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.