My favorite thing about Mann’s movies is how they create an entirely new emotional register. Not realism (gritty, grounded depictions of life) nor camp (exaggerated, ironic, or self-aware dramatization), but some new third way of dramatizing life: a modernist heroic mode unique to the American 80s and 90s view of being a man.
When Mann's hero Will Graham begins to internalize the thinking of the killers he hunts, the emotional world of the film becomes heightened almost to the point of abstraction: neon-infused visuals, stark compositions, and a synthy electronic score create a sense of unease and detachment that mirrors Graham’s mental state. Manhunter isn’t just a crime thriller; it’s an exploration of the psychic costs of stepping into darkness to confront evil.
Mann's formula is simple but somehow always very compelling: the brooding loner hero endowed with special talents that other men see in him and need to use to solve a problem, his idyllic romantic life with a wife and son just out of reach until he can overcome his fallen side, and then the face of evil itself that has to be slain before the hero can return to paradise. The hero almost always solves his problem with speed, an obsession with going somewhere, a Learjet, a racing squad car, a sprint down the hallway of an insane asylum. Like in Heat, as long as Mann's hero keeps moving, he is safe; but the life of a shark is not fit for the hero's family. It's Joseph Campbell’s A Hero With A Thousand Faces but with a specifically second half of the 20th Century masculinist style.
Style concealed within realism; the style rarely brings attention to itself like in a classic noir for example yet is always present in the way the score swells, in the way characters talk, in the way simple scenes of dialogue are shot with the brightest most expressionistic backgrounds of color as if set among a Van Gogh painting. Interestingly, the style is self-important in it’s seriousness yet Mann's world insists it is merely playing itself straight. Beneath the tectonic plates of the "serious" and "straightforward" story there is a soap opera like element to the drama of this world. Think the iconic Phil Collins "In the Air Tonight" scene in Miami Vice. The music takes over, the camera becomes fixed, the dialogue almost leaden in its gravitas.
In Manhunter, Mann is his most Hitchcockian, obsessed with mirrors, the macabre, and acts of voyeurism. He borrows a story element from De Palma's Hitchcockian thriller Blow Out (1981) by having the film’s hero Will Graham solve the crime by watching a film himself. Psychosexual killers, sedated tigers, flaming skeletons of victims: Manhunter's version of America is like one seen from the hyper-violent video game "Grand Theft Auto" but set in the 1980s with Captiva, Florida as its paradise and Kansas City, Missouri as its inferno. He sets noble heroes of yore like Will Graham's dragon-slaying knight against a nightmarish hypermodern music video of the Miami Vice mold.
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