Historical Markers of the Modern Soundtrack

14	Heat	1995 – Michael Mann (USA)
	Ambience & musical vaporization	Michael Mann & the MTV-effect; hovering chords, impressions of instruments & transparent sonic textures; fusing styles

The blurred mix of selected songs and composed score in Heat creates a temperate web of tonings from which a meta-score is discernible, based on externalising pre-recorded songs to extrapolate and extemporise their recordings into the expanded audiovisual design of the film. Heat seeks to narrate, compile and underscore through song, to arrive in parts at a 'song-seeming score' which exploits the dynamics, characteristics and idiosyncrasies of pop/rock recordings. In place of the blunt appropriation and importation which typifies the often reviled use of pop songs in movies, Heat extenuates a song's sonic traits to define the material realm of a scene. Combining a calming and contiguous track selection with a melting, amorphous score (for two drum kits, twin basses, string quartet and six electric guitars), the film plays sophisticated games in breaking down all distinction between song and score while building upon the armory of effects and figures generated within song recording rather than film scoring.

Heat's leaning towards ambient stylings is less to do with a vague contemporaneity and lazy self-effacement, and more to do with a synchronicity between the de-rhythmatised harmonic splaying of songs by Eno, Passengers, Moby, Kronos Quartet, Terje Rydal, Michael Brooks, Einsturzende Neubauten and Lisa Gerrard, and the exhausted, emotional drainage of Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) and Neal McCauley (Robert DeNiro) whose sense of purposeful conflict is rendered meaningless by the film's conclusion. Just as Toru Takemitsu's inverse musical dramatics are central to the deflated heroics of Akira Kurosawa's historical dramas, so too are the ambient brethren of Heat's soundtrack crucial to the creeping existentialism which eventually upturns the film's epic form. And just as the sound of space has become the prime erogenous zone of ambient music, Heat's musical scoring is the prime means of actively spatializing the film's locations and environments - especially as a counterpoint to the highly fragmented framing aesthetic employed by the cinematography.

From the horripulative softness of the low level string murmuring as Neal placidly takes a series of escalators in the film's opening, to the hammering synth pops and concatenated reverb bangs which crackle under the screams of employees and customers during the bank heist, ambience is actually foregrounded as style and form in Heat. The effect is impossible to not perceive: while many films feverishly over-score and force audiences to consume the music as vapid background slop, Heat highlights, amplifies and pin-points its many delicate gestures and restrained palettes.

Yet this arises not from the music alone; Heat is not the result of music driving the narrative in video clip mode. The stoic stature and impassive demenaour of the gang - including Chris (Val Kilmer), Michael (Tom Sizemore) and Nate (Jon Voight) - coalesce into a rock-hard monumental troupe. Their extreme suppression of reaction and the steeled nerves which control their actions cast them in frozen relief, often in craggy close-ups. Against their facial fortresses, a veil of musical ambience is thrown; it wracks their emotional walls with a resounding echo that carries throughout the film.

From the BFI book 100 Modern Soundtracks.