Auto-Erotic Asphyxiation: Michael Bay, Michele Bachmann, and the American Fantasy

Let me take you down another road.

The summer movie season of 1996 was just about ready to get rocking. Old Jeff Strickler of the Minneapolis Star Tribune was apparently surprising even himself in his love for a new action movie, which according to old Jeff was a rare exception among its genre peers because it showed how the film's antagonist, a rogue military commander (or something) played by Ed Harris, had legitimate reasons for launching terrorist strikes against the United States. Meanwhile, doofus Nicolas Cage – in what I believe is the first of his many popular and increasingly agitating action roles – has to get help from the only guy to ever escape Alcatraz (Sean Connery), who also happens to be his girlfriend's dad (or something), in order to stop the terrorists, blah-blah-blah (or something).

But for a teenager, The Rock was very good. It had a formula that had earlier been put to good use by its producers, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, that I dug in Tony Scott's Crimson Tide a couple years earlier. You basically have manly men played by good, award-pedigree actors, women kept on the periphery, witty one-liners, soaring music to underlie heavy emotions, along with a huge Diane Warren pop song (or something). Little did I know the impact The Rock would have on movies, as its director, a guy named Michael Bay, would go on to titanic success. And excess. At this point, I think he only had one other feature, Bad Boys, which served as a moderately successful launching pad for Will Smith and Martin Lawrence.

And who is Michael Bay now? The Rock. Armageddon. Pearl Harbor. Bad Boys II. And finally, the Transformers trilogy, his magnum opus, perhaps not only for him but for every man-child, the long expectant Second Coming of Lost Time as once more we can all be children at play, building things and immediately blowing them up. Going back to that Strickler review, it's amazing to see how far the critical community has come around on Bay. He is now the antichrist, and not without qualifications. The flirtations between Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler in Armageddon, the take on history and kitsch in Pearl Habor, and simply the erotic fetishizing of violence in...everything. Michael Bay creates movies for our worst impulses, making the idiot in his collective audience purr. Attending one of his pictures is like being caught masturbating, except everyone else in the room is masturbating also. It is fantasy as form. He's succeeded in creating a treasured aesthetic, as the sensibility of 1990s music videos have now become commonplace in action films. Films don't breathe today, so much as they glide down a runway in slow-mo, bullets firing behind the sheen of a perfect complexion. To complete the formula, Bay puts in his sitcom humor, something "the folks" always find very delightful. Explosions, cheeky laughs, Oscar-nominated actors, beautiful women, nice clothes, fast cars, rock anthems, more explosions…Sometimes it may resemble a 150-minute Axe Body Spray commercial, but one must admit they achieve their goals. Bay's movies are the epitome of glossy fashion, celluloid user-friendly models downloadable for fulfillment.

And the critics snarl, as they do currently in regards to Transformers: Dark of the Moon, their words like darts falling like harmless feathers against Bay's Teflon chest. The previous film in the trilogy, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was even more hated by its critics. But it made nearly $200 million in its opening week…and the people loved it. The same fate will hold for Part 3, I predict, as the preview audience applauded at its conclusion – even though present was the Star Tribune critic that had since replaced Mr. Strickler, Colin Covert, who would give it a single star rating. Bay has pointed out the numbers to his critics before, as if to suggest their meaninglessness, their lack of a useful function in this economy, their elitism. Who are they writing for anyway? The same people Terrence Malick is making his garbage for, that's who.

Pardon my analogy as I link Michael Bay's initials to another MB that has been having a good week, even though she also seems to be doing socially irresponsible things and has knives out against her. The flaw in their critics, thinking only of the content of the dual MB's words and images, is to dismiss them as simply being idiots. But Michael Bay, much like Michele Bachmann, is not a dummy. They warrant the title of 'genius' as much as anyone. Perhaps more than most people. Which is not to say that they both create some pretty reprehensible things. But why are they so invincible? Both of them seem to be precisely what the towns far away from the tallest buildings want (and the buildings that Bay seems to take so much delight in destroying!)

Before digging into the bile of my own criticism of Bay or Bachmann, I wonder about the suburban mentality that these two have so perfectly channeled and fulfilled. The executive producer of all three Transformers films is Steven Spielberg, and didn't he also make paeans to the suburbs and that life, like E.T.? Isn't Bay then his heir, seeing how Shyalaman has not fulfilled his Newsweek promise, and J.J. Abrams still has a ways to go? Aren't they both making movies that are love letters to the "silent majority"?

If so, it's sad. For people like me, at least. Bay's heroes, perhaps most emblematically Shia Lebeouf in the Transformers films, are basically all swell guys that I envied growing up in the burbs, even occasionally marrying your ex-girlfriend. Spielberg's heroes, on the other hand, I really have never had much problem identifying with: as a child, Elliot in E.T.; and later as an adult, Roy Neery in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Even the myriad of dysfunctions that follow his most stoical of heroes (the spiritual and family questions that are beset on Dr. Jones, for instance) allow a cerebral fellow's identification. Most of all for me, there is David in AI: Artificial Intelligence, the robot who only wants to be "a real, live boy." Spielberg's most memorable protagonists are surrounded by affluence and the normal, but have a few parts missing. Take Oskar Schindler, who's a Nazi but is also, surprising to even himself, a humanitarian, and so an outsider and eccentric in his world.

This was me as a kid in the suburbs! I was surrounded by the Shia Lebeoufs and their families, with new cars, well kempt lawns, and a steady flow of predictable security in addition to rewarding new experiences. And it's not that I hated them. Rather, if I had contempt, it was born out of envy. Which is why I still defend Spielberg to this day; some of it might make me feel a little ashamed or embarrassed. But Spielberg often reflects what I felt like while my house had no electricity or foreclosed, in a prosperous place like Eden Prairie, or Cottage Grove, or Edina. Spielberg is not Terrence Malick or David Lynch, but his hymns to the suburbs are peppered with a bittersweet loneliness that wants to be warm and safe, and gosh darn it, sometimes the director gives that satisfaction to his characters.

Michael Bay, on the other hand, makes movies for the kids who made fun of Elliot and David, the well-adjusted boys with the affluent parents, the steady stream of friends that were constants at the lunch table, who had their lives figured out for them, from the right kind of clothes to wear to college. Again, I'm not disparaging the normal – it's what I envied, and I need to be careful here, because at the bottom of all this is, admittedly, my own resentment. And so let it be written – Michael Bay makes films for and about those people who wouldn't let me be a part of their club, and the guys who got laid before me. So I wonder, as a city dweller, if there's not a similar resentment in some of my modern-day friends and colleagues when it comes to their hatred of Michael Bay.

