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.

The Pieces Matter: A Review of 'Luther' (BBC1) and Thoughts On Dramatic Structure

A cursory glance at the list of reducible units of narrative deduced by Vladimir Propp from an analysis of Russian folk tales reveals that his work remains relevant and is fruitfully applicable to the new BBC television drama Luther. It is as though the casting of Idris Elba in the title role was justification enough for the existence of this weekly serial, and anything else in the work drawn from somewhere other than stock cultural situations and dynamics would be an unwanted distraction.

Indeed, Elba is mostly effective as intense London detective John Luther. Walking with a distinctive bob, and grasping his forehead when in contemplation as though his mind moves almost too fast for him to articulate, he’s an engaging protagonist, even if he is a carbon replication of Vincent D’Onofrio’s near-autistic detective in Law & Order: Criminal Intent, who was himself a more disengaged Will Graham from Michael Mann’s adaptation of Thomas Harris’ Manhunter.

While Graham’s psychological insights and instability were enforced onto the mise-en-scene around him in that film, Luther is unaided by simplistically cast supporting actors and locations. A child kidnapper (not rapist, presumably for watershed broadcast reasons) is run down in a cavernous and abandoned industrial site. A potential killer resides in a thirtieth floor Barbican apartment. The estranged wife (a Humanitarian Lawyer, so lots of chance for character development there) works in city office with glass elevators.

More derivatively, Luther’s immediate superior brings him back to the force after a suspension following the near-death of a suspect that still haunts him. His new partner is a fresh-faced rookie who applied “three times a week in writing” to work with him. Someone higher up the chain of command worries that Luther is a loose canon who could sink the entire unit. I could go on.

Perhaps a more rewarding task, however, would be to question why such elements are once again being trotted out. Partly, it is the sincerest form of flattery: director Brian Kirk (clearly a recent film school graduate) mimics the visual language of Heat-period Michael Mann, while creator and writer Neil Cross plays the unexciting trick of imbuing characters with a vague knowledge of their structural purpose (dialogue such as “was that the speech?” and “let’s have that talk where I tell you such-and-such” abound). This latter device is welcome, but hardly fresh, and was inevitably better done by Steven Soderbergh in the Ocean’s films.

Familiarity, of course, is a warm blanket, and we must be reminded of the following exchange from that masterpiece of satire Futurama, when Leela attempts to make the television show Fry has written more dramatic:

Fry: Married? Jenny can’t get married.

Leela: Why not? It’s clever, it’s unexpected.

Fry: But that’s not why people watch TV. Clever things make people feel stupid, and unexpected things make them feel scared.

Fry is correct to some degree. A genuinely dramatic piece of detective entertainment will perfectly poise the audience on the edge of realisation, but also make them rely on the final push to come from the protagonist. I wrote briefly in my review of Iron Man 2 about the tendency of Hollywood blockbusters to actively discourage audience involvement by crafting denouements so obtuse that we can only shrug in bemusement at their solving. Luther goes too far the other way, for reasons that feel lazy. We all guess that the gun is in the dog long before this is revealed because, in a scene that sticks out like a sore thumb, the dog is the only thing seen being cremated. During a coffee break Luther realises that the person he is interrogating is the culprit of the crime; returning to the interrogation room the suspect is clearly in on the fact that he now knows. Dramatic tension remains, but resolutely at a singular level. Multi-dimensional interaction is deemed too difficult. Rather than the villain seducing Luther’s wife by impersonating a normal person who was molested by the detective, she instead attacks the woman and hisses threats.

Another reason for the wholesale embrace of cliché must be related to the BBC’s budget and public profile issues, and the corporation’s hope for a “sure thing”. It is an unfortunate surrendering to populism, especially considering Channel 4 are both incapable and uninterested in creating anything as interesting as their now-finished Prime Suspect.

I never felt stupid during Luther, nor scared (even though, in the ruthless Alice Morgan, the show attempts to emulate Millennium’s terrifying demon Lucy Butler). At my most charitable I saw a production which was certifying itself in the fundamentals, before hopefully edging into more interesting territory. Unfortunately, these fundamentals consisted entirely of the aforementioned Proppian narratemes: the ‘Absentation’ or broken family unit, the villain’s ‘Reconnaissance’ of the hero (aided by Google), and even the ‘Receipt of the Magical Agent’ in the form of the fragments of the murder weapon. Such obvious formalist elements, presented straight as structural components, leave no room for the airless and uncomfortable moments of real life, nor do they allow room for the exploration of a drama at more than one level. The power of the scene in which the protagonist kicks in a door when he hears his lover is sleeping with someone else comes not just from the aggression, but from the raw directness of it among the multi-layered complications that surround it in the lives lived around such moments. Violence shocks because it is direct and clear, a clarity which is lost without a comparison to the muddle of the everyday.

The runaway popularity both commercially and critically (initially, at any rate) of the U.S. show 24 testifies to the fact that people enjoy entertainment that is not only very basic, but revels in how basic it is by recycling the same information scene-by-scene. Luther might not be this bad, but it certainly does not want us to be left in the dark, either in terms of plot information or character motivation.

Cultural theorist Fredric Jameson wrote in 1984 that to understand, or “cognitive[ly] map” the emerging postmodern world of digital connectivity and apparent creeping social homogenisation “will involve the invention of remarkable new languages and forms.” When I first saw Michael Mann’s (sorry, him again) 2006 film Miami Vice I thought that the first twenty minutes of that film might just be an illustration of such a new language, as it presented a world of simultaneity, complexity and unstoppable motion without offering a clarification beyond its visual existence. I now suspect that I may have been wrong, that the mapping of the psychology of the twenty-first century will take place through the medium of shows such as Luther, storytelling that reassure us that everything is deducible, that we are able to keep up, and that the only tragedy that can befall us is dramatic, and so understandable, and even cathartic.