Of Bond and Battleships and Lord Alfred

There's a moment in the latest Bond film, Skyfall, where we find Daniel Craig’s quip-shy 007 rendezvousing with the new floppy fringed computer whizz-kid Q. Their meeting place of choice - eschewing the upper deck of a London bus or halfway across Waterloo Bridge ... I'm pretty sure that this is de rigueur for spies, or at least George Smiley anyway – is London’s National Gallery in front of Turner’s masterpiece, The Fighting Temeraire.

From Keats to MI6 - Ben Whishaw as the new Q

It's a clever choice. Sam Mendes, the film's director, has clearly had a good old think about this. He's kept a tight grip on all of the usual leaps and chases, the cartoon violence, the casual but forgivable womanising – nobody wants to see Bond flicking through a well-thumbed copy of Simone de Beauvoir's Le deuxième sexe – but he also finds space for these lightly intrusive symbolic asides: quiet moments that allow us to range outside of the staid and ‘reluctantly’ post imperialist imagination of Ian Fleming. A more messy Bond then, one that throws a few cracking questions into the mix.

Anyway, like I said, a clever choice of painting. Its subject, the weary but heroic HMS Temeraire, veteran of the Battle of Trafalgar, being tugged up the Thames to the knacker’s yard, the sun setting on her final journey, is perfect for 007’s current predicament. This old sailor – remember Bond is a Commander in the Royal Navy – is clearly past it. Wounded, obsolete according to the politicians in the film, and really not up to scratch with the hi-tech espionage that the new Q is toting – “Were you expecting an exploding pen?” – Bond is clearly the equivalent of the Temeraire – nickname Saucy by the way – being towed up to her final resting place.

J.M.W. Turner - The Fighting Temeraire (1839) 

Like Bond, this painting is a great British institution. On the back of viewing the film I went to look at it again - London's free galleries allow these casually singular excursions - and on immediately stepping in front of Saucy overheard the following snatch of conversation. “Well, if that’s what the listeners of Radio 4 rate, I'm not rating those listeners very much!” said a dismissive woman who spent around fifteen seconds with the painting, before scuttling off to gush, perhaps, about Constable’s Hay Wain or that big freaky horse that stands opposite. Indeed, Radio 4 listeners had voted the painting the country’s favourite. Voted for it in droves in fact, sinking the nearest competition by about three to one. Yet instant is one thing that this painting is not. A first glance often finds you toying with that word ‘messy’. But then, as with other Turners – with the exception of Blake, and maybe at a push Hockney, he’s my favourite British artist by a nautical mile – The Fighting Temeraire comes to life. Suddenly you’re drawn into the murky shimmering water – can’t take your eyes off it. And the ghostly pallor of the subject, unsettling, almost unreal, as it glides through the ethereal estuary sunset.

And what of that sunset? Well, it’s no cliché, that’s for sure. Again first impressions made me think of a messy breakfast, egg and beans coalescing, not to be removed without a strong dose of Fairy liquid. But it’s a painting that eventually starts to yell. The impasto explodes off the canvas, creating a sunset that is something above and beyond pretty. It speaks of violence, destruction, a life – lives even - lived messily and heroically. And because you’re still looking you begin to notice the details. My favourite, amongst many, is the shadowy boat steered by two figures, occupying the bottom right of the painting. I peel off and forget the larger ship and am suddenly remembering the beginning of Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend - this river is and always will be full of stories, Conradian beginnings and Dickensian endings. Maybe those two people – smugglers? river-rats? – are completely unaware of the little slice of history that cuts across their wake? Maybe, in fact, they were placed (compositionally) into the painting at the exact moment that the bruising gunship passed Turner's eye, ignorant of their artistic posterity and their appearance in a Radio 4 poll some 180 years later? We, mudlarks watching from the river bank, keep on asking the questions. Ponder for a moment that white flag atop Saucy's mainsail? Surrender and defeat, or just the signal that the Temeraire is now in commercial hands?

Skyfall also finds room for another eminent Victorian in its frames. It's absurd, spurious even - but it's the loveliest moment in the film: Dame Judy's M reading the final lines of Tennyson's 'Ulysses' to a Parliamentary Select Committee.

We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Very Tennysonian that. The action is over; sadness and reflection reign, but one final 'Hurrah' can (and must) still be sought. If the Temeraire could speak she surely couldn't put it better than "How dull it is to pause, to make an end, / To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!" Bond comes to the same conclusion. Those glorious infinitives that end the poem ring out as he hurtles under Whitehall in order to save the day. The time for reflection is over, and the refutation of Turner's painting and the poem's clarion call urge 007 on.

J.M.W. Turner - Ulysses deriding Polyphemus (1829) 

Yes, it's this Bond's messiness that I love. Like the painting, like the Tennysonian emotions evoked by the poem, it's a piece of work that troubles you. Introspection - true introspection - is so unusual for a popcorn blockbuster. Maybe that's why, for the very first time, I watched a Bond film and actually felt provoked by what I'd seen. A Bond that is post-Imperialist, Oedipal (I'll save that for the Freudian bloggers), and, quite beautifully, Tennysonian: questioning, unsettling and refreshingly unusual.