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Swinburne Research Bank Swinburne Research Bank http://researchbank.swinburne.edu.au Lobato, R. (2008). Crimes against urbanity: the concrete soul of Michael Mann. Originally published in Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 22 (3), 341–352. Available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304310801919437. Copyright © 2008 Taylor & Francis. This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here with the permission of the publisher for your personal use. No further distribution is permitted. If your library has a subscription to this journal, you may also be able to access the published version via the library catalogue. The final and definitive version is available at http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/. Accessed from Swinburne Research Bank: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/72674 Crimes aaagagggainstainst uuurbanity:urbanity: the concrete soul of Michael Mann Ramon Lobato Pre-press version of article published in Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 22.3 (2008): 341-352. Abstract : This article addresses the reimagination of urban space by the contemporary crime film. Through a case study of selected films by Michael Mann, it argues that the extreme stylisation of certain postmodern crime texts functions to aestheticise the industrial infrastructure of late capitalism, and that the genre offers a visual training through which generic sites of commerce, transit and industry (non-place) may be personalised, rendered habitable, and potentially reclaimed. KeywordsKeywords: Cinema; space; crime; the city; urban studies; Michael Mann; Los Angeles Biographical note: Ramon Lobato is a doctoral candidate in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne and a sessional lecturer in the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University. His work has appeared in Media International Australia , Camera Obscura, Limina , and the edited collection The Business of Entertainment (forthcoming). His current research examines the relationship between film distribution and globalisation, with a focus on informal channels of circulation. Correspondence to: Ramon Lobato, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria 3010. Email: [email protected] Page 1 of 14 In his 1921 essay “The Hotel Lobby”, Siegfried Kracauer makes a suggestive point regarding the triangular relationship between detective fiction, urban space and modernity. For Kracauer, the hotel lobby was the paradigmatic modern space, a “negative church” (1995, p. 175) containing all the essential ingredients for a murder mystery. Crucially, it also offered a vantage point from which the everyday could “be exploited, if at all, aesthetically ” (1995, p. 177, original italics). The relationship between crime narratives and generic urban space is the central concern of this article, which will attempt to pose some tentative answers to a set of mysteries that lie at the heart of the contemporary crime movie – What are the aesthetics of detection? How do criminal fictions negotiate the postmodern city? Why do hotels, airports and train stations make such evocative crime scenes? And what can the genre teach us about the way we engage with our own urban spaces? The films of Michael Mann are, I will suggest, exemplary of a tendency which is present, if unevenly distributed, across a large number of criminal fictions. The crime genre, particularly in its police-procedural and heist-movie variations, is in this sense a lens through which we can examine the mutually constitutive relationship between city- image and self-image. It aestheticizes the infrastructure of late capitalism through a dialectic of enchantment and defacement, providing a vantage point from which generic urban space can be reimagined as a site of fantasy. I focus here on a selection of Mann’s crime films which, like all his work, exhibit a pronounced tendency towards spatial abstraction.1 My intention here is not to offer an appreciation of Mann’s work so much as to make a case for the crime genre’s capacity to function as a staging ground for spatial politics, a capacity which has implications for the way we visualize city space at the level of the everyday. On CConcreteoncrete and CCCelluloidCelluloid The contemporary crime narrative, as opposed to the traditional whodunnit, increasingly privileges spatial intelligence above all else. Missing persons, car chases, police raids, stakeouts, electronic surveillance – these generic tropes all revolve around the location of bodies within the urban environment. Before moving on to consider the way Mann’s films engage with the genre’s spatial imaginary, the following section of the article shall do two things: provide a brief overview of the intersections between spatial theory and screen/cultural studies, and offer some historical and cultural reference points for the particular variety of urban non-place so frequently inhabited by the crime genre. Most work on “the cinematic city” tends to fall into one of the following three categories. First, various studies of early cinema have highlighted the reciprocal relationship of film