The Cinema of Michael Mann: Vice and Vindication 9780231850490

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the cinema of MICHAEL MANN

DIRECTORS’ CUTS

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Other select titles in the Directors’ Cuts series: the cinema of A K I K A U R I S M Ä K I : authorship, bohemia, nostalgia, nation ANDREW NESTINGEN

the cinema of R I C H A R D L I N K L AT E R : walk, don’t run ROB STONE

the cinema of B É L A TA R R : the circle closes A N D R Á S B Á L I N T K O VÁ C S

the cinema of S T E V E N S O D E R B E R G H : indie sex, corporate lies, and digital videotape A N D R E W D E WA A R D & R . C O L I N TAT E

the cinema of T E R R Y G I L L I A M : it’s a mad world

edited by J E F F B I R K E N S T E I N , A N N A F R O U L A & K A R E N R A N D E L L

the cinema of TA K E S H I K I TA N O : flowering blood SEAN REDMOND

the cinema of the D A R D E N N E brothers : responsible realism PHILIP MOSLEY

the cinema of M I C H A E L H A N E K E : europe utopia edited by B E N M c C A N N & D A V I D S O R F A

the cinema of S A L LY P O T T E R : a politics of love S O P H I E M AY E R

the cinema of J O H N S A Y L E S : a lone star MARK BOULD

the cinema of D AV I D C R O N E N B E R G : from baron of blood to cultural hero E R N E S T M AT H I J S

the cinema of J an S VA N K M A J E R : dark alchemy edited by P E T E R H A M E S

the cinema of N E I L J O R D A N : dark carnival CAROLE ZUCKER

the cinema of L A R S V O N T R I E R : authenticity and artifice CAROLINE BAINBRIDGE

the cinema of werner herzog : aesthetic ecstasy and truth BRAD PRAGER

the cinema of T E R R E N C E M A L I C K : poetic visions of america (second edition) edited by H A N N A H P A T T E R S O N

the cinema of ang lee : the other side of the screen WHITNEY CROTHERS DILLEY

the cinema of S T E V E N S P I elberg : empire of light NIGEL MORRIS

the cinema of T O D D H A Y N E S : all that heaven allows edited by J A M E S M O R R I S O N

the cinema of R O M A N P O L A N S K I : dark spaces of the world edited by J O H N O R R & E L Z B I E T A O S T R O W S K A

the cinema of J O H N C A R P E N T E R : the technique of terror edited by I A N C O N R I C H & D A V I D W O O D S

the cinema of M I K E L E I G H : a sense of the real G A R RY WAT S O N

the cinema of N A N N i M O R E T T I : dreams and diaries E WA M A Z I E R S K A & L A U R A R A S C A R O L I

the cinema of D AV I D LY N C H : american dreams, nightmare visions edited by E R I C A S H E E N & A N N E T T E D A V I S O N

the cinema of krzysztof kieslowski : variations on destiny and chance M A R E K H A LT O F

the cinema of G E O R G E A . R O M E R O : knight of the living dead TONY WILLIAMS

the cinema of K AT H R Y N B I G E L O W : hollywood transgressor edited by D E B O R A H J E R M Y N & S E A N R E D M O N D

the cinema of W im wenders the celluloid highway ALEXANDER GRAF

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the cinema of MICHAEL MANN vice and vindication

Jonathan Rayner WALLFLOWER PRESS  london & new york

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A Wallflower Press Book Published by Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York • Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © Jonathan Rayner 2013 All rights reserved. Wallflower Press® is a registered trademark of Columbia University Press A complete CIP record is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-231-16728-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-16729-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-85049-0 (e-book) Series design by Rob Bowden Design Cover image of Michael Mann courtesy of the Kobal Collection

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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c o n t e n t s

Acknowledgements vii



Introduction

1

Mann’s Style: The Jericho Mile, LA Takedown, Miami Vice

2

Pursuing the Professional: Thief, Heat, Collateral

3

Endangering the Domestic: Manhunter, The Last of the Mohicans, The Insider

4

Adventures in Genre: The Keep, Ali, Public Enemies

5

Conclusion

161

Filmography Bibliography Index 182

173

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1 23

62 93

127

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for Sarah, ‘Cut-Throat’ Jake, ‘Serious’ Sam and ‘Mad’ Max

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acknowledgements This book has grown out of lengthy discussion of Michael Mann’s films with students and colleagues at several universities. I am grateful for their assistance, advice and insight, and especially to Dr T. Atkin for his comments and suggestions, all of which have helped to form and inform this study.

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INTRODUCTION

Films are, above all, about something, and the question of remakes and reworkings in the careers of major directors primarily revolves around reconsiderations and restatements of major thematic, ethical and moral concerns […] The fact of authorship, then, the mere tracing of recurring motifs and formal repetitions, is less important than the question of authorship, the questions and issues with which an author struggles over the course of a career. (Desser 1992: 67)

Michael Mann’s work, as a director and producer within filmmaking in contemporary Hollywood and modern American television, presents audiences and followers of his career with certain ‘facts’ of authorship. His expanding oeuvre embodies a consistent thematic agenda and a recognisable stylistic palette, which together survey and depict heightened masculine endeavour, rarefied definitions of professionalism and personal validation, and the frequent union of these elements in the representation of crime. Mann’s principal connection in the popular imagination with crime and action films and police television series masks a more varied portfolio of producing, directing and screenwriting. Although the genres associated with depictions of criminal activity (television crime and police series, film noir, the gangster film, the heist movie, the prison film and police procedural drama) predominate in Mann’s output, significant departures from this perceived orthodoxy reveal the director’s themes persisting into varying generic territory: the period adventure (The Last of the Mohicans [1992]), the horror film (The Keep [1983]), the docudrama (The Insider [1998]) and the biopic (Ali [2001]). Such production facts provoke consequent authorship ‘questions.’ Mann’s relationship to genre, as with his varied creative activities in film and television and his individualistic negotiation of auteur status across several artistic roles and visual media, require detailed consideration for his place within contemporary cinema to v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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be fully appreciated. The context he has inhabited mixes the demand for mainstream popularity with the attraction of artist status, combining the consumption of commercial cinema with the discrimination of individual creation and taste, without apparent contradiction. The personal background which has underpinned Mann’s success in film and television is worth reviewing in order to reflect on the formal, educational and industrial influences which have engendered his unique standing in both media. Coming from a working-class background in Chicago, Mann attended the University of Wisconsin, reading English before becoming interested in the cinema and filmmaking as a craft. Rather than enrolling in a film school in the United States, Mann travelled to Europe to attend the London International Film School: I thought I knew what I wanted to make films about, but I didn’t know anything about how you make movies, how to compose a frame, how sound gets on film or any of that stuff. In London, there was a heavy emphasis on the craft and technology of film-making, which is exactly what I wanted. I also wanted the more artistic, as opposed to vocational approach to cinema. (In Smith 1992: 14)1 Mann’s absorption in practice and practicality at this stage while exploring the aesthetics and artistic motivation for filmmaking epitomise the parallel intensities which have defined his cinema. A commitment to realism, of a left-leaning persuasion, was apparent in the London film school environment (among his contemporaries were Franc Roddam, Gavin McFayden and David Hart who later worked on British television documentaries such as the World in Action series), and has been evident in Mann’s subsequent output (ibid.). At the same time, some of his other peers from this period, with whom his work has been compared and who have enjoyed feature film success in the UK and America, are ‘British commercial directors like Alan Parker, Ridley Scott and Adrian Lyne’ (Fuller 1992: 262). A combination of ideological, aesthetic, practical and commercial influences and approaches is discernible in this formative period. These aspects have carried through into the divided critical evaluation of Mann – being both praised and dismissed as overt stylist, as proficient genre filmmaker, as self-conscious auteur director – in later decades. Mann’s varied activities in this period maintain the competing strands of practical apprenticeship, commercial grounding and ideological commitment noted in the choice and community of his film school. Having learned more about the largescale organisation of film production while working with Twentieth Century Fox in London, and having established his own company to make commercials in Europe, he was well placed to capitalise on the representation of contemporary political controversies for the American media: We had made some documentaries, including something on Paris during May and June of 1968. We had a few connections and all the leftists wouldn’t talk to the American networks, so the networks were forced to deal with people like us. (In Smith 1992: 14) 2

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Having experienced university in America and film school in Europe during the 1960s, and won awards for his student film work, Mann’s first film on returning to the United States was 17 Days Down the Line (1971). This 37-minute documentary road film offers an insight into the contemporary ‘state of the nation’ through interviews with varied, disenfranchised citizens: a rancher, a Vietnam veteran, a former revolutionary (Feeney and Duncan 2006: 9).2 These activities led Mann towards television work, with the view to learning scriptwriting in order to create (and so be in a position to direct) his own screenplay. His writing apprenticeship during the 1970s encompassed some of the most popular and influential series of that period, including Police Story (1973–78) and Starsky and Hutch (1975–79). The realism attending on the treatment of everyday policing in these series also connected with Mann’s experiences and acquaintances in law enforcement, such as detectives Chuck Adamson and Dennis Farina and burglar John Santucci, from Chicago. Mann went on to initiate the television series Vega$ (1978–81) with Aaron Spelling Productions, and was also able to direct an episode of Police Woman (1974–78) before embarking on the production of his first television movie as director, The Jericho Mile (1979) (Smith 1992: 14). Since the success of this prison drama, Mann has worked repeatedly on the representation of crime from the perspectives of criminals and law-enforcers, in Thief (1981), Manhunter (1986), L.A. Takedown (1989), Heat (1996), Collateral (2004), Miami Vice (2006) and Public Enemies (2009). Yet he has also essayed other, equally masculine territories of genre filmmaking in the war and horror film (The Keep), the historical adventure (The Last of the Mohicans), the boxing film and bio-pic (Ali) and the fact-based investigative thriller (The Insider). A genre’s utility to the filmmaker’s expression, or the filmmaker’s contribution to the complexity and sophistication of a genre, were the prevailing factors in the popular output of the studios of the classical period, and remain essential considerations in the post-classical cinema. Mann and Genre The production of The Jericho Mile illustrates the methods and aspirations Mann was developing even at this early stage of his career. Its story of a murderer serving a life sentence for an ambiguous and perhaps justifiable killing extends the complex concentration on crime already established in his other work for television. At the same time, the insistence on location shooting within Folsom Prison, with the substantial risks involved, created a realist depiction of life in a state penitentiary which outstripped the confines of a generic prison drama (Feeney and Duncan 2006: 16–21). In addition, the shooting of the movie on film opened the possibility for a theatrical release in the UK in addition to its television broadcast, and this potential was rewarded and vindicated by the film receiving three Emmys in 1979 (for lead actor Peter Strauss, and for editing and writing) and an award from the Directors Guild of America for Mann’s direction in 1980 (Rybin 2007: 26). The films which immediately succeeded The Jericho Mile (the heist movie Thief, the war-horror film The Keep, and the investigative thriller Manhunter) evince an eclectic v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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and revisionist approach to genre materials alongside an emerging consistency in directorial choice and style (including a strong tendency towards abstraction in certain images and compositions, morally ambiguous conflicts and characterisations, and musical collaborations on electronic scores with the group Tangerine Dream). While it is tempting to see Mann’s film productions at this stage as a series of dissimilar, personal projects, conceived in some ways in reaction against the formulaic television writing and programming with which he had been involved in the early to mid-1970s, the generic roots of these films are important in revealing the recognisable popular bases for all of the director’s subsequent feature films. At the same time, the relationship with classical genres which has developed through Mann’s career is unusual, and in some ways unrepresentative, within the context of contemporary Hollywood. The persistence of certain genre formats and the evolution, substitution and extinction of others in the post-classical era has given rise to varied approaches to conventionalised and formulaic materials. In noting the wider cultural significance of the classical western, and in asserting its demise after the end of the studio period, Robert Kolker contends that a simple genre format which outlives its ideological purpose as much as audience taste is doomed to disappear: Film grows out of ideology and cultural desire and feeds back into them. Sometimes, when the ideology shifts radically or the desire is redirected by history, a genre can either vanish or go into a recessive state. The western film is an interesting example of a genre that bent and then snapped under shifting ideological pressures, perhaps because it was the genre most tightly connected to our country’s historical legends […] a genre exists only as long as history, culture, and the viewers who are the products of both can maintain belief in their conventions. (2006: 255, 262) However, the forces shaping the shifts in meaning are not all extratextual, since an inherent element in the progression and alteration of a genre’s idiom, aesthetics and ideology will derive from the input and aspirations of the filmmakers. Their responses to and modification of a genre’s staples, which may from one perspective simply form part of the ongoing development of its expressive range and relevance, can from another viewpoint represent a betrayal of the commercial and cultural compact in which the conventional reading of filmmakers and viewers must concur: Because a genre is made up of conventions negotiated between filmmakers and audience, tinkering with them, adding personal touches, stretching their generic bounds, only complicates the negotiating process that is essential for a genre to work. Too much tinkering and the audience may simply refuse to negotiate. (Kolker 2006: 257) The American cinema of the 1970s was characterised by a thorough revision of the conventions and touchstones of the classical genres. As much as its espousal of existential investigation and reflexive style from European art film, its often deliberate 4

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frustration of the trajectory and satisfaction of classical narrative and short-circuiting of generic expectation classifies the American cinema of this era as an art cinema by default. Ensuring the genres do not ‘work’ may in itself become a directorial goal: it may disenchant audiences unwilling to negotiate their subject positioning, but equally it may empower and enfranchise an audience not represented and peripheralised by mainstream cinema and its ideology. Evaluating this period in retrospect, Robert Self identifies the importance of genre manipulation to the point of infidelity to the conventions and their attendant ideology, but also recognises this deliberate aesthetic shift as instrumental in the elevation of post-classical auteurs, whose work defied and betrayed the formulae of past filmmaking and also diverged from the contemporary mainstream: The productive freedom of [a Robert] Altman project is widely known within the context of another discourse authorizing the structures and subject positions of these texts called Altman, the discourse of the industry – pressures of the box office, the Hollywood productions system, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – all the relations of production, distribution and consumption. Within the industry, Altman’s constant manipulation of genre amounts to part of the ongoing research and development efforts on behalf of one of Hollywood’s most successful commodities. And most of his films are readable against a more financially successful version during the same period of time in the same genre – thus McCabe and Mrs Miller against Little Big Man, Brewster McCloud against Bullitt, Thieves Like Us against Bonnie and Clyde, Quintet against Star Wars. (1985: 5–6) Robert Altman’s filmmaking career was conducted simultaneously on the periphery of the Hollywood mainstream and at the centre of an American cinema of auteurs, with the common ground of genre filmmaking made uncommon by the intervention and manipulation of individualistic directors. Although emerging like Altman from a background in American television, Mann’s filmmaking exhibits few similarities to Altman’s experimental, improvisational ensemble approach. This is particularly true in the area of adherence to or divergence from genre frameworks and expectations. Where Altman’s films appear mischievous and recalcitrant in their relationships to genre formats, even in comparison with contemporary revisionist texts such as Arthur Penn’s takes on the western and gangster film, Mann’s approach to genre seems reverent and predictable, even unchallenging. In the context of modern Hollywood’s complex relationship with all forms of textual connectivity (in terms of genres, sequels, franchises and synergies across other media and markets), Mann’s apparent persistence within clearly delineated, unironised and unvarying generic territory (such as crime dramas) may seem anachronistic. Kolker’s assertion of the pre-existing purity of a generic form like the classical western must be open to question, since for any genre no definitive and comprehensive text exists. Although original or ‘classic’ generic forms may have vanished, suggesting that their particular interplay of elements no longer sustains ‘belief ’, alternatives, extenv i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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sions and revisions endure and augment a fuller and more inclusive sense of generic heritage. Since the late 1970s (the point at which Mann began feature production), deliberate intertextual references, self-reflexive techniques and the self-conscious re-invocation and renovation of classical genre precedents have formed defining elements in popular filmmaking, and placed redefining demands on film viewership (Carroll 1982). Audience recognition of the precedent text or genre used as a source of allusion must be accompanied by audience complicity in the reading and redeployment of the original, in the form of citation, parody or pastiche. In some cases, such as the musical sequences in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More (Martin Scorsese, 1974) and One from the Heart (Francis Ford Coppola, 1982), the relationship to the generic precedent is knowing and ironic. Since the 1980s, the films of the Coen Brothers have updated, recapitulated and parodied the genres of the studio era: film noir in Blood Simple (1983), Fargo (1995) and The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), screwball comedy in Raising Arizona (1987) and The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), and the gangster film in Miller’s Crossing (1990). More opaque references and remakes define their Barton Fink (1991), which caricatures the lot of the studio-contracted writer, O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000), the title of which alludes to Sullivan’s Travels (Preston Sturges, 1941), and The Ladykillers (2004), which relocates British Ealing Comedy. The Coens’ approach is comic and knowing, yet also allows for suspense and tragedy, and counterbalances irony and metaphor with unexpected verisimilitude alongside the subjective realisms of art cinema. In this climate, Mann’s deliberate recapitulation or updating of genres needs to be appreciated as an alternative means to a similar Altman-like end. Awareness of filmic precedent and the self-consciousness of the visual medium itself inflects Mann’s films even or especially when no ironic or parodic allusion occurs (for example, in the voyeurism facilitated by film and video in Manhunter, the return to a classical-era screenplay as a source in The Last of the Mohicans, and in the self-reflexive symbiosis between gangsters and gangster movies seen in Public Enemies). In comparison with the clear, singular debt to the heist movie exhibited by Thief and Heat, in some more unusual projects (such as The Keep and Ali) the hybridisation of two or more genres occurs as an integral component in the directorial stance towards the visualisation of a filmic and documented past. Unlike the arch and knowing approach of the Coens, Mann’s films exhibit a desire to update and alter genre forms without irony. Although the specific genre bases may vary and overlap, the fundamental continuity in Mann’s work is the representation of masculinity, which itself becomes a generic and self-consciously performed element. Masculinity, Crime and Violence Time is an enemy not only because it is cousin to finitude but because it threatens one of the supports of the delusion of specialness: the belief that one is eternally advancing. The workaholic must deafen himself or herself to time’s message: that the past grows fatter at the expense of the shrinking future. The workaholic life mode is compulsive and dysfunctional: the workaholic works or applies himself not because he wishes to but because he has to. The workaholic 6

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may push himself without mercy and without regard for human limits. Leisure time is a time of anxiety and is often frantically filled with some activity that conveys an illusion of accomplishment. Living, thus, becomes equated with ‘becoming’ or ‘doing’; time not spent in ‘becoming’ is not living but waiting for life to commence. (Yalom 1980: 123) The period of Mann’s career spent in filmmaking and television has also been the epoch of the concerted study and questioning of, and apparent ‘crisis’ in, masculinity in modern Western society. Analyses of media representations have traced and catalogued the varied and often contradictory messages present within portrayals of masculinity, in order to categorise and interpret the definitions of male characteristics propounded by influential media texts, and apparently accepted and adopted by their audiences. Within any such consideration of popular cultural phenomena, Mann’s output as producer and director must figure highly, whether the emphasis lays on a predictable male emotional inarticulateness (as in Heat), the commodification and objectification of male fashions and consumerism (in the series Miami Vice), the predominance of the male body in the rareification of athletic endeavour (as both outward, socially-conscious and ultimately altruistic action in Ali, or inward, solipsistic withdrawal in The Jericho Mile), or the preference for professional activity over domestic commitment, even where the desire for both is acknowledged. While clearly Mann’s films provide myriad, cumulative portrayals of masculinity, which are taken to influence their viewers and further debates on the crafting of masculinity as a set of performed, deliberated and learned behaviours, they also acknowledge and stress that, in the characterisations of Mann’s protagonists and antagonists, masculinity is a consciously performative act, in which the assumed role eventually becomes indistinguishable from both private and socialised identities: Male aggression, competitiveness and emotional inarticulateness are held to reflect their position in the economic system. Capitalism places men in a network of social relations that encourages sets of behaviour recognized as masculine. Masculinity is thus viewed as a set of practices into which individual men are inserted with reference to upbringing, family, area, work and subcultural influences. Socio-economic positioning profoundly impacts upon the masculine sense of self, so much so that men’s identities are constructed through social structures which exist over and above any actions of the individual. (Beynon 2002: 56) Surveillance operations, the execution of robberies and undercover work proliferate in Mann’s films as examples of deliberately performative professional roles requiring skill, commitment and methodological absorption. In The Insider, Mike Wallace’s (Christopher Plummer) verbal confrontation with a Hezbollah bodyguard before his interview with Sheik Fadlallah (Cliff Curtis) is recognised by documentary producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) as no more than a purposeful ‘warm up’ before posing his first combative question. v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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Mann’s male protagonists are shown to conceive of, aspire towards and fail to achieve their goals in terms of increasingly demanding definitions of masculinity. They might appear far from ordinary in the extremity of their socio-economic, professional and personal identities (in the milieux of crime, law enforcement, war, business and sport, all of which can be reduced to forms of capitalist conflict), yet their portrayals of determined yet disappointed self-realisation parallel and speak to everyday masculinities via the privileging media channels of film and television. These and other ‘versions of culturally praised hegemonic masculinities become part of general consciousness’ through the currency and interaction of the media and society (Beynon 2002: 17). Clearly, Mann’s films constitute only one manifestation of these socio-textual trends, but their ‘version’ is significant in its fatalism and solemnity, and its insistence on the underlying potential for or full disclosure of tragedy in the single-minded actions of males: Masculinity is presented as damaging, driving men down the destructive path of addiction to achievement, power, prestige and profit-seeking. The outcome is that many men are racked by anxiety about the level of their achievement, inept at disclosure and seemingly unable to express their feelings. Indeed, traditional masculinity is seen to be based on a very fragile foundation. (Beynon 2002: 15) The social, economic, cultural and philosophical forces working to define Mann’s male characters, from within and without, and the fatalism attending on their defiant efforts towards self-realisation, become summarised in the aphorism repeated by the director and recurrent in the dialogue of his films: ‘Time is luck.’ Faced with a need to define and defend masculinity from the assaults of uncertainty, mortality and disempowerment (whether these arise from a sense of inadequacy in the work place, in the domestic environment or under the pressure of an internalised requirement for success), Mann’s characters turn to crime and resort to violence. They turn to crime either to perpetrate or prevent it, and they resort to violence as the highest and fullest expression of their power and as a surrogate for any other type of individual and communicative expression. In returning repeatedly to the execution, prevention and consequences of criminal behaviour, Mann explores the social, moral and existential significance of this path to meaning in life, and the responsibility and representativeness of the media’s portrayal of violent crime: Broadly speaking the ways in which crime and law are articulated operate along three modalities. The modality of the pre-modern attends to the primordial: drives, urges and states of nature form the basis of a morality play in various reworkings of sin and retribution; the modality of reflexive modernity employs interpretive strategies to peel back the surfaces of crime and law to ‘reveal’ their dynamics and tell origin stories; the content-less postmodern modality explores superficiality and intertextuality to display crime and law as a bricolage of narcissistic, vacuous spectacle and aesthetic. The media does not so much re-present crime and law as define them through these modalities: the 8

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epochal products of nature-culture, which exist in, and not outside of, the mediations of everyday life. (Brown 2003: 191) Since the majority of Mann’s output falls into several overlapping sub-categories of crime drama, some relevant films can be extracted to illustrate these ‘modalities’ of media representation. Thief illustrates the modality of reflexive modernity, in the depiction of its protagonist’s painful revelation of his origins and desires to account for the socio-economic compensation he seeks through crime. The content-less postmodern modality is highly visible in the multiplied layers of media- and historicalawareness which record and rewrite the classical gangster’s rise and fall narrative in Public Enemies. Manhunter, in its depiction of the most fundamental desires, the requirement for punishment for transgression, and the narcissism and spectacle of both law breaking and law enforcement, provides a destabilising representation of all three modalities. All of Mann’s crime-oriented output stresses the existence and pursuit of crime as a parallel, reflection or integral component of the dominant, consensual and lawful societal organisation. Mann’s explorations of crime on film and television show the influence of classical cinematic narrative and its ideology in their stories of crime and punishment. There is a sympathy on show for the pursuit of crime, not simply in a recognition of unjust social conditions producing the criminal (a feature of the studio-era gangster film which is discernible in Thief and Heat), but in the viability and vindication of crime as a professionally coded and rewarded alternative to ‘regular-type’ life. In Heat, the clearest example of the denial of moral distinctions between disciplined work on either side of the law, the criminals appear as more restrained, more dedicated to their families as well as more affluent than the police officers chasing them. However, it is in the characters’ exhibition of personal ethics through action rather than verbalisation, and their definition of their identity and exertion of control through acts of violence, that the plotting of the crime film meets the concerns of the art cinema. The heist and action sequences in Heat are decisive in terms of a conventional resolution of crime film narrative (in eventually ensuring the downfall of the criminal), but they also act as the professional, philosophical and emotional expression lacking or incomplete in other examples of human interaction. Action becomes elucidation for expression otherwise absent or opaque in dialogue. In Mann’s representations of crime, the notions of genre action and the art cinema’s subjective concerns meet in the articulation of existential dilemmas via violent, deceptively decisive masculine action. In this Mann’s films bear comparison with other depictions of criminal behaviour and kinship between law-breakers and law-enforcers influencing the contemporary American cinema. John Woo’s films portray close ties between male criminals and police officers, which as in Mann’s films appear to offer more mutual and reciprocal emotional support than the characters’ heterosexual relationships. The male work environment becomes the definitive but threatening context for integrity and transparency of emotion, where ‘frenzied and violent action’ is juxtaposed with ‘heartrending tales of betrayal, loyalty, and chivalry among men’ (Sandell 1996: 24). The action of Woo’s films often coalesces around male-to-male intimacy in exchanges of looks as well as v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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bullets, which suggests a spectacle of masculinity comparable to that of femininity in mainstream cinema, but which propels and completes narrative rather than halting it in erotic contemplation (Sandell 1996: 26–27).3 Like Mann’s male characters, Woo’s heroes express a heightened professional and emotional life through violent action, without a simplistic suggestion of homo-eroticism: Woo’s films […] suggest a cultural fantasy about gender and sexuality in which intimacy is valorized and celebrated as an important and necessary aspect to all relationships – both sexual and platonic. His films contain a vision of masculinity that allows men to be simultaneously tough action heroes as well as what is often called ‘emotionally present.’ This combination of emotional and physical presence provides an interesting challenge to stereotypical notions of what it means to be an action hero. (Sandell 1996: 24) What transpires in both filmmakers’ work is a reorientation of morality and masculinity, in which the motivation and execution of screen violence also plays a integral part. The range of generic material which Mann traverses foregrounds the pervasive presence of violence as a male potential, choice and skill. In almost all cases, the capacity for violence is a professional attribute for Mann’s protagonists (the many policemen and armed robbers, Nathaniel the scout in The Last of the Mohicans, the soldiers of The Keep), with the threat of violence also encroaching upon domestic space (as in Manhunter and The Insider). Despite its ubiquity, the violence of Mann’s films is at once qualified by the focus on realism (seen for example in the mechanics of scalping in The Last of the Mohicans, and heard in the reproduction of gunfire in Heat and Public Enemies) and by purposeful ellipses (the viewing of the crime scene aftermath rather than the family murders in Manhunter, and the ‘reticence’ which signals the ‘greater importance’ of the prostitute’s murder in Heat by removing the killing from the screen)(James 2002: 47). The examples of violence encountered in the films of Mann’s peers (for example in the portraits of the ethnically specific criminal community in Martin Scorsese’s films, and the ostentatious villainy on show in Quentin Tarantino’s) bring Mann’s choices of realism and reticence into sharper relief. Devin McKinney labels screen violence either ‘strong’ or ‘weak’ not in terms of its severity or the graphicness of its representation, but on the basis of its moral force. Weak violence exists as little more than style and spectacle, while strong violence jars an audience into a reconsideration of its human consequences. Despite its inclusion of myriad brutal acts, the violence in Reservoir Dogs (1992) is dismissed as ‘weak’ because of its blunted moral purpose: The film proclaims itself to be a jaunty, hyperbolic comedy of horrors that aspires to no particular realism or social import. It occurs in a comic-existential dead zone, and is as nonreferential [sic] to a reality outside itself as a (theoretically) mimetic work can be […] this is a formalist filmmaker’s logic, and it has only one self-apparent subject: the set piece. (McKinney 1999: 21) 10

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Scorsese’s characters commit and suffer acts of violence whose significance is abidingly individualised, affecting only the victims. In Tarantino’s films, often even the victims’ suffering is without importance, as violence itself is a character tic of the perpetrator, more an ‘act’ than an event of causal significance. By contrast, in Mann’s work violent acts are staged with verisimilitude. They form a substantial component in the films’ spectacle and conformity to the expectations of action cinema, and yet also have pervasive consequences we are able to preview and deplore. In Mann’s films it is this diffusion of the consequences of violence which causes us to recognise its infliction on more than just the victim and perpetrator. Therefore the worst (most significant) violence is delayed and anticipated in moral as well as diegetic terms: Frank’s selfdestructive acts at the climax of Thief; the bank raid ambush and its aftermath in Heat which engulfs numerous families; and the massacre in The Last of the Mohicans which sets in train the destruction of families and creation of a new society. The ‘strong’ violence of Mann’s films is ‘committed’, because in detailing its personal, communal and societal significance ‘it demands commitments of those still living’ (McKinney 1999: 17). Where reticence in the violent representation is not employed is in the transgression of family spaces, and the horror and offence this inspires. ‘Home invasions’, a term taken from the title of the source novel for Thief and included in that film as an activity beyond the pale for Frank the professional safe-cracker, occur literally as the worst acts of violence in the most inappropriate spaces (in Thief, Manhunter, The Last of the Mohicans, Heat, Collateral and Miami Vice), and metaphorically in the contamination of domestic privacy (in Thief and The Insider).4 The family exists in Mann’s output not simply as a predictable target or victim which it becomes the hero’s duty to save, but rather as a private ideal and social principle which the protagonists value, yet which is threatened more by their own obsessive actions. In discussing the overemphasis on imperilled domesticity in Mann’s work, Richard Combs notes that though it ‘may not be a matter of Disney sentimentality or conservative ideology’ the value of the family ‘is deeply involved in how the films work as narrative’ (Combs 1996: 15). As much as the fundamental aspects of character (philosophy, ambition, desire, solitude) are defined and realised in Mann’s films by visible, decisive and frequently violent acts, the action itself revolves around and is resolved by the fate of families and relationships compromised by these acts, and, by implication, by the character traits which engendered them. Mann’s films are genuinely ‘action’ films in the sense that they are consumed with the motivation, planning, execution, interpretation and consequences of human action, and as a result in most cases accord closely with the structure and effect of tragedy. The problem of an American Art Cinema By the time Chinatown was made, nearly all Hollywood studios were run by younger executives who employed younger writers and directors, and nearly all were making a number of films with appeal to college-educated audiences. This was the period in which college-educated ‘movie brats’ like Francis Ford v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Brian De Palma joined an earlier influx of directors like Robert Altman, Sam Peckinpah, and Arthur Penn and made their first films. This was also when European directors such as Michelangelo Antonioni and Roman Polanski were making films for Hollywood. (Neale 2005: 663–4) Mann’s career of roughly forty years has seen him become embedded in the context of modern American cinema. He has worked with most of the major companies within modern Hollywood: United Artists for Thief; DeLaurentiis for Manhunter; Fox for The Last of the Mohicans; Warner Bros. for Heat; Touchstone Pictures for The Insider; Columbia for Ali; Paramount and Dreamworks for Collateral; and Universal for Miami Vice and Public Enemies. At the same time, as well as being involved in the making of five of the director’s own features, Mann’s production company Forward Pass has produced a diversity of material, including the features The Aviator (Martin Scorsese, 2004), The Kingdom (Peter Berg, 2007) and Hancock (Peter Berg, 2008), and the television series Robbery Homicide Division (2002–03). Yet the ambiguities of Mann’s positioning within both film and television, and of his inhabiting producer as well as writer and director roles, are encapsulated in the description of him as ‘one of the pre-eminent TV auteurs of the last fifteen years – an impresario responsible for an intensely urban, male, “designer” (or otherwise gritty) style’ (Fuller 1992: 262). Here, the labels used to describe Mann (the expansion of auteur standing to include television, followed by the comparative diminution of creative control to the managerial and entrepreneurial status of an ‘impresario‘) indicate the revaluing of television production (or at least this television producer) via the critical framework of film criticism, while continuing to stress the business orientation of television in comparison with the artistry of the cinema. This imbalance in the consideration of Mann’s work has persisted through his career, with his creative input to television generally eliciting faint praise for its influential nature and commercial acumen in comparison with the critical reception of his perfectionism as a film director. Although similar in age to the ‘movie brats’, Mann’s experience of and integration within post-war American film and television have been different enough for this common context to require reconsideration. The American films adopting and exhibiting European art cinema techniques in the 1960s did so under an impetus for emulation and experimentation, but their integration within the production activities of major studios reflected, inevitably, a commercial motivation, to capitalise on an emerging audience and market, which would evolve from a niche to the naturally identified and serviced demographic. Films for a youth audience made by youthful filmmakers represented, at that point in Hollywood history, an alternative and transitional product to replace the outmoded conventional films of the late-classical era. The differences in background, approach and ambition of the first and second generations of post-war American directors from their studio-era forebears have been responsible for the increased currency of auteurism, and lie behind the growth in reference to and revision of classical genres in the modern cinema. The academic background of Mann and his peers has created a contemporary filmmaking community versed in film 12

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history, which addresses its audiences via a presumed common ground of intertextual and auteurist allusion: Whereas the generation of directors who descended from classical Hollywood came largely from Broadway and the theater, and the recruits of the fifties and sixties were trained in television, many new directors of the seventies had studied film as film in university graduate programs and professional schools. They had taken film history, aesthetics, and production as formal academic subjects, and they had learned the technical aspects of production, as well as budgeting and marketing, more thoroughly than any generation before them. (Cook 1998: 13) Films of the 1970s – for example, the works of Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, Arthur Penn and the movie brats or ‘Young Lions’ (Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Francis Coppola, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas) – assume varying positions towards the inheritance of classical Hollywood genres, the allure of new auteur status endowed by the academic consideration of film, and the influences of European art cinema. Entering the industry in this decade via a similar film school route but slightly later than the ‘Lions’ and with his additional experience of television, Mann has maintained a profile in both media industries which has mixed television production with cinematic production values, and commercial filmmaking with art cinema tendencies. The American filmmaking community’s absorption and mimicry of European art cinema’s styles and themes from the 1960s onwards, similar to its adoption of European film personnel and aesthetics during the 1940s, is reflected in Mann’s plot-driven genre formats used to contain subjective art cinema dilemmas. Detailed definitions of the art film as a consistent and recognisable type of film text reveal the extent to which modern American films such as Mann’s have combined disparate and formally incompatible elements to erode distinctions between the genre and art film categories. William Siska acknowledges the consistency of art films in their forms, themes and consequently their marketability and consumption by labelling them as a ‘genre’: The art film as a genre is defined as those narrative films in which abstract issues are dealt with overtly in dialogue and by direction of the viewer to symbolic or metaphorical images. At the center of each film is a ‘raised’ problem rather than the ‘lived’ problems which form the core of traditional narratives. A raised problem is an abstract question that invites discussion and exploration. A lived problem, on the other hand, demands a singular solution. (1998: 354) In Mann’s films there is no ready distinction to be drawn between ‘lived’ and ‘raised’ problems, as his protagonists are seen to be beset by both. There are plot obstacles in the form of physical dangers (the rescues across country in The Last of the Mohicans, the preparation of heists in Thief and Heat), but these actions are also expressions of professional ethics and identity. The answers to the lived problems are, therefore, v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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also responses to the raised questions of meaning in life which consume the more sedentary protagonists of European art film. American remakes of European films which combine elements of action and moral contemplation also help to illustrate this point. The fates of the tainted detective characters in Insomnia (Erik Skjoldbjaerg 1997/Christopher Nolan, 2002) diverge significantly, in that the American cop is able to die in the act of killing the blackmailing murderer, and so gain vindication and escape punishment. In the Norwegian original, the murderer dies accidentally, and the cop is left alive to remember his failings. The Hollywood remake of The Vanishing (George Sluizer, 1998) goes even further to resolve the moral and philosophical uncertainties of the Dutch original (1993) in retributive and resolving action. By contrast, the integration of staple genre material and European approaches, styles and concerns in Mann’s cinema provides a more accomplished exploration of existential issues, and also offers open-ended or compromised resolutions to otherwise predictable Hollywood narratives: ‘mere animal existence is posed against the necessity of transcendent meaning. But the protagonists’ recognition leads to inner pain rather than action, because no transcendent meaning is evident’ (Siska 1998: 356). Frank dies socially and emotionally at the end of Thief, even though the film’s revision of the gangster film tropes leaves him physically alive. As day dawns in Collateral, Max and Annie are left as bewildered survivors, not a conclusive heterosexual couple, on the Metrorail station platform. Vincent Hanna pursues Neil McCauley to a fatal conclusion in the violence and intimacy of Heat, after having left his wife and run gleefully down the hospital stairs in a solipsistic silence. An area of production identified by Siska in which 1970s’ filmmakers proved adept at uniting European art film style and theme with American popular narrative is the ‘modernist thriller, in which the adventures of the protagonist-investigator in the nightworld of the thriller becomes [sic] a metaphor for the modernist journey to self-discovery’ (1998: 365). Mann’s first cinematic feature Thief is interpretable in this vein, as Frank’s burgeoning self-knowledge (like that of the protagonists in Night Moves [Arthur Penn, 1975] and Bad Timing [Nicolas Roeg, 1980]) brings none of the satisfaction and escape he craves, but this description is equally applicable to Mann’s Manhunter and to The Insider, which consciously evokes comparison with the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s. The combination of European art cinema leanings and individualistic Hollywood genre filmmaking exhibited by Mann’s output can also be related to the films and filmmakers composing his personal top ten. In alphabetical order, the director’s favourites are: Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925), Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), Dr Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1963), Faust (F.W. Murnau, 1926), Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961), My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946), The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928), Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980) and The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969) (Feeney and Duncan 2006: 11). This revealing list encompasses morally and spiritually questing silent classics (Faust, The Passion of Joan of Arc), prototypical modernist political cinema (Battleship Potemkin) and its descendants (Dr Strangelove), both definitive and demythologising Hollywood genre pictures (My Darling Clementine, The Wild Bunch), archetypal 14

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European art cinema (Last Year at Marienbad ), the unconventional work of classical American auteurs (Citizen Kane) and the updated genre pictures and personal expressions of their post-classical successors (Apocalypse Now, Raging Bull). The inclusion of no film since 1980 is perhaps more reflective of Mann’s film school background (since this is in many ways a canonical list) than any prejudice against contemporary cinema. The summary of preferences, concepts and themes suggested by this top ten can be mapped convincingly onto Mann’s own output, with Raging Bull’s revision of the boxing film genre and the biopic anticipating Ali; the mix of masculine purpose and melancholia translating from Ford’s and Peckinpah’s westerns to Heat, Thief, Miami Vice, Public Enemies and The Last of the Mohicans; the political struggles of Battleship Potemkin and martyrdom of faith carried from Faust and Joan of Arc to The Jericho Mile and Thief; Apocalypse Now’s self-aware and metaphorical treatment of war reflected in the experiment of The Keep; and Citizen Kane’s intimate portrait of the iniquity and malice of American institutions embodied in The Insider. These comparisons reveal an admiration for other directors seeking their own individualistic spaces and expressions within American cinema (Welles, Kubrick, Peckinpah, Scorsese), whose works also anticipate Mann’s desire for complete creative authority. Stanley Kubrick, the most influential figure for the movie brats whose films were the products of perfectionist control, represents a clear inspiration to Mann: [Dr Strangelove] said to my whole generation of filmmakers that you could make an individual statement of high integrity and have that film be successfully seen by a mass audience all at the same time […] In other words, you didn’t have to be making Seven Brides for Seven Brothers if you wanted to be a part of the commercial film industry, or be reduced to niche filmmaking if you wanted to be serious about cinema. (In Foundas 2006) The similarity to Kubrick in Mann’s ambitions and working methods is borne out in the reports and anecdotal evidence of gruelling schedules, exacting standards and creative differences affecting the production of several Mann films (Sears 1992; Guttridge 1996). However, despite this reputation and even the reservation (like Kubrick) of the right to final cut on his films, Mann’s working methods are based on conscientious interaction and cooperation for his complex shoots (Geffner 1999: 44–6). His meticulous preparatory work with actors and close collaboration with long-term creative partners suggest an auteur film and art cinema product facilitated by numerous artists, with a studio-style producer-unit resource of consistent personnel. Comparisons and Collaborators Since a film far more than a novel is a collective commercial undertaking, deeply dependent on its audience, it stands to reason that even under the control of the most tyrannical and egotistical director the end product will have absorbed as many interpretations as there are contributors, and the production v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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will have been fashioned with audience comprehension and taste in mind. The audience, for its part, will receive the film according to the readerly codes of film consumption and the film’s relation to the contemporary social context. (Saxton 1986: 22) The stylistic ‘facts’ of authorship attributed to auteur figures abidingly fall foul of the scrutiny of filmmaking as a collective commercial enterprise, and yet the recognition of close collaborative relationships behind the works and careers of many auteur directors reaffirm the drive to connect consistent choices and effects to individuals and artistic partnerships (for example, producers and directors, directors and editors, directors and cinematographers). The cooperative activity of the makers transfers readily to the communal work of the audience, reading films via a shared framework of textual and intertextual signals and prompts (generic cues, auteur signatures, the influence of literary adaptations, the baggage of casting and stars). The recognition and reading of the auteur, however the figure or figures concerned are defined, which has become central to the circulation and success of contemporary cinema, now bridges or removes distinctions between art film and commercial filmmaking, since the film artist is central to all texts. Although the degree of their commerciality may vary, the majority of films benefit from the currency of the auteur, which has become an integral part of both its advertising and its meaning. The limitation of some ‘fact’-based definitions of authorship is apparent in the perception and evaluation of a contemporary auteur figure comparable to Mann in American cinema: Martin Scorsese. Scorsese’s output has been pigeonholed in a similar fashion (as a body of work returning repeatedly to the exploration of Italian-American immigrant experience across generations and professions, within the cultural milieu of New York). Such a reductive categorisation overlooks the maintenance of what can be discerned as Scorsese’s overarching concern in theme and characterisation (the fate and choice of the beleaguered individual, trapped between wider social, familial or religious expectations and personal beliefs, convictions and drives), across a varied range of distinguishable generic territories: the musical (New York, New York [1978]), the biopic (Raging Bull, Kundun [1997], The Aviator), the literary adaptation (The Age of Innocence [1993]), even the Biblical epic (The Last Temptation of Christ [1988]) and the feminist, latter-day women’s picture (Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore). Scorsese’s signature subjective techniques (the integration of popular music seemingly recollected by protagonists as a personal, evocative soundtrack, and the conspicuous use of freeze-frame, voice-over and slow-motion to render the individual’s immediate or retrospective standpoint) also cut across the director’s generic range, to belie their apparent centrality to biographical crime sagas such as Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995). Scorsese’s authorship ‘question’ is how the individual copes in extremis, and his techniques have developed to represent and translate the subjective experience of social, psychological, spiritual and metaphysical entrapment. What might be characterised simplistically as Scorsese’s technique and territory (for example the chronological treatment of a career in organised crime, demarked by subjective narration and authenticated by contemporary cultural reference, such as 16

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the popular music ‘hit-parade’ soundtrack), can also be seen to be defined and (dis) regarded as the obvious approach to such material when they are espoused to lesser effect by other films and filmmakers (for example, Ridley Scott’s American Gangster [2008]). These presumed parameters of Scorsese’s methods and subject matter must be challenged and extended by the consideration of his thematic unity, which connects the Dalai Lama with Travis Bickle, and Jesus Christ with Jake La Motta. In a further complication, Scorsese’s thematic and stylistic unity must also be appreciated within the commercial context in which, by the director’s own admission, he alternates between personal and journeyman productions, making a film for the studios in order to facilitate the production of a cherished project (The Color of Money [1987] versus The Last Temptation of Christ; Cape Fear [1992] versus Kundun) (Cook 1998: 27). Mann’s work, if regarded like Scorsese’s as a simple unity of male-centred and maleoriented crime dramas, yields to a similarly restricted ‘fact’-based definition of authorship. However, where Scorsese’s occasional lack of commercial success has been tempered and in some ways validated by acceptance of his auteurist, art cinema worth (as in Taxi Driver’s recognition with the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1976), Mann’s popular appeal, his recourse to genre and above all his prominent and influential visual style have been censured as repetitious and ostentatious features as often as they have been acknowledged and elevated as consistent, signature traits. We should observe that the discernible consistencies of style and treatment within Mann’s canon are prone to devaluation. In the edition of the BFI Modern Classics series on Heat, the very publication of which underlines the film’s contemporary recognition and success, Nick James confesses to the enjoyment of Mann’s films as a guilty pleasure, based on the uneasy balance between their low-brow, genre-based popularity and their aspirational, art cinema pomposity: ‘it’s part of the thrill of the film to experience the partial profundities and the nearnonsense running together’ (2002: 51). For James, this dichotomy produces a response which oscillates between condescension and admiration, often prompted simultaneously by the same scenes, aspects or techniques. The film’s genre trappings and its madefor-television prototype L.A. Takedown ‘make it hard to revere Heat as more than an exaggerated heist movie’, yet at the same time ‘the bombastic dialogue seemed only appropriate to the single-minded élan of the project’ (2002: 8). The assumption of Mann’s control of the creative process as much as the thematic continuity of the filmmaker’s work makes these aspects, whether interpreted positively or negatively, attributable to the marketed star director alone. A similar divergence can be found in an article on Collateral and accompanying review in the same issue of Sight and Sound, which encapsulate the divisions in critical opinion in the evaluation of Mann’s work, as contemporary action cinema rather than American art film. Mark Olsen describes one accentuated sequence as ‘a furious, beautifully choreographed shoot-out in a crowded nightclub – perhaps the finest action set-piece Mann has staged since the street battle in Heat’ (2004: 15). Describing the same sequence, Richard T. Kelly considers that ‘Mann’s normally sure hand at ambitious set pieces goes somewhat awry: a gun-fight in a Korean club is terribly confusing in its delineation of space’ (2004: 50). The failure of technique suggested here calls into question the nature and quality of action cinema itself at v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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the turn of the millennium. Action films made in Hollywood have changed markedly over the past two to three decades, under the influence of popular styles from other film cultures, and the subsequent employment of leading exponents of these styles in American filmmaking. The stimuli of the martial arts film has resulted in the recruitment of directors, cinematographers and fight choreographers (such as John Woo, Peter Pau and Huan-Chiu Ku) from Asian cinema. Other filmmakers associated with strikingly different approaches and styles for action films have also been absorbed into American mainstream filmmaking (Luc Besson from the highly stylised French cinéma du look of the 1980s; Matthieu Kassovitz from the harsh French realist cinema of the next decade; Lee Tamahori from contemporary Australasian cinema), bringing with them styles and ideologies of action filmmaking which vary from the brutal to the balletic. While on one level the transformation of filmmaking technique (in terms of both production and post-production), traceable in contemporary filmmaking generally, is often lamented as a triumph of arresting style and spectacular effect over the crafts of continuity and narrative clarity, on another the concentration on sensory stimulation and visceral experience in modern cinema merely heightens the affective potential of film while remaining largely faithful to genre frameworks, and within the norms of visual narrative established in the classical era (Bordwell 2002). However, Mann’s films fit uneasily, or not solely, within the action category because of the conspicuous facets (of visual consistency and sophistication, editing and cinematography, scoring and recurrent thematic concerns) which lift them into a category of art films aimed at adults. The recognition of this signature, though endowed with Mann’s auteur status, also requires the identification of the director’s key creative partners. The cadre of consistent collaborators with whom Mann has worked spans casting and production credits, performers and technical personnel, international stars and crucial but relatively anonymous co-workers. In all cases, the persistent association is suggestive of a union of vision, method and technique which is instrumental in the director’s realisation. Within the casting of Mann’s projects, the repeated appearances of actors include both stars (Al Pacino in the back-to-back productions of ­Heat and The Insider, Jada Pinkett-Smith in Ali and Collateral, Jamie Foxx in Ali, Collateral, Miami Vice and the Mann-produced thriller The Kingdom), and other less famous regulars. Wes Studi is cast in both The Last of the Mohicans and Heat. Jon Voight appears in both Heat and Ali. Diane Venora stars alongside Pacino in ­Heat and The Insider. Barry Shabaka Henley appears in Ali, Collateral and Miami Vice. Mykelti Williamson, who appeared in the pilot episode of the Miami Vice television series, returns in Heat and Ali. Tom Noonan cameos in Heat after his major role in Manhunter, and Stephen Lang (who starred in Mann’s television series Crime Story) is cast in small but disproportionately significant roles in Manhunter and Public Enemies. Bridging the categories of advisors and performers in Mann’s films, and epitomising his preference for professional consultants to support the research behind his actors’ preparations for their roles, are Dennis Farina and Chuck Adamson, Chicago detectives who appear in Thief, Manhunter and Heat and the Miami Vice series, and John Santucci, a professional burglar who was cast as a cop in Thief and also appeared in Miami Vice. 18

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In the production and post-production processes, there are a number of significant consistencies among technical personnel. Dante Spinotti has worked as Mann’s cinematographer on four films (The Last of the Mohicans, Heat, The Insider and Public Enemies) since their first collaboration on Manhunter. His highly distinctive work on Manhunter makes a revealing comparison with his contribution as cinematographer to the second adaptation of Thomas Harris’s novel Red Dragon (Brett Ratner, 2002). Dov Hoenig has worked as editor on Thief, The Keep, Manhunter, The Last of the Mohicans, L.A. Takedown and Heat.5 More recently Paul Rubell has also edited several Mann films, including Public Enemies, Miami Vice, Collateral and The Insider. One of the longest and most varied creative relationships exists with Gusmano Cesaretti. ­Cesaretti first worked with Mann as research photographer for the Folsom locations and inmates on The Jericho Mile (Feeney and Duncan 2006: 9). Subsequently he has been involved in different and overlapping capacities (as second unit director, visual consultant, still photographer, executive and associate producer, and minor actor) on nearly every Mann feature production and on four television series. This close-knit group of collaborators, to which Mann is clearly able and willing to delegate, are recognisable for their influences and contributions within the formal and diegetic environment of Mann’s films. At the same time, Mann’s stated need for ‘creative intimacy’ and control leads to unusual circumstances such as acting as his own camera operator for 50–60% of the time on Heat and 40% on The Insider (Geffner 1999: 45). In a very concrete sense, with such a technically motivated and involved filmmaker, personal technique as much as style is the individually attributable signature. The questions Mann’s narratives pose for his protagonists – choices dependent on or calling for commitment, integrity, self-respect – represent alternatives or preferences in individual action, but the selection and spectacle of action masks the truth that these are actually insoluble personal dilemmas, rather than situations which can be combatted and contained by privileged intervention. In honing a distinctive style but rejecting the soubriquet of a stylist, and in exploring the landscape of genre cinema while insisting on a ‘realist’ perspective, Mann has crafted a body of work which runs parallel to and yet separate from his contemporaries, and which foregrounds the questions of his own authorship. The facts of Mann’s authorship provide a test-case for the evolving production context of American cinema since the fundamental changes which overtook Hollywood in the 1960s, and continue to resonate in the formal development of popular cinema. The aesthetic and industrial landscape Mann inhabits is marked and articulated by interrelated theoretical concepts, commercial drives and historical discourses: the persistence of a generically-bounded but personalised directorship after the classical model of the studio journeyman; the emergence of the art cinema-inspired auteur director within the immediate post-classical period; the recognition of a highly conventionalised, abidingly populist contemporary Hollywood, and the blurring or amalgamation of all of these filmmaking categorisations caused by the foregrounded auteurism of an American independent cinema, which is supported by and indistinguishable in business terms from the dominant Hollywood mainstream. Defining the ‘question’ of Mann’s authorship is central to an appreciation of the convoluted critical and practical terrain of contemporary American cinema. v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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The ‘Question’ of Mann’s Authorship As a popular audience we demand that the polysemy of the text be suppressed and that the film pretend to monological signification. Furthermore, the institutionalized cinema industry insistently continues to produce films according to this formula […] The author, it would seem, is unavoidable. (Saxton 1986: 19–20) This book essays a thematic and stylistic reading of Mann’s feature productions to date. It also embraces an analysis and discussion of his two television movies (The Jericho Mile and L.A. Takedown) in order to draw comparisons in both theme and visual technique between these productions and the more well-known feature films. The television movies are pertinent to the analysis not simply because of their prototypical status in thematic terms (in addressing aspects of prison experience and law enforcement which inform several other higher profile productions), but because they evince important similarities to and distinctions from the feature films in terms of visual style and narrative technique. The consideration of Mann’s extensive work in television is limited in this book by constraints of space, but will be explored in specific instances in the discussion of the director’s complex auteur status, which encompasses both media and numerous artistic and executive roles. Having worked as director, writer and producer in the cinema and in television endows Mann with an unusual if not unique prominence in the production of modern popular entertainment. His status and success within both media also precipitates a reappraisal of the notions and practices of media authorship and consequently auteur criticism. The numerous and significant thematic consistencies and abiding stylistic continuities within the director’s output are examined here within the context of their making, incorporating consideration of the environment of collaborative artistic activity which characterises Mann’s methods of filmmaking and his contribution to contemporary popular cinema. Of necessity this examination draws comparison with Mann’s contemporaries in Hollywood, in terms of both the evolution and persistence of popular genres, and the notions of authorship in film production and criticism. This study is divided into chapters centred on two overarching thematic areas in Mann’s output (the repeated portrayal of male professionalism, and the frequent depiction of endangered families and domestic spaces) and two key aspects of his methodology and visual aesthetic (the mixed adherence, revision and hybridisation of genre, and the deployment of a heightened and conspicuous cinematic style). Although separated for practical purposes in this study, clearly these aspects co-exist inseparably in Mann’s work: the themes overlap, the genres operate interdependently with the auteur’s expression, and the visual style remarked upon in its operation within these texts is never superfluous or indulgent but always functional, effective and integral to plot, character and thematic articulation. The ‘facts’ of Mann’s authorship are evident throughout his oeuvre in the repeated working relationships with key creative figures, the return of actors and character types in allusive and echoing narratives, and the recurrence of generic frameworks and thematic patterns 20

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across the films and television series he has directed, written and produced. The differences in opinion and critical divisions which have opened over Mann’s standing and significance during his career notwithstanding, the structure, sound and look of a Mann film are in themselves as distinctive as the signatures of many contemporary filmmakers, and more conspicuous than most in asserting the continuous presence of the auteur and his themes. The ‘questions’ that these recurrent features address, simply pose or strive to answer (the place of individualism under modern capitalism, the incompatibility of vocation and family, the heightening of personally coded, professional behaviour in defiance of social mores and moral boundaries, fundamentally a quest for and assertion of meaning in existence) are comparable with the concerns of art cinema and yet are explored through the idiom and ideology of popular genre film. David Desser’s distinction between facts and questions of authorship is necessary in the case of Akira Kurosawa, where no apparent division can or should exist between an art film agenda and a genre film execution. In Kurosawa’s cinema, there is conspicuous but not superfluous style, and no gap or trade-off between moral and spiritual debate and satisfying narrative action: both types of viewers and viewing activity are encouraged, and both types of cinema are honoured. In a more recent parallel, Takeshi Kitano’s film output can be seen to be fully comparable to Kurosawa’s in its violent and affective shifts in tone, genre and impact, which furnish philosophical and moral debate alongside violent action, comedy alongside tragedy, and connect rather than divide action cinema and film festival audiences. Arguably, these Japanese filmmakers have bridged the art film and genre cinema divisions and Eastern and Western cinematic traditions by virtue of a timely exoticism, which merges or balances the expectations and criteria of these exclusive categories. Mann’s work across film and television can also be seen to connect, or perhaps erode such distinctions, and his output as a whole evinces the same negotiation of populism and popular genre in the service of the auteur’s expression. Indeed, the popular framework is itself key to the communication of the auteur’s ideas and the auteurist ideal, as the compact of narrative cinema provides the focus and channel for the posing of the question of authorship: As a cultural institution the cinema is a collective process in the largest sense (despite the fact that it is a very private industry when it comes to profit). It involves not only a cast, crew and studio, but also all of us who consume the film […] Furthermore, the mode of representation along with the narrative tradition are themselves part of the cultural repository internalized by the acculturated individual. Although film producers must learn a distinct subsystem of the codes of production, they nevertheless share not only the classical cinematic paradigm but also more general cultural paradigms of narrative and representation with their audience […] We have a situation in which a collectivity of culturally bound individuals produces a representation whose every facet is drawn from a common reserve of cultural discourse. If a director can be called an author, and thus a speaker of poetic truths, it is only insofar as v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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she or he operates as the overseer of the production of this cultural collaboration. (Saxton 1986: 20, 22–3; emphasis in original) The fact and the question of Mann’s authorship are contained in the popularity and populism of his materials, which form the connective framework between filmmaker, critic, genre and audience. The facts in the circumstances of collaboration in both production and consumption help to elucidate the questions posed in the form of Hollywood narrative and answered through the framework of popular genres, transcending film and television. Noting the manifestation of cultural collaboration in the meeting point of audience and auteur with genre and film style, this study aims to read the expression of cultural and cinematic paradigms, ideals and ideology in the work of this key contemporary auteur. Notes 1

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In the same interview, Mann suggests that his staying in Europe for the remainder of the 1960s was also due to ‘political’ reasons, i.e. avoidance of the Vietnam draft. F. X. Feeney and Paul Duncan, Michael Mann (London: Taschen, 2006), 9. Although this film has never been exhibited, footage from it of a race riot in Albuquerque was incorporated into the depiction of racial disharmony in 1960s America in Ali (2001). Sandell’s discussion is based partially on Laura Mulvey’s 1975 landmark essay, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16, 3, 6–18. Rybin (2007: 23–4) notes a home invasion storyline occurring in an episode of Starsky and Hutch scripted by Mann from 1975. An episode of the first season of Miami Vice from 1985 which portrayed a series of ruthless domestic burglaries was entitled ‘The Home Invaders’. In interview, Hoenig insists that ‘the film director is the guiding force’ of the editing process, and observes that in a ‘major Hollywood movie the director spends more time with his editor than with any other major collaborator’ (Feeney and Duncan 2006: 160).

