A Film Canon

The first, brief film appearance of Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lecter, Manhunter retains only the roughest outlines of Red Dragon, the first book in the cycle, in which retired FBI agent Will Graham (Will Peterson) resumes his relationship with the mannered murderer (Brian Cox), in order to track down a second killer, the "Tooth Fairy" (Will Noonan). For the most part, Mann deflects narrative into lurid cinematography, drawing on the Tooth Fairy's modus operandi - installing mirror fragments in the eye sockets of his victims, once he's left a single fingerprint on their eyeballs - to identify serial killing with media convergence, and to position the serial killer at some as-yet-unformulated media threshold. What little narrative impetus remains is swallowed up by cold, opaque, forensic discussion, as the film offers itself as the very forensic object that Graham is searching for, the tool that will allow him to pursue the Tooth Fairy along that media threshold, and to see what was previously unseen or unseeable. This produces an uneasy disparity between what we can see and what Graham can see, and two quite distinct visual planes. On the one hand, there's Graham's world - a series of spaces that, despite being crisp, sparse and well-delineated, brim with a pregnant emptiness, or depthlessness, just as their brilliant white brims with all the other spectra that it's swallowed. On the other hand, there's a blue-green fluorescence of forensic cinematography - infra-red and ultraviolet cameras, heat-sensitive cameras, nocturnal cameras - that gradually creeps in at the edges of the action - and what makes the film sublime is how deftly Mann eventually brings these two planes together, suffusing their threshold with the lurid tipsiness of a polluted Miami dawn, or the blue-green foliage of the climactic scene. It's at this point that the hushed, hyper-realist backdrops start to feel like some kind of nascent digital architecture, and our perspective starts to converge with the balconies, beaches and jetties from which Graham and the Tooth Fairy gaze out at something that both demands and defies their gazes, astronomers seeking the face of God.