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Curtains. Television screens. Windshields. Venetian blinds. Atrain bursting through the bubble of middle-class calm. A young man’s deadbody. A gun barrel. A brick wall. The Mexican boundary. A dead woman’s hands.Number 11 jersey. A baseball cap. The reflection off the glass top of a table. Adisc. Orange Boy. Orange girl. The wrinkled skin of an old woman. A matchswipe. The cigarette held between the fingers and against the lips. No eyes theremind you. No windows into the soul. Just the skin lit green. Just the fingerswith blood stains. And the lips, with blood on them. And the cigarette. Thismight not be, strictly speaking, a demonstration of Bazin’s notion of depth andrealism. Which happened to be the case with a lot of movies that were beingmade around the Eighties in Hollywood, and a movement, intentional or not, welland truly consolidated into the Nineties. A decade where I suppose thedispositif of narrative cinema changed quite radically and, which in many ways,embraced and propagated the post-ideological fascination with what I oftenrefer to as the cinema of itself. Or to offer a more scientific nomenclature,it could be labeled the cinema of surfaces. The origin was of course in theFifties and the Sixties, in films such as Vertigoand Point Blank, in the films of NicolasRoeg, and the band of Eighties were not anything if not cinephiles themselves,seduced by the appearances and the accompanying illusion. The real action wasin the text, and it’s only fair Steven Soderbergh sort of summarized it with Sex, Liesand Videotape. Where the narrative architecture of the cinema of theFifties and the Sixties was preoccupied with the presence of a gun and theaccompanying political implications, the Eighties and the Nineties often foundthemselves enchanted by the sheen of the metal. The form of the gun, or thesound of a gunshot, and the ensuing reverberations were of equal if not moreinterest than an underlying theme. This was to be the decade (along withtelevision) that probably inspired the Nineties to be the agent thattransformed the close-up from an event to the default currency, and in a movielike the Speed where almost all ofthe conversations even amongst the bit players are via close-ups, one gets thenotion of the growing individualization that was to be one of the standardfeatures of a lot of media in the ensuing years. There was Ridley Scott whose BladeRunner assumed, in many ways, the status of a flag-bearer for thepost-modern loss of identity. Yet, the manner in which the overarching tone ofthe diegesis informed his style, Scott betrayed the essentially modernistapproach of form-function-union to filmmaking. One might even make a similarclaim for Adrian Lyne, whose little cutaways have a reflexive relation with thenarrative. There was David Lynch, and for someone having a background inpainting he displayed a remarkable suspicion for surfaces. There was MichaelMann and Tim Burton, expressionists, one sensual and the other a littlehardcore, and yet all of these filmmakers carved an essentially static moment.Mann would have mirrors and television screens and windows reflect their viewback at William Petersen, and through his languid aesthetic he essentiallycreated landscapes that didn’t feel time-bound. Their cameras still didn’tprefer to deal in close-ups, and chances were any given frame would present itselfto be our desktop wallpapers.    

Nosferatu falls?

