Michael Mann: The Only Male Filmmaker

Some thoughts on some movies

In all the history of film, I doubt any has had such a rotten effect on the medium as Goodfellas. It is a great entertainment done by a great craftsman, and is absolutely trash. It was Goodfellas which established (with a lot of help from The Sopranos, whose creator referred to Goodfellas as his “Koran”) the sentiment and morality of modern crime drama. The morality is this: That in a fundamentally materialistic, amoral and consumeristic society, criminals are in a sense better than the regular joe. Why? Because if you’ve ever felt a violent impulse in your life and failed to act upon it like Henry Hill, you are the worst of all the modern creatures. You’re a hypocrite. “Here I am ordering Italian food like a schmuck,” says Henry Hill at the end of the movie, reflecting on the only lesson learned. The antagonist of Goodfellas is ultimately the viewer, because the viewer is presumably a moral agent living a quotidian life who has just watched a bunch of amoral psychopaths robbing and murdering each other without reason and chuckled to himself, entertained and occasionally thinking, I wish that was me. Joe Pesci even comes out to shoot you in the face.

This is what goes for morality among screenwriters who are essentially nihilists. Scorsese is at heart a moralist, as are the various proteges who have followed his method, which is about the entirety of television (at least the last time I paid attention, which was a long time ago, but anyway…). The problem with all these violent moralists is that they don’t seem to know they’re writing comedies, not tragedies or dramas. Tragedy and drama require character, and the joke of our modern entertainments is that they deal with men who have no character: They are masses of neuroses and violent impulses, and gain “complexity” for how many neuroses can be piled on top of one another without becoming camp. The Sopranos was almost the ad absurdum of this, with a violent sociopath whining to a psychiatrist as if he were anything but a violent sociopath, yet everyone, including the producers, forgot it was a comedy after 9/11. The same was true for the Bush Administration.

It doesn’t have to be that way: I recently made my wife watch three great movies with me: Thief, Manhunter and Heat, all great crime films, and all distinct for being actual dramas rather than violent buffoonery. All are directed by Michael Mann, and they are great because the men in his movies are all real men. They all have their flaws (why am I watching a movie about characters without flaws?). They’re criminals too, but who wants to engage with a visual medium that deals with only lawyers and accountants? You ever been inside a cubicle? The only message that can be drawn from inside a cubicle is that being inside a cubicle sucks. So we, as a visual and illiterate culture, are better off with thieves, lest we learn nothing from them at all.

What is the constant in Mann’s characters? They don’t act like animals about women. I don’t mean that they’re chivalrous, I mean that they treat them like something more than chattels. Who would even want a chattel that’s always yapping? No, you want a woman because….well, you can’t explain it. It is what it is, and that’s manhood, and that’s life. Modern filmmakers try to contort this obsession into a sublimated sexism, an evolutionary side effect…. Explain it all you want, the obsession still exists. But explain it away and you’re suddenly left with something that isn’t a man anymore. That thing is a creature of Freud, and solidified by our satanic, visual, pornographic culture. Not even a whore can be treated as dispassionately as modern men are presumed to treat their wives. Marriage and Eros are not about lust or even about possession. When you love a woman, you become one with her. You might despise her, just as you might despise yourself, but the feeling has nothing to do with mere concupiscence. Either you get it or you don’t: You’re either a man, or that modern creation of psychiatry and advertising (but I repeat myself): The adolescent.

The men here are all men. The men are criminals, but they’re not thugs. There’s a scene early in Thief where James Caan has to retrieve a date he stood up from a dive bar. He’s a bit forceful with it all, causing a male feminist (William Peterson, as it so happens) to try to intervene only to be threatened away by a gun. It isn’t that Caan is anxious to threaten the non-criminal bourgeois/proletariat suckers who have morals and jobs and values and such, it’s that Caan is in love with this woman, and he can’t let anyone stand in the way of his getting her. Cinematically, all that groveling would have been tedious anyway. Ray Liotta falls for Lorraine Bracco when she stands up to him standing her up—What are you, Frankie Valli? Sublimated behind that caveman exterior is a man who respects a true feminist at heart. Scorsese goes for schlock, Mann actually makes it intimate. “Let’s cut the mini moves and the bullsh— and get on with this romance,” he yells at her. We get a full heart-spilling, a meeting of minds and hearts in an all-night diner. She becomes more beautiful as she takes on the roles of wife and mother. If you’re not gay, you know what I mean.

