Of director Michael Mann's ten films, this is his first. I believe it's easy to cite them each in a brief introduction because Mann's scope and structural complexity have certainly expanded but the narrowness of his focus--a focus that betrays his training in filmed documentary--remains strongly connected to this feature.
His focus is on the personal code, how it relates to labor, and the artifacts of that combination.
The the possible exception of "The Keep", a common thread along all of these films is a relentless focus on the work. Their labors are often extreme ones, accompanied by behavioral and philosophical codes that bind their world.
The central subject of his remake of his own NBC television series "Miami Vice" concerns itself primarily with the logistical and psychological contortions necessary to stay within not one but two codes: that of a play-acting criminal within the bounds of the law.
Perhaps Mann's best signature is his courage to expose this code in dialogue. So many of his films turn on a fulcrum distant from violence or conflict, but in conversation, often between men of two opposing codes.
A nine minute scene, appearing relatively early in this picture, is where Caan puts everything on the table, as if we're peering through the keyhole to the mechanics of a reinforced safe.
Similarly, Al Pacino's will sit on the floor of a Japanese restaurant across from Russell Crowe, one perhaps a predator, one perhaps pray, and set the stakes for the remarkable combination of legal mechanics and familial code in "The Insider".
Then there is a riddle of realism and here I will mention one film Mann has not made. "Bullitt," the Peter Yates and Steve McQueen collaboration strongly summarizes the riddle: is the film a commitment to realism with its patience to frame police procedure and criminal economics with apparent clinical attention to detail?
Or the complex protagonist, like Frank in "Thief", or Neil McCauley in "Heat," or Jeffrey Wigand in The Insider, placed as they are at the extremities of their society and their own code that they form a unity across the distance between cops and robbers, or soldiers and guerrillas (as in "The Last of the Mohicans") or a fighter (as the title figure in "Ali") and a government (the Federal Government or the Nation of Islam; take your pick).
These are strongly Romantic figures, in the technical sense of the word, and their codes are exhibited and articulated with what can only be called hyperrealistic self-awareness. Surely few criminals and cops (even as portrayed in his exclusively digital production of "Public Enemies") are so carefully calibrated and concerned with the integrity of a set of ideas.
The influence of "Bullitt" is more tangible in "Heat", but the combination of heroic forms, often shadowed by ambiguity, against an almost technocratic landscape of detail, research, and realism shines here, as it does--I would argue much more dimly--in "Collateral."
The riddle shines brightly in "Thief" and is perhaps its most impressive characteristic.
Now I encourage you to put aside these remarks and look forward to the next two hours. Wherein:
You will marvel at Caan's barrel chest, finally exhibited as an apparent totem of technological triumph.
You may enjoy two fleeting cameos by men who will many years later each carry their own prime time dramatic series for CBS.
You will witness what I posit to be the strangest most intense stare at least between two men, ever captured on film.
You will enjoy Robert Prosky's delivery what is for me perhaps the most vividly offensive and curiously indelible of threats.
And finally the many cars, shirt collars, and public phones that punctuate this film with a rhythm and reliability that perhaps bests the musical contribution herein, one provided solely by the group Tangerine Dream.
Enjoy Michael Mann's first feature film. We begin in the streets of Chicago. 1981.
Notes
1. Best read in the voice of Yale University Architecture Professor Vincent Scully.]]>
2. "Backcut (felling cut)." The final cut in a felling operation.
4. "Buck." To cut a felled tree into logs.
5. "Butt." The bottom of the felled part of a tree.
6. "Cable yarding." The movement of felled trees or logs from the area where they are felled to the landing on a system composed of a cable suspended from spars and/or towers. The trees or logs may be either dragged across the ground on the cable or carried while suspended from the cable.
7. "Chock." A block, often wedge shaped, which is used to prevent movement; e.g., a log from rolling, a wheel from turning.
8. "Choker." A sling used to encircle the end of a log for yarding. One end is passed around the load, then through a loop eye, end fitting or other device at the other end of the sling. The end that passed through the end fitting or other device is then hooked to the lifting or pulling machine.
9. "Danger tree." A standing tree that presents a hazard to employees due to conditions such as, but not limited to, deterioration or physical damage to the root system, trunk, stem or limbs, and the direction and lean of the tree.
10. "Debark." To remove bark from trees or logs.
11. "Deck." A stack of trees or logs.
13. "Domino felling." The partial cutting of multiple trees which are left standing and then pushed over with a pusher tree.
14. "Fell (fall)." To cut down trees.
15. "Feller (faller)." An employee who fells trees.
16. "Grounded." The placement of a component of a machine on the ground or on a device where it is firmly supported.
19. "Landing." Any place where logs are laid after being yarded, and before transport from the work site.
20. "Limbing." To cut branches off felled trees.
21. "Lodged tree (hung tree)." A tree leaning against another tree or object which prevents it from falling to the ground.
22. "Log." A segment sawed or split from a felled tree, such as, but not limited to, a section, bolt, or tree length.
23. "Logging operations." Operations associated with felling and moving trees and logs from the stump to the point of delivery, such as, but not limited to, marking danger trees and trees/logs to be cut to length, felling, limbing, bucking, debarking, chipping, yarding, loading, unloading, storing, and transporting machines, equipment and personnel to, from and between logging sites.
24. "Machine." A piece of stationary or mobile equipment having a self-contained power plant, that is operated off-road and used for the movement of material. Machines include, but are not limited to, tractors, skidders, front-end loaders, scrapers, graders, bulldozers, swing yarders, log stackers, log loaders, and mechanical felling devices, such as tree shears and feller-bunchers. Machines do not include airplanes or aircraft (e.g., helicopters).
25. "Rated capacity." The maximum load a system, vehicle, machine or piece of equipment was designed by the manufacturer to handle.
26. "Root wad." The ball of a tree root and dirt that is pulled from the ground when a tree is uprooted.
28. "Skidding." The yarding of trees or logs by pulling or towing them across the ground.
29. "Slope (grade)." The increase or decrease in altitude over a horizontal distance expressed as a percentage. For example, a change of altitude of 20 feet (6 m) over a horizontal distance of 100 feet (30 m) is expressed as a 20 percent slope.
30. "Snag." Any standing dead tree or portion thereof.
31. "Spring pole." A tree, segment of a tree, limb, or sapling which is under stress or tension due to the pressure or weight of another object.
33. "Undercut." A notch cut in a tree to guide the direction of the tree fall and to prevent splitting or kickback.
35. "Winching." The winding of cable or rope onto a spool or drum.
36. "Yarding." The movement of logs from the place they are felled to a landing.
Felled from the US Department of Labor.
]]>2. Re: WEB53533
3. House Furnish
4. replacement rate?
5. Buckminster notes
6. answering the "why"
7. Web Marketing in the Attention Economy
8. pressie notes
9. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWYuelJAgjs
10. bp invite list
11. Sci-Fi Creepshow
12. RadioShack business plan
13. (no subject)
14. Re: Hi]]>
2. The canted corners and colored slate floor of a specific college dorm room in New England.
3. The video game Mario 64.
4. Tuesday's New York Times Crossword puzzle.
5. Reading about knots.
6. Reading about sailing.
7. Dawn and occasionally dusk.
8. Bringing a petty order to things.
9. Rain.
10. Beer.]]>
An accidental part of this research has been marathon sessions of home-buying television shows, principally "Property Virgins" and "House Hunters".
The primary appeal of "Property Virgins" is the strange post-nationalist blend of Canadian Realtor/host and mostly mid-western clients. It can be surprisingly difficult to tell whether an episode is taking place in suburban Toronto, but in the end it usually is. And the nice neighborhood what-can-you-afford headfake opening is always fun.
Wherever the houses are located, there is inevitably a shot wherein the buying couple enters the kitchen and, bracketed by b-roll of the appointments and hardware, one of the virgins comments on either: a) the presence of a nice island workstation, or b) the disappointing absence of same.
