The Cinema of Michael Mann: Vice and Vindication

By Jonathan Rayner

Michael Mann is one of the most important American filmmakers of the past forty years. His films exhibit the existential concerns of art cinema, articulated through a conspicuous and recognizable visual style and yet integrated within classical Hollywood narrative and genre frameworks. Since his beginnings as a screenwriter in the 1970s, Mann has become a key figure within contemporary American popular culture as writer, director, and producer for film and television. This volume offers a detailed study of Mann's feature films, from The Jericho Mile (1979) to Public Enemies (2009), with consideration also being given to parallels in the production, style, and characterization in his television work. It explores Mann's relationship with classical genres, his thematic concentration on issues of morality and masculinity, his film adaptations from literature, and the development and significance of his trademark visual style within modern American cinema.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Release date: Sep 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9780231850490

Jonathan Rayner

Jonathan Rayner is Lecturer in Film Studies at Sheffield Hallam University

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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 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 large-scale 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)

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 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 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, extensions 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 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.

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 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 post-modern modality is highly visible in the multiplied layers of media- and historical-awareness 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 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