Skyfall: Worrying About the End

“This is the end,” Adele sings in the lush title song to the latest Bond movie, “Skyfall.” Apocalyptic thinking infects even our popular entertainments. And no wonder…Hurricane Sandy may have caused even global warming atheists and agnostics (I have had my doubts myself) to acknowledge at last that nature is taking its revenge on us, that flooded eastern seaboard cities may be our future. Terrorism haunts us still from the shadows. The bottom has fallen out of Syria and (as I write this) there is a real fear that Assad will use chemical weapons on his own people. The latest round of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has only just played itself out in Gaza (and no one even pretends to think there won’t be another round). Behind the Kubuki theater of threats and counter-threats, diplomacy and crippling sanctions, lay the real possibility of a military strike by Israel (with or without the overt or covert cooperation of the U.S.) on Iran, almost certainly igniting a regional or global war. And “fiscal cliff” is now on everyone’s lips as a reminder--far, far, far, too late--that what we call "our way of life" is not a given.

     

"Skyfall," the movie, worries too about the end—the end of the usefulness of human intelligence in the face of those enemies in the shadows who wreck havoc through cyberspace. Worries about the end of the usefulness of the double-0 agents, and of Bond himself, (played again by Daniel Craig, and looking in "Skyfall" as if the miles have begun to take their toll). And in a bit of self-referential mockery it worries about the usefulness against such an enemy of all those gadgets and devices that Bond has used for 50 years to dodge death and surprise his enemies. (“What did you think you were getting, an exploding pen? We don’t really go in for that kind of thing anymore.”) And the end really does come to “M” in a shootout at Bond’s childhood home in Scotland, an affecting scene (and for the sake of the series a sad one, since it seems that any movie with Judy Dench in it can never be a really bad one.) It’s also a bit disappointing to this movie-goer that the villain wreaking worldwide havoc with cyberspacial ease is not a politically or religiously motivated visionary with a global agenda, but a demented sociopath with a personal one. But that too may be true, in its way, to our apocalyptic fears: all of human history may be at the mercy of such types.

Well, this is a Bond flick and people come to the theater to get away from politics. And so of course Bond and his devices do emerge victorious (he’s even equipped with a 60s vintage hotrod with headlights that fire bullets). The series promises to go on satisfying audiences, with Ralph Fiennes newly incarnated as M. And then there is that theme song by Adele, which is its own reward.