Men and Guns, Part Two: "Dirty Harry"
When we last checked in with the idea of men and guns in American cinema, we were in 1953, working Shane through its paces to get to the roots of the oh-so-American notion that violence is regrettable but necessary.
Jumping forward eighteen years, we find ourselves still clinging to that idea and yet in a different world entirely. It's now 1971. The post-World War Two euphoria about American international and domestic triumphs has disappeared so completely it might never have existed. The intervening years seem to have brought little more than a series of dislocations, chaotic conflicts following one after another in swift succession.
On the international stage, the dispiriting Korean War has been followed by the commencement in real public terms of the nuclear arms race, with America and the Soviet Union each convinced that the other is developing more and better world-destroying weapons, and that the country that figures out how best to turn the Earth into a fireball will have the privilege of determining the future of humanity.
International coups and assassinations have become the norm. The U.S. aids and abets the killing of Patrice Lumumba in 1951, and Africa becomes a horrific battleground of ideological proxies; they sponsor a coup in Guatemala in 1954, and Central and South America join that battleground as well. The Soviets use force to suppress an uprising in East Germany in 1953; they occupy Hungary in 1956 to put down a revolution; they invade Czechoslovakia in 1968; Europe is riven, a series of armed camps. There is the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, and over it all hangs the shattering horror of the Vietnam War, the East-West ideological conflict moved into the Asian theater.
On the national stage, violence reigns and persecuted groups threaten to overturn the standing order. The Kennedy brothers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. are assassinated. Women burn bras, war resisters burn draft cards, students are killed by the National Guard at Kent State. There are rebellious riots at Stonewall; AIM and the Black Panthers and the NFWA are founded; people march in Selma and Birmingham and there are battles in the streets in Chicago and Newark and Los Angeles and it seems like every other city.
Forward steps "Dirty" Harry Callahan. Renegade killer of criminals, stoic defender of the people.
Callahan sees himself as a force of the one true justice, which he administers with his .44 magnum, "the most powerful handgun in the world." He loathes the idea that criminals have civil rights. And in some ways, the film that takes its name from him equates the chaotic social changes sweeping the nation with a kind of insane, perverse criminality that must be stamped out. Because of this, the line, both then and now, forwarded by critics as formidable as Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael, is that the movie borders on the fascistic. It's a strong argument, more than ably made.
But the matter is complicated. What I've been thinking about since re-watching the film this week is that calling it fascist might tend to inhibit rather than deepen our understanding of it, particularly if we're interested in the issues of men and guns in America.
Directed by the fascinating Don Siegel, photographed with a great deal of forgotten elan by Bruce Surtees, and with an inimitable score by Lalo Schifrin, the film is as notable for its jaunty charisma as it is for its complex politics.
It revolves around a mano a mano confrontation between a cop and a killer. The killer is a psychopath calling himself "Scorpio" (Andy Robinson) who decides that he will murder one random person each day in San Francisco until the city pays him a ransom. The cop is Callahan (Clint Eastwood), the quintessential loose-cannon, plays-by-his-own-rules, human nightstick who's always in trouble with his superiors for using overly-aggressive methods to get his man.
Scorpio kills a woman in the opening, and Callahan – along with his new rookie partner Chico (Reni Santoni) – sets out to investigate. After Scorpio shoots a randomly-targeted kid in the face, Callahan and Chico almost manage to kill him in an ambush. In retaliation, Scorpio kidnaps a teenage girl and threatens to murder her unless his ransom demands are met.
Callahan gets the job delivering the ransom. Scorpio leads him around the city by forcing him to answer calls at random pay phones and then finally confronts him under the huge cement cross on Mt. Davidson. He beats up Callahan and shoots Chico (who subsequently decides to retire from the police force because of the wound), but Callahan manages to stab him in the leg with a switchblade before he escapes.
