"Far Off the Map": Freedom vs. Control in Public Enemies

Rating: 10/10 (12 July 2009)

Public Enemies has been unfortunately called Heat 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 on which the film is based 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 The Aviator (2004; directed by Martin Scorsese) and his fascinating and fussy Miami Vice (2006). Scott Foundas writes in his review of Public Enemies that the film "suggests a period redo of the 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 that clearly establishes an identity, 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 that pulls the Self into a black void.
Public Enemies does not operate with the usual tropes of character development wherein character actors are allowed juicy monologues and self-serving scenery chewing. It is terse, silent, and even mechanical as opposed to conventionally humanistic. Even 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 (Marilon Cotillard) – the affect is almost ironic and distancing. Instead of compelling the audience to feel what the lovers are feeling, the result is much more akin to Todd Haynes' Douglas Sirk homage, Far From Heaven (2002): these characters are constructions of the growing cinematic world of their particular historical context (1933-1934). 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 disappear into the movie, the same way the characters are disappearing into History; 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. Indeed, the cinematic construction of the Self for Dillinger is circularly reinforced, being that his image of identification (Clark Gable) is in part a film 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 perhaps the only place John Dillinger can be captured and killed is under the blinking lights of a movie theatre, 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.
This kind of structure is not exactly conducive for a summer multiplex audience, any more than Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut was in July of 1999. But as Time magazine critic Richard Schickel points out, Kubrick's critics were always looking for "what wasn't in the movie," ignoring the "movie-ness of the movie," what was being communicated within the frame. The same could be said for Mann. Like Kubrick, his pictures demand the audience to communicate with the text, analytically participating instead of passively viewing. Which is why both directors' films are able to be watched and re-watched numerous times, each viewing having its own resonance depending on the viewer's response, as if each screening had the distinctive character of a live stage performance.
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 structures 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 base submission. Rebelling against this system, or shown to be active in fleeing from it, are the "public enemies", portrayed as archetypes pursuing a kind of poetic freedom, which denotes 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 based on myth, the famous characters in Public Enemies are demythologized 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 that it shares with the films of Terrence Malick (whom is casually referenced through inter-textual clues), 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 dialogue with its audience, not communicating clearly in order to communicate. We must experience it not passively, but actively, just as we may experience and analyze our own life experiences.