In the wake of 9/11, now more than ever the white knight was called to duty and given a license to police nearly anyone, almost anywhere. Much as the Cold War enabled American crimefighters to comb the globe for communists and dangerous left-leaning threats to national security, the War on Terror was a license to hunt down “terrorists” anywhere in the world—or declare those impeding such an effort as enemies of the state. As President Bush told a joint session of Congress in 2001, “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”1 As the nation’s political and cultural landscape changed, so did Hollywood narratives—the two as codependent as ever.
Jack Bauer: The Post-9/11 Rogue Hero
One television series that directly tackled the need for such a post 9/11 rogue was 24, with its contemporary white knight, Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland ). The series warrants the in-depth analysis that follows given its widespread impact on subsequent characters, but also Bauer’s surprising entrée into offscreen political discussions related to the newly launched War on Terror. The series debuted just weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center and quickly became a cultural phenomenon; like the nation that dispatched him, he appeared vulnerable to all manner of enemies—foreign, homegrown, and elected. 24 aired on the Fox Network for the next nine seasons over a 13-year period (not counting sequels without Bauer), which encompasses more than 200 hours of programming. Given its breadth, rather than provide detailed recaps of each season or review the extensive array of characters—areas amply covered by other writers—below are those details that best help identify discernible patterns that affirm or advance the continuum of Hollywood rogues and their behaviors under review, especially those that further influence screen crimefighters that follow.
Bauer no doubt inherits the traits of previous action heroes , including the ability to shoot any weapon and to outshoot any foe (often with just a handgun versus automatic weapons), fly any aircraft (usually without permission), and escape most kidnappings to be “the last man standing,”2 as one of his superiors puts it—the quintessential description of an American hero, regardless of genre or historical period. Bauer’s more routine rogue behaviors include dispensing with the usual warrants, protocols and customary collaborations, but which get exacerbated by his status as an ex-agent, frequently suspended or exiled and forced to work with no official status, but still operating on behalf of the nation.
Bauer retains access to law enforcement tools via loyal analysts still inside government agencies such as Chloe O’Brian (Mary Lynn Rajskub ), who is introduced in season three as his technical wizard who goes rogue too at his direction. Her skills are as inspirational as they are troubling, able to override the trigger of a suicide bomber’s vest or hack into an FBI security grid so she can warn Bauer in real time how to avoid dozens of agents swarming a crime scene. Throughout the series, Bauer gets help from others inside the government that retain faith in his instincts, which is certainly a problem when Bauer is the one framed as the enemy in need of capture. In the final moments of the series, it is Bauer and O’Brian who share the spotlight. After she is kidnapped (again), Bauer makes one last act of sacrifice, agreeing to turn himself over to the Russians in exchange for her freedom. After reaching his Russian captor, Bauer warns, “I’ve taken you at your word, if anything happens to her or my family, your entire world will come apart and you won’t see it coming.”3 Perhaps it was meant to leave open the chance for another season or just a comforting reminder that Bauer will never be off duty.
The basic plot of each season included two intertwining types of threats to national security that unfolded over a 24-hour period, and which usually took 24 episodes to play out. The first type is a “foreign” or external enemy that Bauer personally vanquishes or plays a key role in neutralizing. They included a Bosnian war criminal who wants revenge on Bauer whose botched Kosovo mission killed the criminal’s wife and daughter; Bauer eventually traps him but rather than arrest him, decides to outright kill him.
The Russians were frequently involved in nefarious plots, including two former Soviet satellite nations (both with predominantly Muslim populations) who produce terrorists that release a nerve gas in a Los Angeles shopping mall, later threatening to deploy another biological weapon on other American targets. The Chinese were another recurring enemy, especially Cheng Zhi (Tzi Ma) whom Bauer eventually decapitates to avoid global war. Bauer is eventually turned over to the Chinese for violating the sovereignty of the Chinese consulate in Los Angeles (and for the consult’s death he is framed for). In the scene in which Bauer’s boss reluctantly hands over the rogue hero, he notes, “We’d be burying a million Americans right now if it wasn’t for Bauer.”4
There were also rebel fighters from the fictional African nation of Sangala armed with a biological weapon, and who raid the White House to kill the US president and stop her military strikes on their homeland. Open Cell , a transnational group of international “hacktivists”—an exaggerated resemblance to the real-world WikiLeaks—was one of the more inventive enemies of the state, with its professed commitment to the open flow of information, including classified US government documents.
Nearly every season also included a Muslim terrorist —their motivations rooted in acts of revenge or, as one noted, as payback for American imperialism. Among them was one who stole a few nuclear suitcase bombs to exact revenge on Bauer who tortured his brother to death; another a Turkish sleeper agent who worked in a technology company and planned to wake up cells hiding in suburban Los Angeles; also, the widow of a terrorist who blamed another US president for killing her husband with a drone strike . This latter threat took place in London where Bauer was living in exile, this time bypassing CIA orders instead of his usual Los Angeles-based CTU —or Counter Terrorism Unit.
