If Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz is to be believed, there's no place like home. But what if that home is Skyfall? In his 50th anniversary queer odyssey, 00-Dorothy doesn’t just kick back against traditional notions of home and family; along the way he creates a unconventional family to replace the one he lost and blows up his childhood abode with dynamite. Talk about cathartic!

If this is your first time reading a re-view on LicenceToQueer.com I recommend you read this first.
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‘Inspired by Skyfall’ by Herring & Haggis

The name’s Bond… Flaming Bond

The husband couldn’t be further from the truth, of course. Bond is rarely keen to get home - and especially so in Skyfall.

The married couple on the platform could never comprehend the real reason why someone would jump onto the back of a moving underground train. They exist in a different world to Bond - and not merely in the sense of them being blithely unaware that Bond has the sort of job where jumping onto moving vehicles is de rigueur. In their world, they possess a completely different set of associations of ‘home’. They see it as somewhere safe and comforting whereas Bond… does not.

This apparently throwaway gag does more than make us laugh; it points us in the direction of the queer resonances of Skyfall. The bittersweet irony of this scene is, whenever Bond thinks of home, he wants to run a mile.

What do you think of when someone says the word ‘home’?

Is it the house you grew up in? Is it the people you lived with, your parents or caregivers?

Is it the house or flat you reside in now, on your own or with one or more significant others?

Is it your city?

Is it your country?

Is it your workplace? Is it the people you work with?

Chances are, the answers to those questions are very different depending on who you are and the experiences which have shaped the person you are today.

When it comes to literary themes, you don’t get much more universal than home. Classical scholar Renee Mathis (a real person, not the character from Bond) asserts that: “This desire for a place to call home provides one of the strongest themes for authors, poets, and artists of all kinds to weave throughout their works.”

The word ‘home’ is folded into so many everyday metaphors that we barely stop to notice it. When used as a metaphor, it more often than not carries positive associations. For instance, many electronic devices have a Home key or a Home screen, which we use to return to when we have too many windows open and we need to re-exert control. In music, we speak of a ‘home note’: we find it comforting when a piece begins and ends on this same note. If it doesn’t return ‘home’ we can be left feeling tense because the music has not been resolved.

But not everyone has the same associations with ‘home’. And despite the apparent universality of ‘home’ as a theme in artistic works, we need to be cautious. Although home is often presented as a place to return to, it can also be a place to escape from.

In a 2004 critical review of the literature on the meanings of home, Shelley Mallett declared it to be a “multidimensional” concept whose meanings are “contradictory”, often depending on which academic discipline you are reading within, whether it be sociology, anthropology, human geography, history, architecture, philosophy or another. Things get especially complex once you throw queer theory into the mix (well, we queers do love to make things difficult, don’t we!).

Mallett observes that, in the popular Western imagination “the home belongs both materially and symbolically to the heterosexual couple who enact and promote particular gendered roles and relationships”. Therefore, people who are not in heterosexual couples and/or do not subscribe to traditional gender roles can find it harder to ‘belong’. Instead, they frequently must seek out alternative conceptions of home. In short, anyone who doesn’t fit in with sexual and/or gender norms may need to find different places to live and different ways of connecting with people. James Bond could definitely relate.

Skyfall tries to find a ‘home’ for Bond, putting many possibilities in play. By the end, some of these have crumbled whereas others are standing tall.

I’m going to explore the queer resonances of each of Bond’s ‘homes’ in Skyfall, starting with his country, England. Then we’ll hone in on his city, London. Bond doesn’t even have a flat in Skyfall. We’ll explore the significance of this. Finally, we’ll return to where it all began, in both literal and psychological senses: Skyfall, the titular childhood home.

“Something alien and un-English”: Bond’s country

007 spends most of his time running away from his home nation, flying off on his next mission. Bond may be famous for keeping the British end up, but he does so from a distance.

James Bond has never been very ‘at home’ in Britain. Yes, the scene in the film of Dr. No where we meet Bond for the first time takes place in a club in London, but it’s not long before he’s jetting off to spend the rest of the story in Jamaica. Until Skyfall, there had been a handful of set pieces that had taken place in or around London: Goldfinger’s golf game; Thunderball’s and Never Say Never Again’s sleuthing at Shrublands (a place Bond can’t wait to get away from); For Your Eyes Only’s pre-titles sequence; Octopussy’s auction; A View To A Kill’s Ascot scene; Necros attacking the MI6 safe house in The Living Daylights; the Thames boat chase opening of The World Is Not Enough and the sword fight in Die Another Day. But that’s not all that much screen time across so many films. Most of the time, Bond only returns home in order to receive his next mission. He doesn’t even do that in some films, receiving his briefing while in the field (You Only Live Twice, Licence To Kill).

A chase sequence across London was deleted from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, ostensibly because it slowed the pace of an already long film. But perhaps it also got the chop because London did not feel exotic enough to qualify as ‘Bondian’.

It’s apposite that it’s within the covers of the only Fleming novel set entirely within England, Moonraker, where Bond is most explicitly identified as an outsider in his own country. After meeting M at his club, Fleming omnisciently tells us:

“Bond knew that there was something alien and un-English about himself. He knew that he was a difficult man to cover up. Particularly in England. He shrugged his shoulders. Abroad was what mattered. He would never have a job to do in England.”

With the lone exception of Fleming’s Moonraker, the UK-set scenes in a Bond story take place in the first half, usually in the first act.

Skyfall is the first Bond story to reverse the narrative trajectory, sending Bond around the world on a grand tour: Istanbul; the Turkish coast; a longer than usual stop in London; Shanghai; Macau; a Japanese island… before returning him to London, and then off to his childhood home in Scotland.

The scale of the film becomes smaller and smaller as Bond gets geographically nearer and nearer to home. Psychologically, this reflects Bond’s growing discomfort as he goes more and more inside himself.

Bond is hardly alone as an ‘Englishman’ feeling out of sorts while on home turf. Being part Scottish and part Swiss French might have something to do with it of course, but many of the most famous ‘Englishmen’ were technically natives or residents of other lands. Nationality doesn’t always correspond to geography. That most ‘English’ of novelists, Somerset Maugham, was born in France. One of several of Fleming’s older male mentors, Maugham was an early supporter of the Bond books. In thanks, when Fleming needed a name for Bond and Tatiana to use as cover in From Russia, With Love, he chose ‘Somerset’. Like several of Fleming’s friends - including Noel Coward - Maugham had been a spy himself. Maugham was also an influential writer of spy fiction. Maugham’s Ashenden has a world-weary disillusioned tone which makes it a fitting companion piece with Skyfall. As Maugham’s biographer Selina Hastings points out, even though he emerged into the world within the walls of a British Embassy “in literal terms, France was Maugham’s native country, but he always regarded himself as English to the core.”

And yet, Maugham said in his autobiography that:

“I never felt entirely myself till I had put at least the Channel between my native country and me.’’

One reason why he felt uncomfortable in England was because he was exasperated at England’s sexually prudish attitudes. Maugham didn’t label himself as gay or bisexual but said he was "three quarters normal, one quarter queer", although the evidence assembled by his biographer points to it being the other way around. Before his marriage to a woman imploded he led a double life: a dutiful husband and father in London; a lover of men in Europe. According to the Hastings biography, entitled The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, he was always much more himself, and therefore happier, when abroad.

Like Maugham, Fleming spent a sizeable portion of the year abroad, where he could also escape the stifling sexual conventions of England. Perhaps this is why Bond spends more of his time away from home than at home.

The England portrayed in Skyfall is of course very different to the England that Fleming, Maugham and Bond were eager to escape from in the middle decades of the 20th Century. With Skyfall being released in a Queen’s Jubilee year and the Olympics taking place in London, there was a very conscious decision to not only use British/English/London iconography but also reflect the values of Bond’s nation.

A 2017 study (Vincent, et al) of British newspaper narratives before, during and immediately after the London Olympics concluded that:

“This provided British journalists with an opportunity to reengineer Britishness to reinforce some traditional values and inject some new inclusive ones. Although at times, complex, contested and contradictory, the narratives generally linked the internationalism of the Olympics with a progressive, benign version of Britishness that emphasized inclusion, tolerance, and creativity and, at least temporarily, redefined how Britain regarded itself and was viewed.”

Emblematic of this benign version of Britishness was the Queen herself being escorted to the Olympic stadium by Bond, jumping out of a helicopter with a Union Jack parachute, intentionally recalling the iconic opening to The Spy Who Loved Me, another Bond film released in a Jubilee year. This was a nationalism we would all get behind. Or could we?

In 1983, Benedict Anderson came up with the term ‘imagined community’ to describe how the media creates a sense of national affinity, potentially distorting the fact that not everyone is on the same page. Anderson’s idea has subsequently been applied to communities of other kinds, not just people who share a nation but also those who share a characteristic, such as sexual orientation and/or gender identity. People often speak of the ‘LGBT community’ as if we all agree about everything. But with all aspects of our selves - nationality, sexual orientation, gender - we assume a commonality of viewpoint at our peril.

There’s no harm in being hopeful - it’s essential to have a vision of how things could be - but we cannot mistake Utopia for reality. We cannot turn a blind eye to inequalities. Creating a distorted sense of fraternity has, according to Anderson, made it possible “over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings”.

History has taught us, time and again, that it’s better for the life expectancy of people belonging to marginalised groups if they - and their allies - keep a careful watch out for patriotism sliding into nationalism. Bond is, ostensibly at least, a card-carrying member of most privileged groups (white, straight, middle class, cisgender). But after being betrayed by M - and by extension, his country - Bond has come to realise the limitations of his imaginings. This is most explicitly articulated in Bond’s strong dislike of M’s Union Jack bulldog paperweight: “The whole office goes up in smoke and that bloody thing survives”. Bond’s “interior decorating tip” (as M sassily brands it) can be read as not just hostility towards M but also a questioning of flag-waving.

Right from the beginning of Skyfall’s production, writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade drew heavily on the existentialist elements of Fleming’s last two Bond novels, You Only Live Twice and The Man With The Golden Gun, in which Bond suffers a tragedy as a result of his duty crashing headlong into his private life. Following Tracy’s death he becomes increasingly disillusioned with his job and life in general. On a suicide mission he ‘turns Japanese’, lives a second life and attempts to assassinate M when he finally returns ‘home’ to England. But this is quickly revealed to have been a temporary blip: Bond was brainwashed. Even though M recognises that the best way to aid 007’s recovery is to get him out of the country as quickly as possible, Bond’s loyalty to England is never in doubt. Eon producer Barbara Broccoli has repeatedly stated in interviews that Bond is distinctive as a character because “He's British, he has a certain code that he lives by, he's incorruptible…” But, she adds, “he's also fallible. He has inner demons, inner conflicts…”

In Skyfall, the inner conflict about Bond’s nationhood becomes more outer than we are accustomed to. He feels he cannot immediately return ‘home’ to Britain because of M’s (and his country’s) lack of trust in him.

Being away from his country has given him perspective. He may still be willing to kill - even be willing to die (again) - for his country, but he will do so more cautiously than previously, and for the right reasons. When Bond returns from “Enjoying death” he tells M he’s “reporting for duty,” but his voice is laden with resigned irony.

Whether or not to kill for his country has been a tension in many of the best Bond stories, particularly in The Living Daylights, with Bond deciding to ‘stuff’ his orders and not kill what he’s erroneously been told is a KGB sniper. The dilemma is most obviously brought to the fore in GoldenEye, when Bond decides to kill his former friend, 006, for personal reasons rather than “For England”.

Despite the prevalence of the Union Flags in Skyfall, a jingoistic reading is a blinkered one. Skyfall is both a celebration of British national identity AND a critique.

