I’ve never been the type of person who ever enjoyed lounging at poolside, but since I moved to Key West, I’m starting to see the appeal of it. (I know, I know: enough with the Key West anecdotes already! Bear with me, though—I’m going somewhere with this.) Lately, myself and my co-workers Brian and Emmy have taken to hanging out at the pool behind Southernmost House, a salmon-colored 19th-century mansion that, if you really want to be technical about it, is actually only the second-southernmost house in the continental U.S. But I like it. The pool is open to locals, admission is basically free and you can see the wide, beautiful ocean only a few yards away as you do your laps. It stinks a little out there, but you get used to it.
We were there again last Saturday. And as I sat in my comfy lounge chair, drinking a gin and tonic and contemplating the palm tree positioned directly across the pool from me, I had a sudden notion. I realized that, if any of my old friends back in Edmonton were thinking about me at that moment, wondering what my new Key West life must be like, the scene that they were enviously picturing in their heads was probably almost exactly like the one I was actually in the middle of! Palm trees! Ocean! Blue sky! Sipping a drink in the sunshine! There were even pretty girls in bikinis! (One in particular fascinated Brian and me: she had a lower back tattoo, but she was too far away for it to be clearly legible. We couldn’t decide if it was the word ORGASM printed in Gothic letters or just a row of Chinese characters.)
I couldn’t believe it: I was living out the fantasy version of my own life! This was how all those movies always ended—whenever directors want to show that the lovable bankrobbers’ plan was a success or their “ordinary Joe” hero has successfully outwitted the bad guys and gets to keep the loot he took from them, the last scene always shows them sitting on a tropical beach, wearing Hawaiian shirts, sipping a cool drink and grinning goofy grins, as if they can barely believe their good fortune. That was me! I finished my gin and tonic, and I celebrated by ordering another.
Later that night, Brian, Emmy and I went to see Miami Vice. There was a lot of excitement about the film down here—largely, I suspect, because the locals were thinking thoughts similar to the ones I had by the pool. We loved the idea of the rest of the country watching Michael Mann’s glamourized images of South Florida and wishing they could live here too, in this land of palm trees, white-walled mansions, dangerous men and suntanned, sleek-limbed women.
Miami Vice is kind of exhilarating (it features some of the loudest gunfights in movie history), but in a strange way, it’s so exhilarating that it’s kind of depressing.
Let me explain. The best part of the movie takes place between Colin Farrell, playing undercover agent Sonny Crockett, and Gong Li, who plays the beautiful moll of this big-time South American drug dealer. They’ve been quietly flirting with each other for a while, and now Farrell is offering to take her out for a drink in his “go-fast” boat. Gong asks him what his favourite drink is, and he tells her he’s a “fiend for mojitos.” She says she knows a place that serves the best mojitos anywhere: a little bar in Havana. And so off they go, purely on a whim, to Havana for mojitos. Farrell’s boat barely touches the water.
And suddenly, my little spree of watered-down gin and tonics amidst the smelly air and obscenely tattooed skanks at Southernmost Pool seemed like a very dinky way indeed to spend an afternoon. I may be living only 90 miles away from Cuba, but I’ll probably never take Gong Li there for mojitos in a go-fast boat. No matter how much of a fantasy life you think you’re living, the movies will always be able to top you.
Miami Vice has been criticized for its murky, hard-to-follow plot, but I half-wonder if Michael Mann wanted to mystify the audience on purpose: he shows us a fantasy world so seductive that we can’t help but want to live in it forever, but surrounds it with so much fog that we know we could never find our way there for real. (August 3, 2006)
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