Desire as a Postcard: Michael Mann’s Cinema and the Postmodern Male Subject

In a world in which the space of the city, once peremptorily defined by its lights and shadows, has been transformed into a reflection of itself devoid of identity, an Augéan non-place – as Mann’s films are often described – the search for the cliché as a site of re-formation of identity cannot be dismissed as a merely generic stylistic choice; but acts rather as a confirmation of the collapse of the postmodern individual, who is capable of imagining happiness exclusively through postcard-like images, which are nothing other than the crystallisation of the dream within the era of late capitalism.

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The emergence of New Hollywood cinema corresponds to a decisive moment of transition in the visual and narrative delineation of the crisis of the Western subject. It is no coincidence that from the clearly defined space that film noir carved out for itself during the war years, perceived by Americans not as a heap of ruins but as a horror across the ocean, evoked in the dark corridors of metropolitan cities (a lucid exception being The Third Man, a fusion of American shadows and the ruins of postwar Vienna), the more nebulous subgenre of neo-noir has emerged. Unlike its predecessor with far sharper boundaries, neo-noir has no real continuity, functioning rather as an umbrella term used to tint, depending on attribution, a given film.

The homme attrapé, embodied by a no longer young Humphrey Bogart, is thus reincarnated in the subjects of the New Hollywood, themselves disoriented, nostalgic, undefined, and aware that they stand at a turning point between the end of the classical cinema of the Golden Age and the beginning of a new mass cinema, marked by the advent of the digital and of Reagan-era neoliberalism.

This tension emerges distinctly in Michael Mann, a director with a peculiar presence within New Hollywood. In constant balance between the modernist cinematic tradition that marked the major auteurs who appeared on the scene in the 1960s (Scorsese, early Coppola) and not yet aligned with the new commercial horizons of the seventh art (Spielberg), Mann defines a personal space of inquiry. A television animal in every sense, his transition into cinema fully engages with the emerging of the neoliberal society while retaining a more classical formation in the cinematic medium. “Stanley Kubrick. Eisenstein. Dziga Vertov. And ‘Kino-Eye.’ I mean that’s really my limitation. So my approach to films tends to be structural, formal, abstract and humanist,” the director said of his cinematic influences.1

Frank amid the lights of the metropolis: Thief

In Mann’s films there is a persistent tension, a goal toward which to strive, an ideologised place to be reached. For him, neo-noir is about desire, the redefinition of this desire in relation to the space that postmodern man must inhabit. As Jean-Baptiste Thoret has underlined, in Mann’s works, “what is played out” is not the depiction of the “struggle between environments . . . and characters” – as, for example, the desolate landscape of the mountains surrounding the Overlook Hotel in The Shining and its famous labyrinth – but rather “to create, within such disembodied spaces, a possible human relationship.”2

As in The Shining, a photograph of Jack Nicholson trapped in a temporality to which he did not belong concludes the film and casts new light on it, in many of Mann’s works there appears a peculiar image that embodies this temporal and spatial tension: “a clichéd image of an intimate utopia” where the protagonist can envision “the necessary elements for his happiness.”3

It is in this apparently generic image that it becomes possible to establish a connection between characters from films separated by decades, allowing us to link the taxi driver Max Durocher (Jamie Foxx) from Collateral (2004) to James Caan’s character in Mann’s theatrical debut from 1981.

In a world in which the space of the city, once peremptorily defined by its lights and shadows, has been transformed into a reflection of itself devoid of identity, an Augéan non-place – as Mann’s films are often described – the search for the cliché as a site of re-formation of identity cannot be dismissed as a merely generic stylistic choice; but acts rather as a confirmation of the collapse of the postmodern individual, who is capable of imagining happiness exclusively through postcard-like images, which are nothing other than the crystallisation of the dream within the era of late capitalism.

Frank and Jessie: Thief

In Thief (1981), James Caan plays Frank, a robber specialising in diamond heists, an independent operator, highly skilled and devoted to his methods of work. His life undergoes a sudden shift when, in order to achieve his life goal – to retire from crime and build a family – he decides to work under commission for the city’s mob boss Leo (a great Robert Prosky).

