The Bourne Temptation

Travelling from the couch – the COVID Chronicles Continued

What to do when you can’t go anywhere? Not here, not there, not anywhere. It’s for the best. We all know that, especially Bunnings staff. In some of my more fevered moments, I try to imagine how my father would have coped with the lockdown. He sold menswear for 52 years, not so much a slave to fashion but a slave to the routine of his working day. The thought of dealing with someone who refused to play by the rules would have probably forced him in to premature retirement. I remember his complete incomprehension at one customer who had taken umbrage at something Dad was trying to sell him, and thrown a silk tie, which finished up falling across Dad’s shoulder. My old man just couldn’t work out why anyone would get that angry about shopping. Thankfully, there was no such things as mandatory masks back in the day.

But I digress. I had a day off today. What to do? The gloom outside was a powerful incentive to retreat deep in to the house. I mused about my options from the horizontal comfort of the bed and settled on revisiting Jason Bourne for a bit of morning television. All the Matt Damon Bournes are pretty good, but my favourite is the Ultimatum – it feels coherent and understandable. Tony Gilroy’s script is a ripper, a model of economy without any loss of clarity. My highlight is the moment when Bourne rings the CIA Deputy Director Noah Vosen while Vosen is in his car, hoping to catch Bourne meeting fellow-CIA director Pam Landy. Vosen doesn’t know that Bourne is calling him from his office and when Vosen suggests they meet, Bourne reveals where he is. Bourne of course is uncatchable.

My reason for watching this again wasn’t particularly clear to me when I made my choice. But as soon as the opening scenes rolled – Moscow – and then the US, and Paris and London, Madrid and Tangiers, it all made sense: I was getting a little bit of cabin fever. I was travelling from the comfort of my lounge room, following Jason Bourne from a safe distance: the clamour and distinct noise of Waterloo Station, the clanging gates at Paris Metro Station, the vast zig zag of the New York skyline. It was a deeply satisfying experience on many fronts. Something else struck me about a movie made 13 years ago. Landy confronts Vosen about his determination to ensure Bourne and whoever is with him are eliminated. “Where will it end?’’ she asks. And he responds. “It ends when we win.’’ Coming six years after 9/11, you could, at a pinch, see the rationale but viewed from our perspective in 2020, it felt almost Trumpian, where ‘winning’ is at the expense of someone else and the enemy ‘within’ is almost as dangerous as the enemy ‘without’. It would be a comic book characterisation were it not so serious.

But the vicarious air miles were worth it. And now that I’m “back’’, I don’t have to quarantine for 14 days.