The Bourne Identities
(* This post includes spoilers for every piece of Bourne-related fiction except the video game. There’s only so much I can put myself through.)
In the 1970s and 1980s, Robert Ludlum came up with Jason Bourne and made one of the most convincing and long-lasting American entries to the spy genre. The other, more famous spy with whom he shares his initials’ home had – and, some might say, still has… I certainly would ! – by far the better hand in terms of both books and films pertaining to espionage. This didn’t stop American authors, in this wonderfully appropriate Cold War period, from giving it a go, and some of it stuck (Napoleon Solo from The Man from U.N.C.L.E. has managed to survive in pop-culture, although few know he and the series’ concept were created by none other than Ian Flemming !) but with Bond, Smiley and Palmer on the other side of the ocean, they were taking a bit of a beating. It would be a while until Ethan Hunt and Jack Bauer came along to carry the torch passed onto them by the likes of Jack Ryan and many humble airport novel spies that entertained countless on long layovers and sunny holidays.
There are as of today 22 Bourne novels, including one coming out this year, and old JB has outlived two of his authors, but the very first came out in 1980 and curiously contains absolutely no Cold War elements. It isn’t until 1990’s Bourne Ultimatum that our protagonist crosses paths with the USSR at all. The first Bourne book was Ludlum’s twelfth novel, and he had used the Cold War and communism as plot points previously, but it’s interesting to find it quite absent from this story, which centres instead around the war crimes and shady actions of the American government and secret services during and after the Vietnam war. Not to say that Ludlum didn’t also include elements of current affairs : his villain is real life criminal Carlos the Jackal, who was making a lot of noise at the time with various terrorist attacks across Europe. What would be better than an American hero to bring him fictionally to justice ? By 1986 Carlos had become too quiet and the second Bourne book, The Bourne Supremacy, does not include him at all except in passing, but he returned in the third with a bit of a vengeance and gave JB a lot of trouble before being fictionally drowned in an underground tunnel in Novgorod.
It all makes for quite a politically charged story, even ignoring the second book which – curiously just like The Honourable Schoolboy, second book of Le Carré’s Karla trilogy – takes place largely in East Asia, in this case Hong Kong and Macau, where Bourne-boy has to stop a brewing war to clear his good name and runs into a lot of rather racistly described characters along the way (80s book set in Asia, you can imagine how nasty some of it is). Government involvement, unsanctioned death squads, holding their own citizens hostage, staged terrorist attacks, bankrolling actual terrorists… one might wonder what a modern adaptation would make of all of this.
The answer is, of course, absolutely nothing. The Bourne trilogy of the early 2000s is what gave our spy a second wind and launched him back into popular culture to rather astounding acclaim. When Paul Greengrass took over directing for the second and third, audiences and critics went nuts for his gritty, shades-of-grey, action-packed and shaky to the point of motion sickness style, and his Bourne Ultimatum won three Oscars (Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, and Film Editing, for which it beat PTA’s There Will Be Blood. Lol.) These films tripled their budgets at the box office with ease and even led to visual and tonal changes in the James Bond franchise itself. Talk about the tables turning. But make no mistake, the only thing these films have in common with the books they are inspired by is their names.
Doug Liman, who directed the first film, was a big fan of the books as a teen, and met and consulted with Ludlum regularly as he was building the concept for a film adaptation. Thus his original draft was apparently much closer to the author’s original vision. He had the misfortune of showing this draft to Tony Gilroy (who we have to thank for the worthless piece of shit 2016 film The Great Wall, also featuring Matt Damon), who read it and called it, very eloquently, an “absolute piece of shit.” Gilroy, fresh off of much more artistically advanced projects such as Michael Bay’s Armageddon, had a better suggestion : “keep the central premise […] and throw pretty much everything else away.”
Tony Gilroy did not like the Ludlum material and, rather than take on a different project, decided to gut this one to turn it into something else. To be fair to him, they did make a lot of money.
There is some sense in Gilroy’s decision to pursue the project : the story, no matter the execution, is an exciting one. An amnesiac man trying to regain a sense of identity but finding every clue points towards him being a lethal weapon is a compelling character, and a perfect one for a spy thriller, a genre in which everyone is constantly lying, including to themselves. When I watched The Bourne Identity (2002), I was left with the feeling that there was something of interest here, but that there should have been more. The sequels could have provided answers, some fleshing out of its characters, some advancement, to fill that void, but instead doubled down on the complete lack of characterisation of their Bourne. He becomes a non-character, a vehicle for fast-paced action scenes and stoic male suffering. This is not the place for reviewing the actual films (my review for The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum are here), as my emphasis is on the treatment of the character himself, but the lack of substance the films committed to throughout the franchise led me to pick up the books, almost as a joke. Finally a book, I thought to myself, that can’t possibly be better than the film.
