SPOILERS - Continuities, Gender Politics & Spectacle in 'Skyfall'

SPOILERS

In this post I review the role of M and her relationship with Bond in 'Skyfall', in the light of some of my 2008/09 posts. (It's tempting to imagine that the film's creators glanced at some previous discussions on this site when making certain decisions, given how closely 'Skyfall' negotiates some of the issues we've discussed here in the past; though it's probably all just coincidence.) I also have notes on the film's villain, the Jaws allusion, Moneypenny, Severine, Q and Adele's title song.


M, Bond, Continuities and Gender Politics

Shady Tree wrote:

2nd Dec 2008 23:09

Is the M of CR/QOS intended to be the same person as the M of GE, TND, TWINE and DAD? I think that she can't be, as the franchise has been 'rebooted' with the origins of a new Bond. But the ambiguous stance of Dench's M towards Bond remains the same as before, as do her other personal traits and attitudes: so to all intents and purposes, she is the same character.[Edit]

In ‘Skyfall’, Ralph Fiennes’ character, Mallory, congratulates M on having had “a great run” in the job, suggesting that it's time for her to go. It’s as though he’s simultaneously addressing:

(a) Dame Judi Dench as an actor (she's appeared in seven consecutive Bond films);

(b) the 'rebooted' M of the three Daniel Craig films (who we know from her dialogue in CR has been in post at least since the Cold War);

and

(c) a popular memory of Dench's character, which ranges across all of her previous Bond movies and thus merges together (i) the M of the Craig films, and (ii) the 'pre-reboot' M of the Pierce Brosnan films (a successor to Bernard Lee's M, whose portrait hangs in the background of an MI6 venue in TWINE. When, in 'Skyfall', M makes a knowing reference to the vintage Aston Martin DB5's ejector seat, it's almost as if the film has realigned her with 'pre-reboot' continuity. Come to think of it: is the DB5 in 'Skyfall' meant to be the same one that the newly promoted 007 of CR won from Alex Dimitrios, with a few modifications added? Or is it, by a sleight of merged continuities, meant to be the same vehicle in which the earlier Bond raced around during TB and GE, preserved in MI6 storage?)


By the end of ‘Skyfall’, Fiennes himself has taken up the mantle of M. The final moments of the film make it clear that Fiennes' lineage in the role extends back through the whole fifty years of the franchise: we see him as the new M in a version of M's office dressed as it used to be in the early Bond films featuring Bernard Lee, complete with leather padded door and hard copy dockets marked 'Top Secret'. One point niggling me, though, is that I thought that Mallory started out in the film as a government minister - which would make him an elected politician - rather than as a senior civil servant / retired officer, of the sort who might indeed be eligible for appointment to M's executive role. (I'll have to check on Mallory's status during a second viewing; I may be mistaken.)

Shady Tree wrote:

7th Jun 2009 14:15

Judi Dench was great casting as M and, as an actor, she's done excellent work with whatever has been written for her. The way she was set up in GE and TND - as a notional "evil queen of numbers" who actually had much more to her than an accountant's mind-set - was very well conceived. A problem with the writing since then - most evident in DAD and QOS - is that M's continual lurching between her attitude of, "Call Bond off - he's a liability," and her other attitude of, "I'll trust him and back him up, because he's my agent and, at the end of the day, I privately respect his instincts," has become rather jarring and cliched.

2nd Dec 2008 21:36

An aspect of continuity between CR/QOS and DAD is the stale and wearisome dilemma afflicting Judi Dench's M - i.e., whether to trust Bond or whether to write him off as a liability ("Restrict Bond's movements!" Yawn!) M's wavering, two-sided handling of Bond seems to be an element carried over to the re-boot.[Edit]

