Act II of “The Terrible Secret of Turtle Bay” begins with a continuation of the episode’s “B” story, as Hank and Dean seek adventure while stuck in a hotel room in New York City. Their father, Dr. Venture, has forbidden them to leave. Dr. Venture was a boy adventurer when he was their age (younger even), but the grown Rusty aggressively denies the boys their own adventures. This is his trip, to exorcize his demons, the boys don’t enter into his plans. One guesses he’d rather not have the boys on the trip at all. One guesses, in fact, that he’d rather not have the boys, period.

So the boys play astronaut with a paper cup in the bidet, then, when that gets boring, they move on to playing submarine in the bathtub with the case that Rusty’s invention came in.

Meanwhile, Bad Guy Plot A asserts itself as Senzuri Otaku sneaks into Rusty’s hotel room to a) poison him and b) steal his new invention. He tries to poison Rusty with a trick lifted from You Only Live Twice, the high-water mark of the 1960s James Bond adventures (that’s the one with the volcano lair and the army of ninjas), but is foiled when Hank and Dean, pursuing their B plot, walk in the door. The key to the joke, in a way the key to the joke of the show (if I may be pedantic for a moment), is that Hank and Dean foil an assassin’s plot and save their father’s life inadvertently, and unknowingly. “Assassin Tries to Kill Man, Sons Stop Him” is a plot for a thriller, “Assassin Tries to Kill Man, Sons Unknowingly Prevent Him While Looking for a Box to Use as a Pretend Submarine” is a plot for a farce.

In any case, long story short, Senzuri steals not Rusty’s invention but Hank and Dean. Senzuri might be a terrible ninja, but he has skills enough to dispatch Hank and Dean and leave them in an alley. “You win this round, Dr. Venture!” shouts Senzuri in classic villain mode, shaking his fist at the lightning-laced sky, bringing into play another important aspect of the show, that bad guys need good guys to give their lives purpose. Rusty, of course, hasn’t “won a round,” he doesn’t even know that Senzuri was trying to steal his invention, and, more important, he isn’t even really aware he’s a “good guy” with “bad guys” after him. In at least one way Rusty has succeeded in escaping his past, he no longer sees the world in terms of costumed bad guys scheming to do him in, his demons are internal. His goal is to escape his childhood and the costumed villainy that goes along with it. It’s constantly a surprise to him that another demented freak in a costume shows up to torment him. Rusty left the boy-adventuring game a long time ago, never wanted to be in it in the first place, thinks of it as a scar he must heal, but the world won’t let him forget. He’s trying to grow up but the world keeps insisting he remain a child.

Come morning, Hank and Dean are unconscious in an alley and their wrist communicators have been stolen by a couple of street toughs. Brock alerts Rusty to the situation (waking him from a dream of himself in the womb – speaking of trying to escape childhood) and Rusty orders him to find them – not because he wants them back, but so that they won’t “screw up his gig at the UN.”

Bad-Guy Plot B then asserts itself as The Monarch, having flown to New York after his abortive meteor attack, coincidentally finds Hank and Dean before Brock can. Rusty can’t be bothered to look for his sons, and Brock casually heads off in the wrong direction, but The Monarch has no problem finding them without even trying, and actually without even meaning to. Again, anti-plot emerges, the foiling of expectations. Which brings to mind that the sources The Venture Bros draws from are poor models of plot themselves, starting with Hanna-Barbera cartoons, leading to James Bond and Marvel Comics. Theatrics and spectacle always trump logic and motivation in those tales, and the characters of The Venture Bros are obsessed with them. In a way they are chiefly concerned with “the moment,” the pose, the drama, and will take it any way they can get it. So when The Monarch sees Hank and Dean sitting like a couple of idiots in an alleyway, he doesn’t say “Hey, that’s weird,” rather he says “Hm, Dr. Venture’s precocious progenies. They will be his undoing.” An opportunist seeking a pose (and what man dressed as a butterfly is not seeking to pose?), he “monologues” even though his audience, a cab driver, isn’t paying attention and wouldn’t know what he was talking about if he were.