Instead I discovered another Jason Bourne entirely, a character who shared nothing with film Bourne except his name and his memory loss. Two radically different men, from their morals to their motivations, their techniques, their personalities (or lack thereof). Two Bourne Identities, if you’ll pardon the lazy tagline, that we will now delve into below.
Reading Ludlum is frustrating because he isn’t necessarily a very good writer, or, at the very least, a writer who needed a better, less indulgent editor. His dialogue is clunky, his sentences repetitive, some of his lines painfully cheesy, but you’re not going to put the book down no matter how many times you roll your eyes, because what he lacks in writing style he makes up for tenfold in ideas. His stories suck you in, they’re clever, constructed carefully. His characters feel alive. The opposite can be said of the Jason Bourne films : they are technically and stylistically impressive, and, at the time, new, but they feel absolutely dead. They have no heart and neither does their Bourne.
Jason Bourne is pretty much the only consistent character in the films. Due to the plot points exploited (the exact same ones in all three, might I add), he has no opportunities to forge any relationships, rely on anyone, indeed interact with anyone except via sniper visor or threatening phone call. In the first film he has Marie, but how transformed she is ! The intelligent Canadian delegate, brilliant economist, sharp and resourceful woman he meets in the books has been replaced by a do-nothing, bumbling character, who was criticised so harshly for doing nothing but slow him down that the first thing they did in the second film was to kill her off. Thus, the only heartfelt relationship Bourne is given is severed. More time for motorcycle chases and crashing through windows that way. He is lethal, efficient, impressive, but he’s no one, and seems to have no motivations, to the point where the films are forced to keep throwing CIA assassins his way to give him something to defend himself against. He might as well be a robot.
In the third film, we get the biggest hint as to who he used to be before the Treadstone brainwashing, and it’s possibly the most revealing information we get about what sort of person he is : it’s revealed that he’s ex-army, and voluntarily applied to the Treadstone program, a sort of CIA-affiliated super-assassin factory, so he could put his skills to use, and, essentially, kill people for more money. A bit of an odd type of hero, that. The message, supposedly, is that anyone can be redeemed and that he spends the films trying to walk away from that life to become a better person, but since he also spends those films doing exactly what he’d been doing before, but against his own handlers, it’s hard to believe something inside him has shifted. Not only is he cold, he’s also morally repulsive, not to mention utterly boring.
Interestingly, if we turn to the books, this is exactly the sort of person that Bourne finds himself believing he is. Every clue, every interaction, points in that direction : he speaks too many languages, is too handy with weapons, appears to have been at the scene of too many assassinations for it all to be a coincidence. People hear his name and shiver, doors are closed to him. He is convinced that he is a killer for hire, one of the most notorious at that, and it takes a great amount of convincing and investigation for him to accept otherwise. As it turns out, book Bourne was only undercover as an assassin, a cover so deep and so long – three years – that he has internalised it as part of himself, a sort of split personality which takes over when he awakens with amnesia and finds himself in danger. Previously a scholar living in Cambodia, he was recruited by the US army after the death of his wife and children for his language skills and local knowledge, and put in charge of a secret death squad consisting mostly of thugs and criminals. This operation, Medusa, is strictly secret, as its members are committing what amounts to war crimes as an undeclared battalion, and is soon shut down. Our man, still using his original name, David Webb, has nothing to live for and is recruited for an even more secret operation to draw out and take down international assassin and terrorist Carlos the Jackal. They gave him the name of a traitorous Medusa member whom Webb executed himself, Jason Bourne, prepped him, and sent him on his way : a mock assassin, claiming kills he didn’t commit, leaving a trail for Carlos to latch onto. It all paints a significantly more sympathetic portrait than the film does, doesn’t it ?
To delve further into the narrative interest of this situation versus assassin-gone-rogue, one must mention the rather fantastic part of the book where Carlos has all but one of Bourne’s handlers killed and plants his fingerprints all over the scene. An already terrible situation becomes a nightmare : Bourne does not remember that he’s undercover, and the only people capable of proving that he is one of them, be it to Bourne himself or to the government hunting him down, are dead. There are no documents, no paper trails, it’s all so far off the books that with them dead, he’s nothing more than a killer. It’s very reminiscent of Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, in which DiCaprio’s Billy Costigan finds himself in a similar situation indeed.
