IN MEDIAS RES
Staring out at the sea, wondering if anyone is staring back from the other side. Riptides and palm skies. Hyperreal vistas, Technicolor saturation. Napalm-bright clothing gripped to muscle-hard bodies. “A player negotiates too hard and you never hear from him again…this group goes from zero to high-order violence like that.” Jurisdictional details, cartel terminology. Furniture pale green like lime-wedged mojitos. Windows looking out on a fogged turquoise of impossible horizon, sky and ocean folding into a line of neverending possibility. The rumbleclap of what could be humid thunder or gunfire. “That’s the sound of air rapidly filling the vacuum created by your departed body.” Tough talk of bonebreak intensity, fast-boating from hardboiled cop jargon to pulp koans. Hot-blooded machismo and cool-groove potence, absurdist swagger and earnest gravity.
Atmosphere, surfaces, texture.
“Can’t do time, don’t mess with crime.”
Fragments, a sensorial aggregate of luminance and information, disconnected, chaotic.
“It’s just, there’s variables, you know?”
Bodies in space, asymmetrical compositions.
The Vice squad that once galvanized television screens of the 1980s now fills the widescreen canvas of film: Detectives Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx), Trudy Joplin (Naomie Harris), Gina Calabrese (Elizabeth Rodriguez), Stan Switek (Domenick Lombardozzi), Larry Zito (Justin Theroux). Bracing an informant in his high-rise condo, the team forcing their way into a transnational narcotrafficking outfit.
It’s a cover-story cavalcade of cop-movie clichés, everyone too hard too brilliant too beautiful too cool.
True meaning only begins to accrete undercover, beneath the surface bluster, below the icy bravado and posturing. Amidst the noise, as the insults and threats cut through the room like gunfire, energy and focus cohere around the one person not speaking, leaning silent against the floor-to-ceiling windows. You wait for him to say something, anything, something tough something hard something cool, to join with his partners in this setpiece of verbal cowboydoccio, but he doesn’t.
Det. Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) stares out at the sea, a bioluminescent bruise of blue Miami twilight made mercury-real and glassily immediate via hi-def digital photography. The muscles in his face tic and twist from curiosity to awe to outright yearning. He does not say for what. He does not say for whom. But in this moment, everything else—the cops, the criminals, the codes—dissolves away.
Miami Vice blows its cover, and reveals itself.
~
“That’s my own personal affliction. When I’m trying to figure something out, I look at the sea,” Miami Vice writer/director Michael Mann mused during a 2024 post-film Q&A with “Miami Nice” podcast hosts Blake Howard and Katie Walsh at the Egyptian Theater in Los Angeles, a screening that served as something of a victory lap for the film’s nearly two-decade reputation rehabilitation since its 2006 release to mixed reviews and diffident, disappointed audiences. From a sullen failure of a summer blockbuster to a source of increasing memery (“I’m a fiend for mojitos,” “My mommy and daddy know me,” “Let’s take it to the limit one more time”) to a darkly sumptuous masterpiece of eroticism and romanticism, of action and abstraction, Miami Vice’s long, slow journey of cultural reevaluation has come to resemble the tidal rhythms of the sea its characters and creator so obsessively ruminate upon—the cumulative energy of countless swells and systems rising and falling together across vast distances and underlying movements, generating an overwhelming emotional momentum that only gains with time.
That undulation—oceanic, cultural, critical—is presaged and matched by the film’s controversial visual style, created mostly by the Thomson Viper FilmStream digital camera, which offers an at-times humid and hallucinatory immediacy of immersive hyperreality, and an at-times shockingly rough distorto disintegration into the pixelated visual noise of digital oblivion. That collision of thematically-resonant visual opposites, the smeary and the super-fine, comes because the Viper FilmStream output a 10-bit logoarithmic signal of flat desaturation, an unfinished picture, a collection of luminance and color information that had to be filtered through digital color grading in order to cohere into a crystalline whole that viewers could comprehend.
Likewise, the film alienated original audiences by continually withholding a stable picture of dramatic narrative, refusing clear exposition or psychological motivation, or even an especially transparent plot. Instead: a sensorial aggregate of surfaces, of texture, of atmosphere. An in medias res opening: silhouetting bodies twisting and dancing before digital screens to the inexplicable Jay-Z/Linkin Park mashup “Numb/Encore,” the film then opening up into professional routines, codes, cars, “go-fast boats,” global narcotrafficking, vehicles and bodies moving through space, the accumulation of fragmented flows of raw and overwhelming emotional information whose meanings only accrete and take hold following completion, a film that is only itself once it is gone and the shape of its cumulative impact can be felt in the raw vacuum of its departure.
CUBAN VICES
None of that makes for a typical (or successful) summer blockbuster, though.
