‘We’re Not Making Forward Progress’: Postfeminist Hypermasculinity in Heat

Michael Mann is a director who, seemingly, lives up to his surname. Over the course of a career of more than 30 years, Mann has come to be regarded as a director of films that are, according to BBC film critic Mark Kermode, ‘about guys’.1 In its portrayal of male cultural identity, Mann’s 1995 crime drama Heat displays a hypermasculinity that spirals into an implosive vortex that has a destructive effect on social relations. The film presents gender identities and relations that are unsustainable, and the characters’ insistence upon such identities and relations generates the implosive vortex. The construction of gender undertaken by the film’s characters is not simply traditional and pre-feminist, but post-feminist, as the construction of gender includes an assumption that the goals of feminism have been accomplished. This assumption both underpins the postfeminist sensibility within the film, and excludes the possibility of dialogue between genders, leading to the eventual disintegration of human interaction. Through its portrayal of postfeminist masculinity, Heat demonstrates the need for dialogue between the sexes and the dangers of failing to attend to this need.