This article discusses plot details and scene specifics from Michael Mann’s film Heat (1995) and his novel Heat 2 (2022).
John Carpenter’s dystopian classic Escape from New York (1981), set in 1997, opens with an expository intertitle: “1988—The Crime Rate in the United States Rises Four Hundred Percent.” Though that grim prognostication amounted to an exaggeration, the issue itself had nonetheless become a big deal here in the real world by the early 1990s:
In 1993, the year President Clinton took office, violent crime struck nearly 11 million Americans, and an additional 32 million suffered thefts or burglaries. These staggering numbers put millions more in fear. They also choked the economic vitality out of entire neighborhoods.
Politically, crime had become one of the most divisive issues in the country. Republicans called for an ever more punitive “war on drugs,” while many Democrats offered little beyond nebulous calls to eliminate the “root causes” of crime.
David Yassky, “Unlocking the Truth About the Clinton Crime Bill,” Opinion, New York Times, April 9, 2016
Clinton’s response was the measurably effective (if still controversial) Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, otherwise known as the 1994 Crime Bill, coauthored by Joe Biden, the provisions of which—and this is just a sampling—added fifty new federal offenses, expanded capital punishment, led to the establishment of state sex-offender registries, and included the Federal Assault Weapons Ban (since expired) and the Violence Against Women Act.
It was an attempt to address a big issue in America at the time: Crime, particularly violent crime, had been rising for decades, starting in the 1960s but continuing, on and off, through the 1990s (in part due to the crack cocaine epidemic).
Politically, the legislation was also a chance for Democrats—including the recently elected president, Bill Clinton—to wrestle the issue of crime away from Republicans. Polling suggested Americans were very concerned about high crime back then. And especially after George H.W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential election in part by painting Dukakis as “soft on crime,” Democrats were acutely worried that Republicans were beating them on the issue.
German Lopez, “The controversial 1994 crime law that Joe Biden helped write, explained,” Vox, September 29, 2020
Given the sociopolitical conditions of the era, it stands to reason—hell, it seems so obvious in hindsight—the 1990s would be a golden age of neo-noir crime cinema. The death of Michael Corleone, as it happens, signified a rebirth of the genre itself; Martin Scorsese countered the elegiac lethargy—that’s not a criticism—of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Part III with the coke-fueled kineticism of Goodfellas (both 1990). Henry Hill shared none of Michael’s nagging reluctance about life in the Italian Mafia; he always wanted to be a gangster!
Reasoning that was probably true of audiences, too—as an author of horror stories, I certainly appreciate a healthy curiosity for the dark side—Hollywood offered vicarious trips into the criminal underworlds of Hell’s Kitchen, in Phil Joanou’s State of Grace (1990), and Harlem, in Mario Van Peebles’ New Jack City (1991), both of which feature undercover cops as major characters. So does Bill Duke’s Deep Cover (1992), about a police officer (Laurence Fishburne) posing as an L.A. drug dealer as part of a broader West Coast sting operation.
The line between cop and criminal, so clearly drawn in the action-comedies of the previous decade (Lethal Weapon, Beverly Hills Cop, Stakeout, Running Scared), was becoming subject to greater ambiguity. In no movie is that made more starkly apparent than Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant (1992), about a corrupt, hedonistic, drug-addicted, gambling-indebted, intentionally nameless New York cop (Harvey Keitel) investigating the rape of a nun in the vain hope it will somehow redeem his pervasive rottenness.
And it wasn’t merely that new stories were being told; this is Hollywood, after all, so we have some remakes in the mix. Classic crime thrillers were given contemporary makeovers, like Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991), as well as Barbet Schroeder’s Kiss of Death (1995), which is mostly remembered, to the extent it’s remembered at all, as the beginning and end of David Caruso’s would-be movie career, but which is much better than its reputation, thanks in no small part to a sharp script by Richard Price (Clockers), full of memorably colorful Queens characters and his signature street-smart dialogue.
Creative experimentation was in full swing, too, as neo-noir films incorporated conventions of other genres, including erotic thriller (Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct [1992]), black comedy (the Coen brothers’ Fargo [1996] and The Big Lebowski [1998]), period throwback (Carl Franklin’s Devil in a Blue Dress [1995]; Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential [1997]), neo-Western (James Mangold’s Cop Land [1997]), and, well, total coffee-cup-shattering, head-in-a-box mindfuckery (Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects; David Fincher’s Seven [both 1995]).
Christ, at that point, Quentin Tarantino practically became a subgenre unto himself after the one-two punch of Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), which in turn inspired an incessant succession of self-consciously “clever” knockoffs like John Herzfeld’s 2 Days in the Valley (1996) and Gary Fleder’s Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead (1995). By the mid-’90s, the crime rate, at least at the cinema, sure seemed like it had risen by 400%.
As different as they all are, those films can almost unanimously be viewed as a repudiation of the ethos of ’80s action movies, in which there were objectively good guys, like John McClane, in conflict with objectively bad guys, like Hans Gruber, in a zero-sum battle for justice, for victory. It was all very simple and reassuring, in keeping with the archconservative, righteous-cowboy worldview of Ronald Reagan. And while those kinds of movies continued to find a receptive audience—look no further than the Die Hard–industrial complex, which begat Under Siege (1992) and Cliffhanger (1993) and Speed (1994), among scores of others—filmmakers were increasingly opting for multilayered antiheroes over white hats versus black hats.
Which begged the question: Given how blurred the lines had become between good guys and bad guys in crime cinema, could you ever go back to telling an earnest, old-school cops-and-robbers story—one with an unequivocally virtuous protagonist and nefarious antagonist—that nonetheless aspired to be something more dramatically credible, more psychologically nuanced, more thematically layered than a Steven Seagal star vehicle?
Enter Michael Mann’s Heat.
After the nonlinear narrativity of The Usual Suspects and Tarantino, the plot of Heat is refreshingly straightforward: Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) leads a crew of highline thieves pulling off heists—or “taking down scores,” in the movie’s parlance—across Los Angeles; LAPD Lieutenant Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) is the dogged detective on their trail. For the entirety of its nearly three-hour runtime, the movie has you rooting simultaneously for McCauley to get away and for Hanna to catch him in the act.
The fictional story was loosely inspired by the real-life experiences of Chicago police detective Chuck Adamson, who tracked and killed a thief by the actual name of Neil McCauley in 1964. Adamson, as well as career criminal Edward Bunker (the model for Jon Voight’s character, Nate) served as technical consultants on Heat. As such, Mann’s attention to procedural detail, along with his commitment to psychological verisimilitude, resulted in a cinematic epic that unfolds with novelistic patience, establishing each character in his or her dramatic status quo—mostly his (more on that point later)—meticulously setting the chessboard before drawing the game pieces into one another’s circles.
This is the kind of story that wouldn’t even be attempted as a feature film today, and not because there’s no longer an audience for non-superhero cinema or the near-total obsolescence of movie stars, but rather owed to Heat’s ambitious narrative scope; a project like this would be conceived and developed as a limited series of eight or ten episodes for HBO Max or Netflix. But to watch Heat now, in our age of streaming content that’s gone all-in on the structurally questionable “ten-hour movie” model of televisional narrativity, is to remember what once upon a time constituted good storytelling: the ability to draw audiences into a fictional scenario and keep them there—not with the promise of yet more open-ended worldbuilding, but with the boon of catharsis, the finality of decisive resolution.
We the audience agree to submit to a short-term state of tension in return for the storyteller’s assurance of climax and release—a point to the story, aside from its own endless self-perpetuation. A filmmaker cannot hold an audience in stifled-breath suspense when the narrative arc is interrupted nine times over ten episodes, hence the reason Monster in the House movies such as The Exorcist and The Omen and Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer all failed creatively (and commercially) in their relatively recent transitions to the episodic format of the small screen.
The masterful storytelling of Heat is a welcome reminder that often a long movie is preferable to a short television series. Heat feels BIG, not bloated, in contrast with so much of our so-called “prestige” TV, which “almost always sacrifices good storytelling now for the perceived benefit of good storytelling later, and too often results in neither coming true” (Kathryn VanArendonk, “Why Are We So Sure ‘Prestige’ TV Looks Like a 10-Hour Movie?”, Trends, Vulture, March 28, 2017).
Heat is a grand-scale cops-and-robbers saga told on a broad canvas, but one in which no detail, no matter how granular, is irrelevant. “There’s a design at work in all art,” Tom Stoppard wrote in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1966). “Events must play themselves out to aesthetic, moral and logical conclusion.” Hanna and McCauley, the two most regimented men in their respective professions, move through the plot turns of Heat on a collision course. At the climactic moment, one of them falters in his discipline—at the cost of his life—and one of them doesn’t—at the cost of his marriage—and the story reaches its inexorable dénouement:
It ends the only way it can end, with two of the toughest men in Los Angeles holding hands as one of them bleeds out on the periphery of LAX’s tarmac. For the greater part of two and a half hours, we’ve watched Neil McCauley—mastermind of heists and bank robberies—and Vincent Hanna—lieutenant in the LAPD’s Major Crimes Unit—circle one another, chase each other, and calmly converse over a cup of coffee. Now, however, these apex predators of the urban jungle have reached their endgame, and this cop and this criminal share one final moment together before McCauley shuffles off this mortal coil. The fact that they are played by Robert De Niro and Al Pacino only sweetens the deal.
This is where we leave the twin anti-heroes of Heat, Michael Mann’s epic 1995 crime thriller, right before the final credits roll. It’s the perfect fade-out of a film devoted to the sort of game-recognizes-game professionalism and Zen machismo that the writer-director traffics in . . . steeped in a sense of authenticity regarding what these men do and who they are—as if, in Mann’s universe, there is any difference between the two. “McCauley is passing out of existence, [while] in contact with the only other person who truly understands him,” the filmmaker says, nodding to himself as he recalls the image over a Zoom call. “And ironically, that’s also the person who killed him.
“It’s the last moment of Heat,” Mann adds. “But it’s really the first moment of Heat. It’s when that ending occurred to me that I thought, ‘Ok, I could make this movie.’”
David Fear, “‘Heat 2’: Why Michael Mann’s Sequel to His Classic Crime-Movie Had to Be a Novel,” Rolling Stone, August 7, 2022
On the subject of germinal moments, Heat has special significance in my life, as it is the movie my wife and I saw on our first date, on Third Avenue at East 86th Street, as college sophomores. I distinctly recall the other feature playing at the cineplex that day was the long-since-forgotten Sandra Bullock/Denis Leary romcom Two If by Sea (1996). Few films, and few relationships, have staying power; most are ephemeral. It isn’t lost on me that Heat, culturally resonant as it’s been and relevant as it remains, beat the odds. So did we.
Revisiting Heat over a quarter century later, it is also apparent that it’s so much more than merely an enduring masterpiece; it’s a cinematic mic drop. Heat is to crime operas what Jaws is to shark movies—a never-to-be-bested pinnacle of the genre. Any policier produced after 1995 would exist in the long shadow cast by Mann’s magnum opus. Mangold’s Cop Land is, deservedly, a cult classic—Sylvester Stallone, cast against type as a schlubby Jersey sheriff, gives the performance of his career among an all-star ensemble including Keitel and De Niro—but I can’t help but think it would occupy a far loftier position in the pantheon of crime dramas had it been produced only a few years earlier.
So, having permanently spoiled the cops-and-robbers genre for all future entries, and having reached an utterly satisfying aesthetic, moral, and logical conclusion, I can’t say I’ve ever nursed a desire for—or even so much as entertained a fleeting thought of—a Heat sequel. What would’ve been left to do, after all, save put Hanna on another case, against an inevitably less-compelling adversary?
Besides which, Pacino has long since aged out of the part, and I no more want him to reprise that role than I care to see Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones again or Eddie Murphy in another Beverly Hills Cop. On balance, I find the entire premise of so-called “legacy sequels” utterly depressing: They are less about exploring how beloved characters have changed with age—Creed (2015) and Creed II (2018), which honor the best of the Rocky movies and even somehow redeem the worst of them, are rare instances of a franchise revival done right—than they are about reassuring their audiences absolutely nothing has changed, right down to the fucking wardrobe:
So, with half the characters dead, and the actors who portrayed the surviving characters too old to reprise their roles, to say nothing of a bow-tied conclusion that doesn’t leave you wanting more—in the best possible way—how would one even begin to creatively approach a follow-up to Heat…?
You’d switch the medium. Heat 2 is Mann’s first novel, and though he had help writing it (with Edgar Award–winning thriller author Meg Gardiner), it very much evinces his singular voice and style. If Heat was uncommonly novelistic in its narrative structure, it’s fitting Heat 2 should be so stylistically cinematic. Though not formatted like a screenplay, Heat 2 is very much written like one: Clipped prose, more suggestive than descriptive—mostly effective, occasionally superficial. Action unfolds in present tense, lending the story an undercurrent of urgency as pervasively, surreptitiously oppressive as the stagnant air of sunbaked SoCal. Mann’s economical composition reflects the same no-nonsense, minimalist discipline of his hyperfocused lawman and outlaw.
Spanning the years 1988 through 2000, Heat 2 takes a Godfather, Part II–style approach to its storytelling, operating as an intercutting prequel and sequel to Heat, its nonlinear narrative presented in six parts:
- Part One is set in Los Angeles of 1995 during the immediate aftermath of the movie, detailing Hanna’s time-sensitive efforts to find and arrest the single surviving member of McCauley’s crew, Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer), before he can skip town. But it’s too late: Nate (Voight) has already arranged to smuggle Chris to South America via Mexico, his freedom secured—but without much hope he’ll ever see his wife and son again.
- Part Two winds back the clock to 1988 to depict the whirlwind Las Vegas romance of Chris and Charlene (Ashley Judd), a prostitute sans prospects at that point in her life. Chris soon joins McCauley and Michael Cerrito (Tom Sizemore) in Chicago, where the crew pulls off a safety-deposit vault heist that yields an unexpected boon: a cache of shipment logs detailing the precise highway routes by which a notorious drug cartel moves its money from the U.S. to a stash house in Mexico. Meanwhile, Hanna and Casals (Wes Studi)—Chicago cops at this point in their careers, years before they would cross paths with McCauley’s crew—are investigating a series of violent home invasions in the Gold Coast Historic District perpetrated by a sadistic psychopath.
- Part Three takes us to Paraguay of 1996, where Chris works security detail—he’s a glorified chauffeur—for a Taiwanese crime syndicate exploiting one of the country’s free-trade zones. (You get the gist of what this criminal enterprise is up to even if it’s a lot to comprehend, and I say this having read the book twice.) With strategic patience, Chris demonstrates his substantial value to the family and earns their trust, working his way up the organization’s ladder, all in service to his personal endgame: to establish himself as a key player on the global criminal stage, with the clout and resources to get Charlene and Dominick out of the United States for good.
- Part Four brings us down to the Mexican border in 1988, shortly after the Chicago score, for an absolutely thrilling heist sequence—as edge-of-seat intense as the movie’s Downtown L.A. bank robbery—in which McCauley’s crew plans and executes a takedown of the cartel cash depot. I could barely breathe through this entire section, one of the most suspenseful action sequences I’ve ever read in any book or script.
- Part Five returns us to Paraguay of ’96, developing Chris’ alliance—and dalliance—with the Taiwanese crime family’s industrious-yet-sidelined daughter, Ana.
- Up until this point—326 pages into a 466-page novel—Heat 2 has mostly been a series of entertaining if essentially unrelated vignettes, and were it not for the goodwill these characters, and Mann himself, engendered in the audience through the movie, the disjointed narrative presented here would’ve probably tried the patience of even the most forgiving reader. And yet in Part Six, which moves the story forward in time to 2000, back to the city where this saga began, Los Angeles, Mann and Gardiner tie all the plotlines together in supremely satisfying fashion… even if they do rely on some coincidence-heavy plotting to pull it off.
But, then, it is the very nature of coincidence, of causality, that is the central thematic concern of Heat 2: how events connect and lives intersect, even in ways we can never see, know, or appreciate. There is, as Stoppard instructs, a design at work in narrativity, and that is certainly true of Heat 2; Mann establishes his thesis early in the novel, when Neil gets his nose out of joint over an encounter with a hardware vendor who arrives late with a delivery, only to then make unsolicited small talk about what the crew plans to do, exactly, with all those circular saws and prybars…?
Chris and Cerrito load the gear the supplier brought. Neil jumps in one of the work cars and fires up the engine. Chris hops into the passenger seat. He says nothing. They pull out with Cerrito and Molina in the other vehicles behind them. Neil is still breathing hard.
“Motherfucker…” he says to himself.
Chris turns to him. “Let it go. He’s nobody.”
Neil looks over. “Yeah?”
From the way Neil grips the wheel, Chris knows he’s not letting it go.
“It was a random thing,” Chris says.
“Random? Like the guy who saved pennies I knew once. ‘What the fuck are you saving pennies for?’ I asked. ‘’Cause a hundred of ’em makes a dollar,’ he said. Some anonymous asshole sees you and mentions something to somebody who talks to somebody else, which gets overheard, and you wind up being jackpotted, and ‘Where the fuck did that come from?’ It’s invisible but it’s operating all around you. Little strings of micro cause and effect. You can’t see’ em, but they’re there. ‘Oh! I had bad luck.’ Bullshit. It’s for real. . . .”
Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner, Heat 2 (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2022), 73–74
Neil concerns himself with these matters out of a sense of sociopathic self-preservation, but across town, Hanna, a detective of preternatural empathy, reflects in his own way on those little strings of micro cause-and-effect a mere two pages later:
“I had a Korean girl get shot, once. At random. No reason. Freeway sniper. He could have shot the next car. Through the windshield. She’s riding in the back seat. Shot in the head. She was in a coma for a long time. Family came apart. A year later her father’s an alcoholic, loses his job, parents divorce. The younger brother starts setting fires. Multiple lives screwed up forever. That’s what can happen.”
ibid., 76
Skirting unawares along the edges of one another’s orbits, neither Hanna nor McCauley realize at that moment, of course, that the cosmic connective tissue they both recognize so sagaciously will one day put them in professional—and ideological—confrontation with one another. But we do. Such is the appeal of a prequel for an audience—the godlike thrill of storyworld omniscience—but also the tricky creative challenge for the storyteller. Backstory supplies cause; story dramatizes effect. Backstory is to a narrative what gasoline is to an automobile: the ulterior fuel that makes the engine function, propelling the entity to its ultimate destination. You only need just enough, hence the reason most prequels are more-is-less exercises in narrative inevitability.
At their worst, their most crassly commercial, prequels exist to reconcile continuity inconsistencies (and usually just create new ones in the process), to needlessly expound on summary backstory (the fall of the Old Republic in Revenge of the Sith; the Budapest Operation in Black Widow), to provide backstory for the backstory (Andor; The Acolyte), to fill in purposeful narrative gaps misinterpreted as plot holes (Superman’s young adulthood as dramatized, interminably, on Smallville; Ben’s years in self-exile on Tatooine on Obi-Wan Kenobi), to show familiar characters meeting for the first time strictly for the audience’s voyeuristic delight (Star Trek: Strange New Worlds), to elaborate unnecessarily on intentionally enigmatic visual details (the “space jockey” from Ridley Scott’s Alien and Prometheus), to meticulously explain every offhanded allusion (the Kessel Run in Solo and… just about everything else in Solo)—all so the dutiful superfan can maintain a coherent theory of everything.
This is what’s known as point-and-clap entertainment. It’s meaningless—an Easter-egg hunt masquerading as narrativity, a continuity scorecard presented in place of a cathartic story. The scrupulous collection and collation of the floating facts across an intertextual narrative (such as the “universes” of Star Wars and the MCU) turns storytelling into an exercise in puzzle-solving, as if seeing the “whole picture”—a fool’s errand in its own right, given the open-ended expansion of these corporate franchises—will provide the perspective necessary to understand the rhyme and reason for, the cause and effect of, everything in the sprawling storyworld. Because by making sense of the fiction, we make meaning of the “random” events that occur within it, an epiphany seldom if ever attained in real life.
While Mann takes care to connect some dots—Neil’s idiosyncratic fascination with Fiji’s iridescent algae, for example, is one of many small details given contextual illumination, however unnecessarily, in Heat 2—it doesn’t stink of cheap fan service. Such moments are arguably less a commercial indulgence than an artistic one, instances of the type of existential rumination we’ve long come to expect from the introspective professionals who inhabit Mann’s stories. His preeminently self-aware lead characters aren’t in search of meaning; they take meaning from what they do and who they are—from their sense of self-purpose. Consider Hanna, for starters:
Back when he was twelve in Granite City, Illinois, floating on his back in a lake, looking up into the night sky and constellations, he all at once understood that we are an accident of happenstance on a speck of dust in a blink of time in the big nothing. It didn’t fill him with meaninglessness. It made him feel consciousness was a rare and recent temporary accident. And that meant life is about what you did with it right now. It infused him with ambition.
ibid., 78
McCauley espouses a similar understanding of existence in a conversation with his girlfriend, Elisa:
“We’re here now. No big reason we exist. No purpose. No heaven or hell waiting on how we pray. The only real question is, why keep on living? Is life worth it? Why not just kill yourself? The only judgment is how we use the now.”
“I don’t want to put an end to it. If this is what we have, better live it.”
“Yeah. All we have is this moment. We live it, conscious of what it means. Nothing. But completely live it. That’s what it is.”
ibid., 242
One of key components of Neil McCauley’s psychology, established in the movie, that Mann excavates in the novel is the dogma from which his saga draws its title: “Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” The ill-gotten gains—the drug-cartel money—from Neil’s previous ill-gotten gains—the shipment logs acquired during the safe-deposit score—lead directly and unambiguously to the violent death of Elisa. In her final moments of life, Neil acknowledges his culpability in what’s happened:
He fights it for another moment, clutching tight to the world he’s in, to the world he wants, the one that’s about to disappear. Because of his actions. Because of the things he has brought upon this broken glory who lies here on the road.
ibid., 306
Neil is fully fucking aware he invited this tragedy into his life by choosing to rip off the bank in Chicago, and subsequently choosing to steal from the cartel in Mexico. (And on the subject of cause-and-consequence, the stolen stash-house money winds up unintentionally funding a shitload of monstrously evil activity in the final section of Heat 2, because one bad deed begets another in Mann’s world.) Yet when we meet Neil again seven years later, during the events of the movie, how have these events changed him? Have they inspired him to stop stealing—to stop doing bad things that lead to yet other bad things?
No—he’s simply more disciplined about keeping personal relationships at arm’s length. Neil has no interest in changing who he is—in aspiring to be better.
Neither, for that matter, does our hero Hanna. When we join him again in 2000, he’s been drained of so much of his popeyed piss ’n’ vinegar, long-divorced from Justine (Diane Venora), who will no longer speak to him, desperate to avoid “his report-fucked office” (ibid., 334), and subsisting on a steady diet of Adderall just to keep his legs pumping. Even his faithful sidekick Drucker (Mykelti Williamson) is growing impatient with having to cover for him.
It didn’t have to come to that, though. Someone who once loved Hanna—someone less important to him, ultimately, than Neil McCauley—tried to get him to see the light:
The very last thing [Justine] told him was: Speed won’t give you the power to track your prey in the dark. That glow you feel? It isn’t x-ray vision. It’s self-incineration. Understand? And the door shut in his face.
ibid., 336
Vincent Hanna and Neil McCauley are alpha males who make no apologies for being what they are, who live comfortably in their skin—just like some seasoned action hero still inexplicably garbed in the same jacket he’s been wearing since the ’80s—and who refuse to be changed by any loving appeal or, worse, tragic consequence from a choice they’ve made. They don’t give a fuck. All the self-awareness in the world doesn’t inspire a moment’s humility in either of them. Both men are slaves to their egos and perfectly content to remain so for all eternity. They explicitly admit as much to one another in the celebrated coffee-shop scene from the film, after McCauley tells Hanna his girlfriend (Amy Brenneman) labors under the false impression he’s a salesman:
HANNA: So, then, if you spot me coming around that corner, you’re just gonna walk out on this woman? Not say goodbye?
McCAULEY: That’s the discipline.
HANNA: That’s pretty vacant, no?
