After the brutal fight, James Bond panthers into the bathroom and spies Vesper Lynd huddled under the shower, the water soaking her violet ball gown black. He sits beside her, loosens his bow-tie and adjusts the temperature of the hissing stream. ‘It’s like there’s blood on my hands,’ she whimpers. ’It’s not coming off.’ The pugilist-nosed, bevel-foreheaded British agent sucks the imaginary haemoglobin from her fingers, his petrol-blue, ice-cold eyes as nonchalant as ever.
It’s an obvious mirroring of Macbeth’s Act V Scene I in which Lady Macbeth is observed sleepwalking, crying ‘Out, damned spot!’ and ‘Will these hands ne’er be clean?’, a guilt-ridden shadow of her former-self, the woman who scolded her husband with the words ‘My hands are of your colour but I shame to wear a heart so white,’ earlier in the play. Macbeth’s killing of King Duncan was Lady Macbeth’s brainwave (arguably more than it was the self-fulfilling prophecy of the witches or Macbeth’s own ‘vaulting ambition’), but the regicide which was supposed to unite their marriage has instead turned formerly ‘brave Macbeth’ into a homicidal maniac who flies solo with his plans to kill Banquo and, later, Macduff’s family. In this newly unequal relationship, she no longer knows who her husband is. In Casino Royale, Vesper similarly comes to understand that the man she thought she could control (she pwns - as the gamers said a few years back - their early exchanges on the train) is in fact a cold-hearted murdering meathead. Metaphorical blood can no longer be sluiced off dainty Treasury fingers. Oh, and she kills herself to boot.
We’re always ripping off Macbeth. Perhaps because its Tragical structure is so well-tuned and timeless. And shades of Shakespeare’s bloodiest, and shortest, tragedy crop up everywhere.
Arguably, the closest modern parallel is the Star Wars franchise and the character of Anakin Skywalker. Darth Vader is, in essence, Macbeth.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen the prequel trilogy - and I’m in no hurry to watch them again, dear reader - but even a superficial scan back through my addled memory banks tells me that, in The Phantom Menace, Anakin flies a mean pod-race and is cherished as ‘the chosen one’, just as Macbeth is the hero of the battlefield, his ‘brandished steel’ steaming with Norwegian blood, before the witches predict he’ll be ‘king hereafter’. Both prophecies come true, of course, with terrible results, as Lord Vader becomes the universe’s most feared Sith and Macbeth Scotland’s biggest Thane botherer.
Later, as power goes to our protagonists’ heads, Anakin famously slaughters younglings while Macbeth hires murderers to kill anyone he deems a threat to his ‘fruitless crown’, including innocent children. If Anakin’s arc were to end with Revenge of the Sith, the parallel could be extended further to suggest that both former heroes Macbeth and Anakin die in battle, but whereas Macbeth’s head is cut from his body, Anakin’s sliced and burnt remnants are encased in protective armour to ensure future intergalactic menacings. (Tragic) heroes become villains in an attempt to fulfil fate. In many ways, their attempts to avoid their fates actually guarantee them, with both characters’ fatal flaws being the same: ambition drives their arcs relentlessly and irreversibly downwards as the supernatural (witchcraft/the dark side of the force) becomes a power too tempting to resist.
It’s probably fair to suggest that Macbeth also influenced another film trilogy (albeit one that spawned out of a bestselling book), namely The Godfather series and, in particular, the character of Michael Corleone. Michael, like Macbeth, begins the story as a returning war hero and doesn’t show immediate ambition for power but, once they both start killing, they soon wade so far into blood that ‘returning were as tedious as go o’er.’ Likewise, Michael and Macbeth begin to adopt an act-first, think-later mentality as the bodies mount. Corleone is uber-Macbethean in his conscience-tormented attitude and dealings with the notion of murder as sin, especially when former friends become perceivably treacherous. Macbeth, as King, and Michael, as Don, both want freedom from their own corruption and guilt but, while the Macbeths cannot find inner peace or political support, the Corleone family are not allowed legitimacy - no influential senators or governors in the family line - just as it is Banquo’s children and not Macbeth’s who will ultimately rule Scotland. In Godfather III, Michael is haunted by what he did to Fredo, just as Macbeth is, quite literally, haunted by Banquo’s ghost at the banquet.
Macbeth and Michael Corleone become convinced of their own invincibility, much like Walter White in Breaking Bad, whose inciting prophecy - the starting gun of his murderous journey - was a diagnosis of lung cancer rather than a prediction of greatness. In many ways, the Lady Macbeth character in Breaking Bad is split between Jesse Pinkman and Skyler, Walt’s wife. Skyler doesn’t exactly question Walter’s masculinity to the same extent as Lady Macbeth but she has a belittling presence nevertheless, whereas Jesse is the one who, while abetting Walter in the early days of their meth business, even convincing Walter to kill Crazy Eight, ends up mentally afflicted by his mounting deeds, spiralling towards chemical dependence as Walter’s power and criminal influence grows.
Breaking Bad, The Godfather, Star Wars. The ‘good man gone bad’ template carried off in style (okay, not the prequels) in modern times shows Tragedy’s durability as a storytelling format, warning of the evils of power, of unchecked ambition. The hero ends up our antihero, and we can’t bring ourselves to mourn their demise, only what might have been. But the truth is, Macbeth wasn’t the first to follow what was already a tried and tested formula, since the Tragedy dates back to ancient Greece and possibly before.
After all, greed, temptation and betrayal were there at the very beginning, weren’t they? Eve, like Lady Macbeth, tempted Adam - after hearing Satan’s prophecy - to taste the forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden. The Macbeths, just as Adam and Eve supposedly once did before them, wanted to play God and were both punished for it. Original Sin has been writ large in life and literature ever since. And our Vesper Lynd hands will ne’er be clean, no matter how often James Bond sucks our fingers.
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