BONUS: Heat (1995) and the Point of Men

A review and analysis of Michael Mann's 1995 film Heat

This review, unfortunately, requires me to divulge opinions relevant to the 2010s-2020s Gender Wars. You already have your opinions. I am too tired to ask them to change.

I’ve come to believe a boy is typically born with a hole in his soul. Where one might expect a relating function, or a self-preservation instinct, one instead finds a void, even a miniature death wish. That spiritual hole is widened through childhood, by familial lessons, boyhood friendships, and popular culture. It drives the boy—most boys, a few girls—toward physical risk and arguably pointless competition. A boy’s body and soul, the hole says, are worthless outside of what they can do. In The Will to Change (2004), bell hooks describes this hole as a wound driven into boys by the people around them. But one can also see it an open disk drive, reserved for a Purpose.

Rejecting a Regular-Type Life

McCAULEY: I do what I do best. I take scores. You do what you do best, trying to stop guys like me.
HANNA: You never wanted a regular-type life?
McCAULEY: What the f— is that? Barbecues and ball games?

Michael Mann’s 1995 film Heat revolves around a coffee with a cop and a robber. The cop—LAPD detective Vincent Hanna—is a master of the craft. Ex-Marine, plugged into the underworld, a track record of bringing down heist crews, paid for in two divorces and counting. The robber—smooth operator Neil McCauley—has so far been defined by the operational perfection of his scores. The gear, the timing, the covered tracks, the escape routes. He knows the stakes, though. He doesn’t keep anything in his life that he won’t walk out on in thirty seconds flat, if he feels the heat around the corner.

HANNA: What are you, a monk?
McCAULEY: I have a woman.
HANNA: What do you tell her?
McCAULEY: I tell her I’m a salesman.
HANNA: So then, if you spot me coming around that corner, you’re just gonna walk out on this woman? Not say goodbye?
McCAULEY: That’s the discipline.
HANNA: That’s pretty vacant, no?
McCAULEY: It is what it is. It’s that, or we both better go do something else, pal.

The third act sees both men tempted to do something else. McCauley secures a plane to New Zealand for him and his girlfriend. He almost skips town without tying up a loose end. Meanwhile, Hanna sits with his wife in an emergency room, waiting on the condition of his stepdaughter. He almost ignores his pager. But ultimately, they both choose What They Do Best over the people they love.

Their Purpose comes first.

Purpose, Feeling, and the Sacred

In a 1988 lecture at the Minnesota Men’s Conference, poet Robert Bly expounds on an idea from D.H. Lawrence’s Fantasia of the Unconscious. I like Bly’s phrasing more:

Purpose is sacred to men, and feeling is sacred to women.¹

Lawrence elaborates on this:

Feeling is an end in itself: this is unspeakable truth to a woman, and never true for one minute to a man.² When man, in the Epicurean spirit, embraces feeling, he makes himself a martyr to it...

Bly uses the word “sacred” intentionally. This Purpose, he argues, is what the hole in a boy’s soul is for. Where one might expect a relating function, or a self-preservation instinct, one can instead insert a Purpose, a What You Do Best.

By any emotional metric, Hanna’s life sucks. His work consumes his life. He’s distant from his wife. He lives with a simmering rage that occasionally flares behind the wheel, or after a setback. He feels bad constantly, and he knows how to feel better: spend less time at work, talk about his problems to his wife, and spend more time with his stepdaughter.

But that would divert his energy away from his Purpose. Every day, Hanna chooses between his family and the case. And he always chooses the case.

If he didn’t choose the case, then he wouldn’t have found Waingro.
If he didn’t choose the case, then he wouldn’t have intercepted the bank job.
If he didn’t choose the case, then McCauley would have gotten away.

Hanna pays dearly for these choices. He finds his wife with another man and his stepdaughter in a bathtub with slit wrists. He loses a colleague intercepting the bank heist, too. He makes the choices anyway. He doesn’t know how to choose otherwise. And no matter how miserable his life becomes, he does not want to change.

Because to change, he must turn away from his Purpose.

