Cultural Amnesia (66 page)

MICHAEL MANN

Michael Mann (b. 1943) is a director famous mainly for giving his films, no matter how violent
their subject matter, a soothingly diffused and pastel look, as if their contentedly vacationing audience were wearing sunglasses even at night. Though Mann had already made movies before he
became executive producer of the globally successful
Miami Vice
, it was for the brushed and powdered episodes of that television series that he first
achieved the full development of his characteristic look, which made a hero out of Don Johnson’s tailor and turned Florida into an advertisement for itself. Like most film directors
with an early history of earning their keep in television, Mann was obliged, however, to learn that the look of the thing came second to the story. (One of his first jobs in show business was
writing scripts for
Starsky and Hutch
.) As a consequence, his feature films, pretty as they are to look at, are invariably made coherent by a strong
narrative line, and not just by their tasteful mise en scène.
Manhunter
, for example, is by far the best plotted of the Hannibal Lecter movies,
and would be recalled now as the benchmark for the franchise if it had not been sunk in advance by the comparative anonymity of its leading actor. (Later on—“ironically,” as
they say in Hollywood—the
film’s obscure leading man William Petersen became, as the face of
CSI
, one of the most
recognizable actors on Earth.) The look of movies helps to form the stock imaginative patterns of the world, and to that extent the director often really is the formative influence. This
remains true even though, in the main production centre, there is scarcely such a thing as a successful commercial movie which is not a collaborative venture controlled by a studio that can
fire anybody concerned, the director included. Just as the atmospherics of Ridley Scott’s
Blade Runner
now affect the appearance—and even,
through the music of Vangelis, the soundtrack—of any movie made anywhere whose subject is the future, so do the atmospherics of Michael Mann’s
Heat
affect the look of any movie made about crime: other directors, whether working out of the United States, Latin America, Europe or Hong Kong, either go with
him, towards glamour, or go against him, towards grunge, but they always have his look in mind. What concerns me here, however, is not what happens to the pictures, but to the words. By
definition, they are not in a universally appreciable language. But are they in English either? The answer has large implications, especially for international politics. If the troops who
come to bring you freedom can’t understand even each other, you had better hope that they know what is meant by a white flag.

Let’s violate his ass right now.

—MICHAEL MANN AND
OTHERS,
Heat

T
HE INFORMER
IS
being unforthcoming. The informer is on parole. Hard-driving police captain Al Pacino and his faithful sidekick grow impatient. The sidekick suggests to Pacino that they punish the
uncooperative informer by arresting him for violating his parole. “Let’s violate his ass.” That’s the way the sidekick says it. Did you get it straight away? Confess.

An extremely advanced foreign student of English might have
enough information to
realize that “let’s violate” is cop-talk for “let’s arrest him for violation of parole” and that “his ass” is a standard jive-talk way of saying
“him.” But a merely advanced student—advanced enough to know all the words in the sentence without even consulting a dictionary—might forgivably conclude that the angry
sidekick and the angry captain are on the point of sodomizing their uncooperative informer. The merely advanced student would translate the line accurately and get it hopelessly wrong. (There is
even the chance that a slightly less than merely advanced student, educated by correspondence in some region of central Asia where any version of a horse can buy a bride, would fail to realize
that “ass” is the American version of “arse,” and so get the impression that the two cops are about to commit bestiality with a valuable animal belonging to the informer:
but let’s leave that one out.) It follows that there is more to translation than transliteration: you need the whole cultural context. It also follows that American cultural imperialism is
so powerful it doesn’t need to care whether you have absorbed the cultural context or not. It just wants you to see the movie.

British and Australian audiences—to name only two English-speaking markets for the American mass media—are in
the position of merely advanced students. For them a line like this might as well have a subtitle. I myself, when I first saw
Heat
in 1996, had been
absorbing the American mass media for fifty years at least. I had seen hundreds of cop shows in which the words “violate” and “parole” had been used in close connection.
But when I heard “violate” without “parole” I had to stop and think—not an activity that
Heat
otherwise encourages. It is a
highly enjoyable movie. (I mean as opposed to a lowly enjoyable movie like
Where Eagles Dare
, in which the fun comes from the stupidity.) Michael
Mann’s movies are well planned and look very good. His years in the glossy sweatshop of
Miami Vice
gave him a feeling for compressed narrative and a
mastery of pastel composition transferable to any setting, including the morgue. Both qualities are well on display in Mann’s
Manhunter
, the first and
by far the most interesting film that draws on the dubious charm of the serial killer Hannibal Lecter. Mann is a director who can make even cannibalism into a fashion statement. With
Heat
he attained his apotheosis. Unlimited mayhem never looked so balletic. The gun battles are sensational: rather more sensational,
one is bound
to reflect, than any gun battle could ever be in real life, where a flak jacket would not be enough to protect Al Pacino’s head if even one bank robber were shooting at him with a pistol.
In the film, Val Kilmer and Robert De Niro both shoot at him for minutes on end with automatic weapons. Fusillades of bullets swerve around his head by magic. In real life he would have only his
admittedly formidable hairpiece to keep the hurtling slugs out of his brain. But the director isn’t transcribing life, he is choreographing its myths, and especially the myths of male
conflict: Mann is a
mano a mano
man. He thinks in battles. In a Mann film, even when the hero is alone on screen with a telephone, he battles with the
telephone.

