Tweetnotes Extra: SPECTRE

An essay about the film’s greatest success, un-tweeted tweetnotes on why it struggles. SPOILERS throughout.

It’s All About Death

In SPECTRE Bond is the agent of death who must go from killer to saviour. And the whole movie circles around this message. Or did you miss the mask he was wearing at the start?

From Blofeld’s discussion of the man he and James saw snuffed out to M’s explanation that Bond’s is also a licence not to kill, it’s all utterly on-point. The funeral, the Day of the Dead parade, even the clinic Swann works at where prolonging life is the aim (even if you’re miserably downing health shakes to do it).

There are dead parents all over the shop. Bond’s mum and dad, Oberhauser Snr., Swann’s poisoned pop, even the previous M. And boy do those lost Bond Girls get mentioned.

But that tells you SPECTRE is about death. Why is it about changing Bond?

It’s All In The Structure : The Blown Roses

What happens as standard in Daniel Craig Bond films?

In Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace and Skyfall there are key things that always go the same way. When SPECTRE diverts away from them, it makes a statement.

Informant Bond Girls die. That’s the standard. They sleep with 007, help him out, and the moment he leaves them alone, they’re in danger. Solange hammocked to death in Casino Royale, Fields drowned in oil, Severine William Telled. All imperilled while Bond was absent.

Even Dench’s M, figuratively his Bond Girl for Craig’s third film — and with whom there’s a mother-son subtext we’d better not dwell on too closely — only gets to start dying when she’s torn away from Bond as Skyfall burns.

In SPECTRE Monica Bellucci’s character, Lucia Sciarra, lives.

And let’s be clear: she lives in spite of what’s around her. She’s defined as a widow, the funeral is a haunting, lingering, black-and-white thing. She’s marked by death, and then Bond walks up to her…

And we cut. We cut to her life. A miserable final drink at home as assassins come for her. We’ve stopped following Bond — a rare thing in these movies — and for a moment she’s the lead. Two figures line up to execute her. And Bond takes them out.

If you think that’s normal Bond, look again. Typically we get those scenes from his perspective, not hers. This is all about her reaction, not his action. It’s not an action hero facing the odds, it’s a sudden reprieve from a saviour.

And then, okay, back to normal. They do sex.

But after? Bond’s doing his usual thing of walking away with the information he wanted, leaving the woman — Solange, Fields, Severine, whoever — behind, alone. And to be a Bond conquest is to be marked for death once he’s left the room.

Bond leaves Lucia a phone number. He puts her under the care of Felix Leiter. It’s perhaps the only name you could mention, loaded with history as it is, that would immediately make you feel she’s safe. Felix isn’t in the movie, but his name carries weight…and by not being in the movie, oddly, we know he can’t screw up the job.

Lucia will survive. Bond’s found a way to offer aftercare.

By the way, if you think this ‘parallels across movies’ stuff is unintentional, have a look at the relative finales of Casino and Quantum: first Bond loses a woman to water, then he saves a woman from fire. There’s intent here.

It’s All In The Structure: The Hit Men

What else happens as standard in Daniel Craig Bond films?

In Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace and Skyfall there are killers for hire who Bond chases down for information, but whom he’s forced to kill before they can be useful.

They’re all people who run along rooftops, too. Parkour-ing bomb-maker Mollaka, M’s traitorous bodyguard Mitchell, Skyfall’s train-topping, building-dropping Patrice — each film shows Bond trying to execute an intelligence mission only for it to fall into death. Death Bond delivers.

SPECTRE starts this way too, with Sciarra dropped out of a helicopter rather than being usefully interrogated. But that leads 007 to The Pale King, aka Mr White. Standard Bondian procedure would lead to a rooftop chase and an unfortunate execution. But Bond shows up and White is in the basement (as far from a roof as one can get)…and he’s already dying.

Poisoned and rotting, the man-corpse White faces perhaps Craig-Bond’s first civilised, sit-down interrogation. Bond’s only just ahead, but he’s beaten the reaper. And when it’s time to die, White executes himself, without provocation.

The Bond of SPECTRE has grown. He’s no longer death incarnate. And if he can just persuade Madeleine Swann of that, he might have a shot at becoming a rounded human, beyond the hollowed-out shell of duty he became in those first two (Craig) films.

And what do you know, it works! Come the finale of SPECTRE, Bond’s in the role of merciful saviour. We get a third act where he personally kills practically no-one — possibly two men who have him hooded at gunpoint, and a helicopter pilot; no character with a name. A record low for third-act 007.

Instead, Bond becomes saviour to a captured Swann and then allows Blofeld to live.

It’s a conclusion that only works, if it does, because the theme of the film is Bond’s transition from death-bringer to saviour.

Okay, Let’s Do It — Tweetnotes

Some bullet-point points on where SPECTRE aimed true and where it missed its mark.

