“Some of those that work forces / Are the same that burn crosses”
- Rage Against the Machine
In November of 1992 I was ten years old and living with my family in a double-wide trailer on a nice stretch of property nestled deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwestern Virginia. Two years prior we’d fled the already small town we had called home up to that point, forcing me to reluctantly leave all of my childhood friends behind, including several families of color, and subsequently spend the worst years of everybody’s life—middle school—surrounded by little more than sunburned white skin, slurs drawled out through tobacco spit and Confederate flags attached to literally everything. People talk about the insidious nature of racism all the time but most Americans haven’t really put in the time wallowing through its germination stages. I rode the school bus for 45 minutes each morning and afternoon along dusty, frequently treacherous roads that wound through the mountainous backwaters of a rural landscape both beautiful in its natural abundance and wretched with the dual pockmarks of poverty and ignorance. I struck up conversations with fellow 3rd and 4th graders about nothing more particular than how many cousins they had, where they liked to go swimming and whether they’d read Jurassic Park. Some kids lived in legitimate shacks with dirt floors; others came from comparatively well-off homes with multiple shining 4-wheelers parked in the yard. Everyone was friendly; we were all children.
Over the years I would hear more and more of the racist language from their parents at home bleeding into the school bus conversations. It was obvious that most of these kids had no idea what they were saying. Many had never seen a non-white person in real life. Diversity was non-existent round those parts. But habit breeds familiarity and ultimately comfort and dependence, so the mysterious grievances of their hateful guardians took hold as a legitimate belief system, and an entirely new generation of bigots was crafted before my very eyes. As the rhetoric became more confident and the distasteful banter of prejudice increasingly impossible to avoid, I started using all of that time in transit to perfect my introversion, clamping the big soft headphones of a Discman over my ears and staring out the bus window, watching the infinity of trees rush by. And in November of 1992 I managed to come into possession of a pair of CDs that would forever alter my outlook on race relations in America and the entrenched, increasingly unignorable power structures of white supremacy. While the dirt-caked redneck offspring with whom I had briefly shared the innocence of childhood screamed the N-word at each other behind the imperturbable sentinel of the bus driver’s head, the harsh and very real consequences of that racist chrysalis bursting were detailed for me by the angry poetry of two men of color from the other side of the country.
Zach de la Rocha and Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled debut taught me all about the origins of racist cops, and O’Shea Jackson—better known as Ice Cube—dropped The Predator to keep me up to date on the bullshit they were perpetuating. As a ten year old struggling to parse the reality of the Los Angeles riots, Cube kept it simple enough, espousing “not guilty? / the filthy / devils tried to kill me” and I knew which was the right side to be on. RATM had already educated me on why and how the cops could be so fucked up, and even as a child it was easy to identify the four white police officers mercilessly beating an unarmed black man within of inch of his life as the actual villains that everyone and everything had warned me about, law & order indoctrination be damned. People stress about the propagandist narratives of childhood (and adult) entertainments, and rightfully so, but any adolescent with half a brain can see the difference between wisecracking tough softie John McClane and blood-splattered racist warpig Stacey Koon. The cognitive dissonance inflicted on a developing mind in a situation where figures of authority and supposed protection & service reveal themselves as the actual bad guys can obviously be difficult, but it’s also one hell of a wakeup call. The prism through which I viewed the American police force’s relationship to the nation’s populace—and the racist agenda of the nation’s criminal justice system at large—would forever be influenced by such high-visibility cases that ultimately never did quite enough to peel back the curtain on the underlying rot of white supremacy, and the blazing hot spotlight that the work of RATM, Ice Cube and other angry titans of protest culture would shine on that despicable fact.
Fast forward ten years to my twentieth birthday party. It’s late into the cold February night of a Richmond Virginia winter but I’m shirtless anyway, still nursing a head wound from a recent car accident (not my fault) and vomiting out of a window (my fault). The cops have come, and they’re corralling everyone out of the house and off towards their own respective drunken oblivions. Tensions are running high, as they always do when the police are involved. I’m not leaving the house that night, but I nevertheless feel inclined to lean shirtless out of the vomit-sheathed windowsill, shouting angrily at the cops “look at how much everyone hates you! How does it feel to know that everyone hates you?” Some friends pull me back inside and absolutely nothing happens. The police leave without incident. I am a white man misbehaving in the former capital of the Confederacy; I will face no consequences. The year is 2002 and Richmond is a majority Black city adorned with monstrous statues commemorating traitorous white men who went to war in a failed effort to keep Black people enslaved. Eventually I will move to the neighborhood of Jackson Ward, once known as “the Harlem of the South.” A stronghold of Black entrepreneurship, Jackson Ward’s power was whittled away by racist redlining. Virginia put an interstate right through the middle of it. I will spend years being publicly intoxicated there, but never fear for my life during countless encounters with police officers. I will still be white, privileged and stupid. And the cops will have an agenda to focus on. Their race war has never ended.
