Hollywood Action Films and Spatial Theory

Nick Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138812505
• eBook ISBN: 9781317607137
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This book applies the discourse of the so-called 'spatial turn' to popular contemporary cinema, in particular the action sequences of twenty-first century Hollywood productions. Tackling a variety of spatial imaginations (contemporary iconic architecture; globalisation and non-places; phenomenological knowledge of place; consumerist spaces of commodity purchase; cyberspace), the diverse case studies not only detail the range of ways in which action sequences represent the challenge of surviving and acting in contemporary space, but also reveal the consistent qualities of spatial appropriation and spatial manipulation that define the form. Jones argues that action sequences dramatise the restrictions and possibilities of space, offering examples of radical spatial praxis through their depictions of spatial engagement, struggle and eventual transcendence.

1 Architecture

Appropriating Iconic Forms¹

In an article on Speed (1994), Martin Flanagan suggests action films engage with space in an abstract manner. While city-specific locations might be featured for ‘geographical credibility’, he argues the function of space in action cinema is ‘purely structural’: it is ‘essentially always the same’ from film to film, a site of ‘cinematic spectacle rather than quotidian existence’ or a collection of ‘non-specific backdrops constructed according to the purely physical requirements of the action’.² In Flanagan’s model, action films treat both space and time as little more than obligatory contexts for the unfolding of exciting events. He reaches this conclusion by considering action cinema’s mythic dimensions and its focus on destructive events that nonetheless seem to lack consequence and thus place themselves in an imaginative, neutral space outside history. Given Speed’s blank background of freeways, compressed timeframe of action and the film’s attention to spectacular event over everyday experience, Flanagan’s deductions might seem entirely reasonable.

However, I refute such a claim that the spaces of action cinema are inherently interchangeable. Speed, for instance, is set in Los Angeles, a city defined by its immense urban sprawl and abundance of freeways, details that are hardly immaterial to the film’s unfolding. As Genevieve Giuliano states, the city’s ‘extensive mix of low- and medium-density communities distributed over more than 3,500 square miles and connected by hundreds of miles of high-capacity expressways represents the essence of a metropolitan structure developed around the private automobile’.³ Jean Baudrillard asserts in his own hyperbolic prose that LA is ‘in love with its limitless horizontality’.⁴ In Speed, a bus is rigged with a bomb that will explode if the vehicle goes slower than 50 mph, forcing police officer Jack Traven (Keanu Reeves) and impromptu bus driver Annie Porter (Sandra Bullock) to navigate the freeways and horizontality of the city in an innovative manner, creating routes where there were none before (including across a fifty-foot chasm). These cinematic circumstances might be replicated in other cities, but the resulting film would be quite different. Indeed, even if Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997) repeated Speed’s general set-up – but this time figured around an ocean liner in the Caribbean instead of a metropolitan bus in LA – the sequel nonetheless lacked the satisfactions provided by the original’s pressured negotiation of a particular urban fabric. Moreover, this negotiation speaks to the anxieties and dangers of incessant flow and movement in the contemporary urban environment. In addition to the tricked-out bus, Speed features plummeting elevators and out-of-control subway trains, all of which Traven must take control of in whatever small ways he can. In all these cases, the management of transportation infrastructure normally ignored (or, if noticed, condemned for its capacity for slowness and delay) becomes a major concern for the central characters.

The tight interrelationship Speed offers between a specified set of spaces and the dynamics of its represented action makes the film typical of the processes explored in this book. To suggest action films frequently disregard geographical specificity over-emphasises their use of archetypal characters and situations and neglects their focus on the particularities of the spaces in which they stage their spectacle. The action of these films invokes the maxim of the spatial turn that, put glibly, ‘space matters’. As Barney Warf and Santa Arias indicate, such a maxim does not point to ‘the trivial and self-evident reason that everything occurs in space’ but rather highlights how space moulds that which occurs within it: ‘where events unfold is integral to how they take shape’.⁵ In action cinema, spatial negotiation and engagement become major concerns, these films performing this relationship between the where and the how of movement, activity and being.

This goes beyond claiming action cinema pays attention to a particular urban space. Although the films analysed in this book for the most part do use urban settings, I will not interpret them in a way that ties them exclusively to this scale. To continue the above example, Speed’s action may be arranged according to important aspects of LA’s geography and urban identity, but merely to identify this as an organising principle does not tell the whole story. After all, these aspects of the city are tied to a global economy and cultural tendencies towards imagining space and the built environment in certain ways, all of which find particular and unique expression in this city and in this film. Furthermore, it is not only with global and urban scales that characters interact but also (and most crucially) their proximate physical surroundings. Accordingly, this chapter signals my intention to focus on architecture rather than urban space. After all, it is the immediate spaces through which an action protagonist moves that dictate how they move. In what follows, the way in which space influences action and the importance of spatial particularity in action cinema will be broached in a number of ways. While the navigation of space is my primary concern, I will explore this initially through action cinema’s frequent use of highly distinctive spatial particularity: its depictions of iconic architecture. Through analyses of True Lies (1994), The International (2009) and Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011), this chapter will indicate the importance of space and architecture to the action sequence, and will reveal why the application of spatial theory is essential for understanding the fundamental dynamics of these sequences.

