A story told well is one that reaches beyond its own literal limits, and gestures toward something worth having outside of these boundaries. For instance, later readers of ancient Greek and Roman epic were able to find in these stories — often grim stories about concrete affairs such as bloody battle and death — a way of speaking about their own psychological or spiritual struggles.
To bring things up to date with a more contemporary example, the work of Joss Whedon resonates with many from my generation for a similar reason. Most of us are not engaged in fighting vampires and hell-beasts daily, but a show like Buffy the Vampire Slayer appeals to us in part because we know what it is to fight our own battles, to wish we were normal instead, and to find solace in the oddest of quirky friendships and experiences.
Along these lines, I suggest that the most recent James Bond film, Skyfall, is a movie worth paying heed to, not only because it is simply a well executed film, but also because of its ability to reach beyond its own textual world toward matters of interest from philosophical, theological, and psychological perspectives.
With regard to plot, the film opens with two “deaths” — the apparent death of Bond accidentally at the hands of another MI6 agent, and a lethal attack on MI6 itself, directed at M, the head of the organization. The plot proceeds to reveal the source of the attack, not as a foreign agent, but rather as an ex-MI6 operative, a once Bond-like agent disillusioned by his experience with MI6.
With regard to characterization, a minimalist Q makes his first appearance in the films since Daniel Craig took over the role of Bond, and the character of M, played perfectly by Judi Dench, becomes a good deal more than a figurehead. The character of Bond is also deepened by an exploration of his past via a dramatic revisitation of his childhood home. The effect of all this deepened drama is to move the franchise back toward the emotional depth that made Craig’s first appearance as Bond, Casino Royale, such a successful film; Skyfall is worth seeing for this reason alone.
But what interested me the most is the way the film deconstructs and deepens a franchise grounded in the soil of a progress-oriented modernity.
This grounding is easy to see when we think of our typical associations with James Bond — stylish cars and gadgets, a near fantastic bravado that is (surprisingly) always successful, and binders full of sexy women who are certainly forgotten by the next film if they have not already been killed off.
Evil is an exercise in theatrics, a ridiculous endeavor performed by villains too foolish to realize that they are idiots to pit themselves against Bond. Like modernity, these films play out in the shallows of history, with little imposition from effects of the past, and little consideration of the future, except the optimistic confidence that everything will work out well in a world that trusts in techie gadgets and turns humans into instrumental targets or sex-objects.
It is presumably such elements that explain my failure to “get” the old Bond films. And perhaps changes in these formulae are the reason I do get the more recent Daniel Craig versions.
Casino Royale broke ground by introducing us to a dead-serious and emotionally vulnerable Bond, so that by the end of the film we feel that his loss is something more than the fantasy stage-props of a Bond set. And where this aspect was muted though not wholly absent in the sequel, Quantum of Solace, it returns, and does so well, in Skyfall.
Even more than Casino Royale, this is a film that recognizes that character is far more attractive and interesting than mere sexiness, and the film commendably makes women more than a mere backdrop for the escapades of Bond — M, played by the incomparable Dench, is given almost as much screen time as Bond himself.
Where the old Bond gloried in the ahistorical and timeless confidence of modernity and progress, Skyfall finds itself caught between the teetering abyss of a terrifying technological future and a sense that the past may be the only, if difficult and costly, source of hope.
The looming threat of technology is articulated by technological “quartermaster” Q, who notes that he can do more damage with his laptop sitting at home in his pyjamas than Bond can do on the field; the terror of this is brought home by the villain, who turns such powerful technology to evil purposes.
Conversely, we see a turn to the past not only generally in Bond’s reckoning with his childhood home and narrative, but very particularly in the final scenes involving a church and a salvific “Priest Hole.” A “Priest Hole” is a cellar for hiding priests built into the houses of wealthy English Catholic families (think of the Flytes in Brideshead Revisited) when Catholics were persecuted in England; it is intriguing that this unused haven from forgotten threats becomes more crucial in the plot than any gadget or trick.
There is also a scene in a church that in fact captures some of the gravitas that properly belongs there — though I do not want to press the imagery too far, is it perhaps just possible that Craig’s Bond films are pushing the restlessness of the character so far beyond its shallow boundaries that it can only find its answer in a church?
I don’t know, but what I do know is that I was quite happy to see a Bond film where the woman in his arms at the end of the film was not a shallow consort. “Sometimes,” says one of the minor characters in the film, “the old ways are the best ways.” “Not true,” I say, if by this we mean to compare the old Bond to the new Bond. But if what we are talking about are the old ways of the prescient histories that haunt the orphan-of-modernity Bond in Skyfall, I heartily concur.
