“All I Am Is What I’m Going After: The Cyclical Futility of Striving in Heat (1995) dir. Michael Mann”

by Shawn Rampaul

We’re All Chasers

What Are You Chasing?

Pursuing Goals vs Achieving Goals.

What Happens When We Get What We Want?

We’re All Chasers

1. I like to pretend that I’m the heist man, just like Neil, except that: My wall is my minimalistic oceanic view; My lack of social media footprint is my lack of priors, it’s my invisibility from the feds; and My insufferable pedantry is my slick paranoia-induced meticulousness that keeps me five steps ahead.

2. But I don’t have a life like Neil; in reality I might be more like Vincent. When I come home I’m mute. I’m fine with cold chicken and staring at a blank TV screen before taking a brisk shower just to repeat the exhausting cycle again tomorrow.

3. The truth is I’m both of these men. Vincent and Neil, they’re similar in disposition, but from a granular point of view they’re different — they rhyme.

4. Some men want the Vincent life, they want a spouse, a child or children, a stable career that’s comfortable and purports to fulfill a sense of purpose. Vincent is presumably a noble man, a family-man, a man that does everything the way you’re supposed to — Get the job, put in the hours, and work your way to the top via grit and merit. From this kind of life, you’re supposed to be able to extract some sort of long-term joy, but Vincent doesn’t. Most men don’t.

5. Then there’s some men who want the Neil type of life. They want that inconspicuousness, that quiet life — the freedom is so appealing. A desolate apartment with no furniture and only a coffee maker doesn’t seem melancholic and lonely, rather, brooding, profound, rein-less. Because here you are, meditating in a glimmery suit, disciplined and independent with nothing but a goal and a code. But are you happy? Is this modern monk philosophy really that rewarding?

6. The nexus between these men is that both of their lives are sad and unfulfilling. They are workaholics, junkies chasing a forever moving meritorious high. I am good at what I do—I don’t know how to do anything else, and even if there was something else, I’d much rather do this. These men are chasers, and this is the same thread that connects them to us.

What Are You Chasing?

1. What consumes you? Where is your mind? Can you live here? In the present? Or are you thinking about tomorrow, or the week after, or five years from now?

2. Do breaks seem rewarding? Can you relax? Can you switch off? Can you sleep? Can you go one day without thinking about this thing? If you can, then you’re normal. If not, then you’re deformed just like me, Vincent, and Neil.

3. It’s a bit ironic that Neil scoffs at barbecues and ball-games — this “regular-type”, conventional, perhaps trite way of life. But is that not what his ultimate goal is? Isn’t that why he’s so adamant about making Eady escape with him? Isn’t it to disappear into a paradise with all this money and live some semblance of a trite, dull life? If not, then what’s he going to do there? Is he going to escape to New Zealand or Fiji only to rob more banks? No. But by his own temperament, he’ll get bored, he’ll grow restless of living the “good life” because it’s just a synonym for the dreaded “regular-type life”.

4. And then we have Vincent condemning Neil’s isolated way of life, albeit with a little admiration. But he’s thinking, “I can’t live like that; That’s so transient, so vacant, so lonely”, when in reality, he’s just like that. He’s bulldozed his way through three marriages without having learnt a single thing about how to keep them, making the same mistakes over and over.

5. So we’ve got Neil, the stoic abstainer, an observer, a note-taker — A man who has seen the shortcomings of other men and says “I won’t be fallible like them”. A man with a code, servient to his stringent tenets: I won’t get attached to anything, I can walk away at any moment and not look back in wistfulness. I am different, I am methodical, I am focused, I am not allowed to miss.

6. And then we’ve got Vincent, this blind bull, this demolitionist, this self-aware chaos-addict who refuses to make a change in his life. Why? Because the method works. He’s in this trap, this cycle, and he deludes himself into thinking that each closed case, each bad guy caught will give him fulfillment.

7. Vincent is just as much in denial as is Neil. Because Neil’s notion is: “If I just do this grand score, it’ll be my last one, I’ll get out; I’m done, it’s over, no more, that’s it.” While Vincent is thinking: “If I just catch Neil, I’ll feel whole, I’ll feel some sense of triumph or contentment; If I can catch this bad guy, I’ll be done, I’ll take a break, I’ll relax for a bit, I’ll sleep for a month”.

8. The sad thing about Vincent is that I do believe he wants the barbecues and ball-games, this “regular-type life” but he’s so obsessed with the chase that he keeps postponing it. He procrastinates his own happiness by saying: I’ll tend to those normal things after I do this, after I catch this proverbial big fish, this fish that reincarnates in perpetuity.

