Split Selfness pervades the film. One can distinguish it in the dynamic between Miles and his muse and wife Frances Taylor, with whom Miles ‘never played better’ and whom Miles demands to give up her work – dancing, her own Self in expression – to care for him.[1] Thematic conceits of improvisation and Self, power and expression resolve in the closing scene. Peace returns when the older Miles and his younger symbolic identity merge once more at a piano, discussing chord voicings. Through the narrative of integration, the symbolic order is restored and Miles once again acts the nom-du-père, pedagogically performing the prohibitive and legislative role of the symbolic Father. Only when Miles ceases fetishising his past Self can he reiterate the tension between his ‘public’ and ‘private’ identities. In many respects, it is Miles’ rejection of an ever-changing Self – in favour of an essential ‘I’ – that causes his downfall at the start of the film. These Selves of fictional Miles are captured on a tape of improvised music. A failed Self of Miles in the improvised music is caught on the tape he yearns for. 

Acknowledging the Dionysian creation through his destruction of Self, Miles realises that ‘the overall process of relation between work and world cannot come to an end because there is always more to be said’.[2] Here, he returns triumphantly to stage once more, as the credits roll. Miles Ahead can be read, then, as a heavily conservative film: the king is restored to the throne, the dialectic between individual and society is mediated successfully and the symbolic order returns to once again cover its internal antagonisms. Junior’s desire to be a great player is again curbed by the law of the father Miles, to whom he must pay his dues. But in making that concession, Miles can once again return, for ‘the (real) father must in fact make possible a mediation between law and desire’ rather than outright prohibiting the desire of the subject.[3] Natural order is restored when Miles acknowledges that the symbolic order is not a product of the father, but that the father is an effect of the symbolic order.

Spoiler Alert

In the middle of a car chase in Don Cheadle’s 2016 Miles Ahead, we see an increasingly exasperated (fictional) journalist Dave Brill cry out ‘just make some more stuff up!’.[1] The object of the exclamation is Cheadle’s Miles, who is in a desperate race to retrieve a stolen session tape. Brill’s point is clear: the music is improvised, in losing the tape you haven’t really lost anything, you can easily go and record something like it or better today if you wanted.

Except agency is paramount: despite the tape proving of little value of itself in the denouement of the film, Miles needs ‘my music!’ back in its rightful hands. The stolen tape represents a stolen expression of Self, a Self arrogated by the white capitalists for profit. After all, ‘legally…under contract’, as the unctuous A&R manager of Columbia Records notes, the tape belongs to them.

Further, it symbolises a Self Miles wishes to be kept hidden, what Brill identifies as the ‘rumour’ of the ‘revered and reviled’, Howard Hughes-like burnout of a once-great performer. In reclaiming the tape, Miles wishes to reclaim his public narrative. ‘Come back? I never went anywhere!’ Miles shouts more than once. At one point, Miles even teaches Brill how to box, shouting ‘swing with the hips…get it back! Get it back!’.

‘I know there’s gold on that tape’, Columbia officials charge Miles. The fact is, however, - and Miles knows it – that there isn’t gold in those improvisations. Miles himself fawns over ‘the [good] shit’ Sketches of Spain, despite complaining to a fan that he ‘put out like 15 records since’. Moreover, his regular encomiums of Gil Evans show a man reminiscing on halcyon days of creative Community. It is a Miles filled with regret, doubt and fear that he past his zenith years ago – ‘what you looking at?!’ he berates his trumpet.

Miles Ahead’s MacGuffin of the stolen tape signifies Miles’ symbolic, ‘public’ identity, which Miles himself resolutely wants to control, even as it slips away from him. We see Miles repeatedly listening to the tape and singing along what he wishes was on it, as though aware that he is no longer able to satisfy his symbolic role.[2] Should the tape be released, he would lose his position of reverence, able to walk into any venue for free because his face is the ticket. This point is resolutely driven home in a cinematically Oedipal moment when a prodigious and troubled young trumpet player – appropriately called Junior - hears the tape and exclaims: ‘it’s shit…’.[3] Miles’ ‘private’, troubled identity is not ready to be revealed to the world in the ‘public’ sphere of symbolic roles. It is an Oedipal narrative that induces deeper significance when one realises that the Mother is the trumpet itself. Junior (son), playing gigs at the Village Vanguard and impressing record executives, topples Miles (Father) from the side of the trumpet (Mother). Miles continually defers to playing his trumpet when verbal communication fails him, and without the trumpet-as-expression-of-Self-in-Improvisation, there would simply be no Miles. The trumpet-as-Mother is that which births the Self of Miles in the ‘public’ sphere.  

It is no wonder, then, that when Miles sees Junior play for the first time, the mise-en-scène focusses on Miles’ fearful expression and tightly wound, twitching fingers. It is Miles realising he cannot fear his symbolic reversal, for it has already happened. Here, Miles as nom du père swings drastically to non-dupes errent, wherein – insecure of his symbolic position – he falls from the symbolic; he ‘believes [his] eyes [and joins the] ones who err most’.[4] By ignoring the symbolic sphere of influence and meaning, Miles misplaces himself within the interactional matrix. This misplacement is not deliberate, but in losing the tape Miles is symbolically castrated.

Slowly, however, it becomes clear that Junior is Oedipus and Miles (the father) Laius: true to Classical form, jousted unknowingly from his position before the plot even begins to develop onscreen.[5] Miles knows he’s been beaten in the game of the Mother’s affection. No wonder, again, then, that Junior is so nervous when meeting Miles; Junior understands before Miles that the power shift and symbolic castration has already occurred.

There is a further doubling of this established symbolic narrative, condensed into one line of dialogue. When it becomes apparent that Miles can no longer play trumpet – satisfy the Mother – Junior paternalistically reassures Miles that, with enough practice of his scales, his chops will return. Grammatical shifts prevent the line being a patronising slur. Junior resolutely encourages Miles in the first person plural: ‘we can get your chops back’. Miles’ Self is literally split into the young talent and the older cripple.[6]   

Miles Ahead depicts the resurrection of the murdered Father and the move toward reconciliation through an abandonment of symbolic roles and exploration of Self through improvised music. For in seeing Junior play – a synchronic and entirely subjective experiential expression – Miles discovers that which he never had, a retroactively generated notion of Self in relation to Junior’s. Žižek: ‘there is no original unity preceding loss, what is lost is retroactively constituted through its loss’, a Self does not pre-exist its loss but emerges from its loss as a return to itself.[7] Cheadle’s Miles ascertains Self as a result of its own failure in the symbolic (‘public’) order. ‘A subject endeavours to express itself in a signifier, it fails, and the subject is the failure’.[8] The stolen tapes are the failure and Miles’ loss of Self only emerges once more through the Self of his Oedipal rival, expressed in improvised music.     

Angelica Bastien is then mistaken to call Junior ‘a mirror to Miles’.[9] Junior and Miles’ Selves interact not as mirrors but as a necessary synecdoche of each other, defining Self through heuristic Other: not mirroring content but filling its gaps. The pair symbolically merge and frame each other ontologically. Derrida observed astutely that the frame itself is always enframed by part of its content, by an object that falls within the frame, to the extent that – like an Escher image – the frame and image ground each other through each other.[10]

In Miles Ahead, the gladiatorial, oppositional boxing ring transforms into the Community of Self exploration in improvisation; it is a shift from martial egotism to collective egoism.

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