But this doesn't stick, being that so many geeks I know love Transformers, just as many who hate it. They love the way every moment is eroticized, the explosions, the loud noises, the glass hurling everywhere even though human bodies seem to stay intact (or they just kind of disappear). I wonder about history, and if Michael Bay could have been who he is now 40 years ago, when Spielberg was just beginning. The short, and possibly unexamined answer, is 'no.' Michael Bay was created by videogames, just as his film aesthetic perhaps worked to influence the course of where videogames would go in the decade following The Rock. For Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the theaters would do well to hand out videogame controllers just as they hand out 3D glasses, allowing the audience to be more immersed in the action as their fingers hit buttons and maneuver a joystick as guns blaze, swords slice, and metal crumbles. In videogames, the "camera" eye of perspective is omnipresent, unstoppable, allowed all access, traveling through windows and walls. This is what Bay's image does: it is unrestricted. It works well with our lazy eyes by giving us everything, outlaying so much information, titles on the screen joined with the noise of a computer farting, and even if the story doesn't make any coherent sense, we accept it. Special effects, in their persistence, are story for Bay, a point satirized pointedly by South Park ("That's not a plot – those are special effects!" "I don't know the difference.")

The unrestricted film image, where the camera eye reformatted by the graphic designer is allowed to go anywhere, is taking over the movies and killing the old form of real-time real-space photography. Spielberg is complicit in this entropy, evidenced by the last Indiana Jones picture (starring Bay's new alter ego, Lebeouf, as the son of Indiana Jones), where the stunt-work of the original films – so integral to their success – was replaced by computerized vine catchers and digital prairie dogs: limitless space, as the spatial is no longer necessary. This killed Indiana Jones, and was another reminder of where the special effects action film was heading. The first Transformers film from 2007 was an awful spectacle showcasing the worst of blockbuster special effects, because of how relentless it was to not be boring. But the special effects aspect of filmmaking, geared to satisfying the popcorn-fisted instincts of viewers, was less exciting than tiresome. The pursuit of not being boring proved to be antithetically boring because the noise – aural and visual – worked to create numbness: too much sensation, too little reflection, resulting in an aesthetic nothingness. Upon Transformers' release, I wrote about how its spare-no-expense action was miniscule in effect when compared to what Alfonso Cuaron and Emmanuel Lubezki pulled off in Children of Men, or what Michael Mann did in his nightclub shootout in Collateral, or the CGI-light work of Paul Greengrass in his Bourne films. As per the prelude to this blog, discussing Bay's contrast with Mann, I was working out my invented binary, between filmmakers like Mann, Cuaron, and Greengrass on one side, and Michael Bay and Zack Snyder (300, Sucker Punch) on the other. One side is a very political aesthetic, mindful of ideology and the impact of images. The other is playing videogames, and wants the audience to disappear.

There is no lull in videogames. It is all stimulation, all the time. Your eyes and fingers work away on the controller as your mind works itself into the screen, becoming one with the digital embodiment therein, killing other virtual bodies, collecting virtual money, and saving virtual women. If you die, you always get another life. When the game's over, there is fulfillment, accomplishment, rest, and a happy ending as order is restored – until the sequel comes out, and the villains also miraculously resurrect. This is how Bay's films operate, and it is why they are so successful with their intended audience (I want to note how prescient Bay was with the Transformers villain, Megatron, who is dropped in the ocean: the enemy to freedom anticipating the fate of Osama Bin Laden). His genius is being able to densely put so much into his images, knowing precisely what that audience will respond to – just as Michele Bachmann knows what her political base responds to. If you insult it, you are an elitist. Both Bachmann and Bay, as far as ideology goes, thrive purely in the realm of abstraction: Freedom vs. Tyranny in Transformers being the simple theme, where the Good take on the Bad – and the Bad have no motivations beyond simply being, well, bad.

Bachmann's perfect suburban world, so prosperous and removed from any struggling bodies out in the cities, fits smack into the Bay universe, where the world seems to reshape itself in the presence of individuals: it revolves around the individual and his power, unlike in Mann, where the people are dwarfed and crushed by the outside world. The beings here are not human, but rather waxwork versions of humans. This is particularly applicable to women (has anyone else noticed how Bachmann hasn't aged, even though she's in that rough part of middle age? She is the perfect digital woman!), and it is Bay's portrayal of women that I find most troublesome, even more than the militarism that makes his pictures look like recruitment films. Megan Fox, the female lead from the first two Transformers, was a "tough" mechanic chick, but really only functions as a fulfillment of male fantasy, her vapidity unmatched. It is Bay's intention that she should be a one-note character, because it's that channeling of the collective teenage fantasy that he's after – and he succeeds. Fox's replacement in Dark of the Moon, Victoria's Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, is even more "perfect," and so empty. (And in real life, apparently does not talk back; Fox was fired for her negative comments about Bay – specifically, comparing him to Hitler).

I've so far kept away my own opinion of Transformers: Dark of the Moon. But my reaction to it, I feel, associates with my sense of what Bay and Bachmann mean for the modern condition. In truth, I found myself enjoying it, much as I perhaps wanted to hate it (and hated its two predecessors). In its excess, there is a kind of momentous absurdity that I found appealing, along with special effects set-ups that I admired, such as the human protagonists trapped in a wavering Trump Tower. Even so, it left me with a "not so fresh feeling" later on, and I couldn't help but feel a little used the next day. To his credit, Bay has almost altered his abominable aesthetic in many cases, at times seeming to emulate Christopher Nolan's recent summer films (Inception, The Dark Knight) more than his own work. The film's prologue juggles history, revealing how the Kennedy Administration started its race for the moon because of an alien Autobot spacecraft that crashed there. I was surprised by the amount of restraint Bay was employing during this prologue, and I took notice to how he was thinking of those cameras filming Apollo 11 while it was happening: Michael Bay was being self-reflexive about his own technological spectacles.

And then – well…immediately following the prologue, we see Rosie Huntington-Whiteley's ass in close-up, the commissioned Top 40 rock score singing along. This is Sam's (LeBeouf) girlfriend, prancing around in his apartment, getting ready for work. One of his transformer pets chimes in, "What a gorgeous box." The prologue gives way to latent porno. Dark of the moon, indeed. Bay's film launches into its admittedly interesting commentary on men's desire for women, something that began in the first picture, where Sam's first car, the Autobot Bumblebee, seems to compete with Megan Fox for his erotic fixation. At the conclusion of that first film, the Autobots, statesmen of progressive and immortal technology, preside benevolently over the planet as Sam and his hot girlfriend lay on top of Bumblebee's hood – a perfect amalgamation of sex and technology, women and cars, the two things men love to talk about most.

The friction between Sam's new girlfriend and his car is now much more pronounced, and it will climax with a wedding proposal where a Decepticon scrap functions as an engagement ring. The erotic attachment to technology makes a lot of sense for Michael Bay. As I said elsewhere, his aesthetic reminds me of a man flexing while slowly touching himself, looking in the mirror – or photographs and tweets such images of himself. He gets off on technology and its possibilities. The "gorgeous box" of which the comic-relief Transformers spoke could refer to a mechanical invention or an organic female vagina. The catch is that in Bay's films, the women are far from organic, and if they are nuanced women, they are bitter shrews contemptible of their femaleness. Sam's nemesis is his girlfriend's rich boss, Dylan Gould (Patrick Dempsey), who collects classic cars – and has a female staff of seemingly cloned ladytrons. He points to one car and mentions how it's "built to echo the body of the ideal woman." Bay's women are as mechanically constructed as his Transformer robots are, or as the $200,000 automobiles flashing through the frame.

