Skyfall (2012)

One of those movies ripe for intertextual interpretation, all those references to the gadgets, Bond’s Astin Martin car, musical motifs—topped by Adele’s velvet-blade “Skyfall” lyrics—, spy-culture motifs like the cyanide capsule, the “cut-throat razor,” and glamorous settings  . . . of earlier Bond films and how they turn critic on themselves and, especially, on the post-cold-war MI6 media-saturated culture. I’m sure film/lit/culture critics are already presenting papers and publishing interpretations on the self-reflexivity of the film and the thematic richness that this Bond installment can boast. I’m especially taken with the postcolonial subtext suggested by the Ralph Fiennes’ Gareth Mallory character (who has served in the Special Air Service and been held hostage for a time by the IRA), the unnamed-until-the-end Eve Moneypenny (Naomie Harris), and the colonialist Scottish location. The plot, itself, points to the British Empire’s end of days when both media and governmental investigative powers question the need for a 21st-century spy organization. Much is made of the shift, from the empire threatened by other empires (the old U.S.S.R., China, North Korea storylines) to near-untraceable threats from an individual terrorist.    

And M’s flag-draped bulldog provides humor about the  even as she, the tragic figure of empire control, stumbles inexorably toward her demise. Again, that self-reflexive quality of the film is evident, both in the way Judy Dench plays the doomed M and in the figure of the ceramic bulldog, which inexplicably survives an explosion that destroys MI6 headquarters. The self-reflexive irony is completed as the shadowy terrorist is revealed, a vengeful agent that M has sold out years ago.    

And this leads to another compelling theme, the orphan/mother (or is M more paternal than maternal) relationship between agent and empire. The emotional depth of the film (typically missing from most of the earlier Bond films) is provided by the tensions between Bond, orphaned in childhood, and M (she ordering Eve Moneypenny  to “take the shot” in a fight scene that puts Bond in front of the bullet) and between M and the terrorist Raoul Silva or Tiago Rodriguez (played by Javier Bardem), who calls her “Mommy.” The parent/child theme intersects with the end-of-empire theme as Bond returns to “Skyfall,” is Scottish home.

There, Silva and his high-tech military weapons are bested by the low-tech innovations of Bond, M, and the groundskeeper of Skyfall, played by the classic film artist Albert Finney. The intertextuality of old-style Bond film and this new, more emotionally relational Bond style is developed fully here, coming full circle from the early part of the film when Quartermaster (Ben Whishaw) gives Bond a low-tech “standard radio transmitter” and spits out, “You were expecting an exploding pen? We don’t really go in for that anymore. . . . Please return the equipment in one piece.” What can Bond— the “old dog” with “new tricks,” as Eve Moneypenny puts it—say  but “Brave new world.”