The very day I published my previous post, George Floyd was murdered by four Minneapolis police officers, sparking a series of nationwide—even worldwide—protests against police brutality and systemic racism.
Like many other industries, entertainment companies have issued statements of support for the protests against racism and police brutality now filling America’s streets. But there’s something Hollywood can do to put its money where its social media posts are: immediately halt production on cop shows and movies and rethink the stories it tells about policing in America.
For a century, Hollywood has been collaborating with police departments, telling stories that whitewash police shootings and valorizing an action-hero style of policing over the harder, less dramatic work of building relationships with the communities cops are meant to serve and protect. There’s a reason for that beyond a reactionary streak hiding below the industry’s surface liberalism. Purely from a dramatic perspective, crime makes a story seem consequential, investigating crime generates action, and solving crime provides for a morally and emotionally satisfying conclusion.
The result is an addiction to stories that portray police departments as more effective than they actually are; crime as more prevalent than it actually is; and police use of force as consistently justified. There are always gaps between reality and fiction, but given what policing in America has too often become, Hollywood’s version of it looks less like fantasy and more like complicity. . . .
. . . If the entertainment industry truly believes change can no longer wait, it should start with its own storytelling.
Alyssa Rosenberg, “Shut down all police movies and TV shows. Now.,” Act Four, Washington Post, June 4, 2020
It would be altogether impossible to quantify the hours my best friends and I—all Irish boys from the Bronx—spent in our youth delighting to the madcap mayhem of cop movies like Lethal Weapon and Die Hard, and how Beverly Hills Cop inspired us to fast-talk our way into all sorts of places we weren’t supposed to be, like the time outside the Cloisters we opportunistically insinuated ourselves into a school field trip—not from our junior high, that’s for damn sure—and got a tour of the museum and a free lunch for our efforts, or when, disguised as Boy Scouts, we sold candy under false pretenses in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria.
For the past three decades, we’ve kept spouses and colleagues in stitches with those anecdotes, and yet it’s only dawned on me over the last three weeks the reason we got away with any of that shit was owed far less to our cleverness than our color. Those juvenile adventures, energized by movies that trafficked in a worldview whereby (mostly) white men with badges were free to act without even the smallest measure of accountability, were an ethnic privilege I’ve spent my entire life taking for granted. I am the exact same age—less than one month younger—as the police officer directly culpable for the death of George Floyd.
Given this blog’s ongoing conversation about moral imagination in storytelling—and the responsibility of writers to interrogate the narratives we have long cherished—I thought it was worth chronicling how the police have been portrayed in our popular entertainment over the last century, how those portrayals have influenced public perception and supported real-world systemic dysfunction, and how storytellers can be part of the necessary reform by rehabilitating our own reliance on lazy, even dangerous, tropes—particularly that of the “hero detective.”
For the first half of the twentieth century, the Western was the genre through which we mythologized the American project, and the gunfighter (typically a nomadic cowboy, a lawman, an outlaw, or any combination thereof) was the archetypal hero of such stories, whose spirit of rugged, can-do individualism and courageous code of honor made him the perfect—and often but not always reluctant—agent of “frontier justice.” We’re a country founded on rebellion, after all, and we love our rebels—or antiheroes, as we call them in fiction.
But with the rise of organized crime during Prohibition and the ensuing poverty of the Depression, the relative moral simplicity of the open range gave way to the ethical complexity of the enclosed alleyways of our teeming metropolises. The hardboiled fiction of Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler presented “a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the finger man for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of money-making, where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practicing; a world where you may witness a holdup in broad daylight and see who did it, but you will fade quickly back into the crowd rather than tell anyone, because the holdup men may have friends with long guns, or the police may not like your testimony, and in any case the shyster for the defense will be allowed to abuse and vilify you in open court, before a jury of selected morons, without any but the most perfunctory interference from a political judge” (Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder: An Essay,” The Simple Art of Murder [New York: Vintage Books, August 1988], 17).
Accordingly, new kind of (anti)hero was needed, one uniquely suited to such labyrinthine urban intrigue:
But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.
ibid., 18
This distinctly American gumshoe differed appreciably from the preternaturally eidetic detectives of the Old World, like Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot: “Outwardly composed, but inwardly disheveled—like some bruised, tarnished variation on the folkloric All-American hero—his life, like that of most screen sleuths, is essentially a solitary one, as befits a hired snooper parrying the resentment of those in whose lives he necessarily interferes” (Al Clark, Raymond Chandler in Hollywood [Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 1996], 13). Unlike their European forebears, hardboiled detectives such as Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe (both notably played by Humphrey Bogart) did not serve as hired consultants for the local police, but rather worked around them, far too “insubordinate” for institutional law enforcement. This uniquely American iteration of the detective was decidedly, even proudly, an outsider—a rebel; an antihero.
By the late sixties, however, with race riots and antiwar protests literally setting our cities ablaze, insubordinate detectives previously unfit for our major metropolitan police departments—Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry, Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in The French Connection (both 1971)—were now sanctioned urban avengers, using deadly force with carte blanche impunity. Sure, catching the bad guy was the goal, but killing him—“Go ahead, make my day”—was the reward. Under the Nixon administration’s renewed law-and-order mandate—Tricky Dick was the first to call for the War on Drugs—the archetypal outsider detective was succeeded by the insider. (The outsider P.I., that same year, migrated to the underground cinema of blaxploitation, where he found new purpose in the groundbreaking Shaft franchise.) The badge on this detective’s hip, far from the instrument of constraint to which Bogart’s outsider hero detective refused to submit, was quite literally a license to kill.
It’s fitting, then, that in Reagan’s America, the next phase of the hero detective’s cultural metamorphosis was lionization. With the War on Drugs now in full swing, “conservative ideals of law and order drove a cluster of ’80 action movies, a phenomenon vividly explored in ‘Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan,’ J. Hoberman’s critical look at the decade’s moral depredations. Law enforcement and its military stand-ins had the movies’ undivided empathy and unmitigated lust. Dirty Harry’s clenched street purges and [Chuck] Norris’s dungaree justice had been eroticized. [Sylvester] Stallone’s lawmen—in ‘Cobra’ (1986) and ‘Tango & Cash’ (1989)—seem like strip-o-grams. We’d been made detective-sexual—the dirtier, the hotter, the nuttier, the better (Wesley Morris, “1985: When ‘Rambo’ Tightened His Grip on the American Psyche,” Critic’s Notebook, New York Times, May 28, 2020).
