the bourne supremacy, or we bought a fridge
jesus christ, that's a discussion we're not equipped to handle!
Hi reader. Just a quick note before we start. I’ve had what I’ll discretely call a somewhat stressful week due to some unfortunate personal circumstances. This has resulted in a newsletter that, even in my current state, registers as a lot more unhinged than the typical Nostalgia Detective baseline. Just forewarning all of you there.
Can we talk for a moment about how 2004 popped the hell off?
I don’t mean the entire year. Regrettable things happened in 2004, not least the first of England’s two painful quarter-final penalty shootout defeats in a major international tournament to Portugal (both are formative memories for me, naturally). I mean film-wise. What a feast of riches. What an absolute buffet.
Checking my Letterboxd list for 2004, where I have a measly 18 films, The Bourne Supremacy - a film I like enough to spend hours writing about it - is 11th. That seems low, until you see the seminal movies by Michel Gondry, Edgar Wright, Hayao Miyazaki, Michael Mann, Pedro Almodóvar, Wong kar-Wai and the only Harry Potter worth a damn above it. Also, you know, Spider-Man 2. Below it? Literally Anchorman, maybe the best comedy of the 2000s. When I say feast, I’m talking Mr. Creosote levels of gluttony. 2004 went wild.
What happened here? 2003 and 2005 weren’t like this. There was something incredible in the water in 2004 and 2004 alone. We must investigate this collectively.
Welcome to The Bourne Supremacy. It was a great year.
It is becoming an unfortunately consistent theme of this memory-focused series that I don’t have that many precise memories of watching these movies for the first time. (We’ll rectify that in the next two weeks, I swear.) I doubt it’ll shock you that I don’t have the clearest recollection of my first Bourne Supremacy time either.
Since we’re still wading through the hazy murk of childhood memory, though, I got thinking about how many movies with which I have this odd relationship - ones that I have definitely seen, but long enough ago that I can’t recall any specific details or, more importantly, what I even thought of them.
Quite a few, as it turns out. Particularly the case with Steven Spielberg movies, which feels unfortunate. Jaws, Jurassic Park, the original Indiana Jones trilogy - I have watched all of them, but I’d be fucked if I could tell you a single cohesive thought I had at the time about the movies.
It’s a little like Barcelona, in that regard. I’ve been to Barcelona, and I can remember one image from it. My philosophical question with absolutely no answer to you is - have I, in any meaningful sense, actually been to Barcelona? Did my spatial placement in the city of Barcelona aged three or four actually count as me going there, if I don’t retain any substantial memories of the experience?
I wonder if that sounds dumb, but I honestly don’t think it is. It’s different to go somewhere and to be there. If you’re on a business trip to Tokyo and you took a taxi from the airport to go to the hotel and then stayed in the hotel the entire time, that’s not really going to Tokyo.
There’s an obvious way to rectify this, which is to go to Tokyo or Barcelona again and establish a real relationship to the city that you’ll retain memories of. I did this with The Bourne Supremacy. But I haven’t done it with Jurassic Park, a movie which I have not watched in, I would guess, about 19 years.
I’ve logged Jurassic Park on Letterboxd. It felt dishonest to give it a star rating, but I’ve officially claimed to have watched it. I really don’t know if that’s ethically okay. Please tell me that’s ethically okay.
Doug Liman didn’t stick around for a second movie. That was in everyone’s interest.
For the Bourne franchise, the grass was greener on the other side. To be more specific, the Greengrass was greener. The green was grasser. Uh…
They hired Paul Greengrass to direct the sequel. Apologies for the malfunction there.
The producers picked up on this cool dude with his direction of Bloody Sunday, a 2002 British TV film that dramatised the 1972 shootings in Northern Ireland. Seeing his harrowing depiction of British colonial atrocities, the Bourne team knew that they had found their man.
Greengrass’ career outside of the three Bourne films he directed has actually been focused to an odd degree on that atrocity docu-drama genre. He also directed the 2006 film United 93, about the only hijacked plane on 9/11 to miss its intended target and the 2018 film July 22, about the Anders Breivik massacre in Norway, while Green Zone and “I am the captain now” Captain Phillips are more Hollywood-ised variations on the same thing.
I would like to lightly enquire if Paul Greengrass, having spent a career chronicling the worst things that humans can do to one another, is okay. Is he okay? Paul, are you okay? Let me know, Paul. Let me know if you’re okay.
Maybe Paul is okay. His latest film, 2020 Tom Hanks period piece News of the World, is much more sedate, and seems like the product of a calm creative mind. It’s boring as fuck, but that’s a small price to pay for Paul’s mental health.
What I am about to discuss next in this newsletter may bring back some terrible memories for some of you. I apologise. This is the way I have chosen to tell my story.
The CW show The 100, which ran for seven seasons between 2014 and 2020, is now mostly forgotten to the winds of time. For a brief period, however, during its second season and into its third, it was hot property for the Internet. This was largely due to the introduction of a relationship in season two between the show’s main character, Clarke, and post-apocalyptic goth warrior princess Lexa (pictured above). The storyline was acclaimed by critics and audiences alike, and gained the show heaps of new fans for the queer romance of it all. Shippers were known as “Clexa”. They were enthusiastic.
Then, partway during its significantly worse third season, The 100 made a truly misguided decision: it killed off Lexa. Not in a cool or meaningful way, like a dramatic sacrifice or a surprising character betrayal. No. She got shot by accident. Death by stray bullet by some random dude we didn’t care about. It was a choice. A choice that, I can say with some accuracy, essentially killed The 100’s status as a respectable genre show and catalysed a slow decline that ended in a universally loathed conclusion four years hence.
This - the essentially pointless killing of a beloved character to shortcut a way to raising dramatic stakes - is called fridging.
This also happens in The Bourne Supremacy.
Okay, it seems like I opened up a can of worms by choosing an unnecessarily complicated and fraught example of the trope. I’m hearing there’s a lot more to the Lexa thing than just fridging. I’m hearing there was a years long, still unresolved debate about how LGBT characters ought to be treated in fiction. I’m hearing that I’ve brought decades of difficult cultural history that I am not qualified to discuss as a straight white man into a discussion of The Bourne Supremacy. I’m hearing that if I had just used Deadpool 2 as an example, that would have been perfectly straightforward and wouldn’t have led to this complicated situation in which we now find ourselves.
Shit.
I’d like to apologise for what just happened here. I miscalculated. I brought Lexa into a conversation that wasn’t big enough to accommodate the Lexa issue. That’s on me.
Sorry about that.
I would like to make clear that this is not perfectly comparable to the Lexa situation. That was a faulty and partial analogy. Thank you.
While it feels very 2015 to bring up the fridging trope, it’s hard not to in this case. When Franka Potente’s Marie was one of the strongest elements of The Bourne Identity, her low-key romance with Bourne a pleasant flavouring to the familiar spy story, you tend to notice that her role in the sequel has been reduced to count-on-two-hands numbers of lines before she gets a bullet that wasn’t even intended for her.
(Look, the Lexa thing wasn’t 100% off the mark. Mostly off the mark, but not 100%.)
The movie even knows that it can do better than this. The aftermath of the stray bullet zags away from the expected revenge arc, telling a story with Bourne that’s thornier and more complex than him getting back at the people who killed her. Supremacy is a genuinely successful meditation on cycles of violence and the fundamentally doomed nature of its central character. It is totally cognisant that its action movie thrills are in service of a story that’s more downbeat and cynical than it is triumphant. The Marie thing, by contrast, is big and loud and dumb. It’s a hammer blow of Big Dramatic Stakes in a movie that works just fine with preciser tools. Essentially, it’s unneeded. It’s from a triter, sillier kind of action movie. Do not like it.
Fortunately, it gets better.
The presence of the man above is not the sole reason for this improvement, but it is certainly one of them. I had actually forgotten that Brian Cox (fuck off) stuck around for the sequel, let alone that his role in this one is considerably larger than Identity, which meant that a lot of this side of Supremacy came as a pleasant surprise to me.
Last week, I bemoaned the fundamental lack of sauce in the murky CIA conspiracism part of Identity. I’m delighted to report that Paul Greengrass brought bottles of sauce to set for this one. The shit decor? Gone. The office politics? Cranked up. The sweaty guys in suits barking orders at nerds with laptops as they fidget about the possible loss of their careers? On the bloody menu.