And yet on the other side, you have CIA Director Charlotte Mearing, played by the great Frances McDormand, who seems to be modeled on Hillary Clinton. She wears pants, talks straight, does not smile in a comely fashion, and, well, looks like a real person. More than twice in the film she accosts her male underlings: "Don't call me ma'am." "You're a woman, aren't you?" one of them asks. With this statement, we are assured that Bay's depiction of women here is not a subliminal or unconscious thing. The woman in his film who is powerful by virtue of her intelligence – and not at all by her looks – is herself a machine, as Mearing talks about protocol and paperwork, which "separates us from the animals." Strangely, while Bay's unreal and beautiful model women – who seem to be everywhere – are all too eager to issue romantic and sexual gestures, Mearing is apparently a cold heartbreaker, having broken-up with the film series' special forces nut, Simmons (John Turturro). Even at the end of the film, when the world has been saved and Simmons grabs her for a big end-all smooch, her smile drops quickly and she commands her men to arrest him. Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin, the attractive Christian Conservative female crusader, find their most enthusiastic audience among - if not other Christian Conservative women - older white men. They embody that attractive good-wife fantasy, headstrong and active but fully in support of an older set of mainly patriarchal values, and Feminism does not apply to them. They too are virtually male fantasy constructs.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon's endearing misogyny is rampant. Though we do not see much trace of female robots, the villainous Decepticon Shockwave terrorizes our heroes with a shape-shifting cross between a snake-phallus given a toothy-vagina mouth, ripping through civilization and the best things men have created for us (Mearing, herself a woman with teeth, is responsible for much of the bureaucratic stupidity that will put characters in danger). And then there is a teleportation portal to the Transformers' home of Cybertron, that will give passage to the villainous Decepticons as they land on earth and take over, which I couldn't help but identify as a huge, robotic clitoris.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon has a good message for us young men: work hard and harness your tools, so that you can take care of your beautiful women and keep them securely in your grasp. Sam's problem is that he's out of college and can't get a job, while his hot girlfriend is paying the bills. This puts him in a realm of uncertainty – most pronounced when he meets the flirtatious Gould with his car collection and infinite wealth. Sam's parents work to remind him of his responsibilities as a man, mom offering him a self-help book, She Comes First, and dad adding, "Happy wife, happy life."

Michael Bay, who has that aforementioned erotic attachment to filmmaking, and so to technology as his pictures are technological monuments, has then accomplished the male's dream of amalgamating a man's ideal woman with his ideal tools. He's a garage logician able to keep his women satisfied and eternally beautiful in the comfort of narcissistic prosperity – and to criticize his films for their reactionary arcs is then to criticize prosperity (or to "punish it," such as we hear a lot today). To be subservient to the woman is like being trapped in a job – the "life sucking abyss" described by Sam's effeminate boss (John Malkovich), and then echoed in Shockwave's toothy-vagina mouth. Transformers: Dark of the Moon is perfect for the new social Ayn Rand enthrallment, where pity is decried. To act with sacrificing charity only results in the pitiful lemmings below your sinking boat, pulling you into their den of doom.

Indeed, it is puzzling to have the famous words of Spock from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan given a completely different sense here – especially considering that Leonard Nimoy does the voice! The turn-coat Sentinel Prime has made a deal with Megatron and the Decepticons because, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." You'd think that Sentinel had made a deal to tax the richest 2% of earners in order to help balance the budget – which is an affront to freedom. The "milk of human kindness," that feminine attribute, is done away with in Transformers in favor of pure will, strength, and prosperity. A funny example is Simmons, now wealthy, who is interviewed on The O'Reilly Factor (and is a self-described "big fan"). Simmons says of Gould (who has made his own deal with the Decepticons), "Rich bastards. I used to hate'em. Now it's…." and he shakes his head, as now he's one of them. Freedom, as Optimus Prime makes clear, "is everyone's right!" The Decepticons (who were linked with the Obama Administration in the second film) are so the bringers of socialist, feminist tyranny, who will make slaves out of all 6 million of us, destroying the landmarks of capitalist glory (such as the Trump Tower) and our nation's heritage (the Lincoln Memorial).

What becomes a little frightening in Transformers, from my "milk of human kindness" effeminate male progressive liberal humanist perspective, is how sadistic the Transformers become in their heroism. Optimus Prime has done away with pity or the will to identify with his enemies. Where is the logic in that, after all? Pity makes no sense. Kill them. Stomp them out. Take the battle to them! And rip their heads off. Even when the beaten Sentinel Prime, Optimus' former leader and mentor, comes to understand defeat, Optimus does not hesitate for a moment in blowing the older Autobot's head off. Twice. It's great that Michael Bay can once again show us what being a man is all about.

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This is the kind of stuff that gave me that "not so fresh feeling" of feeling used. I reiterate that the female imagery in Transformers makes me think that it is not accidentally featured here, and Bay truly does have some personal statements he wants to make in response to his PC critics. If you'll excuse the description, he's fucking the screen, doggy-style, as the Alpha Male who knows he's on top of the world. He knows that the feminized audience will criticize him, but he's like Simmons grabbing Mearing, smooching her and willingly going to jail for it. He smiles and winks, knowing that we all like it. And most of us, evidently, do like it, even against our better judgment. This film will be a huge success, as most of Bay's films are. I repeat, it's about prosperity and prosperity will always win – certainly as human beings become more mechanically inclined, digital, and concrete-thinking. Transformers: Dark of the Moon is a Dark Age Black Mass, reflective – even with a degree of antagonism to art – of the current mindset as the most deeply felt independent film. And this is frightening. Almost as frightening as Michele Bachmann being a likely VP candidate (Sarah Palin? Palin is to Bachmann what Roland Emmerich is to Michael Bay; no threat at all, and lacking a lot of the scary sincerity).

The 3D of Dark of the Moon is another step forward on that technological slope Bay and James Cameron desire to take us. The industry wants it to succeed, I think, to salvage the commercial potentialities of the medium (and yes, I admit that like Avatar it is very well executed here aesthetically). The image will have its omnipresent eye and we will disappear in it, merging erotically with the technology the same way the Transformers are built of metal and flowing juice. They see great things in this, believing technology will help us more than harm us.

