Michael Mann, Multipolarity

With the story of the American frontiersman, the movement of people and small capital west in a process of territorial expansion effectively over, Michael Mann has to find a new limit within what Michael Mann, (no relation) calls the civilisational cage. Mann does so in the wake of that last pivot point in American history, when the bureaucracies and systems quietly insulating themselves against internal and external enemies — aeronautics, manufacturing, financialisation, digitisation, the state’s armed forces, telecommunications and mass media technologies — turned out to be highly effective in capturing and canalising the explosion of libertarian sentiment of the sixties and seventies.

Transportation gets us to this. Collateral (2004) begins in an airport, ends at the last stop of a railway line, and takes place primarily in a taxi. Even though Jamie Foxx is leasing his vehicle, he is an inversion of American cinema’s most famous motorist. Here, it is the passengers who are anti-social, passing from the airport to the city for a few hours, either as part of their highly paid professional lifestyles, or to kill a lot of people.

It is Foxx’s inoculation against psychopathy — his knowledge of travel times, his capacity to speak Spanish — that prompts Cruise to call him institutionalised; another very familiar trope whereby the counter-cultural programme is put in the mouth of a chaotic and amoral murderer. A scene in a jazz club manifests what is most American in Cruise’s Joker cosmology: improvisation, evolving, doing instead of talking. We think of the use David Chase makes of the genre in the woeful Sopranos follow-up, jazz is one of the few positive fruits of American reinvention. Fittingly enough, Barry Shabaka Henley is whacked because he knows more about jazz than a white guy, specifically that Miles Davis’ genius was partly a function of his environment. Even the means by which Cruise dies is self-made. His mentoring Foxx in dispatching him might make us think of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) but the frontier is gone; his death is a cliché, told before it happens.

One of you once made the point that Mann’s relationships are unconvincing and this is correct. He thinks in terms of circuits and signals. He grounds personalities in machinic, medical and geographic metaphors; magnetism, kinetic force, contagion, there’s a sex scene in Heat 2 that invokes fighter jets. This is his pop existentialism, the idea that what happens to you is the ramifications of a worldview. DeNiro dies because he is emotional. Val Kilmer gets away because he remains impartial.

It is well-known that Mann does a lot of research, conducting interviews with wives of ex-convicts, reading about the design culture of the Blue Ridge Mountains in developing Ashley Judd and Amy Brenneman’s characters, modelling the Provisional IRA’s street battles with the British Army, consulting with hackers, crime-scene technicians and cops. Suggesting that conscientious, inventive people with a moral code constitute anything other than a tiny minority of American policemen is a consequence of taking too much self-mythologising seriously, but I will make the case that this is not the point. Cops and robbers are a means of getting to a representation of high performance; he compares Al Pacino’s character with Michael Jordan, Serena Williams.

This is a telling comparison given his respective treatments of Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X, the latter depicted as a victim of a conspiracy between the FBI and the Nation of Islam to keep him away from broader revolutionary horizons. As represented here, Ali self-consciously walks a line between black nationalism and doing justice to his talents in a racist society, arguing against his more committed second wife Khalilah Ali (now a Trump supporter) that being exploited by corrupt black people such as Don King is what gets him access to powerful whites. Might as well be Mobuto’s programme. There are moments here which represent new components within Mann’s vocabulary, a sort of fuguey sensation or ambience with closeups and music coming through in the mix, used to absolutely insane effect in the first ten minutes, but petering off through repeated deployment, when Ali comes to Zaire, or hears of Malcolm’s assassination. This is the postmodern sublime, the victory of space over time, sensation over reflection, American consumerism masquerading as freedom.

From Miami Vice (2007) onwards Mann moves from one fulcrum of American cultural anxiety, the multi-racial urban environment, to the frontiers of a changing world order in which the US is not necessarily a world hegemon. Hong Kong, Macau, Ciudad del Este, all neo-colonial free ports from which the appearances of the nation state in the metropole are absent. Any monopoly on violence is held by large enterprises staffed by Lebanese Falangists or Colombian paramilitaries shipping and selling illegal drugs or military hardware. That blackhat’s Sadak is South African is important here, as is the final action taking place during a Hindu-Balinese devotional procession under a monument built by Sukarno. The ‘hand in your gun and badge’ speech is delivered, not by a surly superintendent, but officers of the PLA. The United SSnake$$ still has the capacity to intervene, but it is buried under regulatory tonnage. The National Security Agency may be in possession of a supercomputing algorithm capable of advancing the plot but it is in the hands of an unimaginative boring idiot in an anonymous office who falls for the most basic phishing scam of all time.

A set of close-ups of Hemsworth walking across an airport runway is one of those moments you get in the works of great artists who remain consistent or get better as they go. Their means of expressing their concerns become more concentrated, to the extent that they operate through a syntactical shorthand. We do not need to be told that what is passing through Hemsworth’s mind is the substance of what James Caan says in the diner scene in Thief (1981), but this perspective is now out of date. Chen Lien tells him that dedicating yourself to a programme, serving time outside of time is inadequate. He has to think clearer because Foucault, Lyotard — books he has in his cell — are out of date. Hemsworth has to become Lawrence of Arabia / Paul Atreides, move between less and less well-equipped bases of operation, build devices out of components purchased in open markets and confront Sadak using improvised weapons. The frontier is back.