Miami Vice is a film about undercover operatives that is itself a work of art operating undercover. It adopts the fabricated identity of a $150 million summer action film, of a black/white buddy-cop picture, of the (oft mistaken) cultural impression of the Michael Mann movie as a series of terse neon riffs upon masculinity and codes of professionalism within the crime movie milieu; yet its true self belies something deeper and more complicated while posing as (and failing at) all of the above. It is a film that goes undercover as a big-budget action-heavy adaptation of a TV cop show, yet reveals itself to be a blood-hot melodrama, a mesmeric and melancholy study of how we instinctually/paradoxically crave the love that will disintegrate the personas we create, personas we use to survive the worlds we operate within.
More than that, Miami Vice is something deeper than an undercover melodrama. It is a medalist melodrama.
In the tradecraft jargon of law enforcement, “medalist syndrome” is a state of highline psychological extremity in which an undercover operative becomes so ego-driven and obsessed by their undercover work, so consumed with succeeding in both the creation of their fabricated identity and the success of its mission, that they begin to crave higher extremity, greater risks, grander accomplishments. The line between the fabricated self and real-deal identity blurs, and the falsified persona begins to not only reflect the desires and drives of the real self, but to amplify them and become their heightened, purest vehicle of expression.
Miami Vice is a medalist melodrama: a film made at the highest levels of technical execution by a master filmmaker at the peak of his formidable powers, one that attempts to continue exploring his career-long inquiry into the blunt-force extremity of professionals in the cops ’n crime world living on the knifeblade edge between life and death—an inquiry that progressed through the underworld of cat burglars in Thief (1981), Feds chasing serial killers in Manhunter (1986), cops taking down bank robbers in Heat (1995), investigators going after corporate criminality in The Insider (1999), and detectives after a South American cartel in Collateral (2004), before climaxing in the widening gyre of Miami Vice’s I.P.-hijacking tale of undercover cops cutting into a global narcotrafficking outfit, in what should have been the ultimate diamond-hard expression of Mann’s Jean-Pierre Melville-inflected cineworld of cop-crime concussia.
It failed.
Instead, in Miami Vice’s big-budget hubris, in its cop-movie cover story, Mann’s truer artistic longings and leanings blurred and bled through, became amplified, fragmenting the film’s fabricated identity into a kind of abstract and pixelated crime film expressionism while its true self—a libidinal treatise on the deafening blood-rush roar of yearning for another soul with every particle of your own—cohered amidst the signal noise and projected itself with bombastic do-or-die abandon, becoming the ultimate medalist expression of what a Mann film can be: A love story.
~
“We are at the delicate interface between ocean and air…liquid and gas…the event horizon where molecules evaporate. The interchange is ethereal.”
A script that begins with a conjurance of the sea. Dancing elements, necessary opposites—one needing the other, the other needing the one.
The theatrical cut of Miami Vice runs for two hours, twelve minutes, and thirty-five seconds. Yet the real film, its true self, exists only for a period of twelve minutes and thirty-five seconds. In Cuba.
The remaining two hours are hypnotic fabrication, alluring noise, thrilling digital projections. The Vice team cuts into a globonarco outfit for Reasons; Sonny and Ricardo go undercover as smugglers. Ricardo is made steely and solid by the love and trust of his woman, Trudy; Sonny is wild, untethered, medalist, hungry for something else—see it in his eyes as he searches the ocean, see it in his face flirting with a girl at a club, see it in Cuba. See it in Isabella (Gong Li).
Isabella is shot caller, financial advisor, and lover to Arcángel de Jesús Montoya (Luis Tosar), the film’s cruelly capitalist cartel head and villain, a blockbuster-negating force of anti-personality because he does not matter, the bad guys do not matter, the good guys do not matter.
Cuba matters.
See it in Miami Vice:
Standing by the sea, a face-to-face meeting, dangerous business, a cop undercover as a criminal and a survivor undercover as a narco financier. Mutual recognition of something deeper, something under. The delicate interface, where things evaporate. Riptides and palm skies. “Allow me to buy you a drink.” “I know a place.” A go-fast boat carving through the sapphire void, carrying the two under Malick skies, cruising atop Mann intensity. Moby’s whiteboy funk (“One of these mornings you will look for me/ And I’ll be gone”). Hair in the wind, impossible speeds toward a forever horizon. Sidelong glances. Communication without words. Her hands raised to give him the space to touch her body, to strap her in, to protect her from their increasing and inevitable velocity. The eroticism of capability, the capability of eroticism. That moment a woman decides to take you to her bed. “Do you dance?” “I dance.” Cuban nightclub, legs pumping, dresses flaring. Two bodies pressed together, the closing space between the silhouettes of their faces, the world around them pixelating into nothingness. That mutual recognition, and the sinuous ferocity of need that follows. The sex that will define the rest of their lives, as something breaks loose within her, and she cries. Their bodies in the shower the next morning, his face hidden over her shoulder where she cannot see, his expression the same naked haunt of vulnerability with which he searched the sea days earlier.