This was the MTV era, after all, and there was no reason violating constitutional rights with pornographically violent abandon couldn’t be fun. Enter a new permutation of the hero detective, along with a correspondingly new subgenre: the buddy-cop film. These are the action-comedies I was raised on, that influenced my imagination as a mischievous boy and later a Hollywood screenwriter—the very stories I now find myself objectively reappraising.
Let’s start with the epitome of the genre, Lethal Weapon (1987), a series which gets its title from Danny Glover’s suggestion that Mel Gibson’s Riggs ought to be registered as such for his cinematically volatile mix of Phoenix Program combat training and self-destructive emotional instability, incited by the death of his wife in a car accident two years earlier. The “despondent premature widower” trope is a recurring motif in Gibson’s movies, including the Mad Max trilogy. What’s more, the genuinely concerned department psychiatrist, earnestly played in all four Lethal Weapon films by Mary Ellen Trainor, is the target of perpetual ridicule at worst and summary dismissal at best. Who’s got time to sit on a sofa and work through your shit when there’s skulls that need a-crackin’?
In the first sequel (1989), Riggs yet again goes on a paroxysmal rampage when his innocent girlfriend (Patsy Kensit) is brutally murdered, but on the off chance that wasn’t sufficiently motivating, we retroactively learn the very same Euro-thugs intentionally killed Riggs’ wife years earlier (and staged the previously presumed “accident”) when one of his investigations was threatening to expose their criminal operation. Riggs’ berserker rage at the climax of Lethal Weapon 3 (1992) is catalyzed once more by the apparent mortal wounding of new squeeze Rene Russo, though she narrowly survives to the next sequel—presumably her cosmic reward for being just as violent as he is.
Russo’s Sgt. Lorna Cole notwithstanding, women are for the most part entirely expendable in this subgenre. If they aren’t serving merely as excuses for men to be violent, they are treated as objects of sexuality or scorn or both. When it comes to light that Bruce Willis’ best friend is having an affair with his wife in The Last Boy Scout (1991), only the former is deserving of forgiveness, as made explicit by Willis’ response to Damon Wayans’ observation that he doesn’t seem to like his wife: “At least I liked the guy she was fucking.” (Both The Last Boy Scout and the first two Lethal Weapons are the product of wunderkind spec screenwriter Shane Black.)
Less conspicuous than Lethal Weapon’s violence is its casual homophobia, evident in offhanded utterances like when Glover’s Murtaugh rushes to Riggs’ aid after he’s been thrown to the ground by an explosion, diving atop him to smother Riggs’ inflamed jacket; despite just having been nearly incinerated, Riggs’ spontaneous response to Glover’s protective feat is: “What are you—a f*g?” And only one scene earlier, as Murtaugh speculates that two women may have been in bed together at a crime scene, Riggs accepts the theory by saying, “Disgusting, but okay.” (For whatever it may be worth, that line is delivered verbatim from Black’s script, but the “What are you?” response to Murtaugh’s quick thinking after the explosion appears to have been ad-libbed.)
To Lethal Weapon’s credit, Miranda rights are frequently acknowledged; to its discredit, they are used only as a running gag. In one of the earliest scenes in the first movie, Riggs tells a group of drug dealers he’s arresting at a Christmas-tree lot, “Now, I could read you guys your rights, but, nah—you guys already know what your rights are, don’t you?” Taking his cue from hero detective forerunner “Dirty Harry” Callahan, it’s fair to presume Riggs was less interested in an arrest than a gunfight—and he got one.
“You have the right to remain unconscious,” Riggs needlessly advises a subdued perp in Lethal 3 before noticing the man in custody is stirring to awareness—so he knocks him out cold yet again, this despite the suspect already being cuffed to the grille of an armored truck. (It’s also worth noting that this scene occurs only moments after a faux-outraged Riggs jokingly threatens to shoot a hapless jaywalker in broad daylight on a Downtown L.A. street, with Murtaugh faux-frantically trying to talk him out of it for fear of “video cameras.” In an incredulous demonstration of social tone-deafness, the movie was released less than two weeks after the 1992 Los Angeles uprising.)
In Lethal Weapon 4 (1998), Chris Rock’s Det. Lee Butters pins an Asian man facedown on the street in Chinatown and reads him Miranda—sort of: “You got the right to remain silent, so shut the fuck up, okay? You have the right to an attorney; if you can’t afford an attorney, we will provide you with the dumbest fuckin’ lawyer on earth! If you get Johnnie Cochran, I’ll kill ya!” Incidentally, only moments later, Butters, Riggs, and Murtaugh learn the man they’ve detained is simply an innocent bystander, and when he complains of physical assault and demands a lawyer, they comically tell him to shut up and shoo him off. I’ll admit it seemed hilarious then; it sure as fuck seems appalling now.
But, then, that was the insidious charm of the buddy-cop movie: its capacity to make the appalling appealing. In Stakeout (1987), Seattle detectives Richard Dreyfuss and Emilio Estevez are assigned to spy on the home of the ex-girlfriend of an escaped convict. When a typo misidentifies the subject of their assignment as 313 pounds, Dreyfuss goes straight to fat shaming: “Oh, my God! Oh, she could be the house! This is disgusting! I hate this job!” Of course, when Madeleine Stowe shows up instead, the detectives are only too eager to break into her apartment—because fuck the Fourth Amendment, right?—and watch her undress from underneath her bed. All of this, naturally, is played for sexy laughs.
Gleeful abuse of authority is one of the hallmarks of the buddy-cop movie, and no franchise got more comic mileage out of it than Beverly Hills Cop (1984), in which Eddie Murphy’s Det. Axel Foley always keeps his badge handy—along with an improvised line of bullshit—whenever he needs to access a restricted site. Unlike Dirty Harry, he didn’t use his shield as a license to kill so much as a backstage pass, so there’s that. And at least this franchise had a poor black man getting one over on the capitalist white establishment. Still, the Beverly Hills Cop series continued in the grand tradition of its genre of viewing rules and regulations as bureaucratic impediments to justice—to be ignored or entertainingly circumvented as needed.
