The Philosophy of Michael Mann

"Awakened to Chaos"

31 “AwAkened to ChAos” Outsiders in The Jericho Mile and Thief R. Barton Palmer Running in Circles Recently released movies were an indispensable staple of prime-time broadcasting in the late 1960s. But once the networks discovered it was cheaper to produce their own features rather than pay increasingly expensive rentals , telefilms became an even more forceful and enduring presence on the small screen. The popularity of such programming lasted for more than two decades, and even in the 1990s the telefilm revived, as cable companies such as Turner and HBO, rediscovering the same economic truth, began their own feature production, including a number of award-winning and very popular successes directed by experienced professionals, most notably perhaps John Frankenheimer. With small budgets (but often effective scripts), the made-for-TV movie has from the beginning offered the industry yet another advantage. An assured market makes possible substantial creative freedom. And so in the 1970s, telefilms provided interesting work for a number of aspiring directors, including Daniel Petrie, Michael Crichton, Steven Spielberg, and, of particular interest to readers of this book, Michael Mann, whose movie The Jericho Mile (1979) was his first feature-length project. Produced by ABC for its “Movie of the Week” slot and based on a script by Patrick J. Nolan (Mann collaborated on significant revisions), The Jericho Mile enjoyed not only a successful broadcast run, but, quite unusually, also a respectable theatrical release in the United Kingdom. Mann received positive reviews for his directing in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor , and even Films & Filming (a conservative industry journal not generally enthusiastic about small-screen features), and he and Nolan were awarded an Emmy for the screenplay. For Mann, the project proved an auspicious 32 R. Barton Palmer beginning in a number of ways, not the least of which was that The Jericho Mile gave him the opportunity to develop his personal inflection of a longestablished Hollywood type: the solitary man who does not fit into society but lives instead by his own code, whose values he has acquired through difficult experience. His understanding of the world and his approach to living in it set him irrevocably apart from others. His solitude is no pathology, but a considered position whose rationale he can and does readily expound. Going beyond long-standing industry traditions, Mann’s outsider male reflects the intellectual currents of the era in which The Jericho Mile was made, in particular a fascination with then-popular conceptions of existentialism .1 Often expressing a more generalized antiestablishment outlook, many films of the era feature attractive rebels against a social order portrayed as mindlessly restrictive or just plain stultifying. Consider the parkingmeter -decapitating, hard-boiled-egg-eating misfit charmingly incarnated by Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke (1967, Stuart Rosenberg), a film that channels countercultural rebelliousness on a soft target: the southern chaingang prison farm, managed by ignorant rednecks and psychopathic state troopers. Other examples come readily to hand: the good/bad outlaws and mischievous con men incarnated by Newman and Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969, George Roy Hill) and The Sting (1973, George Roy Hill). Mann’s outsiders, however, have been forced by circumstances to see deeply into the foundational hypocrisy of a culture in which the “war of all against all” prevails over the bonds of community that prove elusive, if not illusory. In that culture, the rule of law lacks a dependable connection to justice, giving individuals no rational choice but self-reliance. It is hardly surprising if they choose solitariness as a hedge against disaster , however difficult and bitter the denial or the severing of connections to others might prove. In its portrait of a convict who has learned these truths and chooses a life he lives for himself alone, The Jericho Mile offers the first sketch of the outsider that becomes a dominant presence in Mann’s filmmaking . He explores this figure in greater depth and with much more poignancy in his next project and first theatrical feature, Thief (1981), based on the thinly fictionalized professional autobiography of John Seybold, a career thief writing under a pseudonym. Mann fashioned a tight screenplay from Seybold’s rambling and annoyingly narcissistic account of his criminal career, instead infusing it with his own ideas. The film is in some sense a genre piece at a time when such neo-noir narratives about the criminal underworld were just starting to become an industry trend—especially if [3.144...