SKYFALL – Cain and Abel

SKYFALL SPOILERS ABOUND 

For SKYFALL viewers’s eyes only.

While surfing the web on this all-nighter, transistioning me from a closing shift to an opening one at AMC, someone on reddit, I came across a post where a fellow geek believe M and Silva to be James Bond’s biological parents. Which spurred me on to finally write another one of my ideas about the film…

If anything, Bond and Silva are metaphorical brothers.

Trust me, I’ve seen the film 5 and 1/2 times.

Silva is the older brother who couldn’t understand mother’s “call” aka his punishment for playing it too loose with the Chinese. Bond is the similarly disobedient younger son, though when he step outside “mother’s” wishes it is always for the good of Queen, Country, and MI6.

007 is put through a similar trial as his “older brother” – one that tests his faith in MI6 and M – yet he comes out the other-side as loyal as ever.

M trusts Bond due to this loyalty. She can have him shot, leave him in North Korea to be tortured, let him disappear and disobey orders, send him into the field when he is not at his peak… all because Bond will do ANYTHING to complete the mission. He’s the “son” who always returns.

Silva’s trials warped him, just as the arsenic tablet burned his insides. He was not the agent M thought him to be.

“At least I did something right,” M says this (or something similar) before she dies. Silva may (or may not) have ever been her favorite (she won’t admit it… aside the subtext of the final line), but now Bond has grown from an orphan into the best agent (“Orphans always make the best recruits.”). Her best “son.”

Silva obviously thinks of her as “mother,” he says it one way or another, many times. A mother who needs to be punished for betraying her “favorite” son, only to find a new favorite in Bond (after all Silva makes a point when 007 is tied to the chair, that it is about the three of them, not just he and M).

They are brother “rats” as mother “made” them.

Silva simply has fun playing with his younger brother while chasing his main prize. He even offers his “brother” a chance to join him, make his own missions. But Bond becomes less fun and more than just a silly annoyance when he stops Silva one too many times.

Bonds thoughts as M as surrogate mother are always hinted at, but made real when Bond mourns her passing. Very unlike this colder, new age 007. Even Vesper didn’t get that much grief.

SKYFALL is about two bothers, competing to save/murder their not-so-beloved mother.