Bourne Ultimatum–The “Real” Ending Contest
Small spoiler below…well, I think it’s small.
Re The Bourne Ultimatum movie (see prior post)–Ann just said to me, “And what’s the big deal? He finds out he was part of an assassin program? Like he hasn’t figured that out?!” Me: “But he finds out he was a volunteer.” Ann: “Puhleease.”
Okay, so, like, I think it’s time for another contest. Entertain me, dear readers. Bourne makes it to the place where he’ll find out “the truth”. Give me an alternate ending. What’s the real truth behind Jason Bourne? What does he *really* find out? Contest ends Friday at noon EST and the winner receives a copy of Best American Fantasy and the trade paper of Shriek: An Afterword. Be as realistic or ridiculous as you like. I’ll be the judge o’ the best answer. Everyone can enter up to five times. Use your full names, please.
Jeff
29 comments on “Bourne Ultimatum–The “Real” Ending Contest”
He WOULD have learned that he was “created” in an experiment that attempted to replicate Albert Finney’s ability to drag a syllable out for an eternity. They accidentally made him a super fighting spy guy instead. Unfortunately, with the bad guys hot on his tail, he was only able to get three words out of Finney’s character before being forced to shoot the old man and flee via the rooftop, etc, etc.
Jason Bourne learns that he is a human forced to repeat the same events over and over as as sort of time occupier, so that his mind remains active and somewhat sane. This allows giant psychic butterflies to use him as a wing decoration. In a fit of depression, he kills himself, only to wake up during the scene in the second movie where his wife dies, and with a cry of horror he realizes that he didn’t escape the game, but was instead taken back to the last checkpoint.
Man, old sci fi was the best.
***
Alternatively, if you’re looking for something slightly more original, Jason Bourne learns that he was in fact an assassin programmed to kill the president, but after his super-stealthy attempt to kill the prez with a pretzel failed, his handlers decided he was a liability. Too greedy to simply kill him, they instead sold him to the highest bidder – which just happened to be a European front company for a group of militant racist Greeks who wanted to use him to destroy the Turks forever by killing the heads of state and plastering blasphemies against Attaturk all over everything. Their uprising failed before it even started however, when in a drunken stupor they attempted to use Moltov cocktails to burn down the local Turkish quarter. The turks were easily able to repel the attack, beat up everyone involved, and tossed them in the Mediterranean.
Jason Bourne decides that the only way to set things “right” is to succeed in eliminating the president, and proceeds to lead the CIA on a merry chase as he tries to accomplish his goals. He fails, and in an epic car chase / rooftop chase / ski boat chase appears to die in an enormous fireball on the Potomac. The CIA, relieved that everything seems to have worked out for the best (collateral and dead agents notwithstanding), proceeds to sweep everything under the rug.
The last scenes are a replay of the seconds before the explosion. We see that Jason Bourne is not in fact dead… but just before the explosion, was snatched forwards in time by a man who mysteriously resembles Mick Jagger, to serve as the replacement body for a very old man who is afraid of dying. The final scene is Jason Bourne, staring at the sophisticated Techno-city in front of him, as the Mick Jagger lookalike says, in a voice over, “I want him without a scratch…”
It was all a dream. Bourne wakes up to find that he is the President, well the President’s husband actually. In the background you can see Hillary stepping out of the shower.
He finds out he’s really Ben Affleck.
Completion of the story would ultimately come with the closure of realistic paranoia. Bourne constantly thought that others were looking for him, seeking him out all through the first and second movie. By the end of the second movie, it was believed that the Treadstone project was entirely out of the way.
How wrong he was.
In reality, the entire time the Treadstone project was running, it was only a side-project of Operation Remaking. The overseers of this seperate project are black bag experts from the 70s, survivors of the Bay of Pigs up until current, all specialized in the killing of other humans. A group of assassins, retired and constantly on the lookout. After finding out he was a volunteer, Bourne fails to believe it and begins tracking the information back through the government with the help of sympathetic officials. This ultimately leads him to the warden of a run down southern prison. The warden of this prison informs him that previously, he was an inmate of the institution and had been originally put there for the murder of his family and friends. He was put into penance at the prison specifically because he was a cold blooded killer, responsible for the death of a dozen people and incapable of controlling his own bloodlust.
