Obscures u.$. involvement in Colombian cocaine, but has some interesting take-home messages for discerning moviegoers:
"Collateral"
"Collateral" (http://www.collateral-themovie.com/)
Directed by Michael Mann
R / Philippines:R-13
2004
A contract killer hires a taxi for the night to drive him to his hits in Los Angeles. Usually, the cabbie flirts with female fares and dreams of owning a limo company. In the wrong place at the wrong time, he looks for opportunities to escape, but gets himself into even more trouble. The killer's employer is a drug cartel with a Mexican face.
This summer has seen a few movies defending the overall integrity and legitimacy of the law enforcement agencies of the united $nakes—in subtle ("The Bourne Supremacy", "The Manchurian Candidate") and not so subtle ways ("Spider-Man 2"). To the latter, we may add "Collateral."
The drug cartel in "Collateral" is "an offshore narcotrafficking cartel," according to the movie's website. In the movie itself, little is said about the cartel. From what we can tell, it seems to be involved with heroin produced in Southeast and Southwest Asia, and cocaine and heroin produced in Latin America. In the real world, these areas are major sources of cocaine and heroin in the united $tates. Lieutenant Colonel James "Bo" Gritz and University of Wisconsin Professor Alfred McCoy have each discussed the relationship between the CIA and heroin distribution in the united $tates, and the CIA's involvement in cocaine distribution has been well-reported.
Leaving the theater, one would think that there was absolutely no relationship between cocaine in Los Angeles, and the u.$. government. All we see in "Collateral" is a jurisdiction conflict between the FBI and the LAPD, and the typical remarks about how the other organization is trying to take credit for catching the bad guy who is giving the morgue a lot of business. This reviewer wishes that "Collateral" would have gone with this idea further, to expose the system's inability to end homicide. To the movie writers' (Stuart Beattie) credit, all of the homicides depicted in the movie, including the killings of the white men who mug Max (Jamie Foxx), are clearly a consequence of private property. But the movie gives us no way out of this situation.
To justify his line of work, Vincent (Tom Cruise) makes a comment about how, some time ago, nobody noticed a corpse on the MTA (metro rail) for six hours. He also talks about how the media blows the deaths of privileged people in the united $tates out of proportion and forgets about Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Rwanda. He criticizes Max for not getting as upset about these things. Vincent's remarks are more cynical than anything else. Certainly, by spending his own time serving drug capitalists, Vincent is doing nothing about these massive deaths; although, the remark about Rwanda is an interesting point.(1)
"Collateral" deserves praise for at least pointing out the similarity between the u.$. multiple genocide in Japan (and terrorism against the socialist Soviet Union) and the genocide of the Tutsi. U.$. imperialism supported both.
What's wrong with "Collateral" is not that it depicts Colombian or Mexican big drug capitalists as being Vincent's employer, or that Vincent's killing of a Korean witness is almost the climax of the movie, but that the movie distorts the u.$. government's involvement in the distribution of Colombian cocaine in Los Angeles. Not for nothing is the CIA called the "Cocaine Importing Agency"(2). At the same time, "Collateral" whips up support for the incarceration of oppressed nationalities. "Kalifornia's Three Strikes law and federal sentencing guidelines for cocaine disproportionately target Blacks and Latinos. The high incarceration rates for petty so-called crimes and the courts' complicity with police who harass and arrest people from oppressed communities on trumped up charges show that the Amerikan injustice system is not about stopping crime; rather, it is about social control. Meanwhile the biggest criminals -- the cops themselves and politicians an militarists like the coke-importing CIA -- these criminals go unpunished."(3) "Collateral" offers no alternative to the Amerikan injustice system.
Even the atmosphere of "Collateral" is pessimistic. The movie's almost exclusive use of nighttime urban party and urban street scenes, and lonely subway cars, set in Amerikkka is typically "postmodern" in feel and politically discouraging. Max's potential intimate relationship with the Department of Justice lawyer, Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith), seems a welcome respite.
Why would Max want to seek refuge in romance culture? Economically speaking, this is not clear. Max has continuously been a taxi driver for twelve years, and as Vincent points out, Max could have made a down payment on a luxury car to start the limousine business that he often talks about. Vincent criticizes Max for not having more ambition. Max is petty-bourgeois, and on speaking terms with moneyed white people. In the hospital room scene with Max's mother, it is made painfully obvious that Max aspires to be "more" than a taxi driver. (Max had been telling his mother that he was already a limo driver.) But he also has the means to do so, in the long run if not the short.
When "Collateral" makes a point of emphasizing Max's economic situation, we have to be clear on some things here. Not only is Max not exploited (even if we ignore the fact that Max has not been a productive worker for at least twelve years, MIM has already explained in Notes and Theory how incomes at or above the u.$. legal minimum wage typically do not represent exploitation), Max is a net beneficiary of imperialism with superprofits shifting his income upward. Just among taxi drivers in the vicinity, one has only to drive a few hours south of L.A. to see taxi drivers in Tijuana who get one-fifth or less of Max's annual income(4). Tijuana cabbies do not have Max's luxury to give free rides to anyone.
Jamie Foxx says that he "really drew upon from the black experience"(5) in his performance as Max, who is supposedly adverse to calling on the police. This is bullshit. Although his fear is understandable, Max does try to use the police more than a couple of times. Also, he ends up in the arms of Department of Justice prosecutor Annie, who is Black. Undercover LAPD officer Fanning appears to be friendly to Max. The clear message is that the blue uniform is Max's friend.
Finally, Vincent is depicted as being a cold-blooded killer. But this does not stop the movie from "humanizing" him, and we have to ask ourselves, to what purpose? This is more of that amorality that is typical of postmodernists and which makes it difficult to talk about who is oppressed, and who is oppressive, in the world.
As if to recognize the limitations of the postmodern approach, "Collateral" tries to provide a specific objective basis for the violence it depicts. Vincent suggests that he suffered physical abuse as a child, which, leaving aside the empirical validity of this cycle-of-crime theory, ignores the fact that most of today's crimes would be impossible in a classless society without patriarchy.
Notes:
1. "US chose to ignore Rwandan genocide," http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1182431,00.html ; "New evidence on the role of the US and France : Who is responsible for the genocide in Rwanda?," http://www.wsws.org/news/1998/apr1998/rwan-a29.shtml
2. "Who profits from the drug trade?," MIM Notes 55, http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/mn/mn.php?issue=055 ; "Cocaine Importing Agency," http://www.csun.edu/CommunicationStudies/ben/news/cia/ ; "CIA Hawking Heroin in Baghdad?," http://www.diggers.org/freecitynews/_disc1/00000070.htm
3. "West coast RAIL rallies opposition to imperialism," MIM Notes 161, http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/mn/mn.php?issue=161
4. "Angry Tijuana cabbies push past police, tell grievances to mayor," http://lists.village.virginia.edu/cgi-bin/spoons/archive_msg.pl?file=aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_1997/aut-op-sy.9708&msgnum=87&start=10749&end=10862
5. "The Thrill of It All : Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx on making Collateral," http://www.freetimes.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1817
6. "By 1970, Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver were both putting forward something a little different than what would be found in standard Maoist circles. Influenced by Fanon, they took up Lenin and wrote off the economic demands of the middle-classes as imperialist parasitism. Then they said what was left was the lumpenproletariat. This represented the correct recognition that salary and wage-receiving people within U$ borders are labor-aristocracy or higher, unless they are undocumented." "On the internal class structures of the internal semi-colonies," http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/contemp/internalclass3.htm