Alan -
The grand contradiction of watching the third Jason Bourne film for me was being presented with a three minute commercial for the US Coast Guard before the actual previews started. I'm sure military recruiters salivate over the possiblities of broadcasting their messages on the big screen. Indeed, the footage felt very much like a CGI-infused action film. The irony of watching _The Bourne Ultimatum_ after this commerial was profound. The film--regardless of how one could critique it on ideological grounds--has the merit of being a piece of anti-military recruitment propaganda. The way the final installment of this trilogy retroactively changes the meaning of the first two films struck me as uncharacteristic of typical Hollywood film serials where sequels typically 'respond' to their predecessors without altering our readings of them (either they fulfill some teleological plot, riff on the established themes, add new special effects, i.e. _The Matrix_). As Bourne recovers his memory, he realizes (and we realize) that the reasons he enlisted in the military and volunteered for the "Blackbriar" special-ops program did not match the agenda of the people in charge of these Repressive State Apparatuses, as Althusser would call them. In fact, the disjunction between Bourne's motivations and the CIA's ia so traumatic it produces his amnesia in the first place, a fact we don't know until the third film reinterprets his inability to remember in this way. To be bluntly presentist, "Don't join the US army with the idea that you're protecting the US. Who you're really protecting is 'Daddy Warbucks.'" Whether eighteen year-old Americans who packed the theaters will interpret the film this way or not is another question.
Considering the Bourne films through theories of surveillance is also interesting, but the political/historical context should be taken into account. In many respects--and this is something the filmmakers were afraid of--the films are anachronistic. They're based on novels from the end of the Cold War era (Does anyone know if these books themselves are anachronistic?). What scares the hell out of me is that history might prove them not so anachronistic after all. There are several indications that the Cold War is defrosting once again. Could these 'nostalgic' Cold War films be more accurate than we might first think? Even if the technological capabilites are unrealistic, isn't the representation of the political economic will for ubiquitous surveillance accurate or, at least, important to think about? Perhaps Bourne's amnesia can NOW be read as representive of our collective amnesia of the political economic backdrop of the Cold War.
Jameson's theories operate with/in the trilogy if we read it as representing the political economic will of US foreign policy. Although I don't have the time to develop the argument, I would claim that a productive way to read the trilogy is to see it as an attempt to cognitively map a totality, mainly the agenda of US foreign policy. The fact that Bourne is a "weapon" that "malfunctions" provides a nice metaphor--although imperfect--for groups like the Taliban.
Kirk Boyle
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