It’s absolutely true that the Kick-Ass franchise is cartoonishly violent, and the plotline in the first movie in which Dave saves a white girl from menacing black drug dealers was downright racially irresponsible. That said, I’m really relieved that there’s at least one franchise out there that’s focused on the problem of escalation between superheroes and supervillains:

In a way, the arms race between superheroes and supervillians is like the real-world cycle in which police forces get more militarized in response to the perception that they’re outgunned by criminals, something that’s been a glancing subtext of pop culture since Hans Gruber took out the LAPD’s armored truck with a rocket launcher. In the end, nobody wins. You just get fireballs. Or two women in a pickup truck getting shot up by the cops, and a police department that then can’t even be bothered to replace their vehicle. Kick-Ass 2, like all superhero movies, will end up shying away from the idea that shutting down this escalatory cycle is a good thing, if only because the entertainment value—or, shall I say, kick-ass value—of it is so high. But more than most other franchises, Kick-Ass is comfortable at least acknowledging that there’s real ugliness there, and testing how comfortable we are embracing that.

During the first episode of CBS’s new police procedural Golden Boy, which premieres tonight at 10 PM, Walter Clark (Theo James) tells a reporter who is interviewing him about his rapid rise from street cop to police commissioner, “Inside me there are two dogs at war. One good and one evil. Now which one wins?” The reporter knows the answer immediately: “The one you feed the most.”

The language might sound a bit stiff. But it’s a great premise for a television show. Many major problems in law enforcement today are the results of gorging the evil dog, from the profits police departments can make from asset forfeiture, the kinds of quotas that were the subject of the third season of The Wire, and an arms race between police departments and criminals that have made it more likely cops will bring military-style force to bear on civilians. Golden Boy, which flashes back and forth between Clark’s arrival in the Homicide department seven years before his appointment as Commissioner and his early days performing his duties in that new post, sets itself up as the story of how Clark acquired the principals that guide him in his post. It could have been a fascinating—and dark—look at how someone acquires the sense of power that allows them to become former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, who is currently in jail for committing conspiracy, mail fraud, and lying to the Internal Revenue Service, or to see how The Wire‘s Ervin Burrell turned into the kind of craven career-hound he was.

But Golden Boy doesn’t have the guts to go there. Instead, the show is the story of Walter Clark’s journey from hotheadednes to sober spouter of aphorisms. Commissioner Clark is the kind of man who says of confidential informants “They’re an important part of the job and they die forgotten…It’s doubtful his associates know he was a snitch. It might bring trouble to the family,” failing to acknowledge the kind of pressure that police departments put on suspects to turn them into confidential informants, and once they’re doing that job, that the incentives can encourage such sources to bring in false information. He is, apparently, the police brass equivalent of television’s bevy of moderate Republicans, a guy who turns his back on the Mayor to meet with victims’ advocates because he’s appalled by the suggestion that he’d “Blow off a victim’s advocate for a guy I don’t like?” As a fantasy of police immunity from political pressure goes, this dream practically comes spangled in My Little Pony-style rainbows and sparkles, it’s so sweet optimistic. And the show seems to exist in a world where there’s no such thing as a bad police shooting like the ones we saw in the Los Angeles Police Department’s hunt for Christopher Dorner—Walter’s shooting of a suspect in the case that made him a hero was good, and as Commissioner, he tells a shaky female cop not only that “Preliminary investigations indicate it was a clean shooting in a difficult situation. In my view, that makes you a hero,” but that she should get all the PTSD treatment she needs before coming back to work.

This is an irritating enough framework. But Golden Boy, despite its innovative framing of police questions, falls into cliches in its execution. Initially, it looks like the show’s use of Chi McBride as Detective Don Owen, Walter’s older partner, is promising. When the two of them first go out on assignment, Walter leaving their office building through a haze of reporters eager to cover him as a tabloid-moving Hero Cop, Walter mistakes Don opening a car door as a courtesy. “Who am I, Morgan Freeman?” Owen asks him. “Open your own damn door.” And when Walter breaks into a suspect’s apartment to try to advance the case against him, Owen tells him that “All this information: useless. If this gets out, this guy is going to walk,” and points out that Walter’s endangered Owen’s prospects for a secure retirement, being careless with the man who is suposed to mentor him in an already-difficult situation. But he quickly devolves into aphorism, revealing himself to be Walter’s union delegate when he’s caught talking to a reporter, an event that apparently has no real effect on their relationship. Owen, it seems, is mostly there to admit minor personal flaws for the sake of drama and to steer Walter in the right direction.

