[COLUMN] Thirty Years Ago, Heat Mapped the End of the American West | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Michael Mann’s Heat is one of the greatest films ever made, and it looms large over so many genres. It is one of the great action movies, featuring a thrilling shootout that is apparently taught in military academies. It is a fantastic study of a particular brand of masculinity, populated by some of Mann’s most distinguished warrior poets in Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) and Neil McCauley (Robert DeNiro). It is perhaps the best bank robbery movie ever made, a propulsive cat-and-mouse thriller.

However, it is also one of the great modern westerns.

It is a western in the most literal sense. It is one of the great Los Angeles movies. Indeed, it deserves to be considered alongside Pulp Fiction, Magnolia and Short Cuts as one of the best anthology movies ever made about the city, part of that rich pool of fragmented narratives about disconnected and intersecting lives that includes great movies like Go!, somewhat less great movies like Crash and even modern efforts like the underseen Freaky Tales.

Heat has a much more linear plot than those movies. The film is structured more clearly as a series of cause and effect. However, like those anthology ensemble movies about the City of Angels, Heat is fascinated by the sprawl of the city, the way that lives spread and interweave in unexpected ways through the vast urban environment. Watching Heat can often feel like watching marbles dance across the floor, colliding into one another in an unpredictable pattern.

Very few bank robbery movies would give as much space to the stories of characters like Don Breedan (Dennis Haysbert) or Waingro (Kevin Gage) as Heat does. Even other movies of comparable length would choose to trim those plotlines, tighten them, bring them closer to the heart of the plot. Instead, Heat understands that everybody is the hero of their own story and that Los Angeles is not just one single clear narrative, but the intersection of a variety of characters who are migrating on their own trajectories.

So much of Heat is about the scarcity of meaningful human interaction, the difficulty of forging an emotional connection in this vast urban disconnect. When the film released, there was a lot of buzz around the collaboration of screen titans Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro, two lifelong friends and two icons of cinema, whose only previous shared screen credit was The Godfather, Part II, in which they were each trapped as the leads of two separate timelines.

Heat mines the audience’s excitement at this premise for dramatic tension. Unlike Vito (DeNiro) and Michael (Pacino) in The Godfather, Part II, Hanna and McCauley occupy the same place and time, but they spend most of the movie at a remove from each other. They see each other through photos and video monitors, but they don’t interact. Pacino and DeNiro share an iconic coffee in the middle of the film, in a sequence that avoids placing both actors in the same frame - Mann shot the scene using a third camera for a wide angle perspective on the conversation, but never used it - and then don’t reconnect until the final moments, as Hanna chases McCauley through an airport.

Heat seems to unfold largely in liminal spaces, places between places where the characters are anonymous. The film begins at a train station and ends at an airport, a structure that Mann inverts with Collateral, which begins at an airport and ends on a train. There are a lot of car parks and shipping yards, hotel rooms and motorways, hospitals and bars. When Hanna’s stepdaughter Lauren Gustafson (Natalie Portman) tries to take her own life, she does so in the hotel room where Hanna is staying rather than in the family home.

Heat is full of near-misses, characters whose actions affect each other unknowingly. Hanna investigates the murder of a sex worker (Rainelle Saunders) by Waingro, a crime he’ll never solve committed by a man he’ll never meet, but who will go on to be a key part of what brings Hanna and McCauley together. The city is just a pool of lights to McCauley as he looks out over the balcony from Eady’s (Amy Brenneman) home in the hills, reminding him of the “iridescent algae” of Fiji.

It is perhaps worth noting that Heat was not the only great movie of the 1990s to feature a protagonist who dreamed of escaping to Fiji. There is a reason for that. As Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) explained of his own globetrotting ambitions, “You can't get any further away before you start coming back.” Fiji represents the furthest point on the globe. As McCauley looks out of his sparse apartment to the unyielding Pacific Ocean, Fiji is an aspirational end of the West.