In ‘Skyfall’, mutual understanding between Bond and Dame Judi's M is by far the more prominent element. If M has cause to doubt whether the resurrected Bond is fit for service, questions about her own fitness to continue in her role are asked by her government superiors, including Mallory. Following the loss of the confidential file and the attack on MI6 headquarters, a belligerent government enquiry into M’s running of the Secret Service puts her judgment in question (as she might have been questioned in TWINE over her compromising personal interest in/past handling of Elektra King). M is clear that she’s done her duty – and events prove her right - but she harbours regrets over the deaths she thinks she's caused. The fact that in 'Skyfall' both Bond and M stare into the abyss draws them closer together, and Bond ultimately has faith in her. When he observes “you did your job” he’s supporting her not only in having stood her ground against her government critics but also, perhaps, in the decision she made to order Eve Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) to ‘take the bloody shot’ which accidentally took him out. He's loyal to M despite his initial argument with her over that decision - and despite the residue tension expressed during his psychological assessment when he makes a comic association of the letter “M” with the word “bitch”.

Shady Tree wrote:

2nd Dec 2008 23:25

The M of GE calls Bond a "dinosaur" (implying that Brosnan's Bond is the same guy as the Bond in all the earlier movies), whereas the M of CR/QOS is testing out her Bond, a new Bond, as an agent only recently promoted to Double-0 status.

It's interesting that in QOS, during a conversation between Bond and Camille, Bond refers to M as a "friend" who'd like to think of herself as his "mother" - and he smiles as he says this. It’s a moment which implies that there's a lot of water under the bridge between these two characters, even though we know that Craig's Bond has only recently obtained his license to kill.

As for Dame Judi, I admire her as an actress, but I think that M is limited as a character and that there is only so much that can be done with her. (TWINE stretched the character's potential about as far as it can go, giving Dame Judi her best material in the part.)[Edit]

I can now take back that last comment. In the final act of ‘Skyfall’, Judi Dench’s and Albert Finney’s characters virtually become surrogate parents for the orphaned Bond, helping him fight off the villain’s assault in his eponymous childhood home. During the gunfight, M sustains an injury which will soon prove fatal. As Bond mourns M, his heartfelt sorrow implies more strongly than in previous films that she's essentially a maternal figure to him. By contrast, in an almost Shakespearean twist, Javier Bardem's villain, Silva, is like M’s ‘bastard son’, a malcontent assimilating to himself the antipathy towards 'mommy' which Bond may have occasionally felt in the past - and amplifying it to grotesque, villainous proportions.

Shady Tree wrote:

7th Jun 2009 14:15

Yes, I think it's time for an assassination of M... an episode which, if Quantum were responsible, would give them real clout, and which would give Dame Judi the honour of a memorable exit from the series. Two films from now, with a new M (I think it should be a man again), we could maybe get a new Moneypenny and a new Q (bring back John Cleese?) as a bonus to keep the nondescript Tanner company.

Well, it wasn’t exactly an assassination – that would have given the villain too much satisfaction ahead of his own demise - but Dame Judi does get to perform M’s death, cradled by a distraught Bond. As an acclaimed thespian it was only right that she was given the opportunity to perform a tragic ending for her character. In Britain, at least, audience reception of the upbeat 007 sketch for the London Olympics Opening Ceremony, in which Craig's Bond meets HM Queen Elizabeth II and escorts her to the festivities, has the collateral effect in 'Skyfall' of imbuing Dame Judi's M with something akin to national heritage status: her own matriarchy parallels the Queen's and is in service to it. It's true that the implied link between M and Her Majesty is mocked in the graphics which Silva sends to M's hacked computer, obliquely recalling The Sex Pistols' 'God Save The Queen' punk imagery, but overall the year of the Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics forms a context which helps explain why M's decline and demise in 'Skyfall' seem so poignant. It also ties in with a greater use than in previous Bonds of British locations, i.e. London and the Scottish Highlands.

