Why Does Billy Corben Hate Miami?
The famed Cocaine Cowboys director is the media’s go to source for bashing Florida
The Miami glow up continues. Many doubted that it would survive the summer heat but as far as I can tell the city’s bright prospects are picking up momentum fast.
This momentum is getting a lot of positive press. A few days ago, the zeitgeist was brilliantly captured by Benjamin Wallace in his New York Magazine piece How Miami Seduced Silicon Valley. He captures the essence of what's happening, a techno Wild West in South Florida that deserves to be tried even if success is not assured. Painting a picture of the colorful characters involved, you can almost feel the salt breeze off Biscayne Bay.
One part of the piece however did bother me, and it has been popping up in a lot of national Miami coverage. The author went to fammed documentary director Billy Corben to get a negative spin on Miami.
I have seen this in a few other articles and it feels odd. Corben has made a career documenting the unique history and culture of Miami, with his famous Cocaine Cowboys series and his ESPN documentary THE U about the University of Miami’s football team. He has very publicly chosen to stay with his hometown when the smart money would have been to move to Hollywood. Shouldn’t this guy be excited by what's going on?
Benjamin does a neat job of summing up Corben’s arguments in the middle of the piece. The argument seems to be a synthesis of a particular world view, that Miami is a sleazy backwater and anyone who thinks differently is fooling themselves.
Let’s go through Corben’s (as told by Benjamin) thought process to see if we can make sense of his negativity.
It’s tempting to get swept up in all this, but when I called Billy Corben, he offered a dramatically different take on his city. Corben is the preeminent documentarian of Florida sleaze, most recently in the latest Netflix installment of his Cocaine Cowboys franchise, and on the phone, he was as quick to enumerate Miami’s flaws as everyone else was to rhapsodize about its allure. There were the record pediatric-ICU COVID admissions the city was experiencing just then. There were the king tides that foretell a perilous future: “We’re sinking. We’re one big hit from a Cat 3 hurricane from being the next city of Atlantis.” There was the collapse of Champlain Towers South, the result of the “generational incompetence of this government.”
We begin with a grab bag of complaints, some true and some overblown. First, talking about Florida’s COVID responsponse is a dog whistle to call out Republican Governor DeSantis. The Governor did not lock down inorder to protect the mental and financial well being of the vast majority of Floridians. Actually living in Florida and Miami this was clearly the right choice. The small death rate from COVID was no justification for the Democrat’s draconian lockdowns. In any event, COVID is over, so the left will have to find new reasons to hate on DeSantis.
Now we get to a second Lefty talking point, global warming is going to flood the city. I do believe in global warming, but the outcomes are anything but certain. As with most things, the farther out in the future you look the less accurate the predictions become. Extreme weather is something the city will have to deal with, but the vision of a hurricane apocalypse where the city slips beneath the waves is more cinematic fantasy than reality. Besides, the rest of the country is facing challenges from climate change, why single Miami out when California is burning and NYC is flooding?
Let’s also not cherry pick evidence. One tower collapsing is not evidence of anything other than those builders made mistakes. It’s long hanging fruit to make a point around this, but I don’t think it reflects any larger trend.
Corben pointed to the city’s rising cost of living and widening income gap, citing a United Way report from last year that found 54 percent of residents can’t afford to live in Miami-Dade County. “Mark my words,” he said. “In our lifetimes, we will see swamp favelas in Miami. We will see people building ramshackle tent villages in a swamp.”
It seems like the opposite is happening. Traditional low tax rates mixed with sunshine and liberal COVID policies are turbo charging the South Florida economy, lifting people out of poverty. Wages are going up and jobs are plentiful. Also because of Republican leadership, lots of space, and a lack of NIMBY culture new housing can be built to accommodate locals and new arrivals.
When Corben writes about favela’s, it feels like he’s confusing Miami with Democrat controlled LA. They did indeed have tent cities, many of their famous beach communities like Venice and Santa Monica are almost uninhabitable. Strict COVID lockdowns and weak policing have created this crisis. Bleeding heart assistance has only drawn the drug addicted and indigent to LA like moths to a flame.
I’m a neo liberal in the sense I feel like a rising tide lifts all boats. If Coben is serious about seeing the quality of living for Miamians rise, he needs to embrace the arrival of new business.
