A Broken Machine

In Heat, Robert De Niro’s master thief Neil McCauley is reading a massive tome entitled Stress Fractures in Titanium. For Neil, whose livelihood depends on drilling through stainless steel, such a book is surely required reading, and it does end up doubling as a nice icebreaker with the woman at the counter next to him—but the book also has a deeper meaning. No director is more interested in hairline fissures than Michael Mann, whose protagonists tend to be men defined by their iron will. The genre isn’t important; whether the protagonist in question is a safecracker, a blackhat hacker, a TV producer, or a mojito fiend, the drama lies in seeing how those hard, gleaming facades hold up in the face of constant and catastrophic damage.