Reality is [Not] Problematic: The Women of Heat

When I first saw Heat in 1995, I was a thirteen-year-old girl sitting next to my dad on the couch. I was there for one reason and one reason only: to see Natalie Portman, who is nearly exactly my age, and thus I was sure that if Natalie and I ever met, we would be best friends.

You can imagine I was mildly disappointed by the movie since Natalie was in it so little and as an adult, I could remember exactly two scenes from a nearly three-hour movie. Al Pacino dragging Natalie Portman out of a bathtub, her wrists and thighs sliced open. And Ashley Judd on a balcony, waving off a very handsome Val Kilmer, protecting him from the police.

That was it. Two scenes out of 3 hours, and both of them belonged to the women.

An interesting quirk of memory since Heat is very much about men. That is not in dispute. I rewatched it recently, and had a lot of thoughts. So many, in fact, that I have an hour-long video coming out on YouTube about it next week.

But in the meantime, I wanted to focus on how this men's movie from the 90s does women. How they were portrayed struck me, especially looking back at 30 years of commentary on the movie. I've noticed that almost nobody talks about them honestly. The people who do talk about them keep asking the wrong question.

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The Wrong Question

Ashley Judd, who played Charlene Shiherlis, is now better known for feminist activism. But in the 90s, she was a hot babe who overcame bad men and very often had scenes where she ran through the woods. Surprising no one, she said in a recent interview that the way women were portrayed in Heat is "not okay."

“And I’m glad, still, that I was a part of this movie, and I do think it’s iconic," she shared. "It’s a reflection of reality, and reality is problematic."

"To say the movie is problematic is not to put the responsibility and focus where it lies, which is with the reality of which it’s a reflection," she added. "Observation and critique is what I’m offering." - People Magazine

It's a weird interview, and I think Ashley was struggling with some cognitive dissonance. She acknowledges the portrayal is realistic. She just can't call it acceptable. That's a hell of a thing to say about the best movie of your own career.

She's in good company. A 2018 analysis on Medium titled itself "Women in Heat: The victims of Mann's men," walked through every woman character by character, framed each one as a victim (of course), and concluded that they "litter the outskirts of the film like snow churned to the roadside." A Screenopolis piece from this summer (gearing up for the upcoming sequel) called the original"not misogynistic, just opportunistic," as if a filmmaker landed on the most accurate, human portrayal of multiple women by sheer luck.

Every one of these takes asks whether the women of Heat are portrayed progressively enough. And since it portrays women honestly, the answer must always be no.

What Honesty Looks Like

I've mentioned before that I'm friends with some internet red pill guys. And not in a "worthy adversary" kind of way. I mean they're really good guys and I like that they actually see women as people, neither condemning nor pedestalizing them.

Like all my favorite internet "misogynists," Heat keeps it real with its women. There are exactly five of them with meaningful screen time, and every one of them registers as a real person. Mann wrote them without a single gold digger, manic pixie dream girl, ice queen, or saintly martyr in the bunch. More to the point, he wrote them without using the box office to settle scores with an ex-wife. These women live in the same moral universe as his men, the one where your choices have consequences and nobody is coming to rescue you from the ones you made.

Justine

Justine (Diane Venora) could so easily have been a one-dimensional nag or a martyr. The cop's wife who goes to bed lonely, widowed by her husband's job. Instead, we got an actual human being who a lot of real-life cops probably recognized. Before she married Vincent, he told her straight: she'd have to share him with all the bad people and ugly events on the planet. And she said that was fine because she loved him. Then she resented the terms she'd agreed to, cheated on him as revenge (is it actually revenge if you're hurting yourself too?), and pops pills with her coffee to cope with what she doesn't like about her life.

But Mann refuses to make her pathetic. She's sharp. She loves her daughter, and she loves Vincent. And most importantly, she doesn't understand that she's the problem. Many couples have fights like this: both people telling the truth as they understand it. And even when Justine despicably cheats on Vincent, she's not turned into a cartoon strumpet stomping on Vincent's heart. She is still a person. A person being a bitch. And she is allowed to have a redeeming moment with Vincent, even though they won't be getting back together. "All I am is what I'm after. I'm not what you want, Justine." She gives him permission to leave her at the hospital, with their daughter recovering in the next room, because she has finally accepted the deal she made. It's painful to watch, and it's true.

I opened this essay talking about Natalie Portman, who plays Lauren, Justine's daughter. There is so much of her character left on the cutting room floor, there's not much to go into with her. And she's not even a woman yet, just a girl who is drowning in her life, and none of the adults in her life (even though they love her) are there to catch her before she spirals into near-death.

They did my girl so dirty with this hair-do

Eady

Eady (Amy Brenneman) is a character study in reasonable (and relatable) loneliness that Mann fleshed out in only a little screen time. Friendly, a little too eager, and sporting an Appalachian accent in LA. Her loneliness is the kind that makes her easy pickins'. Neil McCauley says you should never have anything in your life you can't walk away from in 30 seconds flat, so consciously or unconsciously, I'm fairly sure he picked her because she was alone. A woman with a full life would have asked questions he couldn't answer. Eady had nothing tying her down. She was available in every sense of the word.

