In the dark, the geometry of the world becomes clear. People become silhouettes, flat shapes in motion. In the early 1990s, a man at a driving range becomes a lone figure in the dark, swinging a club at small points of light that fly into the deepening gloom. In 1757, a party of trappers and settlers finds itself on the edge of a battlefield, a fort under siege rising above a cliff, framed by drifting veils of white smoke coughed up by cannon fire. The boundaries of their worlds are thrown into relief. In the recent past, the lone golfer stands under the cold mercury-vapor lights, facing down another man several tees away who keeps making aggressive eye contact. Longer ago and further away, the traveling party makes their way into the besieged fort, which won’t hold out much longer.
Both scenes are about coming to understand the new shape of the world. They’re about breaking points and bad odds, and the American attitude toward both. There may be no going back, so they might as well fight their way through.
America is a nation of defiant individuals, yet also a community dependent on societal structures that we rarely acknowledge, let alone consciously cultivate. The tension between the two is like water, cohesive and adhesive. It holds the country together and threatens to tear it apart. We were born in opposition and we’ll crumble in opposition; it’s in our nature, our fatal flaw.
The Last of the Mohicans (1992) and The Insider (1999) bookend the history of the United States from Michael Mann’s perspective. Though their circumstances are worlds apart, their stories expose the history of America. The country was born in defiance of outside control; its decline comes through the attrition of compromised morals and the need to be number one at all costs. Both films depict small people trapped in extraordinary circumstances, caught up in historical events set in motion by others more powerful than they are, others who are too distant to touch but close enough to still be breathing down their necks.
In both stories, Mann finds the kernel of defiance and control, then explores the tension between the two. His films have a reputation for their technical expertise both in front of and behind the camera, but I would argue that the technical expertise really sings because of the defiance of the characters who wield it. His protagonists don’t engage in opposition simply because they’re contrary; they’re contrary because they’ve earned the right through their skill, and that idiosyncrasy sets them apart from the rest of society. They stand at odds against the power structures that would try to control them, lone men against a tide that will someday engulf them.
*
The tide of history has already begun to rise in The Last of the Mohicans (loosely adapted from the 1936 film adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper’s novel of the same name). The year is 1757. France and England are locked in a battle for control of the North American fur trade. American colonists are still subject to the British crown, but the fractures that will lead to the American War for Independence are already beginning to show.
Mann sketches society in the mid-18th century Hudson Valley as a kind of patchwork quilt. American colonists live on small farms, obligated to obey the orders of the occupying English soldiers who populate the forts nearby, though the settlers feel very little sense of duty to the crown that resides thousands of miles and an entire ocean away from them. Their loyalties are thinner, more personal, intertwined with their neighbors and the land. They’re interconnected by a web of traders and trappers—French, English, and First Nations alike—who traverse the wild using rivers and deer paths. Chingachgook (Russell Means), his son Uncas (Eric Schweig), and his adopted white son Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis) make up one such trapping party. Their easy coexistence with friendly settlers belies their uncertain standing in the world: Uncas and Chingachgook are the only surviving members of their tribe, the titular last of the Mohicans.1 The old world dies as a new one is born.
The fate of the land also teeters on the edge of an axe. War parties have begun raiding deeper into British territory, a conflict that Hawkeye, Uncas, and their father have no interest in joining, but will be drawn into anyway. The French have allied themselves with the Huron and Ottawa;2 the English have created a militia from the farmers and settlers whose loyalty they claim. The settlers, unhappy with the call to arms, manage to negotiate an agreement that they’ll be allowed to leave the fighting to defend their own farms and families should the need arise. The British chafe at the need to negotiate such a deal at all. “I thought British policy was ‘Make the world England,’” complains one officer to another after witnessing one such negotiation. He’s used to commanding control and respect simply because he wears a red uniform. Here, though, his rank and title don’t afford him the same privileges. The First Nations and the American colonists wield their own economic power; on the frontier, everyone’s a little more equal than the Empire would like. British control is slipping.
