Movie Doubles

Beyond Good And Evil - 'Dirty Harry' & 'Zodiac'

One of my earliest movie loves was 'Dirty Harry'. That is to say, I dug this film so much as a 8-year old, I used to try and draw the exaggerated Dirty Harry Magnum .44 everywhere. On my notebooks in class, to the side of my lunch box, and even a bit of wall next to my bedside table. To me, there is still no handgun mightier than the Magnum .44, and as a punk, I feel lucky. In comparison to the Walther PPK wielded by James Bond, it seemed to me a gun that could stop a speeding car was more valuable in fighting crime. One of the first bits of movie dialogue I tried to copy was a clenched teeth: "I know what you're thinking. Did he shoot five, or did he shoot six? Well, to tell you the truth, I kinda lost count in all the excitement..." etc.

What I didn't realise as a young kid was that the villain Scorpio was based on a real killer on the loose in San Francisco at the time, the Zodiac. How could I have missed it? Partly because I was always more concerned with Harry's concern than the sociological significance of 'Dirty Harry'.

The Zodiac killer has been made into various bits of movie fiction since his heyday. The worst of the bunch is not 'Dirty Harry' but 'The January Man' starring Kevin Kline. Why is 'January Man so awful? It's because the central premise is that warm fuzzy reasoning will always beat out psychopathy. It's enough to make you let out a deep sigh of disgust. If the world were so rational, maybe the San Francisco Police Department would have had little trouble in catching the real Zodiac. They certainly weren't a pack of dummies like the NSW Police.

'Zodiac' by David Fincher actually thrusts us into the world of 1960s and 1970s policing as it really stood. There are even references to 'Dirty Harry' where the detectives in charge go to the movies only to be confronted by their jobs. If 'Dirty Harry' is exhilarating in its fascist penis-gun worship as it blows away Scorpio, 'Zodiac' is studious in assaying the facts of
the case, from start to murky end. We are pitted against the realities of technology, procedure and protocol. The epistemological unknowable stands in the way of the characters as they try to sort through the fog of information - very much like the fog of war as described by Robert McNamara.

There were so many pitfalls in figuring out the Zodiac case. The multiple murders and assaults were spread across four police areas. Each of these police forces had a piece of evidence or testimony that might have combined to give sufficient cause to investigate the prime suspect; but never having enough, the judges would never grant a search warrant. And so the story goes as the case slowly drifts down time, right down all of the 70s and 80s. In the process we are even treated to a scene where they end up watching 'Dirty Harry' and are incensed by the portrayal.

To be fair to 'Dirty Harry', it probably represents the frustrations of the public more than a critique of the SFPD. Harry Callahan is a cop who plays at the edge of the rules. He's a homicide detective who is willing to pull out his gun and fire. He goes so far as to make an arrest of Scorpio, but Scorpio ends up walking the streets because Harry used excessive force in his arrest and an unlawful search. In other words, Harry is the original movie anti-hero cop who has zero respect fro protocols. He's a bit like an early model Steven Seagal character, but better acted and no martial arts. It's not that the film-makers thought the SFPD was inept; they just wanted them to catch the Zodiac through all and any means necessary. As the tagline to 'Out for Justice' once read: "It's a Dirty Job, but somebody's got to take out the Garbage."

The Zodiac villain character is far less confrontational than Scorpio. He is evasive, and sporadic where Scorpio is effusive and frenetic. In the end, Scorpio does take over a school bus full of children - something Zodiac threatened to do and never did - and it leads to the climax where Harry guns him down . Harry delivers the Magnum 44 speech like the last rites, Scorpio reaches for the gun, giving ample excuse for Harry to blow him away with the Magnum .44. Most importantly (and I will never forget this image) Harry throws away his badge into the body of water. The very elusiveness of the Zodiac character makes this whole confrontation unlikely. He simply won't come out into the light. Instead he taunts and writes commentaries from the dark - and it is in this darkness that the paranoid imagination grows. 'Zodiac' shows us that in the absence of solid patterns, we start clutching at straws for answers. the unknown factors clamor. The half-truths, the half-clues drive people nuts - it starts to look like a no-win scenario.

The makers of 'Dirty Harry' understood implicitly that if Harry was going to 'win', and by win, we mean slay Scorpio, then he would have to go beyond protocol, and beyond ethics to do so. In turn, he would cease to be a police officer. Don Siegel obviously thought it was a fair exchange. The cops in 'Zodiac' never get to make that choice, even when they come face to face with their prime suspect. They have full restraint and reason - they desperately want to get him, and get him the right way so that he stands trial. That their prime suspect doesn't come to that point forms the great tragedy of the film. It must have been infuriating to watch 'Dirty Harry' while the case remained open.

What emerges from watching these two films together is the notion that ethics starts at the point where protocol is exercised to the maximum. The protocols safe-guard procedure and procedure leads to justice being served. If we want to take a moral course of action, we have to abandon ethics and revert to a morality of a bygone era. So as the real life cops tried to work the problem, the fictitious Harry Callahan 'abandons protocol to do what's right'. Not only do we come to learn a lot about the case, we come to understand America as it was in a certain point in the 20th Century. Having seen 'Dirty Harry' so many times made 'Zodiac' that much more fascinating; and having watched 'Zodiac' several times, 'Dirty Harry' has returned to me as a very rich text.