From the very first moments, one can discern the purely spatial tension between a waning modernism and a postmodernity in the making. The rain beating down on asphalt streets illuminated by mottled lights, atmospheric synths in the background almost seem to anticipate the atmospheres of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Mann’s cities, however, are not a futuristic vision of a dystopian world but a present that has already exploded. This becomes evident precisely when Tangerine Dream’s synths fade out: the view of the Chicago skyline brings us back to 1980s America, yet the reflections on the water and the emerging dawn free this presentation of the metropolis from a rigid monumentalism (see the New York of Woody Allen), transforming it instead into a fluid play of reflections. A play of reflections that also reverberates in the constitution of space itself, in the tension that the director, supported by the then emerging cinematographer Donald E. Thorin, stretches between exteriors and interiors.

The walls of the rooms in which the characters interact, no longer solid and impenetrable spatial divisions, become large glass surfaces in which interior and exterior, rather than relating, rebound against one another, mutually excluding each other in their transparency; they are not porous spaces of exchange but opaque windows in which the relationship between spaces becomes blurred and impenetrable.

This spatial relation is revealed most clearly in the famous scene in which Frank, in a café with large glass windows that transmute “the urban landscape at night into a pointillist canvas of light,”4, shows his girlfriend Jessie (Tuesday Weld) a collage of images and photographs: a collection of moments and figures from his past, and empty spaces to be filled by future choices. It is this collage, then, that signals the convergence, as previously suggested, between Caan’s Frank and the Max played by Jamie Foxx.

Frank’s life in his collage: Thief

Max Durocher is a taxi driver in Los Angeles, a hard worker trying to save money for a brighter future. He keeps, tucked into the sun visor of his vehicle, a photograph of a Caribbean island that, by his own admission, he often looks at in moments of stress, dreaming of a future far removed from the crowded spaces of the city. Both Frank and Max regard their jobs as a form of self-employment and as temporary: they both rely on their own personal skills (an extensive knowledge of the streets of Los Angeles and an acute expertise in diamond heists), and from this they both expect an imminent improvement in their way of life beyond their current work, an improvement encapsulated in the images they always carry with them. But the (male) subject of the second millennium has undergone a crucial shift in his attachment to these images: the cliché of newspaper clippings and personal photographs, such as those of the friend and surrogate father figure Okla (Willie Nelson) in Frank’s case, becomes, in Collateral, the empty shell of a postcard depicting a Caribbean island.

Max’s postcard: Collateral

It is the advent of the digital, in which the subtle link to contingency is forever lost, the contemporary subject and, consequently, his desire dramatically switched in a detached tropical and fictitious vision. After all, Mann had already anticipated this shift in his masterpiece from 1995, Heat, where the digital was slowly starting to embody a novel and peculiar site of encounter, as shown in the first exchange of gazes through a surveillance camera between the two main protagonists – Detective Lieutenant Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) and the professional robber Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro).

In a moment of transition in the ontology of the image, in the heart of the ’90s, Mann still shoots on film but decisively transforms his leitmotif of the image of utopia. During a conversation on the terrace of his lover Eady (Amy Brenneman), Neil compares the shimmering lights of the city of Los Angeles to the iridescent algae of the Fiji Islands “that come out once a year in the water,” later adding: “I’m going there someday.” The nocturnal landscape flattens into the background, and the two characters emerge in an almost unnatural way (Mann would later explain in an interview that he used a special green screen technique to shoot the scene), revealing a novel balance within the composition of the image.

Frank’s original dream is thus irrevocably changed, turning into a constellation of lights, an allegory of the luminous flux that gives rise to the digital image, to a liquid construction of desire, modulated alongside the mutation of the Western subject. It is an imaginal sea that Neil envisions in the sight of the lights of Los Angeles, a marine vision that contrasts with the one he experiences daily through the transparent glass walls of his house: a diaphanous prison in which the endless horizon of the sea does not signify hope but is instead perceived as an immense and desert cage from which escape is impossible.