Twenty years pass. Former white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin is convicted on April 20, 2021 for the murder of George Floyd, a Black man who died slowly and painfully for using a counterfeit $20 bill. Less than two weeks later, Chauvin’s legal team is already disputing the conviction based on footage of one of the jurors wearing a Black Lives Matter hat at an event commemorating Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech from the March on Washington. In America, expressing solidarity with a movement to end racist police violence against minority communities can be painted as incompatible with the smooth running order of supposed justice. Our system cannot tolerate expressions of rage against racial injustice, because the machineries of our system are oiled by racial intolerance. Where official slavery ended, the legal system stepped in to make sure non-white bodies continued to be shackled and either exploited or ignored. Our police forces simply feed the machine; the entrenched culture of racial animosity and power-mad tribalism makes it all possible, but the churning nucleus that stirs these foot-soldiers forward is the economic impetus of our 13th Amendment. Legal slavery as punishment for crimes. Punishment disproportionately sought for people of color. Me, white, drunkenly screaming into a cop’s face just to wake up the next day with a hangover. George Floyd, not white, quietly making a mistake, to never wake up again. The Ku Klux Kops on patrol, in charge, and out of their collective minds.
All that being said, I still fuck with American cop films. Obviously they run the spectrum; some unforgivably irresponsible (1971’s Dirty Harry), others admirably subversive (1985’s To Live and Die in LA). All are fun to watch. It’s possible to be aware that there is no LAPD officer as idealistically good as Keanu Reeves in 1994’s Speed, but it’s still okay to cheer when he decapitates Dennis Hopper. This week I’ve decided to focus on two films that ostensibly focus on cops, but more incisively deal with the world in which they exist. Both are extremely dark and violent, which is honestly only appropriate.
DREDD (2012) dir. Pete Travis
I argued earlier that most adolescents can identify the disparity between the idealized hero fantasies of police-focused entertainment and the depressing reality of Klansmen behind badges. I also pointed out that audiences still shouldn’t feel guilty about enjoying a good cop flick. But don’t get it twisted; “copaganda” does exist. Even the perennial Christmas classic Die Hard (1988)—a perfect action movie—is still about the triumphant glory of a shook cop growing comfortable enough to pick up his shunned service weapon and kill again (rest in power, Reginald). But Die Hard is still a movie that I will watch at least once every year until I die. I know that a real-life John McClane would probably beat the shit out of me over a parking ticket (and never face consequences), but it’s nice to watch fake John McClane run around barefoot and blow away greedy European terrorists. It’s a movie. Most importantly, it’s a movie that never cartoonishly demonizes the low-level criminals most police officers spend their time harassing, those driven to crimes of desperation and need born of poverty. Hans Gruber is a white collar asshole, and the idea that any of those guys would ever face any real consequences is pure fantasy.
Ironically, the futuristic world of 2000 AD character Judge Dredd is one significantly more rooted in the miseries of reality. The teeming sprawl of Mega-City One is rife with the everyday crimes of a desperate populace perpetually ground under the punitive boot of the Judge System. For nearly 50 years, multiple writers and artists have used the comic and its imaginary fascist future to satirize the modern world’s lamentable approach to crime and punishment. Little wonder that Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 masterpiece of America-skewering sci-fi action Robocop was so heavily inspired by it. It’s a world filled with characters absolutely begging for cinematic treatment, although it’s best to flat out ignore the execrable 1995 Stallone vehicle that somehow managed to recognize that Judge Dredd was a fascist stormtrooper upholding a pitiless meatgrinder of empty justice without ever realizing that this was actually a bad thing. What a relief that Pete Travis’s more recent adaptation does the near impossible by nailing the tone of John Wagner’s creation without sacrificing any of the wit or commentary that have made the character and his world endure for so long, while still delivering an absolutely visceral blast of ultraviolent spectacle. As a human being, I detest firearms and the people who love them, I yearn and protest for criminal justice reform and I tend to prefer quiet evenings at home. But as an action-oriented cinephile with an adolescent heart, I want to bask in gorgeously rendered vistas of hyper-masculine hand-cannons making heads gratuitously explode in slow-motion. And if I don’t have to feel like an absolute idiot while watching it happen? ::Chef’s kiss:: What I’m trying to get at here is that this movie kicks ass.
