Flights of Fancy: An Essay on 'Con Air': Parts 6 - 7

Part 6: Penitentiary Wars and Love Songs: Flirting and Power

Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay ‘Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema’ describes the manner in which women are treated cinematically. Mulvey sees them as objects to be looked at by a male-centred camera gaze; their presence “freezes” the story, as they are presented for erotic contemplation. She mentions the trend in 1980s Hollywood to remove such elements from action films by the invention of the ‘buddy film’, in which the interaction between two male stars is given primacy at the expense of the development of heterosexual relationships in the narrative.
    In The Rock, when Stanley Goodspeed states he will “do his best”, his veteran guide to Alcatraz remonstrates: “Your best? Losers always whine about their best, winners go home and fuck the prom queen.” Goodspeed cocks the gun in his hand and explains that his girlfriend was the prom queen. It is a moment of defiant heterosexual bravado, but it also has elements of the flirtatious. In Con Air, such homosocial one-upmanship is pushed further towards explicit male-on-male sexual energy, which – given both its marginalized and stigmatised position within American culture but also the conventions of the action genre and especially that of the prison film – could potentially carry with it overtones of rape and violence. One of the most surprising aspects of Con Air is, for the most part, a disavowal of the sexual deviancy of both convicts and non-dominant sexuality.
    Cyrus Grissom, orchestrator of the escape plan and uber-alpha male among alpha males, is fawned over by the other convicts. Pinball Parker is described as Cyrus’ boyfriend by a DEA agent using Parker as a human shield. Shortly following this, and after Parker has failed in securing an apology from Cyrus for calling him a “two bit dope fiend”, Cyrus comments that Cameron Poe’s involvement in the brief hostage crisis was “truly nice work.” Later, Cyrus takes Poe’s side over a decision regarding the fate of the remaining prison guards whom Diamond Dog wishes to execute: Poe winks at Diamond Dog at the end of the exchange, like a romantic lead who has gotten the better of a love rival. “A self-educated man” Poe says approvingly when Cyrus mentions that he learned nothing from his father – again, the line plays like flirtacious banter.

    The antagonism between Poe and Billy Bedlam seems to have no basis, but the boiling-point for it comes at the point that Bedlam discovers Poe’s personal items, particularly those concerning his daughter. “I knew you was a punk, and I was right,” Bedlam announces, and his revelation could well stem not so much from uncovering Poe’s lie about the length of his sentence than about his pronounced heterosexuality, evidenced by a wife and child. (This revelation is symbolised through a cuddly toy which becomes vital to the mise-en-scene). Poe’s own conversion to the all-masculine world of the penitentiary is hinted at in the montage of his life behind bars. On a care package sent by his wife: “those pink coconut things have made me quite popular. Met a guy the other day, Baby-O, he sure does love ‘em.” Deconstruction of such a line seems unnecessary.
    There are numerous further examples, the most direct of which are on the extended cut of the film (Poe: “I like black cherry jello.” Cyrus: “You like black cherry jello? I like black cherry jello. And I like you.”).
    These are veiled ideas, but they hint at the peculiarly American fear of prison as a place of inevitable sodomy and sexual debasement (The 25th Hour being the most obvious example of this on film). Rather than suggest that the plane full of hardened criminals is a place of sexual threat, the film instead creates a small community of like-minded sexual liberals (barring Jonny-23, who is despised by ringleader Cyrus). The transsexual convict Sally-Can’t-Dance is at no point threatened or abused by anyone except our hero (who cannot bring himself to land a punch and so slaps her). Cyrus is aware and accepting of her life choices (he tells her to scratch the eyes out of any police, as he stuffs a clip of ammunition in her cleavage).

    The conditions between the prisoners suggest a need for alliance and an acceptance of sexual difference – but not the sexual normality which is defined by Poe, which is symbolised through his waiting family, itself encapsulated in the fateful bunny which is brandished as a symptom of his betrayal by both Billy Bedlam and Cyrus, before finally being reclaimed by Poe and presented to his child. It is, however, “a little dirty”, the conflict over Poe’s normative sexuality having left its scars.
    This comfortable homosocial environment can also be seen as reflective of the action genre itself, and a development of the buddy movie’s excision of female agency and aesthetics from the principle narrative. Action films are primarily for men, and there is an element of aesthetic pleasure in the spectacle of another well-toned male torso barely concealed by an ever-dirtying white vest. Con Air goes some way toward acknowledging the inherent acceptance of man-on-man appreciation which terrifies other films into violent debasement and objectification of women (I would argue the examples of the threatened Bishop and the pretty Trisha are too tame to count). In this it is truly unique within the normative and often sexually immature world of the genre.

Part 7: Concluding Thoughts

I have experienced a tension in writing this piece, exposed or not, between a colloquial tone justifying the analysis of Con Air while also engaging in a (hopefully) lightly humorous drawing out of both the ridiculousness of the film and what could be perceived as the ridiculousness of studying it with any academic sincerity; this sincerity itself being the opposite pole, one of an attempted rational engagement with concepts of postmodernity, narrative and gender issues which understands Con Air as a symptomatic cultural artefact.
    The purpose of the above, then, has not been an attempt at a rhetorical flourish through perverse subject choice; but nor has it been a dry deconstruction of a piece of cinema. This is one of the challenges of both Con Air and the study of contemporary Hollywood blockbuster cinema. Such films offer themselves as empty spectacle, and do so with such competent craftsmanship for this stated goal that to understand them as, if not culturally meaningful, then certainly symptomatically indicative of prevailing cultural ‘turns’ (postmodernism, masculine studies) and the theoretical frameworks applied to these shifts (the work of Baudrillard, Jameson, et al) is to invite the accusation of frivolity.
    Con Air seems to me to go out of its way to invite such use as an evidentiary document, and in addition to the above the film contains potentially complex and at the very least unnecessarily problematic viewpoints on race and ethnic identity and the utility and consequences of incarceration, to name but two further avenues of study. This may not necessarily make it a smarter film than its peers (and I tread wearily around the issue of artistic value linked to the successful fulfilment of authorial intention, the hairline fractures within which thinking the modern art movement began to show many years previously) but it in my mind makes it more interesting. It remains a piece of entertainment in which men in vests flee from explosions in slow motion; however, the hollowness of both the sentiment and the spectacle on display seem to offer more methodological grip for investigative analysis than other examples of American action cinema.
    It was at no point my intention here to suggest that Con Air is a masterpiece (although that argument can of course be made). It was rather my goal to intimate the ways in which popular cinema can offer intriguing discourses on a multiplicity of subjects without being necessarily overt or academic about it, and to use Con Air for this purpose because in my own mind it is a superlative example of this.

Flights of Fancy: An Essay on 'Con Air': Part 5

Part 5: Reasons To Rehabilitate: The Use of The Feminine

The protagonist of Con Air is fighting to get back to his blonde wife and angelic child (and along the way he protects the honour of a female prison guard from a rapist). The codification of women as passive objects to be obtained at the heroic conclusion of the narrative is widespread in Hollywood films – the desire for a heterosexual relationship and masculine environmental control interpreted as a great cultural leveller. Poe’s wife Tricia does little of consequence, and Guard Bishop exists in much the same role as Poe’s obligatory black friend – to be imperilled, used by the villains and saved by the hero.
    Despite their conservative use within the narrative, the female characters are surprisingly free of objectification. Tricia is a married woman, a mother, and un-sexual (the possibility for a steamy scene in the opening minutes is avoided, presumably due to her pregnancy). Larkin’s assistant Ginny clearly has an unspoken affection for him, but this plot goes nowhere and she is never used as anything other than a professional at work (if a slightly wimpy one: “All those prisoners on one plane” she says apprehensively at the start of the film, which Larkin flippantly dismisses). Her twinning with Tricia in one of the last shots of the film explicates the unconditional existence of female affection in the world, and the gaudy uncomplicated nature of it (through the bank of glowing lights behind them):

