Body Warp: Images as Lies in ‘Manhunter’

With everyone talking about the 30th anniversary of The Silence of the Lambs, I thought I’d take a second to discuss what I think is the single worst legacy of the film. It’s not the propagation of transgender stereotypes through the character of Buffalo Bill; as a trans woman, I (like many other trans women) will be the first to tell you that Buffalo Bill’s legacy is more complicated than just “grrrr, bad”. In fact, I (like many other trans women) have a particular nuanced fondness for Ted Levine as transgender (yes, transgender) serial killer Jame Gumb. But that’s a story for another day. This article is about how The Silence of the Lambs obliterated a better movie from our cultural memory: Michael Mann’s 1986 Thomas Harris adaptation Manhunter, celebrating its 35th anniversary this same year.

I’m not shy about the fact that I think The Silence of the Lambs is an overrated film. I think Jonathan Demme is something of a hack and that the film is generally fine, but underserving of its cultural status. Maybe I just haven’t forgiven Demme for Philadelphia. There are moments in which Lambs is genuinely unsettling, sure, but I don’t think the larger film holds up to the scrutiny of time.

Manhunter (or as I like to call it, on account of its helmer, Mannhunter) only ages better with time. Where Lambs tugs on the conventional strings to generate emotions in the viewer, Manhunter lets the viewer become unsettled on their own. In fact, it’s often during the most mundane moments that Mann chooses to accentuate the nerviness score or the editing. At other times, the film simply looks on coldly.

A far cry from the conventional 1990’s plucky would-be-feminist girl-power heroine that is Clarice Starling, Manhunter centers on the investigative efforts of Will Graham, played icily by William Peterson. Where Peterson’s coldness paints him as an objective scientist seeing past any potential biases in his long-running role as Gil Grissom on CSI (a show that papers over potential gruesomeness through cartoonish mystery and pseudo-science), that same trait makes for an unsettling Will Graham, a man gifted in the analysis of disturbed minds because he seems to bear too much resemblance to them himself.

And then there’s Hannibal Lecter (spelled Lecktor in Manhunter), played with wicked aplomb by Anthony Hopkins in Lambs, a now-legendary performance that has overshadowed Brian Cox’s beautifully low-key turn in Manhunter. Whereas Hopkins plays Lecter as an over-the-top Shakespearean villain, a precursor to a villain in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Cox’s Lecktor actually seems more grounded. Hopkins represents a trend toward the theatricality of evil; that’s precisely why his performance has echoed throughout the past thirty years of cinema.

Cox, though, is something far more disturbing: to borrow a phrase from Hannah Arendt, he represents the banality of evil, something harder to process and thus more necessary to repress. Hopkins is creepy, but he can be easily set aside as a cartoon. Cox’s mannerisms suggest a living, breathing human being behind the monstrosity.

Lecktor, though, is a much smaller piece of Manhunter than Lecter is of Lambs. Where Lambs is about the dyad of Lecter and Starling, Manhunter is about Graham being haunted by his own ability to understand Lecktor all too well. We only meet Lecktor briefly, but he haunts the film like a ghost until Graham does his best to purge that ghost by confronting a new killer, one dubbed “The Tooth Fairy”.

The Tooth Fairy is really a man named Francis Dollarhyde, played by Tom Noonan in a performance that once again suggests a kind of deep humanity lurking beneath one man’s undeniably evil actions. By pointedly humanizing Dollarhyde — unlike the scheming Dr. Lecktor, Dollarhyde is an all-too familiar image of aggrieved male entitlement to female affection, one that’s only grown more relevant in the age of incels and MGTOWs — Noonan and Mann create one of the most unsettling movie villains of all time.