After walking through enough kitchen layouts myself I realized why islands are so valued by prospective home buyers. Today, cooking is so often viewed as entertainment in mass media that home buyers--when imagining their occupancy of a particular property--project themselves into the kitchen as a show not a room. In a sense the question their asking themselves is: can I shoot a cooking show in this kitchen?
An island most often means you can address your television audience. Without one, food preparation is done back turned, looking away from an audience. One might as well be in a 19th century scullery, not an open-plan sound stage. I think this reaction is completely unconscious, but with open plan living areas with an ability to converse with company while working in a kitchen reproduces the television effect. In this sense its likely a proxy for a wish deeply held with home buying.
I think it leads back to the notion that celebrity experience is an increasingly powerful prism for framing and addressing consumption. Even Tracey Kidder's "House", safely buffered by twenty plus years of media evolution and celebrity magnification, clearly highlights the role that projection plays in evaluating a house.
Anyway, if you're remodeling a kitchen you might consider the question: could I make television here? It's a question everyone wants answered in the open house.
]]>2. The tape would not discriminate.]]>
No. 12, dogleg left. Elevated Tee. Second shot to a greatly elevated green. Shooting into a moderate North Atlantic wind. Carne Golf Links, Belmullet Golf Club. Co Mayo, Ireland.
]]>2. The Plattsburg
3. The St. Andrew
4. The Oriental
5. The Small
6. The Kelvin
7. The Atlantic
8. The Diagonal
9. The Persian
10. The Nicky
11. The Victoria
12. The Cavendish
13. The Grantchester
14. The Hanover
15. The Balthus
16. The English
17. The Half English
18. The Italian
19. The Turkish
20. The Onasis]]>
2. Bridge
3. Wiff N Proof
4. Sailing Knots
5. NASCAR
6. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
7. High-End Stereo
8. Wine]]>
2. The choice of Pissarro. (Kind of obscure; Audience had to work.)
3. "Two Brews!" (Why not more specific?)
4. "Hemlock" seems to be a given name, but other agents have other "poison" names. (Which came first?)
5. The combination of the homosocial and the homophobic. (A central curiosity.)
6. In Switzerland, the business checking in. (It doesn't pay off.)
7. The afternoon before the climb, CE's drink is waiting for him.
8. Pope's end. (Somewhat uncertain.)
9. Is cutting the rope really necessary? (Doesn't seem to be.)
10. Ben's culpability. (Unresolved given the pat ending on other fronts.)]]>
As it happened.
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I wish to touch on the deep connections between McNamara and organizational thinking. McNamara's work applying civilian oversight and robust operations research to the armed forces yields interesting object lessons. His perspective is certainly established by his work, coming out of the Harvard Business, to establish a similar rational revolution at Ford Motor Company. In that time, his invented management caste held an inviolable faith in data: the sourcing, transforming, and establishment of organizational containers. He accomplished similar changes in government. And these vectors of modernist thinking would be tested mightily when management theory collided with the bewilderingly complex "theater" of post-colonial Southeast Asia.2
What makes a study of McNamara so rewarding is his exposure at the elbow of modernism and post-modernism, terms I use only in their context at least as it relates to organizational thinking and perhaps information design. His testimony in Errol Morris' The Fog of War, an essentially uninterrupted two hour survey of his intellectual life that is at turns confessional and professorial. In particular, McNamara's focus on the role of empathy seems to me an acknowledgement of the irrationality present at the core of the human mind. His awareness of this conflict appears strongly in his writing following his public service.
To apply a man's life of controversy and the nihilogism of the Vietnam war to the running of organizations, or the transfer of knowledge or the design of information may appear flip. I run that risk in suggesting his success and failure therein have useful object lessons for a careful student.
Notes
1. The title may be particularly connected to Halberstam, but I'm not sure. It's an interesting choice for sure.
2. I believe an examination of McNamara's theater of thought as it relates to a continuum between perhaps Lévi-Strauss and Foucoult--at least their work on the formation of collective meaning and the roles and responsibilities of man--merits some academic attention.
]]>