    Guard Bishop is treated as nothing but a sex object by rapist Johnny 23 (“When you wake up, I’m gonna be Johnny 24!”), but his viewpoint is undermined by the marginalized and lecherous positioning of his character (“Don’t treat women like that!” yells Poe as he knocks Johnny out). The unconscious rapist is in effect castrated in the finale, his arm (the symbol of his violent virility, carrying a tattoo for each victim) torn off and left dangling on handcuffs. (The only presence in the film to invite objectification as a female sex object is the male cross-dressing convict Sally Can’t-Dance, about more in Part 6).
    One of the only times Steve Buscemi’s crisply cool sociopath Garland Greene talks about his own crimes is to state that “this one girl, I drove through three states wearing her head as a hat.” It is unclear whether this “girl” is a woman or a child. Poe’s response to this claim is to insulate himself from the arbitrary sickness of Greene by reminding himself that today is his daughter’s birthday. A subtle but important connection is drawn between Greene’s crimes and, in opposition to these, the utopian life Poe expects when united with Casey.
    It is Greene’s actions when he meets an eight-or-nine year old girl in a trailer park near Lerner Air Field which redefine his character. They talk and sing bland songs inside a dry swimming pool, and a jump-cut forces the audience to assume Greene has murdered the girl. When we later see her waving goodbye to the convicts’ plane, it is clear that Greene is to be seen in a new light. This allows his escape from maximum security isolation to be a happy ending.
    The poverty-stricken girl has for Greene been a “walking, talking reason to rehabilitate” (as Guard Bishop said to Poe of his own daughter). This man, who has perpetrated dozens of motiveless killings, is redefined by a single non-violent meeting. In discussing the presentation of paedophiles in the media, Yvonne Jewkes states that “the moral panic over paedophilia has perpetrated the notion that sexual dangerousness resides in strangers and that those strangers are not like ‘us’.” (Media and Crime, p97). Greene is indeed a stranger – isolated within his own vehicle for prisoner transport, gagged like Hannibal Lector, and attired in a white jumpsuit with the word SEPARATEE emblazoned on it, he is treated by society as a virulent pathogen.

    While he is dangerous, he is never labeled a paedophile, even though the tea party between himself and the child hinges on the threat of abuse, not least in the disturbing point-of-view shot that closes the scene. Greene’s violence and cruelty are spoken of, but not depicted: a moment in the extended cut of the film hints at his premeditated and unnecessary murder of a guard (“feel better?” asks Cyrus when he sees the body) – while this omits directly presenting the murder, it still failed to make the final cut, presumably in part because it makes the happy ending of Greene’s escape more discernibly worrying.
    It is left to Cyrus to be a threat to the little girls of this world. “The last thing little Casey Poe ever gets to smell will be my stinking breath,” he says to Poe with lasciviousness. “You ain’t getting near my daughter,” Poe retorts later, and it is this reminder of Cyrus potential paedophiliac qualities which most justify his overwrought punishment and death. 
Con Air treats women conservatively as objects under threat or objects of reward. However, it presents pre-pubescent girls as the ultimate engines behind correct action, as Poe’s desire to meet his daughter are his explicit motivations, while Greene’s rehabilitation suggests that love and mercy shown to a child are enough to overwrite heretofore unremitting sociopathy.
    I hope to here have indicated the conventional approach to the feminine taken by Con Air, which is reinforced by its depiction of (inevitably female) children as angels of redemption. This groundwork is necessary for the following exploration of the strange and unexpected presentation of masculine identity in the film.

Flights of Fancy: An Essay on 'Con Air': Part 4

Part 4: Sand, No Trees: The Environment of the Left Behind 

As Zeigmunt Bauman argues in Globalization: The Human Consequences, time-space compression brings with it not just an advantaged class for whom distance and capital are of no object, but also a devalued underclass who do not have the resources for such integration and so become more isolated, and more disenfranchised, than previously in world history. Bauman rather fittingly chooses California’s Pelican Bay – a high security prison – to conclude his argument that the harshest punishment globalisation can inflict is the forced locality of an individual. Prison in the twenty-first century is about disconnecting individuals, preventing them from learning skills or even performing mundane but utilitarian tasks to fill the days and concentrate the mind. Conviction of a crime results in complete spatial and temporal disconnection.
    The dream of the convicts in Con Air is to escape this control. Yet once they have begun their escape they must first move through a forgotten landscape: Lerner Air Field is a place left behind by globalisation, and it is fitting that the prisoners seem so at home there. In this space it is the regimented representatives of authoritarian control – the police and SWAT teams – that are dangerously out of place.
    The America of Con Air is an empty, dusty, useless space. Lerner Air Field is a collection of rusty buildings and scores of abandoned vehicles left to decompose in the desert heat. It is, as Cyrus states, “forty-nine minutes from anything resembling authority”. Whilst other action films of the late nineties revel in the surveillance-culture of modern civilisation (The Matrix, The Peacemaker, and Enemy of the State all present the world as a collection of images on a series of screens), Con Air presents the flipside of late capitalist globalisation and technological homogenisation – the unmonitored and inconsequential wasteland.

