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Chapter 9 It’s a Mann’s World? Adam Segal The director Michael Mann generally works within the genre of the crime film. Within this genre, there is typically a focus placed on the relations among men, with very little emphasis on female characters. Susan White (2001), referring to a 1947 Anthony Mann police procedural, T-Men, writes that “with few exceptions, women cannot and must not traverse the boundary surrounding the criminal milieu the agents are investigating, for their investigation into the underworld is emphatically . . . an exploration of what it means to be a man among men” (98). Michael Mann’s Heat (1995) explores this same kind of terrain. Discussion of Heat has generally revolved around its generic status as a crime film, yet it also makes room for a female perspective in the story. Assuming female empathy with female characters and conventionally feminine concerns, the girlfriends and spouses of the film’s main characters provide an entry point for female viewers. However, there are also moments in the film that invite female viewer engagement with the male characters. Thus the film’s domestic scenes arguably construct a space for a “female” or feminized spectator, while opening up a realm of textual negotiation for cross-gender viewing. As Pam Cook points out in this volume (31), critical approaches to classical film genres have generally assumed a gender-specific address. This essay aims to show how there can be no easily assumed relationship between genres and gendered audiences, for as socially circulating gender assumptions change, they bring with them consequent shifts in audience address. My argument concerns changes in Hollywood masculinity in the early to mid1990s and how this is reflected in one particular film, Heat. Susan Jeffords (1993, 196) records that during the 1980s a men’s movement emerged in the United States, focused on reevaluating the traditional roles and expectations of men’s behavior in U.S. society. This movement produced discussion groups, therapy sessions, men’s studies courses, and magazines that examined the question of men’s changing roles in U.S. society. Jeffords notes that in mainstream Hollywood films, the hardfighting , gun-wielding, muscular, and heroic men of the eighties gave way to the i-xii_1-262_Gled.indd 125 12/13/11 11:17 AM 126 Adam Segal more sensitive and loving family men of the 1990s (197). The tension that the male protagonists face in many of these “sensitive man” narratives is whether excelling at one’s job has to come at the expense of one’s personal and family life (200). Heat is a unique entry in the police procedural/crime genre in that it attempts to illuminate for its viewers the emotional toll that crime work takes on the police and thieves while also revealing the toll it takes on the spouses and loved ones who are left at home to wonder when the men will be coming home. Jackie Byars (1987) suggests that “if we can allow ourselves to recognize shifts between masculine and feminine modes of perception and to see differences between discursive practices rather than seeing just an overwhelming sameness that obscures discourses of women, we can—perhaps—make cultural interventions in reading and theory and in production as well” (302). Heat focuses on the efforts of a driven police lieutenant, Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) to bring down a crew of thieves led by the resourceful Neal McCauley (Robert De Niro). Over the course of this sprawling three-hour crime epic, much is made of the male characters’ lack of time for emotional attachment to the women in their lives (Lindstrom 2000, 22). Lindstrom points out that “the criminals and the police value their personal relationships but ultimately sacrifice them” (23). Lindstrom also observes that all of the domestic scenes in the film “constantly insist that work consumes the time and energy that might otherwise go to personal relationships” (25). In Heat, domestic relationships are anything but invisible. Home life is no longer, as in traditional crime films, a retreat/respite for the hero of the narrative but instead a place where the domestic scenes consist of “emotional contestation” (25). The female characters do not dominate the narrative yet they inflect Heat’s film noir/gangster/police procedural narrative with a touch of contemporary feminist discourse. The major female characters in the film employ the kind of talk that might be heard in a marital counseling session or glanced at in self-help books. If the presence of female talk...

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