WSWS.org is the official internet presence of the 4th International and as all Trots are a fairly easy target in that they usually see the world as Black & White and not as an infinity of grays, hopefully a look at a few scenes from the film will disabuse his view and provide a more complex interpretation of the Ultimatum and the trilogy.
The basic premise of the Bourne trilogy is of a CIA assassin who loses his memory while on active duty. To refind it he has to take on the CIA and in the process exposes the nastiness of its bad guys.
In the opening scene, and following on from The Bourne Supremacy, Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is still in Moscow and still being chased by the Russian police. When finally cornered in a pharmacy by two of the police, he disarms and immobilises one then threatens the other with a gun. Quite understandably with a big gun pointed at him the still conscious Russian begs not to be killed. Bourne's response is to say in Russian with English subtitles; "I don't have an argument with you", and walks away letting the policeman live. Cue film title.
'Know thine enemy' is an adage as old as the Bronze Age - the age of war - and in the trilogy the enemy is identified as not being people of a foreign country or their state representatives but the C.I. fucking A. This is reiterated in those opening frames of the Ultimatum. Reflection not required.
There are a few moments of quiet in the film where some deeper interaction between characters is allowed to play and which enhances our understanding of their relationships. It is in these quiet moments where, if a film in the thriller genre is to be lifted from the mundane, that the story has to be carried with an economy of exceptional dialogue and acting.
The most obvious and important quiet moment is in the cafeteria prior to boarding the ferry to Tangiers, where Bourne and Parsons (Julia Stiles) talk about why she is helping him. A bit of background from the two previous films in the trilogy is needed at this point. Stiles, as Nicky Parsons, who has logistics responsibilties for Treadstone/Blackbriar as well as the monitoring of an assets mental health (see Supremacy), is the only actor other than Damon to have appeared in all three Bourne films. Her role has slowly built throughout the series to the point of getting second billing. In each one of the films Bourne has held a gun on Parsons at least once, threatening her life but never carrying through. Instead they've exchanged long, enigmatic looks, indicating, by the Ultimatum a more intimate relationship than just a professional one had been part of the pre-Identity back story.
Back to the cafeteria. After a few words from Parsons about Bourne being the first in the Treadstone/Blackbriar programme of conditioned assassins who were subject to "behaviour modification" and had to be broken down before assignment, she responded to Bourne's question, "why are you helping me?", with: "It was difficult for me. With you."
The faltering nature in speaking the words and the depth of feeling in her eyes when looking at Bourne brought a recognition to him that her affection was deeper than he had could remember or ever imagined. The double-take on Bourne's face - the use of two shots - after Parsons delivered the line showed some change, some awakening to her feelings for him which a finer actor than Damon would have found in just one long shot. I was surprised he couldn't find it in one shot despite having such a fine and 'giving' actor as Stiles opposite him.
Parsons then asks; "You really don't remember anything?" to which Bourne replies, after regaining his determinedly flat personae; "No". Sadness and dissapointment pass across Parsons face as she lowers her eyes in the recogniton that whatever the back-story between the two, her affections would/could not be requited. This was re-emphasised on the ferry as they leant against the railings by a long sideways look at Bourne from Parsons as well as the long exchange of looks in the mirror while she was dyeing her hair.
Matt Damon has claimed in promotional interviews that the Bourne films are not comparable but superior to the misogynist claptrap that emanates from and underpins the Bond franchise. There is a key scene in the Ultimatum that verifies this with alacrity. After the assassination of Ross, Pam Landy (Joan Allen) is brought on board to help track Bourne. While attempting to do so she also exposes the incompetence of Noah Vosen (David Strathairn) in spy-craft by finding the source of the leak of Blackbriar as not being Bourne but Neal Daniels (Colin Stinton) Chief of the Madrid Office. In a piece of economic acting, editing and writing a range of differences between the way men and women work is put on the screen - the glances between Vosen and his subordinate Wills (Corey Johnson) clearly showing their worries at Landy's, a woman's abilities, or Landy's relationship with her subordinate Cronin (Tom Gallop) which is based on them sharing the work load. There is nothing even remotely similar in any Bond film.
