© 2015 by James Clark
I want to begin this account of Manhunter (1986) with a rather more extensive alert regarding the torrent of misapprehension getting in the way of clarity as to its specific soundness and that of Mann’s other films. Like his guiding light, Jean Pierre Melville (1917-1973), Mann hies to an avenue of performance serving two very disparate market zones. (He is on record as lightly rebuffing filmmakers of “niche” seriousness the output of which few, if any, ever see, let alone comprehend and enjoy. Wide popularity and integrity, he declares, with the example of Stanley Kubrick to back him up, are not mutually exclusive phenomena.) Thus, like Melville, he gravitates to good old crime adventures the dynamics of which verge on what astrophysicist John Gribbin calls “spooky action at a distance.” Both Melville and Mann have sweated out that latter territory—somewhat questionably taken over by astrophysics—way too hot to handle on the part of normal willpower, to the point of Mann’s injecting it into a desperately normal protagonist like Manhunter’s Will, whereby his dividedness in face of hard and deadly challenge can both attractively burnish a heroes and villains diversion while at the same time allowing the penniless niche-crowd to look on with awe that maddening problematics can elicit such fun and profit.
Our Tricky Two in fact probe in this manner an avenue where uncomplicated fun seekers can startle themselves into unsuspected maturity. In getting around to the elegant and very volatile vectors of a film rife with inelegant moments, I feel that a brief look at a performance craft very different in many ways from that of Mann’s can bring to bear how widespread and thought-provoking that play of startling self-revelation has become.
David Byrne, the main engine of those 1980s Dadaists, Talking Heads, has recently resurfaced as a designer of a type of spectacle intensively focused upon mainstream creatures breaking away (however tentatively) to something completely different. By lucky coincidence he became aware of an eventuation largely confined to rural and semi-rural supposed backwaters the Heads would never have seen. High schools out there had spawned a variation of flags-and-batons visuality for the sake of jazzing up marching bands that might not have reminded the bystanders of Vegas. From there it was on to those erstwhile “Color Guard” extras taking sole possession of the limelight in gyms with canned music—a spectacle of precision dance, gymnastics and juggling coming to be known as “winter guard,” running parallel to the hoops season. Byrne had come across a video of one such troupe—their payment for using one of his tunes as soundtrack—and was startled to see decidedly non-elite athletes or dancers tossing flags, batons and mock rifles high into the air and fielding those missiles with Olympian nonchalance, at exactly the same second! Being bowled over by the range of optics there, he decided to ramp up those hidden gems of avant-garde morphology by affixing to the almost unbelievable work of the kids a band shell featuring a roster of current rock notables like St. Vincent and Lucius and the antiquity feature of Byrne himself—each having produced an original song and worked with the design of one of the 10 teams. The resultant juxtaposition of professionalism and amateurism is something not to be missed if it comes to an arena near you! Byrne’s windfall becomes a wonderfully crazy adjunct to those cinematic cyclotrons lurking in the work of Melville and Mann.
