I was talking to Hambone of Soc Engineer recently and he was underwhelmed by the latest Bond, saying that this Bond was unrecognizable from past Bonds. He also said there's an obvious homoerotic component. I hadn't thought of that when I was watching it, but in hindsight the naked torture scene did seem a bit much. Still, I was perhaps a little skeptical. But not so after this Church of the Masses review:
When I was in film school, my radical feminist lesbian professors were quite adament that we all leave Northwestern with a keen sense of what they called "the male gaze" in cinema. The "Male Gaze" is a fundamentally skewed-with-patriarchy way of seeing the world and especially women that, my professors contended, was predicable of pretty much all of classic Hollywood cinema. They used to endlessly dissect camera angles and lighting in shots to reveal cues of the male desire to dominate and dehumanize women. A lot of times I thought my professors were nuts and paranoid. But every now and then they had a point.
Well, I gotta say, there is something icky in Casino Royale that feels very much like what we could call "the homosexual gaze." The women in the film, first of all, spend much of the film very ioconically made up - shall we say, like Liza Minelli or a Marilyn impersonator?
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