McCAULEY: Yeah, it is what it is. It’s that or we both better go do something else, pal.
HANNA: I don’t know how to do anything else.
McCAULEY: Neither do I.
HANNA: I don’t much want to, either.
McCAULEY: Neither do I.
From Heat, written by Michael Mann
Mm-hmm. Because for all its procedural authenticity, for all the real-life cops and criminals who acted as creative consultants on the project, Heat is less concerned with criminality then it appears; Mann’s real fascination, true to his surname, is masculinity. To that point, there are only three women of significance in Heat 2, two of whom—Elisa and Gabriela—are textbook damsels-in-distress; their sole narrative function is to compel the men into violent conflict with one another, into “heroic” action.
The third female of consequence, Ana Liu, struggles, despite her keen intelligence and ambition, to make appreciable headway against the patriarchal hierarchy and cultural traditions of her Chinese crime family, until Chris’ partnership and resources—including a helping hand from his old L.A. contacts Nate and cybercriminal Kelso (Tom Noonan)—allow for the independence she could never quite realize on her own.
Hell, up till then, Ana is perfectly at ease with being Chris’ consolation prize—someone to keep his bed warm till he can reunite with Charlene. She demonstrates infinite patience as Chris wrestles with the choice to return to his family or stay with her. In the end, Ana simply replaces Charlene, much the way Carolina (Salma Hayek) is Mariachi’s (Antonio Banderas) explicit compensation for the violent death of Dominó (Consuelo Gómez) in Desperado (1995). She is Chris’ reward for being willing, in contrast with his mentor McCauley, to change with the times:
The Lius do deals; access supplies, finished goods, hardware and components, available supply chains; make bank transactions through global electronic funds transfers. They have access to government databases in Russia and Israel for intel on customers and any law enforcement that may impede them. They mostly avoid jurisdictions like the United States and thereby fly above legal strictures. They don’t break laws; they soar beyond them and above national judicial systems, operating from this open city, this free-trade zone. They operate outside the hostile police forces, judges, grand juries, parasitic lawyers, and dealmakers within which Chris’ criminal career has been submerged.
However, there is no safe harbor. It’s a state of nature, a lethal jungle. You make your fate. It is in your own hands. Hunter and hunted roam unconstrained. Your intelligence, discipline, and willingness to engage in all forms of violence are the functions that determine whether you survive.
Chris has never felt so free. . . .
The streets outside rumble with the fray of commerce today. Tomorrow? The horizon promises domains he can create. His history abruptly feels dated.
What the hell was it? Neil McCauley, Michael Cerrito, Chris Shiherlis, Trejo. With all their expertise, what were they? They were maybe the best. But at what, being nineteenth-century bandidos robbing banks?
He feels alive and vital in this present, the electric now.
Mann and Gardiner, Heat 2, 324–25
Would Neil have adapted to the Digital Age with the same flexibility and enthusiasm as his protégé? I doubt it. He was smart enough, sufficiently self-aware, to have recognized that about himself. Perhaps through his dealings with Kelso in the movie, McCauley foresaw the epoch of cybercriminality soon eclipsing the kind of old-school break-and-enter scores that were his stock-in-trade. Would certainly explain why he’d planned to abscond to Fiji after the admittedly risky downtown bank robbery.
The Irish thugs in State of Grace couldn’t accept their way of life was ending—that federal prosecutors and, more egregiously, entitled yuppies were squeezing them out of the Kitchen—so they gunned each other down in a climactic barfight, opting to go out in the same violent manner as they’d lived. Stands to reason Neil figured one last big score, despite the heat, would set him up to get out for good—that it would be “worth the stretch.” But his plans, his life, and arguably his very breed of thief met with their permanent cessation on the tarmac of LAX at the conclusion of Heat. Whether he would have adjusted to, let alone thrived in, the world of globalized crime in which Chris Shiherlis has made a name for himself by the end of Heat 2 is an open question.
Mann commented in the Rolling Stone piece cited above that McCauley passed out of existence in physical contact with the only person who truly understood him—Hanna—who also happens to be the man who killed him. But the reverse is also true, and in some ways just as tragic: Hanna had to go on living having killed the only other person who truly understood him. No wonder he’s so depleted, so lethargic, so devoid of purpose or human connection in the 2000 section of Heat 2: He’s a predator without compeer; having eradicated the last worthy adversary, Hanna is reduced to pursuing criminals who act “from deviant psychology, not operational necessity” (ibid., 377), much the same as FBI profiler Will Graham (William Petersen) in Mann’s proto–Hannibal Lecter movie Manhunter (1986).
If prequels by and large serve to elaborate on backstory affairs that were better off glimpsed than dramatized, sequels mostly exist to put the protagonist through the same old motions while tacitly asking audiences to overlook how pointless and emotionally hollow, how commercially calculated, the experience is the second (and third… and fourth…) time around. Having burned through all the backstory by the end of the first movie, there’s no real place left emotionally to take the characters in a sequel—see: Prescott, Sidney—which is why they’re typically unsatisfying. Good stories are about a defining event—often the defining event—in a protagonist’s life.
Mann leans into that notion in Heat 2, depicting latter-day Vincent Hanna as an aging detective with little raison d’être. Hanna is quickened by an unexpected opportunity to resolve an open case from his days in Chicago during the late ’80s, only to discover a surprising—and not insignificant—connection between that investigation and his late archnemesis. McCauley’s ghost surfaces to restore Hanna’s sense of purpose, to inspire him to recommit to his governing tenet, conceived in Granite City all those years ago, that life is about what you do with it right now.
But rather than reconsider his past ways, which would require a modicum of humility on Vincent’s part, the postlude of Heat 2 sees Hanna reinvesting his latent obsessive ambitions in a new/old target: Chris Shiherlis. (Something tells me Chris, a gambler far less dogmatically devoted to some self-defined solitary code than Vincent or Neil, is going to give post-prime Hanna a real run for his money.)
Hanna comes off as a rather abject “hero” to me by the end of Heat 2, and I’m honestly not sure whether Mann intended to imply that or not. It’s oddly fitting the novel’s final scene takes place in “a dark neighborhood throwback bar on a faded commercial street” in North Hollywood, owned by an old man (Voight’s Nate) who “smells like Brut and dry-cleaned polyester” (ibid., 23–24), because the characters who have survived this two-volume, dozen-year epic to reach the turn of the millennium, save Chris, all seem like men with no place in the post-9/11 world around the corner, like the Westies of Hell’s Kitchen in Giuliani and Bratton’s New York.
The coda of Heat, by contrast, validated the unassailable virtue of the heroic-cop archetype Hanna embodied: Here was a man whose instincts, whose tactics, whose doggedness, whose courage, whose compassion, and whose at-all-costs commitment to his moral code were above reproach. Since the postwar period, and certainly during the neo-noir renaissance of the 1990s, when crime was a sociopolitical fixation and our officials on both the right and left were stumbling over one another to flaunt their Dirty Harry bona fides, these were the idealized detectives our pop culture lionized. And I don’t know that that archetypal hero has ever been portrayed more quintessentially, more compellingly, and—for all of Heat’s psychological realism—more romantically than it was with Vincent Hanna, as created by Michael Mann and embodied by Al Pacino.
In the 1988 sequence of Heat 2, Hanna sits at the ICU beside of a comatose girl, victim of a violent psychosexual attack. You can practically hear Pacino delivering this monologue in your mind’s ear:
“You can come back,” he says to Jessica, holding her hand.
The Korean girl couldn’t.
His voice drops to a rasp. “You are in there. I know it. No matter how dark it is. On this side, there is light. You can come back. We are here. We are waiting for you.”
ibid., 78
With reserves of empathy so atypically deep, we completely defer to—and perhaps even take cathartic pleasure from?—Hanna’s infallible moral judgment when, during the course of his manhunt, he tosses one of the girl’s unrepentant assailants off a building rooftop (and not even remotely in self-defense). His partner Casals turns a blind eye to it, and so do we, because Vincent, as Raymond Chandler so poetically defined Hanna’s literary archetype, is the hero; he is everything—the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. After all, “if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things” (Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder: An Essay,” The Simple Art of Murder [New York: Vintage Books, August 1988], 18).
Right?
