Friday, March 07, 2008

The Chaney Identity

This story begins on a steep street in Madrid. My wife and I are conversing happily as we descend. Around the corner strides a tall young man with what looks like a hundred-pound duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He’s climbing toward us faster and more gracefully than I can walk unburdened, and he isn’t breaking a sweat or even breathing heavily. I say to my wife, “That’s who I want to be.”

The guy was a vision of youthful independence, so I was forced to explain myself. It isn’t easy to say why you want to be like this or that, or what you are running from when you imagine a different life.

I thought of this vision last weekend while slumped on the couch with the flu. My mind was too mushy, and my bones too achy, for me to take on any project more ambitious than watching a movie. Luckily, The Bourne Identity was playing – with Matt Damon as a CIA assassin who has slipped his leash. In this first part of the trilogy, he has just lost his memory, but his undercover skills and killer instincts are perfectly intact, and he works methodically to discover who he is, while fighting off a sophisticated operation to shut him down. Jason Bourne is another version of the guy on the street in Madrid, my fantasy self.

No, I don’t slip around corners at the office, pretending to be Bourne. But in an idling part of my mind an ongoing fantasy involves my breaking free from the constraints of society to become a world adventurer or a secret agent who works to dismantle, or at least evade, a corrupt pervasive authority. In its extreme form, it’s the fantasy of the resistance fighter, the one who can sacrifice anything, even love, for the sake of a narrow but towering principle. True, the story sits four-square in the realm of paranoia, but its pleasure derives from the resourcefulness and miraculous invulnerability of the hero. Imagine being the master of your own existence, attached to things only insofar as they are useful, capable of adapting in an instant to any new opportunity or threat.

In reality I’m the opposite of Jason Bourne, physically, mentally, and emotionally. I enjoy lingering, reflecting. I need intimacy, plenty of sleep, a healthful diet. Gulliver-like, I’m bound to the earth by a thousand invisible threads. Precisely for that reason, I also want to break free.

So do many of you, I imagine. Our collective fantasy accounts for several billion dollars of video game sales per year. At this moment, millions of people (not just teenage boys) are slaughtering their way through virtual battlefields and post-apocalyptic urban slums, their blazing guns as light as air. They are decisive, masterful, in control.

And here’s the hard kernel of the fantasy: what each of us wants to be, ultimately, is a sociopath. Now, I’m not suggesting that the youth in Madrid was sociopathic, or even that Jason Bourne represents a sociopath. But the fantasy they embody has its roots in primordial sadism, and it is no accident that the fantasy of ultimate freedom often looks like a vision of total destruction. At the heart of these stories is an assault on story itself, an attack against the relationships that simultaneously give us meaning and make us vulnerable to loss.

The fantasy begins by destroying everything that matters to the human story we’ve grown up with. And so, think of it this way: Bourne’s world is a world without a mother, in which he must give birth to himself. Bourne is the man “not of woman born,” the fantasy of radical change, revolution, the creation of a monster. Yet becoming that monster is somehow our fondest wish.

I can’t decide whether this phenomenon is a sign of our maturity as a culture, since we have relegated the idea to the pleasant cycle of fantasy, or whether the mark set down by Bourne and so many others tells us what an incredibly short distance we have traveled from our origin in the trackless wilderness.

Broadcast by Joe Chaney on March 07, 2008
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