We expected John Wayne; we got Jason Bourne instead.
The Bourne movies are the first major action franchise of the new millennium; they’re also the highest-grossing example of the revival of the paranoid style in American cinema. Matt Damon’s Bourne marries the efficiency of James Bond to the politics of Noam Chomsky. He’s imperial overreach and blowback personified—the carefully brainwashed product of a covert CIA program who goes off the reservation and starts taking down his superiors, a succession of jowly, corrupt agents of the American empire. The Bourne saga’s anti-government paranoia reached its peak in last year’s $227 million-grossing Bourne Ultimatum, which exposes the CIA as an all-powerful bureaucracy that can track anybody, anywhere, and is comfortable wiping out journalists, innocent bystanders, and even its own agents in the service of dubious war-on-terrorism aims. “Where does it end?” the lone free-thinking spook, Joan Allen, demands of her superior. “It ends when we’ve won,” he snaps, before ordering up another execution. Such “fear thy government” anxieties are always laced throughout American pop culture. But they belong most of all to the 1970s, when the one-two punch of Vietnam and Watergate sparked recurring visions of isolated Americans trapped in the gears of an irreducibly complex conspiracy: Gene Hackman’s surveillance expert in The Conversation (1974), tearing up his apartment in search of proof that his every move is being watched; Robert Redford’s CIA agent in Three Days of the Condor (1975), forced to go on the run from shadowy forces within his own government; Warren Beatty’s reporter in The Parallax View (1974), manipulated by a sinister corporation to become the “lone gunman” patsy in its latest bought-and-paid-for assassination.
Now they belong to us as well. HollywoodÂ’s highest-profile conspiracy theorist is, of course, Michael Moore. But the more telling figure is Stephen Gaghan, the screenwriter for Steven SoderberghÂ’s Oscar winner, Traffic (2000), who moved on to script and direct Syriana (2005), the first major Middle East movie released after the invasion of Iraq. Traffic and Syriana are superficially similar, offering kaleidoscopic visions of American policy that rove across borders and multiple points of view. But whereas the former takes care to present the architects of our failed drug policy as decent (if misguided) people struggling with the moral compromises required in a fallen world, Syriana eschews nuance entirely, tracing all the ills of Mesopotamia to a malign nexus of Texas oilmen, neocons, and a trigger-happy CIA, and culminating with the agency ordering a missile strike on an inconveniently liberal Arab leader to preserve an American oil companyÂ’s bargaining position.