The eternally underrated Karl Urban is perfect as the titular automaton, never once removing his helmet or inconveniencing himself with the nuisance of a recognizable emotion. This Dredd is, by definition, a “good cop.” He follows, upholds and defends the Law as written to an absurd degree, never allowing moral quandaries or circumstantial factors to deter him from total devotion to a code he never questions. Essentially, he is not human. Olivia Thirlby is perfect as the psychic (“mutant”) recruit Anderson, introducing a world-weary degree of compassion and a healthy dose of uncertainty. Naturally, Dredd can’t wait to fail her. But the real star of this totalitarian shitshow is Lena Headey, virtually unrecognizable as the merciless drug lord Ma-Ma. The movie is smart enough to give us a brief interlude into the psychology and history behind her gruesome metamorphosis from low-tier sex worker to Machiavellian supervillain with a gift for cruelty and a nearly disinterested assumption of total power; she is a true creature of Mega-City One, molded into her diabolical final form by the omnipresent forces of a crushing lack of opportunity and the crumbling concrete expanses that stretch from one horizon to the next. A predicted world that sounds more familiar with each passing year in our real one. Ma-ma maintains her iron grip on the denizens of the hilariously named Peach Trees mega-block because her Slo-Mo cartel is the only economic opportunity available, a lack of choice never considered by Dredd but one which grows painfully obvious to Anderson as she must defend her life by murdering Ma-ma’s hapless employees.
When four other Judges show up to hunt down Dredd and Anderson in exchange for a ludicrous sum from Ma-ma, the fallibility of the totalitarian system is illuminated. Their voice-activated Lawgiver super-weapons are now operating on the wrong side of the law, rendering the supposed delineation between Right and Wrong entirely moot; justice is always for sale. The incorruptibility of Dredd himself is perhaps the most fantastical element of this nightmarish vision. Or is it the fact that Dredd sets his own Lawmaker to “stun” when fired upon by children? Either way, the implications in relation to our own reality are damning. When American law enforcement enjoys a militarized arsenal and total immunity from accountability, it’s just tough luck when racist assholes with badges repeatedly choose to utilize both. Throughout the film it’s obvious just how terrified the average citizen of Mega-City One is of the Judges. Ask the diverse population of any modern American city how they feel about the police forces aggressively roving their neighborhoods and you may hear a similar sentiment. But as I stroll around the majority white coastal suburban neighborhood I currently call home, I see just as many “thin blue line” flags as I do personal pontoon boats, and there is a Punisher decal on nearly every F-150 crammed into almost every single driveway. These beneficiaries of white supremacy, so fearful of the urban hordes they know nothing about, are fully aware of who the police are protecting and serving. And as for everyone else unlucky enough to live within these gilded parameters, squabbling over the scant resources abandoned by bloated elites to our very own Cursed Earth? As Dredd himself would say, “it’s all the deep end,” and our own system of injustice leaves no other options than to keep treading water.
TOO OLD TO DIE YOUNG (2019) dir. Nicolas Winding Refn
Danish hyper-stylist Nicolas Winding Refn claims to have been inspired by the hyper-American campaign and presidency of Donald J. Trump (ew) while developing his 13 hour Los Angeles neo-noir opus Too Old to Die Young. No wonder, then, that the cops in Refn’s serialized film are primarily boors who openly celebrate fascism. The story begins with a police officer sexually harassing and intimidating a woman he has pulled over while his partner—our supposed hero—does nothing, and ends with multiple righteous massacres. Refn is often accused of placing style over substance, whatever the fuck that means, but critics and audiences alike seem either incapable or unwilling to allow themselves to simmer in the complex uncertainty he depicts so beautifully. He briefly became everyone’s favorite filmmaker after 2011’s Drive reminded us all that the 1980s looked and sounded great, but quickly alienated his new fans with the more esoteric follow-up Only God Forgives in 2013. Both were neon-drenched, hallucinatory eviscerations of toxic masculinity, but the latter film made it a lot more difficult to accidentally identify with its “cool” protagonist. It’s a theme that runs throughout his entire oeuvre and may reach its pinnacle in this latest effort. The world of Too Old… is exclusively populated by corrupt cops, sociopathic cartel bosses and predatory pornographers, with the occasional palate cleanser of a comparatively wholesome rocksteady loving crime boss or masturbating father figure.