All of the films of Melville and Mann—and Byrne’s cadenza—impress upon us that, as Jacques Demy’s Lilac Fairy maintains to a floundering Princess in his film, Peau d’Ane (Donkey Skin), “Life is not as easy as you think…” Hence in our current heat of someone trying to ride that spooky-action-tiger by means of clinging to its treacherous tail, we open with a former crack FBI homicide cop, Will, with a last name (Graham) a bit incongruous for homicide and living in retirement with a pretty blonde wife, Molly, and likewise blonde son, Kevin, at a Florida district where Graham crackers would be a popular prescription. Soon he is at work on the beach with Kevin, erecting a wire fence to protect from crabs the babies of sea turtles. “Crabs get most newborns,” the boy laments. “Yeah, but not now,” the fixer insists. “They’re not gonna make it. Guaranteed!” This little slam-dunk measures up rather poorly to the disconcerting minefield tossed his way by a visitor, Will’s former boss, Jack. The latter’s approach to inducing Will to lend his smarts to a nasty puzzle includes intimations that the strangely-young-for-retirement naturalist has left the force due to a brush with death which has compromised his taste for derring-do. As Jack hands him photos of two crime scenes—each one comprising the slaughter of parents and several children—he remarks, “If you can’t look anymore, I understand…” Will rather coldly replies, “Don’t try to run a game down on me, Jack…”
Shaking off that beach-bum gentrification (I can’t help seeing Jonathan Glazer soaking up this flick en route to his Sexy Beast), Will vows to Molly, “I won’t get deeply involved. He’ll never even see me or know my name…” Then they make love somewhere at a distance from sexy beasts, much of the optics being about Molly’s anxious, saddened face as she holds his head plunged into the mattress. The sound track has opted, in light of a vast, primal sea just out of their superb windows giving scope to silver-blue moonlight, for a tourist-trap aquarium lullaby motif. This, by way of an earlier cut to one of the Dixie scenes of outrage where the displaced Yankee eventually draws inferences from a blood-stained rebel marriage bed—the owners’ Norman Cherner chairs in the kitchen marking them as having (perhaps easy-going) issues with nineteenth century energies. (As with Sexy Beast visiting our local Art Gallery of Ontario to pull out its Magritte Surrealist painting, “The Birthday,” here we are startled by a clutch of 1950s pressed-plywood chairs a set of which we use at our dining room table.) We’re struck by the elite craftsmanship of Will’s subsequent, middle of the night reconstruction of the massacre, its precision establishing a tension of sorts with the preamble in the squad car bringing him to the ugliness and terror, whereby he spends quite a while checking his recording machines, his distractedness welding him to the structure of discovery to a point of ignoring the Southern hospitality of the cop who offers, “I’ll come inside if you want… show you around…”
You have to imagine that Will did hear that gracious (but implicated in “run a game”) offer. However, here was a moment when we were on the spot to puzzle out our protagonist’s tightness and its efficacy in not only turning the tide of the Full Moon Monster but turning the tide of his own straight and narrow crimes against a nature which just might prefer Cherner-chair mobile curves to steel mesh immobile sharp corners. (I think the slurred speech of Will, Molly and Kevin insinuates that a baseline of silence has touched them but has also left them with a rather painful legacy of articulation.) Will not only readily perceives minutiae as to the killer’s General Sherman-like invasion of this Southern encampment; but he himself gains more intensive entry into the enigmatic war machine striking fear in the South. (The first incidence of shock and awe flared up in Birmingham, Alabama. The second atrocity catches fire, aptly enough, in Atlanta.) “It was hot out that night. It must have seemed cool inside…” The surveyor of the slaughter—evincing a special acuity as to insupportable heat and the resentment accruing to a campaign to put down rebellion—addresses the post-mortem report that the woman (seen in a brief and blurry nocturnal scene at the very outset, with a tense ringing sound design which in turn bathes Will as he first walks from the car to the death scene) survived for five horrible minutes after receiving her mortal wound. “What’d he do in the interval?” Post mortem “marks” point to a subdued enemy being subjected to a form of virulent gluttony—looting, if you will, or cannibalism. Back at what seems to be his Birmingham hotel he runs through home videos of the now-departed families, exclaiming to himself, regarding one of the Southern Belles, “God, she’s lovely, isn’t she?” Pulling himself away from that channel, he refocuses on the prey still alive—the hunting here racing along two distinct objectives. “What are you dreaming? That’s something you can’t afford me to know about, isn’t it? They found talcum powder on her leg. But there wasn’t any talcum powder in the bathroom. The talcum powder came out of a rubber glove as you took it off to touch her… You took off your gloves to touch her, didn’t you? Didn’t you, you sonofabitch? But while your gloves were off did you open all her eyes up so she could see ya?” This episode would have us see that pronounced currents of hate and love set the pace for whatever discovery is to be had. It seems that Will’s analysis pertains to the Atlanta woman, Mrs Leeds. “Mrs Leeds was a beautiful woman” [beyond Mr. Leeds and the children, there being the aura of William [Will!] Tecumseh Sherman savaging elegant enemy, Robert E. Lee!]. The Birmingham victims were the Jacoby family, having an Old Testament link and an implication with free thinkers—both factors being a red flag to the likes of anti-Semite Sherman and our scourge here.
Soon after, at the Atlanta FBI office, Will speaks to various lawmen in a more detailed, objective way, his task being a blend of probing dark corners of his own consciousness as a Union Army regular and also as a scout serving up his discoveries to the powers that be. “Elevated fantasy level… You have to know his fantasies…” The district FBI chief warns his troops not to refer to the killer as the “Tooth Fairy,” not, that is, to act like dreaded rednecks (or like the overzealous cops going after rebel Jef, he of the nice pillowcases, the Samourai (Reb luminary Jefferson Davis). Speaking of etiquette, Will is soon tangled up in office politics, taunted by that (selectively gracious) chief (“He must have cut you up pretty good”) in retaliation for his showing him up by way of receiving confirmation (contrary to protocol) that the killer removed his gloves to touch the woman and thereby leave fingerprints.
It doesn’t take very long for our momentarily deft and self-assured loner to be inflamed by that oblique slighting of his courage, to the point of taking measures designed more for show than for showdown. Coming away from the headquarters feeling smaller than before, he’s confronted by a reporter, Freddie Lounds, well known to him as a ruthless sensationalist (in fact a verbal form of paparazzi, doubling, when opportune, as photographer; we soon discover that he had run a photo essay on Will’s breakdown). This backwater hipster once again gets into the protagonist’s face—“Will Graham, whattaya know, whattaya say?”—and the already aggrieved muse as to drastically depopulating the planet lifts the noisy milquetoast over his head and slams him into a windshield, the force of which shatters its glass. “Keep away from me!” the part-time sleuth instructs the baby-fat cutie, as Jack intervenes in the service of an everyday abrasiveness which Will thinks to have essentially circumvented. Thereby a previous such conflict long ago and far away comes to bear as a surprisingly rich counterpoint to Will’s stab at la dolce vita. Recall that in Fellini’s hit movie it is the protagonist who plays the part of the effete pest, flickering gravitas notwithstanding. In this trajectory, Will’s cherishing the beauty of Mrs. Leeds—“God, she’s lovely…”—brings back to us Marcello’s gushing about Anita Ekberg, that happy-go-lucky subversive. It also tarnishes this chapter of Will’s going out on a limb as becoming clogged with ludicrous Tarzan stunts. No longer effectively disinterested and braced to direct his vivid reflective energies toward crushing professionally a range of perverse ineptitude (like that of Sherman, having come to light as the originator of “total war” and less well-known as legitimizing rednecks) our main man veers toward a campaign of unproductive protocol. After he and Jack are finally free of Freddie (who somewhat physically resembles the chubby angora-clad fun-seeker on Via Veneto), Will—trying to sound like a typical take-charge guy—puts forth another aspect of the Tooth Fairy; but he is therewith also obliquely coming to terms with his own sweet tooth. “The Tooth Fairy won’t stop.”/ “Why?”/ “He’s got a genuine taste for it.”/ “You do know something about him.”/ “Not enough…”
We might have imagined that optically poised, promising soloist Will (William Peterson giving a somewhat darker and much more naive, yet still splendid, Mastroianni turn) has stared down his setback. But, on the heels of his admission of being far from fully prepared for the death spiral he was aboard (“Not enough”), here he feels compelled to squelch those FBI lifers who regarded him as a pussy, by going face to face with his old, Moriarity-like nemesis. “I’ll go to Baltimore tomorrow to see Lecktor…” Jack, taken aback, asks why. “To recover the mind-set” is the rather precious, clerk-like reply, a bit of mainstream bravado flying in the face of his already far more workable, pristine, utterly unsung and solitary explorations. With this shift to Baltimore and a rush of Edgar Allan Poe melodrama the narrative begins to posit the kind of giddy implausibility seen in the latter stages of Melville’s Bob Le Flambeur and the latter stages of Mann’s Thief, not to mention Heat and Collateral. There is about pronounced marching away from less than glamorous productive labor entanglement in unbecoming bathetic eventuation the better to bring sharp focus to the spooky (and also sustaining) range left to be covered and how it manages to put in appearances perhaps going nowhere sterling but keeping the flame alight.
