Skyfall: As Bond as A Very Bond Thing

I had the opportunity to luxuriate in a movie theater and decided that since I hadn't seen any but a bootleg of the first Twilight movie, I'd be totally at sea with Breaking Dawn 2,  so I and the hubs invested in a movie franchise we had a much greater investment in--the latest Bond.

It actually was, as far as being a Bond picture, something different, familiar, and awfully good. I didn't grow up with much of a feel for Bond qua Bond--as such, the movies were action flicks that mostly seemed instantly-dated--my youth was spent in the Moore-Dalton period, and I did look forward to the Pierce Brosnan incarnation if only because I was a fan of Remington Steele  tv show, and kind of thought he'd be a good Bond.

Brosnan was a great Thomas Crowne. He was a better than average Bond.

Craig is Bond I think even more than Connery was Bond. In his three outings, we've actually seen him age into the character, and in this film, his "James" is facing his mortality, as well as the mortality of his era of spycraft. We are invited to watch his "death" as the result of a not-very clean shot by his associate at the order of M, and the credit sequence with theme by Adele (one of my favorite current artists, no less!) is super-typical--the quintessence of Bondy-coolness:


The story is about Bond's attempt to resurrect himself in service of his country, even if he has, in the words of his superior, Mallory (Ralph Fiennes), "lost a step", and his loyalty to M (Judi Dench) is challenged as he finds himself risking his life to protect her against the madman and computer mastermind former agent Silva (Javier Bardem) who has a very personal vandetta against M as all she loves.

I don't want to ruin the twists, although other reviews very well might.  What I will say is that the character of M in Dame Judi Dench's hands is completely humanized in a way she wasn't in previous films. Also, as witnessed in No Country for Old Men,  Javier Bardem has no discomfort embodying a truly creepy villain--in all honesty, although I've seen this comparison elsewhere, I have to give it a Heath Ledger's Joker-like prop for being riveting. You wonder what he will do next. He can't not be watched, and he's difficult to watch.

The movie's arc takes Bond from his death in the initial sequence, to the place where he grew up--Skyfall, the Scottish estate of the Bond family where James lived until shortly after he was orphaned and then, shortly after, recruited, presumably by M, herself. There are themes of the cthonic, the subterranean, and the image of M as a "mother". There might be a question of whether Bond's easy love'm and leave'm sexuality is about abandonment issues, or maybe whether he loves country more than he could really love anyone in a conflicted way--that service is his sense of permanence.

There's a notion that the villain, Silva, is a kind of bad homosexual stereotype because there is a definite flamboyance and sexual come-on to Bond in his threats toward him. I'm conflicted.  Silva is above all an obsessive. If he was ever vain, he's disfigured, so he might be over-compensating. Having been technically exiled by his "death" he can create his own reality and push whatever limits he likes--does that include his sexuality? He used Severine. Is he--bi? (Vixen sucks teeth in surprise and goes, "Oh, wait?)  When he suggests he might use Bond sexually because they are so much alike, and Bond wonders why he's assuming this would be his first time, I'm actually more intrigued by what this tells us about Bond-- in either case, I think the threat of rape is a way for Silva to test Bond's limits and his reply is a way for Bond to explain he can deal with that (in Casino Royale, although he wasn't raped, he took one unholy fuck of a testicular beating.) If the homosexual overtones alarm anyone, it might help to note they resolve things over a nice glass of aged scotch on the head of a tortured girl used as the target in a William Tell shooting match.  (No one technically wins. She loses.)

Yes, there still is a bit of misogyny in the old franchise, although M and Eve (Bond's erstwhile partner) are well acquitted. I don't want to give anything away. We'll see more of Eve and Ralph Fienne's Mallory (I hope they keep Fiennes on)  and I like the young incarnation of Q--more down to earth and less outre ( guns and radios--not exploding pens--although he's supposedly a computer genius, I think he might have done something dumb while encrypting Silva's somethingorother map.  Just saying. But Oh well.)

Anyhow, there was a kind of continuity and reboot feel with this movie. It had lots of Bond traditions (an Astin-Martin?) and seemed to take us more intimately into who Bond is and how he got this way.

I enjoyed it and see it a good sign there's still life in the old spy yet.

Summer Reading: What a great week.

So, it happens that I spent the last two days experiencing my version of happy, which means wallowing in new book acquisitions. I got two books that I was very much looking forward to, and like a great big goober, I swallowed them both up at once and sort of have to reread them a bit to try and maintain my "happy" a little longer. I'm a bit like a baby crying because the candy she ate is all gone.

But it was good.

First up, I got The Apocalypse Codex, which is part of Charles Stross' Laundry books, which follows the exploits of pseudonymous hero Bob Howard, computer geek, civil servant, and necromancer as he goes about the not-especially glamorous business of preventing the Eschaton (or at least preventing the eschaton-minded from nibbling the almighty fuck out of our corner of the universe, or out of the heads of people who inhabit it). I love this series, and this book was no exception. Here, we follow Bob as he and some new (possibly recurring?) characters investigate a charismatic evangelist preacher who seems to be "saving" souls--for someone to eat?

I like that Stross depicts the supernatural spy in real world ways--having his regrets and night-horrors, being flawed and needing to explore why he does what he does. I also enjoy that he interweaves real-world history with real myth and fiction in a seamless package. I'm slavering for the next installment of Bob's adventures--and kind of hoping for more entanglement with the newer characters introduced: Persephone Hazard and Johnny MacTavish.--whose interactions suggest a wealth of standalone possibilities.


Another lovely read I gobbled was the Alan Moore/Kevin O'Neill graphic novel, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: 2009. 

It's kind of hard to square the world as we know it, 2009, and the world as our heroes (mostly heroines) experience it, in Moore's 2009. I would not recommend anyone who wants to read LOEG start with this--by all means, read every one from the beginning.  But you'll not be disappointed when you get to this edition, just, um, depressed. Moore and O'Neill's 2009 (sort of like our world, but I hope not--much grimmer) is ugly and it's implied that the ugliness of our world has much to do with the ugliness/crassness of our literature. As with previous installments of LOEG, there is some lit and cultural criticism. But the portraits of Mina Murray, Orlando (as a woman) and others make this an oddly feminist work.

I am really loving the emerging character of Orlando/Vita, etc. The three thousand-year-old warrior and hermaphroditic immortal really is the voice of this issue. Also, you might shudder at the implied villain.

I totally recommend both of these books, but warn they are so devourable you'll really need to either read all the lit associated (and good on you, if you do!). Or you won't--it's a free country.  You do you, m'kay?