"All is flux, nothing is stationary." - Heraclitus
"Miami Vice", "The Departed" and "The Black Dahlia" were all released in 2006. "The Departed" went on to do big business and win several key awards, whilst "Dahlia" and "Vice" did nothing but annoy audiences tremendously. Their characters were ciphers, the films had little action and despite their tremendous visual style, their plots were a giant bore. I myself found both films almost painful to sit through when first seeing them in theatres.
But time has a way of putting everything in its proper place. Today I find Scorsese's film intolerable and have since seen "Vice" and "Dahlia" over five times, the later two films revealing themselves, with subsequent viewings, to be truly spectacular. But isn't that always the case with great films? You're unprepared, they leave you baffled and your immediate response is always to react with hostility.
The "Miami Vice" television series was renowned for its flashy cars, cool clothes, sexy women and glossy look. Police detectives Tubbs and Crockett were as interested in their designer sunglasses and exotic sports cars as they were in catching criminals. The TV series celebrated superficiality and vapid aesthetics.
The "Vice" film, however, is one of profound numbness. This is an anti-procedural in which the characters are all desensitised to aesthetics, director Michael Mann opening the film with Linkin Park's "Numb Encore" before throwing his audience headlong into a police story so dense and alien that we immediately become as suffocated as the characters on screen. Tubbs and Crockett have themselves been on the job for so long that everything has long lost its sex appeal. The clothes, cars and exotic locales are now all completely banal. Life has been bled of colour, their toys have been bled of value and everything has a hollow, empty feel.
The film's plot – the detectives going undercover to infiltrate a criminal organisation – is both unoriginal and unimportant. This is a tone poem, a big budget art movie in the vein of Wong Kar-wai and Antonioni, Mann more interested in crafting a low-key crime story in which business is conducted with the existential detachment of Jean-Pierre Melville.
When late in the film Tubbs says to his partner, "So, fabricated identity, and what's really up, collapses into one frame. You ready for that on this one?", he's speaking of his partner's ability to distinguish between the professional life of a police officer and the domestic realm of romance. But on another level, the film is about the collapsing of identities in a larger sense, the archetypal police hero robbed of all energy, hopelessly fragmented, numb and reduced. The film itself is bookended by the lyrics "I'm tired of being what you want me to be, feeling so faithless lost under the surface" and "one of these mornings, they will look for me and I'll be gone", both movie and cast bleeding off into melancholic nothingness.
The flashy universe of the "Miami Vice" TV series, with its boundless money, its 80s excess, its glitzy materialism, has been torn open to reveal a vast network hidden deep within. If De Palma's "Scarface", released a year before Mann's TV series, exposes the banality of wealth, of pop individualism, of our very own post modern aesthetic, then "Vice" the movie tries – like HBO's "The Wire" - to map capitalism's unmappable network of corruption and money. This is a complex and illegible world in which it has become impossible to interact if not in a peripheral manner. Everything is in flux, moving, changing hands too quick for minds to process, let alone affect. Money, relationships and people are always in transition. By the film's end, a leak in the heart of a government agency has not been plugged, the villains escape and Crockett loses his girl. Nothing is resolved and everything is liquid. Liquid money, liquid people, liquid jobs, liquid relationships. Everything moves and it moves fast.
The detectives themselves embody divergent movements. Tubbs is focused, a man of stability, both in his love life and professionally, whilst Crockett is unpredictable, unbalanced and instinctive. He's always gazing out at the horizon, yearning for that utopian "beach paradise" that all Mann's heroes long for. But "Vice's" utopia differs significantly from the paradisaical longings of the men in "Collateral", "Manhunter", "Thief", "Public Enemies" and "Heat". Those characters all failed to actualise their idyllic havens because they were unable to separate the "professional" from the "domestic". But the lesson that "Vice" teaches is that the modern man is permanently disembodied. There is no "actual", no "real", to connect to. The human being has disappeared and dematerialised into the heart of an urban universe governed by technology and money. The post urban world is a confused and atomized mass held together only by the financial tendrils that cross it and the electronic images that recreate the simulacrum.
Crockett thinks he can resist this global system, thinks he can carve out a place of "tranquillity" that exists outside the flux. But this place no longer exists. In a world where a rapid edit is all that separates Miami beach from the slums of Columbia, where money darts back and forth on go-fast boats, where "product" circles the globe in Learjets, where identities are readily forged, created and abandoned at the click of a button, how can one truly hope to tear themselves away from the global system?
Man literalizes these themes toward the and of the film, when a sliding camera motion tracks the entwined hands of Tubbs and his lover. This same horizontal motion charters the disconnect between Crockett and his girl as she leaves on a boat (and their abandoned safe house). If Tubbs and his lover have connection in motion, it is only because they occupy the same professional space. But even this connection is fragile and hopelessly volatile.
