“God’s terrific. He dropped a church roof on 34 of his worshippers last Wednesday night in Texas as they were groveling through a hymn to his majesty. Don’t you think that felt good?”
Spoilers for MANHUNTER (1986) after the jump.
It all begins with pictures. Pictures being made and pictures being shown. “Do you see?” indeed. The “Tooth Fairy” has parked his boogie van, complete with moonroof (“Have you ever seen blood in the moonlight, Will? It appears quite black.”) outside of the suburban home of the family he is moments from slaughtering, but not without waking them with a floodlight and camera, blinding them while making his visions of their deaths permanent. Seeing such awful pictures made, we are then not out of line in assuming that the pictures being shown, by Jack Crawford (Dennis Farina) to Will Graham (William Petersen), will be the standard grisly crime scene photos. This is only reinforced by the pale, corpse-like knee of knotted deadwood that Crawford slowly eases the pictures across before taunting Graham a little with details. “If you can’t look anymore, I understand.” The photos turn out to not be gore at all, but rather of the family, happy, alive and together.
Will’s family seems the same. He builds a turtle coop with his son, and they talk about the precautions they’ve taken to protect the eggs from crabs and dogs. There are natural evils literally everywhere, so Will and his son build a small cage to keep the innocent safe from the larger world. His beach retreat may be safe, but it’s still a cage he’s constructed for himself. He has given up on trying to protect the world, and is instead focusing on his own family.
(Since all Michael Mann films are about the same archetypical solitary male figures with uncompromisable codes of ethics [a Mann’s Man, if you will] it can be fun to consider them in a continuum. So, for example, when I imagine how Neil McCauley would have done his time in Folsom, it’s not unlike JERICHO MILE, just with less running and more swearing. I mention this only because here we have a Mann protagonist who has lived to see his retirement, young and healthy enough to enjoy it, and he allows himself to be pulled back into his dangerous profession, because it is the thing in the world that he is best at.)
Graham visits the crime scene and is able to quickly suss out much of what happened, enough so that he knows to dust the corneas of the victims. This being a Michael Mann film, even the off screen fingerprinting guy has to be THE BEST fingerprinting guy, one who no doubt lives by an iron-clad set of rules that he may or may not be willing to break for the love of a good woman. Anyhow, Graham then seeks the guidance of Hannibal Lecktor (Brian Cox). Well, first he goes to a police meeting run by a guy whose tie matches the black and white precinct map on the wall behind him. He visits Lecktor to “get the scent”. But it’s Lecktor who gets Will’s scent of Old Spice and murderer.
Just as Crawford came bearing pictures for Graham, so too does Graham come, file in hand (“Pictures?” asks Dr. Lecktor a bit anxiously, almost tipping his hand) to sweeten the deal. Back in the real world now, the cages are built around the predators, not the innocent, but in both instances Will himself is included in the cage. At home he is the crab in the turtle coop. With Lecktor, he may be more of a turtle’s egg.
There is a wonderful moment in Hannibal Lecktor’s introduction scene, and it’s important to remember that is exactly what this scene is. I should state right now I love both MANHUNTER and SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, but it’s hard to view this film now without thinking of Anthony Hopkins. So seeing this larger than life character in a simple barred prison cell is a bit of a letdown. But viewed within the film’s context, it makes him seem like the murderer of nine we’ve been told he is. Until he actually gets the file handed over. Graham has to call in an officer, who unlocks a tiny door in the cell, giving the viewer the sudden realization that there’s Plexiglas between all the bars. It’s an awesome moment that widens the scope of his monstrousness in an efficient, wordless way.
The prison itself is a stark white- walls, bars, bedding, inmate clothing- everything. When Graham is running out through this blur of white, the camera stops on a long blank white patch, right before he descends the stacked staircases. After he finally gets outside and loosens his tie, the camera gradually focuses on a bright green protoplasmic blur. As he catches his breath, it comes into focus as the grass. I mention this only because it is the logical extreme of the film’s color palate. Nearly every shot is littered with neon greens and stark whites (save for the occasional deep blue love scene). But after this first meeting with Lecktor, Graham is so overwhelmed that the colors are literally allowed to take over the entire screen. I tried to find a pattern to the color scheme, and to be honest I couldn’t find a totally reliable one, but more often than not the green seemed to represent the passion of the act, whether it’s creeping around the edges of Graham as his pursuit of the “Tooth Fairy” consumes him, or Reba’s (Joan Allen) seduction of Dollarhyde (Tom Noonan). The white seemed to be related to the colder analysis of the act once the passion of the moment had faded. This is seen in extremes when Will Graham is putting together an especially old crime scene or in Lecktor’s cell, where his days of killing would seem to be behind him, existing only in his mind to be replayed and examined at his leisure. My favorite of these is toward the end of the film, when Dollarhyde murders Ralph (Bill Cwikowski) the coworker he imagines to be seducing Reba, but who has in actuality only driven Reba home. Dollarhyde leaps through the green hedges to shoot and kill Ralph, his most blatantly passionate and thoughtless crime yet.