    In The Cultural Turn, Fredric Jameson identifies the clash of high and low culture that predominates in “newer postmodernisms,” which are “fascinated precisely by that whole landscape of advertising and motels, of the Las Vegas strip, of the Late Show and B-grade Hollywood film” (p2). Las Vegas, for Jameson as for other critics, is a personification of the false pleasurezone of consumerism: casinos with no windows, replicas of landmarks from a dozen continents, the only culture present being that of pastiche (especially if we use that word with Jameson’s delineation of it in mind, as explained in Part 3).
    A crash landing on the Las Vegas strip fulfils the necessary criteria that an action film have a destructive and kinetic action sequence in a recognisable landmark. This is a trend notably distilled in The International and mocked in Quantum of Solace, which both embrace the chilly, isolating consequences of late capitalism. Twelve years before these examples, Con Air exists with the echo of Reaganist American self-absorption still perceptible, and its Las Vegas sequence depicts the friction between hedonistic abandonment to consumerism and the existence of a dangerous and neglected underside to that dream. In it, wards of the state, who should be kept from public scrutiny, brazenly tear through the dream of a plastic America. (It must be noted that this structure is echoed in Zombieland, in which a hostile, empty, and consumer driven (i.e. the Twinkie-quest, the star cameo) America reaches its summation in a literal fairground).
    Bauman considers the utopian city to be unpolluted by history (p38). Las Vegas goes one step further: it does not include history, but it does quote it (replicas of the Eiffel Tower, etc) and in doing so neutralises the threat of a dormant authenticity, or a foreign alternative to the pleasures on offer: there is only this island of lights in the desert, a long straight road which is inevitably reconceived of as a landing strip. It boggles the mind to consider what the narcissistic French postmodernist Jean Baudrillard would think of it all, with his obsessions with replication, America, speed and vanishing points, and this is too hyperbolic a topic to broach here.
    (Nonetheless, by way of further evidence, we should note that when asked where he is taking the captured plane, Cyrus states “we’re going to Disneyland” – a place Baudrillard considered to be “the perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulacra”, a place of unconcealed artificiality which exists, hiding-in-plain-sight, to “make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and America that surrounds are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and the order of simulation” (Simulacra and Simulation, p12). As with Disneyland, as with Vegas: Cyrus is more accurate than he knows about their destination.)
    The crash itself and subsequent fire truck chase embellish Las Vegas as a playground of spectacular and violent pleasures. Cyrus’s death – he is thrown through sheets of glass, electrocuted, then has his head crushed by a building site mechanism – embodies this overblown shallowness, while the concurrent nadir is the explosion of an armoured car. These moments lack a framework for them to be understood as logical occurrences. The destruction of the armoured car and subsequent raining down of burning dollar bills exists solely for the purposes of sensation, and as such it is a fitting metaphor of the spectator experience of the Hollywood blockbuster: watching millions of dollars go up in a series of massive explosions staged for your pleasure.
    For Walter Benjamin, the glass arcades of Paris were the quintessential experience of modernity in the 1930s. They presented capitalism and consumerism as a phantasmagoria of sensation and architecture. In Con Air, the deserted spaces of Nevada, Utah and Arizona, as well as the gaudy Potemkin village of Las Vegas, are indicative of the space of postmodernity, or at least the side of it which is left to the technologically and culturally dispossessed.
    “I’ll be able to see some nice scenery whipping by down there,” Poe says when asked to fix the undercarriage of the plane, “trees and stuff.” He is joking: all he will see is desert. These sand-blown non-spaces (where does the plane take off from initially, exactly?, we see only the depopulated airport) are appropriate to the marginalized and segregated body of prisoners. When they crash through into the populated world of consumerism it is Jameson’s embodiment of “low culture”, the Las Vegas strip, and the first trees we see are a set of plastic palms engulfed in a fireball. We should not confuse this for the real world though, especially considering the casino the plane finally crashes into is, fittingly, the Las Vegas Sands.

