Wondering

[ksmith]

Watching Bourne Supremacy. Loving Bourne Supremacy.

But. I know all about muscle memory and instinct and training that becomes second nature and all that. But if you are suffering amnesia and do not remember anything about your background or your life before a certain point, and only a little here or there of what you were before, is it reasonable that you would remember all your deadly assassin skills, how to vanish and how to tail? The languages you spoke?

Different areas of the brain? Or was it a very specific injury that was explained in the first movie?

WARNING: SPOILERS ABOUND--READ AT YOUR OWN RISK

Comments

[daveamongus.livejournal.com]

Languages I'm sure are something else entirely, and I've heard that many skills are sort of separate from what we think of as memory. How that translates to experience-based skills ("This will work because it worked for me in this place and these circumstances"), I dunno.

[(Anonymous)]

There was no physical injury described in the first movie. The only explanation given is trauma. But having seen all three movies, I would argue that his amnesia was psychosomatic.

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

Different areas of the brain, and different routes to amnesia. There's still a lot not understood about how the brain in general, and memory in particular, works.


Er, which is to say, do I really think a Bourne scenario is likely? No. But it's not outside the realm of "known and understood"; so for definitions of "speculative" that most SF writers are comfortable with, it works for me.

[pbray.livejournal.com]

It wasn't really explained in the first movie, while the books did some pseudo-science handwaving. One of things to keep in mind is that this is his second loss of identity--his original identity as David Webb was erased through psychological programming and replaced by the Jason Bourne construct. Jason Bourne is an artificial identity, one that required constant monitoring and reinforcement to ensure that he did not develop self-will. So from that perspective, the loss of a constructed identity might be seen as more believable because it was in fact an artificial construct, rather than a lifetime of true memories.

Eventually it's revealed that even before the accident, Jason was already showing signs that his implanted identity was fracturing, which is why he was considered an expendable liability and given a mission meant to be his last.

I read the first three books when they came out. Haven't read either of the two authorized sequels, but keep thinking that I may put them on the TBR list.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I've heard the books are really bad--are they? I would like to read them, because they contain info that the movies don't. But I remember reading Day Of The Jackal and wondering how they had made such a dandy movie out of what was a really, imho, turgid piece of exposition.

[pbray.livejournal.com]

My memory is rusty, but I remember the first book as being a very good read, for a 1970s style spy novel. The next two were good, but not as good.

One reason why I haven't reread the books is that the technology that drove most of the plot is so dated--they did a good job of updating it for the movie, but the original was set in the era of microfilms and telexes rather than cell phones, GPS and the internet.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Yeah. The Talented Mr. Ripley is one of my favorite books as far as character studies go. But it was written in the 50s, and all I could think of as I read the crime portion was how dated it was.

[(Anonymous)]

"Bad" doesn't begin to describe the Bourne books. Ludlum was a horrible writer, in that he turned his idea into the one character in each book that wasn't merely a plot device. His prose is awful. For all of their flaws, the Bourne films are considerably better written than the novels that inspired them (fortunately, they don't follow the novel plots all that closely... nor, for that matter, the secondary characters).

And, what's far worse, the situations Ludlum posits make no sense whatsoever to anyone who has spent any time inside of actual intelligence/counterintelligence. I never managed to suspend my disbelief for long enough to get into the flow of the books.

— CEP