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Michael Mann and Nonplace
- The University Press of Kentucky
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14 MIChAel MAnn And nonPlACe A Nietzschean Element in Mann’s Modern Crime Films Robert Arnett Early in Collateral (2004), Vincent (Tom Cruise), a hit man beginning a job, describes Los Angeles as “too sprawled out. Disconnected. . . . Seventeen million people . . . but nobody knows each other. Too impersonal. I read about this guy. Gets on the MTA, here, and dies. Six hours he’s riding the subway before anybody notices. This corpse doing laps around LA, people on and off, sitting next to him, nobody notices.” Buildings, bridges, roads, and other geographic structures act as key elements in Michael Mann’s mise-en-scène and suggest, as Vincent alludes to, the “nonplace” of Marc Augé’s supermodernity . Augé defines nonplace as space that “cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity.”1 Nonplaces separate people from their identity, creating mass groups, such as commuters, passengers, shoppers , consumers. Nonplaces induce physical and virtual sameness and soullessness , and Augé sees the points where large numbers of people collect, such as airports, large retail spaces, cable and wireless networks, as putting “the individual in contact only with another image of himself.”2 Sameness on a pervasive scale makes the essential quality of supermodernity excess: too many events, too many structures, and both filled with too many individuals stripped of their identity. Mann and Augé take a cue from Friedrich Nietzsche in their expression of place: “The language spoken by these buildings is far too rhetorical and unfree, reminding us that they are houses of God and ostentatious monuments of some supramundane intercourse.”3 Michael Mann’s storytelling engages a spatial sensibility, and in a previous essay I track how space influences narrative decisions.4 In this essay, Nietzsche’s writing provides a vehicle to illuminate the multiple levels of meaning found in Mann’s modern crime films, from direction and mise-ensc ène to the central characters’ profound struggle to find meaning, or the lack Michael Mann and Nonplace 15 thereof, in the spaces they inhabit and often to (re)define those spaces. The characters define the spaces they inhabit much as in Nietzsche’s contention that “I do not see how we could remain content with such buildings even if they were stripped of their churchly purposes.”5 From an architectural theory point of view, Mark Rakatansky suggests that the constitution and management of people occur in “institutional space” (office buildings, homes, roads, parks) and that “institutional space may provide one of the more productive themes for a narrative architecture.”6 For Nietzsche, institutional space is religious/God space (churches, monasteries, etc.), and the architect, who “has always been under the spell of power,” creates buildings that “are supposed to render pride visible, and a victory over gravity, the will to power.”7 Yet, for Nietzsche, architecture often fails in its aims and becomes institutionalized . He asserts, “We who are godless could not think our thoughts in such places.”8 Mann, as film director–architect, exerts a will to power with institutional spaces and adapts the management of the subjects within those spaces to fit his rhetorical means. The space often requires minimal “management /will to power” from Mann—that is, the bridge is supposed to be a bridge; lighting and composition enhance the bridge’s rhetorical presence. In some cases, the will to power alters the meaning of the original space. For example, Atlanta’s High Museum becomes the prison holding Dr. Hannibal Lecktor (Brian Cox) in Manhunter (1986). By rejecting its museum qualities, Mann frames the museum to fit a thematic design. For Mann, the museum becomes a prison, and its prevailing whiteness and sterility amplify the absence of identity he associates with prisons. Architecture, in other words, bears multiple levels of meaning in Mann’s modern crime films, but Augé’s supermodernity of nonplace provides only a beginning to understanding the potential in Mann’s mise-en-scène. We turn, then, to Nietzsche for a more philosophical understanding of the excessive sameness of Augé’s supermodernity in Mann’s modern crime films, using the films as case studies, first, to explicate Mann’s filmic style; second, to isolate the various levels of meaning and architectural representation; and third, to find in Mann’s treatment of space elements resonating with Nietzsche’s philosophy. Mann’s filmic style coordinates the camera elements (composition, lighting, color saturation) and built environs and uses them to frame the viewer’s position on the characters and events. The camera frames structures...