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Movie Takes
Skyfall
The great James Bond, as fantastic as ever, and even more pointless.
For my generation of adolescent boys growing up in the 1960s, the appeal of Sean Connery’s James Bond lay in his exemption from those ordinary rules of civilized life by which we were feeling every day more and more reluctantly bound. The fabled “License to Kill” was of course very cool, but pretty academic to most of us, I like to think. Much more to the point of our own lives, Bond also apparently enjoyed the license to engage in sexual relations with women who were miraculously unconstrained by the rule and custom which, as we had had to accept, necessarily prevented us and the girls we knew from doing likewise. How lovely to think that one might free oneself from that social context in order to go down what Philip Larkin, enviously looking at young people like me a decade later, called “the long slide/To happiness.” By that time, of course, we had been delivered from the old rules by the upheavals of the 1960s and Larkin was looking at us the way we had once looked at James Bond.
By all rights, you would think that the sexual revolution should have put an end to the Bond franchise. But the ever-less plausible willingness of beautiful women to sleep with him on little or no acquaintance for nothing but the pleasure and excitement of the experience itself somehow managed to remain an ideal state in spite of being unattainable in practice for those of us who, although theoretically “liberated,” remained unlicensed by the British Secret Service. Now that the series has arrived at its half century anniversary with the latest installment, Skyfall, directed by Sam Mendes, there is something rather perfunctory about the seductions of the current Bond, played by Daniel Craig — as if he regarded it as one of his duties to guard the reputation of the character for sexual magnetism as much as to guard that of poor, militarily enfeebled Britain for force projection.
At one point, for example, a tiny radio transmitter in Bond’s pocket on the other side of the world from the U.K. is able to summon three Royal Navy helicopters to his succor in a matter of moments — which is as much of a fantasy today as a world full of compliant females. But just as the sex in Skyfall (as in the other movies in the series) comes shorn of its still more or less normal back-story of courtship and social networking, so are the encounters with Bond’s enemies stripped of any narrative accountability. The fact is somewhat obscured by a bit of psychologizing in both cases. Sévérine (Bérénice Lim Marlohe), our hero’s most notable conquest, is a sex-slave now forced by nameless fears to work for the villain, Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem). Silva, in his turn, is a former MI6 agent who, having been sold out by M (Judi Dench) to the Chinese enemy, who were torturing him at the time, now seeks vengeance against her and against Britain. But that is storytelling as explaining when what is wanted is storytelling by narrative: not why something happens but how it happens. And how Bond seduces Sévérine or how Silva comes near to destroying both him and the British government are questions that any competent storyteller would want to answer but that do not appear to interest Sam Mendes or his writers.
This is not surprising, as movies in general these days, and Bond movies in particular, are little concerned with such questions or the sort of storytelling to which they are germane. We are warned at the very beginning of Skyfall that we had better not expect any narrative thrills — as opposed to the merely visual ones that are its raison d’être — when at the culmination of a long chase sequence, Bond is apparently shot by his own colleague, falls from a moving train and thence over a very high bridge and under a very high waterfall onto the rocks below — only to appear, after the opening credits and a song by Adele during which we see mute images of him on a beach somewhere taking his unexplained ease with only alcohol for a companion — back in London, reporting for duty to Miss Dench’s M. Amazing! How did he survive all that? Or so we may ask if we have the bad taste and the naive expectation of narrative coherence that the more sophisticated audiences for whom the movie is intended apparently do not.
It’s the same when the three aforementioned British helicopters suddenly and unexplainedly appear over an island in the South China Sea, or when Silva, having escaped from custody by means of computer wizardry (which nobody expects to be explained) and donned a police uniform provided to him by two of an apparently unlimited number of equally unexplained henchmen, shoots up the Palace of Westminster and then appears in his own helicopter (together with a great many more henchmen) at Bond’s ancestral home (“Skyfall”) in Scotland for the climactic confrontation. How did he do all that? Where did he get the men, the money, and the weaponry? How did he escape from the dragnet in the capital? Don’t be silly! He’s the villain. That’s just what Bond villains do!
The enjoyment of things, either sex or violence, which normally come only at the conclusion of a long sequence of preparatory events, only at the moment of their ripeness and without any of their real-world preliminaries must always have about it something of the feeling of a naughty indulgence. The secret of the Bond franchise’s longevity must be lie in this uneasiness of conscience. Our love of seeing our vicarious but more glamorous representative — all of whose conquests of both types appear to come without the more tedious and mundane sorts of effort that we know are required in our own lives — can only be enhanced when he is cheating an all too familiar reality by getting away with something he should not get away with. He is, in short, the perfect wish-fulfillment fantasy, though one that you might expect we’d have grown out of by now.
About the Author
James Bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of Honor: A History and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, both published by Encounter Books.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (22) | Leave a comment
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Freedomfighter_99| 12.5.12 @ 6:22AM
This is nothing new. it was years later that I wondered about the crime Goldfinger was trying to commit - to explode a nuclear device at Ft. Knox to render all of it's gold untouchably irradiated, making HIS gold much more valuable. HUH? It seems to me - I flunked my one year of HS chemistry - but it seems to me that gold - very nearly the elemental brother to lead - is probably very safe when exposed to radiation. And if not - who cares? All this gold just sits in the vaults - getting shifted from one pile to another as one nation pays a debt to another. So the workers now have to wear hazmat suits. Big whoop. THIS was Goldfingers big scheme? Let it pass... that laser table was so cool!
