Remember Everything, Absolve Nothing: Working through Trauma in the Bourne Trilogy

The Jason Bourne trilogy constitutes an interesting example of mainstream Hollywood cinema attempting to engage critically with contemporary political issues following the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Although the critique is constrained by commercial and generic expectations, The Bourne Identity (Doug Liman, 2002), The Bourne Supremacy (Paul Greengrass, 2004), and The Bourne Ultimatum (Greengrass, 2007) nonetheless intersect with debates about terrorism, trauma, and the war on terror. This essay discusses the tension between the franchise's attempt at political critique and its commercial context of romantic sentimentalization.

Generically, Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) shares much with James Bond and other secret agents such as Jack Ryan and Harry Palmer, but the trilogy expresses discomfort with the role of the spy as an unproblematic agent of his government. This is significant in relation to 9/11, as since the attacks there has been significant cultural debate about the appropriate response. The political and military response presented a binary opposition between "us" (the United States) and "them" (terrorists), which avoided critical analysis.¹ Similarly, although 9/11 provided what Susan Sontag called "a monstrous dose of reality," the response was, for some, a replacement of politics with psychotherapy, indicating more concern with treating the traumatized "victims" than with identifying the motivations for the attacks.² However, various popular entertainment texts did undertake a form of political criticism, as noted by Liz Powell in her contribution to this In Focus. The Bourne franchise is such a text, and one of the most significant because the franchise explicitly intersects with some of the debates in post-9/11 culture.

For the purposes of this essay, the major concerns of the Bourne franchise are the concepts of trauma and responsibility. Jason Bourne is presented as a damaged hero, as evidenced by his amnesia and trauma over his past as a CIA operative. Anna Froula quotes, in her contribution to this section, Cathy Caruth's characterization of trauma as "repeated intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts."³ Bourne, and the films' viewers, experience these intrusions as flashbacks, specifically flashbacks to his assassination missions and, in the final film, his training.

The flashbacks stand out from the rest of the films' visual style through lower lighting, over- and underexposure, and unsteady cinematography. These intrusions serve to illustrate the inescapable nature of trauma, creating a parallel between the traumatized hero and the traumatized viewer. Bourne is traumatized, much as Western society, specifically the United States, was by 9/11. Bourne can thus be seen as a surrogate for the American viewer. Just as those who saw the collapse of the Twin Towers either in person or through the media are likely to be haunted by the images, so is Bourne haunted by the images of his past experiences.

There is a further parallel, however, between Bourne and the Western viewer: both are implicitly culpable. The Western (again, particularly American) viewer of both 9/11 and the Bourne trilogy can be seen as tacitly or overtly supportive of the US foreign policy that, arguably, provoked the terrorist attacks. If the public who supported US foreign policy experienced the results of certain policies on September 11, 2001, and therefore bears some responsibility for its own trauma, Bourne is similarly responsible for his trauma, since he was a willing participant in policies of assassination. The franchise does not present Bourne as a passive victim in his trauma but rather as at least partially responsible for what has happened to him. In doing so, the Bourne trilogy stresses responsibility and culpability for what Paul Greengrass describes, in his DVD commentary for Ultimatum, as the current "paranoid culture." At the same time, though, Bourne is presented as a sympathetic protagonist whom the viewer is meant to support. While this tension could undermine any political critique in the films, it is also the means by which a political message is expressed. If Bourne is responsible for his own trauma, so is the audience—the electorate for the (successive) governments who provoked al-Qaeda. These are the viewers at whom the franchise aims a political critique, suggesting their culpability for...