9. But this is the chase—both men lying to themselves, chasing a goal that is unable to yield fulfillment: Neil chasing a false paradise; Vincent chasing his duty. Both men are loyal to their paradoxical self-deception.

10. I think we’re all in denial chasing our goals: If I get this promotion I’ll be fine, I’ll be good, I’ll finally be able to do this other thing; If I graduate I’ll be fine, I’ll be good, I’ll be done and out and I can finally relax; If I can just make it to this next milestone I’ll be able to breathe. It’s a cycle that never stops: We consistently procrastinate our own happiness. We chase one goal straight into another, whether we’re obedient to principles like Neil, or destroying our entire lives in the pursuit of such like Vincent.

Pursuing Goals vs Achieving Goals

1. Michael Cheritto’s line, “for me, the action is the juice” is applicable to Neil and Vincent. That’s when these men come alive. Not after the action, there’s no juice there. All the juice is in the action, that’s what gives these men purpose, direction and drive, something to go towards. Without it, they are nothing.

2. “All I am is what I’m going after,” says Vincent to his wife, Justine. His identity is hinged to the chase. So what happens when the pursuit is over? Who does he become? Or rather, who does he revert to? My bet is that he resumes the melancholy, the tedium, the un-fulfillingness of his life, back to restlessness.

3. Vincent has a look on his face as he holds Neil’s hand until he dies. It’s not a face of contentment, or satisfaction, or even relief. I agree with most viewers’ interpretation that it’s a face dominated by regret, by haunt—this somber realization that the chase is over, that the one man who shared his disposition, who truly understood him, is now gone… that the juice is finished.

4. But flip the ending instead. Let’s say Neil made it out. He escaped. What then? Well, he’d suffer the same fate as Vincent. As I stated in Paragraph 3 of the ‘What Are You Chasing?’, Neil will be rendered restless and bored with that way of life. This fantasy he envisions with Eady will not translate. She will not satiate him; She’ll be fine and content with that ideal life, but he won’t, because he will realize it’s a barren life. Because how do you give up the only thing you know how to do?

5. If all I am is what I’m going after, and I’m not going after anything, then I am nothing. And that’s the irony of paradise—there is no action, there isn’t anything to chase, there isn’t any life to live, just existence in stagnated bliss. In paradise, Neil will have no identity, and just like Vincent in the real ending, he will inevitably go looking for another chase. Because by design, to live, these men must have constant momentum. To stop is to quite simply no longer exist, or less hyperbolically, feel like you no longer exist.

6. For this movie, regardless of which ending we choose above: the ending is the epilogue and the epilogue is the prologue. It’s a cycle that keeps going, a self-subscribing gimmick that offers only the illusion of fulfillment.

What Happens When We Get What We Want?

1. When I was approaching the end of my undergraduate, I was in an anxious state, alive and hyper because I was set to be awarded my degree with the highest tier. All I needed to do was maintain my GPA.

2. I thought I was going to feel fulfilled, triumphant, and reborn when it came to fruition. I was wrong. The evening we found out, a colleague called me up to ask me about how I felt. She had her “congratulations!” lodged in her throat, slowly teasing it upwards, swirling it around on the edge of her tongue. But she jarringly swallowed it when I said “I feel empty”.

3. I was morose and confused. Why did this thing that I had laboured on for three years feel so unsatisfactory? Where was the high? Where was my desire for a bursting celebration? Why did I feel like Vincent at the airport looking into the dark sky? Why did I feel like Neil in his false paradise?

4. What happens when we get what we want? The answer is, if you are normal, contentment; but if you are deformed with an unbridled hatred for complacency, then the answer is nothing. You just keep going, because all you are is what you’re going after.

CONTRIBUTOR’S STATEMENT:

Cinema’s relationship with mental health has always been inherent in my opinion. Every film is a catharsis, a dialogue — a portal of introspection, a medium offering both a mirror and a telescope into the soul of both the viewer and the creator. I cannot overstate the profundity of the ones that neglect to overtly refer to mental health, but create an atmosphere that nonetheless commentates on it —

1. The lost searcher so many of us see in “Eyes Wide Shut”;

2. The completed man yearning to simply go back in “The Swimmer”;

3. The slipperiness of complacency in “Barry Lyndon”;

4. The fragment of human connection in “Exotica”;

5. The oxymoronic intimacy of “Heat”.

“All I Am Is What I’m Going After” is an essay that is deeply personal to me and at times I considered withdrawing the piece because too much of myself is etched into it. It is a self- excavation; I let go of the leash and consequently sicked mirror & strive onto Existentialism, Nihilism, and the portrait of Masculinity by Mann (pun intended) that is still relevant today in the Gen-Z landscape.