(Part 2 of this essay can be found in my review of "Thief")
"Miami Vice", "The Departed" and "The Black Dahlia" were all released in 2006. "The Departed" went on to do big business and win several key awards, whilst "Dahlia" and "Vice" did nothing but annoy audiences tremendously. Their characters were ciphers, the films had little action and despite their tremendous visual style, their plots were a giant bore. I myself found both films almost painful to sit through when first seeing them in theatres.
But time has a way of putting everything in its proper place. Today I find Scorsese's film intolerable and have since seen "Vice" and "Dahlia" over five times, the later two films revealing themselves, with subsequent viewings, to be truly spectacular. But isn't that always the case with great films? You're unprepared, they leave you baffled and your immediate response is always to react with hostility.
The "Miami Vice" television series was renowned for its flashy cars, cool clothes, sexy women and glossy look. Police detectives Tubbs and Crockett were as interested in their designer sunglasses and exotic sports cars as they were in catching criminals. The TV series celebrated superficiality and vapid aesthetics.
The "Vice" film, however, is one of profound numbness. This is an anti-procedural in which the characters are all desensitised to aesthetics, director Michael Mann opening the film with Linkin Park's "Numb Encore" before throwing his audience headlong into a police story so dense and alien that we immediately become as suffocated as the characters on screen. Tubbs and Crockett have themselves been on the job for so long that everything has long lost its sex appeal. The clothes, cars and exotic locales are now all completely banal. Life has been bled of colour, their toys have been bled of value and everything has a hollow, empty feel.
The film's plot – the detectives going undercover to infiltrate a criminal organisation – is both unoriginal and unimportant. This is a tone poem, a big budget art movie in the vein of Wong Kar-wai and Antonioni, Mann more interested in crafting a low-key crime story in which business is conducted with the existential detachment of Jean-Pierre Melville.
When late in the film Tubbs says to his partner, "So, fabricated identity, and what's really up, collapses into one frame. You ready for that on this one?", he's speaking of his partner's ability to distinguish between the professional life of a police officer and the domestic realm of romance. But on another level, the film is about the collapsing of identities in a larger sense, the archetypal police hero robbed of all energy, hopelessly fragmented, numb and reduced. The film itself is bookended by the lyrics "I'm tired of being what you want me to be, feeling so faithless lost under the surface" and "one of these mornings, they will look for me and I'll be gone", both movie and cast bleeding off into melancholic nothingness.
The flashy universe of the "Miami Vice" TV series, with its boundless money, its 80s excess, its glitzy materialism, has been torn open to reveal a vast network hidden deep within. If De Palma's "Scarface", released a year before Mann's TV series, exposes the banality of wealth, of pop individualism, of our very own post modern aesthetic, then "Vice" the movie tries – like HBO's "The Wire" - to map capitalism's unmappable network of corruption and money. This is a complex and illegible world in which it has become impossible to interact if not in a peripheral manner. Everything is in flux, moving, changing hands too quick for minds to process, let alone affect. Money, relationships and people are always in transition. By the film's end, a leak in the heart of a government agency has not been plugged, the villains escape and Crockett loses his girl. Nothing is resolved and everything is liquid. Liquid money, liquid people, liquid jobs, liquid relationships. Everything moves and it moves fast.
The detectives themselves embody divergent movements. Tubbs is focused, a man of stability, both in his love life and professionally, whilst Crockett is unpredictable, unbalanced and instinctive. He's always gazing out at the horizon, yearning for that utopian "beach paradise" that all Mann's heroes long for. But "Vice's" utopia differs significantly from the paradisaical longings of the men in "Collateral", "Manhunter", "Thief", "Public Enemies" and "Heat". Those characters all failed to actualise their idyllic havens because they were unable to separate the "professional" from the "domestic". But the lesson that "Vice" teaches is that the modern man is permanently disembodied. There is no "actual", no "real", to connect to. The human being has disappeared and dematerialised into the heart of an urban universe governed by technology and money. The post urban world is a confused and atomized mass held together only by the financial tendrils that cross it and the electronic images that recreate the simulacrum.
Crockett thinks he can resist this global system, thinks he can carve out a place of "tranquillity" that exists outside the flux. But this place no longer exists. In a world where a rapid edit is all that separates Miami beach from the slums of Columbia, where money darts back and forth on go-fast boats, where "product" circles the globe in Learjets, where identities are readily forged, created and abandoned at the click of a button, how can one truly hope to tear themselves away from the global system?
Man literalizes these themes toward the and of the film, when a sliding camera motion tracks the entwined hands of Tubbs and his lover. This same horizontal motion charters the disconnect between Crockett and his girl as she leaves on a boat (and their abandoned safe house). If Tubbs and his lover have connection in motion, it is only because they occupy the same professional space. But even this connection is fragile and hopelessly volatile.
(Part 2 of this essay can be found in my review of "Thief")