The ‘Bond girl’ who was only there to be objectified: “The agent can go to bed with a woman any time, any place”
The days of James Bond adding as many notches to his bedpost as possible have been drawing to a close for a while now, with Daniel Craig still maintaining 007’s reputation as cinema’s ultimate lothario without devolving into the days where almost every female character was treated as an object.
The franchise hasn’t completely eradicated that aspect from its locker, and maybe it never will. However, the most recent spate of films has given most of the women who encounter Hollywood’s most iconic spy more agency, character development, and non-coital motivations than days gone by.
Of course, it’s all about the timing, with one of the key reasons why the Bond saga has survived more than 60 years of change inside and outside of the industry its ability, or necessity, to be more accurate, to constantly update, evolve, adapt, and move with the times.
The age of Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, and, to a lesser extent, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan dropping sexist one-liners, treating their onscreen paramours as eye candy, and generally reducing them to one-note objectification is a thing of the past. By default, that thankfully means the actors who played these formerly thankless roles won’t be judged on appearance alone.
Obviously, that used to be the case, and while some of the former ‘Bond girls’ came to regret it, not all of them did. In fact, one of Brosnan’s conquests in Tomorrow Never Dies completely understood the assignment, accepting the part knowing full well that she was only there to fulfil a familiar remit.
“I think I’m actually in this movie just to keep Bond’s image alive,” Cecilie Thomsen, who played Inga Bergstrom, said. “I’m in it to confirm that the agent can go to bed with a woman any time, any place, even an Oxford professor.” As reductive as that sounds, she was right on the money.
This being Bond, since he’s rolling around in bed with a Danish professor, he can’t help but say how much he loves “learning a new tongue.” When he’s interrupted by Moneypenny, even she gets in on the act, referring to him as a “cunning linguist.” Get it? Because he’s… never mind, you get it.
Thomsen accepted that, to paraphrase, her role in Tomorrow Never Dies was to make it patently clear to the audience that Bond is still a mad shagger. And, to be fair, the scene succeeds on that front, since it establishes that he is, in fact, still a mad shagger, right before he heads off to save the world again.
Denis Villeneuve probably won’t have any moments like that in his 007 blockbuster, fulfilling the ‘three-girl rule’ coined by Roald Dahl on You Only Live Twice that became an accepted staple of the movies. In this instance, Thomsen was the first act conquest, and she knew exactly what she was signing up for.