Flights of Fancy: An Essay on 'Con Air': Parts 1 - 3

Part 1: Introduction

“Oh well, why not,” says Stanley Goodspeed, played by Nicolas Cage, in the 1996 action spectacular The Rock. He then slams on the pedal of his stolen Lamborghini, and smashes through a plate-glass window in pursuit of a dapper ex-SAS soldier on the run in San Francisco. The moment is absurd. The absurdity is acknowledged, and offered as a pleasure in and of itself. There are plenty of such moments of heightened ridiculousness in The Rock, but the film tries to have its grenade and detonate it too, as director Michael Bay is wont to do, and so fails to fully exploit the potential for parodic excess in the action genre. This is not a reticence observed by the nadir of the 1990s Hollywood spectacle Con Air.
    Beginning with an introduction to the plot of the film, and going on to analyse several facets of it, the subsequent several blog posts will attempt to suggest how a film that seems to be empty and unremarkable spectacle is worthy of analysis.


Part 2: Every Creep and Freak On One Plane

The story goes that Don Simpson, one half of the producing partnership that also included Jerry Bruckheimer, hated the idea of Con Air. Simpson and Bruckheimer had together produced some of the most overblown and superficial films of the 1980s and 1990s, films like Top Gun, Bad Boys and The Rock. Quite what black mark the producer-auteur thought Con Air would smear on his resume we will never know – Simpson’s death in 1996 left Jerry Bruckheimer free to hire debut director Simon West and action-star of the moment Nicolas Cage and go ahead and make the Die Hard-with-prisoners-on-a-plane movie he had always wanted.
    Cage plays Cameron Poe, a hellraiser from Alabama who has turned out good by joining the US Rangers. Returning to his pregnant wife he gets into a bar-fight, kills someone with a punch, and is imprisoned by an uncaring and hypocritical legal system. Years later he is to be released, but first must “hitch a ride home” on a plane transporting “the worst of the worst” to a new “supermax” prison. Among these nasty characters are educated sociopaths (John Malkovich’s Cyrus Grissom), militant Black panther-types (Ving Rhames’ Diamond Dog) and eerily tranquil mass murderers (Steve Buscemi’s Garland Greene).
    These prisoners soon take over the plane, and Poe must retain their loyalty in order to protect his close friend (a diabetic in need of insulin) and a sexually threatened prison guard (Rachel Ticotin). They land at Carson City to offload some prisoners, then on to Lerner Air Field where a plan to switch planes goes awry. Pursued by earnest FBI agent Vince Larkin (John Cusack) the prisoners are forced to flee Lerner and soon after crash-land on the Las Vegas strip.
    The film will here be analysed for the manner in which the illogic of elements of plotting and mise-en-scene construct a pastiche of action genre templates; the depiction of America and the non-spaces the marginalized convicts are forced to function within; the use of children as a compositional element and the complicated portrayal of sociopathy and implied paedophilia; and finally the simultaneous reverence and undermining of masculine identity.


Part 3: “On Any Other Day That Might Seem Strange”: Absurdities and Violence

The overt pleasures of Con Air are the action sequences, which come thick and fast, but each carefully delineated within what are frequently similar backdrops and concepts. In his essay connecting action cinema with the adventure narratives of ancient Greek novels (via Bakhtin), Martin Flanaghan states the world of action/adventure narrative is “ruled by chance and coincidence”, and is “structured around wild detours from reality that despite their infeasibility are perfectly acceptable within the self-determined logic of the genre” (p108 in ‘The Chronotope in Action’ in Action And Adventure Cinema, edited by Yvonne Tasker). I would like to suggest that Con Air is aware of this ‘necessity of infeasibility’, as it were, and uses it to comment not just on the spatial and temporal mechanics of the action film, but also on the culture from which the imperative to create such wild worlds originates; namely, late twentieth century America.
    When Poe et al are making a break for it, only to be confronted at the rear of the plane by a corvette being dragged through the air behind them as they take off, Poe’s comment “on any other day that might seem strange” can be interpreted as “in any other genre that might be out of place.” This surreal sight is soon trumped by Cyrus threatening to kill a stuffed toy rabbit (“make a move and the bunny gets it”) at a crescendo of high drama. These are sly winks to the audience (much like that which Cage offers in the final image within the end credits), but their purpose is more interesting than easy bathetic humour.
    Fredric Jameson explains parody as a response to modernism which ridicules the “excessiveness and eccentricity” of “stylistic mannerisms”; he delineates this from pastiche, implicitly a more developed and perhaps more depressing phenomenon, as it is a similar form of mimicry but is performed “without parody’s ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared with which what is being imitated is rather comic.” (Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ in The Cultural Turn, pp. 4-5). A montage depicting Poe’s years in jail near the beginning of Con Air shows him working out, learning Spanish, writing to his daughter, avoiding prison riots, and learning origami. Let us repeat: the hero of this violent, adult action film learns origami. This is not a parodic moment. Perhaps if it featured within Hot Shots!, or an Airplane film we could consider it parody. But the placement within an overtly heartfelt sequence and the po(e)-facedness of delivery make it, by Jameson’s rules, pastiche.