Also in the operations room when it has been discovered that Parsons intervened and redirected the 'asset', Desh (Joey Ansah) to pick up a new phone, Vosen orders the killing of Parsons. Landy in trying to stop Vosen's actions, responds with; "You start down this path, where does it end?" Vosen replies with; "It ends when we have won!" This exchange between the two epitomise the conflict between liberal and reactionary America. Vosen has expressed in six words of dialogue the neocons delusion that they can achieve absolute control - 'full spectrum dominance' - through imposing a mono-culture on a complex and diverse world by killing those they consider the enemy. Which is the great majority of us.
(There is no winning, only process. And along the trajectory that process takes there will be times of revolutionary advance or regression and either's ephemeral success will themselves be merely process in the final analysis of things.)
Early in the film Bourne said to the brother of his murdered girlfriend, Marie Kreutz (Franka Potente); "Somebody started this. I'm going to find out who." What he found out when he finally got to Dr Hirsch (Albert Finney), the originator of the Treadstone programme of conditioned assassins, was that he wasn't picked but volunteered. There was a reluctance to fully commit to the programme from Bourne - but commit he did and as a result of his volunteering discovered he was complicit in his own creation, in his new identity as an assassin. Complicit as we all are if it is believed the C.I. fucking A. should exist.
A nice touch in the film was when Bourne was handed his dog-tags by Hirsch. You will have to be very sharp to catch it. His religion is Catholic. He has never been a member of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant - WASP - establishment.
Though Matt Damon has said that this is the last of the Bourne films the ending has given some wriggle room for another. After jumping into the East River to escape and surving, Parsons is seen watching on TV the reports of the arrests of Hirsch and Vosen and the failure to find the body of Bourne, nee Webb. In the very final scene a grin - the only time she does in the film - breaks out across her face. A grin that can only be described as lecherous. I think she would be a more welcome stalker to Bourne than the C.I. fucking A!
There was something else which I found to be politically interesting in the film. The name 'Echelon' was used twice. The first when the code word Blackbriar was intercepted from a mobile telephone conversation between the investigative journalist Ross (Paddy Considine) and his editor at the Guardian. The second when Landy asked if an "echelon package" had arrived at the operations room in New York.
Echelon is a top secret programme of global communications interception jointly run by the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - the broader Anglo/American alliance. I think it is probably the first time I have heard the Echelon programme mentioned in any mainstream film and it reminded me of the celebrated and controversial
'ABC' trials held in Britain in 1977/8. Two journalist and an ex-soldier, Aubrey, Berry and Campbell, were prosecuted for breaking the Official Secrets Act and having information on SIGINT - signals intelligence - which is the function of Echelon in acquiring. The original trial had to be stopped when it became known that a former
SAS officer and signaturee to the Official Secrets Act was the chairman of the jury. The defendants were found guilty after the second trial of breaching the Official Secrets Act and received non-custodial sentences. They were facing up to 30 years in gaol. Funny what memories can be generated by modern films.
There are some duff lines in the dialogue, none more so than when Vosen delivers; "Get the vehicles. We're going mobile." In a long and illustrious career stretching from the sheriff in John Sayles 'Matewan', through 'LA Confidential' to 'Good Night, And Good Luck', David Strathairn has never delivered anything so excruciatingly cringe making. But having said that, Strathairn as Vosen personifies the apparatchik - arrogant in office politics efficency and text book routine but operationally incompetent.
Though Walsh in his review has recognised the limitations of 'liberal' films he has failed to understand, or if he does, failed to address, the central weaknesses inherent in Hollywood films, even liberal ones like the Ultimatum, and why they ultimately fail their audience.