24’s Homegrown Enemies and Domestic Threats
The other type of threat Bauer faces is homegrown, from ineffectual bosses and petty bureaucrats to greedy industrials and pernicious moles inside the fictional CTU or within the Secret Service, CIA, and FBI . Most of Bauer’s official bosses, similar to those of previous Hollywood rogues, are depicted as inept and inefficient at best; and at worst, they are guilty of being politically and professionally ambitious, which explains their apparent corruption.
In the first season, Bauer tranquilizes CTU Deputy Director George Mason (Xander Berkeley ) so he can buy time to confirm how “dirty” Mason is, soon finding hidden offshore accounts. While Bauer denies his own behavior is lawless—only the temporary but necessary suspension of rules to solve another “ticking time-bomb ” crisis (the familiar ends justifies the means)—he abhors those who break the rules for personal gain. After a colleague warns him that what he is doing to Mason could put him in prison, Bauer clarifies why “dirty” (rather than rogue) is so dangerous: “You can look the other way once and it’s no big deal. Except it makes it easier for you to compromise the next time.”5 Mason , not understanding Bauer’s special purpose, describes him as “a loose cannon … rules don’t apply to Jack Bauer .”6 Thus, while Bauer’s actions are deployed for the greater good, Mason ’s lawlessness is “dirty,” which is what renders him unfit to protect the nation. Bauer would have rejected the “dirty” in Dirty Harry, viewing him as a fellow redeemable rogue .
Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) takes aim at a terrorist threat in the series 24. Screen shot from Season 2, episode 24, on the Fox Network
One of the initial homegrown traitors in the series is his former lover and trusted second in command at CTU, Nina Myers (Sarah Clarke ), who turns out to be a double-agent, killing Bauer’s wife in the first season but given immunity for valuable information in the second. In season three, after Bauer finds her in a stand-off with his daughter, he initially wounds Myers , then after voicing his vengeance , kills her in cold blood. In season two a group of oil industrialists with links to military and spy agencies creates a phony recording that implicates three (unnamed) Middle Eastern countries for planning to attack Los Angeles with a nuclear weapon. The group had hoped to profit from a war in the Middle East, with its mastermind arming a cell of Muslim extremists to carry out the deed, unaware of the cabal’s ulterior motives.
After Bauer fakes his own death at the end of season four to avoid a Chinese prison (at least for the time being), season five finds him uncovering the penultimate internal enemy: President Charles Logan ( Gregory Itzen ), who is working with another powerful cabal that is actually after cheap oil in central Asia (under Russian control). Bauer not only averts more terror attacks, but also secures incriminating evidence against Logan . When nothing comes of that, Bauer careens past routine rogue behavior to personally abduct the president, somehow bypassing Secret Service agents aboard Marine One along with holding the co-pilot at gunpoint. In a key scene, Bauer threatens to kill Logan but then hesitates, with a smug Logan , noting, “It’s right that you can’t, I’m the president.”8 This scenario put at least one limitation on Bauer ’s behavior, which allowed him to regain some of his patriotic luster.
Yet another conspiracy involving the inner council of a newly elected President Allison Taylor (Cherry Jones ) dominates season seven; Taylor’s traitors are linked to a private military entity called Starkwood. That company had weaponized a lethal pathogen first used on the Sangalan people in a deal cut with the rebel leaders (noted above), now given to terrorists to set off a crisis on American soil. In one episode, Taylor has Starkwood’s Jonas Hodges (Jon Voigt ) arrested, calling him “a terrorist and a murderer,”9 while he claims his only crime was “trying to protect this country.”10 Hodges also had frame Bauer for killing a US senator, noting the “rogue federal agent”11 had motive because the senator publicly grilled Bauer about torture.
Taylor is talked into bringing back Logan in season eight to negotiate with the Russians, supposedly having invaluable expertise that cancels out his previous treachery. For his part in season eight, Bauer kills a Russian assassin then cuts open his stomach to retrieve a valuable SIM card, which once activated, contains Logan’s number, revealing his part in yet another White House conspiracy. In the final episode, Logan takes Bauer ’s recording to Taylor , suggesting she release it to the media to justify Bauer ’s arrest, warning her that Bauer will never quit and will sabotage their “peace agreement.”12 She offers to “lock him away in a black site ,”13 but Logan offers a more sinister solution. On the recording, Bauer warns that Russian opposition to the treaty was silenced by Logan and accuses her of covering it up. “This peace is fraudulent,”14 Bauer says. “And I cannot in good conscience allow the people that lost their lives today to go unspoken for.”15 Even as president, and perhaps because she is a female one, she starts to cry, having to be schooled by Bauer on how to do the right thing. In the closing scenes, Taylor tells Bauer she is resigning to face the consequences of her actions, adding, “you will have to do the same.”16 She says she betrayed her principles and “If I had listened to you, none of this would have ever happened.”17
Like previous rogues, Bauer is a reluctant hero who is also unable to be domesticated. Most of his family relationships end badly: his father kills his brother before the government kills his father for threatening to start a world war. His romantic relationships are equally as doomed because of his devotion to duty. Upon finding his wife dead, he breaks down crying, muttering how sorry he is that he could not rescue her. For the remainder of the series, he spends a great deal of time rescuing other female loved ones, including fellow agents who often became damsels in distress despite being trained operatives.
