Re: [Marxism] Bourne vs. Bond (Socialist Worker on the Bourne Ultimatum)

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Walter Lippmann wrote:
> 
> Though I had not seen the preceding two pictures, I caught this
> on the day it opened. It's kind of an anti-spy thriller and while
> I'm not a big fan of this genre, it had such a powerful anti-CIA
> message, I meant to write about it at the time.

It was explicitly _not_ an "anti-CIA" picture. It was an
anti-Rogue-Element-in-the-CIA picture; in other words it was precisely
the view of the CIA that underwrites many of the conspiracy theories
from the Kennedy assassination on. The actual 'hero' of it was not
Bourne but the higher-up CIA woman to whom he passed over the evidence
on the Rogue Element; the last you see of her she is testifying to a
Senate Committee.

I liked the picture very much -- but the plot was exactly the plot of a
1000 B-westerns and quite a few more respectable westerns. The good guys
are being rousted by a local capitalist (usually a banker as Michael
Perelman pointed out in a recent lbo-post) and a Man on a White Horse
comes to the aid of the good guys (usually "good capitalists,"
especially local ranchers wanting to grow big 'honestly'). That hero,
then, sounds very much like the various Fascist heroes  as presented in
Ezra Pound's _Cantos_. Here we have rogue Bureaucrats instead of a rogue
banker, and we have an ex-rogue gunman (Bourne) -- in this it resembles
_Shane_.

Just as the good guys cannot by themselves (in Shane and a 1000 other
films) beat off the evil element but must have a Strong Man (a reformed
rogue) do it for them, so the good guys carrying on the good fight in
the CIA can't do it by themselves without a reformed rogue applying
rogue tactics to do it for them. You've even got the Church Committee
scenario at the end with the woman testifying to the Senate -- now
everything is going to be just fine.

Carrol


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