“I have one [dream] where I’m drowning. And I gotta wake myself up and start breathing or I’ll die in my sleep.”
“You know what that’s about?”
“Yeah. Having enough time.”
***
Having recently rewatched Micheal Mann’s Heat (1995), I was assured of its place at the pinnacle of action-crime films. It is three intense and electric hours that never lets up, only pulling back from its thrilling, relentless action sequences to dive into the more understated yet equally tense series of personal psychodramas and interpersonal relationships that undergird its men of action. It is these latter sections that, to me, elevate this movie from a masterpiece that I can enjoy and appreciate from a technical and aesthetic standpoint to a narrative that somehow resonated deeply with me.
You see, as with all action movies, Heat contains elements of what one may call male fantasies, in the manner of feminist analysis. After all, all of its men – to varying extents – epitomize a particular type of masculinity that is almost universally valorised in the genre; namely, men who wield lethal violence as a matter of profession, though even their profession is mere pretence: the action is the juice.
However, instead of shoring up this hegemonic fantasy of a manhood and masculinity that is equivocated with narrative agency and expressed through violence, I would argue that this movie, through its thorough study of its characters, instead reveals the yawning void at the heart of it all: the idea that this action-oriented manhood and its lethal violence is a death spiral.
This is abundantly apparent through the glimpses we have of the broken and empty lives that these men lead: Lieutenant Vincent Hanna’s (Al Pacino) rocky relationship with his third wife and stepdaughter, Neil McCauley’s (Robert De Niro) utterly sparse and undecorated apartment, Chris Shiherlis’ (Val Kilmer) aggression towards the woman he loves most in the world, Micheal Cherrito (Tom Sizemore) openly expressing that he lives for the action despite the fact that he has a family of his own, Waingro’s (Kevin Gage) psychopathic violence and white supremacy, and so on.
Nowhere is this more apparent however, than in the famous restaurant scene where Hanna finally confronts McCauley face to face. The two men, despite their masculine bravado – or rather, because of it – seem to open up and bond with one another regarding the brokenness, emptiness and isolation they both feel. It is at this point that the movie grew to become uncannily familiar to me.
For I, too, have had dreams of drowning.
Watching this scene as a trans woman evoked some long-forgotten feelings from a previous life, a time when I was trapped in this same cage, thinking that I was doomed to a vicious cycle of loneliness and alienation, blind to the possibility of any other way of existing in the world, drowning in dysphoria, depression and dissociation under the unbearable weight of manhood and masculinity.
It is an inescapable death spiral in which one always seem to be running out of time, one never has enough time, and it is always already too late. Hence, McCauley lives his life without letting himself get attached to anything that he is not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if he feels the heat coming around the corner. Always running away, always running out of time, always too late, because they aren’t really running away. Their violence has but one conclusion; and so, they run headlong towards death.
This, to me, is why Heat stands at the apex of action movies; for the way that it pushes these fantasies that underpin this genre to its breaking point. Underneath their facade of suave, stoic hyper-competency and brutal ultraviolence, these men of action lead sad, broken and empty lives, desperately yearning for some form of connection amidst a sea of profound loneliness and alienation.
In the end, they can only find that connection through violence, for they do not know how else to live. When the heat of Hanna’s bullet enters McCauley’s chest in their final confrontation, the gap between these two men is closed, and at that moment, for just a brief instant, they are the closest that anyone has ever been to each other throughout the whole movie, before that connection is mercilessly torn apart by the latter’s death, forever lost in the void once more. In the restaurant, Hanna called McCauley “brother”. If he truly meant that, then what a sad thing this brotherhood of men is.
These fantasies – of violent men and their sordid brotherhood forged in blood and fire – is a staple of the action genre, marking its obsession with hegemonic masculinity. Rarely, if ever, does this genre challenge this bedrock foundation of its narratives, often instead valorising and glorifying the violence, bravado, callousness, repressiveness and bigotry (particularly misogyny) that is required for one to be a “real man” under the patriarchal society in which we all live.
Occasionally, one acquires a glimpse just beyond the veil of this hegemony of the sheer emptiness that lies at the terminus of that path, as we see in Heat. But is there another kind of “brotherhood”, or a subversion of brotherhood, or perhaps even an entirely different kind of kinship that yields a different way of life, one that is less cruel and meaningless? I feel that I have found just that amidst the desert of action movies. Just like Heat, the men in this movie are also running out of time. Unlike in Heat, however, dare I say that these men may have just beaten the clock and opened a path of escape from the death spiral.
Johnnie To’s Running Out of Time was released only four years after Heat back in 1999, and it feels like an oasis in a desert for one specific reason; its unabashed embrace of the playful homoeroticism between its two male main leads: ace hostage negotiator and police inspector Ho Sheung-Sang (Sean Lau) and cancer-ridden master criminal Cheung Wah (Andy Lau). The story involves Ho attempting to catch Cheung as the latter challenges the former to a deadly game of wits that involves following a breadcrumb trail of leads through the perilous underground world of Hong Kong’s crime syndicates.
