ABSTRACT
Scorpio’s first victim in Dirty Harry is an attractive young woman whom he shoots while she is swimming. The movie’s opening sequence shows the killer’s gun barrel close up and his view of her in the sights of his high-velocity rifle, before a single bullet enters her neck and she sinks beneath the water. The scene is replayed in Magnum Force when the assassins throw a bomb and fire machine gun bullets into a crowded private pool party. The camera picks on several of the victims, but particularly on another young woman, swimming topless, who receives a bullet between her naked breasts. Each of these killings is eroticized in its own way-the first combines the spectacle of the woman with the crude closeup of the gun barrel, and the second emphasizes the woman’s naked breasts. The eroticization is presumably for or on behalf of heterosexual male viewers whose gaze is presumed in much film criticism to coincide both physically and metaphysically with that of the camera as it first objectifies, then records the sexually charged murders of these women.
