This post, obviously, discusses plot points from Skyfall.

I. The Bulldog

Skyfall is supremely British movie. M writes Bond’s obituary with a bottle of whiskey and a china bulldog painted to look like the Union Jack as company at her desk. After the bombing of MI6 headquarters, Bond grouses “The whole office goes up in smoke and that bloody thing survives?” “Your interior decorating tips are always appreciated,” M tells him tartly. When MI6 relocates, it’s to Winston Churchill’s old bunker: “Quite fascinating, if it wasn’t for the rats,” M’s aide Tanner (Rory Kinnear) says. During a free-associative exercise as part of his field assessment, Bond’s asked to respond to the world “Country.” His immediate response, of course, is “England.” When he and M return to Skyfall, the family estate Bond hasn’t visited since he left for school, they’re met by a fabulous old-school retainer, Kincade. “Some men are coming to kill us. We’re going to kill them first,” Bond informs him. “Then we’d better get ready,” Kincade replies stoutly. When the first henchman meets Kincade’s shotgun, he dispatches the man with a hearty “Welcome to Scotland.” Even the language of daily conversation feels more staunchly English than usual, whether it’s Bond telling M “Just changing carriages,” as the back half of a train is violently torn away behind him, or M sourly suggesting, on Bond’s return from a long absence that “I suppose they ran out of drink where you were.”

That vigorous emphasis on cultural signifiers of British national character makes sense. Skyfall is a film that’s explicitly concerned with the blowback to British imperialism, and implicitly structured to bridge the gap between the UK’s two great contributions to spy culture: the bureaucratic knife-fight and the secret agent with the Walther PPK.

“England. The Empire. MI6. You’re living in a ruin,” Skyfall’s antagonist, Silva (Javier Bardem) tells Bond when he finally arrives on-screen. Much more so than a traditional Bond film villain, Silva is a photo-negative of Bond, a man whose faith in MI6 has been shattered, who abandoned British soil to live on a Japanese island that looks like a dreamscape in Inception, complete with a tumbled Ozymandian statue, who wears white and cream to Bond’s black, who fights his battles with server farms instead of his fists, and whose sexual ominvorousness extends even beyond Bond’s own. It’s possible he’s meant as an allusion to Julian Assange, who recently caused the UK some measure of annoyance, in both physical presentation and weapon of choice. But Skyfall makes the interesting choice to give Silva grievances against his government more legitimate than any Assange suffered personally. When M ran him as an agent in Hong Kong during the transition of control from the British to China, she handed him over to the Chinese government after he was discovered doing offensive hacking outside his brief. “I got six agents in return, and a peaceful transition,” M explains to Bond without sentiment. Silva was tortured, and when he tried to take his cyanide capsule, it failed to kill him. “Life clung to me like a disease,” Silva tells her, revealing the destruction of his dental plate, the ruined face he conceals with prosthetics. “Do you know what hydrogen cyanide does to you? Look upon your work.” Hong Kong isn’t the only element of British foreign policy history that Skyfall alludes to: as Silva stalks M through London, the movie brings up the dreadful specter of that city’s subway bombings. Who needs doomsday devices when you have reality?

The chase ends, where it has to, in a Parliamentary hearing room at Westminster. John Le Carre, the creator of some of the greatest heroes of bureaucratic British spydom, has explained that he dislikes James Bond because “It seems to me he’s more some kind of international gangster with, as it is said, a license to kill… he’s a man entirely out of the political context.” Much of the best of British spy fiction has responded to Bond in the same way, from George Smiley’s disinfection of the Circus, to the men and women working inside the Grid in Spooks. And among the other work of the Daniel Craig era in the Bond franchise has been the reconciliation of that “international gangster” with British politics and bureaucracy. In Casino Royale, M is disgusted at being called in to testify as to Bond’s conduct after he shoots up an embassy in Africa, both because she has to deal with the oversight, and because Bond’s given Parliament reason to demand it:

Who the hell do they think they are? I report to the Prime Minister and even he’s smart enough not to ask me what we do. Have you ever seen such a bunch of self-righteous, ass-covering prigs? They don’t care what we do; they care what we get photographed doing. And how the hell could Bond be so stupid? I give him double-O status and he celebrates by shooting up an embassy. Is the man deranged? And where the hell is he? In the old days if an agent did something that embarrassing he’d have a good sense to defect. Christ, I miss the Cold War.

In Skyfall, she’s back at it again, this time on even more serious grounds. After Bond fails to stop Patrice, a terrorist who managed to steal the encrypted identities of NATO agents embedded in terrorist organizations, M finds herself called to heel by Mallory (Ralph Feinnes), a former soldier-turned bureaucrat. “Are we to call this civilian oversight?” M asks him. “We call it retirement planning,” he tells her. “I’m here to oversee the transition period leading to your voluntary retirement in two months’ time.” After those agents are unmasked and begin to be killed, M is called before an inquiry to explain herself, an act that both makes Bond and his colleagues answerable to a political context and gives M an opportunity to explain why the kind of political context Le Carre called for is less clear-cut in a post-Cold War era. “Our enemies are no longer known to us,” she tells the minister. “They don’t exist on a map. our world is not more transparent, now. It’s more opaque. That’s where we have to fight. In the shadows.” As Silva makes his murderous way towards her, she quotes Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses”:

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Read more

It may just be that I’m already in Homeland withdrawal, but The Americans sounds pretty excellent:

The male-skewing cable network has given a pilot order to the KGB spy drama set in suburban Washington D.C. the early 1980s. The project, created by Joe Weisberg (Falling Skies, Damages), centers on the arranged marriage of Phillip and Elizabeth Jennings, who have two children who know nothing about their parents’ true identity. Their relationship grows more passionate and genuine by the day, but is constantly tested by the escalation of the Cold War and the intimate, dangerous and darkly funny relationships they must maintain with a network of informants and spies under their control. Complicating it further is Phillip’s growing sense of affinity for the American way of life.

I’m fond in general of stories that are about tradecraft mechanics rather than the big boom, whether it’s the reporters chasing down the story in State of Play or the careful piecing together of information in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. And I’ve enjoyed Homeland precisely for its attention to the work you do while you’re waiting, and the waiting for things to shake out in your brain that are an inherent part of the work. So I’m excited for a project that ties the work of building a family to the work of espionage. I also think this is a smart way to amp up suburban angst narratives. If whether your husband sleeps with someone else, your child fits in well at school, your continuing ability to be happy as a housewife are all matters not just of the stability of your family but of your success in battle in a geopolitical and ideological war, it’s a nice way to create more dramatic stakes without having to bring in superheroes.

This post contains spoilers through “Day 7″ of Neal Stephenson’s Reamde. If you want to spoil beyond that in comments, feel free, but please label your comment as such. And for next week, let’s read through “Day 17.”

Given the time that Stephenson’s spent explicating his manly ideals, and showing us various people doing crazy things like stealing credit card numbers and shooting terrorists on Chinese docks in the name of love, it was inevitable that we’d get to sex eventually. And to sexual assault. Wartime can produce some hot temporary romances, like the one between Olivia and Sokolov. But it also provides a space in which people like Khalid can justify sexual violence.

One of the things that’s interesting about the way Stephenson frames Khalid’s attack against Zula is that it sets up a sympathy between us and Richard. Before he breaks into his niece’s apartment, Richard pauses for a moment to steel himself against what he might find: “Growing up on a farm had exposed him to a few sudden and unpleasant sights that he had never been able to clear from his memory. But Zula stabbed or strangled on the floor of her apartment would, he knew, be the last thing that came into his mind’s eye at the moment of his death; and between now and then it would come to him unbidden at unforeseeable moments.” He can’t bear the idea of witnessing violence against Zula, but he must. And as we get more attached to her, the prospect of seeing something bad happens to her becomes increasingly uncomfortable — though we see more than he does, though less than everything, because we’re seeing through Zula’s eyes, and at some point, so closes them.

I’m trying to decide how I feel about Stephenson’s decision to describe Khalid’s assault on Zula and Zula’s self-defense in as much detail as he does. It’s not as if the step-by-step narration of the event is out of keeping with the rest of the novel — Stephenson spends a lot of time on all sorts of details here — and they’re not notably prurient. We’re told that Zula’s vulva is exposed, but Stephenson doesn’t get descriptive, and even his lingering on Khalid’s penis for a sentence is a logistical meditation, not a sexual one, though it does serve to establish Zula’s level of sexual experience in a way that seems like it’s supposed to make Khalid’s assault more heinous: “Zula was not a huge penis expert, but she knew it took at least a little bit of time for one of them to get that hard, which made her realize that Khalid must have been standing outside the door for a while, getting himself ready for this.”
Read more

Do I really need to write a bunch of framing to explain why y’all should be excited about this Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy movie?

Seriously, this is the character actor nerd equivalent of those action movies that list a bunch of overmuscled stars by their last names: Oldman. Firth. Cumberbatch. Hardy. Hinds. Strong. And I’m also kind of compelled by the extent to which this looks like an old print of something from the seventies, as if it’s an actual historical document of another age in espionage. I like that firm visual definition between past and present, I think, though of course it might look like less of an artifact on the big screen.

I love me some John le Carré and I remain eager for a good movie about the War on Terror, so I’m glad to hear that Anton Corbijn’s adapting A Most Wanted Man, le Carré’s novel about an illegal immigrant in Germany who is caught up in an American intelligence sweep, for the screen. I’ve always been impressed by the way le Carré managed to pivot after the end of the Cold War from the practitioners of intelligence to the subjects of the craft, and the way he expanded his moral critique of international affairs to more carefully trace the connections between governmental and corporate power.

The only regret I have about that development is that I’d sort of like to see what le Carré would do if he built a set of core characters for our contemporary intelligence era, what George Smiley might look like in the War on Terror. I suppose we already have that in Spooks (which, if you are not watching it already is a grievous error you should rectify immediately) and Sir Harry Pearce. In the U.S., it’s impossible to tell stories about the War on Terror right now without making your heroes either righteous ass-kickers or saintly guardians of civil liberties. You need narrators who can come at the issues sideways to provide actual clarity on them, and the U.K., as an important ally that isn’t a key driver of the current conflict, is well-positioned to provide that perspective.