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CHAPTER ONE

Mann’s Style: The Jericho Mile, L.A. Takedown, Miami Vice

The conspicuous visual style in evidence in Michael Mann’s films has been the subject of frequent and intense debate, as to its structural and thematic relevance, its sources, its contemporary influence, and its distraction from or replacement of a more meaningful and significant frame of reference for the director’s work. Although the most striking aspects of Mann’s cinematic expression are visual (particularly the continuities in widescreen composition, in colouration and editing), the director’s films are distinguished by equally individualistic choices relating to sound effects and soundtracks. The negative criticism of Mann’s style has centred on films such as The Keep and Manhunter, in which the emphasis placed upon complex visualisation has been censured as a seductive superficiality belying an absence of structure or meaning in his narratives. These films’ inclusion of intense colour effects, and the subduing or muting of diegetic sound in action sequences accompanied by electronically scored soundtracks, display the cinematic exploration of contemporary audio-visual styles adopted from other media. However, such condemnation of the traits of Mann’s output originates in the reception of his television work, especially the decade-defining television series Miami Vice: Miami Vice displays an attention to style which, compared to the rest of TV, seems luxurious, extravagant. Some might even say ‘criminal,’ feeling that such an expenditure of style must, in some way, hide an attempt to defraud, to cover some bankruptcy of substance. (Rutsky 1988: 77) The specific connection of this criticism to television revives the critical distinctions made between film as an art and other interrelated, and supposedly inferior media forms (television drama, advertising and intensive audio-visual interactions such as MTV) with notable cultural sway. That the techniques of these forms should migrate v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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into cinematic narrative (not just in Hollywood but also, for example, in the French cinema of the 1980s), is denigrated in some quarters but is indicative of their influence and contemporaneity for the cinema-going audience. Mann’s Style and Advertising Arguably, the epitome of the criticisms levelled at Mann’s style (as discussed in the Introduction) might be found in a project condensing the key features of the director’s stylistic and thematic signature, and displaying their degree of overlap with norms of contemporary Hollywood: Mann’s advertisement for the Mercedes Benz SL500, entitled ‘Lucky Star’, made in 2002 in the form of a trailer for a non-existent feature film. This proto-text epitomises the abbreviation and condensation of the conventions of classical style in contemporary cinema, in its concatenation of visual clichés. The characteristics considered to exemplify contemporary popular filmmaking (contrived forms of visual style, heightened editing tempos, simplified plotting and a lack of clear narrative structuring), which have been identified as the failings of the modern cinema in comparison with the formal and narrational rigours of classical Hollwood, often find their most exaggerated expression in the intensified form of the trailer. The ‘Lucky Star’ trailer features Benicio Del Toro (who had starred previously in the Mann-produced television series Drug Wars: The Camarena Story [1990]) as an enigmatic loner who engages in high stakes gambling and risk-laden business dealings. Nothing he does seems to be illegal, and yet all his decisions in gaming and stock speculation are uncannily correct. His movements are followed by sophisticated covert surveillance techniques, and his home is invaded. Shadowy underworld or establishment intelligence operatives build up a profile of his affluent and stylish life, but he evades capture and vanishes before they can apprehend him. The advert is accompanied by a voice-over to maintain the illusion of a trailer, an effect reinforced by the placing of the commercial amongst other trailers for forthcoming attractions when screened in cinemas. The creation of the Mercedes campaign and the purposeful placement of the advertisement among real trailers appears to be a deliberate response to the succession of BMW car adverts entitled ‘The Hire’. Examples from this campaign were directed by Tony Scott, Alejandro González Iñárrito, Wong Kar-Wai, Ang Lee, John Frankenheimer and Guy Ritchie.1 Scott’s commercial stars actors from previous films of Jerry Bruckheimer, a producer who has worked often with Scott, and includes myriad conspicuous stylistic devices (step printing, jump cuts, cutting within camera movements, juxtapositions of colour and blackand-white images, on-screen titles) associated with these films. ‘Lucky Star’ has a duration of roughly two-and a-half minutes, with an average shot length of barely over a second. In its sequence of rapidly cut and juxtaposed images, some predictable shots and compositions are discernible, such as images from surveillance cameras, nighttime aerial shots of illuminated skyscrapers, and faces in close-up shot with hand-held cameras. Shots of a night-time pursuit by cars on a multilane highway anticipate the car chase sequence seen in the Miami Vice film, and aerial shots of city streets looking vertically down on traffic evoke comparisons with Collateral. While these examples 24

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clearly announce Mann’s visual presence, the embryonic narrative and the images of cityscapes and spy satellites tracking their quarry more closely resemble the Bruckheimer style, and actually seem like conscious imitations of Enemy of the State (Tony Scott, 1998). The compression of a formulaic narrative and the condensation of Mann’s signature style within this trailer reflect the rudimentary recognition of visual characteristics now commonplace through the popularisation of auteurism, but also magnify the condemnation of contemporary cinema as an effects-laden and insufficiently plotted spectacle. In addition, the recognition of the auteur at work within this self-conscious exercise is complicated by the contradiction apparent in the director of capitalist critiques such as Thief and The Insider making a commercial of this nature for the makers of a luxury consumer item: The placement of Mann’s handiwork is a coup for advertising agency Campbell Doyle Dye – and a black day, perhaps, for those unnerved by the fondness of major corporations for blurring the lines between art and commerce, between novelty and expansionism. […] ‘Lucky Star’ accelerates us into a strange grey zone of marketing by subterfuge […] What Mann and Mercedes have done is turn the traditional device of product placement on its head. Now, rather than a movie discreetly (or otherwise) slipping a logo onto a set or costume, the product – in this case, Del Toro’s shiny silver Merc – becomes the centrepiece, with characters and storylines called into existence as window dressing. (Leigh 2002) Such criticism of Mann’s complicity in this surreptitious advertising practice stresses the subjugation of the film medium and artist to the demands of product placement (itself a common feature of modern American filmmaking) without acknowledging the pervasiveness of this approach in contemporary cinema, and arguably the inaccuracy of such criticism in the case of the ‘Lucky Star’ trailer. The use of the trailer format implies that the anticipated consumption of a film narrative and spectacle is ransomed to the immediate enjoyment of the lesser text, the overtly placed Mercedes product. Yet in the advert the Mercedes logo is never clearly visible, and the car that is seen to be instrumental to the character’s lifestyle and escape is wedded more convincingly to the sketched character than it is to an identifiable brand. (However, this is less true of the appearance of the Mercedes brochure in Collateral, where the marque is closely allied with Max’s [Jamie Foxx] unrealised aspiration.) Instead of brand names being foregrounded as key aspects of product and therefore by extension character identity (as, for example, in Diva [Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1981], the epitome of the 1980s’ French cinéma du look and filmic postmodernism), the cars in ‘Lucky Star’ and the film version of Miami Vice are oddly anonymised in action, particularly in comparison with the indulgence of recognisable design and conspicuous consumerism in the Miami Vice television series (Austin 1996: 120–22). Paradoxically, this reverses the pressure of authorship and ownership visible in the advert itself. The visual signature of Mann in the images is not matched by his name in the ironic end credits, where the corporate authorship is ascribed to ‘Mercedes Films’. The viewer of the advert is encouraged to associate Mercedes with Mann’s signature, rather than Mann with Mercedes’ brand. v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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The comparison between adverts created by contemporary film directors can be repeated through the examples of Mann’s and David Fincher’s contributions to the Nike ‘Leave Nothing’ campaign.2 Mann’s one-minute film from 2007 was shot by Dante Spinotti (Mann’s director of photography for Manhunter, Heat, The Insider and Public Enemies), and stars two high-profile players from the NFL (Shawne Merriman from the San Diego Chargers and Steven Jackson of the St. Louis Rams). The advert truncates the players’ seasons against numerous opposing teams into one match, and then collapses the match into two successive drives (one defensive, the other offensive). Merriman is seen tackling his way up the field, with his body position matched across barely detectable transitions which change the time of day, weather conditions, uniforms and opponents seamlessly as he progresses. Jackson then runs the length of the field in the opposite direction, evading tackles through similar spatio-temporal shifts, until he reaches the end zone to score in slow-motion. The musical accompaniment to the diegetic sounds of the game is provided by the track ‘Promontory’ from the soundtrack of The Last of the Mohicans.3 While this musical signature is highly recognisable as the theme to one of the director’s most commercially successful features, the visual conceit is characteristic of Mann’s portrayal of professional absorption, even though applied here to an unusual subject. The concentration of the players’ experience is translated through the same close-up and mobile camera work which distinguished Ali’s depiction of the ring, and is effective in this case in articulating the athlete’s immersion in individual action in the midst of team play. Fincher’s 2008 advert, subtitled ‘Fate’, was shot by Emmanuel Lubezki (also the cinematographer for Ali), and uses two other players (Troy Polamalu of the Pittsburgh Steelers and LaDainian Tomlinson from the San Diego Chargers). Frequent and balanced intercutting between the players represents their preparation for the sport and the game since childhood. They are followed from birth, through training and college, to their arrival at the stadium in the present. Their destined meeting in the game comes in an impact (Tomlinson as ball carrier, Polamalu as tackler) which seems almost inconsequential in the sport, the game or their careers, but which is presented and accepted as the inevitable result of their predetermined vocation. The accompanying music is a cover version of ‘The Ecstasy of Gold’ by Ennio Morricone, from the soundtrack of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966). This selection augments the sense of preordination in the players’ lives, with the trifle of one tackle standing for years in the sport and decades of dedication. As with the competing car adverts, these two commissions for another global brand are highly evocative of their makers’ signatures. Mann’s Nike film, in invoking the personal precedent of The Last of the Mohicans, endows the sporting environment with the commitment of effort and ethical choice (in which work and lifestyle become inseparable), which characterises that film and all others in the director’s canon. Fincher’s compressed narrative suggests an innate patterning to events which defines and controls the individuals and their activity, in a similar fashion to the cyclical, inevitable nature of the narratives in Alien 3 (1992), Se7en (1995), Fight Club (1999) and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008). Overall, Mann’s advertising commissions suggest that, as in the Scott example for BMW, directorial signature is chosen to illustrate a brand, and conse26

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quently predominates in the construction and imagistic qualities of the advert. If the Nike commercials by both Fincher and Mann appear more self-effacing, in the latter’s case the musical selection provides a forceful connection to the director’s canon. The presumed, pervasive recognition of the audio-visually defined directorial brand, which arguably precipitates the employment of auteurs on commercials in the first place, underlines the importance, perhaps dominance of the auteur signature, even when placed in the service of a global corporation or eminent brand. Mann and Contemporary Film Style The concentrated exercises in authorial style evident in these commercials represent test cases for the developments in contemporary cinematic style identified by David Bordwell. Noting the current trends for more frequent and dynamic camera movement, more rapid editing leading to ever decreasing average shot lengths (ASLs), and a construction of narrative which diverges from the conventional practices underpinning strict spatial and temporal consistency in classical cinema, Bordwell describes these features not as a betrayal of studio-era continuity style, but an ‘intensification’ of these ‘established techniques’ (2002: 16). The particularities of evolving visual style are examined at length by Bordwell, to produce a diagnosis of the state of filmmaking at key points since the end of the studio era. While ASLs are seen to drop throughout the period since 1960, Bordwell avers that spatial continuity need not be undermined by fast cutting, but also suggests that ‘editing rates may soon hit a wall: it’s hard to imagine a feature length narrative movie averaging less than 1.5 seconds per shot’ (2002: 17). Mann’s films are reflective of the overall trend, with around 700 and 800 shots for The Keep and Manhunter respectively being succeeded by nearly 900 for L.A. Takedown and over 2200 shots in Heat which, despite the later film’s much longer running time, results in a drop in ASL from around 8 seconds to just over 4 seconds in roughly a decade. However, what examples such as the Scott advertisement for BMW or the editing of contemporary action sequences suggest is at least the possibility of cutting being sustained at very high rates (comparable to those in commercials) in current and future mainstream features, for longer and longer sequences and greater proportions of overall running time, leading to more releases with ASLs substantially and consistently below two seconds (Bordwell 2002: 22). Bordwell also notes some effects and trends in composition (such as the use of tighter close-ups and singles in dialogue scenes, and the alteration of shot length in the ‘wipe-cut’), where framing and editing coincide to heightened effect (2002: 18). (A variant on the wipe-cut can be seen in Collateral, when a brief shot showing Max [Jamie Foxx] flipping up the sun-visor in his cab, where he keeps the postcard of a desert island, masks a cut to his hand turning the ignition key.) Camera movement is also seen to be increasing in complexity and frequency, but as an authorial announcement rather than a subjective, expressive effect replacing the static, pragmatic and dialogue-dependent set-ups of the classical era. A heightened kineticism of camera movement and editing at once represents an integral, accentuated characteristic of the contemporary cinema’s affective spectacle, and a self-reflexive acknowledgement of the v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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Collateral: the wipe cut

medium’s surface and the maker’s status. In modern American films, the conscious foregrounding of the presence of the auteur in complex and conspicuous camera movement represents a clear example of the adoption of European art cinema motifs and aspirations within the context of mainstream films, with the narrative and immersive genre cinema ironically being served by auteurist, reflexive stylistic assertion. The uses of heightened editing tempos in contemporary cinema are, however, unequal and disparate in intention and effect, and the occurrences of rapid montage in Mann’s action sequences are in themselves dissimilar across films and between phases of his career. A chase sequence in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson, 2001) can be used to illustrate the trends identified by Bordwell. The sequence following the pursuit of Arwen (Liv Tyler) by the Nazgûl, is preceded by scenes in twilight in a forest setting, before cutting to an open plain location in daylight, where the sequence proper begins with a rapid travelling helicopter shot, unaccompanied by diegetic sound. Throughout the chase that follows, the concentration of self-consciously employed technique serves to immerse viewers in a highly affective fashion, despite the evident departure from conventional practices of continuity and the potential distancing effects of the sequence’s stylistic choices. Examples of the techniques on display include: an exaggeration of the chase through cheat cuts altering the relative positions of the participants; a lack of coherence in the direction of movement through the frame (left to right and right to left) by the pursuers and their quarry; swift changes in background and foreground (from wooded to open spaces and vice versa) amounting effectively to jump-cutting; shifting within a shot from an apparent point of view (Arwen’s view of the Nazgûl) to a composition which includes Arwen’s own horse; brief but frequently interspersed segments of slow-motion; drastic alterations between consecutive framings and shot lengths (from extreme long shots to medium shots in shallow focus, from aerial tracking shots to facial close-ups), and heightened movement within and of the frame (whip pans and zooms). The intensity of displayed style in this sequence is all the more striking as (unusually within the film and the trilogy as a whole) it appears to rely on cinematic technique (a 28

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combination of ‘second unit’ action values and heightened editing effects) rather than any digital enhancement. Even without conventional spatio-temporal continuity, the sequence’s bare narrative detail (Arwen’s flight to the ford) remains unambiguous; conversely, with its intensification of subjective and objective representational practices, the effectiveness and impact of the sequence is amplified beyond the denotative demands of plot. By contrast, rapid cutting and framing changes in Mann’s films appear to serve both motivated, realist intentions and affective, visceral ends in superficially contradictory ways. Heat: car lot destruction

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In the armoured truck hold-up in Heat, seven rapid cuts over 11 seconds exaggerate the considerable violence of movement contained within the frame in showing (from a variety of angles and distances) the upended truck crashing into ranks of cars in a lot. The central bank robbery sequence absorbs over 340 individual shots (approximately 15 percent of the film’s total), in less than 11 minutes (or barely 7 percent of its running time). Nonetheless, within this complex sequence, a point-of-view shot of less than a second is included simply to detail Michael Cheritto’s (Tom Sizemore) opening of the front passenger door of the getaway car before he opens the rear door which he uses to enter the vehicle himself. What the shot reveals (which may be almost imperceptible on a first viewing, or may be misread as a continuity error) is Michael’s purely practical action of facilitating Neil McCauley’s (Robert De Niro) entry to the car: the shot and the cut which are both brief and yet superfluous within the flow of the sequence are included simply as a further documentation of the crew’s efficient planning and execution.4 Aside from the detail of and resultant debate on cutting speeds, average shot lengths, plotting and spatio-temporal coherence in contemporary cinema, American film can be seen to have become the meeting point of several influential strands and trends in film style. Textually, institutionally and ideologically, contemporary Hollywood manages to accommodate the distancing, realist and subjective elements of art cinema, the intertextual collaging and ironic reflexivity of postmodernism, and the heightened spectacle and accelerated effect of ‘intensified’ classical continuity, which are in themselves inseparable from the textual and metatextual affirmation of the significance of the auteur, for publicity as much as interpretation. At this point, a consideration of some of the keystones of Mann’s visual style (the use of colour, the composition of the widescreen image, the depiction of the city, the pervasive inclusion of slow-motion) will help to illustrate the convergence of the popular and the auteurist, ‘the intersection of style and genre’ which his films achieve (Rybin 2007: 4). Colour The arrangement of colour in Mann’s compositions is as significant a component of his overt style as the dynamic expressive editing and the nuances of subjective narrative technique which distinguish his films. The monotonal deployment of colour in uniform blocks has become a signature in the director’s work, which can be linked to thematic consistencies and the communication of individual experience and perception outside of dialogue. In an interview, one of Mann’s consistent collaborators, cinematographer Dante Spinotti, has discussed the connotative endowment of colour in the director’s films and the manipulation of tones to deliberate and conspicuous effect in the first of their collaborations, Manhunter. Spinotti attributes the dressing of sets and inclusion of every prop and artifact in the constructed mise-en-scène to the director himself, but claims the application of the ‘deep, romantic blue’ to Graham’s (William Petersen) and Molly’s (Kim Greist) bedroom scenes as his own contribution.5 The conspicuous ‘deep night effect’ was heightened by the use of gels added to windows in the set which, along with the 30

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glimpses of moonlight on the water outside, were to give the impression of being ‘on a ship at sea’. The night bedroom scene between Graham and Molly which is dominated by the bathing of blue light is an emotionally-laden one, given that (as Molly is aware) the investigator has already decided to leave their idyllic retreat in Florida to return to work for the FBI, compromising and endangering his own family despite his motive being to prevent harm to others. This is underlined when the colour returns in a scene of Molly alone in bed, when Graham calls late at night from a hotel. The latent threat to Graham’s sanity suggested by his immersion in the videotape evidence and his insight into the serial killer Francis Dolarhyde’s (Tom Noonan) motives registers (via the colour use and coercive soundtrack) as a physical threat to Molly in the distant domestic and romantic space (see Chapter 3). The significant placement of blue tones, although particularly evident in Manhunter, predates this film and Mann’s collaboration with Spinotti in the director’s canon. With a verisimilitudinous basis in prison walls and inmates’ garb, the colour is also prominent in The Jericho Mile as well as in Thief, and these examples reveal the subjective and expressionistic interpretations of the colour which are also applicable to its occurrences in Manhunter: the sea-blue tonalities associated with Murphy’s prison cell … form a stylistic precedent for the way Mann often links blue and gray color schemes to the existential crises of his characters in later films, such as Frank in Thief, McCauley in Heat, Bergman and Wigand in The Insider, Sonny Crockett in the film version of Miami Vice, and Muhammad Ali after he hears of the death of Malcolm X in Ali. (Rybin 2007: 28) Therefore, from the first television film onwards, Mann’s use of blue carries the connotations of unarticulated melancholy, self-defensive withdrawal, solipsism and denial. Although in Manhunter there are other startlingly coloured scenes which are defined by monotones (the clinical whiteness of Lecktor’s [Brian Cox] symmetrical cell, for example, and the unfocused haze of green which fills the frame as Graham’s distressed point of view after having fled from his interview with Lecktor), the association of vibrant blue with ocean side settings and contemplative scenes extends from Manhunter across Mann’s later career. In Heat, the use of blue to tint compositions in Neil McCauley’s shoreline house is redolent of the isolation, lack of fulfilment and risk of loss which hovers over the similarly tinged scenes of Manhunter. When he

Heat: McCauley’s home v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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Miami Vice: Sonny looks out to sea

returns to his dwelling place after the disappearance of Waingro (Kevin Gage), the apparent emptiness of McCauley’s existence is signalled by the virtual absence of furnishings (in fact, of personal, domestic or decorative objects of any kind) within an environment characterised by colour and explored through framing and editing. When the scene opens with the frame filled by a block of colour, McCauley’s hand in close-up first enters the right foreground of the frame to deposit his functional possessions (keys and a weapon). As he walks into the depths of the frame towards the windows which overlook the sea, the camera tilts in order to reframe his diminished and silhouetted figure. A cut to the next shot reframes him again, showing only a partial profile (jaw and cheek up to the hairline) in close-up on the extreme right of the frame. To the accompaniment of the sound of the sea, the focus racks in order to bring the waves visible through the windows into sharpness while the incomplete face blurs. The third shot which ends the scene returns to a long shot of McCauley seen against the windows in full figure and virtual silhouette, with the gun and keys visible in the foreground. McCauley’s incompleteness is indicated in mundane terms in the same environment in a subsequent exchange (when Chris [Val Kilmer] remarks on the lack of both ‘furniture’ and an ‘old lady’), but in the earlier scene the combination of colour and composition marks McCauley’s solitary return home as a recognition of his solitude and despondency, despite the assertions of ascetic professional discipline which he makes. If the ocean-side scenes of Manhunter, displaying the same colour and setting, appear to anticipate the aridity and solipsism in McCauley’s home in Heat, then the ‘romantic’ associations of the colour within the bedroom scene between Graham and Molly can be rewritten or reversed, as the home and partner can be recognised as those things he is prepared to leave (and in Thomas Harris’s novel, lose) in order to pursue the Tooth Fairy. Similarly, Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) registers a brief moment of unfulfilled longing when, in the midst of the arrangement of his and Ricardo Tubbs’ (Jamie Foxx) introduction to Jose Yero’s (John Ortiz) gang, he gazes out of the informant’s penthouse windows towards the ocean, which will become the site and metaphor of his future relationship with Isabella (Gong Li), in their shared crossing of boundaries and their eventual separation. In Ali, the meeting and dance shared by Ali (Will Smith) and Sonji (Jada Pinkett Smith) in a nightclub bathed in blue light are again suggestive of the compromised commitment to the romantic which the Mann hero will display. Later the same blue will bathe the urban night scene in which Ali spars playfully with members of the public after discussing his perilous legal position with his lawyer. The 32

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cold blue light which falls on Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) at the golf driving range at night in The Insider offers no solace, as his middle-class pastime has become tainted. It no longer offers sufficient distraction from the dangers surrounding his family, and he is harassed silently at the range by a man presumably hired by his former employers. The occurrences of blue, then, emphasise and work to articulate the unease experienced or provoked by the male characters inhabiting Mann’s world, communicating a sense of melancholy and barrenness as much as suggesting a yearning for their remedy, either in empathy and connection or in action, self-justification and withdrawal. Slow-Motion The inclusion of brief passages of slow-motion has become a recognisable trademark of Mann’s films, and his use of this device for subjective emphasis resembles its occurrence in examples from the first half of Martin Scorsese’s career. In Taxi Driver (1976), Travis Bickle’s (Robert De Niro) walk to his lunch date with Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) is rendered with a frontal medium shot in slow-motion. Taken together with his own voice-over narration, the slow-motion suggests both the aspiration and subjective significance with which the event is laden for him (‘I believe a person should try to become a person like other people’), and the fundamental inability to empathise and connect which dooms this and every other instance of his interaction in the urban environment. In Raging Bull, slow-motion is again deployed, within examples of subjective point of view. When Jake (Robert De Niro) looks at Vickie (Cathy Moriarty), Tommy (Nicholas Colasanto) and Joey (Joe Pesci) down a hotel corridor, and when he observes Joey in the street years after the end of his career, slow-motion confers comparable subjective emphasis, albeit with varying emotional effect. Jake’s jealous subjective observation of Vickie’s interaction with Tommy is communicated in a cheat-cut close-up of artificially languid faces and torpid gestures encapsulating his monomaniacal gaze. Here, slow-motion becomes redolent of an unreliable subjective vision fraught with fear of deception or devalued by self-delusion. An externalised but still subjective reply is the shot over Joey’s shoulder which follows shortly after, sharing his perspective down the corridor to give an uncomfortable, unwillingly voyeuristic view of the domestic abuse Jake’s jealousy provokes. The later glimpse of Joey in slowmotion, seen from across a street, precipitates a similarly awkward and emotionally one-sided interaction. With his brother as a different object of desire, Jake’s suspicion of Vickie’s kiss in the first example is transformed into Jake’s own enforced, unreciprocated embrace of his brother in the second. While they can appear to be relatively simple augmentations of action sequences, as in the climactic shoot-out in Thief or the shooting of John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) in Public Enemies, the instances of slow-motion sections in practically all Mann’s films occur to accentuate moments of subjective stress, isolation and heightened perception. The examples of slow-motion tied to shootings in Thief and Public Enemies are in any case notably different to the choreography of slow-motion violence seen in John Woo’s films, stressing the reactive and chaotic rather than the balletic and synchronised. During the bank robbery in Heat, slow-motion close-ups precede Neil McCauley’s v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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shooting at LAPD roadblocks through the windscreen of the getaway car, and Vincent Hanna’s (Al Pacino) aiming and firing of the shot which brings Michael Cheritto’s life and the sequence itself to an end. Likewise, Hanna’s fatal shooting of McCauley at the airport at the film’s climax is heralded by an instant of slow-motion as McCauley breaks cover and Hanna notices his shadow. Perhaps the most exaggerated example of montage in Mann’s output, the final shoot-out in Manhunter, underlines this distinction in its use of slow-motion. Cinematographer Dante Spinotti has described how this sequence was shot using multiple cameras running at varied rates (24, 36, 72 and 96 frames a second), and this effect combined with abrupt ‘staccato’ editing, jump-cutting and rapid repetitions of individual shots, serves to enhance the frantic, unplanned storming of the Tooth Fairy’s house. As in Scorsese’s work, the integration of slow-motion in Mann’s films also occasionally encompasses the point-of-view shot. For example, the drive through the mountain pass at the opening of The Keep is concluded by a slow-motion shot of the Romanian village and its inhabitants through the windscreen of the lead vehicle, which is tied to the perspective of Captain Woermann (Jürgen Prochnow) by the extreme close-ups of his eyes which bracket it. Together these shots serve to signal the captain’s sensibility (markedly different from that of his own men and the SS), and his susceptibility even at this stage to the disruptive influence of the Keep. The extended emphasis apparent in this example contrasts with the barely perceptible instances of slow-motion found in Heat. The first shot of Neil McCauley exiting the train onto the neon-lit station at the film’s opening, and the very similar shot later of McCauley entering the bank which initiates the central robbery sequence, both exhibit momentary pauses conferred by mere seconds of slow-motion. Unlike the shots affirming Bickle’s isolation, these transitory time lags suggest McCauley’s immersion in and concentration upon moments of practical and professional activity: his imminent theft of the ambulance for the armoured car hold-up in the first sequence, and the commencement of the gang’s greatest score in the second. McCauley’s subjective withdrawal, which is signalled by the insertion of slow-motion on his first appearance, is re-emphasised by the shots of the ambulance theft which immediately follow. Diegetic sound, muted during the arrival of the train, returns as McCauley enters the hospital, to accompany the images of injury, triage and trauma which are seen through his point of view. The moving, hand-held shots (both observing McCauley and revealing what he observes) offer only partial and impassive glimpses of the emergency room’s activity, to which he remains indifferent as he prepares to steal the vehicle.

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The Insider: revolving doors

The comparison in the use of slow-motion between Scorsese’s films and Mann’s from the 1980s and 1990s is most warranted by the occurrence of this device in The Insider. This film, though set within the decade of its making, evokes the 1970s conspiracy thriller in both its style and narrative concerns (Thoret 2003). In its resemblance to a Watergate-era thriller, The Insider returns consciously to the era in which American cinema integrated self-conscious techniques such as slow-motion and the freeze-frame, and ‘consciously absorbed those aspects of art cinema narration which fitted generic functions’ (Bordwell 1990: 232). The inclusion of art cinema characteristics in editing style and subjective emphases alongside genre materials, which distinguished the American auteur cinema of generic narratives in the 1970s, clearly also characterises Mann’s filmmaking during subsequent decades. In The Insider, the insertion of slow-motion, which prolongs Wigand’s walk past the security guard as he leaves his company’s offices at the start of the film, is maintained through his subsequent car journey and his entry into the family home, underlining his simultaneous separation from professional and domestic spheres. Slow-motion returns when Wigand crosses the foyer of the airport on his way to the Mississippi court case. The device signals the gravity of his decision to give evidence for the future of his family, and is followed by his being served with papers threatening him with contempt of court. However, slow-motion returns when he resolves to testify, extending the shots as he enters his car in the motorcade and exits it to walk into the court as an indication of his stoical resolve. It also accentuates Lowell Bergman’s final exit from the CBS building, which, like Wigand’s scenes, appears equally laden with moral victory and personal defeat. The frequent use of slow-motion in Mann’s films, in instances of intensive physical action but also in moments of ideological and intellectual determination, reflects the combination of art cinema and genre film which characterises his work. The realist environments in which his narratives take place co-exist with the highly individualv i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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ised perspectives of his protagonists in a simultaneously immersive and self-reflexive spectacle, combining ‘the aleatoric world of “objective” reality and the fleeting states which characterize “subjective” reality’ (Bordwell 1990: 206). Although after its inculcation by the European art cinema, ‘the unexpected freeze-frame’ may have become ‘the most explicit figure of narrative irresolution’, the transitory yet crucial emphasis upon personal perception and experience suggested by Mann’s use of slow-motion offers instead an insight to resolution (as both determination and resignation) in character, by its intensification of decisive, transformative and vindicatory moments for the protagonists (Bordwell 1990: 209). Widescreen Composition Nearly all of Mann’s productions (except the television movies The Jericho Mile and L.A. Takedown and his first feature Thief) have employed widescreen formats. The specifically cinematic characteristics of the widescreen frame (in its potential for exploring the disposition of breadth, depth and varying scale and shot length) provide a marked contrast with the director’s association with an alternative aesthetic tradition, the highly constrained frame of television which offers little by way of breadth, depth or spectacle. In its ratio of 1.33:1, the television screen (albeit prior to its own adaptation to widescreen proportions) more closely resembled the ‘Academy Ratio’ frame of the classical period. The temptation of some critics to compare Mann to Howard Hawks (in the persistent thematic emphasis upon male action and perfectionism) and see him as an inheritor to a visual and structural framework of narrative comparable to classical cinema, produces a potential distinction between an economic and pragmatic mode of classically appointed television narrative, and a more pictorial and expansive widescreen cinematic style. The most striking differences discernible between the visual conception of television and the aesthetics of cinema are explored in more detail below, in relation to the comparable film and television versions of Mann’s script of Heat. In considering Mann’s use of the widescreen frame within his productions, it is necessary to examine the thematic and aesthetic factors driving framing, composition and editing, which combine to produce consistencies in his staging of both expansive and intimate scenes. The disposition of elements in the frame and its near-uniform colouration are crucial to the impact of the scene described above, when Neil McCauley returns to his home by the shore. In Heat’s most notable action sequence, the gang’s escape from the bank robbery and fire-fight through police cordons in central Los Angeles, the framing of the action and rapid cutting between perspectives and shot lengths produces an analysis of the action which is simultaneously objectively observed and subjectively experienced. Although the entire bank robbery sequence is a precise audio-visual construction, within it are myriad selections, including connections, juxtapositions and emphases made between and within individual frames. As Hanna, McCauley, Chris and Michael converge on the getaway car, a moving camera retreating before them shows them in shallow focus medium close-ups, with the street backgrounds blurred. An unsteady 36

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Heat: Hanna looks towards the bank

moving camera shot from behind Hanna observes the street over his shoulder. As he pauses out of sight behind a pillar, his head remains out of focus on the right-hand edge of the frame with the street sharp in the mid- and background occupying twothirds of the frame. Approaching on the other side of the road, Drucker (Mykelti Williamson) and Casals (Wes Studi) are seen in a telephoto long shot which flattens the perspective and exaggerates their rapid movement between vehicles, pedestrians and street signs. Once the ambush develops and the gang attempt to escape, long shots of much deeper focus provide the foot soldier’s perspective on the crowded and embattled city streets. Unsteady shots share the view over the shoulders of Chris and McCauley as they take cover and open fire on police roadblocks in the background. Interspersed with these views are moving shots of Hanna like those at the start of the sequence, suggestive of his frustrated distance from the action and his quarry. (Throughout the pursuit, Hanna’s progress is hampered by the presence of the public, with wounded and traumatised pedestrians blurred in the foreground masking the sharp, moving figure of the policeman behind them.) The destroyed vehicles and injured cops at the roadblock are shown in a montage of low-angled, hand-held shots, which sustain the chaos of the combat. After Chris is wounded, low angles are also adopted to show his desperate escape with McCauley from nearly ground level. The inclusion of the expanse of sky behind the two men offers a tantalising glimpse of freedom at the same time as McCauley’s firing becomes more indiscriminate, to deter pursuit and cover their flight. (From the first shots fired by Chris, a major component and key effect of the sequence is the tone and volume of the gunfire on the soundtrack, in itself as violent and impressionistic as the action and editing.) The climax of the sequence, in the shooting of Michael, indicates Hanna’s intervention with significant stylistic changes. Michael with his hostage is seen sharp in

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long shot over Hanna’s shoulder, with Hanna’s head out of focus in the extreme left of the frame. Hanna takes aim and fires in a static frontal close-up, also marked by a heightening of the soundtrack music and the addition of slow-motion, which is also used for a similar close-up for the aftermath of the fatal shot. The return to a smooth, mobile medium shot as Hanna picks up the child and Drucker and Casals arrive, along with the falling off of diegetic sound and music, signals the end of the sequence. In comparison with this pace of editing and extremity of composition, McCauley’s first meeting with Eady (Amy Brenneman) earlier in the film illustrates an alternative and demonstrative use of the widescreen image, reflecting the film’s equal emphasis on human intimacy. The first encounter between the characters begins with Eady entering the bookshop and the frame in the centre of the background. As the shot tracks left to follow her movement, the focus racks to render McCauley sharp, as the camera settles on him reading by a book stand. Although she now shares the centre of the frame with McCauley, the rack focus has left Eady blurred in the background, and she remains out of focus as she approaches and walks past McCauley, who fails to notice her gaze upon him. When the action cuts to a café, the public anonymity of the setting is suggested by an opening pan and track of a full nine seconds, which picks up McCauley and follows him as he walks from right to left to find an empty seat at the counter: he is in

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focus in the mid-ground behind a blurred line of customers sitting at the counter. When he sits down, he is seen at an angle from behind occupying the left-hand side of the frame, with only Eady’s hair, out of focus on the extreme right, indicating her presence. The interaction between them which Eady initiates is represented in a standard shot/reverse-shot pattern, alternating between opposite over-the-shoulder shots from in front of the counter, showing their faces from the side. McCauley’s unfriendliness justifies this non-committal angle, viewing the slightly shadowed faces from askance, but as his defences drop, the distance between the characters is gradually overcome. A tracking shot from left to right behind Eady resolves the shot/reverse shot pattern into a comfortable two-shot, now from parallel with or slightly behind the counter in order to show the fronts of their bodies and their full faces. As the scene continues, the two characters are shot from the shoulders up in a closer composition, and their intimacy is sealed by McCauley moving his chair closer to Eady, so that the scene ends with them in close-up in the centre of the frame. Mann’s use of the widescreen is adept and multifaceted, and integral to the other expository and expressive devices he deploys to effect in such small- and large-scale examples as those described above. Such analysis of the composition of the widescreen image is inseparable from the consideration of editing and use of colour, as well as the addition of sound effects and music. It reveals the complexity and interdependence of the extensive rather than excessive, articulate rather than vociferous, elements composing the director’s style. Mann’s films exhibit a technical and visual unity and virtuosity in which ‘stylistic structure’ can be proven ‘to become as thoroughly organized as narrative structure’, and equally significant (Bordwell 1990: 279). Cityscapes While the specificity of the locations used in Mann’s films is another of their hallmarks, and represents an additional layer of realism, both his symbolic uses of filmed environments and the remarkable remaking of such spaces (always turning the ‘found’, mimetic landscape into a ‘constructed’, diegetic one), mean that the particularity of place is defined in contemporary denotative, personal connotative and narrational expressive terms. The (mostly but not exclusively) urban environments which his characters traverse are tied indelibly to the protagonists and their activities, becoming simultaneously realist, symbolic, impressionistic and expressionistic. As Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) contends in The Departed (Martin Scorsese, 2006): ‘I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.’ The fixed association of Mann’s films with visions of the modern American metropolis conceals the fact that his films portray several highly distinctive cities (Chicago in Thief and Public Enemies, Los Angeles in L.A. Takedown, Heat and Collateral, and Miami in the varying incarnations of Miami Vice) across different eras and to greatly divergent effects. Although the Chicago of Thief and the Los Angeles of Heat and Collateral are all represented principally at night, the street level experience of contrasting pale and garish lighting and anonymous, oppressive concrete architecture of Thief appears markedly different from the pixellated and pin-point illuminated grid of night-time L.A. v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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Heat: opening cityscape to the metal depository sequence

observed in aerial shots in Heat. Although McCauley’s night-time meetings with Nate (Jon Voight) resemble the urban locales of Thief in colour and architecture, in contrast to the metropolitan compression of Chicago the rendezvous in Heat occur in neutral and meaningless spaces such as parking lots or under freeway bridges, redolent of Los Angeles’ megalopolitan ‘disconnection’ despised by Vincent (Tom Cruise) in Collateral. Additionally, the pallet as well as the perspective on L.A. changes between Heat and Collateral, with yellow-cyan replacing Heat’s grey-blue emphasis and dominating the overall tone, in keeping thematically with the dusk-til-dawn time-frame of the plot. Superficially, Mann’s use of colour and landscape resembles that of the French filmmakers of the cinéma du look (such as Jean-Jacques Beineix and Luc Besson), in their connection with characterisation in the potent visual shorthand of advertising: Stylization and excess are the hallmarks of Besson’s work. Characters are larger than life, decors are in excess of their referent in their hyper-realism. And yet both are less than the signs to which they refer. Besson’s characters lack psychological depth and his sets reduce the city to a topography of the ugly or the grandiose, the derelict or the plutocratic. The sumptuous and the ornate cohabit with the violent and the vulgar. Excess and violence – this is the terrestrial world in which Besson’s characters are held captive. (Hayward 1998: 66) If Besson’s landscapes embody the indiscriminate inclusion of artifacts (and erosion of distinctions in value between them) which characterise postmodernity, Mann’s treatments of cities are by comparison hardly postmodern, but not entirely realist, classical or modernist either. They are more properly historical-materialist, reflecting in their representation a ‘double demand of poetic and rhetoric’: in keeping with Thief ’s critique of capitalist economics and Heat’s bitter exploration of the work ethic, these films exhibit a ‘tendency to treat syuzhet as both a narrative and an argument’ (Bordwell 1990: 235). Within this conception landscape is not an unquestionable premise in a syllogism, but a component in bridging the rationality of the dialectic and the persuasiveness of rhetoric. The cityscapes of Heat contain and depict such oppositions, in embodying and reflecting the characters’ responses to and influences upon their environment. The Los Angeles skyline appears at several points and in various guises during the film, in scenes attached to specific actions and characters. The sequence detailing the abortive robbery of the precious metals depository opens with an extreme long shot of the city, tinted with grey, green and blue lights against the black buildings and night 40

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sky. As the camera moves towards its subject, the shot is revealed to be taken from a helicopter, and as the shot progresses its perspective changes by panning right and descending to rooftop height in order to locate the gang’s van as it approaches their target, and drives past the container park where the policemen wait in ambush. In this example the cityscape seems to be purposefully deployed within the ‘argument’ of the heist film, providing an ideal and comprehensive observation of the gang’s controlled plan and the clandestine counterforce of the police. We know the different motives the members of the gang have for pursuing the lucrative, dangerous robberies, and we sense the tragic inevitability of their eventual failure despite their admirable skills in planning, coordination and execution. Positioning the precise setting in the mimetic location of the city contextualises and moralises the crime as a normal symptom of urban life, with an equally predictable outcome. The cityscape is manifested from another alternative perspective during Hanna’s tailing of the gang before his face-to-face meeting with McCauley. Shot from another aircraft, Hanna’s helicopter is seen over the carpet of illuminated streets and against the relief of skyscrapers. Given that this sequence follows Hanna’s purposeful departure from his insoluble emotional problems at home to return to the all-absorbing hunt, the aerial images of the city offer a logical, concrete topography, and are accompanied by diegetic helicopter sound, to suggest the obsessive, vocational motivation. This more conventional and three-dimensional rendition of the city is paradoxically reminiscent of the future Los Angeles seen in Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), while being attuned to Mann’s themes of work, modernity and capitalism: I think L.A. is the modern city in the United States, but it’s also a kind of cybernetic city … [Y]ou hit one of these nights in January when it‘s crystal clear, it’s spectacular. You can see every star in the sky, you can see 20, 25, 30 miles … air traffic in my mind is almost a metaphor for this whole layer of data. You’ll see the lights of eighteen planes all lined up on approach to LAX on two runways, one-and-a-half minutes apart, helicopters all over the city, and you’ll see this three-dimensional layer.6 The view of the city-as-mechanism (inherited from Thief) is complicated by the connotations of the constant flow of digital information, associated with Kelso’s (Tom Noonan) acquisition of the information needed for the bank robbery by ‘grabbing it’ from the air, the alarms the crew disable, and the air and ground surveillance which Hanna uses but McCauley evades. Yet these webs prove less effective than the human tip-offs and hunches that are the real instruments of fate. The draw of (highly specific) human contact and the intoxication of control that Hanna feels from his profession are encapsulated in the transitional scenes between the aerial surveillance and the coffee shop meeting. A vertiginous tilted pan across the city (the point of view from the cockpit) follows Hanna’s instructions for a car to meet him on the ground, and is accompanied by the appearance of thrusting but elegiac soundtrack music (Moby’s cover version of Joy Division’s ‘New Dawn Fades’) which continues through the brief montage of Hanna speeding down the illuminated freeway. v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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Heat: Hanna speeding on the freeway

Heat: McCauley, Eady and the composite city

A further variant of the cityscape is seen following the first meeting between McCauley and Eady, when they go back to her rented house overlooking the city. The urban sprawl appears as a virtually two-dimensional, grid-like abstraction of miniscule lights. It is apparent from the shots which frame Eady and McCauley in the foreground against this illuminated panorama that this ‘location’ is really a created composite, included for metaphorical effect because it inspires McCauley to allude to the iridescent algae he dreams of seeing in the sea off Fiji. The voicing of this aspiration to the woman he will ask to accompany him on his trip before the man-made facsimile (in the city itself and in Mann’s appropriation of it as a special effect) of the natural spectacle he wishes to see, produces in this scene a melancholy precognition of the unattainable nature of McCauley’s dream. The escape, like the represented city, will remain finally out of reach. However, the flatness of the city’s panorama, evoking the sea he yearns to visit, will become the sea inhabiting the other dream he recounts to Hanna, and he will drown within it. It is not coincidental that a similar skyline recurs on another hill overlooking the city, when McCauley emerges from the shadows to kill Van Sant (William Fichtner), in one of the fatally chosen actions which determine he will never escape with Eady. Mann’s repeated explorations and reincarnations of Los Angeles have marked the city as the emblematic contemporary environment for tragedy, born from a mesmeric combination of male action, assertiveness and fatal conviction. The comprehensive treatment of the city in Mann’s films (from the locations of the docks, dilapidated industrial quarter, derelict drive-ins, downtown banks, offices and airports, to the interiors of coffee shops, diners, nightclubs, hotels and homes), can be compared to the odyssey across its cultural, economic and geographical breadth undertaken in Falling Down (Joel Schumacher, 1992). Having abandoned his grid-locked car, William Foster (Michael Douglas) embarks on a journey across Los Angeles, between a job he has lost and a family that no longer wants him. He negotiates a series of concrete urban 42

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spaces, which nonetheless in their negative diversity constitute an image of the city as merely a collection of nightmare referents (dangerous ghettos, non-white male gangs, barriers and fences): The postmodern city has been conventionally theorized as a site of difference, fragmentation, conflict, and plurality … a particular construction of urban space, as hostile and violent, but also unreadable, out of control: the cityscape represents, contains, and triggers Foster’s violent journey. (Mahoney 1997: 168, 174) As the white male patriarch deprived of authority and function, Foster’s feelings of loss and inadequacy are painted onto the menacing multicultural landscape in a form of expressionism masquerading as inflammatory, polemical realism. His apparent victimisation in and by the landscape mixes sympathy for his loss and delusion with a reactionary animosity towards ‘fragmentation’ and ‘plurality’. By comparison, Mann’s cityscapes are more visible manifestations of ethics, experience and character than expressionistically conceived and perceived environments. Mann’s landscape is not ‘a character’: his Los Angeles is constructed by all of his characters at once: In the films of both Bresson and Ozu, architectural space frames narratives that are built with precision and purpose […] a cohesion and structural emphasis that could be described as architectural. (Wiblin 1997: 109, 110) The films discussed in the remainder of this chapter consist of a television movie realised and released as a theatrical feature (The Jericho Mile), a feature film script cut down to the scale and schematic of a television pilot (L.A. Takedown), and a television series re-imagined and reconstructed as a feature film (Miami Vice). The following examples offer close analysis of highly stylised sequences incorporating music, to show the significance of this aspect of Mann’s style from different phases of his career. The hybridity of all these projects allows for fuller examination of the divergent intentions and influences detectable within and across Mann’s versions of modern American cinema and television. Yet their thematic and tonal consistency within the director’s output also facilitates an appreciation of the negotiation between classical and post-classical Hollywood, and televisual and cinematic narrative, which these texts accomplish, and which Mann’s oeuvre epitomises. The Jericho Mile Synopsis: Rain Murphy, serving a life sentence in Folsom State Prison for the murder of his father, runs to exercise and to distract himself from the prison environment. He comes to the notice of the warden and the prison counsellor, who realise that he runs the mile distance as fast as a full-time athlete. They organise a trial race against civilian runners and a training programme with a college coach, in order to offer Murphy the chance to win a place on the US Olympic Team. Murphy’s friend Stiles, seeking to speed up a visit from his wife, tries to make a deal with Dr D, the leader v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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of the prison’s white supremacist gang. The deal falls through, and Styles is killed by Dr D’s henchmen. When Murphy takes revenge for Styles’ death by harming the white gang’s drug business, Dr D tries to block the building of a running track for Murphy’s race, but the black and Chicano gangs unite behind Murphy and the track is completed. Despite proof of Murphy’s ability, he is prevented from qualifying for the team because he refuses to show remorse for his crime. When the chosen competitor’s official performance in the mile is announced on the news, Murphy runs his own race inside Folsom’s walls and beats the qualifying time. *** Seen in retrospect, like many debuts The Jericho Mile provides a condensation of thematic concerns and stylistic tendencies which are explored and reiterated throughout the filmmaker’s subsequent career. Its examination of the criminal mentality, depiction of institutionalised masculinity, critique of establishment pressures, portrait of wilful isolation and charting of a tragic trajectory all anticipate the repeated scrutiny of these themes and motifs in Mann’s later films. In being a ‘prison’ film, it also serves as a fascinating precedent to the later narratives of ex-convicts and criminals (Thief, Heat, and Public Enemies, which features its own brief prison sequence) and throws into sharper relief the fear of incarceration which impinges on other Mann heroes (Muhammed Ali and Jeffrey Wigand in The Insider). The practicalities of imprisonment threaten to unnerve, even overwhelm these protagonists. When confronted with the possibility, Wigand asks with a distressed, middle-class politeness: ‘How does one go to jail?’ Conversely, the fact that Rain Murphy (Peter Strauss) is observed first (and last) within the walls of Folsom appears to confirm that he belongs behind bars. Society has dictated his imprisonment for life, and since he does not deny his guilt he accepts his situation, or perhaps more accurately adapts his behaviour in order to endure his circumstances. Arguably the influence of prison equally never leaves Mann’s other inmates (Frank in Thief, Neil McCauley in Heat and John Dillinger in Public Enemies), as incarceration provides the social and professional network, credo and skills which define their criminal occupations, while the deprivation of freedom provides the impetus for their accelerated criminal acquisitiveness. Despite the inherent social peripheralisation of imprisoned males, the prison narratives contained in television series and feature films portray prisoners and represent their struggles in conventional heroic terms, and use them to incarnate and bolster hegemonic concepts of masculinity. In analysing the manifestations of masculinity in representations of prison in film and on television, Terrie Schauer explores several consistencies of narrative trajectory and the characterisation of inmates which influence the definitions and interpretations of the incarcerated criminal male. These are based on the three interrelated functions and ‘processes’ of such representations: First, US prison film and protagonist-hero tend to be mutually constitutive – creating prison as an oppressive regime and the protagonist as American Cowboy hero respectively. This neatly reinforces American national identity and hegemonic concepts of masculinity. Second, prison film reifies the binary 44

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division of male homo- and hetero-sexualities, subordinating the former. Third, prison film’s focus on the male physique aligns itself with the wider tradition of glorifying hyperbolically masculine bodies. The tension out of which both represented prisons and protagonists take shape is partially accomplished by structuring prison films around a narrative hero quest, in which the institution is pitted against a masculine hero. (2004: 32) In depicting the prison environment as ‘dehumanizing and mechanical’, prison films create narrative conflicts which are conducive to highly conventional male heroic characterisations and activities, despite the highly unconventional and antisocial nature of the prison locale and community (Schauer 2004: 33). Since the central protagonists of prison narratives are often portrayed as wrongly accused and convicted innocents or those whose crimes are justifiable or understandable on higher moral grounds, they can become readily comparable to the heroes of western films, who are equally ‘resolutely individualistic, moral, rebellious and tough’ (ibid.). Comparing the characterisation and trajectory of Rain Murphy with this generic structuring and interpretation of prison narratives underlines the strong similarities and telling divergences which distinguish Mann’s film. That Murphy is guilty and deserving of punishment is not disputed but rather confirmed by the system and even the inmate himself, even though the crime he committed (the murder of his abusive father to protect his stepsister) was morally motivated and comprehensible in conventional heroic terms. Within the environment of Folsom, Murphy is unflinchingly individualistic, compounding the isolation of his one-man cell by pursuing a solitary endeavour (running the measured mile several times a day) rather than engaging in team sports, communal activities or entering the prison’s gang culture. Murphy refuses to recognise the appeal or the authority of the hierarchic communities of the gangs, which sub-divide the prison population into ethnic and ideological subcultures (the white supremacists, the black brotherhood and the Chicanos). Instead he substitutes one superficially close bond to his neighbour and running-partner R.C. Styles (Richard Lawson). In asserting his individualism, Murphy fails to conform to the expectations of the prison’s official and unofficial hierarchic communities, with his running becoming the fact and symbol of his apartness. As a self-consciously styled introduction to character, narrative and environment, the opening sequence of The Jericho Mile portrays the physical and communal space which surrounds Murphy. The sequence delineates the communal space of the exercise yard and the differentiated gang- and ethnically-determined activities which dominate and define it, but within which Murphy manages to rebel. This montage (lasting a little under three minutes and containing 47 shots), and a similar sequence ending the film, are accompanied by music (an instrumental cover version of The Rolling Stones’ ‘Sympathy for the Devil’) in a manner which anticipates the sequences foregrounding popular music alongside stylised images in the television series Miami Vice. Where these later examples, which became intimately associated with the look and appeal of the television series, emphasise material consumption (in portraying fetishised luxury goods, such as cars) and often have little by way of a ‘narrative “alibi”’ to justify their v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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The Jericho Mile: The black brotherhood

