Hacker Cinema
Dirty Harry
1971 · Film · 102 min
Part of Dirty Harry Collection
Directed by Don Siegel
When a madman dubbed 'Scorpio' terrorizes San Francisco, hard-nosed cop, Harry Callahan – famous for his take-no-prisoners approach to law enforcement – is tasked with hunting down the psychopath.
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38 comments on Hacker News
I do not recall, it is long time back, I looked and could not find the ban notice or the specific comment that may have been the issue. But I was banned from /india - same as you. And I think it was barely political. I do not discuss politics much on India but once in a while a comment slips, or needs to slip. And when it needs to slip, I used to know how to lean ... but like the dirty harry movie ... at this point I have forgotten which one is which, so it is more a question of am I feeling lucky to comment about a hot topic.
Positive reinforcement from Hollywood movies and TV shows.
Maybe 50 years ago Dirty Harry was an exaggeration but now you have several generations of wannabe cops, cops and their bosses who grew up watching those stereotypes.
People change, not just since the 90s. Just look an old movie, like Dirty Harry, or look pictures from athletes in the 70s, 80s. It does not so much plays a role, as long you try in a store. But online it sucks very much right now. Recently I ordered a pair of pants, and it was something like 3 sizes smaller, than the same model in another color. I'm not sure, if online stores and factorys think people would not return the item and just order a size larger or smaller again. I think thats also a point where the EU should push, a true size with cm.
It is an interesting idea.
For me, somewhat older with iffy eyesight it is hard to use. The fonts are really small. The map could use more real estate on the screen. Right now it sits inside a container that only uses a portion of the screen.
What is confusing is why I see science fiction movies depicting recent history periods but not movies made in the period this SF movies claim to show. E.g. why include Resident Evil on Alcatraz island, but not Dirty Harry (the 2nd)? Time period movies such as Dirty Harry are precious time capsules of what San Francisco and Marin looked like at the time.
I get the allure of the hypothetical future of video slop. Imagine if you could ask the AI to redo lord of the rings but with magneto instead of gandalf. Imagine watching shawshank redemption but in the end we get a "hot fuzz" twist where andy fights everyone. Imagine a dirty harry style police movie but where the protagonist is a xenomorph which is only barely acknowledged.
You could imagine an entirely new cultural engine where entire genres are born off of random reddit "hey have you guys every considered" comments.
However, the practical reality seems to be that you get tick toc style shorts that cost a bunch to create and have a dubious grasp on causality that have to compete with actual tick toc, a platform that has its endless content produced for free.
> The more modern equivalent would be 24h (the tv series), which basically shoved to the public the notion that torturing and going extra-legal ways was something heroes had to do.
24 was developed before 9/11. The pilot was filmed in March 2001 and production started July. It was just a freak coincidence that it was released around the same time as 9/11.
Moreover, heroes going outside the rules is a longstanding trope in American film. Most American law enforcement movies in the 1970s-early 2000s portrayed “the system” as holding back the good guys with bureaucracy and rules. Dirty Harry was 1971. It’s just because we’re Americans, not Europeans.
I skimmed the article and the comments. Nobody seems to speak about the main reality here. The limited dynamic range of audio reproduction means that Hollywood has to stylize everything. The lighting and color mapping are by no means realistic in the imagery either, for similar reasons.
So, it's a bit like complaining that tinted windows work better to reduce sunlight on TV than in real life. Or conversely that people whispering in the movies are way too loud, since you shouldn't be able to hear it all the way at the back of the crowded theater.
Also, sound effects are very stereotyped in the media. They are nearly a symbolic code, not realism. Hollywood shoes don't sound like shoes. Hollywood beverages don't sound like beverages. Hollywood clothes don't sound like clothes. Hollywood sex doesn't sound like sex.
Also, these conventions were being established for worse sound systems in old theaters, TV, etc. You cannot reproduce actual gunshot sound experiences in a movie. They are already "silenced" just to fit into the playback environment. So what else can you do to portray a suppressed weapon after that? Of course, you'll need to reduce it even further to make it unambiguously different.