This situation of utter isolation contrasts how much book Bourne relies on those around him. Unlike his film counterpart, he has a circle of people he trusts and who help him rebuild his life : Marie, whom he marries and eventually has children with, is the central one, as she becomes his essential motivation to step back into the field when necessary. Alexander Conklin, who appears in a very rewritten and poorly casted capacity in both the 1988 and 2002 Bourne Identity, is also central, as his one surviving handler who mistakenly tried to have him killed and spent the rest of his life trying to make up for it by raising hell in his defence (Conklin’s name appears in Bourne’s silly scrapbook at the beginning of The Bourne Supremacy (2004), in which there’s an improbable mention of him being Russian : he is, if only ethnically, as is revealed in the third book). Mo Panov, his psychiatrist and friend, Philippe d’Anjou, his comrade from his Medusa days, and many others appear throughout the trilogy in his support. Indeed the safety of his loved ones is this Bourne’s utmost priority and his identity falls apart without them. Their presence allows him moments of vulnerability he is never afforded in the films, not to mention that they’re all complex characters who would enrich any story. Missed opportunities !
Also absent in the films, and of great interest, although not easy to adapt to the screen, is the frequent dialogue between David Webb and Jason Bourne. They are almost two different people, said to sound distinct, to hold themselves differently, and they have many exchanges in which they discuss their separate necessities : David and his skills as a linguist, an academic, a man with a heart, and Jason’s calculated coldness, absence of ties and distractions, instincts and training. Jason tries to keep David out of his head, and David has to chase Jason out of his when he returns to normalcy. Many times David almost doesn’t make it back out. It’s treated quite empathetically, if in a misguided, period-typical manner, as a form of dissociative identity disorder. It would have been a great way to add some meat to all the scenes film Bourne spends all on his own rolling a silencer onto a gun or driving places, and fleshed out his character a little more, but one thing film Bourne isn’t is vulnerable.
Speaking of vulnerability, which Bourne adaptation ends with him covered in blood, crying profusely in Marie’s arms ? It’s the as of yet unmentioned 1988 Warner Bros. Television miniseries, confusingly also called The Bourne Identity. With a runtime of three hours cut into two one-and-a-half hour segments, with Richard Chamberlain as Bourne, this one was written to follow the books much closely, and features a Bourne who is very close in characterisation to the one in the books. Some details of his backstory and employment were changed to fit into the format, and other characters got the short end of the stick here and there, but all in all it is pretty damn accurate. It’s even careful to do as much as possible to take you back to 1975, the year the original book is set in. In one scene, Bourne wears glasses identical to Alec Guinness’ Smiley in the 1979 adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Incidentally I wear the same model #certifiedfreak #realfan
That isn’t to say that this is the perfect adaptation, there are, as always, some curious elements : for instance, in an inexplicable effort to make any sequel impossible, they decided to end this with Bourne killing Carlos in the shootout that wraps up the first book (with less immediately deadly consequences). To put it in spy fiction-related terms, this is a bit like a Tinker Tailor adaptation in which Smiley captures Karla in the denouement.
Another bizarre move was to imply, through a scene that may have been a memory or simply a sort of trauma-induced transposition, that Carlos was the one who killed Bourne’s family in Cambodia. A cowardly move by all means, for a rather important part of the original story is that they got bombed by a fighter plane that could very well have been American during the secret bombing of Cambodia, a piece of information that the government and secret services are both very careful to keep from him. Bizarre to bring them up at all, when his character has been stripped of his Medusa/Vietnam involvement that was brought on by their loss to instead be working as a lone agent for Treadstone, with no government ties. The source material is a very thick brick of a novel and it is very probably far too packed to be fully adapted in a faithful manner, but as in many cases, it seems that the screenwriters were not so careful as to what they cut out.
Three Bourne Identities and an utter waste of a killer spy story. There’s no money in it now, not after the extremely middling reviews for the cash-grab fifth film they put out in 2016 (fifth counting another of Tony Gilroy’s atrocities, The Bourne Legacy). The franchise’s future is uncertain, and the rights have moved to another studio, but I would quite have liked to see what Edward Berger (of Conclave fame, and an early choice to direct the 2011 film version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy before Alfredson stepped in) would have done with the character in the aftermath of all the action. The dream would be a true to the original reboot, set in 1975, a true period piece, focusing on the espionage. Hell, I’ll write it ! Call me.