The Jericho Mile: Murphy and Stiles

The Jericho Mile: a white supremacist’s tattoes

inclusion, the montages in The Jericho Mile exhibit a sustained narrative and thematic relevance (Fiske 1989: 255–57). The sequence begins with a moving long shot lasting 8 seconds, of an inmate who is dancing and walking while listening to a large portable stereo. The music on the soundtrack appears to emanate from this diegetic source, but the prisoner is wearing headphones: consequently an element of subjectivity is introduced which stresses the partitioning and individual experience of the community, the yard and the prison which Murphy’s narrative confirms. Subsequent shots show an open-air chess game, a card table, inmates lifting weights, a basketball game and a baseball game in progress, before Murphy is seen for the first time, running with Stiles in a long shot lasting barely 2 seconds. For the rest of the musical sequence, there are repeated cuts back to 46

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each of these activities (including two to the inmate with the stereo), while Murphy continues his exercise. When the music dies away, the diegetic sound takes over but Murphy carries on running, remaining solitary (once Stiles drops out) and distanced from all other communal activity, and even attempts to keep warming down when the sirens and guards clear the yard. The montage reveals a range of shared leisure and team sporting pursuits within the yard (boxing, basketball, baseball, handball, chess, weightlifting) alongside individual portraits (showing the hair styles and head gear of some inmates and the gang associations of others – picturing specific ethnic groups and their distinguishing features, like the white supremacists’ tattoos). The juxtapositions arising from the sequence’s editing (team games versus individual activities, movement against stillness, dancing moves contrasted with boxing) indicate the complexities of the prison community and each inmate’s chosen means of enduring or ignoring incarceration. The images and the techniques which set Murphy apart during this sequence define his character via his activity in a way which appears to conform to conventional expectation. The overlapping diegetic/non-diegetic soundtrack music establishes Murphy’s existence and experience as unique, unshared and separate despite the rigours of the environment. Without the distraction of dialogue, the musically-accompanied body becomes the centre of the sequence: Prison masculinity … can be a particular kind of performative, embodied spectacle as much as it is wrapped in mythological fantasy. The hyperbolically masculine bodies it spectacularizes are similar to those iconically celebrated through professional sports and other sorts of masculine genre films. (Schauer 2004: 36) The union of Murphy’s individualistic stance and activity with sport furthers the performative sense of his conventional masculine role. Although his sport is solitary, it is the spectacle of Murphy running (habitually stripped to the waist) which prompts connection with and celebration of his efforts within the prison population, which are manifested particularly in opposition to the white gang led by Dr D (Brian Dennehy). Interspersed within the opening montage are (at first unplaced and inscrutable) details from a mural which dominates the walls of the exercise yard (a hand grasping a

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snake, stylised faces and tags, a blazing sun, a cowled skull). Near the end of the montage, a tilting shot and a track out reveal the mural more comprehensively, and it is seen in long shot on several occasions later in the film. The intercutting of details from the mural in the montage adds an enigmatic and distancing note to the compartmentalised views of the prisoners’ pastimes. As it occupies the only communal space, the mural can be read as a shared view and expression of the experience of incarceration, and therefore as a tonal unifier for the sequence as a whole. Like the graffiti and street art seen in other Mann features, the mural compares the prison to a ghetto or exclusive gang territory on the outside, while its symbolism of death, echoed in part by the tattoos of the white supremacists, suggests a disdain for life, a ‘celebratory nihilism’, and perhaps an acknowledgement of the inherent self-destructiveness of a dedication to crime (Feeney and Duncan 2006: 15). The mural previews the death of Stiles and suggests the futility of hope for Murphy, as higher powers hold sway over the ‘dreams’ and ‘expectations’ of the men. Despite Murphy’s commitment to serving his own time his own way, his running (characterised by Stiles as no more than an attempt to exhaust himself physically and ‘zone out’ from his environment) is appropriated by the official authorities and brings temporary unity to the prison communities. Warden Gulliver (Billy Green Bush) sees a potential message of rehabilitation in Murphy (which is ironic, given that he can never be released). Counsellor Dr Bill Janowski (Geoffrey Lewis) uses the training time to talk therapeutically with Murphy and draw out his own views of his crime (which appears equally futile to Murphy, since he did commit his crime and would do so again in the same circumstances). However, it is as much Murphy’s refusal to repudiate himself and his act as the athletic authorities’ unwillingness to admit a convict to the Olympic team which prevents any visible, external benefit. Instead, the fleeting overcoming of prejudices inside the prison, and the confirmation of Murphy’s potential in beating the best official time, stand as the only vindication. In the comparable final montage sequence which ends the film, similar images of the yard, its re-divided communities and Murphy’s run against the Olympic qualifying time recall but modify the model of the first sequence. If the first montage suggests stratification and ethnic division within the prison, as the factors producing either conformity and unity or non-conformity and individuality, the second montage appears to confirm the re-emergence of prejudices between the prison communities, and the heightened isolation of Murphy, now targeted for revenge by Dr D. However, we might also suggest that, in this sequence as before, paradoxical unities and distinctions (between Murphy and the other inmates irrespective of their gang or ethnic associations, and between Murphy and the normal world outside) are formed by his running the qualifying time behind the walls. Murphy’s subtle linkage with the inmate apparently listening in a private transport to the music we hear as the non-diegetic soundtrack, is strengthened by the use of slow-motion during, and the removal of diegetic sound from, the shots of Murphy’s perfect, personal but pointless run. Murphy has kept his ‘face and name’, but he, his record time and the remains of the smashed watch remain inside the walls. 48

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L.A. Takedown Synopsis: Vincent Hanna is a high-flying, thirty-year-old Los Angeles homicide detective. His constant commitment to his career threatens his relationship with Lillian, who tries to support him through the stresses of his work. Patrick McLaren is the leader of a gang undertaking profitable but dangerous robberies. Hanna begins to follow and investigate McLaren’s crew after an armoured car hold-up ends in multiple murders. McLaren attempts to kill Waingro, a psychopathic criminal responsible for the killings, but he escapes to take revenge by betraying the gang to the police. Having left Lillian, Hanna immerses himself in the hunt for McLaren, who has begun a relationship with Eady. When the two men meet by accident they build up a rapport, while sharing their regret that work makes meaningful relationships unattainable. Because of information leaked by Waingro, the gang is ambushed during the next heist. McLaren does not try to escape the police and tracks Waingro down, but is killed before Hanna arrives. Hanna completes McLaren’s revenge by killing Waingro himself. L.A. Takedown is the first concrete incarnation of the long-standing Heat script written by Mann, which was developed early in his career as a project for him to produce for another director. Although eventually realised as a television movie, the interest in this project resides in its formulation as an abbreviated prototype for the final form of the feature-length cinematic version: The emphasis here is more on narrative drive than character. ‘A very superficial dress rehearsal’ is how the director himself described the film. Shot in little over a fortnight, it’s a brisk little thriller, enjoyable in its own right, but fascinating as a trial run for the real thing. (Kermode and Macnab 1996: 58) As this review suggests, L.A. Takedown is a functional television movie, made with a view to becoming the pilot for another crime-oriented American series, but which in retrospect represents an incomplete and dissatisfying contraction of the action and themes fully explored in Heat. Nick James has examined the omissions, changes and curtailing of the script in comparison with the later feature, and notes how the shorter, earlier version pales in comparison with the grandeur and detail of the later one (2002: 84–87). Remakes and specific reappraisals of past works occurred in the output of other self-scrutinising filmmakers (Alfred Hitchcock, Cecil B. DeMille, Yasujiro Ozu) even before the era of the corrective ‘director’s cut’, but in the case of L.A. Takedown what is most significant is the conscious and concrete deviation in the realisation of essentially the same narrative, which is dictated by the demands and formal attributes of the different mediums. Mann discusses at length the differences in concept and execution between the two versions in an interview recorded with the BBC after the release of Heat, which accompanied the first broadcast of L.A. Takedown on British television.7 He reveals the provenance of the Heat screenplay, which was originally written in the late 1970s, and redrafted following the making of Thief. Walter Hill, the director v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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of the crime thriller The Driver (1978) and study of urban gangs The Warriors (1979) was approached to direct the film in this form, but declined. The script was abridged by roughly 30 percent of its length (110 pages down from 180) in 1988–9 for the making of L.A. Takedown. The details of the pre-production, shooting schedule and final form of the television movie reflect this truncation of the screenplay’s subplots, to suit an unswerving television narrative momentum. The focus on fewer and less well-developed characters and the consequent deletion of much of the ‘structure of verses and choruses’ fully explored in Heat, were demanded by the much-reduced running time (L.A. Takedown is more than an hour shorter than Heat). In parallel with the distinctions between ‘A’ and ‘B’ picture criteria in the classical era, the ten-day period of preparation and 19-day shoot of L.A. Takedown stand in contrast to the six months of pre-production work undertaken for Heat prior to its 107-day shooting schedule. For the director, L.A. Takedown represented the chance to ‘shoot a prototype, like opening a play in New Haven before you take it to New York City’, an opportunity he admitted he would like for every production. The distinctions Mann draws highlight the fundamental operational differences between the working environments and products of television and film in the 1980s and 1990s, and also prompt further comparisons with classical cinema which have bearings on the formal and commercial aspects of these two films. The making of L.A. Takedown for the small screen results in a visual execution which differs in concept as well as scale from the cinematic format of Heat. The widescreen images which distinguish Mann’s films before and after the production of L.A. Takedown are characterised by irregular and imbalanced framings, compositions conceived in depth as well as breadth and marked by conspicuous deployment of monotonal and accentual colours, and the deliberate and pertinent inclusion of striking architectural features. The essential differences between cinematic and televisual practices affect the techniques and impetus of the narrative. Mann, as producer and writer of screenplays for both mediums, is well placed to comment on the practicalities of adapting scripts to meet these specific demands: ‘in television, events are the story: the actual plotting has to drive faster because it’s events and people talking that deliver impact.’ At the same time, the graphic limitations of the television image (which in the late 1980s before the advent of widescreen television, was essentially similar in proportion to the Academy Ratio frame of studio-era Hollywood) represent a considerable restriction to a filmmaker preferring the bigger and differently proportioned canvas of the widescreen format: ‘the small screen doesn’t give you anything of the cityscape of L.A. It gives you nothing, it gives you a little tunnel. Television cannot surround you with experience.’8 The environment of Los Angeles is significant in both productions, not just in realist terms but also in symbolic and connotative ones. The effects of the different aesthetic conditions pertaining to film and television can be seen in the comparison of the scenes in both versions in which the bank robbers appear to case their next score but in fact draw out the LAPD into their own surveillance. In L.A. Takedown, the gang meets in a claustrophobic city square bounded by stone stairs and buildings with vertical columns. The establishing shot tilting down from the skyline to street level is quickly replaced by a tight group shot of the gang members talking against the pale 50

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concrete backdrop. By contrast, the locations of Heat span the downtown areas and the ‘industrial core’ of the city: the gang pretend to plan against a skyline of cranes in the L.A. docks, and the cops are clearly delineated, with foreshortened figures and elongated shadows, against the expanse of the container storage area. The effect is almost western-like in composition, in suggesting the purpose and command of male figures on a concrete plain flanked by man-made mountains. Where Mann uses the full breadth of the widescreen frame for landscapes in The Last of the Mohicans, and for divisive, combative interior compositions such as offices and the Japanese restaurant in The Insider, the diverse city locations used in Heat (recalling those of Thief and anticipating those of Collateral) showcase the metaphorical use of urban settings. Industrial, commercial and suburban environments appear for the purposes of authenticity and allusiveness, aggrandising the conflict in which the characters engage while diminishing them in the frame. The scale of the differences between L.A. Takedown and Heat is appreciable principally in the differences of scale: comparing the key sequences which both productions share (for example, the two heist scenes) reveals the tight economy in the staging of the television movie. In L.A. Takedown the opening armoured car hold-up sequence lasts less than five minutes and consists of 80 shots, nearly half of which depict the rifling of the truck, Waingro’s loss of control of the guards and the fatal shootings. The comparable sequence in Heat lasts well over six minutes and consumes 145 shots. The differences in staging are also noteworthy. In L.A. Takedown the heist occurs in an underpass, with the crew wearing black masks and using a refuse truck to ram the armoured car. In comparison, the planning and audacity of the robbery in Heat is signalled by its taking place at a highway intersection, with the crew wearing white masks and using a stolen ambulance and recovery truck. In L.A. Takedown and Heat, the bank robbery sequences occupy 7 minutes 30 seconds (153 shots) and 11 minutes 47 seconds (343 shots) respectively, with more than 200 shots being used in the gun battle in Heat (between Chris opening fire and the death of Michael). Throughout these action sequences, the versions in L.A. Takedown are consistently shallower in focus, tighter in composition and more limited in their framing, epitomising the ‘tunnel’ vision Mann describes and which contrasts with the surround-vision as much as surround-sound of Heat’s widescreen spectacle. Aside from these comparisons with the subsequent production of Heat, L.A. Takedown contains a montage sequence which is highly evocative of the music video precedents of Miami Vice, but which also offers a depiction of the Los Angeles cityscape to contrast with that of the later film. The sequence shows Hanna’s night of following leads after the opening robbery, while he waits to hear back from his informant Harvey (Juan Fernandez). The sequence comprises 35 shots and starts after McLaren’s (Alex McArthur) failure to kill Waingro (Xander Berkeley), when Hanna’s night and the accompanying track (a cover version of The Doors’ ‘L.A. Woman’ by Billy Idol) begin. The song, which recurs throughout the film and accompanies the end credits, displaces all diegetic sound from the montage. The first image is of blurred lines of street lights at night, which are gradually brought into focus, before a cut to a panning shot following Hanna’s car speeding v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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LA Takedown: skyscrapers

LA Takedown: freeway junction

past the camera. A close-up from inside his car shows Hanna driving, stopping, and questioning his fences. This is succeeded by an aerial view vertically down on a freeway at night, a pan over neon street signs, and another cut to another aerial view of the freeway. After another alternation between images of Hanna in his car and the aerial view of the freeway, a shot of a mural introduces the third note in the montage, with the intercutting of street art. The macro- and microcosms of the city are shown in juxtapositions of an aerial shot of myriad lights rippling on the reflective windows of a skyscraper, and a long shot of an ambulance in traffic at street level. After another cut back to Hanna in his car, we return to the aerial view, followed by a shot of traffic then a shot of another mural (as seen from a moving vehicle). A rapid tracking shot with lens flare shows a rank of parked cars beneath an advertising hoarding bearing the imperative ‘GET A GRIP’. Amongst the repeated juxtapositions of Hanna and the traffic, and the ground level and aerial shots of the city which balance the montage, there are repeated insertions of graffiti which assume an equal importance. These shots are also, within the rapid tempo of the montage, privileged with a longer duration in order for their impact to register. Although the narrative shorthand of the musical montage is evident and comparable with the style established by Miami Vice (in condensing and quickening Hanna’s hectic night against the vibrant visual clichés of the city environment), the inclusion of the graffiti images prompts a recognition of their peculiarity within the montage as a whole. While they stand as obvious invocations of the modern urban environment, redolent of both popular cultural penetration and homogenisation and territorial, ethnic and socio-economic division, their meaning here, as with their appearance in 52

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LA Takedown: graffiti

many other contexts in Mann’s work, necessitates further consideration. In the film of Miami Vice, the alienness and danger of Yero’s territory and business is signalled by the profusion of images on the walls of the basement where Ricardo and Sonny meet him for the first time. On Waingro’s (Kevin Gage) first appearance in Heat, a mural outside the Mexican coffee shop is seen in a rapid moving shot before he joins Michael in the truck. Before the montage in L.A. Takedown, a mural is revealed behind Hanna when he exits the last shot of the crime scene analysis sequence which follows the armoured car hold-up. A wall of graffiti provides the background to Hanna’s arrival at the club in Heat when he meets with his informant to find out about ‘Slick’. These instances in the setting of Los Angeles warrant comparison with the integration of the mural of the Grim Reaper in the montage of The Jericho Mile, as thematic commentary rather than simply authenticating detail in a chosen location. Like the prison tattoos on display in The Jericho Mile, the graffiti and the murals seen here and elsewhere in Mann’s films seem to serve as indicators of the menace pervading certain settings, being part of an individualistic expression and exclusive code belonging to a separate and bellicose community. However, rather than seeing the inclusion of these examples as simply the exotic dressing of urban dramas, they can be read as both realist details and articulating elements within the narratives in which they appear. Rybin describes the significance of the Folsom mural in this way: That the Reaper painting has been introduced to us in fragments in much the same manner that the various racial and ethnic groups have been introduced … suggests that the painting’s meaning is relative to the particular point of view from which it is seen. An individual viewer’s reaction to a painting of Death is likely to be different from that of the individual who created the work, especially when that individual is a prisoner. By including images of the Reaper in the context of a rhythmic montage which also intertwines fragmented images of individuals and racial groups, Mann and his editing team suggest that the painting’s meaning is determined by one’s particular position in society. (Rybin 2007: 33) Within the examples mentioned above, the various forms of street art which are purposefully included may appear to suggest the danger and decline of the urban v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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environment (through its association with criminals and those who must navigate the city’s spaces to combat and contain them), but the dynamism apparent in the immersion of both Vincent Hannas suggests that the graffiti is an integral, empowered and empowering element to the city which provides the men’s professional purpose. The connection between Mann’s characters and the self-styled art of their environm–ent provides a parallel to their own self-fashioning and definitions of value within the culturally, economically, emotionally and morally challenging environment of the city. Although graffiti may have positive and negative connotations, it is noticeable that the images of advertising also present in public spaces are incorporated in a similar fashion. The injunction on the hoarding in the L.A. Takedown montage fits the steadily increasing tempo of Hanna’s evening of investigation, and the empowerment by and ownership of the city he exhibits is paralleled by the rapid panning aerial shots of the urban landscape (anticipating similar scenes in Heat). Conversely, in The Insider, the advertising hoardings seen above and behind Wigand’s car while he and Lowell Bergman discuss the moral dilemma of working for ‘big tobacco’, indicate the pervasive influence and tacit threat of corporate America. Ironically in Thief, when Barry (James Belushi) covers Frank’s (James Caan) meeting with the crime syndicate boss Leo (Robert Prosky), he does so from a rooftop dominated by another advertising hoarding, the image (anticipating the example from The Insider) inevitably rhyming together different forms of corporate oppression. Although fascinating as a ‘prototype’ for a later, larger production, the significance of L.A. Takedown in Mann’s output is not limited to its exploration of emblematic materials in an unfinished or compromised form. The brevity and economy of the production reveal not only the differences in modern media and their prospective audiences, but also suggest how the virtues and approaches of the classical era have persisted in the dialogue-driven, self-censored and aesthetically constrained milieu of television. In being a movie script shrunk to fit into television, its use of the televisual staple of the musical sequence also provides a telling contrast to the result of the reverse process, the film version of Miami Vice. Miami Vice Synopsis: Ricardo Tubbs and Sonny Crockett are detectives within the Miami Dade Police vice squad, investigating drugs and prostitution. When the family of one of their informers is murdered by a white supremacist drug gang, they are drawn into an FBI undercover operation seeking to crack a Colombian drug cartel. Posing as drug transporters, Sonny and Ricardo go into business with the Colombian organisation, but their investigation is endangered by Sonny’s infatuation with Isabella, the financial and sexual partner of the drug lord Jésus Montoya. Montoya’s henchman José Yero, jealous and suspicious of Sonny, uses the white supremacists to kidnap Trudy, another member of the vice squad and Ricardo’s lover. Trudy is rescued by the police, but is then critically injured by a bomb activated by Yero, who also takes Isabella hostage. Sonny and Ricardo confront Yero in a night-time shoot-out and rescue in which the cops’ true identities are revealed. Crockett renounces his love for Isabella and makes 54

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sure she escapes arrest, but Montoya disappears and is never brought to justice. As Trudy recovers, Sonny returns to join Ricardo at the hospital. Like Thief, and unlike Collateral, Miami Vice begins in media res, with one investigation already in progress (a Miami Dade vice squad sting operation against Haitian prostitution) but interrupted almost immediately by another initiated by a phone call from Alonso Stevens (John Hawkes), a confidential informant who Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs had handed over to the FBI six months earlier. The film starts without titles, opening the action in a Miami nightclub in a fashion which seems to rely upon an assumed familiarity with the Miami Vice concept and characters, as if neither require introduction. This approach is remarkable given the potential difficulty of positioning an audience for this movie version of the 1980s television series. Arguably an audience versed in the lore of the series could require some lip service be paid to the reappearance of Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs in the new millennium, in a substantially altered, though still vice-ridden environment. Of necessity the characters are conceived very differently: the official record seen in the film when accessed by the FBI shows Sonny’s birthday to be 2nd July 1970. Equally, an audience unfamiliar with the series might require some exposition to grasp the events already at play in the club in the opening scenes. The familiar but revised setting and characters seen from the outset define this filmmaking project not as a nostalgic remake of or homage to a televisual precedent (examples of which have populated mainstream cinema since the end of the 1990s), but more as an alternative, a significantly divergent incarnation from the series blueprint. The opening nightclub scenes tend towards defamiliarisation in their deliberately unenlightening introduction to the vice squad members and their operation. The scenes are blanketed with soundtrack music (beginning with Linkin Park and Jay Z’s ‘Numb/Encore’) which is motivated by the club setting. Sonny and Trudy (Naomie Harris) are seen loitering near to the bar. Tubbs is standing nearby and (partly because the music obscures Sonny’s and Trudy’s verbal exchange), he seems at first to be the object of the others’ surveillance: there is almost an echo here of the character’s introduction in the television series pilot, as a stranger appearing in Miami bent on private vengeance who arouses Sonny’s suspicion. In subsequent shots, Gina (Elizabeth Rodriguez), Zito (Justin Theroux) and Switek (Domenick Lombardozzi) are shown engaged in different activities in the same location: Gina is another part of the team in the club crowd, Zito is setting up surveillance equipment for the sting, and Switek is playing the part of the Haitian pimp’s customer. Gina and Zito are differentiated in the Miami Vice: Ricardo, Sonny and Trudy

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Miami Vice: Gina

club locale by focus racking in the shots in which they first appear, the former being isolated in the background from blurred dancers in the foreground, and the latter identified in the crowd by his face coming into focus. Conversely, Switek is seen briefly in an entirely separate and unknown location connected to the club and the rest of the team only by the continuing soundtrack. The relationships, if any, between these characters, and between their activities and the evolving sting, all remain unexplained at this point. The anonymisation of these characters made familiar by the longevity of the series appears as part of a deliberate tactic of redrafting the principles of the television template for the cinema. This film’s relationship to the 1980s’ series is largely limited to the recurrence of these character names: the Miami locations themselves are chosen and depicted differently, and the bulk of the action is exported to Cuban, Central and South American locations in an additional distancing from the original. The film’s opening also distances itself consciously from the television series in its concentration on viewing the Miami environment at night. Where Collateral carries its action through from dusk until dawn, Miami Vice opens at night, and its expository sequences (the nightclub sting, the rooftop conversations, the car chase resulting in Alonso’s death, the initiation of cooperation with the FBI, and the armed seizure of the drug shipment) occupy the first 19 minutes (or around 14 percent of its running time). The colouration of this opening segment resembles the pallet of Collateral more than the original series, and after the extended Cuban and Central American sequences making up the main body of the film, it ends on another Miami night progressing into morning with the climactic shoot-out, Isabella’s escape and Sonny’s return to the fold. However, in emulation of the television series, Miami Vice foregrounds the musicvideo-like sequences associated with the 1980s’ original in key stylised segments from its opening scenes onwards. The majority of these sequences are tied closely to the Sonny-Isabella plot line, the most obvious examples being their boat ride to Cuba and their parting in the film’s closing scenes. The boat ride scene starts with an over-the-shoulder shot from Yero’s perspective, already registering the suspicion and jealousy that will characterise his view of Isabella and Sonny. (Yero’s selective and perceptive point of view on Isabella and Sonny frames a later, brief musical sequence when he watches them dance to Emilio Estefan’s ‘Pennies in My Pocket’.) Yero’s face is blurred in the right foreground as Sonny’s catamaran departs in focus in the background, and the Moby/Patti LaBelle song ‘One of These Mornings’ begins on the soundtrack underneath the diegetic sound and dialogue. The conversation occupying the journey to Havana signals and 56

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Miami Vice: Yero watches Sonny and Isabella

offers the same ideas of escape as the song’s lyrics, as Isabella asserts her independence from the head of the drug cartel Jésus Montoya (Luis Tosar). The musical accompaniment, Sonny’s acceleration of the boat and the views of the craft from multiple angles provide the metaphors for the liberation which the relationship offers. Musically and visually, the boat trip segues rapidly into a dance scene in the Havana bar and a sex scene accompanied by Audioslave’s ‘Shape of Things to Come’. This music returns for Sonny and Isabella’s drive away from the final shoot-out. In a short montage punctuated by crossfades, Sonny drives her from the city to a safe house at daybreak. The music continues while they await her transport out of Florida, and the action cuts to police and military forces entering Montoya’s now-deserted retreat in the Colombian jungle. After this track fades out, the end of Sonny and Isabella’s relationship and her departure by boat are intercut with Trudy’s recovery in hospital. Gradually another track (Mogwai’s ‘Auto Rock’) fades in during their last embrace, their exchange of glances between boat and shore, and Ricardo’s reactions as Trudy regains consciousness. This track ends after Sonny’s arrival at the hospital and the appearance of the film’s title, at which time Nonpoint’s cover version of ‘In the Air Tonight’ rises to accompany the end credits. The occurrence of this track in an updated form is significant, as the original song was included in the first musically-accompanied Miami Vice: final montage

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sequence in the series of Miami Vice, occurring in the pilot episode ‘Brother’s Keeper’ (Part II) from 1984. Its reappearance is one of the film’s few discernible invocations of the original series. Although musically-accompanied sequences occur throughout Mann’s films and, since the 1980s, have come to pervade mainstream cinema via compilation scores consisting of collected popular tracks in place of original recordings, their conspicuous inclusion in the cinematic remake of Miami Vice represents a recognition of the influence of the television precedent, which is otherwise rather under-acknowledged in the film’s re-imagining. Their association with Sonny’s and Isabella’s relationship, albeit enhanced by the presence in the relevant sequences of style icons and aspirational consumer items such as cars and speedboats, underlines the fact that style and appearance can be definitive as often as deceptive, and that the relevance of outward show is thematically central to the undercover storyline. The sequence which incorporated ‘In the Air Tonight’ in the original series depicted Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs driving to an undercover rendezvous, during which Sonny stopped to telephone his ex-wife for an assurance that their past happiness ‘was real’. In utilising pop tracks for mutual commercial benefit, the compilation score risks distracting from the film it accompanies by evoking the ‘associational baggage’ of the music, but equally can rely on examples of ‘musical allusion’ to ‘either comment on the action or suggest the director’s attitude toward the characters, settings, and themes of the film’ (Smith 1998: 164, 168). In using cover versions of recognisable songs (by The Doors in L.A. Takedown, by Joy Division in Heat, by Phil Collins in Miami Vice), Mann’s soundtracks not only foreground the expressive interplay of sound and image which he sought as producer of the television series, but emphasise the status of the films within his own stylistic and thematic canon. They stand as connective popular cultural texts and intertexts, but also and more importantly as self-conscious ‘cover versions’ remade by the original (film) artist. Conclusion Gestures which earlier filmmakers would have considered flagrantly self-conscious – arcing camera, big close-ups, the flourishes of a Welles or Hitchcock – have become default values in ordinary scenes and minor movies. Interestingly, this more outré technique doesn’t prevent us from comprehending the story. Having become accustomed to a new overtness of narration, we seem to have set the threshold for obtrusiveness higher. (Bordwell 2002: 25) In the context of American filmmaking from the 1970s to the present, Mann’s visual style can be seen as influential and distinctive, and yet also as contemporary and representative, being attuned as much to the director’s own generic, thematic and existentialist concerns as to the tastes and trends of his peers and audiences. The impact of Mann’s style can be seen not only in the ability to define decades in filmmaking and popular cultural reference (as, for example, in the cases of Miami Vice and Manhunter in the 1980s), but also to inflect the work of others: 58

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Mann’s treatment of Harris’s novel set loose his talent for creating transcendent moods and a thoroughgoing image system […] Manhunter was a very glossy product for 1986. It’s [sic] hi-tech look was matched at the time only by William Friedkin’s cops-‘n’-coke thriller To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), which also starred William Petersen and looks rather like a Mann film. (James 2002: 23) From this perspective, Friedkin’s 1980s’ thriller, though perceived as an ‘attempt to fashion a West Coast equivalent’ to his earlier and equally harsh and violent detective film The French Connection (1971), appears more directly inspired by the precedent of Mann’s film, as for example in its incorporation of a score composed by a contemporary group (Anon. 1985a). From another, Friedkin’s film embodies the piecemeal, selfconscious appropriation of thematic and stylistic gestures (from MTV, Martin Scorsese and Mann, as well as precedents from Friedkin’s own previous work) which epitomises contemporary Hollywood, and produces ‘a fetid movie hybrid: Miami Vile’ (Anon. 1985b). However, while such aspects of Mann’s style have appeared to be related to and evocative of specific eras (the musically accompanied pop video sequences derived from the appearance of MTV and strongly associated with the television series Miami Vice), they have persisted in the director’s output and that of his filmmaking contemporaries, while also becoming institutionalised in subsequent generations of television drama (as seen in the multiplying CSI series). Within the contemporary filmmaking context, in which emphasised techniques and conspicuous style are promoted as both mainstream narrational norms and recognisable and readable directorial signatures, Mann’s output illustrates an increasing difficulty in categorisation, authorship and spectatorship. While the director’s working methods and the degree of artistic control he evinces over his work are redolent of an auteurist and independent stance towards filmmaking and the mainstream, his films exhibit the critically bifurcated narrative/thematic concerns of classically-derived genre filmmaking and the characterisation/philosophical territory of the art cinema. At the same time, Mann’s style, in keeping with the groundswell of contemporary film style, has absorbed and deployed the self-conscious and subjective, realist and distancing techniques of the art film alongside heightened and intensified, affective and visceral narrational techniques of the contemporary mainstream, in which his films are produced and consumed. Although other filmmakers (for example, Jim Jarmusch and Steven Soderbergh) negotiate and bridge similar oppositions and contradictions in their work, their stance towards genre appears more ironic (as in Jarmusch’s Dead Man [1995], and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai: [1999]), and their manipulation of art cinema precedents more affected (as in Soderbergh’s The Limey [1999] and Solaris [2002]). Mann’s markedly ­unironic stance towards genre conventions, especially when they are united with art cinema’s humanistic and existential concerns, appears to set him apart from the self-conscious, deprecatory approach to generic materials seen in American films of the 1960s and 1970s, and yet also distinguishes him from the knowing, postmodernist deployment of convention in the wider contemporary cinema. In the crime films for which he is best known, but equally within other generic territories represented by Ali and The Insider, Mann’s work evinces the ‘fruitful crossv i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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fertilizations of modernist concerns and popular narrative forms’ realised in the ‘modernist thriller’ (Siska 1988: 365). His filmmaking seems to maintain the art cinema thematic emphases of the American cinema of the 1970s, and to exhibit the subjective techniques of visual narration associated with art cinema concerns. At the same time, it does not fully reflect or imitate the modernist tendencies of 1960s’ American cinema, or the postmodernist characteristics of knowing, referential and allusive American filmmaking from the 1980s onwards. While it can be seen to follow, parallel or even influence stylistic trends in contemporary cinema, Mann’s filmmaking also represents an individually conceived focus of current style, enduring genre materials and abiding philosophical and cultural concerns. Although there are similarities to be explored between Mann’s work and those of his contemporaries across several decades of American filmmaking (the work of Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur Penn across the 1970s and 1980s; Jim Jarmusch, Steven Soderbergh, the Coen brothers and Quentin Tarantino since the 1990s), the amalgam of action and art which his films display bears comparison with the work of Akira Kurosawa. Straddling definitions of art film and genre cinema further complicated by varying receptions in Japan and in the West, Kurosawa’s films provide a similarly contradictory combination of engaging narrative and overt style, and action which is integral rather than secondary to philosophical significance. With Seven Samurai (1954), Kurosawa delivers a story based on human action (the battle to save a village) which reveals private choice (the personal motives driving each fighter) and articulates individual philosophies (aspiration, altruism, pragmatism, stoicism). Kurosawa’s oeuvre remains watchable as the work of an expert exponent of action and genre, but endures and stimulates moral, humanistic and philosophical debates on the basis of its thematic intensity and consistency, and the announcements of his overt style: the ubiquity of the wipe as his preferred, self-reflexive and elliptical editing transition, the presence of cuts within rapid tracking shots as when the samurai run into action, and jump cuts which compress time and distance, as when the villagers approach the watermill. The viewer’s associated activities, which the interdependence of action, idea and technique demand in Kurosawa’s films, are mirrored in and comparable to the intensification of narrative via style seen in Mann’s films, and the compelling contemporary cinema to which they contribute: For such reasons, the new style suggests we can’t adequately describe the viewer’s activity with spatial metaphors like ‘absorption’ and ‘detachment.’ At any moment, stylistic tactics may come forward, but viewers remain in the grip of the action. The mannerism of today’s cinema would seem to ask its spectators to take a higher degree of narrational overtness for granted, to let a few familiar devices amplify each point, to revel in still more flamboyant displays of technique – all the while surrendering to the story’s expressive undertow. (Bordwell 2002: 25)

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Notes 1

2

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4 5

6 7

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Tony Scott’s entry in this group, entitled ‘Beat the Devil’, stars Gary Oldman, Clive Owen and James Brown, and with a running time of nearly ten minutes achieves an average shot length of 1.5 seconds. The cinematographer was Paul Cameron, who worked with Mann on Collateral. Mann’s and Fincher’s Nike commercials are available to view for comparison at: http://www.ropeofsilicon.com/article/michael_mann_vs_david_fincher_nike_ football_challenge_20081012 (Accessed 7/7/2010). This track is the violin jig used in the night scenes between Nathaniel and Cora in Fort William Henry, and over the deaths of Uncas and Alice at the film’s climax. It is based, like the film’s main title, on Dougie MacLean’s piece ‘The Gael’, from his 1990 album The Search, which was adapted by Trevor Jones for the film soundtrack. I am indebted to Dr Peter Walsh for detecting this detail. This and subsequent quotations from Dante Spinotti in interview are taken from ‘The Manhunter Look’ (dir. David Gregory, De Laurentiis Entertainment Group Inc., 1996), featurette accompanying the DVD release of the Director’s Cut of Manhunter (Momentum Pictures, 2003). Michael Mann in interview: ‘Mann Made: from L.A. Takedown to Heat’. Producer Nick Freand Jones (UK, tx BBC2, 23 February 1997). Michael Mann in interview: ‘Mann Made: from L.A. Takedown to Heat’ (1997). Subsequent quotations and details of the production of L.A. Takedown are taken from this source. Although using varying processes (Super 35, Panavision and most recently digital cameras), all of Mann’s feature films since Manhunter have been shot in the 2.35:1 ratio. L.A. Takedown and The Jericho Mile were in the 1.33:1 ratio, though the latter film (like Thief) circulated in 1.85:1 for its theatrical release.

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CHAPTER TWO

Pursuing the Professional: Thief, Heat, Collateral

Because criminals are outlaws, they operate outside of the rules and expectations by which we define ourselves as a society. But because they exist within our society, they threaten those codes that give our lives order and security […] Either way the outlaw pressures us to decide who we are and what we stand for. (Pauly 1997: 776) Since the 1970s Mann has been most strongly associated (as writer, director and producer) with the representation of crime, on television as well as film, and his output in this area can be seen to work and rework a web of interrelated themes and characters. His repeated depictions of the compulsive vocations of law-breaking and law-enforcement are the outgrowths of the personifications and archetypes of driven, obsessive criminals, police officers and investigators with which he populates modern, geographically specific and yet seemingly boundless, megalopolitan environments. (Mann’s portrayals of crime and consequently his visual style have become defined by the depictions of cities: Chicago in Thief and Public Enemies; Los Angeles in Heat and Collateral; Miami in television and film incarnations of Miami Vice). While Mann’s narrative environment is frequently overcrowded, and family groups, couples and professional communities are always present, the emotional and existential emphasis, and often the mise-en-scène, remains focused on the individual, and his (since it is always a male) assertion of a solitary place, a personal status and a privately coded order within (or more accurately, apart from) the group or the mass. This enduring narrative endeavour within Mann’s canon can be seen to maintain, recapitulate and extend not just the director’s own thematic concerns, but also to reiterate the premise and broaden the territory of the classical gangster film, in order to incorporate and revise aspects of the heist movie and the police procedural drama. In this study of (male) isolation, elitism and selfactualisation through skilled action, Mann also appears as ‘American cinema’s natural successor to Howard Hawks’ (Kelly 2004: 50). 62

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The perfect realisation and expression of individual skill and personal belief crystallise as the goals of many of Mann’s characters, across many represented eras and within distinct genres (for example, for Nathaniel the scout in The Last of the Mohicans as well as for Lowell Bergman the journalist in The Insider) and across apparently insurmountable moral divisions (for example, for both the serial killer and the pursuing FBI investigator in Manhunter). However, it is within Mann’s crime dramas that the nature and consequence of professional expertise and career-based activity assume sociological and communal as well as individual significance, and act as the definitive criteria for creating and identifying meaning within human existence. Principles of individual value upheld by Mann’s protagonists are defined, defended and often defeated within a modern lived environment which is inhospitable, even antithetical to the aspirations of personal fulfilment. It is possible to see in Mann’s protagonists the full spectrum of activities and responses Irwin Yalom summarises as common human solutions to the need for meaning in existence: altruism; dedication to a cause; creativity; hedonism; self-actualisation; and self-transcendence (1980: 431–40). These courses and motivations do not hold any intrinsic value: the apparent negativity and selfishness of hedonism can belie a full exploration of the human condition, and may lead to a greater level of communal or even spiritual understanding; likewise, the positivity of altruistic action or dedication to a cause may actually derive from an insatiable or egotistical drive for self-actualisation. Thus the hedonism and self-actualisation of which Mann’s criminal characters appear guilty are also shared by his law enforcers. Professionalism and perfectionism on both sides can rank as creativity and dedication to a cause, as the individuals exonerate themselves of guilt and responsibility to others on the basis of their dedication to higher codes and principles of conduct: Vincent Hanna’s preservation of his ‘angst’, vice Neil McCauley’s repetition of the mantra which enshrines asceticism and desertion as a ‘discipline’. Professionalism (defined as the specifically encoded enactment of a vocation, conceived as both an ideology and skill set) on either side of the law is seen as preferable to deference to the values of conventional society, even when (in Thief) criminal activity is chosen paradoxically as the route to the acquisition of a stable domesticity, and even where (in Heat) law enforcement activity is putatively devoted to the defence of consensual social values: Heat is a film about work and its increasing personal costs. For the characters in Heat, work provides excitement and challenge, but it ultimately excludes any emotional life outside the demands of the job […] Their work – what it is, how they go about it, how they like it, what distracts them, and, especially, what they have to sacrifice to keep doing it – takes centre stage in the film and in the lives of the characters. (Lindstrom 2000: 21, 22) The implications of this preference for and elevation of work in lifestyle are reflected in their meticulously planned actions, and are verbalised in examples of infrequent and idiosyncratic male speech. Through the physical performance of individually deterv i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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mined roles (both the criminal ‘act’ and its attempted prevention), Mann’s characters redefine, qualify and deny moral and behavioural norms. For Thief and Heat, the indicative conventional model is the heist movie, which examines the motivation, conception, preparation, execution and aftermath of a highprofile ‘score’ (such as a bank robbery, complex safecracking operation or hold-up). Although there are numerous discernible models, precedents and influences, The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950) and The Killing (Stanley Kubrick, 1956) can be used for comparative purposes in order to highlight the structure and problematic morality of Mann’s films. The prominence of heist movies from the 1950s onwards reflects the decline of the Hays Code restrictions of the classical era, which hitherto had inhibited the detailed representation of criminal practices (Maltby 1996: 235–48). The Asphalt Jungle charts the preparation and undertaking of a safecracking operation, a project nurtured by a recently released and ageing criminal mastermind but financed by a gambling operator and a corrupt businessman. The other gang members recruited for the heist are a safecracker (who wishes to support his growing family with his take) and a gunman (who wishes to leave the urban environment and buy a farm in order to return to the rural idyll of his childhood). The film’s narrative inspires compassion for the gang: the robbery is portrayed as an essentially victimless crime, and the individual goals stated by the gang are uncontroversial, nurturing or idealistic. The robbery also represents a last offence and a final chance for escape and happiness for all its members. However, the gang’s planning and expertise are undone by bad luck during the heist and by treachery when the stolen goods are taken to their backers. The leader is recaptured, and both the safecracker and gunman are fatally wounded, the latter dying in a meadow after a futile attempt at escape back to the rural environment of his youth. The perceptible sympathy for the criminals in this narrative resides in their conventional motives for financial gain (the erasing of debts, support of family and escape from urban corruption). However, the tragic denial of these objectives in death and imprisonment is inseparable from an innate judgement of criminality. By contrast, the dishonest businessman is allowed the dignity of suicide. In the words of the investigating police officer, the jungle of the title is not a corrupting environment responsible for the downfall of the gang, but a contested space, marked by minority antisocial behaviour which the police are tasked with containing. The conservatism of the police chief ’s closing speech, which punctuates the scenes of the gunman’s death, justifies the gang’s dissolution as simultaneously pitiable tragedy and inevitable punishment. A similar pattern (of scrupulous preparation overtaken by fate and individual weakness) is present in The Killing, albeit with a more dispassionate, observational stance towards the ignominious fates of the gang members. The complication of the plot’s linear progression, in juxtaposing disparate but synchronised events, can be seen as an influence on the self-conscious structuring of Quentin Tarantino’s heist movies (Reservoir Dogs [1991], and Jackie Brown [1997]), but Kubrick’s clinical and impartial scrutiny of a crime differs from Tarantino’s provocatively non-judgemental stance. Although the protagonists’ entrapment and fate within the heist movie model evoke noir-ish comparisons and implications, Mann’s films avoid the heterosexual betrayals (if not all the distractions) of more conspicuous noir-heist hybrids such as 64

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Criss Cross (Robert Siodmak, 1948). The sense of tragedy alloyed with inevitable and justified punishment in the heist movie persists into later and non-American examples (such as The Criminal, Joseph Losey, 1960), but undergoes a gradual but fundamental alteration in later decades. While expertise in crime remains paramount, it can be appropriated by non-criminals as a form of class and consumerist satire (Fun With Dick and Jane, Ted Kotcheff, 1976) or as an indication of seductive wealth and virility (The Thomas Crown Affair, Norman Jewison, 1968/John McTiernan, 1999). Inexpert failure in the heist, even where crime is motivated by similar and sympathetic desires, can become the basis for slapstick comedy (Welcome to Collinwood, Anthony and Joe Russo, 2002). However, the representation of ineptitude in the heist movie also becomes associated with overt social and political commentary: amateurs commit crime for reasons other than the simply financial. Desperate protagonists are seen to be driven to criminal extremes by social and racial inequalities, but find these injustices reaffirmed by the punishments meted out by the establishment (in Dog Day Afternoon, Sidney Lumet, 1975 and Dead Presidents, the Hughes brothers, 1995). In these examples, sympathy and active support for the criminals is expressed within the diegesis (notably by a vociferous general public in Lumet’s film), with the result that criminal activity becomes imbued with a revolutionary fervour. The heist movie’s abiding fixation on proficiency and a professional unity of action in pursuit of a specified goal are central to Mann’s crime films. As such the heist movie formula extends the moral ambiguities and social criticism inherent within the antecedent gangster genre, in foregrounding and justifying the work of crime. The enhancement of professional expertise is foregrounded not as one characteristic but as the dominant and defining element of male characters. The realisation of personal (masculine) identity is accomplished through vocational activity, and this refinement of action (in the protagonists’ evaluation) peripheralises or discounts moral and legal distinctions: The heist film frequently depicts ambition, work ethic, and the use of skills by the criminals that would be valued in the legal world of work, but these qualities are used instead in the service of crime. The effort to develop a detailed plan, gathering of workers with specific and diverse talents, search for financing, meticulous preparation, trial runs, and concentration and precisiontiming required for the heist itself – all these sound much like legitimate work. (Lindstrom 2000: 25) As well as their meticulousness and diligence, one distinguishing feature of the criminal groups in Mann’s films is their continuity. The crews are not assembled for specific tasks but work together routinely and repeatedly. These groups exist as focal points of association which outweigh the conventional family in importance. Prison associations bind Frank and his friend and father figure Okla (Willie Nelson) in Thief. Prison sentences and experiences, providing a common frame of reference, a collegiate source of acquaintance and criminal schooling for skill acquisition, and a basis for long-term loyalty and identity are stressed in Heat, where four of the gang members are identified v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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as former inmates of Folsom State Prison (Letkemann 1973: 122–5).1 Prison provides the definitive friendships and associations of John Dillinger’s life and career in Public Enemies. Neil McCauley’s prison record, known and respected by policeman Vincent Hanna just as McCauley is aware of the detective’s career, is the first topic of conversation during their contrived meeting in the coffee shop. The characterisations of the criminals as individuals and in gangs in Mann’s films offer a contradictory combination of the extraordinary and the mundane, the conventional and the abnormal, in their behaviour and their goals. Both cops and criminals in Heat evince a devotion to work which is not, or not solely, derived from the assurance of financial reward. In any case, in both professions, financial benefit is subject to and, ultimately outweighed by, physical dangers and emotional costs. The film’s apparent equation of professionalism and sacrifice in both careers, as the choices and definitions of vocational elites and as the tragic flaws of exceptional individuals which afflict them and their loved ones, exaggerates the moral uncertainty already present in the heist movie model: How do we make sense of Heat as a genre film when the gangsters and cops share so many characteristics, attitudes and behaviors? When domestic relations and lifestyle are so strong a part of the film? When even the director disavows its genre affiliation? In fact, the film has strong roots in the gangster genre’s past, especially in the genre’s attention to criminal labor. (Lindstrom 2000: 24) Yet the gang leader in Heat and the specialist safe-cracker in Thief profess their intention of earning enough to quit, and in both films the criminal activity is devoted to funding and maintaining an affluent but outwardly normal family life. The paradox embedded in this inverted work ethic functions both to extend the heist movie’s notion of sympathy, and aggravate the action of tragedy in Mann’s films, when retribution and loss are confirmed as the inevitable punishments for even masterly executed crimes. Within these portrayals of professional and habitual criminal activity, there is a repeated and disconcerting encouragement of sympathy for the criminals fated not to achieve the peace, escape and normalcy their violently antisocial behaviour is intended to yield. This derives as much from admiration (present inside and inspired outside the diegesis) for their exceptional skill, discipline and paradoxical honesty in their labour, as for the unexceptional, familiar and homespun nature of their stated goals and desires. Thief Synopsis: Frank is a professional safe-cracker, who works with a small group to complete complex and profitable robberies. His closest associate is Okla, an ageing prison inmate who is terminally ill. Frank works to secure Okla’s release before he dies, and tries to form a relationship with Jessie, a woman with an equally chequered past. As an ex-convict himself, Frank feels he has little time to create the life he desires (a home, a wife and children), and to speed the attainment of his dream, he accepts 66

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a business deal from Leo, a Chicago mafia boss. When they try to adopt, Frank and Jessie are turned down as prospective parents because of Frank’s prison record. Frank attains his dream, a home, a wife and a child, the latter with Leo’s help. However, Leo seeks to control Frank, exploiting his skills and threatening his family, and Frank is forced to preserve his independence by destroying everything he values. Social bonds are like the handles on a suitcase: The more handles, the easier it is to carry. The more bonds you have to society, the easier it is for society to carry you along. This does not mean you have no free will; it only means you will choose to go along with the rules because the price you pay for not doing so is too high. (Felson 1998: 44) Mann’s first theatrical feature Thief, along with his television movie The Jericho Mile, can be seen to establish several key elements of characterisation and narrative concern which permeate the director’s crime films. The delineation of the criminal’s disrupted and institutionalised upbringing, his prison record, his particular expertise, his rigorous dedication to his craft, and his consciousness of his constantly endangered existence are stated, sketched or inferred in these two films, and repeated and refined in later productions. This creative concentration produces, in Mann’s portrayals of professional criminals embodied by various actors, a consistency in language and expression which can appear at once idiomatic and realist and idiosyncratic and self-consciously performative. These characteristics are indicative of the director’s dedication to verisimilitude, his unmistakable authorial signature and the self-conscious performance, the manifest ‘magic act’, of his characters’ criminal masculinity. The opening sequence of Thief, depicting Frank’s drilling into a safe containing diamonds, is exemplary of Mann’s economy of characterisation and narrative. In Thief and Heat (but to a lesser extent in Public Enemies), the sequences which detail the robberies and burglaries receive emphasis as generic, action-based set-pieces, but also act primarily as the embodiments of the protagonists’ codes and principles. At the beginning of Thief, the three gang members are first seen in action. Joseph the driver (William LaValley) scans police radio frequencies, Barry disables alarm systems, and Frank drills the vault. They are linked by cuts between their locations, but they work without the need for verbal communication. The leeching of colour from the night shooting, and the absence of establishing shots for this sequence (beyond a long crane shot down past tenement windows and fire escapes to the getaway car parked in an alley), act as a further isolation of their individual, albeit interdependent, action. Not only are they alone in the deserted buildings and streets, but they are also, for reasons of practicality and safety, distant from each other. The drilling of the safe is seen in a series of close-ups which centre on Frank’s manipulation of the machinery and the painstaking movement of the drill bit into the door. Conspicuous close-ups of Frank’s gloved hands as he directs the drill endow the task and his concentration with a monastic deliberation. His absorption in his occupation suggests a transcendence of materiality, which appears ironic given the entirely worldly and concrete ambitions which Frank’s crimes fuel.2 An extreme close-up traces v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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the drill’s path through the door to reveal the exposed workings of the lock mechanism. Once the door is opened, Frank discards cash and jewels and selects only a collection of anonymous white paper packets from the safe’s contents. The exit and escape, involving several exchanges of vehicle before the group disperses into the urban night, is also accomplished wordlessly. The night city which the men traverse appears as functional and yet visually refined as their actions. The urban environment is represented as a purely serviceable and yet pictographic grid of evenly disposed light and darkness, with a geometrically determined architecture of bridges, concrete pillars, car parks, and lockups, and parallel lines of gleaming streets and lights extending to the vanishing point. As much as the drill and the cars, the city appears as a mechanism or manipulable artifact which Frank and his gang employ more than inhabit. The definition of Frank’s character through the enacting of this first heist is reinforced by the extended preparation and execution of the burglary which occupies the main plot. The identification of counter-measures to the next vault’s alarm systems and the construction of a thermic lance to cut through its doors are shown in detail, as Frank assembles his team and equipment. However, diverging from the heist movie’s traditional trajectory, this second heist, which is also completed perfectly and without incident, does not represent the climax or conclusion of the film’s narrative. The tragic repercussions are not obvious from the act and moment of the crime itself. The climactic and destructive action of the film’s conclusion centres instead on the incompatibility of Frank’s professionalism with the demands of mafia-based organised crime, and with his domestic objective of home, wife and family. Although the criminal planning and execution progress perfectly for Frank, the project which his crimes are supposed to finance (the assemblage of home and family) actually proves deleterious to his career. Between the two pristine burglaries, Frank begins his association with Jessie (Tuesday Weld). In outlining to her the delays imposed upon his life objectives by prison terms, he insists that nothing can prevent him from conjuring his dream family (depicted on his photo collage) into being. The mechanical naivety of the constructed collage which represents Frank’s desired life may appear to match the self-conscious and symbolic treatment of the cityscape. However, the inclusion of the collage, like the collection of images and photos seen on the walls of Stiles’ cell in The Jericho Mile, constitutes an authentic representation of prisoners’ habits and inner life which Mann had observed in Folsom (Feeney and Duncan 2006: 27). In a manner redolent of his unrelenting aspiration, Frank does not accept her refusal to be part of his life, and counters her confession that she cannot have children with an instantaneous decision to adopt. Notably, Frank approaches Jessie directly after his meeting with Leo, and after his acceptance of assurances that with the crime family’s scores he can amass his fortune and assemble his family more rapidly. (Even on the occasion of their first meeting, the boss’s attempt to exchange pleasantries draws a revealingly monosyllabic response: ‘I’m Leo, how are you?’ – ‘How am I? I’m Frank’.) Frank’s drive to acquire a wife and child arises from an earnest and stated desire to match the aspirational collage to the lived reality. However, the impersonality of the culled images in the collage (despite their personal selection by and significance for Frank), lends them the unconsidered superficiality of a shopping list. Unfortunately, 68

