Skyfall: Bond vs. Belial

I don’t normally think of the Holy Spirit as a bearded Scotsman with a sawn-off shotgun. I also rarely see a movie as thick with Christianity as Skyfall.

I never went scavenging for Christ figures in the Lord of the Rings, and it would be wrong to say Skyfall “had Christian themes,” as if the directors had sat down and sketched out the prepackaged problem, the gospel message, and Bond’s conversion experience in advance. Rather, at the climax of Skyfall, I felt that I was actually watching the drama of the Gospel unfold.

I also felt like I was crazy. Since seeing the movie I’ve read reviews that criticize the plot and characters as unoriginal and ask when the Bond franchise is going to wake up to its eternally unsavory treatment of women. I’ve been more absorbed by the movie’s symbolic qualities, but I should acknowledge those reviews because they helped me understand what my analysis was not—and also offered a clue to the sense of bleakness that ensued from thinking too long about certain aspects of the film.

The narrative of Skyfall is a triumphal rejection of paganism. What it says about life and death, love and hate, sin and judgment and redemption, is so emphatically Christian that it felt lifted from the pages of medieval theology. You don’t have to see the movie this way, but it doesn’t take much mental exertion to do so if you recognize the villain. What the story did with him was bound to be important, just because of the characteristics he possesses.

Silva is a man of the world: smooth-tongued, seductive, brilliant, urbane. He controls a global operation of spies and intrigues, rigs elections and ends lives with a wave and a yawn, and lives as a law unto himself. England and the empire are jokes to him. He is the accuser, hacking into M’s computer and conscience to tell her to “Think on your sins.” And for all his polish, he’s demonic:

“[Even] the use of electricity may be ‘demonic,’ as in fact may be the use of anything and of life itself…[T]he experience of evil which we call demonic is not that of a mere absence of good, or, for that matter, of all sorts of existential alienations or anxieties. It is indeed the presence of dark and irrational power” (Alexander Schmemmann).

It’s no coincidence that Silva is totally dependent on force. His clockwork of computers and mind games boils down to control. In every way, Silva matches the character of Satan in classical and medieval theology and literature: scoffer, accuser, warlord, gentleman—a genius only able to corrupt, not create. So what do you do with the devil?

This is where Bond comes in. Early in the film, he’s mired in reckless dissipation. When he comes back from the dead and back on duty in the face of a shadowy but personal threat to M and MI6, he is still struggling with M’s earlier betrayal and the effects of living for himself: substance and alcohol addiction, a deterioration from his machine-like physical condition, and a disdain for authority rooted in “psychological issues from his childhood.” He may have skirted death, but he hasn’t found newness of life.

Nevertheless, he begins hunting down the threat. Eventually he meets the mastermind (Silva), who plays with his confidence, shows off his own strength and the bizarre wreckage of an island from which he brings his twisted fantasies to life, and even invites (then threatens to coerce) Bond to join his side.

Bond’s response to this situation is clever, but not morally compelling. In a distasteful sequence involving a waste of trust and a woman’s life, Bond relies on his wits and training to spring Silva’s trap and take him back to England. As ugly as this moment is, it’s the point where he declares himself as Silva’s enemy. Whether he can outsmart the villain or not, he’s picked a side.

Back in London, M and Bond find out Silva is still playing his own very planned out game. When the technological wiles of MI6 fail to exorcise the demon, Bond realizes their conflict is about more than which spider has the cleverer web. The real question is whether loyalty can withstand blind force and impersonal hatred. So Bond changes the battle. He goes off the grid and into his past, luring Silva to his fortress of a childhood home. Some viewers found this implausible. Fine, but the symbolism starts to get really interesting. Here we find out that Bond is an orphan, and M recruited him to the Secret Service from the Scottish moors.

Arriving at the mansion, Bond and M find an unexpected companion: the old gamekeeper, Kincade. When Bond tells Kincade the upcoming showdown “isn’t your fight,” Kincade answers, “Try and stop me, you uppity little shit.” Out of childhood, out of the shadows, out of the past, enter the Helper—one who has become unfamiliar but who knows the orphan as well as he knows himself, and will care for the widowed M in her distress.

