‘Like a Party-Political Broadcast for You-Know-Who’: Margaret Thatcher and the Reception of Octopussy (1983)

This chapter offers a reception history of Octopussy's moment of release in Britain to identify how the ideologies of the Cold War were connected in some reviews to James Bond's masculinity, nuclear disarmament policy, and gendered protest movements at the time. It refers a comment made by Derek Malcolm in the Guardian about the latest Bond film since the ‘you-know-who’ he referred to was Margaret Thatcher. The film draws to a close with a cozy chat between General Gogol and the British Secret Service where both sides agree that co-operation and the nuclear status quo is the way forward. Perhaps without meaning to this plotline links Octopussy’s to the party-political debate about nuclear arms at the time of the 1983 general election. The year 1983 saw a rejuvenated anti-nuclear movement in the UK that brought with it powerful imagery and public support that the Prime Minister had to manage.