messenger popped up. As I was deciding if I should finish the first message before answering the second one, my phone rang. It was a guy named “Michael” who wanted to talk to me about Medicaid A and B benefits. I wanted to be the lady in the commercial who just wanted to soak in the bathtub.
Electronic media has countless dark sides. Countless. One is the massive wave of stimuli that we are duty bound to respond to, from emails to TikTok comments. I spend a large chunk of each day deleting junk emails so I don’t have a panic attack every time I open my inbox. And a good percentage of those are emails I should read, but it’s just too much to process. And now that I have reached the status of “Influencer” on Instagram, I get hundreds of messages everyday, almost all incredibly supportive, or sharing a video I NEED TO WATCH. I try to respond to as many as I can, but I will occasionally get the indignant follower, offended that I was too whatever to respond. Where is my time?
And don’t get me started on the constant spam calls I get. Sometimes I’ll get a spammer calling while I’m on the phone with another spammer, all trying to separate me for my money. I’m getting better at not picking up but I do enjoy messing with them and seeing how long I can keep them on the line.” “Hello, my name is Michael and I’m calling about the new Medicaid benefits. How are you?” “Oh, I’m OK, Michael, but I’m suffering from a blocked colon. Do you think you’ll be able to help me? With my blocked colon?” Click.
All this has got me in the dreaded “Good ol’ days” funk that I typically warn against. Here we go. When was a kid, there was one phone in the house that was connected to the house by a chord. There was no call-waiting. If someone called while you were on a call, they got a busy signal and had to try later. That was it. No email. No texts. No DMs. If you didn’t have their phone number, you had to write a letter. On one side, we were more isolated from immediate conversations, but on the other side, we were more isolated from immediate conversations.
As a 20th century boy I can remember what it was like to be away from that landline and be unreachable. We knew when the street lights came on it was time to go home. We could be present in the moment. My daughter, born in 2014, will never know what it’s like to be unreachable. To be truly unconnected and on your own. I’m a sociologist, not a psychologist, so I can’t say if that’s a bad thing or not, but I do know there is great value of calmness and being present in the moment and that’s hard to do with all the pings and beeps and calls from “Michael.” I could unplug for a day but then I’d be stressed about all the DMs and emails that were piling up. Maybe a nice power outage would calm my nerves.
I remember staring at the telephone and wishing it would ring. Be careful what you wish for.
This series is intended to evaluate each product of the James Bond film franchise through a feminist lens, and the relevance of the Bond archetype to shifting ideas of masculinity in the 2020s.
Goldfinger (1964, directed by Guy Hamilton)
“That’s my James!” Welcome to the James Bond blockbuster. With the massive success of From Russia With Love came an even bigger budget (and a new director). Goldfinger gave us franchise staples, like the pre-credits action scene, the bouncy Bond quips, infinite gadgets (including the loaded Aston Martin), the epic theme song, and multiple exotic locations (including rural Kentucky). And of course there are multiple women who are branded as Bond “girls” in the film who find their way into 007’s beefy arms.
The box office smash surely benefited from the 1964 British Invasion and the American obsession with all things English. Bond even has a snarky line about the Fab Four after he beds Goldfinger’s girl Jill Masterson, chiding her not understanding his standards for chilled Champaign. “My dear girl, there are some things that just aren’t done, such as drinking Dom Pérignon ’53 above 38 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs.” (It should be noted that two of the actors in Goldfinger, Richard Vernon (Colonel Smithers) and Margaret Nolán (Dink), had just appeared in the Beatles’ film A Hard Days Night and the Beatles 1965 film, Help!, would be a send up of Goldfinger.)
Goldfinger cemented the formula for what a Bond film would be for decades to come. It was released in September of 1964, in a world that was increasingly surrendering to the ennui of the East-West Cold War, the same month as Lyndon Johnson’s apocalyptic “Daisy” campaign ad that ended with a mushroom cloud. I had been born 7 months earlier and would be socialized into a world that saw Bond as the modern model of masculinity. Let’s check Goldfinger with our five reference criteria.