 Tony Scott was probably the one mainstream filmmaker during thistime who combined the one-two punch of close-ups and a dynamic approach to hiscompositions. What Jim Emerson often refers to as one-thing-at-a-timefilmmaking, Scott was interested in the rhythms that held two accompanyingshots. He favored motion in his frame at the expense of any great detail,dealing in match-cuts and juggling between frames through something close tosynchronization of motion. Maya Deren’s Astudy in Choreography for the Camera could be a frame of reference here. WhatIgnatiy Vishnevetsky in his essay describes as metaphysical romance, where charactersin his later movies, especially guys, seem to “bond” with each other overcomingthe spatial gap of different images, is nothing but the harmony Scott seems todiscover in these bodies in motion. Yet, none of these films seem to attain thepure sensuality, sensuality that is not limited to a body or a couple of bodieswithin a frame, than the opening of his first commercial feature, The Hunger. Sunglasses and leather wearand brightly lit skin and lips and iron-meshes collide into each, providing fora glorious hodge-podge of association. Figures sway against the smoky shallowbackground, each completing the other’s motion across spaces not yet mapped(there’s a crazy monkey thrown into the mix), and genders and equations andidentities are written and rewritten. It is a play of surfaces and actions,signs if you might call it, referring to nothing overarching but merely seekingunison in the moment. Every edit is what makes for the preternatural. That isuntil the narrative kicks in, which happens to be the case with most of hislater films, and yet everything TheHunger is about is already established within those initial few gestures. Man of Fire is the oddity here, whichhappens to introduce its protagonist through a similar phenomenological abstraction.All the horrors of everything the Clint Eastwood characters have ever donemight have been covered up by those layers of wrinkles, but it is not merelymontage (in this case, a volcanic mountain) that Tony Scott invokes to suggestDenzel’s Washington’s tortured soul. He literally burns him on the film, exposingevery pore on his skin that is ready to perspire in that heat, and the multipleexposures create something close to an epileptic seizure. Here, one might arguethat I’m suggesting something that David Bordwell is dismissing here, when he claims –            
“On the same grounds, every awkwardly-editedfilm could be said to be expressing dramatic tensions within or among thecharacters.”                        Valid it is, tocatch the B.S., but Scott, in his more inspired moments, createdphenomenological experiences on film, i.e. experiences that could only becreated and felt on film (don’t know if digital can mimic double exposure andflicker to its visceral extreme), and experiences that, like the very best ofmontage, were intersubjective. And much of it had to do with the way he shotand juxtaposed and contrasted skin tones and textures. The silken MadelineStowe in a world of sun-burnt sweaty mostly ragged surfaces (Revenge). Kiera Knightley in a room fullof huge shirtless Latin Americans gangsters (Domino), and it is amusing how Scott uses his love for surfaces toaddress his content, in this case Domino providing the head gangster a nicelittle lap dance for some information. Or to take that theme to its poeticextreme, Catherine Deneuve in a room full of her old lovers (The Hunger), where identity is nothingbut a disguise and the self is both defined and limited by the immortality ofthe skin. It is this surface, this demarcation between the interior andthe exterior, where the secrets are hidden and identities forged. There is inhis films a prevalence of cavernous spaces and thin membranes keeping theoutside world at bay. Curtains and venetian blinds. There is nowhere TomCruise’s character or we would call his home than the race car. And I wonderabout the old woman and her cave (LovingMemories), and how much more personal and hence sinister it turns out bethan the caves her brother explodes. All the walls with all those pictures ofthe young Gil Renard, the Little League Star that explain The Fan. What’s more, the only witnesses to the queen vampire’sentire history, from her days of blood sucking as a Pharaoh to a modernseductress, are those white curtains. And while we’re speaking of histories, Isuppose there is Youtube space for a montage charting Tony Scott films, from Loving Memories (a dead body) to The Hunger (the body of a phallicwoman) to The Last Boy Scout (television)to The Fan (pop culture) to Enemy of the State (surveillance) to Domino (reality television) to Déjà vu (time), and how these elementsso melodramatically invade the fragile private spaces. Or, even within The Taking of Pelham 123 I suppose onecould examine all the membranes – between the hostages and Ryder on the train,between Garber and his bosses, between the working class and the Mayor’s merrymen – without fearing an inconsequential exercise.  It is the struggle within these areas – the spaces, the family,the society, the traditions, the country – the great genre filmmakers of thepast – would make their most definitive (subversive and deeply personal)statements. Winchester’73 is about alot of things, but that final frame, with the girl in the arm and the buddy insights speaks more about the love-hate nature of domesticity than any film I’veever seen. While someone like Anthony Mann’s men yearned for domesticity, TonyScott, much in conformity with the nature of popular cinema since the Eighties,wanted his completely domesticated men to feel the need to be heroes again, andpreferably in the eyes of their women. This probably is his version of the“American dream”, where a patriarch doesn’t simply rule the territory but earnsthe respect to rule it. While Top Gun andDays of Thunder are about boys beingabsolutely terrific at being boys, with grown mature no-bullshit women learningto respect their boyhood, The Last BoyScout offers an even more concrete version of the dream complete with animage. The film’s is something of a Chinatown,and the dream being chased is not an elusive woman, but the woman within thehome. When the film is done, Bruce Willis, who has defeated the baddies andkicked the mayor’s would-be-assassin off the flood-light, dances against astream of blue and red while everyone applauses. His daughter respects him, hiswife loves him. The fantasy is complete.

The American Superhero

The Fan is almost a “revision” of TheLast Boy Scout, and Robert De Niro’s Gil Renard is something of a defeatedversion of Willis’ Joe Hallenbeck. Enemyof the State, while completely ambivalent as far as any concrete statementon surveillance is concerned, does provide its smug lawyer the opportunity toget back his marriage and also preserve the sanctity of the “American way”. Andby the time Tony Scott incorporated the same personal/popular stakes for ChrisPine’s character in Unstoppable, thisfantasy had long become one of the most tiring aw-shucks-not-again clichés inthe Hollywood machinery. Two films stand apart starkly in Scott’s filmographyin this regard – The Taking of Pelham 123and Revenge – and they seem to beoddly placed for an auteur (what Quentin Tarantino calls a Unique Voice). Notthat I’m a big fan of straight-jacketing an oeuvre into one specific statement,but Pelham especially for the factthat it comes just an year before Unstoppable,and that both films deal with working class trying to fight their way throughtwo of the major catastrophes the country has had to face this decade, it’sinteresting to read the friction between the writer (Brian Helgeland, a “UniqueVoice” considerably darker, pessimistic and dare I say cynical) and Scott, whoseems to be falling head-over-heels in declaring Walter Garber another greatworking class superhero. Pelham is soself-aware at so many levels it is practically its own shrink and its owncritic. While Scott is bathing in Garber’s newly-found glory and respect, who’scarrying a gallon of milk as his wife has demanded of him, after just havingshot a man a few hours ago, Helgeland’s script makes us quite uncomfortable,something we do not feel in many Scott films. Enemy of the State is supposed to be a cautionary/horror taleagainst the evils of surveillance, but when the film, in another of those casesof adolescent one-upmanship, turns the tables and starts bugging the houses ofthe men in power, it just completely misses the bus of what it was about.

