Movie Doubles - 'The American' & 'The Mechanic'

Surviving The Manhunt

Today's movie double is one where I'm going to put up two films with secret agents working in a high tech post-terror laws world. They're both fanciful and largely entertainment, but I'm stringing them together because it seemed worth looking at this growing trend of paranoia.

What do I mean by this paranoia exactly? It's been a growing trend lately where the CIA goes rogue and creates problems to solve for Hollywood Action heroes. This was the case in 'The A-Team' and 'The Expendables' and I noted it at the time, but since then it seems to have grown into an assumption about the way things work to the degree that it is foregone that the agents get lied to and set up to do dirty jobs they may need not have done.

In fact, 'The American' kicks off with an attempt to kill George Clooney's character while the the real first cause of the action in 'The Mechanic' starring Jason Statham is he is set up to kill Donald Sutherland. Acts of treachery kick off both films' stories and more to the point neither of the agencies involved ever get a mention as to who they are and what they are working towards. This isn't political fiction, this is a kind of metonymy of living under the auspices of an out-of-control state. The films both embody a survivalist distrust of the state. Is this healthy? Probably if it keeps you alive but that is exactly what paranoiacs would say as they line up to vote for the Tea Party in the US.

Sensate Function First

The fundamental interest of these action films are fairly tactile and concrete. George Clooney's character Jack is a gun smith so a fair chunk of the action is taken up with assembling a gun with a silencer. 'The Mechanic' is literally concerned with mechanical contraptions to kill people in such ways as to make them look like accidents or heart attacks. Neither films characters are terribly interested in the abstract so they don't seem to think about how their actions fit into the scheme of things. The level of abstraction employed by both films' characters is so low that you wonder if it is some kind of character necessity to be blind to the larger picture.

'The American' is based on the novel 'A Very Private Gentleman' which is surprising because I couldn't imagine a novel with more tedium than sitting inside the head of character whose sense of abstraction cannot allow him to understand the how and why of his existence. 'The Mechanic' is in some ways worse because it is a re-make of an old Charles Bronson movie. IN the earlier version of the film, Charles Bronson's classic impassive, somewhat Central-Steppe-asiatic mien contributed to the stoic story, but in this modern version with Jason Statham, you quickly note that it is a kind of intellectual laziness not to wonder why you are being sent to kill a particular person.

Still, you have to have a movie and the movie has to have action, I guess it shouldn't matter what the cause of these men might be. The opaquenes Jack's cause and the obliqueness of his handler who sends him into a remote Italian village where he would stand out rather than blend in seems dumber than dumb, but I guess it comes straight out of the novel from which it was adapted. It's enough to make you wonder who commissioned the novel in the first place but I guess it doesn't matter.

Hooker With The Heart Of Gold

There always seems to be one of these in a lot of American fiction. Indeed, Julia Roberts' first big triumph was starring as one in 'Pretty Woman', so it's not surprising that a film called 'The American' has one. What's a little disconcerting is that it's an adaptation from a novel, which is to say, there was a novelist who sat down to write this story and the best he could think up as a romantic entanglement for the main character was a hooker with a heart of gold. I'm trying to wrap my head around that. An American gunsmith is my main character; he's going into hiding because somebody's tried to whack him; so he's told to hide out in an Italian village; so he gets romantically involved with a hooker; but she has a heart of gold and they fall in love... Tell me to stop when the cliches get a bit much - but no, the author wrote this and somebody published this and somebody thought this was so good that its rights got sold to Hollywood and it got developed and before you know it it's a movie starring George Clooney.

Think about it for a moment: A remote Italian village where somebody might be able to hideout. What kind of woman ends up as a hooker in said village and how attractive can that woman be? How can you make your plot hinge around this stuff? But they do.

Compared to the adaptation that is 'The American', doing a remake of 'The Mechanic' might seem a lot less original, but at least it doesn't have some hooker with a heart of gold as the romantic entanglement.

Nihilism And The Gun, The Gun, The Gun...

Spoiler warning...! Don't read on if you hate spoilers.

It's always the gun. In 'The Mechanic', it is the gun used to shoot Donald Sutherland's character that gets discovered by his son. In 'The American' it is the very gun we see Jack build that is rigged to blow up in the face of the assassin sent to kill him. In both instances the guns fall under the Chekhov-ian rule where if a gun makes an appearance in the story, it must get fired. I wonder what Chekhov would have made of American action cinema where lots of guns make an appearance and they all get fired as often as possible.

