The 2006 Casino Royale is a reboot for the James Bond franchise. Directed by Martin Campbell, this film’s iteration of Bond is played by Daniel Craig, and co-stars Eva Green as his primary “Bond Girl.” The film received high praise upon its release, and has been generally considered to be the reinvention of Bond that the franchise needed. The whole of Daniel Craig’s run as Bond can be defined by the franchise trying to assert its own relevance in the 21st century. This is especially evident in the way Casino Royale shifts the manner in which Bond is presented as a sex symbol – from “the man men want to be” to “the man women want to be with.”
Those two ideas may not seem incredibly different from each other. After all, they usually appear back-to-back in a single phrase. However, for the purposes of this paper, how they are distinct is important. James Bond has always been marketed as a sex symbol, but prior to the 2006 Casino Royale, he was a very specific type of symbol. Laura Mulvey articulates the divide between the classical male vs female sex symbol in Hollywood in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. To paraphrase, Mulvey identifies sexy male characters as being attractive in a way male audience members could relate and project themselves onto, whereas female characters are sexualized in a way that makes the male audience desire to have them.
Mulvey’s theory has flaws, but when applied to the Bond franchise, it certainly describes an accurate dichotomy. Bond as a character is defined by his suave charm; he is someone who is always surrounded by beautiful, half-dressed women, who are usually remembered for their laughably sexual names. While Bond swaggers around with aspirational skills and characteristics, the Bond girls are often so devoid of personality or personal goals and motivations that it is nearly impossible for female audience members to relate to them. Within the general pantheon of James Bond, women are usually literal objects, pawns in the game between Bond and his usually male antagonists. Bond’s body is rarely physically eroticized by the camera in the way that his female counterparts are. Bond is attractive for how he acts. The Bond girls are attractive for how they look.
Throughout the majority of the franchise's life, Bond was “the man men want to be.” The 2006 Casino Royale is what made him “the man women want to be with.” Casino Royale intentionally changed many of the franchise’s signature features, in a conscious effort to make it a more grounded property: removing the usual crazy gadgets, letting Bond actually retain damage from his injuries, and humanizing the women in the film. The franchise had been the source of mockery for many years for its cheesy insane top gadgets and cartoonishly over sexualized women. Casino Royale went out of its way to ensure “cheesy” was the last word to come to mind after watching it. Also among those changes was re-examining who the presumed audience was – or in Mulvey's phrasing, whose “gaze” the audience was taking on. In John Mercer’s article on this subject, “The Enigma of the Male Sex Symbol,” he points out how Casino Royale intentionally homages a famous scene from Dr. No, having Bond rise erotically from the ocean in a body hugging bathing suit as the camera lingers on his sexualized body. This reframed Bond as sexual in the same way as the Bond girls usually are shown. Mercer described this as presenting Bond as an “object of erotic investment.” (81).
The beach scene displays an interesting balancing act. The scene does not just reintroduce Bond as a “vision of male beauty;” it also introduces the first of our two Bond girls, Solange (Caterina Murino). Solange is the prototypical Bond girl. As the sugar-baby of the film’s secondary antagonist, she is there to be seduced by Bond for information and then to die. Pairing the character’s initial introduction with a scene that reframes Bond into the same sexual context as her is a significant choice. Mercer supposes that this choice was “an alibi to justify the act of looking at Craig’s body” (82), alleviating any anxieties about homoeroticism in the straight male audience by including a sexy lady to look at, too.
However, Solange’s presence there also further re-asserts Bond as a sexual object to be looked at and desired. While Solange is no doubt a beautiful and sexual agent in the scene -- she enters the frame riding horseback in a bikini -- the camera spends significantly less time examining her body than it does Bond’s. Solange is shot almost entirely in wide shots during this scene. The only time we see her face up close is when she is making direct eye contact with Bond, directly matching the medium close-up of Bond and her. In this scene, Solange also fulfills the purpose of further reminding the audience of what the framing of Bond is emulating, drawing attention to how his body is being presented in contrast to hers.
The beach scene is not the only important scene in this respect. This film functions as an origin story for Bond, so the scene where he puts on The James Bond Tux for the first time is significant. During this scene, he watches himself in the mirror, while being watched by Vesper (Eva Green). This is a sort of level up from the beach scene. There, Bond's gaze on the woman is exactly as pronounced as her gaze on him. Here Bond isn’t looking at her, a woman's gaze is on him, his gaze is on himself.
Vesper herself symbolizes a significant shift in the aforementioned dichotomy between Bond and the Bond girls. Unlike many of her predecessors, Vesper is filled head to toe with personality and individual motivations that exist entirely independent of Bond. The fact that she is initially unaffected by his trademark James Bond Charm, but rather falls in love with him over the story while working to her own ends, makes her stand out distinctly among her cohorts, allowing her to be a character the female audience can connect to and project on to.
Mercer describes a “sex symbol” as “a figure who embodies a set of discourses around sex and sexuality within a context at a given moment,” (85). In 2006, the context and discourse around sex and male sexuality was that it needed a new perspective. The mid-2000s was a booming era of rom-coms as the prevalence of the horny female demographic gained recognition among the major players in Hollywood, and so the James Bond franchise followed suit. By modernizing James Bond into something a 2006 audience could find value in, they also created a Bond girl women wanted to be, and a James Bond women wanted to be with.
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