What a fabulous and deeply contextualized take on a film I love to watch and don’t like to think about why I love to watch it! It’s an interesting point about Andrew Robinson. I was a huge fan of his performance on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as Garak before I realized he also played Scorpio—his face is swaddled in prosthetics. And wow surprise appearance by Armistead Maupin! Another fave!
Jason: The sound you hear in the background is my mind working away after one read of Dirty Harry. Mimes and templates and what works inside the average human mind. There seems to be a wave of thinking about this moment in history, with the sudden emergence of a leader who is hugely disruptive of an established order that has worn out. Is he hero? Is he antihero? Is he villain?
This is the kind to stuff I love to contemplate. I will have more reactions as I wrestle with my own Dirty Harry who actually worked inside a bureaucracy that used Hobbesian Dirty Harry tactics. I think I mentioned that under Hoover, street agents operated on the belief they could do literally anything, as long as it was ordered by The President, The Attorney General or The Director himself. That era was coming to an end in the 1970s, when my story took place. Courts and civil libertarians (the old-school kind) were trying to reel the Bureau in and ultimately did so but only after the Establishment worked out a compromise that would allow court-sanctioned wiretaps and microphones and further would allow the introduction of evidence gathered in that way to be used in court. Another part of the compromise was the creation of RICO, the law that recognized there were bad guys out there who had banded together. There are still FBI squads that install "wires" and "read other peoples mail." They just do it with the permission (at least usually) of a court. FISA courts are an example.
So we have a new world today, and new jurisprudence. Formally-denominated terrorist organizations like Tren de Aragua and MS-13 can be investigated by hard-case cops with the formal approval of the courts. Probably a good thing, or at least necessary. But also detrimental to individual rights. Your question about how far the hero can go and still maintain the respect of the citizenry is as viable as ever. It started, in my view, with Hobbes, the authoritarian, versus Locke, the liberationist. And we still haven't answered it definitively.
"Harry finds Scorpio and tortures him into revealing the girl’s location. Scorpio, playing the victim, demands that Harry respect his ‘human rights’."
In 2002, this scenario became reality in Germany. Magnus Gäfgen kidnaped the 11 year old Jakob von Metzler and tried to extort 1 million euros from the parents. After his arrest, a high-ranked police officer decided to threaten him with torture in order to get Gäfgen to reveal the place where he held Jakob captive (in the unlikely event that he was still alive). Gäfgen then confessed that he had already killed von Metzler and told them where he dumped the body. Gäfgen was sentenced for murder (of course). The policemen who threatened him were sentenced in another trial and had to leave service. But after his trial, the imprisoned Gäfgen initiated various lawsuits against the policemen involved, the federal state of Hessen (in which the whole story took place) and other institutions, because he saw himself as a victim of torture. He even went to the European Court of Human Rights with his case. And even though he did not achieve his main goal to get released from prison, he was partly successful.
What a fabulous and deeply contextualized take on a film I love to watch and don’t like to think about why I love to watch it! It’s an interesting point about Andrew Robinson. I was a huge fan of his performance on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as Garak before I realized he also played Scorpio—his face is swaddled in prosthetics. And wow surprise appearance by Armistead Maupin! Another fave!
Jason: The sound you hear in the background is my mind working away after one read of Dirty Harry. Mimes and templates and what works inside the average human mind. There seems to be a wave of thinking about this moment in history, with the sudden emergence of a leader who is hugely disruptive of an established order that has worn out. Is he hero? Is he antihero? Is he villain?
This is the kind to stuff I love to contemplate. I will have more reactions as I wrestle with my own Dirty Harry who actually worked inside a bureaucracy that used Hobbesian Dirty Harry tactics. I think I mentioned that under Hoover, street agents operated on the belief they could do literally anything, as long as it was ordered by The President, The Attorney General or The Director himself. That era was coming to an end in the 1970s, when my story took place. Courts and civil libertarians (the old-school kind) were trying to reel the Bureau in and ultimately did so but only after the Establishment worked out a compromise that would allow court-sanctioned wiretaps and microphones and further would allow the introduction of evidence gathered in that way to be used in court. Another part of the compromise was the creation of RICO, the law that recognized there were bad guys out there who had banded together. There are still FBI squads that install "wires" and "read other peoples mail." They just do it with the permission (at least usually) of a court. FISA courts are an example.
So we have a new world today, and new jurisprudence. Formally-denominated terrorist organizations like Tren de Aragua and MS-13 can be investigated by hard-case cops with the formal approval of the courts. Probably a good thing, or at least necessary. But also detrimental to individual rights. Your question about how far the hero can go and still maintain the respect of the citizenry is as viable as ever. It started, in my view, with Hobbes, the authoritarian, versus Locke, the liberationist. And we still haven't answered it definitively.
"Harry finds Scorpio and tortures him into revealing the girl’s location. Scorpio, playing the victim, demands that Harry respect his ‘human rights’."
In 2002, this scenario became reality in Germany. Magnus Gäfgen kidnaped the 11 year old Jakob von Metzler and tried to extort 1 million euros from the parents. After his arrest, a high-ranked police officer decided to threaten him with torture in order to get Gäfgen to reveal the place where he held Jakob captive (in the unlikely event that he was still alive). Gäfgen then confessed that he had already killed von Metzler and told them where he dumped the body. Gäfgen was sentenced for murder (of course). The policemen who threatened him were sentenced in another trial and had to leave service. But after his trial, the imprisoned Gäfgen initiated various lawsuits against the policemen involved, the federal state of Hessen (in which the whole story took place) and other institutions, because he saw himself as a victim of torture. He even went to the European Court of Human Rights with his case. And even though he did not achieve his main goal to get released from prison, he was partly successful.