Ehh. That seems a hell of a lot less certain in a post–George Floyd world. So does the notion of aggrandizing righteous philosopher-detectives the likes of Vincent Hanna. That the plot of Heat 2 spans the entirety of the 1990s is apropos, because it feels very much like a story belonging to that particular era—when comfortably violent, proudly intransigent men (played, no less, by the two biggest stars in Hollywood) were admired, even deified, just for being so goddamned sure of themselves. Hanna and McCauley reveled in being the two toughest guys in L.A., capable of understanding only one another because of—never lose sight of this—a conscious choice each of them made to keep everyone else in their lives at a distance:
“What we can control, we control,” Neil says. “No avoidable exposure. No unnecessary risk. Everything that’s gonna happen to us, we made happen. Whether we know how or not.”
Mann and Gardiner, Heat 2, 74
What happens to us is a consequence of the choices we’ve made, whether we know it or not—whether we accept it or not. Such is the notion Heat 2 sets out to dramatize, in its intriguing refusal to be either a conventional prequel or sequel: “You make your fate. It is in your own hands. Hunter and hunted roam unconstrained. Your intelligence, discipline, and willingness to engage in all forms of violence are the functions that determine whether you survive” (ibid., 324).
Mann demonstrates that thesis by positioning the 1988 passages, along with the 1995 events of Heat, as the disparate causes of actions and confrontations depicted in the 2000 section of Heat 2, all the “little strings” that tie the movie and novel together forming a narrative ouroboros, in a way, leading up to and away from the life-and-death shootout between hunter and hunted at LAX, what Mann described to Rolling Stone as both the last and first moment of Heat: the focal point of his mythic tapestry portraying unconstrained predators on the urban battlefield—men of intelligence, discipline, and the willingness to engage in all forms of violence.
I find that violence is very ambiguous in movies. For example, some films claim to be antiwar, but I don’t think I’ve really seen an antiwar film. Every film about war ends up being pro-war. To show something is to ennoble it.
François Truffaut, from an interview in the Chicago Tribune dated November 11, 1973
Could it be argued, by that logic, that all stories about crime are ultimately pro-criminality?
Perhaps. A disproportionate percentage certainly seem to be pro-masculinity. Women are NPCs in the world of Heat—useful as plot devices, and either unconditionally willing to accept or, alternatively, obstinately incapable of appreciating that men just need to be men. Only alpha males, after all, truly understand other alpha males—their “game-recognizes-game professionalism and Zen machismo,” the particular world-heavy weight they bear on their shoulders owed to their extraordinary self-discipline, and especially their instinctive propensity to kill one another.
It’s no wonder, then, cops and criminals are the basis for so many of Hollywood’s alpha males. Hypermasculine stories like Heat are ostensibly vehicles to explore and try to understand that men-will-be-men mentality—“what these men do and who they are”—but I submit that more often than not, they just wind up glorifying it. Ennobling it.
Mann is fascinated by men like Hanna and McCauley, as are many of us, myself (formerly) included. But having admired and romanticized archetypal tough guys, those with the “intelligence, discipline, and willingness to engage in all forms of violence,” to the degree of no less than 400% that we have, for as many decades as we have, through our action movies and crime fiction, it might be worth examining the unacknowledged consequences, in keeping with the thematic messaging of Heat 2, that practice has wreaked on our culture.
The stories we tell, and retell, shape our perception of reality. And we tell a shitload of stories celebrating men like Hanna and McCauley: go-it-alone, hypercompetent badasses for whom the rules don’t apply—Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) of the interminable Fast & Furious series, whose paternal devotion to his family “redeems” his criminal sociopathy; Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), Carpenter’s defiantly libertarian gunfighter/outlaw antihero, his “commonsense” antidote to both the right-wing police state of Escape from New York (and Escape from L.A.) and the communist revolutionaries who oppose it—because their personal “codes” supersede their obligations to the social compact, to say nothing of the limitations of the law. They’re just that special.
And make no mistake: Men use these mythologies, however unconsciously, to rationalize our self-serving behaviors and absolve ourselves from responsibility in everyday life—to position ourselves as the righteous protagonist of our very own heroic narrative in which we alone are the apodictic voice of reason in a world full of short-sighted plebeians, all those villains and bit players with whom we are grudgingly made to share the our stage.
There’s a reason macho action heroes on one end of the archetypal spectrum and stunted-adolescence slackers on the other are our two dominant representations of manhood in popular fiction: They both, each in their own way, justify all manner of sin, none so great as behavioral stasis—that is, our birthright as men to act as we please with impunity. And if no one understands us for that, so much the better: Such small-minded misapprehension only validates our innate specialness—our singular heroism—anyway.
Mann’s men, Vincent Hanna and Neil McCauley, are each that kind of man’s man—explicitly unwilling to consider, let alone aspire to, a healthier, less individualistic mode of masculinity. And for as much as Mann appears to revere them for that, that McCauley is dead at the end of the movie and Hanna a weary, lonesome shell of himself by the twenty-first century is, as I interpret it, a hopeful consequence of their incorrigible lone-ranger bravado.
We don’t need men like that in the post–Donald Trump, post–Derek Chauvin era, and we sure as hell don’t need any more paeans to them, either, however nuanced such stories may strive to be. They belong in the past, consigned to dim barrooms that cater to nostalgic old men who yearn for the days when they were masters of the universe: the solitary heroes of a world that reliably bent to their will. If Michael Mann’s exemplary Heat represents the sacrosanct apotheosis of the cops-and-robbers literary genre, it would be fittingly poetic—and, to my view, decidedly welcome—if his ambitious Heat 2 serves as its canonical requiem.
I didn’t watch the first Heat though I actually like ‘macho action heroes’. I read a ton of Mountain Man books and my next trilogy will be about our brilliant and physically powerful ancestors, the Neanderthal. Heat I and II’s MCs don’t seem to have a moral core of justice and kindness to go with their aggressive approach to problem solving. That is why I probably turned away decades ago, probably still will.
Heat is very much worth seeing, Jacqui. It’s in a cinematic class by itself in that it is a rich character study that doesn’t skimp on intense action sequences; rarely is such balance achieved. I can’t imagine Heat 2 would be of much interest to anyone who isn’t already a fan of the movie — it’s more of a companion piece than a sequel — but I would certainly recommend it to those (many) folks out there!
The characters in Heat — particularly Hanna, the saga’s protagonist — absolutely live by a strict code of ethics, and Hanna is a man of tremendous compassion (in opposition to McCauley, who is a sociopath). For reasons I explored in “Forget It, Jake, It’s Tinseltown,” the “detective” (as a literary archetype) became the quintessential American hero of so much of our popular entertainment in the latter half of the 20th century. But at this point, over two decades into the new millennium, it seems apparent — at least to me — that we’ve told enough stories celebrating hypercompetent, comfortably violent, go-it-alone antiheroes, and that what this unprecedented historical moment calls for, in fact, are anti-antiheroes à la Ted Lasso and The Orville‘s Ed Mercer. It’s time to retire the hero detective, methinks, and the police-worshipping fiction he inhabits. The spirit of self-righteous individualism he represents is not a helpful model of masculinity in light of the challenges we face right now as a country, a society, and even a civilization, which require renewed and appreciable esprit de corps.
For that reason, I think it’s a healthy thing to explore masculinity in other genres, such as comedy, science fiction, and the Western, and to consciously phase out some of the tropes and archetypes that, ultimately, promote outmoded mores. I very much think Heat 2 makes a case for dropping the curtain on its own genre, though I can’t say one way or another if that was Mann’s creative intention. But for me, it certainly did close the book — no pun intended — on the cops-and-robbers narrative.
Jacqui, I thank you so much for your steadfast support of this blog, especially after its recent programming adjustment, and I wish you and yours a happy holiday season and only the best of health and creativity in the New Year!
SPC
A thorough review, Sean. You make me see far more into the depths of films than I accomplish on my own.
Thanks, Dave! I’d originally planned to publish this review last September, but as I was compiling my notes, I realized I had so much to say about the book — so many thoughts and threads and insights — and that was when I finally decided I could no longer put pressure on myself to turn out a monthly deep-dive essay. This was the post that “broke” me! Haha! So, I stepped away for a few months, and worked on this review intermittently over the autumn, with the understanding that it would be ready when it was ready. Deadlines typically force me to do some of my best work, but in the case of this particular post, I think it benefitted from all the time I gave myself to conceive, compose, and revise it. I had all the time I needed to really think through all the points and permutations of my thesis.
