Ever since the coming of sound, filmmakers tried in vain to silence the pictures...
Tubbs: So whats going on?
Crockett: As in?
Tubbs: As in there is undercover and then there is "Which way is up?".
Crockett: What? Do you think I'm in so deep I forgot?
Tubbs: I will never doubt you.
Mann's ingenious solution: make the dialogue nigh incomprehensible in its extreme hieratic quality. You might be thinking that this is some pseudo-realist attempt to tackle the argot of these criminal-police tribes that he loves. You'd be wrong. He's been reading his Chion. When people talk in a Mann film it's about the rhythm, the sound of the words not the meaning. He just wants one word here and there to hit you like a stroke on a canvas. The approach to sound design is expressionist in the extreme -- which forces the TV weaned, -- yes, even them -- to fall back to the images, which ever since he's gone Digital, have become more the looser stuff of 30's poetic realism than the slicky-hard rubber style of the early Mann.
Take it to the limit one more time, etc.
