Back to selection
30 Years On, The Heat Is Around The Corner. And In Several TV Shows
Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Heat Released 30 years ago, Michael Mann’s Heat is an almost-three-hour-long odyssey through Los Angeles and the minds of two ideologically opposed men who inhabit it. Codes are established and broken, thrills are tempered by sobering terror, paths are chosen and exit routes mapped. If high-level thief Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) has steeled himself to sever relationships to anyone or anything at a moment’s notice, the man pursuing him, police detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), is defined by a refusal to let go. He holds on to his angst, he tells his wife (Diane Venora), refusing to engage in cathartic conversation with her so that the raw emotion of a crime scene can keep him “sharp, on the edge.” The end result is the same—consummate professionalism at the cost of personal fulfillment.
For all its sprawling scope, one of the film’s most indelible visuals is of intimacy. Vincent and Neil sit across from each other at a coffee shop, where, per Mann, “Both men recognize that their next encounter will mean certain death for one of them. Gaining an edge is why they’ve chosen to meet.” Neil is stiff, his posture reserved, his mouth pursed as if in a subconscious attempt to not let anything slip. But eventually, something does—he reveals that there’s a woman in his life. Like Stress Fractures in Titanium, the book he was reading earlier, his demeanor finally cracks. Vincent is vulnerable too, revealing two failed marriages, a third in rapid decline. The two men start, and end, on opposing sides of the law, but venture onto common ground midway. They share tidbits of their lives, then dreams, then lethal promises. One will have to kill the other, should it come down to it. It will.
The definitive continuation to Heat’s story is yet to come—Mann turned in a sequel script a few months ago that’s just been greenlit—but in the meantime, a slew of TV shows this year have found ways to spin off the original, borrowing its visuals and themes, reworking and re-imagining them in contexts as varied as murder mysteries to workplace sci-fi thrillers.
The charged energy of Heat’s diner scene courses through a similar setting in episode one of Marvel Cinematic Universe series Daredevil: Born Again, in which lawyer Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) asks longtime rival and former mob boss Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) if he’d like to catch up. While Mann films his men through over the shoulder shots, each encroaching on the other’s turf, in frame and in-universe, the wide shot here only emphasizes Fisk’s imposing stature, squeezed into a tight diner booth across from Murdock. While the scene draws from Heat by having both men make direct threats to each other, it also tweaks it slightly—Vincent and Neil know exactly who they are, but Daredevil: Born Again’s characters are clinging to the illusion that people can change, that they themselves have. All the while, however, the underlying tension in the scene only makes it clear just how easy it would be for them to slip into their past selves. Having sworn off his Daredevil masked vigilante alter-ego, Murdock isn’t immune to the allure of swiftly dispensing justice himself rather than leaving it up to the system. Fisk, now a New York mayoral candidate, has cleaned up his act, couching his threats in reasonable terms, pointedly speaking of legal recourse. By contrast, Murdock is repeatedly asked to clarify which persona he plans to act against Fisk with.
The scene’s surface-level pleasantness can’t mask its simmering undercurrent. Murdock and Fisk barely raise their voices, but there’s the unmistakable implication that for all their careful politeness, this can only end in brutality. Fisk acknowledges it’s hard to shake off an innately violent nature. Eventually, neither can help but succumb.
A similar across-the-table sitdown occurs in sci-fi series Severance season two—described by actor Adam Scott as the show’s “Heat scene”—only it’s more of an unexpected flirtation than a confrontation. Subbing in a female character here enables an attraction between two opposing forces, a grieving widower who despises his manipulative corporation and the CEO with a vested interest in keeping him hired. Like Heat, there’s an element of pursuit, but this time, the fixation is romantic, verging on dangerous and destructive. Severance is not so much a love triangle as it is a love dodecahedron, its innumerable pairings made possible by the show’s premise, in which employees at biotech firm Lumon Industries undergo a procedure to split their consciousness in two—their “innies” are effectively trapped in the office, the “outies” are who they are on the outside. Neither retains the other’s memories.