Again Graham studies the happy photos of murdered families in better times, gathered around pools or fireplaces. This time Graham is entering his psycho killer headspace trance on a crowded airplane seated next to a little girl. He then falls asleep. We know that Graham retired once upon a time because he was losing himself and becoming more and more like the killers he sought. That in making his mind like theirs, he was becoming them. Graham has stated that the “Tooth Fairy” gets his inspiration to kill from his dreams, and when asked how he knows that, he is reluctant to answer, presumably because he can’t come out and say “That’s where I get my inspiration.” So what we see of Graham’s dreams can then be read as either eerily idyllic or vaguely disturbing. There’s nothing wrong with dreaming of your wife, unless that’s where your murderous thoughts play. And although she looks like she just stepped out of the most well-shot Dos Equis advertisement imaginable, he looks through her with dead eyes. And he is violently thrown from his dream (and we from the ‘reverie’ with a jump cut) by the little girl screaming- awful bloody crime scene photos have spilled out all over Graham’s tray table as he slept. My favorite part of this scene is after the mother takes her daughter away, and everyone on the plane is leering at the creep with the half beard travelling with photos of gutted women. Graham makes no attempt to explain anything, doesn’t even offer that he’s a police officer, just puts the photos away and looks out the window, appropriately mortified.
Michael Mann has always excelled at visual sequences of his characters going through a process related to what it is they do best, and MANHUNTER is no exception. The handling of the secret toilet paper correspondence between Hannibal Lecktor and the “Tooth Fairy”, employing every scientific trick imaginable (by 1986 standards, not that I’m smart enough to know if breakthroughs in sly technology have occurred since then) and all done under a ticking clock without arousing Lecktor’s suspicions is still fantastic. The previous year’s TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A. also featured great segments of technological processes, and shared a lead actor in the underutilized (in film, anyway) William Petersen. I imagine I’ll be writing about that film soon enough.
It’s worth noting that it takes 52 minutes for the “Tooth Fairy” to appear on screen, more specifically his hand appears. We see his hands again in the abduction of Freddy Lounds (Stephen Lang) in the parking garage of the Tattler. While addressing his hostage, he actually seems deceptively calm, even complimenting Lounds on the reading of his prepared statement. I love the bizarre cadence of his line “Here I…am.” and how well it matches in delivery one of Will Graham’s introductory lines: “I am...alright.” And at times, like when he’s creepily brushing Lounds’ bangs out of his forehead, I think he almost sounds like Kevin Corrigan. In preparing to write this, I watched MANHUNTER for the first time in years. Before the 52 minute mark, I kept thinking, “Where’s Tom Noonan?” After his introductory shot, face half shrouded pantyhose, I went completely blank on his real name for the remainder of the picture.
Then, shortly after the scene introducing us to the “Tooth Fairy”, we get an even creepier scene introducing us to Francis Dollarhyde. Serial Killers killing I expect in serial killer movies. I do not expect them to fall for blind women named Reba. I like that he’s obviously drawn to her because she’s blind (Noonan strikes a ridiculous pose when the darkroom light gets turned on, like he was going to pose as ‘The Thinker’ throughout their entire conversation), and can’t see his cleft palate but he still has no idea what to do with her once she’s back at his house. She has to make every move, and I can’t help but wonder what draws her to him. I guess if a girl was giving me a ride home and took me to stroke a sedated tiger on the way, I would be pretty bowled over, too. Although, given how withdrawn and off-putting Dollarhyde is in general, I want to see an entire movie devoted to explaining the origins and inner workings of his friendship with the bearded Veterinarian.
Seeing or not seeing is a dominant theme throughout MANHUNTER. The “Tooth Fairy” first sees his victims when he develops their home movies, giving him intimate knowledge of their homes. When they gaze lovingly at their husbands/wives/children holding the camera, they can’t know that they’re also smiling for a killer in another town. The reproduced images of their eyes the only accepting gaze he’s ever known, until he starts making his own. The scene late in the film when Graham finally figures out what the mirrors are for, and the visual used to duplicate it is one of those low-key effects that still works really well. And it reminds me of getting a new TV Guide and a pencil as a kid. You could use the eraser on the cover (and the glossier ads) to perfectly white out their eyes and mouths.
I think my favorite bit of business from Tom Noonan comes in the first minutes of his big breakdown, when he’s just sort of moping around his living room, before he’s really lost his shit but after he’s put on Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida (I may question a few of the songs in this film, but that one is PERFECT). He has this wonderful slouchy, defeated, schlubby posture, all rounded shoulders and distended gut. Then he sneaks up to Reba who not only can’t see him but now cannot hear him approach, and suddenly touches her face. The moment is more or less replayed in the climax of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, just a different kind of blindness and a very different woman.
The entire final sequence is enthralling, one of those pieces of film that I could watch at any time for any reason at least two or three times in a row. It’s so oddly put together, and having heard stories that the budget was gone and the crew had slowly dissipated to the absolute minimum, resulting in improvised effects and a rush to the finish that shows in the final product in all the best ways. I know that this film’s bombastic style coupled with the already ostentatious nature of the 1980s can prove too much for some viewers, but I welcome it as an odd departure for Michael Mann that still manages to comment on many of his pet themes and obsessions.
On an unrelated personal note: I was going to watch a VHS copy of this movie years ago at a friend’s house, and their awful old hippie junkie stepdad basically shat all over any movie about a killer, and insisted that we watch OPEN RANGE. He promptly shuffled off to go do more junk, but I ended up watching OPEN RANGE, a film that was rife with murder. It wasn’t bad, but it was also a movie about killers. I should’ve known better than to listen to an awful old hippie junkie stepdad. Generally any two of those things should disqualify people and their opinions.
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