More Heat 2 midrash, brought to you this time by “I was reading Winnicott on the train this morning” and “Michael Mann is really good at furnishing me with transitional objects, which I screw around with in lieu of dealing with my own problems.”
Or really, I just want to showcase the dimensions the story takes on when translated to the written word. What you can extract from, say, a POV character’s actions and reflections, and their relative positioning. It’s a telling sequence, this chapter, and one of my favorites: Vincent Hanna is relayed the psychological profile of Otis Lloyd Wardell, Vincent takes an intimate tour through history and memory (including hooking up with a “young old flame,” so to speak), past and present continue to collide/coalesce as he keeps vigil at the hospital bedside of a comatose teenage girl.
At some level, Vincent apprehends that in order to understand what motivates the murderous and psychopathic Wardell, he has to understand his own repressed aggression against the family structure. This is the reason for his immediate “inward” turn after Easton reads off the FBI report from Kessler, his spontaneous indulgence of personal perversions (Semi-public sex! Pretty tame!) followed by ersatz therapy sessions with the only class of therapist he can tolerate, I.E., an embodiment of lost but blameless innocence that cannot consciously comprehend a word he’s saying.
This is not to suggest that the sadistic cruelties that Wardell “indulges” represent a depravity that Vincent himself secretly fantasizes about or would be at risk of committing himself. Only that the circumstances of abuse and deprivation that helped produce Wardell lie at the extreme end of a continuum that also contains, at some lesser degree of extremity, the data point of Vincent Hanna. The domestic idyll Vincent devotes his life to protecting, saving, sanctifying, precludes his own participation within it. Inevitably, this results in some measure of resentment, whether he registers it consciously or not. Unlike Wardell, he would much rather injure himself than other people — and he does. But the hostility he directs inward instead of outward remains a volatile byproduct of his own damaged psyche and its sublimations.
“Indulged.” When the text is with Vincent during his scenes, he resorts to this adjective a number of times in describing delinquent young men, the means by which he presumes their characters to have been spoiled. He does not conceive, perhaps cannot conceive of the idea that a teenager who falls in with a gang and starts dealing drugs is more likely to have been deprived of some essential need than indulged superfluous desire. Then again, on account of both cultural and generational filters on his perception, he is clearly unable to recognize that he himself experienced a childhood marked by deprivation.
This recollection of his childhood, though superficially mild, belies and understates a sad state of affairs that men of his age in this country have accepted as normal and healthy. What is underneath the text, left unsaid but very much legible between the lines, is that young Vincent Hanna grew up with parents he loved but felt unable to communicate with (and vice versa), and a great depth of feeling with no outlet for expression (emotional lives are for girls; boys should “suck it up”). Michael Mann and I were raised in families where an extremely high cultural premium is placed on higher education, and academic achievement in general; Vincent’s background makes the acceptability of his own pursuits much more of an open question. It’s entirely possible his folks had a strong desire for him to aim for the middle class. It’s just as likely it made him at best a space alien and at worst a black sheep in his Granite City milieu of blue-collar immigrants. He was leaps and bounds ahead of most of his peers, but if he wanted to put his intellect to good use, he had to first put his body on the front lines.
What follows his enlistment is what he experiences as the ultimate betrayal by the ultimate symbolic father: a state that sacrifices its children and denies the testament of their suffering and indeed its own culpability. When he returns, it is with the mark of Cain on him, and no hope of upward mobility via the path he was originally probably going to leverage out of the GI Bill. He is no more at home with his provincial kin than the intellectual peers who shun him, deem him guilty by association. And there is no expiation of a guilt he shares with the country that sent him to die, that would have to acknowledge its own guilt as precondition.
These are the kinds of insights into character you just cannot get via a camera lens, only the “lens” of narration. I’m so excited for Heat 2 to be a film, but I’m also so, so glad it began as a book.
amandla
romaincrisis
andulkaphoto
tangentwithtanner
discoholicmusic
theartofmadeline
