Nearly 20 years ago The Bourne Identity was released in theaters. The story followed Jason Bourne, a covert super spy hitman who woke up with no memory of his identity and, over the course of the film, uncovered his secret ninja skills. He was an elite fighter, keenly observant, and a master of anticipating the actions of others.

The film was exceptionally well done and spawned its own series based on the novels written by Robert Ludlum.

Now, I’m not sure the secret ninja is an official writing trope, but, if it isn’t, it should be, because most superheroes today are secret ninjas – the super soldier who hides their true nature from the world only to unleash their secret ninja skills when put in danger.

Like any good thing, what was once cool has become predictable and uninspired.

Most of us are not, nor never will be, a secret ninja. We’re office workers, blue collar employees, entrepreneurs, parents, hobbyists, and so on.

Sometimes, an average person with their average skills overcoming a greater threat can be far more satisfying than genetically altered foes destroying cities while they work out their grievances.

Rear Window is a great example of this. In the Hitchcock classic, Jimmy Stewart plays a daring professional photographer who got injured in the line of duty and is stuck in his apartment recovering from a broken leg. Bored and in a wheel chair, he fills his time looking out of his window with his telephoto lenses into the apartments of the other residents. In one of them, he thinks he’s uncovered a murder of an abusive woman by his normally passive husband.

At the end of the film, Stewart, unable to escape his apartment, is cornered by the killer. Instead of turning into a secret ninja, Stewart must rely on his wits and use the equipment he knows the best. He darkens his apartment and uses his camera flash to temporarily blind the killer. Unfortunately, it’s not enough. The killer drags him to the window and dangles him out of his second story apartment while help arrives.

That climax contained a lot more danger for the main character and, thereby, for us, because we are as helpless as Jimmy Stewart. We cannot overcome our villain by brute force or a good right hook. We can only hope he comes up with a clever solution, which he does, delaying the attack long enough to be saved from death.

In a world of cinematic secret ninjas, we rarely see that today. The feeling of danger is replaced by the distraction of spectacle. The humanity is lost to pageantry.

I hope the secret ninja experience will soon pass.

I started watching the Marvel series Jessica Jones, about a broken woman trying to make it as a private investigator. I was drawn in right away, so much so that when her secret ninja skills were revealed, it both shocked and disappointed me. Originality suddenly became redundancy.

I still like the show, as I’m starting the second season, but that moment of disappointment made me realize how much I long for original stories about real people experiencing extraordinary events.

Let’s let the secret ninja trope die, or at least, go into hibernation, until it can become a unique idea, say, in twenty years or so.