Christian Imagery in Skyfall

The 2012 James Bond movie Skyfall just came out on Netflix. When I saw it in the theater I was intrigued by the Christian imagery used throughout the film, and on seeing it again I took to the web to see if anyone had unpacked its meaning. I found Father Robert Barron's youtube commentary, hastily composed when the movie was first released, but not much else. So I thought I'd write one myself.

**SPOILER ALERT: Don't read this if you don't want to know how the movie ends.

Baptism, Death and Resurrection 

The most obvious Christian themes in the movie are baptism, death and resurrection. Now, one of the commenters on Father Barron's youtube post asks why we should believe there's baptismal imagery in the movie at all. After all, if every instance of someone getting wet in the movies is baptismal then there's a whole lot of baptism going on! This is a good reminder that many non-Christians, and even quite a few Christians, aren't very familiar with the symbolism of baptism.

The symbolism was clearer in the baptisms of the early Church. The water of baptism represents the waters of the Abyss, the primordial waters that Genesis describes as existing before God created the world. They represent the nothingness of pre-creation. In ancient times, when people were baptized they weren't just sprinkled with the baptismal water, they were fully immersed in it. Through this immersion, the initiate is symbolically sent back into nothingness; they are un-created. They die to their old self, and re-emerge as a new creation. They are "born again," in the words of St. John (John 3). St. Paul likens the death and rebirth of baptism to the death and resurrection of Christ:

"Or are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life."

Romans 6:3-4 

So when in the opening credits James Bond is literally drug through an Abyss and into a watery grave, when he later refers to this as his "death," and when he finally describes his hobby as "resurrection," there can be little doubting that this is baptismal imagery.

Two Rebirths

The themes of baptism, death, and resurrection continue as the movie describes the ultimate crisis of James Bond's childhood. As a boy, James Bond was orphaned. When told of his parents death, the young James hides out for two days in the house's priest hole, and when he finally emerges, "he wasn't a boy anymore." Now a "priest hole" is a hidden compartment built into some Catholics' houses during the Reformation, when the Crown was attempting to eradicate the Catholic church in England. Attending the Mass in those days was illegal, but Catholics are required to attend Mass each Sunday, so some Catholic families would invite a priest to their home on Sundays for a clandestine service. Should a representative of the Crown happen by that day, the priest hole was a place in which to hide him. The young James Bond's two-day refuge in the tomb-like priest hole, and his reemergence as a new man, is a clear image of death and rebirth in the film. That the Mass is a participation in the Passion of Christ makes the use of a priest hole particularly apt.

The theme continues with Silva, the villain of the film, who has also undergone a death and rebirth of his own of sorts, only in his case it has gone horribly awry. He is a former double-O agent who was captured by terrorists, subjected to torture and to terrible suffering. His breaking point comes when he realizes that M, the leader of MI6 and a woman whom he regards as a kind of mother figure, must be the one who betrayed him. Despairing all hope, he breaks the cyanide capsule hidden in his tooth in an attempt to end it all. The cyanide burns through his body, tearing his face apart and searing his insides, but he doesn't die. "Life clung to me like a disease" he says poignantly, one of the film's more memorable quotes. When he emerges from captivity he is also reborn, not as a new man, but as a monster, disfigured from the poison and consumed with a desire for revenge against M and all of its agents.

The Meaning of Skyfall

Skyfall is of course the name of the film, and is the name of the manor in which James Bond grew up, the one containing the priest hole. In his youtube commentary, Father Barron ascribes the meaning of the word "Skyfall" to a passage in Luke, in which the devil is cast down from the sky at the end of times. "I saw Satan fall, like a bolt of lightning from the sky." (Luke 18:10). Now Father Barron's video was hastily put together, and he admits that he hadn't thought it all out entirely, so I'm sure he wouldn't mind my disagreeing with him on this point. Understanding the title is often the key to understanding a film, and with so much Christian imagery in the film it's natural to look for a Christian meaning in the title. But I see no evidence in the movie for the Luke-based explanation.

The movie does provides some clues to the meaning of "Skyfall" however. At the end of the lengthy opening credits sequence, after the usual scenes of scantily-clad, pistol-packing beauties, we see the Skyfall manor being destroyed by blood raining down from the sky. Skyfall literally being annihilated by sky fall. Blood, incidentally, that is pouring from the gunshot wound in James Bond's side, the wound that caused his "death" in the opening scene. This foreshadows the climax of the movie, when the real Skyfall manor is destroyed by fire from the sky, in the form of a military helicopter that first shoots up, and then crashes into and incinerates, the whole house. I would submit, then, that "Skyfall" represents the calamities of life, which rain destruction upon us like fire from the sky (and which seem to rain particularly hard on Mr. Bond). It's end is annihilation and death, the precursor and precondition of rebirth or resurrection. A fitting name for the mayhem-fest that is a Bond flick.

Calamities 

Skyfall is a tale of two men's reaction to terrible "childhood" calamity: the death of the young James Bond's parents, and the betrayal of Silva by his "mother" M. Both Bond and Silva are orphaned, one literally and one figuratively. James Bond's response is resurrection, which becomes his lifelong "hobby," though his rebirth is not at first complete. He emerges from the waters of the opening credits listless and unmotivated. He hides out in nondescript villages, drinking and engaging in reckless and self-destructive behavior. He emerges only when Silva's attack on MI6 headquarters awakens his sense of responsibility. Even then, he is declared unfit for duty: psychologically unstable due to "unresolved childhood trauma". He is physically weak and psychologically troubled throughout most of the film. The key moment for Bond comes near the end of the movie when, as Skyfall manor is about to be incinerated, he looks back at the doomed house and quips, "I always hated this place." It's a laugh line but it's also an important, transformative moment for Bond. Soon afterwards, he will undergo one final baptism, as he is plunged deep into icy waters of a frozen pond on the manor grounds, in a scene reminiscent of the opening credits. Having finally let go of his childhood and the terrible trauma it contained, he is at last able to fully die to it, and to be reborn whole. For the rest of the film he appears healthy and free of the demons that have plagued him.

Of course, Silva's response to his own trauma is far more pathological than Bond's. We learn the extent of it in his closing scene, when he confronts M in a church on the manor grounds. As he enters the building and sees that it is a church he says, "Of course, it had to end here." He puts a gun into M's hand, places his head next to hers and asks her to pull the trigger, ending both their lives with the same bullet. We come to realize that Silva desires not only revenge, but death. His manner is childlike and pleading, he craves release from the insanity that had consumed him, from the twisted half life that he has endured since his failed attempt to take his own life.

Why does Silva find it appropriate that the end would come in a church? The movie provides no certain answer. Perhaps, deep down, he also desires resurrection. Perhaps he only craves annihilation. Whichever it is, death or rebirth, he recognizes the appropriate setting for last things. The end can only come in the Church.

Last Things 

Now, Skyfall is not Ben Hur. I don't imagine the authors have a grand theological design for this movie. No doubt they chose the Christian themes of death, baptism and resurrection to give depth and texture to a series that long ago became stale. And in this they seem to have succeeded. Many reviewers who failed to acknowledge, and probably scarcely recognized, the Christian themes in the film described Skyfall as one of the best Bond movies yet. When real Christianity is portrayed on the screen or in print it never fails to impress.

But there is an interesting reflection to be made here. Death and resurrection is an omnipresent theme of Christianity. We are baptized into it, we hope to share in it on the last day. And like Bond, we are expected to experience it many times throughout our lives, as we cast aside sin in order to follow the way of the Lord. Jesus tells us that unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies it remains just a grain of wheat, but if it dies it bears much fruit. If we don't die to our sins completely, if we put our hand to the plow while looking back to our old lives, we can never be truly reborn.