‘Heat’ and the Tragedy of Attachment
Published by Paul Brasington in Good stuff · Saturday 01 Jun 2024
Tags: Michael, Mann, Heat, romantics
Tags: Michael, Mann, Heat, romantics
Photo credit: Warner Bros
Michael Mann’s 1995 Heat is a crime movie, but more than this it’s a film about men who can’t pay the price of love. At its heart is a double edged romanticism: beyond the cat and mouse game played by McCauley (Robert De Niro) and Hanna (Al Pacino) a love story pulls at our emotional engagement. The love story sits as a counterpoint to the macho romanticism of the way the men see the brutality of their lives, a dubious claim on immoveable identity which helps them excuse themselves.
This sentimental romance of the bond between hard men (something different from a bromance) emerges most clearly in the central coffee bar scene, the first in which De Niro and Pacino appear together, in any film, as they agree sympathetically on the likelihood that one of them will kill the other.
It’s there in the ending when Hanna, having shot McCauley, takes his hand, the scene in its body positions and lighting framed like a Caravaggio painting.
But the fatal chase across the airport is more like a coda than a climax to the film. That climax comes just before the chase begins, when McCauley returns to the car where his girlfriend Eady is waiting anxiously for him, ready to escape to a life together, presumably free of crime, and with police swarming over the hotel they both understand that he’s going to have to walk away, or be captured.
The personal tragedy of the moment is written on McCauley’s expression, as he realises he has made the wrong choices, and then conveyed at length in the baffled despair on Eady’s face. The music swells accordingly. This is the real end, and it’s as poignant as anything in Casablanca.
Shortly before this McCauley has claimed to be ready to embrace his new life. He declares “all I know is there’s no point in me going anywhere anymore, if it’s going to be alone.” The film’s principal subplot works around the question of whether meeting Eady could be enough to make him abandon the core philosophy that’s guided his criminal success, stated twice in the course of the film: “allow nothing to be in your life that you can’t walk out on in 30 seconds if you spot the heat around the corner”.
But meeting Eady forces him to confront the nothing this notion has left him.
The realisation of his own emptiness is pushed on him too by the evident importance of the other gang members’ family lives. Before the big bank heist (which marks the beginning of their end) he urges Cheritto (Tom Sizemore) to consider how much he has to lose (his wife and children). Cheritto says he can’t do without the buzz that goes with the risk. Detective Hanna kills him shortly afterwards, when he’s holding a child hostage. So much for family values.
The editing throughout the film intercuts the development of the crime action with short scenes of the gang’s family relationships, as well as Hanna’s dysfunctional marriage. These scenes underpin everything in the film.
Family ties are emphasised again and again, even in small detail. The doctor patching up Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer) is reluctant to give up his shirt because it was a present from his daughter. Trejo gives up the gang rather than his wife, though she’s murdered anyway. Above all Shiherlis declares that the “sun rises and sets” with his wife Charlene, a commitment McCauley protects by scaring off Charlene’s lover (preserving Shiherlis’ blissful ignorance).
The Shiherlis story anticipates the film’s ending, though with a twist. We’re led to believe that Charlene will betray her husband to the police, for the sake of their son. In the event she contrives to save him, but at the cost of their ability to be together. Shiherlis drives away knowing what she’s sacrificed.
McCauley’s relationship with Eady develops in the light of his awareness of all that the others have. There’s a dramatic tension in the question of whether he really will compromise his working philosophy. As “the heat around the corner” gets ever hotter this tension builds.
We are led to hope the heat of passion will prove the stronger pull, because McCauley is the film’s central figure, a man in a quiet crisis, his moral complexity at the heart of our interest, and his relationship with Eady seems to offer his best hope of any kind of redemption.
Mann depends here on the way we are drawn in stories to see their lead figures as the focus of our engagement, something that makes possible the idea of an anti-hero. McCauley is by any reckoning a cold blooded killer. In the opening heist he executes a potential witness without compunction. He does the same to the money launderer who conspired to kill him. He feels entitled to kill the police who are shooting at him, and in the end fatally risks his own future because he wants a murderous revenge on the man who betrayed the gang.
Though we’ve been led to wonder whether his attachment to Eady will be his downfall, ultimately it’s his inability to let go of his old behaviour, a different kind of attachment, that brings him down.
The character contrasts matter to our sympathies. Certainly McCauley’s target at the end, Waingro, is presented as a different kind of killer, psychopathic and simply evil. McCauley looks decent by comparison, and it’s hard not to feel he’s doing the world a favour by murdering Waingro.
But above all there are the parallels with (and differences from) Hanna.
Hanna also has a home life. His first scene shows him making love to his wife (his third wife, as we find out), though the film intermittently charts the collapse of the marriage. Hanna is volcanic where McCauley is ice cold, but in his way he’s just as detached as McCauley, because he’s equally attached to a notion of himself as a man who does what he does (he brings down bad guys), with little room for anything else.
In this he could have been a cartoon figure, but Mann is subtler. The subplot involving Hanna’s stepdaughter (a young Natalie Portman) illustrates his capacity for decent emotion and attachment, a capacity his wife clutches at in the hope it might give them a second chance, but Hanna walks away again, to chase McCauley. His trajectory is very different from McCauley’s, but he’s just as trapped in himself, and in his different way just as destructive.
Mann’s films are generally distinguished by beautiful lighting and lingering photography. These characteristics serve a further poignancy in Heat, mannerisms turned to meaning. Particularly in the scenes between McCauley and Eady there’s a tactile sense of the landscape, of the grasses and the lights of the city, or the moonlight on the ocean.
Away from the film’s violence this is more than peace: the effective stasis of the landscape offers an apprehension of what we all have to leave behind as we move through our lives, the beauty of the world enduring beyond us.
The tragedy of romantic love lies in our urge to hold on to something beyond ourselves, a love that can endure. The tragedy for the men in Heat is that this power is never in their hands.
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