1. 03:37Spy films are inherently political, unfolding between national will and individual fate.

2. 05:01Beginning with 007: luxury cars, beautiful women, and high-tech gadgets were also part of the Cold War myth.

3. 07:17The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Three Days of the Condor: spy cinema begins to distrust the state machine.

4. 10:31The Bourne Identity continues that skeptical tradition in the new post–Cold War, post-9/11 world.

5. 12:08During the 2000s spy-film boom, Mission: Impossible and Bourne took different paths.

6. 13:19Asian spy cinema also flourished because East Asia’s Cold War aftermath never truly ended.

7. 18:43After globalization, power comes not only from states but from finance, organizations, media, and technology platforms.

8. 21:16Bourne flees through cities while his enemies direct the hunt from screens.

9. 25:03The pleasure of Bourne lies in one person turning the tables on the state machine.

10. 27:26Bourne awakens not through theory but through bodily memory, emotion, and conscience.

1. Ah Wu: Spy films are inherently political. Scholar Wesley Britton, who studies spy cinema and culture, offers a useful division: propaganda films serving the state, and reflective, skeptical films.

Lao Ma: My own idea is that spy films are political, but do not portray political conflict itself.They find the connection between national will and individual destiny.They depict the junction, or conflict, between the two.

Ah Wu: Yes. Everything in the spy-film world askswhether we identify and whether we believe.That is the central question.