[COLUMN] Blackhat Was the Culmination of Michael Mann's Neo-Westerns | by Darren Mooney

Note: This week marks the 10th anniversary of Blackhat, Michael Mann’s sadly underseen techno-thriller. It’s very good. This piece mentions plot points from several of Mann’s films: Thief, Heat, Miami Vice, Public Enemies, Blackhat. It doesn’t get too deep into the endings, but just keep that in mind if you are planning a Michael Mann binge, for whatever reason. (Well, aside from the fact that it’s always a good time for a Michael Mann binge.) Blackhat is currently on Netflix in the US.

Although Michael Mann has never made a literal western, his filmography draws heavily from the genre.

Many of Mann’s films are populated by the sorts of archetypes that would define the western. They are stories of lawmen and outlaws, and the blurred boundaries between the two. They are pulp tales, stories of masculine men who exist on the very fringes of ordered and structured society. However, Mann draws most heavily from the central themes of the western, the idea that these pulp heroes are men out of time, just waiting to be displaced by the inexorable march of progress.

In the western, this industrialization manifests through the advance of the railroad into the western frontier, bringing with it civilization and capital. In many of the best westerns, there is a sense of tragedy as these gunfighters help to lay the foundation of a world that will have no place for them. This is a central tension within many of Mann’s movies, although Mann has traded the American west for a more abstract digital and existential frontier that is being colonized.

This tension plays out across the four decades of Mann’s filmography. It’s present in his very first feature film, Thief, released in 1981. The eponymous breaking-and-entry man, Frank (James Caan), is a small-time operator who works reliably in Chicago. However, his life falls apart when he is targeted by Leo (Robert Prosky), a high-level operator who has tapped into an organized network of criminals that operate at a national level. Leo has a vision for the future of organized crime.

Leo wants to turn Frank into a private contractor, who could “put down contract scores all over the country.” Leo offers a pretty sweet deal. “You don't look,” Leo explains. “You don't case. You don't  do nothin'. We point you to a score. When we say it's there, it's there.” If Frank agrees to join Leo’s organization, Leo will cover any expenses – “money, guns, cars” – and ensure that Frank is protected by “a lawyer, a bondsman” in case of arrest. It is crime as a franchise. Crime is entering the ’80s.

Frank is reluctant to accept Leo’s offer. Frank is a criminal of the old school, “self-employed [and] doin’ fine.” However, the pressure gets to him and he eventually agrees to one last job to allow him to retire from the life, to be with his girlfriend, Jessie (Tuesday Weld). Inevitably, this is not enough for Leo. Leo wants to more fully integrate Frank’s skills into his operation. This sets the two men on a collision course, with Frank representing an older school of criminal and Leo representing modernity.

Inevitably, as Mann’s career progressed, so too did his vision of modernity. Heat is a western in a very literal sense. Although based on a criminal from Mann’s hometown of Chicago, the film is set in Los Angeles, the end of the American West. One of the most iconic shots in Heat finds professional robber Neil McCauley (Robert DeNiro) staring out of his modernist house at the unyielding Pacific, obviously influenced by Alex Colville’s painting Pacific. McCauley is running out of west.

McCauley dreams of escaping to Fiji, a country so distant that – to quote The Truman Show from a few years later – “you can't get any further away before you start coming back.” However, McCauley is also a man out of time. He gets the plans for the movie’s big bank heist from Kelso (Tom Noonan), who is just parsing electronic signals. McCauley doesn’t seem to quite understand it. “How'd you get this information?” he asks. Kelso replies, “This stuff just flies through the air.” It’s a brave new world.

McCauley’s heist is ultimately undermined not by police officer Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), but by the spite of money launderer Roger Van Zant (William Fichtner). Van Zant is a different sort of criminal, who “owns banks in the Caymans.” He wears a suit and works in an office. He isn’t adept at violence. However, when McCauley rips off his bonds, Van Zant takes it upon himself to sabotage the robber. Even after Van Zant’s first attempt to assassinate him, McCauley underestimates the threat posed by the banker, describing taking care of Van Zant as “a fucking luxury.” It’s a major miscalculation.

This theme of lawmen and outlaws existing out of time becomes particularly pronounced in Mann’s work after the turn of the millennium. His reimaging of the beloved 1980s show Miami Vice is a surreal treatise on the realities of globalization. Ironically, given its title, very little of Miami Vice takes place in Miami. Instead, the film focuses on the international nature of the modern drug trade, the blurred boundaries across which these criminals operate.

Miami Vice was a show about the blurred boundaries between police officer and criminal, focusing on a unit of undercover cops who posed as criminals to get close to suspects. The film builds on this idea, with the collapsing of the barriers between “fabricated identity and what's really up” serving as a metaphor for the interconnected nature of modern global commerce. Much of the film takes place in the “Tri-Border Area” separating Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. It’s a border with three sides.

