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.
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