Bauer ’s major love interest after his wife is Audrey Raines (Kim Raver ), a policy analyst who is kidnapped in season four along with her father, Secretary of Defense James Heller (William Devane ), later president. In one of their break-up scenes, Raines tells Bauer , “We both know that you belong here, Jack, at CTU doing what you do best … and thank God there are people like you who can deal with that world.”18 Raines returns for later seasons, even remarries another homegrown enemy when she thinks Bauer is dead, and must be repeatedly rescued; she is also shot, tortured and left suffering from post-traumatic psychosis before finally being killed off in season eight by Bauer ’s enemies. Heller , whom Bauer considers a father figure, often questions Bauer ’s claims. His doubts are well-founded after learning Bauer broke into the American embassy in London, inadvertently shot two protestors outside, locked himself in a secure room (while holding the staff at gunpoint), and sent classified data to O’Brian to confirm his theory about a drone override device.
Bauer finds another girlfriend in season seven, FBI agent Renee Walker (Annie Wersching ), who quickly adopts Bauer ’s interrogation methods, much to the chagrin of her FBI boss. After a lecture by Bauer on having to live with her choices, in a subsequent scene, she tortures a suspect in his hospital bed, sounding a lot like Bauer when she asks a straight-arrow staffer for help, pleading, “Thousands of lives are at stake here. We either bend the rules a little bit right now or we lose this chance forever.”19 When her victim refuses to cooperate, she shoves her gun into his wounds to convince him. He even taunts her as she walks away, reminding her that as FBI she has to respect his rights, prompting her to return to his bedside to squeeze his breathing tube and cut off his air. Unlike O’Brian , whose action sequences rarely go beyond pounding on a keyboard and grimacing into a glowing monitor, Walker at least has the opportunity to join Bauer in the field to chase down suspects and shoot terrorists. She remains a rare but short-lived female rogue as committed to the larger mission as her male counterpart, until she is mortally wounded by a Russian assassin.
America Asks: What Would Jack Do?
The show’s season five was its most critically acclaimed, winning Emmys for Sutherland, an episode’s director, and the show itself for Outstanding Drama.20 It also became a cultural and political juggernaut, especially resonating with conservatives, many of who applauded Bauer as a “one-man army,” a “comforting fantasy,” and the “first post-9/11 action hero .”21 The series no doubt earned most of its attention for its depiction of torture and Bauer as its expert practitioner, tapping into the national dialogue on CIA torture at the time being applied to the War on Terror and under review by Congress for its apparent excesses (e.g., Abu Ghraib).
In the season seven opener, Bauer is being publicly grilled by Sen. Blaine Mayer (John Quinn ) about his harsh methods. Bauer argues that his tactics are justifiable, at one point telling the senator that the man he tortured was going to kill a bus full of innocent people. Mayer counters, “So, basically what you’re saying, Mr. Bauer , is that the ends justify the means and that you are above the law.”22 Bauer argues that the people he deals with “don’t care about your rules,”23 and offers to be judged by the American people: “I will let them decide what price I should pay.”24 Audiences at the time may have already digested the 2004 report by the CIA’s own inspector general who challenged the legality of torture, and the 2006 Supreme Court ruling that reversed Bush’s earlier executive order to exempt al Qaeda and Taliban captives from the Geneva Convention’s ban on “mutilation, cruel treatment and torture.”25
National Review writer Ben Shapiro penned one of his columns, “Where’s Jack Bauer when you need him?” to discuss how the benefits of torture outweigh its harms, adding, “[it] is not only justified, it is morally right.”26 Conservative writer Cal Thomas also devoted several columns to recapping 24 plots to support his pro-torture argument. Laura Ingram told Bill O’Reilly in 2006 “the average American out there loves the show 24 … they love Jack Bauer … that’s as close to a national referendum that it’s okay to use tough tactics against high-level al Qaeda operatives as we’re going to get.”27 That same year Rush Limbaugh hosted a Heritage Foundation panel about the show that included Michael Chertoff , the Secretary of Homeland Security. “I am literally in awe of the creativity … [and] brains behind the program,” Limbaugh offered, adding that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was also “a huge fan.”28
While fans and detractors of the show debated whether torture works on enemies of the state, many episodes of 24 reveal how torture fails to work on Bauer . The first episode of season six shows a ravaged Bauer , having spent 20 months in Chinese custody, with evidence of torture visible in the deep scars left crisscrossing his back. The Chinese, though, confirm that Bauer never divulged any information during his ordeal. In many scenes throughout the series in which Bauer is tortured, he manages to break free, turn the tables on his captors, and escape. Bauer ’s celebrated (and fictional) resilience lends credence to public pronouncements such as presidential candidate Donald Trump ’s controversial remarks in 2015 that Sen. John McCain was only a hero because he was captured, adding, “I like people who weren’t captured.”29 McCain had spent more than five years in a North Vietnamese prison and subjected to repeated torture, later emerging as one of its most harsher critics, even after the events of 9/11. He urged that this is not just a “utilitarian debate … this is a moral debate. It is about who we are.”
Others, including some in the military, thought the show was downright dangerous, with American operatives at Guantanamo Bay being accused of “devising interrogation techniques [that] were inspired by the exploits of Jack Bauer .”30 News reports detail a trip by US Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan and several associates to meet with the show’s producers to tell them that their show encouraged illegal conduct and negatively affected the training of American soldiers. “I’d like them to stop,” Finnegan insisted. “They should do a show where torture backfires.”31 That backlash, including torture’s ability to be used by the enemy as a recruiting tool, is one of many counterarguments that followed in the wake of the CIA’s 2004 internal report, which could not verify any imminent threat thwarted by such techniques.
Ali Soufan , an FBI agent and Arabic speaker, who was among the first to question Abu Zubaydah (still being held at Guantánamo), recalls that the detainee was on life support after being shot in the raid that caught him.32 Soufan used a process he likens to “dating,” in which the interrogator builds a rapport with a prisoner, in this case, cleaning Zubaydah ’s wounds and changing his bedding. As a result, Zubaydah gave up critical information to Soufan that confirmed the scope of the 9/11 plot, but the CIA thought Zubaydah knew more, Soufan asserts, later waterboarding him up to 83 times,33 but learning nothing substantially new—a point forcefully corroborated by the 2014 Senate so-called “torture report.”34
There is also the issue of torture yielding false intelligence. The lynchpin of pro-torture arguments often rests on the “ticking time bomb” scenario (the dramatic device frequently used in 24). The most flagrant and consequential real life case involved a detainee who when tortured confirmed that al Qaeda was working with Saddam Hussein and that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction—both used to sell the Iraq War to the American people; that same detainee later admitted he lied to stop the torture.35
During this post 9/11 period, it seems the CIA itself had gone rogue, with some legal cover provided by the Bush administration, but with the agency hiding the extent of its tactics along with where the interrogations were taking place. In its response to such criticism, the CIA concedes that “serious mistakes” were made and that it “was unprepared … to undertake an unprecedented program of detaining and interrogating suspected terrorists around the world,” concluding that it “did not always live up to the high standards that … the American people expect of us.”36 It denies, though, misleading Congress—a claim that McCain found unconvincing, publicly singling out a series of CIA directors for their “lies.” He also praised the report—the type of oversight that Bauer and his fans would find gutless and annoying—but one McCain believed ultimately “strengthens self-government … and America’s security and stature in the world.” The CIA’s so-called torture program was shut down by President Obama ’s 2009 executive order.37 Karen J. Greenberg , in her 2016 book, Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State , also praises the Senate report, but warns, “Even after the rogue policies were discovered and exposed, the few people inside and outside government who sought to rein them in fell short of this goal. To this day, the government continues to overreach in the name of keeping the nation safe.”38
Jennifer Weed , who edited a collection of essays by experts who debate the ethical and psychological impact of aspects of the TV series 24, notes, “In many cases, the series depicts the tragic implications (personal and political) of doing what is thought to be necessary to maintain an apparently fragile national security.”39 Joel Surnow , the show’s co-creator (with Robert Cochran ), explains that the torture scenes, which range from electrocutions to suffocations, are used to maximize the show’s appeal. “Certainly we’re trafficking in fear. That’s the point. If the show’s not scary we haven’t succeeded.”40 Surnow argues that perhaps less extreme measures work but “America wants the war on terror fought by Jack Bauer ,”41 especially by the most extreme measures, much as 1970s audiences craved Dirty Harry’s rogue approach to law and order.
Yet, Sutherland , the show’s star, told a reporter he was against “waterboarding and electric torture and anything of that ilk,” and surprised anyone could confuse what happens on a television show with reality, especially when “historically [torture] is not proven to be very effective,” especially for a country with “a moral responsibility to set the standard of what is acceptable and appropriate.”42 Both Surnow and Sutherland resort to the “just entertainment” defense, which attempts to distance Hollywood products from the same ideologically rich mythologies they simultaneously leverage to appeal to mainstream audiences .
