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The War
By Charles O'Brien
Peace
Timothy Mayer
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© 2001, 2002 First of the Month
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To Observe and Project
Hollywood's Love Affair with Cops
By Armond White
'When Marge first told me she was going to the police academy, I thought
it was going to be fun and exciting. You know, like that movie Spaceballs.
Instead, it's been painful and disturbing. You know, like that movie Police
Academy."
-Homer Simpson
There has never been a popular American movie about why someone becomes
a cop - that is, about the egotism and politics that influence such a
decision. Yet even after the killings of Patrick Doresmonds, Amadou Diallo
and the rape of Abner Louima, police-worship in movies and in the general
media persists. It's a special American cultural fetish.
Denials of the continuing abuse of police power as just 'an aberration'
suggest that folks' political perspectives are a deeply intertwined mix
of misrepresented real life crises and social fantasy. Projecting audience's
unconscious political whims on to official authority figures has been
part of movie-watching tradition since westerns. Our politically evasive
cop movies (and TV shows) mutated from earlier, more socially aware crime
and gangster genres. Modern cop movies, though, don't simply justify police
authority, they secrete the anxieties of a diverse and divided nation.
Dominant social groups seek a sustained illusion of orderliness to bolster
their confidence. This same need persists in Hollywood and Harlem where
other, subjugated groups find themselves attracted to displays of force
they lack yet still envy.
The American movies clearest about police beat-down reality were those
1950's films dramatizing the thin line between criminal and law-enforcement
careers - films usually about policemen hanging by the crumbling edge
of their neuroses, behaving as monstrously as gangsters. But such honesty
about human tendencies toward degradation (on view in the complex characterizations
of On Dangerous Ground, The Big Heat and Detective Story) was lost during
the social turmoil of the Vietnam War and the late years of the Civil
Rights Movement. Americans needing to assuage their anxieties about their
social place (or more personal insecurities) did so through Hollywood
images and stories that intensified their desire for protection and their
wish to command. Cop movies were never just about the fun of chase-capture-justice
scenarios.
Recall the classic confrontation in Dirty Harry (1971) - Clint Eastwood's
'This is a 44 Magnum pistol. It can take your head clean off' speech.
It's a close-up of Eastwood's blue-eyed squint matched to a grimacing,
wounded Albert Popwell. Towering over the supine crook, Harry taunts him,
pointing a bodacious gun: Fetishized Weapon/Stigmatized Target. White
Law-bringer/Black Malefactor. Nerve to Gutlessness. Civilization to Anarchy.
The coup de grace in this quintessential 70's duet was the perp's plea,
'I got to know!' said without anger and resentment. In that period of
George Jackson's killing and Angela Davis's flight from the FBI, Popwell
had no reason to ask whether Eastwood's gun was loaded. The now-forgotten
black character actor's question hit home; his line felt real and reverberates
through other cop movie standoffs, because it inquired about power - and
its use.
***
Popwell's question was taken up - and exemplified - by rapper Ice-T's
chosen career as a cop beginning with the 1990 New Jack City, play-acting
municipal puissance (just prior to his 'Cop-Killer' catastrophe). Recently,
Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, Danny Glover, Eddie
Murphy, Martin Lawrence and both Chris Tucker and Chris Rock have all
played cop heroes - black actors crossing the blue line, blurring the
real life antagonism felt between America's largely white police departments
and communities of color. These escapists from the nightmare of racial
profiling reach toward a self-hating Hollywood dream (none of them play
characters based on a figure like Eric Adams of the gadfly guild 100 Blacks
in Law Enforcement). Their goals are not progressive but typical of All-American
cop-worship. And ticket buyers to Hollywood's Friday night specials are
unable to resist the superficial excitement of these killer cop flicks.
Worse, they're discouraged from gaining a perspective that might counteract
contemporary delusions about the genre's implicit politics. Today's film-goers
urgently need to know more about how the big screen's Patrolman's Benevolent
Artists have tracked changes in urban history.
After the 60's riots, following on from political exhaustion and hopelessness,
geographic white flight translated into silver screen fright. Hollywood
split 70's cop movie mythology in two: the law-and-order urban westerns
Dirty Harry, The French Connection and the extreme-empathy-verging-on-defensiveness
of the Joseph Wambaugh entries, The New Centurions and The Onion Field
(though Robert Aldrich's underrated version of The Choirboys was such
a coruscating inside-job it altogether subverted Wambaugh's book of cheers).