EX MEDIAS RES
(NUMB ENCORE)
The rest—the jealousy and nefarious scheming of cartel lieutenant José Yero (John Ortiz), revelations of interagency corruption, talk of bullets moving at 2,700 feet per second into the medulla before a body’s finger can even twitch, Trudy’s brief coma and hospitalization, discussion of skill sets and drug loads, the obligatory climactic shootout—is all flash and fabrication, the lie that exists to heighten the truth, the undercover persona that all but screams the desires of the real person underneath.
So much of the discourse surrounding the films of Michael Mann focuses upon their portraiture of masculine capability and extremity within the world of crime—tough guys listening to Audioslave and Miles Davis’ Birth of the Cool, these permafrost personas for whom being the best at their profession is the heightened experience of their lives. Missed in the overweening noise of that discourse, perhaps, is that such cold-ass excellence is not the end-all be-all of these characters’ existence, but merely a means to an end. Thief’s Frank does not wish to be a lifelong criminal; being the best thief simply affords him the ability to live the visionboard dream of love and family he has crafted for himself. Manhunter’s Will Graham does not want to hunt killers; he is compelled to protect families like his own as proof that he can overcome his own darkness. Heat’s Neil McCauley doesn’t take scores in order to lead L.A.’s premier bank crew; he does it to afford a dream of love and life in Fiji. Mann’s men’s journey is not towards perfection, but rather it is through perfection they believe they will find what they seek: to look across the face of the water and see someone looking back. The rest—phraseology like “gladiator academies” and “the yield of my labor” and “just you and me now, sport”—is all cover, the melodramatic medalist syndrome that reveals what is inside, these stories of people living lives of utmost stakes in the criminal world wherein everything is life and death, which is just an amplification of what it is to be in love, in which everything feels heightened, in which everything feels like life and death.
Mann’s cinema is that of love and longing on a life-and-death scale—all that matters are the compressed moments we have in which to share it. The lucky moments, the pockets of time. The twelve minutes and thirty-five seconds. Cuba.
In Manhunter: “Time is luck, Will. I know the value of every single day.”
In Heat: “I know life is short. Whatever time you get is luck. You wanna walk? You walk right now. Or on your own, you choose to come with me. All I know is there’s no point in me going anywhere anymore if it’s gonna be alone, without you.”
In Miami Vice, in one of those moments of compression, Sonny and Isabella walk by the nighttime sea as it moves like shifting obsidian:
“Once I had a fortune,” she tells her man. “It said: ‘Live now. Life is short. Time is luck.’”
Both have crafted personas to survive this world of danger, every day rigidly the same because it has to be in order for them to survive. Both recognize the power of the other to shatter that colorless extremity, to allow each to live something fuller, deeper, truer.
And yet both recognize when Sonny’s cover is blown that it is a love as paradoxical as the film’s surrealistic visuals, one that is “too good to last” together, and yet will last both these characters’ lifetimes apart. A love that is only itself once it is gone, and the shape of its cumulative impact can be felt in the raw vacuum of its absence.
He is tied to her like the seatides to their moon, and the lives of their fabricated personas have caught up to the love of their true selves, the cartels and the cops, the codes and the contradictions. In one last protective act, he sends her on a ship that will take her back to Cuba—alone. The triumph of Miami Vice is that it takes the yearning ubertheme of Mann’s filmography and makes it explicit. The tragedy of Miami Vice is what these two sacrifice for us to see it.
~
Ethereal interchanges. A dance between elements both opposite and mirrored, water and air, liquid and gas, each necessary to the other. A rising tide of elements that reach for the sky and then come crashing back down to dissolve in foamy oblivion.
Live now.
Too good to last.
Life is short.
To the limit, one last time.
Time is luck.
One of these mornings you will look for me and I’ll be gone.
And like a dancer’s hips, like hers, the ocean of this film swells and swirls:
The whorls and curls of Isabella’s wet hair curlicued to the back of her neck in the shower. Nighttime storm clouds of burnt magenta, blurred and crystallized alike by 2006 DV digimpressionism and errant lightning. “Skill sets,” “fabricated fundamentals.” Bodies against landscapes, bodies against screens, bodies against bodies. The devastating impact of a twitched finger upon a gun’s trigger, or from a hospital bed. Riptides and palm skies. Staring out at the sea, wondering if she is staring back from the other side.