Equally as troubling are Bauer ’s relationships with American presidents on the show. As this book argues, rogue characters have long been exploited by presidents to enhance their political capital and to tap into the people’s embrace of popular culture icons and their associative meanings. With presidents such as David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert ) and Taylor , it is Bauer who exploits them, as they serve as his alter ego. Moreover, it seems more than coincidental that the presidents most willing to yield to Bauer are those who represent Americans still struggling for equal footing—a (white) female (who resigned) and an African American male (finally assassinated after two failed attempts). Compared to Bauer ’s freedom to dispense with the rule of law (with impunity), these presidents are impotent, despite being the so-called leaders of the free world.43 As such, it is Bauer who represents the more dependable figure—more than elected officials, seasoned generals, and other highly trained law enforcement agents who inhabit the series. In other words, to be effective, the idealized American patriot must work outside the very system he is charged with defending and often wage war on his own government—one depicted as increasingly at odds with its “we the people” foundations.
It is a corrosive contradiction that relies on a perennial state of emergency capable of eroding democratic processes and fostering an ever-escalating disrespect for the rule of law. In so doing, such fictions make a mockery of the very American values rogues like Bauer profess to be willing to die defending. Rather than rooted in the exigencies of dire circumstances, Bauer and his behaviors risk becoming the new normal. During the series’ peak, Bauer ’s approach was reminiscent of the oft-misquoted expression reportedly uttered by an American major during the Vietnam conflict, noting how he had to destroy the village to save the village.44 That village, though, Bauer was shown both burning and saving risked ultimately boxing the Hollywood rogue into a corner, from which he (and the America that loves him) may never recover.
Racism in America: Police and Homegrown Terrorism
While Bauer was off saving America from foreign terrorists and homegrown traitors, the American homefront remained terrorized by racism. Like Dirty Harry’s San Francisco of the late 1960s, Los Angeles, especially starting in the 1990s, represented a symbolic and literal battleground that pitted the LAPD against an increasingly agitated African American community . After an all-white suburban jury found four white LAPD officers not-guilty in 1992 of using excessive force on black motorist Rodney King —whose beating was caught on videotape—riots erupted in South Central Los Angeles. Following three days of violence, more than 50 people were dead, roughly four thousand injured, 12,000 arrested, and roughly $1 billion in property damage. As with previous insurrections, most of the damage occurred in the city’s already beleaguered neighborhoods, with “echo” riots rippling across other inner cities around the country, making clear the conditions that sparked the late 1960s riots had remained essentially unchanged.45
This rupture was followed by the O.J. Simpson trial in 1994, which again exposed duplicity within the LAPD, along with shining a spotlight on the nation’s perennial problem with racism.46 After the Simpson trials (a later civil trial found him culpable), a Gallup poll reported that roughly three-quarters of both blacks and whites remained pessimistic about race relations in America, which reversed the optimism that surged in the wake of the civil rights movement two decades earlier (polls conducted in 2018 suggest such attitudes have only slightly improved).47
Another blow came with the Rampart scandal of the late 1990s, again implicating the LAPD and involving a group of elite anti-gang squads that were investigated for their astounding success, eventually revealed to have relied heavily on falsifying reports, framing innocent people, drug dealing, and seriously brutalizing suspects.48 Although up to eighty officers were involved, in keeping with Hollywood’s penchant for telling the stories about lone heroes and isolated monsters, the Hollywood products that emerged in the 2000s reduced the list of suspects to a chosen (and highly racialized) few. While the Rampart scandal included many Latino officers, two of the stories below feature two WASP heroes and one black villainous cop, who becomes the personification of evil—perhaps not a coincidence given their post 9/11 timing and the valiant return of the white knight. Like the Traffic /Traffick stories in the last chapter, a comparative analysis of these three Rampart-related stories is the most efficient and revelatory way to tease out what the stories share and where they diverge, especially with respect to the characters’ racial identity.