Sidney Lumet's 1973 Serpico - based on former cop Frank Serpico's whistle-blowing
revelations before the Knapp Commission, provoked reformist sentiments,
giving a black eye to the blue serge profession. But Serpico - with its
entertaining shaggy-dog hero - offered a far less critical vision of cops
than The Choirboys. (Serpico's star Al Pacino was much more inspiring
later when he rode the zeitgeist chanting 'Attica! Attica!' in Dog Day
Afternoon.) Serpico's muckraking myth was effectively replaced by Walking
Tall, the reactionary film-biography of Tennessee sheriff Buford Pusser
(augmented by the citizens's arrest daydream of Charles Bronson in Death
Wish). Vigilante fervor superseded concern for legal 'niceties,' proving
America's ambivalence about cops was so great - and so widespread - that
iron-fist policing thereafter became the cop-movie norm. Almost any rugged
white male actor could try his hand at controlling the urban jungle in
the 70's. Ben Johnson in Steven Spielberg's The Sugarland Express, Charlton
Heston in the futuristic Soylent Green, Robert Duvall in Badge 373, Walter
Matthau in The Laughing Policeman, John Wayne in McQ, Gene Hackman in
the French Connection series. Even Spielberg's Jaws, featuring The French
Connection and Seven-Ups' Roy Scheider as a cop on the water, showed how
police heroes were all the rage in every out-of-control situation.
70's cop movies tended to be adamantly anti-urban. Their versions of
old fashioned heroism looked back from post-Watts L.A. and post-Lindsay
New York to the simplistic moral codes of old western serials. And not
coincidentally, these urban-western cop movies were also, implicitly,
anti-black. They anticipated the violent cop/citizen, white/black antagonism
that would erupt in the '90's. (The Rodney King, Mark Fuhrman and Doresmonds-Diallo-Louima
outrages can be seen as a dire fulfillment of Dirty Harry's tease - the
callous flaunting of authority and undisguised contempt.) Identifying
with Nixonian law-and-order, 70's filmmakers refashioned a genre so that
it betrayed their own paranoia and race/class allegiances. They erected
a blue screen of paramilitary idolatry - paenes to authority still evident
in movies from Colors and Diehard to Speed and One Good Cop with commendations
for Patrolman Bruce Willis, Detective Sylvester Stallone, Officer Arnold
Schwartzenegger. Each of these 90's films reveal the Hollywood institution
acting as a publicist for police brutality and the political status quo.
Cop movies featuring black lead actors like Beverly Hills Cop, Seven,
Kiss The Girls, The Bone Collector further blur real oppositions between
castes, classes and political points of view by keeping viewers locked
on the peace-keeper's perspective. To observe and project - from the behind
the gun. These films reduce the various disasters resulting from America's
inequities - and the social conditions that often lead to crime - to mere
matters of discipline and punishment, law-and-order.
***
Few filmmakers who practice cop-worship understand the full human, political
complexity of their subject. Blind to the way political power is gained,
they ignore how authority congratulates itself. Not even Sidney Lumet's
celebrated cop quartet (Serpico, Prince of the City, Q&A, Night Falls
on Manhattan) conveyed how different economic and ethnic circumstances
affect perceptions of the police and cops' own views of 'others.' Spike
Lee's Clockers never dramatized the politicizing ghetto experience of
recognizing police who live in outlying areas as members of an occupying
army. Routine harassment of non-white people is routinely passed over
as a subject. There can be rogue cops, but there's never clarity about
a rogue system.
The pro-police tradition prevails over films that focus on criminals
in order to illuminate the larger society's failings. Cop movies that
focus on idealized police figures uphold racial and class hegemony. Pandering
to fear of crime as fear of the other, the makers of cop movies seem as
devious as a 'straight-shooting' big city mayor who stays adamant about
America's divisive street-level power positions. Insidious TV cop shows
like Hill Street Blues, Barry Levinson's Homicide, NYPD Blue promote this
pseudo-civic propaganda, beaming fractious cultural/political tumult into
American homes (as did the pathetic New York Undercover which tried proselytizing
police worship through hiphop). For some viewers, NYPD Blue's cozy toleration
of the specter of a belligerent white cop is too offensive; it's like
making a Nazi commandant Sheriff of Mayberry. What might ordinarily seem
a fascistic normalization of police statism is camouflaged by the quasi-documentary
style of such tv series as Cops and America's Most Wanted, both positing
a specious realism (not to be confused with a subtle, complicated, always-timely
show like Law and Order).
***
Cop domestication reached its peak in the 1988 New York-set Someone to
Watch Over Me (the story of a cop falling in love with a socialite) where
police work was sentimentalized as a profession prone to class deceptions
and heartbreak. Its Brief Encounter formula perfected a deep, under-scrutinized
social romanticism. It glossed over the ethnic tension even in relatively
innocuous forms of police and criminal-justice misconduct. This is how
some cop movies - especially New York ones - not only muddle American's
race-bound recalcitrance but contrive to turn it into a celebration of
(white) ethnic working class solidarity. Fort Apache: The Bronx starring
Paul Newman was an exception, but David Mamet's Homicide conformed to
heinous conventions; it was populated with unreasonably belligerent or
criminal blacks, hostile Irish and Italians and guilt-inducing Jews (a
dramatic conceit that has warped into the ethnic caricatures of the The
Sopranos). Homicide misrepresented urban America's moral conflicts and
ended up heroicizing modern cop racism - the essence of Hollywood's lazy
tendency to believe in police work as the answer to America's great ethnic/racial
crisis.
