You Love to See It: Manhunter (Patreon)

A serial killer brings his blind girlfriend to the zoo to touch a sedated tiger. It sounds more like the setup for an off-color joke than the premise of one of the hottest psychosexual scenes of the 1980s. Manhunter, Michael Mann’s adaptation of Thomas Harris’s novel Red Dragon, makes the scene its centerpiece. Mann shoots it with a tender, tightly wound intimacy that feels as though at any moment it could disintegrate into a welter of blood and claws and shattered bones. It’s a skin stretched over sleeping violence, a literal image of death and the lady entwined. As Reba runs her fingers over the softly breathing predator her lover, Francis, watches stricken with unbearable tension and desire from the corner of the operating room, pressing a hand to his mouth, moaning almost inaudibly.

The parallel between Reba touching the tiger’s mouth and her earlier attempt to reach up and feel Francis’s smile is clear; both are dangerous, unpredictable creatures uncharacteristically showing their soft underbellies. Both could tear her apart in an instant if they wanted to. I’ve always read the scene as Francis’s attempt to process his conflicted feelings about keeping Reba close, to justify and sexualize the extreme danger he represents to her. Seeing that dynamic externalized is powerful for him. Overwhelmingly so. In many ways it also mirrors his fixation on the William Blake paintings of the great red dragon and the woman clothed in the sun, the tiger’s fanged reddish-orange bulk a credible stand-in for the demonic figure of the dragon.

On a tonal level, the scene cements the entanglement of the film’s sweat-soaked tension and its urgent sexuality. Reba’s fingers drag furrows through the tiger’s thick coat. They probe at the exposed flesh of its gums and the yellowed daggers of its teeth. Francis shivers in the background, clearly driven to interrupt, to pull her back, but restraining himself. He has a masturbatory air, ashamed and trembling, as he watches. In a way, this is his submission to her. He lets her touch the incredible danger he represents and forces himself to remain in the role of spectator, powerless and objectified. It’s the key to Manhunter, that doomed and damaged love story, and this scene is its moment of grace before the real tiger wakes.