Extreme Prejudice Roger Ebert

[Brinda]

Whenwe 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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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."

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.

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