Heroes In Hard Times

6. The Criminal Class

6 The Criminal Class I could talk about industrialization and men's fashions all day. - criminal to victim in Die Hard The story thus far presents cops disrespected by a service economy open more to communication skills than to muscle, and by angry lovers who will leave if cops do not shape up. They are out of luck and nearly out of work. Sometimes they take the advice of sidekicks about relationships. Always they prove their value as protectors from deadly evil. Sidekicks, neighbors, lovers, and even some authorities thank them for saving their lives. Heroes patch romantic bonds, strike friendships at work, align with the oppressed, and blow criminals away. They have a hard time repudiating white male rage and accepting moral guidance. Heroic white men find redemption in the defense ofthose they deride or neglect as coworkers and lovers. They become heroes not despite these paradoxes but because ofthem. They display but restrain their hateful natures and torch the worst of straight, white manhood. Good and evil involves more than this, though. What, for instance, should we make of its erotically charged violence? What place do associations between sin, capitalism, greed, and exchanges between men have in their hard times? This chapter spells out a moral logic in the slaughter of men who exchange money. As the terrain in which men trade resources among themselves, male bonding becomes the focus of much of the genre's mayhem. In Chapter 5 I explored the common ground between cop and criminal, their status as white men (mostly) and their strained bonds with everyone else. Here, I describe 123 Copyrighted Material 124 Chapter Six the differences between heroes and villains, divided by a classbound code ofhonor that sorts those who deserve death from those who will live a while longer. Just as scornful bosses make up a managerial class fixed on bending workers to their wills, so do many criminals come from an owner class bent on screwing their society for kicks. The criminal class includes alongside the loony serial killers and street drug dealers the robber barons, would-be capitalists, and legitimate owners at the helm ofso many senates, boards, companies, and committees upon which others depend for their livelihoods. The genre presents these rulers as mysterious, irrational, and whimsically vicious-ideal fodder for fantasies of corruption on high. Sometimes cops join such men in their dealings; and the crimes that doom cops to grief or death include not only xenophobic murders of nonwhites and white women but also robberies that victimize innocents, and murders for financial gain. Cops regard these activities as destructive and seek shelter with white women and nonwhite sidekicks because intimacies between wealthy white men bear evil fruit. How does one tell a hero from a villain in a genre that associates evil with white manhood generally? One of the more reliable distinctions between the doomed and the saved arises tautologically from my definition of the genre. Cop action movies are those in which heroes are cops. Since, in most stories, the position of the hero as the subjective center allows one to delineate "good" from "bad," I could conclude that the moral logic was just that simple. One begins with the cop around whom the story appears to center, on whom the camera tends to focus, and about whom others often speak, the character from whose vantage we see, and we regard all people who anger him as "criminal" or "bad." For example, near the end of The Last Boy Scout the cop Joe fights a criminal named Milo. They pummel each other, Milo stabs Joe in the thigh, and then is blown off a high scaffold by police gunfire. As he falls, a helicopter flies up toward him. We see Milo's falling body first, then Copyrighted Material The Criminal Class 125 the helicopter cockpit, and then the rotors and realize what's coming. Finally Milo hits the spinning blades and explodes in a cloud of red flesh. The fun of Milo's undoing comes partly in his outrageous fate and partly from the fact that he has been cruel to Joe, who has promised him death in return. Milo's dicing is both promise fulfilled and narrative closed; he is but one of many men who die after troubling a movie's hero. Anyone who shoots at a hero, or who threatens, much less harms, a friend or relative of the...