The Monarch chases Hank and Dean to the subway, where he gets caught in the doors of the A train and dragged off the platform. Meanwhile, over at the UN, Pete White and Billy Quizboy gossip about Dr. Venture, specifically about his relationship to Brock (Pete thinks Rusty is gay). Pete and Billy are, for the moment anyway, representatives of the “real world,” looking at the rules of boy-adventuring from the point of view of free-range adults. Starting with Bruce Wayne’s adoption of Dick Grayson, boy-adventuring is filled with pairings and ad-hoc families that would look, at best, suspect from a contemporary view. And yet, satirists aside, it’s never been seriously questioned by readers why Bruce Wayne has a “ward” who’s a teenage boy or why it’s okay for Dr. Quest to take his preteen son and his preteen son’s preteen friend on dangerous adventures with spies and supervillany; it’s a convention, like so much else in the world of popular culture, accepted without suspicion. Why is it accepted without suspicion? The answer, alas, is economic: Bruce Wayne has Dick Grayson because DC comics found out that kids read Batman and wanted to give them a character they could relate to. Everyone “knows” that the Bruce/Dick dyad makes no logical sense, but everyone knows that it makes economic sense: it sells comic books. We accept Bruce and Dick (certainly the two most unfortunate names for a couple trying to appear not-gay) because we know that their relationship is based not on love but on shifting units. Which brings us back to Rusty, who has discovered that super-science, super as it may be, is only useful, only employable, when underwritten by a huge corporation. If Warner Bros tells us that Bruce and Dick are okay because that’s how we get more Batman stories, we accept it as part of the cultural exchange, we take the capitalist basis of their relationship as understood, as a given. Many of the characters in the Venture world, unfortunately, don’t have a capitalist aspect to their agendas, or rather, they’re not in on the capitalist joke. They toil in their roles as good guys or bad guys, unaware that the reason for their existence is a monetary one. They are garish, lurid expressions of real dramatic characters, given colorful gloss and cardboard motivations in order make serious stories more fun. Captain America made World War II fun, Superman made the Depression fun, James Bond made the Cold War fun, but the Venture characters live in the present, torn from the context of their cultural roots. They wear the clothes and strike the pose but inside they know that it’s all meaningless now, just sound and fury. They’re Joe Kirby characters living in a Christopher Nolan world.

Speaking of Jack Kirby characters, here’s one now, Professor Impossible, a carbon-copy of Mr. Fantastic, presenting his new invention, an electric car that helps repair the ozone layer. Mr. Fantastic is the protoypical New Frontier superhero, the Kennedy-esque foundation of the Marvel Era, his stretchiness a metaphor for the unlimitless possibilities of the US as a technological superpower, and presumably a friend to Rusty’s famous father. And now here he is, at Rusty’s big moment, stealing his thunder. Rusty’s father is dead but his generation continues to assert its greatness, its meaningfulness. (Of course, Professor Impossible is also a total dick, but that’s another story.)

Hank and Dean, meanwhile, stumble into Times Square, which has been “Brisby-fied” (The Disneyification of Times Square was a big story in the early ‘oos). In spite of New York’s corporate makeover (I doubt even the makers of The Venture Bros would have guessed that Disney would one day own both Marvel Comics and Star Wars), there are still hookers around, and Hank and Dean evade the Monarch’s clutches (again, inadvertently) by going off with one.

Brock (who is part of the B story) pursues Hank and Dean but finds only the two street toughs who stole their watches. Again asserting his overqualifications, he destroys their apartment and kills them. So, to recap, Hank and Dean’s plot so far is: looking for a box to use as a pretend submarine, Hank and Dean are inadvertently kidnapped by one villain, dumped in an alley, robbed by a couple of passing toughs, then pursued by a second villain, who has found them, inadvertently, while their bodyguard hunts them down and exacts brutal revenge, not on the villain who kidnapped them or the villain who is pursuing them across New York, but on a couple of teenage goons who stole their watches while they were unconscious.

Finally, the A plot comes to full boil as Rusty presents his invention. His speech is cloaked in the vocabulary of the New Frontier (he’s trying to escape his father’s shadow but can’t even find his own words to do so), but his invention, “The Oo Ray,” is a gun that melts cities. Rusty, in his monomania, hasn’t stopped to consider that what he’s invented is a weapon of mass destruction. The UN Guy (who has Norman Osborn’s hair) admonishes Rusty that this conference is supposed to showcase inventions for the betterment of mankind, but Rusty, being amoral, has no concept of “betterment.” More tellingly, when the UN Guy yells at him Rusty immediately drops the paternal New Frontier tenor and becomes a whining child, complaining “Hey, I worked really hard on this thing.” Again, “betterment” isn’t the goal, self-aggrandizement is. The presentation is a disaster, leaving the Oo Ray open to the predations of Senzuri.

Meanwhile, across town, Hank and Dean, observed by The Monarch, spend some time with their sleazy hooker. The boys aren’t just innocents abroad, they’re fictional characters brought into a non-fictional world. The capitalist agendas of the real world (Brisby taking over Times Square, their father’s cosmetics contract, street toughs taking their wallets, a woman who charges for “adventure”) keep surprising Hank and Dean, who have sprung from a fictional construct (in more ways than they could ever understand). They flee the hooker in terror. Across the street, The Monarch barely has a chance to spit out his coffee before Brock comes along to torture him. Again, Brock’s assignment is “to get they boys,” but in spite of them being across the street, Brock prefers to stay and torture the costumed villain who happened to be standing outside the building at the time.

The boys run to the UN, again inadvertently, and decide to “go surprise” Rusty. Rusty, who’s wallowing in his post-defeat bitterness, is flatly disgusted that the boys have shown up at all; he’d rather they were still missing. Nevertheless, he wants to exit this debacle as quickly as possible and goes to pack up the Oo Ray, only to find Senzuri masturbating on it. That, it turns out, is the terrible secret of Turtle Bay: Senzuri is not an evil scientist or even an evil ninja, or even an adequate ninja, he is merely a pervert, and an easily-caught one at that. He’s taken away by the authorities and Rusty, in one way, finds a happy ending in his plot: the Army will buy a hundred of his city-melting gun. Again, capitalism wins and personal motivation fails. Senzuri may be a sexual freak but his motive is pure; torn from his cultural context and set adrift in a concrete world, he seeks no profit from his perversion but is trumped by an army with limitless funds.

The A story and B story meet up, but remain unrelated, because Hank and Dean refuse to leave their narrative construct while Rusty, in his craven, amoral way, at least partially succeeds in escaping his. Meanwhile Brock has no problem traversing both worlds; we find him, after torturing The Monarch, in bed with the sleazy hooker and having totally forgotten about his mission. The Monarch, meanwhile, finds his plot once again short-circuited; we find him in the hospital, bloodied and bandaged, his butterfly wings removed from his stomach. Turtle Bay is full of dead-ends and lost souls. Some know they’re lost, others can’t see it, or refuse to.

My analysis of The Venture Bros fell behind with Season 4. As Season 5 gears up, I’m going to rectify that, but I’m also going to go back and look at Season 1, starting with the pilot, “The Terrible Secret of Turtle Bay.”

A pilot episode is a tricky thing. The intent is to introduce the viewer to the world of the show, but too many pilots err too far on the side of introduction. The narrative of a pilot script often pauses too many times to introduce a character or an element, slowing things down and feeling, essentially, too much like a movie and not enough like a TV show. The desired effect of a pilot is have it feel like a mid-season episode: that’s when television works best, when the world has already been established and characters can groove on each other instead of introducing themselves.

The “A” story of “Turtle Bay” is: Dr. Venture is brings his latest invention to some sort of UN conference of famous inventors. (You’d think the UN would be wary of inventors’ conventions after the “United World Security Council” got dehydrated during the 1966 Batman: The Movie debacle.) The “B” story is: Hank and Dean Venture tag along with their famous father, get lost in NYC and tangle with the Monarch.

But the episode opens with the Bad Guy Plot. The Bad Guy for this episode is a Japanese guy named Otaku Senzuri. What does Senzuri want? That, it turns out, is the “terrible secret” of the title, although the answer to the riddle is contained right in the Bad Guy’s name: Otaku Senzuri means, essentially, “geek masturbation.”

Senzuri is a ninja. A wealthy ninja, apparently, who has a huge modern apartment in a Tokyo high-rise and employs both a sexy young acupuncturist and a henchman, Kikai. Kikai (which means “tool”) is, apparently, disposable – no sooner does he set the plot into motion by alerting Senzuri of Dr. Venture’s new invention than Senzuri attempts to kill him by hurtling a handful of acupuncture needles at him. This is a key moment for Senzuri, because his murder attempt not only fails, but actually removes a kink in Kikai’s shoulder and cures him of his desire to smoke. It’s rare that The Venture Bros pulls its punch when dealing with a murderous villain, and in this case it points to character: Senzuri is a terrible ninja, and while he has removed Kikai’s kink, his own kinks are just beginning to come to the surface.

Kikai’s newspaper headline also keys us into an important plot point: Dr. Venture is referred to as “SON OF RENOWNED SCIENTIST.” Obviously he has yet to make a name for himself

This “Bad Guy Intro” sequence (which is set in widescreen to separate it stylistically from the rest of the show – the villains live in a movie while the Ventures live on TV) leads into the title sequence, a gorgeous Saul Bass pastiche set to a hysterically intense, intrigue-filled score. It’s like Hitchcock hopped up on acid, or speed. The title sequence places the show in a context that mere design cannot. Like most of the show’s design, it hearkens back to the 1960s and sets the show’s peculiar tone: of the present day, but not in it. The Venture Bros is a show about people who live in the past. “The past” hovers over every aspect of the show: the characters live in it, wallow in it, retreat to it or struggle to escape its hold. It’s like The Great Gatsby filtered through Jonny Quest. No one on the show is immune from the pull of the past, even the children, even the title characters. If The Venture Bros is about the Venture Bros, then it’s a show about how children suffer under the control of the people in their lives who cannot escape their pasts.

And look! Here they are now, Hank and Dean, the titular siblings, out on their hoverbikes (with the plastic baskets with the daisy appliques), searching the Venture compound for their dog Scamp. What do Hank and Dean want? The answer is: “nothing important.” Even though the show is named after them, the desires of Hank and Dean are almost totally irrelevant to the scheme of The Venture Bros. Hank and Dean are excellent examples of characters who believe themselves to be the protagonists of their stories, when in fact they are supporting characters in other peoples’ stories. In fact, in large part they are obstacles to the other characters, inconveniences. Their father doesn’t love them and their bodyguard would rather be doing almost anything else. Even the supervillains of the show would rather not have to deal with them. Whatever the Venture Bros want, it is almost always irrelevant to the main plot of the episode.

Next we meet Brock, Dr. Venture’s bodyguard. What does Brock want? “To do his job,” I’d say – he doesn’t seem to care that much about Dr. Venture, and certainly not about the boys, but neither does he complain about his lot. When we meet him he’s washing down the X-1 in his cutoffs. Brock is one of the few characters on the show who is oddly over-qualified for his job and over-matched for the tasks set before him. A man of action, nothing fazes him, not an live mummy or a giant alligator. Like Steve McQueen, he minds his business and gets on with things.

Finally, we meet Dr. Venture, the protagonist of the piece. Dr. Venture, we’ve already learned, lives in his father’s shadow. But it’s worse than that, he actually lives in his father’s house and works in his father’s lab. The statue at the entrance to the Venture compound shows Rusty’s father holding him aloft and pointing heroically toward the future, but it serves only to keep him a child in his father’s arms. It defines him, and while the statue is meant to point Rusty to the the future, it’s guaranteed that he lives in the past.

At the moment, Rusty wants only Brock’s approval; he’s excited about a discovery he’s made in regards to the last mission. Brock fumfers before he admits “I don’t care.” So we see that Brock is not Rusty’s bodyguard by choice, it is an assignment, which is an important distinction, especially where children are involved. How can one strive to protect when one has no love for one’s charges? But Rusty’s goal for the episode is, unsurprisingly, “to escape his father’s shadow.” He’s taking a new invention to the UN, before the world’s best scientists, so that everyone can see that he is his own man, or at least that he’s lived up to his father’s image.

For the moment though, his narrative function is to short-circuit Hank and Dean’s narrative. He’s got Scamp the missing dog, he’s experimented on it and removed its skin as part of a contract for a makeup firm. Rusty’s kind of science is the worst kind: amoral and chasing after profit. It is, in fact, hard to think of a more amoral character than Rusty Venture, a man who will use his sons’ dog for experiments, take his sons kidneys without their permission and use “an orphan” as a part of a new contraption. He’s an antihero’s antiheroand his fumbling, fallible, fatal attempts at fatherhood form the show’s emotional spine.

Rusty, Hank and Dean go to the X-1 hangar to find Brock beating up (or, rather, killing) a mummy that had stowed away on the plane, which allows the episode to introduce another of its key components: extreme violence. In its collision of fantasy and reality, the violence on the show is both brutally funny and sharply discomforting; Brock isn’t just good at his job, he’s a seething cauldron of rage when it comes to bad guys, and he never passes up an opportunity to dispatch enemies with extreme brutality. His violence is, like his qualifications, far beyond what the situation calls for. Violence has, of course, always been a part of “boys’ adventure” stories (usually called “action”), and The Venture Bros holds that tradition’s fee to the fire, putting Brock in charge of the boys and forcing them to witness his bloodthirstiness. Brock is, like Rusty, a broken man, not physically broken but spiritually, as amoral with his violence as Rusty is with his science.

After the death of the mummy (who it turns out was not a mummy but a guy dressed as one, Scooby-Doo-like) Rusty tries to engage Brock in some more team-building repartee, But Brock walks away without comment. Rusty, we see, still clings to the notion of the boys’-adventure ethos, where quips are made and high-fives are given after adventures. Hank and Dean, of course, still live openly in that fantasy, but Rusty’s hopes, we see, quickly dim as his relationship with Brock turns tetchy and short.