The most acclaimed cop movie of recent years, Curtis Hanson's 1997 L.A.
Confidential did little more than mix tabloid salaciousness with contemporary
cynicism. But it was enough to outgun Lee Tamahori's similarly 50's infatuated
Mulholland Falls. Crazily the social failings of whites became the core
of both films' decadent nostalgia. L.A. Confidential's unfazed treatment
of the L.A.P.D's racism wouldn't shock anyone familiar with the Chicano
perspective of Zoot Suit and Hanson's nihilist ending was less a tragic
moral response than a political capitulation. These movies did not examine
how power is parceled out unequally - with extreme prejudice - in our
multiracial society. They weren't critiques of depraved social structures;
they saluted corruption. LA. Confidential's Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce
were more glamorous versions of Jack Nicholson's snarling military man
in A Few Good Men who warned 'You need men like me!'
All this may have worked undercover in the Diallo verdict: an audience's
(a jury's) inability to see past the public romance with cop power. Hollywood
movies surely contribute to some people's personal indifference to reports
of police brutality and corruption. But when rap artists Mos Def and Talib
Kweli introduced their anti-police brutality music video project Hip Hop
For Respect, they advised 'police brutality is not a black problem but
a human problem.' Rappers who have not sold out the Ice-T way evince a
strong sense of what's gone wrong in Hollywood depictions of cops. Lately,
the Diallo-Doresmonds-Louima incidents have tainted the ghetto enjoyment
of cop machismo. Listen to 'The Men in Blue' (on Prince Paul's CD A Prince
Among Thieves); it may not be Everlast's best rap track - though it's
pretty good - but it's certainly his bravest. As 'Officer O'Malley,' he
breaches the code of silence that keeps many from admitting what they
know of white perfidy - especially among those with official prerogatives.
'It's the bad lieutenant running up in your tenement,' he raps, referencing
one of those wild depictions of cops (in Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant)
that often appeal to rappers. But, as Everlast warns, 'The police department/It's
like a crew/It does whatever it wants to do.' This white artist's bold
renunciation is reminiscent of Aldrich's dissection of the police rites
of masculinity and ethnicity in the Choirboys. It's a reminder that cop-hagiography
must end. We need to cultivate artistic alternatives to this debased genre
and encourage actual audience protest. Or dismiss the form altogether.
Give Shaft the shaft.
***
The closest I've seen to an honest movie about what compels a person
to become a cop - and, likely, a state-sponsored bully - is Italian Director
Gianni Amelio's Stolen Children . When a young officer is asked why he
joined the force, he answers 'because my father was one, and my brother.'
Such customs are in force in America too. But our movies shrink from exposing
the nepotism and ethnic/racial sense of entitlement that shapes our police
forces. Instead, family tradition takes pride of place in most cop moves.
No one seems to care how it is reproduced in the patriarchal structures
of police departments. Amelio's point was powerful because his hero's
political naivete stung. Hollywood's sick-joke apologias - like Copland
and Q&A - only confuse the issue by luxuriating in cop crisis. It's
as if white filmmakers, serving the status quo, are afraid to look their
horses of protection in the mouth. Or maybe they just lack the feel for
race and class that distinguishes French filmmaker Maurice Pialat's Police
- a Gerard Depardieu vehicle - and Andre TŽchinŽ's Les Voleurs
which features Daniel Auteuil in the role of a conflicted cop.
Among American films, only Charles Burnett's The Glass Shield (1995)
is similarly inquiring. Burnett took on the true story of rookie cop Johnny
Johnson's perilous initiation into a corrupt Southern California police
fraternity -- a deluded black man in an all-white clan. Johnson's moral
awakening came when he discovered the dread racist motives underlying
police procedure and clandestine comradeship. Burnett deliberately experimented
with paranoia-inducing noir stylistics to convey the absurdist quality
of Johnson's daily trials. There were no distracting car crashes or shoot-outs
(such as those that undermined Kathryn Bigelow's feminist cop screed Blue
Steel), but Burnett's usual open-ended humanism got stifled by the film's
claustral tone. Even so brave a cop movie as The Glass Shield felt trapped
on the edge of hysteria - like America's moviegoing polity condemned to
look for a hero in the morass.
***
Armond White is the author of The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture
that Shook the World and Rebel for the Hell of It: The Life of Tupac Shakur.
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