Appendix 3.2: Sample films - synopses and character lists
Goldfinger uκ 64
vaults at Fort Knox where the entire US gold reserves are
stored, in order to explode an atomic device supplied to
Goldfinger by the Chinese government. As Bond recognised,
this explosion would have two important consequences:
They get what they want, economic chaos in the West, and
the value of your gold increases many times.
The US army is alerted just in time to avert this disaster and
Bond is despatched by plane to the White House to receive the
President's personal thanks. Goldfinger, however, had
cunningly escaped from the fracas at Fort Knox and hijacked
this plane, now piloted by his personal pilot Pussy Galore
(Honor Blackman), whose last minute assistance to Bond, it is
suggested, contributed to the successful outcome of his
mission. Bond struggles with Goldfinger; Goldfinger1S gun
goes off and the plane depressurises. Goldfinger is sucked,
delightfully, through the broken plane window screaming
horribly while Pussy and Bond parachute to safety in a remote
landscape where they hide, locked in an embrace, under their
parachute while a USAF helicopter searches for them.
The questions which constitute the film as a thriller are not
about who did what and why, as in the conventional narrative
structure of the thriller, but rather about how our hero will
escape from the ever more desperate straits in which he finds
himself, and which of his many exceptional attributes he will
call on in the process. As the narrative unfolds, as its
questions are variously posed and answered, other themes can
be discerned. Abandoning the hermeneutics and turning instead
to the operation of the semic and symbolic codes is likely to
produce a richer analysis of this text. I do not propose to
follow this path in any detail here, but merely to note for
future reference certain recurrent issues which are worthy of
further consideration. The film can be understood - indeed it
is hard to avoid such an understanding - as a representation
of an ideal of masculinity addressed principally to a male
audience but with sufficiently varied attributes of the heroic
ideal depicted to ensure considerable interest on the part of
a female audience. Bond's image, at times, is offered in ways
reminiscent of the conventional objectification of women on
screen. He engages in plenty of swashbuckling action but he
is also offered as a passive, immobile object for our gaze -
most notably in the scene where he is Spreadeagled, bound at
his wrists and ankles, to the gold table in which the
industrial laser cuts a line which, if continued, would bisect
him neatly from crotch to scalp. The film is littered with
phallic objects - the aforementioned laser being one amongst
many examples. Guns are rarely absent from the screen;
threatening, reassuring, subject to caresses as well as being
offered in full performance, spurting fire and bullets. Cars,
planes, trick devices of one kind and another are shot in low
angle close ups barely justified by hermeneutic requirements
and Bond's own car, the Aston Martin, is endowed with phallic
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