Compliance, Craig Zobel’s terrific movie about a real series of events, in which fast-food restaurant employees were convinced by a prank caller posing as a police officer to detain and strip-search their coworkers, on the grounds that they’ve been accused of theft, is rooted in things like the Milgram experiment, which tested the extent to which group morality could drive individuals to do heinous things to other people:

But the movie, which comes out in August, is also subtly and importantly about how that desire to comply with a prevailing sense of what’s right is heightened when the police are involved (or people believe the police to be involved). In Compliance, the man on the phone takes Sandra, a supervisor at a fast food restaurant, someone who doesn’t have very much authority, and asks her to take on some of his. He tells her that Becky (Dreama Walker), one of her employees, has stolen money from a customer’s purse. It’s a small accusation, but it’s a weightier matter than the day-to-day operation of a restaurant. Until that point in the day, the biggest problem Sandra’s faced has been who left a freezer open, spoiling food. Even if she finds the culprit in that case, it’s a no-win situation for her: Sandra’s still going to be held responsible. The call from the man who says he’s a police officer, and his request for her help in detaining Becky, gives Sandra an opportunity to do something for which she’ll earn credit, even acclaim. Helping the police gives Sandra the opportunity, or so she thinks, to be not just a good employee, but a good citizen.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to see the law enforced and for justice to be done. But that’s not actually exactly the same thing as doing what the police ask, all of the time, without question. Compliance is about the danger of giving someone else the ability to validate your goodness and to ask you to collaborate with them without asking them to meet high standards of responsibility and ethics or verifying that they’re following the law and that their requests are in accordance with it. The mere assertion by the man on the phone that he’s a police officer is enough to get Sandra to follow his directions. And even if the man on the phone had been able to verify that he was a police officer, there’s something frightening about the implication that Sandra wouldn’t have questioned his orders even as they get more baroque and invasive. She values the promise of approval too much to verify or consider any of the steps she’s told she has to perform to receive it. There’s a lot of cultural conditioning behind Sandra’s values and her assumptions, whether it’s the way police procedurals regularly treat brutality as a way of communicating the stress of the job rather than a sign of rot, or the idea, presented even in a forthcoming episode of a wannabe-skeptical show like The Newsroom, that the police almost always arrest the right person and prosecutors almost always secure convictions. But trusting that a job title or a badge suddenly removes the possibility of fallibility, weakness, or evil from a person is a dangerous thing. Compliance will probably be read and reviewed as the story of a bizarre one-off incident. But that string of incidents couldn’t have happened outside a larger cultural context.

I’ve been reading a lot of Judge Dredd comics thanks to the nice people at 2000 A.D.—the new collection of the Complete Casefiles is gorgeous and well-curated—so I was particularly excited to see the trailer for Dredd, the second attempt to make a movie about the lawgivers who attempt to bring order to the post-apocalyptic dictatorship of Mega-City One:

From what I can tell, the moments we see in the trailer are extremely faithful to the script for the movie that’s been circulating for a couple of years, which to my mind is a good thing. The story looks to be simple: Jude Dredd, the best street patrolman in the Justice Department (which, for the unfamiliar, took over the remnants of the United States in a coup, and gave its Judges the power to act as judge, jury, and executioner to combat crime), is meant to spend a routine day assessing Judge Anderson, whose scores would mean she’d fail out of the program, but given her other abilities, the Chief Judge wants her to have a second chance to pass. But their day on the streets takes an unusual turn when Dredd and Anderson investigate a series of murders in a giant housing block called Peach Trees, the provenance of a ruthless drug lord named Ma-Ma (Lena Heady in a role that should make terrifying use of her experience as Cersei Lannister on Game of Thrones).

My only real reservation with the story is that I think Judge Dredd is most interesting when he’s questioning the system that’s empowered him, or pushing for a more expansive or humane vision of Mega-City One citizenship. Ma-Ma is an unambiguous villain, not someone to make Dredd question the hyper-violent exercise of his authority, though the script makes pretty clear how dehumanizing life in the blocks is, and how the violent war on crime takes its toll on civilians. The only real discretion he exercises is in his evaluation of Anderson. I’m hoping this will be a success and that we could see a franchise grow out of this, both because I think the character is excellent, and because I think with success would come confidence to tell some of the more ambiguous, and more cosmic, Judge Dredd stories. If The Avengers universe can get Thanos, surely the American public is ready for a Judge Death movie.

You know, I just can’t get myself that excited to root for a bunch of uber-violent, rogue cops and an extralegal approach to law enforcement, no matter how many handsome men you have doing it, as in Gangster Squad:

This isn’t cool or admirable. And it’s a kind of approach that ends with innocent people brutalized and dead. Give me American Gangster any day, which glorified a straight-up approach to law enforcement and cast police corruption for the ugly thuggery it is.

I was at a screening of The Avengers* last night and up late talking about it with some of my colleagues about it after, so shorter thoughts about this than usual. But I thought this episode of Community, a Law & Order parody, did a really nice job of exposing the ridiculous things we let people get away with when they have badges or the power of the district attorney’s office behind them. It’s not like readers of this blog don’t know that I find it disturbing that our cop shows tend to legitimize a certain amount of police brutality when it’s performed by cops we’re supposed to be emotionally invested in. But it’s still really funny to see Troy rage around an interrogation room, insisting “You don’t order ketchup! It’s a condiment!” And it was a treat to see Leslie Hendrix, who played Law & Order medical examiner Elizabeth Rodgers for years pop up to explain “This level of smashing is consistent with someone stepping on the yam after it was dropped” in the same deadpan TV doctors use to give the impression that crime-solving science is precise and unbeatable.

Crime TV may strive for certain kinds of nuance, but it’s always very invested in conveying how powerful the police are. And goodness knows that’s justified—the state hands the police a lot of power, and protects them when they use that. But approaching the police with respect and caution doesn’t mean we can’t look at the power we give them ourselves, and the ridiculous things we dignify. Laughter at the latter is a good place to start.

*Three-word review: it is awesome. More details to come.