How the language used in James Bond’s ‘Casino Royale’ represents the power struggle between men and women?
Introduction
When Vesper Lynd deduced that Bond typically saw his women as “disposable pleasures” rather than “meaningful pursuits”, she hit the nail on the head. Ian Fleming’s first spy thriller novel, ‘Casino Royale’ written in 1953 begins at the start of Bond’s career, and since then women in the film franchise have become a brand, with similar traits- sexy, glamorous and seducible, but also very dangerous. Historically, Bond girls don’t speak much and tend to fall under Bond’s spell allowing him to dominate conversations. In the film adaptation, ‘Casino Royale’ (2006), starring Daniel Craig as James Bond, the Bond girl, Vesper Lynd almost broke the mould. Bond and his girl were made almost equals, with Vesper being more capable, tougher and more resilient, but like her predecessors she had to die, thus giving Bond a further motive to go after the bad guy. In the light of this, I want to investigate how the language used by Vesper Lynd and James Bond in ‘Casino Royale’ is affected by power,
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which is stereotypically derived from the speaker’s gender, by focusing on the work of theorists such as Howard Giles (1973), Brown and Levinson (1978) and Grice (1989). Through personal research, the work of theorists, Carter and Steiner (2004), found that in media such as films, men tend to be portrayed as having higher and longer lasting career status based on their success whereas women have a lower and shorter career status based on their youth/looks. I wanted to investigate to what degree their findings are relevant to ‘Casino Royale’. Additionally, I will also hone in on power concepts, for example dominant and submissive participants and power behind discourse. Framing questions: • Do Bond and Vesper use more convergence than divergence? • Is there a clear powerful participant in the conversation, if so who and how do they dominate the conversation? • Do Grice’s proposed maxims apply? • Are there any face threatening acts? If so which participant carries out the most? Hypothesis I expect that there isn’t a dominant participant because they both come from comparable backgrounds, both orphans who have worked their way up in MI6 to high status positions. However, I expect Bond will manage the topic because he hasn’t met Vesper before and by her ambiguous name, it can be suggested that he will be intrigued and want to find out more about her. There will be a lot of convergence in the conversation especially by Bond as he is reliant on Vesper to stake him in poker, so is likely to converge with her to get his own way to ensure his plan succeeds. Given the context that Vesper is supposedly different to the past Bond girls, I expect that due to her career, her utterances will be dominated by put measures in place so the plan succeeds, rather than just being eye candy for the famous 007 agent. Therefore, to remain on the set topic, I expect her to flout the maxim of relevance. I don’t expect there to be many face threatening acts because the participants need to build a healthy working relationship to work with one another successfully. Methodology The Casino Royale script was publically available online but in order to check the accuracy of the script, I cross referenced the data by watching the film and noted any significant differences between the script I found online and the film.
I found there weren’t any significant differences between the two, just minor contrasts, for example different syntax structures. This was due to the fact that the online script was published in 2005 and the film was released in 2006, so slight changes may have been made between the two. Out of all of the films in the Bond franchise, I chose to focus on Casino Royale because it is generally regarded as the first film where Bond meets his match, Vesper, a woman with equal wits and charm. Specifically, I chose the first three scenes in which Bond and Vesper first become acquainted with one another, due to the length of the
film.
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"AP Language and Composition." : A Woman’s Beauty: Put-Down or Power Source Soaps and dials. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Nov. 2013. .
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Kiesling, Scott Fabius. "Power and the Language of Men." Making Sense of Language: Readings in Culture and Communication. Comp. Susan D. Blum. New York, NY [etc.: Oxford UP, 2013. 408-17.