The Invisible Armada

2026/01/25

As a leading international law attorney recently remarked (in the wake of President Maduro’s abduction by an elite unit of the U.S. Army), it is not out of the question that Hollywood is now the one writing the scripts implemented by the White House and the Pentagon. It is precisely in this sense that it proves useful to revisit, in light of this clear-cut act of state banditry, the famous and highly controversial Dirty Harry.

I wish to argue here in favor of the following thesis: Siegel’s film, and within it Clint Eastwood’s performance as the lead character, police inspector Harry Callahan, stages a fable (a fiction) whose matrix, entirely political, reveals the secret of U.S. interventionism in world affairs—both in the long term since the formulation of the Monroe Doctrine, and in the sequence that opened at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries with the two Iraq wars.

The film’s plot is well known, yet it warrants careful revisitation. A bloodthirsty psychopath prowls the city (here: San Francisco). He has just coldly assassinated a young woman splashing about in a private pool nestled amid skyscrapers at the city’s heart, using a sniper rifle. On the terrace from which he carried out his crime, he left a message demanding $100,000, failing which he would kill “a priest or a nigger”—signed “Scorpio.”

Inspector Callahan is tasked with leading the investigation, which for him means tracking the killer and stopping him by any means necessary, without delay. He is already renowned for his ruthless methods, earning him the nickname “Dirty Harry”—a label that, in the public mind, does not preclude a degree of admiration. From the outset, he clashes with civilian authority, with which the police are supposed to cooperate: to buy time, the mayor decides to yield to the blackmail. Callahan’s superiors comply.

Amid numerous twists, as the criminal continues his rampage despite Callahan’s manhunt (Scorpio kills a 10-year-old African American boy), the rift widens irreparably between the inspector—who favors vigorous action unburdened by legality or moral scruples—and the various authorities: the executive, then the judiciary, and even police leadership.

For Callahan, only the immediate goal matters: saving lives. For legitimized authorities, even amid the emergency created by the bloodthirsty maniac’s acts, the rules and procedures of the rule of law and common decency must be upheld. This is no mere dispute over the inspector’s “heavy-handed” methods, but an insurmountable divide. Callahan and legitimized authority agree on nothing—which is why, at the film’s end, having perilously pursued the killer who took a school bus full of children hostage and shot him dead (despite being removed from the case), Harry theatrically and emphatically tosses away his police badge; he thus signals his break with the establishment embodying legal and institutional order—the powerful as a world of the weak and failed.

Eastwoodian American vigilante justice

The key operation underpinning this political figure (and ideological apparatus) is the fabrication of the monster. This is a performative operation: the irruption of the bloodthirsty, perverse, nihilistic psychopath is proclaimed from the start as part of the natural order of things, which the spectator must accept as given, natural, obvious—what belongs to the landscape of our existences. Yet Siegel’s Scorpio is so overcharged, so caricatural in his abomination, with his insatiable appetite for the most abject crimes and compulsive repetition of ever more infamous acts, that it distances us from all realism and plunges us into a purely phantasmatic universe—a nightmare world, properly speaking. A tale of terror, but clad in “realistic” garb.

Thus, the matrix at work grafts a distinctly political construction—a diehard plea for a politics of exception—onto pure fantasy, an image surging from the depths of the unconscious or subconscious. This device immediately evokes déjà-vu: fascism, Nazism, and its phantasmagories assembled around repulsive images—those of the parasitic entity, the ferment of dissolution and pollution of the blood community.

The political thread sustaining Siegel’s film—born in the entertainment industry’s space—shares a common trait with U.S. foreign policy, in its continuity but especially today under Trump: monster fabrication is the prerequisite for police operations proclaimed indispensable to its urgent elimination; operations primarily aimed at overpowering whatever resists (or might resist) the expansionist, hegemonistic aims of direct police action’s promoters, freed from any legislative constraints.

Notably, in Siegel’s film, the monster emerges from the very milieu that will develop exceptional uses around its elimination, by any means: he is a White man, deranged and unhinged, but not a damned soul from the earth or an alien. A dangerous madman, yet capable of calculating and weaving a sophisticated perverse plot, slipping through the police net—a monster, but assuredly one of us.

By contrast, since 9/11, the monster has been ever more systematically racialized, first and foremost as a terrorist, with cultural and religious otherness increasingly emphasized: a monster from elsewhere, against an endless clash of civilizations backdrop—as if the new political teratology founding perpetual recourse to exception (its permanentization, if not institutionalization) necessarily passes through constructing a world where differences are ontologized as molar identity conflicts—insurmountable by definition.

