Issue #356: "desire is a metonymy, even if man scoffs at the idea"
I saw the Seven Samurai (1954) 4K remaster this weekend. It was awesome. This viewing, my first time in theaters, really gave me a new appreciation for the movie. A very common but true observation: the movie is a lot funnier in a big group. And it deserves that reaction. There’s some great comedic beats and physical comedy especially with Kikuchiyo (Toshirō Mifune) chasing around Yohei’s (Bokuzen Hidari) horse. Mifune is working hard to leave the audience in stitches almost every time he’s on the screen.
Just having seen The Mission (1999) a little over a month ago, lucky for me, I can see how much To draws from Kurosawa. Between the two, a filmmaker could probably make an exhaustive taxonomy of a superlative ensemble film.
Dwarfed by the screen (I was in the front row on purpose), I also felt a new appreciation for the beginning of the movie. When I first saw Seven Samurai in high school, I felt like the movie didn’t really start until Takashi Shimura comes on the screen as Kambei Shimada, getting ready to shave his head. It’s a stunning scene, Shimada as the samurai who isn’t at the mercy of his pride but instead embodies the historically inaccurate qualities of an idealized or mythic samurai.
This time, though, I was struck by some of first words of the film.
There’s probably a Freakonomics chapter to be written about the idea of bandits choosing not to raid a village until they’ve cultivate their crops. The ideas of restraint and forgoing immediate gratification are big ones in the first part of Seven Samurai, as Yohei, Manzô (Kamatari Fujiwara), Mosuke (Yoshio Kosugi), and Rikichi (Yoshio Tsuchiya) forgo their rice in favor of millet.
That early drama does a lot to endear us to characters we see less and less of as the film goes on. The four villagers looking for samurai to hire stand in for the village as a whole. The film’s structure and pacing is what make the characters and the setting feel so rich.
This week, I revisit Collateral (2004), and probably not for the last time.
Desire’s Ties That Bind in Collateral
I wrote briefly about Collateral (2004) all the way back in 2021. It’s been a while since then.
I have to give myself credit for what I picked up on then — the class analysis of the film. The most important highlight in that 2021 essay was the status of Max Durocher (Jamie Foxx), who I call “working stiff.” But “stiff” has a double-meaning. Though it may not be etymologically accurate, “stiff” also evokes the dead body, a crucial homology in a film that follows an assassin wrecking havoc in the always-already precarious context of organized crime. Vincent’s (Tom Cruise) job is, like so many essential workers, invisible even as, by some measures, it’s a necessity. Vincent’s repudiation of Max’s boss calls back to Dirty Pretty Things (2002), a British thriller released two years before Collateral where Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a cab driver, like Max, gives a memorable but brief testament on behalf of the proverbially voiceless working class.
In so many ways, though, my reading of Collateral back then is a vehicle for an analysis of Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share Volume III (1976) more than its a close reading of the film. And, as is still true today, I am occasionally beholden to clever turn-of-phrase, sometimes more than critical rigor. With that in mind, I have to note a small but significant mistake, claiming Max dreams of “nothing but the tropical paradise depicted on a postcard he keeps in the car’s sun visor,” when in fact his dream is far more pedestrian and shocking. He dreams of owning a limo company, Island Limos, for which the post card image is a substitution. Max can never escape the strictures of capitalist accumulation. Even his dream is a dream of work rather the leisure. And the “cool groove … club experience” to which he repeatedly refers as part of the sales pitch for his imaginary limo company is something his customer enjoys rather than himself.
Revisiting the movie, I thought to break it down to its most constituent parts to provide a reading worthy of the film’s splendor. When I first saw Collateral in the mid-2000s, I felt that its title was obvious, a reference to the idea of “collateral damage” as Vincent rampages through the city. For whatever reason, as I got older, I associated the title less with the damage Vincent unintentionally inflicts when completing his task and more with the idea of economic collateral. Vincent holds something over Max, culminating in the threat on Max’s mother’s life. Her life is held temporarily in exchange for services rendered by Max, to be released upon Max satisfactorily chauffeuring Vincent to his assassinations. So Vincent says, at least. In so many economic relationships involving a relinquishment of collateral, the intention is to retain what is offered as collateral. In Vincent’s case, his actual plan is to kill Max and then his mother, regardless of what Max does.
The exchange of collateral is a complex one between Max and Vincent because they are reflections of one another. This is still a movie about doubles, in the tradition of movies like The Woman in the Window (1944), North by Northwest (1959), Dead Ringers (1988), and Fight Club (1999). Vincent is an avatar of Max’s desire. As I wrote in 2021, including a quote from Slavoj Žižek’s Looking Awry (1991):
We might … read Vincent as a manifestation of Max’s own unconscious, much in the same way as Brad Pitt is to Edward Norton in Fight Club (1999) or Richard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) is to himself in Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window (1944). Žižek writes about Lang’s film, “in our unconscious, in the real of our desire, we are all murderers.”
To the extent Vincent represents Max’s desire, Collateral emphasizes just how threatening desire can be. Vincent seeks to supplant Max, dislodging Max from the routine of his life. Though he won’t literally replace Max, his string of murders is executed precisely such that people won’t be able to distinguish between Vincent and Max.
