We often mistake the moment a culture peaks for the beginning of its eternal reign. We confuse the final, brilliant flare of a supernova with a new, permanent sun. Such was the case with the West in the 1980s, and there is no more perfect, more beautiful, and more tragic artifact of this climax than the television show Miami Vice.
Aired from 1984 to 1990, Miami Vice is not merely a cop show. It is a cultural palimpsest. On its glossy, neon-drenched surface, we see the first, vibrant sprouts of the postmodern world we now inhabit. But scratch that surface, and you find the beating, tragic heart of a dying Modernism. It is the pinnacle of Western power, and the blueprint for its dissolution.
The Modernist Ghost: Bogart in a Blazer
At its core, Miami Vice is a 1940s film noir transplanted to the sun-bleached tropics. Sonny Crockett is the direct heir of the Humphrey Bogart archetype: the lone knight navigating a corrupt world. He is Philip Marlowe with a Ferrari Testarossa and a pastel blazer.
This is the show's modernist backbone. It operates on stark, almost mythological, binaries of good and evil. Crockett and Tubbs are the forces of order, however flawed, against the chaotic, predatory drug cartels. The narratives, while serialized, are often straightforward tales of investigation, betrayal, and justice—or a gritty facsimile thereof. This moral certainty, this belief in a grand narrative where protagonists and antagonists are clearly defined, is a hallmark of the modernist project, which itself was the artistic and intellectual engine of the West's ascendant power from the late 19th to the mid-20th century.
Modernism, with its belief in progress, its "make it new" ethos, and its search for underlying truths, mirrored the West's confidence in its own structures: capitalism, the nation-state, and a linear path of history. Miami Vice’s characters are the last weary agents of this order.
The Postmodern Sheen: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Yet, this modernist hero is adrift in a world that has become utterly, dazzlingly postmodern. And here is where the show becomes prophetic. In 1984, the very year Miami Vice premiered, theorist Fredric Jameson published his seminal essay, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism."
Jameson argued that postmodernism is not just a style but the dominant cultural expression of a new, globalized, and financialized phase of capitalism. Its characteristics include:
· The waning of affect: The replacement of deep, personal emotion with fragmented, intense, and superficial intensities.
· Pastiche: The playful, empty imitation of dead styles, stripped of their original substance.
· A depthless culture: A preoccupation with surfaces, images, and stylistic replication over deep meaning.
Miami Vice is this thesis made flesh. The show is famously "style over substance," but the style is the substance. The narrative is often secondary to the music video-like montages set to the hits of Phil Collins or Jan Hammer. The city of Miami is not a real place but a pastiche of Art Deco, neon, and tropical exoticism—a depthless image of itself.
Crockett's existential angst, his modernist depth, is constantly swallowed by the show's postmodern environment. His pain is just another aesthetic choice, another moody shot silhouetted against the setting sun. He is a man of action in a world that only values the image of action. This was the dawn of the "full-time screen generation," the moment when life began to be mediated not by novels or grand ideals, but by the flickering, seductive logic of MTV and the music video.
1989: The Supernova and the Implosion
Miami Vice’s run, 1984 to 1990, perfectly bookends this pivotal decade. In the mid-80s, under the reassertion of American power by Ronald Reagan, the West—and the USA in particular—seemed to be at an absolute zenith. The economy was booming, the Cold War was being aggressively won. The modernist narrative of Western triumph was reaching its climax.
And then, in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. Miami Vice was in its penultimate season. The West erupted in a clamour of victory, proclaiming the "end of history," as Francis Fukuyama would soon famously (and prematurely) declare. This was the ultimate modernist fantasy: a final, decisive victory for liberal democracy.
But Jameson's theory, and the world of Miami Vice, suggests a different reading. The triumph of the West did not cement its power; it triggered its cultural dissolution. With the grand, unifying narrative of the Cold War over, the center could not hold. The monolithic certainty of Modernism shattered into the fragmented, relativist, and hyper-real playground of Postmodernism.
The West, having won the world, lost its plot. The gritty, moral certainty of a Sonny Crockett had no place in the coming world of globalized finance, where capital flows were more real than borders, and image was more valuable than truth. The very tools the West used to win—global capitalism, media saturation, the prioritization of market logic—created the postmodern condition that would erode its cultural foundations.
The Endless Echo: Vice City and the 80s Ghost
The enduring power of this moment is confirmed by our culture’s obsessive return to it. The most significant cultural artifact to understand the 21st century’s relationship with the 80s is not a film or a show, but a video game: Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Rockstar Games did not merely set a game in Miami; they set it in Miami Vice’s Miami, a perfect pastiche of a pastiche. It is a world built not from history, but from televised memory, proof that the Miami Vice aesthetic had become a self-referential mythos, a symbol of a specific kind of glamorous, amoral power.
The imminent release of Grand Theft Auto VI, returning once more to the neon swamps of "Vice City," underscores this point. In our fragmented, algorithm-driven present, the stark, stylish, and seemingly simple world of 80s Miami remains a potent cultural shorthand for a time when the lines—between cop and criminal, good and evil, power and decadence—felt, however deceptively, more clearly drawn.
This nostalgia points to a deeper haunting. The ultimate relic of this lost modernist apex is Donald Trump. A figure forged in the 1980s glory—all gilded penthouse lobbies, aggressive deal-making, and televised bravado—Trump is a specter desperately trying to project the ultimate power of a bygone era. His political project is not a forward-looking vision but a pastiche of 80s power politics, a promise to make America "great" again by resurrecting the very modernist certainty—in borders, in industry, in unchallenged national sovereignty—that was irrevocably dismantled by the postmodern, globalized world the 80s unleashed. He is a Sonny Crockett who, instead of navigating the new world, denies its existence, howling at the postmodern tide he himself, as a creature of media and spectacle, helped to bring in.
The Last Stand on a Neon Coast
Miami Vice is the sarcophagus of the modernist West. It is where the archetypal hero was buried alive in the spectacular, depthless, and seductive world he helped create. We watch Crockett and Tubbs not as men fighting for a future they will build, but as tragic figures performing a ritual of order in a world that has already moved on to a new, more chaotic logic.
It was the pinnacle, and it was the end. The supernova was so bright we mistook its light for a new dawn. We are still living in the long, neon-drenched twilight it left behind, playing out its themes in our games and our politics, forever haunted by the ghost of power that felt real.
References & Further Reading:
· Jameson, Fredric. "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism." New Left Review, I/146, July–August 1984.
· Fukuyama, Francis. "The End of History?" The National Interest, Summer 1989.
· Miami Vice. Created by Anthony Yerkovich. NBC, 1984-1990.
· Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Rockstar Games, 2002.
· Grand Theft Auto VI. Rockstar Games, (Announced).