Villains Week: The Bourne Trilogy

2 years ago

Villains Week: The Bourne Trilogy

PUT THE ASSET ON STANDBY

by Sarah Malone

Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) wants to be a good man. Or at least an everyday one—to get back to who he was before being trained as an assassin. To undo what he can’t remember but knows he’s done. But the more he learns, the more culpable he finds himself. The more he resembles his pursuers in skills, actions, and past—in everything but his present intentions. So his quest to find out who he is changes from natural, basic, and necessary to a kind of expiation. To stop being a villain, he has to realize the extent to which he is one. When in The Bourne Identity, translating a newspaper for Marie (Franka Potente), he says, “I’m an assassin,” he sounds like he’s talking about someone else. On a very practical level, whether he can remember what he’s done doesn’t matter; he has the skills. And to his former handlers—the films’ ultimate villains—he is an “asset,” and once an asset, always an asset.

The handlers, puppet masters—CIA higher-ups and a Russian oligarch in Supremacy—are stock espionage villains: middle-aged white men, serious, urgent, corrupted by greed or self-importance. To the end, they see themselves as virtuous, or virtue as irrelevant, and the films offer them no mercy or redemption.

But the assets, the assassins sent to hunt Bourne down, who differ from him only in that they haven’t had crises of conscience and forgotten who they are, are put to very interesting uses dramatically and thematically. They give Bourne self-knowledge, and his eventual refusal to shoot the last of them, Paz, offers Paz his own chance at redemption. A villain can stop being a villain. You just need to realize that you are one, and decide to stop.

* * *

The assets are not the only ones in the films licensed to kill. They are not glamorous. In Identity, in the montage in which they’re “activated”—with now strangely dated-looking high-tech overlays—one is teaching music, one riding around Rome on a Vespa, one bored in what looks like a tedious EU meeting. The Roman asset appears to have stored his weaponry in a catacomb. In Ultimatum, Paz (Édgar Ramírez), the asset who refuses to shoot Bourne, may drive a BMW but when he’s activated he’s lying in an anonymous hotel room.

The assets are fragile, like some of sort of high-tech weapons that have to be kept out of the rain. “What they’ve been through,” says Nicky (Julia Stiles), their Paris contact, euphemistically referring to their behavioral training. It’s made them prone to “depression, anger, compulsive behaviors.” “Do you get the headaches?” asks the Professor (Clive Owen), the asset Bourne guns down with a shotgun in a field in France in Identity.

What the assets have gained in return is mastery of hand-to-hand combat and marksmanship; stamina, technical know-how and MacGyver-like improvisatory skills.

“They don’t make mistakes,” Nicky says.

They’re the films’ dark Jedi; as close as their shadowy mentors have gotten to making Terminators. So when the CIA handlers say, “call up the assets,” “put the asset on standby,” we know: fasten your seatbelts. Cue the propulsive music or deadly silence.

It’s a dramatic trick. Bourne is able to defeat every asset sent against him, except the appropriately named Paz. But his encounters with assets are encounters with himself; with what he was, doesn’t want to be, but needs to be in order to find out he really is.

In a neat flip of the before-I-kill-you-Mr. Bond trope, before Bourne kills them, the assets in Identity and Supremacy give him—and us—crucial background information. The first asset, bursting through the glass doors in Bourne’s Paris apartment, lets Bourne (and us) know that there will be no escape to normalcy. This is normalcy.

The second asset, the Professor is positively chatty.

“I work alone, like you,” the Professor says, then, mystified, “we always work alone.”

He seems gratified to catch up, share some shoptalk as he dies. Endearing, for an assassin. He wears glasses. “Treadstone, both of us,” he says. British accent, not upper class. Shaking his head, smiling ruefully. “I get such bad headaches. At night when you’re driving a car? Maybe it has something to do with the headlights.”

He seems surprised to feel life draining from him. “Look at this,” he says. “Look at what they make you give.” (In an early draft of the screenplay, the line was, “At least you’ve got a woman.”)

The Professor’s friendliness, and that of Jarda (Marton Csokas), the asset Bourne tracks down in Munich in Supremacy, underscore that Bourne is part of their world. They know more about him than he does. Nicky refers to Desh (Joey Ansah), the asset Bourne beats to death in Tangiers, by first name.

At the end of Ultimatum, and of the trilogy, Bourne, on the roof of the Manhattan training facility where he was brainwashed, first of the Treadstone assets, is only looking for a way out. He’s injured, exhausted, his guard down. Paz finds him and instead of shooting asks a question at gunpoint that maybe only an asset can appreciate.

“Why didn’t you take the shot?”

“Do you even know why you’re supposed to kill me?” Bourne asks.

No answer. Cue the mournful strains of the music to which the trilogy opened.

“Look at us,” Bourne says. “Look at what they make you give.”

Is he referring to their lives, as the Professor was, or to their capacity to make decisions?

Paz blinks, looks uncomfortably away. The camera follows. Other agents—not assets—are approaching. The asset must decide quickly: he doesn’t have much time in which his decision will matter. As Bourne moves to leap from the roof, Paz lowers his gun.

Their trainer, Dr. Albert Hirsch (Albert Finney), has told Bourne, “You can’t run from what you did,” echoing Ward Abbott (Brian Cox) in Supremacy. “You’re a killer, Jason, you always will be,” Ward says. Do he and Hirsch believe this? (Do they believe anything?) As Hirsch might say, it doesn’t matter. What matters is whether Jason and the assets believe it, that once you give in to the dark side, forever will it dominate your destiny. Almost all of the Bourne “good guys”—Jason, Pam, Nicky, and in the end, Paz—begin as villains. Even Marie, Jason’s girlfriend in Identity, was a hipster grifter before Jason. You can’t undo. But you can stop.

Sarah Malone writes fiction and teaches composition. She tumbls here.