Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Manhunter!

The true test of a movie is how cool it can make looking out a window.

Much as Dark City was the superior film overshadowed by the midwit-friendly Matrix blockbuster, so too Manhunter was doomed to obscurity by the runaway success of Soylent of the Lambs, a made-for-TV-looking movie in which convicted murderer Hannibal Lecter takes pains to stress that blatantly transsexual killer Buffalo Bill isn't a "real" transsexual, because it's very important to tiptoe around GLAAD's sensibilities in between murdering and eating people.

Go on, clap for your safe-edgy antiheroes signed off by the rapists in Hollywood.

So popular was Soylent in its day that it was not until Ridley Scott's embarrassing followup Hannibal, more than a decade later, that people started to catch on that le heckin wholesome serial killer was little more than a fedora lib, so when the series petered out in disgrace with prequel Hannibal Rising, in which the titular protagonist literally wears a fedora and dispatches mean bullies with a fucking katana for disrespecting his Azn waifu, it wasn't so much a case of artistic decline as the emperor doing a twirl to confirm that, no, your eyes did not deceive you, he really wasn't wearing any clothes.

Fortunately one kino did emerge from the unpromising Thomas Harris source material. Michael Mann is hit-and-miss, but here his signature style, honed on Thief and Miami Vice, is put to its best use. Mann matter-of-factly guts the source novel (the ending is completely different and much better for it) to deliver a bleary, oneiric experience shot through with cool 80s synths, hypnotically understated performances and a heightened visual sense that puts Soylent's drab palette to shame.

Find me a shot as good as the worst of these in Soylent. That's right, you can't, because there isn't one.

William Petersen stars as Will Graham, FBI agent with a PhD in staring hauntedly. He used to hunt serial killers, but he's out of that life, dammit, until his old pal pulls him out of retirement for one last job. While this has since become a dead-horse cliché, I think it was still relatively uncommon when Manhunter dropped. The feds need Graham back, because there's a new killer in town: Literally Me, played by 6'5" Tom Noonan. Literally Me is a socially awkward sperg with a cleft palate scar and the tard strength of ten men, who knocks off families for bullshit psychobabble reasons expounded in the b**k but wisely glossed over in the kino. To catch Me, Agent Graham must turn to an unlikely source of insight...Hannibal Lecktor!

In a based display of contempt for the source novel reminiscent of Kubrick's mockery of Stephen King in The Shining, Mann changed the spelling of the name from Lecter to Lecktor. He then gave Harris a wedgie.

While Anthony Hopkins has a lot of infectious fun with the character in Soylent, Brian Cox's portrayal is much creepier. He lets his mouth hang open like a shark or a ravenous pitbull, giving a base, animalistic counterpoint to his polite erudition. Cox has little screentime, but he elevates the character. Nonetheless, this is Noonan's picture, and his Literally Me is perhaps the greatest onscreen serial killer, quietly diffident in his everyday dealings with others, breathlessly grandiose in his presentation to a captive journo, effortlessly sympathetic as he finds love with a blind woman who can accept him both for the ripped giant and the troubled introvert he is.

Literally Me > The Joker (2019) > Travis Bickle > Patrick Bateman > Drive (2012).

In the first half-to-two-thirds of the movie he may fill the shoes of the antagonist, but somewhere in the second act our POV shifts seamlessly to match his, and we root for him at least as hard as for Graham. Pseudo-moralists might fret at this, but this is a deeply Jungian film and we sense in Me the shadow archetype, both boogeyman and whipping boy, that we must recognise and integrate into ourselves to fully realise our humanity. It's important not to sanitise our antiheroes in the manner of Lecter in all those lesser iterations for precisely this reason: the PC-compliant monster still affords us the safe distancing of denial.

/ourboi/ literally lurking in the background like an actual shadow. You think any aspect of the composition in this movie is an accident?

And this theme is developed subtly, unobtrusively, visually throughout the picture, as Graham increasingly becomes Me by retracing his steps, learning to think as he does. Parallels between the characters are suggested by devices as simple as Graham staring at his reflection in the glass before uttering his vow to find Me, or as slyly subliminal as this:

The low angle on the ascending floors of the structure suggest a ribcage or the wings of the Red Dragon painting. "Oh, surely that's but a coincidence!" No. There's no way this just happened to be the most convenient building to shoot in. You have to look pretty hard and sign a lot of paperwork to film a real movie somewhere like this. It's not even a plot-important scene.

Manhunter would be redundantly remade (or, rather, Red Dragon readapted) and the only conceivable reason to watch that version is to compare the style and flare of the 80s classic with the later flick's prosaic plodding. 80s reviewers whined that Manhunter was too stylish, while some later bitched that it had become "dated". A cursory comparison with the later Red Dragon totally vindicates Manhunter's coolmaxxing approach. It also boasts the best soundtrack of the 80s: