DENNIS O’NEIL: Spoiler Alert!
Spoiler alert! Spoiler alert! Spoiler alert! Danger Will Robinson! Alarums and excursions! Better watch out, better not cry, better not pout…Beware! Mayday! Here there be dragons! Detour, there’s a muddy road ahead…
Okay, enough of that.
What I’m warning you about is the ending of The Bourne Ultimatum, now playing at a multiplex near you, recipient of good reviews, maker of serious bucks and, in the opinion of residents of this house, a pretty good popcorn flick.
Except: the ending bothered me, (and here comes the reason for all those italicized cautions above): The bad guys are government functionaries who are perpetrating all manner of conspiratorial nasties. So how do the good guys win? By getting the truth out! By faxing incriminating documents to someone – the movie doesn’t specify whom – able to arrest the villains and get a congressional hearing convened, which will presumably tuck all the villainy into oblivion.
Well, it’s not the first time you’ve encountered this plot device, is it? Lots of thrillers have the protagonist saying the equivalent of, If only I can get the word out…If only I can contact the New York Times, the Washington Post, the television networks…Then he or she does, problem solved, roll end credits.
Okay, these entertainments are just that, entertainments, and we don’t have to measure them against real-world truth. But once, getting the word out actually did have real-world value. To cite just one example, Richard Milhous Nixon’s tainted presidency was squelched when the aforementioned Washington Post exposed Dick’s involvement in the Watergate scandal.
But now? For the past…oh, say, five years – our journalists were a bit tardy getting out of the gate – we’ve been getting the ugly and disconcerting facts in much, though not all, of the media, beginning with the information that the weapons of mass destruction our leaders used as an excuse to go to war didn’t exist through the hiring scandals through the news that scientists’ global warming warnings were redacted by administration do-bees to the current brouhaha about the firing of the attorneys and the involvement of an attorney general Newsweek terms “truth challenged”…Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera…
And are the wrongdoers brought low? Well, no, not unless it’s happened since I read the paper a few hours ago. The abuses seem to be abating, just a little, but they’re continuing and I, for one, am confident that we’ll learn of a spanking new abuse or two before the snow flies. We’ll learn about it by reading a magazine of a newspaper or watching television and the world will learn about it, too, all our friends and neighbors and those noble folk in the corridors of power and…the perpetrators will retire in disgrace and justice will be restored.
Ooops. Slipped into fiction writer mode for a moment there.
Next week, we may actually address something that concerns comic books. No promises, but I want everyone to know that we do, here in the Lower Hudson Valley, remember our roots.
RECOMMENDED READING: Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell.
Dennis O’Neil is an award-winning editor and writer of comic books like Batman, The Question, Iron Man, Green Lantern and/or Green Arrow, and The Shadow, as well as all kinds of novels, stories and articles.
I think one of the reasons "speaking truth to power" doesn't work as well now is that the current administration has co-opted the all-too-willing mainstream media to the point where anything they say is suspect. Stephen Colbert hit the nail on the head when he satirized that "facts have a well-known liberal bias." The goal is to skew and trivialize things so much that citizens become skeptical of EVERY news item, and truth itself becomes just another opinion. A decade ago I couldn't have imagined a country in which presidential candidates are actually asked if they believe in evolution, like it's some sort of fairy tale instead of well-established scientific fact.
It's the ending of FIRESTARTER, when the protagonists go to ROLLING STONE with their story. Even ROLLING STONE editiors said that wouldn't work.
I agree with your estimation completely Denny! In fact, the movie started to go south for me the moment Bourne tells the bad Gov't guy that he's in his office. I wondered: "Why the heck did he do that?" All that accomplished (besides getting a whoop outta the audience) was make things MUCH tougher for Bourne. Rather than risk the violent chase that ensued, he could've gotten out of the building with the incriminating evidence and taken his own sweet time figuring out how to REALLY nail these guys (because the media has virtually no credibility anymore, and there's been the equivalent [or worse] of the Blackfriar Operation going on right this very minute in real life, and nobody seems to care, nor is anybody creating Congressional hearings about it [this admin. has openly admitted committing treason in the Valerie Plame affair and then basically added: "so?"]). Everything from that point in the movie on, I basically reacted with: "Huh?' Wha? Well, that's a bit disappointing, ain't it?"
This very concept was already addressed in the film THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR starring Robert Redford.I won't bother to "spoil" it. For those that have not seen it, it is well worth the time and effort.
Denny is totally dead on. The mainstream press would never vigorously go after the current political leadership. In reality, the story would die, one or two heads would roll but would be well taken care of by those who support the political leadership.Holy crap! A realistic ending would have been the perfect set-up for a sequel!