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The Bourne series is almost unique among recent Hollywood films in winning significant critical praise for its marriage of le Carré-lite intrigue and visceral psychodrama. But the series' most recent outing, titled simply Jason Bourne, has been disappointing. The film met with a broadly muted
response and has the lowest critical rating of any of the series on
the aggregate site Metacritic. A confession: for my teenage self
Bourne made Europe cool. The Bourne films were the first in which I
really cared about location. Two things I saw excited me: first, the
often faded glamour of central and eastern Europe; and second, the
ease with which Bourne slipped between different worlds, always the
master of whatever local language he stumbled across. As an amnesiac
super soldier, Bourne has the uncanny ability to do things he doesn't
know he can, and Damon's famously baffled brow somehow made this
unwitting mastery believable. So he would slip unrecognised through
the world's customs controls armed only with a fan of fake passports
and an apparently polyglot unconscious. Bourne made the rest of the
world feel accessible.
But in
this most recent outing the characteristic fast-cutting, high-impact
action sequences feel merely super-imposed on an exotic background. Regardless of the setting - from a riotous anti-austerity
protest in Athens to a sun-baked Las Vegas strip - events take place
against a backdrop which is interactive rather than actually alive.
Technology is an obvious factor in this evolution of the series: at times the chase scenes resemble sophisticated platform games. But equally important are the conventions of the narrative form itself. The real disappointment of the
Bourne series is that the longer it continues, the more completely it
must shed the ambiguities which made its early premise compelling.
In the
Bourne films women are either peripheral office-dwellers whose
characters can be quietly discontinued (Pamela Landy, played by Joan
Allen in the earlier movies) or, if they are involved in the hunt at
all, they die (love interest Franka Potente and erstwhile ally Julia
Stiles). Women are hard to feature in the lone wolf drama except as
marginal accomplices or sexualised sidekicks. The uneasy presence of
women in the series is not down to a lack of imagination on the part
of the writers, but is a symptom of the lone wolf form itself.
Political ambivalence or contradiction in the series is symptomatic
of what the Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson calls the
ideology of form. Jameson in his The Political Unconscious
views narrative as a "socially
symbolic act" or a way of endowing the mute substance of the
world with meaning. In Bourne the narrative constructs a central semiotic opposition between personal identity - namely, Bourne's own subjectivity - and the
social whole - represented by its guardians in the headquarters of
the CIA at Langley. Yet this binary can be unpacked. While Bourne the
subject represents personal identity and its quest for freedom/moral
responsibility, Bourne the agent has already sacrificed his personal
identity for the perceived good of a greater social whole. Meanwhile,
the representatives of that social whole feature in two forms - those
who are "handmaidens" of the social good and those who have
been corrupted by power. Each position in this square stands in a
relation of conflict with the others. Thus, Bourne does not simply
become one with the social whole by relinquishing his individuality.
In fact, he becomes a dehumanised agent of the forces of corruption.
However, the problem remains that if Bourne simply reasserts his
personal autonomy - his individual freedom - he is simultaneously
turning his back on the "greater good." It is at this point
that narrative form steps in with a solution.
At the
end of the series' most recent instalment Bourne stands revealed as
an unconventional patriot, with the suggestion that he will maintain
his new-found personal conscience whilst assisting the compromised
forces of the CIA in his own, independent way. The strictures of the
form impose a certain type of closure on the narrative, and it is one
that redeems both the individual and, by extension, the notion of a
greater social good. Jameson stresses how form enables the
construction of "imaginary solutions to real social
contradictions." If in everyday life we find that notions of
personal identity conflict with the good of the social whole, form
finds a way of reconciling them. At the beginning of the saga Bourne
is the victim of a mistaken reduction of individual self-sacrifice to
the social good: he has sacrificed himself, his ethical autonomy, to
the secretive "Blackbriar" project, which is in fact run by
corrupt CIA elites. He must now rescue himself by vanquishing the
elites' power over his identity and reclaiming his identity and
autonomy. But this leaves open the question of his own need to serve
the social good. The lone wolf narrative presupposes a certain kind
of solution: Bourne can escape his own alienation by casting himself
as a patriot-beyond-the-law. The most recent film ends with the
suggestion that he will serve the law virtuously but not be reduced
to the status of a law-abiding citizen.
This
throws up a series of problems with regards to place, gender, and
politics. If the real drama of Bourne focuses on the struggle between
the individual and the social whole, the collective dramas of place
are necessarily reduced to backdrops against which the real events
take place. The subjectivity of the lone wolf is necessarily male,
with "honest" brokers between Bourne and the law played by
women (Allen in the earlier films, Alicia Vikander in the latest).
The male hero cannot simply be reincorporated into the level playing
field of the law, in which all are equal and therefore identical
before the law's universal judgement. So Bourne remains above the
law, outside of the social whole, but with the power to act on it and
for its own good. The passivity of the social whole is here
metaphorically feminine, with the masculine role one of mastery and
action. The social good, meanwhile, is that perceived ethical
substance which underlies the rabid corruption of the law's human
representatives. Despite the corruption of those in charge, Bourne
shows no interest in exposing them to the wider public. He has no
time for whistle-blowers or hackers or internet freedom fighters. By
the end of the most recent instalment in the series Bourne resembles
a superhero-like figure: he is tasked with standing beyond the law, a
lone individual, intent on saving the law from itself by his own
special means. His enemies are those tempted by the eternal lure of
power and/or personal greed. Thus, the conclusion implies that
Bourne's earlier search for identity was just a prelude to his real
story as unambiguous defender of authentic American values against a
sea of corruption.
