Skyfall Dissected

***SPOILER ALERT: ENTIRE PLOT AND DENOUEMENT REVEALED***

In my last blog, I wrote about the story ‘templates’ we carry inside us, that we instinctively refer to whenever we watch movies – by which I mean, we have specific expectations of what seems ‘right’ in a story. Whether a film meets these expectations, and – crucially – how it meets these expectations is fundamental to our enjoyment of the movie.

We may know nothing of the film we are about to watch, but even so, I’d argue that our expectations are determined within the first few scenes of the movie. We know very quickly whether we are watching - for instance - a superhero movie, a heist movie, a romance, a tragedy and so on, and we therefore know what to expect from it – if not, the details of exactly how it will develop or end.

However, the James Bond franchise is fairly unique in that we have very specific ideas not just about what should happen but also how it will happen.

We know that there will be an opening action sequence that will try to outdo previous Bond movies, we know that the story will take us to a number of exotic locations, we know there will be two Bond girls, and we know there will be a villain who is intent on world domination who Bond has to stop at all costs.

The elements of a Bond film are so firmly established that they have been parodied many times over, not just in the original 1960s Casino Royale movie, but also in the Austin Powers films – and in numerous Rob Brydon impressions (“We’re not so different, you and I, Mr Bond”)

It’s inevitable that, as more and more Bond films have got made, the newer films have even come to reference the older films – whether intentionally or not. You can’t have a Bond film with skiing without invoking memories of On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Any rooftop chase, any traintop fight, any fight on top of an aircraft, any car, motorbike or speedboat chase will invoke memories of the appropriate movie (at least for James Bond nuts like myself!). Even plotlines are being re-used, and as innovative as Skyfall is, you could argue it’s a repeat of the Goldeneye story – former British Secret Service Agent turns rogue, and plots against his former employers.

What I really liked about Skyfall is the way it embraces those traditions, storylines and plot elements and gives some emotional depth and resonance to them. I was interested to hear Sam Mendes talk about this on BBC radio’s Front Row programme, and explain how the writing team set out first and foremost to tell an engaging story, and only later did they add the ingredients we might expect from a conventional Bond film. In other words, the traditional Bond elements were made to serve the story, and not the other way round.

The R&D department in happier times

One simple example is the role that gadgetry plays (or doesn’t play) in the film. Whereas in previous films Bond is given unnecessarily sophisticated devices, in this film, much is made of the fact he is given just a gun and a tracking radio. Indeed, there are two exchanges between Bond and the villain where they both take it in turns to gloat over their use of something so simple as a radio device. Having something so simple as a radio device is seen as ‘old school’ which is a key theme in the film. Bond uses a cut throat razor to shave, and just in case the audience have missed the significance of this, the writers have Eve commenting on this being something very traditional. Later in the movie, Bond drives ‘M’ in the Aston Martin from Thunderball, and then the denouement of the film itself takes place at Bond’s ancestral home, where Bond has only one shooting rifle, and homemade weapons at his disposal.  There’s clearly an agenda going on here – the film-makers are making a not so subtle point about the Bond films not needing to lean on technology and gimmickry for their dramatic impact (even though one could argue that previous Bond films have often done the opposite). They’re recognizing that what Bond does best is real-life stunts and live action chases. And of course, Bond kills Bardem’s villain not with a gadget dart fired from under his wrist, or with an exploding pen, but with a simple knife in the back.

I liked the way that, even when the makers of Skyfall do the standard Bond stuff, they manage to do something a little different with them. Mendes opens the film with a long shot of Bond where Bond walks into focus – which I see as a riff on the famous gun barrel opening of the traditional Bond films (the traditional Bond opening sequence in fact occurs at the end of Skyfall). Then there are the one-liners that Daniel Craig delivers in as humourless a way as he can possibly contrive. His comment ‘A waste of good whiskey’ when the first Bond girl is killed in the William Tell scene is really laced with heavy irony, and is not meant to invite audience laughter. When Craig walks through the train carriage having leapt off the digger he makes a very subtle adjustment of his cuffs – the kind of gesture that occurred frequently in the Brosnan films, but is somehow less cartoonish as acted by Craig. Again, a very small detail, but I also enjoyed Craig’s reactions in fighting in the casino circled by giant lizards. Twice he gestures the lizards to the bad guy he’s fighting, in a way that draws his combatant’s attention to their mutual danger, and (I thought) to the absurdity of the situation. In previous films, Bond (and the audience) wouldn’t have batted an eyelid at something so unrealistic. Craig’s reaction here again serves to make his Bond much more rooted in the ‘real’ world.

Skyfall’s villain does indeed live in a secret base on an exotic island location, but this base is simply a deserted town – but if anything, this creates a bigger dramatic impact for being more realistic and not being, for instance, a rocket complex hidden inside a volcano. The sobriety of this particular Bond is underlined by his lack of a triumphant one-liner when he kills Bardem’s villain.  His comment ‘Last rat standing’ seems to acknowledge that this is in some ways a pyrrhic victory – which indeed it turns out to be when M dies a few minutes later.

 The Bond villain parody - in happier times

Another feature I particularly enjoyed was the economy of the writing. Every scene is used to further the purposes of the plot. When Bond is taking his marksman tests, he can’t fire straight because of the shrapnel in his shoulder. He gauges out the shrapnel in his shoulder with a knife (thus showing this is a tougher Bond than previous incarnations), and the shrapnel is then analysed by the forensics team, which enables them to identify Bond’s assailant from the opening sequence. The last known sighting of this guy was in Asia, so Bond now jets off to Asia. In other words, the writers don’t just send Bond to exotic locations for no reason – they take care to establish a chain of logic that shows why he’s going there.

The economy of the writing can be seen even in the small details – in one scene, Bond is exercising doing pull-ups on a bar, after which he collapses through lack of fitness. In a later scene, Bond has to rely on his upper body strength to hold on to the bar under the elevator.  Without the earlier scene, the audience would assume this is easy for Bond. Instead, the earlier scene provides us with the information that Bond isn’t fully fit, and this therefore introduces an element of risk to the elevator scene as to whether he’ll be able to hold on (this being Bond, we obviously know the answer to that!)

  

Okay, so I’ve talked a lot about the way Skyfall takes the ingredients of a standard Bond film and does something slightly different with them – but I’d argue that this is only part of the reason why the film engages our interest.

I’d say that interest in the film is created by a number of key narrative strands: Bond’s rehabilitation and his attempts to prove he’s not a spent force; M’s attempts to survive the political fallout from the crisis engulfing MI6 and – in the last act of the film – the attempts on her life; and Mallory’s ascendancy to the head of MI6, and the audience’s changing attitudes towards this character. In other words, the film is held together by its character development.

At the beginning of the action, Bond is not just unfit and unproven - he’s assumed to be dead, and it takes the entire film for him to prove he’s got what it takes to continue in the Secret Service - both to his employers, and perhaps to himself.

He spends much of the earlier part of the film unshaven and failing fitness tests – and until the final act of the film, as he admits himself, it’s been the Bardem character who’s been taking the initiative. If we’re talking story templates, this is one of the most powerful there is: where an untried and untested character initially ‘fails’ but eventually rises above the odds to claim victory eg Rocky, The Matrix, 8 Mile and so on.

I’d say that the best way of understanding Skyfall is as a transitional Bond film. Essentially it’s a two hour swansong for Judi Dench as M. I say this, because – to some extent – Bond’s supposed death at the beginning of the film foreshadows M’s death at the end, and prepares us for it (late in the film, Bond’s underwater fight in the icy loch is in some ways a reprisal and reminder of the earlier underwater drowning scene).

So, the film is bookended by two key deaths: Bond’s supposed death, and M’s real death at the end. They’ve written the script so that, in dramatic terms at least, it’s seen as necessary that M does die as she is accountable for the deaths of various British agents and has made some morally dubious decisions. In the opening sequence, Bond wants to help a fellow agent who is about to die, but M orders him not to. Again, it’s M’s decision that Eve shoots without a clear line of sight with disastrous consequences for Bond. M chooses her own interests (the interests of Queen and Country) above an individual agent’s life. For the first half of the film, she’s under siege politically for her handling of the crisis, and it’s only when she’s allowed to speak during the hearing scene (just after the film’s halfway point) that events start turning in her favour.

