Last week, I wrote about the vigilante killing of Jordan Neely on the New York subway, discussing Judith Butler’s essay “Endangered/Endangering” and the impulse to use hypothetical violence as justification for the real thing. As I mentioned then, that essay is always on the syllabus of my Films of Moral Struggle class as part of our unit on film representations of crime and punishment. Especially since the Neely tragedy has again brought issues of public safety back to the front page, I thought that this week, I’d adapt and share part of my lecture on the evolution of police portrayals in mainstream American cinema. These depictions aren’t static. Rather, they’ve changed along with American culture and politics, and along with the film industry itself.
It’s easy to default to the assumption that culture gets progressively more conservative the further you travel into the past. History, though, is messier than that. It’s full of fits, starts, and zig-zags. Onscreen depictions of police are a case in point. In the silent era, filmmakers weren’t particularly inclined toward flattering their cop characters. After all, at the beginning of the 20th century, policing wasn’t a particularly respectable profession. Though William “Boss” Tweed died in 1878, political machines like New York’s Tammany Hall still exerted a powerful and often corrupting influence over urban politics, battling with Progressive Era reformers whose espoused goal of cleaning up society had its own problems, including close connections to, um, the eugenics movement.
In addition to reflecting real-world police misconduct, there was likely some ethnic prejudice involved in the incompetent bumbling of characters like the Keystone Cops, the stars of a popular series of short films released between 1912 and 1917. Savvy operators like Tweed actively cultivated relationships with Irish immigrants and their progeny, so much so that when a scandal forced Tweed from power, the Irish-American John Kelly assumed control of Tammany. In an age of patronage politics, such an ethnic alliance meant access to government jobs, especially policing. (Kelly had himself served as Sheriff of the County of New York before taking over the city’s Democratic Party machine.) So anti-Irish stereotypes about low intelligence and heavy drinking migrated over to stereotypes about the police as well.
The reputation of police deteriorated further after Prohibition went into effect in 1920. Outlawing alcohol didn’t stem the public’s desire to get drunk. It just drove it underground, into the hands of gangsters and bootleggers. To keep their operations running smoothly, mob kingpins like Al Capone were bribing government officials, cops very much included, to the tune of a half-million dollars a month (over $8.5 million adjusted for inflation). It’s no wonder, then, that when slapstick auteur Buster Keaton released his film Cops in 1922, the titular characters were decidedly unheroic. In the movie, Keaton happens his way into a police parade when a (presumably anarchist) terrorist heaves a bomb in his direction. The hapless Keaton tosses the device away to distance himself from the ensuing explosion, and it blows up near a group of police. The police mistake Keaton for the bomber, sparking a citywide chase. Ultimately, our hero is dragged away by the cops and the film ends with his signature porkpie hat dangling from a tombstone. The implication is obvious: A police gang beat an innocent man to death without bothering to give him a trial.
Such subversive depictions were all but impossible after the Production Code went into effect in 1934. Primarily the work of Catholic reformers, the Code forced studios to adhere to a strict set of rules based on, to quote film scholar Gregory D. Black, “Catholic theology, conservative politics, and pop psychology.” Its goals were more ambitious than simply shielding audiences from graphic sex or violence. The censors at the Production Code Administration (PCA) sought to promote a traditionalist vision of American society, and that entailed a respect for its institutions, including the police. It also didn’t hurt that the Code was essentially a Catholic project, meaning those behind it were particularly leery of the implicit anti-Irish sentiment in mocking portrayals of the police.
This meant that through the middle of the 20th century, onscreen cops tended to be competent, moral, and trustworthy. The template was set by films like 1935’s G Men, which recast gangster movie icon James Cagney as a pure-hearted federal agent. While this shift was a boon for the public perception of law enforcement, it also made for phenomenally boring characters. The drama of the ethically dubious detective, though, was too alluring for filmmakers to pass on completely, so they found creative ways to sidestep the Code’s restrictions. This is part of why private investigators were such a staple of the noir films of the 1940s and ‘50s, taking the lead roles in classics like The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, both starring Humphrey Bogart. Their job has all the danger and excitement of police work, but since PIs were freelancers, the PCA allowed them more ambiguity than their government-sanctioned counterparts.
