‘Heat’: Michael Mann’s Symphonic Drama & The Tragedy Of Masculinity

From the beginning, the dichotomy between women and men is established in Michael Mann’s sprawling, epic masterpiece “Heat,” twenty-five years old this month. However, its central thesis about the tragedy of masculinity remains evergreen. In what Mann himself calls a “symphonic drama” in an interview for Empire Magazine in 2008, the movie is more approximately an opera all of heightened emotions, the brawny men and the earthy women who mourn them even as they find themselves incapable of saving themselves from their brutal allure.

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Deeply, sometimes minutely, exquisitely examined (see Blake Howard’s extraordinary passion project “One Heat Minute” podcast that dissects the picture minute-by-minute), that there’s still meat on this bone a quarter of a century later speaks to the latent fascination of Mann’s career obsessions. The cue I take with “Heat” on each revisit is the statue of the “Pieta” Robert DeNiro’s master-criminal Neil McCauley passes upon his return to Los Angeles as the film opens. An image, the central image in western, Judeo-Christian culture, of succor it is also the keystone metaphor for the role of women in a patriarchal society: as mother to the Savior, literally in this case, metaphorically in every other. “Heat” is on one of its manifold levels, an exploration of that tension.

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Al Pacino’s Lt. Vincent Hanna is introduced in the film waking his wife Justine (Diana Venora) with kisses. He takes a shower while Justine comforts her troubled daughter, Vincent’s step-daughter Lauren (Natalie Portman). Justine is the mother/whore, the wife figure in charge of domestic issues, while Vincent at work shows himself to be an effective, articulate leader of men. Later, Justine gets on his case for missing dinner and not being there for Lauren. He pours himself a little Jack Daniels. Men deal with interpersonal disturbances with violence, anger, and self-sedation. Vincent’s actions are paralleled as we meet Neil’s band of thieves, one of whom, Cheritto (Tom Sizemore), tells cohort Waingro (Kevin Gage) to “stop talking.” Waingro is the loose cannon, we realize, for any number of reasons, but mostly because he can’t keep his emotions under control.

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Emotions, naturally, are coded as feminine. There’s no room for that in Neil’s world. When bookstore clerk Eady (Amy Brenneman) tries to talk to Neil at an all-night diner, his initial rebuff of her demonstrates his discomfort with, his unfamiliarity and suspicion with, interpersonal connection. We read this as a career criminal being naturally cautious, but it’s more than that. Later, as Neil and Eady stand on a balcony, framed by the L.A. panorama at night, Neil compares it all to iridescent algae in the Fiji Islands. In the midst of a dense population, he’s talking about isolation and escape. “I’m alone, I’m not lonely,” he tells her. She says, “I get lonely,” in response.

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Women’s primary function in “Heat” is to highlight the emotional coldness of men and how that coldness isn’t a feature of men, but rather an affectation allowing them to function in a system that sees warmth as a threat. In films from “The Keep” to “Black Hat,” Mann explores the end-spots and journeys of men incapable of exchanges that are not transactional at least, physical to the point of deadly at worst. You could argue that the end where only one man can be left standing—a Shakespearean, Greek, Western conceit — is a reaction to the closeness between Neil and Vincent in terms of how they move through the world. When they sit across from each other and find common ground in what is almost a romantic date scenario, the threat of feminizing their roles to each of them must be redressed by the destruction of one of them. When you destroy your shadow in a Jungian sense, or destroy your doppelganger, you remove from yourself that element that is least examined. For men, it’s the feminine aspect. Neil has to die because he’s allowed himself empathy. Neil could have been saved had he chosen his love for Eady over his desire for vengeance visited upon loathsome Waingro. The choice to abandon Eady and take flight isn’t about Eady so much as it’s the last act of a dead man who has, like Vincent is about to, already chosen the part of him that allows him to live.

We see their relationship reflected in Charlene (Ashley Judd) as well —Neil’s lieutenant Chris’s (Val Kilmer) wife who we first meet as she’s dressing Chris down for his gambling and mismanagement of their money, and then again when she’s teaching their young child what an avocado is. She is fully in the role of support and, as an inverse reflection of Neil’s decision at the end of the film, sacrifices her relationship with Chris in order to save him. “To me, the sun rises and sets with her,” Chris tells Neil. “Ok,” Neil says flatly. When Chris and Charlene are estranged, Neil physically and verbally intimidates Charlene into giving Chris another chance. His ace in the hole is what he believes is his main, perhaps only, source of power to move her affections: he promises to “finance” her divorce if Chris should mess up again. Lillian (Kim Staunton), Donald’s (Dennis Haysbert) girl, has only a few lines, asking him if he’s okay before he starts a humiliating job as a dishwasher at a roadside diner: the only gainful employment for which he’s qualified as a convicted felon on parole. She is interested in how he feels. He wants to return her tenderness through culturally-approved masculine means: finding a job, making a name, being something on a social scale instead of being present on an emotional one.

Her next appearance is soothing Donald’s wounded ego and offering to find him another job. She says she’s proud of him, and Donald can’t absorb that into his perception of himself. It’s hard to paint men as tragic figures because men are brutal and the source of everything that is wrong with our culture and our world — but there is a tragedy to being male that Mann has a conversation with throughout his pictures. Another in a string of examples: Vincent uses examples of atrocities he’s witnessed at work to bludgeon Justine’s desire to have a human connection to him. Vincent says he doesn’t share anything with her because he has to maintain his angst. She says, “you live among the remains of dead people.” Her assessment of him paints him as an animal hunting his prey, and the wreckage he makes the rest of his life. She understands everything. “What I don’t understand is why I don’t cut loose of you.”

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Neil asks Eady to leave with him, and she, understanding it’s very new for them in their relationship, warns that Neil doesn’t know her. He reassures that he knows all he needs to. The element of knowing is the unbridgeable gulf that divides men and women. Filmmaker Walter Hill works on this problem in his films as well. I’d argue that he’s better at it because he himself has more empathy for his women characters (Mercy is the star of “The Warriors,” a film about men; just as Ripley of “Alien” was originally written as a man); but Mann, wading in the same deep water, does his most extensive if not arguably his best (his best for me is “The Last of the Mohicans“) exploration of this theme with “Heat.” The men refer to each other as “brother,” they pledge their fealty to one another: back each other in fights and make eye contact in a way they tend not to with their women. They care about each other. They care about their women, too, of course, but the way they express that care is through a language only they can understand. We understand it too, as men, and it makes us emotional. It’s okay to cry in “Heat” in a way; it’s not okay for men to cry during “Love Actually.” Women understand it too as a pretty good illustration of what’s wrong with men and how we’re trapped with each other in infinite reflections of the same tragedies.

Most poignant for me in “Heat” in any discussion of its relational/gender politics is Trejo’s fate (Danny Trejo) and his family. They’re murdered, him last. His last words are asking after her. I think it’s the only time in the film a man asks if a woman is okay. The rest of it is magnificent, of course, the shootouts and the utilitarianism of crime Mann first essayed with “Thief“; the film’s look, the careful compositions switching between storylines to find the rhythm and the wisdom that marries each character to the other in its grand design. The comparison to music, an opera, is most apt in its compulsive return to its key movements: the score echoing the libretto in currents invisible to the casual viewer but reason embedded therein for the persistent reverence for “Heat,” and for Mann himself, in Mann’s filmography.