So, too, is the sense of equilibrium in the colonies. Hawkeye, Uncas, and Chingachgook get swept up in the conflict when they come across a massacre in progress, British soldiers attempting to defend the lives of Cora (Madeleine Stowe) and Alice (Jodhi May) against a Huron raiding party led by a man named Magua (Wes Studi). Cora and Alice are the daughters of an English colonel named Munroe (Maurice Roëves) in command of Fort William Henry, where they’d been traveling until the ambush. Magua holds a grudge against Munroe for selling his people out decades before; he’s vowed to kill both Munroe and his daughters in revenge for his own enslavement at the hands of the Mohawk. Their lives for the long-gone lives of his family: a reciprocal trade.
Hawkeye and Uncas rescue Cora and Alice and take them to their father, only to find that the French are days from capturing the fort, which the British have no hope of defending. Munroe refuses to allow the militia leave to defend their families, as had been previously agreed—a break in the rule of law, and the shattering of an already unsteady trust. The militiamen whisper about whether the British will honor any of their other agreements; once the soldiers have broken their own law, the law’s no good for governing. Outside, the campfires of the French siege burn, and their cannons roar. Cora turns to Hawkeye for comfort, asking him, “The whole world’s on fire, isn’t it?” He can’t even comfort her properly; he’s been locked up by Munroe for sedition. The two are small players in the background of a grand struggle for power, swept up in the current of history through no fault of their own.
The Insider is a mirror of The Last of the Mohicans, a movie that shares the same loose, assured approach to adaptation (based as it is upon a Vanity Fair article by Marie Brenner), but tells its story with a different tone. The Last of the Mohicans is achingly romantic, depicting both the beginning of a nation and a love story, while The Insider is unsentimental and unsparing, a character study wrapped in a corporate thriller about a court case that breaks trust in established institutions—and leads, incidentally, to the dissolution of a marriage.
We meet Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) as he’s packing up his office. He’s been fired from his position as head of research and development for Brown & Williamson (B&W), one of the biggest tobacco companies in America, for what is effectively insubordination. He’d thought he’d been hired to increase safety standards and better understand the effects of their cigarettes, but the company culture was one of calculated ignorance. If the company can’t prove that nicotine is addictive, then the company could claim that their product, to their knowledge, caused no harm. Why set out to prove something that would lead to less profit? Better to close ranks and claim that they had no intention of wrongdoing.
Crowe plays Wigand with the terse movements and pursed lips of a man with a chip on his shoulder; he’s been wronged, and he knows it, and he feels his fall from grace keenly. His sense of injustice metastasizes into a bitter wound when B&W attempts to tie off any loose ends; his severance agreement had come with a non-disclosure agreement, which the company retroactively chooses to tighten, using the threat of taking away healthcare for Wigand’s sick daughter as leverage to get Wigand to agree to an even worse deal. Like the militiamen hundreds of years before him, Wigand begins to question whether the company ever had his best interests in mind at all.
When Wigand is summoned to the office of B&W CEO Thomas Sandefur (Michael Gambon), he’s invited to take a chair near Sandefur’s desk, the only empty place to sit in the middle of the room. As Wigand sits, cinematographer Dante Spinotti’s camera lowers to follow Wigand’s eye level, and as the camera drops, two additional pairs of business shoes come into view, seated in the corners of the office behind Wigand and to the left.3 It’s a sickening feeling to realize that you’re alone in hostile territory, unprotected by the company who was supposed to provide for you and your family. Wigand is physically triangulated by the lawyers, not even afforded the relative comfort of having his back against a wall. The intimidation tactic only makes him angrier. He leaves Sandefur’s office without signing the NDA, snarling “Fuck you” at his former employer as a goodbye. They tried to control him; their attempts only motivate him to burn them down.
