Slight Rebellion Off Madison: Booze, Dames, and My MAD MEN Years

In my 38 years on this earth, I’ve smoked exactly two cigarettes.  And I wouldn’t even count those two as being smoked; I lit them up for comedic effect amongst friends, blew on them, but to quote that sage wit/ladies’ man from Arkansas, I did not inhale.  I’ve been legitimately drunk four, maybe five times.  All over a woman.  Or women, for that matter.  Such a classic and clichéd male response.  I didn’t drink at all until I was 22, and then only on very rare occasions.  Four years ago, I returned to my teetotaling ways, possibly due to the long shadow that my late father (who was an alcoholic, and smoked for 40 plus years…but a great dad and human being as well) cast, but mostly because I never much liked imbibing and I wanted to rededicate myself to outliving my friends.  Okay, in all honesty, the rise to world fame of pro wrestler CM Punk (who espouses the straight edge lifestyle both in his career and regular life) served as my main impetus.  But that’s another story for another day.

Yet for someone who takes such little interest in the classic vices, I’ve devoted a good chunk of the last six years of my life to a television show that has done more to portray the seductive and destructive glamor of these accoutrements than any other work of modern mass media.

In many ways, Mad Men has been the unlikeliest of cultural institutions of this so-called new Golden Age of Television.  Pitch the show’s premise (advertising executives struggle to stay relevant as the ‘60s progress, vintage bad behavior is indulged) without any of the finer details and you have what sounds like a fairly plodding story arc.  It’s built around a sub-sociopath of a main character who’s not a cancer-riddled meth cook, or a mob boss in therapy, or an alcoholic cop chasing a deadly drug gang.  He chain smokes (a somewhat radical concept in the modern tobacco-phobic media environment), drinks himself to oblivion on a regular basis, cheats on his wife, and lives a generally reprehensible and self-serving existence.  His wife begins as a victim, but is then revealed to possess the stunted psyche of a little girl; she becomes a cold enigma as the show progresses.  The second-billed character is a neophyte secretary who serves as audience proxy, but she too becomes a much colder, pragmatic, and distant character as the show goes on.  Her romantic interest is an Ivy League weasel who makes the show’s lead look downright wholesome.  The comic relief bosses are a pair of Ayn Rand worshipping, rabid capitalists who really only care about the bottom line.  And the younger supporting characters are generally feckless drones in a cutthroat environment.  A death happens here and there, but the most radically dramatic moments usually involve an office argument.

As more than one of my friends has said to me “Mad Men is so depressing.”  Or “I made it through Season 1, but by the time I got halfway through Season 2, I hated everyone except for one of the secretaries.”  Or “Boy, it looks great, but does anything actually happen?”  The West Wing this ain’t.  But Matthew Weiner’s fin de siècle epic has never been too concerned with likeable protagonists and satisfying audience expectations (a lesson he learned well in the writers’ room of the final few seasons of The Sopranos.)  And it’s been this dedication to the purity of his storytelling pursuit (along with singlehandedly reviving mid-century fashion and that distinct strain of Rat Pack-style cool) that has propelled the show into the pantheon of great filmed entertainment…and I’d argue into the pantheon of great art.

My connection to Mad Men began partway through its run.  And much like Don Draper’s best ad pitches (which are carefully cloaked bit of self-analysis), it came out of desperation.  In my former life as a high school English teacher, I made my bones for quite some time teaching elective courses at the Junior and Senior level.  The workload was often challenging, but I could also rest assured that, more often than not, I was getting the cream of the crop enrolling in my courses…or the students who actually liked me.  It was all generally fun, but then the day came, early in 2009, when the department decided to reorganize teaching assignments.  Up to that point, I had successfully (or stubbornly, depending on your viewpoint) avoided dipping below the Junior level, but I was left with little choice but to take on a section of Sophomores in the next year.  I was none too pleased, and in my imagination I pictured this as the final straw.  Because, you know, I could never debase my brilliance by teaching Sophomores.  Ah, the stories we tell ourselves.

Faced with this new challenge, I took solace in the fact that Sophomore year focused on American Literature, which I had taught when that subject was settled in a year-long Junior class several years hence.  So I could drag out some of the old warhorses that I still knew and loved.  But how to mix things up?  My answer came when I finally broke down that spring and watched the first season of Mad Men on DVD.  And then it all clicked. 

