The Bourne identity the movie begins with the titular Bourne floating on the sea, the silhouette of his body visible through the wavy glass. The fact remains that most living bodies (unless it is dead) don’t float on water without sufficient aid. Even though this is physically impossible to achieve, it serves a symbolic purpose. Bourne returns to his primordial state, into the ocean of his mother’s placenta to the bedrock of his anxieties. He (or precisely them) loses everything he possessed, his segmented memories, multiple identities and his sole purpose on a ship. The main conflict spurns out of gaining a conscience. He finds the target, with his son, making him hesitate. Precisely at this moment, he loses his identity as a mindless tool for the state. 

A better tool would have carried out its duty regardless of his conscience. This exact moment could have been made into carrying a mission for the greater good. 

The floating egg is found by a passing fisher boat. No amount of effort in one’s side could change their fates to be treated like objects. Bourne born anew, is carried onboard. One of the fishermen carries out surgery to take out the bullets. He discovers a bullet that is the key to his secrets.  Like every amnesiac, they must discover their past identities. Blank slates, paradoxically, do not originate from a forgetting of the past, but a buckling from its pressure making it impossible to move on. One must rediscover their past to escape it.

We discover along with him what he used to be. Inside the secret box in the Swiss bank, lay several passports and large sums of money. 

It does not escape us our attention that Bourne travels quite a lot. In a globalized world like ours, transition from one place to another is sudden. With every transition in the movie from Berlin to Madrid (Paris and Zurich as well), we see the cogs of the world turn. CIA and NSA is hellbent on bringing (or containing) its agent back.

Wherever Bourne travels to, he finds a piece of himself. But this time, he takes a backward stage and stares at “the things he was” objectively.  In the discovery of his past identities, he realizes a cruel monster lying beneath him. He distances himself from such a being and seeks to mend his past wrongdoings(in the second movie). 

Similar to Jason Bourne, the modern traveler(or a normal vacation goer) begins as lost in the sea due to alienation. Only when the travelers move from place to place, do they feel the emptiness filling up with new experiences. I reckon one fills up this empty flask with calculations, recommendations and sponsorships by the almighty Google. 

One main difference exists here. In the movie, there is a single danger named CIA that wants Bourne dead. For the conspiracy theorists, dangers exist in singular quantities. But for us, there is no such thing, only the uncaring universe.

After I rewatched this in the return flight, this soon became the highlight of the trip to Kobe. I am here trying to find broken pieces just like him.