The politics whose manifesto Siegel’s film presents (despite the author’s later denials, relayed by Clint Eastwood—“not a political film, just entertainment, a good cop thriller, we just told a story…”) thus takes this premise as its launchpad: once the monster roams the city (easily scaling up to world-city), sowing terror and desolation as a potentially apocalyptic threat, any means to eliminate it are fair game—not primarily for practical reasons (it undoubtedly disrupts order), but principled ones, responding to a categorical imperative: life, the collective body of the living, must be protected against what is not just a passing nuisance but a vital peril liable to resurge at any moment.

Two figures of authority clash head-on here: the mayor of San Francisco, the police hierarchy, and the judicial apparatus embody legal authority, an emanation of representative democracy. These various figures of authority act before (facing) instances to which they must account or conform: the public (electorate), the law. These obligations determine their margin of maneuver; in this sense, all these actors are stewards, entrusted with a mission, bound to stay within the limits set by the instances they represent. They are, in principle, revocable. It is these obligations that lead them to exercise a certain prudence in conducting operations aimed at neutralizing the mad killer—prudence that Callahan sees as the effect of indecision, inconsistency, pusillanimity, cowardice.

The inspector occupies an entirely different position, walking a tightrope. As such (a policeman), he is indeed an emanation of the law, its representative on the ground, attested by his badge and service weapon, which he does not hesitate to use when vital urgency (Ernstfall in Carl Schmitt’s language) demands it. Thus we see him intervene impromptu during a bank hold-up (while on his break, about to eat a sandwich in a street-facing cafeteria), killing and wounding the robbers without hesitation.

What matters then is the trigger (and the gap) that occurs when this representative of the law feels justified in taking liberties with it and authorizing himself, caught up in an emergency situation. His own energy, his imperious sense of duty, his instinct as a righter of wrongs pushes him to commit in the name of the good and order (here conflated), by any means necessary—that is, by the most violent means. From the moment he adopts this posture of his own volition and almost reflexively, he establishes himself in that gray zone where he persists as a figure of order and law, but always acting in excess of the latter, no longer as a steward, delegate, or representative, but as the pure practical and self-instituted incarnation of order and the good, engaged in a fight to the death against the forces of evil and chaos.

He creates something akin to a space of sovereignty where the force of arms prevails above all—where decision and action (the fait accompli) cut into the real. Inspector Harry is an adept of decisionism against the spirit or code of delegation and consultation. In this sense, he is not without affinities or kinships with what and those he combats—not an outlaw proper, but still an armed man on the edge of the law—the outer edge, rather, when he acts openly against the wishes and decisions of legal order’s representatives.

The crucial point is the absence of any instance delegating him, his lack of all “representativity”—he self-institutes as the protector of widows and orphans, and more (for he is a moralist without qualms), defender of the Good and the Just against what conspires to bring them down. He is a strict Manichaean: the world divides into two camps locked in a fight to the death—the Good and Evil. And to make things perfectly clear—that he be the armed arm of the Good in all its splendor—what he combats must not merely be an incarnation of evil, but of absolute Evil: the monster, or in the Made-in-USA version since 9/11, the Islamic terrorist, or now under the Trump franchise, the Latino narcoterrorist.

Vigilante justice in the Western genre of Hollywood film history

This vigilante also descends, of course, in a direct line from the "righter of wrongs" of the Western, who likewise is not mandated but acts on his own initiative, compensating for his lack of delegation by putting his life on the line. The character of Siegel, embodied (more precisely, inhabited) by Eastwood, thus fits into a genealogy as ancient here as Hollywood cinema itself—the industrial fabrication of the exemplary U.S. national novel; this in exactly the same way that Maduro’s abduction fits into the continuity of a foreign policy where authority, personified by the President, establishes itself in the role of righter of wrongs where the means of Justice and law (here, international justice) appear hampered, inefficient, double-edged—think of Bin Laden’s assassination by a U.S. Army elite commando in the remote so-called tribal areas of Pakistan. On that occasion, we were indeed already given to see this type of image, recycled in recent days: a focused and tense American President, watching on a screen (surrounded by the inevitable quartet of ministers and generals) the lightning action conducted by the commando tasked with neutralizing the monster of the moment.

The expeditious character of the undertaken action, openly freed from prevailing rules and laws at any level (that of a city or the international community), an action that can thus be called rogue precisely because founded on contempt for customs and common law, appears, on the other side, to the American public (and beyond) as supremely virtuous and meritorious; precisely insofar as it is founded on the decided suspension of the law, and as such constitutes a gesture of sovereignty.

