The very day I published my previous post, George Floyd was murdered by four Minneapolis police officers, sparking a series of nationwide—even worldwide—protests against police brutality and systemic racism.
Like many other industries, entertainment companies have issued statements of support for the protests against racism and police brutality now filling America’s streets. But there’s something Hollywood can do to put its money where its social media posts are: immediately halt production on cop shows and movies and rethink the stories it tells about policing in America.
For a century, Hollywood has been collaborating with police departments, telling stories that whitewash police shootings and valorizing an action-hero style of policing over the harder, less dramatic work of building relationships with the communities cops are meant to serve and protect. There’s a reason for that beyond a reactionary streak hiding below the industry’s surface liberalism. Purely from a dramatic perspective, crime makes a story seem consequential, investigating crime generates action, and solving crime provides for a morally and emotionally satisfying conclusion.
The result is an addiction to stories that portray police departments as more effective than they actually are; crime as more prevalent than it actually is; and police use of force as consistently justified. There are always gaps between reality and fiction, but given what policing in America has too often become, Hollywood’s version of it looks less like fantasy and more like complicity. . . .
. . . If the entertainment industry truly believes change can no longer wait, it should start with its own storytelling.
Alyssa Rosenberg, “Shut down all police movies and TV shows. Now.,” Act Four, Washington Post, June 4, 2020
It would be altogether impossible to quantify the hours my best friends and I—all Irish boys from the Bronx—spent in our youth delighting to the madcap mayhem of cop movies like Lethal Weapon and Die Hard, and how Beverly Hills Cop inspired us to fast-talk our way into all sorts of places we weren’t supposed to be, like the time outside the Cloisters we opportunistically insinuated ourselves into a school field trip—not from our junior high, that’s for damn sure—and got a tour of the museum and a free lunch for our efforts, or when, disguised as Boy Scouts, we sold candy under false pretenses in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria.
For the past three decades, we’ve kept spouses and colleagues in stitches with those anecdotes, and yet it’s only dawned on me over the last three weeks the reason we got away with any of that shit was owed far less to our cleverness than our color. Those juvenile adventures, energized by movies that trafficked in a worldview whereby (mostly) white men with badges were free to act without even the smallest measure of accountability, were an ethnic privilege I’ve spent my entire life taking for granted. I am the exact same age—less than one month younger—as the police officer directly culpable for the death of George Floyd.
Given this blog’s ongoing conversation about moral imagination in storytelling—and the responsibility of writers to interrogate the narratives we have long cherished—I thought it was worth chronicling how the police have been portrayed in our popular entertainment over the last century, how those portrayals have influenced public perception and supported real-world systemic dysfunction, and how storytellers can be part of the necessary reform by rehabilitating our own reliance on lazy, even dangerous, tropes—particularly that of the “hero detective.”
For the first half of the twentieth century, the Western was the genre through which we mythologized the American project, and the gunfighter (typically a nomadic cowboy, a lawman, an outlaw, or any combination thereof) was the archetypal hero of such stories, whose spirit of rugged, can-do individualism and courageous code of honor made him the perfect—and often but not always reluctant—agent of “frontier justice.” We’re a country founded on rebellion, after all, and we love our rebels—or antiheroes, as we call them in fiction.
But with the rise of organized crime during Prohibition and the ensuing poverty of the Depression, the relative moral simplicity of the open range gave way to the ethical complexity of the enclosed alleyways of our teeming metropolises. The hardboiled fiction of Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler presented “a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the finger man for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of money-making, where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practicing; a world where you may witness a holdup in broad daylight and see who did it, but you will fade quickly back into the crowd rather than tell anyone, because the holdup men may have friends with long guns, or the police may not like your testimony, and in any case the shyster for the defense will be allowed to abuse and vilify you in open court, before a jury of selected morons, without any but the most perfunctory interference from a political judge” (Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder: An Essay,” The Simple Art of Murder [New York: Vintage Books, August 1988], 17).
Accordingly, new kind of (anti)hero was needed, one uniquely suited to such labyrinthine urban intrigue:
But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.
ibid., 18
This distinctly American gumshoe differed appreciably from the preternaturally eidetic detectives of the Old World, like Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot: “Outwardly composed, but inwardly disheveled—like some bruised, tarnished variation on the folkloric All-American hero—his life, like that of most screen sleuths, is essentially a solitary one, as befits a hired snooper parrying the resentment of those in whose lives he necessarily interferes” (Al Clark, Raymond Chandler in Hollywood [Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 1996], 13). Unlike their European forebears, hardboiled detectives such as Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe (both notably played by Humphrey Bogart) did not serve as hired consultants for the local police, but rather worked around them, far too “insubordinate” for institutional law enforcement. This uniquely American iteration of the detective was decidedly, even proudly, an outsider—a rebel; an antihero.
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