Dark Blue’s White Knight
Dark Blue (2003) tracks the ordeal of white cop Eldon Perry (Kurt Russell ), a rogue detective with an elite unit of the LAPD charged with investigating high profile cases. Convinced he acts in the service of a higher order of justice, he routinely plants evidence, fabricates records, and violates suspects’ rights, doing the dirty work he thinks the bureaucrats and courts refuse to do. Once Perry discovers that his white boss and surrogate father, Jack Van Meter (Brendan Gleeson ), also his father’s former partner, is deploying Perry ’s methods simply to make himself rich, Perry embarks on a mission to expose Van Meter and make things right, even if it means going to prison himself. Their showdown plays out against the backdrop of the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
Early in the film a nervous Perry listens to news reports about the trial of the four LAPD officers . Even a pair of low-level criminals, the black Darryl Orchard (Kurupt ) and the white Gary Sidwell (Dash Mihok ) discuss the trial before holding up a Korean-owned market, where they kill four people. Their crime is intercut with a police review board listening to the false testimonies of Perry and his white rookie partner, Bobby Keough (Scott Speedman ), who shot and killed a suspect. After the meeting, Perry assures Keough , (also Van Meter ’s nephew), that what really matters is that “the bullets were in the bad guys.”49 Arthur Holland (Ving Rhames ), a high-ranking black police official, sits on the board and asks the toughest questions, revealing his scorn for Perry as Van Meter ’s goon, and eventually declaring war on both of them. While driving around the city, despite the smoky haze from fires and looters crisscrossing the road, Perry spots Orchard and Sidwell in a car, then watches as the white Sidwell is dragged out and beaten to death on the street. Orchard runs off but Perry eventually catches up with him and threatens to kill him unless he confesses to working with Van Meter .
Rather than a shoot-out, the film’s finale features Perry’s public confession and indictment of Van Meter —his last-minute turn toward serving the greater good. The context is a ceremony to promote Perry to lieutenant, occurring despite the city’s security breakdown. Perry begins his speech by congratulating his “four fellow officers” on their acquittal, the camera catching both clapping hands and the glares of mostly officers of color. In what director Ron Shelton calls a “wonderfully messy cathartic act of redemption ,” Perry paints a stark portrait of an underappreciated, overworked cop, who “is the last person a civilian wants to see until some shitbag shoves a gun in his face.”50 The department was his “family’s business since Los Angeles was a frontier township,” with Perry recalling his grandfather’s stories about bringing horse thieves and rustlers back from the mountains on the back of his Appaloosa. After the advent of squad cars and traffic signals, his father joined the force, and “preyed on the predators that preyed on the city.”51 There was never a question that Perry would be a cop, a teenager during the 1965 Watts riots , he recalls how he watched his father take “potshots” at looters with a deer rifle, with Perry having “winged” one who ran back into the burning building just before it collapsed, most likely burning alive. “I was raised up to be a gunfighter by a family of gunfighters ,” he confesses, ashamed but still boastful.52
While Van Meter desperately tries to stop Perry’s tirade, a reporter, long suspecting the collusion, promises to print Perry’s speech “word for word.” In the film’s closing moments, after Holland has escorted a handcuffed Perry outside, the two notice parts of the city burning in the distance, with a close-up of Perry ’s face expressing utter despair. Perry’s final, long-winded confession comes too late to save the man, but arrives in time to salvage the moral hero he personifies and the myths he supports. Like Ethan Edwards , Perry is the fall guy and the ugly American who must perform the “unpleasant tasks so that the majority of people are free to perform pleasant ones.”53 The words belong to Van Meter but aptly voice the rationale that Perry , another incarnation of the rogue, lives (and falls) by.
The film’s race consciousness also goes well beyond a single character, permeating the smallest details to the most sweeping themes, including having the riots serve as the dramatic backdrop. Racially charged language laces many scenes, including one in which Perry speculates about Holland ’s possible departure to Cleveland as its chief, predicting that the LAPD has to “pin his stars on another brother or the community will go ape shit.”54 This theme of animals recurs, including Perry’s shout out to a black male he wants to interrogate: “Hey, you, in the gorilla suit.” Another example is Van Meter ’s lie to Perry , telling him that two “coloreds” committed the Korean market crimes to deflect attention away from his black-and-white thugs. Perry responds by calling the crimes “monkeyshines,” before heading to South Central to “rattle some cages.”55
Perry critically re-establishes himself as a force of good, but which does little to erase the accumulation of racist references that remain largely uncontested. Shelton , better known for his sports films (e.g., Bull Durham), asserts that “the story doesn’t really have anything to do with the Rodney King riots, [but] it actually has everything to do with it. You’re talking about a corrupt LAPD scandal [and] that’s why the city’s on fire.”56 However, like marauding natives in a western, beyond their symbolism as threat, further specificity is left out and racialized rage remains the story’s “straw man.” Even Shelton concludes, “this is not a movie about civil rights , it’s a movie about Eldon Perry .” The factors of his identity, though, are no more an accident than the gender and race of the rioters.
