“I, for my part, from the nature of my life, advanced infallibly in one direction and in one direction only. It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognize the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.” — Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

The duality of man — a concept typically discussed using that clearly gendered phrase — is a theme that has been explored by the arts almost as long as they’ve existed. The theme is generally used to ponder acts which, at a base level, are criminal ones. It’s no surprise, then, that genres that have violence as part of their genetic makeup — crime, horror, war and so on — typically delve into this theme. Man’s duality is often romanticized as a “two sides of the same coin” situation, where the Good Guy and Bad Guy must acknowledge their overlapping yet separate traits, leaving men who choose moral paths able to self-congratulate their Good status. Yet the most interesting aspect to man’s duality — and perhaps the most honest — is an understanding that every man is both Good and Bad, their destinies dictated by their character and not their label. 

Filmmaker Michael Mann was in a period of duality in the mid-1980s himself. Having suffered a blow creatively and financially with The Keep, he focused his efforts on his old home medium of television, and in so doing found a new wave of success. Premiering in 1984, Miami Vice became a huge pop culture hit, notable not just for its buddy cop duo Crockett (Don Johnson) and Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas) but for Mann’s tight stylistic grip on the show as executive producer. Emphasizing fashion (with Mann being inspired by a revival in Art Deco, banning colors like red and brown from the production) and partially scored with a slew of New Wave and pop radio hits, the show became a trendsetter in a number of ways. Moreover, it explored the identity and masculinity of its two protagonists as they flipped back and forth between undercover personas and tried to juggle relationships with their all-consuming work.  As Miami Vice’s popularity climbed, Mann produced another series, Crime Story, which premiered in 1986 and was based on the exploits of former Chicago Sergeant Detective Chuck Adamson. Crime Story was not as successful as Miami Vice, yet it’s plot material would later become L.A. Takedown and Heat, chronicling the pursuit of a master criminal by an obsessed detective while the two men’s personal lives deteriorate in the process. 

Yet Mann had not given up on making feature films, and split his time working on television with making a return to the big screen in 1986. Hired by producer Dino De Laurentiis to adapt Thomas Harris’ novel Red Dragon, the film ended up with the ironically apt title Manhunter. The movie is a quiet trailblazer in a number of ways: it was one of the first films to depict law enforcement procedures with regards to serial killer profiling, it continued Mann’s penchant for flashy visuals and pop/rock music soundtracks (with his prior films’ use of Tangerine Dream replaced here by acts like The Reds and Michel Rubini) and introduced the character of Dr. Hannibal Lecter to pop culture. Made well before that villain’s enormous popularity, Mann’s adaptation of Red Dragon is more focused on F.B.I. profiler Will Graham (William Petersen) and his prey, Francis Dollarhyde (Tom Noonan), inviting the comparisons and contrasts between their respective worlds. That doesn’t mean Lecter is completely diminished; as played with alpha male arrogance by Brian Cox, the killer toys with Graham’s psyche from behind bars, taunting the lawman partly out of sadistic glee and partly out of hurt that such a lesser man could possibly have caught him. Lecter is far from the only man in the film who indulges in masculine posturing, as Graham, Dollarhyde, Graham’s boss Jack Crawford (Dennis Farina) and tabloid muckraker Freddy Lounds (Stephen Lang) all have their moments of aggression, each attempting to use it to assert dominance in situations where they’ve got no control. 

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What Mann delves into with Manhunter is the question of male identity, especially with regard to transformation — not physical transformation (though Dollarhyde’s identification with William Blake’s Red Dragon implies this a bit), but rather a changing of the inner self. Graham’s speciality of profiling psychopathic killers requires him to make an effort to transform his way of thinking and even his personality into his prey’s, studying elements of grisly crime scenes to try and piece together the thought process of such a person. Mann gradually reveals that Graham can be too good at his job, but this isn’t an instance of making the character an 80s supercop — Graham transformed his psyche so well that he was institutionalized after capturing Lecter and he acknowledges (as the film itself does) that it means that a darkness resides within himself. As such, Graham deliberately distances himself from his child as well as his wife, Molly (Kim Griest), during the investigation, knowing their presence will hold his darkness back. By contrast, a woman’s presence is the catalyst for Dollarhyde nearly becoming a loving, moral man rather than the murderous beast he really is, the blind and friendly Reba (Joan Allen) connecting with him unguardedly. Yet Dollarhyde’s paranoid fantasies of male insecurity, believing Reba to be promiscuous, abort this change in him, while these fantasies are what Graham successfully taps into in order to track him down. After the film’s violent finale, both men are made to look physically representative of their inner selves — the deceased Dollarhyde lay in a pool of blood shaped like a dragon’s wings, and the once clean-cut visage of Graham is marred, scarred and bruised but nonetheless intact. As the title implies, Manhunter is a film about men searching for themselves as much as others. 

After Manhunter’s deep dive into the dark side of masculinity, Mann’s next film, 1992’s The Last of the Mohicans, is far more idealistic when it comes to male representation. A re-adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper’s novel (as well as a remake of the 1936 movie, one of Mann’s childhood favorites), the film follows the heroic exploits of Nathaniel Poe (Daniel Day-Lewis), nicknamed “Hawkeye” and adopted by the last of the Mohican tribe, Chingachgook (Russell Means). Set in 1757 during the height of the French and Indian War, Hawkeye and his adopted Native American family come across two daughters of a British Colonel, Cora (Madeline Stowe) and Alice (Jodhi May), and agree to escort them to their father’s fort, which is under siege by the French. Once there, the pressures of the war converge on the characters: the Colonel, Munro (Maurice Roëves), is forced to surrender, Hawkeye is made a prisoner (thanks to helping the American colonist militia escape the fort when their homes are attacked) and a renegade Huron, Magua (Wes Studi), is out for Munro’s blood — including the Colonel’s whole family. Mann applies his studious and well-researched acumen to the movie and its characters, dividing the film’s point of view between several of them. As a result, the motivations and concerns of Hawkeye, Munro and Magua are given equal weight, and even Cora and her desires as a woman nearly trapped into marriage by the arrogant Heyward (Steven Waddington) plays a major part, the first time in Mann’s filmography where a female character isn’t just used as a counterpoint to the men. 

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While The Last of the Mohicans is, on the surface, a very male movie — suffused with “Boy’s Life” outdoorsy adventure, historical accuracy and wartime conflict — its dual nature is seen through Cora and Hawkeye’s romance, making it a secret bodice-ripper of a film. The major aspect of masculinity explored within it is male integrity, a quality that lends itself to wartime honor as well as romance. While some characters begin the film duplicitous, by the end of the movie their inner selves are revealed and represented — Magua wants justice for his people and is justified in that desire, Heyward does care for Cora unconditionally and displays his inner bravery, and so on. Hawkeye is the one character who hardly undergoes a change during the film, making him an ideal romantic man — clearly spoken with stringent morals, Hawkeye promises he will find Cora no matter what happens to her when she’s captured, and its due to his character that such a declaration is believable. It’s telling that Hawkeye — an ideal and idealistic male — is a member of a literally dying tribe, his adopted father Chingachgook and brother Uncas (Eric Schweig) similar examples of male integrity. In Mann’s hands, The Last of the Mohicans is a near-apocalyptic lament, a story of a dying people and way of life, of the last men living on another plane of existence than their brethren. 

