The Deeper Underpinnings of Miami Vice

[Bren10]

This is just to discuss/discover the deeper meanings and themes of the show beyond the surface-level style and visceral elements for those who are interested. Therefore I will start with the most obvious that I can see.

1) Losing oneself in one's work to the point that you become the job. The job becoming how (and pretty much only how) you define yourself as a person. Going so deep undercover and so often that you risk becoming your cover. Or stepping back further, only ever being a person who pretends to be another person. It should be noted that Sonny Crockett is not a hotshot drug runner, 80s guy, or a member of Duran Duran. He only looks like one and imitates one. God only knows what he'd be doing if he were not on the force or what kind of scene he'd be into or what culture he'd be a part of. I mean look at his cassette collection. Would Sonny be actually listening to the music the show is playing for us? Or hanging out at the clubs it shows us? In other words it could be argued that his job, and the people he associates with as a result of it, are the only reason he is at all hip. For all we know he could be on a ranch alone somewhere if he weren't a cop. Pretty much all the characters suffer from the dilemma of identity to one degree or another (which can be discussed, please do), but Sonny Crockett stands the most to lose if you remove him from law enforcement.

2) Fighting a losing battle and the whack-a-mole nature of the drug war and other "vices". I find there are at least two ways of looking at this.  

  a) This is heroism in the face of overwhelming odds. These characters constantly put their lives on the line to fight an essentially invisible (to the layman anyway) war and attempt to do some good or make a difference in the world around them. There are no great public celebrations for their victories or (informed) loved ones worrying over the specific dangers they are facing. Such is the nature of undercover work. This also fuels the "noble suffering" and semi-martyrdom that a Sonny Crockett feels like he is undertaking. It is why he feels civilian people in his life should accomodate him and not the other way around. And while he is not necessarily wrong, there is a steep price to pay for such thinking. It is also why only someone like Gina can truly understand him from a love-interest perspective and the only type of person he can feel true kinship with. Caitlyn plays into this too because even though she's not in law enforcement, she too is living a double life and trying to maintain it.  

  b) Or- Supporting a system you inherently know is wrong/ineffective because it's your job and because you can't or won't do anything else. Or because these are simply the rules the bureaucracy has made and you will enforce them until the same bureaucracy decides those aren't the rules anymore and something else is. Take the legalization of marijuana, for example. It wasn't made legal so much because of some great morality shift in society as much as one day the powers that be simply changed their minds about sending you to jail for having it. I know there's more to it than that but suffice to say that something that was supposed to be so terrible, evil, ruins lives, supports terrorism, fries your brain like a frying pan etc etc. suddenly just..wasn't. And only because the bureaucracy said so. By extension, the same goes for the law enforcement officers themselves who used to lecture people when they pulled them over at 12am.  What I'm saying is that it can be argued that if the characters on Miami Vice were that upstanding and moral then they wouldn't be a part of the system in the first place. They are actively selling themselves and their moral values out for the sake of making a living and/or for more personal reasons like they "get off on the action". Whatever the case they are compromising their common sense and engaging in cognitive dissonance because history has proven that prohibition as a law enforcement model doesn't work very well. It goes back to the definition of insanity as repeating the same process and expecting a different result. I know this is the cynical view but it has to be represented as well.

Please give any more thoughts or observations.

[Robbie C.]

I tend to think the losing oneself in one's work applies most directly to Castillo. That's because, even though I enjoy coming up with solid backgrounds for him, I think in the context of the series Sonny Crockett is intended as more of an avatar or window into the life of an undercover officer writ large. He's got a skeleton background...just enough to give him certain points of reference, but if you watch the series closely you notice that he's one of the few characters who never references background points again. We hear about things that have happened to Castillo or Tubbs in the past multiple times, but Even and Mike only appear once. Robbie's his best buddy from Vietnam, but we only see him once. Stone appears twice, but that's for political episode reasons and not so much as a direct Crockett reference.