The first is Hollywood's propensity to posit extreme individualism as being capable of changing the world - in this case the C.I. fucking A. This extreme individualism is a central characteristic of late capitalist ideology. It serves its purpose well in having people believe the delusion that they as individuals can exercise power to achieve their wants or needs and don't require the collective organisations of the people such as trades unions to defend and advance their interests. Films like the Ultimatum perpetuate this myth.
The second problem is liberal Hollywood's believe that the secret/intelligence institutions of the empire can be reformed from within and that they don't need being dismantled root and branch. The sole role of the CIA is to clear the political path for corporate, imperial America to exploit the world, and as such is an enemy to democracy for Americans as much as the rest of us.
One of the the irritants of films like the Ultimatum is their ability to keep alive the myth that the agents/employees of the secret intelligence services are super humans capable of extraordinary feats. Whereas in the cold light of reality all they are are accomplished liars and actors able to hide their deceptions from 'friends' and/or targets. Leading what may seem very mundane, ordinary lives but gathering information or surreptitiously spreading counter-intelligence.
I've previously written about spooks I've know, members of the CP and their relatives, dead and alive; the spiked drink and the possible interception of internet traffic at the old CPGB HQ in Cynthia St, London during the summer of 2001. Well here's some more.
The woman who passed on an essay of mine in Feb 2002 to 'some friends in America', had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and at which point another women known to her had an affair with her partner. All of whom made it very public. A grandmother claiming to be an anarchist who at that time was studying archaeology at Lampeter in West Wales. She has since moved to Sheffield, employed by the Home Office working with refugees and still professing to be an anarchist. An anarchist working at the Home Office with responsibility for refugees in a time of war! Yeh. Right.
My assessment of her having an affair with the partner and ostensibly still 'friends', is to serve as cover for putting another 'minder' in place for the US once his original partner died.
I was suspicious of her for a while but this was made claringly obvious to me after I dropped a comment into Information Clearing House in response to one from Layla Anwar criticising a
Noam Chomsky interview without having listened to it. The audio interview with Chomsky was about Palestine and titled "Death of a Nation". The page is still available, but not the audio file, and though the comments are registered as '0' they are still there if clicked through. The relevant comments are as follows (all dates are American - the month first):
Chomsky , I don't need to click and listen to anything. I know where you are coming from. Stop being the cheap apologist for the closet Zionism that you so indirectly defend. Come out and proclaim it now . You are authorized under the banner of your "New world Order".
Layla Anwar | 12.04.06 - 10:47 pm | #
"Infamy. Infamy. They've all got it in for me!"
That's a line from an old British 'Carry On' film, a series of comedies. It seems to me rather comedic that some of the contributors to this thread haven't listened to the Chomsky interview yet seem qualified to slag him off. Or am I missing something here and it's true you yanks don't have a sense of irony.
Its also true that Israel or USA only negotiate in bad faith which is exactly what they have done by refusing to accept the democratic will of the Palestinian people in voting for Hamas. The US did the same when the people of Chile voted for Allende and then organised a coup against him on Sept 11th 1973. This time the US, EU and Israel are committing a crime against humanity by attempting ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
Listen to the interview you ignoramus and you will find that Chomsky said immediately after the written quote to the page , "America and Israel immediately demonstrated the absolute passionate hatred that prevails for democracy in both countries". True.
Now Chomsky can be criticised for giving an impression of defeatism in the interview but that also applies to the ICH titling the piece 'The Death Of A Nation'. The Palestinians do not accept defeat hence their vote.
Anonymous | 12.05.06 - 9:44 am | #
As can be seen my comment was anonymous but within days another anonymous comment was put to an old essay of mine on my old site at Blogger.com. The essay started out as being about my experience in the same gaol as the Baader/Meinhoff group of terrorists and their uselessness in advancing the interests of the working class. The anonymous comment was only concerned with that part of the piece and is reproduced below.
""The RAF and their actions strengthened the secret apparatus of the State, introduced new laws undermining the assumption of innocence and the rights of lawyers. And Turkish Gastarbeiters are still kicked to death on German streets."
The RAF took the struggle for total personal liberation and gave it syntax, embodying, with their guns and car bombs, the intensely human experience of resistance to the state and its mythical violence and institutions of hierarchy and commodity. That the RAF were criminals, or that they were murderers (of soldiers who had helped spray agent orange on Vietnamese forests and napalm on Laotian mountains, of industrialists and bureaucrats, the first partisans of fragmented death) does not obscure the fact that the "secret apparatus of State" was terrified of them, and though their Marighellian uprising never occurred, generations of subsequent revolutionaries have interpreted their deaths and disbandings not as the forgone legacies of the dead, but as prophecies, as a glyphic history of full lives. They knew how to love, and who to love, and though they were wrong about a lot of things, their bombs are still exploding in the memories of those who long to tear the world apart and, finally, create something better.
To fit their actions into a modern occident-liberal framework (as they seem to have been in the above quote) is to adopt and accept the State's own implicit goals of nullification of radical dissent and canonization of failed "revolutions". And maybe the reason that Turkish immigrants are still beat up and killed in Germany (and Pakistanis in the UK, and West Africans in France, and blacks and gays and everyone else in the US) is because activists and revolutionaries in the great 1960's and 70's didn't fucking fight hard enough. Maybe if you hadn't been having wet dreams about Moroccan hash and Amon Duul we wouldn't have to stand up to fascists and bureaucrats and careerists and apathy today."
--
Posted by Anonymous to Outside the Gates at 12/08/2006 09:32:52 AM
Forgetting that I don't have a clue who Amon Duul is or that such nonsense has a place in serious working class politics, the writing has the style and the language comparable to some emails sent to me by the woman from Sheffield, who was the first to promote the writings of Anwar by cross posting them to her blog. Anyway it's not her I'm concerned with just her association with Anwar and it's Anwar's writings that need some analysis.
There is no attempt to find common ground between those forces inside and outside Iraq who are trying to get the Anglo/American alliance to leave that country in her writing. She is angry about the affect on her country and its people that the Anglo/American alliance has wrought, but anger does not make for clear thinking.
Layla Anwar's whole body of work, carried by such sites as Uruknet and even ICH, has been a long sectarian tirade against Shia and Iranian influence in Iraq, covered of course by criticism of the ordinary soldier involved in the illegal occupation and the ordinary citizen of the USA and Britain irrespective of their opposition to the war.
(The majority of US or British 'other ranks' who join up do so as a result of economic hardship and the possibility of learning a trade - the povert draft. Don't believe what you hear of the USA and Britain having strong economies. The ordinary soldier is, as Dylan has sung in a not to different context; "Only a Pawn in Their Game", and the majority of whom, on finding the reality of their role in Iraq want to come home and an end to their country causing the carnage.)
One of her most recent 'contributions' -
On the Edge and Unwanted ...., carried by Uruknet on Sept 13th - was a diatribe against Syria because of its treatment of some Sunni refugees from the charnel house that is Iraq. It this piece I want to concentrate on.
The life of a refugee is not the option anybody would want and is only ever chosen when it is between that and the certainty of torture or death. Of the 2+ million Iraqis who have fled their country an estimated
1.5 million have gone to Syria - more than any other country. The USA has only accepted 800, Britain aprroximately 400, despite these two countries being the cause of the exodus. Syria along with Iran is on the USA's regime change list and a crisis caused by an influx of refugees fom a neighbouring country has long been a tactic used to destabilise countries. The Iraqi refugees may not be welcomed by all Syrians, but the country has opened its borders for them at the expense of a possible future upheaval.