Structurally, the show couldn’t have him reject his protege or really dislike him, but I wish it would at least engage with why someone like Owen couldn’t be police commissioner while Walter can. Is it race? Ambition? Does Walter’s willingness to bend the rules to bring in big collars and more media attention make him a more attractive candidate than someone who wants to do the job with integrity? Golden Boy would be a much more interesting show for posing these questions, and for offering up a different, but more discomfiting, end result.

This post discusses plot points from the October 28 episode of Homeland.

“How about a movie?” Finn Walden asks Dana Brody as they arrange their first date in this week’s episode of Homeland. “Once Upon a Time in America is playing in Dupont Circle…He’s an Italian director who specializes in wide-screen agony.” That’s pretty lofty taste for a high school student, even the son of the Vice President, but it’s no mistake that Henry Brommell, who wrote this episode, put a movie full of assumed identities and betrayals in Finn’s mouth. This is a craft episode of television, full of cultural allusions and subtle parallels, as Carrie breaks down Brody and builds him back up into a potential double agent.

I’ve loved the introduction of Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend, wisely underacting opposite Claire Danes) as a sardonic foil to Carrie who speaks in pop culture koans and is willing to employ violence that she isn’t. All the interrogation scenes in this episode are just beautifully written, but Peter’s confrontation with Brody started with a blunt and useful delineation of where power lies in the room—and of how this scene would be different from the exchanges we’re used to seeing on television. “I’m a United States Congressman. You can’t just kidnap me and shackle me in the fucking floor,” Brody insisted. “Actually, we can. Thanks to your colleagues we have fairly broad powers,” Peter reminded him. “I want a lawyer,” Brody insisted. “Well, life is full of disappointments,” Peter told him.

I think this episode of Homeland may end up being interpreted as pro-torture, given Peter’s calm use of much of the latitude awarded to him—it’s telling that the CIA has a medical team on hand to treat Brody’s hand immediately. But it’s telling that Peter’s stabbing of Brody’s hand, his spitting rage, are almost immediately revealed to be an act. “Every good cop needs a bad cop,” Peter tells Saul, and it’s true. It’s the emotional connection Carrie has with Brody that allows her to break down the central lie he repeats first to Peter and then to her, that he wasn’t wearing the vest. But for that to work, Brody had to be goaded to feel his connection with Carrie, and Carrie had to believe that her expertise was being underestimated and her emotional connection to Brody treated like it was evidence of her hysteria.

Carrie’s interrogation may seem emotional at first blush, but with the benefit of watching the episode a couple of times, it’s impressive how systemic it is. Carrie beings by evoking Brody’s guilt at the sin both of condemning her and not loving her quite enough. She gives him water, a kindness. She reminds him of their shared damage from the war. She delineates the difference between him and Abu Nazir. And she reminds him that he’s still worthy of love, and of doing the things that make someone worthy of the love of a daughter, or a lover, or a wife. “It was hearing Dana’s voice that changed your mind, wasn’t it?” Carrie asks him. “She asked you to come home, and you did. Why? Maybe because, maybe because you finally understood that killing yourself and ruining Dana’s life wouldn’t bring Issa back. Maybe because you knew then how much you loved your own child. Maybe you were just sick of death. That’s the Brody I’m talking to. That’s the Brody that knows the difference between warfare and terrorism. That’s the Brody I met up in that cabin.” If you doubt her intentionality, even for a moment, it’s so striking that she moves from the finale piece in her emotional portrait, “That’s the Brody I fell in love with,” to the question “What is Abu Nazir’s plan?” From that moment forward, Brody tells her the truth, about Roya, about the vest, about the fact that there is a coming plan. A blade through the hand produces resistance. But love is undeniable. The question that hangs over the episode is whether the latter could have done its work without the former.
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“Can you stop talking about politics and be a cop, please?” Detective Alex Cross (Tyler Perry) snaps at his boss, high-ranking cop Richard Brookwell (John C. McGinley) near the end of Alex Cross, an adaptation of James Patterson’s novel Cross, about a brilliant, African-American detective. In the immediate context, Cross is asking his boss to be more aggressive in his efforts to protect Leon Mercier (Jean Reno), an industrialist who is heading up the Detroit Fund, a major effort to revitalize the failing city, from Picasso (Matthew Fox), a dedicated and unnervingly skilled assassin. But much of Alex Cross raises the question of what it means to be a pop cultural cop at a deeper level, and reaches some disturbing answers.

