"Baby Driver": Between Coolness and Coldness

In this very smartly composed film’s first half-hour, one has the impression of being treated to a modernist exercise of cinematic form that makes an argument linking the character’s insouciant control of his own art within a cocoon of hyper-artificiality with the delight of seeing shiny red automobiles made to out-maneuver every obstacle and contingency along the way, as substitute bodies in what are in effect musical dance numbers.

This is one way of living in the contemporary world–-or wanting to.  And it is a cautionary tale for all creative nerds who, at some limit of the autistic or schizoid, cannot deal with people or the world at all outside the deployment of their own technical skills or the mediation of art and entertainment.  And so too it is a cautionary image of today's world of people who are wired constantly, so that while walking, riding the subway, doing the dishes and everything else, one listens to music, checks their Facebook constantly, etc.      
In his backstory, the baby-faced main character, "Baby," listens constantly to music through earbuds; he also records every conversation and uses them to create mix tapes; and he is constantly changing ipods. His persona is the consequence of a childhood trauma in which his singer mother was killed in a car accident. This gave him tinnitus, which he compensates for with constant musical input: An All that covers the wound of the never unplugged.  In the early scenes–but only driving red sports cars, like a lucky talisman, perhaps symbolizing the pop cool that he has conquered and to which he continually aspires–he dances the car to the sounds of the music. He’s laboring under compulsory repetition, as he is a kind of indentured servant to the Kevin Spacey character, a darkly intimidating faux-avuncular manager of a criminal gang with changing personae. This is what traumatized people do: they repeat the trauma while trying to move out of it. Or they keep moving forward but without changing the scene. In setting up the background problems to the film’s actual plot, the first reel or so is a head trip, and it works as modernist reflexivity since there is an implicit critique of character through form and form through character, and so too of the contemporary social world also, though only thereby. Baby’s childlike and nerdily obsessive shallowness add to this mix a certain moralism that could lead us to question this kind of easy artificiality and the absurdly exaggerated way (critics have rightly mentioned Jacques Tati’s formalist comedies as a likely reference) in which our pop culture and ever-present entertainment devices theoretically make it possible to live out a life that is zoned-out, giddy, never looking back, in control but morally empty. A life as an innocent, naive, impassive person who appreciates everything and understands nothing.

In this set-up, something must happen; and what must happen is above all that something happen.  A world that has become overly routinized, perhaps especially if this occurs through an artificial world of media and spectacle, will be one whose denizens are uniquely susceptible to an experience that seems foreclosed from any "event" as such.  Genre conventions suggest crime, romantic love, or both; the film obliges.   

Indeed, narratively the Baby world may require the counterpoint of some very world-wise and unpleasant fellow criminals, for this person who though in the driver’s seat is really along for the ride, in this world and not of it. So, indeed: enter crime and violence on the one hand and a partner in guilelessness on the other: the gang and the girl. Romeo and Juliet are the tacit redux here, guy torn twixt gang and girl, girl uncomplicated, idealized, idealizing. A young person’s film replaying a young person’s play.

The film shifts tone to become an intrigue concerning whether he will manage to get out of the indenturedom and away with her. At the end, she sends him postcards of strips of highway over her voiceover about getting together when he is paroled. He envisions her in an idyll that shows her in black and white, looking appealing, in front of an old American car, on a patch of road in front of a landscape. He can only think of her as part of a road escape. Slight touches showing that he has matured a bit and cares about people are introduced mostly near the end, during and after the final reel which is entirely an action film with chases, including scenes that remind me of Michael Mann’s hard core crime film “Heat,” and a good guys versus villain chase.

At moments I was reminded for some reason of the excellent 2016 Italian film “Alaska,” about a guy and girl on an emotional roller-coaster who both wind up breaking the law but stick with each other. But the concerns of that film, which lack the coldness of "Baby Driver"'s cool, were to portray character and milieus, and the strengths of “Baby Driver” lie elsewhere. I suppose it had to explode the comic idyll, bloodless and girl-less, at the beginning, this being plotless and so pretext. The film’s first movement gave me optimistically to think it had the makings at least of the most interesting partly comic American crime film since “Pulp Fiction,” and a better musical than anything we’ve seen in a while, including “La La Land.”