Looking for Doctor Goodhead

The Hollywood Reporter recently printed an interview with new Bond Girls Lashana Lynch and Ana de Armas.  As you'd expect when they're plugging a film that is shrouded in secrecy and doesn't come out for another six months, there's not really that much they can say about No Time To Die, or their characters.  What we did discover - from the headline down - is that these are "Bond Women" and they're strong and independent and brainy and completely different to the female characters of the past.

But you knew it said that, didn't you?  Because the leading lady of every Bond film for forty-odd years has said this in every interview, and yet the message doesn't seem to be getting through.  Every actress is forced to justify her appearance in the film, and how it's different to an archetype that was established when Ursula Andress walked out of the sea in 1962.  I'd argue that the Bond Girls of the Sixties were strong in their own right - would you argue with Fiona Volpe? - but the producers were aware that they needed to change, which is why they made a deliberate, conspicuous effort to make the female leads independent women with strong motivations from The Spy Who Loved Me onwards.  Anya Amasova was conceived as Bond's Russian equivalent, and frequently bests him in the film.  And she wasn't a one-off either.

The very next film offered up Dr Holly Goodhead, played by Lois Chiles in Moonraker.  In a film that is, by and large, hokey fun, you have a female lead who is a trained astronaut on loan from NASA with a Doctorate in astrophysics.  Halfway through the film, it's revealed she's also a CIA agent working undercover.  She fights, she spars, she reacts with absolute frostiness when 007 patronises the hell out of her - she's ace.  And this was in 1979.  Yet here we are, forty years later, asking actresses in a Bond film if they're allowed to have a thought of their own and does the bikini chafe?

I'll be honest: I love Holly.  She's my favourite Bond Girl.  My preferred type is snarky arse-kicker (see also: Pam Bouvier and Tracy).  I love that she's so much smarter than Bond.  If you watch the film, he absolutely needs her along - if she hadn't been able to pilot Moonraker 6, he'd have been left on earth and Drax would have succeeded.  She's the one who briefs the NASA troops, because she knows Colonel Scott personally.  It's also thanks to Holly's piloting that he's able to chase after the globes that are released at the end. 

She does all this coolly and elegantly.  She's rightly disdainful when Bond is surprised to meet a woman Doctor; she casually mentions that she's addressing a conference and dismisses his facile comment; she uses him for sex and refuses to tell him she's off to Brazil.  One of my favourite moments is when 007 sneaks out the bedroom, the cad, leaving her fast asleep - only for her to snap to attention and make plans to leave as well.

Holly also does all this while completely wrapped up.  It's sometimes difficult to defend the series when they have a super-capable character but put her in the skimpiest of outfits to make sure you know she's clever and sexy (yes, I'm talking about Dr Christmas Jones' hotpants).  And while Holly is beautiful - she is played by Lois Chiles - she's never dressed provocatively or gratuitously nude.  She wears five outfits over the course of the film; three long dresses and two pant suits.  There's cleavage in the evening gown:

And let's be honest, those stilettos are horribly impractical:

But the film doesn't lech at her.  It treats her with dignity and grace.  They actually consider what Holly would wear.  Let's be honest, she could've spent the climax in a minidress - there were Drax astronauts on board wearing the same thing, so it wouldn't have been too much of a stretch for her to wear it too:

Instead, she's in that baggy, unflattering orange space suit, just like Bond. 

Holly could be lifted straight out of Moonraker and put in a 21st century Bond film without modification or rewriting.  She is the best, and I'd like every journalist about to interview Lashana and Ana to have a look at what the series was doing with its female characters before they were even born.  (Maybe fast forward through the double taking pigeon though).