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Leo’s motive for the procurement of Frank’s house and son is restraint rather than reward. Once installed, Frank’s wife and son function as instruments of control, since the ‘family’ boss assumes that threats to their safety will force Frank to conform. The irony of Leo’s use of Frank’s family in business is extended by Frank’s businesslike response to Leo’s fatherly equivocation (‘Where is gratitude?’ – ‘Where is my end? I see my money is still in your pocket, which is from the yield of my labour.’) Illegality, in the form of the threat of violence from the crime ‘family’ (the reclamation of the ‘rented’ child and home, and the threatened prostitution of Jessie) endangers Frank’s ersatz family. However, Frank’s resolve to destroy the boss who seeks to control him also entails the disintegration of the newly-established family. He hands his savings to Jessie before expelling her from the house with their son. He then burns down his legitimate domestic and business premises (their home and his second-hand car lot) and throws away his ‘life’ picture. After the shoot-out with the crime family in which Leo and his henchmen are killed, Frank walks away into the night, now apparently bereft of all domestic and criminal attachments. Frank’s uncompromising maintenance of his separateness in professionalism, matched by a lifestyle distinguished by expensive taste and explicit consumerism, prompt the comparison of Mann’s film to a near-contemporary feature also produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, American Gigolo (Paul Schrader, 1980). These two features stand together as an under-recognised pair of existentialist and materialist films which bridge Hollywood genre and American art film categories. Through the aggressively alienated and yet unfulfilled character of Julian the male prostitute (Richard Gere), Schrader’s film foregrounds the same sociopathic withdrawal, the same consumerist acquisitiveness, and the same individually realised morality which define and limit Frank. Julian’s ‘reduction of human intimacy to the level of business transaction’ is a paradoxical ideal which is ultimately neither sustainable nor satisfying (Nichols 1981: 8). While Julian’s lifestyle may be delineated and justified on similar grounds to Frank’s, and while he appears like Frank to see only economic, professional, ‘use’ value in the skills, possessions and clothes he acquires and deploys for pragmatic, vocational purposes, Schrader’s narrative places his protagonist on a transformative and transcendental narrative trajectory which replaces isolation and work with connection and emotion: Julian embraces the ethical principles of the man who seeks to act correctly more than to enjoy himself, who guards against losing self-control (through exploitation, manipulation, or ‘possession’ by another), who values ascetic discipline as a way of life, whose pleasure derives from integrity – from obligations dutifully fulfilled […] Much of American Gigolo’s fascination derives from the relentlessness with which a warped objective is pursued. Self-mortification, denial, dedication – they mark the man of greatness (and of madness) in cultures such as ours. (Nichols 1981: 9) Where Schrader’s film follows the pursuit (and eventual abandonment) of a ‘warped objective’, Mann’s traces a warped path to a conventional objective. However, whereas the promise of love becomes the offer of escape and alternative self-realisation in Amerv i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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ican Gigolo, in Thief there is no transcendental alternative to the materialist and socioeconomic imperatives which form the boundaries of Frank’s urban world. Despite the similarity Schrader’s film has to film noir, it embraces the potential for change, forgiveness and transcendence which are extremely rare in classical precedents, and non-existent in Mann’s films. As in the Hawks canon, there are personal, professional, even existential qualities to work activity for Mann’s male protagonists, but not transcendental ones, since ultimately significant shifts in character, or in character motivations and goals, simply do not occur. Frank’s solitude, in professional and individualistic terms, is reaffirmed, but only as an expulsion and defeat of domestication, and as a pyrrhic victory for personal principles. Without any other goal or association, he is again defined solely by vocation, rather than by family roles, associations or possessions. The perfection of Frank’s work, his ‘magic act’, ultimately requires its and his disappearance from the criminal as well as the domestic milieu. Frank progresses inexorably through a patterned and predestined narrative which, while modifying the tragic trajectory of the classical gangster film, anticipates the trials and punishments of Public Enemies. The individualistic old school thief is undone by the machinations of a modernising Mob, and forced to abandon the woman he loves. However, whereas the nostalgia of the period and the romance of the star and gangster confer a (perhaps predictable) emotional weight to Dillinger’s loss in the latter film, Frank’s abandonment and withdrawal in Thief evince only a masochistic logic, which anticipates McCauley’s destructive ‘discipline’. Frank will not be ‘handled’: he will not conform or defer to social bonds. Despite carrying a preferred vision of family aspiration and social acceptance in his collage, he will not consent to be ‘carried’ by society, and apparently no price is too high to choose to preserve the independence of his pure professional activity: the personal, lived equivalent to the film’s one word, monosyllabic title. Heat Synopsis: Neil McCauley and Vincent Hanna are middle-aged, professional men, who lead their groups (a ruthless armed robbery gang and the LAPD Robbery Homicide Squad respectively) through their own obsessive and skilful examples. Hanna begins to pursue McCauley’s gang in the wake of an armoured truck robbery, in which three guards are killed. The murders are precipitated by the actions of Waingro, a psychopath and serial killer who only joins McCauley’s crew for the robbery. Hanna and McCauley observe each other and build up a mutual admiration, despite the knowledge that they must fight to the death if their paths cross during a heist. While Hanna’s marriage collapses under the pressure of his work, McCauley begins a tentative relationship with Eady, a young woman he asks to accompany him on his travels after he has completed his last job. Waingro leaks information about the gang’s next heist, leading to a violent shoot-out in Los Angeles in which most of the gang are killed or wounded. Hanna closes in as McCauley seeks to escape with Eady and revenge himself on Waingro. McCauley decides to abandon Eady, but Hanna corners and kills him in LAX before he can reach his plane. 70

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The gangster subgenre is epic in nature, highly social, and generally paints a panoramic picture of society and its values – all in all a departure from the usual emphasis in Hollywood on the purely personal and individualistic [the] essential characteristic of the gangster subgenre is its unusually even matching of the opposing claims of the personal and the social. (Nochimson 2002/3: 3) Heat explores at greater length and with fuller fluency than any other Mann film the imbalance and tension between the domestic and the professional, the personal and the communal, the active/performative identity and the passive/acculturated persona. Like that of Thief, the plot of Heat is punctuated by the enactment of the crew’s scores: an armoured car hold-up, a safe-breaking operation, and a bank robbery. In each case, pre-emptive and collaborative action is seen in preparation and execution. The anonymous purchase of explosives, the monitoring of the armoured car’s progress and radio communication, the disabling of police pursuit vehicles and the crippling of alarm systems at the bank and precious metals depository all serve to illustrate the crew’s excellence and apparent unassailability. An additional action sequence follows a set-up and counter-ambush at a drive-in movie theatre, precipitated by a plan suggested by McCauley’s fence Nate to sell bearer bonds stolen during the armoured car raid back to their owner Roger Van Zant, a corrupt investment banker. This transaction, based on profiting from defrauded insurance, should be a sound move if Van Zant is the logical ‘businessman’ Nate assumes him to be, but Van Zant’s pride provokes him to instigate the ambush by his henchmen. The crew’s evasion of the trap is again marked by preplanning and interdependence as McCauley, Chris Shiherlis and Michael Cheritto cooperate to eliminate their would-be assassins. However, despite the crew’s apparent mastery of each criminal act and its repercussions, the consummation of each heist is interrupted by an irruption of chaos. The sudden ascendancy of disorder within the orderly conduct of crime threatens the completion of the individual score, but also previews the eventual dissolution of the crew and death of its members. Where the forces which eventually destroy Frank’s domestic project are connected to ‘organised’ crime, the chaos which threatens to overwhelm McCauley’s crew is characterised as an undisciplined and profitless form of criminality. Van Zant’s vain preference for reputation above business sense is matched, and later comes to be allied with, the uncontrolled violence of Waingro. Waingro is not part of the ‘tight crew’ before or after the armoured car hold-up, and the need for his inclusion is never specified. By comparison, Breedan’s (Dennis Haysbert) eleventh-hour inclusion in the bank robbery is occasioned by Trejo’s (Danny Trejo) absence, but his suitability is guaranteed by his known prison background (as another Folsom inmate). That Waingro is considered to be less experienced or reliable is suggested by his being armed with an inferior weapon during the hold-up: a pistol as opposed to the rest of the crew’s automatic weapons (see Letkemann 1973: 113). Aside from his disruption of the robbery, Waingro’s other criminal acts (serial rape and murder) are portrayed as violently antisocial, and pointlessly destructive. His unnecessary killing of one guard when the robbery has been completed dictates the execution of the others. Michael obeys McCauley’s logical command, interpreted v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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by Hanna at the scene later, in order not to ‘leave a living witness’. In similar fashion, the logic of self-preservation compels the crew to abandon the burglary at the precious metals depository (where a lack of professionalism from the police reveals their planned ambush), to kill Van Zant’s henchmen, and to shoot their way out of the bank heist when the police are tipped off. In each incident, when the chaos of the unplanned, the irrational or the motiveless intercedes, the single-minded crew strive to reimpose order. Although abandoning the precious metals burglary represents a prudent evasion of capture, during the armoured car robbery, the ambush with Van Zant’s men and the aftermath of the bank heist, the attempt to reimpose the crew’s sense of order is based on an escalation of violence: the killing of the other guards and the ambushers, and the extended gun battle in downtown Los Angeles which involves police and pedestrians alike. A comparable but markedly unsympathetic escalation of violence characterises the successive bank raids undertaken by the initially attractive, counter-cultural group of surfer-bank robbers in Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow, 1991). The effect of this shift is to emphasise, as in Mann’s films, a personal bond between the FBI agent (Keanu Reeves) who infiltrates the gang and its enigmatic leader (Patrick Swayze), while reinstating, unlike Mann, a predictably conservative stance towards crime. Similarly, the actions and expertise of the gang assembled for a complex robbery in Ronin (John Frankenheimer, 1998) are codified as the preserve of an elite warrior caste, the masterless samurai of the title. In Frankenheimer’s film, set-piece sequences staged in Paris and Arles (significantly, within the remains of the Roman gladiatorial arena) emphasise the distinction of the groups of adversaries from the wider populace, but in each case their activities result in an escalation and proliferation of violence, which engulfs innocent bystanders. The portrayal of such disregard (when one of the gang members is in reality an undercover or renegade CIA agent intent on foiling a terrorist plot) highlights the mismatch between disruptive violence and conservative ideology in mainstream action cinema, when compared to the often ambivalent and inherently self-destructive nature of violence in Mann’s work. The crew’s reaction to the irruption of chaos is in marked contrast to the premeditated, controlled and suppressive violence used at the outset of the armoured car and bank robberies (see Letkemann 1973: 100, 110). As the bank’s occupants are herded together, McCauley appeals to them rationally and emotionally in order to avoid the use of violence: ‘We’re here for the bank’s money … you’re not going to lose a dime … Think of your families.’ McCauley’s entreaty is all the more ironic, given that the immediate repercussions of the robbery, including and provoked by the crew’s violent response to the disordering of their plans, overwhelm and destroy several family units. Like other crime thrillers, such as Bullitt (Peter Yates, 1968) and The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971), which can be defined by their controlled or chaotic chase sequences, the central theme of Heat is distilled by the reactive violence and endangerment of domesticity apparent in its heist sequences (Rubin 1999: 250). The survival of the crew members’ families and domestic environments is sacrificed to the professional cause, at the same time as their logical, professional but inevitably escalatory response to crises in action endangers the law-abiding public. 72

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Heat: news reports

After the bank robbery, the deliberate decision to compromise the domestic sphere (previewed in Michael’s admission of enjoyment of the ‘juice’ ahead of the financial reward) is marked by the actions of each member of the crew. The presence and influence of stable domestic and family environments have been recognised as significant checks upon the initiation of criminal behaviour (Felson 1998: 23–26). By contrast, the intercutting between the crew members’ homes or partners which introduces the bank sequence (a shot of Eady packing to leave with McCauley after the robbery, followed by one of Charlene Shiherlis [Ashley Judd] at home with her son) underlines the lives and values placed in jeopardy. As a result, a similar pairing of shots (of Elaine Cheritto [Susan Traylor] watching news of the gun battle at home, and of Breedan’s partner Lillian [Kim Staunton] seeing a report of his death on television in a bar), emphasises the pervasiveness and certainty of loss. The juxtaposition of action and environment articulates a choice rather than a competition of values. The most poignant and conclusive incident in the sequence, which encapsulates this choice, is Michael’s instantaneous and pragmatic decision to take a child hostage to facilitate his escape. Any parental sentiment is secondary to the practical course of action (as such, Michael’s act ironically foreshadows Chris’s desertion of Charlene and his son Dominick [played by both Andrew and Brian Camuccio], and McCauley’s abandonment of Eady). Similarly, after his killing of Michael, Hanna’s comforting of the child hostage (anticipating his rescue of his stepdaughter Lauren [Natalie Portman]) appears to be as much a professional as a pastoral response.3 Michael’s instinctive preference for ‘action’, as stated in the decisive meeting before the bank robbery, precipitates his subsequent acts and his death. In comparison, Chris’s decision to undertake the bank raid is motivated by the desire to restore his domestic relationships. After Chris is wounded, McCauley instructs Nate to keep him safe until their escape route from the country is secured, but Chris decides instead to seek out Charlene, despite the risk of imprisonment. This sets in train a second series of pragmatic decisions, ironically antipathetic to the maintenance of domesticity. When she is brought to a safe house by the police in order to lure out Chris, Charlene is told by Sergeant Drucker that her only option to avoid imprisonment along with her husband, and the resultant institutionalisation of Dominic, is to betray Chris and facilitate his capture. (Drucker’s summary of Dominic’s inevitable future, after being raised in ‘gladiator academies’ by the state, mirrors Frank’s recollection of his own childhood in Thief which he seeks to redress through his adoption with Jessie of a child in state care.) When Chris appears, her coded warning allows him to escape v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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and her to avoid the ramifications of his crimes for her own and her son’s future, but the family unit is splintered irretrievably. Her action can be construed as equally selfless and self-serving (she protects her son and manages to maintain her own and her husband’s freedom at the cost of their unity). Chris’s choice to leave embodies a final tragic resignation from the family group, which can again be interpreted in simultaneously selfish and selfless terms. Chris’s dislocation from his family is compared with McCauley’s lack of similar commitments from the aftermath of the armoured car hold-up onwards. The argument between Chris and Charlene over his gambling debts results in his violent departure from their home and his spending the night on McCauley’s floor. The comparison of living spaces is indicative of the characters’ status: Chris smashes various ornaments before he leaves his home, but in McCauley’s house the only articles on view are strictly functional (a telephone, his keys, his handgun and a coffeemaker). When he is seen alone in his house, McCauley is isolated in extreme close-up at the farthest right edge of the frame, with the rest of the composition made up of the glass windows and the sea beyond. The single blue-grey colour, and the racking of focus from the interior to the waves outside, are indicative of McCauley’s alienation, and of the focus of his life existing beyond his dwelling. On waking up, Chris asks McCauley two apparently long-standing and inseparable questions (‘When are you going to get some furniture?…When are you going to get an old lady?’), to which McCauley makes identical replies (‘When I get around to it’). In one home, the irruption of violence is directed against the trappings of domesticity and illustrates the imperilled state of the family itself; in the other, there is no physical or material presence beyond the artifacts associated with work against which to react. It is noticeable that McCauley’s closest associates are also seen to be contained by work-oriented or neutral social spaces. His meetings with Nate take place in cars and car parks, and he encounters Eady in the bookstore where she works and later in a café. More revealingly, both Kelso (who gathers information electronically to set up the bank robbery) and Eady (who is pursuing her preferred career as a freelance graphic designer) are seen to work from home, converting the domestic sphere into business premises. In addition to these compromised spaces, we see Van Zant’s office being used as a living area when he fears McCauley’s revenge, but when he returns to his home it appears to be as under-furnished and unoccupied as McCauley’s. With the contamination of both Michael’s and Trejo’s home spaces (with the television report of the robbery watched by Elaine and the torture and death of Trejo and his wife at the hands of Waingro), no purely domestic environment remains unaffected by the consequences of the crew’s activities. Hanna’s domestic space is also on view within the film, but this area is a site of unremitting conflict. Hanna is seen either rushing to leave, as on the morning of the armoured car hold-up, or returning late, on several evenings during his investigation. In any case, the house is not his but Justine’s (Diane Venora), the ex-husband’s ‘deadtech, postmodernistic bullshit house’ forming part of her divorce settlement. The only possession Hanna seems to value in the house is his television, which he watches in preference to talking to Justine when he returns late from the armoured car crime 74

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Heat: Hanna’s domestic space

scene, and which he insists on removing when he discovers her infidelity. This episode is remarkable in itself, since it is the only occasion on which a meal is seen to be made in any of the homes, and yet even this food, prepared by Justine for her lover Ralph (Xander Berkeley), is left uneaten. Hanna’s withdrawal to the anonymity of a hotel room is succeeded by his discovery of Lauren in the bath tub. The suggestion of a familial bond between the policeman and his stepdaughter, previewed in Hanna giving her a ride home in his police car and intimated in her choice of his room for her suicide attempt, is undermined by the neutrality of this space and the professionalism of his response. Before the discovery of Lauren, the undifferentiated merging of the personal and pastoral in the policeman’s reaction to suffering has been seen in his silence before the bodies of the murdered armoured car guards, as well as in his comforting of the mother of Waingro’s young female victim. In L.A. Takedown, the younger incarnation of Vincent Hanna (Scott Plank) reacts violently to a drunk accosting his wife when he is off-duty in a club, because (as he explains to her later) he equates this casual sexism with the brutal murder of the prostitute which he has had to face professionally. In Heat, Hanna’s preference for non-aligned or professional spaces is different but comparable to McCauley’s desire for but failure to create his own home environment. The coffee shop scene, in which cop and criminal meet and converse for the first time, exemplifies their denial of attachments and considerations outside of professional commitments. The sequence is introduced by Hanna’s return home to find a sink full of unwashed dishes and Justine dressed to go out. Unwilling to engage with marital or domestic concerns, he chooses to return to work, and instigates the meeting with McCauley on the freeway. (By comparison, the meeting between cop and robber in L.A. Takedown occurs entirely accidentally, lessening its impact as a conscious and enlightening encounter between kindred, solitary professionals.) Heat: the coffee shop

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The seeking of this contact, immediately succeeding the avoidance of familial interaction, represents the crystallisation of Hanna’s choice, in line with those of McCauley, Michael, Chris and Charlene. The resolution to meet with McCauley, prompted by their mutual, professional admiration, encapsulates the immersion of both characters in their intensive and exclusive activities, described by the director in his notes for this scene as a ‘morphine groove of self-confidence and decisiveness’ (Anon. 1996: 17). The Warner Bros. gangster films of the classical era often incorporated and foregrounded ironies, parallels and juxtapositions (for example, the conspicuous family-based scenes in The Public Enemy [William A. Wellman, 1931], which throw the professional relationships of the criminal ‘family’ into sharper relief ). These elements could articulate aspects of the films’ conformity to conservative ideology, or their challenge to it. The exchange between Hanna and McCauley provides a peculiar parallel to the candid conversation between Frank and Jessie in Thief, in which a life plan financed by and eventually divorced from crime is mooted as an achievable goal. However, the earlier film ends with the loss, or more precisely the decisive renunciation of this stated objective, and the hero’s return to a solitary existence. In the coffee shop, McCauley and Hanna note the similarity and, in their opinion, inevitability of their activities and choices, and consolidate the recognition and respect their mutual surveillance has inspired up to this point. When police incompetence reveals the police stake-out at the precious metals repository, McCauley and Hanna appear to stare at each other via surveillance cameras. The centrality of their faces in the frame in intercut close-ups, and the appearance of McCauley’s face as a monochrome, negative image, illustrate graphically their equality in perception and judgement, and their status as indelible parallels and opposites. Their distance from a ‘regular type life’, which they recognise, nominally desire but ultimately abjure, is marked in the coffee shop by the presence of ordinary families around them: ‘people living normal lives who have never used guns, never experienced physical violence, never been stolen from and never steal. Surrounded on all sides by this flow of normalcy’ (Anon. 1996: 15). (Again, by comparison, the tighter composition and smaller proportions of the television frame in L.A. Takedown excise such background details, though the chance meeting in daylight does result in both policeman and criminal electing not to open fire because of the presence of innocent civilians.) During the conversation, McCauley repeats the maxim he learned in prison that he had stated earlier to Chris: ‘Allow nothing to be in your life that you cannot walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you spot the heat around the corner.’ When McCauley asserts the primacy of this ‘discipline’ (which will eventually require his abandonment of Eady), Hanna describes this creed as ‘pretty vacant’, apparently unconscious of the irony in his own abandonment of Justine in order to establish contact with McCauley. McCauley’s next remark, that ‘it is what it is’, encapsulates the unarguable, self-evidential nature of both men’s professional principles.4 While the coffee shop scene presents, visually and verbally, an alternative to the paths the two characters have chosen, it ends with a recognition, and championing, of their difference and exclusivity. Each assures the other that their kinship will not prevent them from 76

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Heat: the necessary end

attempting to kill their adversary if their professional judgement demands it. Their final meeting confirms this necessity. McCauley wishes to take his accumulated fortune to New Zealand, a specific pastoral idyll very distant from the urban environment of Los Angeles. Essentially he plans for an early retirement supported by the wealth amassed through his work. The motives for the other members of the crew vary subtly. Chris is a gambler who loses most of the earnings from their jobs, and who needs a big score on the last robbery to sustain his marriage. Michael has a substantial fortune but continues with the gang’s activities for the thrill rather than financial gain. Trejo the driver is relatively undeveloped, but Donald Breedan, his replacement on the crew’s last venture, is characterised as the reformed recidivist unable to thrive in a vindictive society. His incautious return to crime on McCauley’s spontaneous offer appears at once tragic, inevitable and justifiably provoked. The singularity of this ‘tight crew’ is its multi-ethnic composition (encompassing black, Italian, Hispanic and Anglo-Saxon American males), and its apparent commitment to domestic stability. All except McCauley are connected to partners or spouses, and both Chris and Michael have children. However, as Mann points out, the espousal of family values by criminals such as Michael Cheritto is partial, contingent and not comparable to the beliefs and values of wider society: ‘He has a nuclear family. He cares about his kids the same way you care about your kids. The big difference is he doesn’t care about your kids’ (in Foundas 2006). The group supporting Vincent Hanna, the leader of the Robbery Homicide squad, is superficially similar. The squad is variegated in racial and generational terms, including young, middle-aged, black and Native American members. However, important distinctions emerge as both groups become more fully delineated. Where the film juxtaposes social outings by the two groups taking place on the same night, the apparent rowdiness of the cops in a bar contrasts with the restraint of the crew’s behaviour in a restaurant with their families. Children are present at the crew’s table, where it is obvious that some of the cops have ‘dates’ rather than long-term partners. In large measure, the two groups become defined in relation to their atypical leaders. Hanna’s failed marriages are inseparable from his obsession with his work, but he coordinates the efforts of his subordinates, a group of similarly dedicated single men. Hanna’s irascibility jars against McCauley’s self control, and yet McCauley’s solitariness alienates him from his companions. His rigorous, business-like approach hides a comparable desire for stability and a partner, which is potentially satisfied through his meeting with Eady. Ironically, both leaders assume a pastoral, counselling function in v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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offering emotional support to others in the ‘work’ environment (Hanna giving solace to the victims of crime and McCauley intervening in the marital problems of Chris and Charlene) while their own emotional connections (to wives, partners and stepchildren) are compromised. Remarkably, Hanna upbraids his stepdaughter Lauren’s unreliable father in the midst of an argument with Justine about his own absences. Similarly, when Lauren chooses Hanna’s hotel room for her suicide attempt, he is freed to respond to her professionally, as a victim rather than a relative. (In the film version of Miami Vice, a similar victimhood is conferred on Sonny’s and Ricardo’s work colleague Trudy, who goes from being rescued hostage to trauma patient, transported to hospital in a police car.) McCauley’s inability to resist revenge upon Waingro when freedom with Eady beckons appears as a similarly professional motivation, ‘acting against the couple by choosing instead to pay his debt to the group and settle his score with the traitor’ (Thoret 2003). In balancing the heist movie’s analysis of criminal technique with the police procedural drama’s exhaustive cataloguing of detective work, Heat juxtaposes a film genre with an antithetical television narrative framework (Rubin 1999: 244, 249). The connection and equation of each group’s activities contributes to the film’s erosion of legal and moral distinctions between them. However, the linkage of criminal and cop in Mann’s work is at variance with the undercover investigator’s pretence of kinship. In T-Men (Anthony Mann, 1947) and White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949), the cop’s infiltration of a gang never undermines his professional and moral identity. More recent films (Deep Cover, Bill Duke, 1992; Donnie Brasco, Mike Newell, 1997; The Departed, Martin Scorsese, 2006) have suggested the seductiveness of the criminal life, as much because of the apparent ineffectuality or corruption of the law enforcement establishment as of the society and affluence of the gang life. By comparison, Mann’s elevation of the individualistic criminal above cops and gang bosses in Thief, and the equalisation of legal and illegal professionalism in Heat, serve different and less conventional ends. Having suggested the motivations and goals for each elite group, both Thief and Heat lead inexorably towards a series of related losses and defeats. This nesting of comparable and concomitant tragedies within the principal, individual conflicts underlines the films’ pervasive and subversive engagement with the ideology of crime genres in popular entertainment, and their questioning of the values of protagonists, antagonists and audience. The reciprocal surveillance of the cop and the criminal, and their respective engineering and acceptance of the coffee shop meeting, articulate their literal and metaphorical regard for each other. They mirror and complement each other up to the point of death (Hanna only sees and shoots McCauley when he is betrayed by his shadow), and in so doing provide the viewer with twinned points of voyeuristic identification, without a correspondingly secure moral, legal or conventional perspective. We are forced to confront the vagaries and ambiguities of social constructs of criminality, legality and domesticity, just as the law-breaking and law-enforcing protagonists are forced to acknowledge ‘the mutuality of their condition’ (Anon. 1996: 18). Mann’s work within the crime genre stands as the apologia for the classical gangster film, and in Heat as the apotheosis of the heist movie, in its articulation of insoluble social and moral ambiguities. 78

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Collateral Synopsis: Vincent, a professional hitman, arrives in Los Angeles at dusk. He hires the cab driven by Max and uses it to travel around the city as he completes five contract killings in one night. Max, who dreams of owning his own limo company, is forced to cooperate and realises that he too will be killed once Vincent finishes his work. After three murders, Max tries to prevent the other killings by destroying Vincent’s laptop, which contains information on his targets. Vincent then forces Max to impersonate him and visit his employer (a Central American drug dealer) and retrieve backup files. Fanning, a Los Angeles police detective, recognises Vincent’s modus operandi. He traces Max’s taxi and tries to rescue him. However, a shoot-out in a nightclub in which FBI agents try to prevent Vincent’s murder of their informer, results in the deaths of both Fanning and the target. Max realises that Vincent’s last target is Annie, a female attorney he met at the start of his shift. He deliberately crashes his cab and tries to warn her by phone as Vincent closes in. As Annie and Max attempt to escape, Vincent pursues them onto the MTA. In a chaotic exchange of gunfire, Vincent is fatally wounded. Annie and Max exit the train at dawn. We apparently need absolutes – firm ideals to which we can aspire and guidelines by which to steer our lives. [Yet] an existential position holds that the world is contingent – that is, everything that is could as well have been otherwise; that human beings constitute themselves, their world, and their situation within that world; that there exists no ‘meaning’, no grand design in the universe, no guidelines for living other than those the individual creates. The problem, then, in most rudimentary form is, How does a being who needs meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning? (Yalom 1980: 422, 23) Within Collateral, Mann may be returning to several well-tried, even over-stated and predictable thematic elements within his oeuvre. The film exhibits the same pairing of male equals and opposites in Max and Vincent which dominates the narratives of Manhunter and Heat. Collateral also consciously foregrounds the personal morality and codification of male behaviour permeating Thief and Heat, and also like these precedents provides a striking visualisation of the metropolitan environment. However, although Collateral reprises the earlier films’ interrogation of male (criminal) acts as articulations of moral philosophies and expressions of life meaning, the casting in this case introduces a substantially different emphasis upon the role and significance of the star: Mann turns Collateral against genre and star expectations at every turn, producing along the way a subtle and sophisticated movie about the human condition – about relationships, meaning and potential […] The viewer is likely to experience a dialectic of reactions/emotions, from losing oneself entirely within the texture Mann has created, to emerging from that context long enough to ask, ‘wasn’t this supposed to be a Tom Cruise movie?’ (Chambers 2005: 70) v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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Questions of meaning and challenges to social values are staples within Mann’s male-dominated narratives: uncertainties of genre and star expectation generally are not, and the tendency or resistance suggested above to categorising Collateral as a Tom Cruise movie underlines a difference in star casting in this project, despite the superficial similarity to star presence in other Mann films. Recognition of this variance paves the way for acknowledgement of Collateral’s other differences in production and intention, detail and accentuation from the director’s other work, despite some of its apparent predictability. Firstly, the narrative springboard of the night-time cab ride and the forcing together of the characters by chance changes the dynamics of the paired protagonists in comparison with Heat or Manhunter. Max and Vincent are not (at least at first) convergent characters and lack any mutual recognition or empathy, and the narrative situation consequently displays the contrivance of a Hitchcock thriller, or even a Hawks situation or screwball comedy. Collateral is unusual in Mann’s career in that he has no screenwriting credit for the film, which is based on a script by Stuart Beattie, although the director was responsible for the shifting of the action from the original setting of New York to Los Angeles (Olsen 2004a: 14). Where Heat places a condensed, humanistic narrative within a heightened generic framework and a naturalistically rendered environment, Collateral (albeit using the same city setting) encompasses a pressurised, outlandish situation while producing a comparable moral and existential dilemma. The differences are significant throughout: Heat is a transformative experience or cycle of tragedy, whereas Collateral functions like an emblematic trial and tribulation. Secondly, the resemblances to Heat (in the action sequences, analyses of masculinity and the setting of Los Angeles) do not obscure the technical difference with Collateral being a landmark digital production. Previously Mann has experimented with shooting with digital cameras on Ali and the Robbery Homicide Division television series (2002). After five months of pre-production work, Collateral was shot using high-definition digital video cameras: Sony CineAlta and Thomson Grass Valley Viper Film Stream (ibid.). In this production, the manipulation of the setting via this technology, and the technical manipulation of the new ‘medium’ itself, reveal the divergent realist and expressionist tendencies apparent in Mann’s depiction of the cityscape: I think this is the first serious major motion picture done in digital video that is photoreal, rather than using it for effects. DV is also a more painterly medium: you can see what you’ve done as you shoot because you have the end product sitting in front of you on a Sony high-def monitor, so I could change the contrast to affect the mood, add colour, do all kinds of things you can’t do with film. (In Olsen 2004b) The capabilities of the digital cameras provided an atypical register of realism to the film’s images (approximating to what the human eye can see at night rather than what the film camera, without additional lighting, cannot), which subsequently Mann would reprise in Miami Vice and explore in an entirely different vein in the period 80

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recreation of the 1930s in Public Enemies. In addition to its substantial flexibility at the moment of shooting, the digital format also facilitates post-production: for Miami Vice, Mann’s Santa Monica offices were equipped with Avid Nitrous computers and a theatre-size projection facility to allow the director to view the film at an exhibition standard during the editing process (Foundas 2006). Although the high-definition digital cameras allowed for shooting with next to no additional light, one of the production’s innovations was the incorporation of electro-luminescent display panels (most commonly used in mobile phones and other digital displays) in the form of small movable plates to augment the lighting within the cab itself. When operating at a very low level, these panels provided a barely perceptible enhancement to the street lighting illuminating the cab from outside (Bordwell and Thompson 2010: 5–6). Ultimately the digital difference constitutes as significant a divergence in Mann’s representations of Los Angeles as the variations in ratio and scale which distinguish the television movie L.A. Takedown from Heat, with Collateral deviating again in its portrayal of the city. In comparison with the muted, realist monochrome of the Los Angeles locations in Heat, Collateral’s city settings achieve a ‘watercolour delicacy’ (ironic in relation to its noir setting and narrative and despite the inherent sharpness of the digital image), through the suffusion of orange, blue and yellow light from neon signs and street illumination (Olsen 2004a: 15). Nonetheless, shooting on film was retained as an option throughout the production, and was favoured for practical purposes in the filming of the Fever nightclub shoot-out, which was staged on a set rather than at a location (Olsen 2004b). Additionally, a film-digital composite was used for the MTA chase and shooting sequence, with the train set shot against a greenscreen to which was subsequently added the digital rendering of the landscape seen through the compartment windows (Rybin 2007: 184). As with the depiction of the wider city environment, the technical crafting of this effect for the climactic sequence produces a paradoxical representation of a realistically rendered and recreated space fashioned by state-of-theartifice technology. Thirdly, although the narrative event is atypical and less credible than in other Mann examples, it is as necessary to see past the star to the character as it is to read through the genre to the auteur, in order to reintegrate or even relate the film to the director’s others. In Cruise’s performance, the complex combination of guardedness, pride, aloofness and vulnerable obsessiveness is as essential to the conception of Vincent the hitman as the self-conscious verve and idiosyncrasy of Pacino, and the temperance, gravitas and longing of De Niro are indispensable to their characters in Heat. Mann’s obvious record of working with major male acting figures disguises the fact that his projects tend to occur after the key phases of the careers of the stars in question. James Caan appears in Thief in the wake of his highest profile roles in films with Howard Hawks (Red Line 7000 [1965]; El Dorado [1966]), Francis Coppola (The Godfather [1972]; The Godfather Part II [1974]), Norman Jewison (Rollerball [1975]), and his only film as director (Hide in Plain Sight [1980]). Caan as Frank is desperate and restless in his assertiveness and acquisitiveness, intent on illegal and violent self-actualisation dedicated paradoxically to the entirely conventional objecv i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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tive of outward material and inward domestic reality. Nick James notes how Heat represents a key moment (of summation and condensation of previous roles, and rejuvenation and reorientation of technique and expectation) in the careers of De Niro and Pacino, two dominant figures (and contemporaries of Caan) throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In Heat, the self-conscious refinement of performance is finely balanced against an intra- and extra-diegetic awareness and perhaps fear of ageing and declining powers: Their roles in Heat distil elements of other roles they have played throughout their careers, and not just in the sense of the iconic weight their screen presence and familiarity brings to every role. (In other words, their personas are deliberately manipulated.) (2002: 53) In comparison with these earlier examples within Mann’s productions, the casting of Cruise (a star of the 1980s and 1990s, now at middle age) in Collateral extends but alters this trend in the deployment of stars. At one level, the choice of Cruise for the villainous role of Vincent is redolent of a conscious challenge to and by the star, confronting his established persona and audience expectation. Star, director and role all appear implicated in this deliberate reorientation, which assumes the same level of contrivance as the narrative situation itself. However, the deployment of Cruise in such an uncharacteristic role is ultimately entirely in keeping with the film’s diegetic and philosophical concerns. The star’s and character’s performance in Collateral betray a devised quality comparable to the self-consciously managed ‘armoury of techniques’ on show in Heat (James 2002: 54). Fourthly, the contrivance of Collateral’s narrative device, the portrayed landscape and the performers inhabiting them, highlight the conscious artifice of the performances in this film and by extension in all of Mann’s male-centred narratives. Cruise as Vincent broadcasts a persona of amoral and atheistic superiority, characterised by a deliberately dismissive diction. However, that this is an assumed and performed role (masking another, uncertain, truer identity) is revealed as much by his shedding of the veneer of control as it is by Max’s ready assumption of the role and idiom of Vincent in the meeting with Felix (Javier Bardem), the hitman’s employer. Here, Max’s conscious repetition of Vincent’s self-conscious summary of adapting to contingency (‘Darwin, I-Ching, Shit Happens’) suggests at once the appropriateness and shallowness of the mannered performance for them both. Max has in any case been understood to perform a different role and assume his own preferred identity (successful limo company owner) for the nightly visits to his mother in hospital. The calculated characterisations and performances of Mann’s protagonists, marked occasionally by strident dialogue and delivery, are also indicative throughout the director’s films of the overlapping of realism and self-conscious stylisation. An essential part of the rhythm and impact of Mann’s characters is the mode of speech, which stands as a vital component in the conscious performance of professional standing and gendered identity. That the utterances of Mann’s characters often appear self-consciously scripted, delivered and performed highlights several related but 82

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superficially contradictory factors in the crafting of the director’s screenplays and characterisations. On one level, the words of Mann’s male protagonists validate a realist conception of the exclusive jargon and frames of reference of professional elites, in both criminal and policing circles (for example, Frank’s dialogue with Leo in Thief, and Hanna’s and McCauley’s conversations with their respective colleagues and each other in Heat). On another, the commerce between the opposing communities of lawbreaking and law enforcement and their representation within genre film mean that the realist observation and recreation of these groups’ vocabulary and diction already encompasses a degree of self-conscious, premeditated performance. Taken together, these two aspects underpin the conceptions and performances of the preferred, assumed and fashioned identities by which Mann’s males are defined and define themselves. The consistency of the execution of the assumed role is of importance to the performer (as seen in Frank’s assertion to Jessie: ‘I am a straight arrow’; and Vincent’s insistence to Justine: ‘I say what I mean and I do what I say’), even when (for the, in these cases, unconvinced female ‘audiences’) the ruthless uniformity of the performance is itself problematic. As with other aspects of Mann’s style which appear over-determined, Nick James views the deliberate and poised tone of his dialogue as a self-conscious, possibly jarring but nonetheless indicative and integral constituent in the director’s distinctive and developmental stance towards generic materials: These men who have no time for adjectives and adverbs are regularly confronted by smart women who in turn seem, by some of their phraseology – ‘not making forward progress’, ‘maintain a consistent mood’ – to have read a lot of selfhelp books. Their language has a parroted quality that goes against the smooth grain of the men’s crime-speak (although they too are capable of the exaggerated line – take McCauley’s line to Eady, ‘I’m a needle going back to zero, a double blank’). The contrast is effective in setting up the usual notion that the sexes speak different languages, but weak in the sense of restricting the scenes with women to a therapeutic ghetto of sensitivity and inaction […] However awkwardly, Mann is here trying to forge a new hybrid of melodrama, tragedy and thriller. (2002: 50–1) Although in these examples of Mann’s dialogue the male attempts at profundity may appear pompous or stilted, and the balancing female concentration on emotional articulation and diagnosis equally stereotyped or patronising, it is the noted emphasis on contrivance, performed role or learned response, on both sides. which alerts us to the thematic relevance of performed identity throughout the director’s films. This element assumes its greatest significance in the Miami Vice narratives of undercover work, in which a sense of the original self existing before or beneath the act can be lost, and the necessity of consistent and credible performance is paramount: I met these guys who were doing undercover work where they’re inside for six, seven, eight months – really heavy-duty stuff with very dangerous people. I’d say to them: ‘What’s the high?’ […] Guess what? That’s Al Pacino on stage! v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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That’s performance! That’s theater for real. These guys are projecting themselves and they’re talking about what they do in dramaturgical terms. It’s like An Actor Prepares, only there’s no take two. (In Foundas 2006) This consciousness of performance, the construction and maintenance of plausible identity, becomes an element of individual integrity, and as integral and vital a plank to the male professional identity as the exclusivity of jargon, diction and action which (as Mann’s narratives show) ostracises heterosexual partners. While this factor in narrative and characterisation obviously prevails in both the television series and film of Miami Vice, its incorporation in Collateral is in many ways more remarkable in the burdens which various, conflicting conceptions of masculinity place upon Max during the course of one night. Explicitly, perhaps, the film’s theme and Vincent’s watch word is contingency: the intellectual agility and moral resolve to navigate an arbitrary and unpredictable urban milieu. Implicitly for Max, the essence of the experience is agency: the deliberate imposition of will, and capability to intervene in and manage events to a preferred conclusion. While these complimentary objectives and perspectives are (again) in themselves familiar factors within Mann’s narratives (seen in Frank’s resolution in Thief to destroy a domestic identity in order to honour and preserve his professional principles, and the reactive violence of the crew in Heat when irruptions of chaos threaten their professional mastery), in Collateral they assume an unusual force and significance. The emphasis and sympathy lie poised between the decisive but ‘indifferent’ sociopath and the vacillating but honourable citizen: Collateral depicts and articulates Vincent’s worldview for the sake of the film’s dramatic arc, but in the final analysis the film itself does not do so from the position of its character’s amoral stance: Ultimately the film critiques Vincent’s empty mannerism implicitly in its own employment of an expressive mise-enscène and also Max’s ability to discover a greater degree of agency as the film progresses. Only the ambiguity of the ending would seem to suggest the overt despair which Vincent himself exudes. (Rybin 2007: 177) The oppositions between action and indifference, absolutes and contingencies which Collateral keeps in balance also frame an obvious influencing precedent for Mann’s film, Taxi Driver. Unlike Scorsese’s protagonist Travis Bickle, Max is at home in his city and his cab. He is sympathetic in all senses to the inhabitants and rhythms of both, engaging with his passengers and timing his journeys in a simultaneously personal and professional way. His management of Annie’s (Jada Pinkett Smith) journey across town suggests that the ethos for his dream project of ‘Island Limos’ has already been created within the practical environment of his taxi. Unlike Max, Travis seeks agency and heroic status in reaction against the degradation and disempowerment of the city, though both characters assume problematic personae in response to their encounters with the metropolis’s entirely selfish, pragmatic and amoral inhabitants. After the brief, first appearance of Vincent, seen in slow-motion walking through the airport, Mann’s film, like Scorsese’s, opens in earnest with a montage, which intro84

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Collateral: taxi Montage

duces the taxi as the metaphor and agent of chance which governs the night of action. Vincent’s face in close-up is peripheralised almost to the point of excision in the righthand extremity of the frame as he walks out of the airport through a milling crowd of civilians, blurred into irrelevance from his professional perspective. The montage starts with a female face prominently displayed on an advert on the roof of a cab (an obscure gesture, at this point, perhaps towards the presence of Annie in Max’s taxi at the film’s opening and her image/target status at its end). Next we see a non-Englishlanguage newspaper over the shoulder of its reader, and a series of fragmented views of the yellow cabs in the garage. The next shot, of a screen showing an image of streams of traffic seen through a cab window, racks rapidly in order to blur the screen in the background and sharpen the seat and seatbelt in the foreground. Two panning shots follow, a medium close-up showing a table on which is seen the first newspaper and a second (Max’s) open at a crossword puzzle, and a racking close-up roving over the faces of the waiting cab drivers, one of whom speaks in French on his mobile phone. Several hand-held shots of maintenance work on the cabs being performed by anonymous hands are succeeded by a return to Max’s newspaper, before the camera tilts up to his face and he enters his cab. Diegetic noise from the garage is silenced as he closes the door and prepares his work place. A brief montage as he checks the car’s controls, inserts his licence and affixes his postcard image of the Maldives to the visor, brings this introduction to a close, but opens a second montage of Max’s shift, condensing fares, exterior and aerial views of the cab and city, and Max refuelling at a Spanish-speaking filling station, before his first encounter with Annie. Excerpts of various popular musical tracks and styles (rap, R’n’B, salsa) accompany the cuts of this short sequence, but as dusk falls and Annie and Max start to converse, a mellower soul number (subsequently identified as diegetic music inside the taxi) appears to mark their immediate intimacy. While similar montages, fragmented images of the cab, racking focus and juxtaposed musical styles also characterise the opening of Taxi Driver, the effect in Collateral seems calculated to create a markedly different grasp of the portrayed city and the observing cab driver. Where Max’s cab reflects his status (deteriorating from clean order to damage, dirt and eventual destruction), Travis’s equally reflects his, appearing as the unnervingly fixed point in the frame against the moving and mutable sidewalk, whose repellent (to Travis) manifestations of sexuality and violence gravitate inside the vehicle with his passengers. The city’s diversity (particularly in terms of race, gender and sexuality but also implicitly in morality and politics) which intimidates v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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and antagonises Travis appears to represent no barrier to Max, who circulates and takes a variety of fares before he encounters Vincent. Conversely, Vincent’s version of diversity merely encompasses equal maltreatment for victims from varied backgrounds: an Hispanic criminal, a black musician, a rich and corrupt white lawyer, and a Korean businessman, along with the unplanned ‘collateral’. The hitman’s negotiation of the city is mapped and timed purely practically, in detail being ironically similar to and facilitated by Max’s own work ethic and expertise. Vincent’s initial expression of disgust for L.A., being ‘too sprawled out and disconnected’ and so crushing out human contact, belies his frequent expressions (or perhaps performances) of emotional outreach and connection: chatting with Daniel (Barry Shabaka Henley) about jazz; meeting Max’s mother Ida (Irma P. Hall); counselling Max to call Annie if he survives the night. In parallel, Max remains impassive and indifferent to a squabbling white couple in his cab, and almost misses Vincent when he is distracted after dropping off Annie. Equally his adeptness in performance to Felix might be indebted to his fabrication of business success to his hospitalised mother. Thus the distribution of characteristics and creeds between Max and Vincent (superiority and withdrawal versus empathy and engagement; distance and contempt versus emotional investment) is not as straightforwardly polarised as first appears. Ironically, it is during and after Max’s performance of/as Vincent to Felix that Max’s true identity is suspected by LAPD Detective Fanning (Mark Ruffalo). Equally ironically, Fanning has ‘recognised’ the anonymous Vincent via the repeated performance of his ‘M.O.’: a previous spate of killings linked to a taxicab in New York. Fanning galvanises the FBI surveillance team tasked with protecting some of Vincent’s targets. Both Fanning and the FBI set out to follow the two Vincents. They all converge on the Fever nightclub for the four-cornered shoot-out, involving the special agents, Peter Lim’s (Inmo Yuon) bodyguards, Felix’s henchmen, and Vincent. The film’s episodes of greatest unpredictability and its climactic contingency (the chaotic Fever shoot-out, the sudden elimination of Fanning, Max’s crashing of the cab and his eventual defeat of Vincent) are heralded by the bizarre appearance of coyotes in the street as the taxi waits at a red light. During the drive from the shoot-out towards Vincent’s last appointment of the night (killing Annie), Max and Vincent trade critical observations. Vincent upbraids Max for his lack of agency, his inability to act in either the large scale of his unrealised business plan or the small scale of calling Annie for a date. (It is another of the film’s ironies that Max’s dream of agency, looking through a brochure for Mercedes saloon cars, is interrupted by the first irruption of contingency, Vincent’s first hit falling onto the roof of his cab.) Vincent’s answer to Max’s impotent moral objection to the night’s activity (‘You’re out of options, Max. Just take comfort in knowing you never had a choice’) assumes him to be incapable of unpredictable or heroic action. In reply, Max’s analysis of Vincent suggests the hitman’s vacancy is not a ‘discipline’ but simply the stunted development of a ‘state-raised’ sociopath: If somebody had a gun to your head and said, ‘You gotta tell me what’s going on with this person over here or I’m gonna kill you. What was driving him, 86

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what was he thinking?’ You know, you couldn’t do it, could you? Because they would have to kill your ass for sure because you don’t know what anyone else is thinking. […] And the standard parts that are supposed to be there in people, in you … aren’t. Vincent’s specific professional activity, unlike even the remorseless purposefulness of Frank’s or McCauley’s crew, is only possible because of his inability to empathise. His self-realisation is dependent entirely on the destruction of others, rather than being a likely consequence of it. Notably, Max phrases his analysis in terms of a test with fatal consequences, which Vincent would fail. The test which Vincent sets Max with his goading is one he passes, with lethal force. At first he acts purely contingently (crashing the cab to prove he can act to stop Vincent), but then assuming agency becomes at once heroic (setting out to save Annie) and yet more like Vincent in action (roaming the streets armed, bent on a single purpose). The contrast here with Scorsese’s cab driver is worth examining. Travis is bereft of purpose and connection, and the limitation and passivity of his activity of cab driving spurs an unfocused and misdirected urge for meaning, influence and impact upon his environment, which transforms him into an unexpected and perhaps unwarranted hero. In contrast to the restrictive definition of Travis’s character implied in the title to Scorsese’s film, the title of Mann’s introduces an ambiguity which is equally applicable to both main characters. Rybin notes the significance of the title to Vincent (his intended avoidance of ‘collateral damage’, the killing of bystanders in the execution of his contracts), but not the double meaning – collateral as integrity, viability, credit and credibility in professional terms, which Max has failed to accumulate to fund his limousine business (2007: 172). The first form of collateral is precipitated repeatedly by Max’s desperate actions in the first two thirds of the narrative, but he is encouraged or forced to acquire the second through contact with (and eventual imitation of ) Vincent, in embracing contingency and assuming agency and heroism. In refusing to become the first type of collateral, Max gains the second. Just as Max’s capability to adapt and perform are suggested by his destruction of Vincent’s case, and extended and confirmed by his act to Felix, so the vacuity of Vincent’s existence is underlined by his unsubstantiated performance of intimacy for purely professional ends (charming Max with the promise of reward, displaying an interest in Daniel’s jazz anecdotes, interacting with Max’s mother). However, Max’s decisive action (crashing the cab) is at first purely negative: an unforeseeable self-destructive act which merely hinders Vincent’s work, in asserting his ability to act at all. Discovering that Annie is the last target and setting out to stop Vincent personally and physically, represents a developmental transformation in narrative and character terms: Whereas in adolescence and early and middle adulthood one’s concerns are centered on self as one struggles to establish stable identity, to develop intimate relationships, and to achieve a sense of mastery in professional endeavors [sic], in one’s forties and fifties one passes (unless one fails to negotiate an earlier v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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developmental task) into a stage where one finds meaning in self-transcendent ventures. (Yalom 1980: 440) Max’s attempt to assume agency is self-transcendent not only in being a selfless act devoted to the maintenance of a wider social order and morality, but also because it represents a drastic alteration in the potential range of activity of which he has appeared capable. By comparison, while the likelihood of Travis acting violently is strongly indicated, the nature of his ultimate action remains unpredictable. When Max does intervene, he appears to act as physical double and moral opposite to Vincent. Although we might compare Max’s saving of Annie with Vincent Hanna’s identical pastoral engagement with victims of crime and relatives alike, the more important factor to note is that, unlike nearly all of Mann’s protagonists, Max changes significantly in character and action. That this might represent a loss of identity as much as a gain in agency is signalled by the uncertainty of the dawn into which he and Annie emerge, after leaving Vincent to become the unnoticed dead man on the MTA. Although Cruise’s Vincent is perhaps the most self-conscious example of character, casting and performance in Mann’s canon (the pairing and performances of Pacino and De Niro notwithstanding), he also emerges as the most empty and desperate of Mann’s protagonists, with the illusion, assertion and loss of agency and control of chaos truncated into one night. In Collateral, the emptiness (lamented by female characters in Heat) is more fully acknowledged and challenged (by male characters) than at any preceding juncture in Mann’s work. The singular placement of Max in a ‘female’ articulating role when he summarises Vincent’s moral and emotional vacuity, seems a logical consequence of the contempt which Vincent displays for Max’s professional failure, and comes after Max’s thorough and successful assumption of Vincent’s persona in the meeting with Felix. Scorsese’s Travis Bickle seeks a heroic role in response to his alienating experience of the city, his unsuccessful attempts to engage with women, and his uncertain past in Vietnam. Instead of assassinating the presidential candidate (an erroneous symbol of agency, whose campaign and speeches are characterised by vacuous assertions of the ‘power of the people’), Travis embarks on a different, unenvisaged act of violence which redefines him, fleetingly, as a heroic vigilante figure. Max’s transformation into a figure of decisive action may appear as unlikely and temporary, with the significance of his alteration resting more on the disempowerment and death of Vincent. Collateral remains a highly self-conscious story, about a growth of agency and a discovery of new meaning on one side balanced with a defeat by contingency and a loss of meaning on the other, where preceding and succeeding Mann narratives (for example The Insider, Ali and Public Enemies) look at the defiant reaffirmation of meaning, albeit often leading to a loss of agency. The tones of the comic and the absurd cohabit the cab with an awareness of peril and nihilism. Comparisons between Hawks and Mann usually founder on the marked absence of comedy from the latter’s films. Atypically, Collateral exhibits a note of the absurd in its narrative conception and some black comedy in its dialogue, but perhaps can be seen more properly as a situation tragedy. 88

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Conclusion Faith in technique is the religion of the dangerous trades. To go up against an armed felon in a gunfight or to fight him in the dirt you have to believe perfect technique, hard training, will guarantee that you are invincible. This is not true, particularly in firefights. You can stack the odds in your favor, but if you get in enough gunfights, you will be killed in one. (Harris 1999: 225) Mann tends to portray work as a respite from what we do on vacation […] The heat in this context is not the cops but the warmth of human contact. (James 2000: 17) The elevation of professional activity, or perhaps professionalism in his protagonists’ chosen activities, which pervades Mann’s films, represents, as in Hawks’s oeuvre, an expression of belief in and commitment to high and exclusive principles. These creeds are absorbed and observed by males who substitute métier for life meaning, or rather (in Hawks’s case) are able to merge personal and professional life in a utopian existence of comradeship (such as the pilots of Only Angels Have Wings [1938] who all eat, sleep, drink and relax in one place on the ground, and work alone in the air). For Mann’s protagonists, this ideal is unattainable, without the inevitable excision of the rogue, disruptive domestic elements, which interrupt and interfere with their zealous dedication. Yet this does not remove the vain appeals which heterosexuality and domesticity make upon them. In Mann’s films, the concentration on self-realisation and the vindication of individual principle through work can be seen to account for the textual consistency of opening upon action which is already in progress. Mann’s openings in medias res show the characters in their permanent existential and philosophical present, engaged in relentless self-fashioning and wholly committed to affirming personal significance and meaning. Conversely, the endings of Mann’s films deliberately mix resolution with ambiguity to leaven the urge of the genre film towards outright completion. The art film has been most strongly associated with open-endedness in film narrative (the inference of the existence of stories and lives which precede and extend beyond a film’s plot, frame and running time), in contrast to the circularity and unambiguous conclusiveness of popular narrative cinema after the Hollywood model. By comparison, the endings of Mann’s films may conclude their plots but retain an awareness of continuing and problematic rather than progressive existence for their protagonists: can Hanna return to, and stay with, Justine? Will Max and Annie share a future? Where can Frank go after killing Leo? The unseen life outside of the frame is, however, unambiguous in the sense of being confirmed and reflected in the life plotted within it. Earlier prison records and police careers are recounted in Thief and Heat; professional employment and formative influences are recalled in The Insider, in order to predict and justify the characters’ conduct in the present. The absent life of Mann’s characters – the unobserved, lost, or wasted time of earlier existence by which some are haunted, and the threatened potential of the (ultimately unrealised) future by which they are all tantalised – is nonetheless the impetus v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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for the activity they undertake. Caught between a predictive and formative past and the lure of an inaccessible future, Mann’s characters turn to the professional promise of perfected technique. Professionalism in the execution of their chosen craft is adopted as the means to facilitate their aspirations, but becomes no more than the succour of short-term activity, the ‘juice’ of the means rather than the goal of the end. Frank’s ‘magic act’ which masks but seeks to win the constant game of ‘catch-up’, McCauley’s solitary quest for ‘enough time’, Hanna’s public aura of capability flawed by his insistence on the preservation of his ‘angst’, Vincent’s adoption of ‘private sector’ business jargon to describe his morally empty activity (in what he insists is in any case a meaningless, random world) are the varying responses and strategies which Mann’s protagonists formulate to overcome fundamental existential anxieties. The substitution of the work ethic, and the ethics of their work, devoted to other forms of fulfilment and satisfaction, are prompted by a belief in transcendence via action rather than contemplation, yet the asserted control of the conscious is contradicted by the unconscious articulation of doubt and anxiety. When Vincent Hanna and Neil McCauley share their dreams, their admissions (Hanna’s of the recurring nightmare of impotent guilt before and admonishment by the dead he never saved, and McCauley’s of the knowledge of mortality against which his ‘discipline’ offers no defence) represent an acknowledgement, of the limitations of dedication, proficiency and intention, of the unified professional ‘act’. John Dillinger’s silent recognition of his associates’ fates and his own likely destiny when he views the files and photographs in the detective offices is comparable to this moment of realisation. The inevitability of the end, in death and incompleteness, for Vincent the murdered hit-man, Frank the homeless father, McCauley the failed escapee and Hanna the pastoral policeman, rob generic plot endings of any conclusiveness, although they confirm the characters’ and films’ definition of personal and professional integrity. In this sense, in their portrayal of qualities that are strengths and flaws, and decisions which are at once reprehensible and inevitable, Mann’s work offers a modern, humanistic vision of tragedy which considerably extends the tragic potential and trajectory of the classical gangster film. Mann’s heist films examine the intricacies of criminal activity and policing with an attention to detail which ultimately renders any potential moral distinction relative or even irrelevant. The antisocial nature of criminal acts is defused by the promotion of the expertise and discipline necessitated for their successful enactment. The inclusion of comprehensible and sympathetic motivations for criminal behaviour (the constitution and support of families, the desire for self-realisation and escape) might appear as an excuse for the crew’s undertakings, and the loss of life and destruction of domesticity which attend the heists are certainly stressed in terms of tragedy and waste. However, these losses frequently appear ambiguous or one-sided. Michael’s decision to go on the bank robbery, to take his hostage and his subsequent death are (on the crew’s terms) logical, albeit self-centred, selections which he does not survive to regret. Similarly, Eady’s consternation at McCauley’s abandonment is based on her ignorance (compared to the viewer’s knowledge) of his maxim. His earlier verbal commitment to her (‘There’s no point in me going anywhere any more if it’s alone, without you’) is, like Frank’s contract with Jessie, ultimately incompatible with indi90

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vidual principles and professional conduct. Charlene’s coded warning to Chris and Justine’s resigned releasing of Vincent at the hospital before his final confrontation with McCauley, represent a melancholic but conscious female accession to the males’ vocational demands. Despite the inclusion of the domestic domain in Mann’s films, as a fact, goal or ideal to be supported or defended by criminals and policemen alike, alternative systems of value, existential meaning and behaviour predominate for the male protagonists. Only in Manhunter, in which the FBI agent’s investigations into the serial murder of families imperils his own household, is the hero allowed to complete his task, revoke his profession and return to the home. (Alarmingly, however, the director’s cut of this film features a scene in which the facially-scarred Graham visits the home of Dollarhyde’s next targeted family, appearing ambiguously on the doorstep to ‘see’ them like threat and deliverer combined.) The annihilating ‘givens’ of adult life identified within existential psychotherapy – the inevitability of death, our inalienable free will, our fundamental solitude and the absence of innate meaning in life – are countered by personal strategies of comfort, containment and denial (Yalom 1991: 4–5). Family connections at once represent a source of support and the potential for further stress, as separations and deaths only reaffirm solitude and mortality. While families, and by implication legal and conventional lives, exist in Thief and Heat, they do not represent the favoured repository of meaning for the male protagonists. Self-realisation and meaning in life is achieved through the attainment of excellence and observance of self-imposed rules in work. As such, Mann’s treatment of the ‘dominion of crime’ bears comparison with the moral vertigo of Fritz Lang’s M (1931) and The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933), which exhibit the same disconcerting and morally ambiguous combination of police procedural and symbolic conflict, surface documentary realism and expressionist exploration of motivation and states of being. The family is reduced to ‘a tool, a defense against isolation’ which is discarded nonetheless, since it cannot defuse the crisis of meaning as effectively as the work of discipline, and the discipline of work (Yalom 1980: 362). Only in Collateral is the imbalanced equation of professional value and emotional void challenged assertively by a male protagonist, notably one characterised as professionally unsuccessful. In other cases, criminal and police work are as equally invalid and anti-social in domestic terms as they are valued and admirable within their exclusive male groups. In Mann’s films’ evocation of modern tragedy, the protagonists’ human choices are laden with lamentable consequences in individual, familial and social terms, and are represented and subsequently become valued by the viewer in the same morally fluid fashion. Notes 1

Mann’s familiarity with Folsom Prison, acquired during the production of The Jericho Mile, would appear to lie behind the significant references to this penitentiary and the penologist’s knowledge Hanna displays in Heat. See also Rybin 2007: 27–8. McNeil Island Prison, also mentioned in Heat, is noted as the shared history for the parallel characters in L.A. Takedown. v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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The marked concentration on working hands and intricate tasks in this sequence recalls similar compositions, suggestive of the extraction of spiritual meaning from manual activity, in the films of Robert Bresson, as noted in Rybin 2007: 48–9. The characterisation of the senior male law enforcer as pastor and patriarch, responding emotionally to the victims of crime, pervades television crime dramas made since the impact of Heat. Police heroes evince fatherly assurances of justice to ordinary citizens affected by violent crime. Lt. Horatio Caine (David Caruso) in CSI Miami repeatedly and personally guarantees victims and their relatives that perpetrators will be brought to justice. In series 4, episodes 24 and 25 (‘Rampage’/‘One of Our Own’), Horatio’s commitments to justice and patriarchal duty blend (or blur) when he pursues and kills the murderers of his wife Marisol, who is also the sister of a colleague. Jethro Gibbs (Mark Harmon) in N.C.I.S. series 3, episode 13 (‘Deception’) refuses to end an investigation into the abduction of a naval officer until the (unrelated) apprehension of a paedophile is accomplished. He later calms and feeds an infant during an investigation, to the surprise of his subordinates (series 3, episode 14: ‘Light Sleeper’). McCauley’s definitive utterance here echoes the unwavering perspective of De Niro’s character Michael in The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978), who illustrates the inseparability of physical and mental preparedness to his ill-equipped friend by holding up a bullet: ‘This is this. This ain’t something else. This is this.’

