Emma Peel Sessions 25 – Zen and the Art of the Headshot

A Certain Man. Part One.

Mann’s vision is compelling andconflicted. His is a world of trendy clothes and music and buildings which, whether old and decrepit or shiny and new, never fail to be beautiful and are often located on beachfront property, the better to contrast his characters’ in-the-moment struggle to survive and acquire against nature’s indifference to their wants. His 30-year filmography, examined here and in the next four chapters of this series, is a hall of mirrors, reflecting the artist’s past and future back on themselves. Mann’s world shows men and women struggling to be captains of their own fate, even as institutions, businesses, and national governments—and their own devoted loved ones—define their striving as selfishness or push for a piece of their action. It’s a world of doppelgängers, doubles, and perverted reflections. It’s articulated through an arresting style that fuses B-movie schlock with an inner-directedness that channels Michelangelo Antonioni, Akira Kurosawa, and Yasujiro Ozu. It’s a cinema of Zen pulp. Mann is its master.

“Zen Pulp” is a term coined by House Next Door founder/blogger Matt Zoller Seitz, which he used to describe Michael Mann’s career, and his long-running string  of violent films populated by characters defined with codes, rules, and existential turmoil. When I heard the term something clicked for me – the lone man film I’ve been obsessing over for years fits there, as does a lot of other stuff I love from buddy cop movies to weird, rambling politicized scifi. “Zen Pulp” as a term become mass-encompassing, the kind of thing where once you know what it is you can spot it, even if it’s difficult to articulate exactly what it is you’re spotting. For some reason Point Blank is “Zen Pulp” and Payback is just an action movie, when the two of them are based (and, notably are both relatively faithful to) the same source material. Seitz lays it out specifically to Mann, but the term resonated heavily with me. Last year before I saw this I had several conversations where I described Tokyo Drifter, Point Blank, and The Long Goodbye as variations on the same movie. And part of my interest in this imagined genre (can’t even really call it that, can you?) is that it begs comparison to other examples. Everything is variations, all the characters are the lone man. A man wandering into a town and pitting two gangs against each other, a retired detective returning to his roots to fix something, a meticulous assassin entering a situation he has no control over, a cop gets a new partner – - these stories aren’t always innovations in storytelling originality (though in rare times they can be), they are variations on a theme.

It’s always a lone man. Walker. Carter. Wilson. Deckard. Bourne. Shaft. No. 6. Omar Little. Seth Bullock. Snake Plissken. Chow Yun Fat. Bruce Lee. Clint Eastwood. Lone wolf cowboy motherfuckers, as Simon Phoenix would say. The scary guys. The quiet guys. The out of towners. Usually they are outlaws and assassins, amoral forces of cosmic justice or righteous seekers of revenge. It is always one man, and he is an outsider. Either socially, spiritually, geographically, or by language – he is separate in relationship to the place. The characterization is usually flattened to some extent too, and the best examples are characters we literally know nothing about. They are functional ciphers. This can work in a few ways, either placing the character as morally superior or an unidentifiable other. It also achieves the handy trick of allowing the audience to get acquainted with the world around them quickly because the character has to do the same thing. The reticence isn’t just a character point, it is also a storytelling tool. Incidentally, this ties directly into when variations from this type are introduced, it’s always to be critical of the character type – adding a voiceover or partnering the character with a straight man is ultimately a remove from the character, a step back for us as an audience. Michael Mann, most interestingly, is always concerned with parallels to the lone man, ultimately subverting the concept more and more as he continues working. When the lone man is a moral force, it is this separation that allows us as the audience to truly judge the corruption of the situation (interestingly enough when the character is humanized as morally bankrupt, as in Miller’s Crossing, it works just as well). The more we know about the lone man, the more he is an actual person – the less superior to the situation he becomes, the more weak equals the more suspect (rare exception: Altman’s The Long Goodbye, where the permissive attitude Marlowe portrays the whole film finally finds its limit, he has to make a judgement and it’s a harsh one). Codes are important in these films, as is the physicality of the characters – if he’s an airtight no-mess strict man of action, he’s likely portrayed as impeccably dressed and neat, and vice versa for moral gray zone. The more the lone man appears to be in a costume rather than clothes the more absolute his actions are.

