The Cinema of Michael Mann

241 Pages·2007·9.029 MB·English

by  Steven Rybin

The Cinema of
Michael Mann
Genre Film Auteurs
Series Editor
Eileen Jones, Dodge College of Film and Media Arts, Chapman University
Genre Film Auteurs is a new book series focusing on the transformation of
film genres by contemporary directors working within them. Each mono
graph in the series will constitute an in-depth examination of the aesthetic
points of intersection between the creative vision of a particular director and
the enabling constraints of genre conventions. The result will illuminate the
processes of genre construction and authorship that take place within, and
shape, collaborative industry practices. The books in this series are intended
for film scholars, film students, and anyone with a serious interest in film crit
icism, film genre, and film authorship.
The Cinema of
Michael Mann
Steven Rybin
LEXINGTON BOOKS
A division of
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
Lanham' Boulder' New York· Toronto' Plymouth, UK
LEXINGTON BOOKS
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Copyright © 2007 by Lexington Books
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress CataIoging-in-PubIication Data
Rybin, Steven, 1979- The cinema of Michael Mann / Steven Rybin.
p. cm. - (Genre film auteurs)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2042-2 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN-IO: 0-7391-2042-5 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2043-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)
ISBN-IO: 0-7391-2043-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)
I. Mann, Michael (Michael Kenneth)-Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.
PN 1998.3.M3645R93 2007
791.4302'33092-dc22 2007015987
Printed in the United States of America
.~:;:ns l The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSIINISO Z39.48-1992.
Contents
Acknow ledgements VII
Introduction
1 Beginnings in Television and The Jericho Mile 21
2 Thiel 41
3 The Keep 59
4 Manhul1ter 75
5 The Last ol the Mohicans 93
6 Heat III
7 The Insider 131
8 Ali 151
9 Collateral 169
Conclusion: Michael Mann and Miami Vice in the Shadow of
New Hollywood 187
Michael Mann Filmography 215
Bibliography 219
Index 225
About the Author 233
v

Acknowledgements
This book began as a master's thesis under the tutelage of David A. Cook at
Emory University. His enthusiasm for and insight into the topic helped im
prove the content of what follows during its initial stages, and his encourage
ment also helped inspire my subsequent effort to shape the material into a fuIl
length study. I would also like to thank the rest of the Film Studies faculty at
Emory University-Matthew Bernstein, Nina K. Martin, Karla Oeler, and
Evan Lieberman (now of Cleveland State University)-for two profitable
years of education which substantially influenced and informed the best of
what follows. Equal gratitude must go to the School of Interdisciplinary Arts
at Ohio University, which has proven to be a stimulating and supportive com
munity over the last two years. Thanks also to Eileen Jones, for her enthusi
asm for the project as well as for her bringing it to the attention of Lexington
Books, as well as to Joseph Parry and the rest of the editorial staff at Lexing
ton for their wonderful support and guidance as the project neared completion.
A more personal note of thanks to my closest friends, Jason Roberts, An
drew Johnson, and Scott Hay, for their invaluable friendship and insight over
the years; to Jerry Rybin, Terrie Rybin. and Amanda Rybin, for the uncondi
tional love and support which they have generously bestowed upon me
throughout my life; and to Jessica Belser, for her enrichment of my life with
her wisdom, spirit, humor, and love, and for the apparently bottomless reser
voirs of patience and understanding she possessed when I had to spend more
time in Michael Mann's world than in hers.
vii
Introduction
... [C]ritics have avoided this major American filmmaker of the last two
decades, let him slip away.
Jean-Baptiste Thoret I
[Heatl ... gives off a blankness, an indeterminacy, that frustrates inter-
pretation ... it's not easy to delve into, to find significance or resonance
in its detail.
Richard Combs2
Events aren't consumable in the same way that narratives are because they
tend to confuse and confound us by their very nature as blunt encounters,
splintering experience and then meting it out to us in separate clusters
rather than allowing it the kind of coherence that can only come from the
continuity, logical progression, and cohesion of storytelling.
Jonathan Rosenbaum3
The shadow of a houseplant is cast across the corner of a ceiling; electronic
music accompanies the image, while somewhere in another room a thief and
the woman he has recently married make love. A story about the hunt for a
serial killer opens with an overhead view of a police car's hood, an image
which abstracts the roof lights from the rest of the vehicle as well as from the
space surrounding it. A soundtrack drops to almost complete silence, save for
the music of elegiac, yearning strings scoring the descent of an exhausted but
determined cop rushing down a winding staircase. At the end of a story about
corporate control of the media, an intrepid journalist quits his job at CBS and
then leaves the corporation's building, walking away from the camera and
2 Introduction
disappearing into the bustle of a city street. A voice-over of Will Smith as
Muhammad Ali (the central protagonist in a major Hollywood biopic) drops
to an inaudible level, becoming just one sonic impression among many. A taxi
cab's reflection shines back at us in the windows of an office building, creat
ing a play of reflected red, yellow, and blue light as the shot's pulse is timed
to a contemporary rhythm and blues tune.
This descriptive list of images and sounds, of visual and sonic moments
from Michael Mann's films, hints at the compelling manner in which these
movies extract small details from a world and then amplify them, marking
certain images and sequences as stylistic events that suddenly ask for our at
tention in the midst of a story, rather than as the strictly economical, self-ef
facing vehicles of a narrative. Through such style Mann has not only posi
tioned himself as a storyteller with flair but also as an implicative teller of his
own telling, an illusionist who never forgets to move his audience by indicat
ing, through the exactness of his compositions and the intermittent fore
grounding of style over theme-or, perhaps more accurately, the intensifica
tion or the generation of themes through style-that what we are looking at is
an image, composed in a particular way, with particular sounds accompany
ing them. If one were to follow this line of thinking, one might say that
Mann's style avoids the "democracy," the viewer's sense of discovery, that
Andre Bazin once argued was inherent in the deep-focus film image; after all,
Mann once plainly stated that he is "just not interested in 'passive' filmmak
ing, in a film that's precious and small and where it's [entirely] up to the au
dience to bring themselves to the movie."4 Of course, regardless of the ap
proach of a filmmaker, attentive film critics always seek stylistic and thematic
tropes. The only apparent difference in these films is that Michael Mann and
his collaborators have made the job of discovering style and extracting its
meaning a little easier.
Or have they? There are quite a few writers on the cinema who have had a
hard time with Mann. Only a few, like Richard Combs in the second quote
preceding this introduction, have come to terms with the challenge of talking
about Mann's impressive and sometimes overwhelming style, and have made
such difficulty an integral part of the criticism itself. How can one follow
Combs's line of thought, which argues that Mann's style sometimes impedes
a clear interpretation of the stories he tells, and at the same time remain open
to another comment by a film critic, Manohla Dargis, which attributes to the
high-definition digital-video style of Collateral (2004) "a kind of democracy
of images, in which no object in the frame carries more weight than any other.
... As a consequence, Collateral looks like it's capturing a completely un
mediated image of the real world"?5 The fact that Mann's cinema is for some
critics monolithically stylized and closed, while for others generously open,