I am endlessly fascinated by The Bourne Trilogy of films based on the novels by Robert Ludlum. First of all there is the technical excellence of the films, directed by Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity) and Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum). This is what American cinema does very well, the car chases in particular, which have come a long way since Steve McQueen in Bullitt and Gene Hackman in The French Connection.
There are some gaping holes in the storytelling which we shall pass over here but it is worth noting two clichés of modern American television and cinema productions. The first and rather puzzling one is the general contempt shown towards the FBI and CIA, the former usually depicted as complicating the lives of honest policemen and the latter shown as subversive or ineffective. The second cliché is that of employing fading British actors as villains, in this case the once-magnificent Albert Finney and also the more workaday Brian Cox.
So what is the American dilemma and how do these films relate to it? The United States is possibly the only country in the world to have been deliberately and specifically founded according to the ideals of a religious sect within the framework of a more or less democratic political system (omitting the slaves and the indians). When it achieved independence it enshrined its philosophical and political ideals in a Constitution, hence the dilemma. While the Constitution preached the principles of brotherly love, harder heads were massacring native indians, annexing lands occupied by Mexicans, buying more territory belonging to France and Russia and finally colonising distant islands.
We could say that by the mid-20th century, with its domestic situation more or less settled and having played a major part in saving the world from, first of all the foul regimes of Germany and Japan and later protecting much of the world from the foul and incompetent regimes of Russia and China, the United States might be felt to have paid its dues to history by reason of its contribution to the modern world.
This was the scenario at the end of the 1950s when a sudden polarisation took place within the USA. On the one hand young people wanted to extend their ancestors’ brotherly love beyond the restrictions of traditional religious limitations. This impulse was shown at its most extreme by the hippies, but we must also remember that there were hundreds of thousands of apparently far more conventional youngsters who gave themselves over to the joys of rock ’n’ roll while still maintaining the overall appearances of Middle America.
On the other hand we have the magnificent hypocrisy of the Camelot Kennedys, featuring a sex-addicted President whose bootlegger father had rigged his son's election with the aid of the Mafia, maintaining oppressive regimes in Central and South America and beginning to send young men half-way across the world to fight to maintain a corrupt (but anti-communist) regime in South Vietnam. Now, in contrast to the hippies, we have the CIA coming onto the scene, smuggling opium with its Air America, and ordinary soldiers committing atrocities such as the events that My Lai, which not only involved killing 300 people, as is usually reported, but also large-scale rape of women and young girls. Interestingly, progress of that massacre was halted by two American helicopter crew risking their lives to remonstrate with the soldiers and the atrocity was publicised by an American journalist Seymour Hersh, writing in an American publication.
And this is exactly the conflict we see played out in the Bourne films: the pragmatic, hard-nosed officials using Al Qaeda’s atrocities as justification to order their subordinates to step beyond the limits of the law and (because this is Hollywood) their defeat by civilised, humane upholders of the Constitution. Indeed, in the last few weeks, while we have seen overwhelming support for the killing of Osama bin Laden, some doubts have automatically been raised concerning the legality of the action.
The new twist introduced in the Bourne films lies in resolving the moral problem of those at the sharp end of the conflict – the killers. On the one hand, if the special forces who had had Osama bin Laden in their sights ten years ago had enjoyed the autonomy to shoot to kill, the Al Qaeda problem might be on its way to resolution by now, but the Constitution was followed and permission to shoot was withheld. On the other hand the group to which Jason Bourne volunteered his services were trained to kill at will but in order to make Bourne a hero he has to be given doubts which are eliminated by means of brainwashing and torture.
The justification offered by the high-ranking CIA official for setting up the Treadstone and Blackbriar operations is, in effect, that while the USA operates by the rulebook, its enemies do not, so “no more mister nice guy”. In the real world, is it not surprising that films of Guantánamo Bay prisoners suffering sensory deprivation by being blindfolded and wearing ear protectors and wheeled around on trolleys should be made available to the world’s news agencies? Is it not equally surprising that details of the repeated waterboarding of the man said to have masterminded the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon should also be made public? Is it not actually rather shocking that those who have inherited the principles of the US Constitution should cynically keep their prisoners beyond the reach of their country’s laws, ironically in the communist dictatorship of Cuba?
These questions are quite simply answered if we follow the ideas I have set out above: the USA wants the world to know that it can be brutal if and when it feels the need. One of the greatest weapons in the hands of the enemies of America and Western Europe is the conviction that the states making up these bodies have been weakened by the laws they themselves have made. In this sense, the Bourne films tend to reinforce that impression by allowing the nice guys to win. If the virtuous CIA figure Pamela Landy were faced with the option of ordering or committing the extra-judicial killing of an Osama bin Laden (or a Reinhard Heydrich), what would she do? What would you or I do?
And this is what good drama does: it makes us check on our values by entering the world of fictional figures. With the democratisation of Western society it is interesting to see how drama has changed from Shakespeare’s day when the figures facing these problems belonged to the nobility or royalty; today’s Hamlet is the ordinary guy David Webb who was turned into Jason Bourne by the brutal technicians employed by a liberal democracy.
For nations that have stepped off the global stage or have not yet entered it (while nonetheless enjoying the protection of the USA) and for individuals who enjoy the privilege of free speech without necessarily suffering the responsibilities of government, it is very easy to criticise the hardline pragmatists. Nevertheless, I feel that for the last 50 years the USA has been suffering the same kind of national nervous crisis that Reformation Britain passed through (see the relevant essay on this blog) and the crisis has generated the same kind of artistic creativity. In 1968 I was chatting to an American fellow-tourist in Machu Picchu, a man who had fought in World War II and said to me rather plaintively: “I can remember when the Europeans were glad to see American bombers in the skies”. And because America is now quite an efficient democracy all Americans of voting age have to wrestle with the question: where does justified aggression stop and murder begin? The Bourne Trilogy, representing the liberal-left thinking of Hollywood, points us in one direction while Clint Eastwood’s films point us the opposite way. As the Americans would say: “Go figure”.
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