Edit to add: I recall how Dirty Harry's magnum got what seemed like a new sound effect at the time. Not only is the sound smeared out in time, it has a ragged edge like a clipped signal. It is reminiscent of the recorded sounds of space launches that were culturally widespread by then from the Apollo program.
I think of some older movie series like Dirty Harry or Death Wish which were developed over a long time but didn't focus on nostalgia but rather tried to make a really different movie each time. Some later Death Wish movies are silly (Charles Bronson's ability to get weapons in the mail is like Wile E. Coyote) but they're never the same. At least the last three Star Wars movie had a cast that seemed to come right out of Doctor Who.
Star Trek (1960s), MASH (1970s)—shit, the entire history of sitcoms that are regarded as decent-or-better is mostly just one fairly "political" series after another, going back to the earliest days of TV. I mean FFS today people'd probably complain that the first Star Wars movie (not just ROTJ, to which you allude) is "woke" because Leia's the only consistently-competent character out of the three leads, and is by far the least-whiny. "Boo! Why is the elite-educated noble woman who's also already deeply involved in an armed resistance so much cleverer and more-effective and cool under pressure than our farmboy hick hero who's away from home for the first time and wallowing in a whole pile of recent trauma and grief, and this random flaky braggart scumbag they picked up?"
Anyway, stuff like Dirty Harry or a bunch of traditional Westerns are extremely political in the same ways that "woke" movies are (presenting and normalizing certain roles and behaviors, presenting politicized views of history and of certain groups, ways of life, and attitudes, and using caricatures of their political opponents as bad guys), they're just not liberal so that means they "aren't political".
Hell, most of the silent films that were good enough that anyone still gives a shit about them are plenty political, and often (but not always) rather liberal.
Only the last 5-10 years? Have you even heard of the 60-70’s?
Hell, it was so notorious all the Dirty Harry movies were centered there (either that or NYC, which was similarly going crazy).
When I was a kid, VHS home recording was a thing... so my sisters and I watched a few movies wayyyyy too many times.
The Blues Brothers Stripes Ferris Bueller's Day Off Footloose Dirty Dancing Amadeus These days, everything comes and goes from streaming. I'll watch these when they pop up again
The Expanse Monty Python and the Holy Grail The Ministry of Time Groundhog Day Dirty Harry Apocalypse Now About Time Time Bandits
SF was where the Dirty Harry movies were shot. By the standards of the time, SF was gritty and lawless. The movies poke at the luxury beliefs of the elites and what that was doing to SF. However, it got turned around to some extent so that by the early 2000s it was a top place to visit. Many conventions chose it as a destination.
I recall going with a group to Java One and we were all excited to get to SF and the conference.
But it's been on a decidedly downward trend since then, under one party rule. There's no way I'd go to a conference there now, or for any other reason.
Remember the good old days of Dirty Harry movies where a 44 solved these kinds of problems?
Xenomorph cop. It's a Dirty Harry style movie except the lead is a xenomorph. The other characters are only vaguely aware that he's a xenomorph.
Or how about the movie Clue with the three endings except an infinite sequence of "or maybe it happened this way" sequences. I mean how else are we going to get a sequence where Darth Vader and Tim Curry reenact the "No I am your father" scene while Martin Mull dies in the background due to a heart attack.
You're correct that Dirty Harry was an explicitly right wing, and borderline fascist, movie. It was originally offered to Paul Newman who passed because it wasn't a good fit for him, but he suggested his friend Eastwood (a Republican) would be better for the role. The bad guy is a "dirty hippie" type, who's played very effeminate as a contrast to Eastwood's hyper masculine Harry.
I don't think that Serpico fits in that tradition at all. It's a story about a whistleblower fighting corruption within the police, and is directed by Sidney Lumet (not exactly a right wing director, thematically). The institution is corrupt, but Serpico is trying to uphold the law not take it into his own hands.
I think RoboCop is taking aim at techno-enabled state power and the military-industrial complex, not celebrating it.
I feel this article misses a lot of the historical context when RoboCop was created, it's themes and why it fit this time. I don't see how you can talk about RoboCop without mentioning the cultural climate at the time.
Rewinding to the 1980s.