Lastly, we meet a secondary villain, The Monarch. The Monarch, of course, will emerge in later episodes as Dr. Venture’s main arch-rival, but for this episode he takes a narrative back seat to Senzuri. The Monarch is Rusty’s natural match, as much of a failure in villainy as Rusty is in science. The Monarch’s master plan for this episode is to launch a fake meteor into the Venture compound, then have men jump out of the meteor and kill Rusty. The Monarch’s scheme gets no further than Hank and Dean’s search for Scamp; it is short-circuited before it begins when the meteor lands in the Venture compound concurrent with Rusty and gang leaving in the X-1 for New York. Rusty’s scientific curiosity, even the face of a meteor landing in his back yard, is trumped by his driving need to show everyone that he is his own man. The Monarch’s men are left trapped in the meteor, presumably to die.

The X-1 lands in front of the UN (Rusty tells Hank and Dean to stay on the plane, short-circuiting another potential adventure) and before long Brock is attacked by a second stowaway, this time a crocodile, but soon we get to the main event of the narrative, the UN inventors’ convention. Rusty sends Brock to take the boys to the hotel and we see that Senzuri, now dressed in full ninja, is spying on our protagonist. Poorly, as he’s clearly visible to everyone in the room. We’re told he represents “the Onani Corporation of Japan” (Onan being the Biblical “spiller of seed,” and thus the patron saint of masturbators) giving us further clue to his agenda.

Finally, Act I closes with The Monarch, in full Monarch costume, on a commercial plane to New York, presumably picking up his mission where it failed before, to kill Dr. Venture. So, as of the end of Act I, we’ve been given an “A” plot and two unrelated Bad Guy plots, an unusual structure for a 22-minute show. But The Venture Bros uses upending of convention (and frustration of expectations) as its narrative currency.

A Southern Gothic Musical Hairball by Reuben Saunders. Produced and directed by Holly Golden, shot and edited by yours truly.

It’s my intention to take up analyzing the Venture Bros episodes as they are aired, so I found this especially helpful.

Keen readers of this journal will recall that, a couple of years ago, I wrote and directed a low-budget horror movie called Blood Relative. Things being as they are in the world of low-budget horror, it took a while to finish the thing and then it took another while to get a distributor. Now it has one, and boy are they doing their job! They’ve changed the title (which I like) and they’re taking it to Cannes! You can watch the sales trailer here!

Finally, a key scene from Walt Disney’s classic is presented, filling in the missing piece of “the fairest movie of them all.”

Spielberg waxed on his earlier ambitions to make a James Bond movie. According to The Times, Spielberg said he twice offered to direct a 007 pic, but was turned down by producer Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli. “I spoke to him after making Jaws, which was a huge hit, but Cubby said I wasn’t experienced enough and they’d call me if they did a Bond film on water. After Close Encounters, I told him that by now I had two Oscar nominations. And he asked ‘Did you win’? And I hadn’t. So that was that.”

In case the reflective nature of Skyfall were not already apparent, the “preparation montage” begins with a shot of Bond revealed in a full-length mirror.  The mirror will later be used in a trap, the classic “fooling the bad guys with a full-length mirror” trick.  As Kincade says, “Sometimes the old ways are the best.”  We see some traps laid out, others are merely hinted at.  All of them (spoiler alert) work exactly as planned.

As they wait for the Bad Son to show, M asks Bond “I fucked this up, didn’t I?” I just want to tell my younger readers, speaking as someone with kids, not as old as Judi Dench but older than Daniel Craig, this is what every parent thinks every day.  My own mother, near her death, asked me almost this same question (as a WASP, she never would have used profanity with her son).  Not being James Bond, I didn’t have his answer at hand: “No.  You did your job.” And again, I’ve seen this come up in movies from Bambi to Les Miserables, that the crisis of parenthood is not knowing if you’ve ever done the right thing, that all you can really hope for is to teach your children well and hope they make good decisions.  This moment alone would make Judi Dench the best M ever, a genuine parent instead of a strawman father figure.

Bond, not wanting to get too sentimental, goes on to criticize M’s obituary of him.  She says “I did call you exemplary of British fortitude.”  Fortitude being the strength to carry on while suffering, and bringing up the question “Why is the ability to move forward while suffering (KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON) a specifically British quality?  If Bond had been American, M would have mentioned his “rugged individualism,” if he’d been Italian she would have referenced his “hot-blooded passions.”  Craig’s Bond has certainly suffered more than any other (Roger Moore wouldn’t even get his feet wet while running across a pack of crocodiles), but why must Bond — or Brits — suffer at all?  Maybe it’s the British Empire that’s suffered so greatly in the past fifty years, maybe it’s Bond’s cultural position (certainly not his popularity — the Brosnan Bonds were all hugely successful).

