Face Stubble in “Miami Vice”

In the 80s, Don Johnson's perpetual stubble created a trend among the young and powerful and the wannabe powerful -- especially in L.A. It went well with Armani and papaya slices at the Bel Air Hotel. Less well with a leaf-blower strapped to your back. The new movie version of "Miami Vice" drops the snappy theme music of the TV show, the pastel suits, the banter and the pet croc -- but it keeps Don Johnson's stubble. Why?

Before the industrial revolution, it was cool to be pale. It meant you didn't have to work the fields. "Alabaster skin" was the literary equivalent of "nice tan." By the 20th century, when the greater part of the population worked in factories, getting a tan became the thing to do. Outdoors was the new indoors -- for VIPs only.

I think the meaning of cheek stubble flipped similarly in the 80s with the growth of the service economy and the demise of the working-class. Suddenly everyone was wearing a tie and pressed pants - and shaving daily. Appearing in public with a two-days growth of beard meant you didn't need to keep up appearances. George Bernard Shaw put it nicely: "The poor crawl under the law, and the rich step over it." Substitute "convention" for "law" and you have an explanation for why Colin Farrel kept Don Johnson's 5 O'Clock shadow in the movie version of "Miami Vice." Stubble symbolizes membership in the corporate elite, especially when it comes with a Ferrari and a $95,000 platinum Vacheron Constantine Watch, and yet retains its connotation of ordinariness.

Which leads me to a bigger question. Is "Miami Vice," with its two Everymen climbing corporate ladders and swaddling themselves in status symbols, a kind of corporate art - the moody twin of Soviet socialist realism? The evidence points in that direction: