Reading The Media- The Sociology Of Mass Communications
Dark Shadows on the Screen:
Television, Crime & Criminality- Miami Vice and Public Virtue.
Brian Mulrine.
Watch the episode here:
Miami_Vice season_1 episode_12
The crime show genre is one of, if not the, most abiding of models used in popular film and television. From the creaking and technically unsophisticated productions of the twenties and thirties cinema (of which the best UK example is A. Hitchcock's 1929 thriller "Blackmail") to the classic film noir of post war US and later French cinema, (The Big Sleep [1946], Kiss me Deadly [1955], The Maltese Falcon [1941], Diva [1981] ) through to the blood spattered realism of "Reservoir Dogs", [1992] or contemporary British series such as Cracker or Taggart, the genre seems to have outlived all others, even the Western, and remains at the forefront of popular entertainment.
The top rating eighties US series "Miami Vice" first shown in 1985, was itself a "spin off" from a successful comedy crime thriller "48hrs" starring Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy, directed by Walter Hill and released in 1982. The structure, context, and most obviously style, of the series is directly lifted from the original cinema version but this not to assert that the series was a shoddy copy. Indeed the series was to garner the involvement of a number of producers, writers, directors and musicians who are now seen as major players in cinema in the US. Michael Mann (dir Manhunter, Violent Streets, Last Of the Mohicans), Abel Ferrera (dir The Driller Killer, Angel Of Vengence, Bad Lieutenant) and guests from popular music (eg Phil Collins) and the English Stage (Alfred Molina had a five line part in the first series) are all indications of the kudos with which the series became imbued. At a cost of approximately $1.3 million per episode it is clear that the production company and network also took the series seriously.
Much of the global exposure of the series is a result of the unique socio-economics of media production- for regardless of production costs "they can then sell it to the French for $60,000, and to the Third World for $500."(Hugh Hebert, The Guardian 27 April 1993) Stylistically, at least in a television form, the series broke some new ground in its unashamed appeal to the MTV generation (indeed it was originally pitched to the network money men as "MTV COPS").
It was also, as would be expected, to be utilised as an example in the vociferous debate relating to violence in popular culture that is periodically carried out in the printed mass media in Britain.
The series was first broadcast in the UK by the BBC during 1985/6 on the mainstream Channel One, and therefore shown without commercial breaks. Curiously it's cult following in the US meant that some US followers of the series were sent copies of the unadulterated version from the UK. When first broadcast in the UK it regularly captured audiences of 5 to 8 million viewers.
Whilst the narrative structure of each episode may have been well outside normal audience expectations of the genre of crime thriller the story lines and ideological content fall well within what has been described by Elliot, Murdock and Scheslinger as the "official discourse". Its structural, contextual narrative is as closed and its programme format as tightly defined as anything currently produced in the UK.
Actuality television, especially in current affairs programming of a particular type - the authored documentary, can and does present an open, or more accurately an opened context where definitions of crime and motivations for crime can be questioned, concomitant with this is a much looser format within which this discussion takes place.
Contentious questions relating to the nature of crime and the legitimacy of state violence do not appear in Miami Vice. The nature of good and evil and of the identification of perpetrator, victim and law enforcer are taken as common sense understood concepts that require no further elaboration.
The elaboration of character reflects these assumptions perhaps better than anything that is stated explicitly in the text.
The personalities of the central characters of Crockett & Tubbs are, within the context of short attention span broadcasting relatively well defined. We know something of their history, of their interests and pleasures. They may be superficial but at least they are so in a elaborated and fully human way. There is even some suggestion that neither is as perfect and honest as they purport. Police salaries do not even in Florida support the running of European built sports cars.
In Miami Vice we need know no more about he villains than that they speak (if they do at all) with Hispanic accents, and have facial hair (This is frequently a dead giveaway in US made crime films- a beard and a European accent almost guaranteeing criminality of the highest level.)
Non-combatants in the war between good and evil are generally treated as peripheral but may be allowed to be developed, as in this episode, as far as the limits of the programme's restricted airtime take them. The motivation for their inappropriate foray into the underworld -an entirely legitimate version of the American Dream illegitimately pursued- is explored, even if only cursorily. The two nascent but broadly innocent cocaine importing New York teenagers are not to be viewed as evil, but as misguided if redeemable- even at the cost of one of their lives. Indeed they, it can be argued represent the audience's own position- unclear and immature about the nature of right and wrong, confused on the issue of drug abuse, mistakenly seeing drug importation as both a victimless crime and a profitable business, and in desperate need of the firm but fair corrective lessons of Crockett & Tubbs.
The latino brothers who are the real villains of the piece are not given the luxury for self justification- though this is sometimes a feature of cinema crime drama where in any event the structure of the narrative is much looser and all characters, can, within the less restricted demands of the medium, be more elaborately explored. There is, for example, a memorable scene in the 1988 film "Red Heat" directed by Walter Hill (on the surface a routine crime action adventure starring Arnold Swarzenegger and Jim Belushi) in which a blind imprisoned black drug dealer justifies his actions to a Soviet police officer in terms of revolutionary action against white oppression.... "I want to put white powder up the noses and in the arms of every white man on the planet" ....!
Within the context and content of Miami Vice, or for that matter of Z cars, of Taggart, of The Equaliser, or of The Bill, it is the consequences of crime not it's causes that are central to the narrative. Like terrorism, crime is an act of individual aberrance and a threat to the wider social order. Its definition and delimitations are taken as understood and not therefore subject to contention or analysis. Without a consensual accepted mythology of crime -an ideological construct- crime programming in general and Miami Vice in particular would be incomprehensible..
Brian Mulrine
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