And it’s at the hearing that we first see Mallory in a more sympathetic light, first, when he interrupts the Chair so that M can put her own views across, and then when he risks his life in the gun fight that ensues – thus proving he’s not the deskbound pen-pusher that Bond suspects him to be.  Mallory then walks in on Q as he’s laying a false trail for Bardem – and tacitly sanctions support for the unofficial operation that Bond is leading. In other words, at the same time the film is giving Judi Dench a good send-off, it’s also busily building up Ralph Fiennes as the next M.

I say that Skyfall can be understood as a transitional Bond film, but I wonder to what extent Daniel Craig’s reign as Bond can be seen in the same way. We are already three films into his tenure –even so, I think it’s telling that right at the end of this film he’s being asked (by the new M) whether he’s ready to start work. It’s also taken three films to establish the new Q (who hadn’t featured in the previous two films), the new M, and the new Miss Moneypenny. It’ll be interesting to see whether they continue with this approach in the next Bond film, or whether Craig Bond film 4 will be the equivalent of the first film with a new Bond.

Lazenby: the ultimate transitional Bond. But what a great movie OHMSS was!

It’s also interesting to note that technically Bond is only a few missions into his career, and yet a big theme of the film – as noted above – was about being too old for the job. I read this as a reference not to the character’s actual age or stage in his career, but as a reference to the Bond franchise. But still, it makes the chronology of Bond quite intriguing and contradictory – in exactly what mission did Daniel Craig’s Bond drive a 1960s Aston Martin? A question for another day and another blog!

The Stories we carry within us: Why there's no such thing as a 'new Story'

It may be stating the blindingly obvious, but I’ve recently been realizing that many Hollywood mainstream films have what I would call a ‘self-evident’ plot structure. What I mean is, when you’re watching a film and you know roughly how it’s going to develop, and even how it’s going to end. Which is rather odd, when you think about it. Why would we watch something when we know (roughly) how it’s going to turn out?

When we watch Batman, Spiderman, Rocky – or even the King’s Speech for that matter – we know that the story goes something like this: First Part: establish character or character’s special power > Second Part: character goes through some kind of crisis > Third Part: Denouement: character is pitted against his nemesis, boxing opponent or stutter, and wins.

If you think about it, it’s odd we should all want to see stories enacted for us, where we know roughly (if not exactly) what’s going to happen. Why would we do this? Again, it may be to state the blindingly obvious, but I think the answer lies in the fact that although we might know what’s going to happen, we don’t know how it will happen.  I think much of our viewing pleasure relies on us having some idea of what kind of story we’re watching and therefore how it might develop. We go into the cinema with a set of story ‘templates’ in our mind which we automatically – and without thinking about – refer to in watching a film. For the Lord of the Rings we might access that part of our story knowledge which covers ‘The Quest’. For the Kings Speech, the story that gets invoked is probably a ‘Battling against Adversity’.

The analogy that I think helps here is to think about how poetry works. There’s (more often than not) a rhythm underlying a poem that we understand as a metre, and the interest of the poem is created by the ways in which the poem either does and does not conform to that underlying beat.

So, while we’re watching or reading The Lord of the Rings we have various in-built assumptions: that good will triumph, that the heroes will prevail – either by being victorious and staying alive, or by giving their life in a cause that’s ultimately successful. I think our expectations give us a structure which helps us mediate our emotional responses. So, we ‘get through’ the times of crisis in the film – as it were – by retaining the knowledge that it will all work out in the end. Such a structure is important, because otherwise stories would be reduced to a series of random events. Without an idea of what should and should not happen, why should we be surprised if it all goes wrong?

I’d say that, in particular, Hollywood mainstream films and kids’ films wear their plot structure very close to the surface. Within the first few minutes, the audience instinctively knows the general thrust of the film, who the bad guy is, and what the main character’s ‘mission’ is. It’s clear when we watch ‘Happy Feet’ that this will be a story about a character being different from everyone else, and finding acceptance – even adulation – within his community. Within the first ten minutes of ‘Finding Nemo’, it’s clear this is a film about reuniting Nemo with his parents – and we instinctively know that this reunion will take the rest of the film to accomplish.  When you think about it, it’s amazing how strongly rooted these templates are inside us. If ‘Finding Nemo’ ended with Nemo dying, or Nemo’s Dad dying, we, as an audience would feel cheated – we’d feel that in some way, this didn’t work. By all means, have one of the characters appear to be dead; by all means, have one of the characters believe that the other character is dead (in fact, one or the other, or even both scenarios are generally essential in these types of stories); but don’t actually have the character die. 