As in both Thief and Heat, it is the forces of capitalism that seem to drive modernity forward. It is the flow of money and commerce that erodes those traditional notions and identities. The only time that Miami Vice slows down is when Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) takes his lover Isabella (Gong Li) to Cuba. Of course, in the densely interconnected world of Miami Vice, Havana is only a boat ride away. However, once there, Sonny and Isabella have the time and the space to fall in love.

Mann hammers this theme once again in Public Enemies, his film documenting the last days of notorious 1930s bank robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp). Like McCauley, Dillinger is fleeing law enforcement, but he is also grappling with the changing face of modern criminality, which has embraced modern technology to allow for the generation of larger amounts of cash at lower risk through telephone betting. Even in the midst of Prohibition, John Dillinger is a man out of time.

“On October 23rd, you robbed a bank in Greencastle, Indiana,” boasts Phil D'Andrea (John Ortiz) to Dillinger. “You got away with $74,802. You thought that was a big score. These phones make that every day.” However, Dillinger’s bank robberies draw undue attention from law enforcement. “You're bad for business,” D’Andrea warns. Dillinger loses the support of the organized criminals, which causes the ground to shrink from under him and makes his arrest or death inevitable.

In some ways, it makes sense that Mann would be drawn to these kinds of stories. In Mann’s filmmaking, form and function intertwine. His movies aren’t just stories about old-fashioned outlaws trying to adapt to changing times, but they represent the work of an artist navigation similar changes in the industry. Most obviously, Mann was famously one of the first “veteran” directors to embrace the shift from film stock to digital at the turn of the millennium.

Mann is one of the true pioneers of digital filmmaking. His early work in the format is a prime example of that narrow window when filmmakers like David Lynch and George Lucas were exploring digital as a new format rather than as cost-effective way of emulating traditional film. Mann’s films like Collateral, Miami Vice and Public Enemies take advantage of the unique attributes of digital as a format and do not look like traditional movies.

This embrace of digital cinematography creates a tension within the films themselves. The content of these movies is decidedly old-fashioned: Miami Vice is a reimagining of a classic television show, while Public Enemies evokes classic Warner Bros. Prohibition-era gangster films. However, the format of those movies is incredibly modern. There is something uncanny about them, seeing familiar images and iconography rendered through the prism of cutting-edge modern technology.

In their cinematic language, Mann’s films become a literal expression of one of his central thematic preoccupations: classic archetypes like Sonny Crockett or John Dillinger trapped in a digital world that seems at odds with the audience’s expectations of and relationship to them. In some ways, Blackhat feels like the culmination of this trend in Mann’s filmography, the point at which the digital and the physical are thrown directly into conflict with one another.

Blackhat focuses on an FBI team led by Special Agent Carol Barrett (Viola Davis), tasked with tracking down a hacker known as Sadak (Yorick van Wageningen). However, Blackhat emphasizes the challenges facing a nation state trying to police an abstract space like the digital world. The United States has to work with China, one of its chief global competitors. At one point, Barrett’s team has to worry about getting into Indonesia without the right “visas or badges.” Traditional structures are not built to deal with threats like this.

Barrett enlists convicted hacker Nicholas Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth) to track down Sadak. Tellingly, Hathaway relies very heavily on physical and material objects in his pursuit. At one point, he has to recover a physical hard disk drive from inside a melted-down Chinese nuclear reactor. At another, he points out how useless it is to try to identify a mole by name. “Everything will come up phony,” he explains. However, the suspect’s ID badge is a tangible and real artifact.

In contrast, Sadak has submerged himself so completely in the digital world that he has no connection to the material world. “Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I don't even know who I am,” he explains to Hathaway. “Where I am. In what country.” When Hathaway confronts Sadak about the violence and destruction that his hacking has wrought, Sadak treats such deaths as trivial. “I'm a gamer,” he protests. “I hire people to do sub-symbolic stuff.” Sadak deals in abstract ideas.

Indeed, the only thing real to Sadak is money, although it has also been rendered abstract and intangible through digital transfers. Indeed, perhaps in an allusion to Mann’s roots, Hathaway figures out that the only way to get to Sadak is through the transfers into his accounts, in particular the “money from Chicago.” Once again, Hathaway realizes that the key is physical. Arranging a meeting, he preps a hidden knife to use. “It's all about if I can get close enough fast enough,” he explains.

Almost a decade passed between the release of Blackhat and the release of Mann’s next film, Ferrari. For a long time, it seemed like Blackhat might be the director’s last film. It would have been a fitting closing note. Blackhat is the culmination of one of the great central themes of Mann’s career, the story of a relatively old-fashioned outlaw thrown into conflict with modernity, trying to hold on to something real as the world grows increasingly abstract.

Blackhat takes Michael Mann’s western storytelling across the digital frontier.