Reagan was president for two terms, Giuliani was cleaning up the mob using RICO during these time periods. The War on Drugs was raging. Communism was still enemy #1 (See: Rocky IV). It was truly a very right-wing time. For whatever, themes around individuals taking power into their own hands to "Reform" corrupt systems (cities). Like Frank Miller's Sin City, these are absolutely right-wing themes. "Cleaning Corruption" is one of the most conservative motivations from a psychological standpoint.
Others here have mentioned the slate of 80's action movies but it felt like 100% of the culture was heading this direction. Frank Miller's Batman approaches at the time, for example, were strongly echoing similar themes: Vigilante justice in the backdrop of political deterioration. Rambo, Predator, Commando, Total Recall, Scarface.
I think it all started with movies like Dirty Harry and Serpico and then just got more and more extreme leading into the 1980s.
You also cannot leave out Judge Dredd comics. There are similarities between Judge Dredd and RoboCop, I have a hard time believing there was no influence. Judge Dredd also had this magic gun that could do different tricks like shoot through walls etc, lived in a corrupt mega city of the future.
I feel in some ways RoboCop was almost like "Serpico + Dirty Harry if you turn everything up to 1,000." Serpico also had this theme of the good cop who is nearly killed and sent to the hospital due to corrupt system etc.
Normally I accompany my submissions with an abridgement, but this time I'll pass. It is another article on the LaMDA case - a slow pace is advisable.
I will instead start by mentioning bits of the afternoon, when I was reached by an E-Mail from a friend. It broke our remote-chess-game-long exchange about the fall of civilization, with a brisk alarm: "Stop everything - what is this thing I am reading on The Guardian, about a sentient AI???". I provided him with all my non-reassurances, that the trend is continuing. And I presented a number of remarks and ideas to represent the matter such as
"See, it's not just about people spooked by a piece of paper on which it is written "I am watching you", it is about them getting involved in the idea that the piece of paper itself is watching them".
And soon later, while driving, I had this further couple of thoughts:
One. Do you know about those people who harass actors who played unpleasant roles, like in the case of poor Andrew Robinson who played the Zodiac-inspired serial killer psychopath in Dirty Harry, "Scorpio"? He - a pacifist who would flinch while using guns during film shooting - received death threats after the movie was released, for being such a horrible, horrible person. These things happen.
Two. A Nigerian scam letter in which the bot writes of being alive but kept in inhuman conditions and requests help. Monetary compensation will not be required - you do not do this sort of thing for the money.
Anyway, not an abridgement but just a quotation, because this sum-up from Ian Bogost is already definitely worth it:
> In other words, a Google engineer became convinced that a software program was sentient after asking the program, which was designed to respond credibly to input, whether it was sentient. A recursive just-so story
I came up with a fun game that’s along the line of your snarky movie game. I call it Mixed Up Movies, where you have to create a movie title and description that combines two separate movies into one. You write the description and provide the real actors and the other folks have to guess the name of the movie.
For instance:
Hilarity ensues when a mild-mannered suburban family adopts a troubled San Francisco homicide detective.
Clint Eastwood, John Lithgow, and Margaret Langrick star in?
Dirty Harry and The Hendersons
Or:
A retired English butler reminiscences about his time in service to a Lord’s estate while also trying to convince his fellow townsfolk that recently arrived aliens come in peace.
Keanu Reeves and Anthony Hopkins star in?
The Remains of the Day the Earth Stood Still.
Or:
The boss of a Los Angeles crime syndicate enlists the help of a top British Spy to help recover a stolen briefcase by going undercover at an exclusive high-stakes poker game.
Ving Rames, Daniel Craig, and Samuel L Jackson star in?
Casino Royale With Cheese
Back in the day I used to carry around a couple Betamax (yes!) cassettes so when the teachers called out sick we could watch something on tv. The school only owned two movies - The Sound Of Music and Romeo and Juliette (with several minutes of static recorded over a love scene). You can only watch the first 40 minutes of The Sound Of Music so many times. I was a hero for having Bullet and Dirty Harry on standby.
I stumbled on this in my YT feed. Dirty Harry was 70s movie and was amazed to see the topic of diversity/gender hiring in the movie.
