the Bourne movies have left behind perhaps the strongest residue of mainstream anti-government paranoia since '70s thrillers like The Parallax View and Three Days Of The Condor. (Tobias, Scott. "The Bourne Ultimatum." The Onion A.V. Club. August 2, 2007.)
Amid the new and familiar faces (David Strathairn and Joan Allen), it introduces a couple of power-grasping, smooth-talking ghouls and stark reminders of Abu Ghraib that might make you blanch even if you don’t throw up. (Dargis, Manohla. "Still Searching, but with Darker Eyes." New York Times. August 3, 2007.)
Before we go into the Bourne movie, let's jog over to YouTube for a sec to watch Slavoj Zizek deliver an incisive look at what is wrong with September 11 and the two 2006 movies that depicted its events (for those that don't know, that's United 93 and World Trade Center).
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Apparently the clip I watched on YouTube yesterday violates the terms of use, so I'll have to sum up the points Zizek made. Since we're talking Greengrass here I'm going to leave World Trade Center largely out of the discussion, although most of the points apply to both films.
Despite 93's vaunted realism (it was in real time, it was coldly neutral in its dealing with the terrorists), its apparent neutrality gives it an unexpected political message. Because 93 deals primarily with ordinary people in an extraordinary moment, its main message is one of humanity triumphing over adversity. In this way, 93 is not an exceptional film, plot-wise. By making September 11 into a heartwarming tale of the human spirit, the film robs the day's events of their necessarily political context. That Greengrass uses a cinematic technique we call ultra-realism makes this robbery all the more insidious, in that we come to believe that, in watching United 93, we're actually watching history as it happened. This, of course, is an absurd belief; United 93 is a Hollywood picture that takes place projected on a screen. It is as unreal as The Bourne Ultimatum.
Greengrass's way of dealing with violence has not changed much since The Bourne Supremacy. The camera wobbles furiously, fight scenes are fraught with confusion - as with cock-fights, it's difficult to tell in Greengrass's world who is winning until one man lays on the floor unconscious or covered in blood.
This technique employs so many conventions of films we consider realist (homemade video, cell-phone cameras used to capture a trajedy, the jiggly footraces of the COPS TV series) that Greengrass has succeeded in convincing his audience that his movies produce a transcendent truth. Dargis talks at length in her review of Ultimatum about the consequences of violence, how we are robbed of the thrill of violence by being thrown in the middle of the fights; the camera reels as a blow is struck, and presumably, so do we.
More insidiously, the movie flashes to scenes in which Jason Bourne experiences simulated drowning and executes a man he does not know, a man who wears a black cowl over his head. These gestures toward torture at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib firmly situate the Bourne movies in our political context. How we feel about violence as depicted according to the conventions of hyper-realism in The Bourne Ultimatum reflects how we think we feel about it in real life.
One cannot mistake the political message of the first two-and-a-half Bourne movies. It is one of natural and necessary skepticism toward the American intelligence community, which throughout the trilogy is a society of thieves, zealots, and the power-mad, where the good die young in dark basements at the hands of their superiors or are unceremoniously fired for objecting the the atrocities they commit.
In the final scenes of the Ultimatum, this skepticism is nearly completely subverted. The baddies are brought to justice, the stern but feminine Pamela Landy presumably gets promoted to run the CIA, and a new era of ethical black ops begins, the illusion rule of law returns, etc. Meanwhile, Jason Bourne, a character rivaled perhaps only by Jack Bauer in his status as a U.S. foreign policy action figure, lays inert, floating in water. The audience is uncertain as to whether he is dead, until the final moment of the movie, when he jerks back to life. America applauds; their superhuman master of violence and torture has been resurrected (the Guantanamo-style simulated drowning no doubt served as preparation), and now, finally, the CIA is an organization we can trust.
It may be that Paul Greengrass more effectively articulates the American inability to deal with its current political situation than any other director currently making films. By shaking the camera around during a fight scene, Greengrass places us into the situation we think we face in the real world. When we're there, we cheer as our American boy fights foreigners and toughens himself up with torture. The resolution we feel at the end of the Bourne trilogy is not a resolution of our feelings toward violence; we're still glad Bourne is there to fuck some shit up. Instead, our feelings have changed toward American institutions of violence - we've come to trust them. In this sense, perhaps Paul Greengrass is not actually as courageous a filmmaker as we thought. Riveting? Certainly. But honest? Probably not.
The Bourne Ultimatum rocks out. It's awesome to see America win. But Bourne's ultimate message - that we should be comforted that the evil and power-hungry in our nation's inner circles are exceptions and not the rule - is not as hyper-realist as the shakey cameras we're treated to during our American boy's fist fights.
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