Although the beating of King is the event that sparks the violent chain of events, his ordeal is reduced to a snippet of video at the film’s start, while Sidwell ’s gruesome death restages a horrifying incident in which several black men viciously beat a white man dragged out of a vehicle—in reality, truck driver Reginald Denney.57 Shelton describes the scene as “hard to watch,” but hoping it captures the lunacy of riots that he describes as having descended from justifiable social rage into madness. In Shelton ’s view such “madness,” then, is best captured by recreating just one example of black-on-white violence. Shelton , who intended to indict the corrupt system that spawned Perry , also praises Perry ’s methods, noting, “there are things [Perry ] will do that we would never do but that help make the world safer.” Key to both his and Russell’s participation in the film, they explain, was that there be “a good guy there,” who has “just gone wrong,” but still available for redemption .58
In scenes involving Perry and officers of the court, Shelton wanted to depict the insidious nature of how “the real violence of the system’s corruption” takes place behind the doors of “a bureaucratic office [and its] white walls.”59 Such an exposé would represent a profound intervention in Hollywood and American storytelling, but that intent gets hopelessly lost in the romantic framework of the western tropes that Shelton employs. Even he concedes, “If you took out the cars it could be … 1870 in Tombstone.”60 The 1992 riots not only frame LA as an untamed frontier environment , but as he suggests, even a “third world city” engaged in a “civil war ” that resembles “Beirut or Bosnia.”61 With these metaphors in mind, the film’s cinematographer searched for “the ugliest places in Los Angeles” that could best convey an urban apocalypse begging for a gunfighter to remedy and Perry becomes that “gunfighter cop in the Wild West of LA.”62
As film critic Ty Burr notes, “[T]he problem with movies like Dark Blue is that they willfully ignore the systemic, historical, cultural, and class causes of racism in favor of pinning it all on a few bad apples. Sure, that’s entertainment. It’s also a lie.”63 Shelton too invokes the “just entertainment” defense, telling one interviewer, “I don’t take a particularly morally superior view in all this, I’m just a storyteller.”64
Training Day’s Black Menace
The next film, Training Day (2001), features a similarly Rampart-inspired LAPD cop , Alonzo Harris , as portrayed by Denzel Washington . While Perry is available for redemption , despite his criminality , Harris is killed in the end by his white protégé, Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke )—an ambitious rookie who initially wanted to learn from Harris , but eventually discovers Harris to be less a crimefighter who uses criminal means to attain a noble end and more an ignoble criminal who has crossed the thin blue line forever.
Like Perry , Harris is protected by potent (and white) political and departmental accomplices known as the “three wise men,” including a well-placed detective, a captain, and a member of the district attorney’s office. The film also includes mention of what Harris terms that “Rodney King shit,” but also how the Rampart scandal has made it “open season on misconduct,” with one of Harris ’s protectors warning him not to end up “on the front page like those other assholes.”65 While Perry takes down the most corrupt department official, Harris is the only criminal cop who pays for such sins. Along the way, Hoyt balks at Harris ’s methods that include stealing a drug dealer’s cash and claims that he became a cop “to put away … the criminals, not to be one.”66 Sounding eerily similar to Roosevelt’s advice on how to defeat a savage (and Alejandro’s wolf in Sicario ), Harris explains, “I walk a higher path, son,” and “to protect the sheep, you got to catch the wolf . And it takes a wolf to catch a wolf .”67
Det. Alonzo Harris (Denzel Washington), an redeemable criminal rogue. Screen shot from Training Day, Warner Bros
Although Harris is remarkably similar in deed and action to Perry , with both screenplays written by David Ayer , Harris is outcast from the ranks of previous rogue warriors who were sanctioned to perform such dirty tasks, as he is depicted in Training Day as more black than blue—the betrayal of his badge making it possible to reject him, and by extension, reinforce America’s long-standing rejection of his race as well. In contrast, Perry , despite ending up in handcuffs and admitting to a heinous string of crimes, is assumed to be a hero at his core.
Another similarity to Shelton ’s aim for Dark Blue is Fuqua ’s search for the most ravaged locales to approximate an uncivilized Los Angeles on the brink of war, with Harris ’s inner city haunt called “the Jungle,” while Hoyt ’s home is situated in the comfortable suburbs. Also like Sheldon, Fuqua was interested in capturing an urban story in the spirit of the western; and like Peckinpah ’s western, he describes Harris ’s crew as his own “wild bunch,”70 including rapper Dr. Dre as Paul, another black cop with a violent temper.71 Fuqua admits he was “drawn to the script because it reminded me of the great cop dramas of the seventies.”72
Many reviewers also mention the film’s nod to its cinematic ancestors, with one calling it “dirtier than Clint Eastwood ’s Dirty Harry .”73 The white savior pitted against the black deviant, though, did not go unnoticed when Training Day was prescreened for the National Association of Black Journalists.74 It is most likely not the intent of filmmakers to tell stories that compound racism, especially given that Fuqua is African American. Rather, as mentioned above, it is the case that these films follow a well-worn path, littered with established mythologies , and which are themselves racially skewed. Although these above representations and the fates of these specific black and white characters seem highly individuated, they follow a familiar logic—one steeped in the larger social context and that fit neatly along a value-laden historical continuum, which is essentially mapped onto these characters along with suggested interpretations of their actions.
