Mical syndrome5/17/2023 Īll Mann’s work is built on this experience of people growing old and, marked by time (the history of the cinema as much as of America), receiving directly, or in an après coup, some shock that produces the crack in which their melancholy begins. Former passionate militant and dissident, from now on a figure whose protests are in the past – Lowell, “in not seeing the cracks to come”, will have lived the Fitzgeraldian experience: “The realisation of having cracked was not simultaneous with a blow, but with a reprieve”, writes the author of The Last Tycoon in his book The Crack-Up. “What got broken here doesn’t go back together again”, he confides to Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer), his long-time collaborator, before leaving CBS forever and removing himself – literally in the film’s last shot – from a world that has become unrecognisable. What is an insider when the outside has disappeared? What is the periphery when the centre extends to the horizon? How to live in an aquarium when we desire the ocean? So many questions in the mind of Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) – a militant journalist taught by Herbert Marcuse – at the moment when victory (i.e., the broadcasting of the report exposing the tobacco industry) seems to have been achieved. With The Insider (1999), Mann undertook a very personal and disenchanted re-reading of the film canon of the ‘70s – dedicating to its passing a melancholic, politically sublime work on the contemporary illusion of counter-power. Judging by the critical reception to Michael Mann’s films since 1981 – the date of the appearance of his first fiction feature opus, Thief – critics have avoided this major American filmmaker of the last two decades, have let him just slip away.Īppearing on the film scene in the ‘80s with this debut, a passionate thriller, Mann has since made six films including Manhunter (1986) and Heat (1995) – which is, with Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992), one of the best American genre films of the decade. Some abandon all vague impulses to leave whereas others, through weariness, resignation or simple lucidity, end by dropping to the bottom, leaving to everyone else the task of living with their remains. Then, after a while, we learn to live with it. But what we see beyond, from our glass cage, looks like another aquarium: bigger, but in the end identical. It often happens that we believe another, possible world exists – a world where there will be neither walls, nor glass nor artificial rocks. Then, we remember this ocean that we have never known, the space of our ancestors. We spend days dreaming about the world in front of us, but we know that emerging from the water would be fatal. And we find our mouth stuck to its glass wall. All is breakaway and exteriority on this impossible island that is a goldfish bowl. The aquarium syndrome: when the island is no more than an outline, a contrivance. The immense metropolis of Los Angeles peters out here in the sea like a desert, with all the nonchalance of a desert. The Western World ends on a shore devoid of signification, like a journey that loses all meaning when it reaches its end. Here at dawn, is one of the most insignificant shorelines in the world, just a place to go fishing.
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