We are here in full indeterminacy: what is destined to be recorded as a brilliant stroke, an epic and thus memorable action, is, on the other hand, an action that likens the righter of wrongs to the outlaws (bandits, criminals, killers, bank robbers, cattle rustlers…) he combats; indeed, like them, he tends to impose his own law by imposing his faits accomplis. A difference persists, however, and it is not negligible: the righter of wrongs or vigilante of the Western steps forward of his own accord in the name of what he considers the common interest (peace and order in the pioneer village where bandits reign terror); whereas the bandit is driven solely by his self-interest and greed. In the classical Western, the vigilante is certainly, at origin, an elite marksman fearless and favored by fate; but his action anticipates the foundation of a rule-of-law state, often sanctioned by the fact that, at the end of the “clean-up” he has conducted, the marshal’s star is pinned on him, making him henceforth the representative of the law and the first incarnation of Justice in the village. Harry fits into this genealogy insofar as the common interest remains his horizon line, even if his perception of it and the authorization he draws from it are infinitely dubious. With Trump, the break within this very genealogy is patent: the only common interest he knows is that of his own community, insofar as it opposes that of all others—from tariff negotiations to predatory projects on Greenland or other resource-rich territories.

The case of Inspector Harry, like that of Obama ordering Bin Laden’s extermination or Trump commissioning Maduro’s abduction, somewhat breaks free from the original matrix, that of the Western: they detach themselves from already existing institutions and legitimized legal apparatuses, pronouncing on their impotence in the face of evil. To do so, they must add a dose of theology to their summary police action—the criminal-to-be-exterminated or neutralized must be a perfect incarnation of Evil, a monster or troublemaker whose acts provoke moral panics with religious connotations (this motif will be reprised and amplified in Clint Eastwood’s 2003 film Mystic River). In the classical Western, the vigilante’s solitary action finds full justification insofar as it anticipates the foundation of a rule-of-law state, an authority based on law.

Today, from Harry to Trump via Obama (and likewise the Bushes plotting the fall of monster Saddam Hussein, etc.), it is rather a matter of mourning a normativity tied both to the notion of legitimate internal order (of a country, state, nation) and to an international order backed by rules and conventions. Beyond this threshold, only the decisionism of the powerful remains, those equipped with the means to accredit the fable they here enact, bolstering their posture as irreplaceable vigilantes. Indeed, when they fail at this, the backlash is implacable: Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, with his death squads (composed of police mobilized for the supposedly priority and urgent cause of a crusade against the drug scourge)—Duterte having tried to copy Inspector Harry in every way—ends up in a cell in The Hague, answering for crimes against humanity.

What ultimately gathers Harry and his political emulators as heirs to the Western’s righter of wrongs hero is the return to the archaic as a fantasized solution to the crisis of the rule of law, liberal democracy, and the forms of sociability attached to it. By taking matters into his own hands, the vigilante reins in a production of order (a form of order restoration) that passes through the suspension of law and substitutes vengeance (eye for an eye) and score-settling (summary or, as they say, extrajudicial executions) for legal procedures.

The return of the archaic signals itself in the very forms of order restoration (or what those activating it define as such): Callahan, rather than arresting the wounded psychopath, provokes him into an honor duel per inherited Western codes, a trial of truth (ordeal) where the best gunslinger prevails; Obama organizes a manhunt, one of those pursuits codified as a posse, the only difference being the setting is no longer the Wild West but the outskirts of Abbottabad in a remote region of Pakistan; Trump, for his part, revives the tradition of piracy by sinking ships he claims carry drugs destined for the U.S. market; he proceeds to Maduro’s abduction free of all legislation, ex lex, like a mafia or triad boss having his rival or a close associate kidnapped by his henchmen.

All these actions cast a thick fog over the boundary that juridical, political, and moral modernity laboriously erected between the use of raw force, authorizing itself solely by itself, and acts framed by legislation of any kind. But this indistinction is, at bottom, no novelty in U.S. history—it is, depending on the ages, sequences, or phases of that history, more or less sensitive and structural; in fact, it is matricial, instituting and constitutive there: whether in territory formation and state legitimacy establishment or in foreign policy (imperialist, expansionist, and hegemonistic at its foundation), legislation has constantly come to sanction the fait accompli, power plays—the Indian Wars and conquest of the West, the seizure of Texas and New Mexico are, in this regard, the very crucible in which U.S. power is forged, where law comes to ratify what was acquired by main force, at the price of all iniquities, violence, spoliations, and bloodbaths. Sometimes, the checkbook and bargaining relay predation, as U.S. territory ceaselessly grows through successive acquisitions (Alaska, Guam… pending Greenland).

