Collateral: The Things That Matter to Us

"Get with it. Millions of galaxies of hundreds of millions of stars, in a speck on one in a blink. That's us, lost in space. The cop, you, me... Who notices?"

That line comes from Vincent, the coldly efficient hit man in the movie Collateral.  It's arrives at a pivotal point in the story, and it expresses Vincent's extremely nihilistic outlook in a simple and straightforward manner.  It's a clear-cut moral rationalization, and yet it has a sort of enticing logic to it.  It would seem that from a far enough perspective, and on a broad enough scale, that the problems of three little people really don't amount to a hill of beans.  Vincent's night of systematic elimination might seem brutal and tragic in close, human terms, but to him it's all "a speck on a blink."

This statement, however, leads to an unintended epiphany for Max, the cab driver which Vincent has coerced at gun-point into driving him around all night as he runs his "errands."  Max's epiphany and his subsequent actions reveal the fatal flaw in Vincent's philosophy.  Here he is declaring that nothing really matters on the grand cosmic scale, and yet all night long he has been using the things that matter to Max as leverage against him: his life, his mother, his job, his hopes and his dreams.  This blatant contradiction throws Max into a rage, and yet it also gives him the clarity to see through the things that have been holding him back in his life.  What Vincent takes as a nihilistic blank check that justifies murder, Max takes as a liberating affirmation that allows him to see the concerns that have been restraining him for the petty trivialities that they really are.  He takes Vincent's philosophy to its logical conclusion, jams on the gas, and flips the cab at full speed, nearly killing them both.  Perhaps Vincent would have been better off keeping his rationalizations to himself.

But Collateral, after all, really is Max's story.  Through-out the night we're given enough information to piece his life together.  He has been driving a cab for years, but he harbors a secret dream of someday owning his own limousine service.  "Island Limos", he calls it, and he grows somewhat wistful when he speaks of it, "You never want to the ride to end."  He says that he's just waiting to get enough money together, the right client list, ect., but there's a sense that underneath it all that the dream will stay a dream, and deep down Max fears that he'll spend the rest of his life driving the cab.  Vincent cuts immediately to the core of this fear and he needles Max relentlessly with it.  He taunts Max with it, rubs it in his face, because...well, maybe just because that's where Vincent's predatory mentality drives him.

Vincent arrives in Max's life like a walking personification of the kind of near-death experience that kicks someone out of the comfortable complacent place they've settled into.  He starts off as just another fare, but even then he's waving a wad of money in Max's face, asking him to bend the rules and chauffeur him around for the rest of the night.  Max reluctantly agrees, already a little out of his comfort zone.  When the first of Vincent's victims falls out of the night and lands on the windshield of Max's cab, he suddenly discovers exactly what kind of insanity he's gotten himself into here, and now there's far more than his cab license at stake.  His life itself is at risk, minute by minute, as Vincent turns his gun on him and tells him to get in the cab and drive.  It's the kind of thing that puts your life in perspective.

But Collateral is more than a movie about a man taking stock of his life in a dangerous situation.  It pivots on Vincent's philosophy.  For Vincent it is a bleak declaration of despair and meaninglessness.  For Max it is an awakening to the fact that his life is his to take control of, and make the most of.  In a pointless "speck on a blink" what does he have to lose?  Isn't "Island Limos" a small risk to take in the great scheme of things?  That's what Vincent is missing.  The things on this little speck matter, because they matter to the creatures living on this little speck.  Max sees liberation, because he cares about something, because he has a dream, and because he sees that the dream only matters because it matters to him, and it's up to him to do something about it.

By confronting us with a man who lives beyond the concerns of morality, who murders his victims with the cold efficiency of checking off a laundry list, Collateral propels us out there to that place beyond the galaxies and stars where it all becomes meaningless.  And then through Max, it draws us back to Earth with a renewed appreciation for the things we truly care about, and the fact that we alone give them meaning.  "Island Limos" might mean next to nothing on a speck of dust in limitless space, but it's Max's piece of that speck and it means something to him.  A powerful argument against Vincent's nihilism, and an elegant display of philosophy in action.  It's a deceptively simple movie that raises some complex issues.