It would be so easy to make her a sad, sorry girl with wide, always-teary eyes and a quivering lip. Just some stock-standard dame who does as she's told and cries a lot (cuz that's what girls do). But Eady's loneliness is painted in a way that reads as real at every turn. When she learns the truth about who Neil is, she runs. But after she's dragged back, she's given the choice to leave of her own free will. Or to stay with him, and live life on the run. He means it; it's not a trick. And Eady decides on her own to stay. That is a choice, and the film lets it be one. She chose a murderer just to not go back to being alone, relieved that finally she's been chosen. That she has a man who won't leave her. Except he does. She already knows exactly what kind of man she's with, and the look on her face when he abandons her at the end is devastating because she made the choice that put her there.

Even more devastating are all the lonely girls watching who know they would have made the same choice.

Charlene

Charlene (Ashley Judd) is the most complicated woman in the film, and hers is the portrayal Judd herself called "not okay." It's easy to hate adulterers, especially women. Thus it's easy to make cheating characters into cardboard cut-outs. But that's not what happened here.

Charlene and Chris have the kind of toxic relationship we've all seen up close. Their marriage is a disaster by any measure. He's a gambler. Even after a big score, he's still broke. They fight constantly and he does the wall-punching thing. It's not clear if he hits her; probably not, honestly. But having a man who lays waste to your living room, traumatizing the baby, isn't much of a step up.

Despite that toxicity, it's not portrayed sympathetically when we see she's cheating on Chris with a liquor wholesaler named Alan (Hank Azaria). When Neil confronts her about it, she's not cowed, not ashamed. Neil knows better than anyone what Chris is like. But Neil can't have Chris's mindset messed up by his wife leaving him, so he ensures Charlene stays.

Then the bank heist goes sideways, Chris takes a bullet, and he's wanted for killing cops. Charlene calls Alan to come get her and the baby. "God damn you, Chris." She's done. But not in the way she thinks.

Alan, who has already been picked up by the police and is cooperating, drives her straight to them. They make her an offer: give up Chris or go to prison, and your son goes into the foster care system. It doesn't take her long; she agrees to lure Chris in.

Then she doesn't do it.

When Chris pulls up, she signals him with a flick of her finger, their prearranged code for danger. He sees it, the happy smile falling from his face, and he leaves. She tells the cops it wasn't him. They don't believe her, but it doesn't matter, because Chris has clean ID under another name and he drives away for good.

Charlene has just thrown away her deal with law enforcement, guaranteed herself a harder road, and protected the man she was in the middle of leaving. She decided, in the space of a single second, that whatever Chris deserves, she will not be the one who delivers it to him. She'll be goddamned before she hands her husband to the LAPD, even a husband she's finished with.

That is so specifically, recognizably real that it almost hurts to watch.

Any woman who's been in a volatile relationship knows that feeling. The relationship can be over. You can be furious. You can have already made the call to leave. And you will still, in the moment that counts, protect him. There's a kind of loyalty that outlasts love, that persists after affection is gone and the decision to go has already been made. It makes no sense, and it's human. Calling it "internalized misogyny" or "trauma bonding" or any of the other clinical labels people slap on female behavior they can't explain through ideology is a sophisticated way of refusing to look at women as they actually are.

It's a shame that it took a man (ironically named Mann) to put it on screen without apologizing for it.

The Problem with "Not Okay"

What bothers me about the conversation around women in Heat is the same thing that bothers me about my Red Pill friends being called misogynists. And about the conversation in the recent Lindsay Clancy mistrial.

The culture has arrived at a place where portraying women as full human beings, women who make (bad) choices and bear consequences, reads as an attack. Show a woman with agency, and you obviously hate women and want them to suffer. Show a woman cheating, without excusing that betrayal by blaming the man's emotional neglect, and you're a misogynist. Show her staying with a dangerous man without having said dangerous man tie her up and terrorize her, and you're encouraging domestic violence. Whatever she does, the question must always be "Who failed her?"

Somebody always has to have failed her. The possibility that she chose freely and chose wrong is apparently too problematic to put on screen. At least in the era of "modern audiences."

Seeing women as people means seeing the full range of their behavior, including the parts that are self-destructive and inexplicable. A filmmaker who does that is telling the truth. That he risks being called a misogynist tells you how far we've drifted from treating women like adults.

The men I know who get called misogynists are the ones who've stopped lying about women. They see women as capable of loyalty and betrayal, self-sacrifice and destruction. That used to be normal. Hell, it still is.

And the reason we don't see it on screen anymore is the same reason I don't talk about movies made after 2016 on my YouTube channel. Because once you make a choice to stop telling the truth about a particular group of people, then as far as I'm concerned, you no longer have anything to say.

Heat is considered a masterpiece and many people's favorite film for several reasons, the most important being that it told the truth. It told the truth about men and what they respect and what they most want as they breathe their last. And as an aside, just as a bonus, it also told the truth about women, and how we love and how we act when what we dreamed for ourselves slips through our fingers.

It's okay if it isn't pretty. The truth rarely is.