A minor debate has arisen on the internet in the wake of the latest James Bond epic, Skyfall. Has the legendary secret agent now revealed himself to be Catholic? For in Skyfall the ancestral manor house of the Bonds has an elaborate priest hole. These were of course hideouts to shelter Catholic priests from the persecutors in the 16th and 17th centuries. More ambiguously, in the vicinity of this house stands an abandoned chapel (the estate has been unoccupied for decades). The interior is suitably barren for a Presbyterian meeting house – but there does appear to be a most un-Kirk like stand for votive candles in the corner.
It would not be all that surprising to me that Commander Bond turns out to be RC . And if he is such, he is most certainly pre-conciliar Traditionalist. For has he not always embodied a clear ethic of good versus evil on contrast to the mediocrity and ambiguity of this age? He is uncompromisingly anti-communist. His concept of the gentleman seems to be a distant descendant of the era of Astaire and Cary Grant. Obscured by all the technology on display in his later films is his chosen role as a defender of traditional life in all its forms against modernity – as embodied by a series of high tech villains seeking world dominion, usurious economic gain ( Auric Goldfinger) or just simple mass destruction. This contrast between the ancient values of traditional England and the destructive force of modern technology is very clear, for example, in the novel – not the film – Moonraker. Skyfall returns to this theme: Bond only receives a revolver and a radio transmitter from “Q.” And at the end he must do battle against the overwhelming ground and air forces of his adversary armed only with a hunting knife, a pistol, a couple of shotguns, a few sticks of dynamite, a couple of propane tanks and of course a certain Aston Martin…
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Not only might Bond come from a recusant family, but it seems the whole movie is an ode to tradition. Older elements of spycraft are praised, resurrected, and shown to be effective and useful; older features and modalities of the Bond franchise are resurrected (Bond even says his hobby is “resurrection”). A list:
1) resorting to Churchill’s bunker after the attack on MI6;
2) meeting Q in a museum;
3) the Walther PPK and old school radio transmitter;
4) the Aston Martin (a pure replica, it seems to me, out of Goldfinger);
5) Bond’s ancestral estate, with its priest hole and chapel;
6) the Bond family faithful retainer, played by Albert Finney;
7) the death of the old, female M;
8) the installation of a new, male M;
9) the resurrection of Moneypenny’s character;
10) the return to the old office, with the leather-bound door of the old Connery movies;
11) several lines of dialogue about the “old way” and doing things “old-fashioned,” one in connection with a hunting knife;
12) with which knife Bond kills the bad guy–in the chapel, where Christ’s victory over Satan was commemorated innumerable times in the renewal of the sacrifice.
That’s just off the top of my head. I’m sure one could expatiate at length about, e.g., the fact that Bond “dies” in (or just outside) Constantinople (where the Roman empire died); or the fact that a parliamentary hearing is being held on the viability of MI6 in the “modern” world and that said hearing is violently adjourned by the arrival of a very modern criminal, a kind of technological evil genius, whose computer skills are off the charts (Facebook and Google, anyone?). Novel technology is the villain’s; good, old, traditional methods and tools are the hero’s.
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