Bourne Again: Choice, Original Sin, Redemption, and How To Grow A Soul

The Lord Magnifies My Soul: Man Searches For Self By Trying Not To Shoot Shit UpDavid Webb chose to become Jason Bourne, according to Dr. Albert Hirsch, the man who catalyzed that choice.  Under Hirsch's avuncular guidance, Bourne becomes a killing machine so finely honed, so cool under pressure but so edgy that he once detected a Girl Scout packing a party-squib and broke her arm with a golf-ball at thirty paces before she could set it off.Domestic Dispute: Never Bring a VHS To A Knife-Fight. Bourne and A Former Colleague Fight in Somebody's House. SPOILER: Bourne Wins This One in Perhaps The Only Cinematic Fight Involving A Video Cassette

I watched all three Bourne movies on my computer while tending my mom in the hospital when I couldn't sleep, and spent some time reflecting on what makes Bourne tick.

I know the movies are eye-candy trash, but I have a weakness for trash and wondering why it "works" for so many people.

Bourne's often misunderstood in the reviews as a guy who's "lost part of his soul."  But I think rather that he's discovering how difficult it is to have one in the first place.

He's the guy who chose to fall, and did, as Hirsch tells us.  But he's also a complicated man, having mastered a system of violence; but in forgetting who he is, he gets to reclaim his right to be who he thinks he should be.Bourne Bulging All Over And Looking Appropriately Angsty, As Befits A White Guy In Tangier With An Unconcealed Firearm

Bourne is a servant of The World, played by a lot of ambiguous characters in suits,  and its convoluted, twisted governmental systems of violence, power, and the abdication from the right to think for yourself.  Facing down the gun barrel of a fellow assassin's Glock, he asks, "Do you even know why you're supposed to kill me? Look at us. Look at what they make you give."  (He asks this after killing or maiming an extraordinary number of people, but never mind that.)  You don't object: it should be enough for you to be told that killing a man is the right thing to do, and move forward.  Bourne comes to think differently.  But it's an easy choice to make, putting your trust in those who are supposed to know what is right to do.

Super-spies with troubled consciences aren't new, of course: the greatest of them all, Ian Fleming's James Bond, had to drink heavily and seduce women to keep his demons at bay, to make himself bearable to himself. 

The genius of novelist Robert Ludlum, who created Bourne, is to pose the problem of the self in terms of choice irrespective of the past.  James Bond cannot unmake himself, so he self-medicates.  Bourne by contrast decides on the heroic course of remaking himself.  He is Jason, the hero, who decides to pursue the Golden Fleece of being un-Bourne, and re-born.

All this depends on acknowledging that he makes himself a killer: cold-blooded, Bond-esque in his conscience, suppressing it, running from it, but continually making the choice to be Jason Bourne.  But then a failed mission results in his falling into water (baptismal imagery, anybody?) and coming up with amnesia, unclear on who he is or why, and the questions take on a new urgency.  Forgetfulness gives him the chance to become new.  That luxury of forgeting is one James Bond never got.

Julia Stiles Looking Equally Dazed and Confused. But Not As Likely To Tear Out Somebody's Spleen While Doing The Wild Thing. Bonus. What's Not To Love, Here.With his people-mashing skills, Bourne pursues a way to undo what he has made himself, but he cannot undo the training, the hair-trigger reflexes, the survivalist judgments, and his killer instincts.  He can only control them, choose to be the New Guy, the guy who doesn't do that.  In not knowing who Jason Bourne is, he gets to make up who Bourne is.

He even gets to abandon Bourne.

Matt Damon plays Bourne with what some reviewers have taken to be a dumb tough guy brooding.  But I think rather that Damon is aiming at, and hitting, a Bourne whose mind is so busy that he keeps his emotions barely under control.  And of course he shows us clearly, many times in the three movies, the moment where the emotions snap off, the battle-instincts take over, and we can see Bourne processing his next moves even as he beats the hell out of some guy who isn't precisely bad but who has chosen, like Bourne himself had done, to be what he is told.

Tools, beware.

Sin is social, an offense against others.  We are not born sinful or even guilty: the idea that we are is a misunderstanding of what "sin" means.  We choose it, or don't.  And if we do, we become Jason Bourne;  we become so adept at selfishness that we are like killers let loose. 

To change requires that we forget what we were, and embrace the breathtaking choice to be something else for a change.

That's how you grow a soul.

Update on Monday, May 10, 2010 at 12:15PM by Otter

Be sure to check out the Bourne Haiku Movie Review in this blog's pages....

Update on Friday, October 7, 2011 at 11:58AM by Otter

An addendum: The surname "Hirsch" is of ancient pre-Medieval origin and signifies a deer-hunter.  Our English word "hart" is cognate from the Germanic root for "deer."  Bloody, bloody associations that doubtless resonate in the collective unconscious as we watch Bourne and Hirsch doing their Hirschbourne thing.

Dr. Albert Finney-Hirsch bloodying up Bourne one more time, under the skin where it kinda hurts.

Comments

[Gallowglass]

Very insightful and interesting.