Victoria,
And now for something completely different. We chose to follow up the sappy, emotionally scatter-brained P.S. I Love You with the dour, gray-scale The Bourne Identity. I like this movie, but with caveats.
In some respects, the Bourne films play out as the anti-Bond; while Bond is playful, Bourne is intense; while Bond is confident and brash, Bourne is reluctant and measured. I ultimately prefer Bourne’s style of spy action - his please-don’t-mess-with-me-now-I’m-going-to-kill-you thing makes the violence somehow feel more justified. This dichotomy, between Bond and Bourne, is particularly fun because of the way it makes us think about national stereotypes. Bond, the Brit (who should be tepid), is the brazen one, whereas Bourne, the American (who should be ballsy and crude), is cautious.
This is maybe worth thinking about because Bourne’s creator, Robert Ludlum, was an American, as are the film’s director (Doug Liman) and screenwriters (Tony Gilroy and William Blake Heron). This film, and its sequels, feel very much to me like an American version of a European thriller. Or, put another way, this is an action-packed, car-chase filled version of something like Le Cercle Rouge, The Day of the Jackal, or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It is perhaps unfair to blame this solely on the nationality of its creators, but my impression remains: this is an American action film putting on the act of having European cinematic sensibilities. For an example, I would direct you to the scene in which Bourne, quietly assessing his options at a lonely French farmhouse, decides to evade his sniper by blowing up a gas generator.
I don’t mean to sound too negative about the style of the film, because ultimately it works for me. I enjoy seeing a fireball just as much as the next guy.
Far more interesting in this film is its take on knowledge and ethics. This movie seems to be straining for most of its runtime at allegorizing the Platonic doctrine of recollection. According to Plato in his dialogue Meno, “We do not learn, and that what we call learning is only a process of recollection.” In other words, people don’t actually learn anything new, they simply figure out things they already knew, probably, Plato thought, from a past life. Plato understood this to work for virtue too - one couldn’t learn to be virtuous, you simply had to locate the virtue already locked into you. Plato understood that some people would naturally have more than others.
Insert Bourne (or “born.” Get what they did there?). Bourne spends the entire movie learning things about himself that he ultimately already knows. In the conclusion of the film, he is told/remembers that he messed up on his final mission, and, rather than assassinate an African politician like he was supposed to, he chose to be merciful. This occurs, we (and Bourne) find out, because his conscience awoke and thought it might be a bad idea to ruthlessly murder a father in front of his children.
Speaking in terms of strict allegory, this works. Bourne not only learns that he has all sorts of super-spy abilities, he also learns that he has some sort of ethical awareness. This is not something he accrues through education, this is something inherent to his person. As a viewer, this introduces a tremendous problem, however. Why on earth would Bourne’s conscience kick in right at that exact moment? Prior to his amnesia, he was, presumably, a highly successful assassin. Why did his sense of right and wrong kick in then, and not sometime earlier in his life? Say, when he signed up to be a gun-for-hire in the first place? Or when he made his first kill? The film doesn’t offer any sort of explanation, and this feels a bit like cheating. Of course, Plato didn’t offer much of one either, and so perhaps this is just in keeping with the formula. It still bothers me though, more than anything else in the film. Maybe the sequels will clear this up.
Love,
Adam
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