Heat is a western in a very literal sense, in that it is a story of a rugged lawman tracking down a group of outlaw bank robbers at the westernmost edge of the American continent. The opening heist sequence is really just a contemporary stage coach robbery. It makes sense that Mann would carry over some of that sensibility from his previous film, The Last of the Mohicans, right down to including Wes Studi in a small supporting role as one of Hanna’s subordinates.

Like many westerns, The Last of the Mohicans was about the end of the west in a metaphorical sense as much as a literal one, the understanding that all eras end and certain ways of life are inevitably destroyed by the cruel march of modernity. As the title implies, The Last of the Mohicans is about the end of an indigenous culture. Heat explores a similar idea from a more personal perspective. To borrow a quote from The X-Files, Neil McCauley is literally and figuratively running out of West.

Heat arrived at something of an inflection point for Mann. His next movie, The Insider, would be the last movie that he would shoot entirely on film. He would use digital for certain sequences in Ali and would more aggressively embrace the form with Collateral and Miami Vice. By most accounts, Mann has never looked back, to the point that he would even shoot his Prohibition bank robbers movie Public Enemies on digital, creating an uncanny effect.

That juxtaposition of modern filmmaking with a historical setting was central to the point of Public Enemies, which suggested bank robbers like John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) were already outdated by the 1930s, replaced by advances in technology and infrastructure that allowed for the creation of vast networks of capital. These networks are a recurring fixation for Mann, with Miami Vice taking the Florida-based franchise into the realm of globalization and Blackhat exploring cybercrime.

This preoccupation bubbles through Heat. Even in 1995, McCauley felt like an anachronism. The film suggests that the truly modern criminals are money launderers like Roger Van Zant (William Fichtner). McCauley marvels at how much information Kelso (Tom Noonan) can pull in via his satellite dish. “How'd you get this information?” McCauley asks. “This stuff just flies through the air,” Kelso replies. “All you have to do is know how to grab it.”

One of the smaller interesting recurring details in Heat, something often overlooked in discussions of the movie, is the emphasis that the film places on screens and videos. The only witness to the opening trunk robbery is a homeless person described as “console TV man”, who somehow carts a switched-on television set around in a shopping cart. When Hanna discovers his wife Justine (Diane Venora) cheating on him with Ralph (Xander Berkley), Hanna simply takes the television set with him.

It seems like, no matter where a character is in Heat, there is a television set nearby. Sometimes, that set is important to the plot, allowing characters like Lillian (Kim Staunton) to witness the carnage unfolding in real time. More often than not, the television set is just turned on in the background of the shot, silently playing as it does while Vincent and Justine wait to hear about their daughter in the hospital. There is a strong sense of mediated reality here, playing into that idea of urban disconnect.

Encroaching modernity is central to the idea of western, often represented through the idea of expanding “progress” and “civilization”, most commonly evoked through the idea of the railroad. Heat finds the American West on the cusp of another form of modernity, moving away from the tactile and tangible world populated by career cops like Hanna and professional criminals like McCauley, into something altogether more abstract and networked.

It might be too much to draw a line between Heat and the films that would emerge over the next few years about the shift into a digital world, “cinema of simulation” movies like The Matrix, Strange Days, eXistenZ or The Thirteenth Floor. Still, Heat arrived around the time that mainstream culture was grappling with existential anxieties at “the end of history.” Heat suggests the end of its own kind of rigid binary, the neat delineation between cop and criminal.

This is one of the reasons that Heat has aged so well. Even three decades removed from its original release, Heat still feels eerily timely. Its DNA is apparent in some of the bigger and more ambitious movies of the past year, such as Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another or Ari Aster’s Eddington. Heat is a film about the shift from a world of certainty into something much harder to understand or get a grip on.

“I am alone,” McCauley tells Eady at one point. “I am not lonely.” It is a lie, but it is also a reflection of the paradox at the heart of Heat. In the film’s version of Los Angeles, the characters who live in this shared and densely populated urban center may be geographically close to one another, but they may as well be separated by impossible distances.