The arguments put forward by Trump and his team to justify the recent U.S. police actions in the Caribbean and then Maduro’s abduction are scarcely encumbered by plausibility. In this regard, they resemble those advanced by Washington’s bureaucracy and U.S. rulers, relayed on the ground by the army, to drive tribes from their lands, despoil them, displace them, massacre them. For in this country’s and people’s culture, the arrogance and solipsism of power have always been at the command post.

In this sense, one can interpret Siegel’s film as a deconstruction of the founding myths of “democracy in America,” that of the “Fathers” who supposedly baptized an egalitarian republic, vigilant guardian of individual liberties, example for all nations seeking enlightenment, political modernity, and emancipation. With as much cynicism as swaggering brutality, Dirty Harry declares that the king is naked: the rosy cheeks of American democracy are mere facade, cosmetics. The true matrix lies elsewhere, in this adult tale, adapted to all sauces since the earliest days of the West’s conquest: in a world where Evil, in all its species, appears ineradicable and ceaselessly returns in terrifying form, the foundation of society’s resistance and resilience, its very crucible, is not the legal and legitimized institution; it is the strongman who, driven by his innate and unalterable sense of justice, steps forward at the risk of his life to perform the necessary purges, cut into the living flesh, cauterize wounds, treat evil with evil. An indestructible model, to which cinema tirelessly restores colors and faces by interweaving entertainment with political fabulation.

In its wake, the righters of wrongs officiating at the summits of the state appear, when opportunity arises, as perpetual imitators of the Hollywood hero. It is obviously no accident that U.S. politics here appears preformatted by Hollywood’s most popular genres—the Western, the thriller.

The story-telling prior to the fait accompli

Indeed, this insistent inspiration highlights an invariant trait of this politics: at origin, it is a matter of telling a story on which a series of actions will then chain. Storytelling consistently asserts its preeminence over analysis of reality elements. Behaviors fit into fictions whose proper character is to usurp the status of indisputable facts or reality elements—urban life haunted by bloodthirsty and psychopathic monsters, Islamic terrorism on every street corner, international drug trafficking organized by the Venezuelan president… Of course, the useful fictions thus constructed weave together scraps of reality, fantasies, and interest calculations, but the general framework is indeed that of stories accredited as facts by a powerful narrator, seeking performative effects.

The decisive step here is the one that makes the boundaries separating real facts from imaginary constructions as indistinct as possible. The abolition of these demarcation lines is, if one refers to Hannah Arendt, what properly characterizes totalitarian propaganda. The hybris discernible in totalitarian movements revolves around this presumption: the Say of Power would possess the capacity to impose its conditions on reality, to bend it, even to abolish it. And it is precisely this that is at work in the scene staged by Trump and his band (Arturo Ui and his gang) around Maduro’s abduction, what precedes and follows it: putting into circulation a story sufficiently good (rather than truthful or even plausible) to pass not only with the U.S. public but with vast sectors of world opinion. And it is true that small and large narrators (and other coolies of universal communication) have not been lacking in Western democracies to relay Trumpian storytelling, even if emitting purely protocolary reservations about the expeditious manner in which the “Venezuelan dictator” had been kidnapped…

What may be new with Trump, distinguishing him from both the fictional Harry and the real Obama, is that he seems to introduce an additional element of indistinction: he is certainly the righter of wrongs prey to his presumptions, the one who stages himself as such in the most dubious of combats, but he is also, in more than one regard, the psychopath. It is true, as Frédéric Lordon and Sandra Lucbert recently pointed out, that attempts to attribute contemporary fascist flows first and foremost to the madness of rulers produce rather short explanations. But it remains that when a fascist moment or configuration takes form and consistency, a kind of natural selection operates among candidates for supreme functions, carried by an unquenchable thirst for power and total absence of scruples, whose proper character is to make possible the promotion of figures presenting proven pathological traits. It is not Chaplin who invented the raging madness of Hynkel and his model, any more than Mussolini’s megalomania, several traits of which are also identifiable in Trump—not only megalomania, uncontrolled impulses, bombast, mood and disposition variations from one moment to the next, but above all the constant propensity to free himself from reality, to deport toward the imaginary. In all cases, what the entourage of these potentates attests consistently is their impulsivity and a strange combination of obsessions, coupled with a radical absence of follow-through in ideas. Their madness, as such, is indeed a condensate of what a present has become where everything is topsy-turvy, a present itself substantially disoriented (mis-fit).

(To be continued : The following part )