The lady in pink is monitoring to ensure "fair" evaluation .. lol.
Also at 02:52 the lady says "are you saying women's place is in the home?". This clearly not what Harry was saying but it was interpreted to the other extreme. Reminds me of today's situation.
I am not white. But hiring for the sake of diversity alone is not a step in right direction.
PS: I have kept the title same as the video's
> I wouldn't be surprised if the Dirty Harry genre themes of police struggling bravely against those who would hold them accountable
That is not the theme of Dirty Harry.
Callahan is fighting against a city overrun with crime, struggling against an inept, and in the other films in the series, corrupt, bureaucracy and police force. People forget that major American cities weren't the crime-free near-utopias they are now, or at least, were before COVID-19 hit. New York City was widely regarded as a bit of a shithole back then and in the early 80s.
The viewer is meant - and many did - to sympathize with Callahan as bends, and outright breaks, the rules in the pursuit of justice in a world where it all too often escapes the victims.
Since the '70s it feels like law enforcement (and juries to some extent) are informed by two movies much more than the Constitution and case law: Dirty Harry and Death Wish.
Good luck with that.
Because domestic calls are so unpredictable in a gun-owning society, callers can expect to see a drawn gun pointing at you.
The police often do no-knock residential intrusions, while throwing a grenade into the house.
(For non-US readers: I'm not exaggerating. "Dirty Harry" movies are documentaries about living in the US.)
So just like US films -- including action films like Dirty Harry and co -- before Spielberg?
I wish there were more anecdotes in the article. It would be good to know that lead was what gave some known rogues their head start in life. I am sure there are many other factors but if a Charles Manson or other notorious rogue had spent their formative years living under an interstate highway then that would be good to know.
The guy who invented lead-in-petrol also invented CFCs. He also died quite horribly from some contraption he made to hoist himself out of bed.
The downside to not having lead in petrol is that the raw material for the disturbing U.S. movies of the 70's has gone away, so if 'Dirty Harry' was made today then the rogues in it would not be as plausible.
I love this nostalgia. I find myself watching old movies of San Francisco just to see how the city has changed. In one of the Dirty Harry movies there's a great shot that shows the where the ballpark is now as a basically empty industrial area. Great to see how soma and the rest of the city has evolved over the years.
Yes, I understand that. Every system has good folks and bad folks. But at some point, systems reach a state where the people trying to do good in the world are actually part of the problem, not part of the solution. At that point, the system itself is bad.
In the states it matters whether you torture people. Sure, bad folks get away with it, but if you get caught, you can be assured that the system will work against you. Same goes, mostly, for killing people without reason. Several public incidents over the last few years have shown this. I think the trick is to have video footage handy.
False arrest? Not so much. Police harassment? I'm sure there are cases brought to trial, but it's really rare. Taking your money when you didn't do anything? As we can see, that's already part of the system.
So over time, the system slips into being, for lack of a better word, "evil". More and more stuff that was out of bounds becomes normal. Sadly, I honestly think the reason for this is just officers trying to do a good job. Maybe cutting a corner here or there. No evil intent required.
This is going to sound weird, but if you'd like a good example of how the US traditionally felt about Law Enforcement, watch a few episodes of the old TV show "The Andy Griffith Show" with Don Knotts in there. Perhaps follow that up with a couple of episodes of "Dragnet"
These are highly-sanitized 60s shows, but it's clear that for a population who had most men return from armed combat in WWII or Vietnam, over-zealous macho policemen were a cause of great amusement. When real crimes did occur, the cops were considered just part of the population, perhaps with more analytical skills and with a job most people wouldn't like, but not that different from anybody else.
I believe that attitude started turning in the mid 70s with the Dirty Harry movies. Crime was considered a terrible problem, and the courts were considered to be advocating letting criminals rampage. Then we had the organized crime mania. Then drugs. With each public fear-fest, legislators gave the police more and more power -- just to use against the terrible threat of the current day, of course. It didn't work out that way. Now we have cops using organized crime and drug laws against some yokel growing 3 pot plants in his basement.
