THOUGHTS ON PAUL GREENGRASS’S “GREEN ZONE” |
By Scott Macaulay

The genius of the Jason Bourne movies is their welding of existentialist inquiry with the demands of the thriller in a globalist age. Adapted from Robert Ludlum’s series, Doug Liman and screenwriters Tony Gilroy and W. Blake Herron established the template with The Bourne Identity, locating their film’s MacGuffin not in the outside world but under the skin of its hero. As ex-intelligence operative Jason Bourne skips from city to city, pursuing clue after clue, he is ultimately investigating not a case but his own identity. What kind of man was — is — he?

For my money, the first Bourne movie is the best (maybe just because it’s the first, and the fresh concept is so satisfying), but Paul Greengrass’s agitated camerawork and sophisticated editing made the next two more than sequels. As a director, Greengrass organizes physical space with the relentlessness of a search engine, mirroring the panoptical information state that exists around us. Of course, by doing so he accentuates the films’ central irony: in a world in which everyone can be tracked, followed, and indexed, Bourne searches for a kind of gnosis that can not be physically represented. He thus becomes a fascinating filmic protagonist. Is he a hero or a villain? We — and he — don’t know.

Less concerned with character and identity, Greengrass’s recent non-Bourne films are more broadly epistemological in their concerns. United 93 fixes on screen what remains unknowable as well as debatable — what really happened on board the downed flight on September 11. By reconstructing these events within a Hollywood picture, Greengrass implicitly poses questions about the relationship of politics and ideology to history. These issues are tackled again, head-on, in his latest, The Green Zone, in theaters now. Matt Damon is now Miller, a U.S. Army officer showing no traces of Jason Bourne’s inner conflicts. Commandeering missions to unearth weapons of mass destruction at sites identified by “human intelligence,” Miller comes to believe, first, that these leads are faulty and then, finally, fictitious. The camera jitters and the score pounds as Miller searches for “the … Read the rest