In a stereotypically all-white institution, Dr. Lecktor, all in white like some kind of musical comedy sailor—his first name, Hannibal, evoking a precursor to Sherman’s “total war”—pays a handsome compliment to his enemy’s investigative prowess, and asks, “How did you catch me?” Will, taking the ungracious, macho route, snaps back, “[because] You’re insane;” but the mad one agrees to give his take (however undependable) on the current mass murderer sensation—“This is a very sharp boy, Will…”—neglecting to say that the sharp boy has been sending him fan mail. We needn’t go into much detail about this axis of Hannibal and Tooth-Fairy Sherman. These Grand Guignol spooks—diabolically clever in passing information to one another in (Wait for it Sherlock) classified ads appearing in a rag called The Tattler (today it might be called Reddit)—coincide with the facile childishness of Will’s comfort zone to which he has repaired. (“They’re all gonna make it! Guaranteed!”) The trancs he periodically wolfs down do not noticeably offset his penchant for caffeinatedly self-satisfied bombast. Soon he decoratively rounds up a convoy of cruiser cars to protect Molly and Kevin, on learning that Lecktor, abusing telephone privileges (Would Charles Manson be granted such a fat chance to wreak havoc?), has wheedled the address of his Florida hideaway from his former psychotherapist’s secretary. Lecktor’s opening gambit (he being a former psychologist) had been, “Do you have any emotional problems, Will? No, of course you don’t…” The interview’s conclusion finds the prisoner needling his captor for his skittishness (“Smell yourself… You were just lucky…), at which time the free man races crazily along the sanitary corridors of the lily-white facility, ending up trembling on an outdoor walkway like that where Jef, Le Samourai, got burned; and Freddie is on the spot to produce a photo document of his embarrassment. “Gotcha!” he shouts. And Gotcha is now indeed the prevailing register right to the end.
The latter half of the film is a barely digestible fruit cake of corny gestures and improbable twists. But as with Le Samourai tilting to Joan of Arc, a flood of uncanny (a scientist might demean it to “spooky”) optical and aural flashpoints maintains Will’s purchase upon creative navigation and the compellingness of his bourgeois atrocities. A brief opening scene features, in accordance with Melville’s Le Samourai, someone on a bed in murky light—in this case (full) moonlight blue. She is one of those whose life becomes cruelly curtailed. As an intruding flashlight beam plays over her sleeping body we are invaded by an anxious, ringing musical stream. Without any explanation, we are in a position to absorb the surreal fragility of her and our presence, brimming with tempered joys and pain, rich communion and deadly impasse. She becomes restless, awakens and begins to face a particularly harsh mode of fatedness to obliteration. Will’s riding that frisson in order to stalk the itself rebellious scourge of the rebels is often muddied by moralistic hectoring; but there are moments in real time and in nightmares when that eerie ringing overture bites down edifyingly, to offer us something much more than the Tooth Fairy biting down on a terrified Lounds having melodramatically joined Will in a Tattler article as live bait to lure the mystery man. Amidst loopy false starts, Will eventually pinpoints the enemy by down-to-earth reasoning based on tangible evidence of full-scale sensuality self-corrupting to the point of requiring optical means of shoring up an abandoned integrity by means of vignettes of not only punitive dominance and murder but also affection. The sensuous clue of pictorial advantage, incipiently staring our troubled and fussy researcher right in the face in those home videos, plays out to a home video processing lab in St. Louis (Sherman’s point of departure in routing the rebs). On the way to nailing the over-the-top villain (wouldn’t you know he’d be in the process of trying to kill a blind lady in the course of nineteenth-century opera posturing), Will is embedded in a