The disruptive potential of desire is part and parcel to what it leaves in its wake. Namely, nothing. Lacan writes in “The Instance of the Letter of the Unconscious”:
if the symptom is a metaphor, it is not a metaphor to say so, any more than it is to say that man’s desire is a metonymy. For the symptom is a metaphor, whether one likes to admit it or not, just as desire is a metonymy, even if man scoffs at the idea. (Écrits. A Selection Fink Trans. 166)
Desire always leaves its mark, but its mark is a hole. The human-shaped holes of The Enigma of Amigara Fault (2001) or bullet holes, as is the case with Vincent.
In his shooting spree, Vincent executes with the precision befitting a professional. However, this professionalism belies the symptom Vincent can’t extricate himself from. Contract killers are rarely depicted as “serial killers” in fiction, but their method is as rigid as that of a killer enacting a pathological routine with each kill. Vincent would be highly incentivized to obscure the method of his kills to hide his own signature — a mark of the competence of a trained killer. But he can’t do it, a problem easily understood with an example from Magic: the Gathering.
After an incident where a player was caught breaking game rules on a livestreamed game of Magic, Patrick Sullivan comments, “it’s so sick … and revealing to not be able to turn it off on camera. You could run this shit just playing your regular matches, play a clean game on camera, and nobody would be the wiser. It is revealing of a deep, deep pathology that they cannot turn it off for the camera.” This is the problem of desire that Lacan has so adeptly thought and rethought across his oeuvre. Even when every incentive is in place for one to act in a certain way to achieve their stated goal, one cannot act in accordance with those incentives because what one demands is not what one desires. For Collateral as a film, it is not necessary (or, in my view, valuable) to diagnose Vincent’s “real desire” derived from his attachment to killing in a certain way. Is it to be caught? To be known as a killer who is proficient above all others? To communicate to his pursuers that he is the agent behind a deception they can’t penetrate? Why not all of the above? For Vincent and Max, who is a “temporary” cab driver attempting to martial his suite of Mercedes-Benzes, what they express as their stated goal is never the thing at which their desire is aimed. And, as foils, they serve to reveal about each other these subjective gaps.
What is crucial about Vincent’s shooting habits is to understand that he is not the enlightened agent aiding Max in an ascension to masculinity, but equally culpable in a self-deception even unknown to himself facilitated by desire.
Desire’s unknowability and inarticulability enmeshes citizen-subjects in a network of intersubjective collateral. Max misunderstands what exactly that relationship entails when he needles Vincent about killing someone he only met once.
The film then dramatizes the thought experiment, with Max and Vincent sitting down with one of Vincent’s targets, Daniel Baker (Barry Shabaka Henley). Baker tells Max and Vincent about his background as a jazz player and tells a story about Miles Davis. Despite the pleasant evening, Vincent doesn’t let Baker off the hook, killing him after posing a difficult and ambiguous question about Miles Davis’s musical education.
Vincent takes Max’s questions literally but fails to respond to the implicit meaning of the questions that the movie leaves unstated. From Max’s vantage point, it is worse to kill someone “after [you] get to know them,” not better. But what Max is actually referring to is the complex connection of human obligation that Vincent continually disrupts. The only potentially legitimate reason to kill another is that they have wronged you, as Vincent wrongs Max repeatedly throughout the evening. Simply knowing them increases your obligation to them, though Vincent disputes that fact and does not act in accordance with the moral dictum such an idea would underwrite.
The moment of Baker’s killing is a watershed one for Max. Vincent disrupts Max’s symptom of ostensibly obsessive-compulsive car washing and repudiates Max’s abusive and exploitative boss. But any “good” for which Vincent might be proximately responsible on Max’s behalf is far outweighed by the harm he has done to Max. Ultimately, he plans to kill Max, as he did with the Bay Area series of killings Ray Fanning (Mark Ruffalo) describes during the investigation of Vincent’s first killing. In the wake of Vincent killing Baker, “play[ing] him,” Max realizes that the violence of desire will lead him to his death. That the ties desire binds subjects with are the ones that will be dissolved at desire’s whim. As Vincent and Max work toward goals they can articulate, their desire always trips them up.
Max evokes the title of the film recognizing the imminent death he’ll face at Vincent’s hands, whether he is among those listed for Vincent to kill or not: “I’m collateral anyway.”
Weekly Reading List
Brain Steel Esquire modeled Young Thug’s Sp5der clothing line.
Speaking of people wearing funny things, sometime recently Playboi Carti wore a Warzone t-shirt.
I am generally not in favor of hardcore bands and hardcore band merchandise getting attention because of celebrities, but the wardrobe choice made for some striking photos.
Alex Rollins Berg has a pretty good gift guide going in his latest edition of Underexposed.
Hiroko Yoda gives an interesting overview of various analogues to the word “woke” in Japanese culture. He comes to an opposite conclusion than I would, however. While there may not be any catch-all translation for the particularly American idiom, it seems like both the Japanese slang “ishikii takai kei” and even “mezameta” (目覚めた), “awaken,” could work depending on the context. Yoda dismisses the use of mezameta for exactly the reason some people would endorse it, “this sounds like something a cult leader would exhort you to do.” The recounting of “ishikii takai kei” Yoda gives, I think, shows the universality of how socially conscious postures are so commonly evacuated of their content.
Until next time.