Should We Let Dirty Harry Do the Spring Cleaning?

Is there a time when it makes sense to throw the baby out with the bathwater? During spring cleaning we get rid of the all the detritus. We throw things out to make room for new life. Does the same pertain in the world of ideas. What does it mean to have a cleansing in a society which tolerates a certain degree of impurity and imperfection (aka pluralism) by its very nature? Everyone is threatened by terrorists and many of the terrorists, who are a danger to western democratic societies today, happen to be extremist Muslims. Donald Trump and others have advocated closing our borders to Muslims as a way of making sure no terrorists manage to get into the country. During the World War II even such an august defender of the principals of democracy as President Roosevelt advocated interning Japanese citizens. Indeed there are those who would suspend the constitution in times of war.  Stop and Frisk policies are another form of throwing the baby out with the bathwater since they penalize many young black men to spare the population from the few who might be guilty of crimes. In so doing it has created a disenfranchised class with rap sheets in place of college degrees. The issue may come down to something as basic as reading a suspect his or her Miranda rights. Does the protection of rights transcend even the immediate dangers posed by a criminal? Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry took matters into his own hands when he felt justice wasn’t being met? Are we ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater and join the lynch mob when a killer's on the loose?

Conjuring Magnum Force

The reports of beheadings and other atrocities on the part of ISIS bring out the Dirty Harry in all of us. The outrageousness of the crime is directly proportional to the level of revenge— that was the formula for the immensely popular Clint Eastwood movies. Remember Harry Callahan’s famous lines, “But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya punk?” You may find yourself intoning them when you see one of those videos that you’ve had to go to the Fox News site to see (since CNN refuses to show them). Increased feelings of helplessness fueled by the Charlie Hebdo affair and the shootings in Denmark fuel further fantasies. How about releasing the most violent and unrepentant prisoners in maximum security prisons (providing they aren’t Jihadists) and setting them down on the border between Syria and Turkey with full license to wreak havoc. Or better yet, if we need boots on the ground, which is what we are constantly told is the only real way to defeat ISIS, how about a million man strong robot army, which is impervious to suicide bombers? Every robot would have it’s minder, safe and secure behind a control consul at say Strategic Air Command in Nebraska. Let the enemy fire all they want, these bullet and bomb proof robots won't be stopped. Only what happens when it turns out the robots have minds of their own and their artificial intelligences turned out to be real?

A Touch of Sin or the Turin Horse

You may reconsider your views on gun control after seeing Jia Zhangke’s parable of modern China A Touch of Sin. It’s as if you gave Stockman, the crusading doctor of Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, Dirty Harry’s .44 magnum. At least that’s how the film starts. Dahai  (Wu Jiang), a local crusader against corruption (who bears some resemblance to Ai Weiwei), walks around with a blood splattered face after he rids his world of corruption. Nietzsche purportedly came upon the site of a horse being beaten on the streets of Turin and was so traumatized that he never wrote again. Zhangke is plainly drawn to thugs and violence as a metaphor for the violence of the broken social contract that is contemporary China, but also because of its esthetic possibilities. Blood runs throughout the movie like the drip in a Pollock. The director recapitulates this famous scene from Nietzsche, albeit to a different end. After Dahai kills the horse beater, the horse is seen wandering confusedly, pulling its empty cart, not knowing what to do without its sadistic driver. It’s not clear exactly what Zhangke’s trying to say in this scene, but the idea of the beating occurs again and again throughout the movie. Dahai is beaten by the thugs hired by a corrupt local businessman and is mockingly referred to as Mr. Golf (after the golf club with which this is accomplished) by the locals). A young woman who works as a receptionist in a sauna is beaten by two customers and a young worker in one of the huge industrial campuses that populate the movie (the kind that manufactures parts for Apple in Chengdu) throws himself off a balcony to avoid having to carry out a beating. In works like Threepenny Opera, Brecht used thugs and criminals to make his political points and not all Zhangke’s avengers are driven by morality. The movie opens up with the murder of a group of axe wielding thugs, by Zhou San (Wang Baoqiang), a thief who is no Robin Hood. If anything the amorality of much of the violence becomes the harder pill to swallow. And yet curiously despite the knives and clubs and guns, ATouch of Sin is no action movie. In fact there are scenes, right out of early Antonioni, where the camera lingers on the irresolvable psycho-social predicaments of his characters and nothing much happens at all.