*
Control is familiar, hierarchical. It favors the predictable and the profitable.
The Last of the Mohicans first shows the city of Albany through a symmetrical shot of a bridge over a river, its sweeping curve reflected in the water below to form a flattened oval shape. The bridge is hard reality, a crossing imposed upon a river where at first there was none, a way to control and tame the wild. The reflection from the water shows the image England would prefer to see of itself, stamped across the territory it’s claimed, a beautiful scene in two dimensions. But the reflection in the water is not the bridge, and the American colonies are not England. Bridge and reflection together form a synthesis of England’s imposed control and the resistance that rises up to meet it.
Outside Albany, past the paved roads and beautiful gardens, the wild beckons. Hawkeye and Uncas and Chingachgook hunt elk in the woods, running past trees and up and down hills. The running rivers are not the placid, flat river under the bridge. They’re rocky and rapid, difficult to cross and stitched together by waterfalls. The water is as free as the rest of the land. Past the British settlements, past the small farms and slightly more imposing forts, the world is vertical, a green forest full of hills and ravines that rise and fall and expand in three dimensions, not two.
England would force the wild into its tame gardens, though the wild doesn’t fit well. Nor do the English fit the wild. Their policy to try to make everything else England is an attempt to force symmetry, even on the battlefield. The British soldiers think in straight lines; when ambushed, they fall into alternating ranks, designed to allow the soldiers in front to aim and shoot before trading places with the back rank to reload. The tactic works on European battlefields, but America is not Europe. The French and their Huron allies fight from the shadows in the woods: no ranks, no turn-taking, only swift, brutal surprise. The red coats of the British army make fine targets: line them up, knock them down.
The French fight for the same reason the English do. They would have the rest of the world be French, and they would prefer to maintain control over the entire continent of North America, not just part. Colonialism isn’t simply content to drive a stake in the ground and leave it there. Once control has been claimed over a colony, the colonizers won’t give it up, at least until it’s no longer profitable. Furs in the north, tobacco in the south, a monopoly on trade with the First Nations, riches to be exploited everywhere.
Tobacco doesn’t figure explicitly into The Last of the Mohicans—the Hudson Valley is too far north to grow it—but it was one of the resources that drove the English to colonize the continent in the first place, to control its resources. Centuries later, tobacco continues to drive profits for a select number of companies who demand total control over their supply chains and their profits. The Insider explores the cracks that eventually break Big Tobacco, but first it demonstrates the level of impunity with which the major tobacco companies used to operate, an empire of nicotine-driven profit.
Before he’s fired, Wigand—a chemist by training—is not allowed to interfere with the chemicals used to “enhance” the cigarettes that B&W manufactures. Even acknowledging the addictive nature of cigarettes is verboten; Sandefur claims in a congressional hearing that he has no knowledge about whether tobacco is habit-forming. He raises his right hand with half a dozen other Big Tobacco CEOs, perjuring himself for money with a row of other powerful men forming a battle line against anyone foolish enough to challenge them and their grip on profits. Their grip is as assured as the hold the British Empire once had on the globe. Head-on confrontation would be a mistake; only guerrilla tactics could break that line, and even then, the battle would be desperate.
*
Wigand is a reluctant whistleblower. At first, he tries to avoid the fight altogether, taking a job teaching chemistry at a local magnet school, planting tomatoes in the backyard of his new—much smaller—house with his daughters. He’s pulled back into the conflict against his will: 60 Minutes comes looking for information. Producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) needs an expert to decode a series of studies from a tobacco company for him, and Wigand happens to have the scientific background and expertise to be able to do it. The trouble is the NDA, designed to keep Wigand silent about any business B&W might have had to do with tobacco—paperwork so tight that he’s reluctant to discuss any aspect of any tobacco business at all. When Lowell comes calling, Wigand refuses to entertain the question, sending him a handwritten fax that reads, “I can’t talk to you.” Lowell immediately smells a story. Stone walls hide secrets, the kind he’s spent a career investigating; he has a reputation for siding with the underdogs and the political radicals. For Lowell, “I can’t talk to you” is an invitation to dig deeper, to find the party line, to understand the culture of fear that keeps men like Wigand silent.
