Sep 09 2007
The Death of Intimacy
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“The Bourne Ultimatum is the latest iteration of a nightmare haunting the Western mind. Jason Bourne struggles to wake up from a trance that has made him into a thing rather than a person. This theme, which is echoed in everything from the X Men films to the Matrix series and their extensive progeny, speaks directly to the reification phenomenon we’ve been discussing in this dialogue. A variant of the Frankenstein myth from the Romantic era, I suspect this particular strain first developed in the cold war thrillers such as North by Northwest and The Manchurian Candidate when Ludlum first wrote his Bourne novels.”
by Guy Zimmerman
9/9/07
I flew into L.A. on Tuesday after being gone for three weeks. To escape the heat I went to see The Bourne Ultimatum at the Cinerama Dome. Later that night, at home, I watched Bergman’s The Silence. Viewed back to back, the two films made clear to me how radically the culture of the West has shifted during the course of my lifetime. While I was away I’d read J.M. Coetzee’s collection of essays Inner Workings. The book is full of compelling insights about the literary figures of the early part of the 20th century, many of whom were destroyed by the cataclysms in Europe that brought the (relatively) stable 19th century bourgeois paradise to a close. Stepping out of the terminal at LAX and feeling the tight air and seeing the tight worried expressions on the face of the American middle class, it seemed clear to me that, as we’ve mentioned many times, we are at the cusp of a similar world-ending conflagration. Watching The Bourne Ultimatum the image came to me of a culture strapped into the passenger seat of a car that has already left the road. The eyes are screwed tightly shut. No light can enter.
