On “Heat”, One of Cinema’s Greatest Love Stories
Obsession can be a beautiful and advantageous vice, but its invisibility makes it a trade-off. Only those with obsessions can fully understand what they hope to achieve; as one becomes more fixated on a singular target, it eats away at his facade every second of every day and corrodes every ounce of his physical being. It makes interacting with reality, with the mundane everyday life he thought he wanted, impossible. Something obsession can never do, however, is disappear. It’s incapable of parting with a man until he sees his life’s work through to its completion. As everything that makes him human crumbles away, there’s that driving force at his core. It’s the only thing that keeps him going while it repels everything else into oblivion.
Most people don’t understand this feeling. They can’t. They drew the short straw, meaning that they exist in the wrong section of his mind. Only a few are so lucky as to inhabit the small room within his partitioned life and mind — the place he disappears to when he’s face-to-face with the juice. An obsessed man might easily be caricatured as a nihilist, a man who cares about nothing. He would never attempt to stop caring but after a while, the people in the other parts of his life will figure his priorities out. After all, no attentive partner burns out of two marriages and is on the fast track to the end of a third. Obsession can leave you devoid of all good things in life, but it won’t ever leave you.
There are plenty of great movies about obsession and the cost of pursuit: Memories of Murder, Munich, and Zodiac quickly spring to mind. None of the obsessions of these films’ characters are ones that come looking for you. He doesn’t run, nor does he hide. He’s as fixated on you as you with him, and you won’t ever stop looking for one another because the thrill of this chase is the only thing worth living for. It might be the last thing worth living for.
Lt. Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) and Neil McCauley’s (Robert De Niro) first conversation, at an LA coffee shop, is indeed memorable because it pits the two legends together on-screen for the first time, but the scene embodies the entirety of Heat’s epic cat-and-mouse crime saga. Director Michael Mann uses this conversation to validate his film’s entire storyline prior to Hanna and McCauley finally meeting, and it tells the audience everything they need to know about where the rest of the film is heading.
Critics and fans frequently point to Heat as a pioneer of antiheroes, which is especially miraculous considering it’s about two antiheroes of equal stature and two of the greatest actors of all time embody them. Despite being a cop and a criminal, Hanna and McCauley are two sides of the same coin. Mann carves that analogy throughout every instance where their paths cross: Hanna’s first attempt to catch McCauley and his crew comes to mind. When McCauley noticed the sound of a guard sitting down against the side of the truck where the LAPD is waiting to ambush McCauley’s heist, Mann dissects their line of the sight, utilizing the camera like a mirror (it reminds me of the shots of every male character, but never of Jodie Foster, in The Silence of the Lambs.) Hanna and McCauley, meeting face-to-face for the first time, look straight into each other’s eyes; the audience now knows they’re on a collision course as well as that they are inexorably inside each other’s heads. The coffee shop conversation expands upon all this heavy lifting but doesn’t erode any electricity from McCauley’s impending bank heist, the epic shootout that ensues, or the final showdown between Hanna and McCauley in the shadows of LAX.
Writing a celebration of Heat’s twenty-fifth anniversary for The Ringer, Adam Nayman characterizes Mann’s filmmaking pathos as “the impossibility of reconciling individual excellence with conventional forms of security and fulfillment.” McCauley is not excited by his work. He’s a master criminal, sure, but he cannot afford to revel in his craft if such enjoyment could lead to one false move. Hanna, on the other hand, has enough margin for error to pretend he has an enjoyable normal life. He, as Nate (Jon Voight) warns McCauley, can hit or miss. McCauley can’t miss. Ever. Heat’s magic emanates from how Hanna’s and McCauley’s respective quests for individual professional excellence went out the window when they caught onto one another. The coffee shop confirms that neither man would rather do anything else than this.
At the end of their conversation in the coffee shop, Hanna tells McCauley he won’t like having to put him down when it comes to that, as they both know it will. He feels obliged to remind McCauley that he has to save his own skin at all costs: “But I tell you, if it’s between you and some poor bastard whose wife you’re gonna turn into a widow…brother, you are going down.” Pacino’s nonchalant reference to McCauley as his brother, the closest thing McCauley’s ever had to family, is all that’s necessary to fathom why McCauley breaks all of his rules for Hanna. McCauley knows he can’t flee the US until he kills Waingro, the serial killer who sets the entire plot into motion with his carelessness as a hired gun for McCauley’s team and an aptitude for cold-blooded murder. He understands implicitly that hunting for Waingro means he’s going to find Hanna (who has also been hunting Waingro for a string of murders, unaware that Waingro worked with Neil on the job that got Hanna on Neil’s trail.)
Michael Mann is, I think, most interested in how interiority and subjective consciousness interact with the physical mechanisms through which that subjective nature is expressed into observable (although definitively not objective) reality. He occasionally explores this dichotomy through individual characters like Will Smith’s Muhammad Ali, pitting Ali’s justification for converting to Islam and protesting the Vietnam War against the broader social upheaval of the civil rights movement. I’m more compelled by Mann’s interest in how an obsession forces people to partition their own lives and the difference in how they treat the people in each fragment of their life. He explores this most thoroughly in Heat, but it’s hard to miss Mann working through similar ideas in Thief, Manhunter, and The Insider. Mann is revered because his painstaking research gives his work a tangible realism, and his characters are real in that they have their own objectivity and personal perceptions of the world. It’s hard to blame them sometimes for an inability to give a shit about what they don’t give a shit about. Real people naturally prioritize the affairs that populate their lives.
Tom Sizemore’s Michael Cheritto, a member of McCauley’s crew, says one of Heat’s quintessential lines: “For me, the action is the juice.” The first cut to McCauley after this line expresses his trepidation at his crew’s recklessness. He knows this bank job is a bad idea. They can feel the heat around the corner. But they’re staying put. The crew is willing to break their leader’s strictest axiom, but nobody’s in real trouble until McCauley and Hanna meet, because now McCauley can’t walk out the door either. Hanna is McCauley’s juice and vice versa. Everyone involved now has a compulsion to live dangerously, to collide head-on with whatever their juice might be.
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