One still gropes for some rational justification for it. All one can say with certainty is that at the moment, she, like many of her colleagues, wanted her readers to stop and think about the increasingly bold portrayal of violent behavior on the screen. Two weeks earlier she had been forced to come to grips with Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, two weeks later she was obliged to contemplate Straw Dogs, and both disturbed her as deeply as Dirty Harry did. One needs to consult those pieces to discover the full context of her outrage.
Discussing Kubrick’s film she had written that “we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure,” that directors like him were “desensitizing us” to its horrors. At the same time she was aware of “an assumption that if you’re offended by movie brutality you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship.” Obviously, this placed the responsible reviewer in a difficult position: One did not want to give aid and comfort to forces that had for decades juvenilized American movies; at the same time, one did not want to endorse that which one found distasteful merely because it was chic and challenged the “squares,” as Kael called them. Her strategy was to substitute passionate analytical contempt for censoriousness. She concluded her review by asking: “How can people go on talking about the dazzling brilliance of movies and not notice that the directors are sucking up to the thugs in the audience?”
Dirty Harry became her next case in point. In its way it was a more difficult one. Her arguable objections to A Clockwork Orange had been based on its chilly eroticizing of violence, but that argument was inapplicable here. We knew there was an erotic element in Scorpio’s choice of a kidnapping victim, but aside from a briefly held long shot of her nude corpse being lifted out of her tomb, nothing of the torments he inflicted on her were shown or even discussed in detail. The film was as discreet as anyone could wish when it came to linking sex and violence. But as a serious critic with a reputation for burrowing “deeper into movies” Kael would not simply register her squeamishness about the film and let it go.
She did not charge the film with vigilantism, an issue that has preoccupied its latter-day commentators. She obviously recognized that many, if not most, of the heroes in American popular fiction and film are in some sense vigilantes, obliged eventually to take the law into their own hands because the organizations charged with enforcing it are too dumb, numb or crooked to do so effectively.
But fascism, with its implication of racism—that was hot, strong stuff. And never mind that it misconstrues Harry’s character and the movie’s intent. The dictionary defines fascism as “a political philosophy, movement or regime … that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized, autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.” There is nothing in that definition that fits Harry Callahan. He has nothing to say, exalting or otherwise, about nation; he is, as we have seen, color-blind when it comes to race, and the only opposition he wants to suppress is the criminal class; if he actually favored “centralized, autocratic government” or regimentation, his relationship with the paramilitary structure he serves would be—shall we say?—somewhat less contentious than it is.
As a scholar named Eric Patterson would argue a few years later, crime is a pretext, not a text, in this movie and its sequels: “The real target … is the power structure in which the Eastwood character is enmeshed.” His rage is directed against “the mayors and police commissioners who are concerned primarily with protecting and perpetuating their own power, and who perceive Harry Callahan and others like him simply as a means to those ends.” If, he says, the films endorse certain “reactionary policies,” they also “embody an element of protest against exploitation which is surprisingly radical.” Read in this way Harry’s indifference to Miranda and Escobedo becomes logically explicable; they sound to him like more bureaucratic mumbo jumbo, yet another incomprehensible—and uncomprehending—memo from on high.
Kael’s case against the rest of the movie is similarly overstated and more deviously argued. By making Scorpio motivelessly malign, a figure beyond the reach of ordinary sociopsychological explanation, the film makes “the basic contest between good and evil … as simple as you can get … more archetypal than most movies, more primitive and dreamlike,” imparting to it the “fairy-tale appeal” of “fascist medievalism.” By this she meant that it showed crime to be the product of inexplicable wickedness, “without specific cause or background.…”
This, she argues, sends a deliberately perverse message. For if evil is in fact beyond human comprehension, a sport of nature, then by implication we are all licensed to kill without compunction or regret when we encounter it. If, on the other hand, “crime is caused by deprivation, misery, psychopathology, and social injustice”—conditions for which everyone is obliged to bear a burden of guilt—then its artistic representation must engender in us some “sympathy,” some “responsibility” for the criminal.