A tip leads Callahan to Kezar Stadium, where Scorpio works as an usher and lives in a basement room. The two confront one another again, and this time Callahan comes out on top, shooting Scorpio in the leg and taking him into custody. Unfortunately, Callahan has done nothing in his pursuit legally – he's used no search warrants, and has not granted Scorpio his Miranda rights (a policy only recently enacted, in 1966) – and so the District Attorney declares that he has no choice but to release Scorpio back onto the street.
The contest between Scorpio is and Callahan is now personal. Scorpio pays a guy to beat him up, and then goes public with his bruises, claiming that he's a victim of Callahan's police brutality. Callahan is ordered to stop trying to capture him, but disobeys. In the culminating sequence, Scorpio hijacks a school bus with children aboard; Callahan figures out where he's going and leaps on top of the bus to stop him. A foot chase foot ensues, at the end of which Callahan blasts Scorpio into eternity with his famous .44. The film ends with Callahan taking off his badge and throwing it into the water of the quarry where the final action has taken place; it's the same water that has just accepted Scorpio's body.
A good deal of this is familiar to anyone who has watched more than one or two American action films. There are the lily-livered police commanders and politicians, not willing to do what it takes to vanquish the bad guy; there is the rookie partner; there is the flashy dialogue that turns the hero into a kind of raconteur of death: "You've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?" or "When an adult male chases a female with intent to commit rape, I shoot the bastard. That's my policy."
Also present is the notion of lethal violence being regrettable but necessary, which undergirds a great deal of the American action movie genre. And it's here that the charges of "fascism" find their start.
The film opens with shots of a plaque commemorating fallen officers of the San Francisco police department, titled "In tribute to the police officers of San Francisco who gave their lives in the line of duty." This is clearly meant to serve as an epigraph for the film, indicating that it, too, is a tribute of this kind.
Throughout the action that follows, Callahan is almost gleeful in his tormenting of criminals, and the film seems to forward the idea that this hard-bitten approach is the only way to deal with them. In an early scene, he taunts a bank robber that he's shot by pointing his .44 at him and declaring that there may be a single bullet left, or there may not be; this is what precipitates the famous line, "You've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?"
And after he shoots Scorpio in the leg in the stadium, Callahan grinds his heel onto the wound, tormenting the killer to make him reveal the location of the kidnapped girl. This is all brought to a head in the (blatantly absurd) plot device through which the police have to release Scorpio onto the street, and then refuse to put him under surveillance, because his civil rights have been violated; in other words, if only Scorpio could be treated like he really should be, none of these problems would continue.
What many critics through the years have reacted to is this seeming insistence on the part of the film that civil rights in America have gone too far. Not only, under the view they ascribe to the film, do these rights prevent cops from keeping the rest of us safe, they are also, obliquely at least, responsible for the same degradation that produces people like Scorpio in the first place.
This latter connection is a matter of a rather subtle telegraphing. Scorpio has long hair, clearly tying him, in 1971, to the counter-culture. His name, while referencing the real-life Zodiac killer, also connects him to that same counter-culture's fascination with astrology. He wears a belt buckle in the shape of the peace symbol. And when he's captured halfway through the film, he whines about his rights and plays on the fact of police brutality to get himself free; then, as now, these were preoccupations of the political left.
So, for these critics, the film seems to portray American society as being in the grip of a kind of leftist mania, in which ridiculous criminal rights have combined with social change – the world Callahan moves through is portrayed as one in which people of color and homosexuals are increasingly visible – to unleash monstrous, sickening violence. And the answer to this is the reassertion through violence of a reactionary status quo, a world in which the minorities and gays know their place and we simply execute the criminals once we've identified them.
As Roger Ebert put it, in the review I linked to above: "The movie clearly and unmistakably gives us a character who understands the Bill of Rights, understands his legal responsibility as a police officer, and nevertheless takes retribution into his own hands. Sure, Scorpio is portrayed as the most vicious, perverted, warped monster we can imagine – but that's part of the same stacked deck. The movie's moral position is fascist. No doubt about it."