That’s the gift blogging has given me. You think you know how you feel about something when it’s an idea swirling around in the soup of your cerebrum, but when you force yourself to write about it, you give the subject much deeper consideration and wind up drawing all sorts of connections that never would have occurred to you otherwise. I probably overthink this stuff — a 6,000-word essay on Heat 2 seems rather masturbatory and bewilderingly unnecessary — but I enjoy deconstructing a narrative to see how it works and what it’s trying to say. And ever since our shared mentor Vice President Gore taught me about moral imagination, I interrogate the stories I consume through an entirely new lens now — not merely an appreciation for the techniques they employ, but an appraisal of the values they espouse. To that end, Heat 2 gave me a lot to think about.
Thank you, Dave, for your support. I wish you a happy holiday and a healthy New Year. I hope you are as optimistic as I am about the progress we are making on the climate crisis and related matters of environmental justice. There’s a lot to celebrate this season, and there’s real momentum now going into 2023. I am as hopeful as I’ve been in half-a-dozen years. Glad to be in the trenches with someone as committed and compassionate as you, sir.
>“Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.”
Minimalism?
Oh, boy — now you’re starting a big conversation! Why do I feel like I’m being baited, Dell?! You know of my propensity for long-windedness! Haha!
All kidding aside. McCauley’s discipline and dogma certainly draw on many of the same philosophical tools that make minimalism possible, sure. He does live minimalistically, in a sparsely furnished monochromatic home devoid of any personal touches, à la Edward Monkford. You would think someone who knew how to live so modestly wouldn’t need to take down multimillion-dollar scores on such a regular basis! What the hell’s he spending that money on? Cerrito and Shiherlis both have wives and families and big suburban homes (and Chris is constantly losing his money in Vegas), so you understand why they need to replenish the kitty so often. But given Neil’s minimal overhead, one would think he could steal with more selective infrequency…?
But I digress. What minimalism really affords us, when you boil it down, is freedom. That’s the value we receive in return for practicing minimalism. There’s financial freedom, because one needs less and therefore buys less. For instance: My wife and I own an appreciably smaller apartment than we could afford, but it’s exactly enough space for how we live, and it’s easy to keep clean because it is modest and uncluttered.
There is also temporal freedom — i.e., one’s time and attention can be invested in more selective pursuits and interests. The only thing I had to run out and buy this holiday season was a tree. That’s it. My family and I don’t exchange gifts, so all that money, pressure, time, and attention got spared this month for other things, like finalizing this essay (of which I am rather proud), and attending a performance of A Christmas Carol with my wife and mother up in Sleepy Hollow. I could do all that — and other meaningful things — because I haven’t spent the season frantically zipping from one big-box store to another like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Jingle All the Way. I actually enjoy the holidays now. Talk about the gift that keeps on giving!
There’s also emotional freedom. I told you that story the other day about how I got rid of all my childhood comic books over Thanksgiving weekend — just gave them to a friend and never looked back. For the first forty years of my life, I could’ve never done something like that. Never. Sentimentality made me a slave to material custodianship of shit I didn’t need. Instead, I experienced a refreshingly healthy emotional catharsis as I mindfully looked through each comic and remembered what it meant to me, and then let all of them go for good.
The only “sentimental” items we store in this household are our Christmas ornaments, and we have a judiciously curated “collection” of those. We have no “filler” ornaments. Every piece we own is a carefully chosen reminder of a time in our lives or a particular experience. For instance: Every kitten we’ve ever fostered is commemorated on an ornament, because they are ever and always members of our family, even if their sojourn with us was brief. In that sense, the ritual of Christmas-tree decoration becomes an annual reminder of the life we’ve spent together — a healthy appreciation for the life we’ve built together. Because those ornaments add value to our lives — they keep us connected to the past but not anchored to it — they have a place in our home. And come New Year’s Day, they go back in the closet till Thanksgiving. We don’t dwell on sentimental matters, but instead invest our time and attention in the here and now. To me, that’s the difference between a healthy “collection” verses an obsessive one, like the scores of comics and DVDs I used to own. Minimalism helped me appreciate the distinction.
I could go on. The ways in which minimalism has changed my life are well-documented. But I say the above to suggest that the value McCauley receives in return for his own discipline is also freedom — literal freedom, at that. The ability to pick up and go on a moment’s notice is what keeps him out of prison. Unfortunately, it is the thing that allows him to live such a staggeringly immoral, illegal, and emotionally vacuous life. Ultimately, Neil is a rapacious capitalist (he explicitly identifies as such in Heat 2, though I didn’t note the page number). Neil treats everything and everyone as something to be exploited for the value he can extract from it, the cost to them be damned. That’s not a person in emotional balance with himself or society at large. So, I would say, in keeping with his extractive, sociopathic worldview, McCauley abuses minimalism more than he uses it: He treats it as yet one more resource to be exploited toward his own ends. He’s an asshole.
My friend: I wish you a very happy holiday and the best of health, creativity, and productivity in the New Year! The value you add to this blog cannot be quantified. (You’ll notice I cited “point-and-clap entertainment” in this piece, a concept you introduced me to.) Thank you.
Sean
Great to see a post from you, my friend, and so well-written and thought-provoking, although I have to admit I’ve never seen either Heat or Heat 2–not a genre I’m drawn to normally. But now I feel like I need to watch both and then come back and read this again!
Hey, thanks, Suzanne! I’m surprised you’ve never seen Heat, because I know what a cinephile you are! Heat was notable at the time of its release because it marked the first movie in which Pacino and De Niro shared the screen. True, they’d previously costarred in The Godfather, Part II, but they didn’t have any scenes together owed to the fact that the “Vito” and “Michael” storylines are set 35 years apart.
Heat was completely overlooked by the Academy Awards that year, but I daresay has had a far longer shelf life than 1995 nominees like Apollo 13 and Sense and Sensibility. Just more proof that Hollywood awards ceremonies are popularity contests (or, more accurately, PR campaigns), not harbingers of quality or longevity or cultural reach/influence. Anyway, I would absolutely recommend you watch it! When you do, please come back to this post and let me know your thoughts.
I wish you, Ken, and Kate a very happy holiday and bountiful New Year! Thank you for being such a steadfast friend of this blog throughout the year(s). For those unaware, Suzanne has a new collection of short horror fiction coming this February from Potter’s Grove Press called At the End of It All: Stories from the Shadows. I encourage one and all to buy, read, and review it on Amazon/Goodreads!
> Hollywood awards ceremonies are popularity contests (or, more accurately, PR campaigns), not harbingers of quality or longevity or cultural reach/influence
TBF, those things, particularly the second and third, can be difficult or impossible to judge for a movie that came out less than a year ago
Consider movies, books, TV shows, etc., that you yourself have reevaluated over time, that you now think are MUCH better or MUCH worse than you originally thought
Huh. I think I meant to write “arbiters,” not “harbingers,” but I suppose that works, too!
Yes, quality is a more concrete short-term metric; we can acknowledge the quality of a work of art/entertainment even when we don’t personally care for it. (Case in point: I wasn’t emotionally affected by The Hateful Eight even though I admired much about it.) As we’ve discussed elsewhere on this blog (and as you addressed in “The Last Walking Infinity Throne Corrupts Infinitely”), we can also enjoy “bad” movies while consciously recognizing the inferior quality of the filmmaking/storytelling — what I suppose are known as “guilty pleasures.” We don’t have to elevate those movies to high art in order to justify our enjoyment of them.
Such is why the institutionalized practice of anointing a canonical “winner” among all the films and TV series released in a given year is such a silly one — this is The Best — and not at all an indicator of which movies/shows will stand the test of time or shape the culture. To my knowledge, Avatar remains the highest-grossing movie of all time, and was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and yet its belated sequel is underperforming — and this despite the massive hype apparatus of the biggest entertainment corporation in the world!