Even the real-life MI6 are wary of anyone who is too keen to do their duty by their country. When they placed an ad in The Economist in 2014 to recruit intelligence operatives they sought to filter out any wannabe James Bonds of old by making it clear that they weren’t interested in hiring anyone who thought MI6 was “all guns and fast cars”. But above all, they were wary of anyone who would protect their country by “any means possible”. They were more interested in post-Skyfall Bond wannabes, who would do their duty but within the bounds of what was reasonable.

The version of the advert which appeared in *The Sun*

In the same advert, MI6 also made it clear that your gender or sexual orientation would not be a barrier to a successful career with them. Living in London might be helpful however…

“London seems alien”: Bond’s city

Only London could lay serious claim to being Bond’s ‘home’ city. And yet, until Skyfall, we spent relatively little screen time there. And when he gets back there, he doesn’t seem best pleased to be ‘home’. London is described as seeming “alien” in the Skyfall screenplay (the same word Fleming used to describe Bond in Moonraker). Thomas Newman’s Middle Eastern-sounding music successfully ‘others’ a place Bond should feel most at home. And visually, London is drained of welcoming warmth.

So why does Bond come back?

It’s the mention of “London” on a news broadcast which first rouses Bond from his alcoholic malaise.

London is the hook which reels him in:

Regardless of how betrayed he feels, he feels a sense of kinship with both his city and his workplace. Even people who feel ambivalent (or worse) about their ‘home’ city, town or village cannot help but pay attention when they hear it mentioned by name.

Bond didn’t grow up in London of course. It’s his adopted city and one, we presume, he adopted because it was where his workplace is located. But if he didn’t need to live there for work, would he still prefer urban life to rural existence? When Bond and Tracy are discussing where they might live after he’s left Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Tracy suggests Tunbridge Wells, which, although only 30 miles from central London, might be too far away from the centre for Bond. He suggests Belgrave Square, around the corner from Buckingham Palace. They then run through a series of cities - Paris, Rome, Monaco (a city state) - before scoffing at the prospect of living in a barn.

In No Time To Die, prior to Bond believing he’s been betrayed by Madeleine, they have been living a peripatetic lifestyle, driving across Europe. When Bond asks Madeleine where they should go next she chooses ‘home’, although it’s not clear where this would be (perhaps her childhood home in Norway which is the place we’re shown as we hear the music cue called ‘Home’ on the soundtrack later in the film). Post break-up, Bond is shown living on his own in Jamaica. Although it might appear that Bond is living his best retired life, we know he is restless to return to a more purposeful existence. Felix Leiter’s death provides the impetus. This is comparable to the Bond of John Pearson’s Authorised Biography, who is living out his retirement years in Bermuda. Although he’s in the company of Honeychile Ryder, her charms are not sufficient to prevent him from rejoining MI6 when he’s called back to finish an old case. Bond follows the same psychological and geographical trajectory in Skyfall: he feels compelled to return ‘home’ to London when he has unfinished business.

James Bond is drawn to urban centres, something he has in common with most protagonists in queer dramas. Most films made by, about and for queer people have been, and still are, set in urban areas. This reflects the real life concentration of queer people in cities. 2017 research from the Official for National Statistics shows that although there are “rural hotspots”, by far the densest concentrations of queer-identifying people in the UK are in big cities, such as Manchester, Cardiff, Bristol and, of course, London.

In his book on gay life in London in the decades running up to the First World War, Matt Cook writes: “Think of ‘gay’ men and ‘gay’ culture and we think of cities”. It’s a similar story on the other side of the Atlantic: anthropologist Kath Weston has called the mass movement of queer people to major urban centres across the United States (particularly San Francisco and New York) in the 1970s and 1980s ‘the Great Gay Migration’. Weston writes: “For people exploring same-sex sexuality in the years following World War II, the city became the place to be, not the place to flee.”

When it comes to Bond’s own city, London, historian and novelist Peter Ackroyd has traced its queer history back to the Celts and the Romans. Matt Houlbrook, in his book Queer London, points out that the city has long been “the site of a vibrant, extensive, and diverse queer urban culture”. The importance of London to queer men and the way the public perceive homosexuality is “long established”, the association between homosexuality and the city “a familiar theme”.

While some of the reasons for particular gay migrations are historically and geographically specific, the common denominator is that many of the queer people involved grew up feeling isolated. Even in my relatively (sub)urban upbringing I convinced myself that I was ‘the only one in the world’. Kath Weston observes that this is a trope of many coming out narratives, real and fictional, so it’s nice knowing - albeit retrospectively - that I wasn’t truly alone after all!

In my early twenties, I did fantasise about my own escape to a big city. Taking a holiday as far away from the UK as I could get was my way of dipping my toe in the water. Aged 21, I booked flights to Hong Kong and stayed there for 10 days with two friends. This was the first holiday I’d ever taken without my blood relations.

Being quite a shy person by nature I knew moving away from the UK was very unlikely to happen. I didn’t even go away to university and here I was thinking about living in a foreign city halfway around the world! But at that point, having just finished my undergraduate degree, I was in one of the more liminal phases of life. I wasn’t alone in this: one of my friends had recently lost a parent to illness and the other was a year or so away from getting married to someone who lived halfway around the planet. So things felt a bit less nailed down than usual.

I chose Hong Kong mostly because I was really into Hong Kong cinema at the time and, of course, it had appeared in The Man With The Golden Gun. The anonymity that living in Hong Kong offered - one of the most liminal places on Earth - excited me almost as much as it terrified me.

I remember surreptitiously looking up the ‘gay and lesbian’ section of the Time Out guide book to get a sense of what it might be like to live there. I returned home and spent the next 5 years feeling more or less miserable and very emotionally unstable. I doubt I’d have been any happier in Hong Kong to be honest but the experience of travelling abroad to a place I instantly felt more ‘at home’ was a useful one: it provided a possible escape plan if things ever got intolerable.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking cities provide a ready-made paradise for queer people. Even in the most ‘tolerant’ cities, such as London or - my own closest city - Birmingham, queer people can experience open hostility. I’ve experienced this myself, even in ‘safe spaces’ such as Birmingham’s Gay Village. There are particular parts, even specific streets, of my city where I do not feel safe holding my husband’s hand or wearing brightly coloured clothing. In Queer London, Houlbrook explores this in detail. He argues that cities can be “alienating, disruptive and dangerous” for queer people just as much as they can be welcoming. He cautions that the bulk of the evidence we have for piecing together what queer life was like in past eras comes from a time when “the British state sought to suppress particular social and sexual interactions between men”. In most instances, we only know what queer people got up to because they got caught doing it. Fleming writes about this when Bond gets mixed up in police business in Moonraker.

So even though cities are not necessarily all they’re cracked up to be, would queers be any better off living in the countryside?

Queer narratives in a rural setting are hard to come by. In real life, that’s because they weren’t often recorded, or are only now being recovered. Anne Lister, sometimes described as the ‘first modern lesbian’ was a wealthy landowner living in West Yorkshire at the beginning of the 18th century who wrote about her same sex relationships in code. It’s taken until very recently to decode her writing, which formed the basis of the TV series Gentleman Jack.

Perhaps the first gay story in a rural setting that springs to most people’s minds is Brokeback Mountain where fishing trips in wide open Wyoming provide an escape for the same sex attracted cowboys (technically shepherds). Critic B. Ruby Rich, who originated the term ‘new queer cinema’ in the early 1990s, says that the rural-set scenes of Brokeback Mountain constitute “a playground of sexuality freed of societal judgment, an Eden poised to restore prelapsarian innocence to a sexuality long sullied by social shame”. There are few better depictions in contemporary cinema of the dread queer people can feel when returning home after experiencing freedom in another setting.

Queer viewers may feel a pang of this in the final act of Skyfall. It’s not without considerable apprehension that Bond surveys the Scottish landscape before he and M make the last leg of their journey through the glens to his childhood home.

But Brokeback Mountain is a high profile exception to the general rule. It’s far more common for queer narratives to have their protagonists living freer lives in urban areas.

The word ‘urbane’, meaning refined, derives from ‘urban’. Bond is both. Even when he heads to the beach it’s usually somewhere cosmopolitan. See for instance his emergence from the Bahamian ocean in Thunderball or Casino Royale. He’s there to both see and be seen. Bond is incongruous in an unpeopled environment, exemplified brilliantly in Quantum of Solace, with Bond and Camille walking through a desolate desert in their evening wear. A similar moment occurs in The Spy Who Loved Me, with Bond made to looking immaculately ridiculous as walks through a village after a night on the Nile.

When Bond does try to dress suitably for a rural environment, he ends up looking like a fashion model. On the moor in the final act of Skyfall, his poseur status is confirmed by him wearing brands including Crockett & Jones, N. Peal and Tom Ford. His Barbour jacket is tailored to metrosexual tightness, as are his suits (see Camp, below) throughout the film. Like many queer people, Bond finds it difficult to leave his urban/urbane lifestyle behind and he can’t wait to return to where he feels more ‘at home’: in the city.

“I’ll go home and change”: Bond’s flat (or lack thereof)

In Skyfall, Bond is literally homeless, his flat having been sold when he was presumed dead. M coldly informs him this is “Standard procedure on the death of an unmarried employee with no next of kin”. Bond has fallen foul of a deeply out of date HR policy here, as might have many of his queer colleagues. At the time of Skyfall’s release, same sex marriage was not possible in the UK (it was introduced two years later).

The line also reminds us that Bond has no living blood relations and even M, increasingly presented as a surrogate mother figure across the film series, won’t put him up for the night. The first time he broke into her house - in Casino Royale - she told him she’d have him killed if he tried it again. As she’s almost killed him quite recently it’s charitable that she doesn’t carry out her threat.

We presume that Bond has sufficient means to pay for a hotel and does not end up sleeping on the streets or on a work friend’s sofa. Even so, this scene may have a particularly painful resonance for viewers who have experienced any kind of familial rejection and have had to - or have chosen to - leave the family home.

Prior to coming out as gay, I took seriously the possibility that I would be thrown out of my parents’ house if/when I told them. It may sound somewhat ridiculous now, and it’s certainly not been easy for my parents to hear. But it did play on my mind to the extent that I denied myself lots of things in my mid-twenties so I could save enough money in case I had to quickly find accommodation when I eventually told them. Looking back in hindsight, I thought I was being rather melodramatic. That was, until I spoke with several other queer people who had very similar experiences. They weren’t thrown out by their family but they had considered the possibility. Always have an escape plan!

Sadly, not everyone is as fortunate as I was in keeping a roof over their heads after coming out. Research by the homeless charity Albert Kennedy Trust has revealed that nearly a quarter of homeless people in the UK identify as LGBTQ+.

For the last two decades or so, much of the international research into feelings about and experiences of ‘home’ has concluded that queer people view it as a heteronormative institution: something to kick back against and ultimately reject (if they’re not rejected by others first). More recent researchers (including Peter Matthews, Christopher Poyner and Richard Kjellergen) have pointed out this has changed in some socities, with more queer people aspiring to attain what straight people typically have, such as a nicely-decorated fixed abode with a long-term partner and possibly children. Many aspire to these homonormative goals. But others don’t. For some queer people, home may something very or slightly different. Those in a polyamorous relationship for instance may still want a nice place for the three (or more) of them to live. They might just want to consider buying a bigger bed.

We are accustomed to seeing Bond reject normative goals of all kinds. His is a transitory, peripatetic, liminal existence; a life lived mostly out of a suitcase. Bond resists binaries of all kinds, and this includes homeless/housed. He’s always somewhere in between.

Skyfall begins with an attack on one of Bond’s ‘homes’ (London, MI6) and ends with another. The difference is, it’s Bond who performs the coup de grace on his ancestral home. If anyone is going to blow up Bond’s boyhood gaff, it has to be the man himself.

Skyfall is where we start… and end: Bond’s childhood home

Interviewed by Ajay Chowdhury and Matthew Field, Skyfall screenwriter Robert Wade revealed that the final version of the third act of the film, where Bond takes M to his childhood home, was only added at a very late stage of the writing process - two weeks before the script had to be handed over to studio executives. Wade said:

“He was taking his mother figure back to where he was orphaned and it suddenly gives you more thematic depth to the whole film.”