In Corben’s view, the pandemic-era frenzy over Miami is just another South Florida real-estate hustle, one that will inevitably go splat, returning Miami to its age-old identity as “a sunny place for shady people.” He routinely mocked the invasive species that is tech bros, whom he calls “arroz con manbros,” and pointed out that several of the more prominent Silicon Valley transplants faced accusations of wrongdoing in California: Rabois resigned as COO of Square after an employee accused him of sexual harassment; the venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar left Sherpa Capital and Virgin Hyperloop One after Bloomberg reported that five women had accused him of sexual misconduct; and Emil Michael, a top executive at Uber, was pushed out amid an internal investigation into the company’s toxic culture.
So now we get to the root of Corben’s problem, he HATES the people involved with this new Miami. First we get a taste with the real estate hustle concept. Real Estate is big business in South Florida and it creates a lot of wealth and jobs. Clearly Corben has some vendetta against property developers who are nothing but “hustlers''. Maybe some are, but isn’t development an important part of a flourishing society? The real issue; buyers with the audacity to move to his city.
A cheap win for a lefty’s is to lean into #METOO by being anti-broculture. For Corben, these guys are just misogynistic assholes here to creep on the thong clad local women.
I Have a hard time taking a lecture from a guy whose most famous film is called Cocaine Cowboys. I’m confused, I thought Miami was already seedy? So we need to protect the city's virtue from Northern Californians, the world bastion of tolerance and progressivism?
My feeling is he is not really incensed by their sexual proclivities but by their high socioeconomic status. For a long time he was the big dog in town, now his limelite is going to these new arrivals who are richer and more famous than him. The narrative of the city is changing, and he does not have the toolkit to adapt to the new order.
There is a real narcissism of small differences. It’s fine for Corben to have his production company in Miami, but god forbid someone starts a tech company. Could it be that Corben is jealous, that he’s player hating his new neighbors? It seems like the tech bros irritate him more than they should, this entire paragraph is suspiciously specific.
Corben thinks the new arrivals are in for a rude awakening when they eventually grasp the deep-rooted tribalism and feuds of Miami politics. “When we hear people who’ve been in Miami for 34 days try to tell us what our community is and tell us about the competency and responsiveness of our government, it’s science fiction, a genre of Twitter. It’s all lies,” he said. Corben, who in his caustic Twitter feed likes to explain that Miami’s mayor has two private-sector jobs that are potentially rife with conflicts of interest, has variously derided Suarez as “a very bro-ey mayor” who “loves toxic masculinity,” “a hood ornament,” and “a Realtor dressed as a mayor.”
The attack on the Mayor seems unwarranted. As the article points out, Suarez is taking on the entrenched Cuban establishment. Like Corben, old school local politicians are not at all excited to have their power and influence challenged by wealthy outsiders.
Yes Suarez has two outside jobs, that’s because the mayor of Miami is more of a figurehead position (as Corben, correctly if caustically, points out). Florida prefers citizen politicians who still have at least some grounding in the real world. Corben unmasks his disdain for the private sector when he says Suarez is too much like a Realtor. What is wrong with looking like someone in the Real Estate industry? We can’t all be cool kid documentary filmmakers dressed in all black chain smoking American Spirits. Some people have to look towards the future.
One of his most toxic arguments is that people who are new to the city are not in a position to have a say in its policies. Sometimes a fresh perspective is what's needed, a first glance can sometimes tell you more than years of Jaded “wisdom”. The tech community sees something in the city that, for all his experience here, Corben clearly doesn’t.
HE DOES MAKE GOOD MOVIES
I’m not trying to be a total asshole to Corben, I love his movies and TV shows. Cocaine Cowboys is one of the most entertaining documentaries ever made.
That being said…
It feels a little bit like Corben has a toxic relationship with the city. Their marriage is on shaky terrain and he is sick of his partner, no longer seeing the best and only latching on to the worst.
But that does not stop him from unleashing vitriol when others wanted to flirt with his neglected love.
For the sake of Miamians, I ask Corben to stop playing out this melodrama in the national media. Right now South Florida is a bright spot in an increasingly cynical world. What good is Corben doing, what outcome does he wish for? If he turns out to be right it will be a bitter pill for us all. Seems like a pyrrhic victory of an I told you so moment.