But I cannot help but think the result is a kind of idiocracy, particularly when I compare the action sequences of Bay to those of Mann, his opposite. The multi-camera set-ups of Bay, with a myriad of perfect compositions that are quickly edited together to keep our eyes stimulated and fixed, combine with an onslaught of sound, the explosions hyperbolic in the most Wagnerian of ways. A Mexican stand-off (in Bad Boys II) becomes a ripe opportunity to work in jokes and machismo posturing. It is delirious fantasy, which can be entertaining but for me is terribly numbing. Compare Bay's stand-off to Mann's in Miami Vice, where Elizabeth Rodriguez points her weapon at an Aryan Brother holding a detonator that could blow up the trailer where the action is happening. The cops here act swiftly, not wasting a moment for our smug amusement. The music dies down before the action hits, the close-ups lingering instead of quickly cutting away. There is motion to Mann's action edits (like a mechanical determinism, a kind of natural physics), as if he were sculpting chaos, versus Bay's cuts, which are a part of that chaos' construction. The Aryan begins to talk as if he were the bad guy in a Michael Bay picture: "Shoot me? She dies. Shoot me. Go ahead. Fuck it, we can all go. That's cool." Rodriguez interrupts, and says with a flat affect, "That's not what happens. What will happen is, what will happen is, I will put a round at 2,700 feet per second into the medulla at the base of your brain. And you'll be dead from the neck down before your body knows it. Your finger won't even twitch. Only you get dead. So tell me, sport, do you believe that?" And before he can continue the conversation with vulgar wit, she operates exactly what she says she would do. Whereas Bay stretches out Time in his erotic violent fantasy, Mann cuts it short, as if life happens too fast. Bay sees the body as something to be stretched out and played with. In Mann, there is a corporeal basis for everything, and Rodriguez spells it out in a very linear way (Mann's heroes, like I pointed out in my previous post, are themselves tragic cyborgs: Blade Runners).

Bad Boys II, however, made a lot more money. As indicated by that shot in Dark of the Moon's prologue as the news cameras are fixed on Apollo 11, it's the fiery spectacle that the people desire to see, much more than the close-up human being, for whom death is unexpected and quick. Mann's Miami Vice is a rare action film where the women, though beautiful, are photographed realistically, and also have a toughness to match the men around them. They are not objects of desire, but agents of activation. Whereas Bay's films are much like Gould's cars, "built to echo the body of the ideal woman," and so his camera exists to make space shift to the impeccable bodies it photographs, Mann's atmospheres dwarf his people, seeming to predate them: to repeat Thoret, the human is a mere event. Bay's characters seem to float on air during action; Mann's fall with heavy weight, while fantasies or ideals are victims to physics.

Malaise only takes one so far, as Jimmy Carter learned. And he didn't even use the word 'malaise.' He was just being realistic. But the abstractions of modern-day prosperity cloud out the real with its CGI perfection. Michael Bay and Michele Bachmann give the crowd what they want: fantasies and agelessness, along with cruel death to enemies of freedom, though no one can really define "freedom." The sadism of Optimus Prime disturbs me, but he's not too different from a post-modern, Cyborg Age representation of John Wayne, a symbol of a bygone age that so many people believe is lost. Conveniently, Wayne was just hilariously paid homage to by Citizen Bachmann on her campaign trail, as she spoke of Wayne's place in Waterloo, Iowa, when in reality it was the serial killer John Wayne Gacy who was that town's brief celebrity citizen. This is the nihilism of the ghost years in our Information Dark Age: In Mann, the filmmaker has deep concerns about the cloudiness of human identity where the cop and criminal collapse into one frame and the hyperreal impact of the digital steals away our spirits. In Bay and Bachmann, Freedom, Sadism, and Tyranny are all similarly confused, but we dwell blissfully in the illusory ether bits of the videogame fantasy.

Ghost Wars: Miami Vice as the Definitive Film of the Bin Laden Decade

Osama Bin Laden's been dead for a while now, so maybe this note is, if not overdue, inconsequential and out-of-date. After all, Bin Laden's death was thought about as a moment of closure for a narrative that began with a catastrophe nearly a decade ago. But the geopolitical ramifications swung into motion are still accelerating, evolving with the technology that enabled its development in the first place. But considering that Michael Bay's third installment in his Transformers series also hits theaters this week, I'll use this as a kind of precursor to an upcoming discussion regarding him; for the last five years, thinking about information technology's marriage with geopolitics and law enforcement, particularly when it comes to Al Qaida and the Terror War's relationship with Hollywood, I've sculpted my own interpretive and aesthetic binary of the two Michaels, who along with James Cameron form a notorious unit of powerful visionaries whose underlings compare to autocratic dictators. Indeed, it's a good thing that they are filmmakers instead of world leaders, as they would certainly join Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot in leaving a nation of corpses while sculpting out their perfected idiosyncratic vision of the State. Being fair, they are both geniuses. But one represents progress and enlightenment within the Hollywood establishment, while the other is desires to feed into the desires of a successful and apathetic mentality. They are both technophiles working on the cutting edge, and while one is a Romantic, mindful of how there is a conflict between ubiquitous technology and the withering human soul, the other cannot wait soon enough for the human/machine singularity to occur. I speak of Michael Mann and Michael Bay, the yin and yang of the Hollywood action picture.

The reaction to Osama Bin Laden's death has been sheer adulation, with that aforementioned prospect of closure. These ten years, Bin Laden has been a symbol for an ungraspable Dr. Claw-like villain, whose existence was itself open to question. Like Kaiser Soze in The Usual Suspects, Bin Laden was less the stuff of fact than legend. His bogey-man status came all-too-quickly after 9/11. It did not matter if he was alive or dead. The symbol was thriving, whether denoting fear on one side, or inspiration for insurgent voices on the other. Assuming we're going to dismiss the conspiracy buffs and accept that President Barack Obama swiftly and proficiently took care of Bin Laden (as he did in swatting that fly early on in his administration), people have a kind of relief knowing that one less "bad guy" is in the world.
But modernity, and most especially "post-modernity," does not equal "individuality." And though Facebook and social networking gives everyone a "face" on the internet, maybe all we are, essentially, is our avatar, a glistening and perfected surface lacking depth or content, our identities skidding on top of the oceans in go-fast boats afforded to us by the best technology: and we go faster and faster, our avatars increasingly shimmering with perfection. The depths of the water, however, are increasingly held away from sight. It is a mistake to think of Al Qaida and Bin Laden as discontented relics of a medieval age warring on the modern world. On the contrary, one may argue that with their proficiency of satellite phones and cyber networks, they perfectly embody what it means to be modern. Progressive thought has little to do with the "modern": how else does one explain the success of Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann, and Andrew Breitbart? Bin Laden was a very modern man, held captivated with modernity's inventions and conveniences. He was caught with his pants down in all-too-human fashion, even dying with that last thing that all modern men wish to erase before their demise: their porn stash.

There is that famous image of Bin Laden in his compound watching his own televisual image. This is his masterpiece as a communicator. For he was no longer Osama Bin Laden the biological man, and much more than Osama the folk legend. He was Osama the digital video image. He was ageless now, his own avatar. Even in death, his image could be manipulated, as we saw in hoax corpse images spread on the internet. Al Qaida is imbued within this digital era. It is a globalized network, driven by information technology as much as it is by ideology. Being digital, it has no exact source, and so no end. You kill one Bin Laden, there is another to replace him, and another, and another, and another.

