[Perry] Hidden Character Aspects

This post won’t go up until halfway through December but I’m writing it shortly after having seen Skyfall, the latest James Bond movie. I don’t cover any spoilers to the movie in this post but there will be some discussion regarding the characters that you may or may not wish to avoid.

I’m writing this now because about halfway through the movie, I was completely floored by a revelation regarding the character of James Bond.

Namely this: the character of M holds within herself certain aspects of James Bond’s character.

It’s important to note as well that this interaction is something I’ve noted solely when it came to the interaction between Judi Dench’s M and Daniel Craig’s James Bond.

I was originally introduced to the character of James Bond with Pierce Brosnan in Goldeneye but I don’t recall noting this interaction back then.

In any case, halfway through this movie, I came to a point where I realized that M is just as much a part of the core character of James Bond as his suave demeanor, his Walther PPK short, or his preference of having his martinis shaken instead of stirred.

The interaction between Judi Dench and Daniel Craig sheds a light on parts of Bond that would have otherwise remained in the dark. The way the two characters play off one another reveals so much about the character of Bond.

Her presence is almost the only way that Bond interacts with his sense of duty. Throughout the movies, Daniel Craig’s Bond does an awful lot of gallivanting around in what appears to be a flaming disregard for authority and orders. At the same time though, the things that continually draw him back to his job and his country is M. Whether she’s hounding him or whether he returns to her to exchange some witty repartee, he keeps coming back to her with the purpose of fulfilling his duty.

He’s written to portray a very cavalier attitude when it comes to duty and country…but that’s only because M is where that aspect of his character resides.

Without her, he wouldn’t have that drive that makes him such an effective member of her Majesty’s secret service.

But it’s the technique of hiding an aspect of a character within another one that really made me sit up and open my eyes. I’d never seen it done before and even more importantly, I’d never seen it done well.

This opens my eyes a little and my fingers are already itching to try it out for myself.

Do you know any other good examples of characters that share aspects of themselves with other characters?

Related posts:

[Perry] The Power of a Good Threat
Character Voice
[Perry] Wherein Not All Things Need To Be Ambitious