The tactical improvisation of space in the contemporary Hollywood action sequence

This article applies the insights of Michel de Certeau’s influential text of sociological analysis The Practice of Everyday Life to the action sequences of contemporary Hollywood cinema. In so doing it demonstrates the extent to which these sequences can be read as spectacular displays of the spatial appropriation that de Certeau suggests characterize everyday life. For de Certeau, the everyday is controlled by bureaucratic and out-of-reach structures, their strategies of control dependent on the production of restrictive spaces; the individual, however, is able to gain agency through self-directed movement within these structures. In this way, simple acts such as walking and cooking become expressions of personal freedom within capitalist society. This article will illustrate the affinity between de Certeau’s ‘pedestrian tactics’ and the more outlandish feats of the action protagonists of a variety of Hollywood blockbusters. These protagonists temporarily appropriate space from monolithic controlling entities in a similar manner, Die Hard 4.0 (Wiseman, 2007), the Bourne trilogy (Liman, 2002; Greengrass, 2004, 2007) and Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (Bird, 2011) being representative examples of this process. Across these films independent individuals use ingenuity and improvisation to outmanoeuvre agents of systemic control, liberating themselves from spatial restrictions. In presenting such spectacular occupations the action genre and action sequence relate potentially alienating architectural spaces to the bodily coordinates of viewers, who can consequently take pleasure from the display of successful tactical actions within highly regulated environments. However, and in line with close readings of de Certeau, the article will conclude by investigating how tactics might be seen as inevitably and unavoidably subsumed within rigid strategic frameworks in the contexts of both everyday life and the action film.