Blackhat
“Blackhat (2015)”
Text By: Basil Swartzfager
Original Publication Date: January 22nd, 2015
To begin biographically, I have no real interest in making movies. I used to. But the annoyance of long hours, wrangling friends together, and my dissatisfaction with the disparity between the vision in my head and the final outcome got the better of me. Occasionally, though, a movies comes along that makes me wish I hadn’t given it up. It makes me want to run out of the theatre and start filming immediately. Last year that movie was Goodbye to Languange 3D. This year the movie of momentary inspiration came early, it was called Blackhat and it came hard.
Not since Point Break have I seen a big budget action film so willing to push form to the point of joyous aesthetic abstraction. Bodies and objects have equal value in director Michael Mann’s eyes; they are pleasurable pieces to be chopped up and arranged for their attractive power and little else. Blackhat willfully shifts from slow-motion close-ups to long shots that shimmer with the hyperreal quality of 48 (or possibly 60?) frames-per-second. Generally any frame rate besides 24 distracts me to the point of rendering the object unwatchable (I dislike most British television), but Mann makes it artifice part of the point. In a gunfight staged in an empty drainage tunnel men hide behind pillars and the too-crisp digital photography flattens them into dark silhouettes against the blown out concrete behind them.
Chris Hemsworth in the lead role is less a man than an amalgamation of body parts: hands gliding across a keyboard, an ironclad jawline with a strand of hair falling across eyes that stare with equal intensity at a computer monitor and down the barrel of a gun, curved abs bisected from head and limbs link an anatomy textbook. Wei Tang gets similar treatment: sunglasses indoors, long dark hair blowing back away from her shoulders, the curve of long necks and legs. While the intense ogling stare of Michael Bay’s camera often makes me squeamish, lingering on asses and low cut tops with pornographic glee, Mann’s gaze doesn’t privilege one gender over another and, to offer faint apologia, achieves a kind of egalitarian status to his dehumanized images.
This question of objectification brings me to a larger conundrum, if I may be allowed to digress for a moment. If there exists a scale somewhere with Bazinian realism that values long takes, close observation of humanity, a respect for characters as an indexical signifier of the photographed subject on one side of the scale, and postmodernist suspicion of all images, believing every photograph is inherently false and therefore meaningless on the other side, I would prefer to align myself fairly closely with Bazin. I believe in moral responsibility in filmmaking, in treating people like people as a way to invite empathy in the viewer and hold oneself accountable for the images you’re creating. But then I see a film like Blackhat and maybe that all goes out the window. There is such indulgent pleasure in the way Mann chops these people up into empty signs, rendering their humanity a series of momentary gestures cannot add up to any unified whole, that it makes me question everything I tell myself I believe.
The editing only heightens this sense of displacement, working together with this abstracted photography to disrupt spatial continuity whenever Mann feels like it. Even typical dialogue scenes consistently break from coherent space as Mann willfully ignores typical editing rules (the 180 degree rule being the most often broken) in order to create pleasure through the friction of the unexpected. A scene will seem to fall into a typical shot/reverse-shot pattern only to suddenly (and whimsically!) cut to a close-up of one character from an angle I never could have expected and in one moment all sense of viewer complacency disappear. There’s a way this could become incoherent -- many less talented directors have experimented with unconventional editing techniques to disastrous results -- but Mann achieves an internalized logic that keeps the film readable even when it seems assembled from disparate pieces.
Blackhat’s similar approach to narrative that, for me, is somewhat less effective. Or perhaps I am just better at accepting visual and editorial abstraction than narrative. Like the bodies onscreen, carved to highlight their desirable elements while the overall sense of bodily unity is abandoned, Blackhat shreds the crime film narrative and disposes of everything Mann finds uninteresting. In this instance, that means plausible characters with meaningful relationships to one another. It means scenes that build in comprehensible ways, with each moment adding something to either our understanding of the characters or our understanding of the overall plot. While most films that don’t conform to a typical structure do so loosely, giving a free flowing sense of movement where some scenes may feel unnecessary or too long, Blackhat does the opposite. It often feels like the greatest hits collection of a much larger movie, chopping out connective tissue to get from one moment to another in a more rapid fashion. This film feels about ten steps removed from abandoning narrative all together and, for me, I desperately wish Mann could have taken those ten steps. This film is frustratingly close to being a full-on avant-garde film, far closer than the overrated abstraction people lavished on Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity and I must admit this feels like a case where splitting the difference hurts the movie a little. A more conventional narrative could have given the typical moments of catharsis and emotional involvement one expects from this kind of film, and a move towards absolute abstraction could have given over completely to the delirium of setpiece after setpiece, building momentum with each awe-filled moment. Still, this is a step in a beautiful direction for the contemporary action film. I worry, given that this movie cost an amazing 70 million dollars and is in the process of massively flopping, that none of its brilliant lessons will be adopted by future genre directors, but what we have is enough to make it one of the most exciting action films of this decade.
-{Author, Year}