Zero Dark Thirty

When you're about to make a trip to an exotic place that you’ve never been to before, your mind is spellbound and lays out a scenario that's a little bit like a fairytale. Then when you arrive at that place, the mind quickly encapsulates it and creates an indelible imprint, a roadmap made up of familiar associations from your own past. That’s a little bit what the experience of seeing Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty is like. Hannah Arendt famously coined the term the “banality of evil,” in her classic Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Zero Dark Thirty is the banality of good and evil. One can’t help comparing Zero Dark Thirty to classics of political cinema like Z, The Conformist or the film whose cinema verite style it most imitates, The Battle of Algiers, but Zero Dark Thirty falls neither into the categories of fiction like The Conformist, nor cinema verite (which uses non actors to enhance reality) like Battle of Algiers nor obviously, on the other end of the spectrum, documentary--though both its heroine, Maya’s (Jessica Chastain), unshakeable faith in her mission does recall the role Jodie Foster played in Contact, while curiously the analysis of photos recalls another cinema classic about discovering a murderer in a haystack, Antonioni’s Blow-Up. Still there are two looming issues at the center of the controversy around the film: the morality of using torture and its efficacy. A third issue relates to the whether the filmmakers did enough due diligence in description of techniques like waterboarding. Was it a cup of water or a jug of water that was used? To recall another film classic, Zero Dark Thirty is Dirty Harry on the stage of world history. When does the punishment fit the crime? When do the means justify the ends? Osama Bin Laden was killed and the order came right from the top. But are we ever justified in abrogating human rights? While Zero Dark Thirty isn’t journalism, it’s an odd hybrid of fact and fiction that succeeds in creating the feeling of what it might like to enter the world that we read about in the headlines. The figures are not larger than life. They do heroic things without seeming likes heroes and when the helicopters drop down into the compound to execute a piece of history, you feel like you're there and just like the soldiers on screen, just want to get out alive.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

In the Dirty Harry films Clint Eastwood established a dynamic by which retribution is justified by the degree of the crime being avenged. Harry Callahan was the best argument there is for terrorism as a response to oppression and his .44 Magnum is curiously prescient of escalating cycles of vengeance and reprisal not only on an individual level but in troubled parts of our present world. In David Fincher’s adaptation of Stieg Larrson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo a similar dynamic is working. The over the top vengeance that Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) engineers is directly proportionate the traumas she’s experienced both in the present, as a victim of a brutal rape, and in the past by virtue of her abusive upbringing. She's the spokes person for all the mutilated women in the movie, the equivalent of a walking class action suit against a world of serial murders and sexual abusers. The novel and the movie on which it’s based, whatever one may think of them, are, however, beyond good and evil, since they are cultural phenomenae and significant as products of their times. And what makes them unique? Firstly, on the broadest level, to quote George Santayana, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The film is mired in repetitions, beginning and ending on an accident, perpetrating a family line of sexual predators and propagating the notion of a never ending cycle of revenge. Beyond this, every era produces its own private eyes and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo presents a social misfit, threatened with institutionalization, who is a master of bisexuality, hacking and self-mutilation (to the extent that she is pierced and tattooed). As private eyes go, Lisbeth is about as far from the cool elegance of  The Thin Man as they come, yet she’s an acute observer and up there with the best shamuses.  Archaic forms of  Christianity permeate the plot and also recall the kind of nightmarish form of Christianity that raised its head in, in The Exorcist  and more recently in The Da Vinci Code. Most of the movie takes place on an island and one can’t help thinking about another island in contemporary Swedish folklore and that’s Bergman’s Faro where sadism, familial agony and a God that was both haunting and silent were also portrayed, albeit with eons greater profundity and a total lack of the kind of emotional manipulation that both Larsson and Fincher excel at.

Lives of Our Leaders: It's Hard to be the King II

It’s doubtful that there will be any more Abe Lincolns, Teddy or Franklin Roosevelts, or John F. Kennedys. It’s not that there aren’t honorable, even inspired men in politics. It’s just that the job description has changed. It’s one thing to triumph over Everest, but quite another to conquer the entire Himalayan range. Health care, financial reform, Iran, Iraq, Middle East crisis in general, borrowing crisis in Europe, North Korean hermaphroditic bad boy, Social Security on the fritz, oil glorious oil (spilling), tea party uprisings, terrorism at home and abroad, intractable Afghanistan, burial ground of ideological warriors, and now anti-missiles that don’t do the job (“Review Cites Flaws in U.S. Antimissile Program," NYT, 5/17/10). Things were looking up for Obama, but will he be humbled by the sheer magnitude of the challenge, as the results of the upcoming mid-term elections might suggest? What the world requires is a Dirty Harry, a Terminator, someone who will punish the bad guys and free the good. But our avenging angel can’t be too concerned with due process or all the things that make America great. To get things done, America needs a brash, territorial president like Lyndon Johnson, whose canine behavior was demonstrated when he boldly exhibited himself after urinating in the congressional bathrooms. Obama wants to be a man of action, but he is a sheep in wolf’s clothing, the thinking man, the troubled smoking prince who suffers a fitful sleep. Tyranny is the only working political system in these parlous times, and Obama lacks all the qualities of a good tyrant. Firstly, he stubbornly refuses to embrace a xenophobic view of the world. He refuses to create an enemy over which he can lord with self-congratulatory moral superiority. He is a believer in the politics of inclusion. He also refuses steadfastly to lay the blame on his predecessors. Finally, he seems to be faithful to his wife. One of the most important qualities of a great statesman is that he be principled when it comes to humanity as a whole, but a total hypocrite and cad in his relationships with women. This shows that the leader of civilized society has cojones, and will blow out the brains of anyone who tries to get in his way.