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.