At the very least, the film-makers would have to find some kind of meaning in Nemo’s death – in other words, it would have to be written as a Tragedy, and – once again – we’d actually be aware of this fact right from the beginning of the film. Even if you didn’t know Hamlet as the most famous play in the English language, you would know instinctively that this is a story with an unhappy ending, a story about various wrongs committed before the play began, and which will now be put right at the cost of the hero’s life.

This all goes back to the ‘contract’ set up between the story-teller and the audience which is in place from the moment the film /story /play begins.  When someone starts a story with ‘Once upon a time’ (or its equivalent), our expectation is that this is a story that will be worth listening to.  Our response if a story does not live up to our expectations is not to lose faith in stories or films, but to identify the flaw – quite rightly - within the film itself. We might not even know exactly why it doesn’t work – we might blame it on the actor, on the special effects, on certain parts of the story – but we just know instinctively that the film doesn’t work. 

Conversely, there’s a particular kind of satisfaction we get when we come out of a cinema having seen a really good film – one that renews our faith in film-making, or in humankind or even – by extension – ourselves. I’m not banging a drum for these particular films, but I was struck by the fact that the Kings Speech reportedly had audiences spontaneously applaud at the end. And I remember the same happening when the Full Monty was first released (at least, it happened at the showing I was at). The audience’s experience here is about the film hitting the spot and needing to express that recognition collectively – despite the fact that the actors, director and film-makers are probably many miles away at that precise moment, and can't hear us.

I believe that we all carry around with us a set of story templates which are deep rooted in our emotional lives. These aren’t individual to us, but collective (although we may carry individual ‘variations’ or predilections for certain kinds of stories). The ‘against all odds’ story, the couple get together after  misunderstandings story – and so on. When we are satisfied by a story it isn’t just that the story is gripping or compelling on its own terms; it’s also in the way this individual story gives voice to the deeper story we carry within us. 

To put it another way, the need for stories starts when we are very young, and never leaves us. When we are children we want to hear the same stories repeated over and over again - and perhaps our adult experience of stories is simply a variation on this.

In Praise of Waffle: the danger of editing your stories out of existence

***No plots or denouements were harmed or mistreated in any way in the making of this blog entry (for once)***

Well, I had to, didn't I?

Recently, I’ve been recalling a quote made by Andrew Motion about his time as a Booker Prize judge, where he explained that many of the novels he read for the prize ‘needed a good edit’.  His emphasis was more on the care and support an author’s novel gets (or doesn’t get) from the Publisher: ‘Not nearly enough novels get the editing they need’.

But it made me think about a view that’s prevalent nowadays amongst creative writing circles, that good writing is about expressing something succinctly, with no extraneous word, and every word that’s used contributing towards the whole. In short, that more stories nowadays could ‘do with a good edit’. The style en vogue in creative writing, I would say, is very much the style we might associate with American writers like Raymond Carver. Carver was known for following a particular writing process where he would go over his story draft again and again and pare down the words to the bare minimum.

Six Books in need of a good edit

You can see why a poet like Andrew Motion would make this comment: poetry is all about paying attention to each individual word, and its place within the poem, and using each word to its maximum effect: being alive to the different meanings that might be given by its particular location within a poem. And this isn’t to criticize Raymond Carver either, as I’m a big fan of his work. But at the same time, it strikes me that this is only one view of what good writing should be about. You have only to go back to the great 19^th Century novels, to find a rather different model of writing.

And here comes the History bit....

Dickens is hardly known for his brevity of expression. Indeed sometimes he uses ten words where one will do. And yet interest in him is still very much alive, with 2012 seeing many events that celebrate the bicentenary of his birth.

Herman Melville, one of my favourite writers, was hardly a succinct writer either. Indeed, many of the first readers of Moby Dick would probably have appreciated it had that work been given a thorough edit. A key feature of the novel is that the story is interspersed with chapters that interrupt the main narrative and provide a learned disquisition on different kinds of whales, which – one might say - effectively slows down the ‘action’ of the novel.