The cat-and-mouse dynamic between these two characters initially appear to be the kind of heated cop-and-robber rivalry one might have come to expect of this genre (perhaps even somewhat reminiscent of Hanna and McCauley), but after a certain point, their typical masculine bravado turns into a playfulness that veers decidedly into the territory of romance, believe it or not, as the movie frequently – and even at times explicitly – questions and plays around with their heterosexuality. I do not say this lightly; let’s take some examples.
In one scene, Cheung surreptitiously invites Ho to a bar to discuss the next step of their deadly game. When Ho enters the bar and sees that Cheung is already waiting for him, a waitress asks him if he is waiting for someone, to which he replies that he has a date.
Later on, the two set up a false deal with a Triad gang whereby Ho would sell back the jewellery that Cheung stole from the gang, while the police lie in wait for the incriminating evidence to come into the open in order to arrest the criminals. Of course, Cheung must disguise himself to avoid being recognized by the gang; and he does so as a woman, specifically as Ho’s “girlfriend” (quite convincingly, I might add).
As they deliberate privately about the deal, Cheung flirtatiously asks Ho: “Aren’t you going to give me a kiss?” to which Ho replies by wordlessly wrapping his arm around Cheung and giving him a kiss – not just a peck – but a full kiss on the cheek.
Lastly, in the penultimate scene of the movie, Ho handcuffs Cheung to the steering wheel of his own car, forcing him to drive them to the nearest police station. Cheung then reveals his terminal condition to Ho, along with the time bomb that he has planted in the car, heedless of his own life as he is. As Cheung loses consciousness at the brink of death, Ho sorrowfully gazes at him, stops the car, and steps away, leaving Cheung to his fate; or so it seems, except that Ho knows the bomb is a fake, and is allowing Cheung to drive away and escape into the night.
Even independently of Cheung’s presence, the movie seems to actively question Ho’s heterosexuality. In a scene where Ho solicits his Interpol contact for information on Cheung, she asks: “You don’t have a wife, and you don’t fool around. Do you know that many of your colleagues think you’re gay? Well, are you?”, a question which he answers with a quite simple and straightforward “Yes”.
It comes off as a joke, or at the very least a humorous tongue-in-cheek remark. Indeed, many, if not all the scenes that I have given as examples above can be taken as a joke, especially amidst the presumably heteronormative milieu of the target audience for late-90s Hong Kong action movies. As much as I revelled in the unexpected queerness between Ho and Cheung, I could just as easily imagine a theatre full of people laughing wholeheartedly and mean-spiritedly at Cheung’s crossdressing, for example, or Ho’s blunt admission of homosexuality, which would render these scenes into homophobic and transmisogynistic caricatures.
Considering the deeply hegemonic, heteronormative cultural context of action movies, Occam’s razor does tell us that this must in fact be the case; that this movie is an action-comedy whose humour relies primarily on queerphobic narrative tropes. Equally however, we must ask ourselves what Occam’s razor is shaving away here; after all, what is queer reading but a reading against the heterosexual grain, against the dominant and historically accepted interpretations of a canon of fiction and literature that erases and guards against queerness?
The final scene between Ho and Cheung is what convinced me of the sincerity of the movie’s playfulness, as contradictory as that sounds. As Cheung drove away into the night and Ho wistfully did not look back (as action heroes do not), the playfulness and rivalry that has dominated the relationship between the two gave way to a kind of lament that could only arise from the parting of two people that had come closer to one another than they had ever been to anyone else; not unlike Hanna and McCauley.
The main difference here, perhaps, is that the way Ho and Cheung navigated their tense relationship gave me the impression that there was some extent to which they weren’t performing the part of a strung-up puppet, a living corpse, a hollow ventriloquized ideal of hegemonic heterosexual masculinity. They lived, even as they rushed headlong towards death. I do not know if I can say the same for Hanna and McCauley.
The two movies’ curtain calls appear very similar at first – the cop protagonist seeing off his criminal rival as the latter goes not-so-gently into the good night – but where Heat presents us with a dead-end, Running Out of Time feels to me as if it is filled with hope. Though transness and homosexuality shouldn’t be conflated as one and the same, it has resonances; and boy, did this remind me of how the queer playfulness of early transition felt: an opening-up of possibilities, an escape from the steel cage of “manhood”, light at the end of the tunnel, dawn after a long night.
This playfulness can be a remedy for heterosexuality; and not heterosexuality as in the depoliticized definition describing attraction to an ostensible “opposite sex”, but rather heterosexuality as a regime, one that subdivides human bodies and desires into an oppositional binary by guarding cautiously and vigilantly against any possibility of queerness and homoeroticism, convincing those we call “men” that the only permissible form of physical touch and contact one may initiate towards their fellow “men” is through violence.
This is what the action genre is ultimately about; the construction of elaborate narrative rituals of violence for permissible forms of intimacy that reinforces the hegemonic bonds of manhood and brotherhood and guards against queerness and homoeroticism all the while. And yet, it guards against it in vain, for touch and contact – even through violence – is intimacy, and intimacy bleeds; blood spilled, blood rushing, blood running through veins, the heat of skin on skin, the kiss of death. We live, even as we rush headlong towards death.
There is still time. There is always time. It’s never too late.***
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