In
Heat
, the most sensational battle of all is the hamming contest
in the coffee shop between Pacino and De Niro. These two actors have never faced each other on screen before. Each actor knows that this is the shoot-out the audience has been looking forward to
for years. Each actor fights with his best weapons. Al Pacino’s standard weapon is to SHOUT AT RANDOM. Elsewhere in the movie he employs it freely, but in this key scene he abandons it.
Robert De Niro’s standard weapon is to repeat a line half a dozen times with slight variations of emphasis. “Clean up and go home,” he tells Ashley Judd. “Clean up and go
home
.” Hypnotized by this mantra, Ashley Judd cleans up and goes home to Val Kilmer, so thoroughly has her will been sapped. De Niro’s power of
repetition is a tried and tested standard weapon. A standard weapon, tried and tested, is what it is. Tried and tested. Tried and
tested
. But in this scene
he abandons it.

In the coffee shop, the two knights of the screen have taken off their helmets and laid aside the axe and mace. They have
upgraded their weaponry. They are about to go nuclear. They will fight in close-up. Pacino fights with ruminative pauses and a new, noiseless smacking of the lips: a deadly weapon. De Niro fights
with a new pout. It is not as extreme as Val Kilmer’s pout, but Val Kilmer was born pouting, like June Allyson: Val Kilmer can’t
not
pout. De
Niro’s new pout is a vestigial, almost subcutaneous pout, a pout more thought than deed. He is proving that he can pout without moving his lips. He also looks sideways without moving his
head. He looks sideways only with his eyes: a new subtlety. (All modern screen actors look sideways as much as possible while speaking. There is one called Michael Madsen who will face
away from the camera while speaking, giving you a close-up of the back of his head.) Gradually you realize that Pacino and De Niro, like the characters they are playing, will both
walk away from this battle. The fix is in. The two characters they are playing respect each other. But the characters could not possibly respect each other as much as the actors playing them
respect each other.

Pacino and De Niro have each grown used, during a long career, to acting any interlocutor off the screen.
They have met at last only on the tacit understanding that they will act each other
on
to the screen. Exactly measured by the number of close-ups, their
mutual respect will be made exhaustively manifest. The outcome will be a draw. But they have to make it look good. Making it look good, indeed, is the only reason for doing it. Making it sound
good is a secondary consideration. To prove this, each man reaches for the deadliest weapon of all: silence. Personally I find this a relief from the dialogue, which isn’t bad, but is not
very good. In the age of
The Big Sleep
and
The Maltese Falcon
, a similar exchange would have been over and done with
in a minute at most, with each actor delivering a line memorable forever. But that was then, and this is now. Now the actor does not deliver lines. He delivers himself, usually like a truck full
of eggs being unloaded one by one.
Heat
has a structure, and each of its carefully assembled component scenes has a mood. What it lacks is lines, and why
not? It is after something bigger than verbal quotability. But in that case, why throw in a line like “Let’s violate his ass”? The only conclusion you can reach is that
nobody knew it was difficult
.

Nobody knew, or nobody cared: it amounts to the same thing. In films, dialogue is a secondary source of narrative, not the
primary one. If this seems a cause for grief, it can only be said that there are bigger things to grieve about. (A film has to star Steven Seagal or Chuck Norris before it begins to pose a bigger
threat to the language than yellow journalism.) When a semi-literate film-maker proclaims the supreme importance of structure, it might sound like opportunism: but literate film-makers proclaim
it too, and are not likely to be wrong. That capable screenwriter William Goldman has written entertaining books to demonstrate how even the most entertaining film can’t be written like a
book. If the story is not first worked out to make cinematic sense, no amount of excellent dialogue will save it from going straight to video.
For those of us who will see any
film that Ashley Judd appears in—the definition of star power—
Kiss the Girls
is a must. The procedural police dialogue is of the highest class:
anything Morgan Freeman gets to say once you want to hear twice. But the story is out of shape, so the movie was a box office dud. In
Wag the Dog
, the
dialogue is even better: it is up there with the scripts of pre-war screwball comedy, which is as high as you can go. The film, however, would have joined
Kiss the
Girls
on the long shelf of modern flops if the story had not been so satisfactorily worked out. Quite often the process of making the story work will marginalize even the cleverest writer,
and even more often make him or her part of a team, any member of which can be unknown to the others. As S. J. Perelman pointed out in his valuable
Paris
Review
interview, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s personal tragedy in Hollywood centred on his deadly knack for failing to spot, at the time, that he was not the sole author of the script he
was working on, and for being devastated when he found out later. Though there are writers with star power—Robert Towne when he doesn’t want to direct, Joe Eszterhas when he can stay
under the top, Richard Price, Tom Stoppard and David Mamet all seemingly without fail—the practice of calling in extra writers is unlikely to change. Nor is a star director necessarily the
author, though he might strive to be thought so. A successful movie is usually its own author, like a little city. My favourite example is
Tootsie
, which I
admire as a whole and in every detail, especially from line to line. Like thousands of
Tootsie
fans I can practically recite the dialogue from start to
finish. But I have met very few among my fellow devotees who can name its writers, and I am not even sure that I know all their names myself.