Men in Cages: Alienation and Liberation in Collateral (2004) and Phone Booth (2002)
The thriller and neo-noir genres have always been preoccupied with lost men in dark cities – the presence of the towering modern cityscape in urban thrillers is often used as a metaphor to demonstrate mankind’s alienation in a sprawling, dehumanizing, technology-obsessed city. “What makes the portrayal of the city [in film] as a wild, savage place plausible to us is at least in part our cultural memory that the city can legitimately be described as a jungle” (Light 155). The urban thriller often depicts city life as a depressing, shallow one, where people have lost the ability to truly connect with each other, and have become savage in light of that separation. Two such films that explore these subjects in very similar ways are 2002’s Phone Booth, directed by Joel Schumacher, and 2004’s Collateral, directed by Michael Mann. In both films, everyman protagonists are challenged by an all-powerful, philosophical, sociopathic killer figure to engage with their surroundings and the people around them, using confined, technological environments (a taxicab, a phone booth) to do so.
Collateral tells the story of Max (Jamie Foxx) a shy, unambitious cab driver who finds himself having to drive a slick, cool-headed hitman named Vincent (Tom Cruise) through the streets of LA, delivering him to his various ‘stops’ to kill his assigned targets. Phone Booth, unlike Collateral, largely takes place in one space – the titular phone booth. The film focuses on Stu Shepard (Colin Farrell), a slick, narcissistic NYC publisher who enters a public phone booth to make a clandestine call to an aspiring actress (Katie Holmes) he plans to commit infidelity with. Following that call, however, he is compelled to answer the phone again, only to find that an unnamed caller (voiced by Kiefer Sutherland) knows him by name and threatens to kill him if he leaves the phone booth. The remainder of the film is a standoff between Stu, the cops (including a negotiator played by Forest Whitaker) and the sniper, who talks to Stu over the phone.
Both protagonists in Collateral and Phone Booth begin the movie as victims of the postmodern urban alienation that cities often present in film. Stu Shepard and Max are on opposite sides of the socioeconomic spectrum – Stu a rich publicist, Max a struggling cabbie – but their respective problems come from the barriers they put up around people. Stu’s swaggering, loud-mouthed persona serves to place himself on a higher pedestal than others, and he is rude and belittling to his clients, assistants, and love interests. Meanwhile, Max is introverted, apprehensive and affable to a fault; he can hold a conversation with people, but cannot truly engage with them. Stu relates with people on an opportunistic level; he only engages with people he feels can get him ahead in his business, while Max is too afraid to truly engage with anyone, including his mother. Max has been driving a cab for twelve years in order to save up enough money to start a luxury limo business, but cannot follow through; “it’s gotta be perfect,” he says, alluding to minimizing risk factors to start the business (which turn out to simply be excuses for him to not go through with hit) (Mann, 2004). Both Stu and Max have character flaws relating to the distancing effect urban life has on their relationships and ability to communicate, which their villainous counterparts in the film either actively or passively work to correct.
The villains of both films – the yin to Stu and Max’s yang – serve the narrative purpose of providing a counterpoint to their philosophies, a way of freeing them from their postmodern, city-based malaise. In Collateral, Max’s counterpart is Vincent, the hitman; he is cool, calm and collected, a “badass sociopath” as Max derisively calls him later in the film. Vincent’s philosophy is decidedly nihilistic; he takes contracts, makes sure to stay as unknown as possible, and cares not to think about whether or not the people he kills are guilty. Vincent’s effect on Max comes implicitly from Max’s interactions with him, as their time together is merely a glorified hostage situation. The Caller, on the other hand, acts more explicitly as a sort of homicidal Clarence from It’s a Wonderful Life; his target and focus is Stu, his objective is to get him to confess his sins and reveal himself to the people around him under threat of death. The Caller is largely an audio-only character, an “acoustical being” who acts almost as the voice of God using Stu and others to point out the perceived shallowness and evil of Stu’s life (Iacobescu 16). Both characters are, effectively, agents of change for the film’s protagonists.
Collateral and Phone Booth both place their protagonists in a confined, metal box of some kind, effectively encasing them in a cage that provides an effective visual metaphor for the sense of alienation and suffocation they feel in their urban lives. Max’s cab is the setting for a great deal of the film, and the vehicle by which they move from setpiece to setpiece. Unlike Phone Booth’s high-concept dedication to one single location, the cab in Collateral allows Mann to show its audience the whole of LA, from seedy alleyways to high-profile clubs and the like. Phone Booth’s primary gimmick is that the whole action takes place within and around the phone booth, which Stu is forbidden to leave from. Both ‘cages’ are claustrophobic, grey and cold, full of technology and gradually beaten up and destroyed as the film progresses. The cab/booth is symbolic of the city and the barriers it forces between people. The cab’s partition and doors, cutting Max off from his passengers (like the arguing couple in the beginning), is the same as the walls of the booth, which put up literal walls between Stu and the people who surround him in the booth. Stu and Max can see outside their cages thanks to the glass, but can only passively observe without actively participating – a sly and efficient analog to modern man’s inability to truly engage with others in the concrete jungle of modern American cities. In both cases, the protagonists feel isolated, cut off from salvation inside their cage; Max is stuck ferrying Vincent around wherever he likes, and the Caller forces Stu to stay in the booth or he will kill him – the villain characters have all the power.
