The Philosophy of Michael Mann

"Blood in the Moonlight"

90 “blood In the MoonlIght” Toward an Aesthetics of Horror in The Keep and Manhunter Ivo Ritzer Have you ever seen blood in the moonlight, Will? It appears quite black. —Hannibal Lecktor, Manhunter An auteur of visionary urban crime thrillers, beyond doubt. With movies such as Thief (1981), Heat (1995), The Insider (1999), Collateral (2004), Miami Vice (2006), and Public Enemies (2009), Michael Mann is widely known quite rightly as a masterful creator of elegiac gangster and cop movies. Hence, it may not be obvious that Mann has also put his mark on other genres. This essay analyzes a central aspect of Michael Mann’s often neglected early work: the aesthetics of horror in The Keep (1983) and Manhunter (1986). Although these films create this aesthetic in different ways, they employ very similar strategies in presenting their scary events. Although The Keep’s narrative about a haunted castle in the Carpathians can be placed along Tzvetan Todorov’s notion of the “fantastic-marvellous” that features supernatural powers threatening humans and therefore ends “with an acceptance of the supernatural,”1 and although Manhunter’s serialkiller plot draws on manlike monsters in bringing the diabolical murderers Francis Dollarhyde (Tom Noonan) and Hannibal Lecktor (Brian Cox) to the screen, they both nevertheless confirm Mann’s aesthetics of horror as an aestheticization of horror. In The Keep as well as in Manhunter, the frightening is transformed into the beautiful through the audiovisual means of mise-en-scène, montage, and sound. These stylized renditions of horror form the focus of this essay. “Blood in the Moonlight” 91 Horror Considered as One of the Fine Arts [The] union of contraries, where the work required by the artistic idea and the originary power coincide, is the result of the long work of de-figuration that in the new work contradicts the expectations borne by the subject matter or the story, or that reviews, rereads, and rearranges the elements of old works. This process undoes the arrangements of fiction and of representational painting, and draws our attention instead to the painterly gesture and the adventures of matter lurking beneath the subject of figuration, to the glimmer of the epiphany and the splendor of pure reasonless being glowing just beneath the conflict of wills of the play or the novel. —Jacques Rancière, Film Fables Although Manhunter is a genre-bending hybrid of police procedural and serial-killer narrative, horror nonetheless lies at its core. The destructive powers of the psychopathic yet sovereign killers Dollarhyde and Lecktor draw on the viewer’s primal fears of death and bodily infirmity. However, Mann introduces a complex difference between narration and narrated. Not until the showdown and final shoot-out involving manhunter Will Graham (William Petersen) and Dollarhyde is any act of violence shown on screen. What Mann shows instead are the results of Dollarhyde’s dreadful deeds, which Dollarhyde happens to arrange like sculptures. He murders entire families, staging their corpses in tableaux and putting mirror shards over their eyes in order to watch himself. Dollarhyde is hereby equated with an artist who does aesthetic work, and this work itself results in aestheticized works of art. The whole film appears carefully stylized, embedding the killings in a context of beauty. It is all about poetic construction. In his characteristic manner, Mann sets Manhunter in the slick (post)modern United States, with its exquisite architecture and decorative interiors full of glass walls and metallic surfaces, further defined by meticulous shot design. Mann is not interested in an unobtrusive “realism”; in fact, his overly formative codes of narration dismiss any kind of transparency. On the level of the frame, he often composes his images as a kind of abstract still life with very little movement. Backgrounds rely on solid hues or achromatic surfaces, and whole sequences are frequently filtered with primary colors. The moments showing Graham at home with his wife, Molly (Kim Greist), are 92 Ivo Ritzer tinted blue, and Graham’s meeting with Lecktor is filmed against the white wall of the prison cell, whereas green and magenta color Dollarhyde’s scenes. As the cool glowing blues denote the reliable relationship between the spouses and the aseptic whiteness gets associated with the psychopathological connection of Graham and Lecktor that has something to do with death, the disquieting greens hint at Dollarhyde’s dangerousness, which Graham tries to stem. In all cases, but especially the Graham–Molly scenes, Mann...