By the nineties, the buddy-cop genre, which had always been something of a high-wire act of laughs and thrills, had descended into parody—be it self-referential send-up (1991’s The Hard Way), straight-up spoof (1993’s Loaded Weapon 1), or metafictional mindfuck (1993’s Last Action Hero)—which is historically the surest sign of creative exhaustion. Besides, Hollywood had moved on to catching cops off guard in the wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time formula that worked so successfully in Die Hard (1988), a subgenre that, for a time, became a cottage industry unto itself, producing not only four sequels, but the likes of Passenger 57 (1992), Under Siege (1992), and Speed (1994). Hell, even onetime clever trickster Axel Foley found himself inexplicably consigned to a half-assed “Die Hard in an amusement park” plot in Beverly Hills Cop III (1994).
In these movies, the go-it-alone hero detective is no longer merely the preferred alternative—he is the only thing standing in the way of complete catastrophe. Bruce Willis’ bloody games of cat-and-mouse in Die Hard and Die Hard 2 (1990) are only necessary because the proper authorities are too incompetent, arrogant, and/or impatient to resolve the matter effectively. For all their violence, buddy-cop movies were less about body counts than banter; the franchises of Lethal Weapon, Beverly Hills Cop, and Stakeout thrived because the actors cast as the mismatched partners made for compelling, eminently watchable teams. The plot of a Lethal Weapon movie is irrelevant; it is merely an excuse to put Riggs and Murtaugh on another case and let bickering and big action ensue.
The Die Hard formula, on the other hand, is all about plot—certainly situation—and only requires plugging a likeable actor (Willis or Stallone or Wesley Snipes or Keanu Reeves) into a pressure-cooker, life-or-death scenario in which any police backup is either sidelined or ineffectual, and clever kills and corny one-liners carry the story. Such is the reason why this narrative model is a hell of a lot harder to franchise than the previous three iterations (not that Hollywood hasn’t tried). The proactive hero detective of 1940s hardboiled whodunits, 1970s police thrillers, and 1980s buddy-cop comedies had been reduced to a reactive action figure here—a scrappy streetfighter battling for personal survival, not social justice.
It was at this time, however, that the medium of television, Hollywood’s scorned stepchild, sought to restore the dignity of municipal police departments through a new permutation of the policier that placed a premium on procedural authenticity and gritty realism through ripped-from-the-headlines dramatic series like Law & Order (1990), Homicide: Life on the Street (1993), and NYPD Blue (1993), the latter of which was the first network show to feature nudity and profanity, which stirred no small degree of controversy at the time, and arguably paved the way, in terms of both adult content and narrative structure, for the prestige cable series that have flourished in the ensuing quarter century.
The ostensible brainchild of Steven Bochco and David Milch, the creative identity of NYPD Blue is owed in no small part to the influence of former NYPD detective Bill Clark, whom Milch met early on in the development of the series and retained as a technical consultant. In short order, Clark’s true-crime war stories formed the basis for many of the show’s early plotlines, and his extensive experiences with cops and criminals of all stripes informed the psychological profiles of the characters. Clark was a natural storyteller with an encyclopedic knowledge of police culture, an endless wellspring of source material for the revolutionary show Bochco and Milch had envisioned, and it didn’t take the scribes long to realize they’d struck gold:
When we were leaving the restaurant after lunch, Steven held me back a step so Bill couldn’t hear us. “Do not let this guy out of your sight,” he said.
David Milch and Det. Bill Clark, True Blue: The Real Stories behind NYPD Blue (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1995), 38
Consequently, the show was unlike anything anyone had ever seen, as most of its action was centered in the interview room, where a psychological game of cat-and-mouse was played, as in this recreation of one of Clark’s actual investigations (from the 1993 episode “Tempest in a C-Cup”), featuring David Caruso’s soulful Det. John Kelly:
Kelly has gotten a suspect to confess to robbing a taxi driver. Now, trying to get him to confess to a murder, he springs a trap: he steps back, leans against the wall and stares into the distance, feigning disappointment, as if a trusted friend had let him down.
Daniel B. Schneider, “Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye,” Television, New York Times, August 28, 1994
Through their work, seasoned storyteller Milch and his muse Clark became fast friends, and there’s evidence to suggest the better Milch got to know Clark, the less objective his perspective on him was:
Bill is a violent man, and his whole adult life has been spent comfortably among violent men. But he also has a gentleness, decency, and sweetness of spirit that ground and qualify the violence of his life.
Milch and Clark, True Blue, 12
Though I certainly appreciate the complexities and incongruities of the human psyche, it also stands to reason that Milch’s affection for Clark colored how the cops on NYPD Blue were portrayed. While the detectives of the 15th Squad were, for the most part, compassionate (if sufficiently dramatically flawed), the series seldom challenged their innate righteousness, despite their tactical predilection for manipulating a suspect into waiving his constitutional rights, to say nothing of their explicit biases and bigotries. In “Oscar, Meyer, Weiner” (1993), Det. Andy Sipowicz (Dennis Franz) has a racially heated exchange in the interview room with a black suspect, Lewis Futrel (guest star Clifton Powell), who is later exonerated and returns to the stationhouse to confront Sipowicz:
Powell’s textured performance suggests the anger of a man who has experienced years of discrimination at the hands of unjust police officers, but no greater insight into his life appears, leaving “Oscar, Meyer, Weiner” to portray Futrel as a threatening, loud, and enraged black man who provokes justifiable disdain in Sipowicz. . . .
. . . Milch ignores the fact that Futrel, an interloper in the 15th Precinct’s professional (if dysfunctional) family, appears unreasonable although the investigation’s results prove his anger to be legitimate. NYPD Blue, rather than acknowledging this truth, adopts the cop-shop perspective that uncooperative witnesses are untrustworthy, unhappy, and unpleasant people who interfere with the smooth functioning of daily police work.
Jason P. Vest, The Wire, Deadwood, Homicide, and NYPD Blue: Violence Is Power (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2011) 51–52
Even adviser Bill Clark, who had no Hollywood experience whatsoever prior to being taken under Milch’s wing, understood the need to keep the series’ protagonists above reproach, relating to Milch a true account (adapted as 1994’s “Steroid Roy”) about a detective who’d carried on an extramarital affair with a young drug-addicted woman, and the fellow officers who tried to protect him when she turned up dead and his name was discovered in her diary:
After a minute Bill looked at me. “See, I know we could do something with that, but we wouldn’t have space in the one script to bring both this wrong detective in and some other new guys who tried to help him, [because] I know we wouldn’t want to make our guys look bad, reaching out to help this type of guy themselves.
Milch and Clark, True Blue, 107
Exactly. Because when the cop is the protagonist of a story, that story is inevitably biased to his point of view. In such one-sided narratives, we empathize with the police, not the policed. Even when the detectives show compassion for suspects (regardless of whether it’s genuine or strategic), white audiences have been trained for a century to take it on faith the cop’s moral certitude is absolute. How that suspect wound up in that interview room is a thorny sociocultural question the story rarely bothers to ask; and where he goes from there will be determined by the unassailable judgment of the hero detective in whom we, civilized society, have placed our stalwart trust.
But most Americans have never been stopped and frisked, or had their door kicked in by an officer serving a warrant, or been put in a chokehold. Their exposure to the police comes from books and TV shows, and these stories condition them to think police violence is normal. Think about “Dirty Harry,” “Lethal Weapon,” “Blue Bloods”—police officers are always beating people up to get information out of them. That can translate into people thinking excessive force is justified, perhaps especially if a suspect is black. . . .
“Think of all the thrillers that end when someone is finally able to call the police, the assumption being that the arrival of the law automatically means safety and an end to danger,” [crime-fiction author Steph] Cha said. “Crime writers need to stop showing the criminal justice system in an uncritical light. They need to stop taking it at face value that cops are not dangerous”. . . .
In the meantime, white crime writers need to wake up and realize that people are dying, and our work can be a powerful tool for change. What are we doing, right now, to fight the racism plaguing our nation’s law enforcement?
“Crime fiction is the most popular book genre in the U.S., maybe on the planet, and crime novelists need to understand that what they do has a gigantic effect on the way people think,” [Hipster Death Rattle author Richie] Narvaez said. “So as a crime novelist, you have to ask yourself, ‘Am I validating a fascist point of view? Am I doing anything to help?’ We need more stories that deal with the causes and the consequences of crime.”
John Fram, “How White Crime Writers Justified Police Brutality,” Opinion, New York Times, June 4, 2020
Amen. In recent months, I’ve called for writers to be more thoughtful about their messaging, and to tell stories that promote the enlightened ideals of nonviolent cooperation and sympathetic coexistence in the interest of environmental stewardship; accordingly, I’ve argued that teamwork-centric “cli-fi” adventures with prosocial and/or anti-dystopian values—like Ghostbusters II (1989) and Star Trek IV (1986), and more recently The Orville—can serve as exemplars to that end.
Our crime stories, as Mr. Fram asserts above, can be an equally powerful narrative instrument for social progress, but it’s impossible to conceive what cop fiction should look like moving forward without reevaluating our relationship with its audience surrogate, the genre’s archetypal protagonist: the hero detective. He is the subject of uncomfortable interrogation now, as we consider his place in future works of police fiction. By the early aughts, after the collapse of narrativity, we no longer even needed our detectives to be action heroes much less moral arbiters, merely dispassionate DNA analyzers. What do we need from them now—if anything?
“The depiction of a police officer as a protagonist is always going to be deeply problematic.” Ideally, [comic-book author Hannibal Tabu] says, police officers should become peripheral characters in crime narratives.
Ibid.
We’ve had a handful of crime stories that try to present a more balanced portrayal of the police and the policed—Richard Price’s Clockers (1992), David Simon’s The Wire (2002)—but they are few and far between. Whether or not those become the model for a new type of policier, there’s no doubt we need to take the hero detective down from the praetorian pedestal we’ve erected in his honor through our pop culture, and reintegrate him as a part of our community, but not its superintendent—certainly not its righteous moral compass.
In 1944, Raymond Chandler poetically elucidated the need for the archetype when he wrote that ours was a world “where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practicing.” In post–George Floyd America, we need crime writers with the moral imagination to recognize that those dark streets are far more dangerous for some of us than others—that police protect white neighborhoods, but patrol black ones. It isn’t that law and order isn’t practiced, so much as it isn’t practiced fairly.
Our crime fiction must reflect that injustice, not glorify or exploit it for the kind of laughs and thrills that once kept my generation entertained, and aspire to shine a light on it more forcefully while providing a paradigm of fairness and institutional reform—a vision of streets appreciably less mean, down which everyone has the right to walk, neither tarnished nor afraid.
When you mentioned on Twitter that you were considering writing this very article, I responded w/:
>Years ago I wrote a story about a cop in powered armor
>I realized:
>When you write about cops, unless your story is SPECIFICALLY anti-cop it will be pro-cop. You can’t be neutral
>Same for the military, politics, etc.
You replied:
>If the cop is the protagonist, the story is immediately biased to his/her/their point of view. In such narratives, we empathize with the police, not the policed. Few stories have tried to present a more balanced view, among them THE WIRE and Richard Price’s CLOCKERS.
BTW, as I said in another tweet:
>Have you ever wondered what you would have done in the days of the Witch trials, the Slavery era, 1930’s Germany, the MLK Civil Rights marches, any other period of systemic injustice?
>Well, now you know
And:
>Dammit, I joined Twitter to promote my non-political comic, not to express my politics
>But I CAN’T just sit by and watch what’s happening, so I post and retweet the political stuff*
>I want to be an innocent bystander. But I don’t think there is such a thing these days**
>*Apparently, believing we should try not to spread a deadly virus, and that Black people shouldn’t be straight up murdered by the police are both political stances, open to discussion and argument
>**I suspect there never was. It’s just more obvious now than ever
It was in those Twitter exchanges we shared a few weeks ago, Dell, that the thesis for this post was forged — so thank you for that. At that same time, HBO Max pulled Gone With the Wind, and my wife (also a born-and-bred New Yorker) spoke openly of how she’d loved that movie as a kid, but in adulthood she came to understand exactly what it intended for us to lament the loss of, and hasn’t watched it since. At that point, I couldn’t help but consider some of my own childhood favorites in a new context, both personal and cultural.