nocturnal convoy out to the fringes of a Gateway City pointing Westward, not Eastward. The lurching race of the vehicle carrying Will, with its blazing headlights, almost invades the uncanny precincts confronted in that prelude scene. But so much yelling on the part of Jack to wait for more troops cuts far into its energies. Impatient Will, in otherwise Big Moment slow motion, crashes through the Tooth Fairy’s window and promptly gets knocked cold. After laughable distractions befalling the hard-core killer supposedly intent on dispatching the Protector of the South, Will comes to and shoots the Black Hat with his trusty hand gun. Then, in a sort of victory lap (which is of course just the opposite) he visits the distractedly grateful couple who were slated to be victims #3—they offer him a coffee—and the surface of this saga ends with Will, Molly and Kevin on their glowing beachfront, gazing seaward (recall Marcello, more candidly at a loss, at the end of La Dolce Vita), to depths they have butchered at least as sadly as those assaults which the spook brought off.
This is arguably the most intensively thematic film Mann has ever tackled. As such it provides far fewer of those signature-piece ecstatic visits to astronomical locales. But, on the other hand, Manhunter drives us through a dazzling field of ecstasy-nudged arts and crafts products the unleashing of which reins in to brilliant effect the rather doleful tale of a softie bent on protection from a world exactly the opposite of soft. That protagonist’s antagonists have set their sights upon the musings of the rather obscure poet-painter, William Blake (1757-1827)—Dr. Lecktor being not simply a theoretician of consciousness but a psychoanalyst before becoming a jail bird (the Samourai having been drawn to gazing on another kind of bird), he would have occupied about the sole discipline giving the somewhat pre-Jungian seer the time of day. That Age-of-Enlightenment-becoming-flaming-Romantic hero rattling around in the big-time-killers’ pensés inspires the Mid-Western Tooth-Fairy along his route to put in their place dissidents hopelessly oblivious to a hitherto unknown underworld wrongly intuited as hopelessly criminal. In the self-aggrandizing, resentful perspective of a Lecktor not nearly as validly competent as he imagines, the gift of seriously sophisticated warfare coming out of the likes of Blake becomes a license to kill the hoi polloi and therewith become a dimension of a God seen to be happily mowing down finite entities. Near the end of Will’s course of being duped by Lecktor as pretending to help him shut down a mass murderer in fact his protégé, the wily academic turns the tables on the rather heavy-handed virtue of the lawman, in hopes of driving crazy a harmonically timid investigator. “Did you really feel so depressed after you shot Mr. Garrett [in the course of solving a crime some time ago]? But it wasn’t the act that got you down. Didn’t you really feel so bad because killing him felt so good? Why shouldn’t you feel good? God does it all the time. God’s terrific. He dropped a church roof killing 34 of his worshippers… It [murder] feels good, Will, because God has power. And if one does what God does enough times one becomes as God is.” (Before killing him, the Tooth Fairy gives Freddie [who had joined Will in going to press in the Tattler along lines of the Tooth Fairy being a sexual pervert and animal, in hopes of luring him into a police trap] a less guardedly perverted version of his mentor’s bestial rendition of contesting against—and with—those who don’t get it. “Do you feel privileged? Your job is to be a reporter. That’s why you’re here. If you don’t, I’ll staple your eyelids to your forehead… William Blake drew a great red dragon and a woman clothed in the rays of the sun [to an effect, beyond a reader of check-out-counter literature, of conveying thrusts of the ugly and the beautiful being a creative equilibrium]. Mrs. Leeds, do you see? Mrs. Jacoby, do you see? Before me you are a slug in the sun. You are privy to a great becoming, and you recognize nothing. You’re an ant in the afterbirth. It is your nature to tremble. But fear is not what you owe me. You and the others, you owe me all!” Freddie is made to read into a microphone from the Midwesterner’s diatribe—“I have seen with wonder and awe the strength of the Red Dragon. All I wrote about him are lies to pull him into a trap. Will Graham, you will learn from your own lips how much you have to dread. You will lie awake in fear about what the Red Dragon will do…”