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CHAPTER THREE

Endangering the Domestic: Manhunter, The Last of the Mohicans, The Insider

If the commitment to the professional endeavour and ethos is taken to be centre of gravity for all of Mann’s male protagonists and their source of personal fulfilment, then the parallel, opposite, desired but denied alternative resides in the domestic sphere. In Mann’s films, the drive, duty and demands of the one are seen to overwhelm and negate the attraction or necessity of the other. Although the draw or the demands of professional life prove irresistible, the attraction of heterosexual union and/or domesticity is not lessened, even where the acquisition of a family may be seen as no more than an adjunct or expectation attached to professional, masculine success. The mutual and reciprocal benefits of heterosexual partnerships, with or without the addition of family, are rarely seen but are implied within each personal loss the male protagonists sustain through the tragic favouring of professional life. The apparently endless and insoluble negotiation between these polarities in which Mann’s protagonists are seen to engage ultimately, in virtually all cases, privileges the professional life to the detriment of domestic commitment and contentment. That said, the pervasive portrait of domesticity which Mann’s films provide is in itself open to debate: the depicted gender divide elevates and separates masculine activity from female-dominated domesticity, while apparently welcoming women to the work environment (as in, for example, the television series and film of Miami Vice), albeit with noticeably less than equal status. In long-term relationships, Mann’s males exhibit both an unapologetic emotional inarticulacy and an egotistical expectation of implicit understanding towards their partners. These detrimental traits characterise the failed and doomed relationships in Thief, L.A. Takedown, Heat and Ali. The women’s part in the process becomes merely to decipher and denounce male behaviour which appears irreconcilable to both partnership and parenthood, and to decry the lack of equality and mutuality within these relationships: v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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Charlene Shiherlis: There is no point talking to you ‘cause all you are is a child growing older […] We’re not making forward progress like real grown-up adults living our lives. Justine Hanna: You have got to be present sometime, like a normal guy. That’s sharing. This is not sharing. This is leftovers. What is also significant across Thief, Manhunter and Heat is the adoptive, consumerist nature of the families represented. The children in all these examples are not biologically related to the father figures. In Thief, Frank’s desire to have a son is not interrogated any further than his expectation of a wife and home to complete and conform to a capitalist, aspirational norm, and the child is supplied without delay, like contraband, by Frank’s adoptive father Leo. For Hanna, Lauren the stepdaughter is simply another attribute of the house his (current) wife brings from her last marriage. Lauren becomes the focus of emotional investment when she becomes a professional case, a victim requiring his care. Following the ill-fated assembly of domesticity in Thief, Manhunter and The Insider are the Mann texts most consumed with the idea and ideal of the family, and most concerned with its fragility. In Manhunter, the threat to professional dedication which heterosexual relationships represent registers for both FBI investigator Will Graham and his quarry Francis Dolarhyde (Tom Noonan). Graham’s wife and stepson are placed at risk by his abandonment of home and return to work, even as he tries to safeguard the families of others. Dolarhyde, whose perverse enactment of the domestic environment denied in his own childhood entails the murdering of families and the posing of the victims in communal welcoming tableaux, is interrupted in this ‘work’ by an unanticipated relationship which develops with a co-worker, Reba McClane (Joan Allen). As the compromised or distorted choices of Manhunter’s twinned protagonist and antagonist suggest, what is contested across all of Mann’s narratives is the notion of personal value. Domestic existence is never decisively or satisfactorily separated from professional commitment in the lives of his protagonists. While Mann’s narratives might therefore appear to be a series of observations on the realities of class, gender and work in modern America, the genres in which he works make the pressures on the families appear extreme and the men’s responses, oxymoronically, proportionately excessive. For Mann’s characters, the secular struggle for life meaning is also a life and death struggle within the professional callings which dominate their lives, and which also come to threaten their families. Familial interaction is or becomes work as it develops as a further ethical and professional manifestation of gendered and performed behaviour. Most of Mann’s protagonists are unable to sustain heterosexual relationships, and few become parents. The absence of biological fatherhood for most of Mann’s central male figures (in all his films except The Insider and Ali) entails a de-valuing or re-valuing of adoptive parenthood in Thief, Manhunter, The Last of the Mohicans and Heat. In Manhunter, Will Graham’s physical and emotional separation from his own family in the course of his investigations is precipitated by his parallel professional duty and personal need to defend other families. However, his connection to the other 94

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targeted families via his empathic understanding of his quarry’s desires underlines his psychic similarity to the killer, and therefore the ambiguous nature of his own familial identity. In The Last of the Mohicans, the role of fatherhood becomes a contested and competitive cultural influence, with racial and ethnic families demanding loyalty or offering differing forms of spiritual or secular fulfilment. In comparison with these overtly heroic narratives, which are resolved with physical, violent action, The Insider provides an examination of threats to the family which are embedded in the mundane domestic and vocational activity of modern American males. The menace contained within the social, legal and corporate systems of the contemporary world jeopardises the economic, ethical and professional integrity of the masculine protagonists and imperils their families, and yet also provides a national, technological and ideological battleground for heroic activity which is comparable to the warfare and law-enforcement of the earlier films. Manhunter Synopsis: Francis Dolarhyde, a serial killer nicknamed the ‘Tooth Fairy’, kills all the members of two families in Atlanta, Georgia and Birmingham, Alabama. FBI Behavioural Science chief Jack Crawford calls Special Investigator Will Graham out of retirement to assist in the manhunt before the Tooth Fairy attacks again. Graham had identified and apprehended the serial killer Hannibal Lecktor several years previously, but his ability to enter and understand the minds of psychopaths had precipitated his own mental breakdown. Dolarhyde is distracted from his next planned killing when he begins a relationship with Reba McClane, a blind woman who works with him at a photographic laboratory. Unable to remain distanced from the case, Graham abandons his role as an analyst and becomes actively engaged in the investigation, in order to prevent the Tooth Fairy claiming more victims, but in doing so jeopardises his own family and his mental stability. Graham eventually confronts and kills Dolarhyde before returning to his family in Florida. The production of Manhunter followed (and was in essence delayed by) Mann’s involvement in Miami Vice. Mann worked on the screenplay for Manhunter before and during his stint as producer of the successful 1980s’ television series (Smith 1992: 14). However, the relationship between the two texts in the director’s chronology and the similarities in theme and visual style underpin the comparison of their relevance to and position within Mann’s auteur output. The controversies which have surrounded the credit for the style and format of Miami Vice distract from the obvious continuities (in setting, colour palette, use of soundtrack music as well as narrative themes and characterisation) carried over into the production of Manhunter (Rybin 2007: 75–6). The repeated sacrifice of domestic relationships and preference for professional ones (which in effect supplant and replace the notion and structure of family for male protagonists) seen in the television series and already explored in detail in Thief, exist in Manhunter as factors within the choice between moral duty and personal obligation besetting Will Graham. v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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Graham’s dilemma can be summarised in ironic, ­aphoristic formulae reminiscent of film noir: in order to save the families of strangers he must risk his life and the safety of his own family; to thwart the activities of an insane killer he must endanger his own sanity. The incongruous paralleling of and identification between pursued and pursuer, murderer and law enforcer is encapsulated in the ambiguities of the title Manhunter, which can refer to Graham or Dolarhyde the ‘Tooth Fairy’, or both. Rybin notes that Thief and Manhunter cohere with the group of ‘neo-noir’ thrillers made from the late 1970s to mid-1980s (Rybin 2007: 53–4). Some of these films, such as Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan, 1981), simply remake the narratives of 1940s’ film noir, while others like Angel Heart (Alan Parker, 1987) return self-consciously to post-war American settings. Neo-noir transplants to contemporary cinema the thematic framework of classical era film noir: the subjectively rendered experience of a flawed character encountering deceit, violence, corruption and conspiracy, and becoming aware of both the world’s wickedness and his own vice. Usually this entails the abandonment or modification of the 1940s’ films’ black-and-white expressionist aesthetics. Composition and lighting become transformed in these films with the change from black and white to colour, but the near-monochrome geometric cityscapes and night exteriors illuminated by traceries of neon light, as in Mann’s own film Thief and ‘tech noir’ like The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984), visualise and articulate neo-noir’s critique of the dehumanising forces of modernity. What unites Thief and Manhunter, and distinguishes both from Miami Vice, is the evocative noir and neo-noir element of urban night shooting, which is at variance with the daylight and pastel palette of the television series. (It is noteworthy, by contrast, how much of the running time of the film remake of Miami Vice is occupied with night scenes.) Although the generic framework for much of Mann’s filmmaking and television output (derived from the gangster film, the heist movie, and the police procedural drama) would seem to be indebted to classical noir and related to its post-classical revival, the strength of Mann’s connection to noir as a conceptual and thematic paradigm is open to question. Although the threat to the domestic environment and the detective’s family is palpable in some examples, such as The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953), the straightforward absence of stable and enduring family units is more common in most film noir. Despite the heterogeneity of the film noir category overall, some of its strongest and most pervasive unities are the presence and characterisation of the femme fatale, and the threat to morally weak and sexually susceptible manhood which she represents. This element is recapitulated in neo-noirs such as Body Heat, Sea of Love (Harold Becker, 1989) and The Last Seduction (John Dahl, 1993), but is markedly absent from Mann’s oeuvre. In the same way that the notion of the femme fatale is expunged from The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946), a textbook example of film noir under other definitions, the female characters in Mann’s films do not register as sexual threats to masculinity because his male protagonists (like Hawks’s) are not intimidated by female sexuality. The uncommunicativeness and neglect of Mann’s protagonists towards their female partners are readable as bizarre, back-handed compliments. The males’ expectations of implicit understanding appear to be based on an assumed equality and temperamental similarity between partners which ignores or fails to recognise gender or any other difference. 96

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Within Mann’s narratives, the domestic sphere and adult heterosexual relationships do not encompass a noir-ish weakening or disarming of the males, and do not even constitute a distraction from professional activity since in most cases they refuse to be distracted. Admittedly, Dolarhyde’s positioning in this framework is complex, in that his desire for integration within a family unit is sexualised and destructive, yet he is nearly saved (though perhaps ‘weakened’ and temporarily deflected from his professional course) by a heterosexual relationship with Reba. Instead of admitting sexual susceptibility, the males’ unflinching dedication to professionalism imperils the domestic portion of their existence in risking separation or divorce (in Thief, L.A. Takedown, Heat, The Insider and Ali), or entails physical endangerment to the family itself (in Manhunter and The Insider). Yet in spite of this unity in the representation and implications of domesticity for Mann’s heroes, Manhunter remains unique in allowing the domestic alternative to not only survive but eventually supplant the professional imperative. This uncharacteristic conclusion is reached in a text which stands in an unusual relationship to Mann’s other films, but which also occupies a notable place within a web of inter-related texts, which connect with Manhunter’s source novel, Red Dragon (Thomas Harris, 1982). There have been several different versions of Manhunter in circulation since the film’s original release, including the US theatrical version of 1986, a director’s cut containing three extra minutes of footage, and two further cuts distributed on video, featuring several key omissions and additions and with running times shorter than the theatrical version by a similar amount.1 In comparison with the rapid editing tempo exhibited in Mann’s later films, and despite some conspicuous, percussive montage techniques (noteworthy within the climactic confrontation in Dolarhyde’s house), all three versions possess an average shot length of over eight seconds, and all contain one outstanding shot of almost a minute-and-a-half ’s duration (a scene between Dolarhyde and Reba McClane beside the river near his house). Detailed comparisons between these versions, and between them and their source Red Dragon, reveal significant differences of emphasis, which are relevant to Mann’s characterisations and definitions of the male within domestic and professional milieux. In addition, the uncompromising comparisons between personal, familial, professional and institutional choices explored in Harris’s novel have been extended in his other fictional writings (The Silence of the Lambs [1989], Hannibal [1999]) and subsequent film adaptations. These include The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991) and Hannibal (Ridley Scott, 2001) to which the homogenising remake of Red Dragon (Brett Ratner, 2003) must also be added. Incorporating these linked texts into this discussion assists in distinguishing their differences in terms of filmic and literary authorship, and in determining the significance of Mann’s original adaptation of Harris’s fiction. The key element in Graham’s detection of the killer’s motive, method and consequently his identity (in recognising the significance of films as Dolarhyde’s process for selecting his family targets and for recording and reliving his acts of ‘becoming’) is inherited from Harris’s novel. However, the great emphasis in Mann’s film upon the implications of the mechanical reproduction of images and voices sees this detective element become a visual motif and a central theme. v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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Mann’s film initiates the theme of threatened domesticity with a highly significant pre-credit sequence. The first shot is almost as abstract as the first images of Mann’s preceding feature, The Keep: a row of small lights and an aerial, which only later can we recognise as the roof of Dolarhyde’s truck, presumably parked near to the Leeds family house. The camera moves unsteadily, as if hand-held, towards the left, but a cut intervenes before this movement is completed. The cut replaces this enigmatic image with a hand-held point-of-view shot, of torchlight playing on darkened stairs. This is followed by a slow-motion tracking shot, again equating to an unidentified subjective viewpoint, past the open doorway of the children’s bedroom. What the first few shots establish is the nightmare of ‘home invasion’ referred to darkly in Thief, as the kind of crime Frank will not countenance as a job, and yet is willing to perpetrate against Leo and the crime ‘family.’ After two more indistinct, hand-held shots, the sequence ends with a static point-of-view shot of the parents’ bedroom, the circle of torchlight resting on the sleeping couple. As the wife wakes and rises, the slow-motion returns before the sequence ends with a quick fade to black. This opening sequence establishes the Tooth Fairy’s disquieting pattern of violating the family environment. The use of the camera as the serial killer’s perspective leaves the point of view that we share as viewers distressingly anonymous, and yet confers our complicity in the act. (Only subsequently do we learn that Dolarhyde films his victims, and that this unevenly edited and composed sequence can be interpreted as his record of the attack on the Leeds family.) The resemblance of this sequence to those seen in slasher horror films, in which the viewers witness violent acts while occupying the point of view of the deranged killer, is incomplete in that the murder of the Leeds family is left deliberately unseen: we are given visual access only to the intrusion (Dolarhyde’s view of the house interior), and the aftermath (Graham’s subsequent analysis of the home as crime scene). By contrast, the entering of a family home followed by murderous and sexualised violence is portrayed explicitly (and shown to be videotaped for repeated subsequent gratification) in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (John McNaughton, 1986). In Manhunter, because of the deliberate ellipsis, viewers are prompted, like Graham, to imagine and visualise the intervening, unseen action. If the sequence seems to frustrate the expectations which its similarity to a slasher film generates, its subsequent repetition and expansion from Graham’s perspective, as he investigates and relives the killer’s acts and experiences, provides the viewer with a different, unanticipated and troubling form of participation. Instead of granting us the vicarious experience of the killer’s perspective, we are privy to a retrospective interpretation of the obscene act, embodied in the recording of Graham’s spoken observations when he visits the crime scene. Arguably, the recent vogue for investigative television dramas based on detailed crime scene analysis can be traced back to the combination of police procedural methods and behavioural science underpinning Harris’s novels, and documented in several sequences in Manhunter.2 Despite its fidelity to the approach and detail of Harris’s Red Dragon, Mann’s Manhunter makes significant modifications to the novel’s action, characterisation and resolution in order to revise the activities and motives of the male hero, and both exacerbate and resolve the violence done to the notions of home and family at its outset. 98

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Manhunter: Graham’s reflection

The dictation of Graham’s observation and extrapolation of details from the crime scene is taken nearly verbatim from the novel (1993: 17–18). Similarly, Graham’s interpretation of the movement and arrangement of the bodies, the insight to the killer’s removal of his gloves to touch Mrs Leeds, and his intuitive extrapolation from the evidence, are derived from the source novel (1993: 23–4). The sudden intrusion of Valerie Leeds’ answerphone message which disturbs Graham’s first examination in the film occurs in the novel during a later visit to the house, at which point he also views the home movies for the first time and telephones Molly at length, though without gaining the immediate and crucial insight which he achieves in the film (Harris 1993: 41–46). In Manhunter, the answerphone message returns as a subjective manifestation on the soundtrack when Graham waits in an airport lobby, directly after abandoning Molly and Kevin and returning alone to pursue the case. While this irruption is also derived relatively faithfully from Harris’s novel (1993: 177), Mann’s staging and framing enhances and complicates the brief episode. Graham gazes into the reflections (notably, consisting of well-dressed women in the right background and his own ambiguous expression in the left foreground) on a rain-covered window, and then reacts awkwardly to an unseen waitress who overhears his verbalised reply to Mrs Leeds’ subjectively recalled voice. Where at this moment Harris’s investigator indulges in a drunken, defeatist monologue, Mann’s evinces an austere resolve. The scenes in which Graham’s viewing of the family’s home movies on videotape in his Atlanta hotel room reveal clues to the crime scene and the Tooth Fairy’s fantasy bring together the visual and thematic intensities of Mann’s adaptation. Initially while he views the films, he continues to record his dispassionate observations onto a tape. Graham occupies the well-lit right-hand side of the frame, with the rear of the television set blackening and blanking out the left. When his analysis tails off, he calls Molly at home in Florida, before returning to his viewing and suddenly gaining insight to Manhunter: Molly endangered

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Manhunter: Graham’s insight

the killer’s desire. The cut from Graham’s suite to Molly’s bedroom provides a drastic colour contrast, with the pale light of the hotel room juxtaposed against the deep blue of Florida. When Graham terminates the call, and returns tentatively to the television, the music which accompanied Dolarhyde’s intrusion to the Leeds house in the opening sequence rises again on the soundtrack. The music bridges a cut back to Molly at this point, as she settles down to sleep in the blue bedroom, before another cut back to Graham in the hotel. He resumes his position before the television, but the darkened segment on the right of the frame now occupies two-thirds of the composition. Graham’s words now (‘What are you dreaming?’) are unnervingly ambiguous, as he seems to address the desired, deceased woman on the screen, yet his tender enquiry is directed to the Tooth Fairy (‘That’s something you can’t afford for me to know about, isn’t it?’), with whom he now converses and shares a shocking affinity (‘God, she’s lovely, isn’t she?’). These scenes summarise the connection between Graham and Dolarhyde, and condense their shared or combined threat to domesticity in the reduction and possession of women via technological, imagistic reproduction. The bleeding through of the opening sequence’s music to the activity of Graham’s analysis, and then to the setting of his own home and his wife’s bedroom, articulates the Tooth Fairy’s threat to families Manhunter: Molly in Graham’s dream

Manhunter: Graham’s ambiguous gaze

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Manhunter: Dolarhyde’s delusion

that will now also include Graham’s own. However, the danger to Molly to which the soundtrack music alerts us arguably emanates from Graham himself, as he gains his crucial insight to Dolarhyde’s desire after speaking to his own wife, who then comes under threat. Graham’s voyeuristic appreciation of Mrs Leeds mirrors Dolarhyde’s, but is also forcibly connected to the sudden, intrusive access to Molly in her bedroom. In the novel, Graham’s thoughts of Molly during the investigation are ‘tasteless as well as distracting’ (1993: 19), but in the film the connection to his wife serves to focus and enlighten him. The uncertainty regarding Graham’s resemblance and empathic connection to the Tooth Fairy, and the consequent ambiguity of his desire for Molly, which these scenes provoke, are explored further in Graham’s dream while on the plane to Birmingham. Graham boards the flight and arranges the photographic evidence in front of him. A mother and daughter occupy the seats next to him. He fixes two group portraits (of the Leeds and Jacobi families) onto his folder before falling asleep. The blue night sky seen through the cabin window seems to conjure up his dreamed recollection of a day by the sea with Molly. (By comparison, in the novel, Graham consciously recalls the episode seen in the film’s dream, when he compares his life to that of the Jacobis on his way to the second crime scene [1993: 77].) As Graham dozes, diegetic sound ebbs away to be replaced by music which blankets the images of Florida. The first shot is again a jolting change, an almost abstract image of a boat engine suspended in mid-air. Next Molly is seen in long and then medium shot, out of focus and in slow-motion, strolling towards the camera along a boardwalk flanked by trees. Graham, moving normally, is seen securing the engine with ropes before two cuts show us the view through the cabin window as the plane alters course, and Graham asleep in his seat. This is succeeded by a slow-motion shot of Molly smiling at someone out of frame, and then a full-face close-up of Graham, slowed almost to the point of a freeze-frame. His expression, as he appears to look at Molly, is highly ambiguous: not entirely blank, but certainly not benign. Two further cuts show us Molly smiling in slow-motion again, now looking more directly into the camera as if returning Graham’s gaze, and a repeat of Graham in close-up, before we cut back to the plane interior. Images of the crime scenes showing blood-spattered bodies, and Mrs Leeds with her eyes replaced with mirror fragments, have fallen from Graham’s folder and are seen in rapid cuts. The horrified reaction of the child and mother sitting next to Graham rouses him from the dream, just before the plane lands. The ambiguities of Graham’s drives and desires inserted in the film analysis sequence are heightened here by the extension of the apparent threat to Molly, and the v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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vision of the physical mutilation of the murdered families (specifically of the female victims) affecting another mother and daughter. The strongest association between Graham and Dolarhyde, and the most telling divergence from Harris, occurs with Manhunter’s inclusion of Graham’s return to the Leeds house, not to review the films but to re-enact the original unseen murder. Following his final phone conversation with Hannibal Lecktor, Graham re-enters the house, now divested of the domestic clutter seen in the opening sequence and during Graham’s first visit. On this occasion his verbal narration is personal and possessive, and the sequence as a whole exaggerates the link between the experiences of Graham and Dolarhyde until the two characters are merged. After shots which recall the previous intrusion (Graham crossing the kitchen and turning on a light switch), the bedroom crime scene is seen, brightly lit but now restored to pristine whiteness. The tableau of the Leeds couple in bed, as viewed by Dolarhyde on the night of the murder, is arranged before Graham, who stands with his back to the camera, dressed in black. A combined track and zoom effect seems to transport him forward towards the bed as he intones the deciphered and shared secret of the Tooth Fairy’s fantasy, which drives the crimes: ‘I see you there […] And I see me desired by you. Accepted and loved, in the silver mirrors of your eyes.’ The sequence concludes with a medium close-up of a resurrected Mrs Leeds reclining on the bed, with the vacancies of her mouth and eyes replaced by blazing light, and a close-up of Graham whose expression recalls that seen in the dream. Graham’s connection to Dolarhyde, in his subjective immersion in the killer’s perspective and his full comprehension and apparent sharing of the drive behind his fantasy and act, is followed soon after by the camera’s assumption of Dolarhyde’s deluded perspective of Reba’s infidelity (bathed in unmotivated mauve light), when he watches her return home with a work colleague. The possessive, prejudicial and violent objectification of women by both characters occurs in close proximity to cement the association between them. The disquieting linkage between Graham and Dolarhyde, emphasised within the film by such departures from Harris’s novel, receives different emphasis within the varying cuts of the film. For example, following the dream sequence in the plane, Graham visits the Jacobi house. Where in some versions a short scene with a realtor who shows Graham around the house is included at this point, in others the resemblance between killer and investigator is stressed by cutting directly to Graham searching the grounds of the Jacobi house, watching the domestic space in exactly the same way as Dolarhyde is presumed to have done. Another variation includes the blue-tinted scene in which Graham and Molly meet and make love in a hotel room before the stakeout intended to catch Dolarhyde. The absence of this interlude in some versions emphasises Graham’s withdrawal from his family and absorption in the hunt. The hotel room episode occurs in Harris’s novel, and provides the source for Molly’s insights, knowing ‘the value of their days’, and that ‘time is luck’ (1993: 148–9). But the recollection of their first time together which this moment inspires differs between novel and film in that, in Graham’s mind, this joyful moment already holds the promise of loss (‘this is too good to live for long’), whereas the Graham of the film’s observation (‘this is too good to relive’) begins to suggest a divergence, stressing his difference from the Tooth Fairy who requires the props and mementoes of his films in order to‘relive’ his staged pleasures. 102

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Graham’s verbalised sympathy for Dolarhyde is also explored to varying degrees across the novel and cuts of the film. Dr Bloom’s (Paul Perri) compassion for the killer as psychiatric patient transfers to Graham in an abbreviated scene, but its excision from some versions removes some of the ambiguity present in Graham’s character, and in his ability to empathise and share dreams with the killer and still prosecute the hunt to a fatal conclusion. In this regard, Graham’s insistence (voiced to Molly rather than Bloom or Crawford) on being the one to ‘stop the killing’ emerges as an expulsion and denial of his parallel nature and assertion of difference from his quarry, as much as a motivated heroic duty to perform for a greater good. A highly revealing scene shows Graham’s second analysis of the home movies, in which he discovers that Dolarhyde must have viewed the films to choose his families. All versions note Crawford’s unease with Graham’s understanding of Dolarhyde’s motivation, but in the theatrical release and director’s cut (which themselves display minor differences in this scene), the following dialogue is missing: Graham: This all started from an abused kid, a battered infant. There’s something terrible about… Crawford: You’re sympathising with this guy? Graham: 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? This cut of the scene in the video release not only extends Graham’s sympathy for Dolarhyde, but also lays the foundations for Graham’s need to kill Dolarhyde himself while making the only explicit reference in any version of Mann’s film to the Tooth Fairy’s origins. By comparison, Harris devotes several chapters to Dolarhyde’s life, from childhood in the 1930s to middle age in the 1970s (1993: 178–205). The film Red Dragon incorporates a credit sequence which imitates that of Se7en, in showing isolated extracts, sensationalising tabloid press cuttings and writings from the serial killer’s journal. Where in David Fincher’s film this technique (also seen in the opening of his Alien 3) provides a partial, fragmentary and deliberately enigmatic exposition, in Ratner’s the effect is a lurid ‘Tattler-isation’ of Hannibal Lector (Anthony Hopkins) and Dolarhyde’s (Ralph Fiennes) fascination with him. Graham’s articulation of his position in this version admits a duality, only to renounce it in restating his professional duty and personal need to destroy his double. Elsewhere, Mann’s adaptation strengthens Graham’s resolve and (in comparison with the source novel), prepares for Graham’s assumption of the heroic role at the film’s climax, in confronting and killing Dolarhyde himself. Key differences between Harris’s novel and Mann’s film concern the order and significance of events and the actions of Graham, mostly in relation to his own family and this conclusive heroic duty. The idea to approach Freddie Lounds (Stephen Lang), the brazen reporter for the National Tattler, and bait the killer with Graham via the Tattler article is Crawford’s in the v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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novel (1993: 141–4). Similarly, Harris deprives Graham of the resolve to remove his wife and her son from harm by suggesting a visit to grandparents by making this Molly’s decision (1993: 175). Mann’s Graham must stop Dolarhyde himself, whereas in the novel, Molly is forced to kill Dolarhyde to defend Will, herself, and her son (after Graham is attacked first and wounded, and then simply runs for his life)(Harris: 311–12). In the second film version of Red Dragon, Graham teaches his wife to shoot as a precaution (as in the novel), and ends up sharing the killing of Dolarhyde with her when he infiltrates their home and threatens their son. Harris’s Graham finally loses the family his choices have always endangered, and gains, instead of equilibrium and vindication, a realisation of the essential and equivalent meaninglessness of human actions, both merciful and murderous (1993: 319). Mann’s Graham is freed to go back to Florida, at the conclusion of his cathartic and abreactive case. In this respect, Mann’s adaptation of Harris anticipates the therapeutic investigative activity undertaken by Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) in the adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs. While it is as generically hybridised as Mann’s Harris adaptation (combining a ‘gothic narrative of suspense, a police procedural, and a horror story of monstrosity and murder’), Demme’s film examines the inequalities in society as much as instabilities of both perpetrator and investigator, using the same metaphor of objectifying looking ‘to interrogate the asymmetrical social relation between gender and power’ (Young 1991: 8–9). Like Graham, Starling wrestles with personal anguish, but in this case with memories of the loss of her father in childhood. The flashbacks which enlighten us as to her delicate psychological state (provoked after her first meeting with Hannibal Lector, and at the funeral home in West Virginia where a female murder victim is examined) are, however, indicative of the differences between Starling and Graham. Although in effect both investigators use their personal afflictions to motivate and assist the hunts for their serial killer targets, and though both processes (in the film versions at least) can be characterised as exorcisms (of Graham’s alternate self and of Clarice’s childhood grief and guilt), the drives and outcomes are divergent. Clarice is surrounded by patriarchal figures who, as Lector observes, are able to advance her career: the inspirational symbol of her father, the mentor and father-figure in Crawford (Scott Glenn), and the advisor, educator, admirer and therapist in Lector himself. Although like Graham she is positioned ambiguously, in her case this is because she exists as both detective and sympathetic prospective (female) victim, rather than as investigator and empathetic potential perpetrator. Through the example, encouragement and occasional manipulation of the older males, Clarice completes the tracking down and destruction of ‘Buffalo Bill’ (Ted Levine), and achieves, as a result, her promised induction into the exclusive, masculine professional environment. Graham, though he may undertake his trial for dubious reasons, completes it in order to resign and return to his family. Conversely, Clarice embarks on her investigation to earn the right to join the (male dominated) professional preserve. Under the influence of vocational, therapeutic and potentially sexualised relationships with patriarchal figures, and through the pursuit and exorcism of a serial killer target with the same provincial background and transformative aspirations as herself, Clarice is able to transcend her trauma and her gendered kinship with the victims of crime: 104

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‘Starling’s coming-of-age is her entry into organized sadism; to become a professional is to resemble the serial killer who is her mentor’ (Robbins 1996: 81). The predominant factors in Starling’s trauma (her father’s death and her attempt to save the lambs), though based in childhood and the ideal of family, provide the inspiration for her vocation and ambition, in altruistic endeavour to underpin adult self-realisation: The secret of the film, to which the title alludes, seems to be explicitly not sexual but professional. Unexpectedly, and perhaps polemically, a professional psychology takes the place of a Freudian or sexual one. The primal scene of the orphan trying to save the lambs from the slaughter, at the same time trying to save herself, is a professional scene, indeed a sort of myth of professional creation and legitimating. (Robbins 1996: 82–3) The professional ambition which drives Starling is not derived from childhood sexual trauma, but inspired and facilitated by patriarchal figures. Yet it is realised by violent action that exorcises and denies the vulnerability she shares with the other victims, and the potential victim she saves. The overlapping complexities of male dominance, inspiration, patronage and menace which accompany Starling’s progress to success allow the irony attending it (does her entry to a male bastion transform it, or alter her?) to remain in place. Graham’s killing of Dolarhyde is a notable divergence from the source novel, which may appear to conform to the predictabilities of Hollywood cinema, in which individualistic masculine action must resolve and conclude the narrative. In contrast to the muted ending of Harris’s Red Dragon, the symbolic resolution of Manhunter is crucial in its echoing of classical cinematic narrative circularity (the surreptitious home invasion of the opening scenes is redressed by Graham’s violent assault on Dolarhyde’s house), and, despite this arguably clichéd reaffirmation of individual heroism, in its maintenance of certain ambiguities. The film’s narrative has depicted the desecration of domestic space and the endangerment of families, and the hero has repeated these encroachments even as he has striven to stop them. Graham’s violation of his quarry’s home space connects him to Dolarhyde in this intrusion and also to Dolarhyde’s victims through his wounding with shards of mirrored glass. The violence in the domestic space which is presumed to have created Dolarhyde is replicated and exaggerated by his actions in adulthood, but must be repeated by Graham too for the cycle to end, and for his own home to remain unsullied. In order to treasure the family, it appears necessary to at least endanger it, or destroy its likeness. The Last of the Mohicans Synopsis: Chingachgook and his son Uncas, the last surviving members of the Mohican tribe, travel and hunt with Chingachgook’s adoptive son Nathaniel (‘Hawkeye’), a white scout. The three men become embroiled in the war raging between British and French forces for control of the American colonies when they save Cora and Alice Munro, the daughters of a British general, from a Huron war chief named Magua. v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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Magua seeks revenge on Munro for the death of his own family. While Alice Munro falls in love with Uncas, Nathaniel’s attraction to her sister brings him into conflict with Lieutenant Heyward, a British officer who wishes to marry Cora. After the capture by French forces of a British fort commanded by General Munro, Magua takes Cora and Alice prisoner and carries them into the wilderness to seek justice from his tribal leaders. Hawkeye, Uncas and Chingachgook pursue Magua’s war party to rescue the sisters, but Uncas and Alice die before Magua is killed and Hawkeye and Cora are reunited. Mann’s adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826) is less a colonial American romance and more a pre-Revolutionary epic. It assumes this scale in tracing the repercussions of colonial conflict across all the members of several emblematic families. Following on from the concentrated, contemporary subject matter of Mann’s career to date (The Jericho Mile, Thief, Miami Vice and Manhunter), The Last of the Mohicans may at first appear as substantial a deviation in generic and historical terms as The Keep. As the director explained in an interview, the painstaking recreation of the historical period (as seen in the attention to detail in The Keep and subsequently in Public Enemies) was the major, but not the only concern: I wanted to have the scale of a geopolitical conflict – the ethnic and religious conflicts, the struggle of white imperialism on a grassroots level, the conditions of the struggle for survival of the colonial population, and the struggle between the Euramerican and European powers and the American Indian population. That’s the outer frame, that’s the scale of the piece. Then at the same time, I wanted an emotional intensity that came from the stories of Hawkeye, his father and brother, from each of their points of view, and from the Munro daughters and the obvious central love story, which I wanted to be very intimate. (In Smith 1992: 10) The awareness here of complimentary small- and large-scale action in the format of the generic historical adventure film, and the centrality of a romantic couple, representing and eventually uniting divergent views on the conflict, within the narrative, perhaps underline a more conscious conformity to commercial patterning in comparison with The Keep. The conducive qualities of historical adventure and romance, especially when attached to the format of the western, may have appeared to have promised commercial success for The Last of the Mohicans following the reception of Dances With Wolves (Kevin Costner, 1990). Despite its subsequent commercial success, The Last of the Mohicans does not conform comfortably to any single generic classification. In this, the film bears a resemblance to The Keep and also anticipates Ali and Public Enemies. In addition to its status as a literary adaptation, elements from the romance, historical adventure, war and western genres coalesce in The Last of the Mohicans in a profitable, occasionally clichéd but individualistic work. Within this achievement, the pre-Revolutionary setting is key to both the generic derivation and the auteurist expression. While acknowledging the ambivalence towards the representation of revolution in Hollywood cinema (its status as a patriotic, American subject matter, versus its 106

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controversial nature as an ideologically objectionable concept), Brian Taves recognises the convergence of adventure films and revolutionary content: Adventure movies serve as a metaphor, re-enacting by analogy the Revolution […] The adventure genre dramatizes the overthrow of oppressive rule. The narrative movement is invariably toward greater freedom, with respect for human rights and equality gaining a firm footing that will eventually have its culmination in democratic forms of government […] An analysis of the beliefs underlying the Revolution is simultaneously an overview of the specific ideology of adventure films. The conflicts in adventure pictures are revolts to reassert tradition against imposed authority, by winning back legitimate rights lost to a usurper. (Taves 1993: 209) Taves highlights a contradictory mix of tradition and revolt, revolution and conservatism in the adventure film, which encompasses more than the paradoxical representation of a tradition of revolution by a conservative Hollywood establishment. Mann’s film, in being an addition to this staple of production and an extension to the long lineage of adaptations of Cooper’s novel, combines its evolutionary derivation from classical Hollywood with a revolutionary bent from its director’s perspective. The screenplay for Mann’s adaptation of The Last of the Mohicans owes more to a preceding film version (directed in 1936 by George Seitz, from a script by Philip Dunne) than to Cooper.3 Yet the potential relevance of the original story to historical and contemporary politics, for adaptations from different eras including Mann’s own, was as significant to the director as the classical cinematic inheritance and the desire to represent the time period of the colonial war as accurately as possible: In researching the period, I found that events in 1757 moved as fast as 1968 […] [Dunne] was writing at a time of tremendous political struggle in the United States, a country caught in a depression and at the same time seeing events in Asia and Europe […] Dunne essentially gave Hawkeye the political attitudes of the isolationists: independent, anti-authoritarian, anti-British. But then at the end of the movie, in 1936, both men – Hawkeye the proto-American individualist, and Heyward – both in love with Cora, march off to war together to face a greater common enemy. (In Fuller 1992: 266–8) If the conservatism of Mann’s adaptation is here in a return to a studio precedent of historical adventure, then also present is the director’s own analogy and allusion to the American revolution of the 1960s, and the challenges to injustice and the assertion of rights and equality contained within that period. (Subsequently, Mann would address this era of contemporary American history directly in Ali.) If a tradition of American revolution is upheld in Mann’s film, it is not directly comparable to the political orientation of the 1936 version. In contrast, Mann’s characterisation of Hawkeye is more isolationist and anti-authoritarian in defying British rule in the colonies and in retreating at the end of the film to the frontier from which he came. Yet in addition to modifying the treatment and relevance of white American political history through v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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The Last of the Mohicans: the wilderness

The Last of the Mohicans: the opening hunt

the vehicle of the adaptation, Mann’s film (in line with Taves’ definition of the adventure) does reassert tradition, reclaim legitimate rights and demand equality, but on the behalf of indigenous American culture. The film opens with a short series of titles against a black background, which frame and locate the action to follow: 1757: The American Colonies. It is the 3rd year of the war between England and France for possession of the continent. Three men, the last of a vanishing people, are on the frontier west of the Hudson River. The drumming which accompanies the titles, before the first images and full orchestral score appear, is highly reminiscent of the rhythmic, almost disharmonious electronic scoring which opens The Keep, but underlines the film’s resemblance to a war film. The action itself, in accordance with other Mann films, has begun before the film furnishes us with images of it: the armed conflict is already in progress, and the ‘three men’ are engaged in a hunt through the forest (although again, the nature of their activity and the identity of their quarry are unknown at this point). Following on from the titles, the credit sequence portrays Nathaniel or ‘Hawkeye’ (Daniel Day-Lewis), Uncas (Eric Schweig) and Chingachgook (Russell Means) tracking an unseen prey through dense trees. A slow pan in extreme long shot over a blue-green sea of hills, forests and valleys veiled in fog or cloud is succeeded by a rapid series of shots showing first Nathaniel, then Uncas, then the brothers together and finally Chingachgook alone, as they close in for the kill. The hunt sequence evokes a parallel with the woodcutter’s walk into the forest in Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950), in being composed of multiple mobile shots as the characters move between the trees. However, the rapidity of the camera’s and characters’ movements and the editing belies the comparison. Where the woodcutter’s walk ushers the viewer into 108

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The Last of the Mohicans: the hunt’s climax

the equivocal space, unsubstantiated action and dubious character of ‘the grove’, the hunters’ run through the forest is an unambiguous enactment of skill, intent and identity. In Kurosawa’s film, identity is asserted through the unreliable, subjective recollection of alleged actions. In Mann’s, identity is confirmed unambiguously in a skilled, witnessed action given cultural and historical authenticity. The urgency of their movements culminates in the stillness of a slow-motion close-up on Nathaniel’s face and firearm as he takes aim at a stag. The focus racks from Nathaniel’s eyes to the barrel of the gun as the fatal shot is fired. The fallen deer is then honoured as a ‘brother’ by the hunters, who express admiration for their victim and regret in the killing. The hunters’ lament connects their quarry with their own endangered status as the last of a ‘vanishing people’, and confirms the elegiac tone established by the opening titles, the film’s title and its powerful but plaintive score. In extrapolating as much from postclassical westerns such as Little Big Man (Arthur Penn, 1970), Ulzana’s Raid (Robert Aldrich, 1972) and Dances With Wolves as from Cooper’s frontier fiction, The Last of the Mohicans articulates a liberal lament for the Native American noble savage: The frontier is less the place where the anti-social goes to escape the strictures of civilization than the church where the remnant of a liberal culture gathers to worship and mourn a lost and wholly mythic innocence. (Harkness 1992) If the opening sequence establishes the image of the vanishing indigenous people (as skillful hunters, sensitive and attuned to their environment) in liberal and clichéd terms, it serves an important structural purpose in contrasting the subsistence hunt with the subjugating war, and in connecting the first hunting run through the wilderness with a second, where the three men track British prisoners of the Huron war party, and the third which concludes the action. Where the first ends with the death of a ‘brother’, the last ends with the deaths of a sister, and a brother and son. In a tangible echo but modification of the opening of the film, its conclusion shows Chingachgook and Hawkeye joined by Cora Munro (Madeleine Stowe), whose sister Alice (Johdi May) has died with Uncas. In contrast to the claustrophobic forest seen in the hunt sequence but in a parallel to the first overviews of the wilderness, the three bereaved characters stand on a mountain top, looking over the expanse of the frontier. As this ending presents us with a woman effectively displacing a man within the three members of the ‘vanishing people’, this cyclical patterning of the film prompts more investigation. Cora is the sole survivor of another family, but her replacement of Uncas v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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promises a new family with Nathaniel in the future. The grief is registered for the loss of individual family members, but the echoing of the opening sequence in the film’s conclusion is also redolent of the endurance and preservation of indigenous culture. Manifestly, the doomed culture and the vanishing frontier remain in view. Chingachgook’s adoption and education of Hawkeye in childhood is repeated in Hawkeye’s schooling of the newly adult and independent Cora in the political and cultural realities of the colonies. While The Last of the Mohicans plainly operates like a generic western in offering a myth of America’s foundation (alliances with and against violent indigenous people, and with and against iniquitous colonialist powers, to define and defend a new American identity), it also changes this notion and the elegy contained in the title of Cooper’s novel into a recognition of the survival of indigenous culture. In a revision of the adventure film’s notion of revolution and the western’s predisposition towards national myth, The Last of the Mohicans offers a conservative depiction of American revolution against British tyranny, but adds a radical, yet also arguably idealistic and clichéd, vision of equality, with Native American tradition and culture venerated, adopted and perpetuated. The Last of the Mohicans: the Cameron homestead

The hunt sequence is succeeded by an idyllic domestic scene in the homestead of the Cameron family, which evokes the treasured outposts of civilisation seen in John Ford’s westerns. In colouration, the interior of the cabin in this episode recalls the womb-like reds and browns of the Edwards homestead in The Searchers (John Ford, 1956). Chingachgook, Uncas and Nathaniel are welcomed and join the Cameron family and their guest Jack Winthrop (Edward Blatchford) in discussion of hunting, their trapping and news of the war. Through this scene, the comments and reactions of Alexandra Cameron (Tracey Ellis) to Jack’s talk of the county levy of militiamen to support the English army, are noted in cuts which isolate her from the male group at the meal table. Later she remarks pointedly on Uncas’s continued presence with the other men, commenting that he (not Hawkeye) ‘should have settled with a woman, started a family by now’. Flanked by the preceding hunt sequence, and succeeded by the tensions and dissent seen during the calls for recruitment the following morning, this scene and the mother’s interjections within it emphasise the value and fragility of the domestic ideal on the frontier. As in Ford’s western mythology, the family is at once the most honoured institution, and wives and mothers the most cherished individuals within the community, but are also the most endangered by the actions of men, and by 110

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the frontier itself as an environment hostile to the nurturing of families. When Nathaniel’s party come across the destroyed homestead and the massacred family, Uncas touches Alexandra’s body with the same reverence as that accorded to the deer. The divisive recruitment debate, between male American representatives and an English lieutenant, is observed from a distance by the colonial community. We see women and children of varied ethnic backgrounds, shot from a distance with a telephoto lens which flattens the perspective and alienates them from the foregrounded male-dominated discussion. The Mohawk tribal chief Ongewasgone (Dennis Banks) pledges his support to the English cause. It is agreed that a colonial militia will be formed, with its service conditional on permission (sought from the English General) being granted for the men to defend their families and homes if they are attacked. Traditional forms of male authority, questioned implicitly by Alexandra Cameron in the homestead, gain a temporary ascendancy with the obligation to fight (which Nathaniel, Uncas and other indigenous males appear to ignore). However, the authority and culpability of ‘fathers’ becomes increasingly evident through the rest of the action, as fallible patriarchal control, embodied in forms of colonial, military, tribal and familial authority, serve to escalate the conflict. Counter-currents, in the form of Nathaniel and Cora’s disobedience to patriarchal authority, forge a link between the female and the Native American perspectives and build towards Mann’s substantially altered conclusion to Cooper’s story. Acts by and allegiances to ‘fathers’ (in the marked absence of mothers) lie behind the personal values and motivations which divide and distinguish the factions within the conflict. The metaphor of fidelity to and inheritance from ‘fathers’ derives from the source novel, but is extended in Mann’s film. Cooper’s Chingachgook and Hawkeye explore the history of contact and conflict between whites and indigenous peoples via the varying inherited accounts of each other’s ancestors (‘fathers’) (Cooper 1986: 30–33). This dialogue is significant for its establishment of an unquestionable heritage and an irrefutable birthright for both races, albeit with an implied white superiority in intellect, and an acknowledgement of the inevitable decline of indigenous culture. Cooper’s authentic cultural fatherhood is displaced by an adoptive and colonising fatherhood which marks all the power relations in Mann’s film. In a revealing adaptation from the novel, Mann explores and questions the influence of colonial authority as an inverted and destructive fatherhood, driving the language and logic of the novel to a differing conclusion. Displacing the legitimate cultural inheritance of biological and ethnic fathers is the swaying influence of the colonising fathers related directly to conflict and loss of cultural integrity. Cooper’s dialogue between Magua (Wes Studi) and the French general Montcalm (Patrice Chereau) is closely echoed in the film, during the siege of Fort William Henry and on the eve of the massacre that follows its surrender: [Magua] The English war chief, Webb, goes to Fort Edward with 60th Regiment. He does not know that my father’s army attacks Fort William Henry. […] Is the hatchet buried between the English and my French father? (Cooper 1986: 169–70) v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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The assumption of the status of fatherhood by colonising military authority produces a shift in cultural value on both sides. During the siege, the same framework for control is evident on the English side, when Nathaniel approaches the Mohawk leader: Nathaniel: Ongewasgone, are you staying? Ongewasgone: Yes. Nathaniel: There’s too many French. Ongewasgone: And so few of us to fight, yet too many to die. But we’ve given our word to our English fathers. The tribal patriarch’s subjugation to colonial authority in the vain battle for the fort accompanies the rebellion of the colonial militiamen, which is inspired by Nathaniel’s refusal to be ‘subject to much at all’. The film’s alteration to the characterisation of the English military authority (from benevolent patronage to tyranny and ‘absolutism’) in comparison with the novel produces an historical and inflammatory revolutionary motivation for Mann’s version of the historical adventure narrative. Crucial within this reorientation is the centring of English tyrannical authority in the patriarchal figure of Colonel Munro (Maurice Roeves), father to Cora and Alice. In addition to embodying the authority which denies the colonials’ right to defend their homes, and which condemns Nathaniel to death for sedition against the Crown’s interests, Munro is made culpable for the vengeance Magua seeks. Instead of seeking revenge for being beaten while drunk in English service, Magua plots the destruction of Munro and his family in compensation for his own comparable loss: Magua’s village and lodges were burnt. Magua’s children were killed by the English. I was taken as a slave by the Mohawk, who fought for the Grey Hair. Magua’s wife believed he was dead and became the wife of another. The Grey Hair was the father of all that. Thus Munro becomes the iniquitous colonial, military and familial authority against which Nathaniel, Cora and Magua rebel. However, while colonial fathers upholding the ‘cold and selfish policy of the distant monarchs of Europe’ have displaced Native American tribal ones, Magua seeks to appropriate the culture and power of the whites in a betrayal of his birthright (Cooper 1986: 11). In attempting to best his colonial fathers, Magua will only come to imitate them: Nathaniel: Would Magua use the ways of les Français and the Yengeese? […] Would the Huron make his Algonquin brothers foolish with brandy and steal his lands to sell them for gold to the white man? Would the Huron have greed for more land than a man can use? […] Would the Huron kill every man woman and child of their enemy? Those are the ways of the Yengeese and the Français traders and their masters in Europe infected with 112