Stories about returning ‘home’ are as old as storytelling themselves. In Western narrative tradition, The Odyssey is probably the most well known and influential story about a character striving to return home. In Skyfall, we hear a version of this tale when M starts reading an extract from Tennyson’s Ulysses at the Board of Inquiry. But even more pertinent to Skyfall is another coming home story with The Odyssey in its DNA. Although no one - to my knowledge - intended it to be the case, Skyfall is The Wizard of Oz of Bond films.

It’s a bold claim, I’ll admit. But for me, The Wizard of Oz and Skyfall have some profound and - to me at least - revelatory similarities.

The Oz series of novels began in 1900 and more books are still being written today. Original author L Frank Baum wrote 14 Oz books, coincidentally the same number of Bond books written by Ian Fleming. Fleming has had a considerable number of continuation authors and so has Baum. Although Fleming’s books are still wildly popular, even more people come to Bond via the films. Similarly, Oz is known to more people because of the famous film starring Judy Garland, released in 1939. In all its incarnation, Oz is a touchstone for many, including many gay men. I say many gay men - not all. I’ve always struggled to connect with the The Wizard of Oz and watching Skyfall again made me realise why.

There are many echoes of The Wizard of Oz in Skyfall which help to illuminate what is going on beneath the surface of Bond’s 50th screen anniversary adventure. None of these echoes appear to have been intentional but instead the result of playing around in the same thematic sand pit: the one labelled ‘feelings about home’. Both the Oz and Bond stories draw heavily on archetypes drawn from mythology so it’s perhaps inevitable that there would be some overlap. Even so, Skyfall in particular carries more Oz echoes than most Bond films. The 1939 film of The Wizard of Oz famously features a visually arresting transition from the black and white world of Kansas to the Technicolor realm of Oz. Most Bond films begin in a similar way, with the gunbarrel ushering in a world of exotic adventure. Let’s not forget that several of the early Bond film gunbarrels were actually in black and white, until the red blood dribbled down at least. The gunbarrel is always a thrilling moment of transition, bringing us into Bond’s world. Even though Bond effectively kills us, the audience (it’s our point of view staring down the gunbarrel) his violent action essentially brings the rest of the film to life before our eyes.

Skyfall’s sepia-tinted opening shot is intended to recall the traditional Bond gunbarrel, even harking back to those very early black and white beginnings. After Bond has left Ronson to his fate in the underlit apartment, he passes through a doorway into the sunlight and it’s revealed we’re in a bustling city. Not just any city, but Istanbul, the city commonly referred to as the ‘crossroads of the world’, a place not unlike Oz with its myriad peoples.

The effect of Bond stepping from the claustrophobic interior into the expansive exterior is to make us feel like we have entered another world. Dangerous as this world is, it’s where Bond feels more ‘at home’ than anywhere else. Bond has the same relationship with the world ‘out there’ as a wandering cowboy in a western, perhaps the genre most obsessed with feelings about home. Think of John Wayne’s ‘searching’ character in The Searchers. Right at the end (spoiler alert) Ethan turns his back on settled domesticity by walking out of the farmhouse and, framed by the doorway, into Monument Valley, a shot which has been copied endlessly to signify a character rejecting settling down (see for instance Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, released in 2020, with Frances McDormand playing the nomadic protagonist).

If we fast forward to the final third of Skyfall, the cinematography is again largely drained of colour. Here, Bond steps back into the almost monochrome world of his childhood home. When M asks him where they’re going he tells her “Back in time”. Black and white is frequently used as cinematic shorthand to show us events happening in the past or, in the case of The Wizard of Oz, the real world. This is the Skyfall filmmakers telling us to brace for both: this will be a journey into Bond’s past and also something more psychologically grounded than we are used to.

It takes around 9 hours to make the 500 mile drive between London and Glencoe but only a minute in film time. When Bond stops the car to look moodily at the scenery he peers at the darkening sky and announces to M that “Storm’s coming”. Another Wizard of Oz echo, but here it’s not a tornado like the one that rips up Dorothy’s farmhouse. Instead, Bond has to take shelter from Silva, arriving Valykrie-like, in a helicopter. But Bond also retreats to Skyfall to confront his own past. While waiting for Silva’s attack, it’s revealed that, after Bond was informed of his parents’ death, he took shelter in a priest hole, burrowed out sometime in the late 16th or early 17th century to be a place of refuge for Catholics. Viewers belonging to a marginalised group may relate to Bond hiding out in a safe space used by people hiding from persecution. It may also be a call back to the hurricane-room Fleming gives Bond in From Russia, With Love. When the plane he’s travelling on heads into a storm, Bond retreats to this psychological space as a way to cope with his anxiety:

“In the centre of Bond was a hurricane-room, the kind of citadel found in old-fashioned houses in the tropics. These rooms are small, strongly built cells in the heart of the house, in the middle of the ground floor and sometimes dug down into its foundations. To this cell the owner and his family retire if the storm threatens to destroy the house, and they stay there until the danger is past. Bond went to his hurricane-room only when the situation was beyond his control and no other possible action could be taken.” (extracted from Ian Fleming’s From Russia, With Love)

Glencoe is obviously not in the tropics. Nor, for that matter, is Kansas. But the scene in Skyfall where Bond takes cover in the priest hole after lighting the fuse on the dynamite recalls to my mind the hurricane-room of From Russia With Love as well as Dorothy taking shelter in the cyclone cellar. In Skyfall, however, the real oncoming storm is Bond’s childhood self coming back to haunt him.

There’s no place like Skyfall?

In his book Friends of Dorothy, Dee Michel pours a bucket of water over the idea that it’s just because of Judy Garland that Oz has such a big gay following. Perhaps the most fundamental reason why many gay men love spending time in Oz is because the land of Oz itself can provide an escape from ‘home’, just as Dorothy escapes from Kansas - for as long as they’re watching the film or reading one of the Oz books at least. Michel observes: “Many gay fans say their childhood was unpleasant at the time that they became fans.” Personally, I have no doubt that becoming a Bond fan at an early age was a coping strategy for being gay. Watching, and later reading, Bond’s exploits provided the escape from the shame I felt most of the time. I know that many other Bond devotees - queer or not - relied on Bond in a similar way.

Whatever our circumstances, Bond allows many of us to live a fantasy life. And even when the story is over, many of us perpetuate the fantasy in a multitude of ways: playing the film soundtracks allows us to enact our lives as spies, even when we’re just commuting to work; we can pretend we’re experiencing the luxurious existence of an agent on a generous expense account by making cocktails at the weekends in our kitchens; we can literally walk in Bond’s shoes (or a pair that look like them if we can’t afford Crockett & Jones).

The reason I connect with Bond far more than The Wizard of Oz is because of the differing ways these narratives want us to feel about ‘home’.

The problem with Oz is the depressingly conservative ending. I just don’t buy it. Both the 1900 book and the 1939 film end with Dorothy returning to her farmhouse in Kansas. “There’s no place like home!” is the last line of the movie, take directly from this passage of the book, where Dorothy attempts to explain to the Scarecrow why she wants to return to Kansas:

"No matter how dreary and grey our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home."

Dorothy is unequivocal here. In her mind, there is no place like home. There’s not even a hint of the ambivalence which many people - queer or not - feel when they face the prospect of returning to the place they grew up. Unlike Bond in Skyfall, Dorothy has not yet grown up - she is still somewhere around 10-12 years old - and has formed no clear conception of ‘home’ beyond the one she’s familiar with. Even so, it’s perplexing why she wants to return to somewhere that drains people of life. At the beginning of the novel, Baum tells us that:

“When Aunt Em came there to live she was a young, pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her, too. They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled now.”

Oz’s creator eventually gave up trying to fit his Technicolour Dorothy peg into a colour-sapping Kansas-shaped hole. By the sixth book in the series, Baum decided it was time for Dorothy to go to live in Oz permanently. Even some hardcore fans of Oz cannot understand why Dorothy is so desperate to return to where she grew up.

I’m not alone in finding the ending to the first Oz story jarring. Although not a gay man, novelist Salman Rushdie is very familiar with feelings of not belonging. When he watched the film of Oz for the first time as a child in Bombay he didn’t buy the ending either, as he explains in his book about the film:

“Anybody who has swallowed the scriptwriters’ notion that this is a film about the superiority of “home” over “away”… would do well to listen to the yearning in Judy Garland’s voice as her face tilts up toward the skies [singing ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’]. What she expresses here… is the human dream of leaving—a dream at least as powerful as its countervailing dream of roots.”

Contrast this with Bond, who is reluctant to put down roots of most kinds. Might this have something to do with his childhood experiences of home?

“So overdue, I owe them”

Although Skyfall is not a horror film, it does have a haunted house in its title, at its thematic core and in its climax. Stories set in haunted houses are so effective at disturbing us because they deliberately shatter our sense of home as a safe haven. In these stories, the physical home is often something to escape from rather than escape to. When we finally see Bond’s house, the titular Skyfall, it resembles a gothic mansion of the kind people might generally regard to be haunted, even if we don’t believe in such things ourselves.

I can’t imagine Bond, ever the rationalist, believing in ghosts. But the screenplay makes it clear what the intended effect of him going back to his childhood home is:

Interviewed for Empire magazine ahead of the release of Skyfall in 2012, Sam Mendes claimed that one of the three rules of working in Bond’s world was that he “doesn't live entirely in the real world”. This could appear to be laying the foundations to support some supernatural elements in the film. And Mendes has gone on record several times professing his love for Live and Let Die, the only Bond film to feature a character who literally cannot be killed. Despite all this, Skyfall is one of the more grounded Bond films, with Mendes openly admitting to taking inspiration from Christopher Nolan’s Batman series, in which Nolan went to lengths to find rational explanations for everything, including the hitherto supernatural villains, such as Ra’s al Ghul.

More than any other Bond story, Skyfall attempts to provide us with a rational explanation for much of Bond’s adult behaviour. The things that ‘haunt’ him are his childhood and his deceased parents, which have been alluded to before in books and films, but which have never formed the core of the story. Skyfall is not just the title of the film or the name of a house but also a metonym for Bond’s childhood and its associated trauma.

The majority of the information Fleming gives us about Bond’s childhood crops up in passing. The longest passage of backwards-gazing appears at the beginning of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. At first, Bond appears to have mostly positive feelings about his childhood. Sitting at the beach initially conjures nostalgic memories of “those spade-and-bucket days!”.

But the memories of childhood come “almost too vividly” and he quickly represses the memories rather than allow himself to sit with them:

“Impatiently Bond lit a cigarette, pulled his shoulders out of their slouch and slammed the mawkish memories back into their long-closed file. Today he was a grown-up, a man with years of dirty, dangerous memories--a spy. He was not sitting in this concrete hideout to sentimentalise…”

Fleming allows us our clearest glimpse into the “long-closed file” in You Only Live Twice’s obituary, revealing that Bond was an orphan, another thing that he has in common with Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. By itself, this is not particularly unusual in popular fiction. It was pretty much the norm in the 19th Century (see, for instance, most of Dickens’ oeuvre). Back then, making your main character an orphan was “fictionally useful” according to literature scholar John Mullan, although the same might be said of today’s most lucrative fictions (see: Star Wars, Harry Potter, Batman, Superman, etc). Fleming wasn’t just drawing on fictional tropes but partly his own life: his own father died in combat eight days before Fleming’s tenth birthday. According to Bond’s You Only Live Twice obituary, he was only a year older, eleven, when he lost both of his parents.