Syria is a secular state in that there is a seperation between religion and the government. The political party dominating Syria is the
Ba'ath - Arabic for 'renaissance'. It is similar to the party of the same name that Saddam used to maintain control in Iraq, but there was antagonism between the two to the extent that Syria actively supported the UN in expelling Iraq from Kuwait in 1991. Syria is
70% Sunni Muslim , 12% Christian, 8% Alawi (a sect of Shia) and the remainder comprise mainstream Shia, Old Testament Jews and Druze.
It seems illogical to me that the Syrian authorities would allow a Shia Iraqi hotel owner in Damascus to use his premises once a week as a Husseinya and preach sectarian hatred of Sunnis, as Anwar claims in her 'report' from the Syrian capital. Syria is on a war footing expecting an attack from either the USA or Israel and cannot afford to be seen by its own majority population of Sunnis to be weak when faced with sectarianism of such a nature.
The timing of Anwar's piece is more than interesting. Rumours had started to get to reporters of an Israeli air assault on a facility in northern Syria by the 10/11th of September, 3 days before the Anwar article appeared. The rumours were being stoked with leaks from American officials that N.Korea was supplying Syria with nuclear materials who in turn were supplying the Iranian ally Hizbollah. In a lengthy article for the
Observer on 16th Sept , Peter Beaumont has brought together all the known facts on an operation the Israelis are being very reticent in publicising. Reticence is a highly unusual trait for Israel considering it has always used the pyschological power of admitting to raids as a means of keeping its Arab neighbours in awe of the military might at its command.
Syria does not have the economic means or industrial base to get involved in nuclear development. It is near to bankruptcy and following the influx of refugees from Iraq, tottering on the brink, but this hasn't stopped uber-hawk, John Bolton from pushing the 'axis of evil' connection.
Four days after the appearance of the Anwar article a Lebanese MP, Antoine Ghanem was assassinated by a car-bomb in Beirut. The MP was a member of the Maronite Phalange party which was established in the 1930s as a copy of the European fascist parties. It was the Phalange which carried out the massacres at Shatila and Sabra Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982 under the tutelage of Ariel Sharon. Neither of these two salient facts were made known on BBC Radio 4 news reports which have only ever referred to Antoine Ghanem as being anti-Syrian. The BBC news website does mention these facts as a
profile on the Maronite Christians last updated on August 6th.
Though the article by Anwar is concerned with Syria she couldn't resist a one line dig at Iran. "I also noticed a lot of Farsee (sic) being spoken in Damascus. A detail." Farsi, an Arabic word, is the official Persian language of Iran. Syria and Iran have, understandably, developed an alliance following the illegal invasion of a neighbouring country - Iraq - and the threats they are receiving, almost daily, of military intervention to achieve regime change. So it should be expected that Farsi would be heard being spoken in Damascus, though I am sceptical that it would be all that common in the poor areas of the city where Iraqi refugees congregate. Both Iraq and Syria are Arabic speaking nations.
So what am I saying about Anwar's writings and this piece in particular? Well it reeks of counter-intelligence in that for it to be accepted as real requires the readers to have no understanding of the complexion of Syrian society. Ignorance is the lifeblood of successful counter-intelligence and the reason why this black art is so beloved by the CIA/MI6. I have no idea if Anwar is writing for them, but she is certainly not writing to build the unity of Iraqis in their struggle against the Anglo/American occupiers of her country or, come to that, others facing attack by the Anglo/American alliance. Her writings are a retreat from the questioning inherent in the complexity and diversity that made for Iraqi culture, into the narrow, shallow certainties of sect and abhorrence of the Other. It just fuels sectarian hatred and the civil war that the occupiers have so assiduously cultivated in Iraq.
There is another woman writer from Iraq who has made it to Damascus and exile. One whom I was greatly worried for if she stayed in Baghdad because her writings of the vicissitudes faced by her family and friends since the illegal invasion was so real.
Riverbend and her family have found the relative safety of exile from the killing fields of her country. It is not the situation anybody would like to find themselves in but there is now a glimmer of hope for her future.
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