• We got totally John Harrisonned on Blofeld. Bugger.
• When asked if C works for him, Oberhauser says “something like that” (or, erm, something like that). Which suggested, for one glorious moment, that actually he works for C, and that Andrew Scott would have been revealed as Blofeld. A much more thrilling proposition. And frankly it feels like there must have been a draft where that happened.
• Why is nobody having fun writing Blofeld? The family connection prevents Ernst from saying “Mr Bond” like a villain should…but otherwise he gets standard villain schtick.
• Seriously, we’ve reinvented Moneypenny as a sometime field operative, Q as a tech geek and M as an ex-forces hardman. Reinventing Blofeld is where we stop at “they’re kinda step-brothers but otherwise it’s the usual baddie blah”?
• Having Blofeld play the torture scene as uninterested doesn’t make anything more interesting.
• The reveal of Blofeld’s name was so utterly perfunctory as to be pointless. Maybe him revealing his face at that moment would have added something. Had Waltz not been all over the publicity.
• What a missed opportunity with the scar — it’s given to Blofeld by Madeleine, via a watch Q built. Bond doesn’t even directly give his nemesis his defining physical feature.
• Why, narratively, is Blofeld made into Bond’s erstwhile relative? What does it usefully achieve story-wise? It means Bond recognises him at the big meeting, and later it makes Blofeld hand SPECTRE’s big plans to his lackeys so he can play Jigsaw with 007. There’s literally no drama drawn from their past together.
• When Blofeld says “It was me James, the author of all your pain”, what are we actually talking about? He implies it’s about the dead women, but Vesper killed herself — was Waltz behind her with a hook and an aqualung? — and the others were all murdered for their roles in assisting Bond or for personal vendettas. Even without Blofeld, they’d have been killed. “It was me, James. The author of a load of things that were going to happen regardless.”
• The film really cops out with this. There are no gaps in the last three films that Blofeld’s involvement makes sense of. It makes the claim hollow, the pretense of an integrated film series seem false. This doesn’t even live up to the proven-but-uninspiring Uncle Ben murder ret-con of Spider-Man 3.
• A normal reading of the movie is “Oberhauser got so mad at Bond as a kid that he built a evil organisation to piss him off”. That’s the clean through-line in a film that goes for a lot of simple, clean through-lines…
• …Trouble is, that makes no sense. And the makers know this. The actual story is that Blofeld killed his own father in a fit of pique over his split affections, then grew up — likely with dad’s money and a growing psychosis — to start an evil organisation. Then his path re-crossed with Bond and he decided to have some fun with it.
• Without that being clear, the third act plays like a muddled mess. And even with it, it plays like someone forgot what was actually at stake in this movie…
• It’s a finale centred around Bond running around his old HQ looking for his enemy, then doing it again looking for his girlfriend. (Meanwhile M and Q save the world from SPECTRE’s scheme in a different building.)
• Actually, she’s not his girlfriend. Swann picks the moment 007 heads off to face the enemy to dump him. The most clunking bit of character manoeuvring I’ve seen in ages.
• Swann then walks away. She lives in Austria, they just got to a UK safe-house, and she strolls off through London. Is she planning to walk to Heathrow?
• And thus, ugh, we get the most drastically cliched and reductive use of a captured Bond girl in maybe the entire history of the series.
• Blofeld needed his agenda to be harming his company. Let someone from SPECTRE object! “Sir, it’s insane that you focus on photocopying pictures for Bond while we prepare to take over the world’s intelligence.”
• Blofeld worked, was chilling, when he was a silhouette. Maybe he should have stayed that way until act three.
• Mendes’ eye for the cinematic in the small remains joyous. Bond’s stroll across rooftops in Mexico City was to this movie what the ‘lift jump’ was to Skyfall. Simply Bond, totally cinema.
• Léa Seydoux does a great deal more with the part than it manages on the page. And on second viewing I bought what I didn’t buy the first time: she loves Bond.
• Track Swann from her icy start through that drunken conversation in L’Americain and the smile she gives at the end of her ‘gun lesson’. She’s really playing the growth in every gap she can find.
• When Swann emerges in that dress, she’s made a choice to sleep with Bond. It’s totally declarative, a statement of intent.
• There would be some real sense in Blofeld’s assertion that Bond had found “the daughter of an assassin, the one woman who could understand you” if Bond didn’t meet exactly those kinds of women all the time.
• The hotel sequence — Swann nursing red wine and mourning, Bond interrogating a mouse — is the best scene in the movie.
• The car chase was badly mis-handled. Nothing wrong with the car not being ready, that’s a decent set-up to some Mission: Impossible “gadget doesn’t work” business…
• But when a gadget fails, Bond just drives merrily on. The chase is so beneath his basic ability level that he’s able to make a phone call during it. There’s hardly a pedestrian to avoid, barely a single scuff to the bodywork during hairpin turns. Make the battle hard and the gadget fails become funnier — because we badly need them.
• Parachute! Splash! Then Bond lands. And it’s executed perfectly. From ridiculous to sublime in seconds.
• And that, actually, is SPECTRE in a nutshell.
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