Fleming states that Bond’s parents perished in a climbing accident, although it would take more than thirty years for this to be mentioned in a Bond film. GoldenEye’s 006, a fellow orphan and former Double 0, taunts 007 by saying that whereas Bond’s parents had the “luxury” of an accidental death, his own were betrayed by their adopted country (we will discuss the impact of ‘institutional betrayal’ in the next section, ‘Allies’).

Skyfall re-opens the “long-closed file” on Bond’s childhood and invites us to take our time leafing through it. There’s no mention in Skyfall of the aunt Fleming gave him or the uncle who briefly appears in Charlie Higson’s Silverfin. The implication is, aside from the gamekeeper Kincade, he was on his own. According to Kincade (who doesn’t appear to have been a particularly nurturing surrogate parent), Bond had to grow up pretty quickly. Specifically: in two days.

Researchers in the field of Attachment Theory would analyse the death of Bond’s parents as a ‘rupture’ in a child-parent relationship. This would certainly constitute a ‘rupture’ at the top end of the scale and would doubtless have devastating psychological impact. But it’s important to stress that someone does not have to experience their parents’ literal deaths to be significantly affected.

Although it’s widely understood nowadays that the strength and nature of our relationships with our parents influence our development and how we go on to live our lives, this was not always the case. Attachment Theory was pioneered in the 1960s by John Bowlby. He was motivated by his desire to understand the impact his own somewhat strained and distant relationship with his parents had had on him.

In a 1951 book exploring the link between maternal care and mental health, Bowlby wrote about the causes of ‘maladjustment’ and what might be done to mitigate the effects. While Bowlby was writing from a heterosexist point of view, he was keen to point out that his ideas were universal, and more recent researchers have applied his ideas to the lives of queer people. This is especially important because many queer children experience a ‘rupture’ between themselves and their parents/caregivers and the effects can linger long after they have come out and been ‘accepted’, perhaps merely tolerated, by those who should love them most.

Maladjusted young men

On first meeting Bond in the 2006 film of Casino Royale, Vesper Lynd doesn’t need to be told he is an orphan.

Vesper clearly knows her Attachment Theory because as soon as her surmise is confirmed to be correct, she says Bond was, using Bowlby’s exact terminology, “maladjusted”, as a result of growing up without parents. This is what made him an ideal recruit for MI6, something M confirms in Skyfall.

According to historian Henry Hemming, at least one of the real-life models for M actively recruited people who had something go “dramatically wrong” in childhood, including those who lost one or more parents. Hemming claims it gave them an outsider’s point of view. Not only did such people tend to be more loyal to queen and country (as Vesper accurately observes) but it could be argued that someone who feels like an outsider is best placed to spot unusual details in others.

We know of many queer spies who have held top positions in Britain’s real life Intelligence Services, perhaps testament to how effective the recruitment of ‘outsiders’ was for much of the 20th Century. Few of these would have been orphans of course, but many would have had complicated relationships with their parents. Yet, for all the challenges their queerness posed, it may also have given them certain advantages when it came to dealing in secrets.

Even if nothing goes “dramatically wrong” in our formative years, nobody has a perfect childhood, although some find it easier to look back with nostalgia than others. We all have to experience abandonment by our parents, no matter how attentive they are. Psychologist Erik Erikson noted in his book Childhood and Society, published back in 1950, before Bond’s literary birth, that the first time a parent leaves a child on their own, even if it’s just for a minute, the child starts to wonder if their caregiver is going to return. Perfectly consistent parental attention and care is an “unrealistic paradise” in the phrase of Walt Odets, a psychoanalyst who has built on Erikson’s work from a queer perspective. All of us, Odets writes, “experience a paradise lost” but it is “often a more conscious experience among gay men than many others”. Whereas heterosexuals are taught from an early age that paradise will someday be restored by forming an intimate relationship with someone of the opposite sex (‘the one’), “with relatively few exceptions, we are taught that the futures of gay boys entail deprivation, abandonment and loneliness. This often leaves gay adolescents with a sense of loss and longing for something they never had and feel they never will”. The result is that “a sense of loss longing, and nostalgia characterises many gay lives”.

I can certainly relate to this. I am intensely jealous of people who insist that they had a ‘wonderful childhood’. While I had it better than many, from an early age I was plagued with the persistent thought I would never form an intimate relationship with another and, if by some miracle I did, I would die early (growing up during the peak of the AIDS crisis was a significant contributing factor here). In short, paradise was never within my grasp; the future was always frightening to me and my constant worrying about this more often than not made my present a test of endurance.

Unlike Bond, I didn’t experience a sudden loss of my parents. But as the realisation that I was gay dawned upon me, I felt a widening distance between me and my parents. In the seminal gay text The Velvet Rage, clinical psychologist Alan Downs writes about an “expanding fear” that gay boys have from an early age, that our “different-ness” could cause us to “lose the love and affection of our parents.” This was my experience: because I felt unable to share with them a significant part of who I was, they always felt at arms’ length, perhaps because I put them there in order to protect myself from heartbreak if/when I came out. It was a constant nagging fear.

Perhaps so many protagonists of fictional narratives are orphans because such characters speak to the abandonment many of us experience, even if it’s all just inside our heads?

According to Downs, it was this rejection, or the fear of rejection, which ingrained in gay children that:

“there was something about us that was disgusting, aberrant and essentially unlovable. We decided whatever it was… must be hidden completely from view. Although we are older now, we are still driven by this insatiable, infantile drive for love and acceptance. In order to survive, we learned to become something that would be more acceptable… No matter how we expressed it, we needed love and we feared that there was something about us that made us unlovable.” [Downs’ original emphasis]

There are hundreds of guides written for parents to help them deal with their feelings around their child coming out. Most reassure them that it’s normal to feel as if they have lost their child, almost as if they had died. Some even use the famous ‘stages of grief’ model established by the psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross to explain the emotions parents might feel next: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, finally, acceptance.

But there are surprisingly few guides written for queer people struggling to process their feelings towards their parents after coming out. It’s still a big taboo, borne of the assumption that love for one’s parents should be unconditional.

When I did eventually come out at the age of 26, I struggled a lot with my feelings: I felt as though I had not only killed the previous version of myself, but also that I had killed off my parents’ love for me.

While we would all like to assume our parents really do love us, it’s perfectly legitimate for us to question how authentic this love really is. How can we not when they made derogatory comments about queer people and never gave any sign that they would accept their own child if they came out as queer? No wonder many queer adults feel anger towards their blood relations, even if they don’t express it because of social pressure.

For their 2022 book, Families We Keep: LGBTQ People and their Enduring Bonds with Parents, non-binary sociologist Rin Reczek and their straight colleague Emma Bosley-Smith interviewed 76 LGBTQ people and their parents to find out why they keep their relationships going. They found that most queer people had a sense of ‘compulsory kinship’ with their parents: a keenly felt need to sustain relationships at all costs because they felt they owed their parents something. Perhaps this is also the same kind of kinship Bond feels obligated to maintain with London and MI6, even when it’s not good for his health.

Reczek and Bosley-Smith questioned this deep-rooted conviction that relationships with our parents are sacrosanct, arguing that it would be healthier for everyone if we instead created “an ethic of care” with other people “regardless of familial bond”. Parents should not automatically be placed at the centre of the family.

Dedicating their book to their own two year old child, Reczek addressed them directly:

“When people ask me how I would feel if you didn’t want a relationship with me once you became an adult, I acknowledge I would be sad. But you don’t owe me anything - even though the forces of compulsory kinship say otherwise. … I’d like to imagine a time when adult you and I consciously choose to stay in a relationship - or not.”

While a shift to this mindset across the whole of society would require significant systemic changes, the authors hoped their book would give individuals “permission to break free of those family bonds that are not in our best interests.”

Bond does gain his independence from his parents, although not by choice. The relationship with them is suddenly severed - but that doesn’t mean he isn’t still tethered to them. Part of his sense of self, his identity, still hinges on them. When he hid himself away for two days in the priest hole, did he really emerge as a different person? What did go on down there? Did he confront his grief and somehow process it in 48 hours or less? Unlikely. Far more believable is he spent the two days planning his escape from his distressing thoughts and feelings by learning how to cram them into a box labelled ‘Skyfall’ - a box he never intended to open. In other words, did he engage in what psychologists call ‘avoidance’?

How much do you know about fear?

A 2018 study into avoidance and its role in anxiety disorders by doctors Stefan Hofman and Aleena Hay summarised the prevailing thinking:

“Avoidance is typically considered a maladaptive behavioral response to excessive fear and anxiety, leading to the maintenance of anxiety disorders.”

In other words, while avoidance may help us cope in the short term, prolonged avoidance is only delaying the inevitable and will probably cause us more distress in the long run. We may even, as Bond does, attempt to numb our emotions with strings of risky sexual conquests or large quantities of alcohol - with or without the added danger of scorpions.

The anthithesis of avoidance is exposure:

“Exposure is a core element of cognitive-behavioral therapy for anxiety disorders. One important aspect of this treatment is repeated and prolonged exposure to a threat while discouraging patients from using avoidance strategies, such as escape or safety behaviors.”

Learning to sit with your negative thoughts, even openly inviting them in, is easier said than done. But this is what Bond does at the end of Skyfall by laying a trail of breadcrumbs from London to his childhood home. Despite Bond saying his taking M to Skyfall will get them out “in front”, it makes little strategic sense. The real motivation is that Bond has decided enough is enough: rather than running away from his past he will confront it.

“I always hated this place”

It’s easy to assume that Bond’s strong reaction to being asked to word associate with ‘Skyfall’ is because he has painful associations with the house because he was there when he learned of his parents’ death. Yet, when Bond decides to blow up the house, he says that he always hated it.

Skyfall is not just a house: it’s a metonym - or stand-in - for Bond’s whole childhood.

Similarly, the DB5 is not just any car but a metonym for Bond’s adulthood.

Somehow, Silva knows that Bond will take the DB5’s destruction personally. Silva has been systematically stripping Bond of everything he has built up around him to believe in, including ‘ruined’ institutions (“England… the Empire… MI6”) and his faith in his mother figure, M. The DB5 represents the identity Bond has shaped for himself in adult life.

It’s not the same DB5 as the one he won at the poker table in Casino Royale, but it works whether you realise this or not. If you want to force continuity to fit and pretend it is the one he picked up in the Bahamas, it can represent Bond’s self-belief that he has cultivated as an adult, following a difficult childhood; the ego that allowed him to defeat Dimitrios over the poker table and win not just his car but also his wife. If you recognise the registration plate (and the fact it’s now right hand drive and equipped with an ejector seat) you’ll bring along all of the Bond baggage which has been shoved into the compact boot of BMT 216A since it first appeared in Goldfinger. Metatextually, it taps into our own feelings of nostalgia, our own childhood experiences of watching Bond, and perhaps other aspects of our childhoods. In the world of the film itself it reminds Bond of how far he’s come…. but will it be far enough? Earlier Bonds were more self-assured. But what about Craig’s Bond? How will he react?

The destruction of the DB5 is intended to shake Bond to his core and make him feel like a child again. Psychologists have long recognised what is popularly called “I feel like a child” Syndrome. We all keep a so-called ‘child fragment’ within us. Those of us who had particularly stressful childhoods access those feelings very readily - sometimes too readily. They formed our mental models of ourselves on which we have attempted to build our adult selves. But they are shaky foundations on which to build a stable identity. Our attempts to cover over the cracks may not always be successful. We may know the right wines, wear the right clothes and drive a nice car (although few of us can afford a DB5) but these things are just wallpaper, not the bricks and mortar. We can feel like we’re been brought to our knees when someone says or does something which triggers our unresolved doubts or fears. In these moments, we can literally experience our childhood selves in the way we did all those years ago. A queer person on the receiving end of a discriminatory comment will often remark that, in that moment, it made them feel like a child again. That’s because the majority of us developed a self-image which wasn’t exactly flattering. As children, we didn’t like ourselves very much and got used to telling ourselves we weren’t as good as other people because that’s what we were told - implicitly or directly - by others.

