The Bourne Legacy
Aug. 11th, 2012 03:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petroniaEnjoyed this a lot more than I expected to. But then, I wasn’t a huge fan of Matt Damon or the “chaotic close-up” Bourne action style, and the fridging really pissed me off. What I liked about those movies were the talky bits, the jargon, the cover-up — a sense, as with Iron Man, that this vision of the American political-military-industrial complex was grounded in an internally coherent universe. One has to believe the machine functions, because Jason Bourne doesn’t even start off as a saboteur; he’s a heart-cog jammed by a richocheting pebble. And parts of the machine continue to function, out of sheer inertia of complexity set in motion, even as the controls blow and the power shuts down… So it doesn’t bother me that there are franchise-record levels of talkiness, that the first 30 minutes are a Hawkeye Canadian shack fic Jeremy Renner hiking in snow, and that there is no ending. (As in, I was literally surprised when the movie ended, because we were clearly still in act 2.) Your mileage may vary considerably.
All of Jeremy Renner’s agent dudes are basically the same agent dude, which I’m fine with: when I watch a Bruce Willis action movie I also expect to get Bruce Willis. More to the point, Ed Norton’s tightly-wound organization men are all basically the same guy as well. (Crisis level in the room? Watch how far he’s rolled his shirtsleeves.) It’s particularly subtle casting, because what the two personas share is an embedded-ness, a beholden-ness to the system. Renner’s guy is a genius grunt, a super-competent grunt, but he’s always a grunt. It’s why Hollywood keeps having him inherit franchises rather than invent one around him; the mere fact that he’s there buttresses the believability of the system that put him there.
Regarding that system, I posit a sort of Evil Mirror-verse Aaron Sorkin effect — that there is something enjoyable about the Bourne-verse machine, because it may be morally bankrupt but by gum these people are intelligent and know how to get shit done. If only, one thinks, the non-imaginary branches of the government were as competent at what they do, as these guys are at brainwashing and assassination! I thought quite a lot about Obama’s Predator drone kill list while watching this, for obvious plot reasons, but also because I feel that way about said Predator drone kill list in real life. (Do you know, I’ve never seen anyone post about that on Tumblr?) I keep pondering something William Gibson noted, a while back — that immediately after 9/11 happened, he contacted some people who contacted some people, and was assured that the Army, CIA, etc. knew what they were doing: that this was asymmetrical warfare and they were going to respond in kind. Both theory and tools were in place, or could be. But the political directive ended up being quite different.
I have a streak of technological determinism in my makeup, and so my instinct on the thing is that we were always going to end up at the drone strike/cyber-warfare stage, Dubya just delayed the inevitable by a couple of terms. But also, that all US Presidents get their hands dirty (I would expect no less), and this is a flavour of dirt that’s tailored to Obama’s personality.
All of Jeremy Renner’s agent dudes are basically the same agent dude, which I’m fine with: when I watch a Bruce Willis action movie I also expect to get Bruce Willis. More to the point, Ed Norton’s tightly-wound organization men are all basically the same guy as well. (Crisis level in the room? Watch how far he’s rolled his shirtsleeves.) It’s particularly subtle casting, because what the two personas share is an embedded-ness, a beholden-ness to the system. Renner’s guy is a genius grunt, a super-competent grunt, but he’s always a grunt. It’s why Hollywood keeps having him inherit franchises rather than invent one around him; the mere fact that he’s there buttresses the believability of the system that put him there.
Regarding that system, I posit a sort of Evil Mirror-verse Aaron Sorkin effect — that there is something enjoyable about the Bourne-verse machine, because it may be morally bankrupt but by gum these people are intelligent and know how to get shit done. If only, one thinks, the non-imaginary branches of the government were as competent at what they do, as these guys are at brainwashing and assassination! I thought quite a lot about Obama’s Predator drone kill list while watching this, for obvious plot reasons, but also because I feel that way about said Predator drone kill list in real life. (Do you know, I’ve never seen anyone post about that on Tumblr?) I keep pondering something William Gibson noted, a while back — that immediately after 9/11 happened, he contacted some people who contacted some people, and was assured that the Army, CIA, etc. knew what they were doing: that this was asymmetrical warfare and they were going to respond in kind. Both theory and tools were in place, or could be. But the political directive ended up being quite different.
I have a streak of technological determinism in my makeup, and so my instinct on the thing is that we were always going to end up at the drone strike/cyber-warfare stage, Dubya just delayed the inevitable by a couple of terms. But also, that all US Presidents get their hands dirty (I would expect no less), and this is a flavour of dirt that’s tailored to Obama’s personality.
