No Country for Old Men

One of the classic action genre moments is where character of Anton Chigurh performs self surgery using supplies he recently stole from a pharmacy. I love these scenes. I’m normally so squeamish about blood, all aspects of our organic machinery, but I’m fascinated watching someone who can suture their own wounds as if they were wiring a plug. Like the wetware equivalent of recompiling a kernel.

It’s Hollywood shorthand for badass. Assassin, outlaw, good guy who for some reason is on the run from the authorities. It says “I don’t need anyone’s help”. Full respect for the expression of self-sufficiency, yet uneasy distrust at someone who consciously prepares themselves to survive outside of society’s protections.

It seems clichéd, yet when I check the imdb for movies with the keyword ‘self-surgery‘ I only get five results, none of them the aforementioned. Fail. Come on internets, there has to be more than that. A Bourne at least?

(Originally posted on vox.com)

Director Paul Greengrass critizised Bond for “wearing Prada suits”, seemingly oblivious to the fact that his protagonist runs about with a grand’s worth of shiny Tag Heuer on his wrist. Presumably because wearing a watch worth more than most men’s suits fits in nicely with the “low profile” look they were trying to achieve with the wardrobe?

Oh, and also he “doesn’t rely on high-tech gadgets”. This is, of course, balls. Bourne makes extensive use of cell phones in all three movies – a gadget that would have been considered pretty fantastical if featured in the bulk of Bond movies.

One of the reasons Bond movies of the 60s were popular was because they presented their spycraft gadgets as objects of everyday commuter mundanity. Wristwatches. Briefcases. Bowler hats. The possibility of a world existing just below the surface.

There was a time when wireless radio headsets were the sort of thing you’d see in “send-a-team-in” movies (You know: an elite team of well armed, technologically tricked out, highly trained operatives are sent in to deal with an unknown threat. One by one they’re picked off – and the only survivor is usually some unlikely civilian. A botanist, say. With a gammy leg or something). These days a bluetooth earpiece hardly bestows its wearer with any dangerous glamour.

The gap between movie fantasy and everyday mundanity for gadgets can be smaller than the time between sequels. By 2007 the movie world’s CIA is apparently using Google Maps to track targets. CIA computers protected by Norton Anti-virus. By comparison, the real-world’s supervillian “box-cutters” are already widely available.

One thing that struck me is that, for a globe-trotting movie, Bourne doesn’t seem to fly anywhere. Maybe it fits in the logic of the movie as a security/tradecraft thing? He’s in cars, and conspicuously on trains, buses and boats, but never on planes. For example, the journey from London to Madrid seems to be via train – presumably via Paris again. (Although I assume some unseen leg of his trip to New York would have been by plane).

The CIA guys seem to fly everywhere. In Supremacy, Pam Landy flies from Berlin to Washington DC for a few hours and then flies back to Berlin. Maybe, in the the current climate of eco-sensitivity, it’s a subtle way of separating good from bad, especially now that no-one’s allowed to smoke any more.

(originally posted on vox.com)