When these episodes happen, it can be very tempting to give in. There have been times in my own life where I have taken aggressions - verbal and physical - very personally and felt like giving up, wallowing in the past, taking a grim comfort in feeling miserable, as I did for much of my childhood and early adulthood. As someone in their fourth decade, I know I will never become impervious to bigotry’s slings and arrows (and attack helicopters, if we want to extend the Skyfall analogy) and I wouldn’t want to be. Painful as these reminders of childhood are in the moment, they make me more determined to forge a fulfilling adult life and make a difference to others.

Bond also chooses to move forward. Silva’s plan backfires. The bombastic, urgent playing of the Bond theme on the soundtrack and the sudden dolly (push in) towards Daniel Craig’s face show us he’s made up his mind.

The attack on the DB5 just makes Bond more resolute. He had already been moving the gas canisters into place. Silva’s actions cause him to light the fuse on the dynamite.

The screenplay page tells us that Bond takes the match from his father’s cigar box, a detail which is difficult to show in the redominantly visual medium of film but one that shouldn’t be overlooked: Bond weaponises his childhood home to blow up his painful past. He’s not going to let his past define him or hold him back.

We can all learn from that.

Friends of 00-Dorothy: Allies

We all face societal pressure to prioritise relationships with blood relations over relationships with people to who we aren’t genetically connected. But, for some of us, this is not desirable or, as in Bond’s case, possible.

Even so, Bond is never truly alone.

When relationships with people with who we share generic material are irreparable, this doesn’t mean they’re irreplaceable, although it can feel like that.

In Families We Keep, Rin Reczek and Emma Bosley-Smith observe:

“The parent-child relationship is so central to contemporary society that it is difficult to imagine an alternative.”

Perhaps this is why some Bond fans are inclined to think of Bond as a lone wolf, an individualist. Without blood relations, how could he be anything other than self-reliant? Some queer Bond fans see Bond’s apparent self-reliance as one of his most relatable qualities, validating their own efforts to form their own lives away from the people who raised them. But even the most proudly self-reliant people can only get so far on their own. Bond is rarely truly on his own. In place of blood relations he has a whole chosen family.

The term ‘chosen family’ originates with anthropologist Kath Weston, from her 1991 book Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. Conducting fieldwork and interviews in San Francisco whilst in the midst of the AIDS pandemic, she observed how lesbians and gays formed families outside of biological or legal bonds, often out of necessity. While Weston’s work brought chosen families into the spotlight, they had been around long before. In cities across the USA and Canada, drag artists had been forming families for decades, with younger queens being taken under the wing of established ‘drag mothers’ and being invited to join ‘drag houses’. ‘007’ is a term used in some drag communities in the USA and Canada. Although the phenomenon is not well documented, culture writer Max Mohenu has observed that drag queens not yet affiliated with a house are sometimes referred to as ‘007’, playing off the idea that Bond is a free agent. Although much of this language has yet to appear in dictionaries, it has entered the vernacular, in large part due to the increasing popularity of programmes such as Pose and Ru Paul’s Drag Race.

While the term ‘chosen family’ has yet to be codified in mainstream dictionaries, it appears in 2021’s The Queens’ English: The LGBTQIA+ Dictionary of Lingo and Colloquial Expressions as:

CHOSEN FAMILY (noun)

Individuals who are not biologically or legally related who deliberately choose to support and nurture each other like family.

Of course, people who aren’t queer may refer to people they’re not biologically or legally related to as family. For example, they may have an ‘auntie’ or ‘uncle’ who is not a sibling of a parent but a close friend of theirs. And not everyone grows up as part of a 2.4 person nuclear family. Nevertheless (to quote a 2020 medical study (Jackson Levin, et al) into the ways queer young adults are supported by their chosen families), chosen family is considered to be “a signature of the queer experience”.

All Bond films feature Bond’s chosen MI6 family but some films are more family get togethers than others. There’s a pattern across each Bond actor’s tenure with their Bond acquiring more family members the longer they spend in the role. True to this trend, Skyfall brings back two family members hitherto missing in (Craig-era) action: Moneypenny and Q.

Q is for queer

Almost as soon as Skyfall hit the screens, queer Bond fans were ‘shipping’ 007 and his new armourer, filling in the gaps with a romantic and/or sexual relationship between them. Stories and artwork have both proliferated in the years since, with No Time To Die ultimately providing a validation of sorts for what many of us suspected all along: Q stands for more than just ‘quartermaster’.

The queer-coding of Ben Whishaw’s Q is subtle in Skyfall: after all, not everyone who drinks Earl Grey tea leans that way. The most macho Hollywood director of all, John Ford, who regularly called the shots for John Wayne, was well known for sipping Earl Grey on set. Although, having said all that stuff about being macho, in her 2004 tell-all memoir actress Maureen O’Hara (who was directed by Ford five times and an object of his admiration) recalls walking in on Ford kissing a male star.

The correlation between the predilection for Earl Grey tea and the desire to commit homosexual acts is shaky at best, but making Q a drinker of Earl Grey marks him our as slightly ‘fussy’, an adjective we could readily apply to Bond as well, a man who is hardly the most masc in his choice of beverage. No wonder Bond and Q get along so well from the outset!

It takes only a couple of minutes for the Bond/Q antagonism we’ve become accustomed to over the decades to begin manifesting as something more intimate.

In their essay, ‘A Bloody Big Ship: Queering James Bond and the Rise of 00Q’, EJ Nielsen analyses the scene in the National Gallery as a pick-up, primarily because it’s such a public space for clandestine activity. It definitely carries connotations of gay cruising, something Bond has considerable form with. See, for instance, the recognition signals passed between Bond and Saunders in the theatre in The Living Daylights or the coded exchange about a cigarette lighter between Nash, Red Grant and Bond in From Russia With Love. John Logan, the gay man who wrote this scene (see Chowdhury and Field), may or may not have been aware that the steps leading up to the Gallery from Trafalgar Square were a well known gay cruising spot in the interwar period. Research by Matt Houlbrook reveals that the terrace below the National Gallery was rebranded the ‘Meat Rack’ by gay men in the know, so popular was it with the soldiers from the nearby barracks.

From start to end, the ‘meet cute’ (meet Q’ute) between Q and Bond is sexually charged: will they/won’t they?

After the thematically-resonant exchange about the Turner painting, the stage directions in the screenplay point out that “Q rivets Bond”, not the other way around. Bond is impressed by Q’s “intensity”. Q then presents Bond with an image of himself in his pyjamas before moving on to talking, phallically, about pulling triggers. Bond takes the bait, flirtatiously linking the pulling of triggers back to Q in his pyjamas.

In her essay ‘“Brave New World”: The New Q, Masculinity, and the Craig Era Bond Films’, Claire Hines observes that Q being younger than Bond but closer to his age than early incarnations helps to open up more possibilities, the earlier Qs being much older, or played as such. Skyfall’s Q was originally conceived as an older man, possibly to be played by out gay actor Simon Russell Beale. How much would this have changed things?

I would argue that a romantic or sexual relationship between older Q and younger Bond has never entirely been off the table. So-called ‘May-December’ romances are generally thought to be more common between same sex couples, although that doesn’t mean they are any less frowned upon by some. Substantial age gaps between gay men is a particularly “complex” phenomenon according to journalist Adam Bloodworth, but one with a long precedent. He cites the example of Oscar Wilde, who was in his early forties when he defended his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, aged 24 at the time of Wilde’s famous trial, by framing their relationship as one of an older man with “intellect” and a younger man with the “joy, hope and glamour of life before him”. This could be applied to Desmond Llewellyn-era Q quite easily. But with Ben Whishaw, the dynamic is reversed: the younger Q is the intellectual and the older Bond is the one who lives a glamorous life. Hines finds the relationship between new Q and 007 to be “gently antagonistic” but there is also a “playful, teasing quality” and “perhaps even a new sexual undercurrent.” This is something which is developed more explicitly in the films that follow Skyfall, although there is more than enough here to start opening up possibilities.

EJ Nielsen observes that the only reason Moneypenny turns up to shave Bond in his Macau hotel room is that (according to Moneypenny herself), Q is afraid of flying. Nielsen goes on to give us the fuel for yet more 00Q fantasies:

“Since [Moneypenny’s] assistance seems to consist of shaving him with a straight razor and a great deal of sexual tension and then providing him with some attractive yet underutilized backup up at the casino, the possibility of Q filling these roles instead is an intriguing idea.”

Debate rages about whether Moneypenny and Bond do or don’t have sex. For what it’s worth, I have always assumed that they do. For me, the scene which immediately follows Moneypenny shaving Bond, using earpieces to communicate across the casino, has a very post-coital quality. This exchange in particular:

Naomie Harris revealed, on the Empire magazine podcast, that:

"[The shaving scene] actually got cut short. It was originally cut so that you would know categorically that nothing happened, and then they re-edited it so they left it a bit more open."

What are the implications here, from a queer perspective?

If Moneypenny and Bond did have sex this disrupts the heteronormative goal which still pervades many societies: you must abstain until marriage and only then can you have sex with the aiming of procreating. You could argue that this disruption happens anytime Bond has sex with someone: he never has sexual intercourse with someone he’s married to. He has sex with Tracy before marriage but the potential for post-wedding coitus is definitively shut down by Irma Bunt with a machine gun. And although Bond fathers at least two children (his unborn son at the end of the novel of You Only Live Twice and his daughter in No Time To Die), both are born ‘out of wedlock’.
So why does the possibility of Bond having sex with Moneypenny feel more transgressive for some?

Perhaps it’s because Moneypenny and Bond have abstained for so long. Does an earlier, less permissive age loom over us? For the four preceding decades, with Moneypennys played by Lois Maxwell, Pamela Salem, Caroline Bliss and Samantha Bond, we were led to believe that it was just flirtation, although some later exchanges stretched this a bit. For instance, in Tomorrow Never Dies, was Moneypenny made aware of Bond’s prowess as a linguist from a colleague or did she experience his cunning first hand?

Arguably, the possibility has always been there. The chemistry between Sean Connery and Lois Maxwell has always suggested to me that the characters might have had a tryst following the MI6 Christmas party which neither regret but don’t really wish to repeat. But, to date, Skyfall is the closest shave we’ve come to having ‘it’ confirmed on screen.

Moneypenny and Bond hooking-up could carry uncomfortably incestuous connotations for viewers inclined to nail down their relationship as being more like sibling-like. But queer people are generally more aware of a wider range of relationship types that blur the categories of ‘familial’, ‘platonic’, ‘sexual’ and ‘romantic’. The categories are not always mutually exclusive: you can rely on someone like they’re you’re brother, love them as a friend and still want to go to bed with them. We might be more inclined to view Moneypenny, Q and Bond as members of a polycule: a connected network of people in non-monogamous relationships. Members may be friends, sexual partners, lovers and (chosen) family.

Joining them in the MI6 polycule (possibly) is Tanner, who is a bit warmer towards Bond than he was in Quantum of Solace, although he’s far from being the character we find in the novels, where he’s the only serious rival to Felix Leiter for Bond’s affections. Tanner can always be relied upon to deliver giant dollops of exposition. Some of this gets dropped on Bond as he’s already sweating his way through a not-especially-homoerotic training montage. Later, Tanner is complicit in aiding Bond’s escape to Scotland, sucking on a beer while Q does all the hard work.

Malory tells Q and Tanner that they’ll all be “buggered” if the Prime Minister finds out about their abetting Bond and M. As if that’s a bad thing, Malory? Don’t knock it unless you’ve tried it! Off-setting the ‘no homo’ vibe, Malory channels Ru Paul when wishing Bond well on his mission, using a 12A version of the phrase the drag superstar employs to start off a lip sync battle: “Good luck 007. Don’t cock it up.”

