foggy eyes wrote:I'm beginning to wish that the discussion of digital would begin to move away from the question of "realism" here - yes, the aesthetic is surely intended to be immediate and direct, but it's almost being described as some kind of time machine. If anything, we're looking at "hyperrealism", and I think Mann is much more concerned with the mobility, texture, sensation, tactility (etc.) rather than anything else... The way he's using it to, say, render light is at times more expressionistic than the techniques I would usually associate with a "realist" aesthetic...
Though it's certainly true that DV has the effect of immediacy and a kind of "putting you there in the action" quality, such stuff seems just the surface of Mann's aesthetic intentions (though a glorious surface it is). Foggy is right about "hyperrealism" and that gets more to the heart of it all, I think. Because to me what is really going on here, and surely part of Mann's driving motive, has much more to do with the contemporary immediacy of DV
itself rather than its specific application to any theme or subject. To be a little clearer,
Public Enemies is another of Mann's films about myth making as personal identity and how time and place function to shape that (part of the film's great complexity and incumbent difficulty has a lot to do with this); so the DV doesn't just function as a heightened aesthetic base, it also, more importantly, functions as a medium of personal familiarity for the audience. Obviously he's using higher end equipment but the nature and quality of the images is still more directly familiar to audiences in respect to the intimacy of their own personal use. Mann seems to want us to recognize our complicity in this myth making as a willingly celebratory audience as well as our own participation in a myth making process: either a reflection of an inherent tendency toward self-aggrandizement or a worthy goal of imaginative vision in action, depending on how you see it.
PE mirrors our own self-mythologizing back to us in either case. In this way the whole film acts as an extension of the truly great
Manhattan Melodrama sequence Jeff referred to earlier (mirrors within mirrors within..., etc.).
That sequence in fact seems key and even integral to an understanding of the whole project--it's one of those great, late arriving moments which cause you to reassess all of what you thought you've understood up until that moment. And this is because of the extent of the implication of that sequence. It's not simply some gimmicky meta commentary; that would imply that its position is an inherently critical one. But Mann isn't criticizing anything or celebrating it for that matter. He's just documenting a process in action and asking us to recognize the dimensions of it and consider those implications. There is the extent of the mirroring within the text (how far back does this image based modeling go for Dillinger, the "movie fan"?) and the matter of how it resonates out toward us, how we receive it. That prompts a number of questions. Do we audience these images from these different sources the same way? Where is the dividing line if we claim we do? What is the means of distinction for us? Do we even view film the same way as we did seventy years ago? Conversely, is it all so inherently subjective and internalized then that insight and inspiration cannot be shared, can only ever emanate from the foundations of personal psychology? If so maybe we can only expect to objectify the action of someone else's myth making and be unable to take full stock of or even recognize the boundaries of our own.
Certainly that is where the real complications come into play here.
PE functions in enough of an overt fashion as pure genre display to partially obscure the many ways it works against those easy assumptions (the camera work and sound design being just the two most obvious). I have no idea whether Mann's philosophical perspective disrupts the experience for anyone else but I have to say it did partially for me as I tried to work through and integrate what I know he's doing with what it only seems like he's doing. Because this is a Mann genre vehicle that is inflected with the product of his last few years worth of defiantly anti-genre investigations (and this includes aspects of
Collateral and, far more importantly, his great
Robbery Homicide Division TV series). In those cases, we could see up front the way in which Mann considered the presumptive worth and necessity of each individual element. Here, however, he
seems more content to submit to standard, dare I say it, cliches. But this is ultimately not fair and doesn't give him the proper credit for having learned from his experiences and bringing that to bear in a more fully integrated fashion.
Another key scene for me was the one in which Dillinger speaks to reporters at the police station; a scene designed around making a point about his fame. And yet this is not the more straightforward irony of something like the similar scene in
Badlands. Here it feels very much like an obligation rather than a privilege and this complicates our reception to this otherwise "standard" scene quite brilliantly. It's as if Dillinger has little interest in his "celebrity" as such but tolerates these intrusions as a inevitable result of the fact that his myth making, in that culture at that time, demands it be treated that way. He evidences a tiredness of it and yet there is an odd atmosphere in that room which suggests everyone knows its importance toward sustaining the roles they need to play. It all has a lot to do with the willful assertion of character as performance.
And this too seems key. Just as the time period in a sense demands a particular kind of myth making, a particular kind of depiction of imaginative possibilities, here we have one indicator amongst many that Dillinger saw all his actions, those things that defined his myth, as performance. That's why there is so much attention paid to the minutiae of the robberies as routine events staged for maximum impact. That's why we get so much detail regarding arrangements for future operations (when Dillinger and Ribisi's character were making plans it reminded me of nothing less than an actor consulting with his director). This is also why the Dillinger-Billie scenes play out in such familiar ways. This is not like the more recent Mann unions affected by a kind of self-aware externalized existential angst. The difference between
Vice and
PE is one of time and temperament. Crockett had lost a clarity that allowed for coherent myth making and a coherent world, so his world is flattened out appropriately. We recognize those same concerns hanging over the performance set pieces of
PE but Dillinger does not--or, more to the point, he does not care about such things or see them as significant considerations. He is still able to invest in an imaginative process in a way that Crockett now cannot. Mann's inclusion of the moment in which the Depression era farm wife asks Dillinger to take her with him is both an acknowledgment of the lure of celebrity but also, more fundamentally, an acknowledgment of this difference in cultural attitude. Certainly that moment recognizes the desperate desire to escape the misery of specific social circumstances but it's cagey because beyond that it's a positioning of Dillinger's imaginative escape as a rare and vital active force; one made valid and legitimate in its own actualization.
Though I'm still inclined to prefer
Vice (or even
Ali for that matter), that may not be entirely fair to Mann; it may be more of an acknowledgment of my own resistance toward where he seems to be going with all this than any lacking on his part. I too wearied a bit of the lather, rinse, repeat crime scenarios Jeff mentioned. But it's more complex than that. For one thing it is, once again, all about ritualized performance, an assertion of being and identity. But Mann's career arc at this point seems to indicate that he may be moving back more firmly to what superficially resembles familiar genre ground.
Vice was about as alienating a picture as I suspect he's capable of or even wants to do; after all, the very nature of that film is at odds philosophically with Mann's origins and what I think are his values still. At the time I saw that picture as an inevitable end point but now I suspect it's only a marker of passage along the way, a moment in an evolutionary process in which a certain kind of recognition has interceded. In that sense then, despite the fact that everything post
Heat has felt like an ebbing away from the legitimacy of a grandiose vision of the self--a flattening or evening out of all elements, what we have with
PE is a TS Eliot style return to a familiar place that feels new again, reignited with potency and possibility. The surface mechanics are more conventional than ever but Mann's confidence shines through; he's learned something tremendously valuable over the last decade about mythic proportionality and he applies it here and he has the confidence to believe that foregrounding the inner workings of his philosophic inquiry is no longer necessary.