Because all the hype in the world will get asses into seats, sure, but it cannot change the fact that Avatar‘s cultural influence is minimal at best. No one cites Avatar as a seminal moviegoing experience for them. The ten-year-olds who went to see it in 2009 don’t worship it the way our generation reveres even that feature-length toy commercial The Transformers: The Movie. (Folks I know in their mid-twenties are far quicker to cite Iron Man as the movie that made the most memorably indelible impression on their nascent imaginations.) I doubt Avatar inspired so much as a single young person to pursue filmmaking, in contrast with Star Wars and Blade Runner and The Matrix in previous generations. Avatar was ephemeral; it made money, sure, but it didn’t really make a lasting impact on the culture. Twister made a fortune in 1996… and no one has seen or talked about it since.
And you’re right, Dell: One of the objectives of this blog is to look at movies and shows that made an impression on me, reevaluate them through the lens of my experience, and also try to appreciate them in the context of the sociocultural moment at which they were made. Consequently, I think I’ve taken a rather nuanced look at a great deal of my own formative influences — Heat, Superman IV, Mad Max, Young Indy, Scream, Desperado, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, NYPD Blue, Tim Burton’s Batman, State of Grace — and said, “Here’s what worked, and here’s what hasn’t aged so well.”
But you can only bring that sort of perspective to an analytical evaluation with distance, same way we could only see we were in a neo-noir period during the 1990s once we were on the other side of it. It’s okay to take time to decide how we feel about something. Twitter devolves into these “tastes great/less filling” hot-take shouting matches (an old pop-culture reference I trust you will appreciate), with one side proclaiming The Last Jedi (or what have you) a work of genius and the other a piece of shit, as if there isn’t an entire spectrum of potential reactions to be found in between — and a nebulous one, at that, given how our tastes and opinions shift with time.
When I write about a movie or TV show, I’m forced to slow down — to process how I feel about it, and, consequently, I’ll more often than not find myself admiring and criticizing it in equal measure (like I did here with Heat). It’s so delightful to rediscover a book or movie that still speaks to me, often decades later, sometimes for entirely different reasons (like Dances with Wolves and Scent of a Woman do). And then sometimes you go back and look at something again, and it isn’t as good as you remembered — or just doesn’t resonate with you anymore. I feel that way about tons of movies, like a lot of stuff by John Carpenter (Escape, Vampires) and Shane Black (The Last Boy Scout, The Long Kiss Goodnight).
I suppose what it comes down to is this: How we respond to a story — and whether or not we continue to respond to that story with age — is a very personal thing. And it used to be that we had award ceremonies and mainstream critics acting as the arbiters — I used the right word this time! — of what was quality and what was crap. Now what we have instead is this corporate culture of brand loyalty — of superfandom. It isn’t a question of whether we enjoy Picard or Andor or House of the Dragon, but rather a question of whether or not we are “true fans” of those respective multimedia franchises; if we are — and if our fan credentials are to remain in good standing — then we watch, regardless. It’s the Digital Age way of being pressured to watch something rather than choosing to watch it, of being told This is meaningful rather than deciding for ourselves which stories have meaning to us, individually.
I have tried, with this blog, to encourage people to think more deeply about the stories they consume, to appreciate their artistry and interrogate their values, and to have the courage — because it takes courage — to let go of once-beloved stories that, for all sorts of reasons, are no longer serving us. I submit there are certain narratives that have overstayed their welcome on the cultural stage — that have had too much reach, too much influence over our cultural folkways. If “Forget It, Jake, It’s Tinseltown” was my rude awakening about the “hero detective” archetype, then this essay on Heat 2 can be considered my formal farewell to that kind of fiction, the cancelation of my subscription to it and the values it represents. I won’t miss it.
P.S. If you’re a fan of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008), Suzanne, the narrative and aesthetic influence of Heat is all over that movie. The Dark Knight is widely considered to the greatest superhero movie of the modern era, and it simply would not exist — not in its current form — without the template Mann provided with Heat. There is no denying that (and I don’t think Nolan does).
Of course you know, Sean, that what I picked up most in all of this is wasn’t so much the elements of the movie or book breakdowns, but the threads of choice and consequence (e.g., “What happens to us is a consequence of the choices we’ve made…”).
I do always enjoy your “nerding out” on things you love and don’t love.
That’s the theme of the entire novel, Erik: how the “random things” that happen to us are either direct or indirect consequences of choices we’ve made, whether we recognize those connections or not. Neil believes that to be a universal truth, as evidenced by this conversation with Chris:
What Neil fails to acknowledge, however, is how the choices we make impact others, like Hanna’s freeway sniper who destroyed that Korean girl’s family. Our choices carry so many consequences in this life — they radiate outwards in ways we mostly never know. Bad choices have a way of begetting bad consequences for people other than just ourselves. I think that’s worth considering — the unknown repercussions of our decisions and actions — whenever we come to the crossroads. Since we know for certain that bad choices beget bad outcomes, perhaps that will inspire us to choose better. Choosing better is a choice, too — one we never run out of chances to make. As Ebenezer Scrooge once so wisely observed (and on this very night, at that):
Erik, my dear friend, I wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! I will drink tonight to your health, happiness, and bountiful productivity in 2023. May you know only the best of peace and friendship.
Sean
Very neatly done!
Thank you, Lena! You’re my first comment of the New Year! Wishing you the best of health, happiness, and creativity in ’23!
I saw the first Heat movie a long long time ago, and all I remember is one of the characters had tinnitus. There was tinnitus in there, right? Lol. Your post intrigued me and now I think I should watch the first one again and the second one after that. My husband likes these kinds of movies. I wouldn’t normally gravitate toward them, but I can’t help giving them a try when they have high quality actors. An entertaining look into the films, Sean. Have a wonderfully productive and exciting new year. 🙂
Happy New Year, Diana!
Tinnitus is not a plot point in Heat, no, but it plays a substantial role in James Mangold’s Cop Land (1997) with Sylvester Stallone, Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta, and Robert De Niro. Perhaps that’s the movie you’re thinking of…? They’re of the same era and genre (and both feature De Niro in a prominent role).
Heat is always worth revisiting! More than merely an “action movie” or “shoot-’em-up,” it’s a magnificent crime epic, for sure — the magnum opus of Michael Mann’s illustrious filmmaking career. Great writing and stellar performances. It has deservedly stood the test of time, hence the reason we’re now getting an official sequel — 27 years later… and in a completely different medium! I can’t think of any other instance of a filmmaker revisiting a particular concept and characters decades later in a companion novel to the original film! To that end, Heat 2 is very much worth reading… but it’s best to be recently refreshed on the events of the movie before cracking the spine; it isn’t a standalone sequel.
Let me take this opportunity, Diana, to thank you for your steadfast support of this blog, and to wish you health, happiness, creativity, and comfort in 2023!
Sean
Sean, you’ve outdone yourself. Twenty or thirty years ago (pre-blog), this piece would’ve been published in a cinema magazine and dissected in college courses. I hope that somewhere, somehow, Michael Mann gets to read this.
Jeff!
Thanks so much for the kind words! Yes, in its way, this essay is as epic as Heat itself! This was the post that definitely “broke” me, because when I first started composing it in September of last year, I realized I was taking on a project that would easily consume the entire month, leaving no time for my other writing. That’s when I realized I was investing too much time and attention in the blog, and had to scale back. But when I finally published this analysis in December, I had so much to say about the novel — as you can see! I’m so excited to finally discuss the book with someone else who’s actually read it! You are the first person I actually know who’s read Heat 2.
You were kind enough to share your thoughts on the book — as well as you reaction to this essay — in a private correspondence. If you don’t mind, I’m going to publish my responses to some of your points here, occassionally excerpting from your e-mail. Having actually read the book, you raised some issues no one else — including myself — thought to address.
As I noted, it’s impossible to read any of the dialogue in this book and not hear the actors from the film delivering it in your mind’s ear. That’s tough to do. Hell, I’ve read novelizations of movies that don’t capture the unique speech cadences and nonverbal mannerisms of the characters, as embodied by the actors who portrayed them, as well as Heat 2 does!
For that reason, I don’t quite share the same sense of excitement I see online at the prospect of Adam Driver as McCauley, and possibly Timothée Chalamet as Hanna, in a proposed screen adaptation. That’s not the same as casting a younger actor to play a less mature version of an established character — like, say, the way River Pheonix played young Indy in the prologue of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where he was clearly hired to impersonate Harrison Ford’s performance to the best of his ability. (That’s not a criticism. Pheonix is wonderful in the role, channeling all of Indy’s cocksure swagger, adventurous spirit, and honorable intentions, but without the jaded optimism the character would later in his life develop.)
With Driver and Chalamet, we’d get completely different interpretations of those characters, though. That’s fine for a remake of Heat, but Heat 2, the novel, is clearly designed as a prequel-cum-sequel to the 1995 feature film and, as such, draws on the reader’s familiarity with the movie’s cinematic aesthetic and its performances. A movie or miniseries adaptation of Heat 2 would be a true oddity: an adaptation of a book that serves as a prequel/sequel to a film produced almost three decades earlier, with entirely different actors inhabiting roles played by two of the biggest actors of their generation. I mean, if anyone could pull something like that off, it’s Michael Mann, but I think Heat 2 should be left as a literary supplement to a cinematic masterpiece. I’m not in favor of a screen adaptation of this book.
Agreed: If Heat was Hanna and McCauley’s story, Heat 2 is Chris Shiherlis’. More so than even Pacino and De Niro, Val Kilmer had to convey a lot about that character through his performance, as we really learn precious few biographical details about Chris. Heat 2 really gives this character a chance to be in the spotlight, and it’s fun learning about the early days of both his criminal career and his romance with Charlene, as well as what happened to him after the movie. Had that plotline been made into a spin-off movie of its own a few years after Heat, it would have been wonderful to see Kilmer as the lead. He would’ve crushed it. (Perhaps Jack Kilmer could essay the role?)
Agreed. Elisa has agency in the story. And while her death might not meet the textbook criteria to qualify as “fridging,” Elisa and Gabriela only serve the story insofar as they put the male characters — Neil, Wardell, Hanna, Chris — into violent conflict with one another. Overall, I find the portrayals of women in both Heat and Heat 2 to be lacking. But for reasons I address in the essay, this is a story about men — and about masculinity — for better and for worse.
Mann’s gift as a storyteller is his equal attention to procedural detail and psychological verisimilitude. It’s there in Thief and Manhunter, too. When you combine that with his singular cinematic aesthetic, you get crime thrillers that look and feel like no other. For me — and for many — Heat certainly represents the apotheosis of all those elements. Without question, those storytelling priorities — along with his fascination with “game-recognizes-game professionalism and Zen machismo” — are evident in Heat 2.
If Neil is sociopathic, Wardell is psychopathic. As Hanna observes, he operates “from deviant psychology, not operational necessity.” So, in that sense, he provides a contrast to both McCauley and Hanna. But I agree he is mostly a standard-issue psychosexual creep, same as you’d find in any by-the-numbers Alex Cross thriller. Even though he provides the connective tissue between the 1988 and 2000 sections of the story, he was, in many respects, the least interesting element to me, hence the reason I didn’t even address him in this essay. It was as though Mann took Waingro and made him the primary antagonist of the story.
Both stylistically and structurally, this is where the sequel both departs and distinguishes itself from the mothership story. It’s a nonlinear narrative, like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction and so much of our postnarrative fiction these days, in contrast with the conventional dramatic presentation of Heat. Obviously, that had less to do with a creative experimentation than creative necessity: McCauley’s death at the end of Heat meant Mann had no choice but to go the Godfather II route. The shifts are indeed abrupt, and I think what I said in the essay above holds true: This novel might try the patience of a reader who isn’t already predisposed to both Mann and the world of Heat via the goodwill established by the movie. I don’t know that this is a novel that stands on its own two legs, ultimately. It’s just a supremely well-crafted supplement to the movie — a gift for fans, without itself being fan fiction.
Completely fair. I only ever watched (part of?) the first season. The original Exorcist (R.I.P. William Friedkin) is a story (because I’m referring both to the novel and the movie) about which I have conflicted feelings. It’s aesthetically brilliant — terrifying in a way few horror stories ever achieve — but I find it absolutely morally reprehensible. Not because I find it sacrilegious — quite the contrary! It’s about a woman who is so selfishly focused on her career — the nerve! — that her preteen daughter is left to her own devices and accidentally summons a demon (a brown-skinned Iraqi demon, at that) with a Ouija board. Both mother and daughter have zero agency in the events of the story, so it falls to a pair of virtuous Catholic priests — two “Fathers” — to save the day. It is seriously the most repugnant piece of patriarchal propaganda — with a dollop of racism, to boot — I’ve ever read. But, unlike so many horror authors, Blatty’s prose, characterization, and dialogue — and Friedkin’s visuals — are really masterful. I only wish they’d been in service to a more ethical story. That’s another narrative that needs to be left in the pop-cultural dustbin of the 20th century… though nostalgia-addicted Gen-Xer David Gordon Green has other plans!
If you’ve never read it, I highly recommend Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts, which is to The Exorcist what Scream is to Halloween: both a terrifying specimen of the genre as well as a fascinating deconstruction of its tropes. It’s a story about how manipulative stories can be. One of the best novels, horror or otherwise, I’ve read in a decade.
I’d love to be able to say we selected that film to see on our first date because it was an epic cinematic event featuring two of the most intense actors of their day, but it had everything to do with the running time: Since I was coming down from the Bronx and she was coming in from Queens — and this was right after the blizzard of ’96, which dumped record snowfall on NYC — we figured we should find a movie long enough to justify the interboro schlep! LOL! The movie ran from noon to 3:00 p.m. Afterwards, we browsed the shelves at Barnes & Noble for an hour — I needed to find a gift for my sister’s upcoming birthday — and then had an early dinner at Pizzeria Uno. After dinner, neither of us was ready to go home, so we strolled the halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art till the place closed at 10:00. So, we had a ten-hour first date! The rest is history.
Public Enemies and Miami Vice (the movie) both left me cold, but it’s possible I was in a bad mood when I saw them. I should give them another go at some point.
It’s the theme of the story. By the principles of storytelling logic, the climax of Heat 2 certainly strains credulity — the fact that everyone wound up in L.A. at that precise moment, only to see their lives intersect explosively. And yet I keep coming back to the notion that it’s the very cosmic relationship between coincidence and causality that Mann is exploring in this novel. He’s trying to get us to think about these issues — to appreciate the complexity of our shared existence on this earth. I have to give him this: Heat 2 has something to say about the world; it aspires to greater subtextual weight than your average pulp-fiction potboiler. I’ll always give the benefit of the doubt to a story that perhaps tries too hard to be intellectual, to be deep, than one that doesn’t try at all (like, say, Fast & Furious).
Thanks! I explore what I think a prequel should and shouldn’t be in “Young Indiana Jones Turns 30: Storytelling Lessons from George Lucas’ Other Prequel Series.” Even if you’re unfamiliar with Young Indy, the essay has broader applications for pop culture. I lament our culture’s current fixation on “shared universes” — with dot-connecting and plot-point reconciliation. That sort of puzzle-boxing bullshit completely misses the point of what stories are meant to be about, a subject I explored in “Into Each Generation a Slayer Is Born.” For instance, a few months ago I saw a headline for an article entitled “Hugh Grant Confirms He Is ‘Married to James Bond’ in ‘Knives Out’ Cinematic Universe.”
Sorry — what? The “Knives Out Cinematic Universe”? It’s a movie… with a sequel. Not everything is a goddamn universe. Calm… the fuck… down.
And while I ultimately think Heat 2, as both a prequel and sequel, is an unnecessary addendum to a perfectly self-contained cinematic masterpiece, it’s fascinating the way in which Mann plays with our need to draw narrative connections, to attain storyworld omniscience. And the fact that Heat 2 is ultimately so unnecessary only demonstrates how pointless the pursuit of storyworld omniscience is at all. Both Hanna and McCauley understand how meaningless it is to try to “puzzle out” the cosmic mysteries. Instead, they take meaning from who they are, what they do, and the people in their direct orbit, however it was they got there. There’s a lesson there, methinks.
Jeff, thanks again for engaging me so passionately on this subject. And I appreciate your patience while I found time to give your insights the proper attention and response they deserved. You’re the man!
SPC