Threaded within this discharge of somewhat Ku Klux Klan presumptuous illiteracy, there are quick glimpses of a legacy of serious reflective practitioners, on the scale of Blake, the output of which underlines the degree of difficulty in face of which the present cast of characters are missing in action. En route to Freddie’s demise by way of cannibalism and auto-da-fe, we get a split second of an airport terminal and the Tooth Fairy’s knife cutting open a pack of the latest edition of the Tattler and showing therewith Will and Freddie’s illustrated provocation stunt on the front page. But we also see the headline which has bumped their concern for mass murder to the bottom of the page. “Medical Stunner! Man gives birth to healthy baby hours after death in plane!” Ramping up the goofy melodrama here, we have Demy’s Slightly Pregnant Man showering the proceedings with some acidic memos as to our tolerance across the board for idiotic and lethal events when the merest slivers of validity put in an appearance. That the Tooth Fairy—“You [Freddie] find that I’m queer?”/ “God, no!”—wears a nylon stocking over the upper half of his face while touting a Red Dragon [Red Desert?] phenomenon, ignites the attainment, at great cost, on the part of Le Samourai’s patron saint, Giuliana, especially her forbearance in face of crude and outrageous “loved ones.” Not only the care for a chapeau but also the somewhat famously alarming wall edges into this picture. It resembles a lunar surface, true to the antagonist’s monthly dead world urges; and it’s particularly in full force at the kidnapping of the blind, fellow-dark-room worker. But he’s also cooked up a big print/wallpaper of the walls of his lair which he’s installed in the hotel room where he kills Freddie by Dracula methods, only to send him all-aflame (tied to a desk chair) like a performance art version of Francis Bacon’s painting, “Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X.”
Will and Francis Dollarhyde, the Tooth Fairy, are very alike in their unstinting devotion to advantage. Dollarhyde finds himself an object of affection in the unseeing but not unfeeling co-worker, Reba. And he’s momentarily enchanted by that activation of a sense of love being as powerful as a sense of hate. He imagines (erroneously) that there is another man and his insistence on prevailing over others returns with a vengeance, never to subside until he’s shot dead. Will, after the dressing-down by Lecktor apropos of embracing his insight into world history as gigantically disappointing, runs through a reverie of being the Tooth Fairy beholding Mrs. Leeds—and, beyond Lecktor, seeing her as both an entity to hate and to love. “I walk up those stairs. I pass the children’s toys. The children mean nothing to me. They were put here to help me [plug into a murderous God]. I step into the room. I see you there. I see me desired by you. Accepted and loved in the silver [lunar] mirrors of your eyes.” But when the dust of this Red Desert settles he returns to Captiva, Florida to live in the belief that Lecktor’s travesty is not worth a second consideration. During a return to his family before the final push against Sherman, Will tells Kevin, apropos of his breakdown, “I still had his [Lecktor’s] thoughts going around in my head. After a while I was OK again. Kevin, they’re the ugliest thoughts in the world…” (Then a saccharine soundtrack follows their progress through the aisles of a grocery store, Will adopting a retiree limp as he approaches the check-out counter with its wholesome reading.) Could be. But with some of the right stuff, he could have ridden them to a place much more fruitful than Captiva.