Vietnam?

This is the ambivalence that a lot of action blockbusters duringthe Eighties and the Nineties seemed to suffer from, and even in Scott’s black-and-whiteus-versus-them oeuvre Revenge presentsthe most fascinating oddity. That is until Scott himself butchered it intoconformity with his director’s cut and avenged the wrong that was meted out to The Hunger (the ending doesn’t make alick of sense). While smug American cowboy displays his coolness by freelywandering into the Mexican territory in the film’s opening moments, which mightremind one of Top Gun, Revenge, based on Jim Harrison’s work,is quick to bring to mind Vietnam and cause us to believe this little tale issomething of a parable. Anthony Quinn plays that tired cliché of an oldgangster having a trophy wife, a wife who wants to be a mother but he wouldn’tlet her ruin her precious body, a curvaceous body the American cowboy falls inlove with, and yet the film, in its theatrical version, cut by the late Ray Stark,was a dirty messy film that didn’t provide for easy answers and didn’t yield toeasy allegories. Quinn’s gangster does treat his wife with a great degree ofwarmth (as a scene by the pool suggests that is edited out in the director’scut), and the runaway affair between the woman and the American is something ofa heartfelt romance that finds its note with the death. One can imagine whereCostner’s directorial debut Dances withWolves (at one point Revenge wasto be the one) found its tone and pacing, and through the languid pacing eachof the supporting players get some sort of individuality and respect. Thedirector’s cut chops everyone out making us wonder why would someone soselflessly serve the American, and although it removes every bit of warmth fromthe marriage providing for a degree of entitlement, the essential question atthe heart of the tale – autonomy versus righteous justice – still bleeds. Butone thing remains though – the Director’s Cut, with its woman nothing but asexy body that causes the dispute, with its good-guys versus the bad-guysdynamic, with the juxtaposition of the wounded body of the American crawling onthe sand as his smug self flies above (the Scott of the Aughties would’veobviously shot it differently, as you would so easily imagine), is undoubtedlythe Tony Scott film of the two versions. Which is a funny thing, this business of being a “Tony Scottfilm”, and what does it stand for. The careers of Michael Bay and John Mooreare practically built around that identity, that aesthetic and its inherentadolescence. And of course the ambivalence. It was filmmaking throughcrescendos, a fetish for our working-class national heroes. Behind Enemy Lines, with its love forkinetics, with its us-versus-them, with its hatred for bureaucracy andridiculous politics, with its self-righteous excursions into non-Americanterritory, with its father figure rescuing a bright pupil, with its everymoment an excuse to have an helicopter shot, is practically the same movie asthe Tony Scott film that was released on the same week of November 2001 – Spy Game. A case of promoting Americanexceptionalism, if you might want to label it as such. What’s Domino but an early uncritical versionof 127 Hours style performance of a performance,a film that might as well have been titled BeingDomino Harvey.  Or, could we just look at the Tony Scott oeuvre as the cinema ofwish-fulfillment. Of the simplistic fantasy of righting a wrong. A desire forseeking an alternate reality. Not that it takes us anywhere, or ought to beglorified, and even though in cases like Revengeit might rub the wrong way I guess there’s space for the Scott brand ofescapism. This concession sure does ruin a lot of the action picture. But thenhe will always be the guy, despite the sloppy tension-diffusing filmmaking, despiteMotor city Detroit offering nothing by way personality so much so that it mightas well have been Los Angeles, who wanted Clarence and Alabama to live. From One of the Missing to Loving Memories to The Hunger to Top Gun to Revenge to Days of Thunder to CrimsonTide to Déjà vu Tony Scott, likeany person who ever breathed fresh air, dealt with death and fantasized ofovercoming it. That little convent is where Miryea Mendez dies, and Scott isgracious enough to provide for a hill overlooking it. Cheesy as it may soundfor a NASCAR picture, Cole Trickle tackles his own mortality by driving for hisfriend and saving from a fatal accident. And then, there’s Doug Carlin, chasingnot merely mortality but time itself in what might be one of the definitive carchase sequences of all time. It doesn’t matter he leaves a dozen other vehicleson the bridge looking ahead at a long stint at the nearby hospital, or maybeworse, but the single-minded urgency is exhilarating. And poignant, when I’mreminded of that little story of a Southern soldier trapped in rubble all byhimself with his own gun pointing at him. I think of him, and I think of theAgent who dies himself and leaves notes all over for an alternate timelineversion of him to follow them and save the day. Déjà vu was about Claire Kuchever and her death, was about a deadwoman desired by a man, and only someone like Tony Scott could’ve double-reversedit all and made it about the death and rebirth of Doug Carlin, a man needed bythe woman. I wouldn’t want to sound too melodramatic, but when I think of thefilmmaker on the bridge, a part of me still wants to believe he was looking forsomething. Or maybe he left something.
Note: For whatever it isworth, amidst the digital versus film debate, Tony Scott, with thatsingle-fluid-shot concept in Déjà vu, might have given us a starting point forwhat the digital as a medium ought to strive for. Not to mimic film, becausethe concept of a shot is meaningless here, but to traverse space in a whollydifferent way.