From a reader:

Jonah,
I have no disagreement with you that Hollywood looks for ways to design its heroes without an American angle (or with an anti-American angle), but you can’t blame them for Jason Bourne. If you have read the original 3 Ludlum novels, you would know that Treadstone and the other covert organizations were there in the beginning, before Hollywood ever got its mitts on the character.
BTW, some of it is certainly the anti-establishment bias of Hollywood, but part of it is the desire to sell movies worldwide…they have to be popular everywhere.

I don’t disagree with any of this really. But the fact that Hollywood picked the Bourne books out of scores (thousands) of popular spy novels is not an exoneration of Hollywood, is it?

As for Hollywood wanting to sell worldwide, I agree entirely. One of the first pieces I ever wrote for NR was on the remake of Godzilla in which Americans were benign idjits and the French(!) were the badass, morally-centered soldiers. One of the arguments I made was that this was a deliberate effort by the producers to go over the head of the American audience. This sort of thing is standard fare now.

I’d link to the piece, but it’s in the pre-2003 archives and therefore as lost as the Ark of the Covenant in some federal warehouse.

Update: From a reader:

To you and your reader:
The Jason Bourne of the original book, The Bourne Identity, was a patriotic covert op who went deep under cover impersonating an assassin. He never actually assassinated anyone. He did this in order to lure Carlos “The Jackal” out of hiding by playing on his ego.
The problem came when he is almost killed by Carlos and loses his memory, only remembering his cover.
Treadstone is not truly evil either. It just thinks it has a rogue on its hands. When trying to bring Bourne in, the misunderstanding causes chaos on either side.
Hollywood totally distorted it. There was no “Wombosi” (sp?) in the book, no group of trained killers, etc…
Why hasn’t Hollywood optioned Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp a true anti-terrorist assassin. Because he kills the bad guys? Or because we’re always the bad guys?

You know, I kind of thought that was the case. I read The Bourne Identity twenty years ago and I didn’t remember it being so anti-American, but I didn’t remember it well.