Heroes In Hard Times

Preface

Preface Isaw my first white guy get his head blown offin 1982 during a cable TV showing of The Border. The guy runs Latinos over the border in Texas and profits from their deaths, but during a scrap with the hero he falls on his shotgun and ... blam! Later the hero shoots the tires from under a truck sheltering another bad white guy, who screams as he's crushed. I got a charge from the gruesome violence and did not understand why for another ten years. By then I had begun to think about white male guilt and its punishment in our popular culture. Bad white men abound and die in awful ways in the movies we watch, and I wrote this book both to interpret that bloodshed and to argue with fellow scholars about what it means. My journey toward this study began with a love of violent movies in which men abuse each other (I shied from slashers, rape-revenge, and westerns in which they rape and murder women). A few years ago, a like-minded colleague and I noticed that manhood seems to drive most Hollywood product: Male heroes abound, young boys mull over their coming-ofage , concerns for potency color many plots and scenes. Then one day I watched Die Hard. This engaging movie, in which a cop rescues corporate partygoers from murderous bandits, seemed to work over male privilege and anal sex, ofall things.l That in mind, and my interest piqued, I reviewed the genre that Die Hard represents. This book studies 193 of those movies in some detail and argues that they address economic and moral hard times in the United States. As I make this argument, I also bicker with an analytic literature about what cop movies mean. Though few people study much cop action, many sociologists, historians, literary Vll Copyrighted Material Vlll Preface and film analysts, and nonacademic researchers have written about a few movies. A list ofreferences would run too long to reproduce here, in part because dozens of analysts with other axes to grind mention cop action movies here and there, devoting a paragraph or a page.2 Many ofthem provide little support for their arguments; the writers did not intend close study and simply pass quick judgment. A few manage mini genre studies, analyzing a handful ofsimilar interracial-male-bonding movies.3 Though some analysts pay more attention to the uniquely cinematic qualities of these stories than do others,4 virtually all regard the movies in terms of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Many critique the genre as hiding its politics; and most find movies to be in some ways racist, homophobic, individualist , pro-Reagan, capitalist, or misogynist. Some ana1ysts seem to have fun finding loopy subtexts, homoerotic mainly; at least as many seem offended by the movies. This book adds to that literature a comprehensive definition of the genre, a look at its massive scope, and thus a picture of trends across it. Does Lethal Weapon typifY cop action? What light do the other movies shed on its horseplay? Do analysts' casual remarks about action movies in general hold water? Assuming that the meaning of a genre movie depends upon patterns in the larger set, I find, for instance, that Lethal Weapon looks different to me than to most of the other authors who write about it (see the end of Chapter 5 for more on this). I especially want to argue with colleagues over the moral complexity and self-awareness of oppressive straight white men. In other words, lots ofwhite guys in cop action turn out to be bad; but do they know it and what do they think about it? Much of the literature imputes both reactionary machismo and political blindness to the genre, accusing it ofcynical contradiction , erasure of its historical roots, and vain attempts to make narrative sense as it follows its evil impulses. In such a view oppressors know not what they do; and whiteness, heterosexuality , and manhood remain ignorant charades to be unCopyrighted Material Preface ix derstood mainly by professional class analysts, certainly not by the cops or anyone else in the cop action world. Even when analysts do find "critical" impulses in movies, they argue that forces of "hegemony" or "recuperation" blunt them to the point of uselessness or nonsense. I will show, however, that cops often spell out the place of racism, misogyny, and capitalist greed in...