You would expect the title of the new 007 flick to refer to a hypertechnological orbital program of apocalyptic proportions, an update perhaps of the genocidal plot in Moonraker, as opposed to James Bond's abandoned family estate in Scotland. Rather than technological threat, we have the primordial stage of a cruel maternal intrigue, and all the better for it. The Daniel Craig James Bond films have always tended to displace the sexy surface of spy games toward psychology, what it means to be a man and an killer agent at the same time, except this time they got it right, and fascinatingly so. This voyage inward journeys away from the celestial surfaces of technological counter-espionage into the imperial archive: 007 and Mi6's identity crisis leads not to a retroactive justification of covert intelligence operations, but into that other world of "shadows" created by the intelligence agency, more specifically M (her majesty, mother, murder), in the first place. But let us begin at the beginning.
Maternal Betrayal. Opening sequence: M. kills James Bond. Setting: Turkey, the old underworld (struggling for admission to the EU, and the new cosmopolitanism that has no need for spooks).
Bad guy has a hard-drive with the names of every undercover Mi6 agent. 007 is fighting him on the top of a train. A second agent, Eve, across the way with a sniper rifle, is ordered to shoot even though she doesn't have a clean shot. She hits Bond and he falls into the river. Of course Bond is not dead, he is rescued by a woman.. the old story. Raoul Silva, main antagonist, who was once an Mi6 agent and was also betrayed: M turned him over to the Chinese during the Hong Kong handover. Except he got the bad end of the transference. The film's intrigue revolves around his plot for revenge. Against M (her majesty, mother, murder). James Bond, the good son, defends M to the death. Melanie Klein: "the infant directs his feelings of gratification and love towards the 'good' breast, and his destructive impulses and feelings of persecution towards what he feels to be frustrating, i.e. the 'bad' breast...The infant's relative security is based on turning the good object into an ideal one as a protection against the dangerous and persecuting object...It is characteristic of the infant's emotional life that there are rapid fluctuations between love and hate...the idealized object being a corollary of the persecutory, extremely bad one."
Relations with the mother have the advantage of being more radically uncertain than anything oedipal (which, as it goes, is pretty much the same thing every time). The confusion of love and violence. The necessity of making a decision with no foundation in law. Called upon by the Prime Minister to justify the existence of a field espionage activities in the age of tracking algorithms and satellites, M refers to a world of shadows that hides underneath the surfaces of visibility: the terror is precisely that we do not know who the enemy is. As case in point, Raoul, executing his assassination plot, bursts into the hearing room dressed in police uniforms. M's world is beneath and beyond the surfaces of information, uniforms, one in which one has to decide to "shoot or not to shoot" without probable cause. Which cannot be justified to civil society, except by the phrase: "what I see there terrifies me." But M's platonic terrortalk is undercut by the fact that here the terror is not outside, it is internal to the spy organization itself, its own history and betrayals. Good breast, bad breast, good object, bad object, good boy, bad boy. The maternal metonym becomes the only storytelling technique in a world where even spy agencies face the existential threat of austerity measures.
When M dies she is replaced by a man named Mallory. Who has his arm in a sling. A brave new world.
The gadget and the archive. A significant sequence occurs when 007 meets Q, the technologist, in a museum, where they both look at The Fighting Temeraire, a Joseph Turner painting depicting an old Man O'War being dragged off to retirement. Obvious metaphor.
The new Q, hipster computer nerd, hands 007 his weapons kit: a fingerprint operated gun and a radio. "That's it?" says James Bond. "What were you expecting, an exploding pen?" says Q, "we don't really do that anymore." Beyond being a comical riff, the downsizing of 007's arsenal bespeaks a more radical division of labor between the world of computers and the world of the field agent, whose function is demystified of it's technological excesses: he is a guy with a gun, a grunt, murderer with a license. The thing in itself. Hence the film's drive away from the technologized universe, in which nothing is safe (because it can't be "seen") toward the archive of her majesty.
The high tech Mi6 headquarters is destroyed by a hack into the gas vent system. M's computer is hacked through and through. The new headquarters are moved to a WWII bunker where, as it is said, "Winston Churchill worked." The film regresses (M: "where are we going?" Bond: "back in time"), into the depths of the 20th century, into the blood red sun of the British Empire. From the bunker to the countryside, to 007's family home, where the defenders are armed only with shotguns and dynamite against the enemy's helicopters. And the final blow is struck with a throwing knife..."sometimes the simplest weapons are the best ones." At a turning point of the battle, Bond blows up his own mansion, "I hated this place anyways": the final fight is lit by the red glare of Bond's burning house, of his childhood where he was orphaned, the blood red sun... This red sun makes the figures visible, as if it were the condition of possibility for the film, the entire Bond series. A haunting glimpse into the film's own historicity, and the content of Bond's identity crisis.
What gives occasion for this radical reflexivity? It is a critique of intelligence services while appearing to support it (there is nothing in the film that contradicts what Raoul tells Bond, that they, the agents, are rats trapped in a bucket who have resorted to killing and eating each other). But more profoundly, it brackets the twentieth century and its mise-en-scene, and, in a surprisingly lucid manner, tells us that the future is the past's unfinished business. Contrast the primordial mise-en-scene of the burning house with the fallen statues at Raoul's home base, hauntingly reminiscent of the dethroned statues of the former Eastern Bloc.
(Bad son standing in front of fallen statue on deserted island)
(A piece of Lenin's hand, from Theo Angelopoulos' Landscape in the Mist)
Skyfall hence stages the postmodern tale of maternal transference on the ruins of twentieth century dreams. Object theory would have it that the relationship to the maternal breast constitutes the distinct outlines of "objects" to begin with, objects which always have a good side and a bad side, and hence, we could say that really, the film is dealing with the twentieth century itself, as object, as something that the contemporary pair of globalization/terror cannot disavow, however desperately it tries.
The Three Asias. The film begins in Turkey, which appears as a worn out mise-en-scene, a part of the old underworld. Bond's second mission takes him to Shanghai, and the aerial shots of Pudong glowing with light tell us that this is the new technological future (to which the UK cannot catch up). Against which Britain retreats into WWII and Empire (interesting comparison here between the last two summer olympic opening ceremonies: as response to Beijing's digital spectacle, London proffers the industrial revolution). From Shanghai to Macau: an equally lit up universe, yet with traditional "asian" architecture. Macau remains here, and has been since the days of Empire, the casino of the East. East Asia is the place where "things happen"--it is the future that terrifies in its visibility, its unrivaled technological spectacle. It is double: glass facades of Pudong and the old East of sensuality and prostitution--Macau as Cathay. Here, we meet perhaps the most important character in the film (structurally speaking), so important that she has to be killed off before it is half over. Sévérine (Bérénice Lim Marlohe)--racially ambiguous, wearing just a bit too much makeup, black lips, fingernails a bit too long. She works for Raoul, who rescued her from prostitution. But she's lost faith in him and fears him, and wants to be turned by Bond (who doesn't?).
It is, of course, scout's code that all women in a spy thriller are only bad by circumstance and not by nature; they can always be rescued by the right man. She works with Bond until they are captured by Raoul. Raoul ties her up against a defunct statue, and invites Bond to a gentleman's game of who can shoot the shot glass of Scotch off her head. Bond misses, Raoul kills her. "Waste of Scotch" says Bond. Besides for showing that, for both protagonist and antagonist, women are playthings (stemming from the same mother complex), Sévérine's fate reveals what ultimately cannot swallowed in Skyfall's historical remediation. She is what has become of the old Cathay, from Orient-as-whorehouse to the a deadly, sleek, postmodern surface that nonetheless hides countless terrors within: Macau--Sévérine --Shanghai (we meet her first in Shanghai). Blurring racial identity and historical causality, she has to follow the path of all femme fatales in narrative cinema. The editing pattern of her death:
Raoul shoots.
Shotglass drops to the ground, unbroken.
Reaction shot of Bond, who says "Waste of Scotch"
Scotch, Scotland, Mother, Murder.