The warden of the prison then informs him that Operation Remaking recruited him for Project Treadstone, forwarding him to their re-training and background washing facility at the CIA. After months and months of rebuilding and physical training, they managed to harness the uncontrolled rage and hone it down to a razor’s edge… And began picking targets. Alexander Conklin (killed at the end of the first movie) Ward Abbott (killed himself at the end of the second movie) were actually the only knowing members of Operation Remaking. With their help, OR funded the Russian oil program (see the second movie) and took serious kickbacks for themselves from it.
The only reason Bourne isn’t still a point-and-click killer is because he went through trauma, and the amnesia (determined to have been created by new found guilt) allowed him to experience emotions he hadn’t even known since he’d tortured his first animal as a child…
Long story short… End wraps up with him either learning the moral high road and taking it, or winding up screaming locked in a padded cell. Take your pick.
Jesus Christ, guys, you’ve really thought about this!
Jeff
He finds out he’s the son of the Evil Monkey. Ah. (The Evil Monkey being the head of a government agency even worse than the CIA.)
He finds out the truth: He is not Bourne at all, but a bad actor by the name of Matt Damon.
Jason Bourne is confronted by the ultimate reality, he is Darth Vader’s son.
As he makes his way into the building were it all began, he is flooded with memories. The spill of thought fragments come with an intense pain, making Jason double over. Each shard of memory feels like needle teasing its way into his brain. The sound of agents hurriedly clamoring toward his location filter into his awareness, as he struggles to pull himself together. The memories had been revealing themselves to him in bursts for a long time, but with his arrival here, the levy has broken and with it comes intense pain and the deep sense of inevitable retribution.
He starts to move. He is guided through the grimy, flaccid government halls by a familiarity with the layout of the building that he does not completely understand. He makes his final turn down the hall leading to office, the last stop for him on his journey. The last breath for whomever resides there. As he rounds the corner, agent Landy appears before him like a ghost, leveling her Glock 9 mm at his chest. She never intended to get the documents into the right hands. She seems cold as ice as he hears her her say “Jason, but the gun down”.
She is standing 3 yards away. Without conscious thought, he hurls his gun at her face with incomprehensible speed. Her arms fly up to protect her face, but she is too slow to do any good. He hears a shot hit the ceiling as she gets a round off. Bourne reaches her just as the gun is pulverizing the bridge of her nose. An explosion of blood and bone hits him in the face as he slips behind Landy wrapping his arm around her neck. Through bubbles of blood she struggles to speak but no sound is made as he milks the life from her.
Laying her body on the ground, he makes his way toward the office door at the end of the hall. As he reaches for the flimsy doorknob, he hears the sound of a latch. Without pause he turns the knob and it opens with the sound of a babies breath. Sitting in a chair behind an enormous oak desk, covered in stacks of files and adorned with family photos in cheap gold frames, is a sleight man in think glasses. “Sit down Jason” he says.
“It’s so good to see you again”. Bourne hears this through a wall of pain as another wave of memories hit him. “It seems like you’ve come home” the man goes on. “Did you ever wonder why you were the best of them”?
“I know your memory has suffered, I want you to remember me”. Bourne looks around, he notices one of the photos in a gold frame is of this man and Pamela Landy holding hands walking on a beach with a small child.
“You see son, I never wanted to hurt you”…
Bourne dies, Ron and Hermione have to go to World’s End to bring him back after delivering the souls of 100 muggles to Davy Jones.
No, no, no – you’re all wrong! The big reveal is that dating Julia Stiles is apparently such a heinous experience that a guy will volunteer as a guinea pig in a brainwashing assassin program just to get away from her.
[Go #2. Though as of my start, I’ll admit I loved the twist on Goran’s. lol.]
Jason is caught. Plain, but not so simple… Let’s rewind some.
“Ms. Ames”, an informant contacts Jason through a reluctant Pamela Landy, and informs him that there is more to his history than anyone realizes. Jason keeps this in mind while he ferrets out his place in Treadstone. He discovers his state as a volunteer and has trouble believing it… He thinks back to the information and puts an intricate plan into motion.
