Billie Eilish challenging Machismo: I am the bad guy! Duh!
Grammys 2020 ended with Billie Eilish, the 18-year-old ‘singer- songwriter’ winning five awards, the most- of the night. Now, she has recorded a new theme song for the latest James Bond movie - ‘No Time to Die.’ But this particular music suggests more about the intentions with regards to the ongoing debates on the gender politics within the Bond films.
The new film, No Time to Die, will include multiple substantial female roles, and feature the writing of a female screenwriter for the first time since Johanna Harwood’s contributions to the early 1960s films. However, while the script may be getting a gender update, many of the theme songs, and their iconic female performers, have struck a chord with Bond’s regressive attitudes toward women and female agency.
“We know when to kiss / And we know when to kill / If we can’t have it all / Then nobody will”
Performed by Garbage’s lead singer Shirley Manson, the song highlights the paradoxical role ‘female desire’ plays in the endorsement of Bond’s masculinity. Without women wanting him, Bond would not be Bond; but with female desire also comes self-determination, and a challenge to the position of power.
Over the last few years, Bond co-producer, Barbara Broccoli, has consistently maintained that “Bond is a male character … and will probably stay as male”. In a recent interview she has stated, “I’m not particularly interested in taking a male character and having a woman play it. I think women are far more interesting than that.”
Also, writer Phoebe Waller Bridge who helped writing the script in May 2019, adamantly claimed that Bond is “absolutely relevant now and the important thing is that the ‘film’ treats the women properly. He doesn’t have to. He needs to be true to his character.”
Sexism may appear a little different today than it did in 1953 when Bond debuted in Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, but it still exists. Casually turning James Bond character into a female character wouldn’t necessarily change anything concrete in this battle of sexes.
This time the film ‘No Time to Die’ promises change, not by simply interchanging the gender of its main characters, but ‘by giving women the complex roles they deserve’.
Billie Eilish fits in with this renewed sense of female agency within the franchise. At 18 she has reputation of going against the expectations as a musician, youth and female artist. This is impressively attended in her award-winning song bad guy. The lyrics goes like;
“I’m that bad type / Make your mama sad type / Make your girlfriend mad tight / Might seduce your dad type / I’m the bad guy, duh”.
Machismo - It’s time to die!