    Con Air presents a world vacated by the normal. It responds to the increasing absurdity of Hollywood spectacle by presenting an America with no grip on reality, populated by dramatis personae who are so grotesquely not of the real world that they seem to belong to a cartoon. This is symptomatic of a move towards artificiality and immateriality that can be identified in a postmodern interpretation of the contemporary moment, as well the response of Hollywood cinema to this turn. Axiomatic of this is the presentation of bloodshed.
    In the last decade or so films with $100 million+ budgets have become increasingly ingenious in presenting violent actions without presenting violence. The Matrix created a cyber-world where any number of innocent bystanders could be mowed down – all in the name of the freedom of the human race. Comic book films show shootings and conflagrations, but without blood or corpses. Action in the 1980s and early 1990s was more visceral: before family entertainment consolidated itself as the central brand for enormous financial returns, blood and gore were good business.
    Con Air is balanced precariously on the seesaw between the squib-and-swearing fueled action the preceded and the bloodless aversion that followed. It is a violent film itself, but the surreal and overtly absurd elements detract from the unpleasantness of the violence, and seem to be a reaction to it. The ethos offered by Hollywood – that violence is spectacle, and this spectacle can, through editing and scripting, be somehow non-violent (by which I mean non-brutal, and lacking consequences) – is in Con Air boiled over into a world where nothing sticks, and logic is secondary to bedazzlement and earnestness.
    In reacting to other Hollywood films of its ilk, Con Air is responding to an absurdity with absurdity. Its critique is not satirical, political, or comprehensive. If the “wild detours from reality” of the action narrative are “perfectly acceptable with the self-determined logic of the genre”, as Flanaghan asserted above, then Con Air self-determines its own (il)logic with nihilistic abandon.

Downside Up: A Review of 'Inception'

Huddled together in a darkened auditorium, the communal experience of seeing a newly released film at the cinema is something akin to that of a shared dream, especially if that film contains the limitless worlds afforded by digital special effects and their attendant unshackling of aesthetics from indexical reality. James Cameron’s recent Avatar pulled the audience into the lush and bioluminescent world of Pandora through the device of the human protagonist effectively being put to sleep, his dreaming self let loose in new body into a strange world. The Matrix, ten years ago, pulled the same trick. Perhaps such dream-zones are the most pertinent space in which to explore the alienating same-but-different world of global hyperspace, in which our minds can alter our surroundings at will, our projections of ourselves are limited only by our imagination, but in which the rules and dangers are never fully explicated.

Christopher Nolan, director of puzzle-thrillers Memento and The Prestige, has taken this conceit in his latest film Inception and turned it into a device to cause as much havoc as possible. The Freudian diagnosis of dreams as evidentiary expressions of subconscious clutter is used as the basis for what would, if it were not for the dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream madness of it all, be a pretty straightforward heist thriller. If our secrets are hidden within our subconscious, the logic of the film goes, why not create a world in which these secrets can be stolen by teams of “extractors”, skilled in entering the dreams of others, navigating the immune-system of mental mazes, and stealing the guarded secrets of the most powerful people on earth.