(To give you an idea of just how steeped in Bondness Skyfall is, check it out — the deer statue from Thunderball comes back for an encore.  Earlier, a hand tattoo from the same movie shows up on Severine’s hand.  The movie is filled with references like this, some tiny, some played for laughs, all much more elegantly presented than in any previous Bond movie — they have quoted themselves from the very beginning.)

Act IV of Skyfall is in three sections: arrival, preparation, and siege. The “siege” part is the longest and is also divided into three sections: springing the traps, which ends when M is wounded, Silva’s counter-assault, which involves him showing up in a helicopter, deliberately misquoting Apocalypse Now by blaring The Animals instead of Wagner.  So the first act of the siege is “Yay, We Won!” (“Welcome to Scotland!” barks Kincade after he shoots a guy down — yeah, that part was totally written for Sean Connery).  The second act is “Silva Strikes Back.” And boy does he! He shreds the Bond manse with everything he’s got. His counter-attack is so fierce that Bond must retreat. The third act of the siege, “Showdown,” concerns the retreat, and involves a chase across the frozen marshland, Bond almost drowning (again), and a showdown in a chapel. Along the way, Bond blows up his own house (destroys his past) and has his adult identity (his Goldfinger car) taken from him. So, some past is shed, some is taken, but Bond is finally free.

(The three acts of the siege are even color-coded: blues for the early victory, oranges invading the blues for the counter-attack, and all-oranges for the third.)

“Of course, it had to be here,” says Silva as he confronts M in the chapel. (The house with a priest-hole has a chapel – I’m not a religious scholar, so I can’t tell if it’s a specifically Catholic chapel or an Anglican one or what, and the tombstone for Mom and Dad Bond don’t give any clues — except to say that they are “TRAGICALLY DEPARTED.”  I wonder whose job it was to editorialize on the manner of Mr. and Mrs. Bond’s deaths, and who chose the au courant font.) Why does it have to be there?  Because it is the resting place of Bond’s parents, or, ickier, because perhaps Silva is proposing a kind of wedding.  Which, when he finds out M is dying, he does.  He switches immediately from vengeful son to tender lover, and there on the altar of the Bond chapel, Silva attempts to join himself and M in everlasting unity.

His unholy sacifice is undone, ironically, by a literal knife in the back.  Ironic because M has been seen, multiple times, figuratively knifing her agents in the back.  M, unfortunately, is too far gone to save, and while the scene begins by hinting toward a forced jocularity between Bond and M, it lasts only two lines before M delivers her dying words, “I did get one thing right.” The “one thing,” presumably, being Bond himself, her decision to make him a 00 agent, her decision to stick with him after all the crazy stunts he’s pulled, and the decision to send him back out into the field after he’d failed his tests.  She had a mother’s faith in him, even as she tried to give herself a bureaucrat’s distance from him.

An epilogue starts with Bond again with his back to camera looking out over London.  The shot is a deliberate echo of the one introducing Act IV, to show that this is his Bond’s home now.  And even though M has just died, I notice that all the British flags over Parliament are at full mast.  Another fact of life at MI6, that you suffer and die and no one knows, and no one mourns your passing.  That’s what comes of a life spent keeping secrets.

Here comes Eve.  M has left Bond her Churchill bulldog, that other exemplar of British fortitude, as a message to keep going through suffering.

Eve, we finally are told, has the last name of Moneypenny.  Lois Maxwell’s Moneypenny always pined for Bond, never got him, but I like very much the idea of a Moneypenny who can be a genuine friend — and a genuine lover — to Bond.  It is, after all, the 21st century.

Mallory, we find, is the new M. (I guess it’s a prerequisite for the job that your name starts with “M.”) Mallory’s character arc, we’ve seen, is bureaucrat-to-believer (with an echo of past service). Mallory was a stranger to Bond, and us, but we’ve seen him come into focus as he’s turned into, if not a father, at least a stepfather to Bond.  Who will, no doubt, carry on.