Like a personal relationship that’s become poisonous, learning to let go of — to permanently cut ties with — the stories we’ve cherished but that no longer serve us constructively is a healthy thing. As you well know, I’ve long argued on this blog that holding fast to the narratives of the previous century, no matter how comforting and familiar they may be, have only kept us from moving forward, from making progress. Compelled by the dispiritingly tragic events of recent months — from the pandemic to the economic shutdown to the infuriatingly needless deaths of George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks — Americans are finally interrogating some of our most cherished myths, first and foremost American exceptionalism.
When we reevaluate our narratives — be it our patriotic folktales, our economic ideologies, or our pop culture — we question our own values. As a country, we haven’t endured a period of major self-reflection in my lifetime — even after 9/11, we simply pointed the finger “over there” — and though the experience is by no means pleasant, it is long overdue. I think that’s why the conversation happening now is so intense, so volatile, so all-encompassing: “because we’ve woken up from 2,000 years of it. We were fools. We don’t want to be fooled again in that way, so when the narrative gets broken, whether it’s by 9/11, or the Internet, or the collapse of the economy, we look back and say, ‘Those great narratives of the 20th century, most of them were lies.’ Yeah, Martin Luther King Jr. was cool and I guess Gandhi was cool, but most of these things, like Nazism and communism and capitalism, and all of the ‘isms,’ were all really manipulative stories” (Molly Soat, “Digital Disruption and the Death of Storytelling,” Marketing News, April 2015, 44).
“Forget It, Jake, It’s Tinseltown” is my humble contribution to that conversation — a straight white male’s anti–love letter to the law-enforcement narratives I voraciously consumed in childhood, formally studied in college, and later trafficked in as a screenwriter. It’s been easier for me, I see now, to critically reappraise superhero sagas, because I was able to say, “Those were children’s stories, and adults have coopted and perverted them. Give them back.” I still believe that, of course. But the police thrillers I grew up on were in many respects the first toe I dipped into the world of adult fiction: I watched the buddy-cop movies on VHS as a preteen (including plenty more I didn’t mention here, like 48 Hrs. and Running Scared), and then as a teenager was introduced to Dirty Harry and The French Connection through my friend Neil, who owned the neighborhood comic shop. (Later, at CUNY, I took an entire course on hardboiled fiction and cinema, studying everything from The Big Sleep to Chinatown, which is where I first read “The Simple Art of Murder.”) And perhaps because those were R-rated stories I really had no business watching at that tender age, I took for granted that they were written from a place of ethical certitude — that they reflected a morally complicated world in which violence and cynicism were justified, and better I learn that now.
Fortunately, that is not a worldview I came to espouse in adulthood, and I’ve barely seen most of those films in at least twenty years. (Though it is a troubling testament to how often I watched them that I was able to recall from memory everything I cited in this post!) I’ve known for a long time the values embedded in those movies aren’t ones I support, and that they’re all the more pernicious for how entertainingly they’re communicated, but I never sat down to write a formal critique of them before last week. I don’t think I was ready to; I didn’t want to challenge them so directly, to admit how much of my own life’s experiences — particularly the happy ones — are predicated on the same white-male privilege those movies and shows celebrated. Then George Floyd was murdered, by a man who looks like me, born mere weeks before I was. And since that’s catalyzed not only a national debate about police brutality, but the very way it’s been depicted in entertainment, I thought I could bring something to that discussion by speaking to the archetype me and my friends so looked up to as kids: the hero detective. I thought it was time to have a conversation — if only with myself — about him.
When I started this blog (exactly) six years ago, I’d only meant to post essays on narratology — analytical pieces unintended to be political or controversial. Like you, I was in no way looking to exercise my inner SJW. But if the events unfolding on the streets of our country right now aren’t making men like me rethink everything — my upbringing, my ethnic and socioeconomic advantages, my writing — then I’ve got my head in the sand. I try to refrain — not always successfully — from issuing hot takes on Twitter, but rather when I do speak up, to do so from a place that is true to my personal and professional experiences, my blog’s identity, and my (hopefully) evolving worldview. That’s where this essay came from; it served, in its way, as an exorcism — or, more fittingly, a “long goodbye.” With respect to my responsibilities to the social transformation yet to come, this post is by no means enough… but it’s a start. Farewell, hero detective.
>a period of major self-reflection in my lifetime
Technically, the Viet Nam war and Watergate were w/in my lifetime, but I was too young to understand them
I was born just after those events. Vietnam unquestionably cast a long shadow on the pop culture of the 1980s, from Rambo to The A-Team to Good Morning, Vietnam to Lethal Weapon, but we in no way understood what a needless tragedy and colossal foreign-policy fuck-up the war had been at that time — we just didn’t have the context for it. That came later. (For instance: My friends and I habitually called each other “commies” without even the most rudimental sense of what that meant, other than it was bad.)
My generation — the last of the Xers — came of age in the Gipper’s neon-glow 1980s, a time when the country was only too happy to put the national and geopolitical turmoil of the previous two decades behind us. But if you were born into that neoliberal party of renewed commitment to “American exceptionalism,” as we were, and didn’t understand what it was a pendulum-swing cultural reaction to — and haven’t made an effort to better contextualize the era of our upbringing in the decades since — you just sort of wax nostalgically about the ’80s as this Elysian time capsule of arcade games and acid-washed jeans. That’s the arrested state of mind late–Gen X scribes like Ernest Cline and Adam F. Goldberg (cowriters, fittingly, of Fanboys) support with their shitty fiction and TV shows, which are not only paeans to materialistic decadence, but to white privilege itself.
I do like cop and detective stories. I like the L&O but more so, I like the strong individuals, with a moral compass that never wavers, with no give up in their being. I watch the Brit version of cop and detective stories and always get annoyed when their characters whine or (yikes) cry. I know they’re trying to show the emotional side. Just doesn’t work for me. But, there’s room for everyone’s vision in Hollywood, isn’t there.
I love them, too, Jacqui — this post is literally one I’ve (unknowingly) spent a lifetime preparing to write, because I’ve invested so much time and interest in police/detective stories. (Hell, my dog’s name is DCI John Luther!) But as I said in my reply to dellstories above, after four decades of either overlooking some of their questionable morals or simply accepting them at face value, it was time for me to put some of my cherished crime fiction to the test, the way I’ve done in recent years for comic-book movies.
I talked extensively in this post about hero detectives whose ethically and legally problematic qualities we’ve celebrated, but even portrayals of tenaciously virtuous cops whose moral compass never wavers, like Mariska Hargitay’s Olivia Benson on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, have “significant real-life implications: according to a report from Color of Change (which features a screen grab from SVU on the cover), crime series ‘make heroes out of people who violate our rights’ and ‘do not depict the reality, causes, or consequences of [racial disparities in the criminal justice system] accurately.'”
I think stories about the justice system are going to have renewed relevance moving forward, but they need to be told with moral imagination — with an understanding of the immense power they have to shape public perception (and, by extension, reality itself), for good and for ill. Reconceptualizing the crime drama is going to be extremely challenging, because the genre and its conventions are so deeply ingrained in the cultural consciousness, but what an opportunity it offers for renewed creativity and social progress. I want to see crime-fiction authors accept this challenge and rise to it.
By the way, Jacqui, this entire post was in part inspired — and even preliminarily workshopped in — an exchange you and I had in the comments section of “Challenging Our Moral Imagination: On Hollywood’s Crises of Climate, Conscience, and Creativity,” so I owe you a debt of gratitude for that. Whenever readers engage me, you always force me to think more deeply about the subjects on my mind. Thank you.
Excellent ‘interrogation’ of the cop genre, Sean. Very insightful.
Thank you, Dave. I certainly hope a contextual understanding of the history and evolution of the genre will help us better determine how to use it moving forward as a narrative tool for social progress rather than an exploitive mode of entertainment that supports a toxic status quo.
The very last of your post, the idea of streets, appreciably less mean is about the most poetic way to wrap words around it. I’m stunned at the level of detail you provide as I walked down memory lane myself. Those programs and films were so much a part of my youth, and many haven’t stood the test of time–and shouldn’t as you astutely lay out.
Thank you, Wendy — always so nice to hear from you.
A few people have reached out to me offline with their thoughts on the post, expressing similar sentiments to your own: that it seems so obvious now those stories “got into people’s heads and made death and destruction seem normal. You made me appalled that I loved those movies.”
Let me take an opportunity to say here publicly what I’ve said to those folks privately: There’s no shame whatsoever in having enjoyed those movies — they are not entirely without their virtues — but it’s simply time to recognize that those narratives no longer serve us well. It’s like when a personal relationship becomes poisonous and you have to cut ties with that friend or relative or spouse: You’re not happy to have to do it, and it isn’t a renunciation of the affection you once felt, merely an acknowledgement that circumstances have changed, and when you know better, you have to hold yourself to better.
It’s also important to recognize that those stories, though they hardly seem old to you and me, are the product of their times, just as Gone with the Wind is. They shouldn’t be banished from the cultural canon, merely placed within the context of their era. They can still serve us well: as illustrations of how far we’ve come in a relatively short time, and how far we have to go still. We’re in a period of renewed reevaluation and sensitivity right now; yesterday’s Supreme Court decision is a resounding testament to that. We just need to do better, and the privileged among us — yours truly, as a straight, white, educated male — need to strive for more and more empathy. And coming to terms with the fact that something we once loved or supported — like violent cop movies — may have in fact inadvertently contributed to a systemic problem is in itself an act of empathy.
This John Rogers tweet is relevant:
>The only PI show you’re allowed to have on American TV is the consulting detective, who works with the cops and can have people arrested.
>I have tried to explain the difference to TV execs a million times in my career, and they all stare at me like a dog watching a ceiling fan.
https://twitter.com/jonrog1/status/1273472477616697346
Right. As I demonstrated above, in his prototypal portrayal, the American “hero detective” — Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe — was an outsider; it was really only with Dirty Harry and Popeye Doyle that he became an insider, and then later, taking a cue from our Hollywood actor turned law-and-order president, a celebrity, a camera-ready American icon, through buddy-cop movies and TV procedurals. In novels like The Big Sleep, the detective was more philosopher-investigator than action hero — the last, desperate resort for people whom law enforcement and local politicians had abjectly failed. In those stories, justice was never easy — and seldom attained, at that. (Chinatown understood this.)
Crime stories of recent decades lack the nuance and ambiguity of Chandler’s fiction, instead treating authority as an institution to enforce or defy, with little in between. (The Wire is a notable, and uncommon, exception.) Consider the way Adam West’s Batman was a deputized agent of the GCPD; whereas Christian Bale’s was a fugitive from the law. Fictional heroes — superheroes, PIs, the reprehensible meatheads of Fast & Furious (and their Southern cousins/antecedents on The Dukes of Hazzard) — invariably seem to work for or against law enforcement, but seldom with it. These stories don’t provide a model for concerted cooperation, but instead popularize a zero-sum worldview of us versus them, in which one side is wholly righteous and the opposing side a corrosive scourge on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
And don’t think assholes like our reality-show host turned “law-and-order” president — himself conditioned to such a reductive Weltanschauung — haven’t capitalized on that to exploit division and consolidate power. Such is the reason why it isn’t merely our economy, our gun laws, our health care, our criminal-justice system, and our energy policy that need a page-one rewrite, but our popular narratives themselves. In our present era of branded IPs and rapacious mega-franchises, filmmakers need to recognize their responsibility to the culture, and start writing with as much moral imagination as they do commercial imagination.
Did you read https://mythcreants.com/blog/three-genre-defining-books-with-underutilized-tropes/
The third one is Philip Marlowe
Wow, Dell, what a perfect supplement to this post — a much more comprehensive analysis of Chandler’s prototypal “hero detective” than my cursory overview. (And how funny that this analysis, as well, was only just recently published?) I absolutely encourage everyone intrigued by “Forget It, Jake, It’s Tinseltown” to read Mira Singer‘s “Three Genre-Defining Books With Underutilized Tropes” — at very least the content under the third subheading: “The Philip Marlowe Series.”
Neo-noir “tough guy” detectives like The Last Boy Scout‘s Joe Hallenbeck (and perhaps even Criminal Macabre‘s Cal McDonald, though it’s been a long time since I read that) are only superficial homages to Philip Marlowe, the former readily employing the expressions of violence and misogyny that, as Ms. Singer illustrates, were anathema to the latter. From a writer’s perspective, such works demonstrate not only a misunderstanding of the archetype, but a deeply cynical reliance on cheap thrills as a way of generating audience excitement and engagement. That’s both morally bankrupt and creatively hackneyed, because “when we limit violence as a tool, it forces us to come up with more creative ways to address a problem. There’s nothing wrong with a fight when necessary, and books in this genre certainly warrant the excitement. However, new works could make their heroes more heroic by employing more of those nonviolent solutions, or at least attempts at them, with violence as a last resort. The world is a violent place, and fiction can teach us to make it less so” (Mira Singer, “Three Genre-Defining Books With Underutilized Tropes,” Mythcreants [blog], June 5th, 2020; emphasis mine).
Amen. As Chandler himself, in “The Simple Art of Murder,” once said about the archetype he helped pioneer: “If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming to dull to be worth living in.” I think that was meant to be as true of the detective’s fictional world as our actual one. Moving forward, we’re going to need crime writers with the same caliber of moral imagination Chandler exhibited in his day.
Thanks, as always, my dear fellow, for linking relevant content to the topic du jour. You always elevate the conversation around here, and I appreciate that.
They gloss over it in the Lethal Weapon movies, but if you think about it…
Riggs is emotionally unstable, prone to violent outbursts and rages, has PTSD and suicidal ideation…
This is the sort of guy you want as a cop? You want HIM to have a gun, to have authority, to make (literally) life-and-death decisions for himself and for the people he interacts w/?
Fortunately, he kills a bunch of guys at the end of the movie, and that makes him all better
Seriously! The last lines:
Roger Murtaugh: Riggs, if you think I’m gonna eat the world’s lousiest Christmas turkey by myself, you’re crazy.
Martin Riggs: Well, I got news for you, Rog: I’m not crazy.
Roger Murtaugh: I know.
Martin Riggs: Well, good. Let’s eat.
My therapist has never recommended this course of treatment to me, probably because it isn’t covered by my health insurance
As I recall, one of Black’s points of inspiration for the character of Martin Riggs was the LAPD’s real-life “psycho pension” policy, whereby an officer could qualify for early retirement if he was deemed too emotionally unstable to remain on the force; evidently — though who knows how true this is? — some cops would try, consciously and disingenuously, to demonstrate their eligibility (by what manner of impropriety I’m sure I don’t want to know). So, one of the running questions the characters around Riggs wrestle with in the first Lethal Weapon is whether he is genuinely troubled, or cynically trying to draw a “psycho pension.”
Of course, as a dramatic concept, the “psycho pension” is exploited, not explored, by the filmmakers. The moment Murtaugh realizes Riggs is legit crazy — after he jumps off the building on Santa Monica Boulevard handcuffed to the despondent man he was tasked with bringing down safely — the responsible thing to do would have been to go straight to the captain and the department psychiatrist and have him pulled from active duty pending full evaluation. Instead, Lethal Weapon romanticizes Riggs’ reckless behavior, playing it for laughs and thrills, and then seems to suggest that catharsis comes not from committed psychotherapeutic treatment but violent male bonding. Therapy, after all, is for pussies.
The quality of the franchise’s screenwriting diminished with each sequel — Lethal 3 relies too heavily on coincidence, and the plot of Lethal 4 is barely coherent (though the joyous chemistry of the cast helps paper over those narrative shortcomings) — but there’s also some very good scene work across the various films. The “gold pen” scene in Lethal 2 is really terrific, because it (covertly) reminds us of key backstory information from the previous film that will become important later, and it allows two characters who don’t get a lot of screen time together (Riggs and Trish) to quietly bond. I also think the scene on Murtaugh’s yacht in Lethal 3 is a high point of that particular movie, taking us through a spectrum of emotions, and it’s all the more powerful because these characters now have a long history with one another (and us with them, for that matter); it’s not a scene that would’ve been as resonant in the first two films.
Such is the reason this series was so colossally successful — why we kept coming back, year after year, to join these characters on a new adventure and to see what’s changed in the interim — I only wish they’d been written with as much moral imagination as they were commercial imagination. The plots are predicated on a series of not-insignificant sociopolitical issues — from CIA drug trafficking to apartheid to the controversial “Black Talon” ammunition of the early ’90s — but were only concerned with those themes to the extent that they serviced the buddy-cop formula of action and comedy. I admire, to some degree, that the Lethal Weapon films at least aspired to topicality, but, much like Infinity War and Endgame did for environmentalism, the issues that set those stories in motion are short-shrifted and, by the end, summarily shrugged off. And entertaining though all those films may be, it’s important we confront their irresponsible messaging in order to do better moving forward.
> the LAPD’s real-life “psycho pension” policy, whereby an officer could qualify for early retirement if he was deemed too emotionally unstable to remain on the force; evidently — though who knows how true this is? — some cops would try, consciously and disingenuously, to demonstrate their eligibility (by what manner of impropriety I’m sure I don’t want to know)
Like Klinger on “MASH”, wanting a Section 8, or Yossarian in “Catch-22”
Indeed, Dell, the “psycho pension” — whether that was actual LAPD policy or merely some fanciful notion cooked up for the Lethal Weapon screenplay — is certainly a novel law-enforcement twist on the Section 8 program. The notion of a fictional character with military or paramilitary authority (like a police officer) deliberately portraying himself as emotionally unfit for service for the self-serving purpose of being discharged with benefits suggests no small potential for thought-provoking Sturm und Drang…
The trouble, of course, is that rather than take that potentially dangerous scenario seriously, LW merely exploits it to justify all its comedic chaos and violent mayhem. LW not only downplays the gravity of such policy-loophole abuse, but actually wants us to laugh at it. And that, ultimately, is the problem with virtually all the movies spotlighted in this post: Their entertainment value is predicated on treating a number of very serious things — from mental health to violent gunplay to Bill of Rights violations — flippantly.