The frisson of describing a potential target as having a “militarised subconscious” is unfortunately undercut the further it becomes evident that Nolan’s conception of dream-theft is going to rely on a prevalence of automatic weaponry, and deploy massive explosions the same way other films do jump-cuts. It is fitting that all the psyches entered in the film are male, as the ensuing mental constructs are reliant on weaponised conflict and hulking, crashing machinery. Offering the suggestion that this is intentional, the only women in the film are either “architects” (a kind of dream interior decorator), air stewardesses, or demonic interstitial shades (the depiction of the last, admittedly, entertainingly playing on the ‘mad-woman-in-the-attic/basement’ trope).

The film is a two-hour long action sequence unfolding across various levels with different rules, goals, and characters on each, like playing several computer games at once. A genuine first, Inception may be edited together faster and be considerably louder than its own trailer; composer Hans Zimmer is a Wagnerian talent, but his free-associative, thunderingly loud, and literally non-stop contribution here is wearying. In Nolan’s previous film, The Dark Knight, chase and fight sequences proliferated to the point of ceaseless crescendo, but this was all in the service of a story about the terror of arbitrary action and the morally dubious deeds undertaken at times of frenzy. This, by contrast, is a world of rules and limitations which are repeatedly expressed to ensure the audience is aware of how the game is played: when the fact that death in a dream makes the dreamer wake-up is bluntly explained once again I realised how much I craved for the tension of a set-up like that in, say, Pontypool, in which the fascination with remarkable goings on stems from the necessity for the rules to be discovered through desperate inquiry.

Inception is remarkable at times in the skill with which it orchestrates the grandiose, often unique, and occasionally (but only occasionally) mind-bending action spectacle (a single-take fight in a rotating corridor is coordinated with – pardon the phrase – Kubrickian genius, if only the vehicular catalyst for it were not so lazy). The casting of Tom Hardy and Joseph Gordon-Levitt are also particular successes, but it was a shame to see Ellen Page forced into the role of exposition-prompter. Continuing the conspicuous consumption of the near $200 million budget beyond the sets and effects, even the minor roles are filled by name actors (Pete Postlethwaite gets one line, Michael Caine’s role is in the trailer in its entirety, and it turns out that Lucas Haas is still working).

The film is similar in intellectual register to Tony Gilroy’s underrated spy thriller Duplicity, but where that film was unwilling to give the audience very much beyond the occasional frozen pizza joke, Inception wants to give the audience everything it can. It is certainly stunning, but there is a hollowness to the exercise. Leonardo DiCaprio’s protagonist Cobb and his guilt-ridden psychology are given pride of place, but this is at the expense of all else. Say what you will about stories that revolve around guilt-ridden protagonists pining for redemption and middle-aged men seeking reconciliation from their fathers, these elements are not fresh. Never mind that here they are less the subject of the drama than the subjectivity of them is the subject of the drama, but nonetheless their predominance is a disappointment.

Possibly the lack of surprises towards the third act is itself intended to be a surprise, but personally I would have enjoyed an increased tension between the heist players, or more shades to Ken Watanabe’s bankrolling corporate benefactor who inexplicably (in a logical, rather than narratological, sense) accompanies the team into the mind of their target. Duplicity had similarly impermeable characters, but their heavily guarded personalities were the subject of a bravely medium-oriented enquiry into trust and the inability to ever know what another person is thinking. Despite all the time spent within mindscapes, there is little of note to the way anyone in Inception thinks: the characters are ciphers, and reduced to gun-toting grenade-throwers before too long.

Nolan is a very giften director, and he and his team are impeccable at their craft, although the editing of Lee Smith remains too scissorhands for my liking. But in their eagerness to create a well-ordered world of rules, levels and action they have lost sight of the charm, freedom, and bizarreness that are the lasting pleasures of both good dreams and Blockbuster cinema.

Curses! A Review of 'Kick-Ass'

Like hastily eaten junk food, comic book films continue to repeat in stale belches across cinema screens. It is only logical: no matter how minor the comic it will still have some devoted followers, who will – being likely in their teens and very active in techno-blogo-twittersphere – generate more hype than warranted, increasing the slim possibility of a decent opening weekend before inevitable and hasty evaporation of ticket sales and audience interest. In addition to this financial concern, the comic turn is natural considering the movement of mainstream American filmmaking towards hollowness, callousness and self-justified viciousness.