Dame Judi's heir is a man: Fiennes is perfect casting as M. I suppose I should be pleased that some of my wishes as I outlined them in my post of 2009 have been fulfilled: but maybe it’s a case of ‘be careful what you wish for’. Stella Rimington, the real-world former Head of MI6 (on whom the Judi Dench M was partly based in the 1990s), is reported to have said how sad she felt that ‘Skyfall’ ends as it does. She could be forgiven for asking whether decades of improved workplace equality are being negated in the fantasy world of Bond by the film's deliberate reversion at the end to a patriarchal Secret Service set-up, circa the 1960s. Sure, the closing references to vintage Bond tick all my fanboy boxes, but when the capable, action-oriented Eve Moneypenny leaves ‘the field’ to retreat to the role of a 60s-style secretary for the new male M (literally occupying the position of Lois Maxwell’s original Miss Moneypenny) this seems disturbingly regressive in terms of gender politics. It's a piece of retro business which has the gloss of Matthew Weiner's 'Mad Men' but without the same sense of critical irony.

That said, director Sam Mendes, the movie's writers and actress Bérénice Marlohe make a challenging and interesting decision to deconstruct another Bondian archetype - the villain's glamorous 'kept woman' - through their unsettling depiction of the character of Severine, showing her as a fatalistic, damaged victim of sex-trafficking; shot in cold blood without a sense from anybody on screen (not even Bond) that her death particularly matters. Severine is an edgier, nervy take on what an abused woman like Andrea in TMWTGG or Lupe in LTK might have looked like in sordid reality. Her very name is an allusion to De Sade. With her French accent and dusky looks Severine also recalls the dark side of Vesper, broken and neurotic. 'Skyfall' lacks a traditional Bond heroine, but its representations of women are thus divided interestingly - and problematically - between Severine and the new angles on Moneypenny and Judi Dench's M.


The Villain

Shady Tree wrote:

30th Sep 2008 23:02

It's easy to overlook the potential for creepiness and scariness that Jaws had in 'The Spy Who Loved Me' - especially in the earlier scenes set in Egypt - because our collective memory of the character tends to be filtered through the broad comedy of his later appearance in 'Moonraker'.

In the right hands, a rebooted Kiel-Jaws could become a credible adversary of Craig's Bond - similar to what the Dark Night's Joker is to the Joker of the 60s TV version of Batman. In fact, I could just hear Craig, if asked whether he knows this larger-than-life assassin, deliver an old line of Roger Moore's in his own steely, wry style: "Not socially. His name's Jaws. He kills people."

Javier Bardem has said in interviews that ‘Moonraker’ was the first Bond film he saw, and he’s spoken of his admiration for Richard Kiel’s classic henchman, Jaws. In 'Skyfall', Silva's face is held intact only by a steel plate inserted in his mouth; when he removes the plate his face collapses. This creepy allusion to Jaws is one of many rewarding moments in Bardem's performance. He gives us more than a hint of 'The Dark Knight''s Joker, too (as with his self-indulgent push-button precipitation of the tube train crash); and there are shades of other Bond villains such as Trevelyan (a former operative of the Secret Service turned bad and vengeful), Renard (physically maimed), LeChiffre (having Bond tied to a chair), Scaramanga (his apparent enjoyment of Bond's company when he has him at an advantage), Charles Gray's Blofeld (camp), Greene (sleazy), Grant (bleached blonde hair), Largo and Drax (shooting as sport: from clay pigeons to pheasants to Severine) and Kristatos (killed by a knife thrown into his back). Silva's chilling tale about rats conditioned to eat their own kind is not only highly Flemingesque but also reminiscent of the cinematic Blofeld's observations about his Siamese Fighting Fish in FRWL. Yet Silva is at his creepiest when he's coming on to Bond. Bond rebuffs him with a throwaway suggestion that succumbing to his sexual advances wouldn't necessarily be the "first time" that he, Bond, has had an homosexual experience. This isn't really an attempt by the writers to subvert the heteronormative values of the Bond world: the ironic humour of the line merely reflects Craig's Bond's implacable confidence in his own red-blooded heterosexuality. Still, it's an amusing response which lightly recalls the homoerotic tension in CR's torture sequence.


