Today, Mann is one of those rare filmmakers (alongside Lodge Kerrigan and the David Cronenberg of Shivers [1975], Rabid [1977] and Crash [1996]) whose films succeed in delivering a vision of modern, urban America: those impersonal places, the freeways, suburbs, uninterrupted traffic, the America that Jean Baudrillard calls magnificent and sidereal. This is a world of railway yards, neon signs that flicker day and night, a world that seems resigned to the omnipresence of glass and concrete. Mann renews from film to film, with a rare obstinacy, this cold, blue, geometric aesthetic – although it is sometimes broken up by an unusual graininess, or a lack or order that creeps into the system. Predominant here is the transformation of spaces into non-places (as per Marc Augé): hospitals, hotel rooms, roadside cafes, vacant lots, airports, warehouses, empty apartments (in Heat, Neil’s apartment resembles a glass cage separated from the Pacific ocean by a large, glass window) – all are subject to a sort of hyper-geometrisation of the frame, inherited from the Don Seigel of The Killers (1964) and Dirty Harry (1972), and of the formal experiments of Michelangelo Antonioni in Red Desert (1964) and Zabriskie Point (1970). As Christian Viviani has noted: “The obsessive straightness of the urban landscape (…) makes room for a horizontal display (mostly marine and desert) glimpsed across the many windows that Mann keeps for the architecture that is linked to the couple or the family.”
In Mann, the work on space combines an impressive use of short focal length and out-of-focus effects (giving the impression that individuals are on the surface of their environment, rather than dissolving into it), an absence of perspective (in the literal as well as figurative senses), and lastly vast emptiness, accentuated by his preferred format of CinemaScope. The many glass surfaces that fragment the frame turn it into something like a glass jar, but also set up a place of confrontation between a feeling of enclosure, of claustrophobia even, and the sense of an infinite openness. The aquarium syndrome is both container and insulator. “Glass facilitates faster communication between inside and outside, yet at the same time it sets up an invisible but material caesura which prevents such communication from becoming a real opening onto the world” (Baudrillard)
Thus the sensation of gravity, this tendency to reverie that has characters like Frank (in Thief’s second sequence) contemplating the sea for a long time. There are finally those beautiful moments where a character detaches himself optically from his environment, withdrawing from a moment in time in order to wander in an indistinct zone, floating, almost ethereal (see the sequence already mentioned from The Insider where, on the hotel room wall, Wigand watches the animation of his dream-screen). In order to change the world, it is sometimes enough to change focus. “Why does melancholy require exterior infinity? Because it is boundless and void expansion. (…) The sharper our consciousness of the world’s infinity, the more acute our awareness of our own finitude” (E.M. Cioran)
If all Mann’s characters – remember that he adapted James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans – are individuals who are alone rather than figures who are lonely, it is because the dialogue with nature, its elements and force, has been broken. Nonetheless Mann posseses – as if seeking to exorcise the modern undifferenciation of spaces – a will to refind the monumentality of elements, through the recurring representation of the sea (and its variants: tap water, rain water, bath water that keeps running) – the key element of great American literature. This is the sea that once ruled the relationship between the explorer and his environment – Huckleberry’s raft in the Pacific that Ishmael described in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick
The use of the sea, always present in Mann’s films, perfectly indicates his project, which is concerned with reinventing a contemporary mythology from the earliest American fiction, whose survival he tracks. As Frank says to a fishing friend in Thief, the sea, after all, “is our divinity”. It is in this movement between two poles that we can recognise the things that are so central to Mann’s cinema. Between the glass and the sea, the open space and the desert, the memory of death and the need to move forward, Mann’s films patiently lay down the foundations of a great post-classical cinema.
In Mann’s America – identical to Peckinpah’s vision in The Osterman Weekend – the interface exterior/interior has disappeared. At the same time as they enclose, encircle and isolate individuals, the omnipresent glass surfaces feed the optical fantasy of an ‘outside’. To pass from one side of the glass window to the other means nothing; what is needed is to break it (at the end of Manhunter, Will rushes forward towards the window of the killer’s goldfish bowl-apartment and shatters it). But beyond this first goldfish bowl, another appears. In Mann, the décors, characters and situations are often based on reversibility: the windows separate as much as they connect. We are never sure of our position: are we in or out of the goldfish bowl? (This is shown in a dazzling sequence of Heat where, in a play of reversed optics, Vincent and his team are themselves watched and photographed by Neil.) “Everywhere the transparency of interfaces ends in internal refraction”; in Los Angeles “everything connects, without any two pairs of eyes ever meeting” (Baudrillard). In Heat, the central gunfight takes place in the heart of Los Angeles. Mann replays the typical configuration of the Western (Indians encircle a wagon situated in the centre) but reverses the positions: from now on, outlaws occupy the centre while lawmen (the row of police cars) are relocated to the periphery.
All Mann’s work is built on this experience of people growing old and, marked by time (the history of the cinema as much as of America), receiving directly, or in an après coup, some shock that produces the crack in which their melancholy begins. Mann’s films carry these cracks (whether old, recent or new) along like a wave that, in due course, dies on the cliff – belated, splendid proof of the sea’s violence. Figures taking on all the problems that America has not been able to resolve over time – in The Insider, Lowell is at once Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, Frank Serpico and Joe Frady from The Parallax View (1974) – Mann’s characters have to endure their last, agonising breath alone, after the battle. The trace of epic Americans still sticks to their skin, those creatures of transhumance who founded the country; and especially the myth of the solitary hero, those ‘men without women’ (Hemingway), from Natty Bumpo (The Last of the Mohicans, 1992) to the Great Gatsby via Ethan Edwards (John Ford’s The Searchers, 1956): born, living and dying alone.
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