He discovers where Ms. Ames resides (Chicago), where she works (“Golden Times Preschool”), and surveillances her for 2 days. He shadows her when she buys her groceries, watching from behind a stand of melons and other fruit. He follows her to a theater, and sits in the back row while she watches a sad old movie (Casablanca era). He trails her home and watches from outside while she has a heated argument on her home phone and slams down the receiver. Flash forward to the next day, the day he plans to meet her.
Ms. Tessa Ames is a brunette, mid-30s, lithely built and occupying a straight backed wooden chair at the front of a daycare classroom. Jason slips in from the side and watches while she reads the book ‘Where The Wild Things Are’ to the gathered four and five year old children. The children seem contented, but a few do glance toward Jason on his entry. Damn, caught by five year olds. He waits for her to finish, and she tells all of the children to go ahead and find a toy. They scatter and she slips out of the room, motioning for Jason to follow her. She doesn’t seem startled by him, in fact she carries the eyes of a person trouble by what she sees but not afraid. Jason follows her out… There is an exchange between them as subtle orchestral music (primarily piano in the foreground) swells in the distance. Light filters in from doors at the end of the hallway, playing across old wood. The camera backs away from the pair, only to flash back to her face, a tear rolling down her left cheek and her eyes staring into the camera.
Tessa: “Why did you come here, David? You could have called, sent me a letter, anything, but why did you have to come _here_?”
Jason (coldly): “You contact me. Lead me to believe that I have some kind of life I’m unaware of… and then you wonder why I came? To be honest, I’m tired of being jerked around by people that think they know whats best for me and keep everything from me. By people that want me in prison or want me killing people for them. I need to know what it is that you know, but didn’t tell me in that letter!”
Tessa (confused): “Killing people? David, what is going on? Don’t you _know_?” (shocked expression, tear finishes rolling down her cheek)
Jason (sighing): “No, I got hurt… I don’t remember much of anything about myself. I don’t know who I am really, only know the name David Webb because someone else told me and I only know about you because someone was nice enough to pass your letter along at all.” (becomes stern, but patient) “Now please tell me what it is you’re keeping from me.”
Tessa (eyes wide): “David, you left me 4 years and 11 months ago. We got into an argument, you were being reassigned to a new unit and had just been offered some kind of government program that would take care of all of us in return for you going somewhere secret.” (dramatic pause) “The arguement was because I told you I was pregnant.” (slight pause) “Then you ran away from it.”
Jason (stands awe struck, but shakes his head in denial): “You don’t have a kid. I watched you, you didn’t spend any time with a child of your own all day yesterday. I was at the grocery store, the theatre, on your street… I watched you lock the door and slam the phone down.” (becoming increasingly agitated, pupils dilating, panic filling him)
Tessa (light of understanding filling her eyes as she speaks): “I didn’t send any letters, David. I didn’t… And my mom dropped Kevin off this morning.”
Police bust in the doors at either ends of the hall, guns raised and Landy leading the front with several FBI and CIA agents. Guns all turn to Jason Bourne, wanted international killer. The door now seen from between Tessa and Jason opens with a small sandy-blonde haired boy poking his head out, “Mommy? Whats that noise?” The sounds of guns cocking is added to the sound.
A look passes between Tessa and Jason, and Jason sidesteps to put himself between the child and mother, and the guns. He raises his hands, including the gun he had been clutching in his hoody’s pocket. He drops the gun to the floor and holds his hands out to be cuffed. “I’m done.” he says and the lights fade away, credits begin to roll… Well, almost.
White text blurb at start of credits: “David Webb (alias Jason Bourne) was released from custody fourteen months after apprehension, his bail made by Agent Pamela Landy of the CIA and supported by the United States Justice Department. Following the bail, a counter-suit was filed against the US government for mistreatment of an Officer in the US military body. The case went to the supreme court, and a gag order went to the newspapers. Charges were dropped two months later, and restitution agreements were not made public.”
Queue music. Really roll the credits.
[Pant.. Pant.. I’m spent. Well, almost.]
How could I forget the optional scene after the credits:
Jason stands partially obscured behind a wooden electrical wire pole, looking through small binoculars into a city backyard. Through the binoculars can be seen Tessa pushing Kevin on a swing set. Jason puts his back against the pole, breathing hard and turns to walk toward the yard.
The screen goes black as soon as he clears the pole…
[K. Now I’m done.]