Still carrying the bruises of his collision with Dollarhyde, he jokes on the golden sands with Kevin, “Don’t worry. It’s worse than it looks.” A great closing shot, its irony right on the money and the currency of which convertible nowhere on the planet, nor, perhaps, anywhere in the universe. The soundtrack for the closing credits is a calypso jingle beaming out, “Upbeat, listen to my heartbeat…” During the brief pre-honeymoon of Francis and Reba, the former takes her to a veterinarian he knows where a sedated tiger lies on an operating table (crazily involving itself with those deathbeds). She thrills to listening to its heartbeat. That moment of vision was something to carry away.
Reba had told him, “We live alone in the darkness,” and he was touched by her grace therewith. The epigraph of Melville’s Le Samourai compares the solitude of the Samourai with that of the tiger. Reading Blake carefully he could have been touched by the tempered solitude implicit in this: “Tiger, tiger, burning bright/In the forests of the night/What immortal hand or eye/Could frame thy fearful symmetry/…Did He who made the lamb make thee?”
Still the best adaptation of Thomas Harris’ RED DRAGON, bar none.
Thanks for the response and endorsement, Robert.
Mann not only obsesses over workmen who go the extra mile; but he also demonstrates in his films the huge difference between virtuoso and journeyman production.
I’d have to agree with you when you say that this particular film is the most “thematic” Mann has ever tackled. This may be the most stylized forensic film we’ve seen. Tremendous essay!
Thanks, Peter!
I think the drive behind Mann’s subtly bringing on board an army of outriders is twofold. He’s maintaining that a loosely linked metier which most movie fans have never dreamed of is nonetheless a going concern and an obligation for an artist in the new millennium. And he’s emphasizing to those who have dreamed that dream that its nightmare aspect is far from a state of isolation.
In Blackhat, which comes up on the 19th, I think he’s struck by, in Melville’s words, a second wind, including not only tigers, but lambs.
Yeah, Mann is all about process and is endlessly fascinated by the minutia of people working and MANHUNTER is perhaps one of THE best examples of that in his entire filmography as evident in the sequence where Graham and co. race against time to figure out the Tooth Fairy’s note to Lecktor. And all this was being done before the glut of forensic shows like CSI, NCIS, et al invaded television. Mann was certainly ahead of his time in many respects and this is one of them. I always find this film fascinating in its push and pull between the humanity (and the struggle to maintain it) of Graham and Mann’s fascinating with technology and how it aids his heroes.
Excellent essay as always!
Thanks, J.D.!
Great point about steroid-level “process” crashing into set-piece endeavors. The exuberant and very incisive sound and visual (digital) design of Mann’s films seduce the viewer (more or less successfully—needing two to tango) toward a new take on mainstream life.
The pop of such collision in Manhunter stands in marked contrast to the far more world-weary Blackhat, where the real drama is more theatrical, less fulsomely cinematic.
Jim, a very persuasive comparison with Melville’s work is proposed her is your typical fecund and exhaustive manner. MANHUNTER originally received poor to middling reviews upon release, but now it is seen by many as Mann’s finest work. I haven’t yet reached that judgment, but I’d say I’ve come a good way from my earlier indifference. Some now are even thinking it is the best film about Lector. In any case, again you have gone the full nine yards in giving this film the most fascinating analysis I have yet read on it.
Thanks, Sam!
I think the knotted energies of Manhunter give us a channel of rigorous mystery and treasure thrilling in their challenges to field phenomena both individual and comprehensive. After Blackhat, I’m heading into the terrain of troubled and heartfelt intimacy and and wisdom to be found in many of Melville’s films. (Whereas Mann deploys a sort of symphony orchestra to convey the weight and complexity of his muse, Melville prefers a chamber orchestra (or even, a string quartet, with its deft, quiet cogency.) I’ll be leading off that stage of consideration with Second Wind (Le Deuxieme Souffle).