True to the best of this series, Nick James' book on Michael Mann's Heat (1995) lives in that exciting space between the flow of image and sound and the flow of intelligent and applied commentary. James pays exacting attention to the balance between crime movie conventions and Mann's stylish visual sense, realism "with a particular kind of extravagant bombast", a feeling for Los Angeles' space combined with "a rhetoric of existential motivation that's sometimes so hectoring it's like being prodded incessantly in the chest."
James sees the street smart homicide cop Vincent Hanna and the professional thief Neil McCauley fitting into Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro's iconic trajectories, reputations to which Heat's notorious coffee encounter pays homage. Yet a glance down the cast list reveals such contemporary names as Diane Venora, Ashley Judd and Natalie Portman nearing the top of their game. Few thrillers care to examine relationships between working men and women who wait quite as poignantly as Heat, evoking a discourse about long hours vs. 'quality time' that enlivened thrillers and comedies alike in the wake of Reaganomics. Exchanges between Hanna and Justine (Venora), McCauley crewman Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer) and Charlene Shiherlis (Judd) embody Hollywood quotability - "This isn't sharing. This is leftovers" - and an emotional excess approaching high melodrama. (Adding to the pathos, these couples even resemble each other). James discusses the texture of their exchanges with sensitivity: "What kind of restaurant row about relationships gets into such language as 'detritus' and 'signs of passing'? ..Mann is here trying to forge a new hybrid of melodrama, tragedy and thriller." It is some measure of Mann's evolving Hollywood savvy that Heat appealed to the action fanboy, those who sought an intelligent treatment of "work, destiny and male identity", and women. As Australian academic Anna Dzenis wrote: "there are some intensely melodramatic partings in Heat where the face of the woman is the centre for a thousand bittersweet tragic emotions."
Mann famously executive-produced that emblematic '80s phenomenon Miami Vice, to whose swagger Heat owes something of its own rhetoric. Played out in postmodern boxes amidst Eno aural soundscapes, LA's neons recalling Blade Runner (1982), and aspiring to changed fortunes in a finger snap, Heat betrays an '80s spiritual and ethical economy rooted in the "symbiotic feeding frenzy" between street sensibilities and high art so peculiar to that era. The interface between style and experience is rich and ambiguous. In 1997 a bank robbery in North Hollywood shocked TV newscasters for its evocation of that climactic robbery in the film. Cultural theorist Norman Klein later wrote how he showed the coverage to students who felt that Mann's footage was more realistic, whilst the grammar was identical. Of such authenticity-becoming-style, James writes "It's the kind of crime film that wears its research like a shoulder flash on grimy overalls." Like the film, Heat shows with rigour and compassion how Michael Mann became a key Hollywood player by mapping the co-ordinates of contemporary Hollywood aesthetics onto the brutal logic of contemporary American life.
Reviewed by Richard Armstrong
