The Cognative Dissonance of McQueen's Cool in Bullitt

When I first saw Bullitt I liked it, elements of it I loved, but it didn't stick. I watched it again years later, I was older I liked it even more but still there was some distance, it was more from a heady position than the heart, but something had shifted. There was this gnawing feeling to watch it again, like a call, a beckoning. I watched it again and I don't even wanna use the word love, I was engrossed, maybe even entranced by it, and then again, and again, and again, and then a sudden realization…I loved this movie. At the center of this continuing expansion of love, McQueen's steely eyed performance which has been mimicked many times, but in all honesty I don't think is in any way repeatable or touchable. It can be argued McQueen had performances where the “work" was better, but his understanding, the appropriateness of the character, the exactitude, is what makes this his best for me. Both Ryan Gosling and Ryan O'Neal in “Drive” and “The Driver" are so clearly spirtitual imitations of not only Bullitt, but of McQueen in it. There is to each, its own beauty, a similar vein of a charismatic, deadly, but intoxicating sort of detached masculinity, but ultimately both are in the performative shadow of what McQueen does effortlessly. They play/lean into what McQueen is in an active denial of in concert with Director Peter Yates. Each one works for, towards, what McQueen just presents, and what he presents is a constant and ongoing cognitive dissonance in not only the character, but in the way he sees him. There’s a scene where McQueen is taking a newspaper from one of those old newspaper boxes without paying, and he let’s this sort of “Yup" expression glide across his face. It’s so simple but it gives character to the role, adds layers the issue of Bullit's inconsistent ethics. With the others, while they are quite complex in the note they’re giving it’s still really one note, and it’s so earned, there is a belovedness to the performance. In O' Neal’s there is more of an austerity that takes some air out of our ability to expound upon this man’s foolishness. There’s not really a nod to the absurdity, it takes it on its face and its word and has fun with it, but it’s not knocking it. If you watch Gosling in the Diner in “Drive" telling the man to shut up, its a very precious scene. There is a love of the fantasy, shown in the performance-oriented feel of it, if Gosling did it in one take you can’t tell. Everything about the scene feels so worked upon, so fretted over you can almost feel the conversations between the two about it pre- scene. McQueen may very well have done the same, but it doesn't FEEL that way, and that in and of itself feels like a commentary. O'Neal and Gosling really went all out on the detached part and most of the humanity of their characters is lost. They're male created constructs no more than McQueen, but McQueen makes his more difficult to pin down than Goslings, more human than O'Neal's, a big portion of this because he’s so at odds with the men he plays (McQueen frequently spoke of the fraudulent nature of the men he played). Gosling and O'Neal ( especially Gosling) seem to understand but empathize and like their characters more. Gosling says that he thinks of the driver “as a man who watches too many movies, but also as a knight”. He and O'Neal make their own versions of the strong silent trope a cinematic four course meal, but McQueen's only offering snacks. In comparison to the others, he’s lobbing, they're pitching. Now that may feel like it should be inversed, but pitching/and meals are about force and preparation which are also generally good in craft. Acting is mostly no different, but again the less you see the craft, the better. It’s a spectrum, but the farther away from one and closer to the other you are, the higher and higher your performance. Beyond that’s its telling in the vision of the character. Pitching is something that involves much more force in action, it implies effort, lobbing is considered nearly the opposite, both your hand and ultimately what happens afterwards are nearly natural inertia. Inertia: “a property of matter by which it continues in its existing state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, unless that state is changed by an external force” - that’s McQueen's acting style, except of course he did work, but the appearance is that the man gives no effort or is playing himself instead of creating a conscious philosophy about these types of men especially Bullitt…