Maybe this is an all-too-pessimistic way to look at the situation. According to sources, Bin Laden's death is a major blow to Al Qaida, which has since been having problems establishing a new face. But the NSA screenings at the airport certainly show no signs of going away. We are still on perpetual orange alert. The Patriot Act was just renewed by President Obama. Though there are promises of troop withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan, unlimited monies and occupation give equal promise to perpetual war remaining in effect. The gravity of the flux serves the establishment's interests, and with more movement and technology change there remains a slower rate of human change. We are lost in the cycle of a procedural. This is apparently the central idea of David Simon's television show The Wire (for which I cannot attest, being that I have not watched the show, much to my detriment according to friends that have viewed it). But before modern serial television, the flux was a more subliminal feature. You killed the bad guy by the end of the episode, any show, and there was another one by next week. Miami Vice, the television show on which Michael Mann made his name and fortune on in the 1980s – and perhaps has since spent a lot of time trying to make reparations on -- is a definitive example. But I think Mann may have seen a lot of systematic meaning in the television format. Given its own gloss and appearance of style over substance, Miami Vice (1984-1989) has been seen as camp since the dawn of the 1990s. But watching the show (or at least the first two seasons; I haven't gotten any further) in its episodic structure, following undercover cops pursue, kill, and incarcerate cocaine cowboys, the striking thing is how blatantly melancholy and anti-establishment the show is. Miami Vice lacks the finesse of modern serial television, but its underlying theme is an important and provocative one for a popular medium. The system creates criminals just as it catches them, and it thrives on this circle. The abstract notions of Justice and Truth are mere masks the procedural wears, while men as pawns waste away under the duress. What's important to the system is not solving problems, but just keeping things moving, and more importantly, keeping things where they are with the power establishment. The irony of the show's pop-cultural signification is that it is seen as an emblem of the conservative Reagan years, when in fact it has political rage directed at both government and corporate powers. Look closely, and you will see a rabble-rousing activist show that is already too pessimistic to hope for a better future.

As I stated above, Mann made his name on Miami Vice, though he never directed an episode (and is credited with co-writing only two). Like his J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) in Public Enemies, he was an autocratic "administrator," which is disappointing for a fan of his films, which are so powerful in their specific, hands-on details (In watching his other television show, Crime Story, one can immediately see Mann's fingerprints on the one episode that he did direct). But the broad strokes of his style and themes are there, in the same way one distantly sees David Lynch in the inferior non-Lynch episodes of Twin Peaks. But Miami Vice made Mann a Hollywood player and even a kind of networked conglomerate, allowing him to later make The Last of the Mohicans, Heat, and The Insider the subsequent decade, some of the period's best films.

And though I'm not certain, I'd swear that I saw Michael Bay's name on the credits of one of the show's episodes, as a production assistant or something. This would not be surprising if it is in fact true, being that Bay started making music videos later in the decade, beginning his own career trajectory towards being a popular filmmaker in the 1990s with Bad Boys and The Rock, both produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. And though Bruckheimer is associated with successful and superficial big budget trash that appeals to our worst instincts as moviegoers, beginning with his partner Don Simpson on films like Flashdance, through Top Gun, Days of Thunder, Crimson Tide, Gone in 60 Seconds, and Con Air, he was also a co-producer on Mann's terrific first feature, 1981's Thief, starring James Caan.

These are the forces that worked together in the machismo decade of the 1980s to structure the modern action film/television series, which on television has been replaced by Bruckheimer's monopoly of CSI dramas (the first of which starred one of the best actors of Mann's core acting company, William Petersen). Ideology is another pertinent matter. Bruckheimer and Bay seem to espouse a more conservative mind-set of neatly drawn lines between good guys and bad guys, in addition to how they want to approach or cater to their audience (on the DVD commentary of the most respectable movie produced by Bruckheimer, Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down, Bruckheimer verbalizes how he believes George W. Bush will succeed in handling terrorism). Mann, on the other hand, was educated at the radical campus of Madison in the 1960s, and was present in Paris for the 1968 riots (one of the few individuals from the English speaking media allowed to be present with the riot organizers). His films draw equivalencies with Marx (whom James Caan quotes in Thief), Herbert Marcuse (name-dropped as the hero of Al Pacino's Lowell Bergman in The Insider), and other radical philosophers like Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio. Aside from Stanley Kubrick, his primary cinematic influences are cited as being from the 1920s Soviets, like Vertov's Kino Eye and Eisenstein. There is an understanding that everything the viewer sees is grounded in some sort of ideology (versus the apathy engendered by Bruckheimer and Bay) and images work to shape thought and attitudes.

The 9/11 Decade flung the world into its own geopolitical action film, the most intense of its kind since the Cold War. Black Hawk Down's release was even accelerated from summer 2002 to December 2001, to capitalize on the time's somber patriotism (and Academy Awards). Bruckheimer and Bay have owned this decade's vision of the popular action film. But in the corner is a mirror to the time's dark and violent heart, embodied by Mann (and additionally Paul Greengrass). Mann's 2006 film adaptation of Miami Vice expresses the period's anxiety better than any other action picture, and it also seems to forecast its outcome. On the one hand, the Bin Laden killing is analogous to a conscience-ridden liberal's nightmare, where due process is suspended as the guns come out, the enemy being terminated by heroes performing with grace under pressure. This suits Michael Mann's style. It connects him with the Bruckheimer sensibility that he helped create, which of course owes its debt to the canon of crime melodramas preceding it. Mann likes the grand one-on-one Western shoot-out where his existential loners can emulate the heroes of Anthony Mann, John Ford, Sergio Leone, and Sam Peckinpah: James Caan's "worker's revolt" in Thief; Will Graham taking down Dollarhyde in Manhunter (even though he's reminded by Jack Crawford, "Will, a SWAT team's going to take him out. Not us."); Chingachgook going after Magua in The Last of the Mohicans; Hanna chasing McCauley in Heat; or Max standing tall and closing his eyes and firing an unfamiliar pistol, killing Vincent in Collateral.

The Navy Seals that killed Bin Laden seemed to have the clockwork efficiency and flawless courage of Mann's best cops and his best criminals, characters who use their tools perfectly in adapting to a specific environment and executing their plans on a beat (look at how the robbers in Public Enemies and Heat are mindful of the clock). This is the same proficiency we see in the military men of Bruckheimer and Bay. Yet while both schools of my invented binary are steeped in admiration for these individuals, Mann has a melancholic longview, whereas one could look at Transformers as a kind of expensive recruitment film. Bay preaches the endgame, the glory of the antagonist's imminent termination. Mann will have his criminals killed, by he sees an illusory victory or heroism, administered by a Grand System that does not care for individuals. This is a theme explored in wonderful analyses on Mann by Professor Mark Wildermuth in his book Blood in the Moonlight: Michael Mann and Information Age Cinema, Steven Rybin (particularly as regards to his chapter on Miami Vice) in his scholarly work The Cinema of Michael Mann, and Jean-Baptiste Thoret's paper on Mann and Miami Vice, "Gravity in the Flux," a piece that understands Mann so perfectly that I feel inadequate in contributing anything to the discussion. Though hearing a nu-metal cover of "In the Air Tonight" during the moments preceding Miami Vice's climactic shootout may channel the furious, testosterone-based expectations of the big-budget action picture, the concluding sense is strikingly different from the chugging guitars and slow-motion "glory" of Bay's climaxes. To write in hyperbole, rather than naked Neanderthal masculine achievement and power, as the gun becomes an extension of a man's penis (which is what Michael Bay essentially is: 100% pure slow-stroking Anthony Weiner-style narcissism as a hairless chest watches itself masturbate in the mirror – Pure Awesomeness of Dude Orgasm sustained for at least 130 minutes), Mann's pictures are completely grounded in a deep melancholy angst. One of the best critics of Mann, Scott Foundas, has appropriately used to phrase "orgies of violence" in describing his action sequences, bridging him to his forebear Peckinpah. And like Peckinpah, behind the echoes of a gunshot is a pronounced blankness (the headline of Richard Schiekel's glowing Time review of Heat in 1995 was "Duel in the Blankness" – and that perfectly nails Mann). These are not videogame bullets. Bullets and bodies carry weight with this filmmaker, and in a spiritual landscape so vacuous, this is burdensome. Death is an escape, as is the numbness of work.

