‘We’re on Flashdrive or CD-ROM’: Disassembly and Deletion in the Digital Noir of Collateral

Abstract

This paper analyses the inflection of film noir that occurs in Michael Mann’s Collateral, adding to a thread by Paul Schrader, John G. Cawelti and David Desser. These arguments are applied to Collateral, which features a distinctive aesthetic that I argue is ‘digital noir’. Collateral both adheres to and departs from the features of noir, presenting an environment that is similar to an information system in which lives are comparable to computer programs. The film’s digital cinematography blurs people and places together, reducing the very presence of the characters into digital information, captured by the camera for easier manipulation.