5 - Screening Railway Terrorists: Light Modernity, Invisible Threats and the Aesthetics of Concealment in The 15:17 to Paris and Bodyguard

Summary

Introduction: Smooth, Light and Clean

At the beginning of Ang Lee's recent film Gemini Man (2019), Defense Intelligence Agency assassin Henry Brogan (Will Smith) shoots a terrorist on a moving high-speed train from about a mile away. The operation is presented as clinically precise and smooth: Brogan calmly lies in the grass as he watches the approaching train through the rangefinder of his rifle while communicating with his partner on the train. When the latter reports the speed of the train – ‘238 km/h and holding steady’ – the second part of his statement could describe Brogan's position as much as it describes the train. In fact, the two forms of steadiness depend on each other: the high-speed train and state-of-the-art weapons technology are woven together into a hi-tech machine ensemble that announces the film's larger preoccupation with new technologies both on the diegetic level and through the extensive use of CGI. This link between (counter-)terrorism and the high-speed train is also signalled through editing; right after a shot of Brogan pulling the trigger, we see the train speeding towards a tunnel.

The film's concern with new technologies also manifests itself aesthetically. This is evident from the first shot, which shows the white and partly transparent steel-and-glass canopy of Liège-Guillemins, a new Belgian high-speed railway station that was opened in 2009 (Figure 5.1). Designed by the Spanish architect and engineer Santiago Calatrava, the futuristic structure ‘soar[s] upwards, contriving to sculpture light (and the sense of the lightweight) out of steel and concrete’ (Littlefield 2010, 109). The structure evokes the weightlessness that Zygmunt Bauman (2000) sees as characteristic of contemporary ‘light modernity’ or ‘liquid modernity’. The shift from the territorial grounding and bulky machinery of ‘heavy’ or ‘solid’ modernity to the flexible, invisible and extraterritorial power structures and software-capitalism of light modernity (Bauman 2000) has aesthetic implications, too. In Gemini Man, the ‘soaring’ structure of the railway station is connected to the smooth aesthetics of the high-speed train as the camera slowly tilts and pans to reveal the platforms, before we see a shiny white-and-blue train with large glass fronts picking up speed almost without producing any noise. In the entire scene, diegetic sound is reduced to a minimum, and the camera movements are calm and controlled.