Driver of Action – Goldfinger is the archetypical Bond film, the begins with him blowing some shit up in Mexico and ends with him making sweet love to Bond Girl #3 Pussy Galore on a desert island, telling her “This is no time to be rescued.” There is no “buddy,” as in the previous two films, just Bond, and his MI-6 and CIA supporters (who play minimal roles). Even the nefarious plotting by Goldfinger (played by former Nazi Gert Fröbe after Orson Welles proved to be too expensive) to irradiate all the gold in Fort Knox is a minor subplot. Goldfinger is all about watching Sean Connery as Bond move from scene to scene; Mexico, Miami, London, Switzerland, Kentucky. In the opening scene, he steps out of his wetsuit dressed in a white dinner jacket and you know this going to be 110 minutes of pure Connery.
Role of Violence – Again, Bond has a relatively low bodycount in this film. People do die, especially women, including Jill Masterson. For her flirtation with Bond, she is painted gold and dies of “skin suffocation.” Her sister Tilly is killed by Oddjob, Goldfinger’s Korean henchman. But Mr. License-to-Kill is mostly restrained. A Mexican assassin gets an electric fan tossed into his bathtub. Some henchmen go over a cliff in a fiery crash after Bond shoots slick oil out of his Aston Martin. In the climatic scene in Fort Knox, Bond throws a henchman off a ledge and electrocutes Oddjob. (Apparently actor Harold Sakata was severely burned in the stunt.) Mostly Bond is the recipient of violence, including a laser beam aimed at his most manly parts while he is strapped to a table.
Vulnerability – Yeah, no. You wonder if we have to wait until the ‘90s to get new age sensitive James Bond. Whether strapped to a table with a laser heading toward his junk or locked in a Kentucky holding cell, or in a plane plummeting to the earth, we never see James break a sweat.
Sexual Potency – Goldfinger is balls out on the message that Bond is the conquerer of women. In the opening sequence, he goes after a Mexican dancer and then uses her body to deflect an assassin. In Miami, he’s getting a poolside massage from his Florida fling, Dink (who’s cleavage was also featured in A Hard Days Night). Then there’s the romp with Jill who gets painted gold. In Switzerland, when a blonde passes him by in a ’64 Mustang convertible, he resists the urge to chase after her. “Discipline, 007, discipline,” he says to himself. She turns out to be Jill’s sister and they have a moment before Oddball kills her with his killer hat.
That brings us to Pussy Galore (the character, not the male fantasy). The Bond double entendres hit a new level here and Pussy’s name is mentioned constantly in the second half of the film. Galore is played by Honor Blackman, who was Diana Rigg’s predecessor on the highly popular British spy show, The Avengers. So she was coming in to Bondland a Judo-flipping badass, not a submissive DID (Damsel In Distress). In Goldfinger, she’s the leader of Goldfinger’s team of female pilots, playing a role in his grand slam plan. But there’s a scene in Goldfinger’s barn where James manhandles Pussy and the subsequent judo fight ends up with the two literally rolling in the hay. Galore tries to push Bond off her, but no woman can resist 007 and his assault ends in a passionate kiss. Woot, there it is.
Connection – Unbeknownst to the viewer, Pussy Galore’s Stockholm Syndrome turns her into an ally of Bond’s and Goldfinger’s evil plot is thwarted. As has already become an uber-cliche in Bond films, their end scene, making out under the parachute, casts no allusion that it’s the beginning of a beautiful relationship between James and Pussy. We know how this works. Women are transitory and co-workers are support players. Does Bond have any friends? A love that got away? He is supremely untethered. A man alone.
Toxic Masculinity Scale: 7
Summary – Like an explosion of everything that was 1960s before LSD, Goldfinger is a magnum opus of a spy action film. The clever crime attempted (to irradiate the gold in Fort Knox to drive up the value of personal stocks of the metal) takes a back seat to watching Connery leap frog from woman to woman, often with his suped-up Bondmobile (Oh, to have stock in Aston Martin in 1964). Connery’s Bond is the Id unrestrained. One wonders what MI-6’s HR department would say about the workplace flirtations between Bond and Miss Moneypenny in the post #metoo era. But it’s the scene between Bond and Galore in the barn that reminds us that the debonair spy is not immune from the misogynistic value of male entitlement. A generation of boys learned women are to be taken by men, even if they resist. Pussy galore, indeed.