The year before, I had created a trimester course in which the class read David Simon’s classic non-fiction tome Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets while watching Seasons 1 and 2 of his HBO masterpiece The Wire.  My aim was to combine the literary chops of an English course with the sociopolitical musings of a history course and the formal and cultural analysis of a good art course.  The regular homework entailed writing weekly two page essays that drew analytical similarities between each week’s episode(s) and the assigned reading.  For a good deal of the term, most of the students were fairly befuddled by this requirement.  But they enjoyed watching McNulty fight crime in a drunken, womanizing haze.  And, as most people do, they loved Omar’s modern day Robin Hood act.  So it all evened out in the end.  Some of that first crew still reminisces fondly about our time together.  One or two probably still want to kill me.  Such is life.

As I watched Mad Men’s maiden run, I realized that this could be fertile ground for reimagining the Homicide/Wire course for the Sophomore level.  I already planned on teaching Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods, two books whose themes and tropes overlapped so heavily with those of Mad Men that I figured students would have an easy time seeing the connections (my hopes turned out to be slightly inflated…and some call me a cynic!)  And Matt Weiner’s story, while complex in so many ways, was also highly accessible on a plot level; these Sophomores wouldn’t have to immediately dive into the deep end of the story pool like they would with The Wire.

And so, I designed a winter trimester plan in which the Fitzgerald and O’Brien books took the place of Homicide, and Season 1 of Mad Men served as the main viewing requirement.  We would watch one episode a week (two episodes during a few weeks) and then students would take that week’s reading and draw analytical similarities between it and the episode(s) they viewed.  The dreariness of Ohio winter seemed like the perfect time to change things up a bit, and watching a season of this modern classic of a drama the perfect vehicle.  When we finished each episode, I’d take questions from the students, clear up any confusion about plot points, etc.  We’d discuss character development, the historical relevance of certain plot threads and events, and I’d try to hint at some connections they could draw on for that week’s essay.

I ran this curriculum for that first section of Sophomores, and continued to do so for three more years with the entire Sophomore class.  Some of them probably thought I was a bit crazy.  The true believers among them thrived in such an environment.  Others grew to despise those weekly essays with a white hot fury.  Still others probably thought that my nights were spent in a Clockwork  Orange-style contraption, visually mainlining loops of a soused Don Draper hooking up with unattainable women.  At the very least, many enjoyed the exploits of Don, Betty, Peggy, Pete, Sterling, Cooper, Midge, Midge’s dirty beatnik lover, Rachel, Sally in the plastic bag, and creepy Glen.  And sometimes in education (and in life), you have to take the small victories.  ‘Cause in the grand tally, a victory is still a victory.  Unless you’re a character on The Wire, where all victories are pyrrhic at best.

This coming April 5^th marks the beginning of the end for Mad Men, as the final seven episodes start rolling out to the world.  I’ve been thinking a lot about the show and the impact it’s had on my life.  About the young people who might have gained even the smallest insight on life by thinking about the connection between Don Draper and Jay Gatsby.  About the former colleagues whom I clashed with over the supposed pedagogical appropriateness of watching an entire season of a television show in school.  About the deep satisfaction and existential thrill that I always derived from the whole experience.

A month ago, I convinced myself that in the lead up to the final episodes, I would run through the entirety of the show from the beginning, writing a new essay for each episode.  That turned out to be highly improbable.  And the writing would have probably caved in around Season 3, from the tight deadline alone.  But I’m prepared to embark upon this endeavor in compromised form nonetheless.  So in the few weeks before April 5^th, I’ll be diving in once more to that first season and penning an essay for each of its 13 episodes.  Some of this literary journey will feature insights into the show itself, examining old happenings anew and reflecting on how they eventually played out in the dramatic arc of this fictional universe.  Some will feature stories from my adventures teaching the show to Sophomores.  Hopefully, all of it will be, at the very least, somewhat entertaining.  Or amusing.  Or as amusing as a show about encroaching dread and obsolescence can be.  After all, in my final run of teaching this curriculum, a small group of students would occasionally serenade me at odd moments with the iconic “Doo doo, doo doo” melody of RJD2’s Mad Men theme.  Something that can produce that type of advanced level goofiness can’t be all bad, right?

Miles Runs the Voodoo Down: WHIPLASH and The Myth of the Great American Tyrant

 (S           P           O           I           L           E           R           S)

The most exhilarating action sequences of 2014 don’t involve flying superheroes, or exploding robots, or Tom Cruise.  They’re simply composed of one man and drum kit.  Miles Teller going to war with the snare, the kick, the ride.  And himself.  Always himself.