Even so, does the MI6 of the closing scenes feel a bit, well, bro-y? With Moneypenny retired from field work and Dame Judi’s M expired, it’s now pretty much a boys’ club. Whether viewers find this reassuring or discomfiting probably says a lot about them.

“What is this if not betrayal? She's sending you off to me knowing you are not ready, knowing you will likely die. Mommy was very bad!" - Silva

M is the “most significant relationship he has in his life. M is the only person who represents authority to him.” - Barbara Broccoli (quoted in Some Kind Of Hero, Ajay Chowdhury and Matthew Field)

Betrayals hurt most when we are betrayed by someone very close to us. This truism has been explored in detail by researchers in the field of ‘betrayal trauma theory’. In their book, Blind to Betrayal: Why We Fool Ourselves When We Aren’t Being Fooled, Jennifer Freyd and Pamela Birrell bring together their betrayal trauma theory research to conclusively show that the closer a betrayer is to us, the more likely we are to suffer with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), dissociation, anxiety, depression, and borderline personality disorder. Sometimes we even ‘blind ourselves’ to their betrayals, something I would argue Bond is attempting to do throughout Skyfall. While he does confront M about her actions, he’s surprisingly forgiving considering what she’s put him through.

Does she get let off easily because she is his ‘mother’, which Silva explicitly identifies her as on several occasions?

While it has been claimed by some that Fleming’s own mother, Eve, was an inspiration for the ‘M’ of James Bond, there is no concrete evidence for this (although her name was given to Moneypenny in Skyfall). However, it’s widely thought that Fleming drew on members of his own family for his characters. Since writing his biography of Fleming over a quarter of a century ago, Andrew Lycett has become increasingly convinced that Fleming’s older brother Peter was an even more significant influence on 007 than he has previously been given credit for. Lycett says: “If you accept that premise (that he drew on his family for Bond), it’s not too difficult to proceed to the M/Eve Fleming connection. But that, so far as I know, is even more a matter for speculation i.e. it’s not something Fleming himself ever suggested.”

In his seminal biography of Fleming, Andrew Lycett calls Fleming’s relationship with his mother “turbulent and ambivalent” and he finds the fact that Fleming continued to live with her into his late twenties “curious”. Perhaps Fleming wasn’t just hooked on the creature comforts of home but felt ‘compulsory kinship’ for his mother. Similarly, is Bond so readily forgiving of M because of the ‘compulsory kinship’ he feels for her? Who can blame him really, when, as Barbara Broccoli states, she is the “most significant relationship he has in his life.”

An irresistible parallel between Fleming and his most famous creation is his relationships with substitute parental figures. Perhaps because he lost his father at such a young age, Fleming adored spending time with mentorly older men such as Sir Godfrey, the real-life model for much of M’s personality. If the onscreen M had not been changed to a woman in the mid-90s, Skyfall may have played out as a story about conflict with his father, which is always a possible reading of the films where M is played by Bernard Lee or Robert Brown (a different dynamic appears in Never Say Never Again where M is played by Edward Fox, who was younger than Sean Connery).

In Families We Keep, Reczek and Bosley-Smith assert that: “Adult children should be able to be independent or even estranged from their parents without losing their sense of belonging, purpose and identity.” This is a lesson Bond is forced to learn at the end of Skyfall. In the lead up to this, he continues to wrestle with the feelings arising from the ‘compulsory kinship’ he has with M. And Bond does far more than M does to keep the relationship going. It’s usually this way around in real life as well, Reczek and Bosley-Smith finding that queer kids do far more of the ‘conflict work’ that is required to maintain the peace with their parents. They observe that parents often shirk their responsibilities in this area, perhaps because they feel it is their child’s responsibility to put in the labour required. And the children, however old they are, more often than not continue to do this work, out of a misplaced sense of duty.

“007, reporting for duty” - Bond

“All too often, institutions fail the very people they should protect.” - Center for Institutional Courage (2022)

How are we supposed to take M ordering Moneypenny to “Take the bloody shot”, an order which almost costs Bond his life? Bond takes it both personally and professionally. As if your mother figure losing faith in you wasn’t enough, Bond is also betrayed by the organisation she represents. M is not just a person. She represents her institution: MI6. This means her betrayal of Bond’s trust is doubly-wounding. Moneypenny’s bullet only damages Bond’s body. M’s/MI6’s failure to trust him to get the job done by recovering the disk is the psychological hit which almost destroys him.

Skyfall isn’t the first film where a dark secret from M’s past has come back to wreak havoc on MI6. And it’s not the first time her actions caused significant damage to be inflicted on the physical building which houses the headquarters of the institution she heads up. Neal Purvis and Robert Wade have played with these ideas ever since their first Bond script, The World Is Not Enough. Although the bomb damage to the MI6 building early in that film is not as extensive as it is Skyfall, it’s the same idea: an attack on M is an attack on her office, both in terms of her position in the organisation and the workplace itself.

Connected with this is the idea that Bond has been “abandoned” (to quote Silva) by M/MI6, which has been part of the films’ text since he was left to rot in a North Korean jail in Die Another Day. The notion that M is more than just a flesh and blood individual has a much longer pedigree. In the film of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, when Bond asks Moneypenny to present his letter of resignation to M he refers to M disparagingly as a “monument”, something put up to sustain a memory, of a battle or a war, rather than a human being capable of feelings.

Of course, the very fact that we have had several Ms over the decades played by several actors also encourages us to see M more as an institution rather than an individual. While Fleming’s M is named Miles Messervy (and he’s referred to on screen as Miles by General Gogol in The Spy Who Loved Me), it’s highly convenient that all of the subsequent versions of M have been intended to have one or more names beginning with the letter ‘M’. The female M partly modelled on Judi Dench in Raymond Benson’s continuation novels was Barbara Mawdsley. And editor of Fangoria magazine Phil Noble, Jr. was the first to point out that her name is visible in Skyfall. In the box of her effects she bequeaths to Bond, there is a fleeting glimpse of the name Olivia Mansfield, something Eon’s archive director told journalist Ben Ellery for the Mail on Sunday we could consider canon. The name Mansfield is an homage to the first real-life chief of MI6, Mansfield Smith-Cumming, who signed his documents with a ‘C’. Now ‘C’ stands for ‘Chief’ although the present head of the real MI6, Richard Moore, could legitimately be called ‘M’ based on his surname.

The Establishment and blunt instruments

Whatever their nomenclature or gender, M arguably represents even more than just MI6, a singular institution; as the Bond films’ authority figure, M also embodies the Establishment.

The ‘Establishment’ as a term was popularised in its modern sense (capitalised) by journalist Henry Fairlie in a column for The Spectator in 1955:

“By the 'Establishment' I do not mean only the centres of official power—though they are certainly part of it—but rather the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised.”

Those who are not part of the Establishment can be viewed as outsiders. In contrast with M, Bond himself was never intended to be on the inside. He was not part of the Establishment; merely its tool. According to Andrew Lycett, interviewed in 2019 by Clark Collis, Fleming created 007 to be “the antithesis of himself in the sense that Bond was supposed to be the 'blunt instrument,' as Fleming called it, of the government.”

Being a blunt instrument doesn’t prevent Bond from pushing back at his Establishment boss. Although some Bond fans pine for a return to a time when ‘Bond going rogue’ wasn’t such a familiar trope of the series, the antiestablishment streak is there from the beginning, at Bond and M’s first onscreen meeting in Dr. No, with Bond almost coming to a contretemps with M over his weapon of choice. This is a relatively minor falling out compared with what happens in Skyfall, but I would argue that the antiestablishment frisson between M and Bond has always been something that queer audiences can connect with. After all, more often than not throughout history, we queers have been betrayed by the Establishment.

Shady characters: Villains

Like Bond, Silva was once a blunt instrument: something to be wielded by the British Establishment but without ever being admitted to the Establishment himself. Also like Bond, Silva is haunted by his past. However, the similarities run out of road here… In the absence of a chosen family like the one Bond has, something has steadily eaten away at Silva - and I’m not just talking about cyanide.

As we have seen, Fleming was adamant - most explicitly in Moonraker - that Bond was not part of the Establishment but was instead an outsider who would never be comfortable for long periods in England. The same could also be said of Double 0 agents in general, their maladjustment being integral to their professional effectiveness. England is their employer but not where they belong.

Skyfall presents something of a challenge to Fleming’s intention with its penultimate scene. Interviewed by The Hollywood Reporter ten years after the release of Skyfall, Mendes said he regretted associating Bond with so much Establishment iconography: “I would think twice about having Bond stand on the rooftops of Whitehall, with the Union Jack flags in the breeze, given the last 10 years of serial incompetence from [the UK’s] conservative government.”

One could also cite the scene where Bond runs down Whitehall while, overlaid on the soundtrack, M recites the closing lines of Tennyson’s Ulysses, a poem well-established in the canon of English literature. In the background we see Westminster Abbey, the place where Tennyson’s body resides. Could the scene be any more Establishment? Well, any viewer well-versed in queer history could call into question quite how Establishment this scene is; Tennyson wrote Ulysses to eulogise his male best friend, who present day academics consider to have also been his lover. But without this knowledge of the history behind the rousing words, the sequence presents an uncomplicated celebration of British stiff upper-lipped stoicism.

While the Establishment is not off limits to queer people, it has rarely shouted openly about the queer identities and activities of its members. And when unpleasant truths of any kind rear their heads, the Establishment springs into action to protect its members. The article in which Henry Fairlie first popularised the term concerned the defection of two high-ranking Foreign Office figures, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, to Russia. Fairlie criticised the Establishment for deflecting press attention from the men’s families after they’re scarpered to the USSR. Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, were both at the very heart of the Establishment and their spying for the KGB, when revealed to the public, brought British Intelligence into disrepute. It provided Fleming with plot inspiration for From Russia, With Love, where both men are mentioned by name. Guy Burgess’s homosexuality - which he never hid from his Establishment friends and which became publicly known following his defection - sparks off a conversation between Bond and an old school officer about homosexuals being “the worst security risk there is”.

Because homosexuality was illegal, gay men were particularly vulnerable to being caught in honeytraps and blackmailed by the KGB. But some queer spies were arguably motivated to betray their country because they felt betrayed by their country. Could such figures have been indirect inspirations for Silva?

A real life Blunt instrument

On the surface, Sir Anthony Blunt was as much a part of the Establishment as you could get. Not only was he a knight, but he was also a royal courtier: the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures no less, responsible for the care and maintenance of the Sovereign’s extensive art collection.

But Sir Anthony was a Soviet Spy, a close friend of fellow spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Blunt and the other ‘Cambridge Spies’ all met at one of Britain’s most prestigious universities before going on to have successful careers at the heart of government. They leaked copious secrets to the KGB. As well as ruining the reputation of British Intelligence, they caused the deaths of dozens of British agents. There’s a chilling scene in Skyfall which shows MI6 agents around the world being eliminated after having their identities blown by Silva. Although the use of YouTube means it carries resonances of the methods of terrorist groups such as Isis, the unmasking of spies would have made uncomfortable viewing for 1950s audiences too.

Of the Cambridge Spy group, Blunt is believed to have been the most proactive in recruiting other agents for the Soviets. Yet Blunt was firmly a part of the British Establishment, so what motivated him in his attempts to bring it down? It has never become clear why Blunt felt little loyalty to queen and country. But, in a 2020 documentary, one of Blunt’s friends, Alastair Laing, maintained that Blunt’s own sense of betrayal, because of his homosexuality, had something to do with it:

“To be a homosexual, when to indulge in any homosexual act and be discovered in it would have meant instant dismissal and disgrace… he must have felt, in some way, how loyal am I to a country that could potentially do this to me?”

Blunt is not mentioned by Fleming alongside his friends Burgess and Maclean because he was not outed as a spy until the year of Fleming’s death, 1964. Because of an Establishment cover up, Blunt’s betrayal was kept from public attention until 1979, whereupon Sir Anthony was stripped of his titles.

