Heat - Expression in Style

All I Am Is What I'm Going After

Coming up with ways to add new compliments to Heat after the third or fourth time I come across it and it STILL manages to astound me in its tight meticulous craft and transcendental narrative composition; can become an endless proficient obsession as lethal as the one carried by Vincent Hannah or a dangerous pursue of meticulous efficiency and eventual falling to vicious loneliness like the one that falls upon Neil McCauley. But as I grow and learn more through watching lot more, I can come up with a few things that might cook into some significant sense among the multiple awaken in Michael Mann’s undisputed magnum opus in a filmography of ridiculously excellent titles!

If Mann’s cinema is deemed ‘all about style’, well, he’s no bashful about it. All the techno Neon and hand held grittiness that packed his film stock in the 80s could still be seen here and were about to evolve to his digital age in the 2000s, with Heat standing as the intersection point between his two different phases. And maybe that’s why the film feels so much inhabiting its own plain, but still wandering through Mann’s endless search, as you’ve probably heard to death any critic remarking this – to portray the broad scope of men’s identity fundamental pursue to be built out of titles such as career or family.

That’s a notion not just steeped deep in modern existentialism and what’s today seen as the pursued merits of ‘view’ and ‘matter’ amidst our social milieu. Is something that extends itself from 20th century onwards consumerist culture, pushing the individual to such pursues with their very human decency on the balance! In film Noir, that’s rendered through pulpy stories grounded in an unnerving realism revolved around crime tragedies, deadly coincidences and impulses pushing the individual to their limits, and as such, they naturally grew violent and cynical with age.

If in 1937 You Only Live Once ended with the doors or paradise opening to its protagonists, in 1955 Kiss Me Deadly ends with the end of the world; if in 1941 High Sierra had a tragic misunderstood antihero, in 1958 The Lineup or Murder By Contract presented him as an immoral psycho. This evolved naturally into criminal association evolved to the first early heist films, in films like The Killing – Kubrick’s own tale of a methodical obsessive planning coming bite the professional on the ass, doomed by the arbitrary nature of things, losing any grasp of their individual selves in the process.

The same was true in France in a film like Rififi that amidst the methodical planning, depicted the intimate relation of camaraderie and friendship given between men in their shared job as a more genuine and true bond than the ones they have in their own personal lives and their families. From France Mann also took what he saw with Melville’s devoted honoring to such style of classic filmmaking, now embedded with the poetic despair of his tragic lonely characters, making traditional B Noir stories feel like abstract poetry.

Even in the 60s and 70s when the same tropes where either rescued or deconstructed by guys such as Siegel with Madigan or Friedkin with French Connection and To Live and Die in L.A., the expression was still there through the style of genre film in direct service of its heart. Movies that speak through ‘stylization’ of its universe and characters alike! So if this was true with trench coats and top hats living in a world of secrecy and shadows; this is truth as well to Mann’s slick suits, tactical procedural, quick-mag-reloading lethal killers and modus operandi of extreme professionalism.

Heat is the connection of all the above. Is Lang, Melville, Siegel, Friedkin, the heist movie as a dramatic cross from The Asphalt Jungle or Criss Cross being met with the savage manhunt from The Big Heat tolling a existential cost to its high professional protagonist with blazing gaze to its archetypical roles of cops and robbers, equals of coolness, brash attitudes and melancholic existential despair from the Melville movies; being translated to a new audience!

Presented with the same iconography of the urban space being an extension of the individual’s intimate chaos and the abstract nature of black and white chiaroscuro now becoming the postmodern pavements of gray-blue streets and liquid plane of lights that promises the sprawl hypnotizing chaos of the city juxtaposed against the freedom of endless clean roads and pitch dark airport runways that look like wild frontier where survival is the order of the day. If Thief was about trying to fit in society shackles of conformity, of the endless sacrifice and devotion to a single goal, Heat lashes all out like a epic electric opera of a urban wild west epic dressed as cop film with the spirit of old Noir.

