Jack,
Re your points below:
> I see Yuri's point about police procedurals
being
> more Leftist than Faschist because *most*
> procedural cops follow rules or bend them
> occasionally.
There's a whole spectrum of political thought between
"fascist" and "leftist." And the bulk of police procedurals,
while generally to the left of "fascist," are definitely to
the right of "leftist," and, for that matter, to the right of
center.
> Jim Doherty gives us a list of cops who
> definitely do not fit the leftist mold, but
I
> think Jim tries to equate the writer's
politics
> with his books.
Don't you think a writer's politics are going to have some
affect on the books s/he writes? Let's face it, THE COMMUNIST
MANIFESTO didn't turn out the way it did despite the fact
that Marx was a subscriber to "Rush 24/7."
> Wambaugh is definitly anti-facist in his
> approach. He seems to hate dirty cops--at
least
> through the few books that I remember.
Again, being "anti-fascist" isn't the same as being
"leftist." I'd like to think I'M "anti-fascist," but I don't
think anyone could say I'm "leftist."
> Dirty Harry and Bullit are cops, but
their
> stories are *not* police procedurals but
about
> the renegade cops and they follow the PI
formula
> more than the general police procedural.
A police procedural is nothing more or less than a piece of
crime fiction that depicts police work with realism (or at
least with the appearance of realism). To say that a given
work is not a police procedural because the hero's a renegade
is to assert that no such person exists in real life.
Read the source novel for BULLITT before you dismiss that
film as a procedural. The hero of Robert L. Fish's MUTE
WITNESS, NYPD Det. Lt. Clancy, is a fairly typical procedural
cop, middle-aged squad commander in a Manhattan precinct,
marking time until retirement. His personality is not
particularly rebellious. But his actions in the book are
precisely the same as his movie counterpart's.
Bullitt becomes a "renegade," therefore, less because he
bucks his superiors to get the job done, since Clancy does as
much without losing his "procedural" status, than because
he's a young, hip swinger who wears turtlenecks and corduroy
sportscoats. Hardly a profound political statement.
In any case, the rank structure, the equipment, the
nomenclature, etc., of SFPD, as depicted in the film, is
fairly accurate, and there were SFPD technical advisors on
hand. SO the producers WERE trying to give the appearance
(and to some degree more than just the appearance) of
realism. So it was, by definition, a police procedural.
As for Dirty Harry, the one single act that turns him into a
renegade, torturing Scorpio to find out where he's hidden his
kidnap victim, was a fictionalization of something a
real-life cop did in an actual kidnapping case that the film
DIRTY HARRY replicated for the script. Thet juiced it up some
for the movie
(in real life, the cop just screwed his gun up against the
offender's ear and demanded to know where he'd buried his
victim; he didn't step on a bullet wound), and changed some
of the salient details (in real life the victim was rescued),
but the basic situation was taken from real life.
Which brings me back to my original point. Unless the cop is
doing something that a cop would NEVER do in real life (not
just something he SHOULDN'T do in real life), the fact that
he's is coloring outside of the lines doesn't, by itself,
automatically render the story a non-procedural.
Only fundamental inaccuracy in the technical details, with no
attempt to put across even the illusion of verisimilitude,
does that. ANd, as with BULLITT, DIRTY HARRY got most of the
technical details right.
> I compare Dirty Harry to Matthew
Scudder--the
> main diference is that in his stories,
Dirty
> Harry still had his badge. Their approach
is
> virtually identical.
You could say that Joe Friday's approach is, in many ways,
similar to Pat Novak, or Johnny Modero, or one of the other
hard-boiled PI's he played on radio before he struck gold
with DRAGNET. But, as accurate as that observation might be,
it wouldn't make Joe any less a procedural cop, nor Pat,
Johnny, et. al., any less PI's.
Dirty Harry's a procedural cop because he a policeman in (at
least in the first film) a fairly accurate depiction of
police work in San Francisco. Juiced up for drama, of course,
but all fiction is. Fiction is about the exceptional days,
not the routine ones.
> Yuri explained that police procedurals
are
> leftist in that the follow, for the most
part,
> the rules of society.
I don't see how following the rules of society is
automatically leftist. Or even implicitly leftist. To me it
sounds conservative. And that's why, to me, the police
procedural is a fundamentally conservative form, to the
degree that it has any politics.
JIM DOHERTY
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