Okay, I’m a girl, so when my brother treated me, my mother, and his daughter to see The Bourne Ultimatum for a “family” night, we were obviously blindsided. I don’t live for action movies the way my brother does. What I do live for, however, are movies that say something…something about who we are as a community, as a society, as a country, and as a people.
And what is The Bourne Ultimatum saying to us?
… a philosophy that’s all too common in American culture and perhaps influential in world culture. A philosophy that muses… We are on a constant quest to know who we are. We want to live forever (we are afraid of death). And some of us don’t trust the American government.
These statements all just happen to be the makings of our hero: Jason Bourne. Some call him the new and improved American James Bond; others call him an edgy and more realistic hero; and still others call him the future of spies. Whatever you call him, Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is very popular and making a lot of money at the box office. The movie has grossed close to $200 million while the series has brought in a grand total of $500 million.
This cat and mouse, spy-game trilogy involves Bourne who is a highly trained assassin for the United States government. But one of Bourne’s problems—besides being a target for termination—is that he has serious case of amnesia (we'll call it that for now). That’s a combination you don’t want to see coming your way…a deadly assassin with memory loss! But the question I pondered after the movie and after seeing the look of excited contentment on my brother’s face (while my mother and niece asked about dinner) was why? Why can’t we get enough of Jason Bourne? Why is this successful series on its third film and geared up for a fourth?
The answers play themselves out very quickly in this action-packed feature. The reasons Jason Bourne is our hero, the reasons we enjoy watching him run, fight, and outwit the “smart” people is because Jason Bourne is searching for who he is. Jason Bourne doesn’t trust the government, and no matter how hard the “bad” guys try, Jason Bourne just won’t die—immortality, identity, and government distrust, all pillars of American thought and culture.
I feel like I’ve exhausted this theme of identity as a film critic simply because every popular movie seems to explore it. The reason we talk so much about identity is because it is the one thing that draws individual purpose and meaning. Everything we do and say comes from this sense of who we are. The problem is that Jason Bourne has lost a sense of who he is and no longer knows why he is driven to kill, as he asks a fellow assassin who has been assigned to kill him, “Do you even know why you are doing this? The assassin takes pause when Bourne asks the poignant question. We certainly can understand his pause. I’m sure we all have stopped to ask ourselves, why am I doing what I’m doing? Why am I working at this job? Why do I work as many hours as I do? Why am I dating this person? Why is she/he my friend? It’s one of the most important questions you can ask yourself and it can get to the heart of who you are.
But beyond issues of identity, our hero Jason Bourne has a very powerful enemy: The United States government. How ironic. The Land of the Free turns into an all-powerful, all-seeing machine of abuse and corruption… in the movie. Bourne bobs and weaves in and out of the sight of the United States Central Intelligence Agency who utilizes every (and I mean every) accessible means to catch him. In the movie, the government taps (read hacks) into private email, phone records, and phone conversations; they effortlessly and recklessly bash their way into private homes to search through random pieces of paper and garbage. And much like a divine being positioned in the heavens and looking down onto creation, the movie’s intelligence agents tap into every surveillance and video camera within 500 square feet of Bourne, a man who knows their dirty (big) secret. What was fascinating to me was that in a room of 30 or so of the most intelligent people in the world, who had an unlimited view of nearly every person on the planet, they still came up short and could not pin down the one man who stayed right under their noses.
American movies have long captured on the silver screen our distrust of the government. From 1939’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to the 1980’s Rambo series , movie protagonists have battled against sleazy, biased, and dishonest governmental leaders. Many of John Wayne’s westerns boldly stand up against “the powers that be,” whether it is the local authorities or the invisible and always faceless political powers. In fact, I would argue that the whole inception of the outlaw hero was a direct rebellion against the government. Films like The Candidate , All the President’s Men , The Manchurian Candidate and Apocalypse Now which were made in the 60’s and 70’s, all directly question the honesty of the US government.
Pick any one of the action films that were made in the last 30 years and you’ll see a direct or indirect distrust of local and political authority. In all of the films above, including The Bourne Ultimatum, the subliminal question is asked and answered: powerful people or systems cannot be trusted; they will always abuse their power to the demise of regular guys like you and I. And once again we see a correlation from the screen into real events in American history. The United States has watched as powerful leaders (Nixon and Watergate), companies (the Enron scandal), and institutions (the Hurricane Katrina failure) abuse, manipulate, and deceive others for their own gain much like the intelligence agency in The Bourne Ultimatum. I wonder if these are the reasons some have trouble trusting God. Perhaps if man cannot be trusted with power on earth, then God who has all power cannot. But the question is, are God and man the same?
I think the most obvious theme in The Bourne Ultimatum involves this idea of immortality. That night in the theater we saw Jason Bourne shot at, blown up, punched and body-slammed, drowned, stabbed and yet within a few suspended movie seconds, he gets up with a few cuts and a limp and keeps moving. Why don’t we like for our heroes to die? What’s so bad about death? Well, we notice in The Bourne Ultimatum to die means to be outsmarted and vice versa; to be outsmarted means to die. Perhaps one of the reasons there is a fear of death is because we somehow relate death to weakness and defeat, whether intellectual or physical. But yet to be discussed is whether or not that fear is grounded in truth or simply unfounded.
I can’t say for sure whether or not these things were the reasons my brother left the theater so satisfied, but I can say that this trilogy (the three “I”s or The Bourne series) doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon.
