Micheal Mann’s Heat is one of the most revolutionary films to date and is renowned as a masterpiece due to its amplified use of slick style to carve out its themes and emotions while sustaining its brutal realism to provide a crime thriller that shows the flip-side of modern society’s coin and pushes the boundaries of its genre.
Vincent Hanna, a veteran LAPD detective is having a hard time accepting a life with his stubborn, self-absorbed wife and the distressing, constantly demanding nature of his job to furtherly worsen their relationship and his identity. His shadow, Neil McCauley, is a professional thief who takes care of all his heists and teamwork with ruthless planning and strategies with as many back-ups as a centipede’s legs. However, he unknowingly gets eroded by his golden rule of ‘not letting yourself get attached to something you’re not willing to let go of when you feel the heat coming around the corner’, thinking it will sometime quickly save him while it’s slowly killing him with isolation like an insurance he can barely cover for, putting all his life into his job like Vincent.
However, Neil betrays his sole rule by getting attached to his girlfriend Edey as he realises she’s the only thing that can shed away the monster inside of him to the point where he accepts a new life abroad and his loneliness seems to shift into the type where he only needs to hang in there a little longer. He gets deadly confused and even suspicious when they first meet when she shows the remotest interest in him that wouldn’t get her anything but conversation. He treats this as an alien element and, when reality hits him, this rips him right out of his dedicated glass box of security for his business and into the real world and realises there are better things that can happen in your life if you go out and open the door while Vincent slowly loses contact with it as he notices how little his wife means in his life in this god-forsaken world of scum he sticks himself in.
However, when he goes to kill Waingro for the sake of avenging his business and dignity and puts a life with Eady in jeopardy, he proves he hasn’t abandoned his honour and is willing to simply run away. When he tells Waingro to ‘look at him’ before shooting him it’s as if he’s getting him to see him as a reformed man than the stubborn individualist who took in everyone based on his selfish desires but now sees the true qualities in people and now sees him as the true scumbag he is rather than a simple traitor.
The film’s main point is that loneliness can make even the most contrasting creatures almost identical with enough erosion to their identity and masculinity to the point where when detective Hanna and criminal McCauley look each-other in the eye, they almost sympathise with each-other upon how they’re in such different circumstances yet they’re the same person in a different skin after suffering the same back-hand of society’s uncaring void. Hanna has nothing but a draining job he can’t give up on and a crumbling marriage, McCauley has an ending career and someone he cares about but feels the need to put his non-existent honour above her if the worst comes to happen. Fate seemingly reeled them into not so much an interrogation but a trampoline therapy session where our characters, for the first time in their lives, have someone to take seriously, like they’re both talking to a mirror. They’re different sides of the same coin. American loneliness is seemingly a unique creature to the rest of the world. The kind of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different from the sort you know you’ll get through if you just hang in there.
Part of what makes Heat work is, unsurprisingly, Al Pacino and De Niro’s top-notch performances as these 2 protagonists. You warm up to them excellently, so you don’t expect a particularly cruel or sadistic tendency to sprout from them but what you do sense is a black hole cuffing each-other together, and there’s no telling what may arise from it. Vincent doesn’t just hunt Neil down due to his dedication to his job but seemingly to earn his own identity in this corrupt world. If the circumstances were any different, they could’ve been the most understanding friends and that is Heat’s biggest tragedy.
The film’s blue-grey shading and constant distant-angling also adds a soothing blanket of loneliness to each character, shown at it’s peak when De Niro stares at the sea from his balcony at a distant shot from the camera. The film also has a habit of not entirely blending the focused character into the background, making various uses of green screen seem almost obvious, adding that certain dream-like quality to show how separate these people are from society.
One of the heaviest impressions of Vincent’s constant inner-erosion is shown in his telling of his banquet dream to Neil. He’s sitting at a feast with all the criminals he’s ever killed, with none of them saying a word. They just stare at each-other with blackened eyes. This symbolises his world as the only people he’s made connections with and payed attention to are the souls of criminals and dead men, they don’t say or give anything in return but only run from him like his friends and family slowly fade from him. His wife and daughter are like walking ghosts to him as he refuses to stick himself out of his job and the jarred loneliness explodes in a reoccurring dream.
The other side of the coin is shown in Neil’s real life when he has a banquet dinner with his colleague’s family. It’s presented that he has friends but he’s not really there and is just as alone as Vincent due to seeing them as nothing more than puppets with his tragic golden rule.
Vinent’s situation gradually plunges into downward spiral as he’s the only one to notice his step-daughter’s suffering. Her mother’s too stubborn and egotistical to deal properly and her dad is apparently an abusive, dismissive asshole while he just gets too drained by his job to do anything about her constant isolation. She’s his only spot of human concern out of his job as he sees her slowly get eroded by constant dismissals and when she attempts suicide, his relationships and masculinity are vanquished and he gets completely consumed by taking down his other half with nothing left to lose. However, as far as an event like this is likely to pull one’s self down, it does at least slap him across the face with reality as he, for the first time, helps out someone remotely close to him instead of torturing himself with his grounded values after being seen getting pulled between his lives of the one with his dismissive wife and daughter and the one with his distressing, graphic experiences of his job and gets sucked into the black void between them.
There’s also a further question of identity with Vincent: is he destroying his wife because of making no effort of connection when coming home or is she destroying him due to being too stubborn to ease his stress and obsession over his job? She even has a guy stay overnight to serve to his face how little he means to her after paying her zero attention for an extended time. How he doesn’t seem to care about this in the slightest shows he knows fully how she’s trying to pull him out in devious ways but up-front refuses to acknowledge her and furtherly widens the gap between them and shows defiance personally. Ironically, his television is the one thing that he actually sees as his own possession in his wife’s house. When it’s the only part about his wife having another man over that sets him off being when he watches from it, it references how all his attention and identity has only been catered around his small TV instead of his family in an isolated house of ghosts, sadly showing he simply chooses time again not to pay his wife any attention until she understands him, which she clearly does not. Choosing such a small comfort like a TV allusionally symbolises his tiny resulting impact in the mansion full of breeding crime despite the traumas he goes through daily.
When he trashes it on the road, it suggests he's let go of his sentimentality and burden of his wife’s life and becomes a true man to his own, finally accepting a life on his own by destroying the only thing of his from his wife’s house as he was hanging onto her by a thread.
He even directly states to his wife he keeps himself sharp for his job from his agitation and isolation in his personal life as there’s no way he could truthfully talk to her without spilling the horrific things he goes through daily, even if he was in a lighter mood. Vincent converts his malevolent tendencies from his dead-end personal life into refined wit and motivation for his detective duties to prevent himself completely getting consumed by his demons. The biggest example is his unusually determined, unstoppable attitude towards cracking McCauley’s case after his step daughter’s suicide attempt. The stress and woe of such a personal event all got converted and leaked out into pure work motivation, like his job and life are a tragic ying and yang.
When he’s only left with his job, unless he gets a stroke of good fortune like McCauley with Edey, it’d only be a matter of time before he loses all wit, energy and motivation and be made a husk out of his draining detective work while McCauley died in satisfaction with a caring partner and his job done. The same outcasts of LA go the contrasting paths.