The Sun (Never) Sets on the British Empire: The Neocolonialism of 'Skyfall'

Growing up, my little brother was an enormous James Bond fan. He rewatched the films repeatedly on video; he developed an encyclopedic knowledge of all the villains, plots, and gadgets from reading his glossy making-of books; and, in an anecdote our mother never tires of retelling, he wanted to be Bond “without the kissing.”

Thanks to his enthusiasm, and everyone else's moderate enjoyment, each new Brosnan Bond film was cause for a Family Outing to the cinema (and we have never been big on Family Cinema Outings; our taste in films is too disparate). For me, this meant a couple hours' quality nap time. I snoozed happily through Tomorrow Never Dies, The World Is Not Enough, and Die Another Day.

Me, watching a James Bond movie, 1997-2002.

Casino Royale, of course, famously upset some Bond fans who felt it was too serious, too Bourne-y, and unfaithful to the sense of fun that had always previously characterized the series. And maybe it is indeed a complete break with the rest of the franchise, because it's the first Bond film that kept me awake for its entire (bladder-busting, 145-minute) runtime.

Bond is a British institution, and every new film is quite the cultural event back in Blighty. It's a slightly different perspective from this side of the Atlantic, but in some ways the US is an appropriate place to be for the release of Skyfall: director Sam Mendes is a Brit, but he's most famous for a film with “American” in the title. This latest offering turns out to be not only self-reflexive on the half-century-old Bond film franchise itself, but also a somewhat disturbing meditation on Britain's role in the modern world.

Before I get into a geopolitical reading of the film, let's talk feminism: this is NOT a good film for its women characters. The Craig Bond films have been weird about women in general. They don't seem to be quite sure whether or not they want to get away from the traditional Bond treatment of women as interchangeable totty for 007's shagging pleasure. On the one hand, Casino Royale won feminist plaudits for recapitulating Dr No's famous Ursula-Andress-rising-from-the-sea moment with a ripped Daniel Craig in the role of Anadyomene eye-candy. On the other hand, Skyfall features Bond walking in on a former child sex slave in her shower, and that is objectively more squicktastic than most Bond seductions.

Even the one where he shags Honor Blackman straight.

Plus, without getting too far into spoiler territory, by the end of the film the role of women in the MI6 workplace is not exactly inspiring for one's feminist sensibilities.

SPOILER: this is the final shot of MI6 at the end of Skyfall.

Having said all of which, the film does focus significantly on one female character. Dame Judi is of course a British icon, and – particularly in the wake of the Olympics opening ceremony stunt – it's not a huge leap to see her M as representative of the queen (and, by extension, the UK as a whole): she's talked about obsessively as a “little old woman” who holds people inexplicably in her thrall and power, and unfailing loyalty to her is presented as an irrational but ultimately very British characteristic.

I should make it clear that I am not a fan of monarchies, empires, or jingoism, and that my own British nationality is so compromised by my third-culture childhood that it doesn't really have abstract, personal, emotional, or ontological relevance for me. As such, I don't care much for the endless, usually racist and Islamophobic debates over what British identity IS or whether the Royal Family is relevant (IMO: this, and no).

However, I do think that there is a very good reason for the continuance of these discussions, and it is this: Britain has never really bothered to process the loss of its empire.

By this I mean both that Britain has failed to properly grapple with or repent for its imperial sins, and that it has not yet seriously reconsidered its place in the current global milieu. The former is the more difficult task, and I still don't see anyone trying to do anything about it; on the contrary, imperialism, via western neoliberalism, looks to be reinscribed through the very public conversation on modern Britain's role that has arisen in the past few years. Between the Royal wedding, the Jubilee, and the London Olympics, Britain has begun to gain something of a sense of itself in the 21^st century, and I don't know if that's entirely a good thing.

The British brain. See, it does too exist.

21st-century Britishness is precarious and conflicted, but still deeply troublesome (and still, I think, built on a feeling of entitlement to control others). Skyfall beats you over the head with its theme of whether the Good Old Ways are useful in the modern world, but that's because this is a question that has plagued Britain since at least WWII. Bond first meets young tech-savvy Q in front of Turner's Fighting Temeraire, and the obsessive harping on the motif of Old vs. New doesn't get any subtler, between the callbacks to Bond movies past and the, well, explicit conversations about whether the old ways are useful in the modern world.

And yet the film has a striking caginess about the real world. The London Underground hijinks almost entirely avoid evoking 7/7. The villain of the piece is a former British intelligence agent with a grievance about his mistreatment at British hands, but he's played by Javier Bardem; and, while many of the world's countries have legitimate grievances about their mistreatment at British hands, Spain is waaaaay down the list. Giving the villain a purely personal grievance against M allows for a paralleled symbolism: as M represents imperial Britain, so Bardem's character represents any or all of the formerly colonized territories of the world.

The film chooses not to engage with the perspective of the colonized. Bardem's desire for revenge on M is a Very Bad Thing, and Bond takes M “back in time” to defend her. Bear in mind that I've been reading M as a symbol of the British Empire, and you'll realize that I do not love where this is going.

***Spoiler ho***

Bond loses M, but another M arises to take her place. The Union Jack still flies over London. MI6 still operates. The new M still has missions for Bond, offered in front of another painting, this time of an intact fleet of ships. The Good Old Way of territorial imperialism may be gone, but the same colonizing work can still be done – in newer, slicker, more insidious ways.

 

The top-hatted octopus-man is James Bond. Okay, it's not a perfect metaphor.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.