Jocelyn Bourne was unhappy as a woman. She went to her Doctor for a sex change operation and came out Jason Bourne. The clinic was an experimental one, and the Doctor convinced her that the transition would be easier if her memory of her previous identity was removed as well. Once Jason was created with no physical footprint and no psychological footprint, the Doctor finally had his anonymous spy. But he loved Jocelyn as a woman and hoped to have children with her before this all began. After he sacrificed her to the bigger picture he didn’t anticipate his love would succeed the operation. Now, when Jason points a gun in his face, he’s still secretly stimulated and he can’t kill him.
Bourne kicks the door down to the room containing the secret of his origins only to have it collapse in on itself like wet paper. He rips the cardboard away and steps in to see gaudy stage prop backgrounds, drawings of albino fetuses in Sci-Fi green glass stasis tubes, mannequins in various paramilitary fatigues and others naked and tied head to toe with belts of squib packets.
The props fall over revealing every person he’s killed or seen die in the course of the franchise. They wear party hats and greet Bourne cordially, explaining to him that he’s been the unwitting star of a highly successful series of reality action films since he woke up on a Spanish fishing trawler in the Mediterranean. Among the party are several men in digital camouflage, the cameramen. Dumbfounded and smiling, Bourne looks over his shoulder to see a sweat-streaked man holding a shuddering HandiCam with no means of gyroscopic support to steady the images he is still filming.
Ice cream cake is sliced and passed out, which he happily tucks into after his handing his pistol to the props manager. They show him what work they’ve “published so far” and have a chuckle watching on a small tabletop TV what looks like footage of Richard Chamberlain and Jaclyn Smith running down a city street. The actress who played the role of Marie Kreutz offers him a place to stay for the night and he accepts, settling awkwardly on the couch in her flat trying obviously to arrange his thoughts, but collapsing into deep sleep instead. He wakes up laying on his chest with a terrible back ache with his memory again escaping him. The ground underneath him bobs as if suspended on turbulent water and he sees an older man sitting at a desk, speaking to himself in Spanish.
OR it turns out they’re all dead and in Purgatory.
He’s told that he was actually being trained for extremely hazardous pizza delivery (EPD). Bush decided that not only should every US soldier have access to a coke but that they should be able to have a Domino’s pizza too – where ever they are in the world.
Thus all that business about assassinations ect was really just testing to see if he had the guts to do a deliverator-style pizza run in Afghanistan.
Or if I can have another one…
Bourne is informed that he was being groomed for the presidency. Due to his telegenic good looks and supreme acting skill he was the perfect candidate.
But then it was discovered that he had a speech impediment.
At first he merely spoke as little as possible (the results can be seen in the films) but then it was decided that his self-confidence needed a boost so he was given courses in martial arts usw and set up to kill various members of the security forces. Unfortunately, he went to far and killed a foreign leader; turning him into a loose end that needed tying up…
Yup, you can have another one…
Jeff
Bourne discovers that Treadstone and Blackbriar were followup projects of the multiple Oswald manufacturing project of US Navy Intelligence, as described by Kerry Thornley, who considered himself to have been one of the potential Oswalds in training. ONI’s assassin program was created as competition to the CIA’s repeated attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro.
But the Treadstone and Blackbriar projects have languished due to lack of funding for implementation – development, they could do. Coupled with the increasing age of Castro and the now-erroneous expectation in 2006 that Fidel would be dead by the end of the year, the project was scrapped in mid-2006 as less effective than waiting for a sick old man to die soon.
Now all the Treadstone team has been languishing around the brownstone like horse carriage manufacturers after that startup of Henry Ford’s launched, wondering what their meaning in life is now that their lifes’ dedication has been deemed superfluous. Angsting away in irrelevancy, they’ve let their skills lapse through ennui and have mostly drifted off into various employments in the private sector. A large portion of the operators have taken the path of least effort and taken jobs as bouncers in one or another of the thousand bars in New York City, where their skills in violence and false identification prove an easy way to make money, and where alcohol is easy to come by. Sometimes they drift back to 71st Street for any news hoping for orders of a HALO drop over Havana. But Dr. Hirsch, the only father any of them has now, never has any news for them.
