American Fictional Narrative

When Will America Awaken from "The Bush Ultimatum"?

Submitted by mark karlin
on Sat, 08/11/2007 - 7:49am. Editorials

If you don’t like a thinking-person’s action film or don’t want to know some of the details of the just-released "The Bourne Ultimatum," then stop reading here.

Of course, being BuzzFlash, this is not a movie review of a hot box office seller, but rather a reflection on its political "message" – and its larger symbolism as representing the difference between a fictional narrative and reality.

If you are out of the loop with Hollywood box-office hits, the third sequel in the red-hot "Bourne" series, starring Matt Damon, is drawing in record crowds to the theaters this past week.

But there may be more at work than the pulsating "James Bond in search of his real identity" quality to Matt Damon’s rapid-paced survival skills that is attracting viewers.

According to a Chicago Tribune cultural writer, Julia Keller:

People may be drawn to the film by the promise of thrilling chase scenes, but what makes it deeply satisfying are three words of dialogue. Admittedly, audiences haven't even had a chance to hear those words before they fork over the admission price. Yet good movie dialogue can be prescient; it can capture the zeitgeist so well that when you hear it for the first time, it already sounds like an echo -- an echo of what you, and millions of your fellow countrywomen and countrymen, have been thinking for a while.

The three words: "This isn't us."

They're spoken by CIA officer Pamela Landy (Joan Allen), when asked why she's helping the bamboozled fugitive known as Jason Bourne (Matt Damon). She means: Yes, covert action is crucial in a dangerous world, but there is a line. A line you don't cross. Because if you do, you've broken something more critical than a window. Something precious and irreplaceable.

The three words summarize the national discomfort over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, over the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. It's a discomfort that knows no party or ideology. It is part of being an American, of believing in the uniqueness of our ideals.

A movie is just a movie. Occasionally, though, in the midst of a fiction that's slicing through the streets on hyper-drive, something odd suddenly shows up in the rearview mirror: reality.

BuzzFlash won’t ruin the film, particularly if you aren’t familiar with the prior two Bourne films, but suffice it to say, the bad guys in "The Bourne Ultimatum" turn out to be a CIA head and Second-in-Command who are running a black-ops department that is basically the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld torture-rendition-illegal detention-murder program. The makers of the movie leave little doubt about that.

Damon, in the three Bourne films, has a been a vulnerable super-killer trying to find out his real identity and make amends for his actions. In "The Bourne Ultimatum," he is ultimately assisted, as the Tribune reviewer alludes to, by a hard-nosed but patriotic top-level CIA official, Pamela Landy (played with just the right amount of controlled nuance by Joan Allen).

And that is where the issue of who is a true patriot comes to a head, as the Tribune critic identifies. For Pamela Landy the sanctioned killing of anyone who might expose the clandestine black-ops program is "not what she signed up for." The murder done in the name of America is now being conducted to protect those who launched the illegal initiative, not to protect the national security of the nation.

Individuals in the CIA have seized the power of who shall live and who shall die, and their decisions, in the case of "The Bourne Ultimatum," are subject to their own personal needs to keep the program secret in order to protect themselves.

The conversion of Landy from blindly loyal CIA official to patriotic whistleblower is, indeed, the route so many Americans have traveled since 9/11.

"The Bourne Ultimatum," of course, is Hollywood fast-paced fantasy, based on a series of fictional suspense novels by Robert Ludlum. When you leave the theater, you are eased back into the reality of everyday life in America: family problems, cellphone calls, people walking on the street, the lure of restaurants and stores.

And like "The Bourne Ultimatum," America has been held hostage to a fictional narrative since 9/11 that has virtually nothing to do with the reality at hand when it comes to America’s needs, including our national security. The continued acceptance of the Bush fictional narrative about Iraq is like being in a darkened movie theater, in which reality only seeps in when someone opens the rear door and a splash of light momentarily enters into the darkened room.

A majority of the members of Congress continues to pretend that America’s national security can only be protected by supporting the deeply and profoundly detached from reality fiction peddled daily by the Bush Administration. But that fiction is a destructive one, because it is so divorced from reality that it leaves us as a nation more vulnerable to terrorism with each passing day. It is a fiction created to hide other political and personal agendas.

But one day, Congress – should no patriots like Pamela Landy emerge (and let’s not forget the bionic Jason Bourne who seeks to restore his own purity of motive) – is going to have to leave the movie theater of politics showing "The Bush Ultimatum" and deal with the wreckage that has been left in the wake of running a nation’s foreign and domestic policy based on powerful speciously constructed narratives that steam roll over the pavement of reality.

When the credits for "The Bourne Ultimatum" roll, we have been temporarily given the hope that the evil "Masters of the Universe" (read Cheney, Bush, Gonzales and Rumsfeld) have been exposed and brought down.

But then you realize, as your eyes hit the first news stand and you read about Congress giving the discredited perjurer and "torture boy" Alberto Gonzales control over spying on Americans without a warrant -- and that generals are predicting an indefinite stay in Iraq -- that reality is far more harsh than fiction.

The Bush handlers – particularly Rove and Cheney – offer us a fiction of a noble, benevolent empire. "The Bourne Ultimatum" symbolically reveals the tarnished and betrayed integrity of our nation that has been compromised by the reality of what is being done in our name and disguised, with the help of the corporate media, by an endlessly unfolding "Scheherazade" White House narrative. It does it in an adrenaline-paced thriller that tells a symbolic story.

Isn’t it tragically ironic that in a Hollywood movie -- a fantasy -- reality and morality triumph over men of dastardly hubris, while when we leave the fictional film we enter a world not of political truth, but a world of another deadly fiction – one in which the cover-up continues?

In the real world we walk back into, the masters of war and diabolical schemes that cut the heart out of our Constitution are still casting a spell upon the nation.

Reality will, one day, hit America very hard, alas, very hard indeed.

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

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The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.