Or put on carols. Our holiday tradition is to watch hours and hours of James Bond.
I got to see one I haven't seen before, License to Kill. It's one of the Timothy Dalton movies, dark and wildly uneven, but it features an amazing female lead, Carey Lowell.
Lowell is the butchest Bond Girl that ever wore evening dress. She's a pilot which as we all know, is Bondspeak for lesbian. In full makeup, she has the stark beauty of a Nagel print, in casual clothes she looks like the all-American tomboy next door.
She not only knew how to fly and had short hair, she also was ex-military, cocky and snarky. Her evening dress was designed to highlight her shoulders and the smooth muscles of her back, not her cleavage. Even for the epicine eighties, she was a stretch as a Bond Girl.
In most Bond films, the pretty women are gradually eliminated, like branches being trimmed from a tree. At the end of the film, we finally get down to the final woman that Bond ends up with.
In this film, we have two women competing for this position. Besides Carey Lowell, we have the villian's mistress played by Talisa Soto. Soto is doe-eyed and rounded and round-lipped and retro-feminine in all the ways that Lowell isn't. There seems to have been some delibarate lifting of the 1950s aesthetic in her selection. You could label this image as Marilyn Monroe's Latina sidekick in her South of the Border movie without anyone being the wiser.
Not only does the competition between the two remain open until the final two minutes of the movie, but both of them survive the contest. I'm going to guess that the producers of License to Kill wanted to hedge their bets and provide two types of wank material. Just in case a few boys couldn't take their Bond ending up with Lowell, they provided Soto as a consolation prize. And of course, the implied sexual dimorphism between Soto and Lowell only highlights the lesbian subtext and provides further wank material.
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