The Invisible Armada

2026/01/25

A racist film

Dirty Harry is a multi-stage proto-Trumpist rocket: the monster breeds offspring there, and Inspector Callahan always interposes in the same mode—energetic, that is, eradicationist. When the bank robbers, all Black, make their move, he interrupts his lunch break to charge in—killing at least two and wounding another on whom he performs a mock execution anticipating the (torturous) treatment he will later inflict on the wounded Scorpio to make him confess where he has hidden the abducted girl (to no avail—she is already dead). The words he addresses to the wounded man lying on the sidewalk, filmed in high/low angle shots, with the Magnum aimed at his skull and the camera as its alter ego, have every place in an anthology of fascist humor: “You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?” (the wounded man has his rifle within reach, fallen on the sidewalk).

Here, the asocial and dangerous copy of the monster belongs to a species—the Afro-Americans. Harry behaves toward the wounded man as the perfect precursor to the policeman Derek Chauvin who strangled George Floyd in 2020 in Minneapolis, a crime that gave impetus to the “Black Lives Matter” movement. No one is unaware that Trump and his clan, then in power, committed as much as possible to the side of the white cop against the movement against police violence of which racialized people are the primary victims in the United States (as among us). The hold-up sequence in Dirty Harry (its aftereffects will be found in more than one subsequent film by Clint Eastwood and countless Hollywood thrillers) is anthological: the white cop, in his posture as guardian and guarantor of order, looms over the Black delinquent, gun in hand. He holds him at his mercy and toys with his fear of summary execution (the Black delinquent knows the rules of the game as well as the cop in action). The ironic sentence pronounced by Eastwood, well-turned, is designed to make people laugh and secure the spectator’s adhesion—this sequence is a jewel of unapologetic supremacist imagery. The Ku Klux Klan message is not stated as such; it remains surreptitious and subliminal—not one whit less explicit in the dimension of cinema’s powers (images + words + acting + atmosphere + editing effects…) and devastatingly effective.

In a certain way, one could say that Trump’s entire politics is written on this palimpsest: his domestic policy entirely oriented toward hunting invaders and other over-racialized undesirables, poor Afro-Americans according to an immemorial invariant made worse; his foreign policy likewise, aggressively conquering, moored to the phantasmagory of a collection of vital dangers incarnated by dictators, traffickers, delinquents of all species.

Public critique within U.S. film criticism

It is no accident that, from the outset, even before its filming, Siegel’s film raised openly political controversies and objections—something not so frequent in Hollywood. Approached to play Callahan, Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, and Marlon Brando all refused the role. The last was quite explicit about his motives: “too far-right for him.” Not without a touch of humor, Newman suggested on his side that the role would fit Eastwood like a glove.

For the role of the psychopath, the director chose a little-known actor, Andy Robinson. He had the interesting characteristic of resembling more a “deranged hippie” than a professional killer or high-flying pervert à la Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs. This casting choice allowed sweeping broadly by suggesting that the monster could emerge from all horizons, from the bohemian and informal left as much as from the underbelly of order (the ex-soldier gone off the rails, etc.). The choice of this actor was decisively influenced by Clint Eastwood, who wanted the psychopath to have the appearance of a “choirboy” (evil—the devil—is capable of taking all appearances, hence the pivotal role of the vigilante ceaselessly on the breach).

When the film hit screens, part of U.S. criticism was outraged by the fable it conveyed in the most transparent manner: as soon as social and political order and people’s security are at stake, as soon as Evil assails us, the (good) end justifies the means, all means. Immediately, it was noted that under these conditions, the defender of order, the righter of wrongs, irreversibly tips into the same camp as the one he tracks: “the cop being the same as the killer except that he has a badge.”

It is interesting to note that this type of critique and counter-shot could still be formulated and put in place in the context of the time. Today, there would be little question of it, at the hour when vigilantes of thought police make the law in the streets of Trumpian Tombstone in quest of its lost grandeur.

But, supposing Trump is today’s Dirty Harry, one precision must be added. Today, in the context of both U.S. domestic and foreign policy, it is not true that “the cop is the same (or of the same species) as the killer.” This simple equivalence does not hold. The one who attributes to himself the role of world cop today arrogates a global police right that is merely the code name for imperialist and hegemonistic predation operations. In Dirty Harry, the rogue or abusive policeman and the psychopath combat more or less on equal arms. The wars pitting the U.S. supercop against the “thugs” of the moment he has designated as such (Saddam Hussein, Maduro, the Iranian Supreme Leader, Cuban leaders, Kim Jong-un…) are distinctly asymmetrical and cover strategic interest calculations (maintaining and reinforcing hegemony) and, notably, economic ones (access to natural resources, like oil, in the case of Venezuela).

Cinema narrative’s real-world catastrophe

Inspector Callahan is not a predator; he seeks no material or other benefits; he acts entirely under the grip of his own daimon, his personal impulses—one might say his presumptions or disturbing fantasies of purification, an eradicationist fantasy that sends chills down the spine. But he is disinterested; he is not even particularly lacking in glory or notoriety. This is precisely what makes him disturbing: that autarchic side, that autonomy in action, tête-à-tête with his fantasy. He is an expanding extermination machine, but his horizon is limited—to clean house in the city, in San Francisco.

