Drying Up the Soul

Max: First time in L.A?
Vincent: No. Tell you the truth, whenever I'm here I can't wait to leave. It's too sprawled out, disconnected. You know? That's me. You like it?
Max: It's my home.
Vincent: 17 million people. This has got to be the fifth biggest economy in the world and nobody knows each other. I read about this guy who gets on the MTA here, dies.
Max: Oh.
Vincent: Six hours he's riding the subway before anybody notices his corpse doing laps around L.A., people on and off sitting next to him. Nobody notices.

Okay, here we go. I've been a bit nervous about this, so I kept putting off blogging in favor of getting a great insight to post, but then there is always the delete button if I hate what I write.

In class the other day, Professor Leeper talked about how the visual composition of a scene in a film can suggest certain responses and emotions better than (metaphorically) grabbing the viewer by the shirt collar and telling him or her to feel a certain way. He spoke about filming a scene so that it would have the appearance of being cramped, or suffocating, or something of the like, to cause the viewer to feel as if their soul had dried up. He noted that this was obviously more effective than having one character lament to another, "Gee, my soul feels dried up." However, one should not completely discount the obvious. Perhaps then, a good movie is like Shakespeare: the more intellectual levels it appeals to, the wider a group the work as a whole will appeal to.

One of the movies that came to my mind during this discussion was the movie Collateral, starring Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx. I recalled noting the artistry of the shots in this film when I first viewed it. Since the movie is rated R (for violence and language), I had to get my screen captures off of Google Images instead of finding someone who owned it and getting the specific screen capture that I had in mind. The screen capture to the right is a good example of a typical shot in the film, though not the one I wanted.

Cruise's character plays Vincent, a hitman-for-hire who disrupts Max's (Foxx) boring, taxicab-driver life when Max takes him on as a passenger, little knowing the havoc that will resultingly ensue. The quote at the top of this entry is taken from the movie. Vincent talks about how, in large cities, nobody notices or cares what happens to the people around him or her. I thought that the way the scenes were shot in the movie reinforced the idea of being alone in a crowd in a huge, cold city. Many close-ups of Vincent tended to show him visually "cut off" from other people in the shot. The shot that I had wanted to show that exemplified this was of Vincent in the back seat and Max in the front seat of the taxi. The shot is quite obviously bisected by the a support for the grate that divides the front seat from the back seat, and it even cuts partly through the view of Vincent. The movie also seemed to favor greys and blues for shots, which seemed to emphasize the coldness of a big city.

Although quotes like the one at the top of the article made the desired emotion of loneliness and coldness in Collateral a bit more apparant, these emotions were most effectively drawn by the artistry of the shots. The implicit suggestions made through the composition of a scene was ultimately more effective.