When Silva arrives, Bond is no longer impressed with his wiles and force—he actually rolls his eyes at the overbearing mode of Silva’s approach. M, the defender of Britain, is defenseless. Her job is execute Bond’s plans and flee at the right moment, with Kincade’s help, to the estate’s old chapel. Bond has taken her place as defender. In defending M, he defends Britain; in defending both of them, he also defends his mother. The orphan is fighting for natural affection, safety for the widow, and kingdom against chaos. Everything Silva laughed at, Bond has owned. This isn’t just the settling of an old score—this is about an eschatology of chaos vs. peace.

The action sequence in the old house is flawlessly executed and amazing. (Implausible, some complain, but that’s the whole point of making Bond movies.) Bond neutralizes Silva’s attacks one by one, until they are both paused, hiding behind fortresses. So with one fuse Bond destroys both. The conflict becomes man to man.

And it centers on M. The woman who earlier declared that “regret is unprofessional” is wounded at the hip, shedding blood for the sins she wouldn’t acknowledge. Kincade, the Helper, is leading her to the church, shining a light for her feet on the dark moor. That flashlight catches Silva’s eye. Naïve Mr. Kincade, the viewer thinks with a cringe, but the nature of light is to overcome darkness.

When Silva finds M in the church, she’s all alone. Another failure by Kincade, you’d think. But just as providence is not the same as redemption, Kincade’s job is to come alongside, not ultimately to save.

Silva thinks he has dispatched Bond, so when he finds M, all obstacles between them have fallen. In a stunning renunciation of his quest for revenge, Silva embraces M, puts a gun to both their heads, gives M the trigger, and begs her to “Free us both.” Suddenly all he wants is oblivion, absorption, and dissolution into the universe. What he’s demanding of M is an admission that her love and his hate, her sins and his justice, her self and his self, are finally meaningless and indistinct. What he thought for so long was hatred for her was nothing but hatred for his own corrupt self and everything that was not corrupted like it. This renunciation of personality, rationality, moral distinction, and being itself, is the pinnacle of demonic paganism. Weston’s possessed and jumbled consciousness in Perelandra came vividly to my mind:

“‘You be very careful, Ransom. I’m down in the bottom of a big black hole. No I’m not, though. I’m on Perelandra. I can’t think very well now, but that doesn’t matter, he does all my thinking for me. It’ll get quite easy presently. That boy keeps shutting the windows. That’s all right, they’ve taken off my head and put someone else’s on me. I’ll soon be all right now.’…Ransom could never make up his mind whether it was a trick or whether a decaying psychic energy that had once been Weston were indeed fitfully and miserably alive within the body that sat there beside him…The intoxicated will which had been slowly poisoning the intelligence and the affections had now at last poisoned itself and the whole psychic organism had fallen to pieces.”

Silva’s last request is for negation of his being—to become utterly incomprehensible.

And it is his last request. Of course Bond isn’t dead, and he shows up and finishes Silva in the knick of time. (Interestingly, no shot is fired in the church.) M is beyond physical help, but she’s safe from moral madness. The apostle of Death has died. Her death isn’t a theft or an abdication, but a passing on into the province of God’s mercy. Bond is there to mourn and Kincade to witness when she goes.

I suppose it should be strange that in all of this there isn’t really a Christ figure. Bond might fit in a pinch, since he defeats death symbolically when he kills Silva and personally when he escapes drowning twice. But he needs redemption as much as anyone. Not until he spends himself for love of someone else does he find himself again after his long malaise, and many of his actions in the meantime are repulsive. If I was to stick an archetype on him, I would pick the prodigal son or maybe the wayward apostle returning to grace. But I don’t think it’s necessary to stick an archetype on him for the drama that plays out among Silva, M, and Kincade to hold its Christian resonance. Bond is just a sort of spokesman.

The theme of the whole movie is expressed in a word, in the scene where Bond is tied up in a chair on Silva’s island. Silva has just finished showing off his machines and his global control, prompting Bond to comment, “I suppose everyone has to have a hobby.”

“What’s yours?” asks Silva.

Bond thinks a moment. “Resurrection.”