And I think it’s impossible to argue the last half century’s cultural lionization of crazy-but-lovable white males who violently mete out extrajudicial “justice” (as they define it) with legal impunity isn’t in some measure responsible for the Kyle Rittenhouses of the world (the ones for whom the Kenosha police expressed their gratitude). Guys that look like Rittenhouse have long been portrayed in movies and comics as superheroic saviors of a way of life ever under assault by anarchists, socialists, feminists, and “thugs.” And it stands to reason that in a reality-show era presided over by a reality-show president, those warped fantasies — the very ones Alan Moore satirized in Watchmen — spilled off our screens and into our streets.
I just finished your thesis, Sean. Ha ha. You make a great point, and I also hope that Hollywood breaks out of the trope and comes up with something new and interesting when it comes to hero-cop movies. They became boring (for the most part) a decade ago. Like you, I acknowledge my privilege. These movies were pure entertainment for me. The chance that I’d be confronted by a cop with an attitude was pretty slim… to the point of non-existent. But that clearly wasn’t true for a whole group of people where the reality of these shows was a lot closer, scarier, and glorified.
We don’t make movies that glorify child abuse, domestic violence, slavery, and animal abuse to name a few. It’s time – not necessarily to get rid of the hero-cop – but to get rid of the,hero bad-cop. Great post.
Great post? Great point you raise, Diana: that we don’t make movies “that glorify child abuse, domestic violence, slavery, and animal abuse,” so why tell stories that make light of police brutality and abuse of authority? I wish I’d expressed as much in the text of the essay, but I’m glad you had the mind to say it here.
The very enjoyment we take from movies like Lethal Weapon and Die Hard is as much a privilege of being white as never having experienced a turbulent confrontation with an actual police officer. Simply put: We could afford to treat such depictions of wanton violence as pure entertainment, because, in our experience, such mayhem was as fantastical as a Looney Tunes sketch (it’s worth noting, in fact, that Lethal Weapon 2 literally opens with the Merrie Melodies theme music playing under the Warner Bros. logo). Fortunately, the white community has undergone a collective awakening to this over the past month, and I cannot imagine that when film production resumes the “same old” cop stories will be accepted, let alone embraced. I don’t see how, knowing what we know, we can consciously and conscientiously return to telling those kinds of stories.
Thanks for reading, Diana; I realize that this is a long post even by this blog’s standards! I appreciate that you took time out of your day to read and comment on it. Have a safe weekend, you hear?
We have sooo much unpacking to do when it comes to privilege and our racist culture. Criminal justice, healthcare, compensation, and education are just the most obvious tips of a giant iceberg. I heard this morning on the news that black and brown people on the average pay higher property taxes than white people. What the…? It must be all those beach front properties they’ve been buying up. I’m married to a black person, and I feel like my eyes are being opened. Thank goodness. We need to root this stuff out and demand a better country. Finally.
We’re having a meaningful conversation now — better late than never, I suppose — which is a start, but it’s got to translate into meaningful action. There’s cause to think this time will be different — statues are being torn down, schools and sports teams are being renamed — but we must keep the protests going and the pressure on. If we get a new president in a few months — and they’re saying now even the Senate is potentially in play! — that would be amazing, but then we have to put the pressure on the Dems to actually do the hard work of systemic reform they’re currently campaigning on, and not merely enact standard-issue half-measures or symbolic gestures before returning to business as usual.
For folks like you and me — white liberals — we need to keep expanding our own moral imagination. “Forget It, Jake, It’s Tinseltown” was my (overdue) acknowledgment that many of the stories that entertained and inspired me operate on a presumption of white privilege I hadn’t fully considered (and probably still don’t — and won’t ever — fully appreciate). I didn’t realize you were married to a Black person; as you acknowledged, even you are experiencing an awakening to the Black experience! It’s incumbent upon folks like us to keep our eyes, minds, and hearts open — to never assume we understand another person’s life experience no matter how sympathetically inclined toward it we might be. There are, dispiritingly, a lot of closed minds (and hearts) in this country, but I refuse to be one of them; I plan to commit my life — and my writing — to ideals of fairness, equality, and moral imagination.
There’s no question I’ve experienced a profoundly renewed sense of imagination, of appreciation, of patience, and of empathy (some of which has been reflected in my recent blog posts) that simply wouldn’t have manifested without the multiple crises — the pandemic, the economy, the Floyd murder — we’re currently facing. So, though those are by no means welcome events, they’ve definitely catalyzed a measure of personal growth for which I am grateful, and I’m going to do my part — through my writing, my volunteerism, and my social interactions — to facilitate collective growth. There will be resistance — because growth is painful — but the arc of history bends toward progress. I suspect a quantum leap is coming…
>For a century, Hollywood has been collaborating with police departments
That’s not the only collaboration Hollywood does
https://jacobin.com/2022/06/us-military-hollywood-movies-top-gun-censorship/
Tell me this surprises you. G’wan, tell me
Indeed, sir. Much the way crime dramas like Dragnet, Law & Order, and NYPD Blue purposefully sought the explicit and active support of municipal police departments, for both procedural/technical consultation as well as ease of location shooting in the cities where the shows were set, eventually those series became Hollywood-subsided PR campaigns for the nobility (to say nothing of the infallibility) of law enforcement.
I only first encountered the damning term “military–entertainment complex” last month, when I was leaving a comment on “The Last Walking Infinity Throne Corrupts Infinitely” about conservative messaging in Hollywood entertainment, citing Top Gun: Maverick as an example. Sirota’s excellent article — thank you for linking to it — certainly adds a literal new dimension to François Truffaut’s assertion, as we recently discussed, that “every film about war ends up being pro-war.” I will definitely be reading Back to Our Future now; perhaps I’ll even do a book review here on the blog?
All of this goes straight to the heart of the question recently posed by New York Times film critic A.O. Scott: Are the movies liberal?
And while this isn’t perfectly germane to the conversation we’re having here about the military– and police–entertainment complexes, Dell, Bill Maher did an opinion piece last night called “New Rule: Hollywood’s Culture of Violence,” in which he says: “Like every school shooter, our movie heroes are grievance collectors. And when it comes to action movies, there’s one story: ‘He was a nice guy, but they pushed him too far, and now it’s on.’ ” I haven’t watched Real Time in a few years — I grew weary of Maher’s sanctimonious smugness, which doesn’t compare favorably with John Oliver’s much-preferred good-humored pragmatism — but I heard about the segment and wanted to see it. Well worth watching.