Abstract
Chapter 3 explores the emergence of the contemporary crimefighter, especially its rogue variant, Dirty Harry, as a response to social unrest of the late 1960s. Clint Eastwood serves as a pivotal figure who transfers his cowboy persona befitting the mythic nineteenth century West to the streets of San Francisco, where a counterculture was challenging the status quo. As the Vietnam War gave way to Reagan’s “morning in America,” the hyper-masculine “hard bodies” emerge to dominate in the Die Hard and Lethal Weapon franchises. Such films often showcase the Other as sidekicks and “buddies” to their white partners—still the star attraction. Finally, films such as Fort Apache the Bronx and TV’s Hill Street Blues establish precinct life as a microcosm of the larger, troubled society.
[Mayor said] high priority was run these hoods out of San Francisco.
“Dirty” Harry Callahan
I didn’t expect you to use violence!
Capt. McKay
What did you expect me to do—yell trick or treat at them?
“Dirty” Harry Callahan
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Notes
- 1.
Video of speech is also available at jfk.org. Also quoted in Stanley Corkin, Cowboys as Cold Warriors: The Western and U.S. History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 233–234.
- 2.
Like the former all-powerful studio, the Production Code was similarly dismantled during this period, replaced with a voluntary ratings system that is still in place.
- 3.
Michael Wallis, Pretty Boy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 345. Perhaps evidence of his moral dilemma is his suicide in 1960 using the same gun with which he had killed Floyd.
- 4.
Charles Thomas Samuels, “Bonnie and Clyde,” in Focus on Bonnie and Clyde, ed. John G. Cawelti (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973), 92.
- 5.
Joseph Morgenstern, “The New Violence,” Newsweek, February 14, 1972.
- 6.
Nicole Rafter, Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 75.
- 7.
Police are required to read arrested persons their rights, among them, to be represented by an attorney and to keep silent to avoid self-incrimination. Their intent is to reduce individual discretion and to ensure that the process of determining guilt is performed by the courts, as dictated by the American justice system. As Chief Justice William Rehnquist noted in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2004 decision concerning a challenge to Miranda, “the warnings have become part of our national culture.” Quoted in Raju Chebium, “Supreme Court Reaffirms That Police Must Read Miranda Rights to Criminal Suspects,” CNN, June 26, 2000. Available online at cnn.com.
- 8.
Dirty Harry, DVD, directed by Don Siegel (Warner Home Video, 1997).
- 9.
Ibid.
- 10.
Sudden Impact, DVD, directed by Clint Eastwood (Warner Home Video, 2001).
- 11.
The Enforcer, DVD, directed by James Fargo (Warner Home Video, 2001).
- 12.
Dirty Harry, DVD.
- 13.
Ibid.
- 14.
Television first introduced a black and white pair of crimefighters in I Spy (1965–1968), but which utilized Cosby’s reputation as a comic—an approach to mitigating blackness and defusing the radical potential of its difference—an approach will be further discussed in later chapters.
- 15.
See David Forgacs, The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916–1935 (New York: New York University Press, 2000).
- 16.
Peter Lehman and William Luhr, Thinking About Movies: Watching, Questioning, Enjoying (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 309.
- 17.
Leitch, Crime Films, 235.
- 18.
Dennis Bingham, Acting Male: Masculinities in the Films of James Stewart, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 182.
- 19.
Clarens, Crime Movies, 302–305.
- 20.
Coogan’s Bluff (1968), also starring Eastwood with Siegel directing, is an apt forerunner to Dirty Harry, a story of a Western lawman who travels East (from Arizona to New York City) to catch a thief. Once in the city, Coogan confronts characters similar to the vilified hippies and wayward radicals that inhabit Harry’s San Francisco.
- 21.
Nicole Rafter, Shots in the Dark: Crime Films and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 75.
- 22.
The Enforcer, DVD.
- 23.