The ending of Thief is disturbing and inspiring, as psychologically brutal as any I can recall, even if not particularly violent. I doubt any woman can really understand it. It derives from abandoning all material things for an abstract principle. It is the same thing that leads political upheavals and provides the cannon fodder for every war. You just have to admire it, though not without a feeling of dread.

Character is action, and so is manhood. Almost every attempt at defending or attacking manhood is based on a performative gesturing. It’s hard to believe Mann isn’t working against this. Peterson’s face is feminine and sensitive, his hair almost looks permed. Maybe he’s a big guy, but it doesn’t really come off on screen. He looks like a man who might have a manicure (to live and die in LA, huh?), but it doesn’t actually matter. That kind of thing is backbiting, gossip, the kind of thing that should be left for women and true effeminates. We know who he is through what he does. What has he achieved? Beautiful loving wife, good kid, and he’s excellent at his job. This is real manhood, at least on a material level. You care about aesthetics in human beings? You’re a faggot. Men are not judged or judiciable on aesthetics. St. Robert Bellarmine was Van Morrison levels in height. Aesthetics don’t exist in people, only action. If something like aesthetics remains to judge people, it is in the eyes of the wise, not the admonitions of social media. The supreme vice is shallowness, as Oscar Wilde told us, and boy he should know.

Mann is praised for his kino visuals, as if he were merely an aesthetic filmmaker. He was an artist, and he knew visuals must match the psychological weight of his work; he was merely a twitter account if his art did not match his visuals. Filmmaking is a strange medium, straddled between the lowest and highest. The visual and psychological impressions possible are nearly limitless. But how many of your viewers are going to appreciate? Why isn’t this Hannibal Lector eating people?

Mann did not try to cram into his film William Blake’s drawings of the Red Dragon, which are better than all his poetry, which are better than most any film that can ever be. Mann knew his place. This was not an existential struggle, as every existentialist likes to insist. The existential filmmakers are hacks who like battering each other with the pillars of a civilization that no longer exists, and which they can no longer conceive. Remember Satan? Remember Good and Evil? Kind of? OK, here’s some serial killer crap.

Mann seemed to recognize that Thomas Harris’s novels (and the entire Hannibal ecosystem they have fostered) were garbage. In Mann’s work, Hannibal Lecter isn’t even a cannibal (because that’s stupid). He’s a psychopath and a scumbag. The real man wins. The psycho killer gets laid out. Clarice Starling doesn’t grow enraptured and then marry the psycho killer, as actually happens in the books(!). All that garbage is tossed in the trash. Men defending their families: That’s what crime dramas are about. There are those who want to use the darkness of the human soul to convince you that this is all there is, and those who want to dredge you up de profundis to appreciate the glories of the light.

Heat is something like an agglomeration of Thief and Manhunter. Robert DeNiro replaces Caan as the master criminal, while Al Pacino becomes the great possessed detective. The characterizations in the earlier movies are richer, but anything Heat loses in depth it makes up for in scope. Everyone is approaching his own doom. But that’s true for every man. The question is whether you’re approaching doom in an honorable way. More could be said, but not now.

The most confusing parable told by Our Lord is that of the Unjust Steward. The Parable of the Prodigal Son is the greatest short story in Western literature, in part because its message is so clear. The Parable of the Unjust Steward is otherwise. The central analogy is not entirely clear. In the Gospel reading (of the Eighth Week after Pentecost) the great admonition, of being true in little things so one can be true in great things, is not even included. We usually think of “little things” as the quotidian; be true in your honest work day-to-day, for it is the only way to be true when the call of martyrdom arrives. But Our Lord does not make this request alone, for the Unjust Steward is not merely a mediocre accountant, but a thief. In short, we have a thief lauded by Our Lord—condemned too, of course, because this man is unjust—but worthy of commendation from God. “Make friends by use of the mammon of wickedness.” This wicked man can use his unjustly-received goods with Christian charity, why can you not use better gifts more justly? Even in those things you possess unjustly, use them truly. Imagine all the different ways you could have taught the lesson “Who is faithful in little things, can be faithful in great things.” But we are given a thief as this exemplar. Something to contemplate there.

If you like this article check out EMPIRE OF HATRED available in print here and ebook here.