An interesting take on vigilante films, such as Death Wish and for that matter, Dirty Harry:
“But film critics are such inveterate moralists, directing their principled scorn on every deviation from strict correctness and crossing with the light, right? Not in any world we’ve seen. Something in the vigilante film seems to foment a strident exception to typically (and reasonably) agnostic views toward violence in the review community. There’s a limitless history of criminal anti-heroes, and their violence never seems to invoke much explicitly “moral” response. Pauline Kael hated Dirty Harry and loved Bonnie and Clyde. To brand (frequently murderous) “youth on the run” films as objectionable would only earn rapid branding as a hopeless scold, while ex cathedra warnings against the evils of vigilante cinema seem almost a critic’s sworn duty. How to explain this double standard? It’s, well, simply a strain to explain this without looking to the political connotations of the works in question.”
A problem that I, as a classical liberal, have with vigilante films is how sometimes the issue of due process of law tends to get mocked a lot. There is a line from Dirty Harry where our Clint, in his legendary way, takes the piss out of the “Miranda” rule about searches and so on. Various Amendments are shown to be jokes. And let’s remind ourselves that when you watch a film starring Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood shooting down a bad guy, you, the viewer, know that the bad guy is a bad guy and naturally cheer the flinty-eyed man with his .44 revolver. But in real life, the guilt of that odd-looking person is not so obvious. Hence why we have things like laws, Habeas Corpus, juries, search warrants, and all the rest, and why the likes of us get angry when these things are violated, or mocked by the likes of Tony Blair as signs of “19th Century values”. Indeed, take the case of investigative journalist Radley Balko in the US, who has made a career of showing how the War on Drugs and other campaigns have, when combined with the militarisation of the US police, created a series of disasters.
I can therefore feel the moral force of a film which shows a person taking the law into their own hands when I know, for the brief lifetime of a movie, that the person who gets the bullet is guilty. These are often powerful films about morality, and the better ones also highlight some of the ethical dilemmas well, as the better Eastwood ones often do, for instance; even the old Bruce Lee martial arts films play to that sense of rectifying injustice. All great, in my view. But the problem, of course, is that life is not like a film where guilt is always known. It’s a lot messier, and that is why vigilantism is not generally consistent with a civil, pro-freedom order. This is why, even under stateless societies, some form of order has to exist and someone has to say that “this is how we establish guilt and punish the guilty”.
To make it absolutely clear in case anyone brings this up, vigilantism in my view is not the same at all as the freedom to use potentially deadly force if necessary in self defence. I am talking about people who, having seen or suffered a crime, decide at a later date, on their own initiative and without any process of law, to exact a form of punishment, deadly or otherwise.
It should also be realised that to much of the movie going public, the members of this board (both contributors and commentariat) are by the very nature of their views excluded from the mainstream majority.
Many of us are pro-nation / anti-state and that don’t go down too well in most bars and pubs across the world as they can’t differentiate.
Each of us might well have been looking up the wrong end of Dirty Harry’s gun if we’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I’m sanguine about the protections that are embedded in the law (such as the Miranda warning). If they protect the criminals rights in difficult circumstances then they are likely to protect MY RIGHTS in difficult circumstances.
I would be inclined to keep the vigilantism and get rid of the police.
It’s wish fulfilment. Some want to be Bonnie and Clyde sticking it to the man, (or Mum and Dad probably), and others want to be Dirty Harry, (or better yet, Batman), dispensing real justice to those dirty crooks.
Personally I fantasise about being some sort of secular Ollie Cromwell, dishing it out to the effete elite that pretends to have our interests at heart while they grab more and more power and steal more and more of our our money.
For the serious, may I recommend:
The current scholarship of Douglas North, et al..
Violence and Social Orders (Cambridge 2009)
@ Crozier:
Not for long would you be. Bosnia, Iraq, the Partition of India, the Vendee.
Civilization rests on Social Orders. Social Orders rest on containment and control of violence.
I would like to have the police back and dispose of the paramilitary political enforcement drones we more and more have infecting civil society.
I enjoy good crime fiction as much as the next person. I have box sets of The Wire, Prime Suspect, The Sopranos, and others. But it does bother me that trampling on people’s liberty and using the system to strong arm them are such staples of the story-lines of most such fiction. On some TV shows it’s virtually treated as standard police procedure, and perhaps it is.
This seems to be true regardless of the ideological bias of the show or movie. The nature of the bad guy will be different in a left-leaning movie than in a right-leaning movie, but not the police tactics. That’s probably evidence for Kevin B’s assertion that these films represent wish fulfillment for some people. (And also for the thesis of the original article.)
Politics aside, I have often envied the people in films the fact that they know. Lots of films feature people wrongly accused or convicted of crimes, and those who help them. For the crusading lawyer in movie land there are no nagging doubts at 3 a.m. as to whether they are in fact helping free a bad guy.
One sad story I read was that of the sister of a man currently in prison for murder. She campaigned tirelessly for a retrial, and eventually there was one, only the result of that was to make most people, including the judge, more certain than before that her brother was indeed guilty. I found that very sad. Her steadfast faith was like something out of a movie – but unlike a movie it was misplaced.
I watched Death Wish again the other day. Vigilante?
in the first film at least, Bronson walks around in bad neighbourhoods, waits to get mugged, and then (lethally) defends himself. He (and the viewer) know they are the bad guys because they are attempting to rob him with lethal weapons.
I’ve given some thought to this earlier. It seems to me the actual purpose of the police is not so much to defend society from criminals, but to defend criminals from society.
The state has done a deal with you that you won’t punish criminals and in return the state will do it for you, but the state has now decided that it can’t be bothered, as JuliaM documents every day, with the effect that the state is simply protecting criminals from the righteous anger of their victims.
In the movies, travelers in a post apocalyptic landscape are beset by gay mardi gras rejects. But in reality criminals are a minority of citizens. The real problem would be the townsfolk who look you over and then ask, “You ain’t from round here, are you boy?”
Most of what people here are objecting to are hollywood cliches that have become so embedded in movies and tv shows about crime and police as to have replaced reality for far too many.
Real police work involves a great deal of boring routine, endless reports and log sheets, and dozens of contacts with the citizenry every day which do not involve anything sensational or controversial.
Rogue loners who constantly violate basic policies don’t last long, much less become celebrated heroes, and cops who rush into one on one encounters with armed bad guys, instead of waiting for back-up, are considered fools, not heroes.
Of course, there are exceptions to all this here and there, but none of the law enforcement people I have known over the years do much more than laugh ruefully and shake their heads when a discussion of movie police or TV series detectives gets started.
There’s nothing unusual about this. A very fine lady I know who is a highly skilled coronary care nurse regularly has conniptions over the portrayal of hospital procedure in films, and simply couldn’t watch the tv shows about medical drama when they were so popular a few years ago.
The commonest form of vigilanteism in our society is the back and forth gang shootings that occur regularly between rival groups, neither of which have any interest in legal recourse, but opt for the modern version of the duel to settle their conflicts.
Howard Beale, in “Network”, makes the point that, on TV, Kojack always gets the bad guy, and everything always works out before the show is over. The movies are similar in their unreality.
People are drawn to the powerful avenger who makes sure the bad guys pay for their crimes. It’s a theme that goes back into antiquity.
I mean, why else would anyone ever watch a Steven Seagal movie?
‘Civilization rests on Social Orders. Social Orders rest on containment and control of violence.’
Which does not necessarily mean a paid, professional police force.
Police forces in this country didn’t exist until the latter half of the 1800’s. ( marshals and sheriffs yes, organized uniformed forces of dozens or
hundreds, no )
Social order can be maintained and has been in the past by the general populace. Justice was a bit more swift and I strongly suspect in most cases administered more fairly and appropriately than ‘today’.
Yeah, but they do it while wearing cargo pants. That’s very scary because it violates posse commitatus or some damn thing and Radley Balko said that they’ll do drug raids and shoot dogs.
Short version: Anybody who will seriously discuss “Law and Order,” “CSI,” “The Wire,” “Southland,” “Walker Texas Ranger,” most Radley Balko writings, or any Clint Eastwood or Steven Segal movie as though they have any connection at all to the reality of policing, is just not competent to have an opinion.
very tired,
I think your observation is general. The cops you know are right to find the portrayal of their work risible. As is your nurse friend. I know because things I know about: computing, airplanes and astrophysics are spectacularly misrepresented.
