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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

The Cop Show

  
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
10:47 / 04.04.03
If one fictional figure can be said to have dominated the popcult of the eighties, it was the Cop. Fuckin' police everywhere you turned, worse than real life. What an incredible bore.

Powerful Cops--protecting the meek and humble--at the expense of a half-dozen or so articles of the Bill of Rights--"Dirty Harry." Nice human cops, coping with human perversity, coming out sweet 'n' sour, you know, gruff & knowing but still soft inside--Hill Street Blues--most evil TV show ever. Wiseass black cops scoring witty racist remarks against hick white cops, who nevertheless come to love each other--Eddie Murphy, Class Traitor. For that masochist thrill we got wicked bent cops who threaten to topple our Kozy Konsensus Reality from within like Giger-designed tapeworms, but naturally get blown away just in the nick of time by the Last Honest Cop, Robocop, ideal amalgam of prosthesis and sentimentality.

[T]he Cop Show has only three characters--victim, criminal, and policeperson--but the first two fail to be fully human--only the pig is real.

Hakim Bey, 'Boycott Cop Culture!'

So. The idea for this thread started when I was reading this one, and thinking about the fact that I agree with pretty much every thing Ganesh says in it about the pernicious effect of medical dramas, and yet reserve my right to watch and enjoy (sometimes) ER. More specifically, I started thinking about how the flawed, more 'human' attributes or situations given to characters in medical dramas (uh-oh, Dr ----- slept with a patient's wife! etc) doesn't negate the overall portrayal of people in the medical profession as heroes in a manner that has potentially damaging consequences in the 'real world'.

That reminded me of the above section of the Bey piece, which in turn got me thinking about NYPD Blue (currently on after The Sopranos on Channel 4, and something I watch even though it's clearly jumped the shark) and The Shield (I was hooked on the first series, which is all we've had in the UK). Then E. Randy Dupre mentioned in another thread how good a character he thinks Sipowitz is, and I had to get my arse in gear and start this thread.

See, as far as I can tell (and I watch 'em a lot), Bey is right: these police shows are blatant propaganda telling the viewer how great, how heroic and how *necessary* cops are. From show to show, the way this is done differs - the extent to which the power relations between cop, perp and victim are fetishised will vary, or the level on which the show is prepared to depict (and condemn or apologise for) police brutality. But ultimately, the 'human flaws' of the cop protagonists will only serve to show us how noble and long-suffering these people are for doing the job they do... "They're not perfect, but where would we be without these people, huh?" may as well be stamped at the end of the credits of every episode of almost every series.

To start with just one example: NYPD Blue in particular is like some kind of right-wing ideology porn much of the time - the 'bad guys' are almost invariably young black men, often either crackheads or homeless gay hustlers: such a powerful, dangerous element in society needs to be dealt with in very harsh terms (always with the threat of violence, or the reality of it) by the squad of honest, mostly blue-collar cops, lest they prey on the honest blue-collar and middle-class law-abiding populace. And Andy Sipowitz... look, I used to like the portrayal of Sipowitz, and I don't know how much the show changed and how much I did, but... It strikes me that these days, after all the loss he's been put through, we're supposed to applaud Sipowitz every time they bring a young black kid off the streets into the interview room and Andy doesn't beat the shit out of him - what admirable restraint, since this 'perp' obviously disgusts him so! How noble of Andy to be able to show the chief of the squad even the tiniest amount of respect, even though he is a negro! How touching that he treats the gay receptionist with only palpable mild distaste and grimacing, rather than hitting him repeatedly in the face with a steel pipe every day! You get the picture...

(And yes, despite all this I'm still a sucker for cop shows - because generally, I don't believe in limiting my enjoyment of art/entertainment through my politics, only in keeping an eye open to some of the messages being conveyed.)

Thoughts?
 
 
Eloi Tsabaoth
11:45 / 04.04.03
Isn't this true of all (or most) job led TV? Doctors, Vets, Firemen, even to a certain extent Lawyers? Mostly noble, slightly flawed, totally unlike real people.
It all goes back to Dragnet, I fear, a TV series so unlike the actual LA cops at the time it's almost like a polar opposite. Copaganda.
 
 
Jack Fear
13:34 / 04.04.03
Interesting that you should say that. DRAGNET was, if anything, intended as an antidote to the unreality of most cop shows, where the policeman acted like the Marshall of Dodge City.

The original DRAGNET showed cop life as pretty goddam boring, actually—a grind of small-time busts, long hours, bad food, loneliness—a job like any other. The cops weren't hugely heroic figures, but working stiffs, not even remotely glamorous. But Friday and his partners weren't protagonists in the sense that the cops of NYPD BLUE are: they barely had any character traits at all—they were stand-ins, Everycop. The focus, I thought, was squarely on the cases themselves ("The story is true!") In that respect, I think DRAGNET puts the lie to Bey's assertion that in the cop show, "only the pig is real."

Obviously, it had a pro-police agenda, in that it presented the profession in a generally positive light: but there was no myth-making there. It was drawn from life, and felt like it.

How, in your opinion, did DRAGNET contribute to the sort of cop-idolatry that Bey is on about?

Oh, and as a sidenote, this...

Mostly noble, slightly flawed, totally unlike real people.

You don't think most real people are generally well-intentioned, if flawed?
 
 
Eloi Tsabaoth
14:15 / 04.04.03
I must admit my exposure to Dragnet is probably considerably less than yours. I guess what I meant was that the LA police department in the 50s was so rife with corruption and abuse (although often justified by the cops as a necessary response to the rising crime rate).

You don't think most real people are generally well-intentioned, if flawed?

In my experience more the latter than the former. In terms of cop-shows I like, I feel Homicide has a great deal of the moral complexity and emotional realism Flyboy requires, multiple overlapping cases which aren't always solved, less action and more procedure etc.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
16:49 / 04.04.03
On NYPD Blue: while I agree with a lot of your complaints, Fly (specifically the accusation that the perps are generally one of a couple of 'types'), I've read the Sipowicz thing differently. The episode the other week, where he shoots three black guys and spends the rest of the fifty minutes under threat of suspension, was more about his awareness that he'll never erased his past. He needs Fancy's assurance because, at this stage in the game, he's the person he's worked with the longest in the squad and respects the most. It's all a question of nerves and redemption there - the stumbling paying of respect is awkward because he knows he fucked up bad for years and that hangs over him.

(Not really what he thread's about, I know, but I get the distinct feeling that the show is going to become deeply shit soon - the loss of James McDaniel can't be good, and S9 is, apparently, NYPD Light, something that we've been edging towards for a good couple of years now.)

But yeah, cop shows - especially those that purport to be 'gritty' - are nearly always about the hero keeping us safe from society's lower dregs. I normally can't stomach them, but NYPD Blue has a stange hold over me.

One thing about the Bey quote - Robocop's satire. I know that's obvious in a lot ways - the manner in which it plays on TV, corporate power, visions of near-future societies, etc, is ham-fisted at best - but I've always presumed that the hero-worship and, more importantly, the sentimentality, were also part of the joke. The brave, decent cop, determined to see justice done despite losing his family and being shot to shit. Do I credit Verhoeven with too much intelligence?
 
 
Jack Fear
16:52 / 04.04.03
Verhoeven has always walked the fine line between clever and stupid, and his films almost always come so close to saying the opposite of what they really say, and so convincingly, that it's often impossible to determine what constitutes "really" (see also Starship Troopers).
 
  
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