March 28, 2006
inside man
Spike Lee's new film goes to considerable lengths to have Jodie Foster's cosmopolite superfixer quote (pointlessly misquote, really) the titanic financier Rothschild, who said of property, "Buy when there's blood in the streets." We're supposed to blanch at this understanding of history; as advice, it focuses on the moment of choice, when one can ruthlessly climb aboard the worst forces of history or take the high road. And so is the moral dimension of Christopher Plummer's banker, a former Nazi collaborator, rendered.
Oddly, a different adage would have rendered the backstory far more illuminatingly, without offering us such an easy moral superiority: Balzac's "Behind every great fortune there's a crime." The difference is both slight and absolute, in that the former allows the imagination that there could be a billionaire banker who was right with the world; Plummer just isn't quite him. Evil, herein, is a matter off a single choice made years ago that coulda gone the other way. Had the film kept Balzac to hand, we would know that every bank holds a secret, and the snoozy peregrinations to explain why this bank would be obviated.
This is central; there's a record of Plummer's originary villainy in a safety deposit box, and on this document the plot turns. This is the film's problem. As a caper procedural with witty asides, Inside Man is at the top of the Hollywood heap, especially given the aura that the various crypto-political asides ("give me back my fucking turban") take on within the ambiguous tension of a film that is at once a) by Spike Lee, and b) studio contract work. On that level, the film's only real disappointment lies in the amount of time that the hero-criminal spends behind a mask, a choice that made a bit more sense for Hugo Weaving than for the absurdly charismatic Cllive Owen.
But in the procedural's relation between narrative and plot, the mechanics of the former are always more interesting than the "secret" of the latter, not least because the secret is always, y'know, Nazis. The motivation of audience sympathy in such films requires — no less than the domestic drama requires a child in jeopardy — that the villainous Grand Old Man have a specific and historical association with an agreed-upon absolute evil, of which there aren't all that many. Hence the predictability of the "secret," every time.
Had Balzac stood in Rothschild's place [a fine way to start any paragraph — ed.], we would be at once more fluid in our choices, and more honest. The film's failure to pick the right adage is identical to the film's failure to have an interesting plot.
This might be seen as a matter of narrative economy: the crimes crouching in bank vaults (literally, in this film) are rarely singular or easily narratable; they are crimes of duration, in which value is moved by force from some humans to others over time.
Our note is perhaps a banality: that Hollywood movies like to imagine that there are good billionaires and bad billionaires, and that the distinction is finally clear and identifiable. The appeal of this imaginary needs no detailing. What's profoundly ironic is the nature of this particular form of the fantasy, as regards Spike Lee.
The logic whereby historical evil within living memory pools around the Holocaust is exactly the justificatory logic which buttresses the state of Israel at every turn, often at the expense of other historical victims. The oddity here is not, as might first appear, simply that Spike Lee has turned his political thinking to the Holocaust, after decades of irritating Jewish audiences; the oddity is what vanishes, in this particular case, in the smoke of that choice. Lee himself has spoken against this with great vituperation, and indeed has publically posed the United States' defense of Israel against the historical treatmenty of slavery — which is to say, against the systematic, violent long-term extraction of value from black bodies to enrich white bodies. Lee (no more than Faulkner) identifies this as a founding and perpetually repressed story of America, of American wealth and power.
Spike Lee's longstanding reasoning about crimes, fortunes and power, that is to say, has been the exact opposite of the very historical imaginary that deforms and dullifies an otherwise charming and engaging Spike Lee joint; nothing, in fact, could structurally trace "what it means for Spike Lee to do studio contract work" more coherently than this incoherence.
Posted by jane at March 28, 2006 07:40 AM | TrackBack