Dirty Harry: Inadmissible

DensityDuck says:

This was cribbed from Adam Elkus’s account on Twitter (@aelkus) compiled and some editing by me. He deletes all his tweets every five minutes so he probably doesn’t even remember posting this. As far as I know he hasn’t written any essays about it.

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The centurion is an archetype of someone who is a part of an institution which provides some sort of public good, but who feels perpetually underappreciated by society and betrayed by their own superiors. This feeling is, of course, subjective; it may or may not be justified. But it’s common among people such as police, soldiers, doctors/medical technicians, humanitarian aid workers, journalists, teachers, etc. Their tasks often expose them to the worst society has to offer, they operate in conditions of high stress, their accomplishments are celebrated in abstract but often unknown in specific (though their failures are dragged out for everyone to see), and they have symbolic status in the world yet live personally precarious lives and often lack actual agency in their job.

One response is to retreat into self-pity, loathing of outsiders, and finally the willingness to break core professional norms because of the feeling that if you are asked to do a vital job people should not tell you how to do it — the now-infamous “you need me on that wall” speech from “A Few Good Men”. Colonel Jessup’s rant has become something of a cliché but you can see echoes of it in the defensive reactions of almost any public-service worker that finds themselves in a similar position of being challenged for dubious or even illegal behavior.

Harry Callahan’s choice in “Magnum Force” is much different. He is willing to engage in Jessup-like actions in the pursuit of his mission, and he views with disdain both the civilians he protects and his superiors in the SFPD and the SF city government. Callahan does not believe that society can be salvaged, and he was (and is) certainly not alone in that sentiment. It was a common one in 1970s America when the film was made. Yet he also has the courage to directly oppose a far-right death squad of motorcycle cops. The death squad are authorized, as it turns out, by the head of the SFPD himself. And at one point they ask Harry why he still stands up for an order that he himself does not believe in, why he defends a system that he doesn’t think works.

Harry’s response is short and very simple. He is a man of few words, and he merely says that until someone has a better idea he will defend the current system to his dying breath. This is, for a mostly-forgotten 1970s genre-cop movie, almost Thomas More-like. It’s the spectacle of someone being bound by duty even when he thinks no one else is, and in service of something he blatantly despises, but who feels nonetheless that duty itself is worth serving and that service is what makes society more than a collection of mutual interests. It’s the other, more positive side of the centurion pattern. I honestly think both are real. The problem is that a critical mass of the first type can eventually overwhelm the second, and the second can easily flip into the first if disillusioned or disgusted. For me, encouraging or accommodating centurions is dangerous precisely because they can tap into powerful collective feelings of uneasiness about the state of the world and whether or not government can provide order. This isolates them further from society and often gets them to the point where, like the Rampart cops, they start to see corruption as a privilege instead of a failure, and outsiders’ concern as second-guessing rather than genuine alarm.

You might ask “aren’t many superhero or revenge-fantasy backstories premised in a similar ‘they suffered b/c of institutional complacency and re-emerge as vigilantes willing to do the duty others shirk’ idea? The Punisher, Batman, the Shadow, Daredevil…” Well, that is the remarkable thing. Callahan in the first Dirty Harry movie (and the other three) is a vigilante with a badge. But in the second movie he becomes the ultimate inside enforcer. The radical idea is that he might do his job even when his targets are nominal allies. This isn’t common in superhero comics, where even the vigilantes usually end up as part of the heroes’ team, punching the bad guys for justice.

Of course, Magnum Force is still a Hollywood movie. At the end Callahan does take it on himself to kill the Obviously Bad People; he doesn’t turn the chief over to the system, he sneaks a bomb into the guy’s car and blows him up. That ending scene is ambiguous and may be the biggest flaw of the movie, but an ending where the big bad guy gets to walk away would have been hard to sell to cop-movie audiences in 1973. A far better variation on it is “Elite Squad 2” (“Tropa De Elite 2” is its original Brazilian title) where Captain Nascimento ends up blowing the whistle. It doesn’t do much good, but he does his duty, and that’s perhaps the truest expression of the centurion story. Another alternative is Stoneface Vimes in Terry Pratchett’s “Discworld” stories, a rebel who killed an evil king and then allowed himself to be executed because he’d committed murder.

This was quite opposite “Dirty Harry” screenwriter John Milius’s viewpoint for how the centurion story ought to go. An interesting contrast is Milius’s “Apocalypse Now”; his original spec script ends with Willard siding with Colonel Kurtz and the two of them dying in a suicidal last stand against the US air cavalry. “Magnum Force”, on the other hand, was a collaboration with Eastwood and Michael Cimino; the latter had just written “Silent Running”, where the guardian of Earth’s last plant life flies away into space to protect it, choosing his nominal mission over the whims of his superiors in the service of a society that has mostly forgotten about him. To me, the first seems like an abdication of a creator’s responsibility to think through the implications of his work, because unless people are speaking to you personally there’s no way to isolate readers from extreme interpretations of what the character is really about. And by ‘think through’, I mean to understand that he — and it’s telling that with a few prominent exceptions the centurion is a he — represents psychological and behavioral responses to a protector’s perception that the established system cannot work. That’s not an uncommon feeling even in the best of times and it’s not really something associated with following rules or obeying social norms.

These second thoughts often appear after the initial creation. Clint Eastwood — who had become a very controversial figure because of the perceived politics of the first DH movie — read newspaper clippings about Latin American death squads (e.g. Pinochet) and decided to incorporate his reaction into a Californian police drama. His reasoning was what Harry espouses in the movie, that removing the thin fig leaf of legal justification behind killing would create a kind of anarchy within a dictatorship, where no one would be safe because people with legal authority to kill could murder based on idiosyncratic whims. The system might be rotten and run by rotten people, but it was worth protecting because it *was* a system, because the alternative was giving in to chaos and the whim of the powerful. (In a similar vein, the guy who wrote the “Death Wish” book went on to write a sequel called “Death Sentence” in which the hero hunts down a vigilante.)

The remaining Dirty Harry movies (along with “The Rookie”, Eastwood’s return to the genre in the early 1990s) are much more on the Jessup side of the decision. And Eastwood’s final (so far) outing for the idea, “Gran Torino”, mostly explores the hope that society might give the centurion the reward he’s looking for, recognition and remembrance, albeit after he dies protecting it. We occasionally see glimpses of the noble centurion, but we far more often see the bastard, in real life as well as in fiction, perhaps because Achilles is so much more directly inspiring than Sisyphus. What did audiences think? Based on relative box office receipts, they found Magnum Force about as likeable as the first movie; the third and fourth performed much better, the fourth one especially so, and it seems that a return to the typical formula was what moviegoers were looking for. The fifth movie dropped off significantly, though, so maybe familiarity breeds contempt, particularly when your competition is Axel Foley.Report