The ferocity that Teller’s Andrew Neimann brings to these scenes is, in many ways, the syncopated heartbeat of Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, one of the year’s most emotionally intense films and one of the great anti-fables of the canon.  During his bid to establish his core spot in the Studio Band, the elite jazz competition squad helmed by the maniacal Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), Neimann routinely punishes his shortcomings by ensconcing himself in a closet-like private rehearsal room and whaling away at his kit in precision speed drills that serve as both self-improvement and self-flagellation.  A series of tight close-ups, but also a string of would-be emotional exorcisms, these scenes are both thrilling and disturbing in their focused intensity.  The rewards for his drive and dedication are ruptured blisters on his hands, the blood from within spattering his sticks and cymbals.  And a sense that it’s still not good enough.

The ambiguous matter of that possessed drive and determination, and its rewards, is the central question of Whiplash.  Teller is an ideal actor for this role.  His natural baby face has always allowed him to play younger than his age, but there’s a steely reserve in his eyes that also allows him range beyond the boy next door.  The private interior war of Andrew Neimann, the tormented tumult between his family’s middlebrow existence and the transcendent glory to which he aspires, his hero worship of the legendarily mercurial Buddy Rich running smack dab into the immediate powder keg of rage that is Fletcher, his struggle with romance vs. ROMANCE….it all requires the ability to nimbly shift between a broad gamut of conflicting emotions.  It requires an actor who can win over the audience’s sympathies, while shattering them in the next moment.  We’ve seen this character before, the idealistic young man (or maybe the proper formatting at this point in cinematic history should be Idealistic Young Man) running the gauntlet to greatness, emerging on the other end a little older, a little more bruised, but a little wiser.    

Whiplash’s summoning of the question of glory’s price situates it in a timeless tradition of such stories.  But it also serves as a stinging critique of that most beloved and worshiped of all cultural archetypes: the tyrannical genius surrogate father.  Anthropologically speaking, this character stretches back throughout the annals of history.  But Americans have always had a special affinity for such brilliant bullies.  R. Lee Ermey has made a career out of riffing on Full Metal Jacket’s Sgt. Hartman (itself a riff on Ermey’s own past as a drill instructor.)  Several generations of young men have latched onto his profane insults as call and response goofs, but more often than not there’s also a sense of enjoyment for the power that such diatribes imbue (or, at least, that was the case amongst my Boy Scout friends in 1988.)  Bobby Knight is still lauded as a college basketball legend; how many former players still praise him as a great molder of young men, the tough love that they needed at that critical point in their growth?  Sure, he may have been ultimately fired for crossing the line of intimidation one too many times, but we’re not that far removed from decades of Knight’s tirades, chair-throwing, etc. filling up highlight reels. 

It’s no coincidence that these two men made their mark in the military and the sporting world, fields ruled by their dedication to rule, order, and power dynamics.  Their mutual philosophy trades in breaking down the green recruit, depriving him of any shred of an ego, and then building him back up into a sleek and disciplined machine.  It’s admirable at heart, yet exploited too often in the name of tradition.  But the love of the tyrant goes even further.  It explains the grudging admiration that Dick Cheney still enjoys, the same one that Jack Nicholson aspires to in A Few Good Men.  Christ, how many times in the last decade plus, when another torture revelation, another illegal wiretapping scandal emerges has “You can’t handle the truth!  You need me up on that wall!” been replayed ad nauseum on the news?  We’re told that we might disagree with the methods themselves, but that we need villains like them to make the world run.  And hell, with the cowered manner of a post-9/11 country in tow, it’s not a surprise that such bromides continue to be thrown around.  But we’re straying a bit into improv territory here.  Best to get back to the charts.

J.K. Simmons is just one in a long line of cinematic genius tyrants, his Terence Fletcher a physical coil of muscle and tendon, a psychological coil of rage and brilliance.  His sarcastic, profane tirades are stiletto knives of aggression, but they’re also darkly hilarious (he’s easily the most eloquent character in the film.)  Indeed, Neimann and his fellow Studio Band members so often come across as feckless that the viewer is almost driven to siding with Fletcher.  These Millenials!  And their lack of anything resembling standards!