Yes—if this were a remake of Knock on Any Door or Dead End. Or, possibly, if that black bank robber had turned out to be Harry’s chief antagonist. But none of that is true. Nor is this least “dreamlike” of fictions by any means the first to present us with a villain whose monstrousness passed all rational understanding. What psychological explanation can we offer for the doctors Moriarty and Marbuse? Or, for that matter, lago and Richard III? In certain contexts we have always relished characters who proclaim their wickedness in a large and fiery hand and are relieved when they fail to excuse themselves with tales of “deprivation” or “social injustice.” They speak to our instinctive understanding that from time to time figures transcending our customary definitions of good and evil appear in our lives, or, anyway, in our tabloids. In the modern world, they are often serial killers like Scorpio: the Boston Strangler, the Hillside Strangler, Ted Bundy, Son of Sam, Jeffrey Dahmer, to name a few of the many strange creatures who have swum up from the murk of modern life and are not to be explained adequately by poverty or parental abuse.
There is something uncharacteristically prissy, almost social workerish, in the language Kael uses to address this issue. It reflects an ambivalence about the movie audience and about the people who make movies that runs unresolved through the entire body of her work. She understood, better than most, that movies affect us “on sensual and primitive levels” and are therefore “a supremely pleasurable—and dangerous—art form.” So even though she was a populist, she was ever a nervous one. In 1969 when Lawrence Alloway curated a retrospective exhibition entitled The American Action Movie: 1946–1964 at the Museum of Modern Art, he observed in the accompanying monograph that action pictures embrace “a pragmatic willingness to kill when that is required by the situation and a highly developed short-term skepticism about moral principles.” He identified this attitude as part of the nation’s “covert culture,” which he rather nicely defined as that generally unspoken collection of “shady habits, archaic responses and conflicting impulses that are sufficiently general to form patterns of related ideas and images.” The action movie, Alloway observed, consistently drew on, and catered to, this culture, and he noted—with near-comic mildness—that “there seems to be a greater interest in violence in the mass audience than is tolerable to elite critics of society.”
Kael could not accept a vision of the mass audience that acknowledged a certain raw and honest realism in some of its otherwise execrable tastes. She preferred to see it as essentially innocent, unable to defend itself against exploitation by a motion-picture industry, toward which she always took a Manichaean stance. Utterly bereft of moral and aesthetic aspirations this system, as she saw it, corrupted not only its audience, but all whom it employed. Or almost all. For within it there toiled a few people whose artistic integrity was exemplary, lonely rebels pursuing their singular visions, struggling against desperate odds to function as true artists, in the process often rendering themselves unemploya
ble. These few, these brave unhappy few, she always championed.
Donald Siegel, unabashed maker of bluntly, unapologetically violent B pictures, a man who, despite a Cambridge education, seemed never to question the values of the covert culture, was not one of them. Clint Eastwood, up out of television and spaghetti westerns, this new lowbrow favorite who had yet to demonstrate qualms or regrets about doing harm to people on-screen, was not one of them either. By their works Kael knew everything she needed to know about them, which was that they stood for all that she loathed about the hateful system that had corrupted the medium she loved and was forever threatening the masses that she both idolized and patronized.
If this seems an overly schematic representation of Kael’s position, one need only study her review of Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs. He was the only western revisionist to rank with Leone, and it is possible to argue that finally a serious critic had to side with one or the other—the starkly, darkly romantic Italian or the lushly elegiac American. Kael had long since chosen the latter (which may have made Clint guilty by association with the former), for he was her kind of rebel angel, a hugely talented director and often a very sympathetic figure, wearing, especially around his more impressionable admirers, an air of soft-spoken victimization.
He was, as well, a self-destructive alcoholic whose contentious relationships with producers were legendary and, to some, a further earnest of his integrity. He was often out of work, and when he did work he was always having his pictures taken away from him and recut by other hands. Nor was he always careful in his choice of material, which, indeed, became increasingly incomprehensible in the later years of his career.