Data refiners Helly (Britt Lower) and innie Mark (Scott) are in love, a romance complicated not only by outie Mark having discovered that his late wife is actually alive and being held hostage at the same company, but also by Lumon CEO Helena—Helly’s outie—developing an obsession with both versions of Mark. Like Neil and Vincent at the diner, Helena and outie Mark too meet for the first time, but rather than them being on equal footing, the dynamic is wildly skewed. They’re boss and employee, rapist and her (unknowing) victim. Helena likes Mark, but she’s also there as a company woman, attempting to suss out how much he’s really uncovered about Lumon. Her friendly persona is put on, disguising her otherwise cold detachment. Gradually, however, the shop talk morphs into flirtatious banter. Where Vincent asked Neil whether he ever wanted a “regular-type life,” Helena lets herself briefly envision one when Mark teasingly asks if she’d like to bring him home to meet her dad. Neither are the picture of normalcy: She’s in a cult, he had a hole drilled into his head to escape his grief. While Neil and Vincent implicitly understand each other, Helena yearns for the connection her and Mark’s innies have. And if Neil lets slip about his partner, Helena misnames Mark’s as a deliberate way to regain control of the situation and exert authority. What it does instead is snap him right back to reality. He sees through her faux sincerity and leaves. Rather than parting oaths, there’s a lingering gaze, confusion and connection at odds with each other.
The iconography of Heat’s instantly recognizable diner scene doesn’t recur in crime drama series Task, but the spirit of Mann’s film suffuses it throughout, with creator Brad Ingelsby describing his show as “working-class Heat.” He moves the action away from LA’s cityscapes and to Philadelphia’s rural outskirts, swiftly setting up not only the inevitable collision course between his leads—FBI agent Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo) and thief Robbie Prendergast (Tom Pelphrey)—but also their similarities. They’re both single fathers, with Robbie’s wife having walked out on him and Tom having lost his close to a year ago. Like Tom, Robbie is grieving, the death of his brother still fresh.
Unlike Heat’s men, who are at the top of their game, these two are utterly down on their luck. A weary, unfit Tom is pushed back out into the field long before he’s ready, and when one of Robbie’s routine robberies turns into a shootout, he makes the foolish impulsive decision to kidnap a young child who could identify him. As in Heat, the women in Tom and Robbie’s lives become collateral damage—Robbie’s niece is now caught up in a situation she had nothing to do with, while Tom’s alcoholism becomes yet another sticking point in his relationship with his daughter. If Neil’s sparsely furnished house speaks to his disciplined detachment, Robbie’s lack of his own—he’s moved into his late brother’s—conveys the inability to move on. His thieving is motivated by revenge, the impulsive thought of which overrides Neil’s careful plans and common sense by Heat’s end. Neither man is fated for a happy ending.
When Tom and Robbie eventually cross paths, what ensues isn’t civilized conversation at a restaurant, but a fraught car ride, in which the thief forces the agent into the role of his getaway driver at gunpoint. If Vincent is Neil’s death warrant, Tom becomes Robbie’s chance of escape. While Heat’s men share purpose and professionalism, Tom and Robbie trade losses. Robbie lacks Neil’s assertion that he wouldn’t want to do anything else. “Even if I wanted to go home, don’t mean I know the way no more,” he tells Tom, voice laced with regret. Their conversation doesn’t conclude with the mutual agreement that one life must end; instead, Robbie, recognizing Tom’s innate decency, saves his life twice. Tom attempts to repay the favour but bleeds out in his arms, a mirror to Vincent holding Neil’s hand as he dies. Both, by the end, find a measure of redemption, with Tom reconnecting with his kids and Robbie having secured a better future for his, even after his death.
Crime comedy series Poker Face doesn’t stop at merely referencing Heat’s themes, but goes on to play several scenes from the film itself in an episode nodding to various crime classics (the show itself is heavily indebted to Columbo). The first of these sequences—the bank heist that unspools into a public firefight—is on the television at a bar Juice (James Ransone), a thief, buys crime-movie aficionado Kendall Hines (Sam Richardson) a drink at. Wowed by his comprehensive knowledge of heist movies, Juice convinces Kendall to rob the electronics store he was recently fired from, split the cash and finance his filmmaking dreams.
Like Heat’s sadistic killer Waingro (Kevin Gage), however, Juice too turns out to be a loose cannon, shooting the store manager when he inadvertently interrupts their heist. When the body is found, Kendall comes back to the store to retrieve the bag of extra cash he’d stashed—that the cops would’ve found it and traced it to him eventually renders this decision essential, unlike Neil’s ill-advised swerve back to the city right on the cusp of freedom. If Kendall is Neil, unwitting detective Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne) is positioned as Vincent. She puts Heat on across the store’s TVs to distract the thieves after alerting the cops; a shootout ensues just as the film winds down. As Kendall attempts to leave, he’s apprehended, the breeze blowing away his notes. Real life isn’t like the movies.
The show borrows Heat’s choice of climactic song, Moby’s “God Moving Over the Face,” but also finds thematic resonance. For all Kendall’s love of the film, he just couldn’t heed Neil’s emphatic advice—to walk away the moment he felt the heat around the corner.