Ending #1
“You know,†the bad guy says, “I’ve had enough of this shit. It’s always Treadstone this, Treadstone that round here. I’m trying to get some bloody work done. This was a stupid idea right from day one. Your name’s Bob Smith, all right? Your wallet and car keys are in the desk over there. Second drawer down. You can talk to Ms. Manning in Accounts about your back pay. Piss off home, will you, Bob?â€Â
Damon blinks and clenches his jaw in surprise, relief, gratitude. He shoots the bad guy anyway, out of habit, and the guy falls out backwards through the window, and it is awesome. Damon clenches his jaw as if to say, damn, I suppose I should stop doing that sort of shit now.
He gets the car keys. In the wallet — his wallet — he finds Bob Smith’s gym membership card, expired, with an address on it. He drives home, stopping at all the lights, killing no one. As he pulls onto the interstate, he suddenly thinks: wait, who was I supposed to talk to about back pay? (If the director doesn’t think Damon’s jaw alone can express this, now may be a good time to introduce a voiceover–everyone likes voiceovers).
Damon arrives at a small suburban house in New Jersey. He hurls the car into the driveway with a flawlessly efficient handbrake turn. The neighbors look at him oddly. Inside, the house is dark, and there’s a thick layer of dust over everything. A pile of junk mail nearly blocks the door. He does not recall ever subscribing to Vanity Fair. He cannot face the washing up. No one could have the strength to face that washing up. Where does he keep the vacuum cleaner? Who will clean out what’s rotted in the long-since unfrozen refrigerator? The inside of the refrigerator, he thinks, is going to be like something out of Se7en–and suddenly he realizes that all his pop culture references are terribly stale. How can he ever get back the years of pop culture Treadstone took from him? He slumps in a chair, in the dark. Damon’s jaw clenches in consternation and despair–emotion, overwhelming him, threatens for the first time to reach Damon’s eyes. Dramatic music slowly swells. Will he succumb? The camera closes in on his face. Slowly–slowly–he rises and goes over to the sink. Slowly–slowly–he picks up a mold-encrusted coffee cup. Crescendo! Jaw clenched, he begins to clean, clean, as if cleaning for his very life–as if cleaning for all of us. The screen goes black and pounding techno plays.
Ending #2.5
Credits roll over pounding techno. Let ‘em roll a good lo-o-o-ng time. This will give the plebes time to clear out. Yes, yes, step past me, that’s OK, go on, get lost, take your noisy kids with you! Those who have intuited a deeper meaning to Bourne/Smith’s story will stay behind, raptly watching the credits. Gaffers, best boys, PA’s, drivers, caterers, and finally the copyright notice. Now only the cognoscenti remain. Long pause. Then: intertitle: TWO MONTHS LATER.
Smith is having trouble getting his back pay out of the CIA. No one seems to know who’s responsible for his department. He’s this close to talking to a lawyer, frankly. It’s not like he can just get another job, because his resume looks like shit. He’s written to basically everyone at Langley now, and he’s getting nowhere. . .
. . .until a letter from Langley arrives. Mr. Smith, it says, we need to talk, I’ve been thinking a lot about you lately, and I think maybe if we clear the air a little that would just be great. It’s written a shaky, over-caffeinated hand, and signed simply: W.A.
Smith speeds non-stop to Langley. Forgetting that he has an official appointment, he kills two people getting in. Down through the sub-basements and the un-numbered secret corridors. Through an unmarked door–a strange sense of significance compels him. The room inside is full of videotape, unspooling film, confusing machines. A little twitchy man sits at a mixing desk with headphones on. He sees Smith and gives a nervous smile. “Mr. Smith, you’re here, that’s just wonderful, this is really exciting.â€Â
It is of course Woody Allen.
On the desk beside him is a script titled The Bourne Identity.
Smith and Allen shake hands. A tingle of electricity passes between them and Smith understands that he is face to face with his creator. It quickly becomes apparent to the audience that in the world of the fiction that Smith until recently inhabited, as in ours, Allen is a director of philosophically-minded romantic comedies; but in the world of the meta-fiction into which Smith has stepped, Allen is a director of action thrillers. Meta-fictional Allen dreams of creating thoughtful romantic comedies, but his talent for crafting hyper-kinetic violence traps him in this lucrative but hateful career. The director will make all of this clear through framing and suggestive lighting.