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the sickness of greed. Magua’s heart is twisted. He would make himself into what twisted him. Nathaniel, as the white man who has adopted and been adopted by Native Americans, condemns his Native American double for adopting the ways of the whites. As in Grey Owl (Richard Attenborough, 1999) and Cooper’s frontier fiction such as The Pioneers (1823), the white convert serves as a more suitable representative for the preservation of original culture and the American environment than the indigenous disciple of colonialism. Barker suggests that the ‘tendency to make Hawkeye the most Indian character of all’ means that ‘all political issues about race are resolved through him’, and that as a result ‘multiculturalism find[s] a myth to bear it’ (1993: 29). Yet Nathaniel’s rebellious and indigenous influence on Cora facilitates an alternative resolution of the racial, familial and colonial conflict. The primordial patriarchal authority to which Nathaniel and Magua appeal is Sachem (Mike Phillips), the Huron tribal leader. However, his attempt at compromise proves as inflexible and unendurable as the decrees of colonial authority. Cooper’s narrative looks both forwards and backwards, towards the building and consolidation of white American civilisation on the noble ruins of indigenous culture, and the preservation and multiplication of the white family unit as a symbol of this dominion. Fundamentally, Cooper’s perspective and the drama which articulates it is one of inevitable triumph and ascendancy, and inescapable decline and extinction, based on the inherent ethnic characteristics and hierarchies his families embody. By contrast, Mann’s adaptation creates a counter-narrative of loss formed from the endangerment, damaging and destruction of three comparative families: Magua’s, Munro’s and Chingachgook’s. The crucial distinction in Magua’s motivation (a justifiable revenge for a massacred family, rather than malicious reprisal for a humiliating punishment) produces a parallel between Hawkeye and Magua which evokes the mirror-imaging of Scar and Ethan Edwards in The Searchers. Magua’s adoption by another tribe is its own negative parallel to Hawkeye’s cultural conversion in the care of his Mohican ‘father’. Rather than being used, like Cooper’s, to reflect and articulate doctrines of racial distinction, Mann’s families are forced to inhabit a political and cultural environment generated by them, and to reach a multi-ethnic compromise. The admiration for indigenous culture in Cooper’s writing is contingent on the distinctions drawn between noble and ignoble, honourable and dishonourable tribes. (Cinematic westerns, including Dances With Wolves and Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans, have frequently been guilty of the same kind of categorisation.) For Cooper, the extinction of all indigenous cultures is a prerequisite and certainty in the face of white moral, spiritual and intellectual superiority, but some are still deemed worthy of lament. With his Native Americans ‘existing only in a past that the white nineteenth-century reader may enjoy aesthetically’, Cooper is able to ‘imaginatively sympathize with the Indians’ decline and demise, allowing the reader the luxury of sentimental indulgence in a wistful farewell to “good” Indian beauty’ (Blakemore 1997: 55–56). The liberal conscience in The Last of the Mohicans which grieves for the disappearance of the frontier and the indigenous inhabitants of the continent can be susceptible to the same v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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criticisms of simplification and racism in its representation. Henry Sheehan accuses Mann of ‘avoiding racial complications’ in the deaths of Uncas and Alice, without acknowledging that this conclusion, which also incorporates the death of Heyward and the union of Cora and Hawkeye, is a substantial departure from the ascendancy of white, British colonial offspring (Heyward’s betrothal to Alice, bought by the deaths of Uncas and Cora) demanded and unquestioned in Cooper’s novel (Sheehan 1992: 46). The hint of a racial taint in the blood of the dark Cora explains her susceptibility to Uncas and the wilderness and justifies her removal from Cooper’s narrative (Cooper 1986: 158–9). The same openness to the colonial environment, politics and people in Mann’s Cora is suggestive of a liberal multiculturalism already embodied in Hawkeye, the white man raised by a Native American ‘father’, who (unlike the hero who goes native in Dances With Wolves) remains a leader within the colonial community: The point of Cooper’s Hawkeye myth is his aloneness, his separateness from the white culture, his rejection of his own culture to live within a culture where he can never fully be accepted. He is a man of the forests who seeks oneness in a pantheistic universe, away from the Protestant coasts, even as he insists on his whiteness […] Mann redefines Hawkeye’s romantic status in terms of having a family, which makes him something else, a founding father of the west rather than a man increasingly lost as advancing civilization pushes him west with the Indians and the buffalo. (Harkness 1992: 15) However, the racial refashioning of Cooper’s narrative and the heroic repositioning of Hawkeye’s character are dependent upon the role now granted to Cora, as the replacement of Uncas within the vanishing people, as the audience for Hawkeye’s life story and the myth of the Earth Mother, and the inheritor of Elizabeth Cameron’s role as frontier wife and mother. The destruction of families (Magua’s, Munro’s and Chingachgook’s) and the absence or death of mother figures is finally redressed in the creation of a surviving, composite family at the film’s conclusion. Cooper’s Hawkeye disavows any ‘cross’ in his blood, but maintains his difference from white society and even the indigenous people who raised him. Mann’s revision of the frontier myth precipitates the recognition of both difference and apartness, compromise and multiculturalism but also separation and loss, embodied in the experiences which Cora finds ‘deeply stirring to my blood’. The virtues with which Cora is endowed by Cooper in

The Last of the Mohicans: the final family

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death, are those which mark her as inheritor of the Camerons’ qualities for frontier life in Mann’s film: That she was of a blood purer and richer than the rest of her nation, any eye might have seen. That she was equal to the dangers and daring of a life in the woods, her conduct had proved. (Cooper 1986: 343) Ironically, in such a male-dominated adventure narrative within such a masculine oeuvre, it is the fundamental change within and of a female character (from daughter to lover to future mother) which defines the political and cultural reorientation of an American mythology. The Insider Synopsis: Dr Jeffrey Wigand is fired from his well-paid job with tobacco giant Brown & Williamson because he objects to the company’s cynical manipulation of its products in order to addict and exploit its customers. His generous severance package, including vital health care benefits for his children, is dependent on his signing and honouring a confidentiality agreement which prevents him revealing what he knows of the company’s practices. Lowell Bergman, producer for the CBS television investigative documentary programme 60 Minutes, asks Wigand to act as a consultant on a different tobacco-related story, and suspects that Wigand wishes to reveal secrets about the tobacco industry to ease his conscience. While Wigand’s decision to testify to the immoral methods of his former employers threatens his own and his family’s safety, Bergman encounters resistance among the management of CBS and his peers to the broadcasting of a tobacco exposé, which will lay the network open to ruinous legal action. As well as learning to trust each other’s motives and judgement, both men have to face the professional and personal consequences of their stands against capitalist expediency. With The Insider, Mann undertook a very personal and disenchanted re-reading of the film canon of the ‘70s, delivering to its passing a melancholic and politically sublime work on the contemporary illusion of counter-politics. (Thoret 2003) As with Manhunter, The Insider is built upon repetitions and parallels in plotting, characterisation and visual style. The film begins with a confrontation with the Middle Eastern ‘terrorists’ of Hezbollah and ends with the arrest of the Unabomber in the United States. In structure, the film falls into two halves, each with its own whistleblower: Dr Jeffrey Wigand is compelled into revealing his unique and damaging knowledge of the tobacco industry, and Lowell Bergman struggles against corruption and craven self-interest within the corporate structure of CBS. Both men have families, in several senses, to sacrifice for their principled stands. Wigand’s wife and daughters are imperilled financially as well as physically by his opponents. Wigand ultimately loses the love of his spouse and contact with his children. Bergman enjoys the constant support of his wife, but loses his v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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professional family when the star interviewer Mike Wallace (Christopher Plumber) and executive producer Don Hewitt (Philip Baker Hall) of 60 Minutes refuse to back his demands for journalistic integrity and objectivity. While the film repeats the pattern of doubling protagonists seen in other Mann films, it also demands particular comparisons with the treatment of the threatened family and the complications of heroic action seen in Manhunter, and with the precedents of highly principled and paranoid investigative thrillers of previous decades. The first two sequences of The Insider confirm the stylistic and ideological link which Jean-Baptiste Thoret recognises between Mann’s film and the conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s: films such as The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974), The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974) and All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976) made in the wake of Watergate which document the spread of unbridled political and corporate powers, and the often inadequate efforts of principled individuals to thwart them. The threat to individual liberty in these films is pervasive and lethal, and realised through the contemporary weapons of covert surveillance and the legal system. However, the threat is targeted at the individual, the crusading journalist or intelligence expert, whose power and vulnerability alike are posited on solitude. Mann’s protagonists are deliberately portrayed as family men, whose choices in the face of coercion and intimidation are complicated by domestic as well as professional considerations. The disorientating credit sequence follows Bergman being driven through the streets of Beirut to a meeting with Sheik Fadlallah (Cliff Curtis). The blindfold Bergman wears throughout the journey and brief meeting suggests his defencelessness, yet we learn that he is not a hostage but has come voluntarily in order to arrange an American television interview with the Hezbollah leader. His (and later Wallace’s) boldness in placing themselves at risk for objective reporting may also smack of an audacity bred of overconfidence. At the moment these journalists believe themselves to be in control of The Insider: crossing the axis of action

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their images (those they produce and those they project), but the blindfold is the first indication of a limit to sight and foresight in the professional environment. The desire for objectivity in viewing may lead to instability and unpredictability, as seen in the camera’s disorientating repositioning, shooting Bergman and the Sheik from multiple perspectives, during their meeting. The same deliberately dislocated method of representation is used for the conversation between Bergman and Wigand in a Japanese restaurant. In this example, the technique of crossing and re-crossing the axis of action to show both speakers from unexpected angles is used more concertedly to underline both men’s bullish defensiveness, as each questions the commitment and credentials of the other. The aura of danger attending Bergman’s covert activity in Beirut transfers to the first sight of Wigand, who stands alone in the mundane setting of his office, utterly separated from the wider environment by soundproof glass: In Mann’s films, glass functions as a plastic extension of the solitude of individuals. The transparency upholds the illusion of communication, but in the end what is evident is the impermeability of spaces. (Thoret 2003)4 As he packs his briefcase, he is distanced from his work colleagues by a wall of windows which bars all the noise from a party taking place in the laboratory next door. As he descends in an elevator and leaves the building, the hand-held camera occupies an uncomfortably close position next to Wigand’s cheek, his face blurred in extreme close-up in comparison with the sharp shadows of his surroundings. Although Wigand’s departure is plainly a dismissal (as we have seen him clear his desk), as he exits the building his obvious tension, the use of slow-motion and the presence of a security guard gives the scene the atmosphere of an espionage thriller. Although industrial espionage may seem more humdrum than spying for governments, the information Wigand takes with him is ironically of immediate significance to the nation. A similar paradox attends the representation of Bergman’s international intelligence gathering efforts, devoted to highly respected and coincidentally highly profitable prime-time television. The visual registers of editing, lighting and composition used for both introductions are redolent of the heroics of thrillers. The juxtapositions in which the film subsequently engages encourage us to identify the echoes and complete the comparisons between events in both men’s lives, to see their efforts on equal terms, and to link or contrast the conflicts pervading the diegetic environment. We are prompted to compare Bergman’s confrontation with Sheik Fadlallah to Wigand’s with Thomas Sandefur (Michael Gambon), the CEO of Brown & Williamson, and with Bergman’s meetings with the CBS corporate heads, Bergman’s drive through Beirut to Wigand’s motorcade to a Mississippi court room, the innocuous paperwork on which Wigand is first asked by Bergman to consult with the malicious dossier circulated by Brown & Williamson to undermine Wigand’s credibility, even the television producer’s persuasion to speak with corporate coercion to stay silent. The defining contrast between the corporate scientific researcher Wigand and the radical media researcher Bergman demands a comparison between truths of journalism and facts of science: v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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On the one hand, they are men of honor who want to see themselves as people whose word is their bond because they deliver what they promise without self-regard. On the other hand, they are men who are part of global organizations whose power is based mainly on another form of exchange – the purely economic kind, where the emphasis is on maximizing profit without loss or personal sacrifice. Both men think that both systems can operate according to a single system of obligation and honor, based on common assumptions of the worth of the individual’s integrity. Both are wrong. (Wildermuth 2005: 152). Although different in their vocations, family lives and politics, Bergman and Wigand end up sharing a ‘profession’ of principled opposition to corporate duplicity and oppression. Although they have numerous conversations to Hanna and McCauley’s one, their attempts to maintain a ‘regular-type life’ of ‘barbecues and ball games’ are equally ironic and irrelevant. Trying to talk outside the zone of Wigand’s confidentiality agreement, Bergman asks: ‘Do you think the Nicks are gonna make it through the semi-finals?’ Both men find themselves beset by corporate opponents whose omnipotence and ubiquity marks the modern American landscape (a Colgate sign hangs over Wigand’s car where he and Bergman talk frankly for the first time, and CBS logos adorn the glass meeting room where Bergman is informed of the station’s objections to his programme). In attempting to combat these adversaries, both men aim to broadcast open secrets, which are protected more than concealed by money and influence. The comparison of Bergman and Wigand begins with their home lives being seen in isolation, before they come into personal contact. The wealth and neatness of the Wigand family’s residence belies numerous frailties. The eldest daughter suffers a severe asthma attack which requires urgent assistance. When Wigand finally admits the loss of his job after his early return home, it appears to have been expected, judging by the reaction of his wife Liane (Diane Venora). Her immediate listing of their domestic requirements (payments on the house, car and medical care) as his responsibilities isolates Wigand from his dependents, rather than uniting him with his family. The brittleness of this home environment is contrasted with the egalitarian disorder of Bergman’s house. White furniture and cold light in the Wigand house contrast with the darker hues and wooden walls seen in Bergman’s. When the parcel of tobacco fire safety documents arrives, he receives it in bed, where he and his wife Sharon (Lindsay Crouse) are both holding work phone calls. Their teenage sons (one each from previous relationships) join them there. Later Bergman describes the household to Wigand: ‘Everyone uses a different name. Modern marriage.’ The contrast is not simply emotional. Bergman’s home is portrayed as a work environment for both him and his wife, yet she is also able to offer emotional and intellectual support in his trial. Her nurturing appears both familial and professional, like the space she shares with her husband. The Wigand home is supported by, but not supportive of, the professional work of the husband. If Bergman is an honourable man empowered by his cluttered and hybrid family environment, the implication appears to be that Wigand’s honour is constrained by familial demands, and that his domestic, emotional, professional and altruistic drives 118

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are, as Bergman observes, in a ‘state of conflict’. In his first intimate conversation with Bergman, Wigand proposes James Burke, the CEO of Johnson and Johnson, as the paragon of scientific endeavour and business acumen combined, in protecting his profession, products, customers and employees even to the detriment of profits. By comparison, the justifications Wigand offers Bergman for his employment by ‘big tobacco’ struggle to combine his professional ethics with domestic expectations, and ultimately satisfy neither criteria, and neither man: Wigand: The work I was supposed to do might have had some positive effect, it could have been beneficial – mostly I got paid a lot. I took the money, my wife was happy, my kids had good medical, good schools, got a great house – what the hell is wrong with that? Bergman: Nothing’s wrong with that, that’s it, you’re making money, you’re providing for your family. What could be wrong with that? Wigand: I always thought of myself of a man of science, that’s what’s wrong with it. Burke’s ethical standards prioritised customers, employees and society at large as the recipients of his products before stockholders. Wigand’s professional principles, his science as educational and altruistic activity, will sacrifice his genetic stockholders. The family as notion, space and group is the battlefield and the casualty despite the struggle being contained within Wigand. In comparison with the domestic threats propounded in Manhunter, the effects and resultant atmosphere of the conspiracy thriller are established in work environments in order to be maintained and expanded within the Wigand family home. Once the fragility marking the Wigand residence has been depicted, the threat associated with the business of work (the scientist is owned and vulnerable as a corporate employee even when his employment has ended) resurfaces on the occasion of Wigand’s return to the Brown & Williamson offices, to be pressured to sign an extension of his confidentiality agreement. Sandefur purposefully refers to the trappings of middle-class domesticity, remarking on Wigand’s golf handicap and describing the secrets of their capital enterprise as ‘confidential, not for public scrutiny, anymore than are one’s family matters’. In connecting the private preserves of family life to the self-protecting restrictions of corporate operations, Sandefur merges the loyalties and the vulnerabilities which Wigand must respect. If the family has benefited, like Wigand, by the company, then clearly the family must be equally open to the risk of reprisals from it. For Wigand, the cumulative and indivisible threats are to his integrity and his own and his family’s physical safety. However, unlike Manhunter, subsequent events entailed by the hero’s actions will prove these can be separated, though with different consequences and risks. The first sacrifice demanded by Wigand’s non-compliance is the surrender of the family home. Liane sees this as the loss of a repository of family memories (charting the raising of their children), while her husband sees it as a better professional and (therefore) domestic solution for their future: ‘It’s just a smaller scale, simpler, easier, more time, more time together, more time with the kids, more time for us. Can you v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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The Insider: Wigand’s waking dream

imagine me coming home from some job feeling good at the end of the day?’ The new home environment is marked at first by communal activities which can create new memories (brief images of Wigand planting vegetables in the garden with his daughters) but soon becomes tainted, as was seen in Thief, by conflict between the parents and by physical and electronic ‘home invasion’. After the violation of Wigand’s middle-class pastime (finding himself shadowed at the driving range), the idyll of the new home is contaminated by a night-time intrusion reminiscent of the desecration of family space in Manhunter. Wigand is disturbed in his sleep by one of the children who has heard someone moving outside. Leaving her in the basement for safety, Wigand investigates outside, and finds a footprint in the bed he planted with his daughters. Rapid intercutting between him and his daughter, with the effect exacerbated by use of sound, produces the same sense of threat apparent in the juxtaposition of Molly and Graham in his hotel room. Again, as in the previous film, the threat to a female family member is provoked by and attributable to the actions of the patriarchal figure, and the unverifiable nature of the intrusion heightens Wigand’s culpability as well as his paranoia. Wigand telephones Bergman immediately after this incident, but when he receives another call immediately after hanging up he realises his phone has been bugged by Brown & Williamson’s agents. This is followed by electronic terrorising in the form of an email death threat, which again prompts the recognition of an ironic parallel. Notably it is Bergman who first disturbs the Wigand home with his phone calls (blocked at first by Liane) and faxes. That Liane acts as the gatekeeper, who Bergman nonetheless ignores, and is subsequently the recipient of the threatening email again underlines (as in the case of Manhunter) that the male intrusion and threat targets a domestic space characterised as female. Bergman’s persistent coercion of Wigand to reveal his story through faxes and phone calls returns later in the form of unsolicited email and phone calls to stifle him. Wigand fears that he will become a ‘commodity’ for Bergman, CBS and 60 Minutes, and in effect he does, as his testimony is manipulated, edited, re-edited, transmitted and silenced, and his life is reduced to a widely circulated dossier of smearing allegations. With the medium of television and the electronic media of surveillance twinned in their intrusiveness, and the ability to select and manipulate truth becoming integral to Wigand’s personal identity and private persecution, forms of mechanical reproduction and representation dominate the narrative of The Insider in the same way as they pervaded the preparation, perpetration and interpretation of crime in Manhunter. 120

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In The Insider it is the male (Wigand) rather than the female (in the form of targets and victims for violence) that becomes represented and reduced via technology. The means of reproduction in Manhunter (the Leeds answer phone, Graham’s still camera and tape recorder, the home movies and VHS through which both Graham and Dolarhyde access their fantasies of integration and investigation) are at once technological artifacts of the contemporary world and ideology-bearing apparatuses whose use carries disconcerting connotations of control. Within the film’s discourse, mechanical (in the 1980s still mostly analogue) means of reproduction are the preserve of male forms and figures of authority (the law enforcement bureaus and their agents), but are also appropriated by individuals (Graham and Dolarhyde). All forms and examples – the home movie images, crime scene photos, Dolarhyde’s own films – circulate in and exercise forms of agency within the narrative. Although Dolarhyde’s acts represent his method of ‘becoming’, it is the visual medium which allows him to select and record the ‘elements’ (the families, but specifically the wives and mothers) through which the change is effected. Graham’s possession and use of the images is perhaps equally troubling (for protagonist and viewer), but what is most significant is the overlapping or appropriation by these images of the cinematic frame itself. This occurs when Graham views the home movies on VHS, when Dolarhyde watches his films at home, and when Graham dreams on the plane. The occupation of the frame by subjectively experienced images connects the doubled protagonists and the viewers to the underlying concept of reproduction and change (of people and values) through the visual medium. Viewing the Leeds family alive via the films transferred to tape, Graham is able to analyse and record his thoughts of the past event (‘When they were dead…’) while seeing them preserved in a permanent, replicated present. That he is disturbed twice by Valerie Leeds’ voice on the answer machine (once in the house, once in his memory) suggests that it is the method of her changing rather than the fact of her death which is distressing. The frame is filled again with a contained, replicated and possessed family when Dolarhyde views the images of his target during Reba’s visit to his house. The images of the women are relocated, revalued and possessed in a reorientation of meaning and identity, to fuel the male voyeur’s fantasy. In this respect, the male appropriation of the female in Manhunter and the dictation of her meaning in mechanically replicable terms recalls the manipulation and possession of the female via commodification of image and voice in Diva. In Jean-Jacques Beineix’s film, all distinctions of value or taste are eroded by the paradoxes of property ownership, in which duplicates of treasured objects become the defining possessions for alienated urban consumers. In this scheme, loved people are indistinguishable from, and are themselves reduced to, voice recordings, fetishised objects and magnetic signatures. The French cinéma du look to which Diva belongs is a near-contemporary to Manhunter (and the Miami Vice television series), and like Mann’s work has been accused of elevating style over substance, reducing plot coherence in the concentration on the crafting of images, and drawing inspiration from ‘“inferior” cultural forms like television, music video, advertising and the comic strip’ (Austin 1996: 119). However, unlike the post-modern erasure of value in Diva and the avoidance of political and social issues in the cinéma du look as a whole, in Manhunter and The Insider the sociopathic effects of media reproducv i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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tion on identity (in the objectification and revaluing of female images in the former, and the commodification, editing and rewriting of a man’s life in the latter) are integrated within narrative and socio-political critique. Wigand’s moment of reflection in his hotel (after the broadcast of the re-edited programme, without his testimony) is comparable to Graham’s dream, in providing the ambiguous subjective vision of a character in crisis. As he sits alone, a mural on his wall appears to morph into an imagined image of the garden (notably, at the family’s second smaller home) where he planted vegetables with his daughters. Just as Graham’s dream purposefully introduces the ambiguity of his desiring gaze upon Molly, Wigand’s vision multiplies ironies in The Insider’s representation of change and exchange. The apparent interaction between Wigand and his daughters in the vision appears more imagined and desired than recalled. The transformation of the hotel room into the preferred family environment provides an imagistic summary of the room’s significance. It was the location of Bergman and Wigand’s first meeting, is now a business space substituting literally for Wigand’s home, and the digital effect creating a screen from the wall underlines the fact that the room’s windows are already screens, on and through which Wigand views his business antagonists in the Brown & Williamson building. Mechanical reproduction offers narrative insight and pertinent commentary in Mann’s postmodern environment, but no comfort of control or possession to the protagonists. Wigand is determined to speak, knowing he and his family will be hounded and victimizsed even if he remains silent. His question to Bergman before going to court (‘What’s changed? – ‘You mean since this morning?’ – ‘No, I mean since whenever’) might suggest a desire to make a difference with his testimony, or a realisation that with or without change he must remain true to his own principles. The fundamental change to his circumstances, unknown and unseen until his return home, is the departure of his wife and daughters from the home he left, and the dissolution of the family as a direct result of his actions. Wigand himself has changed, and been changed, from corporate vice president to ‘man’ (teacher) of science, from husband to divorcee. While The Insider retreads the thematic and ideological territory of the 1970s conspiracy thriller, by calling into question the arbitrary and apparently unassailable forces at work in society and foregrounding the principle, if not always the effectiveness, of individual opposition, what has changed is the nature, transmission and ownership of information as an overt power rather than a covert activity. In place of the covert, illegal and violent power of governments which threatened the 1970s protagonist, legal and economic power of corporations to control known information is flaunted in the victimisation of his 1990s descendants: It has been said that Mann’s artistic project does not return to the cinema of the Watergate years. Rather, he tries to study the effects of this era, tracing its origins and testing some of its hypotheses […] Of what revelation is Wigand the bearer? What scandal is the 60 Minutes broadcast ready to divulge? What are the hidden secrets of ‘Tobaccogate’? First point: tobacco is harmful. Second point: the manufacturers know it. So what has changed since the paranoid 122

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thrillers of the 1970s? In All the President’s Men […] it is a question of letting everyone know a piece of information known only by a few. In The Insider, it is a question of bringing to the greater public information known to all of us. Henceforth, what is a secret when everyone knows it? What is a conspiracy in the age of complete transparency? (Thoret 2003) Transparency itself, suggested by the stifling windows of the office Wigand abandons, the clear walls of the meeting room where Bergman learns an obvious lie is better than a categorical truth, and the glass frontage of the CBS building Bergman passes through when he quits his job, is not a desirable quality. It is impossible for Bergman and Wigand’s actions to be covert, and their betrayals are immediately obvious to their employers. Both men’s disclosures merely confirm common knowledge, of tobacco’s harmfulness, of the tobacco industry’s brazen power, and of CBS’s pragmatic, protective response to the story. The control and manufacture of information, in the editing and re-editing of the broadcast, the attempts to block and punish Wigand’s testimony, and the rewriting of his life in the dossier, are seen to be more powerful actions than simple revelation of an unimpeachable truth. Although the full broadcast is finally aired, the public is informed and the court case against tobacco is won, the vindication which Bergman and Wigand seek and attain does not register on this wider, social and altruistic scale. Wigand wants his daughters to understand his higher motives, and Bergman wants his co-workers to support his higher principles. These objectives are in themselves more transparent than the broadcast made up of what all parties can see is merely replicable and manipulable information. The parallels between Wigand and Bergman are reaffirmed with the final images of Bergman exiting the CBS building for the last time. This short scene is a conscious re-invocation of Wigand’s departure from the Brown & Williamson offices, and the frenetic, purposeful transit of the revolving doors which Bergman made earlier, when starting to chase Wigand’s story. The revolving door itself may represent a conscious evocation of a German Expressionist precedent to accompany the expressionistic aspects highlighted in The Insider, like the subjectively experienced transformation of the mural in Wigand’s hotel room, and elsewhere in Mann’s work (for example in the existence of Dolarhyde as Graham’s doppelgänger, and in the deliberately canted angles in the construction and lighting of Dolarhyde’s house). In Der Letzte Mann/The Last Laugh (F.W. Murnau, 1924), the revolving doors of the hotel function in both the literal, physical and internalised, psychological worlds as indexes and measurements of destiny, replacing the ‘wheel of fate’ with a mundane equivalent in modern business culture. In The Insider, the camera’s close, near-subjective accompaniment of Wigand’s descent in the elevator before crossing the lobby appears to echo directly the first shots of Murnau’s film. The revolving door occupies a similarly symbolic function in Mann’s film, which can be seen to inherit and develop the combination of realism and Expressionism, prosaic everyday downfall and parabolic spiritual struggle, which distinguishes Murnau’s. Wigand at the start of the film and Bergman at its end move in slow-motion, which marks decisive and transformative moments for Mann’s protagonists as a rarev i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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fied and solipsistic separation. Slow-motion provides such individualised emphasis when Wigand leaves Brown & Williamson (through another revolving door), when he passes through the airport on the way to Pascagoula, and when he gets into the car to travel to the court to give his deposition. The excision of diegetic sound from the scene of Bergman’s exit (in comparison with the steady beat of the door heard in the earlier scene) intensifies Bergman’s isolation, and suggests the peril as well as the principle at stake in the alienated individual’s action. Slow-motion in Mann’s films therefore also suggests endangerment in the moment of decisiveness and righteousness, the vice of hubris within the vindication of personal integrity. The mirroring of the two men’s exits at the start and conclusion of the film emphasises their problematic and punishable crossing of the ‘blood’ (family, emotion) to ‘brain’ (work, intellect) barrier, sacrificing families (at home and at work) to professional ethics and self-respect. Conclusion A good man tries to live honestly, your honour, and never has a double. (Dostoyevsky 1997: 87) Thief shows us families conceived of and contaminated as consumer items purchased through the proceeds of crime. In Manhunter as in Heat, the family is the target of crime, but also the potential victim of law-enforcement. The Last of the Mohicans depicts the family as the recruit, the currency and the casualty of colonial war, but ultimately the family surviving as a transformed cultural repository. With The Insider, the family is again made vulnerable by and to the social and economic forces (aspiration, selfishness, acquisitiveness, corporate capitalism itself ) which support it in modern Western culture. The perfection of professional endeavour seen in Mann’s films is underwritten by the largely unobtainable nature of domestic stability and fulfilment. The inflexible demands and codes of conduct of the one prohibit the nurturing and gratification (what may even appear as the indulgence) of the other. The mutual exclusivity of these principal masculine activities and measures of success is obvious in examples such as Heat and L.A. Takedown, but is more complicated in Thief and Manhunter, where the professional choices made by the protagonists are detrimental to domesticity, even where they are prompted by the desire to create and protect the family, both as concrete entity and as ideal. Graham is without parallel within Mann’s cast of characters in at least attempting to articulate and account for his divided nature to his wife and stepson. Where Hanna can only share the shorthand of his history with McCauley, in Public Enemies John Dillinger’s emotional inarticulacy is justified by an institutionalised short-termism. Like Frank, prison has inculcated in him the need for instant gratification, to ‘catch up’ on lost time for acquisitiveness if not development. Unlike Frank, he ultimately prefers the assumption of myth in death over the accrual of wealth or self-realisation through partnership and love. Describing himself to Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard), he abbreviates his family history because of its irrelevance to his present, materialistic 124

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identity, of which his desire for her and their finite time together are simply further examples: I was raised on a farm in Mooresville, Indiana. My mama died when I was three. My daddy beat the hell out of me ’cause he didn’t know no better way to raise me. I like baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars, whisky and you. In Heat and L.A. Takedown, we are presented in effect with two protagonists worthy of equal sympathy, who make the same choices in preferring the professional over the domestic. Elsewhere, the distinctions to be drawn and the sympathies to be allocated are more difficult to determine. In Thief, Frank’s abandonment of the tainted and untenable family reveals an essential resemblance to the uncompromising Leo. In Manhunter and The Last of the Mohicans, the protagonists are opposed by strange opposites, reflections or doubles, whose existence threatens or devalues their adversaries. The disconcerting psychological kinship between Graham and Dolarhyde can only be denied and exorcised by Graham killing the Tooth Fairy himself, and assuring himself as much as the rescued Reba McClane of his own identity: ‘I’m Will Graham.’ The parallels in experience and choice between Magua, Hawkeye and Chingachgook (loss of family and offspring, adoption within different cultures) provoke not just varying but conflicting responses to the encroachment of white civilisation, which are concluded but not resolved in death. The arrangements of restored or reconstituted family groups at the end of both these films (the Grahams looking out to the sea, Chingachgook, Nathaniel and Cora gazing out over the wilderness), appear as melancholy victories in survival. Graham’s earlier ‘guarantee’ to his stepson that all the baby turtles will be safe in the hatchery they make is modified by the end, to admit that ‘most of them made it’. In comparison with Heat and L.A. Takedown, the possible choices between professional and domestic fulfilment in Manhunter and The Insider are more finely balanced. Graham’s motivation to return to his profession (or perhaps his potential for entrapment within his role, as recognised by Crawford) is superficially similar to Vincent Hanna’s desire to save strangers. For both men, this drive carries a concomitant endangerment of their own families. Equally clearly, what can be classed as altruism or duty within their conduct is better seen as an inner compulsion, a surrender to innate and unappeasable personal need. For Wigand, the professional, the personal and the domestic are fatally interconnected. When we first see him, his job, even in dismissal, still provides for his family financially (not in itself a sin, as Bergman observes), but leaves him morally bankrupt. However, his professionalism will not allow a pragmatic, immoral use of science, and in opposing the corporate establishment his domestic life is destroyed. There is an augur of this in the similarity to Hanna’’s response to Lauren’s suicide attempt in Wigand’s scientific explanation of asthma to his daughter in the midst of her attack, his changing of her from his own child into a professional case for treatment. Although Wigand loses his family and his professional identity in the court case which attends his revelations, he is able to assume a new and different fulfilment. Becoming a successful high school v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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science teacher reinstates him in a role which is simultaneously professional, ethical, rewarding and patriarchal. What Wigand and Graham share is a vulnerability described in Harris’s novel by Dr Bloom: ‘Fear comes with imagination, it’s a penalty, it’s the price of imagination’ (Harris 1993: 141). Graham’s personal vision, including dreams and subjective visual narration, which dominates the narrative of Manhunter was unseen elsewhere in Mann’s oeuvre until the inclusion of Wigand’s subjective dream vision of his family in the hotel room mural in The Insider. The visual projection of subjective mental processes for both these characters signals the fear which imagination engenders: the fear of the loss of the partner and the family which the males’ actions precipitate. In Graham’s case, the fear may also be aggravated by recognition of the fearful symmetry between Dolarhyde and himself, which his imagination cultivates. Despite this parallel, and the similarity of the violent threats which the two men’s choices seem to represent for their own families, Graham is able to return and regain his home. After the auguries of violence which have attended Graham’s actions while away from the family home, the arresting of the action at the final credits, with Graham, Molly and Kevin caught in a freeze-frame on the beach, suggests the need to immobilise the hero and family and prevent any further change or ‘becoming’. Unlike Harris’s hero, Mann’s Graham is allowed a way home. Nonetheless, the inevitable similarity of this final safety in stasis to the Tooth Fairy’s carefully staged tableaux of domestic possession and control, reminds us of the ambiguities and dangers of male drives and desires. Notes 1

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See ‘Alternate Versions for Manhunter (1986)’: http://www.imdb.com/title/ tt0091474/alternateversions (Accessed 17/06/2010). The versions broadcast on British terrestrial television appear to have been neither the US theatrical release nor the director’s cut, but one or both of the alternative video versions. The links between Manhunter and The Silence of the Lambs and television series such as Criminal Minds (CBS Paramount Network Television, 2005 onwards) and the CSI franchise (Jerry Bruckheimer Television/CBS Paramount Network Television, 2000 onwards) are tempting to explore. Like Gil Grissom, William Petersen’s character in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Harris’s Will Graham is an expert on insect activity and its significance in determining time of death (Harris 1993: 113–14). See Barker 1993: 28–9. Ian Steele’s review of the film, though concerned principally with the historical accuracy of Mann’s adaptation, also draws comparisons with the 1936 screenplay (1993: 1179–1181). Feeney and Duncan remark on how in the Brown & Williamson building, in the CBS offices, and in the Wigand home, glass panels, interior and exterior windows and panes of glass create barriers which separate couples, divide colleagues and isolate individuals (2006: 128, 136).

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CHAPTER FOUR

Adventures in Genre: The Keep, Ali, Public Enemies

Genre has always been the prime seedbed of American films. The neorealists and the European school in general, with the great exceptions of the early works of the French New Wave and the more recent New German Cinema, have usually treated the individual film as a work situated in the history of art […] while even in the most ambitious as well as the most perfunctory American films it is the pressure of the history of film displayed in genre form that has been the most crucial factor. (Braudy 1986: 18) Although the influences of filmmaking history as much as those of film economics are discerned and celebrated in Leo Braudy’s evaluation of the works of post-classical auteurs, the characterisation of genre frameworks as ‘seedbeds’ for American cinema’s successes also incorporates, albeit perhaps unintentionally, the suggestion of the limitations of repetition and regimentation alongside the analogy to fertility. The major studio-era genres which post-classical directors revitalised through their output (the gangster film, the western, the musical, the thriller, the war film) were ripe for change, if these formulae were considered to have lost their innovativeness during the decline which preceded the major studios’ 1960s’ recruitment of a new filmmaking generation. At the same time, the pressure of production history and genre form in American cinema can be seen to have played a vital role over the past four to five decades, in the transformation, revision and reaffirmation of familiar generic precedents and the related consolidation of American cinema’s commercial credentials. However, since the end of the 1960s, classical genres have also been contorted and confounded in the personal and often frankly uncommercial exercises in director’s cinema as ‘individual art work’ (even when simple popular appeal was intended) conducted by some notable filmmakers. Examples such as Little Big Man, New York, New York, Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980), One From the Heart and Miller’s v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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Crossing, stand alongside more calculated and commercially successful genre updates, like The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), Scarface (Brian De Palma, 1983), The Untouchables (Brian De Palma, 1987) and Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998). The considerable variations in this list are indicative of the ‘ambitious’ and confrontational, as well as the ‘perfunctory’ and conciliatory, uses of classical precedents, in terms of general conventions and specific texts, which have characterised the post-classical cinema. Michael Mann’s placement and output within the same generic landscape evince a similar connection to and negotiation of classical genres, coterminous with an individualistic display of directorial expression. Where the classical auteurs were discerned and discovered to speak within genres as the abiding patterns of studio production, modern auteurs can be perceived to speak through them, mobilising and modifying the existing frameworks to create signature statements, in an environment at once more conducive to the emergence of the auteur and yet inimical to the persistence of genre as pure form. The genre may pertain as the familiar format for entertainment, but the scale and inherently long-term strategy of current production militate against the rapid turnover of classical studio filmmaking. Instead, the franchise has become the model for repeated rather than prompt capitalisation on commercial success, and the directorial ‘genre’ of thematic and stylistic consistency offers a different unity of expression and consumption. As a result, film marketing is dominated by the championing of familiarity with the commercial identities of franchises and auteur signatures as consumable properties, with genre emerging as a subsidiary element in relation to both. In this way, Spielberg’s overarching thematic concern with the treasuring of children dominates the realist aesthetic agenda of his war film Saving Private Ryan, his period thriller Munich (2005), and his autobiographical adaptations (The Color Purple, 1985; Empire of the Sun, 1987). In thematic and philosophical terms, the experience of tragedy in Spielberg’s films (a symbolic child lost in Schindler’s List, 1993; a father spiritually and morally lost in Munich) remains fleeting and reversible, as attested by the reassuring final appearance of the offspring of Schindler’s survivors, and the reconstitution of a home for the former Mossad agent in New York: All of Spielberg’s films operate to prove the validity of, and to recuperate any possible losses to, the domestic space. Their specific formal devices work toward the success of this project, which becomes finally the universal mise-en-scène. (Kolker 1988: 286–7) In Mann’s canon, director and genre can be seen to occupy complementary yet competing positions. While the generic definition and derivation of Mann’s films is indisputable, the categories he explores are, in defiance of superficial classification, neither predictable nor discrete. The director’s frequent association with the portrayal of crime belies the revaluation and extension of convention, plotting and iconography entailed in his inspection of the genres and sub-genres of procedural drama, heist movie, cop thriller, gangster film and film noir, and the frequent amalgamation of these types and their elements in Thief, Manhunter, L.A. Takedown, Heat, Collateral, 128

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Miami Vice and Public Enemies. Similarly, the assumption that crime is Mann’s most indicative and expressive genre can be seen to be overly reliant on the consideration of this subject matter’s incorporation of his prominent visual signature, and yet at the same time to underestimate the extent of the interplay between auteur and genre: Focus on style must not occlude the fact that Mann’s films continue to be enabled by the conventions of previous genre films […] Style is hardly ever extricable from genre in Mann’s cinema; indeed, style can serve as a prime indicator of Mann’s most salient contribution to the varying genre lineages and genre cycles of which his films are a part. (Rybin 2007: 12) Mann’s speaking through genre is characterised here by Steven Rybin as both a debt and a gift, in which the conventional framework facilitates the director’s thematic articulation, and in return the filmmaker’s canon enriches and extends the relevant genre category. However, Rybin concludes that although there is a ‘considerable inflection of genre’ exhibited by Mann’s films, they ‘do not radically deconstruct genre as do Altman’s’, nor do they mount any comparable challenge to the prevailing form of classical narrative (2007: 9). Mann’s own definition of himself and his work as realist in commitment and nature, and (therefore) of his films as neither connected to nor comparable with conventional genres, indicates categorical ideological and aesthetic imperatives within the director’s approach, which also therefore of necessity encompass varying challenges to classical form (Feeney and Duncan 2006: 21). The realist commitment (particularly the zealous dedication to living authenticities of locale, period, dress, performance and vocational expertise in Mann’s projects), belies the crucial and connective generic foundations of each film, and yet also epitomises every ‘individual’ film’s elaboration and enhancement of its particular genre source. As individual and detailed as every project is for its maker, Mann’s productions remain rooted in ‘an American film context that has always stressed the armature of genre and of film history as the presupposition of every film’ (Braudy 1986: 19). It is in the basic presence and structural consequence of the ‘armature of genre’, and the turning moment of every inflected convention, that the interaction of film history and filmmaker can be evaluated, and the translation of the auteur through the genre can be best interpreted. The Keep Synopsis: During World War II, a detachment of German soldiers is sent to guard a remote mountain pass in Romania. They garrison an ancient fortress known as the Keep, but when they disturb the metal crosses embedded in the walls, a vampiric demon called Molasar is released. As his men are killed night after night, Captain Woermann radios for assistance, and Major Kaempffer of the SS arrives with reinforcements. Sensing that Molasar is trying to break free, Glaeken, his supernatural adversary, travels across Europe to confront him. Dr. Cuza, a Jewish academic, and his daughter Eva are saved from a concentration camp and brought to the Keep to decyv i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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pher words written on the walls in an ancient language. Thinking that he is dealing with partisans, Kaempffer orders reprisals against the nearby village. Molasar saves Eva from being raped by German troops, and speaks to Cuza, promising him that he will destroy ‘the soldiers in black’ if he helps him to break free from the Keep. Glaeken reaches the village and becomes Eva’s lover, but is shot and apparently killed by the soldiers. Molasar wipes out the garrison and nearly forces Cuza to kill his own daughter when he refuses to carry a talisman beyond the walls of the Keep. Glaeken intervenes, forcing Molasar back into his prison in the Keep, but in the process becomes trapped within it himself. If Mann’s career has been associated reductively with the depiction of contemporary society and crime, then the most conspicuous genre anomalies in his output are ­The Keep and The Last of the Mohicans. However, in terms of the director’s consistent thematic concentration and his characterisation of male action, the latter film can be reincorporated relatively unproblematically alongside Heat, Collateral and even the films which precede and succeed The Keep (Thief and Manhunter). The Keep alone remains difficult to integrate, not simply thematically, but largely on the basis of the genres it adopts or invokes. That said, its combined use of tropes from the war film and the horror/science fiction categories cannot be classed as a comprehensive amalgamation. Although this generic evocation is key to both the film’s effects and its aesthetic and ideological agenda, its self-consciousness and apparent uneasiness within either genre category underlines its singularity as a highly individual work of film art, as well as its dissimilarity to the rest of Mann’s films. Even in its most basic realisation, The Keep is atypical amongst Mann’s films, in having an average shot length of nearly 8 seconds. Steven Rybin links The Keep’s production to contemporary fantasy, horror and science fiction films, claiming that it ‘fits (albeit rather awkwardly)’ within the context which engendered titles such as The Dark Crystal (Jim Henson, 1982), The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983), Ladyhawke (Richard Donner, 1985) and Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1985) (2007: 59–60). Comparison with another obvious potential influence, the highly commercial combination of Nazis and the occult in Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981), only serves to highlight further the peculiarity of Mann’s film. Rather than being placed somewhat incongruously within this list of suggested peers (which is eclectic in itself, embracing fantasy and medieval sword-and-sorcery, updated and adult-rated vampire narrative and a modern-day ghost story), The Keep can be seen to initiate a genre or sub-genre of its own, the war-horror film. Aside from the cycle of Vietnam War films inaugurated by Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986), war films depicting World War II were relatively scarce during the 1980s. The brisk cynicism of The Big Red One (Samuel Fuller, 1980) was succeeded by the mechanical reverence and nostalgia of Memphis Belle (Michael Caton-Jones, 1990). Bracketed by these more predictable versions of the war genre, Mann’s film seems to relate more pertinently to other symbolic and broadly metaphorical rather than realist treatments of the war, such as Castle Keep (Sydney Pollack, 1969) and A Midnight Clear (Keith Gordon, 1991), in which the battlefield in Europe functions figuratively as a setting for conflict between personified moral and ideological values. 130

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The Keep signals its peculiarity from its very opening, with a sequence of initially dislocated images which has become a focal point for subsequent analysis and discussion of the film.1 As in Manhunter, the film’s first images appear disjointed to the point of abstraction. To an accompaniment of peals of thunder and the rhythms (rather than melodies) of Tangerine Dream’s electronic score, the opening shot is of a blank blue expanse, which subsequently lightens and gains detail to become a clouded sky. This is succeeded by an extended shot of almost two minutes’ duration, travelling down from the sky over the steep sides of a wooded valley to reach a mountain road and the convoy of German military vehicles. Diegetic sound from the vehicles is introduced gradually, and competes with the rhythmic electronic score. As the convoy progresses towards its objective, the sequence juxtaposes isolated shots of fragmentary details of the vehicles and the landscape with unidentified facial close-ups, subsequently revealed to be of Captain Woermann (Jürgen Prochnow). As the convoy enters the village built in the shadow of the Keep, the camera assumes Woermann’s point of view, linking the close-ups of his eyes to a series of slow-motion shots of the buildings and inhabitants seen through the lead vehicle’s windscreen. Only when the vehicles come to rest does the explanatory title appear: ‘Dinhu Pass, Carpathian Alps, Romania 1942.’ One arresting composition in this sequence shows a profile of the valley in the upper half of the frame perfectly reflected in the surface of a lake in the lower half. While this symmetrical, mirror image anticipates the similarly balanced compositions seen in The Last of the Mohicans (such as the paralleled parading French and British armies arranged on either side of the frame at the surrender of Fort William Henry, and particularly the bridge reflected perfectly in a river which Heyward’s carriage crosses on his way to Albany), this example tends towards a markedly different meaning. The reversed image of the valley in the lake looks forward to the film’s gradual revelation of disturbing parallels and equivalences between the man-made horror of the war and the generic and archetypal terror contained by the Keep itself. Where the poised and equalised images in The Last of the Mohicans are redolent of a rational and dictatorial British order about to be overthrown (on both the personal and national scales) by the experiences of contact with the wilderness, the mirror image of the mountain in The Keep suggests the permeability of the barrier between the rational and irrational, the material and the metaphysical, in this disconcerting environment. The mountains which will constitute a sacred heartland in The Last of the Mohicans appear here as an alienating, mythological locale, resistant to rational interrogation, but also expressionistic and ‘reflective’ of the moral and spiritual turmoil of its would-be conquerors. The Last of the Mohicans: perfect reflection

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The convoy’s sinister journey evokes Harker’s passage to Count Orlok’s castle in Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau, 1922), in its calculated defamiliarisation of landscape narratively (in twentieth-century war resited in the territory of nineteenth-century vampires) and stylistically (via editing, composition and sound). While there is an efficient evocation of the atmosphere of horror in this sequence (in the isolated Romanian location for the action, the medieval setting of the Keep and the village, and in the techniques of sound, composition and editing which conspire to obscure and suggest rather than detail and denote), the treatment of horror staples of isolation, and the supernatural and human agency within an uncanny environment remain generically atypical. In his review of the film, Kim Newman suggests that, like Stanley Kubrick’s contemporaneous adaptation of Stephen King’s novel The Shining (1980), Mann’s version of F. Paul Wilson’s The Keep jettisons a predictable, conventional plot and methodology of horror in both novelistic and filmic terms to produce an idiosyncratic, auteurist approach (1985: 127–8). Rybin makes a similar point in accounting for some of the film’s opacity: Rather than transforming the content of the adapted novel into an altogether different statement […] Mann leaves The Keep’s explanations behind wherever he can, indulging his interest in creating a relativistic universe of evocative images rather than a literal translation of a very plot-driven novel. (2007: 64) However, rather than adapting a source novel which deliberately revises stock locations, situations and characters (Romania, the imperilled village, the vampire and vampire hunter) into a merely functional horror film, or transplanting the horror film’s spectacle of violence into the generic landscape of war, Mann and his collaborators reunite the aesthetics of the horror film and the cultural history of the war with their supposed sources within the cinema of German Expressionism. With a film school background and with Faust listed among his favourite films, it is unsurprising that German Expressionism should register as the key influence in thematic and stylistic terms in Mann’s war-horror film. The prominent influence of Expressionism is discernible in production design and mise-en-scène in The Keep, prompting detailed critical comparisons between Mann’s film and its likely factual and fictional sources: The keep itself has a bold geometry that hearkens back to the German Expressionism of Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau, although Mann and production designer John Box primarily based it on the works of Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer … the film is laden with references to films of that era: Molasar/Der Golem (Paul Wegener, 1920); the glowing eyes and shafts of light/Faust (F.W. Murnau, 1926); the wall of the keep/ Der müde Tod (Fritz Lang, 1921). (Feeney and Duncan 2006: 44, 49) Film school studies of German Expressionism have been inflected since its publication by Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler (1947). Kracauer’s interpretative 132

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cultural history maps the rise of Nazism and the horrors of the Third Reich onto the output of the German cinema of the 1920s, endowing the films with a prophetic accuracy in their representation of subjugation, authoritarianism and violence (1947: 77). Kracauer’s study perceived within expressionist cinema a distillation of the Weimar zeitgeist and an articulation of German cultural and historical consistencies, in its repeated depictions of the advance of a depraved will to positions of corrupt power. While succeeding scholarly approaches and interpretations have qualified or rejected Kracauer’s syringe-model-in-reverse reading of unambiguous links between film and society, subsequent analyses of horror film production in the light of socio-cultural and political trauma (such as the shocking, escalatory cycle of horror cinema in America in the late 1960s and 1970s, coinciding with the duration of Civil Rights demonstrations and the Vietnam War), underline the persuasiveness of Kracauer’s connections.2 In insisting upon the association between expressionist cinema and the history and ideology of Nazi Germany, The Keep establishes a fictional and retrospective vindication of Kracauer’s thesis. The factual grounding of The Keep in the mimetic terms of the war film (encompassing the accuracy of uniforms and equipment, and the setting at the moment of the Reich’s high-water mark, before defeat and retreat in Russia) overlaps with the stylised, generic predictabilities of the horror film (a Romanian forest, castle and vampire)(Rybin 2007: 61). The diegesis allows German soldiers to be both aggressors and victims, to be committing and suffering atrocities. While this also admits a war film cliché in distinguishing between honourable Germans (Woermann, who claims to Cuza he would have joined the Republicans if he had fought in Spain) and depraved Nazis (Kaempffer of the SS), it also allows comparison with the artistic intentions behind expressionist landmarks. The allegories of a manipulative authority and a somnambulant populace forced into evil acts in Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari/ The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1919) and Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1926) are echoed in the acts and fates of the German military in The Keep. The sustained drift in The Keep towards the subjective, the intangible and the oneiric, (which looks forward to the dream sequences in Manhunter and The Insider that are all the more conspicuous because of their rareness within Mann’s canon as a whole), appears to contradict the realist aspects of mise-en-scène. However, this is necessary to articulate the film’s balanced and symbolic consideration of individual and communal morality. The individuality of the responses of each character confronted by the forces associated with or released from or by the Keep (manifested in various forms of temptation, fear and introspection) precipitates the film’s sustained emphasis upon subjectivity. This is rendered, as in the opening sequence, through occurrences of slow-motion, often accompanied by the removal of diegetic sound and its replacement with the electronic score. An indication of the interiority of the horrors and desires which the Keep releases and exploits is encapsulated in the early scenes of Molasar’s escape, and the death of his first victim. Overcome by greed, Private Lutz (John Vine) abandons his guard duty and approaches the glowing silver crosses in slow-motion, with musical accompaniment displacing all motivated sound. When Lutz penetrates the huge enclosed space beneath the Keep, he emerges from a tunnel behind the cross into a vast underground v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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cave. A long shot travels away from a close-up of Lutz’s face across the cavern, to the parallel rows of pillars which appear to imprison Molasar’s spirit form. The focused light of Molasar’s essence then flies from the pillars in the foreground, across the cavern to merge with the point of light (Lutz’s torch) in the distance. This sequence, while important for establishing the horror tropes of the supernatural force which the soldiers will encounter (including the blazing light of the crosses, and the blasts of wind as Molasar escapes) is also significant for its juxtaposition of the worldly and tangible and the spiritual and uncanny. Lutz’s torch is answered by the unearthly light of Molasar; his incorporeality necessitates the gruesome physical destruction of Lutz; Lutz’s veniality encounters an essential evil, which ironically will become embodied via the combined consumption and punishment of the soldiers’ sins and weaknesses (greed, lust, fear, pride and violence). The ‘dreams’ of which the caretaker warns Woermann on arrival signal the Keep’s role as a liberator and magnifier of repressed desires and fantasies for all those who enter its environs. Molasar’s mephistophelian power resides in the tapping of selfdestructive drives, which feed and ‘construct’ him physically and metaphysically as an embodiment of human evil. As in Manhunter, the eyes are the crucial portal for and reflection of desire and identification. In Mann’s next feature, Francis Dolarhyde is driven to modify the eyes of his female victims to visualise the fulfilment of his dream of acceptance and reciprocated love. His pursuer Will Graham is able to visualise, in an acute and literal sense, the psychological needs which the viewing and reviewing of the families and the acts which destroy them are fulfilling for the perpetrator. In both cases, the forms of the home movies Dolarhyde hijacks and those he makes himself are duplicated in Graham’s mind’s eye, and in the texture of Mann’s film itself. In The Keep, the antecedent emphasis on eyes in Mann’s work is highlighted from the first extreme close-ups of Woermann’s eyes in the disquieting opening sequence. Subsequently, Molasar extracts the souls or physical being of his victims through the eyes even as his own appearance induces terror. The essence of his victims allows him to rebuild his own physical being, vindicating his answer to Kaempffer’s question of his origins: ‘Where am I from? I am from you.’ This symbolic parallel, in which Molasar both echoes and consumes the evil of those around him, is redolent of the inheritance from Expressionism: The Golem begins his reign of terror by serially murdering Nazi soldiers to reproduce his physical body, as he is in turn constituted as the (physically present) double of their mad pursuit of power via the manipulation of the masses. (Wildermuth 2005: 79) Although characterised as Molasar’s equal and opposite, Glaeken (Scott Glenn) occupies a less clearly articulated symbolic position. Glaeken’s eyes, which first blaze with light at the moment the security of the Keep is breached, overpower those who stand in his way and assume a grid-like, mechanical appearance when he subdues Molasar with his staff, itself a source of light and more a technological artifact than a magical weapon. Glaeken’s association with technology would seem to represent a rational 134

