26.03.2024
Miami Vice
“So 80s...even the 80s are jealous”
One of the most legendary scenes of TV history.
Whatever miserable
age we’re living through at the moment, it all can be traced back to the 80s TV series
Miami Vice. Are we in postcapitalism?
Or is capitalism
dead and we have already entered the piepline towards
neo-feudalism? Future historians will tell. What we can say with certainty today
is that there has never been a better moment in human history to watch or
rewatch Miami Vice, the TV series than ran from 1984 to 1989. It covers the five
crucial years between the epic Apple superbowl ad,
introducing the age of personal computers and the not so epic collapse
of the Soviet Union, introducing the proclaimed end of history.
Filmed
during the heyday of neoliberalism, with Reagan and Thatcher and Helmut Kohl in
power, it is the merit of Miami Vice to capture it all: The sparkling
promises of capitalism and the relationships of violence they originate from. If
the genre proposal neo-noir refers to the coexistence of these two mutually dependend
worlds, I fully agree with it.
If I could time travel, I would probably choose
one of the parties of the Miami upper class taking place in the elegant
modernist villas at Miami Beach that make Berghain’s Panorama bar look like a poorly
ventilated kindergarten for precarious knowledge-workers and frustrated artists
escaping today’s miserable reality on bad ketamine. If I could wear only one
outfit for the rest of my life, the main characters of the series, undercover
cops “Sonny” Crocket and “Rico” Tubbs, would be my style advisors.
The Wikipedia entry for Miami Vice exists in 34 languages from all continents. The English entry
has seven subchapters: Casting, Locations, Music,
Fashion, Firearms, Cars, Boats and flying boats. Especially the latter half of
these subchapters already tells a story. Miami Vice negotiates one central question,
which becomes more relevant with every day since the series was shot: Are the
relationships we have purely transactional? Or is it possible to experience
solidarity based on relationships of trust and mutual care?
Miami
Vice has a strong message in answer to these questions: It depends on the efforts
we make. In almost every episode, the main characters risk their life to save others.
The scenes in which lives are saved, are always preceded by scenes of transit. These
scenes of transit are the centerpiece of the series. Either by car or by boat, the
detectives do one thing: they step on the gas. There is a clear correlation
between the importance of the life that must be saved and the average fuel consumption
per hour. Can we imagine the detectives Sunny and Rico on cargo bicycles and
stand-up paddle boards? Probably not.