[NOTES] Behind-the-scenes on Manhunter

Here's a look at the prep work I did for my essay on voyeurism, identity commodification, and cereal Manhunter. 

As with my video on Christine, the idea for this essay was already brewing when I first watched Manhunter and wrote my little review on Letterboxd. I was so taken with that grocery store scene. I didn't start to realize until later on the way that those ideas about consumerism also folded into the way the movie engaged with voyeurism. This article (which I also reference in the video) by Aaron Aradillas and Matt Zoller Seitz really helped crystallize some of those ideas. It's an excellent article from a larger series about thematic motifs throughout Mann's filmography. I was really inspired by this part in particular:

There are four levels of perspective operating at once, enclosed within each other like layers of a nesting doll. Level one is the unseen family members who shot the films in the first place. Level two is Dollarhyde, who first saw these films while working at a film-to-video transfer  lab. Level three is Graham, who's watching the movies on tape to discern how Dollarhyde planned the murders and what might have made him choose these particular families. Level four is the viewer, who experiences the other three layers while viewing Manhunter.

Originally I didn't plan to appear physically in this essay, but I got the idea here that it might be interesting to insert myself and explicitly surface an additional layer—you, the viewer, are now watching me watch (and interpret) Manhunter. 

Because most of my essay is about one short scene, I didn't end up taking notes on the timestamps in Manhunter until after I had already completed the script. Here's the Google doc with those notes. There are also notes there for a couple cast and crew interviews I watched. One thing that didn't make it into the essay was a section about Dave Grossman, who is a police lecturer with a very absurd training program about how police are "sheepdogs" protecting the "sheep" (civilians) from "wolves" (criminals). I think Manhunter is making a similar claim, although unlike Grossman, Mann problematizes the wolf/sheepdog relationship to some extent—even though it gets results, it isn't healthy for Graham to relate so strongly to serial killers. There are a lot of other issues with Grossman's views that I'd love to go into another time, but it ended up being outside the scope of this video. If you're interested in an overview without having to watch Grossman's gross (man) content yourself, Some More News did their own video on him a while back (which is how I learned about him in the first place).

Finally here are the notes I took when I was formulating my thesis. Making some kind of visual map like this really helps me figure out what the hell is swirling around in my brain.