Mann understands systems: criminal, law, penal, economic, technological, and how they all are inextricably connected. And beyond all personal steps, there's the ghost of a great, big nothing haunting everything. Whereas the Michael Bay action climax – or conceit of one special effects set-up following another – is designed with the same expectations of a fit man on Viagra in erect anticipation as a perfectly toned, expressionless woman (like Megan Fox) does her striptease, there's already a kind of pronounced and sad exhaustion with Mann's heroes. Crockett (Colin Farell) and Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) prep their guns shortly before they go out to meet their fate. "It's that time," Tubbs says. "Yup," Crocket replies. "Badges are flashed, guns come out, arrests get made. That's what we do." Just earlier Tubbs was staring into space when his girlfriend and fellow cop Trudy (Naomi Harris) was hooked up to life support. "You know what gets me," he tells Crockett. "The prospect of losing her life. Of her losing her life over this bullshit line of work." Both moments in Miami Vice are a couple of the very few instances where characters are given a moment to stop working in the simulacrum and flux of work, and reflect on where they're at and who they are. A common criticism of Miami Vice during its release was how it failed to develop its characters in a conventional three-dimensional fashion, but when we look at the blank white walls of the safety houses, so much like Neil McCauley's (Robert De Niro) walls in Heat, we should understand that this is exactly the point. The key plot conflict in Miami Vice relates to how Crockett, undercover as a drug mover, has fallen in love with one of the cartel middlemen, Isabella (Gong Li). But whatever desire existing between two human beings (who are being mutually duplicitous) is secondary to the designs of the System and its perpetual motion of capital exchanges. "She could be a white collar money manager," Tubbs says to Crockett, "she may even be true love. But she's with them." And in Hollywood action movies, this is what the story is to reflect. You're either an Autobot or a Decepticon, in Transformers-speak. Crockett and Tubbs realize that it's a script, and they sigh before the climax saying, "Let's do this.". Signs or given avatars determine everything, much as Miami Vice's own cultural sign spelled its fate for a lot of moviegoers and critics; its execution is contradictory to what the words "Miami Vice" subliminally mean to us, so much that when the title appears at the end of the picture, it's disarming to see it (a director's talent or subtext does not matter; they may be similarly unmoved by Peckinpah's Little House of the Prairie, or Antonioni's Hill Street Blues). Crockett and Tubbs are programmed cyborgs (and we are programmed moviegoers in a regurgitating pop-culture), constant performers and players as undercover vice cops, but they understand the deep truth that this is still a "bullshit line of work."

Upon release, Mann fans (like Nick James in Sight and Sound) saw Miami Vice as a test of faith, being in line with so many other Hollywood remakes of popular television shows: feeble nostalgia, like Charlie's Angels and Starsky and Hutch (or the upcoming Transformers). But if Miami Vice is not avant-garde action cinema, one must at least allow that it is definitely not conservative, and probably as uncompromising a film that a big budget would allow (of apparently $120 million at minimum, close to $200 million at maximum, indicative of a system of capital that has itself certainly run out of its soundness – though I'm thankful in this case). Miami Vice is a middle-finger to what action movie images have become, particularly during a decade when so much money has been spent on wars where the images of violence and flesh being burned off has been the focus of conscious redaction on the part of the image manufacturers. That Miami Vice cost so much and yet is so contrary with the expectations of its summer cop-action-drama audience is very fitting for a post-9/11 world of intensive military recruitment and good/bad binaries lacking skepticism (Weeks before its release, Fox News entertainment writer Roger Friedmann was vocal about Universal's misgivings about how far Mann had taken the film away from the show, not even having the original Jan Hammer music; a Michael Mann viewer, on the other hand, understands this immediately; Kim Masters wrote similar misgivings from the Hollywood establishment to Mann about Public Enemies in 2009). Certainly one of the most grievous annoyances of the original television show was how prime time action could not show much – if any – blood whatsoever, and so how the characters look like children playing with toy guns as they fire on each other, bodies selectively falling without much corporeal disgust or collateral damage caused to bystanders and inanimate objects. With the first shootout of the film Miami Vice, when Aryan Brotherhood dealers kill undercover FBI agents during a "preliminary meet-and-greet," Mann makes sure that we see and so understand the effect of fast-moving metal weaponry on human flesh, and beyond that, abstract information on that flesh. The words of informant Alonzo Stevens (John Hawkes) were compelled by a simple digital photograph emailed to him, of his beloved wife Leonetta, taken hostage. Three men are killed because of the transfer of information. Money continues to flow. Between the digital lines are lives, and more than lives in the abstract, flesh with all of its tendons, limbs, and central nervous systems, comprising those lives and having sentimental attachment to other corporeal beings. Miami Vice is a very Romantic work in the most literary sense of "Romanticism," where Nature is running up against the designs of Civilization and Technology. It is significant that this first bloody shoot-out, with an arm hurtling backwards in slow-motion, has a background of electronic light, where machine apparatuses seem to be serving the sole purpose of other mechanical systems. The most important space in this schema is the non-space of the electromagnetic, the same place where much of the "invisible war" of Iraq was fought, as insurgents detonated bombs from a distance with a cell phone (and something that we see drug dealer Jose Yero do here).

I call Miami Vice the definitive film of the post-9/11 era, just as it is – by association – possibly the definitive film – pre-Social Network anyway – of the Information Age era, of which Mann is Godfather (and whose The Insider is probably the other great dramatic Hollywood text, alongside The Social Network). In 2006, it bridged two other great cyber thrillers. Paul Greengrass' United 93 and Martin Scorsese's The Departed also deal with 9/11, explicitly in one case, subtextually in the other, and they are attuned to the technological/videoscopic informatics implicit and resultant of the event. Whereas those two films, far more conventionally satisfying I think in their own separate ways (United 93 as a verite, almost real-time thriller; The Departed as a straight noir, and a candidate for one of Scorsese's most conventional plots – a mask for one of his richest subtexts), were more critically successful by virtue of how they exuded a more concrete humanism, Miami Vice has a certain coldness to it, though it is essential. Blade Runner is a key precedent for it, as it is for all cyber noir (The Departed's own aura is attained by being a kind of amalgamation of Blade Runner and Sidney Lumet's Prince of the City), and the screenplay structure of Vice seems to have a kind of digital determinism, or steady flow of constant movement. Thoret writes, "The opening ten minutes are enough for Mann to fix the rhythmic rules of Miami Vice; the event taking place will always matter more than the one that follows, whence the strange feeling of a film in pursuit of itself, obsessed by the next job, the action that follows…It is as if each shot were thinking of two things at once – the event taking place (a deal, an arrest) and the event to come (the same over again) – and the best way to not collapse consists of never staying still. In Miami Vice, it's to be physically there, here and now, because mentally one is always and already elsewhere." Thoret gives a funny example of the film's "short-winded" nature as if it were "in constant precocious ejaculation," bringing up the bedroom joke Tubbs plays on Trudy, where he fakes a premature orgasm.

