Collateral and Identifying Self-Delusion within Naive Realism

by Christopher Barr

“There is no reality except the one contained within us.  That is why so many people live such an unreal life.  They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.” 

– Hermann Hesse

“…humankind cannot bear very much reality.” 

– T.S. Eliot

Collateral is a superb Los Angeles crime thriller, a film by the always assiduous Michael Mann, save the film adaptation of Miami Vice, one of the great American directing auteurs of his generation.  The film opens in a crowded airport when the antagonist walks sharply through the chaos of traveling people with the ease and confidence of a great white shark.    

Vincent sports silver hair and a gray suit transforming himself into a blend of urban camouflage; he is a representation of the modern technological age, the color of metal and as cold as steel.  His humanity is entirely stripped from him and all that is left is a symbolic machine, a meticulous killing machine.  Vincent bumps into a man walking by, both men look at each other.  Vincent, wearing black sunglasses, giving him shark eyes of sorts, picks up that man’s case and walks away while no one in the airport notices their little pass off as Vincent forges on, a man on mission.

Max is a taxi driver, a man that keeps his cab clean and organized before he begins his shift.  He places a picture in his overhead visor of a gorgeous island with a sandy beach surrounding it, that’s his place of Zen, his pictorial mantra that he glances up at when his passengers irritate him.  Max is a city dweller that keeps to his routines to avoid change.

Change has always been an Achilles heel of most people, it instigates alteration, and it motivates precarious movement.  Change often means growth which sometimes requires courage.  Change to most people, is the enemy of safety, and that’s what people want - to be safe.  Safe in their cozy bubble, in Max’s case, that bubble is his taxi cab.  It’s his domain even if the world around him is in a hurry, here in the cab, he can control. 

Losing control is the biggest fear of all, that’s what people avoid, that’s why many of us avoid change and thus avoid growth, so we can maintain what little control we have over this chaotic jungle of a society we inhabit.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, most people want to live, so maintaining control and fearing change because what it bring is understandable.  The problem is what we have to give up in order to be safe, which paradoxical is some ways because in order to survive we have to avoid the requirements of a sustainable fulfilling existence.  A key component of this is giving control over to change in order to realize to discoveries.   

Max picks up Annie, a beautiful young career woman that immediately gives off the impression of strength.  A good kind of strength rather than an overbearing one where it is only masking fear, she’s a confident woman that Max instantly falls for.  He impresses her with his knowledge of the intricacies of the city routes before telling her about his business plan.  A Limo Company, which he claims must be ‘perfect’, called Island Limos where he claims people, will feel like they are on a luxurious island.

This island motif is clearly Max’s psychological daily struggle he has when engaging the world.  The island is a prison cell that he’s glamorized in his mind so he is able to live with the fact that he’s scared to death of taking a chance at something.  He’s clearly a guy that desires change but he is also mentally paralyzed to do anything about it.

Max guesses that Annie is a lawyer by the way she is dressed and her bag.  She continues to be impressed by Max as she tells him that she’s a prosecutor working on a big case.  She tells him that it is stressful and challenging, and then Max gives her his paradise island picture to help her get “harmonic”, to help her relax.  She exits the cab and gives Max her business card and then walks into a building.

Vincent exits that same building, passing Annie and gets into Max’s cab.  Vincent and Max talk briefly about route times and about how LA is too sprawled out, too disconnected.  Vincent then tells Max about a guy who got on the subway in LA and died and for six hours travelled around the city before anyone noticed.

Apathy in the city is unfortunately part of daily life because of all the difference, all the cultures living under one smoggy roof.  Instead of learning about these differences, most people, fearing change, chose to push it out of their mind to the point of indifference.  In the concrete jungle, the animals become distant and quite picky about who they spend their precious time with, and this may sound cynical but most people in the city could give a shit if people out of their “know” lived all their lives or jumped in front of a subway and killed themselves.

Max tells Vincent about his business plan and that this cab gig is just part time, until he gets his dream off its feet.  He then tells him that he’s been a cabbie for 12 years.  You can tell that Vincent knows that Max is full of shit, regardless, Vincent remarks that Max is one of those guy’s that “do” and not one of the one’s that “talk”.

This very thing is a problem that seems to be everywhere, people that talk the talk, but in the end, don’t “do” anything but talk.  This is a result of an arrested population of people that are dreamers while governments regulate most of their lives through various forms of control.

They arrive at Vincent’s stop when he offers Max six hundred dollars to stick with him for the night, so he can make a couple of stops before heading to LAX.  Max hesitates understandably because this is different, Max needs to acclimate to it, like most things that alter his routine.   Max finally agrees to do it as Vincent exits the car, giving Max three hundred dollars up front.

Max pulls over to the side of the building, and glances through a booklet on a brand new Mercedes Benz, clearly a dream car.  He eats a sandwich when out of the blue; a body crashes down on his car, smashing his windshield.  Max freaks out and soon discovers that it was Vincent who killed him.