Why did they do this? I think the answer's simple: Sonny really only 'exists' for about ten minutes on either side of the present. He shows us the stress of undercover work in a different way than the single shot of Artie (who again never appears in Crockett's show universe). His undercover self also evolves over the course of the show, moving from being more or less a grubby guy with a boat to a go-to transportation person and then the "Henry Kissinger of the Miami underwood," which is his stepping-off point to the Burnett break. When we shift back to Sonny Crockett, we see someone who's really only in the here and now. His role as an avatar means we can't relate to him too deeply...just enough to establish the connection before he shows us the undercover world again.

If you take Sonny out of law enforcement and give him the background of a real character, I think you'd find him hanging out on the fringes of the redneck underworld. His music taste is (according to what little we're told) more old-school country and his very name speaks to rural and traditional origins. He might have been a version of Cliff with fewer ambitions. And I think this had the potential to create some serious conflict had the writers bothered to explore it. 

[dizzy izzy]

The theme of losing your true identity through work really resonates. The show does a great job of showing a true progression from hopefulness and vibrancy to grizzled, burnt out husk. The work has consumed him, leaving  no time for personal development. Look how towards the end the OCB is nearly empty. Initially it was bustling full of people and bright. All those others have gotten out. They chose life over drudgery. Not Crockett. He's writing reports in the dark in a building with a few lightbulbs. It's quite the cautionary tale.

[Robbie C.]

I think another thing people who weren't around in the '80s don't realize is just how edgy some of Vice's content was. The social commentary could be biting, but it a very stealthy kind of way. Sometimes it was right out there, but there was always a thread of discontent with the '80s running through the show.

[Robbie C.]

This goes back to some of the discussion on the Freefall episode thread as well. Given the way it developed and the direction it too, Vice simply couldn't have had a 'conventional' finale. Given that at least half the characters were underdeveloped how could you bring them to closure? If Crockett is really an avatar for undercover work, how do you find closure for him? Tubbs was the most likely candidate for this kind of finale, honestly. But it wouldn't have worked given the status Vice held as a critique of the '80s and Reagan's America. Vice simply had to close out protesting the futility of a foreign policy it had been against ever since No Exit (the 7th episode of the series, for those who are convinced this political critique was a product of later Vice seasons). You can find this rejection in Castillo's background: the man who gave up the DEA (and CIA, even though it's never explicitly said he worked for the Company) in order to make a difference at the local level...the only place he felt he could make a difference.

This kind of thing is as much a part of the fabric of Miami Vice as the linen in Crockett's pants, and to deny it is to agree with critics who remain convinced that Miami Vice was simply style over substance.

[Robbie C.]

20 hours ago, dizzy izzy said:

The theme of losing your true identity through work really resonates. The show does a great job of showing a true progression from hopefulness and vibrancy to grizzled, burnt out husk. The work has consumed him, leaving  no time for personal development. Look how towards the end the OCB is nearly empty. Initially it was bustling full of people and bright. All those others have gotten out. They chose life over drudgery. Not Crockett. He's writing reports in the dark in a building with a few lightbulbs. It's quite the cautionary tale.

I think the bigger cautionary tale is Castillo sitting alone in his office. There are never any lights worth the name in Castillo's office. He sits in his dark suits, the very image of duty beyond life. If we take Crockett as an actual character and not an avatar (and when I write about Crockett I paint him as a character, but I'm still not convinced the show ever intended him to be a 'real' character in the sense the others were), he was consumed by both sides of the job (the police side and the undercover side). Castillo willingly gave himself completely to duty. I'm not sure which is darker at the end of things.

Edited June 14, 2019 by Robbie C.

[mjcmmv]

1 hour ago, Robbie C. said:

This goes back to some of the discussion on the Freefall episode thread as well. Given the way it developed and the direction it too, Vice simply couldn't have had a 'conventional' finale. Given that at least half the characters were underdeveloped how could you bring them to closure? If Crockett is really an avatar for undercover work, how do you find closure for him? 

Are you saying that Crockett was a superficial representation of an undercover cop? And if that's what you're saying, is the "closure" they chose, having him simply "quit" a disservice to the original theme? Would it have been better to kill him in Freefall, which was actually considered according to some articles I read. 

