It’s
unofficial, of course, but if you scrape just beneath the surface of Skyfall
(2012) -- the new James Bond
thriller -- the designation “M” clearly stands for “Mother” or “Mom.”
Unconventionally,
this twenty-third Bond film is a modern action movie concerning a mature woman
(played by Judi Dench) who has -- perhaps
not fully realizing it -- become the only parent to two grown and needy (or
maladjusted…) sons.
One
son, a man called Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem), has rebelled against his mother
for her sins, choosing to reject all of her lessons because he feels unloved
and abandoned.
The
other son, James Bond (Daniel Craig), realizes that this powerful mother figure
is responsible for giving his life some sense of purpose, and thus goes to
extreme, life-and-death measures to protect her from his enraged “brother.”
Also
-- and please make no mistake about this
fact – the new Bond Girl of Skyfall is clearly M, not Naomie
Harris’s Eve, Severine (Berenice Marlohe), or anyone else, for that matter.
For
the first time in Bond history then, the primary Bond/female relationship does
not concern sex or romance, but the maternal,
mother-son relationship.
On
these relatively startling grounds alone, Skyfall distinguishes itself from
the twenty-two previous cinematic installments in the James Bond series.
Delightfully,
however, Skyfall also thoroughly re-invents Bond’s place in the world,
lamenting the 21st century reliance on computers and unmanned drones
over “human intelligence” in the dangerous game of espionage. The film thereby forges the (the Luddite?)
argument that sometimes the old ways -- like
a knife in the back -- still get the job done best.
Skyfall also celebrates fifty years of James Bond movie traditions and history. Therefore, one can readily gaze at this prominently-featured
Luddite argument as a rationalization, as
a self-justification, in some sense, for the continuation of the long-running
franchise in the second decade of the 21st century.
Even
today, in the age or push-button soldiers, we need 007.
This
argument about the primacy of human values in the Remote Control Age is so exhilaratingly
presented that Skyfall often feels like a grand revelation. Everything “old” is new again, and this Bond
film brilliantly sends Agent 007 into a brave new world, even while
re-establishing all the old characters (like Q and Moneypenny) and old genre gimmicks
we’ve come to expect (like the Aston Martin’s ejector seat).
It’s
quite a deft balancing act, and Skyfall is at once cheeky and
legitimately sentimental in tone. It
would be easy to term so exciting and revelatory a Bond film the best series installment
in years, but Casino Royale -- just six
years in the past -- must still earn high marks for resetting the series,
grounding Bond, and introducing Craig. Without those accomplishments, the highs of Skyfall
might not have been conceivable.
Instead,
the arrival of Skyfall forces long-time Bond fans to concretely reckon with the
once-impossible-seeming notion that the Sean Connery Era has, at long-last,
been surpassed
Bond
is back and -- no hyperbole -- he’s better
than ever.
“Mommy
was very bad.”
Skyfall opens in Turkey, as James Bond, 007 (Craig) and an operative
named Eve (Harris) attempt to recover a stolen hard-drive that contains the files
of every undercover NATO operative working in terrorist organizations.
Eve is ordered by M (Dench) to take a difficult shot against
the possessor of the drive, the evil Patrice (Ola Rapace). But Eve hits Bond
instead, thereby losing the drive and an agent.
Some months later, Bond -- who is believed dead -- resurfaces when the MI6 building in London
is bombed. M escapes the attack, but
feels political pressure from Gareth Mallory (Ralph Fiennes) to explain the
loss of the hard-drive, and now a terrorist attack on British soil.
Although he is not yet physically or psychologically ready to
return to duty, M nonetheless sends Bond out to track Patrice. The trail leads Bond to Raoul Silva (Bardem)
a vengeful former MI6 agent eager to make M “think
on her sins.”
With Silva launching one terrorist attack after another -- all aimed at killing M -- Bond decides
to take his superior off the grid, and back to his family’s long-abandoned
country estate in Scotland, called Skyfall.
“Less of a random killing machine, more of a personal
statement.”
As I wrote above in my introduction, Skyfall primarily concerns
a family dynamic. In this unusual
family, M is the mother, Raoul is one son, and Bond -- believed dead but actually out carousing on the beach -- is the Prodigal Son.
Bond finally returns to save his mother’s life after Raoul enters
the picture. Apparently, Raoul has
interpreted M’s dedication to duty as a personal statement against him, a
mirror of Bond’s situation. Silva,
however, conveniently overlooks the fact that he was the one who first
transgressed on a mission to Hong Kong some years earlier.
Given this family dynamic, Skyfall also concerns
-- in a strange way -- the value of
forgiveness. Bond is able to remember
that M’s stewardship provided him a home and a purpose, and he forgives her for
ordering Eve to take a shot that nearly results in his death.
