Parallels with Frankenstein

A recent anthology ‘James Bond Will Return: Critical Perspectives on the 007 Franchise’, which offers new ways to view the 007 films, is a wonderful read ahead of Ian Fleming’s birthday on May 28

One of my favourite James Bond sequences in recent times is the interrogation scene from Sam Mendes’ Skyfall (2012). The film’s antagonist Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem) is being questioned by M (Judi Dench), the still-formidable head of MI6. Silva holds a grudge against M because when he was an active MI6 agent in Hong Kong under her command, she betrayed him and gave him up to the Chinese government who then tortured him horribly. Even when I had watched this scene in the theatre for the first time, it struck me that the dynamic between M and Silva was intended as a nod to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The name of the film itself is the name of the Scottish castle Bond grew up in — a classically Gothic setting, it has to be said.

This parallel between the film and Shelley’s novel is the cornerstone of Monica Germanà’s excellent essay ‘Sometimes the Old Ways Are the Best: Technology and the Body in a Gothic Reading of Sam Mendes’ Skyfall.’ The essay is a part of the recently published collection James Bond Will Return: Critical Perspectives on the 007 Franchise, edited by Claire Hines, Terence McSweeney and Stuart Joy. This wide-ranging collection goes through the 007 canon in chronological order, starting with an essay about the first Bond film (Dr No, 1962) and ending with an essay about the most recent one (No Time to Die, 2021).

As Germanà notes in her essay, the Frankenstein parallels also work very well with the film’s other overarching concern: the clash between “the old ways” of spycraft and warfare vs the new ways (hacking, electronic surveillance). In the face of a technologically astute supervillain like Silva, Bond ‘recedes’ into a kind of defensive Luddism, abandoning the gadgetry that contemporary Bond fans would be used to. He even goes back to the Sean Connery-era classic Aston Martin, even as M turns up her nose at this ostentatious relic of a car. In the climax of the movie, as Silva uses his tech-wizardry in his relentless pursuit of M, Bond eventually kills his adversary with an old-school hunting knife. The essays are enjoyable not just because of the depth of the analysis but also for the way they bring together visual, textual and design elements in their readings of the 007 films.

Here, for example, is Germanà noting the visual resemblance between Silva and the real-life hacker Julian Assange, especially their blonde hair.

“Seen as a reaction to MI6’s merciless exploitation of its own agents, Silva’s cyber-attack points to the subversive politics of data hacking, a fact underscored by Silva’s alleged resemblance with WikiLeaks hacker Julian Assange. As ‘illegal’ code-cracking juxtaposes ‘formal institutions... which were previously able to dominate access to information and... dissidents, who, with growing confidence, are able to circumvent traditional networks through technology,’ the film traces a fine line, arguably, between rebellious hackers and cyberterrorists.”

The editors have done a fine job in balancing the theory-heavy essays with other entries that are more focused on the praxis and politics around filmmaking. The Bond franchise itself, based on Ian Fleming’s novels, is a kind of convoluted metonym for Britishness, but the business of filmmaking is rooted in Hollywood ethos — the resultant narrative tension is apparent in the films (especially in the 21st century when the scale of Hollywood means that producers are looking for ‘bankable’ stories). The British vs American clash of values is partly responsible for some of the franchise’s notable misfires, like Spectre (2015). James Smith’s essay ‘It’s Always Been Me: Spectrality, Hauntings and Retcon in Spectre’ expertly dissects some of the film’s narrative confusions and failures. ‘Retcon’ or ‘retroactive continuity’ is a term originating in the comicbook industry, used to describe a situation where writers on a long-running media franchise change previously-established truths or realities, thus ‘overwriting’ the works of their predecessors.

Spectre’s retcon is clumsily done not just in terms of scale — every previous villain in the Bond era being revealed to be pawns of the same organisation — but also in terms of tenor. The overall direction of the Daniel Craig-era movies involved a resetting of 007’s more problematic gender-related and geopolitical themes. Spectre seems to want to undo that whole bloc of stories, but its execution is frequently subpar.