The law as the first line of defense, absolutely: but the law can be ineffectual because of incompetence, corruption, lack of manpower, political correctness or what have you. And under that circumstance, isn’t vigilante law better than no law at all? If the authorities no longer bother with burglaries except to file a report for insurance purposes (which I understand to be the case in some places), doesn’t (for instance) horsewhipping burglars caught in the act serve a socially useful end?
Kevin B – truly quote of the day material, in my humble opinion.
Historically in the 19th century west, the vigilante organizations (and they were organized) were a response by otherwise respectable and law-abiding citizens to a situation where there was either no local legal structure at all, or one which had been corrupted to the point where criminal syndicates had entirely taken over the law-enforcement and court bodies – San Francisco in the mid 1850s, and Virginia City, Montana in the mid 1860s, for example. In the latter, the local sheriff was actually the head of a criminal gang, preying on goldminers departing with their takings. The vigilantes organized to deal with a situation which could no longer be tolerated by otherwise law-abiding citizens.
Sound like much more civilized times than ours.
How my name got de”re”d I’m not sure, but I guess it’s just as appropriate as the correct version. I prefer the original, however, for my own reasons.
I think Sunfish and I are in general agreement, at least I hope so, as I respect his professional opinion.
I realize there is a generalized dislike of laws and law enforcement among the members of this site, and there is certainly enough corruption and poor performance in both our countries to justify a healthy dose of skepticism about the police and the courts, but these glib calls for amateur vigilante groups to replace professionally trained law enforcement personnel are nonsense.
Of course there is tremendous room for improvement in all areas, especially recruitment and training for the police, and more sensible procedures for the courts and legal profession, but that requires the type of calm, determined study and efforts toward reform that glibness can never accomplish.
The quality and quantity of the laws themselves is a major element in the situation, but that discussion is for another day.
There’s plenty of vigilante “justice” being meted out all over the world, and has been throughout history. The ignoble “cultural revolution” in China is a recent, well-known example. The everyday wars that underworld gangs carry on is another.
Pardon me if I doubt a legal system based on that kind of insanity would be preferable to the one we have now, with all its warts and flaws.
Most of the steely-eyed heroes I have known were ordinary men and women doing their duty in uncommon situations. Fictionalized nonsense can’t really measure up to the real thing.
A recent example of this sort of film (and an example I liked) was “The Brave One” with Jodie Foster.
However, I noticed the cast (including Foster) were desperate to disassociate themsleves from any nonP.C. elements in the plot.
Even having a female central character (and the main police officer being black) was not enough for them.
The idea that a person might take “the law into their own hands” was just too much for Hollywood “liberals” – no matter what the circumstances. So people were actually trying to undermine their own film – with their interviews (and so on).
As for Britain.
State police were not compulsory in counties here till the Act of 1856.
Before 1856 (contrary to the lying reports of Edwin Chadwick and co) people were not, in the main, going round eating each other.
If someone was being attacked and called for help – they normally would be helped.
And if a local J.P. called for assistance in hunting down a criminal the local people (if they had not already dealt with the criminal) would assist this unpaid and unarmed magistrate.
Even in London – and before the police force set up in the 1820s.
Even as late as the early 1900s (and in London itself) unarmed police asked for the assistence of armed members of the public who happened to be walking by.
Rather different from the modern situation.
Vigilante movies and to an even greater extent superhero movies are a good example of how difficult it is to advance the public conscience and worldview.
To take a brief detour, consider space battles in scifi movies. Overwhelmingly such battles tend to take a form more similar to 17th century or earlier naval battles than to anything modern. Is this because more modern warfare is less interesting or merely because the collective unconscious and the human psyche still hasn’t adjusted to more modern forms of warfare?
