Miami Vice and the 3 a.m. Soul


“In the real dark night of the soul, it is always 3 o’clock in the morning, day after day,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in his 1936 book The Crack-Up.

Sonny CrockettIt’s a poignant, sad, personal expression of his own mental state, when at 39 he comes to realize that somewhere along the line he has cracked inside. Fitzgerald nods to St. John of the Cross by inserting the word “real” into his line: the mystic meant that the dark night was a step in spiritual development, when the seeker finds traditional prayer unrewarding on a path to a much deeper relationship with God. But the “real” night of the soul for F. Scott and most of us is general fear-laden doubt and isolation, which seems bleakest around 3 in the morning.

(The Crack-Up is also the source for a line often misattributed to Oscar Wilde: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”)

A recent dark night of mine became illuminated by a SleuthTV rerun of Miami Vice (EST 2:00 a.m. to 3:00 a.m.).

In the darkness of the living room the pulsing of the opening credits whisked me into the sleek, color-saturated mythic universe of Metro Dade and eased, for some moments, the weight of my own entangled thoughts.

I never saw season 4 or 5 of Vice, and most original fans became disillusioned somewhere in season 3. Season 4 is grittier, darker, and I’ve been enjoying it through the Sleuth in-sequence reruns.

And so it is 2:00 a.m., and “Mirror Image” begins. It was the first of the 3 ep. arc where Sonny has amnesia. He’s in an explosion while brokering a mob summit, and with the concussion, has no memory of the police officer Crockett, only the drug dealer Burnett. He becomes a killing machine.

The mind starts to wander into the episode–

Woa - Antonio “Huggy Bear” Fargas. They’re just messing with us here, giving us Starsky & Hutch’s funny snitch as a serious bad guy . . ha! it’s Julia Roberts, just before Mystic Pizza, as the drug moll; eighties make-up isn’t kind to anyone . . . Tubbs looks very fine in that beard . . . I think Don Johnson is underrated for this show . . . Matt Zoller Seitz has a nice appreciation of the series over at the House . . . a young Chris Cooper, fresh from Matewan (what is John Sayles doing these days?), just popped up as the cop who has sold out to the Mob. How funny is that—-on the day that Breach opens, where he plays the worst traitor in U.S. history . . . .

So, the world goes on - things are connected, and the center holds. These are little points, but sometimes at 3:00 a.m. they are enough to ease a dark night.

And you can always connect with a great moment from the episode The Great McCarthy in season one. Still hard to believe this scene is from a weekly television show from 1984.

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February 21st, 2007
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    M.A. Peel, I found what you wrote about the soul and isolation, quoting Fitzgerald, enlightening me with your reference to St. John of the Cross and the significance of Fitzgerald adding "real" (a word I use too much, because I find more meaning there than any one word can probably carry) so satisfying. When you continued with a review of "Miami Vice," I expected too much. Your description of the show and what was happening kept me hooked. But when I watched the clip, somehow I missed everything, which happens all the time when I watch TV. It amazes me how engaged and reflective other people can get. Something about television always makes me zone out; don't know why.
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    Kathleen, the clip isn't a payoff on the specific episode I saw at 3:00 a.m., in fact it's from a different season. I added it because it captures so beautifully the spirit of the series, which makes me happy. And since it's on YouTube, it's always availble, which is comforting, in case there's a future dark night when SleuthTV isn't running Vice.
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    For Fitzgerald the idea of 3-o-clock in the morning, day after day, contained that idea of eternity. The interminability of things. Relentless immensity. A novelist's sensibility is to be caged in time. Give us this day regular working hours and the ability to sleep through the night.
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    Is it just me? Or are those arial shots of the racing boats with long white lines behind them supposed to look exactly like lines of coke on coffee table glass? I almost got a nose bleed watching that.
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