For a decade and a half, I have been obsessed with Jason Bourne. I think of him often.
Perhaps you have noticed this. The second newsletter of these things, on Quantum of Solace (read that here, if you want to journey back to a time where concision mattered to me), spent ample time discussing it. More recently, covering Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, the arrival of Jeremy Renner naturally entailed mentioning the other franchise he was anointed heir apparent to in the early 2010s.
The reason for this is quite simple, which is that certain pieces of art will naturally imprint themselves on your spongy subconscious when you are a child, and remain with you for the foreseeable future whether you like it or not. For me, one of those pieces of art - and I mean art, god fucking damn it - was The Bourne Ultimatum. Reader, I saw the light in a drab British multiplex aged eight. I saw the guardian of my film-obsessed future, and he looked a lot like Matt Damon. From there, the future was set.
We have to talk about Jason Bourne. We just have to.
As previously mentioned, this is the last series of Nostalgia Detective. We’ll have time for the weepy goodbyes later, in which all of the weeping will come from me, but it feels prudent to establish that upfront. It’s scene setting. This is the Bourne series because it’s the last series. Shit’s important.
I am nothing if not a fan of the principle of narrative circularity. If the principle of narrative circularity has no fans, then I am dead. I truly hate how sentimental I am in this way. It’s embarrassing. But I am who I am, for better or for worse.
Anyhow, this newsletter began nearly two years ago by covering the Daniel Craig Bond movies, a sequence of great personal significance to me. In between, we have stretched the title “Nostalgia Detective” to its absolute breaking point by covering both highly recent movies and franchises which I had little personal connection to as a kid (sorry, Fast & Furious). But the principle of narrative circularity is calling, and it demands we go back to the source.
We have to close the loop. We have to cover another personally significant action series that transfixed me as a little boy in the mid-2000s. It’s the only way to exorcise the spirit of Nostalgia Detective.
There’s another reason why I wanted to cover Bourne. It’s also about the principle of narrative circularity, but in a different way. Across the last eight months (shit, it’s bene that long), we’ve covered two enormous action franchises that began at the turn of the century and, even as they’ve continued, still feel grounded in that era.
Between them, Fast & Furious and Mission: Impossible cast a big old shadow over post-2000 action filmmaking. As does Bourne. This duology must become a trilogy. His story must also be told.
(Yes, I’m copying the vibe of Ryan Gosling talking about playing Ken in interviews. Forgive me. The great comedians of our time, like Ryan Gosling, invent. The rest of us must scavenge their creations for parts.)
Like Fast and Mission, Bourne’s history is a funny thing. It starts out as a clean and legible thing, then becomes something else, and then becomes something else to that something else. Like Fast and Mission, that odd and illinear history is a product of tempestuous productions, and the timeworn clash between creative and commercial interests. Like Fast, the main guy isn’t there for one movie. Like Mission, Jeremy Renner shows up.
But while Bourne completes our matching set, he’s got his own stripes. Two things separate these movies from Fast & Mission, and they’re both fun to consider.
For one, while there is certainly a front man to this franchise, Matt Damon is not Vin Diesel or Tom Cruise. The man has his flaws, such as the now-fascinating historical document that is his Crypto.com Super Bowl ad, but few would describe him as an eccentric or controversial figure. He’s barely a creative force at all behind, at the very least, the original trilogy. He’s a movie star, but he’s also a workhorse actor whose career never entered the odd franchise-only cul-de-sac that Cruise and Diesel now occupy.
Secondly - and this actually distinguishes Bourne from every franchise we’ve covered to date - the franchise is over. Well, not definitively, because nothing ever ends in Hollywood and the nostalgia cycle spins ever faster, but it’s as over as a franchise can be these days. Since the release of Jason Bourne in 2016, almost seven years ago now, there’s been barely a peep of a follow-up. It really might be done for good.
(This is with the exception of Treadstone, a same-universe TV spinoff with no existing franchise characters that aired one season on the USA Network before being cancelled in 2019. We can put this in the same bin as the forthcoming John Wick miniseries, which is to say, we can forget its existence.)
It didn’t really end on purpose, mind. It just ended. Not in a flop, not in a hailstorm of criticism. Everyone just sort of moved on.
I feel like that’s fun to consider.
I do have a third reason for covering Bourne. This guy.
That’s a little joke that’ll be funny for some of you in a moment.
No, I’m kidding. This guy.
Richard Melville Hall, aka Moby, is best known these days for being weird about veganism and being very weird Natalie Portman. Back in the day, though, he was better known as a musician. His music permeated popular culture throughout the 90s and into the 2000s, used in everything from Heat to Scream to The Sopranos.
Also, The Bourne Identity.
Amidst the Moby gold rush of the early 2000s, where every music supervisor under the sun was throwing one of his songs into their films and shows, The Bourne Identity made the fateful choice to use his song “Extreme Ways” in the closing credits. It was reused in the sequel, and then remixed for the three entries thereafter, becoming indelibly associated with Treadstone’s finest.
For as many years as I have been obsessed with Jason Bourne, I have been obsessd with “Extreme Ways”. I listen to it all the time. I have a playlist that’s just the four versions of the song. I have opinions on each of them. I can rank them for you, if you like.
(Bourne’s Ultimatum (peak) > Original (classic) > Bourne’s Legacy (fine) > Jason Bourne (overdone and overcooked))
I need to talk to you guys about Moby, if that’s okay. I need to get a lot of stuff off of my chest.
Those are my priorities here for this final series: memories, Matt Damon and Moby. These are the three strands we will explore across the next five newsletters.
This is an editor’s note from after I finished this piece. I forgot about the timely and informative evocation of the all-encompassing post-9/11 surveillance state and the ways in which we covered our world in digital eyes fuelled by the comforting illusion that all danger is visible if you look hard enough. That will be our fourth strand. My bad.
Perhaps we’ll learn something about ourselves along the way. Then, at the end, we will lay this newsletter to its sweet slumber. I - and most importantly, you - will be free.
Nostalgia Detective will die, but us? We’ll live.
Quick warning - I’m doing a thing here.
We will not be starting this series with the first Bourne movie, as you might expect. No. We will not. Instead, this series will begin with the third movie, The Bourne Ultimatum, before jumping back to cover the first two, followed by jumping ahead to the fourth and fifth.
That’s three, one, two, four, five. Machete Order, if you like.
Why am I doing this? You’ll see. I have my reasons. I definitely didn’t explain why at the top of this post.
I’ll see you on Sunday for The Bourne Ultimatum.
Extreme ways? They’re so back.