Or, in Kael's words: "Dirty Harry is obviously just a genre movie, but this action genre has always had a fascist potential, and it has finally surfaced. If crime were caused by super-evil dragons, there would be no Miranda, no Escobedo; we could all be licensed to kill, like Dirty Harry. But since crime is caused by deprivation, misery, psychopathology, and social injustice, Dirty Harry is a deeply immoral movie."
As I've noted, this is a cogent reading of the film, but not one that I necessarily agree with.
My thoughts here start with what is in essence a linguistic quibble. But it's a vital quibble, I think, if one wants to understand the tides and sea changes of the American cinema of violence, as well as the evolving notions of masculinity as expressed in that cinema. And perhaps vital, as well, if one wants to understand certain elements of American history and culture itself.
This quibble is over the word "fascism." As best as I can work it out, the Ebert and Kael are both using the word to mean something along the lines of the way I put it above: "the reassertion through violence of a reactionary status quo."
The world portrayed by the film is changing in a liberal direction – increasing rights for criminals (being established, as Kael points out, against a long history of police brutality, for which San Francisco was at the time notorious), and increasing status for minorities – and the film urges a violent, perhaps vigilante-oriented, right-wing response to restore order. Using the word "fascist" to describe this kind of stuff is a common colloquialism; when the Malibu police chief hits the Dude in the head with a coffee mug in The Big Lebowski, the Dude responds by calling him a fascist.
But here's the rub: fascism, in the larger historical context, is usually taken to denote an autocratic regime that works to take control of the political and corporate bodies of a society to establish its own control over that society, usually under the auspices of a single leader. My quibble, then, is this: Dirty Harry Callahan is entirely, and explicitly, disinterested in taking charge of anything, or having anything to do with the organized bodies of states or corporations. He's equally dismissive of everyone, the film tells us in dialogue, and wants no followers at all.
When he throws away his badge in the end, in other words, we are not meant to believe that he is headed off to start a political party which will violently seize the levers of society. A truly fascist film would have the victorious Callahan elected mayor by the adoring citizens of San Francisco; he would then set up a public/private partnership with General Motors under which, in return for their funding of the San Francisco police, everyone in the city would be required to buy GM cars. Soon General Mills and General Electric would join in, Callahan would get elected Governor of California by joyous crowds chanting his name and beating up anyone who didn't conceal-carry a .44, and finally through a series of rigged elections Callahan would set himself up as President For Life of the United States of America.
But Callahan, like Shane before him and Keanu Reeves' Johnny Utah after him, quits, declaring in essence that if these are the rules, he will no longer play. The film's relationship to violence and authority, then, is a complicated one. I think we might start to work through it as follows.
First, the film presents itself as being pro-police, at least in certain ways. The shots of the plaque at the beginning establish this. In the American context, does this alone make it fascistic, or even conservative? Not necessarily. One thinks of The Big Heat, which strikes me as being equally pro-police in many ways, but which doesn't operate under the same sense of – or accusations of – direct political conservatism.
And this message is complicated by the gesture of renouncing the badge at the end. Are we to take this to mean that Callahan suddenly hates being a cop? Of course not. But the gesture of abandoning his badge is certainly a gesture of abandoning his badge; one has difficulty imagining – to draw a perhaps strained comparison – a pro-Nazi movie in which the Nazi throws away his swastika armband in the end.
The movie's view of police is better understood, I think, by a metaphor Eastwood put into the mouth of one of his characters (which is, I think, a defensible way to phrase it, given his body of work) in a film he directed some forty-three years later, American Sniper. This is the notion that society is mostly composed of sheep – vulnerable and somewhat witless – who need to be protected by sheep dogs, as there are terrifying wolves out there who want to eat the sheep.
So the citizens are the sheep, the cops (or soldiers) are the sheep dogs, and the criminals (or terrorists) are the wolves. I have my issues with that notion, and that film, as I've explained elsewhere, but the metaphor is crucial to understanding a great deal of this kind of cinema.