The exploits - and sexual orientations - of the Cambridge Spies directly influenced John le Carré, particularly his novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. So it’s intriguing that an early treatment of Skyfall had an ending which was, in the words of Chowdhury and Field, “le Carré-esque”. In this version, M committed an even greater betrayal after being blackmailed over a former lover, perhaps intended to be an echo of Vesper’s betrayal in Casino Royale. This treatment ended with M not being killed by Silva, but by Bond himself. Although the idea was quickly discarded, the fact that it was even a possibility raises the question: how bad would the betrayal have to be to turn Bond into a matricidal killer like Silva?

“Pathological rejection of authority based on unresolved childhood trauma.”

Like Bond’s childhood, Silva’s is left deliberately murky but a salient detail is him finding delight (or at least morbid fascination) in novel methods of killing wildlife - specifically rats. Harming animals before graduating to humans is something you find in the childhoods of any number of serial killers. But the most formative experience of all - the one that tipped him over the edge - happened later in life, although when he was still a relatively young man. With the action of Skyfall taking place 15 years after the handover of Hong Kong, this suggests SIlva was likely only in his mid-late twenties. M’s sacrifice of him to the Chinese government was the parental and institutional betrayal which destroyed his ability to trust - and form an intimate connection - with anyone or anything.

Silva has no allegiance except to himself. As he tells Bond, he sends himself on his own missions with no oversight. The only uniform he’s prepared to wear is that of a policeman, which he uses as a disguise to penetrate Whitehall security.

The cross-cutting between Silva disguised as a police officer and M giving her speech to the committee reinforces that Silva is even more challenged than Bond when it comes to finding a ‘home’. M’s words highlight to us that Silva’s “face” is scarred, his “uniform” is appropriated and he operates under no “flag”. Although he must have been a British national at some point (a prerequisite for joining MI6), he no longer belongs to a nation. He has no one to care for or care about - or anyone to care for him.

The only home Silva does have is an abandoned island. Silva tells Bond that it’s he who is living in a “ruin” but Silva may as well be talking about himself. (For that matter, so much of Silva’s psychological assessment of Bond could apply to himself - a classic case of projection.)

Like Bond’s childhood residence, Silva’s island is described as “haunted” in the screenplay.

The screenplay reveals a detail which did not make it into the finished film, when Silva tells Bond the story behind the island’s sudden evacuation:

Stepping around the “baby carriage” in the middle of a monologue about cutting out of his life what isn’t essential might be read as a rejection of reproductive futurism, the idea that we are motivated to make a better world for the benefit of future generations of children. Some radical queer thinkers see this aim as a futile one, because fewer of us queer people have our own biological children, ignoring the fact that there are many other ways to nurture the next generation.

Silva does not appear to have any kind of future planned for himself or anyone else. He is motivated only by revenge; the rage he feels at his parent. Unlike Bond, Silva has not created a chosen family to help him get past his rage and build a more resilient sense of self. Silva’s tale is a caution to anyone, particularly those of us who are still working through trauma.

Not his first time?

One of the biggest talking points of Skyfall is the first encounter between Bond and Silva, with Silva sensually stroking Bond’s chest and face, rubbing his legs, pausing with meaning after speaking of “eating each other” and Bond challenging Silva’s assumptions by telling him “What makes you think this is my first time?”.

Audience responses to this line range from ‘this proves James Bond is bi’ to outright denial, commonly articulated as ‘Bond says it to mess with Silva’. While there may be an element of the latter, just leaving it at that unnecessarily closes the door on possibilities. It’s not a million miles away from tagging on ‘no homo’ after realising one has said something that might be construed as ‘sounding gay’. This offensive phrase was popularised via hip hop in the 1990s onwards, another context - like Bond - in which heterosexuality has traditionally been assumed.

But, as bisexual Bond fan Kathleen Jowitt cautions, “assumptions are dangerous”. She writes:

“…the pervasive heteronormativity and monosexism of the society I’m writing in means that, without concrete evidence, the possibility of bisexuality is often dismissed, or, indeed, never thought of in the first place. If one raises it, one’s often held to an impossibly high burden of proof. So Bond’s extensive on-screen sexual experience with women is taken to negate the possibility of his ever being interested in anyone who isn’t a woman, and his response to Silva is dismissed as a joke.”

Denying the possibility that Bond or Silva might be bisexual smacks of bisexual erasure. While neither comes out (pun intended) and says they are bi, neither say they’re heterosexual either. Therefore, all possibilities remain on the table. ‘Bisexual’ and ‘pansexual’ are identities whereas ‘men who have sex with men’ refers to sexual behaviour. The term was coined by epidemiologists in the 1990s to refer to the significant number of men who did have sex with men but who didn’t identify as gay or bisexual. It has subsequently been adopted by researchers in other academic fields to more accurately represent the extent of same sex sexual activity.

It’s understandable why bisexual people would want to attach their identity label to Bond or Silva. Their explicitly (I.E. uncoded) representation in the Bond series up until this point has been practically non-existent.

Describing the impact of the scene, Jowitt writes:

‘What makes you think this is my first time?’ Bond asks Silva, who’s got him tied to a chair and is running his hands up his thighs. And a legion of queer Bond fans cheers – quietly, so as not to disturb the rest of the cinema. Let’s be real: Silva wasn’t the only one who assumed that this was the first time.”

When Daniel Craig was asked about what the scene meant at a press conference promoting the film, he said that Silva would “f*ck anything” but didn’t comment on Bond. However, he did commit to saying that "I don't see the world in sexual divisions."

Whether we use the label ‘bisexual’, ‘pansexual’ or ‘men who have sex with men’, it’s hard to argue against this being a homoerotic seduction. However, the extent to which the scene was ‘officially’ intended to show this has changed over time. Perhaps protective of the film’s box office on its initial release, Mendes and Logan prevaricated a little.

In November 2012, Mendes told Uproxx journalist Gregory Ellison that:

“As long as you understand that the scene is a power game. It”s not necessarily an overt seduction. It’s, ‘If I wanted to I could [expletive] you.’ Well does he want to f*ck him or is he just f*cking with him? This is the question.”

At the New York premiere in November 2012, writer Logan took a similarly circumlocutory line:

“Some people claim it’s because I’m, in fact, gay but not true at all… Sam and I were discussing, there were so many scenes where Bond goes mano-a-mano with the villain, whether it’s Dr. No or Goldfinger or whatever, and there’s been so many ways to do a cat-and-mouse and intimidate Bond, and we thought, what would truly make the audience uncomfortable is sexual intimidation; playing the sort of homoerotic card that is sort of always there subtextually with characters like Scaramanga in The Man With the Golden Gun or Dr. No. So we just decided that we should play the card and enjoy it.” [my emphasis]

So, if we take the director and writer at their word, was the scene using homophobia as a way of intimidating Bond and unsettling homophobic viewers?

Eight and a half years later, in May 2021, Logan was more direct. In his guest essay for The New York Times decrying the Amazon acquisition of Bond because it would stifle risk-taking, he used the Silva-Bond seduction scene as his example of one of those risks:

“Sam and I boldly announced we wanted to do this pivotal scene as a homoerotic seduction. Barbara and Michael didn’t need to poll a focus group. They didn’t need to vet this radical idea with any studio or corporation — they loved it instantly. They knew it was fresh and new, provocative in a way that keeps the franchise contemporary. They weren’t afraid of controversy. In my experience, not many big movies can work with such freedom and risky joy. But with the Broccoli/Wilson family at the helm, Bond is allowed to provoke, grow and be idiosyncratic. Long may that continue.”

Logan’s comments were corroborated by Barbara Broccoli herself in the 2021 documentary Being James Bond. She said that they had to fight to keep the “What makes you think this is my first time?” line in the film as studio executives feared it would be too overt: “We were told to cut that line by the studio and we said no, no, no, we resisted, we resisted”. Affirming what many of us have known for decades, in the same documentary, Sam Mendes retrospectively added that “I think there’s a huge homoerotic undertow in a lot of Bond movies.”

The undeniably provocative scene may have played a part in encouraging people to embrace their homosexuality, bisexuality, pansexuality - or resist labels entirely.

Who ends up on top?

After the ‘seduction’ scene, Silva takes Bond outside for a shooting contest where the possibly bi by-play continues. He tells the unhappy target, Severine, her “lovers” are here, suggesting he and she have had sex at some point. When he tells Bond the contest will decide “who ends up on top”, it’s not clear at this point if he’s talking about further sexual activity between Bond and Severine, himself and Severine, himself and Bond or all three of them together. But considering that Silva probably planned to kill Severine all along, it would be sensible to assume he was referring to something happening between Bond and himself. Or was he planning for Bond to turn the tables and therefore nothing to happen? [This is not the place to go into how much Skyfall relies on coincidence and chance for the plot to fall into place. It’s sufficient to state that, taken by themselves, these scenes raise significant queer possibilities if you divorce them from the line of dominoes that follows.]

Like several other Bond villains, Silva is coded as queer by surrounding him with culture by queer artists. The shooting contest scene is soundtracked with the song ‘Baum’ by gay singer Charles Trenet, the upbeat music working to give us an insight into Silva’s blissfully buoyant frame of mind but working contrapuntally with the scene as we realise the horror of what is about to take place.

When he’s been captured and he’s showing M how the cyanide capsule ate away his face, Silva paraphrases the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley: “Look upon your work, mother.” Many academics recognise that it’s likely Shelley had same sex relationships, perhaps even with his bisexual best mate Lord Byron. Some have even read between the lines and speculated that Shelley, Byron and Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein and Shelley’s wife) were in a polyamorous triad. The Shelley poem invoked by Silva is Ozymandias, about a previously all powerful figure whose legacy has crumbled over time. The only reminder is a ruined statue with the inscription: “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

Silva’s attempt to end his life by biting down on his cyanide capsule may invite superficial comparisons with Alan Turing, the gay war hero betrayed by his country and who died, aged just 41, from cyanide poisoning (officially ruled a suicide, although since contested). I’m not for one minute suggesting that Turing and Silva have more in common than betrayal and cyanide. Turing actually appeared to have relatively few hang ups about his homosexuality. And he really liked running, which Silva is definitely not a fan of (“Your knees must be killing you.”)

Screenwriter and comedian Alistair Baldwin notes that Silva is double-coded, as both queer and disabled, his facial disfigurement marking him out as ‘different’. He is “the latest in “a long line of Bond villains written with the mindset that inner wickedness can’t help but manifest physically”. Baldwin, both queer and disabled himself, observes that it’s a double-edged sword:

“In cinema, the intersection of disability and queerness tends to best cluster around the villain. Well, I say ‘best’ but we’re not exactly spoilt for choice. And, while I recognise this treatment can fortify stigma against my communities, there is something in me that’s drawn to the dark side—like blondes, ‘baddies’ seem to have more fun.

…

“Villains disrupt, and in their disruptions, shift the status quo. The acts of movie villains tend towards horrific violence, things I’d never begin to imagine doing—yet I connect more broadly with the desire for chaos, the desire to shake things up in a world made for the people who get the happy ending.”

Many have noted the similarity between Silva and the Joker in Nolan’s The Dark Knight: Both are ‘agents of chaos’ with murky motivations and vaguely-defined goals. Both have their legions of queer fans. In his article ranking Bond villains for Esquire magazine, queer journalist Jacob Hall placed Silva at number 9 out of 104, describing him as “a tragic monster, a sympathetic villain driven by personal hatred and rage.”

It’s not difficult to see why queer people who feel resentment towards members of their family - or society in general - could connect with Silva on some level.

You go gurrrrls!

Severine has attracted a great deal of attention from academics writing about James Bond, with many finding the character to be a regressive step for the series’ portrayal of female characters. But she is one of the most appealing elements of the film for many queer viewers. Although she is undoubtedly a tragic character, subject to the whims of a succession of men, she is not entirely disempowered.