Dollarhyde works at a film lab. This is, in fact, how he locates his victims: they’ve sent in home movies to be developed. The villain watches these films, studies them, and then seeks out and murders the families. As Graham says to himself during his epiphany on the investigation, “everything with you is seeing, isn’t it? Your primary sensory intake that makes your dream live is seeing”. Graham hits the film’s thesis on the head: a Hitchcockian take on voyeurism and the violence inherent in the act of seeing. The camera is, as it often is, vampiric in nature: it steals away the families for Dollarhydes collection, leaving only the empty bodies in his wake. Dollarhyde is less the camera eye than actually the camera itself, the film, processor of the image, and a warped one at that. That he first courts and then torments a blind woman is another on-the-nose reference to the power of visuality in the shaping of identity, behavior, and culture.

The blind woman, Reba McClane, played by Joan Allen, is at least a refreshing break from blind sages who have quasi-magical powers, particularly when it comes to seeing slick villains for who they are. Instead, McClane’s affection for Dollarhyde is partly driven by her inability to see his obvious creepiness, and Dollarhyde’s exploitation of that disability, as when he voyeuristically watches home movies of his next victims as she sits next to him. Some time after they spend the night together, Dollarhyde explodes into rage when he sees her with another man (notably, he only sees them, and thus cannot hear the mundane interaction that could feasibly temper his jealousy), proceeding to kill him and kidnap her, culminating in a final confrontation with Graham and the FBI.

The theme of vision would be briefly touched on in the climax of Lambs when Clarice Starling does battle with Buffalo Bill in pitch darkness while her opponent cheats by wearing night-vision goggles. It’s a sequence reminiscent of the finale of Wait Until Dark, in which a blind woman disables the lights in her apartment to force the villain into combat on her terms. In Lambs, Starling’s victory over Jame Gumb can be seen as a triumph of natural, earthbound (cis) womanhood over the technologically-empowered transgender Frankenstein’s monster that is Buffalo Bill.

Manhunter, though, is all about the violent, deterministic nature of vision and the image. Through Francis Dollarhyde, the warped image processor, lives are twisted and destroyed. Pictures, of course, can lie as easily as they can tell the truth; Dollarhyde’s entire character proves this emphatically, as does the staged photo-op (with identifying geographical information just out of focus enough to appear unintentional) that fails to bait Dollarhyde into confrontation with Graham. The film hinges on the radical disconnect between image and reality and the intermediate processes that contort and distort our relationship to an observed world, indeed to our very bodies; in this way, Manhunter is a truer and more relevant transgender film than The Silence of the Lambs.

Like most fictional serial killers, Francis Dollarhyde is the embodiment of an illness in the social body, in his case a contradictory one: specifically he is both the embodiment of the drive to form the nuclear family and the greatest threat to imagined Reaganite “family values”. As the Tooth Fairy, Dollarhyde literally pictures himself as part of the family unit, living out the grotesque fantasy through acts of murder. He even defensively braces against the idea he might be queer, not because he is overcompensating but because his unique brand of deviance can and will be connected in the social imaginary. Ironically, Dollarhyde’s killings are ways of performing compulsory heterosexuality he fails to enact through conventional relationships. The conservative obsession over family values drives its own destruction by those who desperately want to fit into its vision but can’t.

In one sequence Dollarhyde asks a bound and gagged reporter repeatedly, at the sight of a slideshow of his once and future victims, “do you see?” It’s a very 1980’s update of Laurence Olivier’s omnipresent inquiry to Dustin Hoffman: “is it safe?” For Dollarhyde, whose life is structured around seeing, being shown the slides is akin to stepping into his mind, not coincidentally the task of Will Graham throughout the film.

At one point in Manhunter, Graham confesses to his son that he had a mental breakdown after tracking, identifying, and being attacked by Lecktor, because he couldn’t purge his mind of Lecktor’s evil thoughts even after Lecktor had been imprisoned and Graham’s wounds healed. But when history repeats itself and Graham is wounded by Dollarhyde, another killer whose thoughts he has absorbed in order to profile, the film ends abruptly on a brightly lit tableau of Graham’s family. It’s a conspicuously sunny image, the kind Dollarhyde might obsess over, might plan a murder over. Graham seems unaffected by his encounter with Dollarhyde. But images can be deceiving.