In a movie theater in the East Village, I sank down in my seat and wept. This was thirty years ago. The film I was watching wasn’t particularly sad. It involved men and women—mostly, almost entirely, men—with guns: cops and robbers. One cop, with a posse of textureless henchmen, and a small gang of robbers. Heat was the name of this movie. If you’ve been anywhere near the internet in the last decade, even if you’ve never seen the film, you’ve likely internalized some of its dialogue in the form of memes: “She’s got a GREAT ASS!” “For me, the action is the juice.” Which, fine. Al Pacino (as Vincent Hanna, the cop) eating scenery and Robert De Niro (as Neil McCauley, master thief) moving through each frame with feline circumspection, the watchfulness of a person for whom every step is a potential mistake, are the movie. You don’t need anything else, really. But Heat is a film about loneliness, and about the kind of obsessive, unidirectional chase that is familiar to every artist. It is also a film about Los Angeles, a place that I, as a not-quite-thirty-year-old writer exiled to New York, missed terribly in 1995, which may be why it hit me so hard.
I’d moved to Manhattan a year and a half earlier, in fact to work for De Niro—my job was to find books, intellectual property that might be adapted for him to star in or produce—and so there was, for me, an uncanny undercurrent of witness, a layer of intimacy most viewers would not have been privy to. Bob was my boss: someone who lacked the gregariousness of other actors I’d known, whose deep and abiding sense of personal privacy—I say I “knew” him, but this just meant that we were in rooms together occasionally—was magnified in the character he was playing...
continued on page 30 of Issue 04 🌆
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