Reel Spirituality Monograph Off the Map

Michael Mann's Public Enemies, a motion picture chronicling the last adventures of John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) in the golden era of bank robbery, was met with a muted response in 2009. Tersely structured and boldly shot in high-definition cinematography, Mann's elegiac romance, on closer examination, formally ties the Hollywood gangster genre to the medium, binding the cultural and technological issues of its 1930s setting with the evolving digital template of its release, with America's last frontier criminal folk-heroes in flight from a new matrix of control developed by J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup). In Off the Map, Niles Schwartz not only immerses us into Public Enemies, but relates it to Mann's contemporary cyberthriller Blackhat (2015), in which the cybernetic systems of control have colonized tactile firmament of our everyday lives. Mann's HD spectacles reflect back onto how the audience experiences images on everything from grand movie screens to smart phones. The space between the viewer and the screen becomes a sanctuary of spiritual reflection and development, as much as escapism.