Their attitude of opposition brings the two men together. Wigand tells Bergman that he takes pride in honoring his agreements, and Bergman tells Wigand, “When I tell someone I’m gonna do something, I deliver.” Moral certainty is fuel for the defiant fire. Wigand is impulsive and angry, unwilling to discuss his problems with his wife (Diane Venora). He’s still smarting from the loss of his position at B&W and the realization that no other companies with research and development departments will accept him as their employee now that he has the smell of tobacco on him. Bergman is more even-keeled, and also more tenacious. “I’m getting two things: pissed off and curious,” he quips about the case. He doesn’t like being stonewalled, and being told “no” only makes him more interested in understanding what there could be to hide. Wigand is Bergman’s mirror; the tightened-up NDA contrarily makes him less inclined to feel any sense of loyalty toward his former employer, and the intimidating anonymous messages and threatening behavior only make him want to rebel more.
The threats keep coming: a strange footprint among the tomato plants in the backyard, anonymous e-mails, a bullet left in the mailbox. Mann frames Wigand alone, especially in the days between his dismissal and his decision to help Bergman in his investigation. Spinotti uses black depths to engulf Crowe’s body, most notably at the driving range. It’s just Wigand and the unknown—no background, no depth of field, surrounded by the crushing terror that he’ll be swept away by the litigious might of Big Tobacco, which insinuates itself into his life in the form of a threatening man in a suit with his own golf clubs. The same darkness surrounds Wigand in his home office, sequestered down in the basement. The same darkness frames his face when he races outside in the middle of the night to search for a possible prowler. His gray hair is tipped silver in the moonlight, drawing cold lines around his head as he checks the fence in a shaky panic, a gun tucked into the back of his pants, figuratively and visually walled off from the rest of the world.
The fear drives him to keep secrets; he doesn’t tell his wife he’s decided to cooperate with the 60 Minutes investigation until after Bergman lets it slip to her himself. Bergman—who is used to the pressures of investigative journalism, who has dealt with other methods of stonewalling and intimidation, describes the couple as “ordinary people under extraordinary pressure” who are more likely to crack than to exude “grace and consistency.” Under pressure, Wigand grows truculent, angry about having to answer to anyone, including the fact-checkers at CBS News.
That fear comes roaring back after his wife and children leave him. CBS has suggested that they don’t want to air the story with Wigand’s interview—a premature burial for his legal fight against B&W out of fear that the story will land the news corporation in enough legal trouble that it would prevent the sale of the network to another company. By covering themselves, they leave Wigand exposed. He sits alone in a hotel room, envisioning his two daughters in the garden, his head surrounded again by fuzzy black depths. He fears that he’s put his children through a hell they don’t understand, through no fault of their own, and that he won’t ever be able to justify his own stubbornness and behavior to them because the report about it is going to be buried by the interests of yet another big business. He longs to explain himself to them, but he’s bound by the distance, the divorce, the NDA, the legal battle to bring the contents of his 60 Minutes interview to air, the fact that his children are simply too young to understand what’s happening.
The darkness and fear also surround another father, generations before. Colonel Munroe’s daughters are older than Wigand’s—Alice is 16, Cora old enough to marry—but, like, Wigand’s children, they are thrust into a situation beyond their ken. Their father has also gone to war. His is literal, with cannon and trenches and the creeping knowledge that the French will break Fort William Henry under their siege. He has no intention of justifying himself to his daughters, especially not when he decides to keep the militia for a last desperate stand, rather than releasing them to go defend their own families. Cora comes to the fort with news that settlers are being killed by raiding parties, and yet Munroe refuses to honor the agreement, a decision that breaks his already-tenuous relationship with the American colonists.
