Everybody wants to be a secret agent. That’s the draw behind American Ultra, in which small-town stoner loser Mike Howell (Jesse Eisenberg) discovers that he’s a sleeper agent with amazing assassin powers of destruction. The trailer is a series of comic set pieces in which Mike, much to his own surprise, kills people with a spoon, frying pan and other sundries. “These sleeper agents live among us. They could be your friend. Your family. Or the person you least expect.” Awesome, dude.
American Ultra isn’t the only film which thinks this is awesome. At least since Robert Ludlum’s 1980 spy thriller The Bourne Identity was published, the spy genre has gleefully distributed fancy martial arts abilities to unsuspecting amnesiacs. The 2002 Bourne Identity film and the 1990 sci-fi/spy flick Total Recall (based very loosely on a 1972 Philip K Dick short story) are two high-profile examples.
But the most direct precursor for American Ultra in the incongruous everyperson superspy sub-genre may be the The Long Kiss Goodnight. In the 1996 film, Geena Davis plays suburban housewife Sam. Sam is an amnesiac, and as she recovers her memory, she discovers that she is actually sexy superspy bad girl Charly Baltimore.
The double identity is played in the film mostly for angst – but it’s also, clearly, an attraction. Sam is gleeful as she suddenly realizes that she can wield a brutally efficient knife while cutting vegetables in the kitchen – and what middle-class dull bourgeois, of whatever gender, wouldn’t like to take a week off to smoke cigarettes, change hairstyles, look hot and shoot some bad guys?
This is the central fantasy of all spy action thrillers. James Bond, Mission Impossible – whatever your franchise of choice, the pleasure is in identifying with some mysterious, ultra-competent , ultra-slick protagonist, whose body is a weapon.
The brilliance of the amnesiac spy trope is that it makes that identification the quietly meta center of the story. In The Bourne Identity, Jason Bourne wakes up not knowing who he is or where he came from. His position, in other words, is exactly the position of the reader, who opens a book (or starts watching a movie) without any information about the fictional world (trailers excepted.) Bourne is the reader; he has to move forward page by page, discovering not just the plot, but the backstory as he goes.
And part of what he discovers is that he is mutliple identities; Jason Bourne is also agent Cain and, somewhere down there, a guy named David. In amnesiac stories, the multiple-identity double and triple agents of spy novels become a metaphor for the audience, all of whom get to change identities, too. In The Long Kiss Goodnight, Sam the schoolteacher was originally a cover story for Charly; Jason Bourne was originally a cover story for David. Similarly, Charly is a cover story for every audience member. You, the viewer, may in your daily life take your kids to the ice-skating rink or sell stuff at a convenience store. But when you dim the lights you know that your real identity is up there, on the screen, killing people with a spoon.
The dynamic is similar to superhero comics: Clark Kent exists so you can imagine that anyone can be Superman. But the amnesiac spy trope is both bolder and sneakier. It makes you, in the audience, the secret identity. Like the trailer says, everyone is a potential sleeper agent, drifting in the dark just waiting to pick up that cigarette and that sniper rifle.
