I'm still in the Christmas zone where it's okay to sit on the sofa, watch films and eat junk food all day. Yesterday evening we sat down to watch one of our favourite films on the TV (even though we have the DVD and could watch it any time we wanted, and frequently do). I saw The Bourne Identity for the first time only a couple of years ago and it became an instant favourite. I like action films; I grew up with a brother who was better than I at wresting control of the remote. But I'm discerning - I won't just watch anything with guns and car chases. The Bourne trilogy combines a very strong plot, script and soundtrack with fascinating psychological elements. While the first film is probably a fail on the aforementioned Bechdel test, I'll forgive it that because Marie is a resourceful and less than stereotypical love interest, and the second and third films have Pamela Landy, my favourite example of a strong female character who is strongly feminine. I'll include a spoiler alert here because, even though the film is more than ten years old, it really is brilliant, so if you haven't seen it, don't read any further until you have!
Matt Damon's character is found floating unconscious in the Mediterranean by a fishing trawler. The crew rescue him, look after him and take him back to land. He has no memory of who he is, what he has been doing and why there are bullet wounds in his back. All he has is a Swiss bank account number found in a small electronic device which was embedded in his hip. He goes to the Swiss bank where he discovers thousands of euros in cash, a range of passports in different names (including 'Jason Bourne') all bearing his photograph, and a gun. He spends the rest of the film trying to work out who he is and why people keep trying to kill him.
Despite having no memory of his identity, Bourne quickly realises he has skills which are quite out of the ordinary. He can very quickly and efficiently disarm anyone who threatens him, and can use lethal force where necessary. He can instinctively identify danger and is able very quickly to respond calmly to get himself out of seemingly hopeless situations. He has an astonishing short term memory and knows that he can run flat out for half a mile without stopping. But he doesn't know why he can do all these things.
Eventually Bourne makes contact with the people who are hunting him, who turn out to be the CIA. He discovers that he is a CIA-trained assassin, part of an elite top secret programme designed to produce extremely tough and effective killers. This knowledge finally triggers part of his lost memory - the events immediately leading up to his falling into the sea. He remembers that he was sent to kill Wombosi, an exiled African dictator, on his private yacht. Bourne remembers getting onto the boat undetected, finding Wombosi in bed and unarmed and aiming his gun at him, only to realise that Wombosi's children are in the room with him, lying beside him in bed. Bourne flees, is shot at by Wombosi's bodyguards, and ends up in the sea. He loses his memory, and very nearly his life, because he will not kill a man in front of his children.
Bourne (not, he finally discovers, his real name) has had a strange psychological episode where the moral ambiguity of the work he has been trained to do catches up with him and causes his mind to crash and reboot. Although he has been trained to be utterly ruthless, it turns out that his conscience has not been trained out of him and it rebels against his training, causing him to fluff the job and to lose his memory. (Being shot probably didn't help his recall either). Bourne has been reborn. He learns who he is as if becoming acquainted with a stranger, and he doesn't like the person he discovers. So he chooses a different path.
In a poignant scene at the end of the second film he tracks down the daughter of a couple he had killed while making it look like a murder suicide. He offers no defence or apology to the daughter; he simply tells the young woman that her mother did not kill her father, but that he killed them, because that was his job. He has come to find her because "if it was me, I'd want to know". A radical repentance; a fascinating film.
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