Strange, isn’t it, that the more (officially) pacifistic and
nonviolent our society becomes, the more incendiary and warlike our
political rhetoric is? I wonder if there could be any connection
with the movies’ penchant for seeking out new but politically
correct ways to idolize men of violence? The seemingly endless
string of celluloid superheroes is one example. They earn their
right to murder and mayhem through their inhumanity. They belong to
a master race of their own and live in a world that allows them to
operate according to different rules and with a different morality
from the rest of us. Vigilante justice in real life, administered
by any mere mortal like ourselves, would be in the highest degree
unacceptable, but we don’t call it that when superheroes do it. Of
course the price we pay for our superheroes is having to live in
toon-town with them to the extent that we take them to any degree
seriously.
But there are other ways to revive the old sense of honor
attaching to killers. The precursor of the cartoon hero in the
movies was the cool hero played by the Steve McQueens and the Clint
Eastwoods (before the real-life Clint turned into a morally earnest
director) of old and their later imitators: men who earned
their right to violent methods by being outsiders, lone
men of integrity standing up to a corrupt system. Their violence is
sanitized partly by being stylized, like that of the cartoon hero,
and partly because they are seen as existing in a state of
Hobbesian nature where civilized alternatives to violence are
either corrupt or not available. The trope of the lone honest man
fighting a corrupt system has become rather a cliché, however, so
cool heroes mostly go heavy on the stylization — which means that
there is a certain sameness to them.
The latest example of the breed is on display in
Drive by the Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn. The
hero, played by Ryan Gosling, resembles the movie itself in being
reduced to the verb describing what he does: drive. He is also
another “man with no name” — which is a time-tested way of
stressing his individuality and his detachment from normal social
convention. The driver works in an L.A. garage or as a movie
stunt-man by day and as a getaway driver for ambitious burglars by
night. Ahead of the opening credits, we see him executing a perfect
evasion of a police pursuit by car and helicopter in almost
complete silence — silence broken only by the sounds of the street
and the crackle of the police radio that alerts him in advance to
the next move of his pursuers. When we hear the police say that
they have “lost visual” we are alerted to the director’s own
technique of getting and losing visual on his hero in order to
evoke the romance of the city at night and the paradoxical
loneliness of its ghost-like familiar spirit.
He, the driver, you will understand, is only a criminal by
necessity — even though the necessity, like other narrative
details, is not specified. It’s enough that we see and hear him
greet a prospective employer with a lucrative “job” in the works by
saying: “How about this? You shut your mouth or I will kick your
teeth down your throat and shut it for you.” He really does prefer
silence to speech, it seems, but that’s pretty typical of your cool
hero. Silence conveys menace, and menace is what the cool hero is
particularly good at. Mostly what comes out of this one’s mouth is
the formula containing the terms on which he will take on
a driving job, which he recites as by rote, and the toothpick he
chews on like Clint Eastwood’s small cigar in Fistful
of Dollars.
He also resembles that other man with no name in having a
sense of chivalry, which is evoked by Irene (Carey Mulligan), a
neighbor in his shabby L.A. apartment building and a poor,
down-on-her-luck young mother whose husband, Standard (Oscar
Isaac), is in prison. Their chaste courtship amounts only to a
pas de deux of attraction, and it also takes place in near
total silence, though with lavish visuals of longing. When the
husband comes home, the driver is drawn into an elaborate criminal
enterprise for the sake of the girl — who really does appear
childlike herself — and her son at peril of his own life and
budding career as a race-car driver. It seems almost churlish to
complain that this criminal plot is among the narrative details the
film declines to spell out for us, but that’s pretty much the way
it is always going to be with the cool hero, since part of what
makes him cool — like Humphrey Bogart in The
Big Sleep — is that he can effortlessly understand
what we, the audience, are deliberately deprived of the means to
understand for ourselves.
One bad guy, improbably named Nino (Ron Perlman), has got
hold of some money belonging to the Philly mob, partly for
investment purposes and partly out of revenge for their having
called him a kike to his face. Another bad guy named Bernie (Albert
Brooks) is both Nino’s henchman and an investor in the driver’s
prospective career as a race car driver. Coincidentally, Standard
is the patsy — along with Blanche (Christina Hendricks) — in a
staged robbery by yet another bad guy named Cook (James Biberi)
with connections to Nino and Bernie. But how they got the money,
what, exactly, the faux robbery is meant to accomplish or
what the connection may be between these various bad guys, both on
and off screen, is not spelled out. Clearly, Mr. Refn and his
screenwriter, Hossein Amini (adapting a novel by James Sallis),
don’t hold with the Occamist principle that entities must not be
multiplied unnecessarily.
The bad guys are not there for the sake of their own
incomprehensible criminal enterprise, however, but only to provide
a series of progressively more dangerous challenges to our cool,
nameless hero and his car in their quest to save the pretty
neighbor and her adorable child from even more shadowy evil-doers.
The film itself, in other words, is a bit of a staged robbery in
which we are the patsies, though we are used by now to being told
by Hollywood that we don’t need to trouble ourselves anymore with
plausible real-world explanations for what is happening on-screen.
It’s not supposed to be like the real world, silly. That’s
why the director has taken such trouble to make it look like a
movie. The cinéphile doesn’t mind this, of course, since
movies and, therefore, movies about movies are his thing.
Increasingly, they are everybody’s thing, though they’re still not
mine.
