With 510 hp, the all-electric Volvo EX90 is a great drive. But because we find ourselves in Los Angeles, we want to talk about how director Michael Mann portrays the city.
No coyote. Not even a stray dog. The only thing that will draw any attention to itself during our two days in Los Angeles is a squirrel. It’ll be lazing on a fence, then suddenly scamper, zippity zip, up into the tree.
It’s early morning, the city is still asleep. We set off northward on the 405, then take the 110 over to eastbound 105, a complex web of five intertwining traffic flows, sometimes stop-and-go, sometimes motionless, always thrumming. Downtown L.A. in a haze, magical light.
The Volvo EX90 rolls along in the quietly approaching traffic. Cool. Relaxed. In its own rhythm while fulfilling the simple but critical task of complying with every single regulation of the California Vehicle Code. The assistance systems make it possible. The car is continually overtaken, on the right and the left.
Entire treatises have been written on how Los Angeles is portrayed in film. On screen, the city is no longer an urban space inhabited by people, but is transformed into a setting that envelops the characters, perceptible in the background of every scene. Director Michael Mann is especially famous for his portrayal of the city in his films. 2005’s Heat and 2004’s Collateral are both set in Los Angeles – and especially in the latter, you get the impression that L.A. is a third lead actor. (For the sake of detail: the other two are Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx.) The connection between the two films occurred “quite coincidentally”, Mann once said – Collateral begins where Heat ends, at Los Angeles International Airport, and it ends at the same subway station where Heat begins.
Supported on camera by Dante Spinotti in Heat and Dion Beebe and Paul Cameron in Collateral, with these two films, in particular, Michael Mann, managed to turn Los Angeles into a visual construct, a “cinematic city”. The city isn’t exactly a tangible place; its omnipresence is what it’s all about. Nearly endless are the freeways, the rows of shops, restaurants, houses, service stations and parking lots. Los Angeles becomes a “noir megalopolis purged of people, a metaphor for deindividualization and alienation in a technicist, globalized world”, as Britta Hartmann, professor of film studies, wrote in an essay on Collateral. Accordingly, only coyotes seem to live in the empty streets. Sometimes a bad guy turns up, but he doesn’t live long.
Over time, one’s attention at the wheel of the Volvo inevitably shifts. It is no longer about reaching a destination as fast as possible, but about the shimmering of the air over the asphalt, the haze over downtown, the shadows and silhouettes of the bridges, the color of the sky. It’s driving to observe, not driving to arrive.
According to Mann himself, Heat was filmed at 160 original locations. Production costs totaled $60 million, and the movie grossed $187 million just in the year it was released.
But what is it that comprises Michael Mann’s intimate relationship with Los Angeles? He himself described it in an interview in Der Spiegel as follows: “Cinematographically, it’s the most exciting city there is. I’m not talking about -Hollywood, but the city itself, the metropolitan area filled with businesses and conference centers. It’s a flexible space, I can use it as a vehicle to convey all sorts of emotions. Though I grew up in Chicago, I’m attached to L.A. because it’s an ideal place for depicting moods, but also for experiencing them.” Mann, however, is far from romanticizing Los Angeles with an idealized view. Quite the contrary. In an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung, he freely admitted: “I exploit the city quite opportunistically, as a catalyst for moods and emotions. There’s something surreal about the city, not perfectly stylized as in Dalí’s work, but in a real, hands-on way, in the layers of patina and corrosion that overlay the surfaces. Everything is dusty, the palm trees need pruning; once it was all elegant and idyllic, but a very long time ago. Today, everything is old and shabby, like the dreams associated with it.”
The all-electric Volvo glides almost silently into downtown on Figueroa Street. All of a sudden, the otherwise expansive atmosphere of Los Angeles becomes dense between the high-rise façades. The sunlight is reflected off the shimmering glass and steel, with deep shadows in between. People have been shot and have died here, in film and in real life; downtown was a bad area for a lot of years. For Heat, Mann filmed the legendary shootout for three weeks on the open street on Figueroa between Fourth and Fifth; set to the monotonous beat of Brian Eno’s song “Force Marker”, in the finished film these two minutes are etched into long-term cinematic memory. The incessant fire of the machine guns, the smashing into metal, the shattering of windows, the body blows. A thriller in mere acoustic terms. The first photo in this story was taken right there. There were no noteworthy incidents at the time, however.
It is the moment of climax: The road trip in a Volvo to downtown is a film in which there is no story, just vehicles lined up next to one other. Nothing happens, there’s no development, there’s no catharsis, not even an exposition. There’s nothing more than a rolling, seemingly slow-moving ballet lacking any tragedy or dramaturgy. And that’s a good thing, measured against Michael Mann’s films and with a view to the crime statistics of Los Angeles.
A young woman is driving in the lane next to the Volvo in a battered Japanese car held together with duct tape, wearing big sunglasses on what is presumably still a real snub nose, sipping some sort of XXL hipster coffee nonsense through a straw and scrolling on her smartphone. Eye contact only exists in Michael Mann’s films. This is where a relationship would develop. Two lonely soulmates who bump into one another in the vastness of the megametropolis by chance, like De Niro as Neil McCauley and Amy Brenneman as Eady in Heat, or Tom Cruise and the coyote in Collateral.
Volvo EX90
- POWERTRAIN all-electric AWD
- POWER 510 hp (380 kW)
- TORQUE 910 Nm
- 0–100 KM/H approx. 4.9 s
- TOP SPEED 180 km/h
- WEIGHT 2,757 kg
After all, the Volvo EX90 is stuck in a traffic jam – it is Los Angeles, after all. All that prevails is the sheer feeling of movement, the interplay of light and shadow, the rhythm of acceleration and braking. I guess that’s what you call arthouse cinema.
Text & Photos: Matthias Mederer · ramp.pictures
rampstyle #33 When You Know, You Know
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