An analysis of Skyfall Stephen Wright http://overland.org.au/2012/11/skyfall-bonds-psychotic-misogyny/ Bond is a burned-out case, getting old, drinking too much.

. Chasing a MacGuffin-stealing baddie (Ola Rapace, last seen killing himself in the Swedish TV cop show Wallander), Bond is accidentally shot by the hapless Moneypenny (Naomie Harris cant shoot, cant drive) and believed to be dead. Bond of course survives, and realising what has happened that M would rather see him dead than see a mission fail disappears and hangs out in India playing dangerous drinking games and seducing unnamed Indian women. In a bar watching CNN, he learns that Ms HQ has been blown up. Back in London, someone is out to get M and probably kill her, after a long process of public humiliation. Bond has to re-submit to his secret agent tests to get his job back (lots of push-ups, shooting, and a psych evaluation that confines itself to word-association). M herself is also under threat professionally. MI6, she is told, is considered an organisation past its use-by-date in this era of democratic transparency (seriously). Of course M knows that out in the shadows lurk many enemies of the democratic project who hate our freedoms. One of the pivotal images in the film is of a China bulldog, pugnaciously Churchillian in expression and wearing a Union Jack, that lives on Ms desk. When Ms offices are obliterated, the bulldog amazingly survives and accompanies M into MI6s new headquarters in a wartime bunker once used by Churchill. Dragged before some kind of parliamentary select committee fronted by a government minister, M quotes the end of Tennysons poem Ulysses in reponse to the grilling she receives. It is her equivalent of Churchills We shall fight them on the beaches speech. Its an extraordinary moment, pitching Britains security services as Churchills heirs, as reincarnations of the Few yeoman protectors of the innocent public, and poetry the expression of their courage and resolution. The carping pollies ridicule her ideas, of course. Then the terrorists walk in and shoot everyone.

The Bond villain is revealed to be Raoul Silva, slaveringly played by Javier Bardem. Believe it or not, Silva is a white-haired whiz computer hacker. Whatever happens to Julian Assange now, he has been inscribed forever in popular culture as a creepy sexualised Bond villain. Silva is also a former MI6 agent and previously Ms favour ite before she abandoned him and replaced him with Bond. In other words, Silva is Bonds older brother or forgotten twin, as devoted to mother M as Bond is. Silva addresses Bond as James, unusual for Bo nd villains. When Silva asks Bond if he has any hobbies, Bond answers sardonically, Resurrection. Its the first appearance of the religious in Skyfall and a harbinger of things to come. It is Silva who directly names M as the symbolic mother of himself and Bond. Silva might be nuts but he at least knows a traumatic mental illness when he has one. Bond allows himself to be captured by Silva, who points out to Bond that M lied to him when Bond was deemed to have passed MI6s secret agent tests. She wouldnt lie to me, says Bond earnestly. But she did, says Silva: Mommy was very bad. Later in the film, when Silva has allowed himself to be captured by Bond and taken to MI6 HQ, Silva confronts M with her ruthless betrayal of him years earlier, which left him with a partly disintegrated jaw. Removing what ap pear to be dentures, Silva hisses Mother at M, but the word is almost inaudible and incoherent. Pursued by Silva, Bond and M head to Scotland to take refuge in the Bond ancestral manor, Skyfall, situated in the bleak Scottish highlands and constructed of slate and lichen. They get there in Bonds original Aston Martin, the one Connery used with the ejector seat and the machine-guns in the bumper bar. This is significant, as Bond has never been more Bond than when he is in a car full of gadgets, and the Aston Martin is more Bond than Bond himself. Where are we going? asks M. Back in time, replies Bond. And in fact the landscape around the Skyfall manor looks otherworldly, as if Bond and M have passed into another dimension. It also means that if Skyfall is trying to claim that Craigs Bond is Connerys Bond, well then Craigs Bond is about eighty years old.