“I feel just terrible,†Allen says, “I really do. Can we talk? I think we need to talk.â€Â
Smith stabs Allen in the eye with a pencil, strangles him with videotape. Old habits die hard. Allen’s unfazed–the creation poses no physical threat to the creator. Of course not! But emotionally, morally, it’s a different story–as becomes immediately apparent. Allen switches on one of the TVs and puts in a video cassette–The Bourne Ultimatum. “I did my best, but do you have any idea how hard it is? You try to make something beautiful, but they won’t let you.†He starts to run the tape backwards. The credits run up-screen. Scenes of violence reverse themselves–the dead return to life. Allen keeps shaking his head. Bourne sits beside him. Scene by scene, Allen explains where he went wrong. How he meant this scene to be funny, and this scene sweet, and this scene to make a point about existentialism, and this scene to satirize New York upper-class dinner party mannerisms, and yet always, again and again, he found himself resorting instead to violence, car chases, the sniper on the rooftops, the pen jammed in the carotid artery. It probably wasn’t a very good choice of movie for what he wanted to do, Allen admits.
Smith starts to resent this. What does Allen expect Smith to say? It’s not Smith’s fault–who’s supposed to be apologizing to who, here? It gets awkward.
When they’ve done Ultimatum, they go backwards through Supremacyand then Identity. Allen just feels awful about what happened to Franka Potente’s character–he had a whole subplot planned where she goes on to be a successful but neurotic fashion designer/mystery novelist. Smith sits in silence. The audience reflects on how Smith/Bourne is trapped inside an identity and life he never knowingly chose, and so is (meta-fictional) Allen. And indeed aren’t we all trapped, in a sense? Yes, we are, in a very literal sense, because the theater’s staff have locked the doors–it’s a condition of their license to distribute the movie. The experience must be perfect. This hidden post-credits sequence goes on for around thirteen hours–Smith finds it hard to follow the movies, played backwards, while Allen’s talking, and so Allen has to keep going forwards and backwards again. We who are trapped in the theater have no access to the bathrooms. There is no Coke or Pepsi, and the Sprite is warm and flat. The air conditioning is at first too powerful, then it stops. This is an excellent opportunity for us all to reflect on the tragedy of the human condition.
Bourne makes it to the place.
He knows it’s the place because there’s an ornate neon sign on the side of the building that blinks “The Place”. He nods.
He enters the dark lobby, all broken linoleum and lime portraits and the air full of dancing dust.
There’s a row of plastic blue chairs, all facing the wall. At the end of the lobby he finds a door. It’s locked.
He thrusts his hands into his trouser pockets and finds a comb, several sticks of gum and a paper clip. Using these simple items, and his sporadic memories of the tv show McGyver, he fashions a key and unlocks the door, before kicking it down and jumping up and down on it’s splintered carcass for several joy-filled minutes – his expression doesn’t change.
There’s a staircase that rises up and up and up. Sweating like a nun, Bourne finally reaches the top and finds a circular room with checkered floor and ceiling.
In the middle sits a man in a wedding dress. He’s reading ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ except the title keeps flickering, so it also says ‘To Kill Mock’, ‘To ill am king’, To lamb in bird’ and so on.
The bride-man notices Bourne and puts the book on his lap.
There’s silence.
Then the bride-man speaks:
“I do.”
The end.
Or something.
Suddenly, after jumping through and shattering the exact right number of windows, with that shaky camerawork where you eventually realize that the cameradude or cameradudette is using wires too, Jason Bourne — who rarely needs pee breaks — confronts the men and women who have been keeping him down.
“Men and women, you have been keeping me down. Spit it. I need the freaking dish. The dudes and dudettes in the seats have sat through like three of these movies. We can’t keep going on this way.”
“You’re no Jack Bauer,” the conspirators say in unison. “Then again, only ultra-conservatives like Jack Bauer. Rumsfeld and Limbaugh are big fans.”
“There’s a mad conspiracy going down and it’s about me,” Jason Bourne says. “I’m the mad conspiracy and I don’t know jack. I’ve been forced to resort to lots of high-speed violence. There have been times that I’ve hit so many people, so hard, even with my elbows, that I was unsure of who I was even hitting. It was a blur of elbowing and head-butting unlike anything heretofore committed to film.”
