Last week I had to take a long plane journey and, though I try to avoid these things, my eye was drawn to the American films scrolling by on the seat-back televisions that surrounded me. One of the films caught my attention — first, by its frenetic, jerky style, which seemed to resemble that of experimental filmmakers such as Bruce Conner; and second, because it was shot in Mexico, a place where I have worked. So when the film came round again, I watched it. It was called Man on Fire.
Man on Fire is the story of a troubled former counter-intelligence agent played by Denzel Washington. Plagued by alcoholism and a guilty past, Washington’s character gets a job as a bodyguard for a rich American girl, resident in Mexico City. Lengthy bonding scenes follow in which, inevitably, the cynical bodyguard learns to love the winsome little blonde. Equally inevitably, the kid is kidnapped and the ransom money is stolen.
After this lengthy exposition, about an hour into the picture, the girl’s parents are told their daughter is dead. And Washington’s character goes on a one-man vengeance trail against the gang who kidnapped and killed his child-friend. Up to this point Man on Fire has been visually agitated; changing styles and film stocks fast and furiously, sometimes to no clear purpose, sometimes very effectively.
About 50 minutes into his killing rampage, our man discovers — guess what? — the girl ain’t dead! I, like everyone else on that 777, already knew this. So did the audience, when the film first came out. No Hollywood studio would dare offend its audience’s presumed sensibilities by actually bumping off an established character-kid. There are no surprises in a big-budget studio movie, especially not one from Fox, the lowest common denominator of them all.
Man on Fire presents the discovery of the girl alive as happenstance: a fortunate by-product of the hero’s killing spree. And there we might leave it. Another bad film with a lousy script and a good actor. If that were all that Man on Fire was … but there is more to it than that. I think the movie qualifies as something new: the first authentic American action blockbuster in which the hero doesn’t just go on a killing rampage, but a torture spree as well.
Washington is one of the best American actors alive today. He generally gives great performances, and he does good work in Man on Fire. But he is playing a torturer. The problem is that this fine actor isn’t doing a Ben Kingsley or a Laurence Olivier, portraying the torturer as villainous scumbag. This is a case of torturer-as-hero. In Man on Fire, Washington cuts one Mexican man’s fingers off. He sticks an explosive device up another Mexican’s arse. He blows yet another Mexican’s hand off with a shotgun. He does this after blindfolding them with masking tape. He does it to extract information about where their boss is. Then he kills them.
I can’t recall seeing other mainstream Hollywood movies in which the hero tortures people. Certainly, some of the films have had a masochistic streak: the younger Clint Eastwood was forever being beaten up or burned alive, Mel Gibson’s directorial oeuvre seems to stem from his being frequently cinematically tortured, and even Washington was whipped within an inch of his life in Glory.
But actively practising torture is something else. The only prior action-torturer I can recall is Dirty Harry. Dirty famously stamped on the injured foot of the kidnapper-killer, played by Andy Robinson, in a baseball stadium.
I need remind no one that the dirty not-so-secret of the wars on terror, Afghanistan and Iraq, has been torture. It was the dirty not-so-secret of the war on drugs in the 1990s, and the war on communism in the 1980s, too. Then, as now, it was the torture of dark-skinned foreigners, by United States counter-intelligence experts. Then, as now, it was often sexualised torture, like Washington’s bomb-up-the-Mexican’s-bum. Torture to extract information as to where the leaders are.
We used to all agree that this was bad, and that in paying for the murder and torture of Nicaraguan and Honduran farmers, the United States had gone seriously wrong. Beginning in October 2001 a variety of Hollywood screenwriters, directors and producers, “drawn from the movie world’s A-list” were invited to a series of meetings at the Institute for Creative Technology, affiliated with the University of Southern California.
The institute was set up in 1999 with a grant of $50-million from the US Army to create training simulators. In the aftermath of 9/11, the A-list creatives were supposed to come up with scenarios by which terrorists might seek to attack the US. Would it be naive to question whether this was a one-way street? Or whether the Pentagon, which already maintained film liaison offices in Los Angeles, had a few ideas for the A-list talent to work on, as well? Since 9/11 the “serious” US media have been full of opinion pieces by the likes of Alan Dershowitz and Newsweek‘s Jonathan Alter saying we must consider employing forms of torture so as to win the war on terror. The US military and the White House aren’t averse to torture, as we already know.
Man on Fire, with its American-torturer-hero, appeared in the US just before the Abu Ghraib scandal broke. That, we can fairly certainly say, is a coincidence. It may be just another coincidence that Washington’s justified-man-of-action is — like Tony Blair’s friend in the White House — an alcoholic who gives up booze for the Bible: a stereotype so hackneyed it would have been vetoed by Murdoch’s execs, if this were not an election year. — Â