Moving Target
“Perhaps we should see this literature of crime, which proliferated around a few exemplary figures, neither as a spontaneous form of ‘popular expression,’ nor as a concerted programme of propaganda and moralization from above; it was a locus in which the two investments of penal practice met—a sort of battleground around the crime, its punishment and its memory.”
That’s Foucault from Discipline and Punish, though the passage serves as a pretty fair exegesis of Michael Mann’s latest firefight, Public Enemies. “Battleground” is especially apropos, as Mann’s film, like Soderbergh’s Che, sloughs off the psychodrama spadework of the biopic for structuralist combat—Babyface Nelson’s hideout in the woods especially looking like a set stolen from some earlier WWII movie. Mann thankfully dials down his usual mythic equation of cops and robbers here—it’s there, certainly, but like the film’s romance, flitting historical context (J. Edgar Hoover gassing up his paranoid policy of retribution for the more insidious witch-hunt to come), period touches, and everything else that makes this a Hollywood snore, it’s way down in the mix, smeared by the digital night.
It is interesting, given the money involved, that Mann chooses to violate the sepia nostalgia of the period process with an incongruously modern visual style. Gordon Willis’s cinematography in The Godfather cast gangsters as Renaissance angels etched in light; Mann’s makes John Dillinger look like Johnny Depp caught by aesthete paparazzi. Gordon’s compositions are frescoes; Mann’s are moving targets. A small scene, like the one in which Dillinger first takes Billie out to dinner in a fancy restaurant, scrambles familiar conventions of establishing shots and shot-reverse-shot. They’re there too, like the overarching structural motifs, but shouted down by a rapid exchange of handheld close-ups—it’s reality TV squared, with a surplus of visual information and energy ricocheting within an enervating story of forestalled death.
Every subsequent American generation has subjected the romance of the Depression outlaw to its own prides and prejudices; most of these revisions are guileless, but a few are formally strong enough to furnish a fork in the road to nowhere (Badlands and Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska make a natural pair). In almost all of these works, there is some code of realism used to position this telling of the story as the authentic article. Whether it’s provided by Bruce’s stark 4-track hiss (all the more striking for coming between mega-albums The River and Born in the U.S.A.) or Arthur Penn’s ropes of blood, N.W.A.’s unapologetic profanity or Truman Capote’s solemn reportage, this realism is as constant as is it contradictory.
Mann stretches some of our current visual codes of realism to their representational limits, but he also looks on the Dillinger saga as one comprised of competing fictions. Everyone in the movie agrees Dillinger is in the public domain, but as Foucault indicates, there’s disagreement about who the icon belongs to. Dillinger’s own view of himself, as an early pop star who does what his fans wish they could, cuts against Hoover’s view of him as a wound and a trophy (in a supremely unironic gesture of power, Hoover displayed Dillinger’s death-mask in FBI headquarters after his demise). Ever eager to play both sides against the middle as long as it meant a buck, Hollywood furnished both these romances. On the one hand, we have the series of noirs termed film gris by Thom Andersen—film made by lefty, soon-to-be blacklisted writers and directors in which the outlaw is a sacrificial lamb and realism trained on social desperation. In the same period, however, Hollywood began turning out “semi-documentary” police procedurals, often made with direct input from Hoover himself. I wrote a paper about these semi-documentaries last fall, in part because it seemed to me that too many historians counted the era’s “realism” as an intrinsically lefty proposition. To the contrary, realism is just as likely to extol the panopticon as it is lament the forgotten man. (One of the latter, thered-baiting I Was A Communist for the FBI, pulled off the neat trick of winning the Best Documentary Oscar in spite of being a patent fiction — James Frey, eat your heart out).
What’s it got to do with Mann’s Dillinger? Nothing, except that here the film’s realism does nothing so well as gloss a very Foucouldian common ground: the elusive obsession with visualizing the criminal, an activity which, as accounted for in the fine book Police Pictures: The Photograph as Evidence, played an important role in the origins of photography itself. In perhaps the finest scene of Public Enemies, Depp as Dillinger wanders the taskforce of fice dedicated to his capture, contemplating his own mug shot like some dreamy flâneur, forestalling his and the movie’s end. No guns are drawn. He peers into the future, lingers, and then leaves for the last picture show.
Leave a Reply