Marking 20 years
of bold journalism,
reader supported.
Culture
Film

Oh, Mann Movies

Or, what it's like to be a woman forced to sit through 'Blackhat' and its macho ilk.

Dorothy Woodend 28 Jan 2015TheTyee.ca

Dorothy Woodend writes about film every other week for The Tyee. Find her previous articles here.

I have a somewhat radical theory that men and women are interested in different things. Before you start sputtering invective and waving your hands in the air, bear with me for a moment. I want to tell you a story.

Back in about 1986, my sister had a boyfriend we shall call "Snoredom" (not his real name). He was a classic type, born and raised in the genteel lands of Lynn Valley, British Columbia, and thus possessed of all the knowledge one would ever need or want to govern the universe. At some point in his life, Snoredom was visited by the idea to move to Sweden. I'm not exactly sure when or why this passion for Abba Land took hold, but by the time my sister arrived on the scene it was a like a mold infestation in his brain.

One day while out on a date, Snoredom spent the better part of a few hours explaining the intricacy of the Swedish banking system to my poor sister. Being a polite young woman she listened, and only occasionally lapsed into a coma. Many years later, any mention of the Swedish banking system can still cause a relapse of this vegetative state in my sister. But now at least we have the term "mansplaining" to explain the phenomena.  

I thought about this while sitting through the interminable Michael Mann movie Blackhat, trying not to black out and tumble head over heels into the relief of nothingness. I hate to break it to you boys, but you can be pretty darn dull sometimes. Mann, even more so.

Blackhat entered theatres last week, but it probably won't be there for long. The film had one of the worst openings in recent history, earning a measly $4.4 million on its opening weekend. Eviscerated by critics who had a field day with its nonsensical plot and slick style, the film will slink away, tail between its legs. But I'm sure the Mann will rise again. Already some particularly dogmatic cinematic types are calling the film a misunderstood masterpiece.

Mann is a stylist of the old school variety, and a favourite of certain film critics who get off on his macho ways. He makes movies for men (Miami Vice, Heat, Manhunter). Women show up to be ogled and humped, but never have that much to do with the main, manly proceedings. Critics have argued that Mann exists somewhere between art house and mainstream cinema. I don't know about that, but I'll admit a few of his films have a certain pulpy flavour and sleekness that is fun to watch, even if you possess ovaries. Miami Vice was well-nigh incomprehensible in places, mostly due to Gong Li and Colin Farrell's duelling accents, but there were a few balletic moments of skin, guns, and fast motorboats slicing through wine dark seas. Heat also had some charm to it, and even included a scene with Pacino and De Niro holding hands.

Head-scratching thrills

Sadly there is little of that tangy fun in Blackhat, a largely turgid affair about the nefarious netherworld of hackers (the titular hats), where men with ones and zeros coursing through their blood write glowing green code at a furious pace. In our interconnected world, the intricate worldwide web that ensnares us all is a vulnerable thing, susceptible to viruses, invasions and corruption. Luckily Chris Hemsworth, a.k.a. People Magazine's Sexiest Man Alive, is here to help. (The film's casting is a little inexplicable, but perhaps the director read it as 'Sexist Mann Alive' and got over-excited.) Hemsworth plays Nick Hathaway, a bona fide hacker genius and a real Mann's man (meaning he has a way with the women), can take and give a punch and knows his way around international terrorists circles. In our introduction to Hathaway, he is seen reading cultural theory in his jail cell (Jean Baudrillard's The System of Objects, no less). Serving 12 years for cyber crimes of the financial variety, Hathaway whiles away his time in prison by reading Foucault and Derrida, and breaking into the prison's computer system to add extra money to his fellow inmates commissary accounts.

The film's action kicks off in a nuclear facility in Hong Kong. While technicians read the paper and go about their day, inside the system an invasion has already begun. Deep within the circuits of the computer system, a RAT (remote access tool) is at work, opening an entranceway for a virus to wreak havoc. This Tron-like world of glowing green data and ominous rumbles makes you think you’re in for something more interesting than actually happens. After this bravura opening we come back to the boring old real world, where the U.S. government and the Chinese military are struggling to discover who might be involved in the cybercrime. Chinese agent Chen Dawai (Wang Leehom) and his beautiful sister Lien (Tang Wei) are tapped for the job of working with the Americans. After securing a deal with the U.S. authorities, superstar hacker Hathaway (Chen's old college roommate) is sprung from prison in exchange for helping track down the blackhat. Paired with a couple of federal agents (played by Viola Davis and Holt McCallany) to keep watch on him, the team travels to Hong Kong to begin their search.

After the meltdown in China, the bad hacker's next target is revealed to be soy futures. Well, of course it is, you say. That's only logical. After running up the soy markets, where will the nefarious blackhat strike next? Netflix accounts? Your visa bill? If this gets your blood going, you may be a man; I'll wait while you have a peek below the belt to see if there's something down there that looks vaguely like a sack of oranges. Computers and semi-automatic machine guns are wielded with equal aplomb as the good hats and the blackhats finally make contact in a street parade in Jakarta. It's all supposed to be thrilling, but you may find your attention wandering after a while, or find yourself asking random questions like: "When did this fugitive couple have time to stop and buy nifty new outfits, complete with cool sunglasses?" or "Can rolled-up magazines really stop a speeding bullet?" And when the ultimate villain is finally unmasked, you may find yourself scratching your head even harder. Is that all there is? The Swedish banking system has taken over the world? Really?