“You’re an idiot. You should go read a book. Speaking of which, doesn’t it strike you as odd that they keep the titles of the books but the movies tell totally different stories? Admit it, they write the scripts without even reading the books.” No one will ever know who said that part.
“Didn’t someone already make a Prisoner entry?” Jason Bourne asked. “Or that scene in Philip K. Dick where he picks up the sheet of paper with ‘concession stand’ or something written on it? Both of those gimmicks are better than this, right?”
“Screw you, fancy Boston boy. Lots of your supposed elbowing and headbutting was done in the editing suite. On set, you were a wussy; you’re no Bigfoot Norris or Chuck Bronson and you’re not going to figure out the mad conspiracy no matter how hard you try. We need to keep you as a tentpole franchise so that we can do Bourne Again and Jason Re-Bourne,” the conspirators say in unison again even though the unison thing has gotten tedious for everyone involved.
“Have you heard the new Tegan and Sara? It is stunningly cool, better than Spoon even,” says Cigarette Smoking Man, smashing through a window and standing on top of a table, dressed like Brandon Lee in The Crow. It looks cool. Very cool.
Everyone pauses to be blown away by the freaking cc-oo-oo-ll-nn-ee-ss-ss.
CSM is so excited about the new Tegan and Sara that CSM licks his lips, even though Tegan and Sara are both openly lesbian. “I don’t really smoke, kids. They’re an herbal equivalent that are non-carcinogenic,” he says.
Everyone gets very confused and looks at Lolsquidz on a nearby computer screen.
Somewhere where they can’t find it, even with like ten minutes of searching, using all the obvious keywords, there’s fanfic where Jack Bauer puts his foot on someone’s neck. It might’ve been written by someone named Dan and linked to by ljuser nihilistic_kid but there’s only so much time to waste on the search engines. Really, one would think that searching for X-Files and 24 couldn’t possibly lead to so many stupid websites.
It’s like trying to remember who was looking for pitches for Swamp Thing novelizations like a year or two ago. It’s just not worth the effort.
All the people in the room think about how funny that fanfic was and how they actually do wish that they could find it so they could steal or rewrite some of the funnier jokes that might have been written by someone whose first name might have been Dan.
They stop looking at the screen and get back to the action. Music by Tegan and Sara starts playing really loud.
“Do you comprehend the verbiage that is purling from my lips?” asks Chris Tucker, from an intercom next to the computer, because he is busy helping children, on foot, in Africa.
“You suck because Rush Hour 3 is going to trounce Stardust this weekend. If the Bourne kid holds strong and doesn’t fall off like every other movie does nowadays, Stardust might only come in a distant third. We need Stardust to make 30 mil in its first weekend so brainless Hollywood execs will buy other weird fantasies outright. Otherwise, they’ll just offer dollar options and make sequels with nothing but smashing and exploding and yelling,” says Jack Bauer — who just arrived out of nowhere — surprising everyone just like CSM did.
But Jack Bauer is dressed in dirty denim and Jack Bauer doesn’t lick his lips. He doesn’t even utter a wolfish chuckle, standing next to CSM on the table with all the other men and women who are part of the mad conspiracy staring at him from their seats.
Jason Bourne adjusts his crotch, feeling the pressure.
Some people pause and think that Jack Bauer is the baddest macho man who could possibly appear. They are wrong.
“Nobody likes to, but I really like to cry!” says a new character who just got invented named The Super Weeping Heroine Who Always Quotes Tegan and Sara. She leaves and goes and gets her own story that is way better than any ending that Jason Bourne would be in, because the second you try to write a new ending about Jason Bourne, you start falling into action hero tropes no matter what you do. It’s like trying to jump over the snakes and fires in Pitfall. Sooner or later, unless you’re being ex-treme-ly careful, you’re going to time it wrong and then you’ll kill Pitfall Harry.
Admit it, if you met someone named Pitfall Harry, you’d buy him an imported beer, even if he was ridiculously pixelated by today’s standards.
“Chuck Norris’ tears cure cancer,” say the Lone Gunmen, in unison. They, too, have appeared from nowhere. Unlike the rippling musculature of the rest, they’re winded and all three of them look mightily stoned.
