Sunday, July 17, 2011
"Off the Map": Aura, Freedom, and Control in Michael Mann's "Public Enemies"
"Help me see things the way You do." Sgt McCron (John Savage) in The Thin Red Line (1998)
"God don't care about me, about you. We be. And that's the onliest thing He did." Drew Bundini Brown (Jamie Foxx) in Ali (2001)
"The capabilities (intellectual and material) of contemporary society are immeasurably greater than ever before - which means that the scope of society's domination over the individual is immeasurably greater than ever before. Our society distinguishes itself by conquering the centrifugal social forces with Technology rather than Terror, on the dual basis of an overwhelming efficiency and an increasing standard of living." Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man
“Life in the late capitalist era is a constant initiation rite. Everyone must show that he wholly identifies himself with the power which is belaboring him…The miracle of integration, the permanent act of grace by the authority who receives the defenseless person – once he has swallowed his rebelliousness – signifies fascism.” Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
Beyond its impressionistic portrait of American history and famous outlaws, Public Enemies examines how we experience the movies. It wants to actively engage with its audience in this question, which is not to say that its philosophical points override the historical occurrences dramatized. On the contrary, Michael Mann aspires to link all disparate elements together: politics and culture, history and celebrity, film making and film watching, all being tied to how we watch and interpret as the viewer, here, seeing works of art in an age of – not only mechanical – but digital reproduction.
In echoing the sentiments of Frankfurt School philosophers and Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” cinema is a mass art lacking “aura,” or a distinctive, intangible singularity. Motion pictures are distributed across the globe with countless prints, usually taken in as a frivolous escape for an audience. Cinema is then different from a stage production, musical performance, or an original photograph, sculpture, or painting found in a museum, where an art’s context is more historically specific. Ideally, the viewer or listener would experience the work as part of a linking web bringing analogies, richness, and dimension between the separated confines of past and present, the alien and provincial. But more than almost any other art form, movies represent the mass-cult representation of popular culture controlling lazy responders who want to be pleased. The Frankfurt philosophers were mainly Jewish intellectuals from Germany in the 1930s. They saw how the governing apparatus was controlling media in order to persuade people all too willing to respond with obedience. In manipulating popular media, an authoritarian government robbed people of their subjectivity, or their own aura. More so today, conformity to the popular forms of art ensure success, safety, and acceptance. It is a contractual agreement between distributor and attendee. Things simply being as they are, the audience is not “clobbered into submission,” but is willingly subdued and comforted by what it sees, which typically connects “out of the most profound and uninformed aspects of a culture’s collective fears and desires,” and “confirmed and reinforced the basest instincts of that culture," to quote the film scholar Robert Kolker.
Public Enemies is mass-produced art, shot and edited digitally, distributed to thousands of multiplex movie theaters in the summer, and starring two lucrative movie star actors. But it is conscious of its place as a product of mechanical / digital reproduction. Michael Mann’s body of work has always been interested in how images and ideas of mass culture affect ordinary people, controlling them just as these people long to affirm their own sense of a unique identity. The Insider begins with a close-up of a blindfold covering the camera’s perspective, our perspective. Cinema, or any mass-produced image, controls what we see and has ramifications on how we process the presented topics. But the plights of struggling real people, and the engineers creating those images, are inconsequential to the capital mandates of a corporation. Adhering to a popular image that reinforces monetary growth and industry ensures a person’s stability, but for how long can one work in such a way without losing their nerve? The intense struggle within The Insider, and Mann’s subsequent feature Ali, is about men threatened by the homogeny of media images, who in retaliation work to control the images themselves. The individual and subjective Reality works against the insurmountable social Reality.
We see the hero of Public Enemies, John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), interacting with mass-art in a few instances – the radio, listening to Billie Holiday songs, and twice in a dark movie theater. But Dillinger is a romantic individual, projecting himself into the world through the force of his own imagination. He’s scripting a romance with himself in the lead role. In several other cinematic instances, this is seen as an ironic flaw of the character (Taxi Driver; Natural Born Killers). But in Mann’s Dillinger, it conveys a beautiful longing. Indeed, most people who come into contact with art and are controlled by it, have an automatic response. But Walter Benjamin saw something liberating in the “loss of aura” as mechanical reproduction took over. The viewer could have an active and intimate dialogue with the work of art. He writes, “The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert.” Instead of deadening, mass-produced art could be strangely activating.
This was the intention of the early Soviet filmmakers, like Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, both of whom are cited as being two of Michael Mann’s three key influences (the other is Stanley Kubrick). The art seeks to immerse the audience in the moment, and also make them engaged in a dialogue, where the film and viewer are intersecting. The technological ingenuity of cinema is not empty mechanics, working to soothe us as docile machines, but has a potential to reach the heart and change us, striking us even with epiphanies. Mann’s prodigious challenge throughout his career has been to walk the tightrope of being a popular, mainstream director, administering immense productions over which he is entitled complete control. And yet his personal idiosyncrasies, out of sync with the bulk of mass-produced art in whatever genre (action, biopic, historical), has provoked some media analysts (Kim Masters, Roger Friedman) to wonder why he is still allowed to make movies. And yet, that his unparalleled technique and vision has thriven for so long is an affirmation of how aura works in the mainstream. As a filmmaker of the Information Age, he implants the serious questions of the Frankfurt School into a digital era, where mechanical reproduction is moving at the speed of light. He repeats the question, How does the individual remain grounded and hold on to integrity in such a hyperreal landscape? Shooting a 1930s period film with handheld high-definition video is audacious enough, but the form of Public Enemies perfectly suits its themes. It is a film about John Dillinger, but just as importantly, a film about experiencing films.
“Time is Luck”: An Anachronistic Filmmaker
Public Enemies may have been anticipated as the capstone to the career of a Chicago-born film artist, whose work has been primarily focused on criminals and law enforcement, an abstract relationship that mines the broader theme about the disharmony between private and public selves. But Mann’s dialectics between cop and robber, between family man and working man, were both handled to such an extent in Heat (1995), that Richard Combs’ Film Comment article on Mann (March-April 1996) concluded that the director may never find the crime film a comfortable fit again. He had brought a cosmic weight to an otherwise tired subject, crafting a fulfilling and dense ensemble on an immense canvas of postmodern urban decay and technological numbness. The end of Heat, with Moby's "God Moving Over the Face of the Waters" haunting the soundtrack, feels apocalyptic in its emptiness: Whatever new life being birthed here in this electrical and ether-ridden Genesis bears the Post-Human mark. At 170 minutes, Heat is both exhausting and spectral, and the audience feels much like obsessed Robbery Homicide Division detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), having survived and accomplished his professional goal at the cost of being spiritually spent, craving sleep (just earlier on this climactic night he tells his fellow detectives that he's going to “shower and sleep for a month") and burdened with the knowledge that nothing has really changed. The juxtaposition in the film's final image indicates that the only escape from the constant self-perpetuating flux of work and static despair is death, as behind the slain bank robber Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) are the air-traffic lights leading to a proverbial "elsewhere," an abstract plane that is as real as the mirage of flashing lights in motion. "Told you I was never going back," McCauley tells Hanna shortly before dying. This doesn't only refer to Folsom Prison, but to any kind of fixed position on a historical line. He is always in flight, always changing disguises, while his Paradise is ultimately a hyperreal one created by a stream of electricity that in his subjectivity evokes an ocean he's never even seen. The terrors of "Control" are manifested in the institution, in Folsom, in contract work, or imposed subscription. This is true for McCauley as it was true for Frank (James Caan) in Mann's first feature Thief (1981), and for the colonials and natives in The Last of the Mohicans (1992). The flight here is the flight from History: History which gives us a context, but also may be a prison, trapping us in that very context. Three factors are at play: Time and how to master it; Capital, which enables one to believe that they are catching up to Time; and Love, or the exercise of human longings coming to fruition within a temporal context afforded by the aid of Capital.
Public Enemies has been unfortunately compared to Heat, except this time set in the 1930s. This is an extreme oversimplification, though we can imagine how that film would have played out being that Bryan Burrough's marvelous book Public Enemies (published in 2004) reads a lot more like Heat than its consequential film adaptation. Mann, whose own narrative style has evolved since 1995 into something very impressionistic and sparse, brings the material closer to a project he produced and oversaw before handing off to his colleague Martin Scorsese, The Aviator (2004), and to his fascinating and fussy Miami Vice (2006). Scott Foundas writes in his Public Enemies review that the film "suggests a period redo of [Mann's] 1995 crime saga, Heat, albeit reduced nearly to the point of abstraction." Unlike Heat, where almost every actor in the crowded story is given a juicy scene clearly establishing an identity (as an ensemble crime film, it lacks peer), “Time” in Mann's more recent work is moving ahead so fast that there's no room (no time, no space) for an individual to establish Identity, where even the protagonist is struggling to hang on under the weight of this immense gravity pulling the Self into a void. Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) in The Aviator wants to go faster, fly higher, and create bigger cinematic worlds than ever witnessed, his context for reality transformed into a desert space projected onto a screen that lays a geography on his own naked body. His innovations and assimilations with those technologies of "The Future" – "The Way of the Future" – eventually swallow him in the dark of complete isolation. Similarly, Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) in Miami Vice is disallowed any development in the context of the motion picture, save for a duplicitous sexual and emotional relationship with one of the global drug procurers he is preparing to arrest, Isabella (Gong Li). Dreaming of the ethereal ocean, he is pulled back into the flux of action, of his work, of a socially-imposed fabricated identity, into the hyperreal world where a personal history populated with photographs and ornaments of history are non-existent. The film ends with him walking away from the ocean and love, entering the wired and replicated environment of a hospital. Like Hughes, his destination is Nowhere, his Self stored on file and estranged from his heart and mind. Unlike Hughes, who cannot avoid BEING HOWARD HUGHES (and such a grasp onto one's "authentic Identity" is incongruent with the technological "way of the future"), Crockett is at least permitted to go on functioning, though at the cost of being an automaton, maybe afflicted by what Marx calls Alienation.
Public Enemies is terse, silent, and even mechanical as opposed to conventionally humanistic. When it unfurls using the norms of cinematic suturing – such as the heightened melodramatic music of Eliot Goldenthal during the blooming romance between Dillinger and Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard) – the result is almost ironic and distancing. These characters are constructions of the growing cinematic world of their particular historical context (1933-1934). The mass-produced entertainment of the period has produced their style of characterization and relation to others. As a filmmaker whose style is geared towards generating content, Michael Mann is here eschewing normal methods of character development and storytelling precisely because he doesn't want us to wholly disappear into the movie, the same way the characters are disappearing into History, which is not to say he does not want to immerse us with a sense of reality. But while feeling what John Dillinger is feeling, we have to be in a dialogue with a film that is asking us about our reactions to it, because it is the Movies, after all, that generate our own personal myths and validate our preconceived identities, making sense out of human experience -- our relationships, our loves, our deaths – much as Mann's Dillinger experiences cinema (Manhattan Melodrama) moments before his last stand. The cinematic construction of the Self for Dillinger is circularly reinforced, being that his image of identification (Clark Gable) is in part a Hollywood studio's construction based on the man Dillinger himself has created with the assistance of the media. The "Real Self" is possibly non-existent, ghostly, and the only place John Dillinger can be captured and killed is under the blinking lights of a movie theater, the Biograph (a name suggesting a "Life"), because he's more Real there than in his corporeal body. Public Enemies is focused on the Real Self within History and how that Self dissipates within that History's systematic unveiling. The State becomes realized as an Idea of absolute Control and Reason, and people within that Right Hegelian System personified by J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup), such as the tragically alienated Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), are doomed to become nothing but despair-ridden suits, dying slowly and then forgotten. Dillinger’s consciousness sets him apart just as Public Enemies is separate from other summer blockbusters, or even -- if not especially -- “realistic” period crime films. It is a film about aura, as idiosyncrasy and uniqueness perish all the more frequently with the acceleration of technology and art. It is finally a meaningful triumph of digital filmmaking.
Throughout the opening minutes of Public Enemies we see a recurring image of constant ineluctable movement: a chain-gang marching, Red Hamilton (Jason Clarke) shoving Dillinger forward, Walter Dietrich's (James Russo) limp with the box, and the strategic movements geared towards opening doors and passing through them (which will be more vibrantly handled by Mann during the Lake County Jail breakout, where Dillinger must get through eight doors). The motif of forward movement is exactly like the film itself, which is wound up, set on the ground with the title placard of "1933," and then driven forward to a final existential destination. This is not a new theme for Mann. Neil McCauley in Heat is always associated with movement and direction, though his final destination is not “Real.” Mann spatially demonstrates this idea with a motif of vanishing points, or graphic vectors that stretch far into space, which is why lit highways and city streets have always visually appealed to him. If traversing through space is like traveling through time, then taxi driver Max (Jamie Foxx) in Collateral (2004) is a perfect demonstration of an aimless adult with substantial dreams but no will to move forward with them. He's been driving a cab for twelve years while building up the impractical business plan for a limousine company (Island Limos), lying to his mother (Irma Hall) about his success. The hit-man Vincent (Tom Cruise) taunts him by essentially telling the ugly truth: "Someday? Someday my dream will come? One night you'll wake up and you'll discover it never happened. It's all turned around on you. It never will. Suddenly, you are old. Didn't happen, and it never will because you were never going to do it anyway. You'll push it into memory, then zone out in your Barcalounger being hypnotized by daytime TV for the rest of your life." In Thief, Frank (James Caan) criticizes Jessie (Tuesday Weld), the girl he's romancing: "You're marking time is what you are," he tells her. "You're backing out, you're holding out. You're waiting for a bus that you hope never comes, because you don't want to get on it anyway, because you don't want to go anywhere." In Heat, Neil McCauley relays his recurring dream to Vincent Hanna: "I have one where I'm drowning. And I have to wake myself up, otherwise I'll die in my sleep." "You know what that's about?" Hanna asks. "Yeah," McCauley answers. "Having enough time." Hanna interprets McCauley’s dream of Time in relation to the thief’s desire "to do what you want to do." In Miami Vice (and Manhunter and Heat) the Mann mantra is spoken: "Time is Luck," with Sonny telling Isabella that one cannot negotiate with gravity." Time is moving quickly in Mann's pictures, and with each succeeding film it has only moved faster and more unsteadily. He's gradually done away with the tripod and the Steadicam, which can both warmly embrace a moment and make it seem permanent.
This technique is not only a way for Mann to create anxiety and uneasiness within his audience, but also reflects the personal anxieties of an individual growing older, a restless worker approaching his 70s. Mann's hero Stanley Kubrick died quite unexpectedly at the age of 70 in March of 1999, and any fan of Kubrick legitimately mourned that there could have been more Stanley Kubrick films, his perfectionism and craftiness, taking years to make the film he wanted to make (four for 2001; four for The Shining; seven for Full Metal Jacket; four for Eyes Wide Shut; not to mention years spent on developing films that never happened, like AI, Napoleon, and Aryan Papers), resulting in a career output of only a dozen features. Mann's films, particularly Thief and Heat, are very unique in that they nakedly deal with the subject of a male's fear of aging. When Mann made Thief in 1981, he was nearing 40, and had spent most of his time working as a television writer for shows like Starsky and Hutch. Even after Thief he spent most of the 1980s as the creative administrator of Miami Vice - never actually directing an episode. The spite for television felt in some of Mann's movies, such as Heat, is probably as much of a statement about the dangers of Videoscopy as it is the personal anger of an intelligent and politically minded artist who was professionally imprisoned by TV for nearly two decades - working in a derided art-form the same decade that Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg, and De Palma were making ground-breaking movies within the Hollywood establishment. And though he could be credited for changing the television paradigm in the 1980s by bringing cinematic techniques to primetime TV with Miami Vice and Crime Story, he undoubtedly lost a lot of time to build an oeuvre on par with the 1970s movie-brats, being eclipsed by both his fellow London imports (like Ridley Scott and Adrian Lyne) who would make glossy and popular journeyman films in Hollywood, and the New Independent Filmmaking revolution that became a conspicuous movement in the late 1980s.
Mann belongs to an awkward generation apart from Coppola, Scorsese, De Palma, Ashby, and Spielberg, in addition to being far from Soderbergh, Jarmusch, Spike Lee, Linklater, Allison Anders, Carl Franklin, Abel Ferrera (a Mann protégé, who began by directing episodes of Miami Vice and the pilot for Crime Story), Mira Nair, and climaxing with Tarantino. Thief and Manhunter had cult audiences and were well regarded by critics, but he was still a television personality inextricably tied to the distinctive (and by 1992, perhaps infamous) look of Miami Vice. The Last of the Mohicans, made six years after Manhunter, aroused a lot of interest both because it was removed from Mann's work in the crime genre, and because it was incomparably ecstatic as both an action picture and period film. Mohicans prompted thoughtful articles on Mann, from both Graham Fuller in Projections and Gavin Smith in Film Comment; but it wasn't until the release of Heat three years later that film writers would herald Mann with the kind of respect only given to Scorsese, a strange happening given that in 1995 Pulp Fiction had become a phenomenon and crime films such as The Usual Suspects and Desperado displayed a kind of a self-referential post-modern ironic cool, preferring clever dialogue over complex mise-en-scene. Heat was the anti-Usual Suspects, while simultaneously being different from the testosterone-drenched action-oriented productions of Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson. Gavin Smith wrote, "A Mann film can be imagined as a combination of Antonioni's art sensibility, Kubrick's meticulous construction, and Herzog's Method recreation of reality as applied to Sam Fuller material." As a crime film it was distinguished from Scorsese's work (Casino had been released just a month earlier) because it was simultaneously realistic and abstract - real, but also hyperreal. Anthropological, but unabashedly Dramatic and Philosophical. The Reality it represented was the painterly Reality of Edward Hopper.
Heat was a unique triumph, yet it remained melancholy for the director's present legacy being that the literature on Mann’s generation - which was really blooming during the early 1990s and eclipsed soon after - had already been written. His contemporaries were already well known and documented - even household names. It only reinforced his separateness. He emerged after the Movie Brats (and was educated in London rather than New York or California); he wasn't a foreign journeyman (the Scotts, Lyne, Alan Parker, Peter Weir etc); though educated in London he wasn't part of the new British cinema (Stephen Frears, Mike Leigh, Neil Jordan, Bruce Robinson, Peter Medak); he wasn't a cultic genre filmmaker who enthused "geek culture" (George Lucas, Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson), and he wasn't part of the new independent cinema. During the 1990s, the line between "independent" and "mainstream" was becoming increasingly blurry, as Pulp Fiction grossed $106 million, and independent companies like Miramax Films were able to regularly open movies in suburban multiplexes and launch expensive award campaigns. Being that film critics who write comprehensive books need to categorize things, it was hard to read about Mann because he didn't belong to any historicized group. As a working man who was very good at his job, Michael Mann was similar to his angst-ridden aging protagonists, obsessed with "catching up" and doing what he wants to do as he quickly works to assemble a complete body of work. The fact that this oeuvre is full of repetitions in terms of mantras, dialogue, motifs, themes, even musical selections, makes us wonder if Mann is chasing his own tail/tale. He seems to have some kind of mono-myth story, and is restless in his endless pursuit of whatever the "Michael Mann" story is. The problem is, Mann has never had a receptive environment that complements his talent: The Insider might be the best film of the 1990s, but it was avoided by many who didn't want to retread ground covered quite plainly in A Civil Action; Ali was seen as just another expensive Oscar-baiting biopic with a big Hollywood star (Will Smith); Collateral was a genre film with another star whom film snobs love to hate (Tom Cruise); and the title of Miami Vice speaks for itself. The clout of an "author" is meaningless here, because Mann did not develop in a time when he could be recognized as such. Yet in his private sphere Mann continued to wield tremendous power as a businessman and make movies in his own way - perhaps to the chagrin of film executives (Michael Eisner famously hated The Insider) and gossip columnists (Friedman and Masters).
Time is a lofty burden. For those working within any system, the present always more important than the moment following. This was what Miami Vice was about (beautifully explicated in Jean-Baptiste Thoret's essay "Gravity of the Flux"); in Public Enemies, Death is real, immediate, and inevitable - and the men featured in the picture are running down the spatial graphic vectors of time trying to escape this grave determinism, while also trying to "catch up" and preserve themselves in a kind of transcendent permanence. These characters are running out of time, just as the communicating artist is.
The Last American Folk Heroes
The criminals described in Burrough's book are different from the organized crime insiders of the 20th century’s larger criminal mythology. Their distinction is that they are the outsiders: John Dillinger, Alvin Karpis, Baby Face Nelson, the Barkers, Machine Gun Kelly, Pretty Boy Floyd, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were all active and famous within a very specific time frame, beginning in the 1920s and ending with Karpis' arrest in 1936. To say that they became bank robbers because of the Depression is not really accurate, given that bank robbery was budding beforehand. The primary reason for bank-robbery becoming a viable "career" option for lower-middle class middle-American individuals had much more to do with the evolution of technology, specifically the machine gun and the development of the V-8 engine for automobiles. These tools were available to many people, and when used with proficiency, they ensured that one could out-gun and out-run the otherwise disorganized local police officials, who were susceptible to bribery for protection, the greatest example being St. Paul, Minnesota, where the relationship between the police and the criminals enabled the city to be an infamous safe haven (documented marvelously in Paul Maccabee's book John Dillinger Slept Here, which is a favorite collection of source material for Public Enemies author Burrough).
These "Public Enemies" like Dillinger, Floyd, Nelson, etc, were for me less interesting growing up, when I originally began reading about organized crime after becoming obsessed with The Godfather films and GoodFellas. The Sicilian Mafia and other ethnic gang structures resulting in an organized commission during the 1920s, with Charlie Luciano, Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky, Benjamin Siegel, Mickey Cohen, etc, had a connotation of something black, satanic, and ancient: it functioned as a secret society, whose lethality only seemed to be more pronounced as the gangsters became modern (such as Paul Vario in Nicolas Pilleggi's Wise Guy, or John Gotti). The dynamics of the gang hierarchy, rights of passage, inner conspiracies, and literal or metaphorical back-stabbings, had the weight of Shakespearian drama, such as Gotti's Macbeth-like assassination of Paul Castellano, which resulted in his ascendancy to the head of the Gambino crime family. I was more attracted to structure than to disorder, and so the "public enemy" stories of Dillinger and company felt like petty anarchy when compared to the regality of La Cosa Nostra. It was proletariat street theatre as opposed to grand opera (to steal a perfect analogy that Foundas gives in his Public Enemies review). The public enemies were not seeking to be part of an organization; they were essentially doing this because it was the only thing they were skilled at, and having begun it and being catalogued "in the system" as offenders, there was no way for them to get out of it. Though many of these characters, like Nelson and Barrow, were sociopaths, there is evidence to indicate that others, particularly Floyd, were aware of their social bind, and filled with envy for the people they terrorized. They wanted a normal life, with a stable family, a house, a room of their own where they would be simultaneously comfortable and free. This idyllic kind of rest is contrary to the Romantic picture they represent in our consciousness, but a life of constant transit without firm grounding and an open social identity makes such a longing reasonable.
They are stark contrasts to the Lucianos and Lanskys of the criminal world. Luciano was not a public enemy – he didn't really live among the public. The Syndicate gangsters were contained within a huge corporate body that made it a kind of mirror to the courts of law in the United States. Although the Syndicate was responsible for more terror, murder, and general illegality than the public enemies of the Midwest, the fact that it had a structural apparatus made it less of a threat to public consciousness. The "satanic" is a Romantic image, but the "cabal" isn't. Milton's Satan found such love and admiration from the Romantics precisely because he was the poetic picture of an individual almost absurdly going against the implacable hegemon (namely, God).
America has its own mythology, and in Art the two most important prophets of that mythology are probably Whitman and Twain. The American story is itself almost permanently hummed in a Romantic pitch, being the tale of a dually ancient and virgin frontier, colliding with burgeoning civilization and the factions fighting for its control. The frontier is a vast transcendental possibility, offering a promise that will always be fulfilled in time – never Now, but always in the Future. It is the New Canaan for which we wander in the wilderness, much longer than forty years. The freshness of American geography during the 19th century made its literature highly contrastable to the Romanticism of England, where there is already a kind of melancholy and futility in the praise of natural beauty. The ancient abbeys and castles in English Romanticism had infested the countryside for centuries, communicating emptiness in the desire to control the environment; human passion is reduced to hauntings, like the mourning ghosts of Wuthering Heights. But the possibilities in the American mythos are infinite, incalculable, and vibrant, where Death and Life, particularly for Whitman, is a false binary in the greater picture, our architectural columns and creeds being meaningless in a cosmic poem we cannot hope to translate. English Romanticism is marked with the Ecclesiastical, where hope and striving are destined for disappointment. That the English countryside had been conquered many times over since the Roman Empire reminds one of the present’s fallibility, so doomed to pass. America in the 1850s, when Whitman wrote his first draft of Leaves of Grass, was still unfinished and fragmented, with many mysterious entries into the dark woods remaining. History hadn't arrived yet, and so there existed a strange kind of "nostalgia for the future" which was always on the horizon. This continues from Whitman and Twain into the modernist era, with the emergence of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Steinbeck. The frontier had been conquered with agriculture and the necessity for money had outgrown the necessity for Nature and reflection, but the longing for the past remained. The frontier was still ever-present in American consciousness, though it was passing on, once again into a sacred Nowhere. The lost thing that Jay Gatsby was trying to acquire with his capital gains was virtual, unreal, and always out of reach. The weight of Time, its Gravity, became a prominent theme in this sad literature, where Fitzgerald's heroes were swallowed by history, and the frontier no longer belonged to Man or Nature, but as Steinbeck tells us, now belonged to a strange impersonal consciousness controlled by the flow of capital – The Bank, which was The State, The Corporation, or whatever hegemonic force. Emerson's Nature with an Over-Soul, where every organism is connected, was reduced to a dust-bowl wasteland plowed by lonely machines driving families from domiciles. The remaining vestige of the frontier was whatever lay in "California," the sought-after paradise of the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath.
Looking at American history in this context makes the public enemies more interesting, because they were of the public. And though the public were in the midst of the Great Depression, advancing technologies allowed them to take a part in the large social audience of recorded history: radio and talking movies gave life a prism where real life experiences could be given an immediately digested context and meaning, in addition to an escape (and a way for power structures to wield control). Myths became transmitted and projected, and the Movie Theater replaced the Bonfire, where history was communicated in folklore and myths. Heroism was given the concrete faces of Gable, Grant, Flynn, Cagney, and Stewart: a freshly projected ideal, a new kind of frontier and religion.
More significant than the organized criminals seeking to control neighborhoods and official dominions (with such power that they can fix the World Series, as Arnold Rothstein did in 1919), were these public enemies, because of what they communicated to the public at the time. They became a Romantic image of Freedom from the constraints of ubiquitous forces keeping people poor and immobile. They were paupers who had fooled the system so that they could sneak into the castle and live like princes - but never held silent by an omerta oath. And being in the public, they were witness to their own "becoming" as myths, working to manipulate their images and even influencing each other. In his bid for a public relations makeover, Clyde Barrow, for example, told a bank customer to keep his money because he was there "for the bank's money" - something he had ripped off from the printed stories about Dillinger (Barrow was a sociopath, however; there was a false ring to the performance). Dillinger's robberies would become "performances" where he would live up to his stage reputation by putting his coat on a hostage to keep her warm, and be warmly jovial to bank customers – however dangerous he was capable of being.
John Dillinger then was an important part of our American mythology, and even as a criminal, the context of his mythology is not morally suspect, unlike Bonnie and Clyde (whose own grandiose mythology was almost wholly created by the 1967 film) or the fictional criminal figure of Vito and Michael Corleone in The Godfather trilogy. Dillinger represents the rugged American frontier individual, struggling to maintain his freedom in a world where freedom no longer exists. Born in rural Indiana and constantly on the road, Dillinger's association with Freedom also becomes an association with the fertile possibilities of Nature, as opposed to the banks he robbed and the lawmen who pursued him, who despite the wishes of Hoover and Washington, would always be representative of the cruel and impersonal Machine working against the masses, a divide cleanly put into song by Woody Guthrie's "Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd": "Yes, as through this world I've wandered / I've seen lots of funny men / Some will rob you with a six-gun / And some with a fountain pen / And as through your life you travel / Yes, as through your life you roam / You won't never see an outlaw / Drive a family from their home."
Dillinger is a hero with no political or ideological goal, but simply his own freedom across endless stretches of frontier space. He appeals to Marxists on the Left and libertarians on the Right. This land is our land, and no single entity should own it, and a phenomenological experience of it brings one back to an incendiary "Ground Concept" of this Land that is more powerful than the rational and controlling Hegelian systems developing with the unveiling of History. To some, John Dillinger was the Great Depression's Christ (he had more charisma as a leading man than the similarly martyred Floyd), and even at his 1934 trial his lawyer, Louis Piquett, invoked this idea by stating that "Christ had a fairer trial!" Representing a "Spirit" that is so different and at odds with the cold "Machine" emerging in a country becoming increasingly industrial with political leaders being inextricably tied to Big Business and capital interests (think of Warren G. Harding's recent involvement with oil companies during the Dome Teapot Scandal), Dillinger was a beautiful force that could not be contained by the system, performing escapes interpreted as miracles. Imprisoned, he would free himself like a wild element in Nature, battling a System that guaranteed Service and Protection, but really only served and protected the interests of the Allocated Power – not the lone Individual and his family.
Born in a well-off middle class family during a time when the middle class scarcely existed, John Dillinger was the definitive ne'er do well, an aimless youth, terrible at school, who exhibited little drive or ambition. His mother died when he was three, and he had a troubled relationship with his father, from whom he was never able to get approval. He longed for a justification, but lacked the skill to acquire it. His problem, like most ne'er-do-wells, was an inability to settle down. His drive to escape imprisonment was something exhibited early on in his ability to not hold down a job, a marriage, or military service, as he went AWOL soon after joining the Navy – twice. He had a yearning to go somewhere, but simultaneously no plan, which only furthered the strenuous relations with his father. His inability to be static, coupled with the fact that he always ended up back home, is a paradox of constant escape and a need for domestic warmth: Dillinger wanted to flee Mooresville only so that he could return. He was a variation of Gatsby, falling forth into the future so as to grasp the time he had lost in the past (certainly related to the maternal warmth he was missing). His luck turned for the worse after getting drunk and robbing a local grocer of $550, resulting in a 14-year prison sentence. Like the Hero in the belly of the beast, he emerged from nine years in Indiana State Penitentiary, transformed into a consummate bank-robber. He had been "baptized" by the older and more experienced fellow convicts whom he befriended, composited in the character of Walter Dietrich in Public Enemies, but really derivative of a true-life bank robber named Herman K. Lamm, who while incarcerated in 1917 developed a rigorous technical system of bank robbery – such as the "casing" of banks and the importance of getaway maps, called "gits.” It was from students of Lamm that Dillinger would hone his craft to such an extent that he awed those he was robbing. Eventually, news headlines and popular culture sealed his myth, and he would give birth to stories both popularly eye-witnessed and apocryphal.
Simultaneously, the world was growing smaller with more advanced systems of surveillance and communication being instituted so that our collective experience of reality could not any longer be apocryphal. The myths would all be projected and finally televised, machinery dictating its course and influence. Aura was lost, and so was the potency of our folk symbols. Interpreted thus, Dillinger and the public enemies' demise was also the last gasp of the Folk Hero. The Frontier was conquered. Reality was officially Official, as J. Edgar Hoover ushered in a kind of new Roman Empire, the interstate hegemon acting as an all-seeing matrix on what was once upon a time the "New World".
Mann’s Digital Prism
Public Enemies is an elegiac chronicle of the last American folklore myth, while simultaneously fastening the archetypes to the urgency of the present earth. It cannot be categorized as a "historical epic." Like Miami Vice, its structure is one of pursuit and escape where the film is trying to catch up with itself, as History tries to catch up with Dillinger. It is less a nostalgic take on history than it is a kind of self-reflexive suggestion of our own media-sculpted historical consciousness, fed both passively by the news and poetically by cinema. Time and Space are manipulated by the Historical Conclusion, the Hegelian God and the science of the Machine. Public Enemies is frustrating as escapist moviemaking, alienating an audience that wants to disappear into the past within the multiplex, while also completely poetic and deeply moving when interpreted by an active audience in dialogue with it, understanding that the archetypes of cinema are not extended from individual experience but are rather projections of our private landscapes.
Mann's method of presenting this world to us - with high-definition lightweight video cameras that directly call attention to their presence - reinforces this idea with a sense of exigency. We have never seen a period film like this before: though there are amazing high-def deep focus images in David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, their presence was not at all a distraction, and the filmmaking sutured us into its world. Public Enemies feels immediate, with the Past projected into the Future. Our ideas of the period world – and period film – are inverted. Mann realizes that cinema is consciousness, but he doesn't want us to be comfortable with that, the same way Spielberg allowed us immediate access into the past with black-and-white in Schindler's List and zoom-lenses in Munich. A recurring question of film reviewers regarding Public Enemies has to do with its relevance, and why should we care about such a story being presented as it is. "Why?" asks Richard Corliss in his Time magazine review. And why are you showing it to us in this fashion?
The answer, it turns out, is precisely the method. Though I won't argue that Miami Vice is the best film of our new century, I believe it is probably the most defining: it is our generation's Blade Runner, echoing the statements of cyberpunk author William Gibson, where the Future is Now, with cyberspace more significant than 'meat-space' (real space in real time) and the general populace being Post-Human cyborgs functioning in an uneasy relationship between flesh and gadgetry. With Miami Vice, Mann made a new kind of espionage/war film, mirroring our world of 24-hour news cycles and mass immersion into video images and surveillance, where the binary codes behind a person's identity are more important than one's private history and passions. In 2009, things have only continued to move faster. Technology is more important, and freedom is more constricted by devotion to one's social security number. So just as much as Public Enemies projects the Past into the Future, so is our Present, which is perpetual and digital with no link to the past or the future being that everything everywhere is "Right Now" in the electric flux of capital and information, projected into the Past. It is not our anger toward AIG and the banks that makes John Dillinger's story relevant to our time, but rather our general dependency on virtual Systems destroying our ability to reflect and find a "room of one's own.” The form of Mann's recent cinema is an obtuse approach echoing the post-human spirit of our times, far removed from the comforts of Hollywood period movies set "once upon a time." All time, Mann is arguing, is Present, and yet Time is always in Movement being pulled forth by temporal gravity. And cinema's presentation of Time and History is linked to how technology gives us those fragments as a sculpted chaos. That which the film is showing us is not a "human perspective" but is the construction of machines. To quote Vertov and his technique, which is astoundingly pertinent to someone viewing a Michael Mann film: "In the face of the machine we are ashamed of man's inability to control himself, but what are we to do if we find the unerring ways of electricity more exciting than the disorderly haste of active people?…I am an eye. I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, I am showing you a world, the likes of which only I can see."
Our human optical ability is not the same as a camera's. But the secret language of film that has surrounded us for the last century has confused this, and the visuals of movie drama have become our own drama, filtering into our memory and being edited, scored, and constantly re-edited. The structure and semblance of a novel was good for the 1920s, but now it is cinema - and perhaps, very detrimentally to our species, even Reality TV. Human identity is re-molded by our technology as is history, where incident is re-shaped and re-set. If nothing is objective, and even our memories are malleable with time, how too is History to be treated?
Public Enemies hurls us into a time and context, and after sending us into orbit, makes us rely on our own observation and cognition to do the work. "1933" the film's first title says in large font, echoing the beginning of Mann's The Last of the Mohicans (1992), which similarly gave us a vague setting and then could be viewed silently with the fragments roughly strewn together. "It is the fourth year of the Great Depression. For John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Alvin Karpis it is the golden age of bank robbery." The first images are set within the "Institution," with great vertical lines of imprisonment behind the chain-gangs marching in formation. "Indiana State Penitentiary - Michigan City, Indiana." That is all the information we are going to get. Incepted, History will now begin moving and there will be no non-diagetic material to assist us: no backstory, no prologue, no narration, no more titles. We are moving forth in time, just as the prison inmates are walking in determinate lines, a visual motif occurring throughout Public Enemies. The prison will establish the rhythm, which is based on contrasts: muted and muffled sounds with sharp loud ones; large establishing shots with precise rack-focusing close-ups (often extreme close-ups); wide spaces and closed-in-spaces; the deep blue sky and clouds with the dwarfing architecture of the prison. The visual language is paradoxical, placing us directly in 1933, but it's so visceral in movement that Mann keeps us from lulling away in it. We may be fascinated by what we see, but we are not allowed to dwell in it with the relaxed passivity of a lazy viewer – accommodating two-shots or medium-shots with pristine dialogue or conventional shot-reverse-shots are eschewed. Steadicams are practically non-existent in favor for the corner-jutting confines of shaky hand-held images. This is a film that does not want to be contained anymore than a prison inmate with a lust for life.
Cutting to outside the prison walls, we see a black car pulling up. Two men in dark trench coats exit, one of them wearing a badge, the other having his hands cuffed together. The badged official, whom we must presume to be a lawman, is shoving the hand-cuffed individual ahead, the camera slowly tracking with them from a distant angle (again, the motif of propelling forward). The steel doors open.
In the prison, Mann follows another prisoner, Walter Dietrich, in close-up, keeping the camera close on his face as he carries a box forward. Simply by looking at the man moving in this tight image we can deduce information. This man's face and movement suggest that he is hardened, experienced, thinking strategically, and limping - a physical defect that again conveys a certain amount of experience. He lays the box down next to another inmate, Homer Van Meter (Stephen Dorff), and from the box the two fish out of shiny objects: guns. This is an escape happening in precise coordination, the elder Dietrich and younger Van Meter being joined by the portly Charles Mackley (Christian Stolte), stick-figure thin Pete Pierpont (David Wenham), and violent Ed Shouse (Michael Vieau). The group easily overpowers the unsuspecting guards and heads out of the inmate work area.
Meanwhile, the hand-cuffed man is recognized by the guards as a recent parolee, John Dillinger. "You didn't last long," he's told while being checked in. Quickly, the hand-cuffs fly off Dillinger's wrists and he points a machine gun, forcing the other administrative guards to open the cell-door. Dillinger's "official" escort pulls out a shot-gun and reveals himself to be John "Red" Hamilton. Hamilton makes his way back outside to prepare the car (his exit outside, so silent and held in a continuous long-shot, is a marked difference from the hard close-angles of steel and loud panic happening within the prison). Abrupt and unexpected violence triggers the prison alarm, and the group frantically hurries to exit, the subsequent gunfight like a small drizzle that quickly becomes a torrential pour, a few spattered gun-shots turning into an endless staccato of firing weapons, falling bodies, and shattering glass. The escapees all flee to the car, turning back to cover each other as they fire their weapons at the manned prison turrets. Dietrich is physically the weakest link in this long and shaky path of continuous movement to freedom, and is shot by one of the long-range rifles from above, his hand clasped by Dillinger as the getaway car begins to move away.
Mann films both men in shot-reverse-shot medium close-ups. Dietrich seems to smile at his protégé while pulled along with the car, the eyes of the old man slowly emptying of life. The emerging music is sad and contemplative rather than immediate and action-driven. It is source music that Mann has pulled from Terrence Malick's 1998 World War II film, The Thin Red Line. That this music by Hans Zimmer ("The Lagoon") should be used in such a way during Dietrich's death forces us to cognitively mull about some of the things that this film may be suggesting. Mann often uses source music in a very inter-textual way, meant to associatively illuminate themes that he stubbornly refuses to concretely define for us. This piece of score compels a series of questions: 1) Why is it being used? 2) What does it relate to in its original context? and 3) How does that text (The Thin Red Line and possibly Terrence Malick in general) resemble this text of Public Enemies? The associative answers are wholly suggested to us by the next few minutes, and they give Public Enemies a particularly distinct semblance throughout the following two hours and any repeated viewings.
Mann and Malick
Whatever differences exist between them as great cinema sensualists, Malick and Mann have a similar thematic interest in the individual’s longing for freedom and how freedom is ultimately acquired through subjectivity. The individual's subjectivity is opposed to the Finality of the System, to the plainly speaking Objective. It is through this subjectivity, where our Love is expressed, that Bell (Ben Chaplin) in The Thin Red Line makes his peace with existential angst, even though on the larger plate of History, per Hegel and his “slaughter bench,” his passions matter not at all. Their respective films serve as a stage where the conflict between human subjectivity, the Individual with his passions, and Objective History, striving towards an Ideal, plays out.
Both filmmakers are interested in the binaries of the Mechanistic and the Natural, between Imprisonment (always socially imposed) and Freedom, between the Flux of Work and Tranquil Calm. They are both Romantic and romantic, in how escape is often personified as a love interest. And death is always waiting at the conclusion, so often eluded but ultimately accepted with bold resignation - as if life was a ritual. In flight, Richard Gere's con man in Days of Heaven, Witt in The Thin Red Line, and Neil McCauley in Heat all escape into death, with no exit; Sam Shepherd's Farmer in Days of Heaven is enacting a fight with Gere, but really runs into the screwdriver that kills him, as if by his own will; Kit in Badlands makes a monument out of the place where he will be caught by the police, trying to script his own outlaw myth, not unlike Dillinger in Public Enemies, who is conscious of handing "souvenirs" to hostages. The characters are living out a mythic paradigm, sometimes gracefully (like Dillinger and Witt), other times clumsily (like Kit and Baby Face Nelson).
The visual and aural style of the directors also bear many similarities, by which the camera will follow and linger on a character, who may be doing nothing at all - except looking and listening, their gazes often disappearing into the horizon. Sometimes the camera will, God-like, stalk the characters from behind, bearing down on them. This cinematic method of capturing beings in the world is how Mann and Malick develop characters. They are able to give their characters a soul with a camera. The challenge of shooting actors – particularly movie-stars like Will Smith, Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell, Richard Gere, etc – is to make them seem unconscious, like photographs from the 19th century. And for me, the films of Malick and Mann do this better than anybody else. A volume of information is given by a glance or shrug. Mann's technique as a director of actors is not to have them regurgitate information about their lives, but to have the performers immerse themselves in dense research and development before the shooting begins. In Collateral, Tom Cruise's Vincent gives a few lines of dialogue regarding his own childhood, though he leaves any specifics unanswered. Mann had developed a complete biography for Vincent that he believed would be communicated through the nuances and small tics of the performance. For Ali, Will Smith was given a "curriculum" that he would study for 10 months, relating to sociology, religion, and physical training, all ingested prior to shooting. The information that is unspoken registers on a very subconscious level because it is nevertheless present and completely pertinent to what the character is doing. The vilest of Mann's villains, like Jose Yero (John Ortiz) in Miami Vice, may not be allotted much sympathy, but in the span of fifteen seconds we see the source of his motivations, as he gazes at Sonny Crockett and Isabella closely dancing. Malick also chooses not to rub the private lives of his characters in our faces, instead giving us fractions of a story and fractions of a thought.
Aurally too they are aligned. Much of the dialogue in The Last of the Mohicans is hard to discern (probably a deliberate choice or not even a concern for Mann, though strangely the film won an Academy Award for its sound design), and not until the chain of translation occurs at the end, between English, French, Mohican, and Huron, is the English officer Duncan Heyward (Steven Waddington) able to see things outside of his stubborn imperial box. Other films by both directors are full of mumbling voices, then muted moments, where the sound is designed so that the wind or musical drones are hushing the spoken dialogue. Even some of Malick's narration is deliberately elusive, as it is often spoken in mumbling whispers. The New World has scenes that seem completely, from beginning to end, incomprehensible.
But then, both directors are interested in language. As Mark E. Wildermuth explains in his book Blood in the Moonlight: Michael Mann and Information Age Cinema, Mann's film are all about the pursuit of honest dialogue – symbolic exchange – in a world growing over-abundant with mechanical, or capital, exchange (take Miami Vice, wherein one needs subtitles to understand the investigative jargon). Dishonesty is congruous with the "loss of speech," and from there the domestic household falls apart. Corporate bodies, meanwhile, from Imperial England to the Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company, seek to silence individuals and burden them with contracts, filled with "guarantees" that cannot be fulfilled. The most honest form of communication, ultimately, may be two individuals simply sharing time and space together, self-aware and aware of the other.
Malick's words, whether understood or not, flow freely on screen or through narration, as beings seek to clearly define the sublimity of their day-to-day existence, making a monument of themselves, the way that Kit (Martin Sheen) desires to create personal monuments in Badlands. It is our relationship with language that both filmmakers, I believe, show how their art relates to our experience of life. Just as their rich imagery and mise-en-scene almost wants to possess a moment in time and hold it, Time slips away, and the echo of the transcendent is only allotted for our memory, and our memory only. Malick is not a "zeitgeist" director like Mann, in my own paradigm of "Information Age Cinema" filmmakers, but he is nevertheless seeking to preserve that element of the raw and passionate experience of life on an almost primordial level, of our deepest human memory, that technology and our dependency on gadgetry is obscuring – so much that an emergence from the auditorium after The New World into the mallification of middle America feels like entering a terrifying abomination: It is the most visceral demonstration of apocalyptic climate change, an electropolis of cybernetic immediacy suturing us into the flux at odds with our own self-authoring reflection.
For both directors, this relates to an acute awareness of other movies and the influence of our image culture, though again, Malick is not an "Information Age" filmmaker the same way that Mann, Soderbergh, Cuaron, Greengrass, or recent Scorsese are: he is an influential relative, though, living in the woods like Thoreau, refraining from coming out of his cabin (maybe kind of a William Blake when compared to Shelley, Byron, and Keats). They are both interested in our American mythos and history, filtered through their artistic prism in their authoring subjectivity, though their revisionism is not genre skewering. While Public Enemies and The New World certainly are playing with our perception of American myths, they are not very similar to the historical revisionism of Robert Altman (McCabe and Mrs. Miller; Thieves Like Us; Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson) or trope revaluations of Jean-Luc Godard and Michel Haneke. Neither filmmaker, though totally conscious of cinema history, is interested in genre functions as they are interested in Life. Mann has said that in preparing Thief, he didn't look for material in Jean-Pierre Melville (whom he admires), but he looked for actual thieves. Though both Mann and Malick could be classified as politically leftist, even radical, they are not interested in disillusioning us of our myths with "the awful truth," but rather seek to energize them, simultaneously dymytholozing while making them more abstract and ecstatically truthful. In his analysis on Malick, Hwanhee Lee makes this distinction between cinematic revisionists like Altman and Malick, saying that Malick (and I believe similarly Mann) is walking a very slim line that brings cinema back to its origins in its presentation of the Myth – the Myth being something that does not manipulate or lie to us (and thus must be unveiled as an "untruth") but rather is a filter for our own life experiences: "[Malick] understands myths as 'cultural paradigms,' if you will, that function as a precondition for making sense out of the human experience, and that shape the sensibilities of the culture that produces them. Indeed, myths, as recognized as such, are not hypotheses that might or might not turn out to be true, as they serve a completely different function from the presentations of facts." Whether or not something is factually true in this conscious rewriting of History (and our own memories are constantly rewritten as it is) matters less than how we interpret the recorded incidents and how they resonate with us. This idea is integral to the epilogue of Public Enemies and possibly its relevance as a historical film. Film is consciousness, or at least the contemporary projection of it, and can be utilized as either a system of projection or a system of control; in its purest form, it may really capture the Calm – the grasp of one’s “Beingness” – that we are looking for while evading the flux of History.
Hegel’s Slaughter-Bench of History
Public Enemies, while tying itself to Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, reinforces a deterministic framework of bodies in motion, flung towards Death. As Dillinger looks into Walter's dying eyes and is forced to let go of his mentor, the lifeless body falling to the ground while the car keeps on moving communicates a certain futility regarding the Individual on his quest for Freedom, which calls to mind Hegel's "victims on the slaughter bench of history." A key philosophical conflict in the film will be a Hegelian one, which branches out into consequent schools of Hegelianism: individual, subjective Freedom versus Absolute Freedom, which is found in citizenship and service to the status quo. Dillinger's glare into the eyes of the dying man, which will be a recurring motif through the film, is akin to someone trying to preserve the Life, Dreams, and Memory of another subject, who is disappearing into nothingness, the slaughter bench of History without meaning or actualization, "drifting off into the night," as Dillinger says. Remembering The Thin Red Line again, this is a recurring instance, where Malick has Witt looking into the eyes of the dying, as if to console them and hold them permanent. Nevertheless, the getaway car keeps on moving. Dillinger's challenge will be to embrace the concept of "Letting Go.” And yet, from another angle, is his own Individuality actually a Hegelian triumph, being that this picture is about the "becoming" of his own mythology? The subjective character of John Dillinger will come to realize that his mythic sociological construct is what is most important. It is this which affirms his love and his legacy, giving poetry to the people in dark times – much like what Muhammad Ali realizes while in Zaire during preparations for the Rumble in the Jungle. The dissonance in Mann's protagonists is that these characters, though molded by their times, have no desire to become a part of the State, or civilians under the established conformity of Law. They want to hold on to their egos, to their subjectivity (Ali wants to be the Peoples' Champion, but the way he wants to be the champ, not like Joe Louis, and his confrontation with Foreman during the Rumble in the Jungle correlates to political abstractions in which his subjectivity is vested), but the vectors of causality in the etching of Time make this impossible. Dillinger is always on the run, trying to conquer both Space and Time. "How far away's the farm?" Dillinger asks, referring to a safe house. "3.2 miles," Hamilton answers, indicating that this relationship with Time and Space is so important that it is regarded in very specific increments, much like the timing of a bank robbery. Both clocks and maps will become large props and set decorations in Public Enemies. They must be mastered for survival.
Mann cuts to a low angle of Dillinger as he looks from West to East, the camera slowly tracking alongside him as he scans the horizon. This is the empty frontier of immense space that Dillinger will use as his maze as he robs banks and flees to safe houses throughout the Midwest, also suggesting something infinite that cannot possibly be contained by time and technology. The resonance here is both Romantic and Religious, as Dillinger's image is complemented with a spiritual song, "Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah" by the Indian Bottom Association Old Regular Baptists, bespeaking a fascinating American dynamic: dually Native American and tied to the geography of this ageless frontier that existed before Time, while simultaneously being Biblical and suggesting that this individual quest will be a kind of religious journey towards a ritualized existence, John Dillinger's "Becoming". Interestingly, in this film that focuses on individuals caught between determinism and freedom, Old Regular Baptists are known for having split into factions, where one favors absolute Calvinist predestination, and the other favors absolute free will. As the film plays out, interpreting Public Enemies analytically is troubling (again, analogous to Malick), because it's like interpreting theology (or Hegel), wrought with contrasts but not facile in its own silent philosophical position.
Coming to a safe house, the men are wrapping up what appears to be food in newspaper, the action stitched together quickly, the dialogue muffled. Instead of luxuriating in the moment, Dillinger and company -- like the film -- are rushed. The camera follows them leaving from inside, stopping close to the wall where we can notice the conspicuous erosion of this farm house that has been so still over time. Outside the house, the woman living there stops Dillinger. "Take me with you, Mister," she says, and the camera slows down. "I can't, I'm sorry," Dillinger says and the camera continues moving at its original tempo, Dillinger outpacing it, the woman, holding a child's hand, growing smaller with her house and drying bed sheets blowing in the wind behind her. It's a powerful and melancholy image, and to linger on it longer would have made this an even more lush (and more comfortably "period") film, but Public Enemies, like Dillinger, is restless with the necessities of "plot" (history) outrunning our desire for solace and permanent beauty. This is a visual style that Mann had utilized in Miami Vice also, and is a visual complement to both film's frustrating (but conscious) narrative structures. Steven Rybin commented on Miami Vice in his own book-length study on Mann that the film captures "an immense depth of field in certain shots that renders the world…as simply overwhelming, too much to experience visually in a single viewing of the film. At certain points while watching the film during its initial theatrical release I myself felt an acute desire to hold onto individual film frames for longer than Mann was willing to let them linger on the screen.” This world is ungraspable, as beings are pushed forth into time, always in the present (as Calvin's God always sees people in His linear universe of predestination), instead of having a personal historical context or future plans. The deception of this static beauty is that Time is still moving, and that the House, if we remember the walls, is surely dying and eroding. The Woman here is held down by her socially-imposed and domestic responsibilities as house-body and mother, seeing the flight into the wilderness as a gate to freedom. But it is nevertheless impractical (something blatant when we see the child tugging at her hand) and impossible to think of as a Realistic proposition. Her encasement in the past feels much like Walter Dietrich's demise, another victim of the slaughter bench.
This idea becomes expressed musically during the next sequence, as we hear Otis Taylor's bluesy banjo song "10 Million Slaves," the lyrics telling of how modern everyday labor, repeating itself day after day, is analogous to slaves crossing the ocean with shackles on their legs. The attitude towards history in this song is that it never changes, only the appearance does: "Don't know where, where they're going / Don't know where, where they've been," is repeated over and over, indicating that everything here is a constant Present, individuals having no history or future, and the final destination is always solitude: "Sun goes down / You'll be standing / You'll be standing by yourself." The song is also communicating the film's difficult method of narrative to an audience used to elaborate exposition where the history of the plot and characters can be cleanly surveyed so that we can calmly make sense out of everything, relaxing as we sit back and are lulled into entertainment. The film, with its Vertovian via Calvinist God-like mechanical eye, doesn't care about the characters' past. Public Enemies is only interested in where they are right now. The two characters introduced during the song are predator and prey, heading down a linear vector of Nature: an apple orchard, where nature has been groomed and conquered in such a way to make a straight deterministic line through which this man in a bright blue suit, Pretty Boy Floyd (Channing Tatum), frantically runs away from a rustically-dressed lawman calmly aiming his rifle, Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale).
As Floyd flees from his doom (he has gotten quite far - in reality, Pretty Boy Floyd was killed soon after John Dillinger), the camera runs with him, the lightweight high-def image creating something that feels surreal. Purvis aims and fires, blowing a hole through Floyd's midsection. Subdued, Floyd insists that his name is "Charles Floyd," as if he's trying to set clear his "actual" biological identity in front of his socially given one as a romantic outlaw. His determined running and unwillingness to be subdued even when he is clearly beaten (he pulls out a revolver while on the ground, which is quickly kicked away by Purvis), indicates that any kind of entrapment is to be resisted, and he is as desperate for freedom as a caged wild bird. The important thing for this character, and this whole dramatic instance, is to abstract the whole relationship of the individual's longing to freely establish his own identity as the larger homogenous System seeks to implant its staple on him. Yet this is not an Either/Or, being that the reference to "slaves" without a past and future here is ironic, as we'll observe in the character of Purvis. Floyd is as much of an image revolting against the shackling of the system as Dillinger is, but Purvis, the bona fide FBI man, is a slave without a past or a future, inextricably tied to his job. Critics and audiences have complained that Bale's Purvis lacks depth. He certainly lacks "exposition" and the depth of a deeply soul-searching individual with time to reflect. But reading in-between the lines of Bale's Purvis, what will emerge is a performance of stifled despair and base submission to a systematic job at odds with a good man's natural disposition.
If Purvis is here different from Al Pacino's Vincent Hanna, it is because Hanna, according to Mann's own DVD commentary, is one of the only self-aware people in the world of Heat, carrying his angst with him while pursuing his prey. Purvis is a good man, but not so self-aware, and is acting a part given to him by "the director," J. Edgar Hoover. While Purvis answers questions of the press later on, we will see him putting on an affectation of movie-star charisma. Factually, Hoover – and the media – liked Purvis precisely because he resembled Clark Gable and had a movie-star look. This addresses another big difference between Mann's cinematic detectives: Vincent Hanna (or Crockett and Tubbs for that matter) was much better at his job. Though Purvis, historically and as here played by Bale, was a competent lawman, he wasn't by any measure extraordinary and he botched several attempts to capture Dillinger and the public enemies. The reason being, Mann's film could be said to postulate, the strictly mechanical regiment of Hoover's Bureau kept agents in a lock-step binary psychological position, where they were separated from the people they were attempting to capture. On the other hand, Vincent Hanna and Will Graham (William Petersen) in Manhunter not only use forensic methods to capture their prey, but also psychologically need to identify with them. "All I am is what I'm going after," Hanna admits. Purvis is not as introspective.
Hoover’s Mechanical Determinism
Mann cuts away from the restless action in the Midwest and "10 Million Slaves" to Washington D.C., where J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) is being questioned by a panel of congressmen. Hoover is looking for more funds in establishing his revolutionary Bureau, which will introduce a "Federal" law enforcement, able to bypass corrupt and fragmented local jurisdictions, and aiming to pursue, capture, and kill "public enemies" running rampant and robbing banks. A federal system is needed, Hoover is saying, and his architecture for this System, the FBI, will embody the spirit of what he believes to be historically essential and "Modern." In other words, it precludes any sense of idiosyncrasy, not only in terms of geography, where small locality is overridden by the larger mechanical structure, but the private idiosyncrasies of the Individual, who exists solely to be a small mechanism working with other mechanisms in a vast technological work force. This is exemplified by Hoover's guidelines for employment in the FBI, where an agent could be fired for being a minute late, and where one's desk was a clone of all the other surrounding desks, with an efficient set-up designed solely for work, forbidding personal photographs and any kind of memento. The idealized vision of the FBI agent as designed by Hoover was college educated and bureaucratic, assimilating law enforcement into an office environment, where scientific and logical deduction was more valued than street experience and intuition. Hoover, dapper and infamously effeminate, had disdain for "rough-looking" individuals not interested in strict office protocol, wanting his agents to be a social sign for bourgeois respect, without any kind of disarming individual quirks: suits and ties, where notepads were more important than guns.
Crudup's Hoover is only on screen for perhaps about five minutes in the entire picture, but his force, while not being a lingering "presence" on the rest of the picture, is yet the feature that drives the narrative forward into the future and into a place out of time and the grasp of freedom. The structure of the film, where characters are not allowed a historical context ("don't know where they're going, don't know where they've been" as Pretty Boy Floyd frantically runs), mirrors Hoover's "Modern Age." This opening scene with Hoover, where he is arraigned harshly by Senator McKellar (Ed Bruce), brilliantly establishes Hoover's motives, character, and threat, as we realize that his fortuitous rise to power resulted in the fermentation and cancerous growth of American Fascism. As Hoover explains how his Bureau has been successful, McKellar stops him. "How many criminals have you apprehended, Mr. Hoover?" he asks. Hoover answers by claiming that the "Bureau" has apprehended a large number of criminals, which validates its success, but he is interrupted again by the senator. "No. I mean you, Mr. Hoover. How many criminals have you personally arrested?" Hoover is stifled. "I have never arrested anybody." Hoover is less of a human being than the embodiment of an Institution denoting a System, an abstraction with a jowly chin able to hand down facts and figures, but unable to relay the grit of actual experiences when dealing with the anarchy of lawlessness. "I am an administrator," he says. His function is mechanical, and it's the mechanical functionality of a process that Hoover espouses, not the intuitive human element of work.
McKellar goes after Hoover. "I think you're a front," he accuses, insinuating that Hoover is running wild with control as he is trying to implement an expansive system capable of wielding more power than law-makers. Even if such a System as the Bureau were to gain a desired position of power, McKellar asks, "I wonder, Mr. Hoover, if you're the kind of man fit to run it." Hoover is indeed a "Front," a new kind of Modern Being created less by real experience than by a publicist, Harry Suydam (Geoffrey Cantor), with powerful ties to the print media. Systems are administered by individuals, but when that individual is more devoted to implementing a System of Control instead of basic service and protection, the morality of governance is a viable question. Hoover's motives are less associated with good intentions than with the consolidation of Power, and a will to tame the wild frontier of erratic local law (and individualized) jurisdiction. As Hoover leaves the room, Mann's camera tilts beneath his heavy form and we see paintings on the ceiling of uniformed men on tamed horses, an image that will repeat itself later on, associative with civilization dominating and subduing Nature into its own service.
As if to validate what McKellar has said, Hoover tells Suydam to contact Walter Winchell, feeding the information that "McKellar is a Neanderthal," a subhuman (and therefore inconsequential) hinderer to progress and modern ideals. "We'll fight them on the front page," Hoover says. The dialectic of Truth and Reality has been lost to the constructs of power and public control bought with mass propaganda in communication. "Reality" is not in the context of the argument, but in the printed or recorded information that is manipulated by human (or Institutional) minds, and projected onto a hungry public that is handily controlled, and we will see this method of Automated Media Control in action later on, as Dillinger and his pals are watching newsreels at a cinema. Hoover's method of relating to the rest of the world is silent and subliminal, symbolized by the uneasy presence of Hoover's companion (and alleged lover), Clyde Tolson (Chandler Williams), whose presence is captured repeatedly through rack-focusing by Mann, as he is quietly (and unnervingly) surveilling things. His inconsequence and lack of definition from a narrative perspective is contradicted by Mann's camera, establishing him as something significant, ubiquitous, but ineffable, an embodiment of this impersonal Modern System that does not use language to communicate, because it doesn't communicate. It simply oversees and controls.
Cut to Purvis sitting in front of Hoover's office, groomed perfectly to the extent that he looks like more of an office fixture or ornament than a human being. As the two walk past the identical desks of Bureau agents, Hoover informs Purvis that his objective will be to capture John Dillinger, "public enemy number one." Walking outside the federal offices, Hoover stops in front a small mass of reporters and cameras, declaring "The United States of America's first War on Crime," directly casting Melvin Purvis in the role of the special agent who will capture Dillinger. The one-dimensional presentation is what matters for Hoover, and that feeling extends beyond his own performance in front of the microphones to Purvis, who raises an eyebrow (like Clark Gable), and answers how he captured Pretty Boy Floyd with suave delicacy. "Through an apple orchard."
Purvis gives the media the two tools which he will be using to catch Dillinger, who is bereft of such advantages: "The Bureau's modern scientific techniques," is the first, followed by "the visionary leadership of our director, J. Edgar Hoover." This whole moment may seem contemporarily relevant given that Hoover's tactics were not too much unlike the spirit of our own times, with the War on Terror following September 11 (the impetus for Hoover and the United States government was a combination of the "Kansas City Massacre," where federal agents were shockingly killed while escorting an arrested criminal, in addition to Hoover's own need to keep his federal job, jeopardized by the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt; he needed to create a successful program, captured by the media, that would cement his public reputation - hence, McKellar's accusation of Hoover being solely a "Front"). This reinforces a Mannian binary about the technology of the corporate hegemon, where everything can be extrapolated, deduced, and controlled, versus untamed elements associated with Nature, as just earlier we saw Dillinger's gang disappearing from an urban bank robbery into the thick woods. Purvis, his directive handed to him and modus operandi established, is not unlike a cyborg in Blade Runner, who doesn't know he's a cyborg, in pursuit of other lawless cyborg replicants. He is inextricably tied to the technical apparatus of his job. This is philosophically ironic, being that when Marx envisioned a new era of technological progress, the technical apparatus would enable man to have more private time, more leisure, and more self-actualization - when in fact the opposite has happened.
Dillinger is also linked to a "technical apparatus," being that Mann's focus during and after a bank robbery was the technology and functional dynamics that allowed the Dillinger gang to accomplish their goals. The bank robbers are operating functionally: Dillinger gets the safe open, while Pierpont and Mackley cover the interior of the bank; Van Meter stays outside by the door, keeping a lookout for police; he taps on the window (a maneuver Pierpont is waiting for) if trouble arrives. Hamilton, keeping an eye on a clock, waits in the car with the git (or getaway route). In order to get the job done efficiently, they have machine guns that are more advanced than the arms of local law enforcement; they also have faster cars. They rely on the scientific and hands-on proficiency of engineers. At a safe house, we will see a gunsmith retooling Dillinger's guns to fix the weapons’ structural problems, while Hamilton and Pierpont are shown some new automobiles -- "real fast cars.” When Dillinger escapes from Crown Point jail, he asks the garage mechanic for the "best car," and is directed to the one that "has the new V-8 engine." The difference between Dillinger and Purvis is that one is using technology to achieve his own ends (it is in his individual service), while the other's job and personality is blurred within the very paradigm of a Technology synonymous with Modernity. In speculating on analogisms between the War on Terror and the War on Crime, there is a divide between human intelligence versus mass surveillance, or technological intelligence. The Bodies caught within that war, when it is purely based on the technological, become inconsequential. This will become a problem for Purvis, who is constantly associated with a simulacrum of civilized constructs, versus Dillinger, often associated with nature and the deep frontier. When Mann shoots both characters with his high-def cameras, Purvis' backdrop is often an array of windows from a building next-door, while Dillinger has the open sky. Even the black car of Dillinger is painted with endless trees reflected on its surface as it descends into the woods.
In Dillinger's world, where technology and human beings have a mutual amiability, so are human relationships more friendly, even between opposite sides of the law, opposite sexes, and different races. While the gang reconstructs its small technical apparatus at the safe house, Dillinger has a friendly conversation with a Chicago police chief, Martin Zarkovich (John Michael Bolger), who says that Dillinger will be safe in the city. With them is a friendly Romanian woman, Ana Sage (Branka Katic), whom we can infer is a brothel Madame, also located in Chicago. "Come and visit the girls," she says to Dillinger. Everyone in this house seems to relate in perfect harmony, given that their exchanges are a healthy mixture of the symbolically friendly and the monetary. Dillinger and the gang rob banks, paying off salesmen and engineers for tools enabling them to rob more banks. They pay off Zarkovich not because they have to, but seemingly out of basic generosity: Zarkovich tells Dillinger he's safe in Chicago, and Dillinger offers "a little something" as a gift, not a payment. Zarkovich is also protecting Ana Sage's prostitution ring, which offers sexual intimacy to Dillinger's gang (and we can assume the police), while also receiving capital from the bank robberies. None of these relations are worn by a sense of obligation or control, but are rendered as active exchanges between individuals all working within their own niches while sharing the fruits of their labor with each other. Its corporeal structure is very basic, with different organs cooperating while remaining independent.
This is heavily contrasted with the two "Big Corporations" in Public Enemies that aim to consolidate power with an endless abundance of control and capital: The Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the criminal Syndicate, one personified by the bureaucratic administrator, J. Edgar Hoover; the other by the Chicago boss Frank Nitti (Bill Camp), who also is developed as someone not-quite biologically human. Dillinger himself comments that Nitti looks like a "barber," indicating that this man, probably one of the most powerful men in the country, is devoted to a world of endless professional and capital growth rather than leisure, and as played by Camp, Nitti never seems to be enjoying himself (this also links him with Mann's globally networked cartel leaders in Miami Vice, rarely smiling with all their wealth, as Bloomberg TV serves as an incessant backdrop). In Miami, Nitti comments to his top assistant, Phil Deandre (John Ortiz), "It's hot, right?" "Yeah, Frank." "Since those pricks shot me, I can't get warm." Frank Nitti is just as much estranged from his individual human biology – that which ties one human to other humans – as Hoover is. He is able to wield mass mechanisms of impersonal Control, but unable to be Human. Mann treats his antagonists quite unusually, choosing to emphasize the spirit of something dreadfully uncanny and strange, whether it's Hoover's apparent pathology (such as when he makes Purvis repeat himself on the phone three times), the ghostly presence of Tolson, or the bizarrely subhuman Nitti.
Performance of Romance
At Chicago’s Aragon Ballroom, the issues of temporal plans are addressed when Dillinger meets casually with Alvin Karpis (Giovanni Ribisi, a dead ringer for Karpis - about whom Mann actually wrote an unproduced screenplay in the early 1980s). Karpis asks Dillinger is he wants in on a plan to kidnap a rich St. Paul banker, Ed Bremer, which, given the success of a similar kidnapping months before (the Hamm Brewery kidnapping, also out of Minnesota), would be extremely lucrative for everyone involved. "I don't like kidnapping," Dillinger says. "Why not?" Karpis asks. "The public doesn't like kidnapping." "Who cares what the public thinks?" "I do, I hide out among'em." Dillinger is conscious of the identity he is creating within the context of media communications, and just as Hoover wants to control reality through that means, so too does Dillinger. To become a kidnapper would mean that he would be a "home invader," something disdained by Mann's heroes in other films because it violates the sanctity of the family household. Dillinger understands, particularly during the Great Depression, that the masses have no love for institutions like the banks, and his bank robberies are thus heralded by the "folk culture" as they are condemned by the governing forces. He does, however, show interest in a possible train robbery that Karpis is putting together. "It's a big score," Karpis says, "the kind of thing you go away on."
This addresses an interesting facet about Karpis (which made him so interesting to Mann in the first place): the end of his criminality is escape into leisure, representative of the general working man. He doesn't necessarily like what he's doing, but it's the only thing that he can do in order to catch up with lost time spent in prison. Kidnappings offer bigger payoffs than bank robberies, where the risk is outweighing the reward. Karpis was considered the most intelligent of the public enemies, whose strategy in work was mapped out like a life plan. He wanted to create a new identity, financed and secured by his heists, and then live his life out comfortably – precisely the same objective as Frank in Thief, McCauley in Heat, and suggested by Crockett to Isabella in Miami Vice: as luck runs out, it's good to "cash out" before it's too late - because you will get caught.
Asked by Karpis about his future, Dillinger admits how he doesn't have one, and Mann brings particular attention to how Depp says it by raising the volume temporarily: "No plans." Dillinger, much like the structure of this film that is so focused on the present as opposed to the past or future, "ain't thinking' about tomorrow." This man has the ability to enact perfect bank robberies and expertly mold his own legacy among the public through those robberies, but he is so devoted to constant movement, outrunning time while making up for the time he’s lost, that he has no ability to plan for next week. He is a ne'er-do-well with money now, evading stasis whether in prison or in life.
It's here where Dillinger first sees Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard), dancing in a red dress. He approaches her, putting on his most charming face and uttering words that belong in a movie. As a "movie relationship" some may sigh that this is token screenwriting, inserting a superfluous love story within the gangster story, and given how the film handles the relationship, this is a sensible objection. Much of Dillinger and Frechette's dialogue feels scripted, and we even see it scripted out as federal agents look at transcriptions of their phone conversations. However, the romance between Dillinger and Frechette was very real, according to both eyewitnesses and those transcripts, and the nature of this romantic relationship calls attention to a subtext in Public Enemies that relates to the romance of our myths, particularly cinema. In a film where dialogue is often muted (there's very little of it in the first fifteen minutes), Dillinger's direct addresses to Frechette indicate that his words in fact have something to do with a romantic image of himself that he has constructed with the help of his love for the movies, related to a role in which he is casting himself as a protector of a Woman, given that he yearns for a feminine bond since his mother died when he was three. The actuality of his identity matters less than the performance of this role, so he stumbles over himself when she asks his name. "Jack," he says, clumsily beginning to dance with her as a chanteuse (Diana Krall) sings "Bye, Bye Blackbird." Later on, he will make her repeat her romantic "line readings" to Dillinger on the phone (the same moment we see scripted), a moment that echoes something forced out of Purvis by Hoover (and so linking Dillinger to Hoover as two symbols of control, though Hoover seeks to control official spaces and Dillinger subjective ones). What's very interesting to observe here is Dillinger talking to Billie about herself, but only through his eyes, praising her beauty in such a way that he seems to be creating her right there, wasting no time in casting her as "his girl" with a hurried impatience similar to Frank in Thief (who tells Jessie, "Let's cut all the mini-moves and the bullshit, and get on with this big romance!" Similarly, in his DVD commentary for Heat, Mann says that Ashley Judd's Charlene was essentially the same woman a lonely inmate like her husband, Val Kilmer's Chris Shihirlis, would invent while incarcerated). Dillinger is "catching up," he tells her, and like the movie, he has no time to give a deep expository back-story or motivation. He has no time to dwell on Billie from a distance, letting the relationship grow organically and slowly. He has a defined picture of fulfillment: he sees it, he wants it, it fits into his romantic paradigm, he takes it – only with as much irresistible charm and performative ability as executed during one of his bank robberies. Those robberies reinforce the performative nature of Dillinger and his gang, as their first female hostage, Barbara Patzke (Emilie de Ravin), is associated with being a Hollywood starlet when Van Meter tells her, "When I'm not doing this I'm a scout for the movies." These characters, in love with the mass-cult experience of movies have sublimated the romance of art into their everyday lives, because that higher culture of romance – even if unreal – stands in opposition to the systematic reality of the Depression and institutional control. The movies were a shelter during the Depression, being fairly affordable, in addition to being a hot-summer sanctuary with the theaters' air conditioning. For some, as Benjamin said, mass-produced art could be liberating. Dillinger calls Billie "dark and beautiful, like that bird in that song." She is analogous to a produced artistic creation, separate from the real while simultaneously being affirmed by it, an idea that finds its conclusion during Manhattan Melodrama near the climax. Which is the Myth and which is Real? Or are they both mythic, influencing each other and making the other more real – the Blackbird and Billie, Clark Gable and Dillinger, Myrna Loy and Billie? Mann is not denigrating these mythic forms in our mass communication culture of screened images in accordance to how the subject interprets those myths. In our own era of romantic mix tapes/compact discs, and to borrow the title from the recent Arthur Phillips novel, the song is you.
This commentary on the medium continues when Dillinger and Billie exit the Aragon together. We notice how there is a jump cut as they begin walking on the sidewalk, a maneuver that calls to mind a few ideas. It takes us out of the romance, reminding us that this is a film, enabling us to analyze it while simultaneously ingesting it as a story. It also, in this movie about the incessant forward movement of Time, suggests a transcendent quality to this relationship, being that for a small moment the characters have broken the deterministic flux, subverting the cinematic and temporal "laws of gravity.” The image of Dillinger and Billie stands alone, broken from the previous moment, indicating a new kind of beginning for the characters. If the Goldenthal music swelling at two points during the romantic pairing of Dillinger and Billie feels too melodramatic, even disarmingly anti-Mannian, it is because the music is a projection of Dillinger's own cinematic subjectivity, in love with the melodrama of the movies and its romantic archetypes. The first time this musical composition hits, it is in a Syndicate-owned restaurant, as the camera lingers on Billie in close-up, looking at Dillinger (much like the Myrna Loy close-ups from Manhattan Melodrama later on). It separates them from every other character in the restaurant as if they are in their own constructed fantasy, even distant from us. The second time this music is used is markedly similar, at a race-track in Miami. It begins as Dillinger paints their romance very specifically for her, contrasting his design with the utter facts of existential death: "I ain't going anywhere, and neither are you. I'm going to die an old man in your arms." The music then swells as they kiss, the world left far behind them (or moving on beyond them): the horses -- the flux -- cross the finish line and every other character in the frame rises to see the winner. The romances of individuals are as unreal as they are real in accordance to a subjectivity and performance undertaken in good-faith upon the stage of an experience. Mann's treatment of the romance is a multi-dimensional commentary on our own experiences of love and companionship, as it is a commentary on the romantic mythos of movies upon which we either identify or have our own ideas of romance kindled and sculpted. One casual criticism of the film's love story may be that Billie is simply an agent for the protagonist's desire. This is true -- she is. This is a film about subjectivity, and Dillinger has honestly invented Billie Frechette, just as the folk culture/FBI has invented "John Dillinger." Mann plays with this idea, by having Dillinger identify with the female voice on the radio (Billie's namesake, Holiday) when thinking about Billie Frechette, and later on the symbolism becomes more transparent, when Billie's freedom from FBI surveillance is accomplished by dressing up in drag, assuming the guise of a man. She is Dillinger, and he is Billie, another theme that connects Public Enemies to some threads in The Thin Red Line and The New World.
Just as every conscious individual creates their own subjective sense of reality, so too do filmmakers in their craft, life reinforcing art reinforcing life endlessly, each subjective eye a universe unto itself. The high-definition video presentation of a '30s gangster film clearly addresses its new method of presenting an oft-filmed subject while also clearly remaining the vision of an individual film director. Mann's decision to relay formal ideas musically is a common feature of his films, though it is often overlooked. As an interesting point of comparison, the melodramatic music that is used to separate the lovers from the simulacrum in Public Enemies is not unlike the synthesized Tangerine Dream music score used to highlight Frank's triumph after his heist in Thief, where Mann films Frank, Jessie, and Frank's partner Barry (Jim Belushi) as if they were in a commercial, luxuriating on a California beach. It implies a certain dimension of fantasy. At the end of this triumphant sequence, we see that this "non-diagetic" music is in fact coming from Frank's expensive home stereo. It is artificial and manufactured. The synth score is inverted by the hard guitar rock used during the film's climax, also by Tangerine Dream, where the nihilism of Frank's revolt is a rejection of the hyperreal dictates of his capitalist exploiters: between nothing and being real in a place where reality is dictated by a corrupt system, he chooses nothiongness. Music in this Brechtian light is employed by Mann elsewhere, such as the warm scene between Max and Anna in Collateral, where Groove Armada's "Hands of Time" fools us into thinking that it is the music being played on Max's taxi stereo, when in fact it is the song scoring Max's experience of warm dialogue with Anna. Whatever music is being played on the radio is unheard by Collateral's audience: it's identified by both characters as being classical. Our subjectivity trumps basic objectivity, for better or worse.
The Syndicate restaurant has the same bar-like vertical columns as the prison that opened up the film. The brute arena of facts is not as important as the freedom afforded by subjectivity. As the two initially sit down, Dillinger gives away his identity to Billie: "I'm John Dillinger, I rob banks." Wanting to implant himself in a "real" relationship with Billie means that he must relate in good faith, again like Frank in Thief, who can't "begin this big romance" until he has angrily come clean with Jessie. This contrasts to the doomed relationships in Mann, like Francis Dollarhyde (Tom Noonan) and Reba (Joan Allen) in Manhunter, where speech and the use of the mouth are particularly emphasized by Mann; in Heat between McCauley and Amy Brennenman's Eady; the marriage between Jeffrey and Liane Wigand (Russell Crowe and Diane Venora) falls apart in The Insider because he is unable to tell her detrimental information, such as being fired and agreeing to break a confidentiality agreement for a TV interview; between Max and Annie in Collateral, where his plan to design a limousine business attracts her, but the fact that he probably will never go through with it impedes him from actually ever daring to call her; and Sonny Crockett and Isabella in Miami Vice, which is a relationship founded on duplicity that "has no future.” Ironically in Thief, though Frank is honest with Jessie, they are also in a doomed relationship because it is developed within a false system of exchanges, where wealth, home, and child are all provided by the exploiting boss figure of Leo (Robert Prosky). Because individuals in Mann struggle to be transparent with each other, and are never able to be completely so, lovemaking in his films almost always share the common characteristic of the coupling participants usually still wearing clothes: Frank and Jessie in Thief; Will and Molly, and Francis and Reba in Manhunter; Vincent and Justine in Heat; Ali and Sonji in Ali; Crockett and Isabella in Miami Vice; and here Dillinger and Billie in Public Enemies, where the sex is very abstract, cut together with jump cuts and breaks in continuity, the actors having a kind of bizarrely erotic choreography as Billie voice-overs about her past. It feels a lot like the scenes between Bell and his wife in The Thin Red Line, and John Smith and Pocahontas in The New World, where the participants are also clothed and the moment feels more like a kind of erotic transcendence than a sequence of carnal pleasure. The physical relations between Dillinger and Billie again relates to issues of time in film, much like the jump cut, and how the romantic relationship between two individuals over-steps the imprisoning bounds of temporality, as if it exists out of Time.
We learn that “nothing exciting” has ever happened to Billie, as she grew up on an Indian Reservation, moving from church to church and town to town. She says that she was in plays, connecting her again to being a dramatic performer on a canvas or stage. She is trying to tell Dillinger where she's been, but he honestly does not seem interested. Historical biography for Dillinger is as important as it is for Public Enemies: reinforcing Mann's stubborn expositional device, as Billie complains that she "doesn't know" Dillinger, he retorts quickly, "I was raised on a farm in Indiana; my momma died when I was three; my daddy beat the hell out of me because he had no idea how to raise me; I like movies, baseball, good clothes, fast cars, whiskey, and you. What else you need to know?" This is Mann's reply to his critics on character development: He has no time for your questions. "Boy, you're in a hurry," Billie observes. Her commentary is not only directed towards Dillinger, but to the film's structure. Public Enemies distinguishes itself from other Hollywood entertainments as it is in dialogue with itself. For Dillinger, a day is "a long time," as indicated by his stays in hotels. This is not a justification for a sleek and fast-moving film, but mirrors the pleasures of a man with a lust for life, in love with a present moment that he's trying to elevate, just as it is showing the confines of a system that wants to stuff all of History in a perpetual simulacrum of hyperreality where everything is controlled. The difference is that Dillinger is always ecstatic, always moving, like Pretty Boy Floyd trying to outrun the static operatives of the system, holding the Present still. "It's not where you're from," he says to Billie, "it's where you're going." The irony is that Dillinger isn't necessarily going anywhere, however much he keeps on moving. His desired destination, where past, present, and future all intersect in a state of pure fulfillment, is during lovemaking with Billie, a kind of paradise of sexual bliss which is underscored by the fact that his suitcases are packed by the bed, and that they are coupling in the hyperreal environment of a hotel. The Billie Holiday lyrics for "Love Me or Leave Me" comments like a Chorus, "I want your love but I don't want to borrow / Have it today to give back tomorrow": an expression of longing for something permanent that is not controlled by Time. "Where are you going?" she asks him. "Anywhere I want." His answer is truthful, to an extent, but he must remain "going." He will never comfortably stay "anywhere," and that "anywhere" is a ultimately a utopian abstraction, addressed as being "off the map" later on, a fantasy closed off by governing systems that control private economic life and impeding a free subjectivity. We should understand that freedom here is not necessarily "economic freedom" as in "free enterprise," but rather "freedom from" the cruel economics of the system, just as it is "freedom from" the politics of the system. It's a freedom denoting the wild and vast possibilities of unchartered Nature.
Purvis’ Virtual Plane
On a radio, that connection of Dillinger to Nature is reinforced, as a newsman reports that Dillinger "roams the Wild" while being pursued by federal agents. Immediately following this commentary is the passive information that the U.S.S.R. has been allowed into the League of Nations, indicating that the world is becoming less fragmented, much like America (also denoting entropic failure, being that the world would soon "collapse" in this modern era, the League soon falling apart). Mann highlights the uniformity of the mechanical Modern age by focusing on Purvis' scientific strategy of mechanical deduction: Dillinger gave this coat to a hostage. He was somewhere. It was cold. He bought a coat. Where did he buy the coat? He was in a safe haven somewhere. "Such methods will help us find him." Mann cuts to probably the most bizarre of Public Enemies' sets: the surveillance center where Purvis and his associate Carter Baum (Rory Cochrane) are able to record conversations through any phone line in the country. The space is compact but unsettling in its mechanical features, looking like a science fiction Planetarium transported into the 1930s, where expansive real spaces across the country are reduced to a light bulb, conquered by a wire. It is this space where the corporate hegemon is able to compress all space and time into a single efficient unit of control, suggested by one of the few dissolves used in the picture, where a shot of the surveillance room dissolves to a yet another shot of the same surveillance room – without the indication of time passing. It is the machine of ubiquitous control where time has lost meaning.
This hyperreal space of virtual control, where Reality and Relationships are compressed into recorded information (digitized as it were), is contrasted to the necessities of real space and law enforcement. Purvis explains to his agents, all of whom are basically office bureaucrats, that they will be carrying firearms and that they are dealing with "hardened killers." This was a very real problem with Hoover's FBI, because the agents were white-collar college graduates more attuned to abstractions of law enforcement than to concrete hands-on pursuit where their Real Bodies were in danger of gunfire. Most of these agents lacked experience in strategic thinking as applied to real world confrontations, and were clumsy with guns. It's this divide between the abstractly scientific Modern Methods, associated with Hoover's creation of the "Gentleman Lawman/Bureaucrat," and Real World Combat, that we will see as being detrimental to Purvis' profession as his agents prepare to raid a hotel where they believe Dillinger is hiding out. The nervous agents don't seem to be able to communicate with each other. Purvis has to slowly spell out his question: "Are they aware that we are here?" Purvis and another agent go inside to confront a suspicious hotel guest, and are cordially greeted by a woman and her fiancé, both of whom have identification and clean records, though we are aware (and so is Purvis, yet he remains silently cautious) that this is all a front. The genial man is Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham), and acting the part of legitimate shoe salesman, he points out that he recognizes the movie star-like lawman Purvis.
Purvis bids them goodnight and leaves, instructing his agent to "stay right there" until reinforcements arrive. What unfurls reveals the utter lack of human coordination on Purvis' team, contrasting with the perfect functioning of the Dillinger gang. The agent, instructed to "stay right there" curiously moves into the hallway (another straight deterministic path with no escape). The elevator opens and he is distracted. A suspicious character emerges from the elevator and approaches the agent, who nervously faces him (his back to Nelson's door, which opens) and awkwardly utters, "Bureau of Investigation, what's your name?" The man, Tommy Carroll (Spencer Garrett), nonchalantly remarks, "You wanna know my name?" Nelson quickly emerges from his doorway and shoots the agent multiple times.
Alarmed by the sound of gunfire, Purvis hurries back into the hotel, finding his agent near death. He looks at the dying man until his last breath (like Dillinger and Dietrich), then heads for Nelson's room. Nelson and Carroll have already left, their getaway car in flight down the narrow city streets. Purvis races back down to the street, discovering that the Bureau car that was to block any escape route has instead driven up to the hotel, "because we heard gunfire." Purvis wears an expression of open-mouthed disbelief. His men are unprepared and incompetent in dealing with this lethal and real kind of rival.
Hoover is disappointed in his bright star and chides him. Just as the Bureau has suffered a casualty and Baby Face Nelson has escaped, Dillinger has robbed another bank. The crimes, gunfire, and bloodshed are of less interest to Hoover, however, than the negative publicity and tarnishing of his Modern System's image. Purvis has a request which is anathema to Hoover. He wants the Bureau to recruit older, more experienced agents from Texas, rugged lawmen, which is precisely the opposite of what the effeminate bureaucrat Hoover wants in his clockwork system. "I thought you knew what I was building here," Hoover says agitated. Purvis' response is unwelcome: "Our type" – meaning the office bureaucrat lost in a web of abstraction – “cannot get the job done.” The following exchange between Hoover and Purvis is consequently eerie. As Colson looks on, Hoover almost childishly says, "I'm sorry I cannot hear you." Purvis speaks louder: "Our type cannot get the job done." "I'm sorry, I cannot hear you," Hoover repeats, and Purvis again says, "Our type cannot get the job done." It seems like Hoover is trying to get Purvis' unwanted message heard and registered by the silent doppelganger, Colson, in addition to exacting a passive-aggressive form of humiliation. Purvis' repetition is disarming for an audience because he seems like a machine or an animal being put through behaviorist conditioning, quite the opposite of our own notion of a movie hero (played by the usually heroic actor who just recently portrayed Christopher Nolan's Batman). This character of Purvis, we will see, is not a throw-away under-developed supporting role, as has been criticized by even some of Public Enemies' admirers, but is utterly tragic and pitiful, like a tamed dog trying to please his chiding master. He is a good man with good intentions, but because his whole sense of character is related to the image Hoover has picked for him, he cannot live with himself in good faith. His plea for Texas lawmen is an unexpected request that stifles Hoover, and what he says mirrors, almost exactly, what Captain Staros tells Colonel Toll (who has a very similar reaction to Hoover) in The Thin Red Line: "I cannot lead my men to slaughter."
These Texas agents are led by Charles Winstead (Stephen Lang, a regular Mann stock-company player from the 1980s, in what is probably the film's most outstanding of small performances), who leads his similarly weathered men off a train in the Chicago station. Wearing boots, low maintenance, with tan leathery skin, some of them not cleanly shaven, Winstead's men are antithetical to the Hooverian Agent, not only physically but in practice. It's their real-world devices of intuition, able to forecast how bodies will move in real space and in real time, that differentiates them and makes them more successful than the agents on Purvis' team. Later in the film, whether Purvis listens to him or not, Winstead will be able to confidently predict how Dillinger will move out of Little Bohemia, and later, out of the Biograph Theatre in Chicago. When the Bureau finds out that Dillinger will be seeing a movie on his fateful last night, Purvis sets up teams at both local Chicago theaters. Winstead proclaims this absurdity. "What's playin?" he asks. He's told a Shirley Temple movie at one theater, and a gangster film at the other. "John Dillinger ain't going to no Shirley Temple movie," he says, lighting a cigarette. Human intelligence is superior to impersonal Hobbesian surveillance, though ultimately the System does not listen to Winstead. Purvis doesn't take Winstead's advice at Little Bohemia (his motive being that the Bureau cannot risk letting Dillinger get away again - corporate reputation being more important than the reality of a situation), and in Chicago he still deploys agents to both theaters. The larger and more ubiquitous system, to which Purvis becomes closer out of necessity as the film moves forth, trumps the human.
The Waste Land
Dillinger is captured while vacationing in Arizona, albeit not by the Bureau but by local law enforcement. The smoothness of the established narrative is completely shattered, just as the soon-to-be-realized erotic coupling of Dillinger and Billie in a bathtub is harshly interrupted – again reflecting the unstable development of a fast-moving unsettled narrative. Some of the characters whom we were just beginning to know and be comfortable with – Pierpoint and Mackley – disappear completely, as they are also captured and sent to Ohio for trial, imprisonment, and execution. In his cell, reading a magazine titled True Detective, Dillinger comes face to face with Purvis, visiting for a sense of closure on the Dillinger pursuit (and his failure to apprehend). This confrontation is brief and did not ever occur (in fact, John Dillinger didn't even become Public Enemy Number One, or much of a concern to Hoover and the FBI until much later than this Arizona incident), but it firmly reinforces Mann's themes and how he is treating these characters as both historical and abstract figures. In the context of the scene, both men are already celebrities ("Here's the man who killed Pretty Boy Floyd," Dillinger says with a smile as Purvis approaches the bars) whose reputations have been sealed in media print and headlines. Mann's framing of the two men while they talk to each other is interesting, the bars either obscuring their eyes or mouths, indicating that the discourse happening here isn't necessarily genuine, and may be simply performative. But then Dillinger connects with Purvis on the square issue of death: "It's the eyes, ain't it," addressing Purvis' own experience with the dying agent shot by Nelson. "They look at you right before they go. And then they just pass away into the night." This point of identification is rejected by Purvis (who, being an instrument of a System, must not have any kind of kinship with the Other, Dillinger) who says, "Goodbye, Mr. Dillinger."
"See you down the road," Dillinger says, the road, being movement, also being Life (from which the dead, either Dietrich or the mortally wounded FBI agent, drift away from). "No you will not," Purvis says, stopping, his mouth covered by the bars. He is as much a prisoner as Dillinger is, his freedom to communicate stifled by steely circumscriptions. "The only time we'll see each other again is when we take you out to execute you." And here, as Purvis walks away the apparent existential victor in terms of who lives and who dies, Dillinger says something that stops him: "Better get a new line of work, Melvin."
Bale dramatically stops at that utterance, framed in one of Mann's wonderful extreme close-ups, the digital grain in the underlit space eating away Purvis' face. Dillinger has really hurt Purvis, and even though he probably only said it to childishly taunt an authority figure, its content from one professional to another cuts to the tragic problem of Purvis. Dillinger is caught, but Purvis failed in catching him, and for a man who is slowly merging with the larger system (becoming his occupation), existing as a Citizen and not a Subject Unto Himself, he is faced with the possibility of being Nothing, and his attempts to fight this later on results in a kind of professional and personal alienation, where his identity is continuously dissolving.
In chains, Dillinger is flown to Chicago, Mann intercutting footage of the aircraft with what seems to be black-and-white archive footage of the plane landing, indicating that History is Happening Now while being recorded (in actuality, the black and white footage was shot by the vintage cameras Mann’s digital cameras are shooting). The camera pays particular attention to the now-ancient cameras shooting the action, seeking to archive Reality onto public celluloid, stealing Dillinger's spirit and preserving it in a space where it dually loses its Identity and yet also finds itself (like Mann's other historical biopic, Ali). After being escorted over state lines into Indiana, Dillinger is asked questions by the press. This scene is interesting because John Dillinger is in control as an actor in his own self-scripted movie, not Sherriff Holly (Lily Taylor) or the DA Robert Estill (Alan Wilder), who infamously put his arm around Dillinger. For the first time in front of microphones and movie cameras, Dillinger is able to perform with his wit and charm, telling his story with appropriate and deliberate pathos, masterfully manipulating both the press and his public - again, much like Muhammad Ali, who was similarly under arrest and condemned by Hoover's fascist FBI (personified by an amoral agent played by Ted Levine), or how Lowell Bergman uses other vectors of media in order to win a small battle against large corporations in The Insider. At his trial, defended by Syndicate lawyer Louis Piquett (Peter Gerety), and with dialogue mostly taken verbatim from history, Dillinger is painted as an enslaved victim, his shackles carrying reference to "the tyranny of the czars," and not American liberty. Piquett cleverly fools Sherriff Holly into making the court believe that Dillinger will be successfully contained within her Crown Point jail, and that there is no need for him to be sent to the State Penitentiary while he awaits trial (and the electric chair).
What follows is a fascinating sequence of movement towards escape, as Dillinger, helped by an African American inmate named Herbert Youngblood (Michael Bentt), goes through eight locked doors towards freedom. The obstacles are visually presented from the outside in as the scene begins with an establishing shot of the jail looking more like a fort, with military soldiers surrounding. Inside, we see Dillinger waiting for a janitor to come through the holding cell. He quickly turns around, holding the janitor down while shoving a gun into his neck – the pistol revealed to be nothing more than sculpted washboard. Mann, fascinated by complex processes, begins with the problem of how does one escape through an armored compound with X amount of locked doors, when your captors are armed and you only have a toy gun? It is a combination of raw strategy and technique mixed with performance. He is careful that no one sees the fake gun, keeping their back to him, yet also making it visually clear that a gun is present and all-too-real. Covering him is the most physically imposing of fellow inmates. Performance is everything in Public Enemies.
The first door open, Youngblood subdues the janitor and Dillinger grabs the next guard, quick enough so that the gun is not seen and that the two bodies – Dillinger and the officer – are already against the second door. The process repeats itself, from door to door, as finally Dillinger is able to open a door bearing real firearms. "I knew it wasn't real," one guard says as Dillinger puts on a fedora and heads into the garage, exiting through the compound's last barrier in a car "with the new V8 engine." Passing through all of these impediments, with two hostages and Youngblood, Dillinger perhaps faces his most suspenseful foe in the guise of technological control: a traffic light. For a director often accused of lacking a sense of humor, this moment, as played dead-pan by Depp and scored by Otis Taylor, is equal parts suspense and brilliant visual comedy. Dillinger's Ford struggles to remain inconspicuous to the vast array of armed soldiers on a sidewalk and a police car that is similarly halted at the light, communicating the absurd power of the Traffic Light, which was proliferating during the same period that federal law was uprooting local jurisdiction (to be historically accurate, the traffic light was invented in 1920, a few years before Hoover's Bureau began in 1924). The vast road is now manipulated and subject to control by impersonal, and "irrationally rational," technologies. The green light finally comes, and passing the cop car, Dillinger puts the V-8 engine into gear, racing down the road to freedom.
Dillinger's escape is again a sculpting method he uses in crafting his own myth and public reception. He sings "The Last Roundup" to one of his hostages: "Get along lil' doggies, get along, get along….", a cheerful folk song painting him as a cheerful character. This information is shared by the hostage over the radio waves. Hoover listens in disgust, the image, accentuating Hoover's bizarre relationship with Colson, rack-focusing between the two men in a single flowing movement: focus on Hoover, flowing to focus on Colson in the foreground, flowing back to focus on Hoover. It's through lethal silence that these men controlled the country.
The powerful forces of Hoover and the Syndicate have both reacted to make Dillinger's world less welcoming. The safe house where his gang went earlier in the film is closed off. Chief Zarkovich tells him, "I'm only taking orders," waving Dillinger away. The nests of sanctuary that were essential for Dillinger are now off limits, because the System – whether Federal (which is recording Billie Frechette's phone calls, and waiting outside her apartment) or Syndicate (which won't protect the public enemies) – has power and interests that are more important than the symbolic exchanges witnessed earlier. Dillinger confronts Nitti's front man, Deandre, about the new methods of Syndicate control in a room filled with telephones and bookkeeping boards: the first call center. This new method of capital control (a mirror to the Bureau's bugging office) brings in as much money every day, day after day, as one highline Dillinger bank robbery. This is a new bookmaking monopoly, the source of which is the communication technology: "These phones equal money," Deandre explains, meaning that technology equals money, and the System, which determines the nature of human relationships, is tied to its techno-capital infrastructure. Because Nitti pays the cops to stay out of this call center, it can continue to run without delay ("Back to work," Deandre instructs the workers, who are distracted by Dillinger's aggressively angry entrance). The only obstructions to this new system of mass flowing capital and big business are people like Dillinger, the "outsider" gangsters who are not part of the criminal simulacrum. So Nitti has forbidden sanctuary, medical help, and financial assistance to Dillinger, Karpis, Nelson, etc, and would probably have them dead because of the extra heat they bring (a historical example, for example, was made of the St. Paul yegg, Verne Miller, who was partially responsible for the Kansas City Massacre). "We ain't harboring you no more," Deandre says sternly, but suggesting notions of bad faith, where Deandre's personal opinions conflict with his corporate voice, he whispers to Dillinger, "But do you need anything to tide you over?"
The complementary side of this institutional bluntness from the Syndicate is the growing amorality of Hoover's Bureau, which in its devotion to acquiring Hobbesian control (and again associating the War on Crime with the War on Terror) becomes unethical. "Hamilton has a 36-year-old sister, arrest her," Hoover instructs Purvis. Hoover then lists other family members related to Dillinger's gang and how they all must be apprehended and imprisoned, regardless of whether or not they have been in contact with the fugitives. "Hamilton hasn't seen his sister in years," Purvis tells Hoover. "Then create informants!" Hoover understands that reality is created by the apparatus and the dictates of the System. "We are in a Modern Age," Hoover says, then whispering with venom, "As they say in Italy nowadays, take off the white gloves!" Senator McKellar was correct about Hoover's character, which has led to the implementation of a hegemonic structure seeking to cast an all-seeing matrix of control over what was once the frontier, the beginning of American fascism and a kind of uniform cultural imperialism that would become, as Mann showed in Ali, the main impediment for the Civil Rights Movement. After making reference to Mussolini's Italy, Hoover walks away from Purvis, and gets in front of the cameras with a dozen uniformly dressed "young crime fighters," whom he is awarding with a badge for their good work.
Passive Viewing: Hoover’s Cinema
The image changes into real celluloid screened in a cinema auditorium, being watched by Dillinger, Hamilton, and Van Meter, who are now joined by Tommy Carroll and Ed Shouse (who, being responsible for Walter Dietrich's death because of his imprudent actions during the Michigan City escape, was thrown out of the getaway car by Dillinger). The children that Hoover is awarding are visual representations of the clean-cut homogenous America of subservience and reality dictated by Citizenship that Hoover is obsessed with creating, and because it quashes the individual's subjectivity, which Dillinger is trying to flee. Though Dillinger is poetically powerful among a public whom he is hiding within, Hoover's manipulations are just as powerful in their ability to make human beings mechanical, or as Adorno and Horkheimer state, "automatic." We notice that the cinema is now showing a Bureau-sponsored newsreel detailing the public enemies, including Dillinger.
"They may be in this theater," the booming voice tells the audience, and Mann cuts, rather wryly, to Dillinger and company looking on. "They may be sitting amongst you." The light of the auditorium goes on. Dillinger remains still, only his eyes being allowed to move. "Turn to your left," the voice directs, and everyone in the audience, with the exception of Dillinger, turns to the left. "Turn to your right." Everyone turns right.
This moment shows how masses of people may be controlled by large, mechanical, and impersonal forces that in turn make them mechanical, all for "the greater good" of the Nation State. To quote Herbert Marcuse, "Technological rationality reveals its political character as it becomes the great vehicle of better domination, creating a truly totalitarian universe in which society and nature, mind and body are kept in a state of permanent mobilization for the defense of this universe" (One Dimensional Man). The people in this movie theater are not receiving any kind of profoundly mythic identification here in their relationship to the big screen, but are lulled into a kind of a robotic trance. This is a significant textual moment in Public Enemies, and one should keep in mind the reactive nature of this audience, comparing it to the emotional reaction that John Dillinger will have while watching Manhattan Melodrama at the Biograph later on. Putting a period on the scene is a newsreel feature on Ethiopia, a historical reference tying the propaganda we've just seen to Hoover's endorsement of Mussolini's Italy, as in 1934 Italy would indeed take off its white gloves while warring with Ethiopia in the establishment of its empire, using methods that were notably inhumane. This, tied with the reference to the League of Nations earlier, and a subsequent Will Rogers radio broadcast where there is opposition to government spending, reflects an anxiety about the establishment of Empire. Surely, FDR's government needed to establish a federal system in order to deal with interstate criminals, just as the New Deal needed to be implemented to save the depressed economy and create the middle class; but the attitudes and philosophies of whatever is constructing that gigantic and pervasive structure, determining its moral character, is more important.
The practical reality of the environment has outweighed Dillinger's ability to handle things. He wants to break Pierpont and Mackley out of prison; he wants to get back together with Billie; and he is desperate in taking down a big score. Being desperate, he is forced to join forces with the erratic Nelson, whom Dillinger doesn't like. Nelson has cased a bank in Sioux Falls that will apparently pay off $800,000. This, in addition to Karpis' train robbery, will finance Dillinger's dreams of helping his friends and reuniting with his lover. But desperation does not pay off. For one thing, Nelson is more focused on shooting people outside the bank than making sure the job gets done quickly and quietly. The gang is flanked unexpectedly from above while exiting, and Dillinger is shot in the arm while Carroll is mortally wounded, the bullet entering the back of his head and resting underneath his eye. Nelson keeps on firing and will not get in the getaway car, resulting in more collateral damage – which is the kind of publicity Dillinger wants to avoid. He finally has to grab Nelson and throw him in the car in order for the group to make their getaway. The risk was not worth the reward. Instead of a huge $800,000 score, they've only gotten away with $46,000, or $8,000 a man.
Out of Time: Little Bohemia
It's here where the action reaches its crescendo, and the sound of the film hushes as the gang drives into the woods, the trees shining on the car's surface. Goldenthal's music rises and we follow the car drifting into night, recognizing the most infamous incident of Dillinger's mythology, Little Bohemia, a simple resort located in the woods of northern Wisconsin that has subsequently etched itself in America's collective memory of criminal and law enforcement history. After splitting the money with his gang, Dillinger shares a quiet moment with Hamilton. "We need to leave tomorrow morning," he says, again addressing the film's motif of how rest will always be broken by the arrival of the present. Hamilton then says something bizarre: "You'll be all right," which means that Hamilton has an inclination of the imminence of his own demise. "When your time's up, your time's up," Hamilton tells Dillinger. "And my time's up." In this film that sustains itself on criminals running from the existential realities, Hamilton is the only one who, before being mortally wounded anyway, seems ready to let go and give up. The way he voices his existential reality, with no evidence of death's closeness, is characteristic of a wind-up toy, or one of Philip K. Dick's replicants in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. There is something uncanny about Public Enemies, and it relates to the bizarre mechanistic/deterministic way that some of these characters communicate, such as Hamilton here, and Hoover, Purvis, and Nitti elsewhere (or Floyd, who says strangely to Purvis, “I believe you have killed me.”). No simple period saga, it sometimes has the eerie feeling of having been written and performed by a stock company of cyborg actors struggling to reach a kind of verisimilitude of a human-ness, which has become estranged from biological normalcy.
This same kind of strangeness is demonstrated by Christian Bale's Purvis in the following scene, where agents are torturing the dying Tommy Carroll, in terrible pain from his mortal head wound. Filmed in a close-up as Carroll is tortured behind him, Purvis is blankly open-mouthed, as if his consciousness were being invaded. This is a kind of terrifying cruelty far removed from the "scientific method" that he was endorsing earlier on. The ends have come to justify whatever means, and Hoover's insistence that the "white gloves come off" has resulted in a man whose private self is invaded by the bureaucratic/corporate one. He is alienated from his authentic self and his surroundings, and obstructing a doctor from administering drugs that would alleviate Carroll's pain is grossly un-scientific (to recall The Insider, where Jeffrey Wigand defines the Man of Science as someone different from the Business Man – it is irrational for a scientific man to allow people to be harmed).
Purvis' ineffectiveness as a leader becomes more evident during the Little Bohemia raid. Surrounding the resort and ignoring the more strategic advice of Winstead, Purvis opens fire on a group of men leaving in a car. Out of his element in dark nature, Purvis has clumsily killed two civilians, and possibly injured another. Sparked awake by the gunfire, Dillinger hops off his bed (again, rest and leisure interrupted), while Mann cuts to a framed portrait above his bed, of a man riding a wild horse, suggesting that what is happening right now, within the deep woods, is civilization aiming to tame wild nature (also linking this to the early scene with Hoover, where a similar painting was featured in a Washington mural).
As filmed by Mann, the gunfight reflects the real details of the massacre, where it was so dark that individuals on both sides of the law, in addition to civilians, did not know exactly whom they were firing upon. Two exits ensue, one with Nelson, Shouse, and Van Meter, the other with Dillinger and Hamilton. Ironically, the lawmen are more focused on Dillinger than on Nelson, despite Nelson being substantially more dangerous. What matters is public perception, and Dillinger is the number one public enemy. Yet unorganized and their vision obscured by the dark and endless trees, Purvis's team ends up mistaking Nelson for Dillinger.
Retreating in the other direction is Dillinger and Hamilton, being stalked by Winstead, who, as opposed to Purvis, is totally coordinated in the natural environment. Fired upon by Dillinger, Winstead ducks and somersaults on the ground, re-poised and ready with his rifle aimed. As Winstead runs toward the trees, he is apparently dead meat for Dillinger, who should have a perfect shot – except Winstead has disappeared. Dillinger and Hamilton are confused, as if they have been in combat with ghosts, something suggested by the vaporous mist moving past them in the starlight. Dillinger's equal in Public Enemies is not Purvis, but Winstead; both characters are able to move within environments like ghosts, because they are linked to the environment – specifically to Nature. Winstead's movements with a rifle on the ground, as compared to Purvis, are not unlike a comparison between Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis) or Magua (Wes Studi) set alongside the English soldiers in The Last of the Mohicans; Hawkeye and Magua are part of the environment, while English officers like Duncan are estranged from it, their actions sewn into abstract definitions of land ("British policy makes the world England.") In a confused skirmish set in the thick of Nature, Purvis in Public Enemies has killed innocent civilians, just as Duncan in Mohicans comes close to accidentally killing Chingachgook (Russell Means). Winstead and Dillinger, in their representation of Nature, seem to be the only characters who know where they are in this geographically confusing battle.
Just as unexpectedly as he disappeared, Winstead rematerializes, wounding Hamilton. Dillinger helps his friend down a slope to safety. It turns out Winstead was right about his recommendation to Purvis regarding reinforcements and properly blockading an area with “a lot of real estate.” Nelson, meanwhile, stops a Bureau car on the road driven by Baum, who, like Purvis, lacks the intuition to suspect an ambush. Nelson ferociously fires on Baum, who is pulled out of the car, and shot again. Nelson, like Dillinger, is also living out his life as a script, with dialogue designed for the movies: "All you bastards wear vests, so I'm gonna give it to you high and give it to you low," he says before shooting Baum. Earlier, we had seen Nelson imitating James Cagney, indicating that he is also influenced by the movies, imitating the anti-heroes that his own headlines have helped create. But Dillinger sees the relationship reverently, while Nelson has the apathetic enthusiasm of a boy who has assimilated with his videogames.
Purvis flags down a car and pursues Nelson, who has picked up Shouse and Van Meter. The scene ends with Purvis firing into the night, causing Nelson's car to overturn into a ditch, the impact of the crash killing Shouse instantly, who in the passenger seat seemed to be experiencing the escape at leisure just moments before – a passive viewer. Van Meter and Nelson, not working in conjunction (Van Meter refuses to help Nelson out of the car), are both killed by Purvis and the agents, the latter's death being an over-the-top tempest of gunfire, well-suited for a megalomaniac. These deaths are historical revisions, though well placed in the context of a film narrative; both men were killed after Dillinger, Nelson dying in a fashion not unlike portrayed in the film, Van Meter being brutally slain by police in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Out of town, Dillinger has broken into a pharmacy for Hamilton, who insists that his friend should let him go. "Haven't you ever seen a man die? You gotta let go, John." "Bullshit," Dillinger dismisses Hamilton. "You gotta let go. Billie too." And that stops Dillinger. He realizes, much like a movie that's reached its crescendo, that he is running out of time. Hamilton's death indicates that his own time is running out, being that all of his companions are deceased or caught. His stubborn determinism to flee and fight is pointless, and he has no where left to go and no one left to see. He has, it seems, run out of space. Congress has just passed a National Crime Bill, which will prosecute interstate criminals, something that sparks the ire of Nitti, who is now as determined to get rid of Dillinger as much as Hoover. Federal power is now "coast to coast," Nitti complains to Deandre. "Wake up! That's what we are!" The corporate body of control now being "Inter-State" and "Coast to Coast," the frontier is conquered.
Dillinger is able to get Billie out of her apartment by fooling the surveilling agents with a double. The double arrives, giving Billie a bag containing a trench coat and fedora. Disguised as a man, Billie is able to walk into the Chicago streets and find Dillinger hiding in his car, a brilliantly subversive technique of disguise of using a Front against a corporate body, itself constructed of Fronts and deception. Reunited, Mann presents a bizarre abstraction of space. At 4:00 a.m., before sand and driftwood in front of a tremendous abyss of black - presumably Lake Michigan - the two lovers struggle to stay awake. Dillinger gives Billie his plan: he will go with Karpis to finish a high-line train robbery, which will give them enough money to go away forever, with all the time in the world at their disposal. "Where?" Billie asks, wondering if it's Cuba or somewhere in South America. Dillinger's answer is interesting, because it is as non-specific as the black mass of water/nonspace behind them: they will slide “off the map.” This kind of sacred "space" to which Dillinger is referring, was the frontier in early American history, a frontier whose demise was forecasted with deep melancholy by Chingachgook in The Last of the Mohicans. By 1934, there is no frontier left, no space left, and no private sphere where one is "beholden to none." Billie says that she wants to take this ride with Dillinger. It is a transcendent ride not set in Reality, only suitable for the fantastic world of the imagination – and movies. This space “off the map” is no different from the abstract "future" which always arrives as the "present," the future still remaining at a promised arm's length. Real space, "meat-space," the tangible frontier, has been conquered by technology and there is no way to move.
The Ghost
Using phone surveillance, the Bureau is able to capture Billie just as easily as Dillinger was able to free her. While going to meet a Dillinger contact at a liquor store, she is accosted by a portly agent, Harold Reinecke (Adam Mucci), and asked "How'd you get here?" "A taxi," she answers, frantic. Dillinger watches from outside, seeing agents and police swarm around the premises, oblivious to his presence. Billie is driven away.
Dillinger stands right in front of a police car, grieving, not caring if he's seen. Here again, as will be reinforced later on, is his problem as it is also his tool: John Dillinger, as a flesh and blood meat-space person, is not real. His reality is not in his flesh, but is inextricably tied to his public image – in official photographs and mug-shots, in press clippings and movies. Among the public he walks absurdly as a ghost. He belongs to the air, to the media, to the screen, to the ether. He is a virtual character, because in this Right Hegelian System where being a citizen counts more than individual freedom or subjectivity, it is Official Status that matters more than Private Status.
Later on, Dillinger accompanies his new girlfriend, Polly Hamilton (who knows him as "Jimmy;" she does not know his real identity) to City Hall so that she can get her waitress license (one needs official clearance in order to work - and so too to exist). He chooses to enter the Police Department with her, eventually entering the police's Dillinger Squad room. We see that he has a gun in his pants, and he is not at all hesitant in looking around the desks of the officers, indicating that he may have a death wish. On the soundtrack is the wordless wail of Blind Willie Johnson and his song "Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground," which was influenced by Christ preparing for his death on the Mount of Olives. Dillinger is confronting his myth, and the myth is in fact his reality. As the camera scans over the photographs of Dillinger, we may note that we haven't seen a "personal" photo of him throughout the entire movie. It's been stubbornly avoided. Recalling the horse track scene in Miami, where Deandre invites Dillinger to come to a special Syndicate club, Dillinger even says "No pictures," meaning that he didn't want his picture taken – on one level indicating that he doesn't want his image associated with amoral Syndicate criminals, but also suggesting his character is, in the context of this film, separate from the personalized individual unique image, that which has aura. He belongs to something larger, either as a criminal in the System, or a hero in Myth, denoting the "off the map" place that America cherishes and sings as its own Whitmanian song of Self, lost in the flurry of modernity.
"What's the score?" Dillinger asks the circle of cops on this hot July day, surrounding a radio. "Cubs 3-2, seventh inning," one answers. Dillinger smiles. He is a ghost in life. This is a man with no past or future (Don't know where they're going / Don't know where they've been) whose history is contained not in biological relationships, but in official police photos. He is a child of an institution. This again reflects Mann's decision of how to lay the content of his story out, where the method of the story becomes, after cognition on the viewer's part, the content. Upon reading Bryan Burrough's book, the first inclination for a good screenwriter would be to pursue the scenes between Dillinger and his father, which would allow an audience to become immediately very close to this individual, the Dillinger home in Indiana being an excellent backdrop for drama in-between bank robberies. But Mann is deliberately saying, "No, I want you to think about things in a different way, and think about the mythology of this character, and how we experience mythology within the context of cinema." The closest comparison to Public Enemies in terms of film biography (aside from Ali) is probably Steven Soderbergh's more formidible Che in this respect, where over the course of four hours, we are given no background information on this character regarding the makeup of his beliefs or private thoughts. Just a dozen minutes before the end, as Che (Benicio Del Toro) is in prison, we finally get some personal disclosure, and then he asks his guard, "Will you untie me?" Soderbergh's Che, like Mann's Dillinger, has to be forever in movement, his reality tied in with his myth, which is related to his enigmatic inability to be tied down and cleanly defined by an audience that craves definition. Also like with Dillinger in Public Enemies, Soderbergh pays close attention to the evolving technology, used by Che's enemies to finally catch up with him.
This ghostly unreal-ness about Dillinger is reflected in Reinecke's abusive interrogation of Billie, whom he repeatedly slaps while she is tied up in the Chicago Bureau office. His unwillingness to allow Billie to go to the bathroom indicates how the Bureau and its unethical practices of control is insensitive to basic human freedom (and, as the musical comedy Urinetown hilariously points out, true freedom is being able to go to the bathroom when you have to). Billie gives up, directing Reinecke to an apartment on Addison Street. The whole office goes to Addison, but discovers an empty apartment with nothing on the walls and no furniture, provoking the incensed Reinecke to take a phone book and throw it violently at Billie: a mass of official identities and spaces sanctioned by government, in opposition to the anonymity longed for by Dillinger and Billie that is located “off the map.”
Reinecke's interrogation is interrupted by Purvis' arrival, who is stopped by his secretary Doris Rogers (Rebecca Spence): "Mr. Purvis, those men cannot treat a woman like that," she tells him, almost instructing him. This is an odd moment, because in Mann's films, which are the source of interesting sexual-political dynamics, the Woman is typically the element propelling the man forward into action: Jessie in Thief, Molly in Manhunter, Cora in The Last of the Mohicans, Eady for Neil and Charlene for Chris Shihirlis in Heat, Annie in Collateral, and in a variety of ways in Miami Vice (the narrative starts with the image of a dancing woman). Purvis, this man who has become increasingly numb over the past two hours, simply nods at Doris' request, and, with Winstead's help, stops Reinecke. Untying Billie, he tells her that the bathroom's down the hall. "I can't walk," she limply cries, and in a deeply moving moment, he lifts her up and carries her to the restroom. The reason this scene is so incredibly touching has a lot less to do with Billie's pitiful state than it does with Purvis'. It's the last noble action afforded to a pathetic though virtuous man, whose compliance with his employer has victimized this woman, among other innocent people. It's a more profound embodiment of Deandre's private whisper to Dillinger, asking if he needs anything.
The final section of Public Enemies begins with Purvis acting in conjunction with both the Syndicate and the Chicago police. Zarkovich makes a deal with Nitti: Ana Sage is going to be deported back to Romania, and she is willing to help Purvis (and in turn, help the Syndicate) capture and kill John Dillinger, if it means that she will be able to stay in America. "I want guarantee," she insists to Purvis. It's a guarantee that he is unwilling to give her – he is too good of a man to flatly lie – but the idea of asking large corporations for contractual "guarantees" is another Mannian motif, and it always ends up with the larger structure not making good on its language: Leo in Thief; the FBI in Manhunter; the imperialist generals in The Last of the Mohicans; the corporate criminal Van Zandt (William Fichtner) in Heat; the Brown & Williamson tobacco company and CBS in The Insider; the FBI and the Nation of Islam in Ali; Vincent in Collateral; and the FBI and the panoptical Columbian drug lord in Miami Vice. Purvis here says that he will do the best that he can for Sage, but he will guarantee that if she "does not cooperate" (notice how Purvis doesn't use contractions here) he will make sure that she is out of the country within 48 hours. She agrees and the trap is set. In aligning herself with the corporate structures, Ana Sage will commit her own kind of contractual sin with her betrayal of trust to Dillinger, with whom she shared a relationship of symbolic exchange. The story is famous: Ana will be going to a movie with Dillinger and Dillinger's girlfriend (and one of her "girls"), Polly (Leelee Sobieski).
Accenting the religious overtones of Dillinger's last day, as if it were mythic ritual, Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground" once more emerges on the soundtrack, as Dillinger shaves and readies himself, going through actions that seem ritualistic. He looks into his time-piece, where the clock is mirrored with an image of Billie, the only personal photograph we see in the entire picture. This movement and image of the time piece suggests that the fulfillment of Love is the same as the fulfillment of Time, and it is always manifested in the "someday" that takes place "off the map," an idea of love expressed in the other Billie Holiday song used in the picture, "The Man I Love," where the man Billie is looking for is always in the future – always "someday" and always in dreams. Strangely enough, the only place where Dillinger can experience this fulfillment is the same place where we, the audience, are: at the movies.
Active Viewing: Dillinger’s Cinema
The Biograph Theatre scene works on two levels: as suspense, because it is the fulfillment of Purvis' pursuit; but also as romance, because it is Dillinger affirming his dream of love, life, and death "off the map" through the movies. For Mann's Dillinger, the cinema screen becomes not an escapist projection, but a mirror that opens the viewer up to the marvelous subjectivity that he has molded and nurtured through his own experiences and relationships. This idea of Dillinger at the cinema, then, becomes an address to Mann's audience. Mann has an interest in how we react to images, setting into motion a dynamic that gets to another dimension of the audience. Manhunter, The Insider, and Ali all have subtexts about the mass-produced image and how people react to it.
