Mann and Politics

Rating: Null/10 (12 August 2004)

I'm distressed at the lack of interpretation that Mann's new film, Collateral, is receiving from American film critics. Mann's film is a politically charged allegory, not of professionalism, but of civic duty in an age of back-seated assassins. Could we not all understand Tom Cruises' Vincent when he remarks to Jamie Foxx's Max outside the gas station, "Don't go getting other people involved - you'll just get innocent people killed!" as properly characterizing the Bush Administration policies in two ways? First, to dissuade the critical public (Max/Mass) from contesting that they "can't drive you around while you're killing folks. It ain't my job!" And furthermore, that a vote against the confidence of the man with the guns is a vote for punishment. This has clearly been the case with the early right-winged screeching of "Anti-patriotism" to anyone considering the war in Iraq as unjust. To Vincent, too, Justice and Politics are incommensurable.
To elaborate, Vincent's preposterous claim later in the film after the nigh club showdown that he "saved your life" is exactly the kind of logic that the Bush Administration practices when it argues that by killing thousands of angry and poor Middle Easterners that this can only be interpreted as saving American lives. The question of why the citizens of third world countries might be out to kill Americans doesn't appear to face most Americans today as immediately as Max assumes the question for himself.
After all, it is his cab that is being "taken for a ride."
Michael Mann has created a masterpiece of Political film-making, where the American Dream is reduced to a greasy postcard of an island where corporations relocate, go tax-free, and replace every American Flag with the taxi billboard of Bacardi Silver. But if American film reviewers are unable to read subversive cultural undercurrents, then we, unlike Max, will not wake up in the morning.