Let’s not sugar coat this: with Severine being, essentially, someone who was sold into sex slavery from an early age and who remains under the coercive control of a domineering man, having Bond slip unannounced into her shower brings up uncomfortable questions around consent. And what really leaves an unpleasant aftertaste is the lack of emotion Bond displays when Severine is killed by Silva. While we could argue that Bond saying “It’s a waste of a good Scotch” (weighing a woman’s life against a dram of expensive whisky) is a ploy to put Silva off his guard, keeping up a pretence that he’s unflustered, without any indication to the audience that Bond has been affected by Severine’s death, it comes across as callous. Compare this with Bond’s not-quite-concealed anguish at finding Andrea Anders with a bullet in her heart in The Man With The Golden Gun, another character who brought Bond into her life in a bid to gain her freedom.

Whatever Bond’s depth of feeling towards the tragic Severine, many queer viewers have taken her to their hearts. She is frequently depicted in fan art. Trans Bond fan Spencie d’Entremont, who was inspired to emulate Severine’s distinctive look, finds her “the most visually striking character not only in Skyfall but in the entire Craig-era. She was created to stand out. She’s here for a moment, but she is the moment.”

Like many queer Bond fans, Spencie is transfixed by the character but is left wanting more - especially from Bond himself:

“As a woman viewer it hits me differently, I think. Severine is an ornament who is discarded and left unprotected by someone - Bond - she felt was a confidante. I see Bond Girls as a metaphor for the global good; usually, Bond will thwart the villain’s plot to destroy or take over the world. We don’t see the world, but we do see the Girl. She is what we see, representing what he’s protecting. In Skyfall, the film resolves but Bond fails to save both women [Severine and M]. The world feels lost.”

Even so, in her brief screen time, Severine makes a strong impression. Spencie observes that her sharp fingernails, painted a dark bloody red, and her mauve lipstick make her look like she has “torn somebody apart. She’s like a komodo dragon in human form.”

Similarly, Monica Germanà, in her book Bond Girls argues that although the small flesh tattoo on Severine’s wrist brands her, like a prisoner, the much larger dragon ‘tattoo’ slinking up her see-through dress is a badge of her identity: she is almost literally a ‘dragon lady’. While Severine’s reliance on a man from the West, Bond, to free her does make her, in the words of Germanà, a “disenfranchised victim of Western/patriarchal control”, Severine’s story “speaks also of rebellion”. Germanà links Severine with the title song lyrics’ talk of someone owning your number and name but “never… my heart”. Although Severine is contained in many ways, there’s a part of her which is all her own.

Severine’s resilience runs more than fabric- and skin-deep. Screenwriter Robert Wade told Ajay Chowdhury and Matthew Field “she’s toughened herself up because she knows what it is to have been abused at the hands of men.” Bond recognises this bravery but sees through the even braver facade. Perhaps he is projecting here? Bond is no stranger to strapping on emotional armour himself. Bond notes that Severine puts on “a good show”, something queer viewers may relate to. However many slings and arrows we experience, we can still put on a show when we need to. If Skyfall is the Wizard of Oz and Bond bears more than a passing resemblance to Dorothy, Severine is like the offscreen Judy Garland, whose show-must-go-on philosophy has resonated with generations of gay men. Gay film scholar Richard Dyer identifies the pivotal moment where Garland started to attract a significant gay following: when she was cast aside by the men in charge of MGM (future distributor of the Bond films) and attempted to take her own life. This was the key moment because, Dyer says, “it constituted with the public a sudden break with Garland’s uncomplicated and ordinary image”. While no one could describe Severine’s image as uncomplicated and ordinary, I would argue that it is her sudden break - betrayed by a shaking hand and a faltering cigarette - which makes her resonate so much with people who have learned to survive by putting on a good show.

Camp (as Dr. Christmas Jones)

Lots of people find M’s death at the end of Skyfall emotionally affecting - but I don’t. Although I urge myself to cry (crying being one of my favourite pastimes!) I remain frustratingly dry eyed every time.

I say this as someone who is a snotty tearful mess every time I watch On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Casino Royale and No Time To Die. There’s no ‘masc’ posturing here.

So why don’t I find the ending of Skyfall remotely lachrymose?

I have a hard time persuading myself to forgive M for her betrayal of Bond and the callous way she treats him when he brings himself back from the dead. Perhaps I hold myself back from allowing myself to feel sad for M because I have, like many queer people, somewhat complicated feelings about my parents. Perhaps this mess of emotions battles for supremacy with more conventional feelings of loss?

Or perhaps it’s because the scene is so deliciously operatic that I simply cannot take it seriously. It tips over into Camp. This is probably not what the filmmakers intended and it’s because it’s unintentional that it’s eligible for consideration as ‘pure Camp’. As bisexual critic Susan Sontag said:

“Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is "too much”.”

We’re used to Bond films presenting us with a heightened reality, but the death of M is off the scale. It may not take place in a volcano base but Skyfall’s ending is a serious rival for Most Outlandish Denouement in a Bond Film. Having the death of the mother figure unfold inside the church which adjoins the final resting place of Bond’s actual parents almost tips it over into self-parody. It’s so symbolically rich it risks giving us indigestion! Even Silva can’t seem to believe the serendipitous neatness of it all: “Of course. It had to be here. It had to be this way.”

Perhaps the contrived feel of the scene would have been less pronounced had the filmmakers stuck with the location from an earlier draft: M’s death originally took place in a whiskey distillery. Recall that it was relatively late into the scripting process that the setting was changed to Bond’s childhood home.

The direction in the final screenplay describes the sight of Bond holding M’s body as a “tableau”, making it clear that the shot was always intended to be stylised and unnatural. The sepulchral lighting recalls religious paintings from the Renaissance. The overall effect might make us question whether we should laugh or cry. Perhaps both?

The Emtombment of Christ (1603-04) by Caravaggio

Have Bond’s suits shrunk in the wash? Certainly compared with the first two Craig films, the suits are more fitted to the actor’s frame.

Bond Suits’ Matt Spaiser argues that, while irksome to tailoring traditionalists, there is a method in the madness:

“Bond’s suit looks like it is bursting at the seams, which is a reflection of Craig’s Bond’s suppressed anger that makes him a dangerous person.”

One could also argue that it’s Bond’s dissatisfaction with aging (a key theme of Skyfall) which leads to him selecting clothing that accentuates the shape of his muscles, in a bid to prove he’s still fit and relevant. It also makes him relatable to some gay men, who are more likely than their straight bretheren to go to greater lengths to maintain their sexual attractiveness.

In the early noughties, fashion writer Charlie Porter observed:

“Gay men are obsessed with youth through lust and fear: lust for what we covet and fear of what we will inevitably lose.”

Whereas many straight men in the 30s and 40s are content to wear clothing which is shapeless, gay men are more likely to stick with fitted alternatives with youthful connotations. Porter explains:

“In a more competitive environment, gay men have a much stronger interest in showing themselves off than heterosexual males. By sticking to the boyish look into their 30s and 40s, gay men with no interest in fashion still have a sense of style. I have friends who find fashion too boring to hate it, yet they still look good because they rely on this predefined and identifiable wardrobe. It means that gay men appear to know what they are doing with fashion, even if they don't. Hence the belief that gay men are more fashionable.”

Skyfall has several Hot Bond Boys with Bit Parts, including one right at the start: poor ill-starred Ronson (actor Bill Buckhurst) is rather easy on the eye, which may contribute to Bond’s mixed feelings about leaving him behind to bleed to death.

So many of Skyfall’s characters and locations are ‘haunted’ that it’s in-keeping for secondary antagonist Patrice to be described as a “ghost”, someone without an identity at all. In the pre-titles sequence, Patrice uses a gun which - let’s be honest - looks like it’s attached to a pair of enormous testicles. Technically, it’s a Glock 18 with a 100-round Beta-C drum magazine. And it looks like a pair of enormous testicles.

The chase through the London Underground is a camp treat: it makes little logical sense, especially if you’ve ever used the Tube. Why do the (in real life nailed down) signs between the escalators fly off when Silva sends himself hurtling down said escalators? The real answer is: because every Underground user has dreamed of doing this and Bond films are nothing if not wish fulfillment. And the train being used as a projectile by Silva is bizarre if you stop and think about it for even a second. Best advice: don’t stop and think about it. But let’s say we do… This may be one of those cases where we’re reading too much into things. But Skyfall, a Bond film which takes itself a bit too seriously at times in tackling Big Themes, invites these sorts of readings. So… in cinematic terms, an underground train could be see as a queer appropriation of the stock cinematic metaphor for heterosexual intercourse: a train entering a tunnel. The cliche in its heteronormative form is used to great comic effect in the closing moments of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, appears in several Bond films (From Russia With Love, Live and Let Die) and is parodied in the Monty Python sketch A romantic interlude with a couple watching a montage of suggestive imagery (including a train through a tunnel) rather than actually having sex. So what might Silva giving Bond a “prize” of a massive, snaking underground train mean on a symbolic level? Oooh, Mr Silva!

Queer verdict: 005 out of 007

Skyfall hits close to home for many queer viewers - possibly too close for some of us who have been been putting off travelling back into our pasts. But if’s there a lesson to be learned here, it’s that we can move beyond traditional ideas of ‘home’ and ‘family’ if they cause us pain and replace them with creations of our own. So let the sky fall. When the world crumbles, we will face it together, standing tall.

Further reading

More on Q’s queerness: https://www.licencetoqueer.com/blog/q-is-for-queer

More on chosen family: https://www.licencetoqueer.com/blog/no-time-for-family

https://www.licencetoqueer.com/blog/queer-re-view-tomorrow-never-dies

More on Tennyson: https://www.licencetoqueer.com/blog/the-truth-about-tennyson

More on sexual orientation as a spectrum and the Silva seduction scene in particular: https://www.licencetoqueer.com/blog/how-queer-is-james-bond

More on Susan Sontag, Bond and Pure Camp: https://www.licencetoqueer.com/blog/007-notes-on-camp

More in the Cambridge Spies’ influence on From Russia With Love: https://www.licencetoqueer.com/blog/queer-re-view-from-russia-with-love

Acknowledgements

In all, this piece has taken around 200 hours to put together over a period of 8 months. And the weird thing is, Skyfall is not even one of my favourite Bond films! But there’s so much going on in this film that the research and writing just kept growing. Believe it or not, I cut out several thousand words. This is the short version! Thank you to everyone who has talked with me anout Skyfall in this time.

Special thank yous to…

My husband, Antony, for being the person to hear many of these ideas aloud for the first time. Anyone who reads this will quickly gather a sense of why this was such a difficult piece to write: so much of it resonated with me personally. Only Antony will ever know quite how personally. Darling, I love you more than anything.

Andrew Lycett for generously giving of your time when I contacted you asking for your help with the ‘M could have been modelled in part on Fleming’s mother’ possibilty.

Spencie d’Entremont for giving me your passionate and extensive insights into Severine. I’ve only had space to include a small fraction of them here. That was a fun Zoom conversation!

Ajay Chowdhury and Matthew Field. Re-reading the relevant chapter of Some Kind of Hero is always part of my research process but it was especially helpful for this piece. And it’s been lovely getting to know you in person over the past few months.

Ben Williams for reinforcing my thesis around Bond being itinerant/nomadic. When we recorded that podcast all of that material was very fresh in my head and you gave me the confidence to go to town on it.

Dr. Brendan J. Dunlop, with who I recorded a podcast midway through writing this. Some of our chat about avoidance behaviours helped me tighten up certain sections.

@SeanieBird (twitter) for the discussion of ‘007’ being a term using in drag ballroom culture.

Marty Mackillop for the conversation about different kinds of families. I had a lot of what you said in mind as I was writing this.

As ever, several images have been sourced from the wonderful Thunderballs.

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Queer re-view: Skyfall