COMMENTARY : ‘MIAMI VICE’: AN EBB TIDE IN PASTELS FOR THE ‘REAL MAN’

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled,

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Thus in the 19th Century did British poet Matthew Arnold describe the long, slow withdrawal of the Sea of Faith. When we watch the stunning and evocative images on “Miami Vice,” the brilliant bursts of firepower juxtaposed with its eloquent prettiness, its Edward Hopper-like shots, its near-liturgical praise for American materialism, we are reminded of Arnold and wonder how he might have written about the quality of profound sadness the show is able to convey, a sadness underlying its hip-pop veneer.

“Miami Vice,” going into its third season for NBC with the assurance of its top 10 prime-time rating, is a series for our times. Its insight and understanding of our contemporary situation is drawn without a word of editorial comment; its larger message, of overwhelming despair, remains seemingly unstated by critics or fans.

The show, a media darling, is praised as sizzling, steamy, glitzy, action-packed. “It’s the hottest thing on the tube today--perhaps the hottest TV show ever,” trumpets fan magazine Tiger Beat in its “Miami Vice” special edition. But under the MTV throb, the high-tech weapons and Armani wardrobes, what the series knows as its very essence is the sense of abandonment that accompanies the loss of the “real man” as the norm for our TV entertainment as well as in much of our American life.

“Miami Vice” shows us in great detail what happens when the myth of the “real man” fails. Television is our closest guide to what we are as a nation. It’s particularly powerful in that it is both indicator, pointing where we are going; and a realization of who we are and what we have become.

Advertently or inadvertently, the creators of “Miami Vice,” utilizing a triad--a lieutenant and two detectives inside the Miami Police Department--have found:

The City of Miami, a global gateway at the nation’s edge.

A hopeless drug war.

Complex immigration problems.

A loss of real relatedness among people.

They have found a metaphor for contemporary America, a pretty pastel canvas that is essentially devoid of meaning. And into this spiritual wasteland they have introduced as heroes the reflective sort of people perhaps we must all become to survive in such a time.

Crockett, Tubbs and Castillo are very much characters of our age; good men who are worn down by the futility of trying to stem the tide of evil in the world, who know that their efforts will bring, at best, minimal results, who enjoy dressing like the bad guys they pursue and driving similar expensive cars but who essentially deviate from evil at a critical point of honor.

Yes, the series does still use weapons and blind power to move along its internal narratives, and some of the opening sequences are as brilliantly compressed as haiku. But its near-prophetic message and its heroes’ sensitivity to what is realistically possible in the way of fighting crime remind us of the “real man’s” exit, and a time of change in our once-certain national destiny.

Who is the real man? He has been found most often in movies, from John Wayne to Sylvester Stallone. On TV, he has been manifested in many earlier cop shows: “Dragnet,” “Police Story,” “The Untouchables,” “Hawaii Five-O.” The real man can express a limited range of emotions; he can express blind rage, anger, vengeance, envy, lust, greed, ambition--but he can never express sensitivity that might suggest solutions other than gunfights, never tenderness that might lead to relationships rather than the total destruction of his enemies, never connectedness that might lead to wholeness.

In “Miami Vice,” Crockett and Tubbs are sensitive to their basic helplessness and are aware, without articulating it, how vulnerable they are in their circumstances. Understanding that most solutions will be only temporary and merely adequate, they operate with the knowledge of limited options. They are not gods or heroic fathers: They are not men who are doing good or saving people or cleaning up the town. The punishment and possible rehabilitation of criminals is not even an issue. The men they seek are “maggot low life” and “scum,” smooth and confident in their evil. “The man never sweats,” says Tubbs of a big-time dope dealer. “The man’s as hard as a cash register.”

The vulnerability we feel in these officers is in part their unstated recognition of their own isolation as they track international drug dealers, neo-Nazi survivalists and Third World arms smugglers. Even within the police force they are alone. “The natural order in the streets has been disturbed,” says Castillo quietly. “I must do what I can to restore it.” And viewing, we can identify with this separation.

Crockett, Tubbs and Castillo are fully aware from the beginning of each episode that what they can do is connected solely to one small story inside the main context of the show. Inside each story, which is played out with enormous physical vitality and blazing guns, good triumphs. However, the three leading characters are vulnerable men who seem to be emptied out of all the qualities we traditionally associate with male power, who seem like they are just learning to be in a world where there are no answers, where the individual compassion the characters can show for each other and for the characters in any single episode are the yeast of the show. Crockett and Tubbs are good-looking, but they are, more importantly, men who can wear designer suits, drive fast cars and display in their way of being on camera a detachment that is not negative, but does say to the viewer: “We are a pretty picture.”

With this manner, they almost insist that we look at the deeper levels of the stories’ circumstances--that we listen to the lyrics of the insistent music that comes into play just as the situation seems most despairing.

Unlike the classic cop shows, the stories pose more questions than they answer. The stories let sadness in, let us look at the difficult side of any open society. Most of us have lost a sense of communal commitment to any one group and/or place. While struggling to admit as many people as possible to all parts of our culture, we have seen genuine dialogue come to an end.

When men are vulnerable and open to new ways of seeing their own circumstances, there can be changes for all of us in the way we relate to each other. Writes James Dittes, professor of pastoral theology at Yale University, in his book “The Male Predicament”: “Men are discovering that manhood is far richer than the charade of manliness.” Much of “Miami Vice” seems to be leading in this direction, even though projected out of the classical cops-and-robbers format.

“Miami Vice” lifts up vulnerability for men as a positive attribute. In the series, the characters do not have changing relationships with each other. They are not working on personal development and growth. No one character is solving all the problems; no one character is enormously better than anyone else. The policemen work together as best they can. There is no personal life, no religious ethos or social view beyond the scope of the show to nurture these people. They have no apparent commitments of any kind. They endure their circumstances without discernible hope for more understanding.

The new emptiness of our society, founded as it is on a rampant individualism, is endured and suffered directly by the triad of heroes. They do not believe in violence as a principle of their being or a God-given right. They work in a pretty hell that they enjoy, but do not idolize.

“Miami Vice” is honest about our materialism and our present real situation. In the United States today we do have to deal with a multinational population, a tidal wave of drugs and terrorism, not as a European phenomenon, but as one that affects us at home. We cannot make things right. We will have to survive, and most solutions will be only adequate.

What can we learn from this show with its remarkable context? Perhaps that we must give real thought and care to each other--that we can no longer afford to be cut off in some small enclave of the globe.

“Miami Vice” deserves high regard as a commercially successful production and, also, as an imaginative set of cautionary tales for our times. Power politics have brought us to the nuclear brink. At the same time, albeit slowly, the female consciousness and the emergence of women as fully human are being realized as defining a new sort of heroism, a holistic alternative to the “real man.”

Paradox and contradiction confront us today and it’s not surprising that Crockett and Tubbs have emerged in an era of popular entertainment that at least one critic has described as bringing the resurgence of the “hard-boiled male,” citing Stallone and Clint Eastwood and Eddie Murphy, men of decisive action and no ambiguities.

In contrast, “Miami Vice” often captures, in the way the characters address the police cases, that distinctive feel of the rending tension created by contradiction when there is no way out. We the viewers are also in paradox much of the time. In these days quick certitude is rarely available. “Miami Vice” accepts this condition as one of its working circumstances.

Slowly, torturously, we are all trying to learn new ways of relating to each other. To remain vulnerable and open is the challenge now. Isabel C. Heyward in “The Redemption of God” puts it well:

“And so we stand confused and reluctant in the abyss between what we have experienced as fact and what we have envisioned as possible, unable to linger forever in whimpering passivity in bondage to idols in which we no longer believe or to leap through our fear in the passion that threatens to transform us. We wait. We hope. We seek change.”