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.
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