<i>Atomic Blonde</i>, Neue Deutsche Welle, and Jane Bond

Abstract

Blonde features a secret agent of outstanding ability who excels in every situation and who starts a casual relationship with a beautiful girl throughout the course of her adventure. Such characteristics are reminiscent of James Bond. Yet Lorraine Broughton differs largely from the enigmatic British secret agent: she is female. Based on the graphic novel The Coldest City (2012), written by Anthony Johnston and illustrated by Sam Hart, Atomic Blonde is an action spy thriller set in the Berlin of an alternative world during the fall of the Berlin wall. David Leitch's film relies largely on its musical score to recreate the zeitgeist of 1980's Germany-particularly the soundscape of the Neue Deutsche Welle ("New German Wave"), a popular musical genre of Cold War-era Germany. But this sound also serves a diegetic purpose, too: the lyrics of the songs selected often reflect what is happening in the particular scenes over which they are played. So, for instance, Leitch elects to overlay an audio track of Lena's 1983 anti-war protest song, "99 Luftballons" (both the original and a slower, more melancholy version), during a scene in which the camera shows the innocent victims of nations in conflict and those who must endure the social, cultural, and above all economic hardships of times of great upheaval. Nena's song, of course, tells the story of a military general who mistakes ninety-nine children's balloons floating in the sky for uniden

The Queer Female Action Spy Hero in Post-millennial American Cinema

“…If Lorraine Broughton is a James Bond equivalent in the sense that she is a violent, elite, and unemotional superspy action hero, by contrast Delphine Lasalle fulfils the gender-traditional expectations of the Bond girl. As Katharina Hagen (2018) points out, in Atomic Blonde Lorraine Broughton's 'tough brand of femininity is augmented all the more because she is given…someone that she is charged with protecting and saving, and someone in whom she takes pleasure'. When viewed in this way 'Broughton really does become a "Jane Bond", a female action figure who is constrained by the mythic archetype of Bond, and who seemingly flouts conventions at the same time as she is forcibly consigned to a role long occupied by Bond's traditional brand of hyper-masculinity' (Hagen, 2018, p.4).…”