Heat dramatizes the shift from Fordist hierarchies to flexible post-Fordist crews
Evidence
‘A guy told me one time’, says organized crime boss Neil McCauley in Michael Mann’s 1995 film Heat, ‘Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner’. One of the easiest ways to grasp the differences between Fordism and post-Fordism is to compare Mann’s film with the gangster movies made by Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese between 1971 and 1990. In Heat, the scores are undertaken not by Families with links to the Old Country, but by rootless crews, in an LA of polished chrome and interchangeable designer kitchens, of featureless freeways and late-night diners. All the local color, the cuisine aromas, the cultural idiolects which the likes of The Godfather and Goodfellas depended upon have been painted over and re-fitted. Heat’s Los Angeles is a world without landmarks, a branded Sprawl, where markable territory has been replaced by endlessly repeating vistas of replicating franchises. … McCauley is perhaps the part that De Niro played that is closest to the actor’s own personality: a screen, a cipher, depthless, icily professional, stripped down to pure preparation, research, Method (‘I do what I do best’). McCauley is no mafia Boss, no puffed-up chief perched atop a baroque hierarchy governed by codes as solemn and mysterious as those of the Catholic Church and written in the blood of a thousand feuds. His Crew are professionals, hands-on entrepreneur-speculators, crime-technicians, whose credo is the exact opposite of Cosa Nostra family loyalty. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 69
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: The 1979 Fed rate hike began the post-Fordist era — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 71; Post-Fordist work substitutes communication for Fordist silence — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 72; Flexible production bypassed Fordist rigidity to serve quick-changing markets — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 936 (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- Flexible production bypassed Fordist rigidity to serve quick-changing markets
#corroborates(0.85) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 936 - The Fordist regime collapsed with the 1973 recession
#expands(0.80) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 847 - The Fordist mass production model is misrepresented by post-Fordist theorists.
#contradicts(0.75) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 507