The Shield’s Unredeemable Rogue
Finally, the LAPD Rampart scandal inspired the television series, The Shield , with producer Shawn Ryan attesting to having followed news reports of “these awful things the CRASH unit was doing in the Rampart district,” and thinking they would make an interesting series. The series opens with media reports about the city’s most dangerous district now experiencing declining crime rates, with Vic Mackay (Michael Chiklis )—another Scotch-Irish everyman —and his crew of white males given credit for the results. Quickly on display is Mackay ’s contempt for Capt. David Aceveda (Benito Martinez ), who demands Mackay ’s reports on his desk the next day. A smug Mackay fires back, “I don’t answer to you … not even on Cinco de Mayo,” taking a racist jab at the captain’s ethnicity, along with chiding the ambitious Aceveda for his media appearances taking credit for the unit’s success. Mackay claims to answer to someone more powerful in the department, publicly disrespecting the captain for having no street experience and having been promoted, as the captain sums up the rumors, for being “the right color at the right time.”
The plot also includes the struggle to find a young girl who has been sold to a child molester by her crack addict father—already being questioned by a competent but traditional detective. The captain scraps that approach and brings in Mackay who beats up the suspect who then reveals vital information, as is the custom in Hollywood storytelling; this also makes Aceveda complicit in Mackay’s coercive tactics and foils his attempt to rein in Mackay. Rather than settle for depicting Mackay as a redeemable rogue whose good deeds outweigh his methods in “emergency” situations, the show takes a much darker turn, with the episode also showing the FBI ’s effort to nab Mackay , whom Aceveda once described as “Al Capone with a badge.” To others in the precinct, Mackay seems untouchable, as Det. Claudette Wyms (CCH Pounder ) explains how little anyone cares as long as crime is down and if that means “some cop roughs up some spic or some nigger in the ghetto, well, as far as most people are concerned, it’s don’t ask, don’t tell.”75 When Det. Terry Crowley (Reed Diamond ) joins Mackay ’s crew, whom Mackey suspects is the FBI snitch that he is, Mackey behaves in a way no redeemable rogue had done before: he kills Crowley as casually as he killed a drug dealer just seconds before. To show the act’s premeditation, Mackay makes sure to use the dealer’s gun to kill Crowley .
Reviews for the show’s premier episode ranged from “a stunning piece of television about a rogue cop” to liking it to “a cop version of The Sopranos.” One pegged it as “darker than NYPD Blue ” and the Rampart scandal without “the indictments.” Moreover, as the show’s producer admitted in an interview, once the first episode showed Mackay as a cop killer, he too wondered where to take the story after that, admitting that he and his writers deliberated about “where the line could and should be” for Mackay ’s subsequent actions. Given the character’s popularity, however, “It almost didn’t matter what we had Vic do, people had just decided that they liked him and wanted to see what he could get away with.” Ryan explains that 98 percent of the time Mackey is “doing the right thing—it’s the other two percent that makes us sit up and say, ‘whoa, that’s not right.’”76
Earning critical notices and strong ratings, the show lasted seven seasons, with Chicklis winning an Emmy in 2002 for his embodiment of Mackay . Knowing the series was coming to an end, Ryan concedes that he and his FX network boss wanted to present the finale as a Shakespearean tragedy, returning to the “original sin” committed in the pilot meant to expose the “rotten core” of these “urban cowboys .”77 In the series finale, crew member Shane Vendrell (Walton Goggins ) kills himself but not before poisoning his pregnant wife and young son—a murder-suicide that even rattles Mackay . As Mackay ’s fate grows dim, he first tries to cut a deal with Immigration and Customs Enforcement , or ICE , to deliver a notorious drug dealer in exchange for immunity for his past actions (committing acts quite similar to those of the actual Rampart officers). After Mackay ’s ex-wife and children are taken into witness protection in exchange for her cooperation, Mackay is further devastated, having been shown as a doting father to his three children—two of them dealing with autism.
The most harrowing blow, though, and a daring move on the part of the show’s creators, is to depict the consequences when Mackay ’s plea deal plays out. The final episode shows him reporting to work for ICE but learning he will not be on the street but confined to a cubicle producing detailed reports on case files. “This is not what I signed up for,” he rails. “I don’t do desks.” In the closing moments, having traded in his leather jacket for an off-the-rack suit, he lines his desk with framed pictures of his kids while another stack of files is dropped on his desk. He looks gutted, tears welling up in his eyes, following the sound of a distant siren to the window, where he looks out at a city he once thought of as his turf, run his way. It seems a fitting albeit tragic end for a cowboy cop whose last act is to grab the gun he has hidden in his desk, stare at it, then stuff it in his waistband on his way out—either to continue his way of doing things or to realize its irrelevance in his new role.