Crockett, Tubbs, Bush and Bin Laden: Michael Mann's Experimental Revisiting of "Miami Vice"

By 2006, Peter Parker had swung triumphantly onto a New York City rooftop, catapulting off a glistening American flag in the closing moments of Spider-Man. Bruce Wayne’s gritty Gotham City origins had been scrutinized in the Freudian Batman Begins Psychogenic amnesiac Jason Bourne had replaced war-torn, world-weary drifter John Rambo. Brit-import Daniel Craig’s arrival as James Bond saw 007 trade irreverence for introversion in Casino Royale. Five years into President George W. Bush’s two-term period in office, attitudes surrounding the 2001 World Trade Center attacks’ devastation on the national body and his administration’s subsequent war on terror had already invited slews of allegorical outcries for justice to be served on a global scale – however critical or encouraging - to the mainstream, wide-release blockbuster.

From the start of his run as executive producer on NBC’s Miami Vice in 1984, Michael Mann had exploited the consumer-oriented trends of the Reaganite free-market, and was no stranger to psychoanalytical film technique; its elements, incorporated in the realm of that hugely popular television series, agreeably married with the show’s creation of a domineering male image. Now in the Bush era, Mann’s status in film as a writer-director – an auteur with an knack for bringing realism and nuance to the action-crime drama in works like Heat and Collateral  – had long since been a calling card established by his critics and peers alike.

Frequent collaborator Jamie Foxx (Ali, Collateral)’s suggestion to Mann that they return to Vice’s world, then - inadvertently or not - suddenly raised a wholly new prospect: to reassign the neo-conservative principles  of the show’s undercover buddy-cop duo, Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs, in order that they reckon with the present-day forces vilified by President Bush’s anti-terror rhetoric. The sensibilities of the writer-director’s “product” – its neatly positioned notions of masculinity alongside Reagan’s reverence for capitalist consumerism and his administration’s war on drugs – resurface on film, transformed  as the reflection of a new world order.

Discussing Mann’s period as Vice’s executive producer and his integration of cinematic techniques into the television medium, John-Paul Trautnau in his A One Man Show?, argues for the series’ ability to transcend the small screen: “We gaze intensely at film, but glance casually at television,” he says, continuing, “This widely held assumption about film and television is challenged by Miami Vice. Mann was well aware that viewers have a collective subconscious of some kind. By giving them ‘what they want,’ Mann had to find out what people actually desired. This issue of the subconscious is paramount when discovering myths and values that are firmly rooted within American culture.” But if Vice the TV series spoke to the excess that drove 1980s America, (“in a firmly supportive position between the two major pillars of Reaganite free-market ideology - ‘law and order and conspicuous consumption,’” says Trutnau) the question for the 2006 film becomes, “How can America’s desires be re-tapped?” Just what was on the collective subconscious? In an effort to answer this question, the reinvention of Miami Vice* demanded that it not simply grow out of the structures of the show that preceded it (its famous art-deco/neo-noir aesthetic and rescue fantasy narrative) – but that they would mitigate symptomatic anxieties reawakened by the trauma of 9/11.

From the opening credits of Mann’s cinematic adaptation – a series of sleek title cards in oceanic blue, each accompanied by their own thunderous, percussive boom – the film stakes its claim as a sober look into the titular city’s subterranean depths. This black void slowly dissipating, lurching toward familiar territory, an underwater, tracking eye-line shot looms forward to reveal the foam, bubbles and rippled texture of the South Beach waves that border Vice’s unmistakable locale. 

Above sea level, the white crush of the waves kicking up from Crockett (Colin Farrell)’s MTI Offshore Catamaran (labeled “Mojo”) splash an on-looking lens. A bird’s-eye-view long shot gazes for a fleeting second at the convoy of boats beside it, whizzing at high speed. Alternating interior close-ups of Crockett and partner Tubbs – their stoic grimaces cloaked behind designer shades, as the two make their entrance for the first time - interplay with a close-up of Crockett’s profile observing him splitting the duties of their run, communicating with the rest of their squad, heard in grainy transmission via headset. Then a cut to Tubbs’ hand at the helm, thrusting the boat’s clutch to shift its gears. Then to the gauges of the dashboard, ramping up to top speed. Then, as Mojo drags streaks of white across their turquoise playground, another extreme long shot. A bird’s-eye-view angle captures the boat skipping a bumpy wave or two, just before cutting to a shaky, hand-held styled high-speed shot from behind the windshield, simulating the weight of the ride.