But this version of the tyrant comes along at an intriguing cultural turning point.  Modern society has rallied against bullying like no other time in recent history, so the social acceptability of loving this type of character is becoming more and more taboo.  It certainly lends added heft to what are already queasy confrontations between Fletcher and his charges, as he draws a bead on every ethnic, economic, and sexual insecurity that they possess.  At the same time, there’s truth to be had in Fletcher’s criticism of young people who are only satisfied with comfortable mediocrity, of a generation of Millenials who have been insulated against suffering and failure by parents desperate to atone for their seemingly painful childhoods.  Irresistible force, immovable object…you know the game.      

Whiplash’s power lies in the almost surreal extremes to which the plot is pushed to enhance its refutation of the genius tyrant image.  Some have criticized the film for not getting jazz right (whatever that is) or for ignoring the inherent joy of musical performance.  But despite the semi-autobiographical aspects of the story (Chazelle was a high school drum prodigy), it’s a mistake to think of this as a jazz film.  Or as a fully realistic one, at that.

 For me, Andrew’s car crash on his way to a major competition seems to provide the key to much of the film’s aim.  Having been physically and mentally thrashed by Fletcher in the run up to this contest, he’s now a brilliant set of frayed nerves, deeply proficient but petrified of making another mistake, of losing his spot.  After the crash, as Andrew jogs to the performance hall and beyond, the film takes on a disjointed, somewhat hallucinatory tone.  The story is told from his point of view, so it’s not too much of a stretch to theorize that some degree of psychological break has taken place, that much of the remaining plot is a slightly enhanced version of what the real events might be, the traumatic results of whiplash both figurative and literal.  
  

The viewer might go into Whiplash looking for the emotional reassurance that often comes from this type of melodramatic, Manichean conflict.  But catharsis is not what Chazelle is aiming for.  That would be too easy of an endgame.  Throughout the story, he constantly subverts the audience’s expectations for a traditional payoff.  When Fletcher is brought to tears after receiving the news of the death of former student Sean Casey, it seems to be that moment when the monster is revealed to be a softie hiding behind a gruff exterior.  But Fletcher merely doubles down on his histrionic intimidation of the Stage Band.  When Andrew attacks Fletcher onstage, it’s the moment of glorious revenge that a hero is supposed to have.  Only it ends in his expulsion from the Shaffer Conservatory and a conflicted moment in which he agrees to anonymously testify against Fletcher in a lawsuit involving the Casey’s death (which, in opposition to Fletcher’s car crash version, is revealed to be a depression-related suicide.  It’s doubly interesting that even though the lawyer nails Fletcher for creating the environment that eventually led to Casey’s demise, the film offers no final evidence.  There exists the very real possibility that this was who he already was, that Fletcher offered him a moment of stability and strength before he returned to the long goodbye of his life.) 

Months later, Andrew and Fletcher seemingly reconcile when they meet in a jazz club, the former now a deli clerk, his teacher fired from the Conservatory.  Fletcher offers him his old gig, playing “Whiplash” and “Caravan” at the JVC Festival, and for a moment the audience expects this to be that feel good resolution to all of the psychological warfare.  But Fletcher ups the ante by betraying Andrew onstage with a piece for which he’s totally unprepared, final revenge for ratting him out to the college board.  Finally, Andrew bolts offstage in the consoling arms of his father; “Let’s go home” Dad says, in a line drawn from so many family dramas of yore.  But Andrew is too deeply entrenched in this private war to give up, his final fuck you delivered to Fletcher as he hijacks the concert with an extended drum solo of such primal anger, force, and skill that it serves as the emotional exorcism that he sought for so long in his speed drills. 

And yet, the final shots of the film are of Andrew and Fletcher exchanging a smile.  The teacher and the pupil.  The devil and the object of temptation.  The villain and the hero.  Both caught in an ever-regenerating contest of wills.  Shades of the famous Rich-Gene Krupa drum battle, two prodigious talents soloing against each other in tandem.  No easy answers.  No reassurance.  Drum roll.  Curtain.

BLACKHAT: A Girl and a Gun and a Laptop

(S      P      O      I      L      E      R      S)

This is the story of a film that you probably haven’t seen.  And another film that you probably haven’t seen because you pigeonholed it into a prison of mediocrity.  And a director who everyone wants to be one thing, when he’s clearly something else.  And maybe what all of this says about the modern state of moviegoing…and life…and all of that other stuff.

