I made a pretty arbitrary list of 200 movies that I've never seen and decided to watch them and write about them in alphabetical order.
Dirty Harry
1971
Critiquing Dirty Harry is pretty interesting, the more I think about it. The standard question one might typically ask themselves when performing an act of movie criticism is: Does this movie achieve what it set out to do? If that's the question, then the answer can't be anything but yes. Dirty Harry strives to present a darkly fun romp through the seedy underbelly of the police world, and present the argument that maybe it's pussy left-wing bureaucracy that often prevent justice from being served in this mad, fucked-up world. Or, to put it a different way, Dirty Harry is basically The Dark Knight without the superhero tights, and the same uncomfortable question lingers at the end of each film: Are the hero's actions justified morally?
But it's interesting, because while Dirty Harry presents its case and does it well, the conclusion it comes to is one that I am completely against. For example, it was thrilling to see Harry chase the criminal and finally capture him, and it was frustrating that the criminal was able to escape the justice system due to red tape. This is my opinion as an audience member for a film: thrilling. But then the film presents the D.A. character as someone who cares more about the unfair law than about bringing this one particular criminal to justice, and going about it in the most obnoxious way possible, never once acknowledging that these laws exist for a reason. (It was probably especially frustrating to me because I watched this film right after being subjected to a months-long F.O.P.-funded smear campaign of Larry Krasner.)
I mean, this movie is just fucking drenched in right-wing faux-machoism politics. The tough guy in the truck with the "Back the Blue" decal and a firearm in the dash would fucking love this movie, because it's fantasy that many people of his ilk might daydream about, i.e. having the opportunity to bring about justice on your own terms, even if it comes about violently. Dirty Harry is basically George Zimmerman in movie form.
We don't really need to go into it, I don't think. There probably aren't too many with a blue-striped American flag on their lawns who are also reading the liberal pussy-ass Puke on Your Birthday, so if we went too far down that road, I might be preaching to the choir, to an extent. We're here to talk about a movie, not make generalizations about trumpers.
I will say this. If you agree with what Harry is up to in this film, then you're probably missing one important difference between the film's depiction of injustice and any real-life presumptions of injustice. The key difference here is that, as Dirty Harry's audience, we get a close look at the criminal as well as the detective trying to catch him. We have undeniable proof that Scorpio is a bona fide psychopath and deserves to be brought to justice. But if you're applying this idea of "justice by any means" to police investigations in the real world, then that butts up against the foundational idea of "innocent until proven guilty." If Scorpio actually existed in real life, then we wouldn't actually know for certain that he was guilty until he was charged and tried and convicted. We don't have the benefit of a film crew filming his crimes.
So when the D.A. says they can't charge Scorpio because Harry didn't get a warrant, as well as only getting a confession out of Scorpio because Harry tortured him, then the reaction becomes two-pronged. As the audience, we are frustrated that the villain is getting away—we know he is the villain because we've seen him act villainously and violently and murderously with our own two eyes. But as members of a functioning society—at least to a reasonable person—then it's tough to disagree with the District Attorney. The laws that force police officers like Harry to perform his job in the right way are not in place to protect people like Scorpio, they are there to protect innocent people who are wrongly accused. If these laws didn't exist, then someone like Harry could—as an absolutely fantastical and completely absurd example—perhaps trap nonviolent protestors on a major highway, commit war crimes against said protestors, and not be held responsible for his actions. Crazy, right?!
That last bit of sarcasm probably tips my hand a little too indiscreetly. It's pretty clear if you've read some of my half-witted shout-into-the-void blogging on PoYB what is more important to me, whether a movie is good or whether democracy is upheld. So it furthermore shouldn't surprise you that this aspect of Dirty Harry bothered me to the point that it was definitely ruined for me.
But there were moments where I was also able to pull back and appreciate the film-related aspects of Dirty Harry. There was a lot of bizarre shit happening in the margins of this movie that I mostly appreciated. The visits to the strip clubs, the completely superfluous partner character, the unhinged performance of Andy Robinson as Scorpio. If this film didn't directly apply to police reform issues that we are still bickering about in 2021, and if it didn't completely miss the mark in that regard, then I would probably adore Dirty Harry. But it's just too much to ignore.
What I was surprised about—and this is more of an indication of my completely ignorance regarding the history of film and film criticism in general—is that the problems I had with watching Dirty Harry now are the same issues that some critics in the early-'70s took to Dirty Harry as well. Ebert called it "fascist" at the time. Movie critic Pauline Kael accused it of being too efficient and effective as a piece of copaganda, basically. The fact that it works well as a movie-watching experience is exactly what makes it immoral, in other words.
I don't know if I completely agree with Kael here, that Dirty Harry's very existence is immoral, per se. Though Kael does take a swipe at my long-standing belief that good art makes you feel something—she argues that if that were true, the best artists would be the ones who gave us heart attacks—I think our slight disagreement is more than that. I think there's room to say that a movie isn't necessarily immoral even if it presents an argument that we wholeheartedly disagree with and, if everyone did agree with it, then it would bring about democratic decay.
Because I really do agree with Kael in that, taken at face value, Dirty Harry makes a case for fascism. And maybe there really are people out there who are either confirming their own fucked-up beliefs through this film, or, worse, are attaching themselves to new and dangerous ideas of abuse/justice. Maybe! But then that gets into the whole argument of whether that's the movie's fault, if that happens. I'll always go back to Oldboy when I think about this—Oldboy didn't say you should bash your foes in the skull with a hammer, even though the hero in the film literally did just that. If a film from 1971 is helping a young kid from the Far Northeast think it's okay for cops to have carte blanche to do whatever the fuck they please because they are the "heroes," then is that Dirty Harry's fault?
I mean, ultimately, I hate Dirty Harry and everything that it either purports to represent or is bagged down with unfair assumptions of what it's representing, but I wouldn't wish it out of existence. It's important, and certainly not immoral, for the conversation to exist. The fact that I can point to Dirty Harry and say that I find it reprehensible for certain reasons is important. It is well-made movie, and it creates a dialogue. Even if the dialogue is just me shouting at a movie that can't shout back, it's still a dialogue, and a critical one.
GRADE: 1.5 pukes out of 5
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