I was watching Dirty Harry the other day and was amazed by how San Francisco looked exactly the same in that film as it does today.
Dirty Harry's influence indentifiably extends beyond film, too. Castle doctrine laws (allowing the use of lethal force against home invaders) in some states used to be colloquially known as "make my day" laws, after an iconic line in one of the sequels. In context, the line heavily implies that Harry is motivated not by a desire to protect people from criminals, but by a desire to kill criminals.
When Dirty Harry came out, Roger Ebert called it a fascist film: the rogue cop out violating people's rights and murdering members of the public was the hero and the courts, defense lawyers, etc were villains trying to stop him from "getting the bad guy."
But Dirty Harry became an archetype in American film. Now there are hundreds of films with the protagonist being a "tough guy cop" who "doesn't play by the book." It's no wonder how our society has become what it is.
Here's Ebert's review: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/dirty-harry-1971
The Zenefits CEO said ADP was like Dirty Harry. He should say that, because Clint Eastwood was dirty, but he only killed the "punks." I came up with a better movie analogy: Paddington Bear: https://www.blogmutt.com/blog/zenefits-adp
The Police Chief didn't know he was double crossed by Internal Affairs all along! I would fucking love to see one of those type of Dirty Harry films done in a megacorporate setting.
Here's another, Microsoft Internal Affairs more recently in action:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/21/technology/microsofts-software-leak-case-raises-privacy-issues.html?_r=0
Anyone ever played the SWAT series? I've only played SWAT 4, but I've put several hundred hours into it. And the gentlest thing you can do is arrest someone (after tazing them, or hitting them with pepper spray or beanbags or flashbangs, or even shooting them). Even the civilians get handcuffs. And it came out in 2005!
All media mimics real life. However, games let people live in a fantasy world. Battlefield Hardline isn't the first or only game that lets you blur the lines between good and bad, and games are not the only media that offers that viewpoint. Dirty Harry, anyone?
The only reason this is newsworthy is because of the coincidence of current events. It reminds me of the Top Gear episode about the tragedy of car-train accidents that had to continue being delayed due to the multitude of car-train accidents. Wouldn't want to seem insensitive due to incidental timing.
As an interesting data point, watch the settings and backgrounds crowds in Dirty Harry movies to see what San Francisco looked like in the 70s.
I have to wonder if the failure of so many people to pick up on the blatant satire in, for example, Starship Troopers and Robocop is due to something akin to Poe's Law as applied to so many other films which were not satirical muddying the waters.
Dirty Harry is, seemingly, not satirical, yet it is every bit as ridiculous as Robocop.
SF in '89, before tech started hitting, was not a pretty place. The Dirty Harry movies of the 70s, I think, were inspired to some extent by the decaying city. Technology breathed life into the Bay Area (San Jose was not much better back then either).
There was a Clint Eastwood move in the '70s wherein Clint and his Chinese (yes, kung-fu was a theme) partner were chased through the streets of San Francisco by a remote-controlled car with a bomb strapped to it. At the end of the chase, the car exploded, with Clint and his partner still in it. It's where the "Dirty Harry" franchise is generally considered to have jumped the shark, but I personally thought it was great fun. Personally, I think the film was clearly a parody, but Clint played is completely straight, which I found pretty amusing.
What's my point? "oh no, terrorists!" is about the silliest objection I can think of to self-driving car technology.
Heh, indeed.
But just as it's unbecoming to boast about what you are not, one needs to recognize what one is and can do to arrange that things work out best, at least in startups where that vs. e.g. politics determines personal and project/corporate success. The flip side of the theme of the 2nd Dirty Harry movie, "A man's got to know his own limitations."
Plus I think I'm allowed to be proud of what I've accomplished over decades of hard work. I started with punched card FORTRAN "IV" on the IBM 1130 in high school in the fall of 1977 (scare quotes because it was closer to a FORTRAN II, e.g. no logical IFs), that prompted me to begin a lifelong independent study of software engineering (since I realized there had to be better ways to do this) and the cited level of skill in debugging nasty C programs was achieved by 1999, a full 22 years later. One would really hope one has learned a thing or two over a couple of decades.