Mann uses this same kind of story structure where characters are always moving – but to nowhere – in Public Enemies, which even has a song-lyric joining its images, "Don't know where they're going, don't know where they've been." The form of his storytelling is viscerally felt, something that for me divides the newer Mann from the older one who had more immediately satisfying plots, such as found in Manhunter, Heat, and Collateral. That last film was a potent turning point, given how it was mostly shot in high-definition video in a way that wore the image's lossless compression. Mann does not want to hide his video, and is consciously placing it in a paradigm separate from celluloid. But as technology has gone digital, so have Mann's heroes, evaporating into the pixel ether of being and non-being; cabbie Max (Jamie Foxx) works to reach a big dream of owning his own limo company, but will more likely remain fixed in the present flow of taxi driving, working on his dream until he wakes up old; his opposite is hitman Vincent (Tom Cruise), a man without an identity or a history, willingly erasing himself as he kills others for a steady flow of income. A question Mann's film of Stuart Beattie's screenplay – which he describes as the third act of a much larger elliptical story – asks is where exactly does this toil – the "bullshit line of work" – end? It's significant that Collateral ends on an LA train, carrying Vincent's bullet-ridden corpse that no one will probably notice for a long while. Even though the train's coming to the last stop, it will only keep on moving in the other direction, whirled without end, back and forth. The work never ends for individuals, the only true stop being death – something portrayed by Vincent here, and by John Dillinger – who lives for the present until the promise of romantic fulfillment provokes him to step "off the map" – in Public Enemies.

As Thoret noted, in Miami Vice, the movie itself seems to be trapped in "the Here and Now." "Everything progresses at top speed," writes Thoret, "but essentially nothing really moves forward." This makes it frustrating viewing at first, as instead of a predictable flowing arc, there is a straightforward trajectory into nothingness. To be active in the flux or the simulacrum as a steady worker "is also to lose oneself therein," something metaphorically offered by Alonzo's tragedy in Miami Vice, where the Aryans' contract to keep his wife alive is broken. With nothing left, he walks into oncoming traffic, leaving a briefly-viewed path of blood beneath a semi. Thoret nails Mann's theme, and really the theme of all of his films, when he says, "[The] human is only an event, a lost atom in the multitude." Mann's heroes are always in search of that elsewhere beyond the flow of work and action: Frank's collage in Thief, of attaining a nuclear family and financial stability; Neil McCauley's goal to retire to New Zealand in Heat; the Mohicans and settlers, seeking freedom from the violent political conflicts in The Last of the Mohicans; Wigand and Bergman in The Insider, trapped by their respective systems of Big Tobacco and CBS Broadcasting (which are both incidentally connected because of their monolithic natures) in The Insider; Max's postcard of the Maldives in Collateral; and John Dillinger's place "off the map" in Public Enemies, which he can sometimes taste at the movies. Miami Vice has a curiously dissonant moment when the film's flow is interrupted as the vice cops prep snitch Nicholas (Eddie Marsen). There are numerous ironies going on here, being that Nicholas, simply by being employed as a snitch, makes substantially more money than the cops who rough him up (the flux keeps his "cash flow" coming, Tubbs tells him). The cops work to intimate him, much like Al Pacino's Vincent Hanna works over his snitch in Heat: it's a performative aspect of the job. But then Mann frames Crockett in close-up. He turns away from the talking and looks out to the ocean. The sound disintegrates and he's lost in his dreams for a brief moment. Just as suddenly, he turns back to his work.

"The system runs at full speed but on empty and possesses no other end than that of its own stability," says Thoret. This describes the late-capitalist, global network that interests Mann, displayed in his post-modern crime and corporatist dramas, but designed and administered by the imperialists of yesteryear in The Last of the Mohicans and J. Edgar Hoover in Public Enemies. This describes the War on Terror just as it describes the War on Drugs (or Hoover's "War on Crime"), and though Miami Vice is "drug war" film and not a "terror war" film, it associates with the latter. Tubbs even mentions how the drug lord Archangel de Jesus Montoya (Luis Tosar) utilizes technology that the CIA has in Baghdad. The drug dealers here are not "cocaine cowboys," but are "vertically integrated," as Nicholas says. They are panoptical with omnipresent eyes, part of the whole apparatus. Montoya's key middleman is Jose Yero (John Ortiz), who has pronounced eyeglasses, and runs a system of constant surveillance. In his book, Al Qaeda and What It Means to be Modern, the philosopher John Gray writes, "Al Qaeda resembles less the centralized command structures of twentieth-century revolutionary parties than the cellular structures of drug cartels and flattened networks of virtual business corporations. Without fixed abode and with active members from practically every part of the world, Al Qaeda is 'a global multinational'." Like drug cartels, Al Qaida is now a virtual business, a structure without a center; it lurks in a digital realm. The execution of 9/11 was a masterful act of post-modern communication on every level. Just as Muhammad Ali gave the geographical location of Vietnam as "on TV," it is on the televisual screen where Al Qaida effectively showed its face (just as in The Insider, Lowell Bergman and 60 Minutes speaks to the leader of Hezbollah and offers him a "face" through a Mike Wallace television interview). Writes Gray, Al Qaida understands that "the twenty-first century wars are spectacular encounters in which the dissemination of media images is a core strategy."

Law enforcement reacts to illegality by becoming a Hobbesian surveillance state, and the workers within that state are denied individuality -- though promised "Freedom" -- as they merge with the virtual electromagnetic field that they are investigating and seeking to control. Miami Vice has an interesting presentation that almost demands subtitles as characters talk about their "Op-Secs" or whatever other jargon. They are more machine-like than human, constructed alongside their technology and bent on defining reality by that technology. The illegal actions of the Haitian pimp Neptune (Isaach De Bankole) are viewed on a cell-phone camera; airplanes are only "ghosts" if they are perceived for a second on radar technology, as we see Tubbs pilot a plane beneath another plane; go-fast boats run closely together to do the same. Elsewhere, Lt. Castillo (Barry Shabaka Henley) can only order his men to shoot on cartel snipers when his technological gadgets have picked up their radiating human forms through a mechanical lens. Finally, Yero, who has eyes on everything with his surveillance command center in a casino, proves to Montoya that Isabella has more than a "casual" relationship with Crockett, showing him the two duplicitous lovers dancing, their images on a laptop screen. Again, those other two cyber-punk masterworks from 2006, United 93 and The Departed, operate with the same language. In the former film, the Air Traffic Controllers have their eyes locked on radar screens, just as the military personnel have a hard time distinguishing "real world" crises from simulations. In The Departed, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) "erases" Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his identity by simply hitting a delete button: you are a social security number. You are merely your avatar, your outward sign (your wedding ring, your t-shirt, your badge). Though race matters, lineage is inconsequential (why does the Irish mob boss, Frank Costello, have an Italian name? This is a question the film wants us to ask that even the most perceptive critics have not). History is nothing, a resonance that makes The Departed an inverse of GoodFellas.

