Emma Peel Sessions 28 – Giving Up the Ghost

A Certain Man. Part Two.

(part one is here)

Tucker Stone:

Parker wasn’t the first of this type of grit-covered protagonist, but he’s one of the purest expressions we’ve got. Like the men at the center of a Michael Mann film, or Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne character, Parker is the sort of man/machine combination that surrenders totally to the job at hand, obstacles be damned. Efficiency, succinctness and a fundamental lack of emotion: these are their primary tools, supplemented by the sort of only-in-fiction physical power that allows them to incapacitate anyone they run into, usually with one punch. Their only weakness–one which forms the center of the first Parker novel, and operates as the impetus for failure in many of Mann’s films–is emotional attachment, often to a woman. That’s not to say the books are sexist, although that argument has some plausibility, but that these stories work as a sort of emotional wish fulfillment to a certain personality. Feelings–unpredictable, messy and useless when it comes to control fantasies–wouldn’t it be nice if one could just turn them off when they get in the way? For Parker, the answer resounds as an unequivocal “yes”, and that’s whatThe Hunter circles around. A man who can do anything, as long as he doesn’t make the mistake of loving a woman ever again. He tried it out. Didn’t fit.

The disconnect between emotionality and the lone man. So much so that the characters are frequently portrayed as inhuman, or less than human. In Yojimbo, Sanjuro is referred to as a dog, and often. While films like The Limey and Limits of Control emphasize a cultural and geographical disconnect, other films mark the protagonist’s spiritual and emotional disconnect. Sometimes, these films use that otherness to create a moral bias in the viewer, to varied affect. In the notes of the Yojimbo criterion disc, Kurosawa talks about creating a world where both of the average man’s choices are evil, and how Sanjuro was a moral force strong enough to stand against both and win without compromising himself. The protagonist is a judge of good and evil, even though he is often made into non-people by those around him.

Sanjuro is also told by the innkeeper “You don’t look like one of the living”, and at the time he doesn’t. But its a sentiment echoed through every one of these films – Rachel asking Deckard if he’s ever Voight-Kampf-ed himself in Blade Runner, the titular line in Dead Man when Nobody finds out Blake’s name  (“then you really are a dead man!”),  Mad Max dying figuratively at the end of the first film by wandering into the wasteland, the implications of Tom Reagan’s homosexuality in Miller’s Crossing, etc. They are the other, and the disconnect between the lone man and the world around him is the key to his stance as judge.

Beyond dehumanization – the lone man is often a ghost in his own narrative, untethered and wandering. You don’t get inside their heads, you don’t get to understand their motivations. The Assassination of Jesse James keeps the man at such an arms length as to make him unknowable. James’ actions are completely unpredictable and the few looks into his motivations are unnerving. Bullit is such a blank slate that the big surprise at the end of the film works the way it does. Whereas a simple portrayal is often used to help audiences relate to a character – these are characters who have cut themselves off from the world as well. You are an observer, rather than a participant, which alters the way violence is processed. It is less cathartic, and often more expressive. And occasionally, it is abstract.

Walker in Point Blank‘s main difference in comparison to The Hunter is that very quality. Walker isn’t so much disconnected as he is a literal ghost. If Walker dies in Alcatraz, his unchecked savagery is righteous vengeance, and his drifting into the darkness after he’s finished is his true death. It doesn’t work on a base level, really, because Walker is such an animal of impulse. What he does isn’t that of purposeful vengeance, it’s wild lashing out to right a perceived wrong along simple, capitalistic terms he understands. Pay me my money. Any vengeance Walker has is taken out on Mal, and by accident. Its too sudden, and when Walker keeps going up the ladder its partially because something’s missing inside him and he’s going to stick to his principles. Which is pay me my money. The metaphorical nature of Walker being a ghost gives his actions great significance. His figurative death at the start of the film amplifies everything. The death of his wife (and the way time moves around him in the following scenes), the death of Mal, his running up against the corporation. In a way, he is the ghost of the old way of violence going against the new. Faceless, unaccountable, unaffected. Walker doesn’t care not because of how he was raised or what he believes in, he doesn’t care because he doesn’t care. But the tactics are the same and both leave men dead. Walkers might be more honest, but in the end its the same thing with the same results. The real trick is that Fairfax just points Walker in the right direction and leaves for the next two hours of film. You could even go farther, Blade Runner is very much about death – and its characters exist only in the small window we’re shown, as their pasts are thrown in doubt. They are disconnected as a whole, and as the larger society around them is dying, they are dying. Dead Man isn’t about a man who’s dying so much as a man who literally embodies death, killing without trying, bringing destruction to everyone he meets. Dead Man is the opposite to Yojimbo, because the ghostly outsider isn’t here to act as the universe’s moral adjudicator. He’s a figure of an uncaring and confounding order to the universe, on a journey towards death he becomes death. The lone man stands against humanity, because he has to in order to do what he must. Or at least so we don’t get too attached.

next up in part 3 – Michael Mann, John Woo, Cowboy Bebop. Moral codes, parallels, homoeroticism, doves, and Men Doing Work.

Advertisement