FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Skyfall

Rant Number 512      30 October 2012

‘Think on your sins’ intimates online the terrorist hacker to Bond’s boss, sweet wrinkly Judy Dench. Sins indeed. Yet, Skyfall’s faults are not so much theological but cinematic. The tedium of those perfunctory, unreal car chases! As to Daniel Craig’s metallic, hard-faced and tight-assed acting, it is humourless, unsubtle – it palls. Still, James Bond is not boring to the priest. An old addiction. One he is happy to share with millions worldwide. Why, despite the flaws, Bond’s endless fascination? Hhmmm....Licence to kill and to love – Don Juan and St George, man the lover and man the slayer. A duality that did not seduce Schopenhauer: ‘Life begins in the lust of the flesh, the madness of carnal desire – it ends in the rot and stench of the grave’. Nonetheless, Eros and Thanatos are the primeval polarities around which human, animal existence must revolve. 007 embodies both, hence, arguably, his undying appeal.

However, in The Bond Affair the prolific Italian semiologist Umberto Eco nearly killed off our hero for good. The grave charge, the unforgivable sin imputed to Bond was racism. Based on an examination of Ian Fleming’s fine novels. (Damn it, I remain a fan.) Eco maliciously but correctly observed how all of 007’s villains are foreigners. Dr No, Mr Big, Blofeld, Emilio Largo, Le Chiffre, Hugo Drax, Goldfinger, Count Lippe, Rosa Klebb, Red Grant, Scaramanga and now Raoul Silva – none of them is British. Thus, evil=foreigner? Huh!

Actually, Eco mixed up two related but distinct categories. Xenophobia and racism are not quite identical. Many peoples and nations dislike foreigners. Preferring people of one’s own kind, isn’t that natural? On the other hand, racism of the skin colour variety, aimed particularly at blacks, is what upsets right-thinking white people. (Curiously, racism does not figure amongst sins in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.) But notice that, out of the rogues’ gallery, only Mr Big – ‘the first great criminal genius of his race’ – is black. Dr No is Eurasian, all the rest are as white as the driven snow. Blofeld is Greek-Polish, Largo Italian, Le Chiffre French, Drax German, Klebb Russian, Grant Irish. Few are of imprecise nationality or origin – Lippe’s eyes suggest a dash of Chinese blood - but, whatever they might be, black-skinned they are not. Instead, each exhibits some disturbing, small or large physical defect, from Drax’s dental diastema to Silva’s horrible synthetic mouth. Nice semiotic symbolism, illustrating the bearer’s inward, sinister oddness. Point made: Bond’s enemies are alien monsters, moral as well as physical. Crude but effective.

Pace  Eco, Ian Fleming’s Bond is not a skin racist. Because he is very much an English gentleman and a gentleman is not a racist. (Fleming was dismayed when he saw Connery cast as Bond – a working-class Glaswegian!) At least taking as a benchmark Cardinal Newman’s famous definition: ‘A gentleman is someone who never knowingly causes pain’, as racism obviously must do. Nor does Bond hesitate in bedding girls of the whole colour range. Nonetheless, in his aversion to outsiders 007 is very British. A paradox, surely, as Britain is perhaps the most welcoming, hospitable and generous nation on earth to foreigners. Tolerance and xenophobia, it seems to me, can be easy bedfellows. Britain proves it. So does Bond.

Alas, of another sin, anti-Semitism, the literary Bond is less innocent of. Goldfinger’s ungainly physique suggests some ‘Jewish blood’ and people whose names end in ‘ski’ and ‘stein’ are not always the most ‘respectable’. Only a few hints but enough to arouse suspicion, methinks. Of course, the cinematic Bond shows no trace of such prejudice. Wise career move. An anti-Semite would not thrive in Hollywood.

Like God, 007’s creator is a master of his craft. A daring writer, too. Which author would risk making a popular novel end unhappily? In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service Bond and Tracy (surely wedding a ‘Tracy’ means Bond can’t be a snob) have finally got married and drive off blissfully into their honeymoon when Blofeld’s Maserati screams past, a gun roars and Bond’s beautiful, newly-wed wife is shot dead. Superb! A finale that would have pleased Nietzsche: a love story’s predictable happy ending is something mawkish, false and Christian. Yet, the public demand it. Fleming showed real guts in defying his readers’ bourgeois expectations.

Ian Fleming, a naval intelligence officer, lived through WWII and the 1956 Suez debacle. It meant Sunset Boulevard for the British Empire. It was also the right time for 007 to issue forth from his creator’s pen, as Athena sprang out of Zeus’ brain in Greek mythology. As British power and influence in world affairs waned, the Bond cult arose. Brits, humiliated by their famed espionage’s dismal failure at spotting Soviet spies like Philby, Burgess and Maclean, craved fictional consolation. 007 provided it. Bond might suffer setbacks but he always got his country’s foes in the end. ‘Never go a bear of England’, he bullishly warns the dastardly, Hebraic Goldfinger, while also seducing lesbian Pussy Galore. False as a three pound note of course but people loved 007. They still do.

Where Skyfalls scores highest is with the villain. True, I usually tend to prefer the bad guy to the good one – the Nietzschean streak in me - but Javier Bardem’s Silva really upstages Bond. The man’s twisted ego conveyed by vanity evident in the tinted blond hair, his suave malignity suffused with campness, the natural Spanish accent: features that nicely emphasise the essential foreignness of another of England’s eternal enemies. The only mistake was to give Silva too obvious personal reasons for his grudge against Dame Judy. A genuine Bond villain’s psychology is best rooted in a wider, freakier, almost metaphysical lust for power and supremacy. The fault, I surmise, must be partly directorial. Sam Mendes’ insecurity with a Bond movie is apparent when he veers wildly from the tiresome trickery of explosions and superhuman stunts to the cheap pseudo-psychology of a bisexual Bond. Give me a break, man!

007’s latest avatar illustrates the myth of the eternal return. Cyclical, well-nigh eternal, Bond will always springs back, like a lethal, libertine jack-in-the-box. Maybe the next incarnation will give us a black 007. Well, why not?

Revd Frank Julian Gelli