The creation story of Jason Staebler is Dead, the erratically updated literary e-venture that you’re feasting your eyes on right now, claims Michael Mann’s Miami Vice as its Genesis Chapter 1.  Like many would be authors, I felt like I needed a tangible prompt to motivate any kind of regular output from my quill.  And being a confirmed teetotaler, following in the decadent, self-abusing footsteps of Fitzgerald and Burroughs was sorta out of the picture.  Instead, in the late summer of 2006 I turned to the nascent services of Blogger.com for this here free web home.  As most of you faithful readers can see, that prompt hasn’t quite worked out as I intended.  But hey, it’s a start.

The prime impetus for the timing of this blog’s creation was that August’s release of the Miami Vice film.  Like many, when I first heard the pitch of Mann rebooting the tv show that he famously helped to shepherd along, that 80’s paean to feathered hair and pastel suits, that seemingly outdated cultural chestnut…well, yeah, of course I followed along with the opinion that most people with TASTE held.  Seriously, was Colin Farrell with a mullet supposed to be taken seriously?  Weren’t we as a culture waaaay past the electrosynthetic allure of Vice’s cokey noir?

Being a confirmed Mann enthusiast, I still went to see Vice on opening day.  And what I saw convinced me to start this blog.  Because here was a major work of art, an expressionist take on the crime film that was probably going to flop at the box office and be ridiculed by the commentariat.  And who was going to preserve any conversation of its worth?  Yep, that’s right: this guy.  Hey, it was 2006.  I had only been online fulltime for three years.

Thus, in my maiden essay for the blog(which you can read here…it’s pretty decent, but a bit dry and shallowly informed) I asked the question “Is Michael Mann the Terrence Malick of Testosterone?”  I was pretty proud of myself for that one.  Here and there, I still envision meeting Mann and addressing him as such.  Obviously, I’ve watched too many films about Hollywood parties.  But all joking aside, I still think that there’s worth in that neophytic essay’s philosophical thrust.

And that philosophy is even more in the foreground with last week’s release of Mann’s newest crime epic Blackhat.  Starring part-time Norse god Chris Hemsworth as Nick Hathaway, the MIT schooled super hacked who’s furloughed by FBI to assist in a joint U.S.-China hunt for another super hacker hellbent on disrupting the world, Blackhat is ostensibly a globe-trotting techno thriller.  Now by this point, you’ve probably ingested the general boilerplate judgments that the film has received.  “It doesn’t make much sense.”  “The computer science is wrong”  “Hemsworth is toootaly miscast!  The hacker with muscles!  HA!”  It doesn’t help that Universal dumped the film into the mid-January wasteland, essentially leaving it for dead with a dodgy series of pre-release trailers and almost no major print advertising leading up to its opening day.  In some ways, I can understand this stance, because for almost ten years, the studios and the moviegoing public have been pining for a Michael Mann who doesn’t really exist anymore, only to be disappointed at every turn by the director he’s become…or, maybe more appropriately, the director he was all along.

In many ways, Mann is a victim of his own success.  With his 90’s run of The Last of the Mohicans, Heat, The Insider, and Ali, he garnered much acclaim for his deft melding of critical examinations of codes of masculinity with classical narrative structure.  It didn’t hurt that he was working with members of the Hollywood acting pantheon.  I mean come on, this is the guy who followed up directing Method master Daniel Day-Lewis by bringing Al Pacino and Robert De Niro together in one scene for the first time.  True, in its time Heat didn’t possess the critical status that it has today, but its signature long form action sequences have always been regarded as genre landmarks.

2004’s Collateral marked a major turning point for Mann.  The contemporary press marveled at Tom Cruise playing a villain (gasp!...although to give him his due, his feral Vincent is a marvelous turn…and remember, this was when Cruise could still lay claim to the status of biggest box office star in the world) in a tense two character voyage through the existential darkness of one Los Angeles evening.  But more important to the arc of Mann’s career was his full embrace of the possibility of digital cinematography.  Although he had begun experimenting with digital on Ali, Collateral was where he and co-DPs Dion Beebe and Paul Cameron pushed a technology that was still the exception to its fullest limit.  As Beebe notes in an insightful ASC interview, “With Collateral, we suddenly saw on the screen the night sky that we could see with our eyes, and that was revolutionary. Nobody had captured that in that way before.” Such a daring representation of the urban nightscape was complemented by the burnt ash lighting of the nocturnal Los Angeles streetlights, a stark visual scheme that seemed shocking at the time, but that would prove to be a roadmap for where Mann was going.