I watched Live and Let Die with my son Sam (11) this evening.  It was his first Roger Moore Bond movie.  Moore, for me, is charming and light, but Sam, quite rightly I think, greatly prefers Daniel Craig.  Watching Moore pretend to kick and karate-chop bad guys in the streets of Harlem and the bayous of Louisiana is thoroughly unconvincing, it doesn’t look like Moore would care to ruin the drape of his slacks.  Although we both got a healthy laugh out of his expertly delivered line: “Don’t worry darling, its just a small hat, belonging to a man of limited means, who lost a fight with a chicken.”  I had also forgotten that the bad-guy plot of Live and Let Die was, at the time, a ripped-from-the-headlines adaptation of the story of Frank Lucas, the real-life Harlem drug lord who really did take over the heroin trade from the Mafia, a tale well-told in the movie American Gangster.

Nevertheless, Sam is of an age enough to want to know the facts of life — by which I mean “How did the movie do?” For this, I turn to Box Office Mojo, which not only keeps track of these things but also goes so far as to adjust grosses for inflation.  (Their list of all-time grosses, adjusted for inflation, is particularly edifying.)

I’m shocked to find that Live and Let Die is one of the least popular of the Moore years. The Looney Tunes cartoon Moonraker is number 1, and the truly bizarre Octopussy is number 2! (No pun intended.) The trajectory seems to be: People weren’t ready to embrace Moore when Live and Let Die came out, then there was the unfortunate Man with the Golden Gun, which would turn anyone off of the series, but then there was the going-all-out Spy Who Loved Me, which saved the franchise and allowed Moore to do five more of them.  It’s hard to imagine a studio today saying “Well, the grosses were way down on the first movie, but let’s let the guy do two more and see if things pick up.”  Which of course goes back to the Bond movies being producer’s movies, the Broccolis own the property and no studio can tell them what to do.  At this point, the Bond movies could justify their production on ancillary rights alone, it’s not like people are going to suddenly stop watching James Bond movies in endless rotation on cable networks.

As for the superior You Only Live Twice doing less than half of the turgid, bloated Thunderball, YOLT had the misfortune of splitting the Bond dollar in 1967 with the ersatz Bond parody Casino Royale, which was a huge hit that year but is not listed here for some reason.

Act IV of Skyfall begins at 1:45:49 and opens with a stunning shot of Bond, with his Goldfinger car, as a tiny figure in a huge landscape, fitting as Skyfall‘s primary goal is to place the Craig Bond in context, not just in the Bond-verse but in the cultural landscape.  The narrative asks “How does James Bond fit into the modern world of espionage?” but what it’s really asking is how he fits into the modern world at all.  And I don’t think I’m “bringing this” to the movie, I think it’s quite intentional.  The Bond movies have never, ever seriously asked us to consider the world of real-life espionage at all, they’ve always been colorful, absurd, high-flown escapist spectacles, the Batman of espionage thrillers.  They didn’t offer a solution to the Cold War, they offered escape from it, they goofed on it.

And so, as with Batman, Bond must now be re-imagined, brought to earth, scaled back and made a resonant character. I’m not a grade-A cultural analyst, but one thing I’ve noticed in the past decade is that everyone has an opinion on Bond, and must have an opinion on Bond, and must be prepared to discuss and defend those opinions, and must be prepared to offer logical reasons why they prefer Dalton to Brosnan or why The Spy Who Loved Me is better than Thunderball or why Nick Nack is better than Tee Hee, all in spite of the fact that it’s all quite silly.  James Bond, for some bizarre reason, bless his heart, matters to us as a culture.  He obviously means something.

I think the cultural shift regarding Bond is the same shift that has presented itself to straight white men everywhere: he’s no longer in charge of everything, and the world is no longer his red carpet.  Watching You Only Live Twice the other day, I was struck by how the whole narrative just unrolls for Bond to step into.  There’s a scene where Japanese super-spy Tiger Tanaka takes Bond to his gigantic Ninja Training Camp, an idea silly enough by itself, but sillier still is the way it’s presented to Bond: here is a gigantic ninja training camp, we are all here to help you, do what you like with us. Guns, gadgets, vehicles, women, travel are all thrust toward the Connery Bond with the flourish of a fruit basket in a penthouse suite for a VIP.  ”Right this way, Mr. Bond, your fantasy adventure awaits you for you to partake.”

With rare exceptions, the Bond movies are nothing but fantasy comedies for middle-aged men with adolescent minds (which is why Roger Moore kept being cast long past his sell-by date – Bond on paper may be a young man, but Moore was the audience).  The typical Bond plot falls apart with only a cursory glance and has the visual panache of a 50s Batman story: giant props, garish villains, shark tanks, volcano strongholds, indestructible henchmen.  In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service Bond leads a chase into a stock-car race and no one bats an eye.  The climax of You Only Live Twice hinges on a self-destruct device called “The Exploder Button.”  They are movies made to entertain Don Draper, and, lest we forget, Don Drapers used to run the world.

