Warning: Major Spoilers Below!
It should come as no surprise that Skyfall, the latest film in the James Bond series, is characterized by as much misogyny, homophobia, orientalism, and crypto-fascist ideology as its predecessors. Once more, the post-colonial crusader shags and butchers his way across the globe, resolutely defending the West from its own excesses and the menacing foreign other.
So what’s new? What makes this film different, either from its predecessors or contemporaries? The answer lies in the film’s main conceit: the waning relevance of the Bond character in the landscape of the modern security apparatus. The James Bond of the post-9/11 world signifies a different kind of “agent” than either his Cold War or Clinton-era counterparts,* an agent configured by the technological constellation of modern surveillance and military power. We argue that the millennial Bond is no longer an autonomous agent – but is now posited as the ideal cybernetic weapon of the modern security state: James Bond, always the consummate extrajudicial killer, has become a drone. But he isn’t just Jason Bourne -- programmed from the outset -- the significance of the turn lies in the fact that he was once other than that, a character celebrated for his idiosyncrasies, out-sized personality, and individual cunning. The loss of this Bond, or his relegation to a charming anachronism, is a reflection of the character of modern techno-war, but also of the turn into obsolescence, joblessness, and impotence that characterizes life during the economic collapse of our historical moment. Bond is not the pure automaton that Bourne is meant to be, but rather the old war horse that’s been awkwardly retooled to suit the changing (or vanishing) nature of the job, which includes reckoning with his own disposability. In that way, the film is explicitly situated at the convergence of the rise of the surveillance state and the maturation of cyberwar, and the austere realities imposed by the current crises of global capitalism.
High technology has always been as characteristic of the series as sex, violence, and English cheek. Technology mediates every Bond adventure in countless ways (a camera in the lapel pin, a rocket in the headlight, a nuclear device in the ambassador’s briefcase). The audience of Skyfall chuckles knowingly when Q, the MI6 quartermaster, issues Bond only two gadgets, in contrast to the usual panoply. His sparse kit consists of two rather archaic pieces of technology at that: a radio, to be used as distress signal, and a handgun. The gun is more complex than it appears, however -- fitted with a biometric safety and programmed to respond only to Bond’s touch, it is a cybernetic device that cements the bond between man and machine. The gun is an extension of Bond’s arm, or, more likely, his body is a vehicle for the weapon. (Q and Bond agree: “we still need someone to pull the trigger,” even if the rest of the process is automated)
The pleasure we derive from recognizing the way in which this film transgresses the conventions of the series replaces the fetishistic pleasure typically derived from the gadgets-on-display scenes of earlier Bond films.The gadget gag works because the audience has developed certain expectations about the role of technology in the films: Bond uses gadgets to get bad guys. The joke therefore calls explicit attention to the new technological reality expressed by the post-9/11 series: Watched over by a hyper-surveillant intelligence apparatus that relays orders in real time, and expected to perform with the precision of a machine, Bond is no longer merely a spy or a sex symbol or even an assassin, but a cyborg: an automatic weapon that also thinks – a mechanized organic weapon system. Feats of technological wonder, always central to Bond allure, are no longer performed on-site by the agent. The wonders now being performed are of a more computational nature - they are performed at a centralized location, among banks of computers, far from the actual site of conflict. The agent is still the beneficiary of technology, but it comes now more often in the form of data - where to look, which way to go, what decision to make, all piped in via earpiece. He no longer makes discretionary decisions, but is meant to function remotely, as an executor for decisions already made by technocrats operating at a distance. Having become a cybernetic warrior, Bond is as international as ever, but has ceased to be a mere man of mystery. He is no longer the user of gadgets, but is himself a gadget, networked securely into the landscape of global techno-war.
This iteration of Bond operates in a a world in which intelligence agencies have supplanted conventional militaries in many ways. The CIA doesn’t just steal attache cases and infiltrate sleeper cells anymore - led (until recently) by a four-star Army general, it conducts full scale, undeclared warfare with its own fleet of drones. As we’ve learned, the modern superspy lothario more likely resembles David Petraeus than James Bond. What a militarized intelligence outfit needs is soldiers, not individuals - and Bond is assuredly the latter. The changing character of intelligence agencies and of warfare itself necessitates a change in the character of its agents, and as the film itself stresses, Bond’s status as an “agent” has never been more in question. After he returns from a boozy hiatus, MI6 administers rigorous tests to adjudge his fitness for duty. He fails every test – physical endurance, marksmanship, psychological stability – being, as it were, insufficiently machine-like to perform under the new criteria. (only the unilateral intervention of his sponsor M gets him back into the field – for she, too, has a stake in the legitimacy of the “old way”). In her defense of her job before a parliamentary inquest, M argues that in today’s wars, Bond is more necessary than ever. With his agile mind and singular body, Bond can still go where the Her Majesty’s conventional armed forces cannot, just as the drone is the ideal weapon for cybernetic warfare: organic enough to fit into the tight spaces and to get dirty when necessary, mechanical enough to keep the handlers clean through remote command and control. (The MI6 of Skyfall is subject to censure from Members of Parliament, suggesting the way in which recent developments have wrested control of killing operations away from the yeoman officer caste of old into the hands of the civilian technocrat elite exemplified by no one more so than Barack Obama.)
In the elaborate chase scene that opens the film, Bond and Moneypenny pursue a man through the streets of Istanbul, micromanaged at every turn by M via satellite imagery. The mission goes awry as the agents venture out of tracking range, and M, although blind as to what’s going on on the ground, continues to anxiously issue orders and demand moment-to-moment updates. Finally, as Bond wrestles with the villain atop a moving train, she orders a hesitant Moneypenny to take a risky shot which hits 007 and sends him tumbling into ravine, presumably to his death, and allowing the bad guy to escape with the precious data. The catastrophic end to this mission is on one hand a failure of technology, an inadequately perfect link between drone and operator, and on the other hand a failure of M (herself a member of the old guard) as a technocrat, insufficiently adept at remotely managing assets. The tensions established in this opening scene run throughout the film.
Bond negotiates the new reality effectively because he maintains an ardent connection to the past. He shaves with a straight razor, acts on impulse, relies on his intuition. He insists that “the old way” is still necessary, indeed perhaps better, than the way of the computer programmer or the technocrat. This is always the craftman’s response to the process of deskilling. Deskilling is a technological process intended to drive down the costs of (and increase managerial control over) the labor process, and is therefore a key feature of capitalist organization. As a process, it takes several co-determinant forms, organizational and mechanical. A skilled craftsman (say a butcher) is deskilled when the task he performs -- dismantling an animal -- are delegated to several less-skilled workers (now “meat-cutters”), or to a machine. The butcher’s role is now performed by a meat-cutting apparatus, human and automatic, as tasks performed by human beings (“skilled” or “unskilled”) are ideally transferred, in the drive to diminish labor costs, to the machine. In the trajectory of deskilling, the craftsman becomes a line of workers, and the line-workers are replaced by robots. So the drone confronts the agent. A thousand technicians operating by remote are now meant to handle the job once done by the craftsman/killer. More precisely, 007 is now a killer drone in the hands of the programmers.
This is the key to Bond’s personal development (such as it is) in the new film, such that the millennial Bond more resembles George Clooney’s sympathetic axe man from Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air than he resembles Jason Bourne (already programmed) or the growing pantheon of modern (more autonomous) super-heroes. In 2009, amid the deepening depression (dubbed “recession”), Up in the Air asked us whether, since millions of people were going to lose their jobs anyway, it wasn’t more humane to fire them face to face. Clooney’s character is skilled in the craft of redundancy, deftly guiding white collar workers in the “transition” to unemployment (repackaged and sold as a bright new future). He is soon the target of the degrading redundancy process of which he is a master. The young new star of his “consulting” firm is introducing a computer interface (firing-via-Skype) in the fashion of an online call-center (once again the technological rationality of deskilling that threatens the craftsman’s autonomy is both organizational and instrumental). Confronted with his own redundancy in the computer age, Clooney’s character insists that he “old way” is superior, both ethically and in terms of product quality, a common claim when one’s job is being deskilled into oblivion. Bond, as a fellow craftsman and target of the deskilling process, may be a more pragmatic figure (having always kept apace of technological innovation), but he too must resist the more aggressive encroachment of technology by proving that the old way is still necessary. No surprise that Q, once the aged tinkerer and craftsman, has been replaced by the young computer programmer, as both victim and harbinger of the new technological order.