That theme is continued in Mann’s crime epic, Heat (1995), which sees its protagonist and antagonist being representative of a unique breed of man, each understanding the other in a way no one else can. Heat is the ultimate version of Mann’s interest in adapting the real-life exploits of Chuck Adamson, particularly the subject’s 1963 pursuit of professional robber Neil McCauley. Having written a first draft of a script in 1979, Mann first adapted a few elements from it into episodes of Crime Story before using the script as the basis for a pilot movie intended to launch yet another television series. That series never got off the ground, leaving the pilot film, L.A. Takedown (1989), an unfortunate curiosity in Mann’s filmography. With the limited resources (not to mention runtime) dictated by television in those days, L.A. Takedown struggles just to tell its story, never mind develop its characters. As such, the masculinity explored in the film is merely surface level, with detective Vincent Hanna (Scott Plank) and criminal Patrick McLaren (Alex McArthur) delivering Mann’s tough-guy patter with performative machismo. The driven natures of the two men make them come off like workaholics, their relationship woes and ultimate fates byproducts of the violent world they both inhabit. 

When Mann was convinced to revisit his original epic script after making The Last of the Mohicans, the resultant feature film, Heat, is far more rich and nuanced than L.A. Takedown could’ve hoped to be. Now, Hanna (Al Pacino) and his prey, Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) — the character regaining his real-life counterpart’s name — are complex individuals surrounded by a well-drawn ensemble of characters. Heat is still male-dominated, but the presence of several major female characters — Vincent’s wife Justine (Diane Venora), his adopted daughter Lauren (Natalie Portman), Neil’s girlfriend Eady (Amy Brenneman) and Charlene (Ashley Judd), the wife of McCauley crew member Chris (Val Kilmer) — allow Mann’s usual contrapuntal use of femininity to become its own alternate world, a more aspirational one that the men can’t quite cross over into. Hanna, Neil and their respective crews of cops and robbers are truly in their own dimension, one where just about every person not in their game is a pawn to be used, where they occupy the same spaces as each other, even the same restaurants. That aspect is what leads to the film’s infamous diner sequence, a Mann trope that sees legendary actors Pacino and De Niro share the same scene for the first time, a meeting of the minds between two professionals who intrinsically understand each other.

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The diner scene is also indicative of Heat’s homoeroticism, the pairing of Hanna and McCauley the most unabashedly romantic in the movie. For an artist steeped in masculine interests, it’s curious that Mann’s films have tended to avoid homosexuality to this point — the most explicit mention of it is in Manhunter, where Dollarhyde is furious at being referred to by Lounds as potentially gay. Perhaps, then, the connection between Hanna and McCauley should be referred to as homoromanticism, since their interactions aren’t really laced with sexual desire so much as a deeper kinship and affection. With the diner scene acting as the duo’s “date,” the cat and mouse game between the two begins to look more like a sort of courtship, each of them losing their female significant others thanks to their interactions — in the film’s climax, McCauley literally leaves Eady upon sighting Hanna. Each is attracted to the other not so much because of their personalities but because of their choices, neither fully understanding why the other would choose a life of law enforcement or crime. Yet the men completely understand the similar lifestyle and mindset both worlds require, making their kinship not just romantic in a broad sense but elemental, extending the metaphor from Manhunter of predator and prey, Good and Evil. Both men either realize (or come to realize) the relative freedom and burden that comes with refusing or having attachments, McCauley’s lonely ethos on life a continuation of where Thief’s Frank ended up. Hanna catches McCauley, thanks to Neil breaking his own rule with Eady. The cop kills the robber, then holds his hand as the two share one last look at the horizon. Like the other men in Mann’s films, these two cannot change who they are, but they do have the capacity to understand one another, making their masculinity a sort of brotherhood. Their fated destines also speaks to Mann’s deep understanding of prison mentality, the concept that one’s character dictates one’s fate. In this way, masculinity itself is its own sort of prison, a cage that keeps someone like Hanna away from a meaningful romantic relationship while it keeps someone like McCauley from ever truly finding an escape. In Mann’s duality of man, cop and robber are, in Stevenson’s words, “radically both” one and the same. With Heat successfully summing up Mann’s interest in the duality of cops and robbers, the filmmaker would next move on to explore other intersections of male prowess, integrity and criminality.