Neail and Eady talking about their life: Heat

However, in another crucial dialogue in the film, the situation is reversed. It is the exchange between the two protagonists, the lieutenant and the criminal, that reveals a completely different conception of dream and subject, further exposing the homoerotic phallocentrism at the center of Mann’s universe: it is only between male subjects that indeed the true meaning of their being can come to the surface and does not hide behind the puppet of a sweetened dream-image.

Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, seated in a crowded café where no one seems to notice them, reveal thus their intentions and their intertwined destinies and, in a moment of fragility, narrate to each other their recurring dreams. There is no space for softened visions of idyllic places or utopian futures within the relationship between the two male protagonists; the frightening exploration of their nightmares, of their crisis as subjects, can finally be spoken out loud.

Vince starts to describes his dream: “Sitting at this big banquet table and all the victims of all the murders I ever worked are sitting at this table and they’re staring at me with these black eyeballs because they’ve got eightball hemorrhages from the head wounds.” To this nightmarish vision, Neil confesses: “I have one where I’m drowning and I got to wake myself up and dreaming or I’ll die in my sleep.” At that point the lieutenant asks him if he knows what this dream is about. Niels replies, assertive but almost defeated: “having enough time.” It thus clearly emerges how the temporality of a desire oriented toward an extension of the future (Neil’s “One day I’ll go there” regarding the Fiji Islands) is doomed to collapse: the Neil who dreams of drowning in a sea speckled with iridescent algae is precisely the other side of the construction of the postmodern subject.

Neil sharing his nightmares with Vincent at the bar: Heat

But desire in Mann can take on even different connotations than an escape from one’s reality toward something better; it can be shaped into a sadistic urge to destroy the hard-won island of happiness. This is the case with Manhunter (1986), a film adaptation of the novel Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, marking the first appearance on the big screen of the character Hannibal Lecter, here portrayed by Brian Cox. Manhunter represents the countershot to Thief. The film focuses on the personal struggle of detective Will Graham (William Petersen), who, unlike Frank, has already achieved his long-desired goal: a happy family and a beautiful house overlooking the sea.

Will shows us, from the very beginning, photographs of his family, which, unlike Frank’s collage, have become a realised utopia. Mann decided to put these photos in one of the first scenes, in the moment in which Will is informed that the FBI needs him once again. He must return to action after having been responsible for the capture of Hannibal Lecter, in order to work on another, strikingly similar case: a sadistic, psychopathic killer who exterminates happy families, just like the one Will has managed to build – a gruesome juxtaposition emphasised by Will’s sunny pictures and the forensic photographs of the murdered family.

But this first dialogue facing the sea and its horizon also wants to mirror the very first exchange in Thief, and the differences between the two are symptomatic of the reverse angle that Mann has developed in Manhunter: whereas Frank speaks with a humble fisherman about the divinity that lies within the beauty of the dawn reflected in Lake Michigan, here the sea becomes the scenario for the beginning of Will’s self-destructive impulse, a morbid desire to lose what he has gained, to sink again into Frank’s position of lack and desire.

Will is briefed by the FBI on the new case: Manhunter

Will’s secret weapon, both in capturing Hannibal Lecter and the reason why he has been called back for this new case, lies in his ability to empathise with the killers he must track down. However, within this act of mimesis is necessarily included the need to stand on the other side of the family photograph, shaping what Simpson has called “dialectical tensions between binary oppositions” able to outline “uncomfortable affinities between protagonist and antagonist(s).”5

On the other side of this dialectical tension is the killer (Tom Noonan), nicknamed Tooth Fairy by the press and later discovered to be a man called Francis Dolarhyde. However, the killer’s tension toward the visual element, which leads him to collect and obsessively rewatch personal home movies of the families he later chooses to exterminate, is a morbid obsession that bears no relation to the longing to reinsert himself into the world, to build his own little utopia, that characterises Frank or Robert De Niro’s Neil McCauley.

