Impossible Nostalgia, or

What was it that was written above the gates of Hell? “Surrender hope, all ye who enter here,” or some variation thereof?  

Anyway, I just thought I’d toss a warning your way—your eyeballs will bleed, and it’ll be a while before we get to Ethan Hunt and his Merry Band of ‘Mericans. Really, though, it’s okay: even Dante was a hero. 

Ernest Becker’s Big Red Button

Amidst a string of nightmare-inducing books, Ernest Becker wrote his Pulitzer-winning The Denial of Death in 1972. The book’s basic thesis was that because man’s innate knowledge of his own mortality was of such impact, it was necessarily repressed, and he created a subsequent hero-centered belief system that allowed him immortality. Big thought. Basically, because we were afraid of the mystery of the afterlife, we decided to take comfort in the thought that our individual actions and beliefs are heroic, that they give us immortality. Becker quotes William James in the beginning of a book that will span from Freud to Kierkegaard to Otto Rank:  

“Mankind’s common instinct for reality has always held the world to be a essentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life’s supreme mystery is hidden …No matter what a man’s frailties otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he suffer it heroically …the fact consecrates him forever.”  

A cinematic example might be the following exchange from Troy: the messenger boy at the beginning of the film tells Achilles, “The Thesselonian man you’re fighting…he’s the biggest man I’ve ever seen. I wouldn’t want to be fighting him.” Achilles answers, “That’s why no one will remember your name”. Our chests burn with excitement.   

Becker extends his analysis to the cold actuality of the world: what is to come, then, of failed heroes? What is the result of energy expelled as the grief and anguish at losing your chance at everlasting life, or at those who threaten it? He believes that, ultimately, we struggle against each other for our stake at immortality, always defending our cultural or personal heroic vision, no matter the cost to the quality of our lives—imagine the peace Troy could have had if Achilles had allowed himself to be forgotten. Imagine the peace Achilles could have had. 

Achilles is the classical hero. In near-modern times, we have Ethan Hunt. And in the modern grid of the world through which we now move, Jason Bourne has assumed the mantle.   

The World’s Hinge 

One should view Becker’s thesis with its publishing date in mind. While the fundamental idea remains sound, the hero system I just described still feels dated. Something has shifted in the forty years since his ideas were put in print.   

The 20^th century was the American century, but in the 21^st, we’ve barely wasted a decade before questioning whether that can continue. The question started with the birth of a new form of communication, and then a proclamation—“All friends, good friends, a secret should be told: we’ve got a computer now and more electricity than we know what to do with.” 

Pause. 

Cellars were dug! Water was stored! Back-up generators installed, then forgotten; Y2K was yet another American hysteria (like Trolls or Beanie Babies), one that spread through the masses with the simple power of a basic idea that Christopher Nolan’s Inception would help explain: there was fear, even the smallest pinprick of fear, at the possibility of our own technology failing us, of John Connor’s war with the Machines starting off far too early. A small idea that was enough to make even the most sane citizen begin to wonder if something really could happen; if, perhaps, we had bitten off more than we could chew. 

(I acknowledge that most mock-historians would still bow to the demand to recognize 2001 as the beginning of the New World. But I still like to remember the tragedy and calumny of the Y2K-that-never-happened as the true tell of the change to come: we partied like it was 1999, because, well, it was, and because we weren’t sure if the computers would revolt, crash, die and take the world with them, all because of our own short-sightedness in programming the silly boxes. Ha! Ha ha! Silly us! We’re such kidders—as if our short-sightedness should limit what was to come.) 

It didn’t matter. The question was fleeting in America’s memory as the iPod revolutionized music, as Google discarded libraries and card catalogues, as cell phones soon became more powerful than government computers just years prior. Red Dawn was rewritten as the newest Die Hard without the Russians and software became the new prisoner exchange. The musical voice of the artist gave way to auto-tune: a digital voice for a digital age. 

The new world is changing: uncertain of what it will become, but certain of what it no longer can be. We with books are the vanguard of a world that is slowly forgetting its own sense of smell—but when was the last time your lust for data was concerned with scent? 

The Magical Realism of Ethan Hunt

Remember: heroism is not a virtue—it’s a perspective.  And perspectives are historical.   

Ethan Hunt is a hero of the world before the hinge of the 21^st century. But, now, in the 21^st century, heroes are suspect unless they are satirical.  

Thankfully, Mission Impossible IV is. The best scene of the entire Mission Impossible franchise is Ethan’s life-long dream: the man risks, then saves his own life for a quiet moment of conquest, then is immediately asked to save the world by being meticulously tracked down to ensure he receives his personalized invitation. Ethan stands among the giants in Monument Valley, which have stood, in his estimation, forever. 

What makes Mission Impossible IV work is the silliness it exudes in searching for a sense of pathos. The agents are “cut off and disavowed” (not just in failure this time), and given a severance package of a train car easily worth a billion in technology and resources: a child’s toy-box of technology. They’re forgotten and given free reign to travel and save the world, should they so choose. But most of all, they’re given a chance to be heroes in the century of American dominance: heroes through vengeance and sex appeal, through forgiveness and redemption (a leap of faith into the cooling fan), through the proving grounds of “the field”—for all, the heroic defense of the causa sui of the country that defends the world and that will forever endeavor to save it.  America has admitted its wrongs, unfortunately cut the funding, and yet expects its citizens to do what they do best and simply be great. Bring glory to the flag and we shall reap glory upon you. 

It’s assured that the team will win back their honor and return America’s ability to wage ultra-top secret wars legitimately again.  he finale is the amazement in the actors’ eyes at “what all these people will never know.” It’s all fun and it finishes in the soft-focus camaraderie of beers and congratulations amidst the calm harbor waters that these heroes purposely deny. Hunt eventually watches the love of his life from afar—he, the hero, unable to come closer without endangering her life, still trying to save the only world that he understands. There’s a certain tragedy in the fact that he is only chasing a ghost, but we shouldn’t be surprised—we were, after all, told that from the very start. 

Becker’s idea of a hero exists in this world: one where self-knowledge and data are terrifically limited compared with the possibilities that we all now feel pricking at the back our necks. Technology here seems limited to what once could be found at Sharper Image, not necessarily in scope or ability, but in feel—gloves are the infamous device that fail in Mission Impossible IV, yet, in that universe the sensation of raw touch will always overcome failures of gadgetry—Cruise triumphs over shoddy circuits; he flies around the Burj Khalifa itself. When we shift perspectives, though, and once again consider the idea of a hero—now set in the modern day with its unscrupulous use of tracking technology, of data collection, conversations monitored for single, suspect words and thoughts—it seems impossible not to think of Jason Bourne.   

Jason Bourne and the Hazy Shade of the New World 

Where Ethan Hunt veers wildly all over the screen, making decisions at a frantic, wide-eyed pace, all decisions in the Bourne trilogy are made in a closeted room miles, if not oceans, away. By the time we reach The Bourne Ultimatum, ten years after the original, “assets” are so controlled the when Desh proceeds off-route even a block from the optimal route, a computer operator looks up in fear at her boss. The personalities of the original assets in The Bourne Identity have no place here: the fear this new world has instilled in all of us allows no room for mistakes, only more control and more power to save, collectively, “the world”—to silently cement our immortality with a desperation repeatedly summed up by the trilogy’s mantra—“Look at what they make you give.” These words are given the palpable weight of a human life, many times over, and expose the hollowness of the old hero-focused perspective in the new world.  

While the analysis of the flawed state of any hero seems sound, even Becker hesitates in the final chapters of The Denial of Death to provide an alternative that hasn’t already failed. How can he assign a new definition to the way man ought to live without stumbling in the exact same manner every other hero-system has? He acknowledges the difficult gap between living for the grounded material world and living for the imaginary, or illusory, world above—even these are just genres for heroes.  Every great thinker has stumbled and failed when it came to the inevitable architecture of building Utopia.   

The conclusion centers, then, on the impossibility of a heroic life for mankind in light of the dualistic pull upon one’s life: you either fly high in a G5 like Ethan Hunt in the old world, an angel defending a heroic system in a bespoke suit, or you disappear like Jason Bourne in to the train systems and autobahns of Europe, a master of the cacophony of noise and shuffling in the new world around you. 

Both of these men are partially realized (as we all are); even the power of self-knowledge, of voluntarily buying into the hero-system, isn’t enough to fully rescue them. Bourne recognizes the falseness of his choice to give himself up to the system. As he stares into space, remembering the damage his own hands have done to others’ lives, he seeks only to understand, and then destroy, the system that had taken so much from him.  The strangeness of Bourne’s heroism lies in his ability to master the material world, but not to be its champion. Bourne doesn’t seek to create a new idealistic system in which to defeat his own mortality, nor does he believe it exists in our mess of a world. He wants nothing to do with immortality. 

In a different work, Becker wrote, “The great tragedy of our lives is that the major question of our existence is never put by us—it is put by personal and social impulsions for us.” When Bourne disappears, we hope he’s making his way ahead of us, into a future that contains something closer to a ‘whole man’, something that eventually fits this new world of ours.  

Rebirth through water, twice over, for Jason Bourne.  For David Webb.  For whomever he now chooses to be. That is the Bourne trilogy: the sum of a swinging pendulum, finally making sense and bringing forth a new kind of hero that seeks only the satisfaction of a full life, one with no thoughts give to what lies beyond.  And that is what Mission Impossible can never be.

Edward Montgomery is a writer. He can be found here.