Gr0w1er601| 12.5.12 @ 8:37AM
"...No, Mr. Bond,... I want you to DIE!..." The BEST line in that movie!!
LarryK| 12.5.12 @ 8:49AM
Bond: "Do you expect me to talk, Goldfinger?"
Goldfinger: "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die."
gracielamiramontes| 12.5.12 @ 9:44AM
I just got paid $8241 working off my laptop this month. And if you think that's cool, my divorced friend has twin toddlers and made over $9k her first month. It feels so good making so much money when other people have to work for so much less.
This is what I do..WWW.youtube.qr.net/jOUs/watch?v=9xOf6Pe0ETk
Appleby| 12.5.12 @ 7:15AM
There was a really stupid TV program called "V" which originally ran in two parts as a TV movie. In one scene the Rebels who were living in really well appointed caves emerged -- perfectly coiffed, impeccably dressed and very clean and tidy -- to find a fleet of balloons waiting to whisk them off to wherever it was they were going (leaving aside the fact that balloons move very slowly, are exceedingly easy to spot, and there's no telling where they may end up), causing my sister and me to burst out laughing in our own living room. After that, every time some One Bound Jackery ("With One Bound, Jack Was Free!") occurred, one of us would say "Where did THAT come from?" and the other would say "Same place they got them damned balloons!" Later this technique was refined in the Indiana Jones movies, where (for example) Indy goes over a very tall cliff on the outside of a carload of Nazis, and within minutes is seen emerging back onto his jump-off point, battered but ready to continue. (The quintessential giggle in this scene is when somebody on the sidelines unseen throws his hat onto the set.) It's what my Dad called an Idiot Plot. Only something impossible can save Jack, and so something impossible happens.
SUBVET| 12.5.12 @ 11:05AM
What !!!!!!! no mormons today.........
fmm| 12.5.12 @ 7:48AM
The movie was decidedly more enjoyable and meaningful than this article.
Alan's Girl| 12.5.12 @ 2:00PM
My thoughts exactly. It's a fr***kin' movie, for gosh sakes!
Pecos Pete| 12.5.12 @ 8:02AM
Ben Stein went to the theater 6 times to watch, as Mr. Bowman says, "the perfect wish-fulfillment fantasy." And that says a lot about Ben.
Occam's Tool| 12.5.12 @ 1:04PM
It reflects Ben's economic theories as well.
Doctor_X| 12.5.12 @ 8:22AM
Suspension of disbelief is a term coined in 1817 by the poet and aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who suggested that if a writer could infuse a "human interest and a semblance of truth" into a fantastic tale, the reader would suspend judgment concerning the implausibility of the narrative.
I guess Coleridge was wrong.
squalis| 12.5.12 @ 9:36AM
Somehow I missed the quantum mechanics and theory of relativity discussions on Star Trek as to how moving faster than the speed of light was accomplished
Occam's Tool| 12.5.12 @ 1:05PM
Space Warp, dude. Advanced bullshitology.
Controse| 12.5.12 @ 11:43AM
If Mr. Bowman believes escapism is pointless he should not waist his time watching James Bond movies.
Who Knows?| 12.5.12 @ 11:56AM
Maybe you shouldn't "waist" YOUR time commenting.
Derek Leaberry| 12.5.12 @ 12:32PM
The current Bond film isn't even based on anything Ian Fleming wrote. The further one gets away from the Fleming vision and his prejudices, his forming of the Bond personality, and the world in which Fleming and his alter-ego lived, the more the James Bond series becomes pointless and banal, albeit a moneymaking franchise.
Mazzuchelli| 12.5.12 @ 1:53PM
I saw the film last weekend. A couple of visuals were spectacular, but that was about it. There was no true energy; just episodic improbabilities as Mr. Bowman indicates. Besides, the Bond franchise jumped the rail with the departure of Sean Connery. With just a few exceptions, the British male seems incapable of telegraphing the testosterone-fueled masculinity that is central to this role and that comes naturally to American men. I could walk downstairs to the technodweeb floor and locate a dozen guys more macho than Craig. He has the muscles but just doesn't seem to have the desire.
Seek| 12.5.12 @ 6:15PM
Another Old School purist. Bah, humbug. You must have forgotten the whole movies. Nobody messed with Craig's Bond any more than Connery's.
Abdullah| 12.5.12 @ 1:55PM
I did watch Skyfall, liked it actually. Then came home and watched "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy", a 1974 spy novel by John le Carré. I watch it every few years and like it more each time. You actually learn something about espionage and MI6 watching this one. What a rotten business and villains are almost indistinguishable from heroes.
Peppermint Tea | 12.5.12 @ 3:19PM
...and in breaking news, James Bowman opines that the James Bond franchise is political and sexual fantasy.
Ghost of Cicero (NB) | 12.5.12 @ 8:45PM
When I first heard that Craig was going to be the new Bond in "Casino Royale," I thought, HE'S TOO 'PRETTY' TO BE BOND!!!" Then I saw the movie. And I was a believer. To me, Craig brings an "edge" to Bond, a "hard-core killer" kind of attitude that one would EXPECT of what Bond was always meant to be: AN ASSASSIN!
Besides, in the Craig movies, they're driving Aston Martins again, which is a damned site better than a freaking BMW!!!
pomdter| 12.6.12 @ 11:59AM
My favorite James Bond movie is still Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang.