Good Guys

Since movie audiences generally like to “identify” with characters, it is instructive to look at film heroes now and then. Working-class heroes tend to be the Clint Eastwood type, strong and silent, each of whose blunt words issues from impacted character, which pretty much means physical courage. By his willingness to lay himself on the line, often risking death, he shows up the evasive middle-class verbalists for whom he does the dirty work. The villain he chases down and kills is the drug-crazed sadist or the unappeasable fanatic or the utterly cynical predator. The lesson is that the bottom line of social order is a certain irreducible amount of violence, and that’s where Eastwood’s Dirty Harry comes in. He never questions the value of social order: it means, simply, the protection of the weak: and if he curses the weaselly politicians at the top of that order, it is because they have betrayed their trust. In the latest Dirty Harry film, The Enforcer, Harry (Callahan, by the way) actually roughs up a priest—who has been gullibly sheltering a gang of phony revolutionaries. There are no real revolutionaries in Harry’s world, nor any reformers; how could there be? His time horizons are short, futurity is bleak or unreal, and the only genuine social imperative is securing a little permanence. Those who talk about grandiose improvements are ignoring the palpable dissolution around them. They are stupid, fraudulent, or gutless, and their verbal artifices serve only to block out reality.

The respectable popular movie-—the kind that gets reviewed in Time or Newsweek less as a discrete work of art than as an installment in a cultural serial—has a different kind of hero. Though descended from the dumb brute disaffection of Marlon Brando’s prime, he is himself a verbalist, also in rebellion against his superiors, but set off from them less by his courage than by his sense of irony. While they assume the legitimacy of social conventions, institutions, and appearances, he knows it all for the corruption and hypocrisy it is. Jack Nicholson, the freestyle smart ass, came along at a time propitious for open cynicism; his electric, rather mean charm conceals the moral complacency of his screen persona, who moves from bedding women to belting them without ever going on the defensive ethically, because all his sensational pleasures are kept subordinate to his mission of battling the powers that be. He is the Life Force, whom society resists and oppresses, but never supports.

JS

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Joseph Sobran

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Since movie audiences generally like to “identify” with characters, it is instructive to look at film heroes now and then. Working-class heroes tend to be the Clint Eastwood type, strong and silent, each of whose blunt words issues from impacted character, which pretty much means physical courage. By his willingness to lay himself on the line, often risking death, he shows up the evasive middle-class verbalists for whom he does the dirty work. The villain he chases down and kills is the drug-crazed sadist or the unappeasable fanatic or the utterly cynical predator. The lesson is that the bottom line of social order is a certain irreducible amount of violence, and that’s where Eastwood’s Dirty Harry comes in. He never questions the value of social order: it means, simply, the protection of the weak: and if he curses the weaselly politicians at the top of that order, it is because they have betrayed their trust. In the latest Dirty Harry film, The Enforcer, Harry (Callahan, by the way) actually roughs up a priest—who has been gullibly sheltering a gang of phony revolutionaries. There are no real revolutionaries in Harry’s world, nor any reformers; how could there be? His time horizons are short, futurity is bleak or unreal, and the only genuine social imperative is securing a little permanence. Those who talk about grandiose improvements are ignoring the palpable dissolution around them. They are stupid, fraudulent, or gutless, and their verbal artifices serve only to block out reality.

The respectable popular movie-—the kind that gets reviewed in Time or Newsweek less as a discrete work of art than as an installment in a cultural serial—has a different kind of hero. Though descended from the dumb brute disaffection of Marlon Brando’s prime, he is himself a verbalist, also in rebellion against his superiors, but set off from them less by his courage than by his sense of irony. While they assume the legitimacy of social conventions, institutions, and appearances, he knows it all for the corruption and hypocrisy it is. Jack Nicholson, the freestyle smart ass, came along at a time propitious for open cynicism; his electric, rather mean charm conceals the moral complacency of his screen persona, who moves from bedding women to belting them without ever going on the defensive ethically, because all his sensational pleasures are kept subordinate to his mission of battling the powers that be. He is the Life Force, whom society resists and oppresses, but never supports.