The term “neoconservatism” generally refers to a conservatism formed in response to 1960s upheavals, and which re-invests in faith- or moral-based solutions to domestic woes, and deployment of specific foreign policy initiatives supportive of American aggression in world affairs and that eschew multilateralist approaches.
- 24.
See Wilkinson, American Tough, 6.
- 25.
Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 11.
- 26.
Ibid., 11.
- 27.
Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
- 28.
Deborah Caulfield, “‘Dragon’ Rourke Breathes Fire,” Los Angeles Times, September 16, 1985. Available online.
- 29.
See chapter 9 in Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Continuum, 2002).
- 30.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick posits that such close male partnerships urge the need to differentiate between camaraderie and homosexuality, the resulting “homosocial” relationship dependent on intense emotional bonds, as well as those that might imitate a father son connection. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 1.
- 31.
Tasker, Spectacular Bodies, 5.
- 32.
Ibid., 6.
- 33.
Ibid., 9.
- 34.
Jeffords, Hard Bodies, 13.
- 35.
Each man’s body and its links to virility purposefully advantages Riggs, starting with both men’s appearance in the nude. The original film opens with Murtaugh in the bath, with his children crowding into the room to wish him a happy 50th birthday. In this manner, Murtaugh’s body is treated as non-threatening, while Riggs’s naked and taut torso (captured from the rear) is sexualized.
- 36.
See Ed Guerrero, “The Black Image in Protective Custody: Hollywood’s Biracial Buddy Films of the Eighties,” in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993).
- 37.
Lethal Weapon, DVD, directed by Richard Donner (Warner Home Video, 1997).
- 38.
Norman K. Denzin, Reading Race: Hollywood and the Cinema of Racial Violence (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002), 96.
- 39.
Lethal Weapon 2, DVD, directed by Richard Donner (Warner Home Video, 1997).
- 40.
In Lethal Weapon 4: The Jewish Leo (Joe Pesci) and the black Butters (Chris Rock), as in one scene, Leo tells Butters, “we got a history together,” referencing their ancestors’ supposed shared sense of marginalization.
- 41.
Denzin, Reading Race, 88.
- 42.
Jeffords, Hard Bodies, 57.
- 43.
Ibid., 62.
- 44.
Ibid., 61.
- 45.
Die Hard with a Vengeance, DVD, directed by John McTiernan (20th Century Fox, 2005).
- 46.
Ibid.
- 47.
Ibid.
- 48.
Sharon Willis, High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Films (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 31.
- 49.
Die Hard with a Vengeance, DVD.
- 50.
Willis, High Contrast, 52.
- 51.
Die Hard with a Vengeance, DVD.
- 52.
James Berardinelli’s review of Die Hard, 1988. Available online at reelviews.net.
- 53.
Die Hard, DVD, directed by John McTiernan (20th Century Fox, 2004).
- 54.
Ibid.
- 55.
Ibid.
- 56.
Ibid.
- 57.
Lethal Weapon 2, DVD.
- 58.
Die Hard, DVD.
- 59.
Tasker, Spectacular Bodies, 9.
- 60.
Fort Apache the Bronx, DVD, directed by Daniel Petrie (Producers Circle, 1981).
- 61.
Ibid.
- 62.
Ibid.
- 63.
Ibid.
- 64.
Bochco worked with co-creator David Milch (who launched Deadwood for HBO in 2004). Other Bochco crime shows that proliferated in the 1990s and 2000s include Brooklyn South (1997–1998).
- 65.
“‘Hill Street Blues’ Created Two Eras for TV Drama: Before and After,” Fresh Air, NPR, May 7, 2014.
- 66.
See Cedric C. Clark, “Television and Social Controls: Some Observations on the Portrayals of Ethnic Minorities,” Television Quarterly (Spring 1969).
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Yaquinto, M. (2019). Dirty Harry and the Urban Frontier. In: Policing the World on Screen. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24805-5_3
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