If you look at vigilante heroes and the sub-category of superheros (who almost invariably tend to be vigilantes) you will notice that once you strip them of the trappings of fantasy and of modernity at their core they are a very old idea. They are the aristocracy. They are given power, authority, and status above that of normal men. They wield it according to their own personal judgment and rarely within the confines of a larger authority. And they do good. They defend and protect the public, often at the expensive of great personal sacrifice. This mythology is no different than that of knights, princes, kings, and queens. Divine right monarchs who ruled their subjects justly and protected them from the dangers of the big bad world.
I enjoy a good super hero fantasy as much as the next guy but a part of me is more than a little disturbed by the prevalence of such anti-individualist, anti-egalitarian mythology being so popular.
It is not “anti-indvidualist” Robin but it is indeed “anti-egalitarian”.
Indeed if people really were all equal (other than in their right not to be aggressed against) then the arguments for freedom would be much less strong.
Egalitarianism tends to lead to slavery – because people resent others being more successful (in anything) than themselves. And also (like Rousseu) would rather be the slave of the collective (which they see as “true freedom” for, in egalitarian fashion, they see themselves as part of the collective) rather than the employee of an individual.
Some people are better than others.
Better in just about every way.
The trouble is that these people often seek not to show their greatess in positive ways (as for example, Jon Huntsman senior has done), but in negative ways.
For example, Louis XIV was a great man – it was not just that he was King of France (Louis XV and Louis XVI were also Kings of France – and they had vastly less impact on the world around them via either domestic or external policy).
However, his greatness was expressed in negative terms – he rejected (in practice if not in theory) the rules of natural justice, and his duties as a just King – and, instead, went after power for its own sake.
Prince Eugene (amongst many others) understood that about Louis XIV.
Although French he offered his sword to the great enemy of France – the Hapsburg monarchy.
Not because the Austrian Emperor was a great man (he was not – he was an ordinary man put, by accident of birth, into a position of great responsibilty), but because the greatess of Louis was negative (as was seen by such things as his persecution of unarmed civilians at home – and his falling upon the Dutch in aggressive war).
Louis had (in Science Fiction terms) “gone over to the Dark Side”. Not really ironic in relation to him being known as the “Sun King”, as those who claim to be the source of light (the centre of everything good and worthwhile) normally have gone over to the Dark Side.
Still freedom and equality….
Freedom does not produce equality – not in results and NOT in “opportunity” either.
Some people are born with rich parents, some are not. And it is a lot less difficult to make money if you already have money.
Some people are born with loving parents, and some are born with parents who abuse them and leave them damaged for life.
Those who value equality (egalitarianism) will never really be happy with freedom – because it will not give them want they want.
It will not even give them “position on merit” – as some people (whether the local landowner or the Emperor of Austria) will turn out to be quite ordinary people who have gained their position by accident of birth.
No eqalitarian will accept that – and their demands for “people of merit” (by which the, privately, mean THEMSELVES) to have higher position in society do NOT lead to greater freedom.
On the contrary – the use of FORCE to achieve this end, leads to utter slavery.
For it is the fact that the person in charge (say a private employer who has inherited the family firm) may be quite an ordinary person (inferior in some ways to some of his or her employees) that is the basis of the only form of equality that is any good.
Equaltiy of the right of nonaggression.
For the person in charge may not be a superior person (although they may be) – they may be in their position by accident of birth (or other good fortune).
So they have no right to claim to be Platoinc Guardians leading the population to the light.
This is the complexity of the matter.
The argument for freedom (or some of the arguments for freedom) rests BOTH on some people being better than others (so they should be allowed to achieve more) AND that people in charge may actually be INFERIOR to others – and have no right to try and “fundementally transform” society (and the people in it) by force – because of some special ability they possess.
Of course there is sometimes greatness in the use of power.
Alfred the Great really was “Great” – no ordinary man could have done things he did (as the Kings of the other Anglo Saxon Kingdoms – and the Kings of Wessex before him, proved).
But natural justice applies to such great rulers just as it applies to everyone else.
This is, again, the only good form of equality.
By the way…..
The greatness of Alfred can be seen in his children.
Not in his son Edward – who was a rather ordinary man.
But in his daughter – the “White Lady of the English” as both the Irish and the Vikings called her.
As Ethelfleda (Aethelflaed) faced the same times as her brother King Edward and (for obvious reasons) had rather less opportunities than him – her greatness is easy to see.