Here Vincent becomes Max’s very own encounter with the Real, where his bubble is broken, literally and figuratively.  Vincent forces Max to carry on driving him and thus forces Max to live outside his fantasy world and into the real world of danger.   

Vincent tells Max the last thing he wants to hear after he figures out that Vincent is out on a killing spree; Vincent tells Max that he’s going to have to leave his comfort zone, “Okay, look, here’s the deal.  Man, you were gonna drive me around tonight, never be the wiser, but El Gordo got in front of a window, did his high dive, we’re into Plan B.  Still breathing?  Now we gotta make the best of it, improvise, adapt to the environment, Darwin, shit happens, I Ching, whatever man, we gotta roll with it.”

“The superior man perseveres long in his course, adapts to the times, but remains firm in his direction and correct in his goals.”

– I Ching

Vincent poses an interesting perspective, or rationalization, about Max’s concern for death that occurs in his own surroundings versus the genocide in Rwanda, or the mass killings in Japan during World War 2 as a result of Hiroshima and Nagasaki being strategically bombed.  Vincent is suggesting that our concern about death is subjective and generally, for most people, never objective.  But yet death occurs in the real world and isn’t subjective until the living attempt to apply meaning to it.  Essentially the hypocrisy here is that death isn’t really about the person who died, but rather about the living person who is around when it happened.  People often turn another person’s unfortunate death around and somehow make it is all about themselves.

Vincent takes out his second target while Max is tied up and being robbed by a couple of thugs down in an alleyway.  Vincent shoots the two thugs, point blank, and gets his brief case and Max’s wallet.  Max is still pursuing his ‘flight’ instinct and is thus causing Vincent to kill people that otherwise wouldn’t have to die.

Vincent and Max go to a jazz bar while detectives try and figure out what’s going on with the murders.  Vincent is metaphorically Jazz, he’s off melody, behind the notes, not what’s expected and not surprisingly, Max doesn’t like Jazz for that very reason.  Vincent points out that most people, ten years from now, will have the same job and the same life, but with them, doing what they are doing, they won’t know where they’ll be ten minutes from now.

Vincent and Max talk to a Jazz musician about meeting the great trumpet player Miles Davis.  Here we get another story about a man who had opportunities, he had chances to ‘make’ something of himself and it all blew by him, days to weeks, weeks to years, years to forgotten.  Now he does what Max does, he talks and doesn’t “do”.  Then Vincent kills him after he fails to answer a pivotal question about Miles Davis and where he studied music.  He was Vincent’s third target all along and Max didn’t even know it.

While Max and Vincent visit Max’s mother in the hospital, Vincent finds out that his mother thinks her son runs his own limo company.  Max is angered by his lie revealed and takes Vincent’s briefcase, running out of the hospital with it and before Vincent catches him, he throws the case over a safety railing on a pedway, over a freeway where a transport truck hits and destroys it.  This naturally pisses Vincent off but he’s also impressed that Max showed a different side of himself.

Here we begin to see that Vincent, in spite of himself, cares about Max, he cares about this cage that Max has built around himself to keep safe.  Vincent becomes an unsuspecting guru of sorts to Max’s sluggish pupil. 

Vincent asks about why Max lied to his mother, he asks about his so-called limo company.  Max runs down a list of excuses as to why it’s not off the ground yet and then says that it has to be perfect, in other words, it has to remain in the fantasy world of the mind so it can stay perfect.  If he actually attempts it and fails then he’ll have nothing to fantasize about in his safe little bubble, so he keeps pushing it off.

Vincent is quite the opposite; he lives too much in the real world that he’s become detached from humanity.  He pretty well sees everything as it is, without all the sugar coating and re-imagining that most people apply to reality.  As a result, Vincent is like the shark that can’t stop moving or he’ll die, he’s a man without a dream, he’s a man without any form of hope for the future.  Vincent is a true product of the modern age, a manufactured assassin.  On some levels, Vincent is reality in all its blood and death.

The Buddha went on a six year pilgrimage and finally after attempting to understand what it is to be alive, while sitting and mediating under the Bodhi tree in Bodhgaya, Northern India for 49 days, Siddhartha Gautama awakened to an eternal present and thus becoming the ‘Enlightened One’.  What the Buddha discovered here was the ordinary, everyday person either lived in the past or in the future but not in the present.  The Buddha aimed to only live in the present and thus cleansed himself of his past and laid waste of dreams of the future.  What made this man so profoundly unique is the mental discipline that was required for him to arrive at such a revelation.  At a glance, while untrained, this might look obvious but one would be hard pressed to find a person that was able to cut all the baggage from their past, that quite literally defines most people, and remove it, or rather properly compartmentalize it.

Most people live in the past and not the present, and those that don’t readily live in the past, dream of a future where their lives are better in some way, usually resulting in them getting more things and more money.  Or dreams of living among people that one can control better to make life easier.  It’s hard to truly comprehend what it must have taken for the Buddha to achieve this level of understanding of his own mental faculties.

