The Philosophy of Michael Mann

Emotion, Truth, and Space in Heat

227 eMotIon, truth, And sPACe In heAt Jonah Corne Thermometric Extremes: “Dead-Tech, Postmodernistic, Bullshit House” Returning home in the late, bright Los Angeles morning from the police detective work with which he has been consumed all night, Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) discovers his wife, Justine (Diane Venora), engaged in a serene domestic moment with another man, what appears to be a kind of replacement husband. Situated in the kitchen, Justine puts the finishing touches on a plate of food for the man, who reclines barefoot on the sofa in the living room watching television and sipping a cup of coffee, seeming more settled and at ease in the house than Vincent does at any point throughout Michael Mann’s 1995 film Heat. Catching the couple in this quaint aftermath of the act, Vincent behaves blasé, withholding reaction in a manner that Justine reads as incitement: “Don’t you even get angry?” she inquires. A confessed chronic weed smoker and Prozac popper, Justine herself remains weirdly unperturbed, almost benumbed, but her manner, we slowly grasp, derives largely from her having effectively contrived the exposure of the affair by taking no precautions to conceal it, doing so as a way of trying to elicit some sort—any sort—of emotion from her unavailable, workaholic husband. Her premeditation, indeed, invests the scene with an aura of theatricality that accounts for the highly caricaturized picture of traditional domesticity on display. Justine does not so much condone the role of a good wife— ensconced in the kitchen, blithely waiting on a man—as assume and play up such a role for momentary effect. Seeking a reaction from Vincent, she stages a mousetrap performance that dispenses with all subtlety. 228 Jonah Corne If at the beginning of the scene Vincent fails to react with the anger that Justine hopes to bring out in him, however, he abruptly meets such expectations and wildly exceeds them. Indulging that penchant for the tantrum that has become the signature of his acting style throughout the later part of his career, Pacino here delivers one of his most memorable, ranting fulminations . When Ralph (Xander Berkeley), whom Justine ironically refers to as her friend and whose banal name contrasts sharply with the portentous , symbolic latinity of “Justine” and “Vincent,” begins uttering profuse, milquetoast apologies for being the unwitting agent of Vincent’s cuckolding, Vincent berates him with escalating fury: “You know, you can ball my wife if she wants you to, you can lounge around here on her sofa, in her exhusband ’s dead-tech, postmodernistic, bullshit house, if you want to, but you do not get to watch my fucking television set!” Ostensibly the only thing in the house that belongs to him, the television, nevertheless receives no special, sensitive treatment from Vincent, who smashes it with staccato blows and tears the cord from the wall, shortcircuiting the picture. (Bland Ralph is watching that blandest of things on television, the news weather forecast, which yet holds a special significance in a film whose title’s primary meaning refers to temperature.) If ever Vincent was connected to the house, it was through the television, and now he has pulled the plug, severed even this meager, mechanical root. Bearing the battered box under his arm, Vincent makes a grandstanding exit. As Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro), Vincent’s criminal object of pursuit and typical Mann doppelgänger, remarks during the celebrated face-to-face scene in the diner, “A guy told me one time, don’t let yourself get attached to anything you’re not willing to walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” Unable to take the heat of his own marriage, Vincent flees, reinforcing all the more his secret kinship with the men on the other side of the law. In terms of affect, which might be thought of as the expression of the self’s own internal weather, Mann’s film is concerned as much with coldness as with heat. Indeed, from keeping cool to blowing his top to disengaging in his rage, Vincent possesses an inner climate that seems almost entirely to lack moderate (temperate) phases. Emotions are a perpetual source of trouble for him, somehow always in excess or in short supply. Accordingly, sensing a degree of projection in his charge against the house as being unfeeling or “dead,” Justine throws back Vincent’s own language at him just before he [3.133.12.172] Project MUSE (2024-04...