The variations on simple themes and simple characters are the most interesting thematically – blank characters are often a benefit because they can be used for any purpose. The best of these films are often the ones with the most silence and the most space between action beats – Point Blank, The Driver, Limits of Control, For a Few Dollars More – where the characters pass from archetypes into truly existential figures. The finest films imbue the recitation of plot points with something profound – and these rote points that gives each new take such power. No Country For Old Men works so very well because it differs so greatly from The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, but at it’s heart is wrestling with the same core. Each film is battling the urge to say something important and still be a proper action film, but No Country goes one further by autocritiquing and interrogating every aspect itself, until it denies the audience the ending it wants in order to say something even greater than the catharsis of Leone’s film could provide. Yojimbo, the godfather/progenitor of this – was not only equal parts action film and character portrait, it was itself a riff on Red Harvest (which I’m about halfway through now and, well it’s pretty good but its nothing near Yojimbo). The stacked riffing yields almost infinite variation – Le Samourai and Limits of Control are almost identical but in execution result in polar opposites – the retelling of Altman’s Long Goodbye at 30 years remove changes it’s argument from “world’s gone crazy” to “world means nothing”. The Driver, in responding to Point Blank’s style ends up refuting it’ point. And when the stories start to become meta, as they have recently, the results can be shocking. Sukiyaki Western Django and Kill Bill (and Cowboy Bebop of course) turn the cultural translations, appropriations, and cover versions into forced feedback noise solos. The Ford-Kurosawa-Lean-Corbucci-Leone-Peckinpah-Argento-Woo-Raimi linear timeline slammed in on itself, compressing time and art into the filmic equivalent of a Bomb Squad track, playing concepts rooted in a specific culture like instruments. There are outliers as well – Shane Black created the buddy cop picture in clear reaction to the lone wolf crazy motherfucker type of cop movie by simply asking “what about that guy’s partner” and giving us Lethal Weapon and it’s swathes of imitators (and Hot Fuzz does that one better by reversing the roles and making the boring guy the gun happy nutjob and the lone wolf the by the book type). Michael Mann’s entire career has been about how guys like that end up relating to institutions on both sides of the law, playing Yojimbo for as many angles as he could you could say.

Ultimately the “lone man movie” is a spot where exploitative violence and internal complexity don’t cancel each other out, the final scene of Sanjuro kicking off more than a half century of blood-flecked art cinema. Guys get shot, people get cut in half, we as the audience are presented with having our cake and eating it too – sometimes to the detriment of the films messages, sometimes not. A film like Blade Runner benefits more and more from it’s depiction of violence than it detracts – Batty and Deckard are finally shown to be the same man because of the way they perform violent acts. The good guy, bad guy dynamic is destroyed so much that Batty’s death is far more affecting that Rachel’s fate as love interest. It is a rare case where the audience’s need for violence is undermined completely. Most films don’t ask that of us, in fact I’d say most of the films I’m thinking about go the other way and feed that impulse for shit getting fucked up (which, I’m happy to say I enjoy a whole hell of a lot, hell Crank is just Point Blank for a post-GTA audience). The greatest appeal of these films for me is that wanting to see motherfuckers get shot doesn’t mean that I don’t have to forget about Stanley Kubrick  for it’s runtime. I want blood I want soul and I don’t want to have to choose between Merchant Ivory and Steven Segal. Thankfully I don’t have to. 

So here’s what I’m thinking. A series of essays – I don’t know how many – about the lone man film, the zen pulp and all the similarities, connections, and divergences that a fake genre could have. A series about ghosts, psychopaths, avengers, individualists, assassins, cops, cowboys, thieves, and loners. This is just the start of the idea, which I’m sure will mutate into something a lot more airtight, but I’m a little excited.

Next up part 2 – Giving up the Ghost