James Bond's resurrection: how coming back to life became a film favourite.
Bringing characters back from the dead has long been a TV staple, but why the sudden spate
of fake deaths in film?
Daniel Craig in Skyfall.
In his latest film, Skyfall, James Bond enjoys a usual day at the office. He is beaten, shot at, dropped into icy water, driven off the road and detonated with explosives, before finally being picked off the top off a moving train by a lone sniper and plunging into watery ravine.
"Where the hell have you been," he is asked upon reappearing one night in a darkened alley. "Enjoying death," he replies. "Everybody needs a hobby." "What's yours?" "Resurrection."
A lot of people have been taking it up recently. Resurrection has become screenwriters' favorite means of reviving a weary series without going to the bother of a full reboot. In the latest Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, Batman spends much of his screen time (spoiler alert) springing back from the grave, not once but twice, after his spine is snapped by the villainous Bane and after sacrificing himself to save Goth City from a thermonuclear explosion.
The second season of the BBC drama Sherlock, meanwhile, ended with Holmes seeming to hurl himself from the roof of St Bartholomew's hospital in central London, only to show up at his own graveside watching a bereaved Watson from a distance. Twitter, Facebook, and various fan forums lit up with theories as to how Holmes had managed to fake his own death, with some viewers even posting their own explanations on YouTube.
Why this sudden spate of faked deaths and resurrections? Bond's watery plunge harkens back, of course, to the granddaddy of such feints – Holmes's plunge from the Reichenbach Falls in Arthur Conan Doyle's story The Final Problem, a death prompted by Doyle's weariness with his own creation.
"I must save my mind for better things," he wrote to his mother, before bringing Holmes back three years later in The Adventure of the Empty House. These days, we know better.
"If a character falls off of a cliff or other high structure, especially into water, he or she is almost guaranteed to still be alive," notes the websiteTV Tropes, an online compendia of TV and film conventions, which suggests several advantages to faking your own death.
• To throw the villains off the trail
• To allow said character to be taken into witness relocation
• To make a criminal commit Just One Little Mistake
• To allow two characters to live Happily Ever After
• As part of a con
• To gain a temporary advantage in combat - generally considered less than sporting
• Unless it's done to fake out your teammates and throw them into an Unstoppable Rage … then it's heroic
• To prevent a Time Paradox
• To see how his heirs would react
• To allow said character to be taken into witness relocation
• To make a criminal commit Just One Little Mistake
• To allow two characters to live Happily Ever After
• As part of a con
• To gain a temporary advantage in combat - generally considered less than sporting
• Unless it's done to fake out your teammates and throw them into an Unstoppable Rage … then it's heroic
• To prevent a Time Paradox
• To see how his heirs would react
The trope has long been a staple of daytime soaps, where characters were always perishing in plane crashes only to turn up several seasons later living on a farm, or in the harem of a Moroccan prince. The world of the comic strip, too, has recently flown its capes at half-mast for the passing of Batman, Batwoman, Green Lantern, Spiderman, and Superman, all joining the list of fictional characters, from Tom Sawyer to Juliet Capulet, whose demise, like Mark Twain's, turned out to be greatly exaggerated.
Maybe it was inevitable that as film franchises mushroomed, and they started to more closely resemble these long-form serials, resurrection would pass up the food chain from TV soaps to high-end Hollywood movies, following the example Lt Ellen Ripley in the Alien films, who perished in a vat of molten lead at the end of Alien 3 only to be cloned from surviving flesh tissue for Alien: Resurrection in 1997.
The conceit still groaned with the memories of a hundred horror sequels – from Halloween to Friday the 13th. The movie that gave resurrection its current respectability was released just a few years later: Doug Liman's The Bourne Identity in 2002.
In that film, you'll remember, Jason Bourne is shot in the back and plunges, like Bond, into another of those watery graves that never seem to last. Hauled out of the sea by Italian fisherman, Bourne finds himself suffering from amnesia, but can speak several languages, cut off a man's air supply with a karate chop to the larynx, and scale the outsides of Swiss banks using only his fingertips.
His multiple passports offer no clue to his identity – a rogue American assassin whose only tactical advantage is that his handlers now think him dead. Living off the grid, he attempts to solve the mystery of his own murder. Together with Chris Nolan's Memento – which also featured an amnesiac, in this case piecing together the facts of his own life and his wife's death – Liman's film played midwife to a modern species of film noir, featuring heroes trapped in mazy plots, flipping through identities like someone flipping pages of their web browser.
There is no more pertinent question, in the era of the internet, than the one posed by Bernardo in the first line of Hamlet – "Who's there?." Identifying yourself has never carried greater importance than it does online, just as assuming a fake identity has never been easier and the premium put on anonymity never higher. Denying the most basic piece of binary information we have about us – are we alive or dead? – becomes our biggest weapon.
Or, as spymaster Ralph Fiennes puts it to Bond when he comes back from the grave in Skyfall: "I have one question: why not stay dead?"
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