In analyzing art and how we ingest it on a daily basis, from easy access of records to play while washing dishes to paper-back classics at the drug store, Herbert Marcuse says that as long as art has become part of the system, it ceases in questioning it, and thus impedes social change. Poetic language must transcend the "real" world of the society, and in order to transcend that world, it must stand opposed to it, questioning it, quelling us out of it. "The truly avant-garde works of literature," Marcuse writes, "communicate the break with communication." Mann walks a very risky line with Public Enemies because he is making an expensive summer film that is visually and aurally disarming, and cannot help but disappoint an audience looking for conventional escape. Its high-definition makes what it is displaying more urgent and real, while at the same time, because it is beautiful in a way completely different from how we find "film" beautiful, it is disturbing, deliberately calling awareness to its spell while simultaneously weaving it. We are the film, just as the song is you; just as Myrna Loy is Billie Frechette, so is Marilon Cotillard, or this mythological Billie Frechette, representative perhaps of someone in our own life, whose real presence is perhaps only possible "off the map," in another world where one is free. So too are we John Dillinger and Melvin Purvis, Red Hamilton and Carter Baum, Walter Dietrich and the woman at the farm, Ana Sage and Polly Hamilton. Strangely, during the most suspenseful part of Public Enemies, as Purvis and company prepare to ambush Dillinger, it is also the one moment when the film, like Dillinger here, feels most contented. The ambush does not feel like an interruption, but a construction of Dillinger's own self-scripted destiny. The film's dialectic between audience and film, and between reality and myth, is complete – or at least in a kind of indefinable poetic language that transcends the multiplex truths and norms that tie us down and lull us to sleep as viewers.
Watching Manhattan Melodrama, about a gangster's (Clark Gable) relationship to his law-enforcement friend (William Powell), and the woman between them both (Myrna Loy), Dillinger sees his own life, but not as biography. It is the affirmation of his subjectivity that cannot be touched by the Bureau or the Syndicate. The gangster's name, "Blackie," associates him with the "blackbird" of Dillinger and Billie's song, while also suggesting something else about love and subjectivity. Just as the Song is You, so is it me, and so are you, also, me. Billie Frechette is "Blackbird" (a song that was often sung by men) but then Clark Gable, or Dillinger's cinematic projection, is "Blackie," and Dillinger is Billie. The enigma of Love, which always involves another person, but also involves the malleability of memory and constructions of incident and circumstance to fit within a romantic paradigm, is the enigma of the Self.
Cinema experienced in this light, as if the movie theater was a holy temple of spiritual transcendence where dead bodies are resurrected through the mercurial use of speed, is the opposite end of the art consumption we have seen elsewhere in the picture, such as during the newsreel. Dillinger's connection to cinema here is an emotional and private one (something lost also by those of us in love with a strictly analytical and academic approach to films), and the dialogue between his gaze and Myrna Loy during a climactic scene in Manhattan Melodrama communicates much more than any psychoanalytical monologue. These constructions of art are also the co-conspirators of our constructions of Reality, the constant revisionists of our Memory. History and Life, ironically at a magic place called the "Biograph," are always changing.
"Die the way you live," Gable says as his character prepares for the electric chair. "Don't drag it out." Dillinger watches, knowing and transfixed. He emerges as the self-conscious individual who is ready to die, perhaps even hoping for it. His place belongs "off the map" anyway, the only vestige of freedom left for him. Under the shining movie lights, he is once more a Real Body, and as such is vulnerable to death. As time moves in, he has a premonition and looks behind him, his eyes catching Reinecke stalking him with a gun. Dillinger gazes back, unforgettable, his piercing glare immediately silencing Reinecke's frenzied aggression. Reaching for his gun and knowing that he's surrounded, a final skirmish occurs. Winstead is the first of three men to shoot Dillinger, his bullet proving to be the fatal one, going through the back of the head and out through the cheek. Mann pays attention to how Purvis is different from Winstead. Purvis lacks to determination to throw a woman out of his way, while Winstead, like a machine, plows ahead without remorse or hesitation. He is Dillinger's double. Not Purvis.
On the ground, it seems that Dillinger is mouthing something. Winstead curiously kneels and places his ear to Dillinger's mouth. We hear "Buh-buh…buh…" and then nothing. He is dead. "What he say?" Purvis asks. "Couldn't hear him," Winstead answers. Flares light up as the crowd and photographers descend on the feverish and confused scene. Purvis walks through, bathed in light, his career apparently saved, as does Ana Sage. Ironically, this is not true in either case, as after Dillinger's death, Sage was deported back to Romania, and Hoover alienated Purvis to the extent that Purvis quit the FBI – the corporate guarantor proving to be dishonest after all. At the end, we learn at the end that Purvis committed suicide in 1960, indicating that he, unlike Dillinger, "dragged it out" past his time, which adds another tragic perfume to Bale's understated and remarkable performance. The camera rests for less than a second on the shaken Polly Hamilton, whose face expresses incomprehensibility; she, like everyone else on this dense canvas, is thrown in as another victim on the Hegelian slaughter-bench. The Bureau has won. The camera floats above the Biograph Theatre and the crowded smoky street where history has come to fruition.
The final scene is in the women's correctional facility where Billie is serving a two-year sentence. She is helpless, locked up, and submissive to the System that has imprisoned her and killed John Dillinger. There to meet her is, surprisingly, Winstead. "They say you're the man that killed him," she says with bitterness. "One of'em," he replies. "So why did you come here? To see all the pain you've caused me?" "No." He pauses, his affect remaining flat, but honest. "I came here because he asked me to." He tells her how Dillinger fell, and how, while on the ground, he said something. "And what I think he said was, 'Tell Billie for me, Bye, Bye Blackbird.'"
The communication of this sacred information is incredibly cathartic for Billie and the audience. But it is not a scene that should be taken passively. It was created by Mann and not based on any historical incident. We are, like Billie, taking Winstead's word, and are we sure that we heard what he heard ("Buh…buh. Buh.")? The truth of the matter, like cinema's own relationship to historical facts, is inconsequential, being that the poetic truth is more important than the objective facts, those annoying things that Werner Herzog calls "accountant's truth." Winstead's information brings meaning to both the Myth of John Dillinger and his transcendent frontier romance with Billie Frechette, and poetic closure to the film that we have seen. This is secret information, words that are hidden away from "official documents" stored away in the Prison House of History as recorded and analyzed by the System. Billie's tears, provoked by such confidential words, are the final revolt on the closing door that lock her within the institution, bespeaking the paradox that love and subjectivity may not be the truth, but they still are the only vector towards freedom one has in a System that seeks to control the private interests of the individual.
The real "Lie" is the "Lie" within the systematic oppression, which once more returns us to Malick and The Thin Red Line (or The New World for that matter). Witt (Jim Caviezel) is able to face his death with a similar calm that John Dillinger has, as he has sublimated his subjectivity onto a poetic landscape, similarly "off the map" that is yet, for him, very real. His opposite, Sgt. Welsh (Sean Penn), reflects the aching melancholy and beauty of the world's contradiction near the end, in words that are very similar to Mann's beliefs of how the governing structures operate: "Everything a lie. Everything you hear. Everything you see. So much to spew out. They just keep coming. One after another. You're in a box, a moving box. They want you dead. Or in their lie." He continues, "One thing a man can do. Build an island for himself. If I don't meet you in this life, let me feel the lack. One look from your eyes, and I am yours forever." There is a desire in the conscious individual to look into the eyes of a dying man and keep them permanent, but the victims of the slaughter bench of history drift on into the night regardless, something both terrible and beautiful. Similarly in The New World, John Smith (Colin Farrell) believes the Truth of his life to be the romance with Pocahontas (Q'orianka Kilcher) as experienced in the forest. Everything else, "objective reality," in the context of his life, was inconsequential.
Public Enemies is not a rehash or period revision of Heat, but rather an obtuse and fascinating dialectic between film and audience and between historical reality and American myth. The film documents a particular time in history, when technology was enabling larger social structures to override local constructs and private individuals, to the extent that it would completely absorb human beings and the symbolic functionality of their relationships, in addition to Nature and the mystery of the frontier. Hoover's Bureau, the abstraction for the Great Corporate Body, is thrown over the once mythological and transcendent American frontier as a technical matrix web that forces its workers, however virtuous, into submission. Rebelling against this system, or shown to be active in flight from it, are the "public enemies," pursuing a poetic freedom from economic and political structures, so that the individual may control his own subjectivity and his own time. Unlike other elegiac period films, where the characters are either revisionistically de-mythologized or their presentation is wholly adhering to accepted myth, the famous characters in Public Enemies are visceral, real beings who are presently aware of their mythos and how that mythos is "becoming." It is a film that affirms the paradigm of our mythology, a trait it shares with the films of Malick, as long as those myths do not exist as tools of control but rather as touchstones with which we can identify and make sense out of our own experiences. The work of art must hence be in active dialogue with its audience, not manipulating passively in its bid to entertain and communicate (or control). Mann wants us to go to the movies as John Dillinger does, looking at strangers while also locating our own private mysteries, as a double mirror of Art and Life reflecting upon each other.
Michael Mann Filmography
Thief. Dir: Michael Mann. Scr: Michael Mann. James Caan, Tuesday Weld, Robert Prosky, Willie Nelson, Jim Belushi. Director of Photography: Donald Thorin. Original Score: Tangerine Dream. Editor: Dov Hoenig. United Artists, 1981.
The Keep. Dir: Michael Mann. Scr: Michael Mann. Scott Glenn, Ian McKellan, Gabriel Byrne, Robert Prosky, Jurgen Prochnow, Alberta Watson. Director of Photography: Alex Thompson. Original Score: Tangerine Dream. Editors: Dov Hoenig, Chris Kelly. Paramount, 1983.
Manhunter. Dir: Michael Mann. Scr: Michael Mann. William Petersen, Kim Greist, Dennis Farina, Tom Noonan, Brian Cox, Stephen Lang, Joan Allen. Director of Photography: Dante Spinotti. Original Score: Michael Rubini and The Reds. Editor: Dov Hoenig. DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group, 1986.
The Last of the Mohicans. Dir: Michael Mann. Scr: Michael Mann, Christopher Crowe. Daniel Day-Lewis, Madeline Stowe, Russell Means, Steven Waddington, Jodhi May, Eric Schweig, Wes Studi. Director of Photography: Dante Spinotti. Original Score: Trevor Jones, Randy Edelman. Editors: Dov Hoenig, Arthur Schmidt. 20th Century Fox, 1992.
Heat. Dir: Michael Mann. Scr: Michael Mann. Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Val Kilmer, Diane Venora, Amy Brenneman, Ashley Judd, Ted Levine, Wes Studi, Tom Sizemore, Jon Voight, William Fichter, Kevin Gage, Danny Trejo, Hank Azaria, Natalie Portman, Dennis Haysbert, Jeremy Piven, Mykelti Williamson, Tom Noonan, Henry Rollins, Xander Berkeley. Director of Photography: Dante Spinotti. Original Score: Eliot Goldenthal. Editors: Pasquale Buba, William Goldenberg, Dov Hoenig, Tom Rolf. Warner Bros, 1995.
The Insider. Dir: Michael Mann. Scr: Eric Roth, Michael Mann. Al Pacino, Russell Crowe, Christopher Plummer, Diane Venora, Philip Baker Hall, Lindsay Crouse, Debi Mazar, Stephen Tobolowsky, Colm Feore, Bruce McGill, Rip Torn, Gina Gershon, Michael Gambon. Director of Photography: Dante Spinotti. Original Score: Lisa Gerrard and Pieter Bourke. Editors: William Goldenberg, David Rosenberg, Paul Rubell. Touchstone Pictures, 1999.
Ali. Dir: Michael Mann. Scr: Stephen J. Rivele, Christopher Wilkinson, Eric Roth, Michael Mann. Will Smith, Jamie Foxx, Jon Voight, Mario Van Peebles, Ron Silver, Jeffrey Wright, Mykelti Williamson, Jada Pinkett Smith, Nona Gaye, Michael Bentt, Joe Morton, Bruce McGill, Barry Shabaka Henley, Giancarlo Esposito, Albert Hall. Director of Photography: Emmanuel Lubezki. Original Score: Lisa Gerrard and Pieter Bourke. Editors: William Goldenberg, Lynzee Klingman, Stephen E. Rivkin, Stuart Waks. Columbia Pictures, 2001.
Collateral. Dir: Michael Mann. Scr: Stuart Beattie. Tom Cruise, Jamie Foxx, Jada Pinkett Smith, Mark Ruffalo, Bruce McGill, Javier Bardem, Irma P. Hall, Peter Berg, Barry Shabaka Henley, Jason Stathem. Directors of Photography: Dion Beebe, Paul Cameron. Original Score: James Newton Howard. Editors: Jim Miller, Paul Rubell. Dreamworks, 2004.
The Aviator. Dir: Martin Scorsese. Scr: John Logan. Prod: Michael Mann, Sandy Climan, Graham King, Charles Evans, Jr. Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, John C. Reilly, Kate Beckinsdale, Alec Baldwin, Alan Alda, Ian Holm, Danny Huston, Jude Law, Gwen Stefani, Kelli Garner, Frances Conroy, Brent Spiner, Edward Herrmann, Willem Dafoe. Director of Photography: Robert Richardson. Original Score: Howard Shore. Editor: Thelma Schoonmaker. Miramax / Warner Bros, 2004.
Miami Vice. Dir: Michael Mann. Scr: Michael Mann. Colin Farrell, Jamie Foxx, Gong Li, Luis Tosar, Naomie Harris, John Ortiz, Elizabeth Rodriguez, Justin Theroux, Ciaran Hinds, Barry Shabaka Henley, Domenick Lombardozzi, Isaach De Bankole, Eddie Marsen, Tom Towles, John Hawkes. Director of Photography: Dion Beebe. Original Score: John Murphy, Klaus Badelt. Universal, 2006.
Public Enemies. Dir: Michael Mann. Scr: Ronan Bennett, Michael Mann, Ann Biderman. Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Marion Cotillard, Billy Crudup, Stephen Dorff, Stephen Lang, Stephen Graham, Channing Tatum, Jason Clarke, David Wenham, Spencer Garrett, Christian Stolte, James Russo, Giovanni Ribisi, Bill Camp, John Ortiz, Domenick Lombardozzi, Carey Mulligan, Rory Cochrane, Michael Bentt, John Michael Bolger, Brakna Katic, Emilie de Ravin, Lili Taylor, Peter Gerety, Leelee Sobieski. Director of Photography: Dante Spinotti. Original Score: Eliot Goldenthal. Editors: Paul Rubell, Jeffrey Ford. Universal, 2009.
Recommended Viewing
Blade Runner. Dir: Ridley Scott. Scr: Hampton Fancher, David Peoples. Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Edward James Olmos, Sean Young, Darryl Hannah, Brion James, Joe Turkel. Warner Bros, 1982, 1992, 2006.
Body of Lies. Dir: Ridley Scott. Scr: William Monahan. Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, Mark Strong, Golshifteh Farahani, Vince Colosimo, Oscar Isaac. New Line, 2008.
Che. Dir: Steven Soderbergh. Scr: Peter Buchman, Benjamin A. van der Veen. Benicio Del Toro, Franka Potente, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Julia Ormand, Lou Diamond Phillips, Demian Bichir, Rodrigo Santoro, Edgar Ramirez, Matt Damon. IFC Films, 2008.
The Thin Red Line. Dir: Terrence Malick. Scr: Terrence Malick. Sean Penn, Jim Caviezel, Nick Nolte, Elias Koteas, Ben Chaplin, Woody Harrelson, John Cusack. Fox 2000, 1998.
Recommended Reading
Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Herder & Herder, 1972.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. University of Michigan Press, 1995.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations. Schocken Books, 1968.
Burrough, Bryan. Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI. Penguin Books, 2004.
Combs, Richard. "Michael Mann: Becoming." Film Comment. March/April, 1996.
Feeney, F.X. and Paul Duncan. Michael Mann. Taschen, 2006.
Foundas, Scott. "Public Enemies". The Village Voice. June 30, 2009.
Fuller, Graham. "Making Some Light." Sight and Sound. December, 1992.
Groves, Tim and Thrasvvoulou, Costas. "Against the Flow of Time: Michael Mann and
Edward Hopper". Available on www.screeningthepast.com.
Kolker, Robert. Film, Form, and Culture. University of Maryland Press, 1999.
Lee, Hwanhee. "Director's Profile: Terrence Malick." Available on
www.sensesofcinema.com.
Maccabee, Paul. John Dillinger Slept Here: A Crooks’ Tour of Crime and Corruption in St. Paul, 1920-1936. Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1995.
Marcuse, Herbert. One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Beacon Press, 1991.
Rybin, Steven. The Cinema of Michael Mann. Lexington Books, 2007.
Sarris, Andrew. "Miami Vice". The New York Observer, July 28, 2006.
Thoret, Jean-Baptiste. "Michael Mann: The Aquarium Syndrome" and "Gravity of the Flux: on Miami Vice", both found on www.sensesofcinema.com.
Virilio, Paul. The Information Bomb. Verso, 2006.
Wildermuth, Mark E. Blood in the Moonlight: Michael Mann and the Information Age Cinema. McFarland and Co Inc Pub, 2005.
Noted: "Off the Map: Aura, Freedom, and Control in Michael Mann's Public Enemies"
Source: http://nilesfilmfiles.blogspot.com/2011/07/off-map-aura-between-freedom-and.html
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