Believe Care Invest: The Bourne Identity

Why Jason might be hard to identify with

• He’s literally a blank slate. You might think we would most readily identify with an “everyman”, but they’re actually hard to identify with. We like heroes who know more than they show. 

Believe

• But we always like characters who have a lot of secrets, and that’s still true when his secrets are even secret from himself. His wounds take a believable amount of time to heal. He practices saying “Tell me who I am” before the boat lands. Watching characters practice for conversations is always relatable, for some reason. 

Care

• He’s literally lost everything. He doesn’t even know his name. He’s afraid of every cop and every siren.  He’s a walking wound. 

Invest

• He doesn’t know who he is, but right away he’s doing pull-ups on the boat.  He’s tying sophisticated knots compulsively. He speaks multiple languages. As soon as he confronts some cops, he busts out amazing moves to take them out. We love this bad-ass. Of course, as I’ve pointed out before, the moment we really fall in love with this is when he’s escaping from the embassy, sees an evacuation plan on the wall, and rips it off so he’ll have a map. 

Five Es

• Eat: Just the opposite, he chooses not to eat with the sailors (but he must at some point). 
• Exercise: He does pull-ups on the ship. 
• Economic Activity: The ship doctor gives him some money, he goes to a bank to get the rest of his money. 
• Enjoy: Nope he doesn’t enjoy anything until later in the movie.
• Emulate: I guess sort of when he ties knots while hanging out with the sailors? I got nothing.

Rise above

• He finds out who he is but decides not to report back to the US government. He leaves his guns behind in his safety deposit box, even though he’s figured out he’ll need them for whatever his job is. 

High five a black guy

• Nope.