Jason Bourne, Anti-American?

I wouldn't be as quick as Chris Orr to dismiss the notion that The Bourne Supremacy is an anti-American film. (And I gave it a positive review, mind you ...) Chris writes: "This is a movie, like most, with good guys and bad guys - and both groups are made up almost exclusively of current or former employees of the 'American government.'" True enough, and certainly a movie has to do more than posit an evil conspiracy embedded in the U.S. government to qualify as anti-American; otherwise our net would sweep up everything from 24 to All the President's Men. On the other hand, there has to be some point where an indictment of the bad guys within our government becomes so sweeping as to shade into outright anti-Americanism, and I think that the earlier Bourne movies walked the line that Chris is describing more carefully than the most recent installment: In those two films, you had a sense of the American establishment being balanced between the Joan Allen position ("this isn't us") and the pro-torture, pro-Treadstone, pro-anything goes position embodied first by Chris Cooper and then by Brian Cox. Whereas in Supremacy, the rot seems to go much, much deeper; the sins the U.S. government commits as an institution, in the light of bureaucratic day, are much worse; and Allen's "good American" seems a weird anomaly more than anything else. Yes, the film ends (SPOILER ALERT) with the bad guys exposed to press scrutiny and the indictments that follow, but there's nothing in the film as a whole to give you any confidence that a few prison terms will remove the deep corruption from the system; there will be another Treadstone, and another one after that, because this is the path that our government (and by extension, our country?) has chosen to take.

Again, I liked the movie in many ways, and I'm overstating the case a bit. I just think there's a large gray area between generic "corruption in high places" films that don't have a broader anti-American message and exercises in explicit Amerika-bashing like Dogville. And The Bourne Supremacy, more than Bourne's previous outings, is way out there in the gray, and too close to America-bashing for comfort.

Update: Alex Massie adds his two cents.

Second Update: I don't know why I kept calling Ultimatum Supremacy above, but my apologies.

Comments

The theme I got from Bourne Supremacy is 'bureaucrats gone crazy', which is anti-Washington, rather than anti-American. There's a difference.

Posted by MattF | August 29, 2007 8:54 AM

The movie certainly comes off as trying to be very critical of the American government, as it exists now, but not anti-American per se. So I think MattF has something right on this. Of course, the ways in which they've altered the story-line from what was in the books makes the anti-American government take even more evident.

Posted by Michael Simpson | August 29, 2007 9:10 AM

I think this discussion might be better served if we were to use a less-loaded term than "anti-American". I mean, suppose for the sake of argument that "there will be another Treadstone, and another one after that"--aren't we allowed to oppose that without being slurred? Just because a filmmaker holds a deeply cynical view about the likelihood of human rights abuses emanating from the govt., doesn't make them an "anti-American" as such--it just means that they're disappointed in the way America fails to live up to its ideals, which is very different from repudiating those ideals explicitly.

Posted by Dan Miller | August 29, 2007 9:12 AM

I agree with MattF. There's a strong tendency for conservatives to confuse authority figures - especially when they're also conservatives - with "America."

George Bush is not America. Dick Cheney is not America. America hired them, under a set of restrictions known as the Constitution, to do a job for us. Pointing out that they're immense failures at that job and that they've ignored many of the restrictions is not "anti-American." It is quintessentially American, and I am f*ck*ng sick of being told otherwise.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | August 29, 2007 9:13 AM

Ross, if you're talking about the third one - it was Bourne Ultimatum. Supremacy was the second one.

Posted by Dan | August 29, 2007 9:22 AM

I think Ross may be right about the difference between the first two movies and the third, though it's rather a subtle contrast; the first movie lacks the second's straight-arrow Joan Allen CIA operative, and while we know there are other CIA programs than Treadstone, we focus only on Chris Cooper's wild man operating at Brian Cox's behest but providing him plausible deniability (and for all we imagine, every department head we see alongside Cox has a similar arrangement with someone under his command). "Ultimatum" worked for me because it turned the trilogy into a parable of personal responsibility; Bourne spends three films tracking down the people who turned him into the killing machine he discovers himself to be in the first film, and the responsible party turns out to be the face that's been looking back at him in the mirror since the opening scenes of "Bourne Identity." The message: any wrong done by a democratic government in the effort to protect us against those who want to do us harm will require the consent of its citizens. Seems to me that's a worthwhile warning, whatever one's politics.

Posted by Jeff Peterson | August 29, 2007 9:23 AM

The problem with anti-Americanism is that, as Ross points out, it's a continuum, and we all know it when we see it, but not when someone else sees it.

