No, Michael—Your Book Actually Didn’t Need THAT Scene
Dear Reader,
Just a quick note that this week’s newsletter contains a conversation about sexual assault in works of fiction. There are no descriptions of assault but it’s hard to say “stop doing X” without saying what “X” is. With that said, if you don’t need that energy in your life, I invite you to scroll down to the Recommendations and Bits for the Week, or to skip this week’s newsletter. I promise I won’t take it personally.
I have rarely been more frustrated by a book as much as I was by Michael Mann’s Heat 2. Mann’s 1995 classic, Heat, is in my movie Pantheon. For folks of my vintage—who like three hour heist films—it is the holy grail. There is no The Town, Den of Thieves, Triple 9, without Heat. Even the opening bank robbery scene in the Dark Knight is derived from Mann’s stylized downtown LA robbery scene (below).
The film stars Robert De Niro, in his acting prime, as Neil McCauley, the leader of a gang of highly-disciplined bank robbers in Los Angeles. Heat came out one month after Scorsese’s Casino, giving De Niro among the best back-to-backs in cinema history. Mann’s cast is full of actors who later fell on hard times or are now too old or broken to reprise their roles: Val Kilmer before his throat cancer; Danny Trejo before he was Machete; Tom Sizemore before he lost his career to substance, prostitutes, cocaine, and sex abuse allegations; and Jon Voight before he went MAGA. In the film, McCauley’s gang is pursued by an out of control LAPD lieutenant named Vincent Hannah, played by an extremely over-the-top (to the point of parody) Al Pacino. Watch the clip below and tell me I’m wrong.
Heat was the first time Pacino and De Diro appeared on screen together. For 90s movie heads it was like Messi and Mbappe lining up together for Paris Saint Germain. Their scenes were electric—Pacino a trigger happy lunatic with a crumbling life and marriage and De Niro his ever precise, cautious, and calculating prey. In our age of sequel culture a Heat sequel was inevitable. But in doing so, Mann was faced with a choice: recasting the iconic (and some disgraced) actors or using de-aging technology, like Scorsese had done with the Irishman. He opted for neither and decided to make the sequel a 470 page tome. When I heard that Mann was going to make a sequel, albeit a novel, I was ecstatic. The book functions as a prequel, looking at the lives of characters from the film and a sequel, telling the story of Val Kilmer’s character, Chris Shiherlis, who survived the climatic heist in the film but is gravely wounded in the firefight.
Sexual assault isn’t a plot device. Stop treating violence against women as the new mustache twirling when you want to prove your “Big Bad” is bad.
As I have discussed in prior editions of the newsletter, as of late I am consuming copious of southern noir novels. If you’re unfamiliar with the genre, think about Timothy Oliphant's show Justified, most Cormac McCarthy novels, or any number of the classics by Elmore Leonard. Obviously, Heat isn't Southern noir. It's set in LA but it follows all the tropes of the genre. Here’s the thing, maybe the book was amazing. I don’t know because I stopped reading it after a deeply unnecessary violent sexual assault. In the book, during a home invasion the “Big Bad” assaults an underaged girl. The assault was discussed in passing as it happened but then for God knows why, recounted in technicolor detail later in the text. It was gross. It was gratuitous. It ruined the book for me.
There are better ways of building up a villainous character. I am deeply weary of seeing violence against women as a plot device to show that a guy who is clearly a scumbag is indeed a scumbag. Sexual assault isn’t a plot device. Stop treating violence against women as the new mustache twirling when you want to prove your “Big Bad” is bad.
It’s gross and I’m over it. If authors and filmmakers can’t tell a story without a woman being victimized they can count me out.
Exactly zero books and films have been improved by the inclusion of graphic depictions of sexual assault. It was lazy from Mann and ruined the entire book for me.
As an aside, I think it’s worth mentioning that I feel the exact same way about white characters casually using the n-word without consequence. This is a major reason I think Pulp Fiction, and most Tarantino films are unwatchable but that’s for another day and another newsletter.
Recommendations and Bits for this Week
First, our society has proven repeatedly that it has unlimited coffers for police assault weapons, tactical vehicles, and concussion grenades. However, we criminally underfund the arts. The choir program at First Creek Middle School in East Tacoma has long been dependent on their annual fundraising auction. This year, given the pandemic and economy, they're struggling. I'm asking you to join me in making a donation to the First Creek Choir Boosters. All proceeds will go to support music education in one of Tacoma's most chronically ignored communities.
Next, last week I shared my (hilarious) attempt at creating an AI self-portrait. That elicited a response from reader R.G. I think he’s more right than wrong here:
There was a recent article that I read (can't remember where) about how we may be fooling ourselves with what we perceive to be the genius TikTok algorithm...that perhaps it's not as good as we suspect, but because we are human beings and our brains are designed to tell stories, that we are putting more on this than we suspect.I feel the same way after seeing the two AI images above. Perhaps we think AI art is so interesting because we are putting stories to it, whereas, it's just picking random shit and morphing it into something else. Maybe we WANT these things to be genius, even though they aren't…
The article he couldn't recall is this piece by Clive Thompson on Medium. It’s worth a read. This week, I tried a different AI engine and entered the same search terms: “draw Nate Bowling, a Black American political science teacher in Abu Dhabi.” Here are new results. Nope, not quite there yet.
Lastly, if you’re in my beloved hometown of Tacoma, on a recent episode of Nerd Farmer, I did a deep dive on the housing market in Pierce County with Marguerite Martin, the proprietor of Move to Tacoma. For the last few years, first time homebuyers were hammered by soaring prices. Now that prices have started falling, they’re getting smacked by rising interest rates. The current national average for a 30 year fixed is 6.72%. In January of last year, that number was 3.22%. That is “only” a 3.5% bump. But that bump could mean an extra $1500 per month in interest on a $500k mortgage. Maybe your reaction to that is don’t buy a $500k house? Good luck, bub. The median home price in the county was $551,727 in January. She explains it all better than I do, but it’s a classic heads I win, tails you lose situation for families in the region.
Until next Sunday!
As always, if you have any thoughts or feedback about the newsletter, I welcome it, and I really appreciate it when folks share the newsletter with their friends.