On Miami Vice

It has been suggested that the opening sequence of Michael Mann's Miami Vice features a profusion of continuity mismatches. Of course, I may have the wrong idea of what constitutes a mismatch by current industry standards, but it seems to me, if you're talking about matches on action, there are at most two errors in that sequence out of... well, a fuck ton of cuts. Moreover, both errors are so subtle that I could only be certain after I played through the patches a few times on my computer.

My hard-nosed contention: whether we like what he achieves with it or not, Mann's mobilization of space in this sequence and throughout his work is undeniably calculated. This is not open to debate.

The sequence starts with the image of a club dancer silhouetted against an animated digital screen. The image is flat. Its subject is abstracted. In its lack of perspective, the composition addresses itself toward the audience obstinately and obtrusively. Its function is to confuse our sense of place, to deny us the security of a set of spatial bearings in experiencing the event we are going to witness. It is a surface-image, covering over the violent Eisensteinian dialectics, which percolate underneath. But what this opening shot pointedly does not signal is that the sequence will proceed without an underlying logic. On the contrary, the logic is there. Only it is "discreet", a word Mann loved to use when describing the plot lines of Collateral in his DVD commentary.

The next series of cuts establishes in order the location of all the players who are taking part in the sting. Proceeding from a second environmental surface-shot where we register the presence of a club dancer then a DJ (a very typical 'Mannian' use of rack focus in conjunction with a simple camera movement, either a track, pan, or tilt - here a tilt), a cut to a longer shot gives us our first glimpse of the club as an architectural space - we register two club dancers receding into the depth of the shot, one of which is the one we saw close-up in the former shot. She is identifiable by the digital screen to which she is adjacent. Then a lateral movement left and a second rack focus give us our first glimpse of the faces of Trudy, Sonny, and Ricardo against this architectural space. The two close-ups which follow show us Sonny and Trudy against digital screens (telephoto), then Sonny and Ricardo against the same screens (wide angle). This contrasting alternation of a flattening effect and a deepening effect between two shots which are content-wise quite similar is again typical of Mann: The heads protrude out, only to be smashed against the screens. Then they are allowed to protrude again. The figures are defined against an antagonistic background screaming for our attention, and all this already preceded by an aforementioned layering of 'surface-shots'. The lighting effect here is bold: our protagonists' eyes are illuminated as points, while the textures of their faces are partially (Sonny) or almost entirely obscured (Ricardo) by shadow. The intensity of their gazes, the unflagging steadiness of their countenances against the background, their discipline as agents with a job to do amid a polyphonic space that threatens to drown them, all combine to express the force of will, which allows human beings a momentary mastery over their environment.

If we count the two shots with rack focus as constitutive of two compositions each, then what we have is seven compositions (five shots) in total. In this sequence, Mann has marshaled a series of environmental details and put them in an order that is coherent, but, and this is the point, only tenuous and temporary. The perspectival control which these agents exercise over the club via focused surveillance will soon be broken by unpredictable happenings, by flashes of impulse and passion, by misguided commitments and games of deception, all delineated within the network of spatial relations late capitalist structures have forced upon people.

Standing for the development of the rest of the film, this brief five-shot segment represents not a lack of order, but the threat of that lack. We have to figure everything out in the moment of its occurring, as the characters do. I suspect this is why so many critics, even supporters of Mann's work, have seen Miami Vice as nothing more than a disastrous jumble with affectations of visual style. They see only jerky hand-held camera movements and vaguely rhythmic cutting, while failing to recognize that Mann's work describes the conditions under which the subject is lost to a "flux" of images, in a precise formal system, which itself is designed to keep that flux at bay. Miami Vice is all about living in the moment, the moment when individual systems of logic must face each other and themselves, must meet their compromises and their contradictions. Thus, Ricardo asks Sonny, and us, "fabricated identity and what's really up collapses into one frame. You ready for that on this one?" And his partner responds, "I absolutely am not."