and urban development at the levels of production, consumption and distribution. As both artefacts and catalysts of industrialisation, cinema and the modern city have been feeding off one another since the turn of the century, when rapid urbanisation in North America and Europe gave rise to a city-based workforce with clearly defined leisure time. Academic interest in the city-cinema nexus has often taken the form of renewed attention to a handful of exemplary texts, such as modernist “city symphony” films like Walter Ruttman’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) and René Clair’s Paris Qui Dort (1923). Much of this work has sought to track, through textual analysis or empirical Page 2 of 14 research, the ways in which cinema both facilitated and represented changing experiences of urban space (i.e. Arnwine & Lerner, 1997-1998; Clarke, 1997; Barber, 2003; Shiel & Fitzmaurice, 2003). A second way in which the city has been mobilized as an area of inquiry within cinema studies is via phenomenology and spectator theory. The work of Giuliana Bruno (1997, 2002) and Anne Friedberg (1993) has been particularly influential in this respect. The latter’s notion of the “mobilized ‘virtual’ gaze” (1993, p. 2) is a useful model for the analysis of contemporary cinematic and televisual subJectivity. Drawing upon architectural, feminist and postmodern theory, Friedberg stresses the active nature of such a gaze – its visual flânerie – as well as its links with city-based practices of tourism and consumption. Bruno explores a similar terrain, examining the connections that exist between architecture and cinema (see also Vidler, 1996). For Bruno, cinema is “an inscription of spatial desire” (2002, p. 60), a “narrativization of space” (1997, p. 21). A third branch of contemporary spatial theory comes in the form of what is sometimes referred to as postmodern geography. Drawing on de Certeau and Lefebvre, North American theorists including Edward SoJa (1989, 1996), Sharon Zukin (1991) and Michael Sorkin (1992) have explored the contours of a new kind of city space – the sprawling, decentred, post-Fordist metropolis epitomized by Los Angeles and appearing in increasing numbers across the globe. A foundational text for this approach is Mike Davis’ City of Quartz (1991), a cross-disciplinary and painstakingly researched investigation into the histories – both real and imagined – of the City of Angels. Indeed, Davis’ more recent Planet of Slums (2006), along with the innumerable polemics of Paul Virilio (2005), provide a valuable flipside to some of the more romantic models of urban space through their close attention to the political economy of development, urban dysfunction and segregation, and, in Virilio’s case, the immensely important issue of technological relays between media, urban planning, and the military. Such work often inhabits a productive space somewhere between screen studies and urban studies, constituting a dialogue which can be extended to consider such topics as the impact of media representations on property markets, the design of entertainment venues, technologies of spatial visualisation, the influence of cinematic texts in design discourse and practice, and, crucially, issues of media distribution. For the purposes of this essay, however, the discussion will be limited to the ways in which such issues haunt the films of Michael Mann, whose glossy crime epics engage this hybrid body of thought in interesting ways, and to what we as viewers might take away from this encounter. As hymns to the American Sunbelt city, Mann’s movies have a special relationship with the horizontal megalopoli theorized by SoJa and his peers. Like many contemporary crime directors, Mann consistently privileges ostensibly empty, impersonal, outdoor spaces such as airports, car parks, gas stations and freeways, spaces that are as far away from “home” as one can imagine. These are the non-places posited by Marc Augé (1995) as the by-product of “supermodernity” – those generic urban sites which eradicate both difference and history, offering only “the shared identity of passengers, customers or Sunday drivers” (1995, p. 101). 2 The architectural iconography associated with non-place – malls, car yards, freeways, gas stations, and so on – has been used for a variety of ideological purposes throughout the twentieth century, and its representation in the contemporary crime film or TV series inevitably engages with these discourses to some degree. In other words, these spaces Page 3 of 14 have a representational history – and it is to this history that we will now turn. To this end, the following section attempts to draw parallels between seemingly disparate moments in twentieth-century cultural production in order to argue for the existence of a minor strand of anti-humanism (or proto-posthumanism) based around the fetishisation and occasional eroticization of non-place. Histories of NonNon----PlacePlace One of the most memorable moments in the cultural history of non-place occurred in Italy, 1910, when a group of Futurist artists and acolytes hurled 800,000 brochures into the air from the campanile of St Mark’s.
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