Blue, in Manhunter, is the color of home, safety and
shelter. At its most basic, blue is the color associated with the space where a
character can truly live. Since we see the majority of Manhunter through Will
Graham’s eyes, it makes sense that most of the blue in the film permeates his idea of home.
The shot that opens the film establishes the semiotics of blue by panning
down from a blue sky to the figures of Will Graham and Jack Crawford framed
against an equally blue ocean. That Jack is, in a sense, asking Will to temporarily "turn his back" on the blue haven he has created for himself with Molly and Kevin and return to the world of dangerous work explains Will's positioning here.
It is important to note that the Graham home abuts these two borders of blue. Later, an interior shot of Will and Molly in
bed as they discuss Will’s decision to go back into the field is rendered in an
intense—if artificial—blue. This same blue reappears each time Will contacts
Molly during his investigation, reinforcing the idea that blue is the color of
home, a stable place that awaits a wandering character.
When Will visits Lecktor in an attempt to “recover the
mindset” of a psychopathic killer, he wears a solid blue tie, almost the way
one would wear a crucifix when visiting a vampire. Although we see Lecktor
securely caged behind a series of bars, we know that for Will the real threat
is not physical but mental proximity, that Will is terrified of Lecktor staging a "home invasion"
into his thoughts as he had once before, when Will initially caught him.
The solid
blue tie is an extra bar added to the cell, the “thin blue line” of an interior
police force assigned to keep Lecktor out. This use of the tie color is a
deliberate choice on the part of director Michael Mann: Will is wearing
the same shirt he had on in the previous scene at the Atlanta Police Department, but has obviously changed ties in anticipation of being face-to-face
with Lecktor again. That Lecktor, in brilliant and psychopathic fashion, picks up on what Will is doing is demonstrated a little bit later when he uses a blue highlighting pen to tamper with his phone and ultimately obtain Graham's home address.
The color next appears during a dream sequence while
Will is on the plane to Birmingham. Blue sky is visible through the windows as Will arranges on a folder a series of photos depicting the deceased families while they were still alive. Suddenly we see a blue engine suspended by a rope, seemingly being loaded out of the sky. The dream-image is initially disconcerting—since Will is on a plane, it’s almost as
if this is the engine of the sky itself that we see being brought down to earth. A
shot later in the dream reveals this to be a boat engine that Will is working on. Molly approaches Will
on the dock, and there is close-up of her smiling at him. The blank, almost predatory look on Will’s face in his parallel close-up indicates that his interior space,
his dreams, have slowly begun to mingle with those of the killer he is
pursuing. As proof, Will is awakened when a young girl seated next to him
begins screaming for her Mommy—while Will slept, brutal crime scene photos of the butchered Leeds and Jacobi families somehow spilled out of his briefcase. It is almost as if, during his dream, Will had been responsible for these families' transformation.
Home--the blue engine that makes Will run--hangs by an unsteady rope. Outside the plane, darkness swallows the little bit of blue left in the sky.
Later, when a sting operation with the hope of catching
Dollarhyde has been set up, Will is given a set of Glaser Safety slugs, special bullets with blue
tips, guaranteed to "one-shot stop" a killer.
The blue on these bullets is a clear
indication of what Will wants to protect--he knows that he will have to take his “home” back by force. Although the
sting is a failure, the blue bullets remain in his possession—we are given a clear shot of one on the floor
of the police car as Will loads his gun on the way to Dollarhyde’s
house near the end of the film. At this point, Will is so far gone in his
identification with the killer that only Dollarhyde’s death will set him free.
The blue on the bullets, small dots, are the vestiges of Will’s desire
for home and peace. They have become weaponized in pursuit of Dollarhyde.
After Dollarhyde’s death by these bullets, we see Will reunite with his
family at the end of the film. Although he bears some physical scars, the grin
on his face as well as the parallel blues of his and Kevin's shirts hint that he
has escaped the mental scars of his previous encounters with the killer’s mindset.
The freeze-frame which ends the film shows Will, Molly and Kevin looking out on
the same blue sky and ocean which opened the film. Will is safe.
On a side note: when the focus of the film shifts about midway through from Will’s to Francis Dollarhyde’s point-of-view, we see the neon-blue (so far associated only with Graham’s
vision of home) used in a seemingly contradictory way. The establishing shot of Gateway
labs, where Dollarhyde works, is bathed in this neon-blue, as is the interior and the glasses Dollarhyde is wearing. Why is the "home" color used here?
Gateway Labs, for all intents and
purposes, IS Dollarhyde’s true home, at least as far as Mann’s film is
concerned. In adapting the Red Dragon source material, one of the major changes
director Michael Mann made was the removal of
Dollarhyde’s backstory and biography. Given that, in the novel, this backstory
was so intimately connected with his grandmother’s home, Dollarhyde’s actual, physical
home is mainly seen at the climax of the film, where it is presented as a kind of
alien landscape without history. For Mann, Dollarhyde is a purely cinematic entity, literally and figurally a kind of
filmmaker, a director who scripts crime scenes and casts women in the lead roles of his
visual “dreams”. This Dollarhyde’s true home is film—hence the blue when we
meet him at the film lab where he works. This is Mann indicating, through a
strategic use of a color whose meaning has already been established in relation
to Will Graham, that his Dollarhyde lives purely on and through film, and that
the end of this life will be an equally cinematic event with little or no reference to Thomas Harris's book.
