Back many years ago I used to go to our local library looking for something new and interesting. I would go through the stacks looking for books that had many copies, thinking that popular meant good. I’m no literary critic, but in that manner, I discovered Robert Ludlum, and gobbled up everything he wrote. If not good, at least he was enjoyable. He had a sense of authenticity about him, and his characters, while formulaic, were not the typical American-good-everyone-else-bad type. Anyone could be a villain, duplicity was all about, and power was always hidden in the shadows.
Ludlum died having written perhaps half of his final book, and other authors took over. I could tell, reading that last book, exactly where he passed on. The writing voice changed, the characters became cardboard cutouts.
Robert Ludlum is now a trademark, and the books are written by a committee named “Robert van Lustbader.” I’ve not read another since.
His character Jason Bourne was a wide favorite. A spook who suffered amnesia, he began to discover, as Matt Damon put it, that he was the biggest bad ass on the planet. They made a movie of it, The Bourne Identity, and it was fun to watch as this young man discovered hidden talents, an amazing memory, and incredible reflexes. He also fell in love, had a guilty conscience, and just wanted to be left alone. He was a bit complex.
Two more movies followed, but Hollywood being what it is, they became less enthralling, and substituted chase scenes for real plots. They introduced us to a world Ludlum would have laughed at, where elected officials have real power, where there is a real news media. Spook agencies in these sequels tremble in fear that journalists will expose them, that a congressional committee will grill them, de-fund them. My willing suspension of disbelief went out the window. The movies became mere gladiator spectacles.
I have tried now, twice, to sit through the latest installment, JasonBourne. Two nights ago I awoke to see the credits rolling. What did I miss? Something about Las Vegas. One important facet of movie making was missing: acting. Tommy Lee Jones was as believable as head of the CIA as George Bush in the role of POTUS.
Julia Stiles was carried over from The Bourne Ultimatum, and, of course, killed. Jason is not allowed the comfort of a close companion. But she needed to go, as we were to believe that she too had Bourne’s gifts of computer wizardry and street fighting. She’s a pretty person, and yes, I always buy that a woman can be soft and beautiful and also kick fight and throw a punch that drops a man like a bag of Play Doh. In this movie they they gave us a new girlfriend, Alicia Vikander, who hails from the Walking Stick school of acting. But it’s OK. They will kill her in the next sequel. Honestly, she needs to be killed.
In The Bourne Identity, they gave us the character Marie, played by Franka Potente. She was more of the true Ludlum style, an innocent thrown into an evil world who survives by previously undiscovered nerves. She and Jason were deeply in love – he still had his boyish charm, and yeah, it was just a movie, but I bought into them. They killed Marie in The Bourne Supremacy, as tragic waste of a vital character.
Since that time Bourne has turned morose, brooding, violent and boring. He’s not aging well. I hope in the next movie sequel (The Bourne OK Guys Let’s Just End It?), they do us all a favor and kill him off too.
Piece of Mindful 
I watched a little of it a few months ago. What I remember was Julia Stiles getting killed by a sniper, around the time of the Dallas sniper attacks. I know we talk about committees writing these movies, but I would love to know the logistics because it amazes me how it all ties together.
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I believe I saw all the Bourne movies besides the last one, but I forgot the plots. I wonder if the journalist plot elements prepared the people for Snowden and Assange.
Regarding journalists, I find it interesting that Superman is a journalist. In ancient times Ogma (Irish)/ Ogmios (Gallic) was the god of eloquence and alphabet. Ogmios is liken to Hercules. There is also some solar symbolism in Ogmios/Hercules/Superman. In a way you can say they symbolize the power of propaganda (written/audio/visual).
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The real “journalist” in Superman is Lois Lane – that franchise is dead to me since the latest reincarnation – I watched the first one, which was 9/11 redux, only because some scenes were shot in a place we had just visited, Vancouver Island. In it, Lane is smart, aggressive, creative, confrontational to power. I could easily buy that a man can fly and drill holes in the earth by spinning his body. But that portrayal of an American journalist just blew it for me. It was too unrealistic.
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So far 3 of the Bourne movies, including this one, were directed by Paul Greengrass. In between his first two Bourne movies, he directed United 93 about the alleged flight on 9/11 that allegedly crashed in Pennsylvania and is famous for the catchphrase “Let’s Roll.” (Mark you talk about head-smacking moments: one of mine was when I stopped to think about the fact that so many of the alleged victims on 9/11 allegedly called their loved ones on cell phones from tens of thousands of feet up in the air.)
That is a tip-off about this guy, and looking at his Wiki and IMDB page, he seems like a psyop auteur. He started out directing TV news and “co-authored the notorious book Spycatcher with Peter Wright, former assistant director of MI5, which contained enough sensitive information that the British Government made an unsuccessful attempt to ban it.” (Yes, we know that the best way to get people to ignore someone’s book and not take it seriously is to try to ban it.)
Let’s see, what else…”He then moved into drama, directing non-fiction made-for-television films such as The One That Got Away, based on Chris Ryan’s book about SAS actions in the Gulf War and The Fix, based on the story of the betting scandal which shook British football in 1964.”
So pro-war propaganda that is almost certainly a fiction given that Wikipedia tells us it “tells the true story of a SAS patrol during the 1991 Gulf war.” And a movie about a psyop designed to make people think that sports are only occasionally fixed by a few bad actors and when they are, the truth will come to light and people punished.
“It was announced in late July 2013 that Greengrass was in final talks to direct Aaron Sorkin’s script about the Chicago Seven, a project to which Steven Spielberg had been attached… “Sony Pictures announced that Greengrass will be the director of an upcoming version of the George Orwell novel 1984.”
We have good reason to believe the Chicago Seven trial was manufactured to discredit the peace movement (and hippies in general), and George Orwell was a spook. So basically Greengrass seems like the go-to guy when you want your psyop sanctified. (His gritty, intimate, “real-world” style lends itself to making fake things seem real.) If that is true, it suggests that all movies he has made about “real” events are really about fake events. Three of which raised my eyebrow: Bloody Sunday, Captain Philips, and Memphis.
The first is about the alleged British massacre of Irish protesters in 1972, where 26 were shot, 13 of whom died on the spot and another 1 of whom died later on. It never occurred to me that this event was a psyop. There is a lot of video footage from that day. I spent a few minutes looking it over. Seems like a lot of similarities with modern day hoaxes like Paris, Brussels etc: lots of shots that are meant to be evocative of the violence and destruction we never actually see. Anyway, would be interesting to pick that one apart. Though some of it seems real enough (just not the carnage). Not ready to close the book on that one just yet, though.
The second was about a merchant marine captain who volunteered to be held for ransom by Somali pirates to save his crew. Not so hard to believe that story was made up. But: it also suggests that the whole pirate scare off the coast of Africa was a big psyop. Notice how we don’t hear about it anymore. Did the pirates just decide it wasn’t worth it anymore? Was there some massive action taken to crack down on it? Or did the psy-ence fiction writers just get tired of that story line? I could probably answer some of these questions with a quick google search, but I don’t feel like it.
I will end my comment by noting that after 1984, Greengrass is slated to direct Memphis, one of two new movies about the final days of MLK. Make of that what you will.
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I have looked a the MLK assassination and believe it was faked. But I didn’t have the tools to marshal any evidence that would convince anyone. Maybe now I do. For one thing, at the Lorraine we don’t see his face in any if the post-shooting photos. For another, we can ascertain that his security was removed from the building beforehand, something that they would not have done if he were in real danger. Those guys were deeply loyal to him, so Jesse Jackson telling them they have to vamoose would have steeled them for something and put them on high alert.
Then there are the coffin shots. The wife and kids are standing over the body, but their expressions are stilted, unemotional. If it were a normal family they would be distraught, angry, inconsolable. The little kids would be in shock. I saw none of that.
Given what we know now, how they placed the face of JFK on another man and Oswald’s on a cadaver, I want to take a look again at those coffin shots. It would be very hard to uncover anything, as his head is buried deep in the lining, but you never know … I could get lucky.
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A thought I read a while ago, had to really search for it but it’s always worth another reading, something I wanted to share here. Pretty similar to many things said at PoM, written by Jasun Horsley of auticulture.com :
“In Robert Altman’s The Player, the Faustian producer-executive played by Tim Robbins makes a quip to the effect of: “Now if we can only do away with the writer, we’d really be cooking.” Hollywood has yet to succeed in this goal, but it has come close. Nowadays big Hollywood movies are worked on (not only before but even during shooting) by so many different writers-for-hire that the end result is that the movies seem to have been written by no one, or not to have been written at all. The situation is thus: a seemingly inexhaustible stream of worthless movies that make money for studios to make more worthless movies with, and so keep the public hungry for ever-more worthless movies. The medicine that forever promises but never delivers the cure. It is a blueprint for everlasting dominance over the masses, Hollywood supreme, worlds without end. Save for one single factor—Time.
Time means change; time means impatience with and intolerance for no-change. One way or another, change must come to pass. When a system refuses to change, when it establishes itself—finds “stability” from—a refusal to change, then the need for change builds and builds, until a point where it can only come about apocalyptically, i.e., suddenly and catastrophically. A long period of apparent no-change, then, is the ideal lead-in to a short period of transformation.
A system that is corrupt is by definition already dead. Corruption comes not before but after death has occurred.
This simple logic can—and must—be applied to the world today: the legal world, the political world, the world of media and entertainment, and the world of Hollywood. Concepts such as Art, Science, Religion, since they are eternal and abstract, cannot be corrupt, nor can they be corrupted. They stand outside any institution or discipline that claims to represent them. The institutions themselves however—those lifeless structures, ideologies, theories or styles—are like shells, crusts that form around the abstract, in order to make us conscious of it. As such, they are by their very nature corrupt; the only question is how corrupt they are. This usually relates to how long they have been around.”
from here: http://auticulture.com/wp-content/uploads/Horsley-on-Hollywood.pdf , even more deep insight is his piece on the movie “The Counselor” .
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We’ve had a bit of trouble with spooks and trolls, as you know Vex. As I have it set up now you only need be approved for one comment, and all that follow are unimpeded. If this is not the case, let us know and we’ll make appropriate adjustments. We have no desire to monitor your input.
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Noted, Mark, thanks.
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