In movies and television, being a detective or beat cop has often meant that you can break rules, beat or threaten suspects, shoot people and almost always get away with it after a semblance of a review—and even if you don’t, you can retain the audience’s sympathies. In Alex Cross, it also means that you can beat your colleagues, steal evidence, drop a murderer off a roof rather than bring him to trial, and frame someone for a death penalty offense without regret or compunction. From a liberal perspective, it’s always made sense to be skeptical of glamorizations of this kind of power for reasons of both self-protection and principle. There’s no question that much of the popular appeal of tough cops lies in the fact that their violence and corruption is deployed against people who are coded as distasteful or decadent, be they people of color who are presented as gang-bangers or terrorists, or hippies who are harbingers of anarchy a la Dirty Harry. And while it’s easier to dismiss these violations of the order when these tactics are turned on people we’ve been taught to hate and fear by people movies and television tell us we can trust, if we bother to think clearly, it’s awful to imagine that brutality straying beyond what we’ve defined as acceptable targets—which should tell us how awful it no matter who is the subject of renegade police violence.

Alex Cross spends a great deal of time establishing its titular character as someone we can trust to deploy violence, and to transgress the rules that constrain him in his work as a police detective. He believes in rehabilitation and innocence, visiting a young prisoner who’s taken the rap for two murders committed by her uncle, who tells him “You can’t save everybody, Doctor Cross,” only to have him remind her that “I’m not trying to save everybody. I’m just trying to save you.” He is an intellectual, a man who plays chess in the prison yard by starlight, and who offers his daughter suggestions for how to improvise during her piano practice. He is a loving father, one who is delighted when he finds out his wife is unexpectedly pregnant, and plans to transfer to a desk job with the FBI so he’ll be able to earn a better living and stop risking his own safety on the streets. He is affectionate with his mother-in-law, Mama (Cicely Tyson), who appears to be channeling Ruby Dee’s performance as the mother of drug lord Frank Lucas in American Gangster, if with somewhat staticky reception. If nothing else, it’s a virtue that Alex Cross makes so transparent the process of cinematically signaling who is a legitimate employer of extreme violence and legal manipulation and who is a legitimate target of those abuses.

The targets, in this case, are a constellation of decadent white men, and two Asian women the movie treats with astonishingly callous disregard. The first of these men is Picasso, who enters the movie by putting himself on a card for a cage fight that’s being held in an abandoned church, and betting heavily on his own performance. If that weren’t enough of a signifier that Picasso has deviated from commonly-held sensibilities and morality, he’s swiftly revealed to be a sexual sadist. Picasso takes home an attractive Asian woman he met at the fight, but when they’re in bed, he asks her “Do you like it?” When she says yes, he tells her “Well, I can’t have that,” and proceeds to paralyze her and cut off her fingers one by one to torture information out of her. “There is no way it takes all ten fingers,” Cross’s partner and boyhood friend Tommy (Edward Burns) declares at the crime scene the next day. “The other nine were for fun,” Cross tells him. That they later make a macabre joke out of using her severed fingers to open her safe apparently isn’t meant to sully our respect or affection for Tommy and Alex, though we are, of course, supposed to be revolted at the man who committed the initial violence against her.
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