#blackhat 2015

[dgct2]

blackhat (2015)

Dir. Michael Mann

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Kalman P. Bland, The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual, Princeton University Press, 2000 / various Mann screencaps.

[michaelmanns]

Blackhat (2015)

Dir. Michael Mann

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[“Crypto-Jew”] focuses on the discomforts of crypto-Jewish identity and the process of looking for absence. Nasrallah wrote: “I’m staring. / And, though I am entitled, / I feel like I’m prying. // I’m looking through a keyhole… / crouched in awe of wisdom, / expectant and hesitant. // I’m listening / like a child who is eavesdropping, / lapping up the pearls of wisdom / that knowingly roll down the grain of wood, / as I squat, uncomfortable, / before the door to antiquity.”

The speaker can and cannot access Jewish knowledge, within earshot but forbidden; the key to the past is missing, and the gaping keyhole creates distance between past and present. Not represented as sensorially vivid, like in Sandoval’s poem, the past is undefined and indistinct, described through a single word: “antiquity.”

The secret and unexplained behavior, however, is much more intriguing to me than the history or the science. How does a family continue to perform rituals they don’t understand for 500 years? [...] Whole communities, unbeknownst to one another, followed customs and engaged in practices they didn’t understand for centuries and passed them on to their children and grandchildren, preserving, against all logic, a tradition that was meant to die out. But it didn’t. It persisted. 

The relics of the family’s Marrano past were preserved, even if no one ever took them out and showed them to the children. They kept them. Who does that? Why? Maybe it’s what the Stage Manager in Our Town says: “Everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal.”

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Told myself I would commit to a semi-thoughtful review of every movie I watch this year. Helps to start January with a Blackhat/Collateral double feature.

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For this little Blackhat blurb I would like nothing more than to talk about how Sadak's name and username are an ironic play on the Proto-Indo-European triconsonantal root SDK* which "translates" (roughly, heretically, with due deference to Cleanth Brooks) to justice or righteousness — I might argue, at the risk of opening a whole supermarket aisle's worth of canned worms, that conformity is the word we're looking for in modern English** — but to explain this to the uninitiated Mannboy would require an essay's worth of exposition, citations, etc, and so I'm going to limit myself to broad strokes, high-level accessibility. I really do have to hand it to the guy; even gesturing vaguely at these interpretations on my own blog makes me feel like I'd be better suited to preaching from a cardboard pulpit in Times Square while Napoleon XIV plays from a boom box. Fortunately I was raised non-proselytizing. Unfortunately for my mutuals I have a blog and opinions.

*Also very likely a reference to tzaddik but I would likewise refrain from platforming that reading where any old pair of wandering eyeballs could stumble on it!

**He thinks he's SOOOO funny with the literal grapheme doublespeak and he's right, it's hilarious

[michaelmanns]

Manhunter (1986) | Blackhat (2015)

Dir. Michael Mann

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Thank you so much for the info! I just finished Heat 2 and my brain is on fire. I’m gonna reread it and try to get my thoughts in order, there’s just so much to take in. As to your point about the characters next Mann-Gardiner book being continuations/extensions of Chris and Vincent, that would make a lot of sense. Heat 2 felt like it was a continuation/synthesis of all Mann’s previous works. It would make sense for the next book to be sequel/continuation of Heat 2 in terms of the ideas and themes but not necessarily an actual sequel to Heat 2.

You're welcome! And yeah, hands down the most insane trip I’ve ever been on reading a book. I’m still on it! The story itself is a hardboiled postmodern romp, and I also just never expected him to write a mass market crime novel that was intentionally designed (this is my master thesis, lmao) to engage you in a a hermeneutic test of wills. So when you read it a second time, my recommendation is to slow down and pay conscious attention to the language used and the reflexive activity that is you translating that language during the act of reading. When I first started picking up on some of the more ostentatious “text artifacts,” the effect was like having the embedded image in an optical illusion jump out at you all of a sudden. And once you see it, you can’t stop seeing it, and you also can’t stop wondering about the perceptual machinery that enabled this trickery to begin with. I will never know what made him decide to construct the book in this way, to give it a double-identity that is both concealing and announcing itself as hard as it can. This scene from Blackhat may be instructive:

So maybe he is just “still writing” and trying to figure that out himself. It is very much an archival effort, which you pick up on, and that reflexive quality has a playfulness to it that is whimsical one moment and vicious the next. And fabula aside, just nuts and bolts of narrative technique or pure “style,” the prose is mystifying. A vocabulary of “lowbrow” contemporary pulp grafted around metaphors and poetic devices so archaic they find their closest analogues in the Hebrew Bible. (Really!) For me personally it is so “fraught with background” that exegesis unveils information hazards. I’m being hyperbolic for fun, but it really is written as an undercover hypertext — a covert operator intended to be operated upon by the reader, opened up, investigated.

And there’s no end to the Derridean abyss of free play. You could do a term paper just on the Kubrick references, for example (I probably haven’t even caught all of them yet). Excuse me, why is Chris Shiherlis speaking sudden florid Yinglish in chapter 86? What is non-diegetic “Champagne Supernova” doing in Chicago in 1988? Or uncanny textual parallels to the design of a museum exhibit on the architecture of the gas chambers?? (I can't find the original post on my blog to link to, but maybe I should just make a new one, because it's there and it's crazy.) And WHO THE FUCK IS NATE, WHAT’S HIS RACKET???