#michael mann

Thief (1981)

You want some music with that? Here it is...

Of course I am dying to see how Manhunter looks given mention of the color technology involved, but more than anything I can't wait to find out what changes were made to the story structure. Which scenes were reportedly extended, what “unfortunate” lines of dialogue were excised (lol). To me the single most profound and impactful scene is the one of Will and his stepson talking to each other at the grocery store, and I'm curious to see if that's been emended at all or left untouched.

Call me a sicko, but I loved hearing him wax in layman's terms about the psychoanalytic fundamentals. And that's really as fundamental as it gets: that children like Dollarhyde who are being abused don't conceive of what's happening to them as a terrible injustice, as a wrong committed by a disturbed parent who is morally at fault. Because human children are quite literally dependent on their parents (or other caregiving adults) for survival, we have evolved psychologically to maintain an emotional connection and to be predisposed to positive regard. So when parents do awful things to their kids, the kids wind up rationalizing that the defect must lie within them, that whatever elicited the mistreatment is internal to their own condition. This cycle of shame reproduces itself, and I quote Mann with a chuckle, “from generation to generation,” occasionally to tragic, even horrific results.