ABSTRACT

Eastwood’s critical nemesis, the critic Pauline Kael, says that movies such as Magnum Force have replaced the old-style John Wayne hero with “a man who essentially stands for nothing but violence” (New Yorker, 14 Jan. 1974, 86). She goes on to point out how the Callahan character “lives and kills as affectlessly as a psychopathic personality.” It is the numbing and distancing effect of such movies that she objects to, claiming that they routinize violence to the point of alienation, and that they give no encouragement to the audience to think about the social issues-which may well directly affect them-embedded in the film. For instance, in her review of Dirty Harry she indicts the film for not pausing to consider-or to allow the audience to consider-the social conditions under which Scorpio could actually get his high-powered rifles and machine guns. Still on Dirty Harry, she notes with some distress that

the movie was cheered and applauded by Puerto Ricans in the audience, and they jeered-as they were meant to-when the maniac whined and pleaded for his legal rights. Puerto Ricans could applaud Harry because in the movie laws protecting the rights of the accused are seen not as remedies for the mistreatment of the poor by the police and the courts but as protection for evil abstracted from all social conditions-metaphysical evil, classless criminality. (1973, 387)

With similar issues in mind, she concludes her ruminations on Magnum Force by noting the obvious fact that audiences flock to see films like this, and by

suggesting that in the mid-1970s the audience “rather likes its fantasies to be uninvolving.” The implicit view here of an audience’s relation to these movies is that it is constituted in what is commonly called escapism. Audiences, we are often told, in fact do not go to the cinema to be reminded of the frustrations and inequities of their everyday existence, but exactly to escape them, or even to produce some fantasized solution to them. Kael’s objection to this phenomenon, sustained throughout the 1970s, is effectively to the kind of violence and amoralism in which such escapes and solutions seem to consist. Her position is, of course, an awkward one in that her exhortation that audiences — especially minority audiences-should recognize more clearly their own oppression cannot quite deal with the fact that such audiences have their own reasons for cheering and applauding. That is, the pleasure that audiences take in the products of the culture industry is difficult to reconcile with ideological monstrosities, like Magnum Force, that seem to be capable of procuring such pleasures for them.