But the whole point about Moby Dick is that it’s rough around the edges. It’s not supposed to be clean, and neat. It’s about the smell of sea and rope.

In a letter written after he’d finished the novel, he famously confided: ‘I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb’. The novel is often seen as being about the search for meaning, or as in some way enacting that quest (and the attendant perils) and as such it’s entirely appropriate that it ended up being like the behemoth that is the subject of the story.

If floundering in your argument, invoke the Bard ...

"Words, words, words"

Perhaps the idea of giving something ‘a good edit’ is the kind of comment that’s most frequently made by one contemporary about another, rather than by posterity (posterity often seems much kinder about these things)

Ben Jonson famously wrote down this anecdote about Shakespeare in the papers that were found after his death:

I remember, the players have often mentioned it 
as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing 
(whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. 
My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand.

So, Shakespeare, one of the greats of all time, was judged by Jonson as lacking the ability to edit his own work – and as being someone who was too easily satisfied with the standard of the plays he wrote.

It’s a feature of Shakespeare we often forget that his plays actually require editing every time they’re staged. It’s very unusual to see a performance of the complete text: scenes, characters or lines are cut as a matter of course. Witness how unusual it was when Kenneth Branagh released his film of Hamlet which dramatizes the complete script.

Being a photo of a moustache in need of a good edit

We simply accept the fact that the plays work without certain lines, scenes and characters. And yet we don’t, for a moment, hold this against Shakespeare and condemn him as a writer who was unable to polish his own work. Indeed, modern audiences happily do without the long-winded wordplay or comic larking about that the Elizabethans so loved. In a recent documentary on Hamlet presented by David Tennant, one Academic even suggested that the 'bad quarto' of Hamlet (the supposedly unreliable text of Hamlet that didn't reflect Shakespeare's intentions) has a lot going for it in being shorter and snappier than the canonical version.

Time for an analogy...

I would argue that the editing process isn’t just about paring down, removing and deleting. It’s not about cutting the pieces off the rock until we get to the irreducible diamond. For me, it's not about finding the tiny precious gem in the hunk of raw material, and sometimes it's better to leave some bits of the raw material behind.

Blogger in search of a diamond

So what am I saying? That verbosity is good? No. But I think one person's view of what's extraneous isn't necessarily the same as another. In his introduction to Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien explained that he sometimes received letters where readers complained about particular characters, or scenes and he was amused that these characters or scenes were often ones that other readers declared were their favourite. 

So, to use the diamond analogy again, what one reader may dismiss as the extraneous material, other readers value as the diamond. One could take it further, and suggest that the artist or creator of the work themselves aren't always able to discern the gem from the stone. Or rather, that in applying certain subjective (and quite harsh) criterion, the creator can often end up rejecting something that still has meaning and value for others.

To use an example from popular culture, there's an interesting interview with Christopher Lee where he talks about the making of The Wicker Man, and bemoans the fact that the finished film bore little resemblance to the much better film they had scripted. Generations of movie-goers still value the film that they ended up making - indeed it's often ranked as one of the best films of its kind.

At least the Wicker Man was actually released - even if not in the form that was originally intended. Think of Kafka who was ambivalent towards his work to the extent that he didn't even want it to see the light of day, and asked Max Brod to burn his unpublished work after his death (although Brod made it clear that he no intention of doing so).

Rather than think of editing a work as being about cutting something to the bone, I'd like to suggest another model might be equally effective - that of jazz improvision. Not every note of a solo is needed, not every note is possibly as effective as it could be, there are musical phrases that could equally well be replaced by others. There may be times when the musician loses the attention of the listener momentarily (or for longer). The key thing is not that the musician comes up with something perfect and flawless, but that what they create is something that excites our interest most of the time, that sustains our interest most of the time and (if that interest is lost) that recovers it quickly. 

If we're reading a novel and don't like the direction the plot has taken or think a particular scenario is unrealistic, or we don't believe in the action of a character, our interest is still recoverable provided the rest of the novel engages us. But of course, if there are too many unrealistic scenarios or situations that don't ring true, our interest will be permanently compromised.

Couldn't resist this one.......