"Dirty" Harry Callahan does not take a position on social change. At points, he even seems envious of it: when he sees some hippies engaged in sexual hijinks while he's on a stakeout, he sighs and says, "You owe it to yourself to live a little, Harry." He may treat elements of this change with nastily condescending bemusement – as when he encounters a gay man on his journey up to the cross on Mount Davidson – and he may think that certain members of this newly emerging liberal society are weak, or stupid, or pathetic, but he does not see it as his job to do anything but protect them.
He is the sheepdog. His job isn't to worry about the idiocy of the sheep, but simply to tear out the throats of the wolves.
It is precisely this assertion, I think, that gives the film a great deal of its charisma. Callahan (and perhaps Eastwood and Siegel) has the confidence that comes from knowing (or believing) that you know better about the people than they know about themselves. He's tougher and more resolute than everyone else in the film; he can be funny – and he's given great, funny lines throughout, and even made into the butt of the joke at one point when he falls off a trash can while trying to peer in a window – because of his overarching confidence that he's right. (This is, incidentally, the exact way that a good deal of standup comedy achieves its charisma.)
Ebert and Kael are correct that there is a moral stance in the film, and it's a moral stance that I disagree with. But I think they either mistake or don't understand the psychology underlying the work, which skews their understanding of that moral stance.
It is not a movie that argues (if, indeed, a movie can be said to "argue" anything, which is a complicated notion in its own right) that we need to do away with Miranda rights as such and establish a totalitarian state ruled by cops.
Nor is it a film that really interests itself in the notion of what produces criminality or wayward actions: both the bank robbers that Callahan subdues and the man thinking about suicide that he hauls down from a building ledge are presented as rational, if distressed. They are not the "super-evil dragons" of Kael's conjuring, but rather a part of the daily life of San Francisco. It is Scorpio, on the other hand, who is external to that daily life. He is a wolf of the type that wanders into the valley occasionally (but eventually, always eventually, in the film's account), and which must be dispatched with extreme prejudice.
As someone who disagrees with this vision of the nature of American society, I think there are a number of critiques that can be made of it. The sheep/sheepdog/wolf metaphor sounds clarifying to many people, I suspect, because of its simplicity. But it is exactly that simplicity that prevents it from clarifying anything at all.
As Kael notes, criminals are produced by many sources…as are men who would be heroes. And sometimes calling yourself a hero and deciding that you get to use violence to maintain that position is just another route to criminality. Scorpio isn't the only one who kills a lot of people in the film. Dirty Harry does too. Which is to say that the neat distinction between sheepdogs and wolves works to disguise the degree to which the former are often the latter in disguise.
Further, the metaphor relies for a good deal of its emotional force on a notion of the persecution of the sheepdogs. Under the metaphor, society hates the sheepdogs because the sheep are dull-witted. They can't see things as clearly as their protectors, often to the point that they don't even know they need protection. If only Callahan's superiors – clearly coded here as just as sheep-like as the wimpy citizens around them – could share his understanding, then they would just let him do what he wants. But they can't, and they don’t, and so everyone's always persecuting him because they don't understand how he's saving their asses.
When he throws away the badge at the end, it is best understood as a gesture of disgust at this persecution, I think. In the parlance of the playground, he's taking his ball and going home.
In all of this lies at least a part of the deep psychology of the American heroic man of violence. He feels that he knows better than the unenlightened citizens he's trying to save. And he feels persecuted, unrecognized, a martyr for the cause, a kind of tragic believer in the democratic rights of the people who also (perhaps paradoxically) wants to insist that his ungoverned violence is the bedrock on which those rights are raised.
Whether one agrees with this morality implicit in this depiction or not, I believe that understanding it is essential to understanding not only American film culture, but a good deal of American culture. And it's a depiction with its roots in a view (or perhaps myth) of American history that is exactly as old as the country itself.
Is it fascistic? Not on its own, no, I don't think it is.
Is it connected to social movements that, fifty years later, seem to be pulling Americans closer to totalitarian ways of thinking? Well, that's a story for another time…
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