Miami Vice and 2009’s Public Enemies followed a similar digital strategy, but both were met with critical and audience apathy.  There are notable visual differences between the two films, the former luxuriating in quasi-Brakhageian impressionism (I still love A.O. Scott’s line about Vice being "an action film for people who dig experimental art films, and vice versa”) while the latter embraces the pinpoint resolution of the RED camera.  The bigger point of commonality, though, is how cinematic style becomes a character in and of itself, possibly the lead character.  There’s pleasure to be had in watching Farrell, Jamie Foxx, Gong Li, Christian Bale, Johnny Depp, and Marion Cotillard smolder, but Mann’s prevailing concerns are with exploring the limits of archetype and form.  And that’s not necessarily a popular concept in the modern big budget film landscape.

That preoccupation with the abstract continues in Blackhat.  After all, a film whose most visually dynamic action sequence is a CG-rendered flight through the interior workings of a hacked computer that occurs in the first five minutes probably isn’t going to win over many current action fans (who, let’s face it, are the target demographic that Blackhat was being pitched to.)  Most modern action films give the audience the pomp and violence that they’ve been trained to expect from decades of the genre’s dominance, but here Mann makes the daring choice of presenting the true action film of the modern world, a world where ground wars are losing their currency and cyberattacks are the wave of the future (he’s admitted that the Stuxnet attack on Iran’s nuclear system was an inspiration).  The infamous North Korean Sony hack was, in many ways, cataclysmically damaging, but the most readily accessible drama involved leaked celeb nude pics, barbed and dishy e-mails, and the temporary cancellation of The Interview.  No Audie Murphys to be found in this conflict.

And that’s an off putting concept for a film supposedly built on suspense and intrigue (cue this response).  But Mann seems to be hinting at something bigger than the labyrinthine techno-plotting.  Indeed, he’s once again gone back to his wheelhouse: cool studies of conflicted masculinity.  The audiences who grew to love the Michael Mann of the ‘90s could be lulled into forgetting his deeply lyrical duet of Thief and Manhunter from the ‘80s.  Those two thrillers are also ostensibly about hyper-talented professionals driven to the brink, but they’re also loving tributes to the noir loners of the ‘30s and ‘40s.  And both are ultimately oblique tone poems to the radical nihilism of classic masculinity, thrilling and sleek in their form, gorgeous in their visual audacity.

The Michael Mann of today has simply come full circle in his artistic obsessions and ambitions.  This time working with DP Stuart Dryburgh (who also lensed the pilot of Mann’s late, lamented HBO existential racing drama Luck) he continues to explore the beauty in the mundanity of the urban environment.  Blackhat’s Hong Kong is alternately a sterile architectural battleground and a neon jungle, the perfect embodiment of the conflicting nature of our world. 

Those who criticize Hemsworth as being miscast sorta miss the whole point, the one that Hathaway lays out when he tells Chen Lien that surviving prison is a matter of making their time your time to devote to your mission: improvement of the mind and the body.  Nick Hathaway is nothing less than a modern day samurai, operating in a digital world but still driven by a timeless code of honor.  His physical prowess is the armor that he needs to guard his nimble mind.  And make no mistake, it’s his story and his alone.  Devious as the chief villains may be, they don’t possess the charisma of a classic Mann villain…which may be the whole point, the encapsulation of an encroaching computer-driven threat that is so often anonymous. 

Much of the film’s charms, then, lie in the very zen concept of removing the ego form the viewing experience, dropping the classic dramatic expectations to bask in the pure cinematic possibilities of the form.  After all of the convoluted cyberplotting, Hathaway’s story ultimately concludes with a very analog standoff, as he confronts the main villain and his henchmen with but a knife and his own will.  This visually stunning sequence, set amidst a densely populated night parade in Jakarta’s Papua Square, engulfs the three principles in a sea of torches, their battle reduced to its most primal form.  When Hathaway finally confronts his enemy, his motivation for following through on the kill is not any hope of regaining the promised commutation of his prison sentence, but in avenging the murder of his friends.  In a world bound by Silicon Valley-inspired naked self-interest, the super hacker turns out to be the most moral and honor bound character in the film.

Not that Mann's art film aspirations are for everyone.  But it would be a shame if his late career excursions into the deep recesses of the form continue to quickly fade out of the theaters.  In a tentpole driven cinematic landscape, they're ever more vital and important markers of a still rewarding filmic past combined with the exciting technological possibilities of the future.