Skyfall · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Bond rides the elevator to an empty floor of a Shanghai tower, all glass and dark. An assassin works at the far side. Outside, a wall of animated neon — a jellyfish the size of a building — washes across every surface, so that the only light in the room is borrowed, advertising someone else's product. Bond becomes a silhouette. The two men close, and for several seconds Deakins refuses to tell us which shape is the man and which is his reflection thrown back off the glass. It is the most beautiful thing in the film and also the most honest, because Skyfall is a movie about an agent who has turned into an image of himself, and here he is, fighting one.

For fifty years Bond has been the purest popular form of what Deleuze calls the action-image: a man perceives a situation and acts to change it, the situation resolves, the editing serves the chain. Perceive, act, resolve. The whole franchise is a machine for completing that circuit cleanly and often. What makes Skyfall strange is that it takes the machine and jams it on purpose. Deleuze gave a name to the moment cinema lost faith in that circuit — the crisis of the action-image, where a character can no longer react adequately to what he perceives. Mendes stages exactly this, inside the one franchise built entirely on the agent who always can. Craig's Bond comes back from his own death depleted: he shakes on the firing range, fails the medicals, drinks before the mission. He still sees everything. His body just arrives a half-second late. The plot — a stolen list of operatives — is a pretext the dossier itself admits is a pretext; the real engine is obsolescence, the suspicion that the man and the institution behind him have outlived the kind of world they were built to act in. Read this way the film stops being a caper and becomes something rarer: a blockbuster about the waning of its own form.

That Shanghai floor is what Deleuze would call an any-space-whatever — a space that has stopped being a setting for action and become a field of pure affect, cut into disconnected fragments of color and shadow. The neon disconnects it further; bodies dissolve into backlit shape. And the glass does something more precise. When present and reflection can no longer be told apart, you have a crystal-image — Deleuze's hyalosign, the point where the actual thing and its mirror-double become indiscernible. Bond literally cannot land a blow without striking the glass first, and we cannot tell the blow from its echo. The film keeps returning to this. Silva is the crystal made into a person.

Because Silva is not a villain in the old binomial sense, force meeting opposing force. He is what Deleuze calls the inversion-image: the heroic figure and his feeble, degraded double. Silva is the agent MI6 made, used, and abandoned — Bond if the institution's betrayal had finished its work. Peroxide-blond, theatrical, intimate to the point of menace, he is Bond's reflection returned as ruin, and his entire scheme is built so that capture is part of the plan (a structure lifted straight from the Joker in The Dark Knight). The hero spends the middle of the film not pursuing his enemy but receiving him.

And everything around these two men is rotting in a very particular key. Deleuze's term for it is crystal-decomposition: an ordered, aristocratic world quietly going to pieces from the inside. Look at where the film puts its world. Silva's lair is a derelict, half-flooded island, a dead city. MI6 is driven underground into Churchill-era tunnels after its glass headquarters is blown open. The climax abandons the franchise's globe-trotting glamour entirely and retreats to Skyfall — Bond's ancestral home, a cold stone house on a Scottish moor, revealed as the orphaned origin of Britain's most polished servant. Bond turns the manor into a trap and watches it burn. The aristocratic world that produced him, the gentry house on the heath, is set on fire by its own son. Gassner's production design makes decay and exposure the film's recurring motif, and Deakins lights the decomposition like an old master — the amber of the Macau casino, the cold institutional blues of MI6, the firelit dark of the finale, light and shadow worked as a continuous gradient in the German expressionist manner, things charged with a glow that seems to come from inside them. The DB5 sits inside all this as a pure symbol, Deleuze's object that condenses the film's organizing relation: the franchise's whole past wheeled out as a physical relic, ejector seat and all, and then — of course — sacrificed to the fire.

The lineage is unusually legible. Goldfinger supplies the DB5 and the gadget-and-grandeur template, quoted as self-mythology. On Her Majesty's Secret Service supplies the elegiac register of a Bond who can grieve. Casino Royale made the wound continuous; No Country for Old Men gave Deakins the patient, motivated low-key light and the insistence on legible geography over blur. Straw Dogs gave the siege-of-the-house finale, a man improvising lethal traps against an overwhelming force. The Dark Knight gave the captive architect. Skyfall's invention was to fuse all of this into prestige drama and run it through the action-image's own crisis without breaking the machine — to make a billion-dollar entertainment that is secretly about whether entertainments like it still know how to act. It also proved, on the Alexa, that digital capture could hold a painterly, photochemical image, and it handed the series a way to honor its past without being embalmed by it. Watch the Shanghai fight again. Bond is already swinging at a reflection. The whole film is in that one undecidable shape.