March 04, 2006
16 blocks
It's interesting: the particular filmic sequence in which someone, now a superhero, now a civilian, must needs make a way through the city without passing through the streets, exactly, traveling rooftop to rooftop, leaping perilously over the gaps, racing across the tarpaper and rubble, past the dovecotes and antennae. Circulation, somehow, has become a problem — perhaps because it's designed in part for surveillance and control. And so it is circulation itself that must be eluded.
There's a matching sequence, motivated by the same narrative needs for evasive action in traversing the downtown from here to there, but entirely different in affect and imagery. This is the passage from the lowest floor to lowest floor of buildings (a sequence featured more than once in 16 Blocks), requisitely smashing through walls as one goes. When such a sequence apears onscreen, it involves ground floors that seem basementlike, or basements themselves; bars figure prominently in this tradition, though not as much as grottos where some sort of restaurant prep work is being done, most frequently by Asian workers. This is in fact the classic mise-en-scene of the substructure creep: the basement of the Chinese restaurant, where non-English speaking workers scarcely look up beyond an impassive glance as the leads race through on their way to and from other lives, bloody and beweaponed.
Sure, you can just get from here to there by going basement to basement, like the winter-minded passages of the disneyland called MIT, or like John Cheever's voyager making his way home through the suburbs, swimming pool by swimming pool. But in the city, for whatever reason, immigrant labor is the necesary setting for this particular fantasy.
Often these sequences are set in the heights or depths of a particular kind of structure, stone-faced turn-of-the-century apartment buildings with a drab restaurant at ground level, the buildings that most surely and anonymously signify the massive population shift to urban areas (with attendant increase in labor density) that happened in the United States, 1880-1920. Their roofs and basements both provide for the spatialization of the urban 20th Century; they invented the third dimension for the city as surely as, per Apollinaire's poem "Guerre" (Calligrammes), World War I invented it for the globe. But if the roofs suggest flight, the basements with their sweatshop spectrality are more directly the scene of urbanization and industrialization istelf, the more material facts of western modernity.
Here one thinks of the tactic of urban combat in particularly dense blocks which involves entering one house and knocking through walls to move to the next and the next; didn't Benjamin write of this? Certainly the arcades convert this fantasy of fleeing from public space by cutting though city blocks — the hero appearing as a curiosity before the laborers — into its most profitable form, even in the late morning of modernity....
Posted by jane at March 4, 2006 03:55 PM | TrackBack