McQueen's back and forth with Robert Vaughn in the hospital is my favorite part of the film precisely because it’s so good and because in it is everything that made McQueen McQueen. It is also telling and reflective of what McQueen gets about the morbid and silly conceptualization of masculinity. The setup is that McQueen's Detective Frank Bullitt was put in charge of the protection of a key witness to Robert Vaughn's ambitious Walter Chalmers case. The witness ends up dead as a result of some funky goings-on and now Vaughn's Chalmers goes immediately after Frank. He asks him “What went wrong?”. Script wise Bullitt is not going to answer this question but give his own, and that produces a question of its own for both actor and audience.. Why doesn’t he answer this? The answer to that for the actor is going to color their approach, and that approach the performance. McQueen notoriously brought alot of himself to his roles, but in the context of what was needed for the character. Several times in interviews he would mention his dislike for compromise and being pushed around ( I think he saw alot of this going on ) and when he wasn't saying it in these interviews it still made itself clear and it bares itself here in this scene, not because McQueen merely acts it as such, but because he understands the assignment by way of his own nature, which was philosophical, and deeply moral, but also privileged and willfully inconsiderate based on his perception, a hypocrisy of self. Bullitt doesn't like the question, so he poses another one and McQueen sees it as deliberate. The way he delivers it, it’s a man built on code and ethics, but also bored with people, again a sort of hypocrisy. Taking his time to finish chomping on his sandwich, he nonchalantly utters “Who else knew where he was?” This is purposeful, he does this so casually that he doesn’t even bother with enunciation ( a frequent consequence of McQueen's uniquely smooth style) and Vaughn's Chalmers asks him to repeat (which feels like it was real) when McQueen repeats, the only actual thing that has changed about the delivery is the volume, (and not by much) he’s not raising his voice, it’s a rebellion, but it’s not morality, it’s ego, as the next few moments will reveal. When he later brings up the fact that someone leaked the witnesses whereabouts, and it wasn't the detectives charged with his safekeeping, Chalmers remarks that’s hardly the issue, and McQueen's response is incredulous disbelief, but it’s patient, just barely registers, normally this is bad, but with McQueen it’s apart of that constantly imitated percieved unflappability, something he saw in the men he consistently played, something he understood the audience pined for, but something he also seemed to have a healthy amount of disdain for. McQueen talking about his character Michael Delaney in “Le Mans” (1971) : “I said, “When you’re racing, it’s life. Anything else that happens is just waiting.” Now, that quote is meant to show the vacancy of Michael Delaney’s mind, to show you that he’s latched on to this ridiculous roundy-round race as a way of avoiding the hard questions. Like, has he ever loved anyone. Does he have a plan for the future. That kind of stuff.” What those who imitate McQueen often forget is the fissures, the breaks, the holes poked open for air in McQueen's men, and maybe more importantly the size of these holes, which seemed to be “just right"…At least for McQueen. Gosling is better at this, but contextually more is provided in his film, but I think McQueen's is much more suited to the reality of the man, not the fantasy. When Vaughn says to Bullitt, “don’t evade responsibility, in your parlance you blew it" take a look at McQueen's reaction his face drops..

That's a breath of doubt, of “you're ’re right, I did”, before Chalmers then says “You failed to take adequate measures to protect him" and its right back to himself. That kind of self doubt is not gonna last long in a man like this, he can't bound through life escaping all the things that hold the rest of us down that way. Even if McQueen didn’t understand these men or himself to the fullest, he understood unequivocally the fantasy of them. He played them so well because he understood the absurdity. The room here with Vaughn this hospital room became a ring for a sanctioned pissing contest and he grants its the exact seriousness it deserves, which could be summed up as the famous line from “The Social Network” - “You have part of my attention, you have the minimum amount". That’s the driving force of this scene, treating it as if its boring, barely worth mentioning, it undermines these men, shows their pettiness. Not one line here in this scene is misplaced, misguided, under or over executed, not by McQueen or Vaughn for that matter. Its intentional too (McQueen famously paired down his dialogue for maximum effect and focus) an example of the mastery over himself and perfecting the art of creating an image of self that established McQueen as the ultimate ideal, even while he himself made fun of the entire concept or notion. An excerpt from another McQueen interview: (the film he is referencing is unclear) “I do believe that the very deal that this picture is based on, personal courage, that has nothing to do with what courage represents in our society today, and with some of the things I, or John Wayne, or Clint Eastwood, have done." The cool that emonates from Bullitt then comes not from the effort to try and create a man we could all desire, aspire to be, or commemorate, but from a desire to look at men like him plainly and construct their reality in a way that allows us to love them for their flaws, while squarely looking them in the face and saying “You're kinda sad". That feeling has a lot more in common with the themes at play in both men Neil Macaulay (Robert DeNiro) , and especially Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) in 1995's “Heat" than it’s antecedents of hard boiled detectives who are too cool for school and McQueen's work in it just as brilliant as those two. It’s a performance, a movie, an actor who found his brand of cool in his cool-ness about these men. A cognative distance as well as dissonance from the very ideal of manhood he seemed unable to escape. Something I think on some level almost any man can understand even if he misses the point entirely. This is the brilliance of this film, and McQueen. Undercutting the ideology in the guise of it, the effectiveness, well that’s another story but that, I deciphered- is what my ever creeping love of it and McQueen in it - is about.