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counterbalance to the moral ambiguities of evil and spirituality which Molasar both embodies and inspires. Yet placing the conflict between Glaeken and Molasar in terms of rational/irrational, material/immaterial and philosophical/technological binaries does not imply a preference or superiority when the defeat of one necessitates the sacrifice of the other. In addition, Glaeken reveals his own susceptibility to desire in the environment of the Keep, when he becomes Eva’s lover ‘out of [her] dream’, in order to ‘touch, as only mortal men do’. Their lovemaking evinces the same fatalistic longing (and they assume the same sacrificial pose) as that of Will Graham and his wife before the night-time stakeout in Manhunter, suggesting Glaeken’s similarity to Mann’s other protagonists who yearn for but abandon intimacy for duty, and a susceptibility to temptation to parallel Cuza’s. The abstraction of Molasar’s evil (suggested by his initial ethereal form) stands in contrast to the physical and technological associations of Glaeken, and these factors in turn reveal the film’s complication of the spiritual dimension generally inseparable from horror narratives. As Molasar kills and consumes more soldiers, and becomes more physically defined, his difference from Glaeken begins to disappear. Similarly, the initial distinction between the intellectual learning of Cuza and the spiritual belief of his friend Father Mikhail (Robert Prosky) evaporates in the presence of Molasar. Cuza subjugates himself to the demon, whose very existence appears to destroy the faith and humanity of Mikhail. If the film, unlike Wilson’s book, does not explore the confusion that the apparent significance of the Keep’s crosses creates in the Jewish Cuza, it does refashion the power of the crucifix in technological rather than spiritual terms. Mikhail gives a crucifix to Cuza to protect him from the demon, but Cuza passes it on to Woermann after he has allied himself to Molasar. As Molasar massacres the garrison, Kaempffer kills Woermann and takes the cross to protect himself. Molasar is impervious to the cross as religious symbol, and crushes it in his hand before draining Kaempffer. Moments later, Cuza confronts Molasar with the talisman, carrying it before him like Kaempffer’s crucifix. When Molasar strikes Cuza down, Glaeken picks up the talisman and reincorporates it into his weapon for the final battle. While the progress of the cross through the film appears to render it meaningless within one belief system, its power is restated as a mythical and technological object. In a similarly blasphemous parallel, Molasar’s capricious actions and commands appear as parodic echoes of scriptural stories (curing Cuza’s illness with a touch, but commanding him to kill his offspring to prove his loyalty). Such inverted allusions may confirm Molasar’s malice, or simply devalue the polar opposites of good and evil which he and Glaeken appear to embody. Molasar’s status as a symbol of evil is perhaps undermined by his reliance on human evil to exist, just as Glaeken’s position as a simple symbol of good is complicated by his contradictory associations of human sentiment and technological force. Yet these complications can also be seen to structure the technological-spiritual, mass-individual binaries and ambiguities of Metropolis. Rather than simply placing technology in opposition to faith or philosophy, The Keep reveals that the application of technology to the root of evil merely acts as a facilitation and exaggeration of humanity’s destructive potential, as Mark Widermuth suggests: v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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Kaempffer, who has shown complete loyalty to the brutal Reich and all it signifies since his appearance in the film, nevertheless snatches the blood-stained cross from Woermann’s dead hands as he prepares to engage the Golem outside. He exits the room where he killed Woermann only to find himself in a landscape of destruction that brings to mind the horrors that humankind will survey only four years later in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (2005: 84) In such a reading, the razed landscape and blackened bodies represent a latter-day expressionist prophecy, not only of the war’s end in the atomic bombings but in the fires of the concentration camps from which Cuza and Kaempffer have come. The connection is justified by the film’s own deliberate grounding of its symbolic events in a historically allusive landscape of man-made horrors. Woermann’s quarrels with Kaempffer are used to highlight references which are at once contemporary and anachronistic in their significance to the conflict. Woermann confronts Kaempffer with his knowledge of SS war crimes committed at Poznan, and warns him that if their adversary in the Keep has the same disregard for life, the tactics of fear will fail, and he must take this lesson ‘back to Dachau’. This retrospective confirmation of Kracauer’s expressionist thesis is made explicit by Woermann in a later speech: To escape the weakness and disease you sense in the core of your own souls, you have scooped the most diseased psyches out of the German gutter, you have released the foulness that dwells in all men’s minds, you have infected millions with your twisted fantasies, and from the millions of diseased mentalities that worship your twisted cross, what monstrosity has been released in the Keep? Who are you meeting, Kaempffer, in the granite corridors of this Keep? Yourself. This combination of historical truth and anachronistic commentary, realist aesthetic and expressionistic allegory, illustrates The Keep’s heterogeneity in combining war and horror conventions. Its generic materials, taken from conventional war and horror films, are subjugated to a self-consciously revived expressionist cinema heritage. The antecedent art cinema basis of Expressionism accounts for Mann’s film in retrospect, just as Kracauer’s interpretation enjoys the persuasiveness of hindsight. Although this stylistic and narrative experiment has not been repeated (in Mann’s work or anyone else’s), the potent combination of war and horror has been explored frequently on film since The Keep’s muted release. Since the appearance of The Keep, the category or sub-genre of war-horror has been expanded by several more contemporary films, including The Bunker (Rob Green, 2001), Deathwatch (Michael J. Bassett, 2002), Outpost (Steve Barker, 2008) and Dead Snow (Tommy Wirkola, 2009). Some of these examples can be seen to engage in deliberate generic hybridisation and (self-)parody. Wirkola’s film unites the black comedy and struggle for survival of the zombie film with commentary on ignorance of and guilt for Norway’s occupation in World War II, whereas Horrors of War (Peter John Ross and John Whitney, 2006) acts simply as an unaccredited extension of the war136

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horror meta-narrative contained within the Wolfenstein game franchise. Perhaps the films closest in intention, but more critically acclaimed than Mann’s horror hybrid, are Guillermo Del Toro’s horror-fantasy allegories The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). In Del Toro’s films, the defencelessness of children before the atrocities of civil war becomes empowered by contact and collaboration with parallel, symbolic and supernatural realms redolent of the potentials for resistance and transformation. In other examples, the episodes and the nature of the horror are grounded in a specific relocation of the horrors of combat itself: supernatural punishment, although arbitrary and misdirected in its effects, is manifested as the response to the human violence of war, particularly where straightforward and conventionalised killing in combat is replaced by atrocities and war crimes. In this combined narrative and thematic concentration (in which the wronged dead take revenge upon the guilty living), these films arguably owe more to Poltergeist than The Keep, although notably (and perhaps inevitably given the Anglo-American origins of most of these titles), German soldiers are most often present as the guilty parties, and the targets or embodiments of supernatural justice. By originating supernatural vengeance in specific but fictionalised horrors of war (such as war crimes perpetrated by combatants), films such as The Bunker and Deathwatch use the setting of war as a diegetic justification for gruesome violence. Yet in doing so they deny or avoid any wider and historically specific criticism of underlying political sources or motivations for the horrors of war. Paradoxically, perhaps, via its self-conscious stylisation and assertion in thematic and graphic terms of the expressionist association, The Keep seeks to concretise parallels and links between physical violence and political thought: Mann focuses on their [the Nazis] use of iconography in order to explore the means by which the human imagination – specifically the subconscious mind – can make human beings susceptible to exploitation in mass culture. Indeed, he seems to argue that the subconscious mind, and in particular the collective unconscious’ repository of archetypes, has always represented a potential source of evil. (Wildermuth 2005: 77) On his arrival, Woermann warns the caretaker that the bad dreams of the Keep are ‘fairytales’ in comparison with the nightmares perpetrated by men in the war. Later, he confronts Kaempffer with the possibility that what he will encounter in the Keep is no more than a reflection of himself, the embodiment of his own fantasy. Molasar’s gradual assembly of his physical form from the souls of the soldiers he kills underlines the limitations of his existence, as an extrapolation and embodiment of their evil rather than his own. As such, every physical and realist horror of The Keep represents an absent and abstract political power, suggested through the thematic and narrative parallels to Expressionism. Although it can be seen to incorporate a duly macabre spectacle for a horror film, The Keep’s true uncanny material is, in keeping with Kracauer, an ideological horror, an expressionist rendering of political doctrine and social history as subjective nightmare. v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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Ali Synopsis: In 1964 at the age of twenty-two, Cassius Clay defeats Sonny Liston to become Heavyweight Champion of the World. His association with the Nation of Islam, his friendship with Malcolm X and his own growing fame make him a controversial figure for the American authorities. He changes his name to Muhammad Ali. He is placed under surveillance by the CIA and defies his draft orders for the US Army. Combined with his inflammatory remarks on the Vietnam War and racism in America, this precipitates a ban from boxing, a heavy fine and a prison sentence, and leads to the loss of his heavyweight crown. Although he is cleared under appeal to the Supreme Court, Ali loses most of his fortune and is barred from boxing in his prime. Subsequently Ali is defeated when he tries to reclaim the championship from Joe Frazier. In 1974, in a high profile contest promoted by Don King and staged in Zaire, Ali has the chance to regain his crown in a bout against the champion George Foreman. In Ali the use of contemporary covers of 1960s and 1970s pop songs on the soundtrack deviates from the approach of most traditional biopics, which tend to use pop songs from the time period covered in the film’s diegesis in order to suture the viewer into an often nostalgic experience of a past moment in history. Mann avoids such nostalgia in Ali and instead offers us an experience of a historical biopic which foregrounds the importance of its social and political themes to our present-day situation, while at the same time combining the biographical genre with tropes from the boxing film. (Rybin 2007: 13) Unlike The Keep, Ali does not telegraph its distinctiveness with the combination of conflicting art cinema and genre elements, and yet it engages in a similarly fundamental reappraisal of its historical subject via a comparably bold exercise in generic transformation. Although a precedent for Ali’s amalgamation of classical genre material, biopic conventions and post-classical Hollywood stylisation existed in Raging Bull, Mann’s solution to the blending of these elements at once diverges from Scorsese’s film and from the formulae of each generic constituent. Superficially, a biographical or journalistic film treatment of the life of Muhammad Ali might be seen to follow readily in Mann’s output after the docu-drama treatment of The Insider, but whereas The Insider evoked the evasive conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s in its depiction of principles under pressure, Ali offers a more uplifting yet enigmatic portrayal of a known but unfamiliar figure. Expectations surrounding the subject matter, as much as its likely conventional treatment, attached themselves to the proposed biopic of Ali’s life from the project’s commencement. Spike Lee, the director and writer of Malcolm X (1992), objected to the selection of Mann (by star Will Smith and Ali himself ) to fulfil the same roles for a biopic of another black American figure of similar significance.3 Lee’s insistence that a black subject would benefit from a black sensibility should not imply the necessity of it, and Trevor McCrisken and Andrew Pepper explore and challenge such assumptions in their consideration of Lee’s and Mann’s films in tandem. They recognise the 138

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requirement for the reappraisal of both producers and productions, expectations and audiences, in order to break down reductive definitions of the respective advantages and disadvantages of historical treatments in independent and mainstream cinema: We need to find new ways of talking about film and history that acknowledge its contested, contingent status, and […] we need to find new ways of talking about Hollywood and independent films that challenge the assumption that the former will always be contaminated by repressive ideologies and the latter will necessarily be wholly free of corrupting influences of ideologies of nationalism, capitalism and patriarchy […] to explore the complex ways in which all films simultaneously collude with and contest dominant ideologies and discursive formations. (2005: 163) Mann’s film accomplishes this new approach in avoiding both the rise-and-fall pattern of the boxing film and the full biographical portrait of the biopic. In concentrating on a selective ten-year period (from Ali’s acquisition of the heavyweight crown in 1964, through his conflicts with the American establishment and the Nation of Islam, to his regaining of the title in Zaire in 1974), Ali paradoxically begins with victory and concludes before the end of his boxing career, yet at a point at which his myth is established. The flashback structure of the script devised by Stephen Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson (similar to their screenplay for Nixon [Oliver Stone, 1995]) was reoriented, and the focus tightened to what Mann considered the most significant decade of Ali’s life (Feeney and Duncan 2006: 139–141). To read Mann’s film in relation to the potentialities of and assumptions about contemporary historical cinema portraits requires comparison with other socio-political biopics (such as Oliver Stone’s) as well as Lee’s, but also necessitates an evaluation of Ali alongside Raging Bull and the conventions of boxing films in general. Although recognised as a genre in itself, the boxing film can also be seen to overlap meaningfully with the biopic in its deliberate expression of individual struggle as representative of wider social discrimination and injustice in America, as in for example The Great White Hope (Martin Ritt, 1970). Furthermore, thematic and situational similarities between boxing films and gangster films heighten their persistent and shared examination of prejudice against, unequal opportunities for and criminalisation of the beleaguered individual: The evolving conventions of the boxing film genre express conflicts pervasive in American culture […] In the boxing genre the ceremonial weigh-in, the impersonal referee and the bare ring speak of equality, a rule-bound competition emblematic of the culture of opportunity. But these films constantly unmask the trappings of fairness and express the liability of difference. Everywhere the fix is on, the fighter is cornered, the game is rigged. The boxer’s physical being and social consequences of this condition define him as different, and that difference generates conflict as the boxer pursues opportunities in the fight game. Ethnicity accentuates the boxer’s body as the source of difference […] v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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as a result, the boxer generally represents an oppressed underclass struggling to rise. (Grindon 1996: 54–5) In spite of navigating between the conventions of the boxing film, the precedent of Raging Bull’s art cinema revision of the boxing genre, and the landmarks of contemporary Hollywood biopics of prominent figures of the 1960s, Mann’s Ali evinces (like Scorsese’s) an auteurist consistency in style and theme. Scorsese’s repeated depiction of the protagonist beset by inner doubts and external demands is paralleled by Mann’s concentration on unyielding and uncompromising males. Where the spiritual dimension of Scorsese’s cinema transforms the boxing film into an inverted and secular Passion, the consciously performed masculinity of Mann’s characters assumes greater import in Ali’s depiction of boxing as politicised 1960s self-fashioning. Ironically, in view of the cultural protectionism implied by the criticism of Mann’s recruitment to Ali, the style and construction of Lee’s own biopic Malcolm X exhibit strong similarities to the self-reflexive treatment of the past and the enforced significance of history on view in the work of mainstream (white) directors. The exuberant dance club routines which punctuate the scenes of Malcolm’s youth echo the musical interludes of Lee’s other films and recall classical studio musicals, or more accurately the self-conscious evocation of the big band spectacle seen in New York, New York. Significant scenes of hardship and persecution from Malcolm’s childhood unroll in a partial, interrupted and revelatory fashion used to similar effect in Ray (Taylor Hackford, 2004). The film’s final montage, in which black-and-white reconstructions of the 1960s give way to authentic, contemporary images of Malcolm, appears comparable to the incorporation of documentary footage alongside dramatised and speculative scenes in Stone’s films such as JFK (1991) and Nixon (1995). However, where Stone’s unpredictable and often equivocal merger of bona fide and unverifiable images is intended to undermine grand and institutionalised narratives, Lee’s pointed use of documentary images works actively to limit the possible readings of the past. Ironically, the varied multitude of children seen celebrating Malcolm X Day at the film’s conclusion, and proclaiming ‘I’m Malcolm X’ becomes indicative of the narrowed and didactic perspective conferred by the film upon Malcolm as a black cultural icon. The sequence resembles nothing more than the images of survivors and succeeding generations, apparently indivisible from one view of Jewish-ness, and the persuasive, one-dimensional depiction of their saviour, consolidated at the end of Schindler’s List. The singular determination of Malcolm’s image and importance achieved at the film’s conclusion stands in contrast to the fluidity of his identity which marks the scenes of his conversion to Islam while in prison. In championing the suggestiveness of these scenes’ subjectivity in exploring Malcolm’s transformation, McCrisken and Pepper lament the film’s subsequent, inexorable movement towards a limited and inflexible enunciation of Malcolm’s meaning: Much of the rest of the film draws back from such radical uncertainty […] as a result of this need to frame Malcolm X’s life as a linear, teleological progression towards an already demarcated and unambiguous end-point, [the film] seems 140

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quite conventional, or at least appears that way once the inflammatory nature of its subject has been duly noted. (McCrisken and Pepper 2005: 165–6) While the corralling of meaning to specific ends might be expected of a film which begins with the infamous Rodney King footage and the burning of the national flag, the conservatism of its conclusion is remarkable in view of this opening challenge. Malcolm X ultimately assembles a unified and influential portrayal of a figure of cultural consequence, but in so doing raises the question of whether it ‘constitutes a Hollywood film or a “Black” film’, and whether its combination of declarations and compromises informs, provokes, or even reaches its intended audience (McCrisken and Pepper 2005: 166; Horne 1993). If the communication of meaning in Malcolm X is hindered by both the controversial and contested nature of its subject matter, the attempt to assail and reassess the myth of Ali represents a different but equally daunting task. Where Lee’s film looks to fix (and consequently obscure or pragmatically tame) Malcolm’s significance for a modern audience, Mann seeks to return to an unfixed and controversial point in Ali’s life, which predates his national rehabilitation and global recognition. The uncritical international adoption of Ali as an icon of personal achievement and individual struggle, a sporting hero and black role model, could have resulted in an equally biased and unchallenging cinematic portrait (despite the casting of the American establishment and society at large as Ali’s antagonists). Instead, the partial summarisation of Ali’s importance in the present requires the film’s retrospective revaluation, returning to a point which predates the myth to trace its formation in a reversal of Bundini Brown’s poetic conceit, ‘from the fruit to the root’. The opening sequence of Ali bears comparison with the heterogeneous and opinionated montages of Oliver Stone’s biopics, and the enforced contemporary relevance demanded by Malcolm X’s introduction of the Rodney King footage. Mann’s multifaceted opening juxtaposes times, places and perspectives in a deliberately dense and initially almost opaque collage. This eight-minute sequence does not so much introduce the era and the protagonist as confront us with formative fragments, from which we must assemble our own view and values.4 Nominally, the moment on which the film opens is 24th February 1964, when against expectation Cassius Clay wins the bout against Sonny Liston to be become World Heavyweight champion. However, this episode is relayed through a series of separated and subjectively experienced vignettes, ‘a bravura cinematic précis’ which unites formative moments from Ali’s life to date (Wootton 2002: 16). Beginning with the start of a concert given by Sam Cooke (David Elliott), the sequence assimilates shots of Ali being observed by police while on a training run at night, before shifting to shots of him in the gym before the Liston fight. While the Cooke medley continues on the soundtrack, the view changes to a slow-motion, point-of-view close-up of a punch bag, and then alters again to isolated slow-motion shots from inside the ring of Liston’s last successful defence of his title. These images are interspersed with close-ups of Ali’s face, grounding them as subjective recollections even though they do not always correspond to Ali’s actual point of view. Ali’s memory of Liston’s (Michael v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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Ali: the trailing police car

Ali: church mural

Ali: training montage

Bentt) taunt as he leaves the ring is followed by a drastic shift to a recollection from childhood, in which the young Ali watches his father (Giancarlo Esposito) paint a church mural including a blond, white Jesus. A cut back to Cooke’s concert is followed by a further close-up of Ali training, before another childhood image is inserted (young Ali in the segregated section of a bus, viewing a newspaper headline of a lynching in Chicago), again with the punctuation of close-ups in the present which assert the images’ subjective origins. At this point the images change to a recent recollection of Ali hearing Malcolm X (Mario Van Peebles) speak, with Malcolm’s voice competing with Cooke’s on the soundtrack. When the images return to the training, Bundini Brown (Jamie Foxx) is seen to enter the gym, and Ali’s first meeting with Bundini is recalled. More images of Cooke’s performance are followed by photographer Howard Bingham (Jeffrey Wright) entering the gym as Ali spars with a partner. As Cooke’s medley reaches its climax, Ali and his entourage are seen driving to the weigh-in for the Liston fight, and the music fades out as Ali enters the room to face the reporters and his adversary. Within this sequence, intercutting balances without privileging any individual element. The relative opacity of this sequence on first viewing, when the temporal and spatial relationships between incidents which the editing codes as simultaneous or overlapping are yet to be established, can be deciphered via the suturing of the close-ups of Ali’s face, which reassure us of the images’ unification in personal memory. 142

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The arresting images and motifs (of casual bigotry in the present versus lethal prejudice in the past, subjugated faith in childhood versus independent belief in adulthood) work to acclimatise the audience to the South of the 1960s, with the close-ups and points of view adding the impetus of star identification. Less clear, however, is the subjective significance of the images to Ali himself (the reason for their recollection on the eve of the Liston fight, and the meaning they assume when they are recalled). If the connections to be made between images redolent of a submissive Christian faith, newspaper reports of racial violence and the magnetic appeal of Malcolm X are readily accessible, those between Malcolm and Sam Cooke, or between racial prejudice and Ali’s black opponent in the ring are not. The immediacy and free associational quality of the sequence suggests the protagonist’s uncertain identity at this point, by visualising his continuing instability as a construct (and as a construct of blackness amongst other political and cultural representatives). Ali’s fashioning of his own views and motivations from this concatenation of experiences and memories asserts his status as a work-in-progress. Yet merely being made aware of these environmental stimulants does not gain us access to the formative process, or allow us to predict the end result: The opening sequence […] asks us to understand [Ali] in the context of Civil Rights and Black Nationalism, of the Nation of Islam, of soul music and social protest, and of Sam Cooke and Malcolm X, without ever suggesting that the cumulative effects of such influences will necessarily produce someone whose identity is determined from the outside in, rather than vice versa; determined according to social and/or political formula. (McCrisken and Pepper 2005: 179) The apparent subordination of Ali in this opening (he is yet to achieve the fame of Cooke or the notoriety and sway of Malcolm) in fact anticipates his outstripping of both as a cultural icon (becoming more popular than Cooke, more influential than Malcolm). It will be Ali’s success in sport and subsequent pervasion of popular culture, and the focusing of spiritual and social concerns which his fame provokes and allows, which will endow him with this enduring status. As Howard Cosell (Jon Voight) observes when Ali privately expresses his puzzlement at the furore his raised profile has created: ‘All they are is political: you’re the heavyweight champion of the world.’ At the same time, the sequence’s repeated juxtaposition of the corporeal and the intellectual (Ali’s physical preparation and Cooke’s ecstatic female audience contrasting the young Ali’s absorption of the religious and newspaper images and Malcolm’s articulation of a new creed of self-respect) connects the halves of Ali’s existence and the source of his personal struggles with the thematic bases of the boxing film. As well as articulating Ali’s personal progression and showing their contribution to his ultimate cultural significance, the film’s portrayal of his spiritual, familial, domestic and financial difficulties mesh with and reflect on the thematic concerns of the boxing genre. Leger Grindon identifies four principal conflicts which define the drama and trajectory of the boxing film narrative: body versus soul; opportunity versus difference; market values versus family values; and anger versus justice (Grindon 1996: 54). Ali v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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adopts but modifies these organising principles of the generic narrative, but also integrates them within (or reveals their close kinship to) the conventional conflicts which are necessary to vindicate character in the dramatic form of the biopic. Ali’s ‘beautiful’ body does operate as the symbol and expression of his passionate soul, but the body also defines him problematically through his vexed relationships with women. Yet where Grindon identifies ‘marriage, domesticity and family’ as both challenges to the ‘exclusively male world of the ring’ and the alternative to physical action that will allow the boxer to ‘cultivate his soul’, Ali’s spiritual self-realisation is facilitated by his body in the ring, and undermined by his body (in sexual relationships inside and outside marriage) beyond it (Grindon 1996: 61). Where conventionally in the boxing genre the ring offers an opportunity to those disadvantaged by difference, in Ali difference leads directly to political struggle, and to the denial of self-realisation in the ring. Market values, in the form of the purses Ali can earn under the dubious management of Herbert Muhammad (Barry Shabaka Henley), function as a complication of Ali’s faith and individualism, while the practice of his faith impacts directly on domestic values, in the ending of his first marriage and the problems of his second. Ali’s anger at injustice becomes inseparable from the increasing politicisation of his difference and faith. However, it is not linked to the fixing of the fight game (occurring generically, and seen in Raging Bull in the control of boxing by organised crime), but to the injustices of both black Islamic and white American establishments. In revising the form, occurrence and significance of these generic elements, Ali necessarily recasts the boxer protagonist himself. Ali at once assumes his mythic status via fame as a boxer, but in doing so outstrips boxing itself. His success both connects him with and separates him from others, just as he insists on his individual interpretation of his acquired communal significance: ‘I ain’t gonna be the people’s champion [like Joe Louis]. I just ain’t gonna be the champ the way you want me to be the champ. I’m gonna be the champ the way I wanna be.’ The figure of the boxer always embodies this paradoxical combination of community and separation. The solitariness of his sporting activity contrasts with and even contradicts the connections made with the crowd, his trainers and entourage and his family. The characterisation of Ali’s apartness and difference in terms of faith, blackness, and his sporting excellence are linked to the imperatives of both the boxing genre and the biopic, but also epitomise the continuities of Mann’s isolated male protagonists. However, individuality is also always shown to be contingent and difficult to attain. Ali insists upon his apartness in professional terms to his father when he is questioned about the religiously-inspired changing of his name: ‘Ain’t nobody made me. Ain’t nobody in the ring but me. I made me.’ Yet the name he assumes, like the slave name he renounces, is the gifted imposition of another. The film exhibits a marked sensitivity to these ambiguities, and a refusal to ignore or correct them for a more simplistic and consistent portrayal and understanding of its subject. Ali’s vices, his failings as a husband and his unexplained tolerance of Herbert and Don King (Mykelti Williamson) co-exist alongside his self-destructive, principled stand against the US government. This conscious ambiguity signals the film’s dissimilarity to Lee’s and Stone’s 1960s’ biopics:

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In the same way that history itself remains tantalizingly available but ultimately unfathomable, so the idea that we can ever truly know someone else, in Mann’s film, is presented as both desirable: we do want to know who Ali is; and yet unattainable […] the interpretative burden is passed from filmmaker to viewer: the question ‘Who is he?’ soon becomes ‘How can we begin to make sense of his behaviour, of what he does and says?’ Make sense, that is, of the contemplative ‘private’ Ali and the loquacious, brash ‘public’ Ali? (McCrisken and Pepper 2005: 178) Ali’s superficial difference from other Mann protagonists is his articulateness, the overexpression and over-determination of his public persona to reporters, on television, to opponents and to those within his professional and family circle. Ironically, his public and private statements can appear as consciously performed as the self-explanations offered by Frank in Thief and McCauley and Hanna in Heat, even where their unguarded spontaneity (in his comments on Vietnam on the telephone to a reporter, his rhetorical tour-de-force outside the court after sentencing, and his criticism of Sonji’s dress after a bout) is the root of both their power and the problems they precipitate. Such over-determination could have been used (as in Malcolm X) simply to reinforce the biopic’s role in confirming an existing understanding of a significant true-life figure. However, as in the case of the challenging opening sequence, Mann’s film and Smith’s role make access to the protagonist and the period dependent upon a reading rather than a recreation of history, and on performance, both in and of a character. Musical sequences in the film which might betray similarities to other biopics restate this difference. Popular music accompanies the aftermath of Malcolm’s assassination, brief scenes of Ali quarrelling with Sonji over her appearance and Ali’s night-time meeting with his lawyer in Chicago. Similarly, documentary images of contemporary demonstrations, which are succeeded by the re-enactment of Martin Luther King’s Ali: documentary footage

Ali: all along the watchtower…

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death and shots of Ali training on a rooftop while rioting takes place in the streets below, are included in a montage accompanied by a cover version of ‘All Along the Watchtower’.5 However, these musical inclusions exist only as excerpts from cover versions which lack the nostalgic, evocative effect of the direct musical quotations in other 1960s-set films, or the subjective, experiential connection with contemporary popular music in Scorsese’s films. Instead we are reminded, as in the opening montage, of the performance and assemblage of the film’s meaning, just as the film as a whole charts both Ali’s self-realisation and the growth of myth around him. Awareness of the star, even when submerged in such a conscientious assumption of a character, forces our recognition (as in the case of the roles inhabited by Mann’s other leading men), of that character’s own conscious, constant and contrived performance. Yet we remain unable to penetrate the complexities of Ali, even when we gain access to his innermost thoughts. On three occasions (in Ghana when he criticises Malcolm for his feud with Elijah Muhammad, when losing to Joe Frazier and in the midst of his fight with George Foreman), we overhear Ali’s inner monologue. These instances are in their way as difficult to interpret as every other aspect of the film’s Ali. The first (spoken internally before being uttered aloud) seems a betrayal of Malcolm’s friendship in preference for the prevailing attitude of the Nation of Islam. The second is a realisation of the moment of defeat, when the body fails to obey the spirit. The third, occurring as voice-over before Ali reverses the course of the bout to defeat Foreman, appears ambiguously as a challenge to either or both of the fighters: You want the title? Want to wear the heavyweight crown? Nose broke, jaw smashed, face busted in? You ready for that? Is that you? You face a man who would die before he’d let you win. Even this climactic bout does not accord fully with generic convention, and deliberately curtails the biopic timeframe in order to concentrate on a combined physical and spiritual transcendence. Conventionally, the ageing fighter is forced to face his own decline, and the realisation that victory in the ring alone is not enough: ‘can [the boxer] overcome the deterioration of his body by cultivating his soul?’ (Grindon 1996: 55). In Ali, the final bout is not simply a vindication of Ali’s endurance of hardship (mentally in his banned years and physically during this fight), but also of his own way of being the people’s champion. A genuinely subjective use of music, in a sequence employing slow-motion as Ali runs around the back streets of Kinshasa, shows Ali responding to the mythologisation and expectation surrounding his title fight. Foreman, in being described as the United States champion, could assume the role of Ali’s political adversary, but the government has already been defeated in the granting of Ali’s appeal. Instead, Ali recognises and aspires to the heroic status he is seen to occupy in the murals on Kinshasa’s streets, honouring an ideal which Don King has peddled cynically in publicising his African title fight. This final transformation might appear to confirm the myth the film has evaded or questioned throughout its length, but in allowing the ideal and its deconstruction to cohabit the screen simultaneously sustains the film’s problematic perform146

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Ali: Kinshasa murals

ance of its subject. The winning of the final bout is not an ending, as the closing titles indicate in detailing events from Ali’s later life. Rather it marks the beginning of the reinterpretation to which the film itself contributes: More than any other film made in recent years, Mann’s Ali suggests that it may be possible for a white filmmaker (or a black one, for that matter) to make a critically engaged and formally innovative historical film about a black subject within Hollywood […] that throws its all-too-familiar subject into sharp, alltoo-unfamiliar relief. (McCrisken and Pepper 2005: 176–7) Mann’s film emerges as an examination and critique of the processes and products of mythmaking as much as a reflection of or contribution to them. In wedding the biopic and the boxing film, it also achieves a paradoxical fusion of realism and selfconsciousness which, while directly recalling The Insider, in fact permeates Mann’s entire oeuvre. Public Enemies Synopsis: Parolee John Dillinger stages a daring prison break to free members of his gang of bank robbers. Bureau of Investigation Agent Melvin Purvis hunts down and kills Pretty Boy Floyd. Bureau Chief J. Edgar Hoover presents Purvis to the media as the leader of a new task force created to bring Dillinger, now named ‘Public Enemy No.1’, and his gang to justice. In pursuing Dillinger, Purvis’s men come across Baby Face Nelson, but fail to capture him in a shoot-out in Chicago. Engaging in a series of bank robberies, Dillinger meets and falls in love with Billie Frechette. They are arrested in Tucson when they holiday together. Dillinger escapes from custody and returns to Chicago. Following an unsuccessful robbery organised by Nelson, the gang is ambushed by agents at Little Bohemia Lodge, and only Dillinger escapes alive. Dillinger plans to leave the country with Billie, but she is arrested and interrogated by agents seeking Dillinger’s whereabouts. While he waits to execute a train robbery, Dillinger is betrayed to Purvis’s men, and is shot dead outside a cinema. His killer Charles Winstead visits Billie in prison to reveal his last words to her. The War on Crime was little more than a public-relations ploy, a federal giant stomping out criminal insects, a dovetailing of Hoover’s ambition with the v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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needs of the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal policies […] For the Bureau, the only ‘elective’ segment of the War on Crime was the decision to pursue Dillinger. Here Hoover was indeed hemmed in by his own ambitions. But Hoover didn’t ‘create’ Dillinger, as some have argued; Dillinger was already a national figure when the FBI entered the case. He was precisely the type of interstate criminal a national police force should attempt to apprehend. (Burrough 2005: 543) Given that he is originally from Chicago, has explored the socio-economics of crime and policing of the city before in Thief, and has been associated with the both realistic and stylised portrayals of modern crime on film and television, there is an element of inevitability and appropriateness in Mann’s turning to the era, personalities and materials of the classical gangster film for Public Enemies. The tragic trajectory of the gangster, and his fatal flaws of hubristic self-isolation and materialistic acquisitiveness, have also been clearly discernible in Mann’s previous portrayals of crime. However, the ‘armature’ of genre here constitutes an articulated structure more than a static construct on which to hang a new covering, implying the increasing permeability of generic parameters and therefore movement and progression within and beyond them. Mann’s approach to and execution of this apparently respectful gangster genre piece ultimately discloses more details of the director’s manipulation of genre concepts and conventions than his superficially more radical examples, such as The Keep or The Last of the Mohicans. From the outset, it might appear that the principal ‘genre’ the director is revisiting is his own: the essential materials of Public Enemies (expert crews of bank robbers opposed by dedicated law enforcers, with both elite groups operating outside of the experience and restrictions of mainstream society) prompt potentially reductive comparisons with previous films: ‘the Heat­-in-the-Depression tag is inevitable’ (Nathan 2009: 44). However, the sequence covering the first bank robbery (while preserving the earlier film’s observation of individual roles and responsibilities within the gang’s operations) is almost perfunctory in comparison with the representation of the definitive heists in Thief and Heat. While this may reflect the professional expertise and minimal exposure to which Dillinger’s gang aspired, it also suggests the frequency and routine-ness of their robberies (the only other bank raid depicted to its end is the chaotic failure which ensues when Dillinger collaborates with Baby Face Nelson), and that, even more than was the case in Mann’s earlier films, the heists are simply illustrative of deeper currents in characterisation and theme. As precursor to and progenitor of police thrillers, heist movies, procedural dramas and film noir, the gangster film occupies an influential but often rigidly demarcated position in analyses of classical Hollywood’s output. In films produced during the pure genre’s brief span in the 1930s, there is a constant and often inconclusive balancing act between exciting and exploitational representations of crime and conservative moral intentions which insist upon the gangster’s downfall and destruction. The opportunities, exhilaration and material rewards of the gangster lifestyle are set against a tragic narrative trajectory, in which aspiration and ascent must end in punishment and 148

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death. In addition, or contradiction, to portraying the attractiveness of gangsterdom (particularly to immigrants denied legitimate routes to success), the 1930s films fulfil an obligation to show the fleeting and eventually worthless benefits of crime, and the temporary evasion but ultimate inevitability of punishment. The gangster’s climactic death, at the hands of his rivals as often as through the actions of law enforcers, reasserts consensual values, even when his predicament evokes sympathy, and his actions and environment seem far removed from conventional society. As a foundational example, The Public Enemy offers both a broad social indictment and a justification for the existence of the gangster at several points through its narrative. The opening sequence, containing documentary footage to validate its portrait of the era (1909), highlights the pervasive presence of alcohol in pre-war American society. A lengthy unbroken travelling shot, traversing a crossroads within a working-class area of an unnamed city, connects the indicative detail (barrels carried in a brewery dray, beer being delivered to men at work, and the evangelical presence of a Salvation Army band) before coming to rest on the entrance to a bar as the heroes Tom and Mike (still children at this stage) appear in the doorway. Similar scenes which widen the focus (such as images of the crowd of ordinary citizens purchasing alcohol in a frenzy on the announcement of Prohibition in 1929) punctuate the film to formulate a dramadocumentary agenda in tandem with the sensationalised narrative of Tom Powers’ (James Cagney) criminal lifestyle. Although Powers’ violent career establishes him in parallel with the real-life gangster figures labelled ‘public enemies’ by law enforcement agencies, the film’s depiction of his upbringing and environment, and of the pervasive, corrosive effects of alcohol even before Prohibition, suggest the need for both sympathy for the gangster and recognition of the true public enemy, alcohol. Modern and recent revivals and revisions of the gangster genre have maintained but modified the aspects of social observation and sympathetic characterisation established in 1930s examples. Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) combines the casual criminality and non-conformity of the gangster with social criticism of 1930s economic injustice and contemporary youth rebellion and counter-cultural disaffection. Miller’s Crossing depicts gangland loyalties and conflicts characterised by humour and menace more often than lethal violence, and occupying an urban environment both legally decrepit and yet morally sustained. Road to Perdition (Sam Mendes, 2002), though centring on the classical concern of American immigrant experience, also bears a passing resemblance to a Mann film in the central character Michael Sullivan’s (Tom Hanks) dilemma. Working for and joining a criminal ‘family’ to support his own wife and children exposes him to betrayal and them to the violence he has meted out to others. After witnessing his father commit murder with the son of his gang boss John Rooney (Paul Newman), Michael Junior (Tyler Hoechlin) questions his father on the ethics as well as practicalities of living: ‘Does Momma know?’ – ‘Your mother knows that I love Mr Rooney.’ This domestic-professional dichotomy which drives the narrative of Mendes’ film evokes comparison with the insoluble personal quandaries of Mann’s protagonists. The incompatibility of Michael Senior’s fatherhood and his role as hitman and adopted ‘son’ to Rooney lead to his self-sacrificial defence of Michael Junior, in order to ensure that his son does not repeat his mistakes. v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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Like Mendes’ film, Public Enemies explores the economic realities of the Depression and the spread of organised crime, and like Penn’s it adopts subjective and selfreflexive techniques to acknowledge the gap between contemporary gangster films of the 1930s and their retrospective reappraisals in later decades. Mann’s film also shares with Penn’s a recognition of the liberation and limitation of the automobile as an alternative domestic living space. In both films, the car is at once an expensive consumer item and a status symbol which is unavailable to the characters without resort to crime, but also carries the stigma of rootlessness, itinerancy and poverty. The echo of the title of The Public Enemy which is discernible in Mann’s film (via Bryan Burrough’s source book) might suggest an unequivocal inheritance from the classical genre Wellman’s film helped establish, but on close examination Public Enemies displays as elaborate a relationship with its filmic and literary sources as all postclassical gangster films. The return to the classical genre entails a recreation of the classical period, in cinematic and sociological terms. In keeping with the painstaking historical representation which characterised The Last of the Mohicans, Public Enemies attempts a comprehensive and immersive re-enactment of John Dillinger’s (Johnny Depp) year of criminal celebrity. The evocation of 1930s New York in King Kong (Peter Jackson, 2005), accomplished largely through computer-generated imagery, forms a noteworthy comparison with the means and end of Mann’s evocation of the same era. As well as a credible Depression-era recreation, Jackson’s film is also a satirical and self-reflexive essay on filmmaking and filmmakers, which is relevant to the decade in which it is set as well as the twenty-first century moment of its own making. As a self-reflexive and referential exercise, Jackson’s King Kong demands comparison with the 1933 original (in its arch allusions to Merian C. Cooper and Fay Wray), while in effect it references the 1976 update/remake only by its erasure. The figure of the misunderstood film director Carl Denham (Jack Black) harried by studio executives alludes ironically to Jackson’s contemporary status, but also to the career of Orson Welles through insistent references to Heart of Darkness (an adaptation of Conrad’s novella was one of Welles’ early abortive projects with R.K.O.) (Cowie 1989: 16). Jackson’s early career in low-budget independent horror film production in New Zealand (exemplified by Braindead, 1992) is also noted in the hold of the ship bound for ‘Skull Island’ containing a cage marked ‘Sumatran Rat Monkey’. Alongside these self-reflexive aspects stands the detailed depiction of the Depression (‘Hooverville’ in Central Park) and recognisable popular cultural reference, as seen in Ann Darrow’s (Naomi Watts) impersonation of Charlie Chaplin in her Vaudeville revue. Jackson’s approach combines the brisk and ironic merging of fidelity to the R.K.O. original with self-conscious reference to other movies (including his own). Yet both of these strategies are also extended through the highlighting of other plot elements and stylistic features wedded to the director’s auteurist signature (such as the use of motion capture in Kong’s characterisation and the recreation of the ‘spider valley’ sequence lost from the original in characteristically gory scenes in an insect-infested chasm).6 Jackson’s remake thus achieves an invocation of the text and context of Cooper’s film, while playfully reaffirming its own contemporary and directorial significance. 150

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Public Enemies: Hoover’s publicity machine

The depiction in Public Enemies of Dillinger’s criminal fame during 1933–34 (the thirteen months spanning his release and death) is accomplished through a zealous dedication to authenticity, grounded in genuine settings, architecture, modes of transport, styles of dress, details of weaponry, patterns of speech and modes of behaviour peculiar to the period. Mann’s intention for the film was to create an amalgam of subjective realism (the experience of sharing Dillinger’s perspective on the narrative events) with a documentary realism (the detailed and accurate recreation of the period through concrete mise-en-scène). As with Mann’s other films, this process of subjective identification and historical visualisation begins at once, with the action already in train: ‘I wanted to bring the audience into a certain immediacy with events and relationships, so that you feel that the lives, the history and the relationships are pre-existing, and we are just immersed in them mid-flow, mid-stream.’7 Geographical authenticity derives from the customary preference for locations over studio shooting. Locations across the range of Dillinger’s activities (encompassing Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana) provide depth and consistency to the framing of the action. Selected locations in Chicago, Columbus and Milwaukee were used because they harboured surviving examples of early twentieth-century architecture (including bank buildings and vaults of the period for the staging of Dillinger’s robberies). Specific interiors included Joliet and Statesville Penitentiaries in Illinois, the quarters of the Historical Society of Milwaukee (formerly the Schlitz Brewery Company Bank), and the Pittsfield Building in Chicago, which served as Purvis’s Bureau field office. A working steam locomotive was transported to Union Station for the filming of the arrival of Agent Winstead (Stephen Lang) in Chicago. A fully functional Ford Trimotor (carrying Johnny Depp) was flown into an airport containing a collection of vintage aircraft to recreate Dillinger’s flight into Crown Point. The sequence of the Little Bohemia Lodge gun battle was filmed at the actual location in Manitowish Waters, Wisconsin. Crown Point Jail in Indiana and the Biograph Theater in Chicago were refurbished by the production to allow the filming of Dillinger’s jailbreak and death in their genuine settings. In tandem with such conspicuous commitment to realism are the use of vehicles (Ford and Pierce Arrow cars) and music (the inclusion of Billie Holliday on the soundtrack) faithful to the period. Within this environment, Depp’s presence, which is central to the film’s suggestion of Dillinger’s star quality, introduces a self-reflexive element similar to the invocation of Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968) in the (invented) arrival of the ‘cowboys’ by train. Although these aspects appear to compromise Public Enemies’ commitment to historical accuracy, ultimately they epitomise its conception of its subject. v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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Public Enemies: the cowboys arrive

The casting of Johnny Depp as Dillinger opposite Christian Bale’s Melvin Purvis is one of the film’s greatest coups, not simply in terms of clear commercial appeal. Depp joins and in this generation begins to equal the pantheon of male actors (those surmounting or seeking to evade straightforward star status) who have collaborated with Mann in the past, and with whom they have delivered definitive performances (Pacino, Caan, De Niro, Crowe, Foxx, Day-Lewis, Smith). As with Pacino’s execution of his roles in Heat and The Insider, Depp’s incarnation of Dillinger is more than the sum of previous performances. His Dillinger admits a ruthlessness (albeit reluctantly released) beneath the bravado, an awareness of the seductiveness and ephemerality of fame, and (with Dillinger in his thirties portrayed by Depp in his forties) an encroaching age within the rakishness. The augmented age of the actor endows the character with an unenvisaged gravitas, suggestive of wider experience and selfawareness, which is comparable in Mann’s canon with the purposeful shift from the thirty-somethings of L.A. Takedown to the forty-somethings of Heat. Depp’s move towards middle age is acknowledged rather than over-emphasised by the digital detail of facial lines, and the brow from which the creases no longer fully vanish. The changes in clothes and appearance which Dillinger undertakes to retain anonymity not only fail in diegetic terms, but also announce themselves as a selfreflexive gallery assembled from Depp’s career straddling the mainstream/independent film divide. Among the shifts between fedora and leather jacket, overcoat and suit, straw boater and round glasses, are visible the libertine, the rogue, the dandy and the innocent, from Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Terry Gilliam, 1998), The Libertine (Laurence Dunmore, 2004), Pirates of the Caribbean (Gore Verbinski, 2003–07) and Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Tim Burton, 2007). If Depp’s characterisation of Dillinger presents him as a self-conscious performer, this is balanced by Bale’s incarnation of Purvis as a man forced into an inimical role. As in Heat, the narrative furnishes the paired protagonists with events and insights which alter them. If the alienation and self-awareness are shared equally by McCauley and Hanna in Heat, the transformations of Dillinger and Purvis appear as dissimilar as their comparative status in the film. In both Mann’s screenplay and Bale’s portrayal, Purvis’s ethical identity is sacrificed to the completion of his manhunt, so that he compromises the principles which had previously defined him. Conversely, Dillinger’s transformation is in effect a recognition, of the movie stardom he has coveted and attained, the parallels between the real and the movie gangsters, and ultimately the 152

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indivisibility of Depp and Dillinger. Mann maintains Burrough’s description of the ineffectual, young ‘college boys’ recruited to the Federal Bureau and the experienced ‘cowboys’ from Texas and Oklahoma as the only effective investigative agents on J. Edgar Hoover’s (Billy Crudup) staff (2005: 11–12). However, the screenplay markedly alters the manhunt for Pretty Boy Floyd (Channing Tatum), making Purvis responsible for the fatal shooting and crediting this event for his rise in Hoover’s organisation. This alteration produces a possible anomaly, or rather an intriguing inconsistency. During the pursuit of Dillinger and after the failed attempt to apprehend Nelson, Purvis admits to Hoover that ‘our type cannot get the job done’. (By contrast Burrough notes it was Hoover, not Purvis, who decided to involve the cowboys after the debacle of the Little Bohemia Shoot-out [2005: 367–8]). This confession appears to have been already contradicted by the elimination of Floyd, unless we interpret Purvis’s concern and the decision to bring in the cowboys as simply a means to aggrandise the threat of Dillinger (in terms of the Bureau’s operations and/or its self-publicity, and in terms of the film’s structured conflict). The ‘hunt’ of Floyd, ending in a perfect long-range shot which recalls Hawkeye’s killing of the deer at the beginning of The Last of the Mohicans, suggests Purvis is already capable of the ruthless action (coercion of witnesses, torture of suspects and killing of criminals) for which he is seen to have to steel himself as the narrative progresses. Yet the scenes of Floyd’s shooting are necessary to compare Purvis’s developing expertise and commitment with those of Dillinger, as they follow the opening jail-break sequence and signify Purvis is an equal and worthy adversary. (In fact, Pretty Boy Floyd was killed in a gunfight with a group of Bureau agents and police officers: Purvis was present but may or may not have been responsible for the fatal shots [Burrough 2005: 466–7].) This parallel is further suggested by the bluegrass music on the soundtrack for the death of Floyd, which returns for the rapid representation of the Dillinger gang’s expert robbery at Greencastle, and similar music which ends the scenes of the audacious Crown Point jail break. The establishment of Dillinger and Purvis as adversaries anticipates the film’s fated conclusion (echoing Heat as much as the classical gangster film), but the differences apparent in Public Enemies’ handling of these precedents belie the surface similarities. The recreation of Dillinger’s death preserves the appearance of the event as an arbitrary execution conducted by law enforcers, which contrasts uncomfortably with the deaths of classical gangsters at the hands of other criminals, or their arrests by police or ‘G-men’. Purvis’s lack of involvement in this final shooting also alters the value of the film’s conflict. As this conclusion suggests, the film’s combination of faithful representation, narrative reordering and re-emphasis, and self-conscious commentary amounts to a revision of genre and a referential treatment of history. Mann’s meticulous reconstruction of the 1930s extends beyond vehicles, filmmaking and fashions to create a cohesive socio-political habitat. The implications of the integrated detail this encompasses are both narrative and denotative, and allusive and connotative. Hoover’s embarrassment before the Senate Appropriations Committee provides the motivation for exaggerated media coverage of his fledgling Bureau’s successes and stars, epitomised by Purvis’s shooting of Pretty Boy Floyd. Hoover’s subsequent injunction to Purvis (‘As they say in Italy these days, take off v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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the white gloves!’) connects with glimpsed newsreel images of Ethiopia (the arena for Italian fascist aggression in 1934) to suggest disturbing parallels between America’s political climate and that of contemporary totalitarian Europe. Such references, and others to the continuing financial crisis, unemployment, and the contemporary World Series, validate rather than ornament the context. However, the purposeful reordering of these events (Hoover’s embarrassment before the Senate committee actually followed Dillinger’s death, as did the hunt for Floyd) reveals both the film’s crafting of historical events into a generic narrative line, and its endowment of these events with a relevance, like that of the classical gangster films, to contemporary American society (Burrough 2005: 534–36). As with Mann’s other experiment in the form of the biopic in Ali, the screenplay of Public Enemies exhibits complex manoeuvres in its structuring and emphases, which are undertaken to accommodate and articulate the authorial vision. The realist commitment evident in mise-en-scène disguises to a degree the licence which is taken with the factual narrative of Dillinger’s last year. Burrough’s investigative text provides a wealth of detail and incident to validate the recreation of the mid-1930s ‘crime wave’, but the screenplay’s selectivity in using this source reveals a determined re-reading of events, which goes beyond simple truncation or elision. Burrough’s narrative provides the justification for the film’s portrayal of Dillinger’s awareness and manipulation of his public image, and his performance during robberies ‘like a hungry actor on a brightly lit stage’ (2005: 165, 186). Yet it also states that the ‘War on Crime’ was launched not by Hoover but by Attorney General Homer Cummings, in the wake of the Kansas City Massacre rather than bank robberies or prison breaks, and was aimed at racketeers, not the subsequently identified public enemies (Burrough 2005: 58). Hoover’s unwillingness to join the hunt for Dillinger, and the delay in the Bureau’s involvement until April 1934, are also noted (Burrough 2005: 247, 274). Just as Burrough reveals the glamorous rewriting of the historical criminals’ career in Bonnie and Clyde, we can discern the manipulation of Dillinger’s image in Mann’s film (Burrough 2005: 24–7, 228–30, 360–1). Excision of Dillinger’s guilt in the murder of at least one police officer, and of examples of Purvis’s incompetence in the pursuit, allow the (re) construction of both characters as victims of wider socio-political forces, and produce as fundamental a recrafting of the story and context as that undertaken in Penn’s film (Burrough 2005: 188, 248–9, 369–70). Perhaps the most revealing debt to and yet substantial reorientation of Burrough’s book lies in the film’s adoption of its title. The public enemies of Burrough’s narrative are all the high-profile gangs and individual criminals at large across America between 1933 and 1934. The book asserts their publicised status as ‘public enemies’ was fuelled by and served the purposes of J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Investigation Bureau during an era of corrupt, inefficient and regionalised law enforcement. The period under scrutiny encompasses the rise and fall not only of John Dillinger, but also Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, Alvin Karpis and the Barker gang, as well as the other members of Dillinger’s own close-knit group. In isolating Dillinger as a gifted, driven but fated professional thief comparable to other Mann protagonists, the film’s screenplay necessarily excises most of these histor154

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ical figures: Karpis (Giovanni Ribisi) is only glimpsed in two scenes; Dillinger’s gang members Harry Pierpoint (David Wenham), Red Hamilton (Jason Clarke), Charles Mackley (Christian Stolte) and Homer Van Meter (Stephen Dorff) are largely undeveloped, and Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard) is shown as the only girl in Dillinger’s life. Conversely, while Pierpoint’s apparent leadership of the gang (at points before Dillinger’s induction and during his incarceration) goes unrepresented, Dillinger’s long-term association with Nelson (Stephen Graham) is telescoped into collaboration on a single, doomed heist. An added effect of this significant re-orientiation is the redrawing of Nelson as Dillinger’s opposite, the untrustworthy psychopath to his nonchalant professional and ‘a caricature of the public enemy’ (in effect, the Waingro to his McCauley) (Burrough 2005: 99). The growing sympathy in the narrative for Dillinger is reinforced by the damning (albeit justified in Burrough’s terms) portrait of Nelson, and in this respect Mann’s film echoes classical gangster movies, such as The Public Enemy, Angels with Dirty Faces (Michael Curtiz, 1938) and The Roaring Twenties (Raoul Walsh, 1939), whose characterisations distinguished between ‘honourable’ and ‘dishonourable’ mobsters. While it may, like Burrough’s book, recall the classical gangster film precedent in its title, Public Enemies significantly extends the application of the label to include unseen and unsuspected social threats. Part of the sympathetic treatment of Dillinger is the revelation of greater dangers in the form of the Chicago Syndicate and Hoover’s gathering force of Federal law enforcement. The mafia’s organised crime is demonised in its manipulation of businesses and bribery of cops, in contrast to Dillinger’s Robin Hood-style robbing of banks (as the wider public’s enemies of the Depression era) with a gang of organised criminals. Capone’s former lieutenant Frank Nitti (Bill Camp), who ‘looks like a barber’ to Dillinger, and his horse-racing wire service embody the banality of a spreading, everyday evil, but the mob’s communications room displays a conscious resemblance to the telephone exchanges where Hoover’s agents use wirePublic Enemies: FBI wiretaps

Public Enemies: the Mafia’s wire service

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taps of doubtful legality to entrap suspects, their associates and their families. For the Syndicate, Dillinger and Nelson are no more than a ‘distracting anachronism drawing unwelcome heat down on their oddly corporate endeavors’ (Patterson 2009). As in Thief, the distinctions are insistently drawn between admirable organised criminals and detestable organised crime, and between forthright robbers and corrupt cops. Tellingly, the scene in which Dillinger discovers the wire service behind a shop front is followed immediately by Hoover’s exhortation to Purvis to abandon ‘obsolete notions of sentimentality’. Hoover’s sanction of ‘vigorous interrogation’, wiretapping, and the suspension of habeas corpus, is seen to accompany the publicising of his cause for recognition and funding via the media of the day, in obvious parallels to the erosion of civil liberties and media manipulation in post-9/11 America.8 Purvis’s progress, from regret at his initial killing of Floyd to desperation at his failures to stop Nelson and Dillinger to resignation to the methods he is forced to use, places him outside of the law enforcement community in the same way as Dillinger is ostracised by organised crime. Scenes of torture have become a pervasive feature of contemporary popular (particularly American) films, clearly in response to the controversies of military and intelligence activities in the United States and overseas as part of the ‘War on Terror’. Some have occurred in recent fantasy films clearly intended for audiences of children and young adults. For example, the capture and containment of Bumblebee in Transformers (Michael Bay, 2006), and the interrogation of the Silver Surfer in The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (Tim Story, 2007) are glossed narratively as mistaken and ignorant responses to national emergencies, which are corrected by subsequent actions. By contrast, the torture of a naked James Bond in Casino Royale (Martin Campbell, 2006) appears as a disturbing development in that film’s repositioning of the male (vice female) body as spectacle within a compulsively corporeal franchise. While Rendition (Gavin Hood, 2007) portrays the prejudicial treatment of prisoners of the security services, The Bourne Ultimatum (Paul Greengrass, 2007) extends this contemporary commentary in imagining torture and psychological manipulation of American personnel by their own side, in order to craft the recruits required for clandestine and morally suspect operations. Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012) confronts unflinchingly the adoption of torture techniques, the resultant erosion of moral distinctions between adversaries, and the inevitable inurement of perpetrators to the violence they are driven by circumstance to perform. In Public Enemies, the extraction of information from the wounded Charles Mackley and the interrogation of Billie Frechette are presented as consequences of Hoover’s actions rather than those of Dillinger or Nitti. Purvis’s endurance of Mackley’s torture is corrected by his intervention in Frechette’s, under the gaze of his secretary Doris Rogers (Rebecca Spence), as an abuse he cannot countenance. (The scene of Mackley’s torture is derived from the questioning of another fatally wounded robber, Eddie Green, but Burrough verifies Doris Rogers’ intervention in Billie Frechette’s questioning (Burrough 2005: 276–8, 288–9). As such, his subsequent hesitation at the Biograph Theater, leaving the killing of Dillinger to others, can be interpreted as both an abdication of duty and a resumption of integrity. 156

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The climax at the Biograph Theater again allows for the recreation and re-reading of the genuine historical incident. While the film makes frequent use of self-reflexive techniques (the black-and-white newsreel of Dillinger’s flight into Indiana custody, Hoover’s staged publicity shoots transposed from colour to black and white when viewed by Dillinger in a cinema), the Biograph sequence employs an extended juxtaposition of Depp’s Dillinger and Clark Gable’s gangster in Manhattan Melodrama (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934). Prior to going to the cinema, Dillinger indulges in another self-conscious performance in his circuit of the offices of the Dillinger Squad of the Chicago Police. The audacity of this act is undermined by the realisation it brings of his solitude and his inescapable fate, as every compatriot’s photo on the notice boards is labelled either ‘In Custody’ or ‘Deceased’. The only image left is his own, and the cinema trip offers him the chance to choose the image he leaves behind. As Dillinger watches Manhattan Melodrama, the juxtaposition of Depp and Gable in close-up sparks a satisfied recognition (in Depp/Dillinger and the audience) of one idol’s resemblance to the other, and vindicates the close association between gangsters whose lives are remade on screen, and movies which themselves influence the self-fashioning of gangsters. The parallel is extended by Billie’s/Cotillard’s likeness to Myrna Loy on screen, with the effect heightened by the sharing of Dillinger’s subjective view (the cinema screen filling our frame, with her face seen in slow-motion and close-up). This indivisibility of the stars and characters is comparable to the insertion of portraits of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway into authentic sepia snaps which comprise the credit sequence of Bonnie and Clyde. As in Penn’s film, the recognition of the artifice of the film narrative demanded by the presence of the star enhances rather than negates the re-imagining of the era portrayed, and also stresses its significance to the era of its making. Gable’s last speech (‘Die the way you lived, all of a sudden, that’s the way to go. Don’t drag it out. Living like that doesn’t mean a thing’) is seen to match Dillinger’s Public Enemies: Myrna Loy watched by Depp/Dillinger

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current situation, to articulate an idealistic popular cultural creed, and thus to provide a better epitaph than his unattainable desire to escape with Billie. Loy’s lines to Gable (‘Goodbye, Blackie’) also seem to inspire Dillinger’s dying words to Billie, which only his killer Winstead (the final facilitator of the myth) can pass on. While bearing a superficial resemblance to the defeat and negation of the classical gangster’s rebellion, Dillinger’s death in Public Enemies also appears both fated and sought, and conducive to a romanticised institutionalisation within popular culture and memory (in parallel with that of Penn’s protagonists). Public Enemies achieves a generic transformation comparable to the reorientation of audience expectation, history and film history undertaken in The Keep and Ali. The film’s adaptation of Burrough’s source amounts to a qualified recapitulation of the original gangster genre, and a biopic which is politicised both in terms of the 1930s Depression setting and the world ‘depression’ and ‘War on Terror’ contemporary to the time of its making. In its conformity to and contravention of the gangster film formula, and its subtle combination of faithful period recreation and determined commentary on the socio-political parallels between the Americas of Depressions past and the present, Public Enemies has been crafted as the most pertinent and authoritative example yet of Mann’s command and (re)construction of classical genre. Conclusion Genre frameworks remain vital to Mann’s filmic expression and critical reading of his work, as the articulation of the author’s concerns depend upon movement from and through convention. The ‘armature’ of genre provides the pivot between fixed points of filmmaker and film history, and the fulcrum between directorial style and audience expectation, which facilitates the expansion of a generic canon and the enhancement of the filmmaker’s expression. The three films discussed here all explore ambiguous relationships with more than one generic framework. Unlike the variations on war and horror which have succeeded it (with the exception of Del Toro’s), The Keep’s combination of these elements tends towards an art film sensibility. In this example, a new subgeneric form emerges from the turning moment of a combination of formulae taken from popular and art film sources. As a conception, The Keep not only unites atypical genre sources, but merges Mann’s contemporary visual style with the art direction, thematic concerns and film historical readings of a national cinematic precedent. In the cases of both Ali and Public Enemies, their twin origins in masculine popular genres and the historical context of the biopic produce substantial variations. In contrast to Malcolm X, Ali addresses its subject rather than appropriating it, and achieves an auteurist enunciation without a concomitant cultural didacticism. Its stylistic statements, period recreations and character observations remain as separate as the central figure from summaries and reductive readings. Yet the film does not evade contemporary and individualistic political commentary (exemplified by Mann’s use of his own 1970s’ documentary footage to represent the simmering discord of the late 1960s), or deny the need for the reappraisal of a global Ali in (his and our) personal terms. 158

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In comparison with Scorsese’s Raging Bull, Mann’s film assumes a similar subjective distance, but probes faults without sacrificing sympathy, remains resolutely less loquacious than its subject, and re-aligns the trajectory of the boxing genre in order to undertake a similar revision of the biopic. Public Enemies’ negotiation of two formulae (the biopic and the gangster film) also encompasses the expectations aroused by the film’s resemblance to the director’s own precedents (Heat and Ali). However, we might also describe Public Enemies as a (literary) adaptation, since its derivation from Bryan Burrough’s source book results in alterations as significant as those seen in The Keep and The Last of the Mohicans. The film’s conscientious recreation of an authentic time period is juxtaposed with its sweeping reorganisation of the biographical/historical timeline, to suit not only a dramatic trajectory in line with genre precedent, but also to produce a contemporary political commentary on government, freedom and justice. The plurality of the public enemies represents a reorientation in the definition of the present threats to society and its principles. Considering these examples underlines Mann’s contribution to generic lineages in the course of pursuing personal, authorially-motivated projects. The genres do not confine the filmmaker any more than the filmmaker restrains the genre in bending it towards personal style, relevance or theme. These films which punctuate Mann’s career reflect the diversity of genres in his output, and, belying his films’ thematic and stylistic consistency, the hybridity which defines each individual project. Notes 1 2

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The film’s opening is discussed at length in Rybin 2007: 67–70, and in Wildermuth 2005: 80–2. See the documentary analysis of horror cinema in The American Nightmare (Adrian Simon, 2000), in which filmmakers and academics (Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, John Landis, John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, George A. Romero, Carol Clover and Tom Gunning) reflect on the cinema’s articulation of national trauma. Lee’s objection is noted and discussed in Mickey O’Connor, ‘Boxing Love’, Entertainment Weekly.com 15/12/2001 http//:www.ew.com/article/0,,188158,00.html (Accessed 17/12/2009). See also Feeney and Duncan 2006: 139. Lee also criticised the prior involvement of Norman Jewison in the production of Malcolm X (McCrisken and Pepper 2005: 171). Jewison went on to direct The Hurricane (1999), with Denzel Washington. The opening sequence also echoes the montage of documentary footage at the start of When We Were Kings (Leon J. Gast, 1996). In preparing Ali Mann was given access to hours of outtakes from Gast’s film (O’Connor 2001). These images are taken from Mann’s own short documentary film 17 Days Down the Line (1972), which records the director’s ‘road trip through a polarized 1970s’ America’ (Feeney and Duncan 2006: 11).

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As well as the scenes in his own version, Jackson recreated the lost sequence as an extra for a DVD re-release of the original King Kong. This process is traced in a documentary The Lost Spider Pit Sequence (2005). See ‘The Mystery of the Spider Pit Sequence: An analysis by Roy P. Webber’: http://thethunderchild.com/ Movies/WebberFiles/SpiderPit.html (Accessed 24/05/2010). Director’s commentary, Public Enemies (Universal Pictures, DVD release, 2009). Subsequent details of the production’s historical locations are taken from this source. For discussion of the film’s digital realisation of the period, see Tudor 2010. Hoover’s publicity machine was not fully active until after the ‘War on Crime’: (Burrough 2005: 517). John Patterson (2009) observes that ‘Billy Crudup’s Hoover has a Rumsfeldian cast of mind’.

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Conclusion

The modernist project – the questioning and revising of old forms and conventions, the denial of self-evident truths […] is over […] Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975), Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976) and Three Women (1977) were the last commercial films by American directors seriously to play against the conventions of cinematic storytelling. Postmodern American film has done its best to erase the traces of sixties and seventies experimentation […] returning with a vengeance to a linear illusionist style. That style in turn creates, or re-creates, the ready acceptance of conventional expression. Coupled with the increased ability on the part of many filmmakers to use images and narratives to manipulate response, the viewer has been subjected, more than ever, to greater imaginary structures of displaced yearning, misplaced heroism, and forced amelioration in films that pose banal solutions to the wrong questions. (Kolker 1988: x–xi) For three decades, Michael Mann’s feature films have provoked spirited responses, critical and celebratory, and have divided audiences with their amalgamation of the generic and the artistic, the eminently popular and the allegedly pretentious, and the elegance and contrivance of their visuals. The formulaic nature of many aspects of his output (such as the repeated returns to the representation of crime, and the obsessive interrogation of masculinity in terms of moral standing, professional excellence and emotional commitment), combined with a conspicuous, persistent and perfectionist deployment of the image, colour and composition, makes each succeeding film a familiar but volatile and highly affecting viewing event for his audiences. His subjects and characters are derived from both classical Hollywood (and in many instances are closely comparable to the archetypal, unabashed masculine mythology of John Ford, Howard Hawks and John Huston), and from the post-classical cinema’s conscious v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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absorption of the manners and materials of European art cinema (philosophical investigations of modernity, stylised renditions of subjectivity and a refined, recognisably individual crafting of the visual image). American Dilemmas Chronologically and formally, Mann’s filmmaking can be seen to grow out of a definable but delimited American art cinema moment: the 1960s and the 1970s, which cultivated and was characterised by the works of directors like Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Penn, Sam Peckinpah, Robert Altman, Mike Nichols, Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola. These directors exhibit ambitious, contradictory desires to imitate and rejuvenate the ethos and output of the classical Hollywood studios, while incorporating the stylistic divergence and subjective narrative concentration of the contemporary European art cinema. Within these filmmakers’ auteurist articulations and Hollywood homages are a preponderance of evolutionary exercises in genre filmmaking, combining premeditated personal expression with self-conscious transformations of popular cinematic forms. In sharing this enterprise, Mann’s films unite or arguably eradicate the differences of apparently unassailable cinematic poles: Paul Schrader thought it boiled down to a fundamentally different attitude to the world: ‘American movies are based on the assumption that life presents you with problems, while European films are based on the conviction that life confronts you with dilemmas – and while problems are something you can solve, dilemmas cannot be solved, they’re merely probed and investigated.’ (Elsaesser 1994: 24) Similarly, where the progressive, causally-motivated action of classical Hollywood narrative simply tests and confirms the pre-existent characteristics of protagonists in the completion of their plot goals, art cinema narrative explores the alteration or transformation of a protagonist’s knowledge, beliefs and identity through often passive experience, arbitrary events unmediated by human intervention, or philosophical contemplation. In collapsing this binary, the ritualism of action and prioritisation of professionalism in Mann’s films represent a remodelling of classical genre to accommodate the existential uncertainties and defeats of art cinema. Alternatively, this structure and approach can represent a punctuation of the art film’s intimate theatre of personal, philosophical and ideological debates with the deceptive clarities and temporary resolutions of postclassical narratives in set piece action. Heat constitutes the pre-eminent example of this approach, presenting two complementary strands of activity. Dialogue and debate parallel and anticipate action, and action concretises and articulates the individual protagonist’s perspective. Decisive, physical and violent actions may appear to offer the self-realisation and vindication which eludes the protagonists in other forms of human interaction, but in Mann’s narratives they also remain inconclusive: after the Foreman fight Ali’s career continues and wanes; Hanna’s marriage may or may not be over as he waits by the dying McCauley; Sonny Crockett returns to the squad without Isabella; 162

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Murphy may run an Olympic speed but remains behind bars; Bergman is forced to become the outsider, using the methods of his own profession to betray it, creating a parody of the principles of journalism (Wildermuth 2005: 168). These are peculiarly American, and American cinema, dilemmas, in which certainties of self, society and individualism are eroded by personal doubt and failure, economic, corporate and social oppression, and the impossibility of co-existence with other individualists. The question remains then, in light of Kolker’s conviction that American cinema’s modernist moment is over, whether the literally post-‘modernist’ cinema of the last three decades, which straddles contradictory mainstream and independent, American and European practices, styles and definitions, really represents a break from or a continuation of the experimentation, generic revision, social observation and individual expression of 1960s and 1970s American art filmmaking. Mann’s filmmaking is popular in form and fact, and clearly commercial and mainstream in intent, and his authorship signature and profile evince the marketability of the auteur as publicity package, textual structure and generic, unoriginal consistency within cinematic consumerism. Public Enemies unites these strands and currents in Mann’s output. It builds on the classical gangster film in returning to Prohibition-era Chicago and the glamourised, disruptive figure of the gangster. It reiterates the formula of Heat, in casting notable acting contemporaries as sympathetic opposites in a crime drama. In following the post-classical model of Bonnie and Clyde, it re-imagines the era of the classical gangster film in a self-reflexive, subversive yet ultimately ceremonial and celebratory way, in order to create an appendix to a pre-existent, ostensibly book-ended canon. However, unlike the self-conscious intertextual allusions in which other contemporary filmmakers indulge, there are few such obvious and self-reflexive moments in Mann’s cinema. Mann’s approach to genre material may appear uninflected in contrast to the ironic, self-conscious genre exercises of the Coen Brothers (updating, remaking and parodying film noir in Blood Simple and The Man Who Wasn’t There, recapitulating the screwball comedy in The Hudsucker Proxy, and annexing Ealing comedy in the remake of The Ladykillers), or Steven Soderbergh (The Limey conceived as ‘Get Carter as made by Alain Resnais’) (Johnston 1999: 12). Ironically, perhaps, in becoming more like European cinema (being about insoluble dilemmas), contemporary American film has become more like its classical forbear (in furnishing commercial cinema for every taste). The deliberate quotation of James Cagney’s signature line (‘What do you hear? What do you say?’) from the Warner Bros. gangster film Angels with Dirty Faces (Michael Curtiz, 1938) in Manhunter (by Freddie Lounds on his meeting with Will Graham) and in L.A. Takedown (by Vincent Hanna talking to his informant) functions as realist characterisation rather than reference. (A scene deleted from the final cut of Heat also shows Hanna using the same line to a fence and informant.) It suggests the immersion in popular film culture, a shared knowledge of crime as genre film, of those populating the criminal milieu which Public Enemies explores in greater depth. In an irony to equal that of the existence of a realist auteur, this recurrent allusion in Mann’s dialogue is, paradoxically, an intended signal of verisimilitude. The recognisable presence of the auteur in Mann’s case resides in generic, thematic and stylistic concentrations rather than (as in, for example, Tarantino’s case) a deliberately unoriginal signature of diverse v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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quotation, redolent of exclusive intertextual familiarity. The breadth, variety and duration of Mann’s career makes the tracing of this signature more complex than a stylistic or generic definition may suggest. The Auteur Producer Mann has been an iconoclast and a creator of icons. Using bold audiovisual strokes and veracious observations to tear down simplistic urban or frontier fables, he has erected more complex, modern and seductive mythologies in their stead. (Sragow 2010) If the figure of the overt and readable auteur has become the staple of commercialism and criticism in popular film, then Mann’s career, not simply across film and television but across numerous artistic and technical roles, singles him out as a particularly special case. Mann’s work as writer, director, producer and occasional camera operator for his own films assumes the ubiquitous creative control of the auteur filmmaker, but equally can be seen to both extrapolate from his writing and producing in the television context and lead to his work as producer of other directors’ films. While classical precedents for the producer auteur, responsible for the casting, scripting, production values and artistic direction of their projects, are clearly available for comparison (for example, David O. Selznick, John Houseman, Arthur Freed, Pandro Berman, Val Lewton), a modern high-profile figure comparable to Mann in straddling television and film represents a greater challenge to the criteria of auteurism: The best known American film producer today who is not partnered with a major director or star is Jerry Bruckheimer. One keynote of his output has been the action-packed buddy/rival films, from Beverly Hills Cop (1984) through Top Gun (1986), Armageddon (1998) to Bad Boys (2001). Industry observers have noted his diversification into historical dramas such as Pearl Harbor (2001) and comic adventures such as the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise since 2003 (not to mention CSI). He is known for hiring stylish directors such as Tony Scott and Michael Bay to make his films visually arresting. Even if we acknowledge that he is the most successful producer working today, Jerry Bruckheimer cannot be considered an auteur in any sense of the word. But like the most accomplished of his predecessors in the classical era, he, and other producers, can help to facilitate the contemporary auteur’s work. Perhaps the most fruitful way to think about producers and their relation to creative work is as a brand name, much as today’s auteur-directors are marketed to the moviegoing public. (Bernstein 2008: 188) For Matthew Bernstein, Bruckheimer’s pervasive influence and multifaceted, multimedia success seems to stretch the auteur label to breaking point, unless his role is seen as initiating the development of individual directors’ signatures. Recruitment to Bruckheimer’s projects facilitates the stylised examination of combative masculinity in Scott’s films, the glamourisation of consumer and military hardware in Bay’s, and the family 164

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theme park cross-over in Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean. This last example presents the problem of a corporate identity and signature (that of Disney) to compete with Bruckheimer’s, and this underlines a wider problem of attribution versus contribution in the producer-auteur’s canon. Within modern mainstream cinema, the outputs of several brand name directors (such as Bay, Verbinski, Scott, Renny Harlin, and Roland Emmerich) are almost indistinguishable in their depictions of fetishised hardware, their franchising aspirations, extensive merchandising tie-ins, soundtracks and stars. Yet the Bruckheimer (or formerly the Simpson and Bruckheimer) look, contained in the opening shot of a filtered, monotonal skyscrapered skyline, is distinctive enough to be both brand and signature. The CSI television format (2000 onwards) adapted to settings in several US cities but maintaining a formulaic approach in its overarching depiction of crime and in the minutiae of visual style, has become a global success and created a criminal science ‘genre’ of numerous derivations and imitations. In the sense of contributing the crucial and consistent vision, and in assuming the dominant role in instructing and crafting the look, creed and commercial expertise of his productions, Bruckheimer is no less an auteur producer than Selznick, or for that matter Michael Mann, as for example in relation to Miami Vice. In addition to his work upon many television series, Mann’s contribution as producer to the films of other directors bears out the strength and consistency of his predilections and his place (like Bruckheimer) at the centre of a creative and commercial community. Producing rather than directing Scorsese’s The Aviator perhaps denies his viewers the kind of meticulous historical biopic of obsessive individualism Mann would realise subsequently in Public Enemies, but the collaboration does underline the strong resemblance between the two contemporary directors’ work and vision. After acting in Collateral, Peter Berg’s direction of the Mannproduced projects The Kingdom and Hancock brings together the stars of previous Mann films (Jamie Foxx and Will Smith), and Mann himself appears in a cameo in Hancock. In particular, The Kingdom resembles an amalgamation of contemporary narrative and action elements, combining something from Bruckheimer (crime scene analysis) with many recognisable Mann characteristics (the intricate action sequences of Heat with the Middle Eastern politics of the opening of The Insider). The thematic concentration Mann has exhibited as director and producer appears likely to continue to be explored, through his own projects and those of others. Mann’s most recent television series, entitled Luck and starring Dustin Hoffman, Nick Nolte and Dennis Farina, was transmitted on HBO in 2011 for one season, but not renewed. He has also acted through Forward Pass as producer for the crime film Texas Killing Fields (2011), directed by his daughter Ami Canaan Mann, which was entered in competition at the Venice Film Festival. The Presence of Politics Coming to cinema too late (if one considers him as a contemporary of the key ’70s filmmakers) or too early (if one regards his cinematic project as pre-empting the televisual aesthetic of the decade to come and announcing from his ’80s debut the neo-classical movement that will continue to century’s end), Mann was from the very beginning an anachronistic filmmaker. (Thoret 2003) v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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One of the most pervasive but least explicit ways in which Mann’s filmmaking can be seen to descend from and continue the project of American art cinema of the 1960s and 1970s is in its social commentary and political awareness. The popular genres of crime in American film and television, from the first heyday of gangster films of the 1930s through to pervasive Bruckheimer-produced procedural dramas of the present, have always articulated or at least featured a socio-political dimension within their representations of law-breaking and law-enforcement. This remains the case whether they are interpreted as radical explorations of the inequalities and injustices which produce crime and its perpetrators, or as reassuring, conservative depictions of the neutralisation of deviant criminal behaviour for the greater good. However, the grasp of the capitalist context of crime in society, and the comprehension of criminal activity as a function of or equivalent to mainstream consumerism (which is discernible in wider crime dramas as well as in Mann’s work), is augmented in the director’s case by a broader but less explicit criticism of social power systems. Steven Rybin recognises this in his description of the consequences of the ‘contemporary capitalist machine’ faced by Frank in Thief (2007: 54). Such an assembly of Mann’s ideological perspective from his work meshes with his own reflections in interview, but runs into challenges because of continuing accusations of his all-consuming style and commercialism. Such criticisms come to the fore in the case of Mann’s work on advertisements for Nike and Mercedes-Benz. These may be categorised simply as explorations of style and technique in cognate media, but the director has been conscious of such paradoxes in his work before: Having been part of the Madison campus’s radical days, he began to feel the contradictions of his position: ‘I would make money on commercials and try to put it to use on my own projects. Some material I filmed on the Paris student riots wound up on NBC’s First Tuesday because NBC’s own people couldn’t get close to the radical leaders. You never resolve these contradictions’. (Sragow 2002) In this regard, comparisons between Mann and his contemporaries in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and the new millennium extend the contradictions at work in the director’s cinema of socio-political observation. If Thief appears to be a capitalist critique in almost allegorical form, then the director’s touchstones in the next decade (Miami Vice and Manhunter) negotiate an ambiguous position between the moral criticism of capitalist culture and postmodernity, and the celebration of materialism and rampant consumerism via a saturated visual style and an insatiable, acquisitive mise-en-scène. An overt criticism of the role of business within modern society gives momentum to The Insider, portraying the principled individual beset by iniquitous and brazen institutions. Conversely, the scrutiny of the imbalance between the satisfactions of work and the demands of family in Heat depicts the tragedy as one of lamented, respected personal choice rather than external, societal predetermination. In Ali and Public Enemies, having been made highly aware of the construction of the image of influential individuals (by the media, by outsiders and by the central characters themselves), the films still insist upon the significance, sway and potential subversiveness of such images. 166

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While examples like these open up some ideological ambiguities, other potentially unpalatable aspects of this treatment appear inseparable from the generic material and thematic approach Mann essays. His version of American cinema and auteurism may seem old-fashioned in comparison with the directors of contemporary Hollywood, whose output can be seen to combine the poles of independent filmmaking and commercial cinema. Just as in the classical era when the B-pictures and the B-picture units of the major studios, in mirroring the output of minor, independent studios, often became the enclaves of personalised, artistic filmmaking, so in the present filmmaking environment, the major Hollywood institutions have adopted or created ‘independent’ filmmaking arms to appeal to a specific, rather than necessarily elitist, audience and furnish commercial products for an art market. Again, Mann’s position here is a curious one, when his filmmaking can be overlooked because of his involvement in the outright commercialism of television production, while his demanding and individualistic filmmaking can be criticised for not being commercial enough. His films can and do feel old fashioned, perhaps, in appearing to offer auteurist consistency and apparently uninflected genre materials. There are some remarkably conservative features detectable not simply in the generic materials chosen for repeated re-examination, but in the definitions of masculinity they encompass. The obvious comparison for this purpose would be with Hawks’ concentrated observation of male activity and creeds of professionalism, where character definition is conditional upon group recognition and demanding personal standards. Yet acknowledging the resemblance to Hawks’s thematic arena in Mann’s films highlights fundamental tonal as well as philosophical divergences. Besides the limited exceptions of the black humour discernible in the verbal exchanges in Collateral and the moments of Hanna’s bravado in Heat, Mann’s cinema does not admit comedy, especially of the self-deprecating type which in Hawks co-exists with and serves to deflate the vanity and portentousness of male elitism. A masculinity which cannot stand parody or mockery and appears impervious to irony is also apparently dismissive of or antagonistic towards other challenges to hegemonic definition. Mann’s world, despite the environments and communities it encompasses, remains invariably and uncompromisingly heterosexual. This observation might appear superfluous in the context of a mainstream cinema, American or otherwise, which has not long abandoned the demonisation of homosexuality, and even in the twenty-first century has only tentatively explored any manifestation of non-heterosexual affection, desire, sexuality and relationships. Mann’s first feature, The Jericho Mile, does not even include a stereotype of homosexual character or activity within the prison environment.1 (Yet the hedged accusation of a relationship between Murphy and Stiles prompts Murphy to defend his own and his dead friend’s honour.) Admittedly such circumspection could be attributable to the project’s origins in television: such a consideration may also explain the film’s lack of offensive language, but does not account for its insistent portrayal of violence. Frank does refer obliquely to episodes of homosexual rape from his prison experience in Thief. Manhunter’s script replicates verbatim the homophobic mindset of Atlanta detectives, turning over ‘the K-Y cowboys and the leather bars’ in their hunt for the Tooth Fairy (Harris 1993: 30). v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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Similarly, but departing from Harris’s novel, Mann’s script makes Graham responsible for the homosexual slur aimed at the Tooth Fairy via the National Tattler, which is used to goad the killer out of hiding (Harris 1993: 141–6). More recently, in Public Enemies, any speculation about J. Edgar Hoover’s sexuality and his relationship with Melvin Purvis present in Bryan Burrough’s book is assiduously avoided in Mann’s film.2 Even without a knowledge of the kinship between Hawks and Hemingway, the director’s films alone at least admit and at most are enhanced by an acknowledgement of the homoerotic potential implicit within the elite male group, and complicating the males’ advances towards females on the group’s periphery. The choice for Hawks’s males seems to be between professional and personal development, but the eventual union with females actually promises both in an unanticipated equality. By contrast, Mann’s narratives seem to insist upon the incompatibility of vocational and domestic contentment, and even of the sexes themselves on the basis of fundamentally dissimilar drives, beliefs and goals. This pattern of characterisation and behaviour for Mann’s male protagonists does not represent chauvinism, either sympathetically or unsympathetically. Rather, in comparison with the qualified and comic optimism with which Hawks explores sexual difference and desire, it suggests an antipathy in heterosexual relationships which contrasts cruelly with the sympathy and respect exhibited between Mann’s protagonist-antagonist males. Mannerism: Cougars, Cars and Coyotes There are still cases where stylistic coherence reflects the comprehensive and specific instructions of a single person. There are others in which the group ideal has been stimulated not by the director but by the inherent logic of the script, the story to be told […] If that redefined auteur method leaves us examining the politics of Capra, the conflict of guilt and desire in Hitchcock, or the social vision of Ford, there will be no problem – as long as we do not forget that none of these individuals can be given absolute credit for and title to the films they guided to completion. Directors, too, are parts of the system, and if they generate an abstraction that proves to inspire and unify the activities of their many collaborators, that is an intriguing explanation of how the parts of the cinematic system – people, arts, and shots – might be drawn together into a coherent whole. (Kawin 2008: 198–9) Mann’s consistent concentration on a strictly delimited thematic and generic range, his repeated collaborations with key creative personnel, and his work as a producer on conducive and cognate projects with others across the fields of film and television, lend his output a coherence and persuasive authorial weight, even if an ‘absolute credit’ is qualified by intellectual recognition of the communal production process. The director’s visual signature and his thematic emphases have been identified and discussed at length in this and other studies of his work, and in combination they account for the critical attention his films have received and for their commercial accomplishments. Some aspects of his style appear highly conspicuous and yet ambiguous, or 168

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unwilling to submit to one-dimensional interpretation. The deliberate and arresting use of intensified blue colouration is a case in point. The saturation of the frame with this colour when Will Graham and Molly make love, before his departure to begin the hunt for the Tooth Fairy, appears to link this shade to the family, the freeing environment of the ocean and romantic love – all the benefits and qualities he abandons by his return to work. The association of Molly and home with this colour is reaffirmed by the blue blanketing of the shots of her which are intercut with Graham’s insight into the Leeds family murder via the tapes in his hotel room. The same tone occurs in later scenes when policemen arrive at the Graham home to take Molly and Kevin to Crawford’s safe house. These repetitions suggest the same domestic space seen earlier is now tainted and endangered, by Graham’s surrogate Dolarhyde but also by Graham himself through his actions and his resemblance to his quarry. The use of the same colour is seen in Heat, with blocks of blue dominating McCauley’s home in a wall of windows overlooking the ocean. Water and the ocean are in themselves indicators and symbols of contemplation and longing in Mann’s films (the family’s pretend holiday in San Diego in Thief; Graham’s dream in Manhunter; Sonny Crockett gazing out to sea before the investigation has begun in Miami Vice; Dillinger and Billie sitting beside Lake Erie to discuss their future). The blue which sets the tone of McCauley’s solitariness in his immaculate but deserted home is accentuated by other deliberate stylistic effects (rack focus between the character in the foreground and the waves beyond the windows, and widescreen framing which peripheralises and fragments the male figure). In combination, these effects serve to articulate a frustration of emptiness rather than a danger of loss, as in Manhunter. Although blue is clearly used to an emotive tonal effect in both films, its specific, subjective significance for their protagonists is seen to vary, despite the similarities in theme and composition which connect the films made a decade apart. In a convergence of theme and mise-en-scène, Mann’s films feature data handling systems, artifacts and mechanisms of mechanical reproduction, and means of communication as narrative devices and pervasive symbols of attenuated, empowered or parodied human contact. This tendency is most visible in Manhunter (in crime scene science, conference phone calls, data faxes, film and video recordings and answer phones), but also pervades Collateral (the killer’s crucial information), Heat (Kelso’s information for the bank raid simply ‘grabbed from the air’, McCauley caught on a thermal-imaging camera), The Insider (in which information is primed for violent and discriminatory use) and Miami Vice (infra-red surveillance images of drug transportation by sea, data transport on the streets of Ciudad del Este). The extensions of human perception which these measures offer are matched by changes in the characters’ presumptions of proprietary authority, and facilitations of their often ambiguous activities. In his categorisation of Mann’s thematic signature, Steven Rybin describes this characteristic inclusion of technology as the foremost element: the wielding of technology in order to control and potentially overcome the contingencies of society; the blurring of the line between the actions of the protagonist and the actions of the antagonist; the ambivalence regarding goals v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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achieved or not achieved as well as a gradually increasing desire to transcend the patriarchal institutions which generate a desire for those goals in the first place; a depiction of the gravity and the consequences of violence; and the vulnerability of the family. (2007: 202) Placing this consistent element first underlines its central positioning and importance to the causality of Mann’s films and the distinctive visual articulation of their conflicts. Electronically and mechanically created images used in the exercise of power contrast with the murals and graffiti frequently foregrounded in Mann’s mise-en-scène (for example in L.A. Takedown, The Jericho Mile, The Insider, Collateral, Miami Vice and Ali) and relatedly, body painting and tattooing (in The Jericho Mile, Heat, and The Last of the Mohicans). Such spontaneous and unlicensed images, often purposefully in public view, are redolent of both a democratisation and a personalisation of imagemaking which stands in opposition to homogenising replication and the control of electronic surveillance, yet at the same time carries negative connotations of group identity (for example the tattoos of white supremacists on show in The Jericho Mile, Heat and Miami Vice). Aside from the many stylistic and thematic consistencies considered so far in relation to the Mann canon, there are certain examples of self-conscious intrusions and visual non-sequiturs within his films which warrant more scrutiny. Although several of Mann’s films, especially his earlier features, have enigmatic opening sequences, often including near abstract and decontextualised images (the blank sky and landscape of The Keep; the lights of Dolarhyde’s van in Manhunter; the MTA seen from a distance in Heat), and nearly all begin with their narratives in medias res, a curious consistency is the inclusion of a shot or image, apparently subjective in nature, whose significance is delayed or even denied. Before the ambush of the British party in The Last of the Mohicans, Cora Munro glimpses a cougar watching her from the forest undergrowth. This fleeting image, personifying the danger of the frontier in a natural predator, can be seen to link backwards in the film to the deer killed by Nathaniel and the Mohicans, and forward to the danger of Magua, who will vanish into the forest after the ambush of the British column. A similar natural irruption occurs in Collateral, with the sudden appearance of a pair of coyotes in the city when Max’s cab is halted at a traffic light. Rybin suggests that the animals’ arrival serves as a ‘metaphor for the theme of contingency in the film’, but as with the role of nature in the earlier film (recalled by Max’s excuse to the police Collateral: the coyotes of contingency

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Public Enemies: the body in the prison yard

Public Enemies: the body at the roadside

patrol that he ‘hit a deer’), the appearance of randomness and chaos disguises an alternative purpose and truth (2007: 181) The coyotes are present in the city environment for reasons unknown (like Vincent), but their unexpected appearance also previews Max’s sudden change of mind towards decisive action, ironically provoked by Max’s nihilistic and chaotic outlook. Driving home from giving his life-changing evidence, Jeffrey Wigand sees a car on fire by the road side, an image of unexplained danger and loss which only gains meaning when he returns to his deserted and childless home. The opening of Public Enemies combines the methods and effects of these irruptive incidents in earlier films. Before the prison break occurs, we are given views of the exercise yard, where a group of chained and shackled prisoners is marching in line. Amongst the close-ups of the men’s hands and feet, a prisoner’s body is glimpsed prostrate on the ground, apparently ignored by all. Dillinger organises the prison break principally to free his mentor Walter Dietrich. When Dietrich is fatally wounded, he slips from Dillinger’s hands and his body comes to rest on the road. Ed Shouse, the unreliable gang member guilty of the raising of the alarm within the prison, and thus ultimately responsible for Dietrich’s death, is forcibly ejected from the car by Dillinger, and his body is also left by the roadside. The prone bodies on the road remain as links back to the discarded prisoner in the yard, affirming even at the film’s beginning that the escapees’ fates are sealed and that their deaths, inside or outside prison, are preordained. Such apparently arbitrary events and objects, while emphasising the spontaneous reactions of characters under stress, are also indicative of the abiding narrative and stylistic control in Mann’s films. Final Words Mann […] seems never to alter the basic premises he outlines in his earliest films. The films that follow add depth and detail to his understanding of culture v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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[…] But the fundamental elements of the original vision emerging from The Jericho Mile and from Thief remain unchanged. (Wildermuth 2005: 195) Mann’s authorship must be viewed in several chronological, industrial and formal contexts: the post-classical context, inflected by television but still marked by the influence of experimentation in American film of the 1960s and 1970s, in which his career begins; the brand name, commercial American auteurist cinema of the 1980s and 1990s in which Mann’s signature and success became established; and the emerging digital cinema of the new millennium, which Mann’s films are proving instrumental in defining. His films have looked backwards to the era of a self-conscious, auteurdominated American art cinema of the 1970s, even while they have fitted or motivated the visual style of subsequent decades and cohered with the commercial, genre-driven contemporary cinema. His work has been central to and instrumental in the definition and success of a modern cinema of heightened technique, aimed at the intense and intended manipulation of audience response, which has nonetheless striven to retain modernist credentials of style, address and political orientation. The consistency of the generic territory his films have traversed has provided both archetypal and iconoclastic examples of classical film formulae, and has given voice to realist structures of misplaced and endlessly frustrated yearning, and revealed the fallibility of misplaced and misprized heroism. Unapologetically, Mann’s films decline simple solutions in answer to their continued, complex questioning. Notes 1

2

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Depictions of masculinity and male sexuality in the American television prison dramas are explored comprehensively in Terrie Schauer, ‘Masculinity Incarcerated: Insurrectionary Speech and Masculinities in Prison Fiction’, Journal for Crime, Conflict and the Media, 1, 3 (2004), 28–42. Burrough 2005: 13, 66n. This suggestion does, however, introduce an intriguing element to Purvis’s euphemistic admission to Hoover, in relation to the capture of Dillinger, that ‘our type cannot get the job done’.

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FILMOGRAPHY

The Jericho Mile (ABC Circle Films, 1979) Producer: Tim Zinnemann Cinematography: Rexford Metz Screenplay: Patrick J. Nolan, Michael Mann Editing: Arthur Schmidt Art Director: Stephen Myles Music: Jimmie Haskell Starring: Peter Strauss, Brian Dennehy Thief a.k.a. Violent Streets (Mann/Caan Productions, 1981) Producers: Jerry Bruckheimer, Ronnie Caan Cinematography: Donald Thorin Screenplay: Michael Mann, from the book The Home Invaders by Frank Hohimer Editing: Dov Hoenig Production Design: Mel Bourne Music: Tangerine Dream Starring: James Caan, Tuesday Weld, Willie Nelson, James Belushi, Robert Prosky, Dennis Farina The Keep (Associated Capital, 1983) Producers: Gene Kirkwood, Howard W. Koch Jnr. Cinematography: Alex Thomson Screenplay: Michael Mann, from the novel by F. Paul Wilson

Editing: Dov Hoenig, Chris Kelly Production Design: John Box Music: Tangerine Dream Starring: Scott Glenn, Jürgen Prochnow, Ian McKellen, Gabriel Byrne, Alberta Watson, Robert Prosky Manhunter (Dino De Laurentiis Entertainment Group/Red Dragon Productions, 1986) Producers: Richard Roth, Michael Mann Cinematography: Dante Spinotti Screenplay: Michael Mann, from the novel Red Dragon by Thomas Harris Editing: Dov Hoenig Production Design: Mel Bourne Music: The Reds, Michel Rubini Starring: William Petersen, Kim Greist, Joan Allen, Brian Cox, Dennis Farina, Tom Noonan L.A. Takedown (1989) Producer: Patrick Markey Cinematography: Ron Garcia Screenplay: Michael Mann Editing: Dov Hoenig Production Design: Dean Taucher Music: Tim Truman Starring: Scott Plank, Alex McArthur, Michael Rooker, Xander Berkeley

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The Last of the Mohicans (Morgan Creek, 1992) Producers: Michael Mann, Hunt Lowry Cinematography: Dante Spinotti Screenplay: Michael Mann, Christopher Crowe, from the novel by James Fenimore Cooper Editing: Dov Hoenig, Arthur Schmidt Production Design: Wolf Kroeger Music: Trevor Jones, Randy Edelman Starring: Daniel Day Lewis, Madeleine Stowe, Wes Studi, Jodhi May, Russell Means, Steven Waddington Heat (Warner Bros./Regency/Forward Pass/Monarchy Enterprises, 1996) Producers: Michael Mann, Art Linson Cinematography: Dante Spinotti Screenplay: Michael Mann Editing: Dov Hoenig, Pasquale Buba, William Goldenberg Production Design: Neil Spisak Music: Elliott Goldenthal, Brian Eno, The Kronos Quartet Starring: Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Val Kilmer, Jon Voight, Diane Venora, Tom Sizemore, Mykelti Williamson, Ashley Judd, Amy Brenneman, Wes Studi The Insider (Blue Light Productions/ Forward Pass/Kaitz Productions/Mann Roth Productions, 1999) Producers: Michael Mann, Pieter Jan Brugge Cinematography: Dante Spinotti Screenplay: Michael Mann, Eric Roth, from the Vanity Fair article ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’ by Marie Brenner Editing: William Goldenberg, Paul Rubell, David Rosenbloom Production Design: Brian Morris Music: Lisa Gerrard, Pieter Bourke Starring: Al Pacino, Russell Crowe, Diane Venora, Michael Gambon

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Ali (Columbia Pictures/Forward Pass/Peters Entertainment/Initial Entertainment Group, 2001) Producers: Jon Peters, James Lasiter, Paul Ardaji, Michael Mann, A. Kitman Ho Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki Screenplay: Stephen J. Rivele, Christopher Wilkinson, Eric Roth, Michael Mann Editing: William Goldenberg, Stephen Rivkin, Lynzee Klingman Production Design: John Myhre Music: Lisa Gerrard, Pieter Bourke Starring: Will Smith, Jon Voight, Mario Van Peebles, Ron Silver, Mykelti Williamson, Jamie Foxx, Jada Pinkett Smith Collateral (Dreamworks SKG/Paramount Pictures/ Parkes MacDonald Productions, 2004) Producers: Michael Mann, Julie Richardson Cinematography: Dion Beebe, Paul Cameron Screenplay: Stuart Beattie Editing: Jim Miller, Paul Rubell Production Design: David Wasco Music: James Newton Howard Starring: Tom Cruise, Jamie Foxx, Jada Pinkett Smith, Mark Ruffalo, Peter Berg Miami Vice (Universal Pictures/Forward Pass/Michael Mann Productions, 2006) Producers: Michael Mann, Pieter Jan Brugge Cinematography: Dion Beebe Screenplay: Michael Mann, based on the television series created by Anthony Yerkovich Editing: William Goldenberg, Paul Rubell Production Design: Victor Kempster Music: John Murphy Starring: Colin Farrell, Jamie Foxx, Gong Li, Naomie Harris, Ciaran Hinds

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Public Enemies (Universal/Relativity Media/Forward Pass/Misher Films, 2009) Producers: Kevin Misher, Michael Mann Cinematography: Dante Spinotti Screenplay: Ronan Bennett, Michael Mann and Ann Biderman, based on the book by Bryan Burrough Editing: Paul Rubell, Jeffrey Ford Production Design: Nathan Crowley Music: Elliot Goldenthal Starring: Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Marion Cotillard, Billy Crudup

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Felson, Marcus (1998) Crime and Everyday Life, second edn. London: Pine Forge Press. Fiske, John (1989) Television Culture. London: Routledge. Foundas, Scott, ‘A Mann’s Man’s World’, L.A. Weekly 27 July 2006 http://www. laweekly.com/2006-07-27/news/a-mann-s-man-s-world/ (accessed 17/12/2009). Fox, Julian (1980) ‘Four Minute Mile’, Films and Filming, 26, 4, 19–25. Fuller, Graham (1992) ‘Making Some Light: An Interview with Michael Mann,’ in Projections 1, ed. John Boorman and Walter Donohue. London: Faber & Faber, 262–75. Geffner, David (1999) ‘Cause and Effect: Michael Mann directs The Insider’, DGA Magazine, 24, 4, 42–7. Gehring, Wes D. (1988) The Handbook of American Genres. London: Greenwood Press. Geiger, Jeffrey and R. L. Rutsky (eds) (2005) Film Analysis: A Norton Reader. London: W. W. Norton. Grant, Barry Keith (ed.) (2008) Auteurs and Authorship: A Film Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Grindon, Leger (1996) ‘Body and Soul: The Structure of Meaning in the Boxing Film Genre’, Cinema Journal, 35, 4, 54–69. ____ (2002) ‘Ali’, Cineaste, 27, 2, 32–4. Guttridge, Peter (1996) ‘The controller general’, The Independent, 18 April, section 2, 10–11. Hardy, Phil (ed.) (1997) The BFI Companion to Crime. London: Cassell. Harkness, John (1992) ‘White Noise’, Sight and Sound, 2, 7, 15. Harris, Thomas (1991) The Silence of the Lambs. London: Mandarin. ____ (1993) Red Dragon. London: Arrow. ____ (1999) Hannibal London: Heinemann. Horne, Gerald (1993) ‘“Myth” and the Making of Malcolm X’, The American Historical Review, 98, 2, 440–50. Innes, Martin (2004) ‘Crime as a Signal, Crime as a Memory’, Journal for Crime, Conflict, and the Media, 1, 2, 15–22. James, Nick (2000) ‘No Smoking Gun’, Sight and Sound, 10, 3, 14–17. ____ (2002) Heat. London: British Film Institute. Johnston, Sheila (1999) ‘The Flashback Kid’, Sight and Sound, 9, 11, 12–14. Kawin, Bruce (2008) ‘Authorship, Design and Execution’, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.) Auteurs and Authorship: A Film Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 190–9. Kelly, Richard T. (2004) ‘Collateral’, Sight and Sound, 14, 10, 50. Kermode, Mark (2000) ‘The Insider’, Sight and Sound, 10, 3, 46–7. Kermode Mark and Geoffrey Macnab (1996) ‘L.A. Takedown’, Sight and Sound, 6, 6, 58. Kolker, Robert Philip (1988) A Cinema of Loneliness, second edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ____ (2006) Film, Form and Culture, third edn. London: McGraw-Hill. Kompare, Derek (2010) CSI. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. 178

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Kracauer, Siegfried (1947) From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Leigh, Danny, ‘Wheels within wheels’, The Guardian Tuesday 9 July 2002 http://www. guardian.co.uk/film/2002/jul/09/artsfeatures.advertising (accessed 27/07/10). Letkemann, Peter (1973) Crime as Work. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Lewis, Jon (ed.) (1998) The New American Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lindstrom, J. A. (2000) ‘Heat: Work and Genre’, Jump Cut, 43, 21–30. Mahoney, Elisabeth (1997) ‘“The People in Parentheses”: space under pressure in the post-modern city’, in David B. Clarke (ed.) The Cinematic City. London: Routledge, 168–85. Mason, Paul (ed.) (2003) Criminal Visions: Media Representations of Crime and Justice. Cullompton: Willan. McCrisken, Trevor and Andrew Pepper (2005) American History and Contemporary Hollywood Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. McDonald, Paul and Janet Wasko (eds) (2008) The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry. Oxford: Blackwell. McKinney, Devin (1999) ‘Violence: The Strong and the Weak’, Film Quarterly, 46, 4, 16–22. Moore, Michael (1993) Act and Crime: The Philosophy of Action and Its Implications for Criminal Law. Oxford: Clarendon. Nathan, Ian (2009a) ‘Lyrical Gangster’, Empire, 241, 72–9. ____ (2009b) ‘Public Enemies’, Empire, 242, 42–4. Neale, Steve (2005) ‘Chinatown’, in Jeffrey Geiger and R. L. Rutsky (eds) Film Analysis: A Norton Reader. London: W. W. Norton, 660–77. Newman, Kim (1985) ‘The Keep’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 52, 615, 127–8. Nichols, Bill (1981) ‘American Gigolo: Transcendental Style and Narrative Form’, Film Quarterly, 34, 4, 8–13. Nochimson, Martha P. (2002/3) ‘“Waddya Lookin’ at?” Re-Reading the Gangster Genre Through The Sopranos’, Film Quarterly, 56, 2, 2–13. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey (ed. (1996) The Oxford History of World Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nystrom, Derek (2004) ‘Hard Hats and Movie Brats: Auteurism and the Class Politics of the New Hollywood’, Cinema Journal, 43, 3, 18–41. O’Connor, Mickey, ‘Boxing Love’, Entertainment Weekly.com http//:www.ew.com/ article/0,,188158,00.html (accessed 17/12/2009). Olsen, Mark (2004a) ‘It happened one night’, Sight and Sound, 14, 10, 14–15. ____ (2004b) ‘Paint it Black: Michael Mann Interview’, Sight and Sound, 14, 10, 16. Patterson, John, ‘Number one with a bullet’, Guardian.co.uk 26 June 2009 http:// www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/jun/26/interview-michael-mann-public-enemies (accessed 13/01/2010). Pauly, Thomas H. (1997) ‘The Criminal as Culture’, American Literary History, 9, 4, 776–85.

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Tirrard, Laurent (2002) Moviemakers’ Master Class: Private Lessons from the Worlds’ Foremost Directors. London: Faber and Faber. Tudor, Deborah (2010) ‘Light bouncing: digital processes illuminate the cultural past’, Jump Cut, 52, http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc52.2010/deeDigitalCinematog/ (accessed 27 July 2010). Viviani, Christian (2000) ‘La Carrière de Michael Mann’, Positif, 469, 4–11. Watts, Carol (1993) ‘From Looking to Coveting: The “American Girl” in The Silence of the Lambs’, Women: A Cultural Review, 4, 1, 63–77. Wiblin, Ian (1997) ‘The Space Between: Photography, Architecture and the Presence of Absence’, in François Penz and Maureen Thomas (eds) Cinema and Architecture: Méliès, Mallet-Stevens, Multi-Media. London: British Film Institute, 104–12. Wildermuth, Mark E. (2005) Blood in the Moonlight: Michael Mann and Information Age Cinema. London: McFarland. Wilson, F. Paul (1992) The Keep. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Wolfe, Cary and Jonathan Elmer (1995) ‘Subject to Sacrifice: Ideology, Psychoanalysis, and the Discourse of Species in Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs’, boundary 2, 22, 3, 141–70. Wootton, Adrian (2002) ‘The big hurt’, Sight and Sound, 12, 3, 16–18. Wrathall, John (2002) ‘Ali’, Sight and Sound, 12, 3, 34–5. Yalom, Irvin D. (1980) Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books. ____ (1991) Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Young, Elizabeth (1991) ‘The Silence of the Lambs and the Flaying of Feminist Theory’, Camera Obscura, 27, 4–35.

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INDEX

Adamson, Chuck 3, 18 Ali 18, 22, 59, 80, 106, 138–9, 144, 158–9 Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More 6, 16 Alien 3 26, 103 All the President’s Men 116, 123 Altman, Robert 5, 12–13, 60, 160 American Gangster 17 Angel Heart 96 Angels With Dirty Faces 155, 163 Antonioni, Michelangelo 12 Apocalypse Now 14–15 Aviator, The 12, 16, 165 Bad Timing 14 Bale, Christian 152 Barton Fink 6 Battleship Potemkin 14–15 Besson, Luc 18 Bigelow, Kathryn 72, 156 Big Heat, The 96 Big Red One, The 130 Big Sleep, The 96 Bonnie and Clyde 5, 149, 154, 163 Bruckheimer, Jerry 24–5, 69, 164–6 Bullitt 5, 72 Bunker, The 136–7 182

Caan, James 54, 81–2, 152 Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The 133 Cape Fear 17 Cesaretti, Gusmano 19 Chinatown 11 Color of Money, The 17 Color Purple, The 128 Coppola, Francis Ford 6, 12–14, 81, 116, 128, 162 Cotillard, Marion 124, 155 Crowe, Russell 33 Cruise, Tom 40, 79–80 Dances With Wolves 109, 113–14 Dark Crystal, The 130 Del Toro, Benicio 24–5 De Niro, Robert 30, 81, 88, 152 De Palma, Brian 12–13, 128 Departed, The 39, 78 Depp, Johnny 33, 150–3, 157 Devil’s Backbone, The 137 Dog Day Afternoon 65 Donnie Brasco 78 Empire of the Sun 128 Enemy of the State 25 Fargo 6

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Farina, Dennis 3, 18, 165 Fenimore Cooper, James 106 Fight Club 26 Fincher, David 26–7, 61, 103 French Connection, The 59, 72 Friedkin, William 59 Fun With Dick and Jane 65 Godfather, The 81, 128 Goodfellas 16 Good, the Bad and the Ugly, The 26 Hannibal 97 Harris, Thomas 19, 97–9, 102, 168 Heat 3, 6–7, 9–12, 14–15, 17–19, 30, 34–6, 44, 50, 60–6, 70–81, 91–6, 124–8, 130, 152, 162–5, 169 Heaven’s Gate 127

Last Year at Marienbad 14–15 Leone, Sergio 26, 151 Limey, The 59, 163 Little Big Man 5, 109, 127 Lucas, George 13 Manhunter 3, 6, 9–14, 26–7, 30–2, 58–61, 91, 94–101, 115–16, 124–6, 130–4, 167, 169–70 Man Who Wasn’t There, The 6, 163 Murnau, F. W. 14, 123, 132 Memphis Belle 130 Metropolis 133, 135 Miller’s Crossing 6, 149 My Darling Clementine 14 New York, New York 16, 140 Night Moves 14

Insider, The 1, 7, 10–12, 14, 25–6, 33–7, 88–9, 94–9, 122–5, 128, 147, 165, 169 Insomnia 14

O Brother Where Art Thou? 6 Once Upon a Time in the West 151 One from the Heart 6, 127 Outpost 136

Jackie Brown 64 Jackson, Peter 28, 150 Jarmusch, Jim 59–60, 152

Pacino, Al 7, 18, 34, 81–3, 152 Peckinpah, Sam 12–15, 162 Penn, Arthur 12–14, 60, 109, 149 Petersen, William 30, 59, 126 Point Break 72 Polanski, Roman 12 Poltergeist 130, 137

Kassovitz, Matthieu 18 Keep, The 1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 98, 106, 128–38, 170 Killing, The 64 Kingdom, The 12, 18, 165 Kitano, Takeshi 21 Kracauer, Siegfried 132–3, 136–7 Kubrick, Stanley 13–15, 60, 132, 162 Ladykillers, The 6, 163 Lang, Fritz 91, 96, 132–3 Last of the Mohicans, The 1, 3, 6, 10–15, 18–19, 51, 63, 94–5, 105–9, 130–1, 148, 170 Last Seduction, The 96 Last Temptation of Christ, The 16–17

Raging Bull 14–16, 33, 138–40, 159 Raiders of the Lost Ark 130 Raising Arizona 6 Reservoir Dogs 10, 64 Ritchie, Guy 24 Road to Perdition 149 Rubell, Paul 19 Santucci, John 3, 18 Saving Private Ryan 128 Scarface 128 Schindler’s List 128, 140 v i c e a n d v i n d i c ati on

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Scorsese, Martin 10–17, 35, 59–60, 84, 87–8, 138, 140, 162, 165 Sea of Love 96 Searchers, The 110, 113 Se7en 26, 103 Seven Samurai 60 17 Days Down the Line 3, 159 Shabaka Henley, Barry 18, 86, 144 Silence of the Lambs, The 97, 126 Simpson, Don 165 Smith, Will 32, 138, 166 Soderbergh, Steven 59–60, 163 Solaris 59 Spielberg, Steven 13, 128–30 Spinotti, Dante 19, 26, 30–1, 64 Starsky and Hutch 3, 22 Stone, Oliver 130, 139, 141

Terminator, The 96 Testament of Dr Mabuse, The 91 Texas Killing Fields 165 To Live and Die in LA 59 Untouchables, The 128 Vanishing, The 14 Venora, Diane 18, 74, 118 Voight, Jon 18, 40, 143 Warriors, The 50 Welcome to Collinwood 65 White Heat 78 Wild Bunch, The 14 Williamson, Mykelti 18, 144 Yates, Peter 72

Tarantino, Quentin 10–11, 60, 64, 163 Taxi Driver 33, 84–5

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Zero Dark Thirty 156

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