Policing the World on Screen

American Mythologies and Hollywood's Rogue Crimefighters

Marilyn Yaquinto

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030248048
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030248055
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book analyzes Hollywood storytelling that features an American crimefighter—whether cop, detective, or agent—who must safeguard society and the nation by any means necessary. That often means going "rogue" and breaking the rules, even deploying ugly violence, but excused as self-defense or to serve the greater good. This ends-justifies-means approach dates back to gunfighters taming the western frontier to urban cowboy cops battling urban savagery—first personified by "Dirty" Harry Callahan—and later dispatched in global interventions to vanquish threats to national security. America as the world's "policeman often means controlling the Other at home and abroad, which also extends American hegemony from the Cold War through the War on Terror. This book also examines pioneering portrayals by males of color and female crimefighters to embody such a social or national defender, which are frustrated by their existence as threats the white knight exists to defeat. 

© The Author(s) 2019

M. YaquintoPolicing the World on Screenhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24805-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Marilyn Yaquinto¹

(1)

School of Social and Cultural Studies, Truman State University, Kirksville, MO, USA

Marilyn Yaquinto

End Abstract

When President Ronald Reagan wanted to thwart Congress’ resistance to his plan to drastically cut taxes in the 1980s, he invoked a shorthand he knew most Americans at the time could relate to: he quoted “Dirty” Harry Callahan’s famous taunt to “make my day” and invited his opponents to a showdown. Rather than rely on Constitutional measures to referee executive-level disputes with the nation’s two other branches of government, Reagan preferred a cultural weapon that leveraged public pressure on Congress to submit to his will; he effectively equated his tough stance with that of the popular screen enforcer intent on street justice. Reagan ’s invocation not only testifies to the off-screen clout of such a character, but also lends the character political credibility and wider application. In this manner, such a character is performative, using Judith Butler’s encapsulation of gender, but which is true of any performance of identity, being both cause and effect—the performance having the “reiterate power … to produce the phenomena that it [also] regulates and constrains.”¹

This book is about the interplay between popular culture and politics—not politics of a partisan nature, but as the tactics and strategies associated with power and authority and their ties to cultural norms and social control. Both realms are interested in trafficking in myths for their ideological utility, but the “stars” of this book are the myths themselves as well as who performs them, especially as they “dance” together. Reagan did so not only with Dirty Harry, but also with the fictional Cold War hero, Jack Ryan, whom one reviewer even dubbed a “Reaganite hero.” Jack Bauer, described as “the first post-9/11 action hero,” represents another manufactured hero available for political cover, giving conservative media gurus like Rush Limbaugh talking points to defend the CIA’s use of torture in the War on Terror. Such a symbiotic relationship between popular culture and politics creates a fun-house mirror effect, as the “fake” and the “real” play hide and seek—even to engage what Jean Baudrillard terms the “hyperreal,” noting that once the “real” has been intertwined with fantasy, the “hyperreal” emerges, effacing contradictions between what is real and what is imaginary, as “unreality no longer resides in the dream or fantasy … but in the real’s hallucinatory resemblance to itself.”² In the current environment of “fake” news and “alternative facts,” it is often difficult to spot the difference, let alone ponder the consequences of such confusion.

This book argues that the fallout from relying on such myths is dangerously real. Joseph Campbell describes myths as “public dreams,” and not without roots in reality, but with facts fudged to create narratives that best match dominating agendas. If perhaps there was a “dream” to achieve white supremacy, then race as a biological fact falls far short; but race as defined by what Émile Durkheim describes as a “social fact”³ delivered the justification for centuries for chattel slavery and its crippling legacy of racism. Durkheim and Campbell forward a similar point: myths and social facts (regardless of how far adrift from a knowable truth) are consequential as they are capable of underwriting cultural norms and informing social structures. Myths that underpin the crimefighter hero in Hollywood stories have deep roots in American history and politics. Whether a western lawman, a lone urban detective, or a clandestine CIA agent, his mission is to embody what is normative and to “police” the Other—real and imagined, at home and abroad.

American Exceptionalism and Stories of Ascendency

Among the most profound American myths in play, including the above examples, is that of American “exceptionalism,”⁴ although many observers believe the term has been rendered meaningless by overuse and oversimplification. Space is limited here to provide a comprehensive history of the term’s genealogy or its many contradictory uses, but a recap of its broadest strokes is instructional for its fluidity and availability for makeovers. The term was reportedly in use among communist leaders to describe US resistance to socialism as “exceptional,”⁵ given its rise in other industrialized nations (Joseph Stalin is often given credit for coining the term, which is far more intriguing, but its credulity suspect). Its next incarnation was by historian Richard Hofstadter who offered the term as a theory to help explain why the nation had avoided war on its home soil during the twentieth century. Finally, the term was rebooted as a patriotic celebration of American accomplishments, often attributed to Reagan era conservatives but just as enthusiastically forwarded by President Obama in one of several speeches, including a State of the Union address.⁶

American exceptionalism is among those attempts to explain the nation’s rapid ascension from a former British colony to global behemoth within a few centuries, especially when compared to the longevity and evolutions of other nation-states in Europe and Asia. Two world wars in the twentieth century acutely strained the resources of both the British and French empires, which in a weakened state, invited contentious and often bloody liberation struggles in many of their colonial possessions in Asia and Africa. At the same time the United States emerged by mid-century in a unique position of wealth and influence, in part by converting its auto factories into profitable war machines for much of World War II.⁷ Its further elevation to “superpower” status accompanied its deployment of nuclear weapons, soon matched by the Soviet Union’s similar capabilities. For the next half century, conflict and competition between the two nations rested on the concept of mutually assured destruction, ultimately producing a more prolonged Cold War—so called for its lack of traditional firefights. In this type of war, ideology and culture products are often a more effective and available weapon (including popular culture products as a means of disseminating ideology).

As scholars began to study the nation’s rapid ascendency, several theories emerged—one attributed a formula for success to the Pilgrims’ pioneering spirit and their adaptation of Enlightenment ideas to the “undeveloped” New World.⁸ Others analyzed the Puritans, whose “errand in the wilderness” to establish a biblically inspired “city upon a hill” evolved into a radical democratization of ideas that produced a new society.⁹ Yet another approach cites the vast environmental riches—America as the New Eden and this former European as the American Adam charged with transforming “virgin land” into civilized settlements that could process tangible commodities. This supposed New World was quickly overrun by pioneers heading West to occupy the expanding nation and to fulfill a Manifest Destiny, along with immigrants pouring into the urban centers of the East to facilitate its rapid industrial growth.¹⁰ Other historical narratives rely on the biographies and accomplishments of “a few good men,” including founding “fathers,” inventors, military heroes, and titans of industry (also routinely described by the less-flattering term of robber barons) as most responsible for the young nation’s remarkable rise. None of the above narratives are untrue nor are they singularly able to explain such complex and interdependent phenomena.

Whatever the origins, most writers converge on the idea that this new nation was utterly transformed by its interactions with the supposed untapped and untamed wilderness, which created related myths about a reliance on rugged individualism. It was enough to prompt the French diplomat and historian, Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited the United States starting in 1831, to warn about its overdetermined embrace of individual autonomy at the expense of collectivist behavior, aside from “ad hoc” responses to emergency circumstances. By the eighteenth century, American popular culture featured a steady stream of rugged frontiersmen, determined underdogs, and lone “rangers” who preferred to be the “last man standing”; the American Adam was expressly embraced by writers such as Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson.¹¹ This book utilizes such a figure as it traces the revamped Adam archetype to his incorporation into Hollywood storytelling, first occupying the untamed frontier as a mythic cowboy then migrating to the uncivilized urban landscape as a redeemable rogue crimefighter —each evolution retaining key attributes of that early, quintessential American. The archetype also includes a particular performance of masculinity, an ever-adaptive nod to white supremacy, and the obfuscation of class membership; emerging as the white, male “everyman” able to prosper in uncharted lands, survive challenges by the Other, and rely on his own discretion to distinguish law from disorder—his gender, race, and denial of class all woven into his foundational construction.

The Frontier Thesis and the Gunfighter

The concept of a frontier and its associated mythmaking also informs the development of the nation and its reflection in the screen character at the heart of this book. As a theory, the frontier was initially used by scholars to narrate (and re-imagine) the post-revolutionary push West that first transformed a nation and its people. The concept’s importance to the American psyche was cemented the moment historian Frederick Jackson Turner dramatically announced at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair that the frontier had, in effect, disappeared. Gone with it was its real and perceived value as a “safety valve” for white communities escaping the increasingly crowded cities of “foreign-born” peoples and “the dange...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Frontier Ambitions and Cowboy Narratives
• 3. Dirty Harry and the Urban Frontier
• 4. Black Crimefighters: Portraits in Blue
• 5. Female Crimefighters Defending the Homefront
• 6. Becoming American: Ethnic Others as Crimefighting Heroes
• 7. Globocops, La Frontera, and America’s War on Drugs
• 8. The War on Terror, Homegrown Racism, and the White Knight
• 9. Recruiting the Other as Globocop
• 10. Policing the World: The Last (White) American Standing
• Correction to: Policing the World on Screen
• Back Matter