Starting from the premise that the film makers are aware of what they are doing but that still they are tracing a shape whose contours are formed by the ideological sub-strata of our society. This is the ‘big other’ of Zizek and via his work Lacan, something to which reference is made implicitly in all works, the form of which is accessible not by looking directly at representations but by looking at what those varied forms do, how they relate to the material world in which they have existence.
What is the ideological form of which Skyfall is the clothing or as my sister called it the lichen, morphing lichen? So if I look at material conditions of the film, those events outside it that allow it to be, give it shape, what are they? To take one; it is referring to Julian Assange as the baddy saying firstly that the world of real politics and death is the proper subject of a film. It might be seen as saying that in the end death, war and destruction, torture are possibly also just elements of entertainment. The work with Assange doesn’t fall into real politics and get dirty. The baddy is like Assange, sexually ambivalent and potentially dangerous. He has unresolved issues with mother and is a laugh at therapeutic roles and practice. His downfall is that set of issues and not the meat of his crimes in themselves for which he is un-attackable, he only loses through his personal weakness. His crimes stay free of any comment, only existing as the perfect geek’s unaccountable, impersonal actions. His normal yet extreme complexes are his downfall and the final crime is his resolution of that complex of emotions. These are the boring old ones of rejection, lack of love and punishment and betrayal. This followed by torture which leads to bitterness. So Assange is subsumed into entertainment, a sort of mainstream Woody Allen film where we laugh with the therapist. So that’s one condition of the film: it takes the real events of war and our proximity to its truth through wikileaks and makes it pure entertainment based around the audience’s awareness of psychological categories. The ideological shape is that this is what matters perhaps? The ability to laugh at oneself, to allow the sacred (real death and war) to be turned to the service of an evening out. This is the form we believe in.