The usual set pieces of Mann movies creak along: a redoubtable hero, and a character whose vocabulary renders even the simplest dialogue into some new version of The Jabberwocky. I spent a great deal of time craning forward in my seat trying to understand the new neologisms that were spilling out of actress Tang Wei, like a gamer on speed. "Pwnage," you say. "What noobiness is this?" Certainly computer geeks create new words all the time, but this poor woman seemed to be suffering a massive stroke whilst on screen. Hemsworth does his best to function as the director’s avatar, beating up bad guys, bedding beautiful women with nary a blink, and single-handedly besting the FBI, the NSA and the Chinese military. He's like a super-sexy Edward Snowden, without the diffidence. But at the end of the movie, things waft away like smoke with heat. 

The great white hero

As curious as it may seem in this day and age, the great white hero still lives in the movies. In fact, he reigns supreme. It's not a huge surprise, I guess. If you have money and power, you will greenlight films that reflect your world back in the most flattering fashion possible. I'm sure producers will give Mann more money at some point to make yet another movie, and off he will totter.

Much ink has been spilled over the mighty white Oscars this year, but take even the briefest glimpse of the awards season and you will see a lot of Birdman and Boyhood action. Men have picked up the majority of the directing and writing nominations, and largely swept the best film categories. The stories told are primarily concerned with men and their interests, whether it be the slow moult of boy into man in Richard Linklater's magnum opus Boyhood, or the non-stop wanking that is Whiplash.

Another case in point is director J.C. Chador's A Most Violent Year, a film that concerns a heating oil salesman in 1970's New York City. Certainly the film is well put together, with care and attention lavished on the details of camel hair coats and feathered coiffures, but what exactly is the point? Who really cares, in fact, about a heating oil company in the 1970s? The answer is apparently men. I can't think of a single woman I know who would be interested. But then I felt the same way about Scarface, The Godfather Trilogy and the Swedish banking system.   

Oh men… Sometimes I wish you would stop hogging everyone's time and attention and let someone else have a shot. I don't know if it's even worth wading into the morass that surrounds American Sniper at the moment, although in reading a lot of what is being written on the subject, I remembered an essay that Emily Nussbaum wrote for the New Yorker about All in the Family and specifically the character of Archie Bunker.

Norman Lear originally conceived the character of Archie Bunker as anti-hero and a cautionary tale about racism. He did not expect that the American audience would embrace Archie as a mouthpiece of the common man. In her New Yorker essay, Nussbaum explains this unexpected development thusly:

A Republican loading-dock worker living in Queens, Bunker railed from his easy chair against "coons: and "hebes," "spics" and "fags." He yelled at his wife and he screamed at his son-in-law, and even when he was quiet he was fuming about "the good old days."... A proud liberal, Lear had clear ideological aims for his creations: he wanted his shows to be funny, and he certainly wanted them to be hits, but he also wanted to purge prejudice by exposing it. By giving bigotry a human face, Lear believed, his show could help liberate American TV viewers. He hoped that audiences would embrace Archie but reject his beliefs.

In fact, the opposite happened. I thought about this fact while critics and pundits struggled to explain the unexpected success of American Sniper. Far from being something the U.S. public is supposed to grapple with, namely the complexities of war, the film has given the conflict in Iraq a human face, and it is white and male.

The other film that came to mind while watching American Sniper was The Wolf of Wall Street. Certainly they are very different films, but they share the same strain of American braggadocio of mythmaking and grandstanding. Both films end with the entrance of the real person behind the myth into the movie itself. In the case of Wolf, the leering suckface of the real Jordan Belfort was enough to render the entire conceit of the film -- that it was, in fact, a critique -- moot. American Sniper ends with actual footage of Chris Kyle's funeral procession, complete with Texas roads lined with Americans saluting and waving flags. Any argument that the film is something more than a filmed hagiography is undone for me by this one scene. But if you need more convincing, try watching the making-of-clips, in which Kyle's wife talks about her husband as though he invented the polio vaccine, walked on water and rode a bareback unicorn.

Stories about military personnel whooping at the film's scene of Kyle's miraculous shots, or weeping openly at his demise, proves the point that Lear learned the hard way: you can't control how an audience will choose to see a film. That was made explicitly clear when brokers and Wall Street Masters of the Universe organized screenings of The Wolf of Wall Street and howled along to the action in lupine frenzy. 

The other thing that is readily apparent in reading Nussbaum's piece is the fact that the culture wars have been going on almost as long as the real wars. It's kind of exhausting at a certain point, and any grown woman with a lick of sense would take one look at the boys burning up the Twitter feed, or mucking about in online comment threads, and walk right out the front door.

You can't keep a good Mann down, or so they say, but you don't have to listen to him either. Just stay the heck out of any movie theatre that is screening Blackhat… and avoid Sweden at all costs.  [Tyee]

Read more: Film

  • Share:

Facts matter. Get The Tyee's in-depth journalism delivered to your inbox for free

Tyee Commenting Guidelines

Comments that violate guidelines risk being deleted, and violations may result in a temporary or permanent user ban. Maintain the spirit of good conversation to stay in the discussion.
*Please note The Tyee is not a forum for spreading misinformation about COVID-19, denying its existence or minimizing its risk to public health.

Do:

  • Be thoughtful about how your words may affect the communities you are addressing. Language matters
  • Challenge arguments, not commenters
  • Flag trolls and guideline violations
  • Treat all with respect and curiosity, learn from differences of opinion
  • Verify facts, debunk rumours, point out logical fallacies
  • Add context and background
  • Note typos and reporting blind spots
  • Stay on topic

Do not:

  • Use sexist, classist, racist, homophobic or transphobic language
  • Ridicule, misgender, bully, threaten, name call, troll or wish harm on others
  • Personally attack authors or contributors
  • Spread misinformation or perpetuate conspiracies
  • Libel, defame or publish falsehoods
  • Attempt to guess other commenters’ real-life identities
  • Post links without providing context

LATEST STORIES

The Barometer

Do You Think Naheed Nenshi Will Win the Alberta NDP Leadership Race?

Take this week's poll