DISEMBEDDED LOCALITIES

Action films seek differentiation in a crowded cinematic marketplace. One strategy for achieving this is to feature iconic or otherwise remarkable buildings. These buildings are an appropriate place to begin discussing action cinema’s spatial engagements, although the term ‘iconic’ requires some definition. Describing certain structures as iconic calls attention to their architectural quality and their attempts to be visually distinctive, functioning as they often do as signature buildings on the city skyline. For architecture critic Charles Jencks, the iconic building is about publicity above all else. Driven by the desire for ‘instant fame and economic growth’, structures like Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao are designed and built in order to raise awareness of a location, institution or business, achieving this through visual dazzle rather than patient consideration of context, use and longevity.⁶ An iconic building may seek to represent that which takes place inside it, to be a kind of ‘visual one-liner’, but this explanatory function is less pertinent than the capacity for distinctive design elements to enigmatically demand global press attention.⁷ The Bilbao Guggenheim is an especially successful iconic building, changing the economics of the city by attracting large numbers of tourists, many of whom come for the architecture first and the contents of the museum second. Other cities and corporations have sought ways to be put ‘on the map’ in a similar fashion.⁸ This is not, Jencks admits, a new phenomenon. Distinctive architectural achievements have long been used to define and globally advertise their host cities. In the late nineteenth century, for example, the Eiffel Tower, a ‘useless’ structure, quickly became ‘the symbol of Paris, and for the world, France’, a metonymic capacity it retains today.⁹

Nonetheless, the trend is pronounced in the twenty-first century. Buildings like the Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA (by Frank Gehry), the CCTV Building in Beijing (by Rem Koolhaas) and the reconstruction of the Ground Zero site in New York (by Daniel Libeskind and others) all in very different ways indicate an emergent spatiality of immense, iconic forms. These buildings seek to differentiate a given area in an easily communicable, visual manner that effortlessly crosses cultural boundaries. As globalisation connects cities, countries and individuals, the assertion of local identity becomes increasingly important or perhaps important in a different way, as this sense of place has been deeply affected by the globalised media economy and the need to feed this economy with direct and instantly digestible content.¹⁰ A local area, company or institution can receive public attention and media airtime through an iconic building, creating a symbol that can be divorced from context and therefore does not rely on the history or the particular qualities of its material location.

Whether it is treated with reverence – as in a chase up and through the Eiffel Tower in A View to a Kill (1985) – or destroyed with gleeful abandon – as in the collapse of John Lautner’s stilt-supported Garcia House in Lethal Weapon 2 (1989) – the touristic appeal of iconic architecture clearly motivates its use in action cinema. The asserted specificity of these buildings is rooted in commodity systems and the branding processes of both contemporary Hollywood and the global city. Nonetheless, specificity is but one aspect of action cinema’s spatial attention. Audiences of Speed are not drawn to the film for its portrayal of LA (scholars of film or urban studies aside), so I do not want to suggest the settings of action sequences are always deployed for the purposes of branding and marketing. Yet paying attention to the market-led dynamics behind the inclusion of iconic architecture in action cinema can usefully point to the more intrinsic functioning of space and the immediate environment within this cinema. Action sequences set within and upon iconic buildings overtly exhibit the innate tendency of such sequences to be closely attuned to the particulars of space. Briefly, A View to a Kill relies on and responds to the Eiffel Tower’s skeletal structure and panoramic view of Paris, while Lethal Weapon 2 shows us a hypothetical demonstration of what would happen if the delicate-looking supports of a stilted house were torn away.

If there is more to this than touristic or destructive visual pleasure, then this is thanks to the attention action cinema pays to the human body in space. In their depictions of extremely embodied processes of spatial acclimatisation, appropriation and manipulation, action sequences strongly tie themselves to the particular locations in which they take place. The best way to understand these processes is through the application of spatial theory. Later in this chapter I will use the influential work of Michel de Certeau to argue action sequences are spectacular versions of his pedestrian tactics; in future chapters I will use Henri Lefebvre’s writing as a touchstone for unravelling what is at stake in any analysis of space and actions that take place within it. For the moment, though, I would like to examine what I consider to be a surprising but indicative intersection between the worlds of critical theory and Hollywood action cinema: the use of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in LA in both accounts of postmodern subjectivity and the Arnold Schwarzenegger blockbuster True Lies. That film’s titular paradox points to its presentation of urban space in a useful manner. Although the film uses location shooting, editing and backdrops to construct geographical lies, it does so in a manner that speaks honestly about contemporary spatial experience. Moreover, the evident kinship between theorisations of the hotel’s spatiality and the way in which it is treated by action cinema succinctly articulates the potential for productive dialogue between these fields.

The film’s second major action set-piece sees Schwarzenegger’s protagonist, Harry Tasker, pursued by terrorists on the streets of Washington DC. Having outgunned many of them in a restroom in the Georgetown Park Mall, Tasker chases their commander Aziz (Art Malik) through the night. Aziz commandeers a motorcycle, Tasker a police horse and they race through neoclassical hotel lobbies, restaurant kitchens, parking structures and into the lobby of the Bonaventure (fig. 1.1). They each get into one of the building’s distinctive cylindrical glass elevators and head for the roof. Once there, Aziz escapes by jumping his motorcycle to an adjacent rooftop, whereas the horse wisely refuses to attempt the leap. The sequence is semi-comic, using the incongruous presence of Tasker’s horse to undercut the intensity of the action and the threat of violence. Further incongruity is created through the use of the LA Bonaventure in a chase that ostensibly takes place in Washington. Such artificial cinematic geography potentially stresses what Flanagan considers to be the ‘purely structural’ nature of space in the action film. After all, we might reasonably assume that if space were so important then it would at least be represented faithfully.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Architecture: Appropriating Iconic Forms
• 2 Space: Surviving the Non-Places of Globalisation
• 3 Place: Meaning Through Movement
• 4 Paraspaces: Spatial Displacement and Consumerism
• 5 Cyberspace: Embodying Digital Networks
• Conclusion: Action and Everyday Life
• Bibliography
• Index