It would be hyperbole to blame SKYFALL for the ills of the United Kingdom after the 2015 general election. And yet…
There’s definitely a sense that SKYFALL was part of a cultural streak of conservative nationalism between the London Olympics in 2012 and the Conservative Party’s election victory in 2015: the undercurrent of British exceptionalism through Union Jack imagery and the Tennyson poem; the allegorical theme of the old warship that still has some fight in her; the treatment of Scotland as a decaying appendage of England; and the admonition explicit in the text that we ought to be afraid of amorphous and unidentified threats in the shadows, faceless threats that, through the character of Silva (Javier Bardem), also just so happen to be queer, foreign, and disfigured. By the end, Bond has retvrned to all its classic trappings. So why shouldn’t England?