Michael Mann – The Keep, Heat, and Postcapitalist Mythmaking
First, thanks to all of the recent subscribers to Flesh/Markets: a newsletter of the horrific, surreal, and extreme in art and life. There are more than a hundred of you now, which is highly motivating.
I hope at least some of you have been enjoying the summer, even amidst the lingering of a literal plague and the visible implosion of the biosphere that supports our lives. I certainly have been! New York is really fantastic right now without the hordes of tourists. If you have a chance to come, don’t, I like it just the way it is.
I felt compelled to sit down tonight and riff a bit after watching Michael Mann’s incredible, nearly-forgotten masterclass The Keep. It’s a complete oddity from one of Hollywood’s directorial titans, a surrealist horror-fantasy indulgence, full of magical lightning and soul-sucking demons, by the same guy who would later direct uber-serious thrillers like The Insider. It’s also a skeleton key to the weirdness of Michael Mann’s deepest self, and it lends enormous credence to my pet thesis that Miami Vice is a science fiction show.
But first: The Keep. On paper it’s a cheesy, if entertaining, B-movie: In 1941, a detachment of troops under the Nazi regime have been sent to occupy a forbidding, alien structure somehow nestled in a high and primitive mountain village. A family of strange caretakers warn them away, but they insist on staying in the black-stone dungeon. It’s no surprise at all when they begin to be picked off by a strange supernatural force.
But what happens after that tease of a guilt-free gorefest is an example of auteur-driven adventure-fantasy filmmaking that joins the weird company of John Boorman’s Zardoz and Excalibur, David Lynch’s Dune, and Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy. What seems like the setup for thoughtful horror takes a sudden, delirious turn when the German authorities respond to the soldiers’ request for help by sending in a full SS unit that proceeds to terrorize the townsfolk, thinking that the strange killings are actually the acts of partisan resistance fighters hidden in the village.
The SS captain, played by Gabriel Byrne at his ruthless, heartless, sneering best, at first refuses to listen to any local nonsense about protected spirits, until his own unit is slowly consumed by the Keep’s strange power. He locates a purported Jewish scholar – played by a youthful Sir Ian McKellen! - to help decipher strange writings left by the inscrutable, murderous entity. This all continues to complexify as an attempt to escape the concentration camp braids into a series of taut double-crosses, all revolving around a mystical amulet of great power.
Oh, and Scott Glenn – hot off The Right Stuff, mind you – plays an ageless wizard who wields a mystical purple light-saber.
All this, directed by the guy who went on to make a gritty, bro-friendly heist movie like Heat. It’s a fascinating contrast. Really, The Keep is such a bizarre film in the context of Michael Mann’s career. But it makes a lot of sense if you look at Mann’s films more deeply. It failed commercially, after a rather notorious series of studio cuts that led to a much shorter version of the film than Mann intended.
(The cut material seems to be totally lost, and I’ve heard some speculation that it would have made some plot and lore details clearer, but I have to say I found the film really tight and clear in its released cut.)
This failure to take a turn into fantastic filmmaking basically hangs like a shadow over the rest of Mann’s career. Michael Mann is maybe best know for his semi-experimental interest in slow, sweeping, experiential shots that took full advantage of the film frame. These long shots and silences aren’t the weighty psychological pauses of a Hollywood blockbuster. Often they are moments for characters to contemplate weighty decisions or reassess their priorities. But they’re also pauses long and quiet and still enough to force the audience to absorb the weight of pure being, the motion of the world, most importantly the mute, emotionless dynamism of water, light, and air.
Mann is in some moments as meditative as Terrence Malick, and far more restrained. Yet his subjects are the fodder of Hollywood, bank robbers and thieves and other sorts of killers, and his settings are cities and industrial sites and nightclubs.
(In this he’s to my mind a directorial counterpart to Nicholas Cage, who is clearly one of the Hollywood greats, but who brings to even his most weightless and formulaic characters, like Con Air’s Cameron Poe, an enthralling taste of auteurish weirdness).
Its existence and troubled release give huge credence to a theory that I’ve secretly nursed ever since watching maybe ten episodes of Miami Vice a few years ago. The Keep represented Mann stepping into pretty much overt fantasy, a somewhat strange shift from taut psychological crime thrillers. It was only after The Keep’s failure that he returned to Executive Producing Vice, followed by Manhunter and Heat and Collateral and Public Enemies and Blackhat and etc. He did also direct both The Last of the Mohicans and Ali, which I’d forgotten. But he clearly became a man with a row to hoe, and he hoed it.
I’d argue the sublimated could-have-been of The Keep, its weirdness and existential meditativeness, kept resurfacing just under the skin of Mann’s gritty, grounded con-men and hoods. Mann executive produced Miami Vice starting in 1984, but to my surprise didn’t direct any episodes. Still, at least in the early seasons, it’s shocking how much Vice, which is inextricably associated with the flash and excess of the 1980s, had a deliberate, almost meditative pacing to it. Add to that the choice of an exotic Florida setting, complete with dangerous animals doubling as monsters and dragons, and I’ve always suspected that an impulse to weirdness lay deep in the heart of Vice – an impulse deeply tied to science fiction and fantasy.
In fact, seen through this lens, The Keep becomes a very cool skeleton key for all of Mann’s work. As he explains in some extremely interesting interview footage included in this solid video essay from the Celluloid Heroes YouTube channel, Mann decided to adapt F. Paul Wilson’s horror-fantasy novel because he thought it could be transposed into the register of the dream, a zone of pure happening without the leaden weight of pseudoscientific rationality.
And indeed, everything in The Keep happens both in a literal dream-like haze of mist that wreathes the mountain pass, and with occasional leaps of dream-logic as the story clips along and steadily expands. Great declarations are made in booming oration, love stories are told in a few beats. It’s all very clearly fantasy more than it is horror: a particular kind of dark fantasy, for sure. But these figures are very clearly broad types engaged in eternal battles.
This same mute, mythic resonance basically gets transposed whole into Mann’s other work, where it is embodied by people who move through a much more familiar world. Not Nazi bunkers haunted by imprisoned spirits, but Miami nightclubs haunted by the ghostly force of drugs and crime. Los Angeles gains the unreal sheen of the Fairylands.
Seeing Michael Mann as a fantasist of the real drives home the point that some of our great folk artists are exactly that: tellers of folk tales, shapers of the mythopoetic that is immanent in our every single day, even the seemingly mundane ones. Mann’s thieves and criminals are characterized by the banal meticulousness of their operations – their nearly corporate attention to detail, their discipline, their muted affects. Yet it is through this discipline, the humble discipline of the tradesman, that their great works and ecstasies are gained, events that play out the great passions and stories of our own and every time. At their greatest heights they become the knights and lords and evil wizards of our own dim world.
Mann’s thieves are working stiffs, for the most part, even if they’ve made the big time. Mann is really ultimately a poet of work, a mythologizer of competence and professionalism and, most of all, craft. These are the closest things to magic in our world: to be better than someone else at manipulating its materials and networks, its channels of information and pressure and influence. This is often how I think of my day job as a journalist, doing sometimes confrontational work covering major corporations. I’m a fighter of armed pretty near to only with my wits.
I guess at the end of the day what I’m saying is that Michael Mann at his best gives us, in the figure of the thief or detective or other cagey operator on the fringe, a modern translation of the great adventurers and dreamers of a more heroic (and mostly imagined) age. These figures are gateways for imagining ourselves, even in our somewhat reduced paper-pushing condition, as great, or at least daring, in the ways we dream the people of a mythic, forgotten past once were.