By the 1960s, the Code’s stranglehold over American cinema was starting to slip. Provocative films like Some Like It Hot (1959) and Blow-Up (1966) managed to make a ton of money at the box office despite being released without PCA approval. Sensing its growing irrelevance, the industry abandoned the Code, replacing it with the modern rating system in 1968. Now, no topic was officially off-limits if the studio was willing to accept an R or an X rating. Between this newfound freedom and a broader countercultural suspicion American institutions, the stage was set for a flurry of films that approached policing with a more skeptical eye. In 1971, The French Connection introduced audiences to Detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle, a racist alcoholic who doesn’t hesitate to shoot a fleeing suspect in the back. Sidney Lumet’s Serpico (1973) went even further, with Al Pacino taking on not just a few bad apples, but an NYPD that was corrupt from top to bottom.
While 1970s made room for onscreen criticism of American policing, not all of this criticism came from the left. Enter, the vigilante film. Between rising urban crime rates and a racist backlash against the advances of the civil rights era, there was a sense, especially but not exclusively among conservatives, that law enforcement was ill-equipped to maintain order and dispense justice. As USC professor Todd Boyd put it in an interview with HuffPo:
If you go back to the ’60s, the time when the Miranda ruling is instituted, this idea that you have to read people their rights — I think, really, from that moment going forward, there’s been this false sense that politicians are tying police officers’ hands behind their back, that they can’t do their job because of politics and bureaucracy. In these representations when you have the rogue cop, it’s as though you have a figure who rejects the bureaucracy, rejects the politics, rejects the things that would prevent him from doing his job and instead decides to go on their own in pursuit of catching what is regarded as the bad guy. And in so doing, people embrace this idea that the end justifies the means: This rogue has to do this, and it’s great that he does it because it’s beneficial to society.
In other words, caring about the rights of the accused is PC bullshit, and anyone who wants justice will have to pursue it outside of the law. Though the movie has its defenders, there’s a reason that critic Pauline Kael characterized the politics of 1971’s Dirty Harry as fascist. At every turn, Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan is stymied by his superiors. The audience is primed to cheer as taunts a (Black) bank robber with his legendary “Do I feel lucky” monologue and tortures the psychopathic serial killer Scorpio, an enemy that is only dispatched when Harry sheds the mantle of police officer, literally chucking his badge into a lake. The film was successful enough to warrant four sequels. Death Wish (1974), with Charles Bronson enacting bloody revenge in the name of his murdered wife and raped daughter, also got four sequels and an 2018 Eli Roth remake to boot.
Though lighter in tone, the buddy cop wave of the 1980s and ‘90s also trafficked in the rogue cop archetype. These movies usually revolved around an odd couple pairing, with a rule-following, by-the-book officer partnered with one who’s wilder, more volatile. The loose cannon cops—the unpredictable ones—they were somewhat morally ambiguous. In the Lethal Weapon franchise, Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) turns erratic after the death of his wife. While his instability wouldn’t have passed muster under the Production Code, Riggs’ personal tragedy gives the audience an excuse to sympathize with him and excuse his disregard for basic civil rights. In the 1987 original, for example, the film goes out of its way to endorse Riggs’ trigger happy approach and dismiss his partner’s (Danny Glover) reluctance to kill, as in the scene below:
Depictions of police onscreen have never been a monolith. The independent Blaxploitation cinema of the 1970s often positioned cops as antagonists, and during the 1980s, you had movies like Do the Right Thing and Prince of the City that were explicitly critical of law enforcement. But as you move closer to the present, the film industry has shown a greater willingness to question the police. Though equity is still a long ways off, Black filmmakers’ increasing access to the resources of Hollywood is a major—probably the major—part of the story here. From Antoine Fuqua’s Training Day to Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station to Melina Matsoukas’ Queen & Slim, we’re seeing more studio movies that challenge the idea that cops are the good guys and police departments deserve our deference.
Breaking away from a naive trust in law enforcement is, in my view, very much a good thing. However, the film industry shouldn’t pat itself on the back too hard. History shows that progress isn’t linear. Keaton’s Cops was followed a decade later by G Men, and especially given the right’s full-throated endorsement of (white) vigilantism, there’s likely an appetite out there for a new wave of Death Wish-inspired brutality. For all the conservative griping about Hollywood liberals, studios ultimately follow the money, even if the path leads to reactionary politics.