License to Hallucinate: The Somber Phantasmagoria of Spectre
Spectre / directed by Sam Mendes
Color me impressed that the James Bond franchise has persisted through the present day. A decade ago and more I was urging, to extremely small and non-influential circles, that James be replaced by Jane and the whole series go feminist action hero. I said this as someone who had been raised watching these films, but who felt that a point of exhaustion had been reached. For whatever reasons, though, my suggestion never became the social media tidal wave I thought it would be. Another road was followed instead - a revamped, energetic renaissance of Bond-age, with Daniel Craig leading the charge, first with the greatly entertaining Casino Royale, then the so-so Quantum of Solace (worst title ever, right?), and then the operatic Skyfall. There was a turn to the psychology of the man, and though we never really did get too much insight, these efforts introduced an intriguing and appealing intimacy into the audience’s relationship with Bond that really hadn’t been there before. Though there was still gadgetry, it was introduced as much for its limitations as its cool factor; the ultimate gadget, after all, was Bond.
Spectre feels like the logical end point of the Bond resurgence. It attempts to link the three previous films into a greater whole by introducing a theme not just of conspiracy, which has already been there, but meta-conspiracy - not just plots against England or MI-5, but against Bond himself, a plot that has been afoot without Bond, or the audience, knowing it. Indeed, in Spectre, the grand plot against the world is more or less inseparable from the grand plot against Bond, the net result being a sense that we have finally entered, and perhaps become lost in, a hermetically-sealed Bond universe, where neither new characters nor actual world security issues intrude. (The fellow’s clearly always been a bit of a loner, but this was the first one where I was really bugged by the fact that there aren’t any other double-O agents who have his back; is he really the only honest agent? Instead, it’s his boss, the new M (Ralph Fiennes), who’s his partner in gunplay when the chips are down. The sense that we are whittling down the dramatis personae rather than growing it only adds to the sense of a sealed system.)
But that the system is closed doesn’t necessarily mean it’s claustrophobic. Rather, like the special chemistry that transpires in a vacuum-sealed tumbler when a vodka martini is shaken not stirred, Spectre’s closed conditions help it achieve, in its strongest passages, a special phantasmagorical quality. I don’t think this tone is accidental. After all, the opening sequence, which in a way anchors what is to come, is set amidst the Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico City, a hallucinatory spectacle if there ever was one. Attired in a top hat and an elegant suit with a skeleton imprint, Bond’s appearance is both mesmerizing and uncanny, as he strides with unmistakeable intention through the crowds, a beauty on his arm, sex and death all rolled up in one slick package. Yet the intimations of mortality are quickly turned around, as the ensuing action sequence makes clear that 007 is more a harvester of souls than one of the harvested.
It turns out that Bond’s Mexico City jaunt was an unauthorized mission, which means Bond gets suspended - all to the good, it turns out, because it means that he gets to go rogue (which seems to be the rule rather than the exception in these recent movies), and adding to the general sense of a Bond world turned topsy-turvy. Oh, and did I mention yet that there’s a move afoot to fold MI-6 into a new security agency and get rid of the 00 branch? Strange and foreboding portents in the spy world! Guided by a final message (from beyond the grave!) from the previous M (Judy Dench), Bond’s inquiries into a shadowy criminal conspiracy lead him to Rome, where the peerless narrow streets and Mediterranean light fade unsettlingly into darkened arcades and gloomy dens of iniquity. Bond races his latest hot Aston Martin through the midnight streets, pursued closely by a Lamborghini helmed by an Odd Job-ish assassin, and finds that none of his special gadgetry or weapons will function: the spy equivalent of that nightmare where you’re forced to take an exam you haven’t studied for. Please, will someone pinch him so he can tell if he’s dreaming or not? Things start to look up a little bit when the woman he’s sworn to protect in exchange for vital information provided by her father turns out to be a hot young psychologist (Lea Sedoux) who must be rescued from a Swiss mountaintop clinic, a locale which will allow him to impress her greatly (though not with his skiing skills as you might have expected, but rather with his ability to pilot a plane that gradually loses its wings and in the final accounting, tail).
As the trail leads to yet more exotic locales - Tangiers, then deeper into the wastes of North Africa, to the over-the-top, inside-the-crater-of-a-meteorite lair of a master criminal, the sensations only become more dreamlike. Traveling by train, Bond is attacked by that Lamborghini-driving assassin, which must prompt him to think, at least somewhere in his subconscious, “Hasn’t this all happened before?” And when he meets his nemesis, in the form of master criminal Blofeld (played with sinister glee by Christoph Waltz), who sort of turns out to be his semi-half-brother, there’s a surfeit to the experience that is sort of thrilling, even as the criminal mastermind makes the typical hubristic errors and doesn’t kill the secret agent when he has a chance, but chooses instead to put him in an impossible-to-escape-from situation from which he will escape, just as surely as the sun will rise in the east and set in the west, for he is, hallucinatory atmosphere or not, still James Bond. Indeed, against this surreal journey and its psychological horrors, Bond remains the solid and implacable center of it all, and by the end, he may even have decided to quit this hard life while the quitting’s good.