In an echo of Kubrick, Mann decided to transform this obsession into a form of torture: after kidnapping the journalist Freddy Lounds (Stephen Lang), the Tooth Fairy forces him, bound to a chair, to watch a montage composed of home movies of the murdered families and photographs taken by the killer immediately after his crimes. “Reflections, mirrors, images”: “your primary sensory intake that makes your dream lives is seeing,” states Will during his process of identification with Francis Dolarhyde, in an imaginative conversation with his “double” that reveals the true logic behind his cruel homicides. It is exactly this obsession with images and their collection that leads the killer to his capture: the murdered families were linked together by their home movies, which Francis accessed prior to the crimes through the film developer shop where he works.

But the killer’s dream is not a softened vision of an exotic beach or a happy family, but rather the horror inherent in their destructions; and his infatuation with the blind co-worker Reba (Joan Allen) can be understood precisely in these terms, in a romantic bond that both recalls and overturns the modernist classic Peeping Tom. In Michael Powell’s film, the use of the camera, the framing of the lens, is juxtaposed with acts of murder, with the very structure of looking channeled as violence. Mann, by contrast, anchors this relationship not in the act of framing but in the collection and the meaning behind the already produced image: photographs and videos become the dream-image on which the killer feeds, while the blindness of Reba marks the impossibility of constructing such a dream, creating a new connection between image-production and desire. The singular trajectory of the desiring subject thus thickens, for the first time, into two interwoven lines, a play of roles in which the dream captured in Will’s family photograph is both the ultimate objective and that from which one cannot help but seek escape.

Spatial relations once again serve to express this tension: the expressionist nocturnes of Thief and Heat are exchanged in Manhunter for increasingly aseptic environments; the relationship between exterior and interior outlined before collapses into a claustrophobic closure, with the notable exception of the dreamlike bedroom of the protagonist’s house. The large wall of glass from which the sea can be observed, in which Will’s wife Molly (Kim Greist) is often seen laying on the bed, anticipates the bare Colville-influenced dwelling of Neil McCauley in Heat: yet in Manhunter the relation to the infinity of the sea underscores the utopian construction of the detective’s world – and the helplessness of its collapse.

Bedroom in Manhunter

Alongside these images of dream and hope that accompany the characters in his films, the sea often dominates Michael Mann’s cinema as “the canonical image of impossible journeys, those that everyone dreams about but no one can take.”6 For Mann, therefore, the sea and its horizon of light represent the counter-image of the protagonists’ pictures, a metaphysics of self-destruction, the nihilism of contemporary man.

This remains true even in Mann’s digital universe, where the sea still plays a crucial role. In his cinematic version of the iconic TV series Miami Vice, the director surrounds his characters with marine waters that shimmer within the liquidity of the digital medium: the horizon for impossible journeys is still present – it can even be crossed, as the characters played by Colin Farrell and Gong Li, Sonny and Isabella, do in grand fashion; only, though, to be peremptorily reaffirmed in its phantom physiognomy of impossibility in the film’s final scene.

The digital, rather than a reef on which one might run aground, has in fact enabled the director to put into practice, to traverse, worlds that were only hinted at in previous years. The unexpressed and unrecognisable Miami of Miami Vice can thus be seen, for Jamie Foxx (alongside Colin Farrell, the other member of the duo of police protagonists), as the expansion of the postcard image that, in the earlier Collateral, his character kept as a relic in his taxi. A phantasmagoria of digital aesthetics, a macho fantasy, the environment in Miami Vice is the realised utopia of the Max from Collateral, which reveals itself in all its nihilism.

Sonny and Isabella flee together by speedboat: Miami Vice

Mann’s cinema thus constitutes a continuous restructuring of the male individual in late capitalism: a restructuring that emerges in the tension between subject, desire, and the images through which this desire is externalised. The ever-evolving subject attempts to envision a future suited to him, doing so within a present urban space with which he must contend. It is within this triad – subject, image of desire, and spatiality – that Mann fully expresses the collapse of modernity, his capacity to incorporate “the alienated urban space of postmodern capitalism” within “the cultural dilemmas of the twenty-first century.”7

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All images are screenshots from the films discussed.