The Weekly Watch: Round 2

On jazz-loving hitmen, the many faces of imperialism, and millennial unease

Welcome back to Willow and Ink! Based on some valuable reader feedback (namely texts from many a friend noting that my piece last week was, to quote one of them, “Wayyyy too long”), I have *tried* to keep this week’s a bit shorter. So only three blurbs. Enjoy, let me know what you think, etc etc.

Film

Collateral (Michael Mann, 2004)

There was a brief period of time, just about one decade, in which Tom Cruise became the most fascinating movie star on the planet. Not the biggest – he was and still is just that – but the most fascinating. It began with his Oscar-nominated eponymous role in 1996’s Jerry Maguire, and ended with Collateral, Michael Mann’s exquisite 2004 thriller.

What characterized this stretch of Cruise’s career was a willingness to break type, playing characters who one did not associate with the boy-wonder, young gun persona of his early roles (Born on the Fourth of July notwithstanding). He was not the hotshot lawyer, hotshot pilot, hotshot whatever. He was instead a down-on-his-luck sports agent (Maguire), a greasy motivational speaker suppressing familial trauma (Magnolia), a cuckolded husband (Eyes Wide Shut), and in Collateral a bona fide villain in the form of Vincent, the amoral, nihilistic assassin who forces a cabbie (Jamie Foxx) to chauffeur him around Los Angeles as he dispatches of five targets in the wee hours of the morning.

The thing each of these roles has in common is that the people behind the camera were serious, established auteurs who were interested in utilizing Cruise’s public image and star power to subvert audience expectations. Stanley Kubrick knew exactly what he was doing by casting Cruise and his then-wife Nicole Kidman as participants in a fractious marriage. Cameron Crowe knew exactly what he was doing by casting Cruise, whose previous characters had to struggle mightily to do any wrong, as an agent who cannot seem to do a thing right. It was indeed just a matter of time before the logical endpoint of this trajectory was reached, with a filmmaker finally deciding to slot him in as the Heavy.

The delightful thing about this period is that Cruise himself seemed to relish the opportunity to work with such directors – as the old saying goes, it takes two to tango. Such is the benefit of more or less unmitigated success: it provokes and encourages risk-taking, often (as here) with brilliant results.

A devil’s elixir of pop culture backlash ended this period with a fizzle: the greater awareness of his somewhat bizarre religious views combined with the infamous Oprah couch incident. The image rehabilitation Cruise and his publicists felt the need to embark upon completely nixed his willingness to experiment, and pulled him toward a different kind of movie stardom, predicated on pure action and scale, on defying death for the benefit of an astonished audience. I love the Mission: Impossible films and Edge of Tomorrow and Top Gun: Maverick, to be sure. But I will always wonder and rue what could have been if Cruise had continued to challenge himself.¹

Books

Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power by Niall Ferguson
The history of imperialism is a history of oppression. We all know this. We’ve all been taught this, if not by our schooling then by popular culture, in which colonialism looms large as one of the chief progenitors of the current depressed state of previously colonized nations.

In his magisterial account of the history of the British Empire, Niall Ferguson does not really dispute this point, but instead endeavors to give a “warts and all” account of the four hundred year imperial dominion over which the sun never set. His central thesis is less that the British Empire was a force for good (in contrast to the reputation that the book has unfairly picked up as a borderline racist apologia for all things imperial) than that it was perhaps the least bad imperial force of the many that were in operation in the same time. No sins the Brits ever committed, for instance, could measure up to the scale of atrocities such as the horrific 1937 Rape of Nanking, the six-week long massacre of Chinese civilians at the hands of conquering Japanese forces, nor to the iron-fisted brutality with which the Belgians conquered Congo – a campaign and rule estimated to have wiped out nearly half of the native population.

In this sense, Ferguson’s argument is one of relatives, not absolutes. Even while arguing that Britain was not as bad as its imperial rivals, he by no means argues the Empire was an unadulterated good. The book’s accounts of the Brits’ unrepentant racism towards and harsh subjugation of native populations are unsparing. Perhaps the most egregious atrocity in the history of the Empire, the Amritsar massacre of 1919, is given a lengthy and rightly unforgiving treatment. Ferguson ultimately claims, however, that “[the Empire’s] sins were generally sins of omission, not commission.” The Great Famine of 1876-1878 in India was not the consequence of an active campaign by the British to ravage the native populace, but instead a failure to provide sufficient support during a series of poor harvests. Are the British guiltless? Certainly not. But it takes a particularly kind of myopia to be unable to distinguish between suffering resulting from a lack of action and suffering resulting from bloody, barbaric campaigns of murder and pillage.

Ferguson’s history benefits from his brilliant writing, which has a compulsive readability that is all too rare in many books about history, even those ostensibly catered towards a layman reader. Empire forms a blueprint for how popular history ought to be written, bringing dry facts to life through narrative, and taking a granular, personal view of its subject rather than a broad, impersonal one. In addition to making matters far more interesting, such an approach also forgoes the pretense that history is its own autonomous beast, and instead foregrounds the fact that history is built by the people who live it.

Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam
An upper-middle class New York family heads out to a spacious, isolated Airbnb in Long Island for vacation, only for the owners of the house to arrive at the doorsteps just two days into the stay. The owners claim that they are fleeing the massive blackout that has brought the city to a standstill. Is it terrorism? A massive industrial disaster? A revolt by the natural world against the species that has plundered and pillaged it? Indeed, can these mysterious strangers’ story even be trusted?

None of these questions (barring the last one) are ever really answered over the course of Rumaan Alam’s meandering narrative. The novel’s focus is how we respond to catastrophe – the mixture of panic, disbelief, and horror we experience, in addition to the various coping strategies we adopt. Domesticity is revealed to be one such comfort: the two families seem to generate much comfort from setting tables, preparing meals, and doing laundry even as the world around them continues to collapse. Their conversations, the structural core of the book, flit rapidly between frank discussions of their current situation and fanciful discussions of their normal lives, which they are gradually admitting to themselves are long gone.

I must confess that I enjoyed what the book was about far more than how it went about it. Alam’s idiosyncratic prose was at times grating; I found it to be overfilled with language stretched beyond the point of narrative or stylistic utility, and into the realm of self-indulgence. His liberal similes and metaphors often feel strained, including a sentence in the book’s fourth chapter which nearly made me stop reading: “His penis jerked itself towards the sun, a yoga salutation, bouncing, then stiff at the house’s allure.”² It settles into a better rhythm as the book progresses, or perhaps I got used to it; nonetheless, Leave the World Behind grew on me tremendously as I went along, and especially when I began to stop hoping for narrative cohesion and accept that closure was not on the horizon. Such a novel is not for everyone, but will be enjoyable for readers who allow intriguing subtext to compensate for under-structured text.

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For what it’s worth, this post is about 500 words shorter than last week. Baby steps! Tune in next week for my first foray (in this newsletter, to be sure) into the world of Bollywood. See you then!

1. I can already hear the reader complaints. “So what did you think of the actual bloody movie?” Well, sorry. It’s superb. Mann’s talent as a filmmaker is to take potboiler premises and extract deeper meaning out of them by developing out his characters in a way that makes their interpersonal struggles, rather than the actual narrative elements, the focal point of the story. In Heat, the actual heists are somewhat tangential to the stories of the cops and robbers involved in them; the film’s central drama instead lies in the way their personal and professional lives clash with one another. This penchant for shifting focus to the individuals is on divine display in Collateral. Its best moments are not its action sequences – which are actually somewhat underwhelming, especially for a Mann film – but instead the conversations it features between Vincent and the cabbie Max, in which they talk about and investigate each other’s inner lives.

2. I am truly sorry you had to read that.