Max is living in the future, a man that dreams of a ‘perfect’ business where he believes he will find fulfilment.  Certainly not comparing Vincent to the Buddha, but they both do have one thing in common, and that one thing is what Vincent finally teaches Max, and that it to live in the present.  Max is a dreamer, but more tragically, he’s not actually living a life, he is merely existing while surviving the chaos of the world around him.  He’s suffering self-deception, like most people, he is miles away from reality, while his basic motor skills and daily duties are being fulfilled, he spirit is not.

Self-delusion is a malediction that we all suffer from.  We alter reality and rewrite it to suit our subjective experience we choose to perceive, and when I say choose I don’t mean consciously rebuilding reality; I mean to say that this is part of our hard wiring in the sub-structures of the mind.  Naïve realism is what the resulting delusion becomes, our very own perception of reality, which is unique to us.  Our brains constantly mislead us into believing almost anything other than what is real, in the world without us. 

We trust our brains for the most part because that’s all we know to trust.  Everything comes from the brain, even if one looks down at their leg and believes they see their leg out there in the world.  The computational effort that is required to come to such a conclusion was worked in the brain.  Everything is relayed back into your brain, deconstructed and then reconstructed in your image, what remains is discarded but never lost.

The FBI and police detectives suspect Max’s cab outside of a night club as the cab they are looking for.  Max had to go inside to get Vincent a new list because of the previous getting destroyed on the freeway.  Max meets with Felix, the man that Vincent is killing for, a man that has never actually met Vincent.  Felix believes Max is Vincent as he expresses how furious he is over the list being lost, forcing Max into a corner.

Rather than running, Max for the first time in the film, stands his ground, like the Narrator in Fightclub, Max starts to talk and sound like Vincent, the Tyler Durden of their opposing personalities.  Max succeeds and gets the list out to the cab to Vincent and they drive off to Vincent’s next target.  It turns out Vincent’s been contracted to kill witness’ that are turning state’s evidence against Felix to save themselves from going to jail.  

On their way to a Nightclub called Fever, where Vincent eventually kills his forth target during a massive joint FBI, LAPD shootout, Vincent encourages Max to call Annie, the prosecutor he got the number from in the opening scenes of the film.  Vincent reminds Max that life is short and that he should take the chance.  Vincent knows he’s done, but his glimmer of hope now lies in Max, who starts to become a fantasy that Vincent starts to have about living a normal life.  He nurtures his new found fantasy by helping Max see his potential; he also likes the idea of not being alone.

Vincent has become a drifting wolf in the night, roaming from kill to kill and in between just existing.  He explains that there in a galaxy with millions of stars and they are on one of them, he sees life as meaningless.  He has all the tendencies of someone who wants to commit suicide but projects them outward into the world.  He’s on an existential, extroverted rampage of disappointment toward the reality and lack of meaning to his own life.

Max asks Vincent what wrong with him?  He figures there must be a wire loose because the parts that are supposed to be built goodness into people, he doesn’t possess.  Max sees Vincent’s lack of empathy; he sees that Vincent is dead inside, a sociopath.  Vincent wants to know why he didn’t start his business, why is he still driving a taxi.  He tells Max that he isn’t going to call that girl and he isn’t going to start his company.  He says it was all a dream and that one day Max’s going to wake up and he will be old and it will never have happened.

Max speeds the taxi up as Vincent illuminates him on the fact that he’s a loser and will always be one.  Max reminds Vincent that, according to him, everything is insignificant anyway so the hell with it.  Max is waking up out of his inactive slumber and taking back control of his own life.  As a result, Max crashes the taxi against a guardrail and flips it down an empty street, smashing it against a row of parked cars.  Max sacrificed himself in order to live again, to start new as a man experiencing an awakening.

The police show up and Vincent escapes the wreckage of the car and runs off.  Max gets arrested at the crash but sees that Annie, the prosecutor is Vincent’s last target so he gets the upper hand and cuffs the cop to a pole and runs after Vincent.  Max is facing his fears and embracing change not only for the sake his own life by for Annie’s as well.  

Max arrives at Annie’s building where Vincent is ready to kill her, then Max intervenes and shoots Vincent wounding him as he and Annie run away.  Max and Vincent’s showdown ends on a subway car with Vincent fatally wounded.  He reminds Max about the man that died on the subway and travelled around the city for six hours before anyone noticed him, then he dies, and Max and Annie walk out during the dawn of a new day.

Collateral was a commentary on detachment in society, on how people have forgot how to be humane to one another.  It’s also a film about rising up out of the decadence of society and taking back one’s humanity even if no one else is willing to.  Collateral is about survival, and how so many people live their whole lives without waking up to the fact there is so much more to it.  Max killed the wolf, he killed the shark, so that he could live again, without living with fear. 

“Change proves true on the day it is finished.”

– I Ching