The Michael Mann Mythos: Appreciating The Aesthetics of Criminal Ascetics

Michael Mann is always searching.

Over nearly four decades as a director, screenwriter, and producer for film and television, he’s sought to render onscreen how a professional thinks in the most detailed way possible. In the Mann-u-verse, there is an adoration for vocation, for the ascetic pursuit of a craft, and for those few who can be trusted. It doesn’t matter if that craft is safecracking (James Caan in 1981’s Thief, Mann’s first domestic feature), being a noble and crafty eighteenth century warrior (Daniel Day-Lewis in the 1992 epic The Last of the Mohicans), robbing banks with panache and a brooding soul (Johnny Depp in 2009’s John Dillinger biopic Public Enemies) or the yeoman’s work of two elite crews of criminals and cops pitted against one another in the solitary streets of 1995 Los Angeles. In both its lucid style and solid box office success, Heat was the film that collapsed these impulses into one frame. But for Mann and his characters, a singular sense of duty is always at life’s core. Which is essentially how Heat’s relentless style and legendary onscreen sparring match between Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino began life as a 1980s TV movie. Cue the Ferraris, flamingos and jai alai.

In 1984, Miami Vice debuted on NBC in a streak of turquoise neon and Don Johnson stubble smear. As its executive producer and showrunner, Mann was instrumental in crafting the look and feel of Vice, and as the music video era burst forth into the pop consciousness, his knack for a hot music cue or blast of outsized 1980s-ness had found its perfect vehicle. Miami’s rain-slicked streets were a playground for cocaine cowboys and the mercurial cops who pursued them (often to a moody synthesizer groove). Though Mann was also involved in the underrated period police drama Crime Story (1986), it was NBC’s wish for him to produce a new television series that led him back to a draft he’d kicked around about lawmen and hoods who saw themselves in each other’s determined and detached vocational style.

As a show, Mann’s script didn’t pan out. But it did surface as a TV movie called L.A. Takedown (you can watch the whole thing on YouTube). Detective Vincent Hanna’s war of wills—and, ultimately, just a war—with a brilliant thief and his crew? Check. A crazed, violent shoot-out in the center of Los Angeles? L.A. Takedown’s got it. Uneven acting, stilted direction, TV movie reaction shots, and some awkward pacing? Er, L.A. Takedown also has a lot of that. So as a restless pursuer of his craft, it isn’t too much of a stretch that an also-ran television product would become Mann’s highest-minded cinematic achievement. Remember: He’s always searching.

With Heat, Mann reshaped the L.A. Takedown into a form that activated his obsession with the loner warrior, the man who lives by a moral code of his own design. (And with Mann, it’s always a man.) “Are you a monk?”, Pacino’s Hanna prods DeNiro’s Neil McCauley about his life as a criminal ascetic. But Neil has a code. He trusts what he’s built, and relies on his discipline as the avenue to a form of lonely redemption. To McCauley, and probably also to Hanna, life is all for nothing but a final, personal victory. The end, however roughly achieved or ill gotten, justifies the means. L.A. Takedown started as a weird back burner TV movie project, yeah. But it blossomed into the fullest realization of the Michael Mann mythos.

It’s also a variation on a theme. The archetype appears again in the Mann-directed 2006 tone poem Collateral. Solitary, cagey killer-for-hire Vincent (Tom Cruise) explains his predatory work ethic to freaked out cabbie Jamie Foxx. “Make the best of it, improvise, adapt to the environment. Darwin, shit happens, I Ching, whatever man. We gotta roll with it.” And the taxi’s lights catch the darting yellow eyes of a coyote, alone in the mean streets of LA’s desolation.

While he is relentless, pointed, and research-driven as a filmmaker, Michael Mann has never been the most prolific. Blackhat arrives in theaters this week, his first film since Public Enemies in 2009, and stars Chris Hemsworth as a rogue hacker tapped by international security agencies to take down one of his own, a cyber criminal with no politics other than seemingly random terror. As a lone hero with a dark heart, you could do worse than cast the guy who plays Thor. And Mann has said he only works with serious people. (“Why would you not want to dive into the deep end of the pool?”, he told Wired.)

A crime thriller that jaunts from the United States to Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Jakarta, Indonesia, Blackhat hits the notes of realism, tradecraft, and high order crime that have been Mann hallmarks throughout his career. Born of our society’s reliance on tech, screens, chatter and data, it might also be the first film to truly make serious people sending emails very seriously actually look compelling on camera. Trust: Mann has done the research. After all, he was into search before it was a billion dollar enterprise.

Johnny Loftus is a freelance writer in Chicago. Contact him about Miami Vice fantasy leagues on Twitter at @metrowheelman.

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