It’s hard to get sweatier than Cox in Supremacy, really. The man simply radiates stress. With Chris Cooper out of the picture, he is elevated to the role of main government stooge slash human embodiment of the rot inside the American intelligence community, and that’s not even taking into account the introduction of a plotline in which Cox embezzled thousands of dollars years ago and then covered it up and THE TRUTH IS COMING OUT AND IT’S PRETTY INTENSE ACTUALLY AND
See, this stuff is engaging. This is Bourne heritage. Specifically - and we’ll get more into this next week - it’s Tony Gilroy heritage. The guy thrives in writing wormy little government drones snivelling out evil plans in dull meetings. It’s his bread and butter. If I seemed a little worked up about the whole Marie thing, it’s that a movie that dedicates ample time to the psychological degeneration of a corrupt intelligence chief as the web of lies that constitutes his career unravels, along with his will to live, is sophisticated enough to avoid dipping into the shlocky revenge-thriller well.
The Bourne movies are pulp, but they are not shlock. If you’re wondering what separates the two, I cannot really tell you this. It’s just a vibe.
If we’re talking CIA, we have to be talking Pamela Landy.
Brian Cox is serving sweaty excellence in Supremacy, but it’s Joan Allen’s new character who really allows this side of the franchise to find itself. Aside from the decor, a large part of Identity’s insufficiency in this regard was the lack of internal tension on the CIA side, with too much time spent just watching Chris Cooper and Brian Cox in tense huddles.
Pamela Landy - Pam to her friends - changes that. I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that the Pam character is a pretty good symbol of the milquetoast attitude towards structural corruption in these movies that we discussed back in Ultimatum - the archetypal Good Agent who represents a benevolent side of the intelligence apparatus just so we know they’re not all Coxes. That being said, Pam rules. Pam is simply the best. You can’t have Bourne without Pam.
With Pam in the room, there is tension. There is drama. There is bickering and office politicking and factionalism and all the juicy stuff that makes this series far more than just the Matt Damon runaround hour. For the purposes of dramatic tension and conflict and unpredictability and all the good and narratively correct things, this is a major improvement. But it’s also just great fun. The human brain simply loves office drama. It has been an insatiable urge lodged in our brains since the first caveman started arguing over who gets to hunt when.
A moment, if you please, to celebrate Europe.
The Bourne movies are shockingly European, for a major American franchise. Until the New York finale in Ultimatum, in fact, the only trips outside are the Goa cold open here and the Tangier sequence in Ultimatum. Otherwise, it’s all continental capitals, baby. Few pieces of media make me think about going on holiday as much as Bourne movies. It’s these and The Trip.
The bulk of Supremacy is set in Berlin, which is a perfect Bourne location. In the early 2000s, only a little more than a decade following the collapse of the Wall and reunification, it feels like the ideal space for the franchise’s preferred vibe of murky politics and quiet, gnawing paranoia.
Berlin had been a proxy ground for the world’s great powers to flex their muscles at one another for decades, so it feels intuitive and right that the CIA treats it like a second home. Parts of Berlin are grimly austere, parts are impressively grandiose. Like many capitals on the continent, it wears its scars as prominently as it wears its attempts to paper over those scars. It’s a vibe.
The latter two entries would take more extensive trips outside Europe, and I think they both suffer as a result. The Las Vegas finale in Jason Bourne, particularly, feels like a total misunderstanding of the aesthetics that make these movies work so well. It just goes to show that our boy Jason is truly at home on the interrailing circuit.
I don’t have much to say on the Moby subject this week, by virtue of Supremacy having the only non-variant edition of “Extreme Ways”.
Wait a gosh darn minute. This is a variant!
Credit goes to this blog post for catching this one. While Supremacy doesn’t remix “Extreme Ways”, it does tinker with it by extending the opening instrumentals for about 25 seconds. This is easily explicable. While Identity brings in the horns and zooms out fast to credits, Supremacy instead uses the horns to punctuate a reveal, and then pans slowly out of the landscape, letting the song go on before the credits hits. Future Bourne movies would ape this method. It works.
Except The Bourne Legacy. Oh, we’re going to have words about that credits sequence.
One thing I do remember about watching The Bourne Supremacy for the first time was that the beginning of The Bourne Ultimatum now made sense. Oh, I realised. He was in that place at the start of that movie for a reason.
That was it, for child me. That was the trilogy. Ending in the middle. The circle neatly closed.
What a great series of three movies with a complete story that I watched in the wrong order. Surely they would never return to this. What more story was there to tell?
Next time: There was never just one.
Take a wild ride into the Renner-verse with The Bourne Legacy, the odd duck spin-off/sequel that swapped in Matt Damon for the hottest property of the early 2010s. I’ve tabled some time to discuss subjects such as a pre-fame Oscar Isaac, The Dark Knight Rises and the phrase “my chems”.
Also, finally, a full and comprehensive deep dive into the Jeremy Renner app.