Love & Logistics – on Michael Mann’s Miami Vice (2006)
Black SUVs pass through polystyrene blocks
To me, what speaks most to Mann's aesthetic specificity is that my favourite-looking sequence in this film, a scene (seemingly completely undiscussed in the discourse) wherein Tubbs and Crockett load the Odessa haul onto a ship in Barranquilla, has so much to tell visually about the relationship between the individual and the capitalist environment, and how our capacity for connection can transcend such dehumanising contexts.
You could call it "grit porn," I guess, and in part perhaps I am fetishising the dirtiness, but there's an undeniable lyricism in Mann's editing choice to juxtapose children handling blocks of packing polystyrene, those weightless white blocks and their particles blowing in the eddies of wind around them, with the blackout SUVs of the powerful that glide through the scene. Shots of poor, brown-skinned local sons poring over the weightless detritus of globalised trade for anything valuable that may have "fallen off the wagon."
On the polystyrene block: was there ever any substance in existence, prior to the invention of the container ship, whose value is so positively correlated to the space it can occupy, in terms of cubic metres per molecule? Whose value is so negatively correlated to its weight, for its impact on fuel efficiency? Whose paramount desirable property is its very inertness - its ability to maintain volumetric integrity regardless of pressure, heat, or moisture? The very conditions for their existence are the vast surpluses unlocked through productivity gains, and fuel efficiency optimisation.
The SUVs of the powerful
We extract from their grip our Amazon Prime hauls and find these "occupiers of space" a great headache to dispose of - by definition they're bulkier than the items we purchased, yet they have negative worth. They can't be folded like cardboard; there's no way to reduce their volume. We remove them from our homes, from our offices, and they end up in purgatories like these. They need to be weighted down lest they get blown about by the wind.
The Sons of Barranquilla
The children sort through these symbols of geographic price arbitrage, as if there might remain some vestige of value stuck to what is essentially negative space manufactured on an industrial scale.
Those minds unlikely even to be able to conceive of the mechanisms by which the tranches of high-leverage capital sat in offshore Wealth Management accounts extract their pound of flesh in this godforsaken node that only ever exists between the A and the B of the global supply chain. The relativist construction of the social strata expose even Yero – at the start of the film the most feared drug lord – to have been a mere labourer, a middle-manager far from "Joe, boss of his own body" in comparison to the real players Isabella and Arcangel. Only taking his boss hostage (a violent revolution) has the possibility to elevate Yero's standing at the climax of the film.
Crockett loads the Odessa crates
In this backwater of no inherent economic value beyond the situation of its harbour among oceanic trade routes, there is no emotion, no catharsis, no closure expected or desired. What is expected and desired is only competence, the absence of incident so that supply can ultimately move on to handshake with demand.
Isabella bites her lip
Yet Crockett and Isabella's eyes yearn for each other, gazing over SUVs, wooden crates, and packing polystyrene. Love and lust in the most inhumane back-offices of global materialism.
Crockett desires Isabella