[Robbie C.]

He's not a superficial representation as much as he's an avatar or window into that life. That's a lens. So when he quits and leaves it's like dropping the lens. Killing him might have been better, but that also would have validated him as an actual character and not as an avatar. He exists so the series can show us that immediate picture of UC life. Maybe they realized there wasn't a good way to really find closure for him so they just let it go.

[mjcmmv]

5 minutes ago, Robbie C. said:

He's not a superficial representation as much as he's an avatar or window into that life. That's a lens. So when he quits and leaves it's like dropping the lens. Killing him might have been better, but that also would have validated him as an actual character and not as an avatar. He exists so the series can show us that immediate picture of UC life. Maybe they realized there wasn't a good way to really find closure for him so they just let it go.

I don't think they were that deep. The ratings were low, so now,  it was all about "let's get out and take the money while we can!" If killing Crockett gave them higher ratings, then so be it. Cynical, I know, but it's what I believe. No one cared about giving the show or the characters, the ending they deserved. 

[Robbie C.]

It's hard to say where the writers' minds were at, though. And given the arc the series had been taking since the very beginning, a happy ending wasn't in the cards. A traditional wrap just wouldn't have seemed right, no matter how much it might seem so in rose-colored hindsight.

And the concept of Crockett as avatar, I think, developed over time and had quite a bit to do with DJ's own fluctuations with the character. It also stems in part from how Michael Mann tends to develop (or rather not develop) characters.

[mjcmmv]

26 minutes ago, Robbie C. said:

It's hard to say where the writers' minds were at, though. And given the arc the series had been taking since the very beginning, a happy ending wasn't in the cards. A traditional wrap just wouldn't have seemed right, no matter how much it might seem so in rose-colored hindsight.

And the concept of Crockett as avatar, I think, developed over time and had quite a bit to do with DJ's own fluctuations with the character. It also stems in part from how Michael Mann tends to develop (or rather not develop) characters.

But did Michale Mann have a part in this development at the end? I thought he lost interest and turned his back on MV. That is, until the movie, and that was a disaster as far as I was concerned. 

But your reference to DJ's fluctuations, and by that, I think you mean "disinterest" and desire to move on...yes, I think this had a powerful influence on the last season. He was ready to capitalize on his popularity and star status. The fans were moving on, too and so,  the show suffered. 

Edited June 14, 2019 by mjcmmv

[Robbie C.]

No, I'm talking about how Crockett changed very quickly from the detective we see in the pilot (which is almost pure Yerkovich) to something both more and less than that original character. I think Mann was pushing the Crockett character into an avatar role, and that happened to suit how DJ wanted to play the character. Sanders has a line in his book about DJ pretending to be Crockett pretending to be Burnett and that resonated with me. PMT was impressive in that he could shift from Tubbs to various flavors of Cooper without missing a beat, but DJ never really did that. The one time he tries (when Burnett is supposed to be a neo-Nazi) it just comes off as wooden and forced.

[pahonu]

This may be unpopular to some, but it has always seemed to me that the show, while set in the Reagan era, was a pretty damning indictment of federal policy during his administration.  Early shows like No Exit, with its ending where Amato, after all his illegal activities, was simply to be released on the courthouse steps because he provided a useful connection for the Feds to weapons smuggling in Central America is but one example.  In that case both local authorities (vice) and the DEA were left high and dry because of fairly shady foreign policy.  Castillo's DEA work trying to interdict drug smuggling in southeast Asia as described in Golden Triangle was seen as nothing more than a hindrance to foreign policy is another example. After all, the show existed during the Iran-Contra events of the mid-80's and their murky details.  There are many other examples. This thread continues throughout the series culminating in the finale, Freefall.  The whack-a-mole nature of vice's work, expressed numerous times in the series, shows more than a little frustration with federal policy of the era.  I know many members of this forum look back fondly at this era in terms of social circumstances, like music and fashion which I relate too personally also, but Michael Mann seems to view federal policy of the time in less than glowing terms.
 

Edited June 14, 2019 by pahonu

[Glades]

Am 13.6.2019 um 03:44 schrieb Robbie C.:

When we shift back to Sonny Crockett, we see someone who's really only in the here and now

I remember an interview of Michael DeBarres  with  Don Johnson from 2013:
Michael asked Don what he would say to the young man who came to San Francisco from Kansas. Don replied: "Don´t change a thing!" (Which I understand as "past is gone, don´t care about it".) Later, Don once mentioned (I don't know the exact context anymore) that he don't know what he will do in 30 minutes.

Maybe Don Johnson himself is a person who lives entirely in the present and doesn't care too much about the past or the future. Maybe that's why Crockett didn't care much about either. As far as I know the actors themselves have taken a lot of care of the background of their character and his coherence.

That´s just some of my thoughts.

 

Edited June 14, 2019 by Glades

[Glades]

This is the Link to part 1 of the interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkpGXa92cjQ&t=64s  
 

[Matt5]

24 minutes ago, Glades said:

This is the Link to part 1 of the interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkpGXa92cjQ&t=64s  
 

Interesting - I’ll check it out now.

[Robbie C.]

2 hours ago, Glades said:

I remember an interview of Michael DeBarres  with  Don Johnsonfrom 2013:
Michael asked Don what he would say to the young man who came to San Francisco from Kansas. Don replied: "Don´t change a thing!" (Which I understand as "past is gone, don´t care about it".) Later, Don once mentioned (I don't know the exact context anymore) that he don't know what he will do in 30 minutes.

Maybe Don Johnson himself is a person who lives entirely in the present and doesn't care too much about the past or the future. Maybe that's why Crockett didn't care much about either. As far as I know the actors themselves have taken a lot of care of the background of their character and his coherence.

That´s just some of my thoughts.

 

That’s always been my thought, too. He could have pushed more with Crockett but clearly chose not to in many ways. 

[Bren10]

Delving into Tubbs though, why is he seemingly less affected by the damage that undercover work inflicts? Is it because he is less comitted? Or newer at it than Sonny? He is just as effective at the job as Sonny and has the ability to play more than one persona, unlike Sonny. Is that Sonny's problem-that he is too invested in one particular undercover identity? Castillo doesn't exhibit these issues either, but we don't see him in the field undercover much. Or maybe his experiences have turned him into the seemingly cold stoic that he is. It's hard to tell because we only meet him pre-Vice in The Savage. We do know he was involved with the Civil Rights movement. Something else that is almost never discussed is whether Gina or Trudy ever suffer from these issues. The only times I really see it addressed is Give a Little, Take a Little and The Dutch Oven. Maybe Bought And Paid For and Hell Hath No Fury but that may be pushing it. I imagine hanging around pimps and prostitutes and pretending to be one yourself all the time can't really be all that healthy over time. In Stan's case he does lament that his job is just spying on people at some point.

Edited January 10, 2020 by Bren10

[Robbie C.]

I think Tubbs survives because he does shift so often from cover to cover. Or (to reference my fiction) he has various shades of Cooper depending on what's needed. I think he's as committed (look at the various dialects and such he uses with Cooper) as Sonny, but he's not as vested and (I think) doesn't identify as closely with Cooper as Sonny does with Burnett. Castillo is, I think, formed by his experiences. I always got the impression that his pre-Vice fieldwork was more paramilitary in nature as opposed to UC work. Trudy and Gina both suffer from the underdevelopment of their characters, as does Stan, but I think you see hints of it with both Gina and Trudy.

[Robbie C.]

Actually I'd say Gina suffers from it more than Trudy given the number of times she tries to form relationships outside of the OCB squad. Trudy's one attempt is more trying to rekindle something from her past. And one could always argue that Missing Hours is an example of Trudy's disconnect from her real self caused by her work.

[Bren10]

Ah, the dreaded Missing Hours once again rears its ugly head. We just can't get away from it. Is it now possible that that ep is actually far more important as a character study of Trudy? And it now deserves a reassessment in terms of how it is viewed? Robbie, you have  just opened a whole new can of worms here.

[Robbie C.]

7 minutes ago, Bren10 said:

Ah, the dreaded Missing Hours once again rears its ugly head. We just can't get away from it. Is it now possible that that ep is actually far more important as a character study of Trudy? And it now deserves a reassessment in terms of how it is viewed? Robbie, you have  just opened a whole new can of worms here.

Heh...It's kinda what I do... Missing Hours is a strange episode to be sure. Was it strange because the writers were on drugs? Was that the only way they could convince James Brown to be in an episode? Was Chris Rock using it to practice for his role as Pookie in New Jack City? Steven Sanders categorizes it as one of Vice's oneiric episodes (relating to dreams) along with Shadows in the Dark and Mirror Image. And perhaps he's right. I've come to believe that Missing Hours is more about Trudy's quest for her past and her own sense of self, rather like Mirror Image is Crockett 'becoming' his other self (Burnett). The whole episode is centered on Trudy seeking something, with a sort of guide (Carson, who just happens to work in Central Records - the supposed repository of all background and history) helping her along the way. Interestingly, the houseboat (Saprophyte) is named after an organism that grows on and feeds off of dead organic matter (a subtle metaphor about the drug trade perhaps?). I'll have to watch this again to dig deeper into it, but I've always had the sneaking suspicion that it was some kind of metaphor for Trudy's own background and possibly her fear of losing her self in her job.

[Bren10]

I posted in the Missing Hours thread that I think somebody had a fascination with the UFO/Abduction (these are 2 different phenomena and should be regarded as such) topic and decided to work it into an episode. That side of it does appear to be well researched. But the deeper situation with Trudy is not at all well communicated here and is executed rather badly. It comes off like a "spectacle"  episode. It's too bad it took 30 years to understand what they may have been getting at. It is quite Lynch-ian in how we try to piece it together though. I think this is a case of Miami Vice's reach exceeding its grasp, and very late in the game no less. Many people won't even give it that much credit. 

I do think there was an opportunity to cover this sort of subject matter in a good and serious way what with Castillo's SPOOK background and all the other times the Vice Squad has encountered stuff like that. 

[vicegirl85]

On 6/14/2019 at 9:41 AM, Glades said:

I remember an interview of Michael DeBarres  with  Don Johnson from 2013:
Michael asked Don what he would say to the young man who came to San Francisco from Kansas. Don replied: "Don´t change a thing!" (Which I understand as "past is gone, don´t care about it".) Later, Don once mentioned (I don't know the exact context anymore) that he don't know what he will do in 30 minutes.(snipped)

I've seen that interview, too.  What I took from it was that DJ feels like there's no point in wishing he'd made any different choices, or musing over what different kinds of turns his life might have taken if he had done things differently.   What happened, happened, and he's willing to own it (although sometimes it seems he acknowledges he embroidered some past history in order to make his story more dramatic...).  That history can't be changed to something different now, so no point in spending time thinking about it.  The choices and actions taken in the past led to the person he is now, his character, the family he has, the IMDB listing, etc.... the sum of all past choices. 

Growing and learning from the past is one thing, but what happens from here on out is the only thing that can be affected by current choices.  A little different, although related, to the concept of living only in the present moment.

[vicegirl85]

3 minutes ago, Bren10 said:

I posted in the Missing Hours thread that I think somebody had a fascination with the UFO/Abduction (these are 2 different phenomena and should be regarded as such) topic and decided to work it into an episode. That side of it does appear to be well researched. But the deeper situation with Trudy is not at all well communicated here and is executed rather badly. It comes off like a "spectacle"  episode. It's too bad it took 30 years to understand what they may have been getting at. It is quite Lynch-ian in how we try to piece it together though. I think this is a case of Miami Vice's reach exceeding its grasp, and very late in the game no less. Many people won't even give it that much credit. 

I do think there was an opportunity to cover this sort of subject matter in a good and serious way what with Castillo's SPOOK background and all the other times the Vice Squad has encountered stuff like that. 

Definitely!  So many opportunities, and sadly there were other episodes I think we could say had the same fate of MV's reach exceeding its grasp.