Inside Man

I plan on giving away within this essay large elements of the plot of this film. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend you do so before reading this.

Halfway through Inside Man, Madeline White (Jodie Foster), a mysterious go-to woman for those in power who need to get things done quietly and efficiently, enters a bank being held hostage by Dalton Russell (Clive Owen), to make him an offer on the behalf of Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer), who owns the bank and is very protective of a secret contained in a personal safety deposit box inside. Upon entering the bank’s foyer, Spike Lee cuts to a disorienting overhead shot that shows Foster taken to the ground and frisked by Owen. The bright police lights spilling in through the glass doorway cast long shadows over their heads, and they momentarily, stunningly, but with absolute purpose clearly are meant to resemble the iconic image of the hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner, clad in black and standing on a crate with electrodes attached to his fingers.

My jaw, quite literally, dropped, and over the matter of seconds after realizing what Lee was doing, I waited for an affirmation from the rest of the crowd, which I didn’t get. I can’t infer the silence as ignorance—perhaps they were as struck as I was at what Lee was showing, and thus telling us. The digitally produced ghastly specter of that particular detainee spread across the internet last year, becoming the most prominent symbol of one of the worst and most humiliating episodes of a war started and executed through deceptive practices.

More importantly for the purposes of Inside Man, though, the image of the prisoner represents the power digital media affords its users to capture and disseminate a version of truth that, theoretically, can be as ideologically polysemic as it is strategically powerful. The current administration wanted to repress the Abu Ghraib photos for the same reason they currently deny the existence of those with the President and Jack Abramoff in the same frame: they realize that, when publicly disseminated, digital technology is, to paraphrase John Fiske, the eyewitness, accuser, defendant and verdict.

Inside Man is a study of an inventively planned and executed bank heist in an age when American society is permeated on all levels by digital technology and the accompanying messages for which it facilitates transmission. Lee manipulates popular digital culture in service of his narrative in ways that, ideally, force the viewer to retreat for a moment and consider what he or she sees and hears, and why they do or do not believe it to be true.

At one point in the film, during the middle of the hostage crisis that has emerged as a result of the robbery, Russell demands that Detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington) quickly raise a camera to a second-story window. He obliges, and we see the subsequent video transmission of the group of robbers surrounding a hostage, who is then coldly executed with a shot to the head. This shocks and disgusts Frazier, and he angrily runs to the front door to lambaste Russell for breaking the captor/negotiator contract they’d agreed upon. However, we learn toward the end of the film that that event was completely staged—the execution was a carefully planned piece of trickery designed to throw the police for a loop, which it certainly did.

Most importantly, the event was taken as fact by the police (and consequently the film’s viewing audience) largely because of its method of transmission. The scene plays upon the audience’s collective memory of so many profound and widely disseminated visual moments of violence—from Eddie Adams’ Vietnam-era photograph of the execution of Nguyen Van Lem, through the taped beating of Rodney King 15 years ago, to the internet-circulated beheadings of Iraqi war prisoners Nick Berg and Daniel Pearl and release of the Abu Grahib photos—and the fact that widely disseminated images of powerful violence have the visceral appeal to serve as judge and jury.

At several points in the film, Lee also recognizes the authority of the aural. With our President currently under threat of censure for his willful (and admitted) wiretapping of the phones of American citizens, Lee acknowledges the fact that privacy is a thing of the past, and anyone can theoretically be monitored at any time. Early on in the film, one of Washington’s assistants is reviewing equipment at their disposal to deal with the situation, and produces a pen that when clicked, begins recording for up to a half-hour. Washington is impressed, regarding it as James Bond-esque. She replies that it’s available on Amazon.com.

A bit later, after delivering pizzas rigged with transmitters to the hostages and their captors, Washington recognizes a foreign language emanating from their receiver. He recruits a man from the group of locals gathered behind the barricades, and he informs them that it’s Albanian, the language spoken by his ex-wife. They get her to the scene, and she reveals that what they’re hearing is indeed the Albanian language, but only a recorded piece of political propaganda from a deceased president. One of the captors was shown eating pizza and playing the recording from an iPod attached to a speaker. Later, we learn that a message delivered early in the film to the police by Russell contains an electronic transmitter, and the intricate strategies of the police themselves have been monitored for the majority of the film. Indeed, access to digital technology is shown as being accessible to all.

The multiple meanings conveyed and reappropriated by digital technologies are referenced by Lee early in the film, when Russell is frisking his captors and ordering them to turn over their keys and cell phones. He comes across Peter Hammond, who doesn’t have a cell phone. This is patently unbelievable to Russell, who threatens to kill Hammond if he’s not telling the truth. Hammond sticks with the story that he’d left his phone at home, prompting Russell to dig through the already confiscated phones until finding one with Hammond’s number in the speed dial menu. He finds one, and dials. Nothing is said, but we hear Kanye West’s “Gold Digger” emanating from an adjoining room, damning Hammond to a physical beating at the hands of Russell.

Lee mixes in a bit of black comedy here (no pun intended) by expressly commenting on the fact that the world’s most prominent rapper has created a piece of music simultaneously identifiable with black hip-hop culture (the phone plays the song’s unedited n-word refrain) but disseminated thoroughly enough to serve as a ringtone on a stiff, white corporate type’s cell phone. This is a perfect representation of the idea that digital media do not discriminate, that their reach extends to any and all consumers, who then do with them what they will.

Moments later, a young black hostage named Brian (Amir Ali Said) offers Russell his PSP game system, and Russell lets the boy keep it. This leads to a scene in the bank’s vault a bit later, in which Russell brings Brian a slice of pizza and sits to talk with him, to make sure he’s doing okay. Brian is completely unfazed; he’s easily the calmest of the captors, the rest of whom are terrified adults. He’s playing a game on his PSP, and Russell looks at it. It’s a “Grand Theft Auto” type, with realistically-rendered gangsta-style black characters engaging in a very violent gun battle, culminating in one character blowing off another’s head with a hand grenade in a scene so over-the-top that some audience members laughed. The game takes up the full-screen, and bold text at the top reads “kill dat nigga!” Brian, after being asked if he’s frightened by Russell, empathizes with his captor, going so far as to compare him to 50 Cent, offering that they share the motto of “get rich or die tryin’”, while also uttering every hoary street cliché this side of “word is born”. Russell is genuinely aghast at Brian’s insouciance, and promises to talk to his father about it later.

But Brian’s not the lone character to internalize such popular cultural narratives.  Throughout the film, a variety of characters reference previous genre films—Russell refers to Frazier at one point as “Serpico”, Frazier’s partner Mitchell likens himself to one of the Corleone clan, and, most tellingly, Frazier uses Dog Day Afternoon’s climactic airport scene to call Russell’s bluff after he asks for two 747s for escape. Throughout the film, Lee indicts all types of ideological culprits, boldly and without pause.

As I write this, I see that the Sunday (March 26) edition of the Indianapolis Star contains a feature titled “Getting the big picture: Digital cameras are changing the way we communicate”. This sort of misleading technological determinism is widespread in popular accounts, and isolates technology, instead of the people who use it, as the catalyst for social change. As Lee asserts through Inside Man, though, this is not the case—while it’s been democratized to the point of profound consumer access, technology doesn’t contain any inherent power over the reception of its multiple messages. To quote Fiske again:

Technology applies power and helps direct it, but does not motivate or direct it. Power is social, not just technological, and it is through institutional and economic control that technology is directed. Although technology extends the terrain and the mode of struggle, it does not correct the imbalance of power (my emphasis).

In 1991, current Vice-President and then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney pushed the employment of camera-equipped “smart bombs” to display American military prowess to reporters and television viewers via a bloodless videogame where the goal was only to guide a bomb into a building. It worked flawlessly, and gave CNN, then the primary source for news, a reputation for innovation in war coverage.  The most modern technologies of the era were coupled with the dominant ideology of joystick-war to successfully distance the public from the thousands of deaths actually occurring in Iraq.

The digital technology used in the current Iraq war, however, is unique in its capacity for its widespread distribution, which in this case lead to the opposite end: the ignominious demise of the Abu Ghraib captors and the further atrophy of public support for an already hugely unpopular war. Recently, Salon.com published every one of the 279 leaked photos from the Abu Ghraib prison travesty, making the humiliation and sexual exploitation of dozens of prisoners available to any and all visitors to the site. Clicking through the photos, it becomes clear that digital technology was employed by the military captors here not for clerical documentary or strategic purposes, but instead for a bit of private revelry—the hooded, naked prisoners were boldly displayed, piled upon one another and pointed at like so many deer carcasses as trophies for a job well-done. Their reception has created a public atmosphere artfully commented upon by Lee where seeing (or, just as often, hearing) is believing, and the distance between the receivers and distributors has been blurred to indistinction, making us all, to a degree, inside men.

Filed under: Denzel Washington  digital technology  film  Inside Man  photography  Spike Lee