The James Bond of the Cold War was a suave and seductive gentleman -- as much a diplomat as an assassin, according to the (avowed) style of the global conflict. The game of espionage, at least in fantasy, needed him to negotiate calmly in the cold rooms and fire away in the hot ones. The modern state appears to have little use for such an idiosyncratic figure, preferring the managerial control implied by techno-bureaucracy and mechanical warfare. And so Bond must unite these tendencies with his own. Even his name – and of course the way he speaks it – has a unitary, verbal quality. Bond bonds. He unites the past and future, classic and modern, analog and digital – not only the spy and the soldier, but the man and the machine. In one sense he has always done so: his trigger finger has kept the Empire together ever since it began to fall apart. But the new Bond is a paradigmatic expression of that unity – he remains a killing machine (now with added emphasis on machine), but one which, confronted with redundancy in a computing age, must articulate a new synthesis. Predictably, the film comes down on the side of retaining some of the old ways, as much as it mourns their inevitable relegation to the dustbin of history. Film itself is, after all, an industry of craftsmen and artisans. Skyfall could convincingly be read as an anxious expression from former indie darling Sam Mendes about the future prospects of the film auteur in the age of the digital.
At the end of Skyfall’’s bizarre third act, M is dead, a casualty of the pitched battle waged at Bond’s eponymous childhood home in remote Scotland. The entire third act is an odd contrivance meant to rehabilitate the notion that there is still a prominent place for the “old ways,” but the absurdity of the film’s climax betrays the absurdity of the fantasy that these things can be maintained in the face of an overwhelming new order. Bond survives in the world of the film as a relic, a stopgap measure allowed to exist until the totally seamless automation of killing is achieved. For us, he survives as a pop-cultural relic whose exceptional resilience temporarily disavows our fears about being rendered totally out of place in the increasingly surveiled and jobless future.
- the FWPBI (Sam Connet & Logan Joseph)
*Although the final Bond film to star Pierce Brosnan appeared in 2002, we hold the three subsequent films (which feature the more mechanical action-star Daniel Craig, opposed here to the Brosnan’s suave “playboy”) to be more acutely demonstrative – and acutely aware – of the reconfigured security state of the post-9/11 era.
UPDATE: The authors are unsatisfied with their own omission of an unheralded, but utterly essential aspect of our experience. We attended the film's opening night in a sold-out IMAX theater in Midtown Manhattan -- all fine and good -- but the factor to which we really owe our enjoyment of the cinematic spectacle was our consumption of an ample and diverse array of, you guessed it: treats. during the film, we shared a medium diet coke, from the fountain (medium being the ideal size in this case: large enough to be shared, small enough to avoid overloading the bladder, causing unwanted treks to the lavatory -- of especial import as this particular film runs to nearly 2.5 hours). (the decision to go with a fountain drink, rather than a cheaper bottle from the store has to do with the peculiar conditions in which bottles of soda are often sold in new york city's many delis and corner stores. quite frankly, they are often found squatting haphazardly on corroded shelving behind flimsy plastic curtains in a dubiously refrigerated case. In other words, they are *just not that cold*. furthermore, a fountain soda can be much more enjoyable than a can or bottle of soda, a fact that shouldn't require any elaboration for fellow soda-drinkers and movie-goers). Alongside a small(ish) bag of popcorn from the theater, we enjoyed neat portions of chocolate covered almonds, this time smuggled in from the corner store. All were pleased by this combination, and vague allusions were made to "doing that [combo] again". there was also a small bag of kettle-cooked potato chips involved, which were enjoyed midway through the film, all of the other treats having long-since been consumed. These were "regular," ie salted potato chips, and were also purchased at the corner store, stowed in our belongings, and smuggled into the theater. but we're getting ahead of ourselves -- it must be noted that debates were had at the store as to the preferred seasoning of the potato chips, with my co-author and fellow FWPBI campaigning for the choice of salt & vinegar. although a fan of salt & vinegar seasoning, I vetoed its selection for the following reason: as we were buying an unknown, "off-brand" bag of potato chips, I found it too risky to select salt & vinegar, having been recently subjected to a badly overseasoned variety of such. My co-author relented, although he continued to maintain that our experience would have profited from the more adventurous selection, even commenting during the film something to the effect that salt & vinegar would have really "made" the evening. I, on the other hand, was quite satisfied at the time, and remain so as of this writing. -S
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