Okay, no, you know what, I’m not done talking about this. (Spoilers, if you’re still looking forward to catching Skyfall on DVD.)
When I was four, my mom took my sister and me and walked out on my dad. Until I was in my mid-20s, that old house stood unchanged, except for increasing layers of dust and mildew and sun-fading. I could go back and visit, and my old room was just the same. The bookshelves were the same. The bathrooms were the same, slowly gathering cobwebs and rust and looking as if my dad never even used them. Family photos were left to lie, slowly washing out till they were brassy photo-negatives of themselves.
Dad stopped even actually living there after his parents died and he moved into their house, but still it all just sat there. I remember so much of my early life in that house, and it was…like the post-apocalyptic remains of my life as it might’ve been. When I went there, it was almost like I pretended to be the ghost.
When we finally sold it—I was 26—it was both weirdly traumatic and freeing. Like an exorcism, or a rebirth.
So I get on a weirdly visceral level what Skyfall is to Bond. It’s the place and time in his life before he was who he is now. He’s CHOSEN to be who he is; he doesn’t want that other life. Whether it was traumatic, or the ending of it was traumatic, or he detests baggage or just feels self-conscious about having been a soft little child (self-consciousness might be the worst thing he could possibly imagine), he’s done his level best to erase that remnant of the old him from his history.
When he goes back there, he’s a different person. Lots of people have remarked how it ‘didn’t feel like Bond.’ Because he isn’t. There, he’s the ghost of a person who never quite existed. The fact that he even showed it to M at all kind of knocked my socks off; I would never have taken anybody but my closest, most trusted friends back to Dad’s old house, because there’s a creepy vulnerability to letting someone walk through a place like that, like you’re letting them into your head. But I think that just saying, ‘He trusts M’ would really be over-simplifying. He trusts that they share goals, but he’s also well-aware that she’ll ruthlessly exploit anything she’s given to get what she wants. But Bond’s a bit of a masochist (and a bit of a sadist, too, when he gets going). He likes it when desperation forces him off the map. And, frankly, it’s one place he didn’t mind getting riddled with bullet holes.
But I’m starting to get off-track. The point is, as far as Bond’s concerned, I’m pretty sure Skyfall getting wiped off the planet is one of the best things that could ever happen to him. Because that ghost of his old life that haunted him? It’s gone. Before, someone could conceivably go there. See who he was. Walk away with an awareness of him that’d be beyond his control to stamp out. But now it’s only in his head, where he can seal off that door so no one ever goes in there again. That last piece of youth and vulnerability is gone. Now it’s like he sprang full-formed out of a gun barrel to assassinate for Queen and country.
And at the end, that’s what we see. Just before that cut, we have Bond at his most agonizingly human—which is barely recognizable as James Bond at all. That’s…some other guy, also played by Daniel Craig. And after, when that last persistent fragment of his past is dead, along with his house and the woman who made him what he is, we have a cold predator in a bespoke suit. He’s closer to a machine than human, and then we know him instantly. ”At the end,” we say, “it’s like he’d finally become James Bond.”