But while the iconography of Miami-Dade County may be present, the tongue previously placed firmly in its cheek has now been removed. Any hammy undertones linked to 80s Vice’s title sequence have been replaced with a grave sense of purpose. No pink flamingoes on the stroll, no lingering (presumably male) gazes upon scantily clad women on the promenade. Excluding Jan Hammer’s renowned electro-synth television theme in favor of composer John Murphy’s stripped down guitar solo, Mann’s insistence on his ‘product’’s drastic tonal shift begins to emerge.

When asked of this decision, Hammer dismissed Mann’s reconsideration of the style inherently linked to the Vice brand: “I think it’s a matter of being too cool for school,” he said. By knee-jerking this departure, though, Hammer misses the implications of Vice’s socio-political consciousness. The director’s jaunty, vérité stylings, the film’s “here-and-now” aesthetic, may illustrate an active feeding of Crockett and Tubbs’ inherent “need for speed” on a level of primal thrill - but rather than propulsive and celebratory, the duo’s purported moment of male-bonding is strangely hectic, full of unrest. Crockett’s transmissions from Mojo’s interior - filled with tumult from the force of the waves beneath - bear more reminiscence to the docu-dramatic hysteria of Paul Greengrass’s post-9/11 tale of American heroism, United 93, than the straight-forwardness of the Vice TV series’ music-video montage spin on its exotic locales. On this feeling of being everywhere at once, New York Times critic Manhola Dargis says of Mann’s stylistic approach to deviating from action spectacle: “It’s as if the world were visible in its entirety, as if all our familiar time-and-space coordinates had dropped away, because they have.”

    
 In detaching itself from the foregrounding of success and oblivious decadence the TV series may have previously leveraged, Mann’s reconstruction of Vice’s title sequence draws attention to the unsavory reminder of our nation’s vulnerability. Mann’s shooting scheme fixates on boating as an extension of redemptive – never reigning - power, as Crockett and Tubbs enact a ritualistic and idealized fantasy of masculine potency. Trade boxing for watersport, and Yvonne Tasker’s assessment of the Rocky films’ male power and powerlessness from Body in Crisis or Body Triumphant placed in Vice’s aquatic sequence reads the workings of the sequence as “a space of spectacle and struggle, an enclosed arena of masculine performance.” As spectacle, it is Crockett and Tubbs’ anxious forge against the “raging waters” of an externalized terrorist threat. And as the squad arrive on shore to meet up undercover with Haitian pimp Neptune (Isaach De Bankole), it becomes clear what they’re struggling against. The threat is no longer metaphorical, it’s literal. The sense that the American way of life is in constant jeopardy remains frequently pervasive.

To be sure, Neptune isn’t the only one Crockett and Tubbs pursue who has a funny name and cocktail of skin colors. This set up reveals one of several of Miami Vice’s inherent contradictions. It is true enough that the film’s opening improves upon one of Mann’s original goals employed by the series to win the “TV vs. Cinema argument” - the notion that “psychological intuition,” as Trutnau states, “forms the basis of [Crockett and Tubbs’] police work.” But while empathy and a hyper-real sense of space exists for Vice’s heroes, the same can seldom - if ever - be said of the film’s villains. In a scene in which Crockett and Tubbs navigate a night-club in pursuit of their first drug bust, the pair’s progressive values are prominently featured, as they stand side by side in front of a multiplicity of colors and neon lights streaked across the night sky. “From a binary point of view, Crockett and Tubbs are ‘entirely at ease in a multi-racial climate,’ since they themselves embody this ‘mixed team.’ Likewise, the ‘coloring of the location – Miami and its (often nocturnal) surroundings – is an essential and ever-present feature in Mann’s series,” Trutnau says.

Yet while the film foregrounds this perception as an American ideal, it is just as quick to exploit how ethnic others resent their ability to uphold it. This lack of moral equivalency present in the film’s vilification of South American drug lord Arcangel de Jesus Montoya (Luis Tosar) and his second-in-command, Jose Yero (John Ortiz) prevails throughout Mann’s mise-en-scene, lighting and color scheme, as Crockett and Tubbs delve deeper into their investigation of the city’s corrupt underbelly. When first introduced to Yero, the duo meet him in a dark back alley, in which blackness consumes all but their faces and the silhouettes of armed guards. Here, threat is all consuming, and their enemy is clear - he lurks in the darkness, possessing no sense of humanity. Audiences, along with Crockett and Tubbs, can identify his prominent features - his drawling accent, slick, black hair and full grown beard border on Islamic-fundamentalist caricature. Yero concludes his meeting with the pair to discuss a drug deal by addressing the white Crockett with exceptional hostility: “You seem okay,” he says to Tubbs, “but him? I don’t like how he looks.” Tensions begin to boil.

Yeros (John Ortiz, left) meets with Crockett (Colin Farrell, center) and Tubbs (Jamie Foxx, right)

President Bush’s appeal to citizens’ sentiment, grievance and outrage following news of Osama Bin Laden’s funding of the executed plane hijackings on American soil had adopted the Reaganite ideology’s neoconservative notion of the “externalized other” in more ways than one. The Bush administration’s zero-sum relationship between “freedom and democracy” and “evil acts of terrorism” established binaries of good/evil, hero/villain, threat/threatened; as Bruce Lincoln quotes Bush in The Rhetoric of Bush and Bin Laden: “Every nation has a choice to make. In this conflict there is no neutral ground. If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents, they have become outlaws and murderers themselves.” Similarly, Bin Laden’s responses with rhetoric of his own perpetuated this division: “Tell them that these events have divided the world into two camps,” he said of Americans. “The camp of the faithful and the camp of infidels. May God shield us and you from them.” As Yero talks in a shadowy, yellow private security room at his club, one bears in mind the reported caves in which Bin Laden took refuge after his mass killings. On the phone, he tells Montoya, “I don’t like Americans, too good at what they do. They are wrong, somehow. Somehow, they are wrong.”

Jose Yeros (John Ortiz) [Left] and Arcangel de Jesus Montoya (Luis Tosar) [Right]

Omar Bin Laden, son of Osama Bin Laden

The orienting binaries of this tension between nations comes to fruition during Crockett and Tubbs’ squad’s raid of a mobile home in a trailer park, after pinpointing the location where Tubbs’ girlfriend Trudy, has been held hostage by Yero’s men nearby. Mann’s high-speed, pseudo-handheld camera movement follows both men running stealthily, the sound mix deafeningly quiet, save for the sound of their rapid, hushed breathing. The trailer park’s scattered metal fixtures and tattered garbage cans - all shot in hues of green – create a point of view suggestive of a soldier’s night vision goggles. Crockett sneaks up behind a watchful guard and debilitates him in a chokehold, before the squad makes their way into the house, killing Trudy’s captors.

As a purveyor of American values, Tubbs’ selection defines his function as a hero, assuming a plot of passion, in which he is threatened with retaliation. This adds, as Rikke Schubart describes in Passion and Acceleration, a “narrative motive a la fairy tale: to save an object – the hero’s wife, daughter, innocent people, or even world peace.” Vice’s trailer park sequence as a retaliation to terrorist threats, then, is explicitly addressed in The Terror Dream, in which Susan Faludi emphasizes the political ramifications of the “rescue fantasy” as “a central aspect of our cultural mythology that resurfaced in the aftermath of 9/11.” “The specter of the white maiden taken against her will by dark ‘savages’ became our recurring trope,” she argues, “that maiden’s rescue, fantasized or real, became our reigning redemption tale.”

Following Trudy’s rescue, Yeros sends a signal to explode the building, sending her and Tubbs flying and nearly killing them on impact. This abrupt moment of action spectacle is perhaps most frightening because of the nihilism that seems intrinsically attached to the man who ordered it. President Bush would be the first to submit that such a suggestion is clear as day. As Bruce Bonger writes in Psychology of Terrorism, “Terrorism is not about war in any traditional sense of destroying the material resources of an enemy nation and taking over that country; instead, terrorism is fundamentally about psychology. Terrorist acts are designed strategically to incite terror and fright in civilian populations.” Crockett and Tubbs’ efforts seem noble enough, yet it is the perpetuation of a mutual hostility that ignites them. That these men must ultimately resort to an undercover method of taking part in drug deals to eliminate drug dealers is something of a reflection of its buried subtext – that evil is justifiable if its target knows nothing else. For all its pleasures, Mann’s Miami Vice experiment’s biggest fault may be that of its understanding of the foreign world – one that falsely resolves that the psychology of those “dreaded others” knows nothing more than hostility and terror.