Mann’s use of long lenses amp the scope with evocative romance of this Noirish modernity, while his metaphysical glance covers the screens with a dreamy texture of bluish modernist impressionist paintings or surreal piles of yellow salt looming in the background; crossing in vast in scale, while the characters crowd the screen as if they were intrusively in your field of vision and you are observing them through open keyholes into their lonely vivid L.A. lives.

A mutual existential conundrum, shared between a vast range of characters each going through their own inner turmoil, enough to be their own individual little movies of their own, never mind how little they are in the story – Natalie Portman’s stepdaughter, Dennis Haysbert’s ex-convict, even Danny Trejo who’s barely shown properly amidst the crew, has this brutal and sad final scene – all feel small inside the narrative yet you feel like you’ve watched an entire character journey with them even when the focus is entirely on the central titans battle. Much like one of my all time favorite westerns, The Wild Bunch, the sprawling assemble is so well defined and perfectly casted you wished to see more of the story of each of their characters, packing the nuanced potential for such!

And yet, the movie remains condensed and laser-focused. Constructed under meticulous narrative construction of pure novelty vast detailed-richness with intricate minutiae details, gestures and small lines that tell all you need to know about a character or plot beat – the Kilmer / Judd ‘goodbye’ scene UH. Melding together through series of technical planning and meticulous process leading towards the painstakingly crafted set-pieces that range from series of heists, encompassing feuds with easy to hate perfectly casted character-actors, William Fichtner as the local corrupted business man and a nazi psycho serial killer from a scene-stealing shivering scum Kevin Gage.

It has the world creating a live and soul of its own while remaining laser-focused committed in its own processing, the arduous construction and planning to get the unattainable goal, a bank vault or a group of professional thieves. A manhunt thriller epic journey intercalating with the characters own matrimonial affairs and blossoming romances. All entangled and seemingly connecting together in a sprawling plane, coming together in a climatic centerpiece that had entire generations gushing all about THAT shootout, which yes it deserves to be shown at the Louvre!

It isn’t pure cathartic sadist awesomeness of tactical proficient mastery of action-shootout (well shit, it is). Is the diligent blocking, the perfect editing, the ear bursting soundscape, the entire thing is staged like a battle but the effect result is pure horror outburst; urban terror at its most chaotic wild effusion of lawless instincts. Rules of the game is coming out alive, no  matter the cost, from both sides of the barrels – again, style and execution dictates character and their own individual expression.

While at the center of it all, you get the long-awaited battle of the century: Michael Corleone vs. Travis Brickle, Al vs. Robert. It makes the long due encounter of De Niro and Pacino acting opposite to each other on the same screen worth the damm wait and would only get matched again with The Irishman decades later, but even then it wasn’t as cool as the cosmic confrontation between Vincent Hannah and Neil McCauley, two old dogs of a dying breed.

Perhaps the loneliest of all the characters in the movie because of their twenty four seven professional mental state and workaholic nature; sticking to their traditional meticulous methodical selves, trapped in their inescapable obsessions that gives them reason. Two perfectly respectable foes, two perfect contradictions that seem like a match made in Mann’s heaven of hard-working citizens and how they reflect the core soul of such human nature state engulfed in the modernist prison of having to build purpose, wealth and legacy, and the cost for such!

Can we be whole in our endless contradictions?! Our violence and passions, selfish desires and savage impulses, pushing those we love away, pulling in what we think we want; commit to the labor not just as necessity but as vice that defines who they are, even if at the cost of neglecting their own lives and those they love. We hate them for it but also love them in our own reflected search for defined meaning and shared existential despair to lose track of what matters to us while chasing after the thing that gives us reason.

This is the heart of their own relationship, the mutual understanding they each other better than no one else. The mutual passion and undying respect for devotion, set in a matrimony of bullets. That’s the heat of it all! The heat that pushes us, bounds us, destroys us in blazes of soul-crushing disparity; putting together two souls forbidden to inhabit the same cosmos of existence, the hard burden of truly being alone!

While this is our cinematic Heat, pulpy noir perfection and masterful translation of genre sensibilities to the modern vineyard of macho cinema. The painstaking perfect contradictory masterpiece of one’s man undying expression: one of the greatest action movies of all time that also happens to be one of its greatest dramas!