The Heat (2013)

Since Spy (see separate blog)  established Melissa McCarthy and director Paul Feig as a major voice in American popular film, their 2013 The Heat rewards a revisit. The film didn’t win the fan or critical reception it deserved because it was too revolutionary. Spy glided in on the rails The Heat laid down. 

McCarthy’s cop Mullins is the antithesis to the Hollywood heroine. She’s a fat broad, loud mouthed, spewing more profanity in one scene than the whole David Mamet canon. She’s like a Falstaff but with principles and courage, an otherwise unconstrained Id that serves her one cause, the law.  Hollywood heroines aren’t supposed to be unapologetically fat. They have to wear makeup (even in their sleep, apparently). They have to be gentle, sensitive nurturers, unquestioningly serving civilization — especially its men and patriarchal institutions. 

Sandra Bullock’s Sarah Ashburn plays that role here. Note the conventional character merits a first name, the outlaw doesn’t. Sarah is thin, neat, enslaved to decorum and manners, but with an intuitive perception that shows up the merely mortal men in the police force. She has the potential to break out, as we see in her disdain for the conventional expectations the force has of its women. So she’s unpopular — her one similarity to Mullins which makes their ultimate harmonizing plausible. Otherwise they are poles apart: in language, fashion, methodology, self-control.
     As well,  both have a self-doubt with familial roots: Sarah was orphaned, Mullins rejected by her amoral family. Their opposite responses are Mullins' radical self-loathing and Sarah's detachment. 

Foreshadowing Spy, the effulgent outlaw McCarthy character proves a more effective agent of justice — poetic as well as legal — than the more decorous women. She unleashes a physical strength that the more feminine Sarah seems to catch from her — as when she works through a stabbing and head-butts her captor. For all her wildness Mullins notices the incongruous cigarette butt — and creates a disturbance to enable Sarah to grab it. “Who closes the door to take a shit?” Mullins indignantly asks, short on the feminine demure.

Yet in the McCarthy-Feig world the fat broad has sexual as well as comic appeal. Here she’s dogged by a smitten one-night-stand. She finally shakes him off with a sentimental platitude that the unsophisticated suitor might apprehend: “It’s not you, it’s me… God, buddy, do you not hear how pathetic everything out of your mouth sounds? I mean, there's a girl out there for you, but it's not... it's not me. Maybe it's her. [indicating Ashburn] Her lady business is like an old dirty attic. Full of broken Christmas lights and like doll shoes and shit. Why don't you clean THAT out for her?” Well, it starts out as a sentimental platitude. Sarah defends herself feebly: “Uh, that's a... that's a misrepresentation of my vagina.” Of her vagina perhaps, but not of her personality. 

Clearly Mullins rejects — transcends— sentimentality. She jailed her brother to save him from the drug netherworld. Mullins identifies the passing driver who honks and gives her the finger: “My mom.” Her filthy apartment is in the druggies’ building, though her windows are boarded up with target practice posters. A lifelong victim of prejudice, Mullins snaps into her own: An albino cop is “Snowcone” — and her instant suspect. “You're giving her beauty advice? Do you even own a fucking mirror?” Of course the real villain is Snowcone’s young handsome (i.e., “normal”) partner.  

But the main element in Mullins’ character, the animating force of the film, its energy and wit, is Anger. Not just anger, as in discontent or resentment, but Anger. Rage.
     Mullins seems to react with fury against every little thing that goes wrong in her life: a missed clue, a usurped parking space, a recalcitrant witness, a surprising gunsel, etc. But her rage operates on and derives from something deeper: her sense of the radical injustice of the situation of women in our culture.
     For Sarah, coolly exposing her male colleagues’ inadequacy and her superiority is enough. She is sufficiently privileged as a conventional beauty to be thus easily satisfied. So she holds everything in, her emotions as well as the body parts which her Spanx holds “together.… everything where it's supposed to be.” But the fat and clumsy Mullins has no such consolation, so her every expression, whether verbal or physical, is rage. Her anger becomes a self-perpetuating weapon: “I’ll kill her with your dead body.”

The film picks up the Mullins spirit. It explodes simple sisterhood and gender stereotypes. When Sarah phones her superior to remove her irritation Mullins calls her “Tattletits. Fuckin narc.” An end credit points to the reduction of women to their sexuality: Gina’s boobs are played by Jessica Chaffin’s boobs. In the last scene an off camera woman says “I left my baby in the car.” This is not a film about woman’s conventional responsibility.  

     The film takes its energy and thrust from Mullins because she has a Falstaffian appetite for life. Instead of Dentine she nibbles on a red pepper. When the film settles into the genre’s sentimental conclusion — yes, the two women become bosom buddies — Mullins’ official recognition  by the police department is imaged in her reduction to the uniform: she wears one. But her spirit reasserts itself. She howls, leaps in the air and mimes the conversion of her trophy into a discuss hurl. Even though she has been accepted she will always find a way to be her unsocialized self.