Stoically depicted by the bizarrely unlikable Miles Teller, main cop Martin is an empty vessel in a uniform who hunts down pedophiles when he isn’t spending time with his underage girlfriend. His moral compass is hopelessly warped if not entirely absent, and he serves as our unsettling avatar on a journey through the underbelly of America. Perhaps the best that can be said about the police as Refn sees them is that none of them are openly racist, although they do at one point perform a bizarre and confusingly nationalistic play about the crucifixion of Jesus. They are, however, entirely ineffectual at the prevention or punishment of crime, instead focusing on their own entitled enrichment while the real work of hunting down legitimate monsters is handled by a one-eyed former government agent being directed by a secret mystic, and the mysterious Mexican woman Yaritza (the striking and nearly silent Cristina Rodlo), who works for a cartel that she is secretly undermining by murdering its members and setting their trafficked female victims free. Yaritza is the closest thing to justice that Refn allows, and it is she who is granted the privilege of donning a cool jacket (shades of Ryan Gosling in Drive) while she moonlights as the fabled High Priestess of Death. But Refn shrouds everything in glowing layers of symbolism, from the tarot-based episode titles to a feverish murder montage in a trailer park full of pedophiles (big ups to Santa Claus being blown away by a shotgun), so it’s impossible to say if his worldview is more aligned with the “cosmic nihilism” of Yukio Mishima or an underlying belief in celestial justice. This is, after all, a filmmaker who once had a Thai policeman with a penchant for karaoke seemingly retrieve a magical sword from between his own shoulders in order to mete out some divine punishment.
Such a grueling chiaroscuro would be overwhelming if not for Refn’s gifts as a visual artist par excellence, as well as his penchant for humor pitched beyond black. Colors pop out of the murk like the explosions of an unexpected fireworks display in the middle of the night, and the score by regular collaborator Cliff Martinez convincingly oozes with equal amounts of hope and dread. Moments like a botched assassination attempt in a yard populated by henchmen bobbing zombie-like to Prince Buster’s “Ten Commandments” and a high-speed chase with an electric car that gradually runs out of battery power help break up the exhaustive negative vibes, and even the most violent scenes are shot and edited with a tasteful degree of restraint. Refn wants to bum you out, but he wants you to think about why you’re bummed. He also knows how to draw you in with a prurience pitched somewhere between enticement and revulsion. The world he presents is an ugly one, but it’s a world we have all made possible, and he coats it in a sheen so attractive that we can’t help but want to peer inside. There are no moral absolutes here; even Yaritza is complicit in her cartel-usurping husband’s murderous plans to transform America into a “theme park of pain.” With her mystical origins, perhaps she is aware that we’ve already reached that point without his help. Or maybe she’s just letting him blow off some toxic steam while she bides her time pegging him and plotting to save the world.
By the time the story comes to an end (Amazon did not renew it for a second season, despite this being the best thing they’ve ever done), we have no idea where things stand. The impending apocalypse brought on by inevitable climate catastrophe and the alarming rise of fascism is referenced so casually as to be a foregone conclusion, and the closest thing we’ve been offered as a savior spends the final episode fingering herself in a lavish home, convinced that the end is near and effectively unconcerned about it. If those two chaotic integers of environmental destruction and unchecked fascism are in fact never confronted, either in Refn’s film or our own reality, we could very likely end up with a world that only Judge Dredd could love. Unless, of course, we can figure out how to act collectively and prevent any outcome that would register these creative visions as optimistic by comparison. I certainly can’t claim to be optimistic myself, when sales of ever larger gas-guzzling trucks continue to increase and any challenge to the protection of killer cops is met with racist dog whistles by depressingly popular elected officials. In the meantime at least we can watch cool action movies together and still unanimously agree that—say it with me now—ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS.