| Quantum of Solace - what does it mean? |
from http://www.tjbd.co.uk/
Quantum of Solace is the title of a story published in For Your Eyes Only in which James Bond plays a very small part. Bond is attending a dinner party hosted by the Governor for The Bahamas at the end of a week in Nassau before leaving for Miami, in which he feels completely out of place. Once the other guests have left, Bond and the Governor and make small talk to pass the hour or so before Bond feels he can also depart. When he makes a remark about wanting to marry an air hostess, the Governor proceeds to tell a story that he says Bond may find interesting.
The Governor’s story is about a man who meets and marries an air hostess after meeting her on a flight. However, after a posting to Bermuda their marriage began to unravel and when he finally leaves his wife, he makes sure he does everything possible to destroy her life. The story ends with the Governor telling Bond that a relationship “can survive anything so long as some kind of basic humanity exists between the two people” and that all kinds of obstacles can be overcome in a relationship, but not “the death of common humanity in one of the partners”.
He rather pretentiously calls this the “Quantum of Solace” - or as Bond explains it - “the amount of comfort… When the other person not only makes you feel insecure but actually seems to want to destroy you, it’s obviously the end. The Quantum of Solace stands at zero.”
The Governor then reveals that the wife had been one of the dinner party guests.
Quantum of Solace was first published in 1960 and seems to be a comment on the state of Ian Fleming’s marriage at the time, although according to Andrew Lycett’s excellent biography of Fleming, it was based on a true story he’d heard in Jamaica.
from http://www.imdb.com
The meaning of the film's title according to different sources. The Governor character in the Ian Fleming short story of the same name defines it as "... a precise figure defining the comfort, humanity and fellow feeling required between two people for love to survive. If the quantum of solace is 0, then love is dead." He then introduces the Law of the Quantum of Solace as follows: "I've seen flagrant infidelities patched up, I've seen crimes and even murder foreign by the other party, let alone bankruptcy and other forms of social crime. Incurable disease, blindness, disaster - all of these can be overcome. But never the death of common humanity in one of the partners. I've thought about this and I've invented a rather high-sounding title for this basic factor in human relations. I have called it the law of the Quantum of Solace." In the same story James Bond comments on the Law of the Quantum of Solace as follows: "That's a splendid name for it. It's certainly impressive enough. And of course I see what you mean. I should say you're absolutely right. Quantum of Solace - the amount of comfort. Yes, I suppose you can say that all love and friendship is based in the end on that. Human beings are very insecure. When the other person not only makes you feel insecure but actually seems to want to destroy you, it's obviously the end. The Quantum of Solace stands at zero. You've got to get away to save yourself." In an interview, the producers explained: "It means that a relationship cannot be salvaged unless there is a 'quantum of solace' between the two parties - 'Quantum' meaning 'measure' and 'solace' meaning 'comfort' - so if they are not willing to share that then their relationship is not redeemable. In our case, it is a couple of things: Bond is looking for a 'quantum of solace' after his experiences in Casino Royale (2006), and QUANTUM also happens to be the name of the villainous organization in the film.