Because these films take a close look at the modern city and its alienating effects on its citizens, the way each city is presented plays an important part in the film’s message. Michael Mann’s Los Angeles in Collateral is essentially the third character in the film – every new setting is vibrant, neon-tinged and bright, though this still serves to have an alienating effect on Max and others. The highways and overpasses of LA are filmed in gorgeous helicopter shots, and Mann’s use of digital camerawork lends a rawness to the city that makes it ooze character. The film transitions effortlessly between sickly green slum apartments to slick, neon-blue nightclubs, to subway stations that glow with nauseating fluorescent light - showing the city nearly as an alien planet. The film’s events take place at night, leaving the already-dim light of the city itself to cast a pall over Max’s harrowing journey. Mann’s LA is literally an urban wilderness – in one thematically pivotal scene, Vincent and Max stop the cab to contemplate a coyote that walks across an empty LA street in the middle of the night. The coyote is representative both of Vincent’s cold, animal antipathy and the city’s animalistic consumption of its citizens, both things that Max must overcome.
In Phone Booth, the downtown New York city street on which the film takes place is full of sprawling buildings and hundreds of windows, Stu being surrounded by a sea of gray anonymity. All around him, Schumacher has placed symbols of Stu’s indecision, lack of identity and shallow, bourgeois perspective; the brightest building in the setting is a porn theater/adult book shop, in front of which colorful prostitutes stand, and an advertisement behind him says in stylized lettering, “Who Do You Think You Are?” – almost as if the events of the film were a performance art piece, and this were its title. The film’s color palette is primarily a sickly blue, playing up the coldness and inhumanity of the city around him, making Stu look almost ill. The result is a panopticon-like scenario in the best traditions of Foucault, in which the Caller can look down and observe Stu in all his flaws without Stu being able to look back, visually personifying just how alone he feels in the alienating world of the big city (Foucault, 1995).
Both men in both cages go through certain tests of character through their respective films – the events of the movie serve as trials by fire, allowing them to exorcise the various mistruths and lies they have made of themselves. In the case of Max, Vincent forces him to get real about his dreams and expectations – while Max claims he drives a cab “temporarily,” he has done it for twelve years without making plans to start his dream limo company. Instead, he lies to his mother that he is already successful to make her proud of him. Vincent correctly calls Max out on the fact that he will not follow through on his plan to uplift himself beyond his current circumstances:
“Someday? Someday my dream will come? One night you will wake up and discover it never happened. It's all turned around on you. It never will. Suddenly you are old. Didn't happen, and it never will, because you were never going to do it anyway.” (Mann, 2004).
This is at the crux of Max’s character journey – his time with Vincent must teach him to be less of a ‘thinker’ and more of a ‘doer’ – “he moves from being a dreamer to being a realist” (Schwartz 106). With Phone Booth, the Caller’s objective for Stu is to get him to confess his proposed thoughts of infidelity to his wife (played by Radha Mitchell) and to be honest with himself and others about the false, shallow persona he puts on to be a successful publicist in dog-eat-dog New York City. In both cases, alienating urban life has led them to this point – Stu has become a monster in order to succeed, while Max has retreated from the intimidating world of the city to remain safe and risk-free in his cab.
The climaxes of both films feature Max and Stu overcoming their character flaws and combating their aforementioned alienation to take risks and reach out to their fellow man in honest, open ways. Max, after implicitly learning how to be adaptable and confident through his interactions with Vincent, takes a stand on his own by crashing his taxi in order to eliminate the leverage Vincent has over him. He then rushes to save Annie, his love interest, from Vincent, finally taking the plunge to ‘call her’ (as Vincent constantly taunts him to do). With this simple step, he chooses to actively engage with a member of the human race openly and outside of his cab. With that move, he is given the redemptive power to rescue Annie and shoot Vincent, effectively countering his nihilist look at the world. Vincent’s final moment is intriguing – referring back to a story he told earlier in which a man gets on the MTA in LA and dies, he tells Max in a rare moment of friendship, “Guy gets on the subway and dies. Think anybody'll notice?” (Mann, 2004). Mann’s implication at the end of the film is that Vincent, having no one to mourn him, falls victim to the city’s indiscriminate carelessness, while Max earns his humanity and moral worth by reaching out and actively engaging with Annie on a human, real level.
In Phone Booth, Stu’s redemptive moment comes during his confession, in which he admits his complicity in the shallow vagaries of urban life – “I’m just part of a big cycle of liesI have just been dressing up as something I'm not for so long, I'm so afraid no one will like what's underneath” (Schumacher, 2002). Like in Collateral, effective human communication is the key to victory; through his successful conveyance to Det. Ramey (Whitaker) that he has a sniper on him without the Caller noticing, he is able to free himself. His true moment of self-sacrifice, however, comes when he finally exits the booth, making the brave choice to force the Caller to shoot him instead of either of his love interests. Through this move, he is able to reconcile with his wife (complete with promises of communication and honesty); at the end of the film, the Caller clandestinely approaches him and threatens to return if he does not continue his “newfound honesty” (Schumacher, 2002).
Collateral and Phone Booth demonstrate an interest in exploring the alienating effect that urban life has on people’s ability to communicate and their respective priorities and concerns. Stu and Max are characters changed and damaged by the demands of their cities, turning them into lost souls in need of redemption. Vincent and the Caller act as both obstacles and guardian angel figures, providing philosophical clarity and needed conflict for Max and Stu to overcome in order to truly actualize themselves. In essence, both films argue that, in order for citizens to find their true selves within the concrete jungle of the big city, they must let go of their lies, learn to communicate openly and engage with their fellow man, and follow through with their dreams. These lessons are couched in atmospheric cinematography and deeply metaphorical visual symbols, in the form of their respective technological cages, encasing them in traps from which they must free themselves.
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