In fact it is is pretty hard to write anything that is a thriller without a gun in this day and age, for the gun is ubiquitous in America fiction and increasingly in European fiction. The gun is such a leveler compared to swords in stories that the expert use of a gun is not that much lethal than an inexpert use of the gun on the screen. I've covered the Freudian analysis of the gun so I won't bother, but I do want to mention Chekhov because it seems that where we are in the development of fiction is at a point where there are so many tropes and plot mechanisms we're familiar with, it doesn't seem to matter much any more how a plot turns.

And if the plot turns are arbitrary, then we're in an era of arbitrary characters. This is interesting because it ties into the apparent un-interested-ness of these characters when it comes to their causes. We don't care about why or how these characters fit into the world because they don't. They're nihilistic outsiders with no accountability to laws or rules which makes them escapist fantasies but at the same time they make us paranoid because it seems if the world really is every man for himself, then there is a complete breakdown of moral responsibilities. In a sense this kind of fiction feeds on itself to generate the next generation of even more nihilistic, disconnected dysfunctional 'heroes' wielding ever more and ever more specialised guns.

It's as if we've committed to a kind of course of emotional retardation in exchange for getting our kicks - and yet the climactic action in both films are not momentous. They're both struggles that take place that won't change the world exactly because  they have no cause. The spectacle of trucks and explosions in 'The Mechanic' is a kind of empty display while the shoot out at the end of 'The American' is hardly satisfying or interesting.

Why Do The Agencies In Movies Go Rogue These Days?

This one's actually been doing my nut in. Back in the 1990s, the CIA were more or less the guys we rooted for in Tom Clancy adaptations. The only exception that pops into my mind is Robert Downey Jr.'s character in the 'Fugitive' sequel, who turned out to be the real villain trying to frame Wesley Snipes' characters. (Turns out Mr. Snipes don't pay no taxes but that's another story.) It's in the decade after 9/11 that we start to see these movies with rogue CIA agents. For instance there's the Colin Farrell vehicle, 'The Recruit' where Al Pacino plays a guy who has gone rogue. Lately, we keep seeing the bad guys in black suits riding black four wheel drives and firing M-16s and such at the heroes. It's becoming more than a cliche, but an identifiable block of narrative.

What's actually doing my nut in about all this is that it seems Hollywood's development culture has bought into conspiracy theories of all colours in the quest for a catchy story and has distilled the essence down to this *thing* where there is a large contingent of black ops being run out of  the CIA's auspices that are basically rogue. We just don't know it. To what purpose? We don't know. For what reasons? We don't know. Yet the sense of paranoia about this keeps expanding out, feeding in to conspiracy theories. Gone are the pseudo-rational exploration of say, UFOs by the FBI in the X-files, instead we're in a culture of accepting as premise that our governments are secretly doing bad stuff all the time and our heroes are more or less emotionally stunted action men who destroy lots of stuff for our entertainment. Not to to get moralistic on everybody but this is pretty weird.

Even in the heyday of action movies, the main characters were government agents in line with government protocols. Whether it be James Bond with a license to kill or Steven Seagal playing some kitchen-knife wielding ex-Navy SEAL, they were government agents. Now the main characters are these marginal agents who are without boundaries or accountability. They're interesting fantasies but you wonder about the absence of a social vision. It's like we've all joined the name-less rider and we're not even out there trying to do good.

Stoicism As Virtue, Sadism As Threat To Integrity


Both Jack and Arthur Bishop are stoic types. Jack more so than Arthur Bishop who enjoys his LPs in his own private comfort. I understand that discipline helps a great deal in a career of killing people, but these films play up the stoic to mythic proportions. It's hard to believe these characters actually find no particular joy in hat they do. In the case of Jack, I guess sleeping with hookers is a fine pursuit of pleasure but even then you get the feeling he'd rather not be enjoying it and that's just too much.

I know it's a trope that's developed over time that the stoic disciplined dude tends to beat out the undisciplined epicurean, but sometimes you think this line of plot construction itself is a cliche. How do we know that stoicism pays out such magnificent dividends in success? Yet the insistence on the stoicism as virtue is also hitting some crazy pitch.

I'm not saying stoicism is wrong; far from it. It's just that the way in which it is portrayed in these films is simply ludicrous. I suspect that the reason they work so hard at is because if these characters enjoyed their jobs as gunsmiths and assassins, then that opens the door to the thinking of Marquis deSade, and so the film makers (and novelists alike) insist to us these characters don't enjoy all the killing and mayhem. No, of course not! Because if they did, they might just be Sadist perverts who will drop in our estimation; or perhaps expose that the audience is fundamentally sadistic but is repressing such urges. I just figure it's worth noting, because lately these films' belief in stoic heroes is getting silly.