This sci-fi platform is why Mann's conspicuous use of HD videography – which understandably annoys so many film purists – works so well. We get the sense of an electronic, digital world where even the human beings are units of binary code, and the screened image has become ubiquitous. Thoret points out how the final shoot out between the vice cops and the cartel looks a lot less like than the operatic mid-film downtown L.A. shootout in Heat – so gloriously cinematic and the best shoot-out of its kind – than modern-day war reporting from a 24-hour news outlet. This is also why one of the obstacles in making the film – the worst hurricane season in the region's recent memory – further informs Miami Vice's Romantic theme. Nature truly is embattled with Civilization, the personal dreams of an individual longingly looking for human attachment and the depths of the ocean contrasting with the flux of work in globalization. This is not Thomas L. Friedman's progressive sense of post-Cold War globalization that we read about in The World is Flat. Mann's films show how the new communication and information technologies have worked to abolish time and distance, and in doing so have obliterated our ability to experience a sense of freedom in our need to reflect.

This true meaning of globalization, where things are always moving but caught in an ever-present Now with no historical perspective, was finally locked in with the modern myth of Al Qaida and the legacy of 9/11. The end is only an abstraction, when in practice everything is ceaselessly in motion without development (much like an episodic television show). The new wars promise an End to Terror, the same way the Drug War promised its own accomplishments, but we are consequently only deeper into the flux with more bodies but fewer souls to count. It is the toll of hegemonic control: if governments restrict drugs, there will be violent drug cartels. If governments have military and economic bases in Islamic countries, there will be insurgencies. Meanwhile, capital keeps on flowing throughout all sectors. Montoya is wealthy beyond measure, but he is joylessly glued to Bloomberg TV; outside of his limo, the streets of a South American country are littered in the debris of empty merchandise boxes, taken from the first world and sold for a discount here. Global capitalism lays the world bare, leaving discarded remnants of waste. The cop and criminal, soldier and insurgent, are not opposites, but are pawns in the same steady, absurd process of power maintenance. In this global technocracy, where history takes place on television and laptop screens, there is no such thing as "home." Just as Yero is dispatched, blown apart by Tubbs (Osama Bin Laden-style, I imagine), there is no closure to the narrative that keeps on moving to nowhere. SWAT teams close in on Montoya's house, but he is gone. Indeed, everything is gone. Like the airplane blip on the radar, he too is a ghost, traveling through the ether, and yet still controlling everything. He is the way of the future, an intimation grasped when we see his empty compound and hear Audioslave's lyric, "The shape of things to come" on the soundtrack. In virtually every other nostalgia picture, including Transformers, this is the filmmaker's promise of a sequel. But Mann's characters are haunted: "This has no future," Crockett says to Isabella about their romance, and he could well be also talking about authentic humanism in big motion pictures. Global capitalism is a False Dawn, a Hegelian End, but the perfection of that end is the disintegration of the self.

"You cannot fight gravity," Crockett says. Freedom is a myth, and the gadgets that compress space and time, making us increasingly dependent on them, may not open up the world, despite of their progressive intentions. Instead, we are sealed up and doomed to be locked in repetition. Mann's pop soundtrack reflects this: songs like "Numb," "Strict Machine," and "Auto Rock" decorate Miami Vice, feeding into its electric nightmare of angst. Within all of Miami Vice's subtitle-required tech-speak, and the conspicuous addiction of men to their machines, there is the almost humorous break from the action, where Crockett and Isabella go to Havana – Haven of Peace – to dance and make love (someone I know derided this sequence: "What the hell? You travel to Cuba and stop everything just to get laid?") The careful viewer will notice how elementally things stick out in this extended sequence, as there is virtually no use of cell phones or electronics. It is an immersion into the remains of the human in a world given to the post-human, a dream within a dark-age, as Isabella shows Crockett photographs of her mother, explaining her origins as a Chinese-Cuban; he meanwhile talks about his father's experience as a trucker touring with Lynard Skynerd (in a bar that seems to be saturated in photographs). The cars of Cuba make this look like a trip into the past, where the post-human was never permitted to happen. It is a respite from the onslaught of the digital, but all too quickly Crockett will have to leave, getting back to work.

That's the uncomely rhythm of Miami Vice which make it so strange, a new kind of action film just as 9/11 announced a new kind of war. One story trajectory instantly uploads another, and another, and so forth. The film begins with the vice cops prepping to arrest Neptune, but with Alonzo's call, everything switches. It then becomes a case of "Who is the leak?" The FBI? The DEA? ATF? Crockett and Tubbs are hired to infiltrate the Aryans and Jose Yero, but that leads to the global network of drug running, and so on. By the time the picture is over, the question of the leak is over, and we continue to be hurtled forward against the gravity of time. There is no satisfaction. Certainly, Jose Yero's death is one that's well-earned, much like Osama Bin Laden. But the rabbit only goes deeper into the hole, and all the ends remain loose. What we're left with is "a bullshit line of work," and no time – time being luck – to find meaning. We aren't left with the feeling of goals accomplished, but only the deeply intimate things that have been lost (embodied in another human being). This is a frustration that many viewers had with Miami Vice as a summer action movie in 2006, and so it serves Mann's theme well. Crockett walks away from love and Isabella, on her boat to Cuba as she stares longingly back at the shore. He walks into the hyperreal cloned-without-end buzzing walls of the hospital, into the flux of No Time and No Here but Now and Nowhere Else, Mogwai's "Auto Rock" thumping like the programmed rhythm of a decaying cyborg heart, a blade runner. The narrative has ended but nothing has changed. This is a theme in all of Mann's previous films: victory is all excruciatingly local and brief, following which the call of a glistening techno wilderness beckons the hero back into its grasp, ad infinitum until there's nothing left but the dark. However, in Miami Vice more than any other mainstream film during the decade following 9/11, Mann makes us feel the numbness of the electromagnetic invisible ghost war for our identity, where we are already Autobots and do not see it yet.

Recommended Reading:

Gray, John. Al Qaeda and What It Means to be Modern. Faber and Faber. London, 2003.

Rybin, Steven. The Cinema of Michael Mann. Lexington Books. Lanham, MD, 2007.

Thoret, Jean-Baptiste. "Gravity of the Flux." Recovered at: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2007/feature-articles/miami-vice/.

Virilio, Paul. The Information Bomb. Verso Books, 2006.

Wildermuth, Mark E. Blood in the Moonlight: Michael Mann and Information Age Cinema. McFarland & Company, Inc. Jefferson, North Carolina, 2005.