While contemporary audiences my get a bit of a creepy vibe from Goldfinger’s Bond, there’s a creeping trend that may be less noticed today. The third Bond film sees 007 more dependent on the technology provided by his employer. It may be a homing device in his shoe or an ejection seat in his car, but 1964 Bond is becoming less a man left to his own devices and more to the devices Q builds for him. Bond is the halfway point between the archetypical cowboy, fending for himself on the frontier, and Modern Man, juggling apps and monitoring social media, never not wired to the electronic collective. Where would Bond be without Q? Where would we be if the internet went down? One imagines that Bond would be better off, but not by much.
Why wait? That was the question I got from a small group of teenage boys. I was leading my Thursday night discussion for a bunch of boys in a court-ordered residential facility in Northeast Portland. It was the late 1990s and these kids were on the verge of being locked up in juvie, but were the “at-risk” youth that still have a chance to not get sucked into the vortex of the criminal justice system. So a judge sent them to a group home and on Thursdays I was their counselor.
I was trying to share with them the simple joy of Pez, something I cherished from my own youth. I was carefully loading the tiny candies into a Popeye Pez dispenser. Some were going sideways and others were falling back out.
“Why don’t you just eat the candy?” asked one kid.
“No, wait, it’s gonna be great. The candy comes out of Popeye’s larynx,” I said.
“Why wait?” asked another.
It was a valid question. I mean, it’s not the greatest payoff in the world. Why not just eat the damn candy without all the hassle? Suddenly the Pez dispenser became a metaphor for a fading American value – delayed gratification, symbolic of a grand cultural shift. Sometimes the wait is part of the payoff, y’all. I know you want it now, but…
I was reminded of this because I bought Advent calendar for my daughter for Christmas. I loved them as a kid and this is the year Cozy’s really getting into the holiday. (Although she freaked out a bit at meeting the Macy’s Santa.) I liked the day-to-day anticipation of the arrival of the big event. Each day you get to open a window and get little surprise, making it one day closer to Santa’s orgy of gifts. The initial Advent calendars were created by the German Lutherans in the 19th century but they’re probably now mass-produced in Chinese factories for the Western world. You can get them cheap pretty much anywhere. You don’t even have to be Lutheran.
So I picked up a calendar called 24 Chocolate Days ’til Christmas (made in a gluten-free factory in Canada) to introduce Cozy to the tradition. When I pulled it out on December 1, she yelled, “Santa!” I explained to her that we open one door each day until Christmas and there’s a treat behind each flap. Day 1 was a little chocolate choo choo. She was thrilled. Then I told her we’d open the next door tomorrow. She was not thrilled about that. In fact she threw a screaming fit, laying on the floor, yelling, “No! No! No!” I mean, why wait?
I resisted the temptation to just give in. It would’ve been so easy. She’s a real heartbreaker when she’s sobbing. But I thought this would be a valuable lesson about delayed gratification. Now a week into it, she seems to be getting it. You’ve gotta pace yourself and spread the joy out.
For years I assigned a book in my criminology class at Portland State called Crime and the American Dreamby Stephen Messner and Richard Rosenfeld. It makes the case that the elevated crime rates in the U.S. are a product of our “by any means necessary” values. For example, it’s not how you got your wealth/car/college degree, it’s that you got it. So if you embezzled/car-jacked/cheated to get it, no big whoop. It’s having it that gets you the points. It reminded me of the unofficial American motto, “You can never be too rich or too thin,” (explaining a lot of white collar crime and eating disorders). Just think of Donald Trump ripping off the chumps at Trump University while Melania gulps the postpartum diet pills. Look where that got them!
We live in a culture of immediate gratification. I used to have to wait forever just to hear an album I wanted. Now I just pull anything and everything I might want up on Spotify. Remember taking your film to the drug store and waiting a week to see the pictures? How about waiting for a letter to come from your beloved? Please Mr. Postman! (When my grad school girlfriend was studying in Paris, I would torture my Atlanta letter carrier with that song.) Now if something takes more than 30 seconds to get we are convinced the wifi has been hacked by the Chinese.
If you celebrate Christmas, you know that by 3 pm on Christmas Day the letdown has arrived. Is that all there is? “Christmas” is the anticipation of Christmas, the build up. Much of life works that way. Sweet anticipation. Of Friday at 5 pm, or a first kiss, or Election Day. I want Cozy to enjoy the journey at least as much as the arrival. How you got there matters. One door, one piece of Canadian chocolate at a time.
Watching the Wheels 