Warning: This article contains spoilers for The 355.
Despite mixed reception, James Bond franchise is scared to deliver. Audiences were interested to see the first female 007 with the arrival of No Time to Die in 2021, played by Captain Marvel actress Lashana Lynch. However, despite a warm reception to the role, many viewers expressed dissatisfaction at Lynch’s sparse screen time and her under-baked development, although some noted that she marked a definitive improvement over Bond’s previous female counterparts. Interestingly though, several key elements that tie Bond’s films together are re-framed in The 355 through the lens of a female cast, and display the potential for a typical 007 film with the female and male roles flipped around.
The 355 features an all-star cast including Jessica Chastain, Lupita Nyong'o, Diane Kruger, Penelope Cruz, Fan Bingbing, and Sebastian Stan, and marks director Simon Kinberg’s stab at the spy thriller genre. The narrative follows Chastain’s CIA agent Mason “Mace” Browne, a maverick officer who breaks off from her chain of command to stop a tech device from sparking global catastrophe. Browne assembles an international team of spies to stop Jason Flemyng’s English terrorist, including Nyong'o’s former MI6 computer specialist Khadijah Adiyeme, Bingbing’s MSS officer Lin Mi Sheng and Diane Kruger’s German BND agent Marie Schmidt. Penelope Cruz and Sebastian Stan round out the cast list as DNI psychologist Graciela Rivera and Chastain’s love interest-turned-traitor Nick Fowler.
Jessica Chastain’s Browne is the template for how female-led espionage thrillers can correct their course. The 355 contributes an enticing argument in favor of why the next James Bond should be a woman, and it also corrects several rather tired and outdated tropes that remain an unappealing stain on the genre. Additionally, it removes the main problem with Lynch’s 007 character. James Bond, despite its attempts to modernize in the wake of feminism and the #MeToo movement, is at its roots a narrative told via the male gaze, a problem from which No Time to Die’s Nomi inevitably suffers, as well as, arguably, Ana de Armas' CIA agent Paloma.
The main concept of the male gaze isn’t merely the objectification of women, or the violence wrung from their storylines to give the male hero a motive to shoot a building full of villains to pieces. According to entertainment writer Stephanie Forster, “It’s a way to explain a limited male view, where the rest of the characters exist mainly to serve him, his interests, and his storyline.” (via No Time To Die wastes the perfect 007 opportunity for Nomi. She isn’t there to take the wheel. Nomi is as skilled an agent as Bond, but make no mistake, she is there as an accessory to Bond’s narrative and has no story of her own.
Browne’s team of spies, however, are the focal point of The 355. In a twist on the typical spy thriller, each member of the team leaves her partner or male counterpart at home while she jets off to save the day. This extends so far as to even flip the infamous trope of “fridging” women to further a male character's narrative. In the first act, Stan’s Fowler is apparently fridged by Flemyng’s villain. In the third act, the most important men in each of the women’s lives are killed off, spurring them to action in the finale.
Dr. Miriam Kent states that fridging is “ultimately connected to men’s and women’s roles in society: who’s active and ive.” (via Casino Royale is especially deadly for Bond girls, with Vesper Lynd’s death still driving Bond four films later in No Time to Die. In turning the trope on its head, The 355 makes the male characters the ive participants in the plotline. Instead, it gives women the reins and makes them the active, driving participants in their story.