Why Heat Must Fail the Bechdel Test

Alison Bechdel’s eponymous test is a measure of whether a story is about women. To the extent the women talk to each other about something besides men, a book or film or comic cares about the interiority of these female characters.

Heat does not concern itself with the interiority its women. It’s not about the women, because this film is specifically about a male experience. Justine’s decision to leave, Eady’s decision to stay, and Charlene’s decision to warn her husband only matter insofar as they react to the men—Hanna, McCauley, and to a lesser extent Shiherlis and Breedan—choosing Purpose over the women they love.

The men struggle with these decisions. McCauley tells his girlfriend that he’s done taking scores, that he doesn’t want to do anything else alone, without her. Hanna almost changes his ways after his stepdaughter’s suicide attempt. But the women are all left behind. Justine comes to terms with it. Charlene knows it’s the only way out. We only see Eady’s reaction for the thirty seconds flat it takes McCauley to walk out.

Paul the Apostle gets it. If it was up to him, every man would choose God, and his Purpose as given by God, over the touch of a woman.³ Marriage, he concedes, is better than burning in sin, but it’s ultimately a distraction from What You Do Best.

The women in Heat are not helpless. They make their opinions known, and they act on their own accord. But they fail to change the men in their lives, because for those men to change, they must turn away from their Purposes.

There is one compromise that the film does not explore: a man can make a family his Purpose. If a man decides that paternity is What He Does Best, then the monomaniacal focus that McCauley puts towards taking scores, that Hanna puts towards pursuing McCauley, instead goes toward the project a woman most needs a man for: a family. For most families, it’s the barbecue and ball games that McCauley and Hanna deride: a masculinity tempered by feeling. But if necessary, that Purpose will motivate men to carry their families through war, famine, and poverty. And such a man may not name that burden until he’s three scotches deep with his adult son, long after the struggle is over.⁴

What is the Point of a Man?

In a mechanized, digitized economy, the physical strengths of men make less of a difference relative to women. Handguns, industrial machinery, and information technology are not materially more effective with increased upper body mass. A three-hundred-pound deadlift does not have economic value.

In such an environment, the hole in a boy’s soul becomes more pronounced. It makes him antsy in school, unruly as a teenager, destructively adrift in his twenties. Where one might expect a relating function, or a self-preservation instinct, in rush video games, gambling, and pornography. Simulated purpose, simulated risk, simulated reward, named as costs to the women in that boy’s life. Again, one would be forgiven for seeing that hole in a boy’s soul as a wound. But Judith Butler was right about gender being a performance—at least for men. To be a man as opposed to a child, one must do manhood.⁵

And to do manhood, one must choose a Purpose and hold it sacred. That Purpose must be worth facing fears, taking risks, suffering defeats, and muddling through misery. A man’s Purpose must supersede and justify feeling bad.⁶ This is why big boys are told not to cry, and why men would sooner lift weights than talk about their feelings: the tears and heartfelt conversations are of little use to one’s Purpose.⁷

Men ruin our lives and trash our relationships⁸ because Purpose is more important.
Men kill ourselves en masse because without a Purpose, we’re just a body.
Men are fascinated by cars and guns and flame and blood because we wonder if we could do what the men in Heat do.

Could I charm Eady into my bed?
Would I carry Shiherlis out of that gunfight?
Could I headshot Cheritto without killing the kid he was holding?
Would I do what it takes to take down McCauley in the end?

And if I were to die at the hands of a rival, would I have the honor to befriend my killer, to take his hand as I bleed out?

Defining Manhood is a Political Project

There are limits, of course. Reaching for pure masculinity, sacrificing everything to one’s Purpose, is tantamount to reaching for godhood. Every culture agrees that such a project is lethal—it is for McCauley. But insofar as women drive the discussion of What Men Must Do, then Purpose will not be discussed appropriately.⁹

Feminist thought of the 2010s broadly made this mistake. This cohort didn’t know what men should do—only what we should not do. Feminists recommend therapy and “healing from one’s traumas” because they assume feeling is an end in itself. If men healed their wounds, if they felt better, then men would cease to oppress. It didn’t work.

A political movement that wants men—not boys, not anons—must name a Purpose. A reason to shoot guns, perhaps, but more pressingly a reason to work, to struggle, to take pay cuts, to risk getting fired. This is the point of men. Men are arguably meant to wager, to bleed, to die (or make the other poor dumb bastard die), because some human endeavors need bodies and souls that are worthless outside of what they can do. George S. Patton said it better:

[The] real man never lets his fear of death overpower his honor, his sense of duty to his country, and his innate manhood…Each man must think not only of himself, but think of his buddy fighting alongside him. We don't want yellow cowards in the army. They should be killed off like flies.

This does not necessarily contradict bell hooks—Patton was clear that soldiers remain scared, tired, hungry in battle. But such feelings should not stop a man from holding to his honor,¹⁰ his loyalty, his duties, his mission, his Purpose. Such things are intangible and unmoored from specific people, and they demand sacrifice.

And if you want to check if you’ve got a good Purpose, play Moby’s remix of “New Dawn Fades.” Imagine you’re weaving through traffic at midnight with a hard look on your face. And name your claimed Purpose.

See if the vibe feels right.

Special thanks to the Defense Analyses Research Corporation (DARC) for recommending this film. This crew has a lot to say about Heat—and you’ll hear more from them.

This post and the information presented are intended for informational purposes only. The views expressed herein are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of their current or previous employers or any elected officials. The author makes no recommendations toward any electric utility, regulatory body, or other organization. While certain information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, the author has not independently verified this information, and its accuracy and completeness cannot be guaranteed. Accordingly, no representation or warranty, express or implied, is made as to, and no reliance should be placed on, the fairness, accuracy, timeliness or completeness of this information. The author assumes no liability for this information and no obligation to update the information or analysis contained herein in the future.

1. None of my trans friends have endorsed this model when presented. Make of that what you will.

2. As a point of reference, consider the difference between “That Girl” morning routines and counterpart male morning routines. In the former, the routine itself is the flex—“look at how well I take care of myself.” In the latter, the routine is a means to the true flex—“this is why I can do something you can’t.”

3. 1 Corinthians 7:7-10, from Geneva Bible:

For I would that all men were even as I myself am: but every man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner, and another after that.

Therefore I say unto the unmarried, and unto the widows, It is good for them if they abide even as I do.

But if they cannot abstain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.

4. A corollary of this suggests dating advice for women: if your life would not on-net benefit from the costs and desserts of a creature with a grand project, you do not need a man in your life. Consider political lesbianism. I’m not joking.

5. Is this a willful oversimplification of Gender Trouble made without reading it? Yes, it is.

6. I am no different. I spent most of 2023 and 2024 achy and exhausted. I’ve spent 2025 nursing a metastasizing despair. And in the process I made some of my biggest personal and professional victories. If I spent my twenties trying to feel good, you would not be reading this.

7. And as bell hooks herself notes, those feelings are often rejected by the women in a man’s life:

Often men, to speak the pain, first turn to the women in their lives and are refused a hearing. In many ways women have bought into the patriarchal masculine mystique. Asked to witness a male expressing feelings, to listen to those feelings and respond…they may simply turn away. There was a time when I would often ask the man in my life to tell me his feelings. And yet when he began to speak, I would either interrupt or silence him by crying, sending him the message that his feelings were too heavy for anyone to bear, so it was best if he kept them to himself…I did not want to hear the pain of my male partner because hearing it required that I surrender my investment in the patriarchal ideal of the male as protector of the wounded. If he was wounded, then how could he protect me?

8. …and live in r/malelivingspace

9. And again, bell hooks is the rare feminist who names this:

To simply label [men] as oppressors and dismiss them meant we [feminists] never had to give voice to the gaps in our understanding or to talk about maleness in complex ways. We did not have to talk about the ways our fear of men distorted our perspectives and blocked our understanding. Hating men was just another way to not take men and masculinity seriously. It was simply easier for feminist women to talk bout challenging and changing patriarchy than it was for us to talk about men—what we knew and did not know, about the ways we wanted men to change. Better to just express our desire to have men disappear, to see them dead and gone.

10. Consider the strangeness of chivalry as a concept—it’s an honor code for how a man should treat women. It has little to do with the women themselves.