Be that as it may, Kael’s agony as she confronted Straw Dogs was clearly visible. On its face, it was everything she despised; the story of a wimpish mathematician living in rural England whose wife is raped and sodomized by village yobbos and who in avenging her reclaims his manhood. It is a thoroughly nasty (and thoroughly riveting) piece of work—talk about eroticizing violence!—expressing at least as many of the covert culture’s values as Dirty Harry did (the woman, for example, seems to invite the rape, then eventually relaxes and enjoys it, virtually parodying moronic males’ suppositions about sex crimes). But there was, Kael argued, a higher purpose at work here. Peckinpah wanted us “to dig into the sexiness of violence,” she said, while exhibiting a worked-out “aesthetic of cruelty.” His slow-motion representations of bad behavior “fix the images of violence in your imagination,” “make them seem already classic and archaic.” Thus, in her mind, was “a fascist classic” born—a statement of authentic belief on the part of an authentic artist, as opposed to the “greedy, opportunistic” fascism of those hacks Siegel and Eastwood.
There is a desperately rationalizing note here, a need to maintain consistent support for a director to whom the critic was deeply committed. Moreover, like a lot of people, Kael could tolerate prodigies of violence when it was aestheticized (and somewhat distanced) in the Peckinpah manner. There are slo-mo hails of bullets in such Kael favorites as Bonnie and Clyde and The Godfather that were not approached in Dirty Harry. These scenes are perfectly defensible, but one can also argue that in the intricately interconnected modern world violence is visited on us suddenly, inexplicably, that it is often a matter of finding oneself by chance in a deranged person’s line of fire. That being so it is as feckless (and misleading) to salvage the absurd and terrifying moment by prettifying it as it is to look for its sociopsychological explanations. One resists it as best one can, with an assertion of outraged personal morality. It’s not much, but it’s what Dirty Harry Callahan has.
In the end, the argument over this movie centers on two related questions: With what degree of darkness does one view contemporary life? And how does one judge the intent of the filmmakers?
On the first point twenty-five years of history have served Dirty Harry well. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. has written, over the last couple of decades a tendency in our culture has developed “which unites our lumpen proles with our post-modern ironists to celebrate transgression for its own sake.” This was something no one would have predicted in 1971. One might perhaps more easily have perceived a point David Thomson has since made: “Those saved by the social revolutions of the 1960s were only ever a few. Eastwood guessed, or knew in his bones, that Harry’s ‘dirtiness’ was a refreshing reclaiming of common sense and direct action as far as middle America was concerned.” Or the one comedian Dennis Miller later made in one of his monologues: “Somewhere along the line society took the wrong fork in the blame road and decided to give criminals the benefit of the doubt. How did they become the victims? C’mon, everybody knows that’s a buncha shit, and that’s why Dirty Harry made Clint a big star.” Both remarks reflect the way we live and think now.
No serious commentator today would advance a description of criminal motives as naive as Kael’s. In fact, serious general discussion of crime’s causes and cures has been largely silenced. Few care to think much about the former, and few believe any of the latter, however hopefully they are advanced, are likely to have a large effect on the problem. Whether or not crime has become an epidemic may be statistically debatable, but fear of crime is unquestionably epidemic. We may still retain a residual capacity for outrage over “dirty” cops like Detective Mark Fuhrman, who surfaced in the O. J. Simpson trial, but even liberals no longer wish to “understand” criminals; we simply want them to be punished. This is not entirely because we have all succumbed to reactionary rhetoric. Unrealistic and ineffectual sentimentalism of the kind Kael indulged in played its role in bringing us to this pass. Like it or not, we live in a Dirty Harry kind of world, and, if anything, the movie seems more prescient—more “realistic” if you will—than alarming.
This leaves the question of intent. Had this movie been released in a less polarized political climate, this question would never have arisen. But these were not normal times. The war in Vietnam was still on, the college campuses were still rife with protest (the killings at Kent State had occurred only a year previously), and a parallel between taking a hard line on crime and taking a hard line on the war was often drawn in those days. The class issues implicit in the film were similarly potent. Harry’s working-class roots and attitudes were the source of his appeal to the mass audience. It is obvious that by subjecting his activities, his moral decisions, if you will, to second-guessing by a temporizing bureaucracy, the film placed him under pressures every working stiff, for that matter every middle-management drone, in America understood. Maybe they couldn’t talk back to their superiors or take action on their own recognizance, but when Dirty Harry Callahan did, they knew exactly where he was coming from—a place in their own hearts—which was something they no longer knew about a lot of movie heroes. Elsewhere in those days, in all the better circles, blue-collar males were the objects of scorn and fear. When they were not actually members of the police force, “pigs” like Harry, and their hard-hatted brethren formed the hard core of the hated Silent Majority, often not so silently mounted muscular counterdemonstrations against war protests.
No matter that Harry Callahan never said a word about any of these issues. No matter that the film carefully particularized his anger. It was easy enough to extrapolate from his bluntly expressed attitude about criminal rights a whole range of unspoken opinions, make him into a generalized symbol of much that was hatefully illiberal in American life at that time. The failure to anticipate this response was, frankly, not very smart of the moviemakers. The possibility that they duplicitously entended Harry as a metaphoric endorsement of a whole range of reactionary attitudes cannot therefore be definitively disproved—except, perhaps, by resort to the films Clint made after this one, and to the authentic anger this line of criticism elicted from him and from Siegel.
The latter’s response was simple: “I don’t make political movies,” he said truthfully enough (and in one variation or another on the theme, often enough). “I was telling the story of a hard-nosed cop an
d a dangerous killer.” When he claims in his autobiography that “Not once throughout Dirty Harry did Clint and I have a political discussion,” it is entirely plausible. When he adds, “We were only interested in making the film a successful one, both as entertainment and at the box office,” that rings true as well.
Clint, because he has been so frequently questioned on this matter, has offered a wider variety of responses over the years. He has accused his critics of leftist extremism. He has invoked the Nuremberg argument, holding that a man has a duty to oppose laws he feels to be unjust and that failure to do so constitutes a punishable crime. He has likened Harry to the Peter Finch character in Network, urging his listeners to declare themselves mad as hell and unwilling to take it anymore.
Most of these statements betray his singular lack of talent for abstract argument. He has been most effective when he has followed a line similar to Siegel’s. Discussing Harry’s character, he has insisted that “I’m, as an actor, not out to play my political feelings. I mean, that would be boring as hell, to preach some statement I have about where I thought the country was going, what was wrong with it.” Conceding on one occasion that Harry was an “authoritarian” figure, he nevertheless insisted the authority he stood for was that of the autonomous individual forced to function “in a world of bureaucratic corruption and ineffectiveness.” Or as he has also put it, “Harry is a terribly honest character, and I like that. He’s not a political animal, and he doesn’t understand political intrigue.”
Discussing the film in general he has said: “It’s just the story of one frustrated police officer in a frustrating situation on one particular case.” As early as 1974 he told his first serious biographer, Stuart Kaminsky: “The general public isn’t worried about the rights of the killer, they’re just saying get him off the streets, don’t let him kidnap my child, don’t let him kill my daughter. There’s a reason for the rights of the accused, and I think it’s very important and one of the things that makes our system great. But there’s also the rights of the victim. Most people who talk about the rights of the accused have never been victimized; most of them probably never got accosted in an alley.” Twenty years later he put it even more simply: “The real romance of the film [is] the audience is sitting there going, ‘Yeah, if I was stuck down there for five hours, I wouldn’t want some guy talking about the Miranda decision. I’d want somebody out there trying to get my ass out of there.’ That’s just kind of basic. I didn’t see anything political about that.”
Clint Eastwood Page 39