So we have returned to the site of the original trauma, the bleak site where Bonds parents are buried lying beneath suitably spartan and spooky-looking headstones. Skyfall is of course the place where the sky fell for young James and launched the orphan on his career of murder and misogyny. Orphans, says M sinisterly at one point, make the best recruits. Skyfall is the paternal imago, so we know that weird shit is now about to happen. Given that the film situates word-association at a key point, and the only word that Bond refuses to associate to is Skyfall, its worth speculating on its associations. The firs t one that comes to mind is sky-father: father as God, as omnipotent, unreachable being, the archetype of the myth of misogyny. Skyfall is dank, abandoned and mouldering and has, apparently, been sold. Still resident, however, is the crusty old paternal gamekeeper Kincade (Albert Finney), who ceremonially presents Bond with his fathers still -functioning hunting rifle. With these reminders of the paternal (following Lacan again) we could at last expect a psychotic episode from Bond a non-Bond moment and thats what we get. Bond now has his Mother (M) and his Father (Skyfall) in one place, so shit is going to go down, and it is going to be spectacularly weird shit that hasnt gone down before. Kincade gives M a tour of Skyfall and shows her a priest-hole that leads out onto the moor, surfacing near the Bond family chapel. I guess this means that the Bonds were Catholics. When James parents died, says Kincade solemnly, he hid in here for two days. Wh en he came out, he was no longer a boy. And while one might conclude that when Bond em erged from the priest-hole he was a man, one might also conclude that if he was no longer a boy, perhaps he was instead a girl. Either way, it is the Bond experience of a religious epiphany. So now we have the religious again making its appearance, revea ling Bonds crushing of his vulnerable nature which he views as feminine, as all misogynists do. Then Silva arrives in a heavily armed chopper with twenty ninja commando thugs. Like some malevolent monster house of horror, Skyfall is booby trapped with nail bombs and so on by Bond and co, who, with the aid of the house and the Aston Martin, proceed to shred the invading ninjas. Dad has become resurrected resurrection being Bonds hobby and Bond pere is vengeful and cruel and unpredictable, as only the misogynist can be. In the course of the battle, M is wounded and she and Kincade escape via the priest-hole, the secret traumatic heart of Skyfall. After grenading the house and machine-gunning it from end to end, Silva has his chopper shoot up Bonds Aston Martin, which explodes. Cue Bonds final meltdown.

The gutting of the Aston Martin is the destruction of the Bond image, of the official story, of the false self that Bond has carried round all these years. Bond goes nuts. He ties a couple of sticks of dynamite to some gas bottles, mutters, I always hated this place anyway, and dives down the priest-hole, presumably his first return since the death of his parents. The cylinders explode throwing flaming debris at the chopper which spectacularly nosedives into Skyfall. Emerging from the priest-hole, born of the Father as it were, Bond heads out to the chapel, dispatching the two remaining ninjas on the way, but is beaten to it by Silva. Silva sees Ms wounds and clasps her to him, crying, calling her mother and attempts to get her to shoot them both with the one bullet. Before he can do this he suddenly straightens up with a large hunting knife planted in his back, courtesy of Bond. Bond cradles the dying M. The white-bearded Kincade stands with bowed head, like Joseph of Arimethea at Golgotha, and we are treated to a long shot, all chiaroscuro, of a Pieta. This time its the grieving child holding the dead mother. It looks like a scene by Gricault, and it is freaky and weird, and psychotically hallucinatory. Returning to Britain, Bond fronts for work, refreshed, and dedicated to a new M, Gareth Mallory (Ralph Fiennes). M is now s horn of its emotional context. It is just an initial now, the initial of a paternal figure. Bond has returned to the paternal, a ruthless, pared down, coldblooded paternal. Bond is robotic once more. This time, he is not the Bond who kills as part of a lifestyle of glamour. Now he knows exactly what he is doing. And he has Ms china bulldog in his pocket.