Now the president is a black man and Bond’s boss is a woman and the Bond brand of leering sexism and casual misogyny is repugnant and off-putting.  That’s why the Craig Bond has been re-imagined, brilliantly, as an underdog, a shadow living in a shadow, a grown child who dreads a trip home: he can’t escape his past, he must go home — in order to burn it to the ground.  In fact, we could say that the plot of Skyfall exists as an excuse for Bond to go home and destroy it, to shed his past.  Like Silva, he wants to finally be his own man.

“How old were you when they died?” asks M.  ”You know the answer to that,” says Bond, “You know the whole stoory.” An “as you know, Bob” scene in reverse, two characters discussing something the audience desperately wants to know more about, but in this case the lead refuses to play.  There is a habit in Hollywood of the executive, or producer, or actor, or director, or marketing guy, saying “I want to know more about _____,” and the writer saying “Well okay, I’ll make sure that’s clear then,” and it’s a crying shame because it’s mysteries like the nature of Bond’s childhood that keep the character interesting, or better still, vital. Tyler Durden’s complaint was that he lived in a nation of men raised by women, that all our male instincts have been softened and abstracted, and this is where the Craig Bond comes in — he’s going to be a man, unapologetically, in a world where men are no longer fashionable.  His “You know the whole stoory” line is a bitter acknowledgment that James Bond is cultural property, that he belongs to everyone now, that we “know the whole story,” but we don’t know the man.  Skyfall seeks to crack open the perfect oblique eggshell of Bond and examine the secrets inside, but it also recognizes that in order to keep him vital we can’t know everything – because real people don’t want us to know everything. George Carlin once said that language is a tool for concealing the truth – well, culture is a language too, a language we use to talk about everything except who we are.  It’s like examining a black hole, we can’t see it, but we know it’s there by the way it affects everything around it.  ”Orphans always make the best recruits,” observes M, because, like Bruce Wayne, like Don Draper, like Harry Potter, they have less attachment to familial structures and more attachment to institutional ones as they seek desperately to replace the thing they cannot have.

Bond and M get to Skyfall, Bond’s ancestral home, a dusty, empty baronial manor house surrounded by marsh.  Is this a metaphor? Is Bond a decaying shell of a manse in a wilderness, steeped in history with only his 50-year-old car to remind him of his youth?  What did Bond’s father do, that he owned such a remote, isolated pile?  How old is the Bond money?

The shell’s caretaker, Kincade, is played by Albert Finney, but I have to assume the part was written to entice Sean Connery back to the franchise.  How awesome that would have been, to find a bearded, bald Connery puttering around the empty shell of the Bond manse with a shotgun, ready for battle.  As it is, Finney has no direct connection to Bond except through the Bourne movies, where he plays the head of the Treadstone program.  When informed that his life is in imminent danger from an unknown number of trained assassins, Kincade reacts as though he’s been told that raccoons have gotten into the grain, as though defending the house from assassins is the most natural thing in the world. Obviously the part was written for Connery.

“Do we still have a gun room?” asks Bond. Kincade, suddenly a makeshift Q, performs an anti-Q scene, concomitant with the theme of privation in Skyfall — it’s an embarrassment on poverty, the guns are gone, just “your father’s old hunting rifle” and “a couple of sticks of dynamite.”  The narrative, which not that long ago was leaping about neon-lit Shanghai and cruising through a fantasy casino in Macau, now becomes, strangely enough, a big-budget remake of Straw Dogs, with Bond, M and Kincade building home-made booby traps.  The paucity of Bond’s tools set against the wealth and plenty of Silva’s computer-aided empire are exactly what Skyfall needs — there is no miniature helicopter or high-tech gadget waiting in a briefcase for Bond to whip out.  And so when Bond goes to practice with his father’s rifle, his aim is now true: he’s out of MI6, he’s out of the modern culture, he’s home.

Elsewhere, folks have remarked upon Bond’s Catholocism, as his house has a priest hole.  Me, I don’t buy it, Kincade says the priest hole “dates back to Reformation,” but I have a hard time believing Bond money is that old.  Although it does give added resonance to Silva’s admonishment to M to “Think on your sins.” (Silva, being Spanish and having a Day of the Dead skull for his logo, is a more likely candidate for Catholocism.)  I think the priest hole is simple escape-route planning, since the plot calls for an escape route, but the screenplay takes care to root the route in character, to say that when James heard that his parents had died, “he hid in here for two days.” We know nothing of how or when that was, whether Bond was eight or twenty-five, and how violent or unexpected the deaths were, and I hope we never do.