We all laughed at CAIR, I am sure, when it argued that True Lies was anti-Arab just because Arnold spent the movie killing dozens of evil Arabs who wanted to nuke Miami. After all, one of Arnold's team was a "good Arab," and someone has to be the villian.

Orr is making basically the same argument here - that because Joan Allen and (arguably) Matt Damon are "good," the mere facts that every evil character in the movie is an American or their agents and that they are evil in recognizably American ways, are not enough to make the movie "anti-American." In response, we can only say that we know anti-Americanism when we see it, but we do.

Posted by J Mann | August 29, 2007 9:27 AM

What if America deserves to be bashed? Look, it's really not controversial at all to say that in the 20th century, the CIA did default to the Chris Cooper/Bryan Cox/Albert Finney side. It's hard to find even conservative historians who dispute the consensus history on American involvement in Iran, Guatemala, Nicoragua, Indonesia, Panama, etc. It's hard to do so both because of the meticulously chronicled historical record, and more recently, the CIA's own documentation. The US really has done a lot of dispicable things in its covert foreign policy. There's no reason to believe that we've suddenly gotten religion and changed our ways. The CIA has a horrid history. These movies reflect that.

Posted by Freddie | August 29, 2007 9:42 AM

I don't know if you can classify a film as being "anti-American" when the underlying message is essentially "if any of these Americans ever found out about the really bad stuff we're doing they'd be super pissed and we'd totally go to jail."

I really think this discussion here is trending into some Dana Stevens-esque areas of self-parody.

And Mickey Kaus's assertion that the "anti-Americanism" of Bourne proves his suspicions concerning the "anti-Americanism" of Paul Greengrass's "United 93" hits way too close to the notion of "reality having a well known liberal bias" as Stephen Colbert might say (it also pretty clearly illustrates Kaus's lack of understanding behind the concept of "screenwriters" and "source material").

Posted by Dave White | August 29, 2007 10:11 AM

The criticisms on the thread thus far, I think, are correct. Unfortunately, for Christianists like Douthat, as long as a Republican is president, there is no distinction between "American" and "US government".

Posted by SavageView | August 29, 2007 11:20 AM

How well is America doing these days?
Today came the news the only officer charged for offenses at Abu Ghraib will walk. Very bad behavior acknowledged by all, a symbol of American wrongdoing in the eyes of the rest of the world, and no officer held accountable.
Extensive torture conducted by the military, more limited torture (limited in the number of victims) conducted by the CIA. This torture government policy, fiercely defended in public by the departed head of the CIA and nobody in the military brought to account even though the military's execution of the policy is acknowledged to have gone out of control and come to be aimed at gratuitous humiliation and pointless infliction of suffering.
A lawless (in the view of many conservatives) intrusion on privacy rights pushed by elements in the White House so far as to lead to an attempt to obtain a signature approving it from a severely ill Attorney General who's turned his powers of office over to a subordinate.
Leaders of the executive branch who have devised a theory that subordinates the other two branches and within the executive, lodges complete power with the unitary executive, i.e., the will of the President. This theory carried into practice we know not how far.
How deeply embedded has the practice of torture become in America's military and intelligence agency? How institutionalized has this distended power of the executive, buttressed by contentions that those who oppose it are letting the enemy in at the gates, --how enduring will it be?
A majority of the Republican party fears the Islamist enemy and is prepared to rewrite the Constitution to defend against him. I fear their rewrite--the end of America as a beacon of hope and freedom.

Posted by FearfulPatriot | August 29, 2007 12:05 PM

Freddie, shame on you for letting something as trivial as facts interfere with the crucial task of ideologically policing the culture for left deviationism. There is important work to be done here.

Posted by Ben | August 29, 2007 12:08 PM

Correction:
Colonel Thomas Pappas, a commander of Abu Ghraib, was punished administratively for allowing the use of dogs by interrogators.
And Janis Karpinski was reprimanded and demoted.
And Major General Geoffrey Miller, the officer most immediately responsible for the crimes at abu Ghraib, was obliged to invoke his Article 31 right not to testify at a court martial proceeding in early 2006.

Posted by FearfulPatriot | August 29, 2007 12:18 PM

I don't think it the plot or characters that make BU an anti-American movie, it is the little details. As Americans, what we are not seeing is how the movie tickles the senstive parts of how Anti-Americans in Europe see this country -- the facsicm, the extra-terroriality, our disregard for their laws; contrast how different new York looks in the movie in the approach shots than the European cities (although London and Madrid both have skyscrapers now).

Posted by charlie | August 29, 2007 12:50 PM

I am very sincerely trying to understand Ross points and, I confess, failing.

Even if we allow the interpretation that the CIA is a fundamentally corrupt institution, I don't see how that equates to a charge of anti-Americanism. Would we say the same about a conservative film that depicted the ATF as a bunch of institutional thugs?

America is not this or that government agency, nor is America this or that presidential administration. In a very fundamental way, America is also not its government... or, more precisely, not *just* its government.

America is a set of ideals expressed by the Declaration of Independence and codified by the Constitution. Throughout our history, government agents and agencies have often failed to live up to those ideals. Pointing out those failures is not anti-American, nor is expressing a cynical feeling that such failures are inevitable.

Perhaps if the Bourne movies attempted to say that every American institution was fundamentally corrupt and that no one was attempt to adhere to our ideals, one can make the charge, but I don't see that being the case. At no point do the Bourne movies claim that America qua America is evil.

Posted by Andrew Lias | August 29, 2007 1:21 PM

Sorry, but this is an incredibly asinine post.

Once more, with feeling:

The National Security apparatus of the United States /= America. Postulating the existence of people in a government agency who abuse their power is not anti-American. You can make a much stronger case that people who abuse the power of a government agency are anti-American, since this nation (unlike most) was explicitly founded on the principle that the government answers to the people rather than the other way around.

Conservatives are well-aware of this most of the time. They cheer wildly when politicians say "government IS the problem." They happily trash and insult every aspect of the US government except the National Security apparatus. But somehow, for some strange reason, where the military and CIA are concerned, negative portrayals are seen as an affront to mom, apple pie, and The Fatherland must be defended from such slanders.

Should Ghostbusters be considered anti-American because the human villains are an EPA bureaucrat and an incompetent big-city mayor?

Get a life.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | August 29, 2007 1:42 PM

Ghostbusters is sure as @!*^&#$ anti-ghost, I'll tell you that.

Posted by J Mann | August 29, 2007 1:59 PM

The Bourne Supremacy is a piece of entertainment using the conceit that the CIA is a gang of amoral murderers, which has been the theme of a thousand films, from "The Killer Elite" to "Absolute Power." Labeling such a trivial flick "anti-American" is like saying that a card that says "Happy Holiday" is "anti-Christian."

And, excuse me, but where is it written that films have to be "pro-American," any more than greeting cards have to be "pro-Christian"?

This is Bill "Whore told me I have a big penis" O'Reilly's line of argument. Is Ross intending to position himself as the Atlantic's answer to Bill O'Reilly? Will we have a similar debate over every film that Hollywood releases? What about Balls of Fury? Is it pro-American or anti? And how about Desperate Housewives? And what about American Idol? Is it really American?

Posted by Alan Vanneman | August 29, 2007 4:03 PM

This argument is pretty half-assed. "If only the film had depicted some the good things that arose out of the Blackbriar (Treadstone) program, we wouldn't feel such reflexive hatred for the program and it's handlers once they started hunting down innocent civilians."

The film is precisely about what happens when an organization operates above the law. Yes, they could have shown numerous scenes where this power is exercised for the good of the entire world, assassinating an Osama Bin Laden-type for instance, but it would be superfluous. The real crux of the debate is "Where does it end?" Obviously, it either ends when the Blackbriar program finishes up its objectives and Strathairn's character locks up shop and willingly hands over the keys (i.e. never), or it must be shut down by American Ideals (i.e. adherence to the rules of law, and a strong and free press).

If Bourne had been killed, with all the deaths attributed to random patsies, and all wrong-doing swept under the rug, THAT would have been anti-American.

Posted by Ben Childs | August 29, 2007 5:05 PM

Freddie gets it right, but I'd just like to add that Ross is also wrong about Dogville, which was clearly much more of a commentary on outsiders, community prejudices, and human nature in general than it was about the character of 1930s (or present day) America. Calling it America-bashing is like calling Lord of the Flies English-bashing.

Posted by Ashish George | August 29, 2007 5:07 PM

You're all missing the point.

If Americans found out that there was a secret government assassination bureau designed to kill off terrorists cleanly and professionally, they'd lynch Jason Bourne for having destroyed it and through it, America's capacity to wage aggressive covert war.

You people are living in cushy, postmodern, stars-in-your-eyes America. Chances are, you're children won't have the same luxury.

Posted by Dante | July 10, 2008 8:08 PM