Deadlights: Do You See?

Manhunter is a movie about looking deep into the putrid innards of the worst humanity has to offer and examining that welter of gore and bile not with disgust, but with empathy. It's perhaps the single most important lesson horror has to teach: that to dismiss what repulses us out of hand is to foster its growth in our own hidden places, that the dangerous work of empathizing with the most degraded human beings alive is not merely some trendy criminologist strategy but a vital necessity to the maintenance of a caring personality.

As FBI criminal profiler Will Graham actor William Petersen is equal parts gentle touch and open wound. Soft-spoken and thoughtful, he wrestles with the psychic cost of chasing murderous lunatics while increasingly vivid projections of those same men form within him and whisper in the darkness of his thoughts that perhaps to feel for a killer is to slip too deep into his skin. "Smell yourself," imprisoned serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lektor (Brian Cox) quips smugly from his cell after deducing that Will has come to see him in order to "...get the old scent back."

Images and the observation thereof play a central role in Manhunter. The killer leaves mirrors in his victims' eyes to observe the transformation he believes he's undergoing. He watches home movies of the families he preys upon in order to select his targets. Later he shows slides of his killings to a captive reporter, asking the man repeatedly, "Do you see?" as though trying to infect him with his own warped understanding of the world. Graham, by contrast, more often than not sits in silence with the images of violence and depredation he must take in to understand his quarry. His focus is inward, to solve not through deduction but through empathy.

Manhunter's long stretches of quiet contemplation allow the import of its choices to soak into its audience, to penetrate preconceptions and destabilize our ideas of what wrongdoing is and how to understand its place in the world. Where a lesser horror film might offer up grotesque images for their own sake -- to shock and unnerve, to set a tone -- Manhunter finds the deeper meaning in the madness. Rubbernecking in passing at some awful spectacle isn't enough; you've got to mean it when you look.