The Millennium in Frames: The Bourne Identity and 9/11

The Millennium in Frames is our close-to-chronological look at the most important, influential, popular movies since 2000. Right now, we’re in the middle of 2002.

For all its complications and nebulae, there’s really only two ways people talk about Bourne Identity now: as an innovative and steely action movie, and as a seminal post-9/11 conspiracy thriller. The former conversation feels shallow, but has loads of sneaky depth, and the latter conversation feels reflective, but might actually be prescient.

Bourne Identity came out in 2002. It stars Matt Damon as a spy who’s lost his memory and, on the way back to finding out who he is and where he came from, uncovers a vast conspiracy within the American government. There’s a never-seen-anything-like-it chase scene featuring a Mini Cooper, there’s a never-seen-anything-like-it fight scene between a guy wielding a knife and a guy wielding a ballpoint pen, and there’s a never-seen-anything-like-it stunt where Matt Damon flings himself down a stairwell and survives because, by the way, he was falling on top of the corpse of a guy he just killed. Bourne Identity is one of the best (and certainly influential) action movies of the new millennium, but to the movie’s credit, that’s not even the most interesting thing about it. The movie’s amnesiac-centered plot, while not a response to post-9/11 America, certainly felt like a response to post-9/11 America, and that makes the whole thing feel propulsive, of a moment, and persistent.

What connects Bourne to 9/11 is the positioning of the viewer as an outsider to the intelligence. As we follow Jason Bourne on his journey to discovering his real self (and the killing machine he proved to be), the CIA is presented as a dark, adversarial, and manipulating force. They are hunters who use secret methods and unsanctioned practices to complete the mission, all in the name of “a better, safer America.” An organization that we assumed to be allies, whose operations we took for granted, and whose protocols went without question, became untrustworthy and shrouded from the very beginning of this movie. Does the dynamic sound familiar?

It’s important to say that Bourne was written in the late 90s and was produced in 2000, so while as an isolated work it’s not responding to September 11th in the slightest, it still felt that way when people watched it in June of 2002. The movie’s critical and commercial success (and unexpected enfranchisement—remember, this was before sequels were locked in years and years ahead of time) probably can’t be entirely chalked up to its relevant tones and themes, but those things at least plays a part (the stylish action scenes and Damon’s emergence as a physical, almost mechanical blockbuster actor certainly helped, too). This wasn’t just a good movie to audiences in 2002, it felt like a good modern movie, something that was happening right now. You could be walking down the streets of D.C. tomorrow and—who’s to say—Jason Bourne could’ve passed you going the other way. You’d never know. The characters felt like real people and the premise felt plausible. In part, that’s credit to the United States we were living in, but the movie deserves credit for hitting that sweet spot between speculation and grounded-ness.

The later Bourne movies would push the levers forward on the style and action scales (Supremacy would emphasize the latter and Ultimatum would emphasize the former, and both excel), but Identity succeeds for its sure-handed balance of far-away phone-call intrigue and up-close-and-personal palm striking. For that matter, the Bourne franchise as a whole turned the phone call into a kind of action scene in itself, where people did battle by leveraging information, feinting, improvising, and always trying to stay ahead. It was representative, in a way, of what people imagined to be happening in the real-life Langley, and it was indicative of the next decade of war, where guys with remote controls would influence body counts, and tense negotiations across thousands of miles of cell towers would make or break the next several months of relations with the enemy. The critical moments here didn’t come with a pointed gun, they came with fingers lingering over the “end call” button. Audiences sweated over these scenes just the same. In a small way, Bourne taught us how to interact with the War on Terror.

And even if it was in a sense by accident, how Bourne Identity positioned us—always catching up, always demanding answers, always paranoid of our own secrets—was a move that would affect thrillers for years to come. It was after Bourne that the Mission: Impossible movies became more sinister and more “this is way bigger than we thought” revelatory. It was after Bourne that James Bond stopped trusting people, even in MI-6. It was after Bourne that every huge Hollywood actor, from Denzel Washington (Safe House) to George Clooney (The American) to Angelina Jolie (Salt) to Mark Wahlberg (Shooter), had to fill their IMDB page with one “secret agent betrayed by their employers” character. In other words, this was the beginning of espionage movies that went beyond the cheeky gadgets and mask fake-outs of the 1990s. These spy movies had things to say about the worlds their characters chased each other through.

The best movies in the wake of September 11th didn’t try to sooth audiences or instill a sense of hope. Instead, they doubled-down on the paranoia and examined American questions like the reach of national security, the complications of an invisible enemy, and when our government should keep secrets from us. Bourne Identity is an example that, sometimes, in the face of a crisis, Americans need to be injected deeper inside the questions instead of shown a pretty picture of a cushy non-answer. Even if the truth eludes us, there’s power in taking control of the chase.