Warning: Unboxed spoilers for Con Air. I’m assuming if you havn’t seen this movie yet, you probably don’t have any burning desire to.
In this recent discussion about The Increadibles several posters opined that there are not underlying messeges in popular film and that filmmakers do not have a great deal of intent when making popular films. I do not agree with this. Almost all films have an underlying ideology they are forwarding. This doesn’t mean that filmmakers are always fully conscious of it but it also doesn’t mean that it is just something interpreters are making up out of whole cloth. Everyone has a worldview, and in every work of art- especially one so carefully planned as a movie- the worldview is going to shine through. Even if it is pop fluff.
Okay folks, fallacy or not I’m gonna appeal to authority here. I’ve made movies. You damn betcha that when I approved every costume, decided what race each of my actors was going to be, decided how bright or dark to light things, how fast to edit things, how much exposition to give, what kinds of locations I was going to use, I was thinking the whole time “What is this saying?” If I set a love story in a bar, is it a dark seedy bar, or a bright dance club? Each of those convey something different about the characters and their relationship and ultmately love in general. If I make a joke, is it an ethnic joke? Is it a complicated pun? Is it a common joke most people in the audience will have heard? Is it a random digression totally unrelated to the story line? All these are “just being funny” but all of them do radically different hings to the film. Everything on screen is the result of a decision. And filmmakers don’t make decisions by rolling dice. Film costs too much money to do that. Nobody who has made it high enough the ladder to be making commercial releases is that sloppy.
For example, Escape from LA is a remake ofEscape from New York. Why was the venue changed to LA? It could be that LA was closer and easier to film in, but it was a pretty big budget feature and that sort of cost wasn’t really a factor. It could be that the director just thought LA would be a better idea…but why?
The answer lies in the fact that New York no longer represents the dystopian future. It used to be that we lived in close lying suburbs and small towns and considered cities to be great faceless hellish places that we would all be stuck in in the future where all sorts of horrors would thrive. But in the last twenty years, the suburbs with their big-box stores and increasing sprawl have become the new face of facelessness. Our cities are becoming depopulated and full of vacant lots and empty buidlings. The people that live in the inner cities are no longer pictured as white people- and frankly we don’t care what happens to them quite as much. Their dystopia isn’t as scary as one that affects the great middle-class masses. We no longer envision great overpacked cities, but instead a great dark sprawl that is creeping across our states. Los Angeles is the urban area that best personifies this.
Film is one of the most powerful ways to get an ideological messege across. Perhaps the first to notice this were the Soviets, who immediately started a cinema program after gaining power. Their theorists set to work on how to use film to shape Soviet society. Castro also recognized this, and began a Cuban film institute to train filmmakers, instituted mass public screenings, and funded two different film critique television shows- one of which was meant to teach full on film theory to the masses- to teach the people to understand the language of his propaganda film. In America films are obviously far less poltical, but on the whole tend to convey Capitalist values (the aquisition of goods as a means to happiness, a nuclear family, even the use of “star power” is a lot like name brands).
Con Air is about as dumb as a movie gets, but it has a lot to say about America. It is at it’s core a Les Miserables story- a story of a totally and completly rightous man wrongly imprisioned. The main character, Cameron Poe is obviously meant to be a pure hero- someone to consider wholy good. He is a fairly simple man, speaking in a slow drawl, devoted to his family- especially to protecting his woman, and a bit of a redneck (his choice of bars isn’t that classy). He is a perfect spokesman for the anti-intellectual movement that was just starting up around that time, and really came into fruition with the election of George W. Bush. Even his name implies he is “Poor”- a simple honest working man. By chooseing this kind of hero- as opposed to say a guy that spends his time in jail reading Yeates or an upstanding lawyer in jail for tweaking some finances- the filmmaker is saying something about the ideal American male.
Even the style of film says something. Con Air is ultra-slick. No gritty realism here. When the plane crashes in to a casino, the slot machine hits a triple seven jackpot. We are supposed to take this story as an over-the-top fairy tale, not as a slice-of-life film. Thus the characters are broad, but architypical.
It’s hard to make a prison movie without addressing the prevelence of African Americans in prison. Con Air does this with two contrasting characters- a “good” character that gone in some trouble and is on his way out, and a “bad” character that is a black militant. The movie once again puts people in one of two catagories- “nice guys” who deserve to be treated well and animal-like criminals that need to be caged up. It is interesting that the militant is the latter. It obliquely implies that the Black people in jail are largely Blacks that have removed themselves from American society and if they’d just give that up so many of them wouldn’t be in jail. It implies that the Black underclass is a result of choice, as opposed to societal factors, and that Black identity is harmful and leads to trouble. Once again, it was a choice for that character to specifically be a Black militant. Interestingly, the “good” Black character’s name is “Baby-O”, which recalls the diminutive names often betowed on Blacks like “Boy” (of course there are plenty of Black people that go by “Baby”, but the point is that the filmmaker chose “Baby” and not any number of other Black nicknames). Con Air is implying that the good Black is the tamed Black.
The female prison gaurd is a good contrast to the devoted wife. The female prison gaurd thinks she has what it takes to handle these prisoners. At first she seems to be doing okay, but when confronted with a rapist, she ends up in a bad spot. In other words, women can be tough, but their ability to be raped ultimately makes them too venerable for jobs like this. It’s signifigant that she is threatened by the rapist, as opposed to any number of other violent people that would want to cause her trouble. It says that women are in unique danger. They are not suited for roles like policewoman or soilder because they have that vagina. Just like the fears that female soilders will harm the military because the men will be so interested in protecting them that they won’t be able to do their duties, the prison gaurd needs saving and distracts Poe from the real business he ought to be doing. It strengthens the perception that women are always in danger of being raped when they are in non-traditional roles or alone in the presence of many males. It strengthens the idea that some men just can’t keep themselves from raping any woman they come across.
Note that the wife (who never ends up in danger like the prison gaurd) stays faithful to the husband and always seen taking care of her child and out of the action- in fact, she never does anything of her own will- throughout the movie she is shuttled around by male characters and left to wait patiently. As the counterpart of the ideal male, we have to assume she is the ideal female. She doesn’t go running off on her own to save her husband or anything like that (remember, her husband is in jail for doing something active and violent to protect her…this movie isn’t squeamish about protecting people with violence…but it shows that is for men to do, not women). She does what she is told, nurtures her kid, stays chaste, and waits patiently.
And who knows what the scene with the child killer is about. There has to be some reason something that bizarre and uncomfortable is in that movie. Is it about redemption? Is it a look in the mind of pure evil? Is it a fantasy? The setting- an empty pool, a dirty child, broken toys- seems to mirrior the depreveity in his head. But thats all the sense I can make out of this scene. It is interesting the this character is the one that has the “smartest” lines (although the nearly equally evil “Cyrus the Virus” is intellegent in that evil mastermand way). He spends his time musing on philisophical subjects. And yet he is the worst character of the bunch- as opposed to simple minded God-fearing Poe. Anti-intellectualism again? Making intellectualism look like a pathology?
The prison world is pretty interesting in Con Air. Prison is shown as very slick and high tech. Lots of sleek metal. And yet it can’t contain the prisoners (all of which seem just as crazy as criminal- an interesting though in itself) who use raw firepower and their brilliant depraved minds to overtake it. Brutality wins out. I don’t think all this slickness is about prison. It’s about the modern world, the underlying violence we sense beneath it, and how it can all be saved by a return to simple family values.
Then again, the whole thing is so laugh-out-loud absurd that you can’t help but wonder if it’s also a self-aware critique of action movies and the American family. The interesting thing is you can be at once a critique of something and still be forwarding it- Fight Club is a good example of this. Fight Club was ostensibly against slick commodification and de-masculinization, but it in itself was slick and offered a way to live out ultra-masculine fantasies instead of living them out yourself.
I hope through all this I’ve shown that even the least consequential “pure entertainment” cinema still has messeges to convey. I’m not saying my analysis is entirely the correct one. You could probably go in an make an analysis of Con Air as a Marxist-Leninist work. Few works of art or culture are entirely straighthforward and one-sided. But I think my view on things is the most obvious and prove a certain amount of intent in the way the film is made.
You’re going to piss off a lot of southerners with that remark, and this is coming from a fellow Californian. I think you’re totally off-base here. I believe the themes in Con Air go back farther than the USA, in fact I would compare him more closely to Homer’s Odysseus. Both are men whose goal is to “get back to their family” and their desire to see them pushes them to great feats.
Just kidding, I was actually enthralled by it, I think it’s an amazing analysis though I don’t know if a film maker would intentionally set out to say “a tame black is a good black”. I guess an English teacher did once tell me that there is a school of thought that meanings in books/movies/music can be subconsicous. Other than that I think you make a solid case.