What used to distinguish 007 from previous thriller heroes was his unique brand of ironic detachment. Ian Fleming's books demanded to be taken straight. The earlier films mocked their source material's vanity, as well as the thriller genre, love, death and Her Majesty's secret service. Their studied cheesiness mocked the mockery itself.
In Skyfall, Daniel Craig's Bond delivers a scattering of old-style quips, but the chronic flippancy from which they used to spring has disappeared. Indeed, the film's lack of larkiness is the point of one of the cracks. Ben Whishaw's Q, favouring practicality over hilarity, offers Bond only a gun and a radio tracker. When this produces a raised eyebrow, he says: "Were you expecting an exploding pen? We don't really go in for that any more." Thus frugally equipped, our hero confronts a world pervaded by guilt, doubt, grief and foreboding rather than the joshing sadism of his previous outings.
The asperity of that world is no novelty for Craig's 007. In Casino Royale, he suffered the humiliation of being tortured in the nude. Even more startlingly, he declared himself unambiguously in love. Quantum of Solace provided him with the psychological driver for his behaviour that had previously been considered unnecessary.
Still, James Bond is not the only screen hero to have sobered up. When his mirthfulness was at its height, it infected his big-screen beefcake peers. In the 1990 version of Total Recall, Arnold Schwarzenegger tries to outdo Bond in homicidal gibes. Impaling an enemy on a drill, he remarks: "Screw you!" When his wife tells him he can't hurt her because they are married, he shoots her in the forehead and says: "Consider that a divorce." This summer's reworking of the story, on the other hand, was glumly earnest, offering social and political allusions in place of flippancy.
The cheery Batman of 1966 has become the grim and agonised Dark Knight. Prometheus aspired to a portentousness of which Alien felt no need. The teen-flick turned sombre in The Hunger Games, while The Amazing Spider-Man spent so much time grappling with existential angst that he had little left for derring-do. Inception presented more of a mental puzzle than a white-knuckle ride. Even Harry Potter felt obliged to exit amid such unalloyed grimness that there were fears he might scare the children.
Cinema still plays host to gross-out, farce and facetiousness; yet it is darkness, deliberation and doom that are doing some of the best business.
by David Cox, The Guardian | Read more:
Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar
