The Heart of Vice

[S.FL84]

https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-1985-08-18-8502030711-story.html

[airtommy]

Excellent article!

Quote

I would wager that, after its run is concluded, Vice will have been a show of fragmentary brilliance rather than sustained achievement -- The Twilight Zone rather than Hill Street Blues.

That's a great prediction.

Quote

"I'm not interested in form, I'm not even interested in content, I'm only interested in affecting the way people think and feel," Mann said

MV isn't about the story, it's all about creating a mood.

[Glades]

I´d really like to read the article. Sounds very interesting!

But unfortunately this website is not accessible from Europe. Please could somebody post the full article? This would be great.

Edited March 9, 2020 by Glades

[Glades]

Fortunately I was able to read the article with a small trick after all. I would like to post it here in full length, because I think it illuminates certain backgrounds of MV very well. Especially the ones concerning the thinking, the way of working and the intentions of Michael Mann:

 

THE HEART OF VICE

SunSentinel (1985)

The flamingo-pink and cobalt-blue color scheme of Miami Vice is all the rage now. You even see people on the street wearing imitation Armani jackets over solid-colored T-shirts. Vice logo shirts and hats are sold in K-Marts. The series plays everywhere. Never mind that a Dade County police lieutenant resigned as the show's technical advisor because its portrayal of his profession was "totally ridiculous" and "insulting." The fact is that Miami Vice has about as much to do with police work as Gunga Din did with the British Raj. The show is metaphor, not reality.

Indeed, what makes Miami Vice interesting, at least as much as the series itself, is what it represents -- an alternative to the straight, linear storytelling of standard TV melodrama; Vice's dark, moody cinematography is an alternative to the over-lit, morgue-bright lighting that predominates on TV; its stripped-down cast concentrates on just Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas, with occasional help from assistants. Edward James Olmos, their frightening superior, is not a lovable curmudgeon a la Ed Asner, but a Latino with homicidal eyes who speaks only in frigid, chilling whispers worthy of Uncle Creepy; an alternative even to the crowded, Brueghel-esque density of Hill Street Blues, which, with its several plots intertwined among a dozen characters, is the equivalent of the 19th-century novel as compared to the pulp paperback orientation of most episodic television.

On Miami Vice, the narratives are usually just hooks on which to hang the atmospherics; the plots, as plots, could be gotten out of the way in a half- hour, maybe less. What Vice is about are grace notes, like the episode where there's a shot in which Crockett and his pal are on their way into the Everglades. The camera follows them from a helicopter, then lifts up and circles once or twice, watching until the car disappears beyond the horizon line.

The shot runs a minute and a half, with no dialogue to "explain" that the cops are passing over from the turf they know to the turf they don't know, on their way to becoming strangers in a strange land. This is astonishing stuff for television.

Most television is illustrated radio, large close-ups of people reacting, with prosaic punch-line and set-up dialogue. TV's constant simulation of an extremely prosaic reality is an easy way to deal with the time and money constraints; imagination and the world it inhabits can cost money.

Miami Vice is one of the few small islands of competence in an ocean of merde. That Vice fails at least three times as often as it succeeds doesn't make it any less remarkable. I would wager that, after its run is concluded, Vice will have been a show of fragmentary brilliance rather than sustained achievement -- The Twilight Zone rather than Hill Street Blues.

Sometimes the writing is astonishingly sloppy -- on the Smuggler's Blues episode, guest star Glenn Frey is shot but his eventual fate is left unexplained, a simple matter of professional storytelling that slop like T.J. Hooker manages as a matter of course.

The show's omnipresent style and its meaning becomes clearer when you take into account the career and ideas of Michael Mann, its executive producer. When I interviewed him four years ago, he was fresh from writing and directing Thief, a stunner of a debut film starring James Caan.

Mann, a blue-collar Chicagoan, got his degree in English literature from the University of Wisconsin, and a Masters from the London Film School. Scripts for Starsky and Hutch and Police Story led to Mann writing and directing The Jericho Mile, a top-rated TV movie with Peter Strauss.

"What I like about television is the turnover," he told me then. "I'd write an episode in three weeks, two weeks later they'd be shooting it, six weeks after that it's on the box. By that time, I'd have written two others. Seeing the process go that fast is a tremendous high."

Mann's favorite writers, both past (Joyce, Hemingway) and present (Marquez, Fuentes, D. L. Thomas), are all radical experimenters in their use of language, and Mann spoke wishfully of a filmic equivalent. "Films that are other than traditional narratives, with traditional psychological motivations, cannot be processed by critics," he said. "They have a strange provincialism of the mind. What did they say about 2001? What did they say about Stavisky? Those are both very good movies but they didn't follow the traditional modes of storytelling. The critics didn't get them.

"Frankly, I think that if we're not going to get into new ways of telling stories and affecting people's feelings, then we're not going to have an audience. People get straight narrative six hours a day on TV."

Mann's subjective, experimental values permeate Miami Vice, and help account for the show's smoky moodiness, where loss -- at the least -- and sudden death -- at the worst -- are just a turned corner away.

Hill Street Blues habitually ends with Frank and Joyce in bed trying to compensate for their invariably exhausting day by playing kissy-touchy. The message is clear; no matter what disasters and sadistic events occur, there is always a place to come to and hide.

On Miami Vice, the sensuality of surfaces -- which is, after all, what Florida is about -- barely conceals a loneliness and despair that is more than just knee-jerk existentialism.

There is beauty here, yes, but there is also a sense of alien-ness that is natural in a place where everybody is from someplace else, looking for somebody else, hoping to score with something else.

"I'm not interested in form, I'm not even interested in content, I'm only interested in affecting the way people think and feel," Mann said, and I'm inclined to believe him. His show is more than an exercise in theoretical style; it captures something that exists here and, by extension, other places of languid corruption as well.

What Miami Vice is really about is the ongoing struggle that is involved in living in an amoral, lonely place. The show's success indicates that its meaning extends far beyond the geographical boundaries of Dade County; it suggests that we all may be living in a desolate Miami of the mind.

 

Edited July 13, 2020 by Glades

[RedDragon86]

I don't mean to nit pick but how was the writing sloppy at the end of Smuggler's Blues? Jimmy was not seriously hurt from being shot, he was wounded and he obviously survived. The implication is there.

I think the way this episode was closing, timing being a major factor I don't think it was necessary for Sonny and Rico to bother to see if he was OK, then go visit him in hospital like they did with Jake.

They knew he was OK and so did we, without over-egging the pudding.

 

Edited July 28, 2020 by RedDragon86

[Matt5]

1 hour ago, RedDragon86 said:

I don't mean to nit pick but how was the writing sloppy at the end of Smuggler's Blues? Jimmy was not seriously hurt from being shot, he was wounded and he obviously survived. The implication is there.

I think the way this episode was closing, timing being a major factor I don't think it was necessary for Sonny and Rico to bother to see if he was OK, then go visit him in hospital like they did with Jake.

They knew he was OK and so did we, without over-egging the pudding.

 

Great point - great episode.