I stopped up late the other night and watched the Bourne Identity on Sky. OK, so it is really just a James Bond kind of thing. I personally think that Matt Damon looks too innocent and schoolboy-like to be your average James Bond kind of thug. But perhaps I have been watching xXx too much! Vin Diesel makes a better bad guy.
Cos of course in the end that is what Damon is.
Sorry if you haven't seen it.
But it struck me how much the whole film plays on the whole image theme. Damon is a pretty innocent looking kind of person - you even feel sorry for him - being plucked out of the water and having minor surgery by some foreign trawlerman who takes out this grubby toolbox and starts cutting him open. Who would not feel afraid. Next you see him on the streets of Zurich, homeless, memory-less, lost. But suddenly, when two cops try and challenge him, he lashes out with extreme violence - hospitalizing both...with minutes he is terrorizing the US Consulate and through the film you realise that actually behind the placid, innocent exterior lies a violent, programmed killing machine. Damon is an assassin. That is such a powerful image. Behind the innocence lies the training and the ability to do so much damage - and what he does to some people is just awful - note the violence of the final Paris scene where he uses one of his victims to break his fall. And then, in the last scene he turns up in Greece at his friend's new scooter hire company - now he is dressed in an collarless white linen shirt and jeans - the typical holidaymaker. However, he remains the killer. He has not dealt with the issues about Treadstone which the Professor tries to tackle moments before his death in the middle of the film - do you get the headaches...is it getting to you...and then he dies. The issues about what treadstone has done are not dealt with. Bourne/Damon tries to suppress them and ignore them by a violent orgy of destruction. In the end I was left wondering whether actually they were ever dealt with.
The postmodern love affair with the image...David Beckham's image is being shown in the Portrait Gallery - 1hour and seven minute video installation. Image is all - but what lies behind the image? Who is David Beckham? What does he think? What has his life trained him for? Another professional machine - a marketing tool, a media star, a commodity. He's a great footballer and my team (yes, I admit it, I support Man United) miss him! But the front means that you never get behind what is going on in the person. Image and superficiality always mask the real person.
Postmodernity wants us to take on the image and allows us to present multiple images...but who is the real Bourne or the real Beckham or the real Pete Phillips, or the real Jesus Christ? And what does that say about the hype about the Passion - another orgy of violence. I know it was true and I know that it represents one reading of the text. As an evangelical I want to support the film. But what of the imageless resurrection? We have no images of that. We do not know how it happened. It is the mystery. We have images of the resurrected Christ - not least through the stories of resurrection appearances...but does The Passion prove postmodernity needs image to relate to reality? Could Passion 2: The Resurrection have as great an effect?
And then, yesterday, a lightening bolt landing near the house blew the sky box! No images for three days! Help!
Must go...
Pete
Comments