M is similarly able to forgive Bond’s trespasses and welcome
back the Prodigal Son, the boy who went out into the world with the inheritance
of responsibility and purpose and squandered that inheritance on booze, sex,
and scorpions.
By contrast, Raoul Silva -- who evidently still loves M (or
Mom…) -- can’t see his path to forgiveness, and remains consumed by overwhelming
hatred because of Mom’s abandonment.
This family dynamic plays out in Skyfall even in terms of
setting and locations. Bond -- a boy forever in search of the parents he
tragically lost in childhood -- brings M back to his family estate, Skyfall to
play house, after a fashion. There, 007
also re-connects with an old friend and mentor Kincade (Albert Finney), a
surrogate father figure.
The three characters -- working
and living together at Skyfall -- are,
briefly, a family, replete with a home and a hearth. Bond thus recreates the family home he never
had in his youth. Raoul arrives and
destroys that home, refusing to forgive Mom and rejoin the family.
In exploring this dynamic, Skyfall is perhaps the
most human and personal of all the Bond films.
It explores not only the elements of Bond’s tragic and lonely past, but
excavates the nature of his (violent) life in terms of how he sees his
connections to others. For Bond, M and
Kincade are the only family he can count on when the chips are down, though
there is the suggestion that Mallory may become a father figure as well.
Outside this dramatic through-line, Skyfall establishes a roiling
tension and competition between 21st century espionage and Bondian-style
espionage, which came of age during the Cold War of the 1960s.
This tension is expressed best in the quips back and forth
between the mid-life Bond and his young, new Q (or Quartermaster), played by
Billie Whishaw. Q tells Bond that “age is no guarantee of efficiency,” and
Bond’s response is that “youth is no
guarantee of innovation.”
In other words, a person with experience and expertise still
has something to offer in the world of espionage.
Q also comments explicitly on a painting in an art gallery where he first meets 007. The painting depicts a warship’s decommissioning.
“It always makes
me feel a bit melancholy,” Q opines. “Grand old
war ship…being ignominiously haunted away to scrap... The inevitability of
time, don't you think? What do you see?”
What Bond sees, of course, is that he is that old warship, and the one succumbing to the inevitability
of time.
He isn’t as young as he once
was, and he faces the possibility that he will soon be obsolete, outmoded in
the Remote Control Age. But the events
of Skyfall
prove otherwise. There is still
room in the world for Bond’s brand of “human” intelligence.
Even M gets into the act of discussing the present and the
past by quoting Alfred Tennyson’s Ulysses
at a critical dramatic juncture:
“Tho' much is taken,
much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved heaven and earth; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved heaven and earth; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
This is Bond’s gift to the world, and perhaps England’s as
well. Bond and England no longer dictate
the movement of Heaven and Earth, but their wills remain strong, and when
threatened, they will not yield. They
are, as they have been….heroic hearts.
The emotionally-delivered Tennyson quotation above thus
permits Skyfall to proudly re-assert Bond’s importance in the cinema,
and even Bond’s place in the world. Jason Bournes and Ethan Hunts of the world
be damned, there’s still a place for Bond, James Bond in the 21st
Century.
The battle between Silva and Bond is not merely one of brothers,
but of belief-systems, the film cleverly reminds us. Silva is the high-tech terrorist hiding
behind anonymous servers and diabolical hacks. Meanwhile, Bond is the old-world
dinosaur who still enjoys his Aston Martin’s ejector seat, and takes M off the
grid, to a brick-and-mortar home he hasn’t seen in years.
It’s digital vs. analog…and
analog carries the day.
The amazing thing is that in our convenient and robust Web
2.0 Age, we root in Skyfall for analog to win.
We long for the romance and sheer individuality of a character
like James Bond. He calls not upon
gadgets, tools, or software to win the day, but some deep internal reservoir of
individual will and discipline. We may
be constantly perfecting our tools and gadgets, but Bond has perfected his human
mechanism, and in reminding us of that, Skyfall has perfected the Bond
formula.
It’s appropriate that the last act of Skyfall involves an
all-out siege which is more Peckinpah and Straw Dogs (1971) than Ian Fleming,
because the analog world does feel, at times, under siege, doesn’t it? The Old Guard seems to be crumbling, a brick
at a time, and some people view this shift as the End of History, and not as
the beginning of Something New, perhaps Something Great.
In an age of irrational exuberance about gadgets, apps, and computerized
military capabilities, James Bond and Skyfall remind us that a reliance on
humanity -- on our experience and wisdom
-- can be the most potent weapon of all.
Here’s to another fifty years of James Bond and his heroic
heart.
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