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What is “united” about the United Kingdom in December of 2018? On Monday, British Prime Minister Theresa May canceled the Brexit vote she promised would take place on Tuesday, because she wasn’t going to win it. The pound sterling started dropping. A rogue MP grabbed the ceremonial mace from the central table in Parliament and started waving it about. Pete Wishart of the Scottish National Party called Monday “the single biggest political crisis since Suez with the biggest capitulation since Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow.”
The timing, in other words, couldn’t be worse for entertainments like Mary Queen of Scots, which inherently has an intense relation to modern politics, but prefers to plumb history for the costumes and sibling-esque rivalries. In Mary Queen of Scots, we don’t see a reckoning with the future of a country united across the Scottish-English border. We see queens cry and fret about their hair.
There would seem to be more to history than that. Relations between Scotland and England could not be at a lower ebb. Scottish citizens overwhelmingly voted to stay in the EU during the Brexit referendum, but they were drowned out by English votes. Although Scotland had an independence referendum four years ago and opted to stay in the U.K., a bad Brexit treaty could very possibly lead to a breakup of the union. Ireland is in an even worse position. Currently under discussion in Parliament is the so-called “backstop,” a last-ditch option that keeps the border in Ireland open in the unpleasant event of a “no-deal Brexit.” A closed border could be disastrous for both the island’s economy and the Good Friday Agreement’s peacekeeping terms.
That the United Kingdom is on the brink of collapse reminds us that its integrity was not preordained—that it was, in fact, maintained by violence. At the U.K.’s political heart has always been the English crown—now the Parliament in London—which has abused countless citizens in the name of centralized power. That legacy of violence runs through Ireland, through Scotland, through civil war, and through the bloody colonialism that ate up so much of the world as part of the British Empire.
Josephine Livingston made this point about a fad for historic dramas but she brings up a point that I think is as applicable to blockbuster films in our time. If the indie and arthouse film seeks to present historical events as kind of family drama or comedy that places the interpersonal at the level of political or social allegory, this is something we see going on in the blockbuster. The tropes may not be fundamentally different in a film about one Mary than about James Bond.Thanks to many an old Bond movie being easy to stream for free these days if you have the right services, you can watch the older Bond films. A few simple moments of observation clarify the difference between the old SPECTRE and the new. The old Blofeld was set on bending the Western world to his will through subterfuge and then outright terror. The geo-political goals were fairly plain. In the Daniel Craig era Bond ... things are ... a bit ... more personal.
Bond has been a psychopath who knowingly puts himself in danger and makes a point of using his violent and socially disposable nature to perform missions to preserve the Western order in general and the Western order as distilled in England in particular. But what was different about the new SPECTRE was we got a shadowy criminal empire run by a half-brother to James Bond. The globe-spanning espionage, intrigue, murder and terror was all subjugated to what, in the end, was a pedestrian and banal sibling rivalry story. The problem isn't exactly Daniel Craig as Bond, it's the way screenwriting in the last few generations has shifted toward an idea that "raising the stakes" means making this or that thing "personal" but doing so in ways that would have been ... well ...
take Gravity. The backstory of Sandra Bullock's character precludes the very thought of anyone sending her up into space. No one who lost a child and had psychological issues that made them panic would probably be sent into space to begin with. Back when there was The Weekly Standard John Podhoretz made this point in his review of the film, a film he wanted to like more than he did--as a child of the space age he knew enough about the psychological screening of astronauts to know that the Bullock character would never be sent into space and you can't just "forget" that for the sake of watching a 21st century adventure film. What seems "powerful" and "personal" to contemporary screenwriting types inadvertently betrays things that were known as norms in earlier generations.
Before the recent SPECTRE could "work" as a tale of sibling rivalry it had to "work" as a coherent tour of geopolitical flashpoints. That is the point at which the newer Bond film failed.
But as a window into how teams of screenwriters think film should be "about" these kinds of symbolic sibling relationships a trudge like SPECTRE can still have some use. Contemporary film that attempts to "engage" historic events or blockbuster genres like global espionage and wars of races of robots by transforming these tales into sibling rivalry tropes or quests for identity betray the times not so much because these issues don't keep being "fresh", but because whether in the arthouse or the megaplex, storytellers in film may have become so solipsistic they can only think in cinematic terms.
But political figures in history were not enacting dramas of post-Maslow attainment. The sorts of tyrants and megalomaniacs who feel obliged to "make history" don't seem to think in the terms in which contemporary screenwriters can sometimes like to feel through scripts.
If the United Kingdom stops being united the question of why a James Bond would keep doing what he's done is probably not going to become the center of attention. Skyfall could riff on the idea that Bond was a monster who lurked in the shadows but he did so for "us". The Daniel Craig era bond plays with the idea that maybe this isn't a worthwhile pursuit, maybe Bond wants to call it a day, but the question is always framed in purely personal terms, even with M as a surrogate mother, not in terms of a principled refusal to continue serving this empire in this particular way. Which I guess is a way of saying James Bond is never going to become The Prisoner.
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