Q, Austerity, Excess and Spectacle

Ever since Alec McCowen's entertaining performance as Q in NSNA - complaining in his cockney accent about the impact on his work of budgetary "cutbacks" - there's been humorous potential in introducing a Q purposely unlike the much-loved Desmond Llewelyn's version. (One problem with John Cleese's short-lived turn, in TWINE and DAD, is that he is in some ways too much of the same stock as Llewelyn.) I'm therefore quite happy that the new Q is personally unprepossessing and remarkably young, conforming to a modern stereotype of the genius techno kid but without being too much of a caricature. In a way which again puts me in mind of Alec McCowen's gripes against "cutbacks", 'Skyfall' reflects, indirectly, the economic 'austerity measures' which in the real world are putting the brakes on consumerism in large parts of Europe - including the UK and Spain (Bardem's/Silva's country of origin). The jokey lines in 'Skyfall' that one of Q branch's life-saving gadgets is simply a radio, and that 'we don't do exploding pens anymore' (a reference to GE), indicate a new minimalism. This isn't the first time that the Bond series has eschewed gadgetry as a reaction against past excesses (cf. FYEO after MR), but the current real-world climate of 'austerity' gives it all an extra resonance. The crumbling desolation of Silva's island, the daily grind of rainwashed London life, the barren surroundings of Skyfall and the return, at the end, to the Secret Service's small-scale, lo-tech/no-tech office spaces of vintage Bond films all resonate, too, with notions of 'austerity'.

If the world's emerging centres of economic growth are in the Far East, it's significant that 'Skyfall''s most glitzy, escapist locations are Shanghai and Macau. For Bond's final scrape with Patrice, spectacularly silhouetted against Shanghai's skyscaper lights, all that's missing is some lavish John Barry-style music - and no, I don't just mean the James Bond Theme. (Here, as elsewhere in the movie, Thomas Newman's generic action score is seviceable but repetitive and insufficiently Bondian.)

The pre-credits chase sequence in Turkey combines, oddly, the high standard of stuntwork established for the Craig films by the parkour sequence in CR, with moments of partial throwback to a comic exoticisation of foreign cultures last served up (in more cartoonish forms) in late 70s/mid 80s chase scenes such as Bond's and Vijay's escape through the colourful Indian bazaar in OPY. Yet 'Skyfall''s pre-credits sequence, culminating in the fight between Bond and Patrice atop the train, remains the action highlight of the film - a breathtaking set piece which is arguably positioned too early in the film (as was the problem in TWINE, with its 'Follow that!' pre-credits boat chase).


The Title Song

Adele's song is a success. As someone who prefers a respectable pastiche of John Barry's classics to more experimental tracks, I welcome this one as the most Bondian of Bond songs since David Arnold's 'Surrender' and 'The World Is Not Enough', though it's not as complex as either of those. (Having said that, 'You Know My Name' nailed it as CR's opener, and I've recently grown to appreciate Jack White's 'Another Way To Die' in a way I wouldn't have thought possible when I first heard it, dismayed.)
In the tradition of Bondian vocalists, Adele is an appropriate choice - though musically there's perhaps an overdependence on a piano arrangement of The James Bond Theme bass line as the spine of the first minute and 20 seconds of the track. I'm not too sold, either, on the choral echoes which come in later (they're a little too cheesy, in a light entertainment, sing-along, 'X Factor'-ish sort of a way). The final note of mounting menace provides a bridge back into the film and puts me in mind of similar effects in 'Scaramanga's Fun House'.

Adele gives more than a nod to Shirley Bassey - as at 0.40/0.41, where she races to and draws out the consonant "n" in the "count" of "and count to ten". But also, perhaps, her affectation of a catch in her voice at 1.13/1.14, as she enunciates the 'e' vowel sound of "them" in "So overdue I owe them", is a passing homage to Amy Winehouse's trademark vocal style. Adele's performance and the essential melancholy of the song make me think, actually, how unlucky we are that Amy Winehouse never did perform a Bond ballad, as at one point was the intention. I'm moved by the gothic, funereal elements in Danny Kleinman's main title sequence to wonder again about the Bond song contribution-that-never-was from the late 'Back to Black' singer. But it's great that we've got Adele for this one.