One Shot invites close readings of the basic unit of film grammar.
Thief (Michael Mann, 1981).
In a now-iconic scene from Michael Mann's Thief (1981), Frank (James Caan) and Jessie (Tuesday Weld) drink coffee at an all-night diner. He’s dragged her here after letting her languish alone at a local dive where they were meant to rendezvous. They settle into opposite sides of the booth: she’s hunched forward, he’s arched back. Cups and saucers lay before them; bubbles of neon decorate the dark beyond the window. The shot is symmetrical, succinct, and exceptionally Mannian. The immutable diner and its pervasive simplicity come to encapsulate the auteur’s vision and true concerns.
Frank is the first in a line of Mann archetypes: solitary bruisers and consummate professionals in their chosen fields leading lives stripped down to their barest essentials. It stands to reason that people in pursuit of a less effortful existence would be drawn to coffee shops and diners. More than just a way station in which to dwell unnoticed, the diner is a sanctuary of codified, ritualized routine, where familiar customs and tacit agreements offer respite to characters who deliberately and methodically build their day-to-day on an unyielding matrix of protocol, an unspoken urban bushido. The diner absolves them from the monumental, nigh mythic, decision-making of Mann’s cinematic cosmos. Sometimes they barely scan the menu, that labyrinthine document being only an avatar of possibility. (Another typical Mann shot finds someone gazing out into the distance, grappling with difficult choices.) In today's culinary landscape, the diner is one of the last places where one doesn't have to muddle their thinking. A Denver omelet. Ham on rye. Nothing more, nothing less.
Even the CBS cafeteria of The Insider (1999) and the low-key downtown LA restaurant Hamjibak in Blackhat (2015) fall into this lineage of locations. Classified as neither home nor work and containing within it the potential for both individual solace and shared camaraderie, the diner is a quintessential “third place.” Its frequent appearances underscore Mann’s penchant for collapsing the boundaries in his work—between external actions and interior motives, the heavy burden of duty and the easy bliss of domesticity, even digital and celluloid. We will know a certain kind of world is over when Mann figures congregate in plush rooms appointed with posh silence instead of pedestrian clatter.
When Mann’s men attempt to live outside of their spartan liturgy, things fall apart. As he’s pulled back into a life of crime for that one last job, Frank gains house, wife, family. But they cannot last. Where he will go next is uncertain. In a world of fleeting moments, nothing is more steadfast than a cup of joe on a Formica surface.