“I’m Not Supposed To Be Here, I’m Supposed To Be Dead”

I said on Sunday that I've been thinking about the Jason Bourne series of neo-noir movie thrillers since I started this blog. Some recent comments from Trump about his assassination strike me as pertinent:

“I’m not supposed to be here, I’m supposed to be dead,” Trump told reporters from the New York Post and Washington Examiner aboard his plane to Wisconsin, where the Republican National Convention will kick off Monday.

Then regarding the Iwo Jima-style photo of him pumping his fist beneath the flag, he said,

“A lot of people say it’s the most iconic photo they’ve ever seen,” Trump said in the new interview. “They’re right and I didn’t die. Usually you have to die to have an iconic picture.”

I'm not sure if I like the word "iconic" -- it's overused, and it seems to mean more than it really means; I prefer "paradigmatic". But insofar as it refers to a kind of subliminal appeal to the psyche, I'm on board with it. As soon as I saw the quotes from the interview, I went back again to the Bourne thrillers. Why are they so appealing, and why do I find them so pertinent to the Trump story arc?

Let's go back to the fear that commentators have been expressing since well before the assassination attempt, like Frank Luntz, by no means the sharpest tool in the shed, last June 20:

Yes, Trump dropped a few points after being found guilty on 34 felony accounts, but remember this, that would have destroyed any candidate as recently as 10 years ago. And the fact that Donald Trump is still even with or in some cases leading Joe Biden after being found guilty of 34 felonies? Oh, my God, that is so significant.

And one more point, I'm watching the independent vote. I don't believe that they're swaying back and forth between Trump and Biden. I think that they decided that they hate both candidates. They hate both parties. And they're voting out of anger, out of desperation, out of resentment, that this is what our political system has gotten.

So, be very careful on how you analyze what goes on from now to the debates, to the election, because I think there could be a hidden anger vote that surprises everyone on Election Day.

He said the electorate is angry, and watch out. And he said it a week before the fateful Atlanta debate. Indeed, elite opinion has been voicing fear of MAGA retribution for months, per Reuters:

May 31 - Supporters of former President Donald Trump, enraged by his conviction on 34 felony counts by a New York jury, flooded pro-Trump websites with calls for riots, revolution and violent retribution.

After Trump became the first U.S. president to be convicted of a crime, his supporters responded with dozens of violent online posts, according to a Reuters review of comments on three Trump-aligned websites: the former president's own Truth Social platform, Patriots.Win and the Gateway Pundit.

This from NBC News on June 10:

Donald Trump wants to talk about revenge, and neither Sean Hannity nor Dr. Phil can stop him.

Both have tried.

. . . But for Trump, it’s all politics, and revenge may need to be meted out.

“Well, revenge does take time, I will say that,” Trump said during a Thursday interview with Dr. Phil. “And sometimes revenge can be justified, Phil, I have to be honest. Sometimes it can.”

This takes me back to a paradigmatic literary form, the early modern revenge play:

The revenge tragedy, or revenge play, is a dramatic genre in which the protagonist seeks revenge for an imagined or actual injury.[1] The term revenge tragedy was first introduced in 1900 by A. H. Thorndike to label a class of plays written in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras (circa 1580s to 1620s).

. . . While taken from Greek and Roman source material, many early Elizabethan plays with revenge themes had those themes exacerbated by the English translators. That is to say, the original stories were vengeance focused, but when rewritten and staged in England, they had an even greater focus on gruesome revenge.

In other words, they were popular because tastes demanded them:

Elizabethan audiences loved revenge tragedies, probably because they were used to watching horrifying scenes for entertainment, and popularity for this genre can be traced back to the 1580s. Although the earliest revenge tragedy we have access to The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd (c.1587), the Ur-Hamlet (also attributed to Kyd) was probably written about the same time and this play influenced Shakespeare’s Hamlet which, as we all know, is one of the most famous plays that has ever been written.

Revenge plays continued to be popular in the 1590s and early 1600s with some of the bloodiest revenge tragedies being produced between 1585 and 1595, including The Jew of Malta (c.1590) and Titus Andronicus (c.1592). They were written sporadically until the 1640s but they tapered off in the Caroline era as tastes changed.

So, what are current tastes as of the early 21st century? Let's look at one of the most popular film franchises of the past decade, John Wick:

The films have received critical acclaim, and have been considered one of the greatest action film series of all time. Many critics and publications consider the first film, as well as Chapter 4, as two of the greatest action films ever made. The films have earned a collective gross of more than $1 billion worldwide.

What's behind this?

John Wick embraces a quiet, sly silliness that borders on parody. It's a movie that knows what it is: bloody, visceral, and self-aware enough to wink at the audience from time to time with an expertly placed one-liner.

. . . Wick's prowess as a dealer of death is actually the best example of the franchise's tonal balance. He's legendary throughout the assassin community, an unstoppable Terminator-style figure that inspires awe as much as terrified resignation. The audience sees none of Wick's murderous history, however; it's all conveyed through dialogue that reads like a modern fairy tale or a superhero origin story. Viggo Tarasov (Michael Nyqvist), Iosef's father, flat-out abandons Iosef to his fate because that boy's in deep sh*t. But he still seethes over Wick's mythos, especially how Wick once killed three men with a pencil. "Who the f*ck does that?" he demands.

The Bourne film franchise, a decade older although sequels extend into the John Wick period, has the same winking irony, but it adds a specific theme of death, resurrection, and revenge that isn't as prominent in the Wick series. The Treadstone agents who are dispatched to kill Bourne always believe they've succeeded until the controllers at Langley find they've been outsmarted again. This is something the audience loves -- the sort of deep-state elitists you can see every night on The PBS News Hour being skewered and advised to hire good criminal lawyers.

So in many ways, it seems like the Trump story arc -- at least the part covered by his political career -- may as well have been written by a team of Bourne screenwriters, Trump in many ways battles the same villains who run Treadstone and their political patrons. Cheated at the ballot box, slandered in the media, sued by neurotic old women, indicted by comically corrupt DAs and slimy special counsel, reported dead time after time, still returns like Jason Bourse to make monkeys of every one of them.

Trump gives them the same Jason Bourne thrill, winks at the public, and the public loves every minute of it. Why? The public, as even Frank Luntz has begun tardily to discern, is angry. They're angry at the 2020 election. They're angry they were cozened iinto voting for Joe. They're angry at the polite verities. He understands the public mood better than anyone -- there's even a bit of old-time Hollywood there, but not the Holywood we ave now, except maybe for Bourne and John Wick.