Unwriting Copaganda
"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero..." - Raymond Chandler, "The Simple Art of Murder"
Nazis unwelcome: here’s my post about moving this blog off of Substack soon. I might put this stinger on every post until then to try to irritate Nazi Sympathizer Hamish McKenzie. I might forget/get bored and stop. Not today though!
Cotton Xenomorph’s “Cryptids and Climate Change” issue continues, with Grace Arenas’s “The monster of the week is a clunky metaphor for climate change” bending genres all over our literary Nostromo.
Much like a good plate of tacos, all the media I like is full of pig. Al pastor, carnitas, spare ribs, hot links, chicharrón, bacon, center-cut chops: GrubHub or Netflix history? So many of my favorite movies and TV shows and hell even books (who reads?) are chalk-full of cops. And if it’s not clear how I feel about those spouse-abusing alcoholics who can’t even witness a self-immolation without drawing their guns? I’ve never let my son watch a second of Paw Patrol.
Yet I myself just foie gras-ed (shoutout Kaveh Akbar for that metaphor) all five seasons of Fargo plus True Detective: Night Country plus the novel I’m reading this week plus The Batman plus most of Columbo plus the month of “Noirvember” implies the presence of policía plus whatever else I’ve been watching recently probably has cops or detectives somewhere—The Great Hypocrite am I, forever trying to stop myself from suggesting to my wife that we watch Seven or The Departed again.
Obvious thing to get out of the way: I enjoy the aesthetics of horror and noir, these black-and-gray shadowy alleys, or sunlight that feels wrong for being bright. I enjoy books and movies that pull me into someplace thrilling and grimily lived-in.
Do these less-sanitized areas of the human experience necessitate a high presence of cops, though?
Columbo fans will tell you that Peter Falk’s character is a lower-class child of immigrants, that the LAPD’s greatest detective is immune to copaganda claims. This is a show about the rich behaving above the law and the one man both capable and willing to hold them accountable. Copaganda has many definitions—it “creat[es] a gap between what police actually do and what people think they do,” it is cops doing viral dance videos for your most idiot acquaintances to breathlessly plaster all over your Facebook feed, it is police departments helping to create the modern police procedural. Columbo certainly doesn’t act like a real cop. Personally, I think Columbo isn’t copaganda because I know enough about real police to know that Columbo is Lord of the Rings for Marxists: a pretty fantasy where a funny guy wins the battle against evil, puffing blue smoke the whole time.
So let’s say you want to write something like Columbo, have some unassumingly-right-about-everything-in-a-world-that-doesn’t-value-that speak truth to wealth? Rian Johnson went the private detective route with Benoit Blanc, then went a more surprising direction in Poker Face with Charlie, a card dealer-turned-drifter with magical powers. Fletch—you know, from the Fletch movies—is an investigative reporter. That’s not a bad move. It’s his job to find something out, and while you’d have to have him working at ProPublica or Bellingcat instead of a local paper today, I trust this is a man who has no problem asking hard questions and making rich people uncomfortable and living with knowledge he maybe wishes he hadn’t sought. Problem is, writers writing writers always risks developing a bad case of hairy palms.
Fargo hewed close to its movie inspiration—lone good cop with grounded, family-based morals working in a department too stupid and indifferent to understand the near-supernatural evil it faces—for three excellent seasons. Season four, though, puts the moral/emotional core in the hands of Ethelrida Pearl Smutny, the chaotic good teenage daughter of humble funeral home owners. The main cop is a cowardly, indecisive loser who can only speak without a stammer when he’s saying something racist (side note: as someone with a stammer and social anxiety, I absolutely do wish those things on racist cops. Wish things you suffer from on your worst enemies, homies). Season five goes out of its way to show how useless cops are in just about any remotely important situation—a season very deliberately set in 2019, I believe.
I get why Fargo has that trajectory. As it exists in fiction, the “cop” or “detective” is not meant to resemble anything real. In fiction, a cop or detective is the same as a knight (rooted in, say, Herakles/Beowulf/Gilgamesh), an intellectual wizard (rooted in, say, Socrates/Sherlock Holmes/Marlowe) or both (Jesus H. Christ/Jedi Knights of the Old Republic). It’s someone with the courage and smarts to face down evil when confronted. Someone with the juice—whether that’s societal permission (gun and badge) or internal motivation (their dad got shot the day before retirement). They may or may not be able to change things—Philip Marlowe is the quintessential “guy who isn’t able to affect much, but sure learns something the hard way”—but they’re someone who makes you think, as Raymond Chandler says, “the story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.”
I do look to books and movies for adventure, is something I’ve learned about myself. “Adventure” and “escapism” are somewhat loaded terms—I do prefer my fiction to honestly reflect the real world somehow, I’m just also looking for the occasional werewolf, you know? The occasional elder god reminding me we’re all but specks floating in an indifferent and meaningless universe. The bone-chilling reminder that unstoppable evil lurks outside my door, but the light of my family can keep me safe and warm through the night. Plus a little adventure. Is that so much to ask for?
Let’s talk about True Detective.
Not everyone knows this, but there are three seasons of that show very worth watching (sorry, Colin Farrell and Rachel McAdams, I wanted better for you and the city of Los Angeles, too). One way I like to think about it is breaking apart the title: what does it mean to be “true,” a “detective,” or a “true detective?” Each season (worth watching) is about detectives who want to pursue cases that the bosses (and higher higher-ups, like CEOs and state senators) want to go away. What does it mean to have characters who want to really get to the truth of something, especially something they’re “not supposed” to learn? The advantage of those characters being cops is that badge and gun gives them state-sponsored carte blanche to go anywhere/do whatever.
Of course, this is the problem with cops in real life.
For all their many flaws, though, what compelled me about Rust Cohle/Marty Hart, Wayne Hays/Roland West, and Liz Danvers/Evangeline Navarro is part of that Chandler quote. These are people fit for adventure and in search of a hidden truth. That’s a strong way to conceive of a character. One of my favorite recent protagonists, Kris from I Keep My Exoskeletons To Myself, I don’t know if she thought she in search of a deeper truth or if she thought she was fit for adventure. But parenting a child in a cruel world is absolutely an adventure, and “why are these people so cruel” or “how do we live around these cruel people” are some pretty quintessential questions. That’s one example of a main character who isn’t a cop but swaggers around the page as someone who knows how to move through a hard world, even if they’re figuring it out second by second.
But I’m getting sidetracked, and I can feel Jodie Foster looking at me with a withering wrap it up gaze like I’m little Petey Prior.
My point is that cops, as they are depicted in fiction, are great adventurers. You send them into the ice caves of the night country or horror house that is John Doe/Riddler’s apartment? Yeah, that’s compelling. That’s not remotely how cops are in real life, though, and it’s irresponsible to depict them that way in fiction. Benson and Stabler and Ice Cube are how we got militarized police and QAnon.
So I’ll be thinking a lot about characters who aren’t cops who can make for good adventurers. Also who aren’t journalists, though, maybe I’m softening my stance on journalists as main characters. If you have any good books about regular dudes getting swept up into adventures? Remember that “dudes” applies to men, women, and non-binary homies, The Big Lebowski is my favorite movie, and hit me up in the comments.
Aight. If you made it this far, here’s some Propagandhi:
Sorry you got an email,
Chris