The
early movies in the franchise were enjoyable precisely because they
were the initial instalments in a series which was as yet unfinished.
If we were to know the entirely predictable conclusion in advance we
wouldn't like them. \bourne is not unique in the respect. Almost all
episodic fiction that starts off well ends badly. This continual
disappointment of episodic genre fiction - fantasy, sci-fi, detective
thrillers and so on - is not simply down to creative exhaustion. It
is a fundamental limitation of a form which, however exploratory or
ambiguous the initial premises, must result in certain kinds of
resolution. In short, we are disappointed by an inevitable happy
ending which is nevertheless demanded by the form. This raises a
question, which I will attempt to answer below, about why modern
audiences are almost always disappointed by conventional endings and
yet narrative fiction is for the time being unable to provide
alternatives.
Fredric
Jameson argues that individual texts resolve their inner systems of
binary oppositions by formulating a political allegory or
"ur-narrative." In the case of Bourne we have the allegory
of the struggle to preserve individuality and personal autonomy in a
morally compromised world. But the discovery of this political
allegory brings us to the limits of what Jameson describes as the
"first concentric circle" of criticism and to the borders
of a second. In the second field of criticism texts are reconstructed
not as containers of semiotic systems of meaning, but as carriers of
"ideologemes" - that is, elements of class-based ideology.
In the Bourne series the conflict between the individual and society
is not bridged by an alteration to society as such but rather by the
individual's elevation above that society. Bourne is the ideal
capitalist subject, a master of blind social forces, able to bend
them to his will in the name of a greater social good. Despite the
early ambiguities of the series, in which institutions in an advanced
capitalist society are open to question, the social good is in the
end reaffirmed as identical with the interests of US power. At this
level of analysis an alternative, anti-capitalist narrative is
obvious: Bourne could side with the anarcho-utopians and hackers
against the dominant institutions of US power in an ongoing battle
for his own soul and the liberation of others.
Why
would such an outcome not work at the level of narrative itself? Why
does the suggestion that Bourne's heroism be converted into an
anti-capitalist liberation project feel so inherently ridiculous? It
is at this point that Jameson's third and final circle of critical
analysis makes its appearance. At this final level of analysis, the
text is constructed as an expression of cultural struggles within an
overarching mode of production. This latter is a Marxist term used to
locate in a single concept all of the dominant and subaltern
categories through which social life is organised. The capitalist
mode of production, for example, is dominated by modes of
organisation of social labour, elaborate systems of social and
private property rights, the coercive reinforcement of political
power through the state, appropriate forms of political
representation, and specific forms of cultural production.
Nevertheless a mode of production is not hermetically sealed, but
contains traces and anticipations of past and future modes of
production within itself. The coexistence of rival sign systems
within a mode of production creates a dialectical struggle which
plays out in culture. Form is therefore the property of a given mode
of production. In Jameson's analysis form itself becomes a kind of
content - the ideological expression of the mode of production to
which it belongs.
Marxist
critics are famously obsessed with history, and Jameson believes that
it is ultimately to history that texts owe their authority. As a
Marxist critic Jameson believes certain texts are more adequate to
the demands of history than others. Some texts reinforce the status
quo while others challenge it. The literary critic Hayden White has
noted the parallels between Jameson and Jean-Paul Sartre in the way
that both see life as being "worked up into a story" via
its connection to the past and its projection into the future. For
Jameson "the human adventure" must be one continuous tale
"sharing a fundamental theme." The Marxist critic restores
the buried continuity of a "single master narrative" to the
surface of the text. Where there is a weakening of narrativizing
capacity in the cultural production a particular social group, we
find evidence of social crisis. Bourne is interesting not because the
narrative form itself is in crisis, but because its resolutions
cannot help but feel inherently false. The fact that the conclusion
of the latest instalment in the series feels so inadequate says less
about the series itself than an underlying crisis of narrative
representation. As is often remarked, Jason Bourne is not James Bond.
In fact Bond is never really confronted with any of Bourne's ethical
and moral dilemmas.
This comparison of the Bourne and Bond series
provokes a question. Would it be possible to endlessly re-stage the
first Bourne film in the same way that each episode in the Bond
series is essentially a re-staging of all the others? Of course,
Bourne's permanent entrapment in a world where his own identity was
forever undisclosed, where his past and future were permanently
withheld, would land the audience in the world of the absurd.
Precisely because it is a form which constructs a connection with the
past, and projects identity into the future, Bourne must resolve its
story into a formal conclusion. The crisis consists in the fact that
the old resolutions are historically inadequate, while the
possibility of an alternative form is yet to be born. The real
ultimatum is this: should narrative fiction "come to terms"
with this lingering sense of dissatisfaction or seek to overturn it?