“But Chuck Norris has never cried!” Matt Damon shouts impetuously, accidentally shattering the fourth wall like it was another window for Jason Bourne to jump through. “How about this — since you all have amnesia or none of you have seen my movies — just tell me a better ending for Harry Potter and the Hollow Deaths!”
Chuck Norris shows up. No one can breathe because it’s so exciting. The music gets loud. Everyone is frightened that their eardrums and lungs will rupture simultaneously. They all lick their lips and then the music stops. The exhalation sounds are almost as cool as CSM dressed up like The Crow.
In a grandfatherly tone, Bigfoot Norris whispers, “Harry got old, the same way the best fighters get old. It’s incurable. Harry turned his back on his wizardly ways and became a matador. And then, gray and wizened, Harry Potter was gored by a bull. Both the entry and exit wounds became infected and he died. None of his wizard friends were at his side but he died the true death of a matador.”
Chuck Norris weeps. Cancer, especially of the foot, is eradicated from the world. For the rest of the month, a large party is thrown in honor of Chuck Bronson. Jason Bourne overthrows his overlords, wanders Tibet and stops causing his own suffering.
Jeff and Ann VanderMeer sit for about an hour in the theater watching the latest “Bourne” movie. It takes about that long for them to realize that this isn’t really the kind of thing that interests them anyway, and while there’s enough time left of their day to do something fun, they might as well head out.
The VanderMeers make their way out of the darkened cinema, exiting via the emergency exit doors at the base of the screen. A blast of sunlight and fresh air invades the popcorn-stale atmosphere of the the theater. The audience stops playing with their cell phones long enough to realize they too don’t really care what happens to Bourne. Thus begins a slow but steady exodus of bored movie-goers, free from their sticky seats and determined never to sit in them again.
After the last person leaves the theater, Bourne looks down from the giant screen, and in a moment of fourth-wall breaking goodness, sighs in relief. He and the various other bad guys, assassins and governmental boogie men drop their guns and take off their shoes, replacing them with shiny new taps. Bourne throws on a top hat and grabs a cane.
“Ready boys?”
“You got it Mr. Bourne!”
Thus begins the one and only showing of “The Bourne Ultimatum” that ends with an orgy of jazz tap.
Does an over-rated lunk head actor tap dancing make a sound if no one’s in the theater to hear it?
You bet – A sexy, sassy sound.
Just as bourne is about to jump from the roof into the river, FBI agents Mulder and Scully burst onto the rooftop; they have been searching for Jason Bourne for six weeks, believing him to be another of the self-regenerating supersoldier alien hybrids. Bourne is shot and falls into the river below and Mulder and Scully run to the rooftop’s edge, frantically searching the water for signs of his body. Seeing nothing but the disturbed waves, Scully turns to Mulder, her forehead creased.
“Well, Mulder, you see? Nothing. If he were a supersoldier, he would’ve surfaced by now. Are you satisfied now?”
Mulder shakes his head.
“No, Dana; the fact that he didn’t surface is enough of an indicator that he survived. Jason Bourne — and the truth — are still out there somewhere.”
Scully rolls her eyes. ” I knew I should’ve become a vet like mom told me…”
Or how about this one:
As Jason Bourne is about to jump, there is a flash of light, a loud whoo-whooshing sound, and suddenly a large blue British Telephone booth with the words “Police Box” materializes out of nowhere and startels Bourne into falling awkardly into the river ten stories below, where he lands wrong and snaps his neck.
Dr. Who steps out of the box, walks to the edge of the rooftop, and flinches. “Oh, bugger all.” he sighs, returning to his box.
Mulder and Scully burst out of the stairwell, panting. Mulder takes one look at the box and shouts “Aha!” and the box obliges him by promptly doing its trick in reverse and vanishing.
Mulder kicks the roof in frustration.
“Oh, DAMN IT ALL, CAN I NEVER CATCH A BREAK?!!”
Jason Bourne, who somehow survived his own death and managed to run back up the stairs by then, obliges Mulder and breaks his neck.
And then scores with Scully.
Where’s my Oscar?!!
Hi there! Great thought, but could this really do the job?
That was intriguing. This is one of the funnier one’s I’ve heard: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDRT8GgKlw0
I think im going to go with the fleshlight
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