DarkImbecile wrote: Fri May 07, 2021 12:23 am
therewillbeblus wrote: Thu May 06, 2021 10:39 pm
…as this was made between his two best films and I have faith that there’s a better movie in there somewhere.
Have you written about why think
Manhunter is one of his best anywhere? I didn’t see it in a cursory search, but I would be very curious to see what you find in it that works better for you than his ‘90s to early ‘00s work.
Also, did you see the director’s cut or theatrical version of
Blackhat? I’ve never seen the former, but I’m curious if it improves on the original, which is seriously flawed but oddly (almost inexplicably) engaging to me at certain points…
For
Blackhat I watched the DC.
I haven't written about any of Mann's other work I don't think, other than a response in the
Heat thread recently. I do believe I've shared that I appreciate the philosophy of
Manhunter, specifically that Mann portrays a man who is devoted to work and good at it, but also sees the world as grey momentarily between black-and-white barriers. His ability to get inside the mind of a serial killer without empathizing fully to the point of losing yourself is a very psychological technique that reminds me of what a therapist needs to do in practice, and the depiction of his struggles around balancing that perfectly- an impossible task for a fallible being- is well-drawn with enough distance to resist coming across as overcooked. One of my favorite exchanges in movies, period, is this:
Will: This started from an abused kid, a battered infant. There's something terrible about..
Jack: What are you, sympathizing with this guy?
Will: Absolutely. My heart bleeds for him, as a child. Someone took a kid and manufactured a monster. At the same time, as an adult, he's irredeemable. He butchers whole families to pursue trivial fantasies. As an adult, someone should blow the sick fuck out of his socks. Do you think that's a contradiction, Jack? Does this kind of understanding make you uncomfortable?
The willingness to engage in contradicting feelings and still arrive at a tangible outcome is admirable, and while it's often counter to my own progression of dwelling longer in the abstract, it's powerful to watch Mann wrestle between his split philosophies: The industrialist lens of human beings as self-measured by their utility, effective tools moving towards logical progressions of self-betterment and acquiring tangible markers of value to survive in a chaotic world; and the psychological lens of emotional sensitivity, which is accepted as innate but Mann spends his career wondering about its capacity to be suppressed, or even the morality of its suppression. It's often either idealized in fantasy (Caan's dreams of family and children in
Thief) or sublimated in 'appropriate'/non-vulnerable avenues that align with environmental supports and simplified identity constructs (often the workplace, i.e.
Manhunter and
Heat), or even compartmentalized in
Manhunter for Will to leave work to be with his family, significantly in a very different physically-defined location in nearly every way, a dreamlike cottage on the beach compared to the urban buildings that mark his professional life.
Emotion may be innate but Mann seems to understand, through this wrestling, that suppressing emotions is a necessary sacrifice many of us need to make- partly because our psyches can't handle the turmoil that interferes with our industrialist definitions of tangible productivity in individualistic western cultures, but partly because civilization's cold, neutral, barbaric state doesn't support it as a higher form of self-preservation in actuality (vs.
Thief's fantasy). Mann appears to believe that, much like industry, we have evolved to the point where we
can successfully survive by controlling our emotional valves and issuing these innate drives in specific places rather than allowing them to control us. This isn't always possible, and I think in some of his most interesting work we see how characters' own lack of self-knowledge emerges with subtle visibility beneath the shiny surfaces with implicit realist tragedy, and this supports Mann's quest: If emotion is so nebulous, we must try to tame it, or maybe not 'must' but we have a drive that says we must, and that drive is trying to protect us from the chaos of sitting with intangible information. So whether we objectively 'need' to or not, we subjectively have a part that certainly stresses that need in response to the frightening and brutal nature of our environments, and our limitations of self-actualization without outside environmental supports to help define us. How ironic, we need what we fear and we fear what we need; we don't know exactly what we need or what we're afraid of, so we do whatever we can to make life simple.
I think Mann tackles this conflict best in his early work, but I do really like
Heat a lot, and I'll admit that
The Insider blew me away around the time of its release and was one of my all-time favorite films for a bit. I haven't seen it in so long it deserves another watch, but it deeply moved me as a middle school boy.
Other than these reasons,
Manhunter is just an engaging film. It's well-paced, gorgeously shot, and I'm generally a big fan of those 80s synth crime thrillers: this and
Thief, but
To Live and Die in L.A. probably blows them both away and is one of my favorite 80s films, also with William Peterson. Maybe I'll write that up someday, but not only is it a pulp-bullet shooting through celluloid, there is a deeply cynical look at how humanity erodes as people acclimate to roles, bleeding into their professional and personal lives, that is downright sinister.
I haven't even delved into Noonan's villain, who I believe is pitched in a manner that earns some of our sympathy for the boy that was, and even postures at potential for the man briefly before taking Will's position that it's just too late- though we see that tragedy for Noonan and for Allen in real time, just as for the boy, and so our empathy remains static for uncomfortably longer than Will can take in his own aloof narrative. I will also freely admit that I don't think
Red Dragon is terrible like the rest of the world, so part of me just thinks it's an interesting story.