ABSTRACT
The conspiracy thriller is a staple genre of popular cinema and, as the commercial success of the Bourne Trilogy has proved, one for which twentyfirst-century audiences still have an appetite. A narrative descendant of the post-war film noir, sharing its taste for moral corruption, criminal action, and principled investigation in menacing urban settings, the genre gained landmark status in American independent production of the 1970s. As liberal directors and actors sought to come to terms with issues of representation in an era of political assassination, escalating Cold War tension, and the growth of civil rights movements, three films in particular – The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974), Three Days of the Condor (Sydney Pollack, 1975), and All the President’s Men (Pakula, 1976) – gained emblematic status. These films were influential in establishing a narrative template linking thematic questions about the legitimacy and reach of political power with a visual style founded on a paranoid encounter with the domestic environment. On the one hand, the bleak thematics were consistent with an era in which mistrust of government was a topical reality. On the other, the use of authentic locations established the cinematic site of conspiracy as resolutely urban, resolutely familiar, and resolutely legible: the choice of Seattle, New York, and Washington, DC in the case of the three films cited above exemplified the genre’s direct correspondences between the identifiable modern city and plot lines concerned with finance, industry, and politics. These correspondences between national space and supranational forces were largely consistent throughout genre films of the era, and underpin the core dramatic concepts which have prevailed in more contemporary works, including the Bourne Trilogy. These include variations on: i) corruption within a high-ranking political agency (often an extension of American intelligence services); ii) a lone individual (often a journalist or writer armed only with words) in conflict with an organization with vast financial and material resources; iii) a discourse of surveillance in which the maverick hero is tracked through space and time by the organization; and iv) the constant threat of violent action (most commonly assassination) to eliminate the hero in the interests of a cover-up. But while the key dramatic elements of plot and characterization have remained steady, a significant narrative shift centred on the spatial
environment has occurred in the early twenty-first-century conspiracy thriller, a shift that reflects visually the impact of new technologies on cinema aesthetics, and thematically the post-9/11 experience of the USA in global politics and global violence. As this chapter will argue, the aesthetic and spatial shifts that we see in the Bourne Trilogy (The Bourne Identity, Doug Liman, 2002; The Bourne Supremacy, Paul Greengrass, 2004; The Bourne Ultimatum, Greengrass, 2007) renew the genre in terms of an attention to conventions and visual style, while offering a powerful dramatization of the geographical reach, technological capability, and violent potential of globalized systems. Key to the narrative trajectory of Jason Bourne in space and time is the trope of the destabilization of individual identity engendered by the experience of globalization.