Neither Munroe nor 60 Minutes can yet see that the world has changed around them. Cora and Bergman both can. When Cora arrives at Fort William Henry with Hawkeye and the others, she sees the flames first, an orange glow above a crown of trees that heralds the fort and its imminent loss. Cannonfire rumbles like thunder, and the logs that form the fort’s walls splinter under enemy fire. Hawkeye is sanguine—he owes no loyalty to the British, and he’ll help the militia escape the fort to go find their families—but for Cora, the glow of the fort in the distance is the end of her world. Other worlds are ending around her. She’s seen the dead settlers, the aftermath of raiding parties; she knows that the British can’t hold the territory. Chingachgook’s tribe is gone; Magua’s family has been destroyed. The whole world’s on fire.
Long years into the future, the world keeps ending. “What got broken here doesn’t go back together again,” Bergman tells a colleague in the aftermath of the 60 Minutes report on Big Tobacco. Wigand’s testimony makes it out into the world, and the power of companies like B&W is diminished by the response from the federal government, but the truth of the matter is that 60 Minutes left a source exposed, a dereliction of duty that betrays the executives’ motivations. They’d rather profit from the sale of the network than uphold the tacit agreement that news should speak truth to power. They’ve become the establishment, and in Bergman’s eyes, the establishment should always be regarded with suspicion. It isn’t enough simply to be able to see the old geometries.
*
Piss off the right people and they’ll make it their life’s work to burn everything down. Piss them off hard enough, and they’ll build a new world in the ashes out of spite. American colonists did it after they felt they’d been used badly by the British, their defiance fueling the war for independence. Wigand’s defiance is his inheritance as an American, the force that pushes him to finally blow the whistle on B&W’s deception about their product. Bergman’s tenacity in pursuing the story is another form of defiance: this abuse of power must be stopped, and the only way to stop it is to challenge it.
Mann draws a line from Wigand to Bergman to the lawyers who take on Wigand’s case, who snarl at the B&W suits attempting to intimidate Wigand in his deposition. Bergman is under no illusions about his own employer’s place in the drama, the corporate interests at play. “To a network, probably, we’re all commodities,” he tells Wigand, who worries that CBS will give him up as a liability, “To me? … What you are is important.” The system sees people as simple numbers on a balance sheet. To value someone for who they are—not their worth as a moneymaker or their liability—is to rebel against the system entirely.
Jump back in time, and it’s the same as it ever was. The British value the militiamen for their ability to fight the French, and they make promises they’re unwilling to keep in order to get the colonists to fight for them. Hawkeye and Cora understand that the American colonists are worth more than just the rifles they carry. When Munroe refuses to let the militia go, Hawkeye helps them escape. He literally covers them with musket fire, sniping at the French soldiers blockading the fort to create an opening, and Munroe imprisons him for it. Cora visits Hawkeye in his cell, promising to find him wherever Munroe sentences him to go. Hawkeye will repeat those same words back at her after the siege is broken and they’ve escaped the French, Magua close behind them in their flight. “I will find you,” he tells her, and it’s a promise, a reminder of what she’d said before, and a statement of defiance: No matter how far they take you, I will find you. You’re more than a pawn in an Empire’s game. We’ll build something together in the ashes of the world.
- The filmmakers took care to portray the Hudson Valley of the time as accurately as possible, but the hazard of adapting a Fenimore Cooper novel is that even the title is historically inaccurate: the Mohican people still exist today, though they have been displaced by the American government time and again.
- Both are names given to a variety of First Nations peoples, though not the names they use for themselves. To avoid confusion I’ll employ the names presented in the film.
- Spinotti shot both The Last of the Mohicans and The Insider. His camera, paired with the blocking in both films, keeps us keenly aware of who’s in power, who’s out, who’s uncomfortable, who’s angry—all through the geometry on screen.