It seemed that Kick-Ass would be something of a relief from all this. Promising a knowing inclusion of the dramatic and aesthetic expectations of the “young adult” comic book genre (a deadly eleven-year old girl!), but with a critical eye towards the link between this film world and the real world: how are the goals and ambitions of the average American teenager formed and manipulated by widespread generic banality? The real and the fantasy feed off each other, currently only able to offer a trajectory that spirals ever downward. There is certainly room for a film attacking these issues and which, even if not excoriating the peddlers of morally lazy trash, at least opens up alternative avenues of thought to those of unreal empowerment through dress-up and revenge.

Kick-Ass seems to engage with these issues, but very quickly backs away. Or, more accurately, becomes drawn in by the lure of easy answers through violence. The protagonist, Dave Lizewski, is tired of being a non-presence at school and getting casually mugged on his way home. Donning a mask and batons to fight crime, he is promptly beaten up and stabbed. A bracing concept. Yet there is something unsettling about the stabbing. Digital blood, followed by a comedic overwrought car crash. This is not bathos, it is glorification.

(These digital spurts of blood are becoming increasingly prevalent in Blockbuster cinema, again a result of the comic influence. But while the panels of Frank Miller feature a splatter of red across them, the brutality inherent in this captured moment is lost when translated to the screen. These gushes of obvious post-production tinkering plainly separate violence and spectacle, focussing exclusively on the latter. It may be a direct translation of the visual style of the comic onto the film, as it was in Sin City and 300, but the different medium alters the meaning of the aesthetic. Grittiness is expressed differently on a printed page than it is on the silver screen at twenty-four frames a second.)

The violence in Kick-Ass functions narratively (initially at least) as the unpleasant intrusion of the real into the fantasy; however, it is filmed in such a way that it merely fuels the fantasy, driving it further into masturbatory indulgence.

Fine, then. This is not to be the To The Lighthouse of comic book films (as last years Watchmen could and should have been, in the same way that the sharp source material by Alan Moore was so comprehensive it made all further graphic novels about masked avengers redundant). As it develops further, and Lizewski (superhero name: Kick-Ass) becomes a media star through youtube footage and canny social networking, there is plenty of room made available for satire to creep in. Unfortunately, nothing except sensationalism manages to survive the ensuing din. The film aims for cynical but ends up utterly charmless.

A more successful duo of crime fighters is introduced, who are at war with a villainous yet wholly undefined syndicate responsible (indirectly, it must be highlighted) for the death of an inevitably unnamed and voiceless female figure of maternal comfort (worryingly, Lizewski’s mother is also depicted as dying silently and indolently). These various characters all become embroiled in possibly the most lazily plotted of such scripts to date, and less and less gets in the way of violent action sequences (each one with a soundtrack stolen from elsewhere: John Murphy’s signature cues for 28 Weeks Later and Sunshine, and Ennio Morricone’s overexposed For a Few Dollars More theme).

Director Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake, made in the ebb of hype following Guy Ritchie’s own London gangster films (which Vaughn himself co-produced), was one of the most stylish and inventive British films of the last ten years, easily earning the title of The Long Good Friday for the twenty-first century. Since this, however, Vaughn has increasingly looked like a director-for-hire, even though he co-produced and co-wrote Kick-Ass. The most memorable parts of the film are the zaniest, and feel distinctly like they have been conceived of solely to keep Vaughn interested in his production (and it takes something pretty zany for interest to be retained in a film which cues up the song ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us’ when two superheroes meet).

We end up on the same damn rooftop that Iron Man 2 ended on: man and woman sharing an intimate moment, a poor digital recreation of New York behind them, the unwelcome promise of a sequel, and not a single thought given to the disproportionate collateral damage wrought during the preceding “adventures”. Kick-Ass in the end tells us nothing more than that the temptation for violent catharsis through a cartoon lens is too much even for what seems a highly talented crew. The generic template is adhered to so closely that attempts to interpret any critical discourse on the unpleasantness unfolding become increasingly difficult, and finally impossible. This is not to say it is not entertaining: it’s a film with great comic timing and some fresh ideas up its sleeve. That it feels so hollow in the end should be a lesson for future filmmakers to avoid indulging in the temptations that are here so fully given in to.

Further reading:

The Dangers of Exceptionalism: Some Thoughts on 'X-Men Origins: Wolverine'

Land of the Parodic, Home of the Absurd: A Review of 'Watchmen'