Every couple of months I catch up on films in the "new to weekly" section of the local video shop. You know the deal, one or two overnighters with five weeklies for a pretty good price. Filling out the latest bunch was The Bourne Supremacy. Yes, it was made in 2004, but some of the "new weeklies" are even older.
Hey, I was riveted from start to finish. "Boy, was that fun," I said to the dog, as no one else in the house will have anything to do with this kind of shit. (Incidentally, the dog prefers the early films of Kieslowski, but will endure anything for a cuddle.)
I'll have to admit that I enjoyed the first one, The Bourne Identity, mainly for Matt Damon-Bourne's love interest, the exquisite Franka Potente. Franka's face comes from the age of Greek Goddesses. The nobility of her classic bone structure makes her a perfect fit for the prow of a ship. Yet, in Tom Tykwer's The Princess and the Warrior, her face, framed by hair the colour of pale yellow flowers freshly picked by a young woman who is about to fall unconscious from a heroin overdose, became soft and yielding, demure to the point of giving the impression that she could be led to a softly lit room and ravished quietly. Yet again, in Run, Lola, Run, her face, framed now by flaming, hennaed hair, the same intense colour no doubt sported by the legendary She Who Must Be Obeyed, became raw sexuality, knocking passers-by off their feet with a sweating, animal lust …
Er, heh-heh, but that's not what this article is about.
The Bourne Supremacy was a ripper waste of time, a jolly good way to passively experience killing people while killing time in my lounge room. Movie finished, out the door to mow the lawn, but not before adding several more kill notches to the butt of my fantasy weapon of revenge.
In the end, I could rent five weeklies a day for months on end, each with similar themes of the violent invincibility Americans so love. (Wait a minute. Thanks to American cultural hegemony, everyone in the world sees and loves these films.)
Bourne is invincible. He knows how to win every fight and get out of every scrape. He can avoid hundreds of police converging on his exact whereabouts simply by walking away at a brisk pace. With a SWAT battalion about to break his door down, he will deftly climb out the window and up a conveniently placed ladder to the rooftops, over which he will hop with the greatest of ease because there is nothing he cannot do. He has as many passports, as much money, and all the artillery he needs, which he keeps in a locker at a bus station in a town in a country that he can get to with more greatness of ease, no matter how far away he is. Everyone knows where he is most of the time, especially the film's nearly robotic assassin (which is why he needs to make all those miraculous escapes). But somehow no one knows where this locker is.
Who taught him how to be invincible? The CIA. That's right, the same agency with the real-world reputation of having its collective head up its collective arse when it comes to simple, basic intelligence. The CIA, as we can plainly see from black-lined FoI records and movies like this, knows the best methods for killing anyone anywhere, but not much else.
With Hollywood conveyor-belting films like this, it's no wonder America is so fucked up. See, American males are being shown up there on the big screen how cool and easy it is to be invincible. A good percentage of them walk out of the theatre thinking they could do a Bourne. What makes these American blokes different to the rest of us is that they can stride across the street to a gun shop and buy a weapon (or weapons) to prove their newfound invincibility.
But what is turning the country schizoid is that while Bourne is a good guy who breaks the bad guys' rules, it's no longer easy to differentiate between the two.
The CIA were the good guys once upon a time, but now we know them to be professional assassins who bring down governments unsuited to American imperialism.
The President used to be a very good guy. But starting with Nixon, the presidency has gradually lost its status as the goal of every red-blooded American. With Bush2, we clearly see that the President of the United States is the modern equivalent of the cattle baron in old Westerns who is a model citizen by day, but by night, is the head of a ruthless cattle-rustling syndicate.
So, who is the bloke who has just seen The Bourne Supremacy, or one of its endless clones, going to emulate? The bad guys or the good guys? If he doesn't know which is which, who then is he going to eliminate with his brand new weapon (or weapons) to prove his invincibility?
These days, the US is such a miasma of confused morality and selfish agendas that people no longer trust their elected leaders. Except, of course, for fundamentalist Christians. They still believe in George W. Bush, their surrogate saviour. And well they should, for he and they both share a yearning for Armageddon.
In the end, if our morally clueless Bourne-watcher wants to prove his invincibility, he -- and of course it is always a he -- can make it real simple. In the tradition of those who have gone before him, he has only to lock and load and blow away the nearest group of vulnerable folk.
-- Benoît Balz
