Perhaps the biggest hissy-fit in all of literary history belongs to Achilles of The Iliad. Homer’s revered tale is essentially the story of a crybaby who throws a tantrum when his comrade-in-arms Agamemnon takes away one of his captured concubines. The offended Achilles stubbornly refuses to continue his participation in the siege of Troy, spending all of his time whining and pouting instead. His selfishness results in countless Greek deaths at the hands of the Trojans, who are only too happy to see their foes’ best fighter sulking on the sidelines.

Achilles doesn’t care about this sudden rise in Greek casualties until his best friend becomes one of them. Only then does he dry the tears from his eyes, pull out his sword and proceed to dump a chalice of whoop-ass all over the Trojan army. I suppose this act of quasi-redemption is why most scholars still refer to Achilles as a hero when all appearances point to his simply being a spoiled brat who casually sacrifices the lives of his countrymen because he’s not allowed to ravish a particularly good-looking captive.

Achilles came to mind as I watched The Bourne Supremacy the sequel to 2002’s The Bourne Identity which introduced film audiences to experimental CIA agent Jason Bourne. In the first film, an amnesiac Bourne gradually discovers he was an assassin usually assigned to execute members of foreign governments whose politics disagreed with his White House superiors. Repulsed by his former career, Bourne manages to escape from his CIA pursuers in the hope of starting a new life. The Bourne Supremacy finds our hero unsuccessful in his quest, forced out of hiding after being implicated in a web of murder and intrigue involving a Russian oil magnate and Bourne’s old CIA boss.

Like many movie heroes, Bourne has a knack for getting into high-speed car chases in densely-populated urban areas. Though it’s probably impossible to breathe any new life into the cliché-ridden realm of automotive pursuit (unless you’re the Wachowski brothers), directors Doug Liman and Paul Greengrass deserve credit for crafting chase scenes that are both stylish and exciting. They clearly saw these scenes as a way of showcasing their filmmaking abilities.

For me, however, the car chases also showcased the disturbing lack of respect for other human beings shown by Bourne, the so-called hero. While fully realizing that car chases are a film convention and are certainly not meant to be realistic, I’m nevertheless disturbed by their insistence that innocent people’s lives should be risked or even sacrificed for one person’s agenda.

As Bourne races through Moscow, an Indian village, and Berlin, he endangers the lives of the hundreds of people who happen to get in his way. During one particularly destructive chase in The Bourne Supremacy, our hero’s taxicab pounds its way through traffic, crashing into dozens of other cars and undoubtedly injuring their drivers. Bourne shows little mercy for his police pursuers who are innocently doing their job and completely unaware of any larger conspiracy. He smashes through their vehicles, causes them to wipeout violently, and otherwise ensures many lengthy hospital stays and possibly a funeral or two.

This collateral carnage is a staple of action movies and its conventions reveal a complete disregard for every person’s life save the hero’s (and perhaps his sidekick and/or girlfriend). The camera never shows the results of Bourne's actions. The entire world outside of Bourne's car is reduced to a multitude of faceless drivers and pedestrians who are consigned to injury or even death just so that our hero can solve his own personal problems.

Achilles and Bourne are alike in their selfish disregard for human life and their examples show a division commonly made in popular entertainment between characters who are supposed to be heroes and the rest of the people who live around them--the rabble.

Heroes are played by a top-level Hollywood star like Brad Pitt or Matt Damon. Movies are made and books are written about their stories. Their problems matter. The rabble, on the other hand, is played by extras who, if they’re lucky, get their name in the credits as “Police Officer with Sunglasses” or “Lady with Shopping Cart.” Their stories do not get told. Their problems, which sometimes include getting hit by the hero’s car, don’t matter.

In fiction and in reality, we’re constantly being taught who matters and who does not: that certain lives are worth more than others. Iraqis who are killed to “protect Americans” matter about as much as the doomed security personnel on Star Trek whose red shirts and nervous expressions always signaled their imminent death at the hands of some bloodthirsty alien. We don’t know who they are, where they came from, whether they have a wife or children, anything. We only know that they must beam down to some planet and die so that Kirk and Spock may live.

The parallel between entertainment and politics is important because many Americans see their country as the world’s hero. For this reason, they are able to completely ignore the deaths and serious injuries of thousands of innocents caused by the ongoing car chase that is American foreign policy. By collectively dismissing these atrocities as necessary evils, US citizens most closely resemble the terrorists whose tactics they claim to oppose.

Dead foreigners don't count and in the case of the US invasion of Iraq, are literally not counted. Many left-wing Americans succumb to this self-centredness too. In Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore spends as much time examining the death of one US soldier as he does mourning for the over 10,000 Iraqi casualties, illustrating the grim mathematics that inhabit the American mindset.

Our society paints heroes in full profile and reduces the rabble to a mass of hurried brush strokes in the background. The rabble, we are taught, are expendable. Their existence is unimportant, their deaths unremarkable, undeserving of any screen time and surely not worth mourning over. Kill a bunch of them to get oil, fire a thousand to save your portfolio from plummeting; it’s all equally justifiable in the end. It’s how heroes from Achilles to Jason Bourne have trained us to think.

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