His emulator in the White House is of an entirely different stature and operates on an entirely different scale—he is increasingly distinctly close to Chaplin’s Hynkel trying to spin the globe around his index finger—he sees himself as king of the world, exercising police and conquest rights wherever his fantasy carries him. What is moreover new with Trump II is, among other things, this: he intends to profit from a new version of domino theory. In the 1960s, this founded the fear that if a communist regime were allowed to establish itself in Vietnam (or elsewhere in the region), contagion would spread to the entire zone (Southeast Asia) and beyond. Hence the enormous military investments, destructions, crimes that punctuated the second Indochina War—for the results we know.

Trump today has launched a crusade to topple all that remains of worn-out, even exsanguine regimes born of the great 1970s upheavals and emancipation movements in the Global South. He applies himself to it with intuitive knowledge of weak-link theory—if Chavista Venezuela falls, then the Cuban regime is in danger, and the little that remains of enlightened regimes in Latin America (notably in Colombia) likewise. Make America Great Again here shows its hand—a “greatness” regained, indissociable from aggression, predation practiced in contempt of international law and the law of nations pure and simple—an international piracy whose traits increasingly resemble the European conquest policy undertaken by Hitler from 1938 (annexation of Austria). In other words, a new raw fascism, increasingly unapologetic and now thriving above all in foreign policy, which means: Hitler’s European dream projected on a planetary scale.

In this kind of configuration, the sole element of the real resisting the push of fantasy and the death drive sustaining it is power, an other and adverse force capable of opposing this expansion—not merely obstructing it, but stopping it. During World War II, the temporary, circumstantial, and in many regards unnatural coalition named “the Allies” gathered against the Axis; in the current configuration, China, possibly reinforced by Russia and North Korea—three nuclear powers.

The risk of nuclear conflagration is the sole element (but it is of size) capable of obstructing a generalized blaze like that witnessed during World War II. In one camp (or rather in the first-magnitude power blocs involved in emerging conflicts, as camps have crumbled over time since the Cold War—no properly Western camp exists anymore, under the effects of Trumpist autarchism and anti-Europeanism), in all these blocs, the object of strategic reflections bears precisely on this point: how to fold the match, carry the decision, while remaining below the risk of nuclearization of the conflict? Until now, the reconquest and scorched-earth pacification strategy practiced by the United States and, in the Middle East, its powerful spearhead Israel, has perfectly succeeded at it. But as soon as the center of gravity of conflicts shifts East, particularly East Asia, it will probably no longer be the same. Then the Inspector Callahan of the moment will have to resolve to bring out the heavy artillery; the .44 Magnum will no longer suffice for the task. But he will no longer have before him exhausted caudillos, but organized and realistic powers, likewise equipped with the latest in heavy artillery.

To close the loop, let us return to cinema planet: Dirty Harry‘s phenomenal success called for sequels according to Hollywood market laws, and they came in number—Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), etc., with different directors but always Eastwood in the title role, the same character of the indocile Inspector Callahan and the same narrative framework, that is, the same ideological and political matrix. Simply, Hollywood cynicism and opportunism being limitless, the strong reservations raised by the original version among the U.S. cinematic critical establishment (“a deeply immoral film,” fed by “far-right imagination,” a “disgusting” film endowed with “fascist potential”—to say nothing more…) led the hacks working on the following films to try to blur the tracks. In Magnum Force, Callahan recenters himself, effecting a marked return to the side of the law by tracking a group of renegade policemen, a true death squad that has assigned itself the task of exterminating all San Francisco’s criminal and asocial elements; his sidekick and foil is a good-natured African American whose presence is meant to erase the memory of the equivalence made in the previous film between the American Black and the armed thug.

In The Enforcer, the fable becomes more explicitly political; the psychopath killer is replaced by a motley gaucho-terrorist group named (for laughs) People’s Liberation Army, proceeding to thuggish abductions cloaked in pseudo-political motives aimed at pocketing juicy ransoms. The bloodthirsty group is led by a former Vietnam War elite soldier given, for the occasion, the face of a Cohn-Bendit lookalike. Thus it is these monsters that Callahan must settle accounts with.

With all these script variations aimed at blurring tracks and performing necessary sutures, the narrative matrix remains invariant: Callahan is the rebel in service of order where order fails—and here we recover the central thesis of Siegfried Kracauer’s classic book on Nazi cinema［1］: where institutions supposed to guarantee the continuity of order and citizens’ security are bankrupt, a courageous, solitary, and clairvoyant rebel puts his energy, anger, indignation, and expertise (he is expert in violent means) at the service of order restoration. He could agree with outlaws of every stripe (fake revolutionaries, vigilantes, great perverts…) on the diagnosis pronouncing the decadence of the caste supposed to represent citizens and defend them against chaos. These proximities are often evoked.

But his horizon line is neither anarchy, nor chaos, nor the great disorder in which all illegalisms and schemes prosper—it is order restoration. He is animated by a forcible nostalgia for the time when law and order prevailed (or were supposed to prevail)—that lost (mythical) golden age, like that of American greatness according to Trump. So he shoots into the crowd, relentlessly relaunching his rebellion, rage, and hybris—without ever deceiving us: in the end, we never lose sight of which camp he plays for—he is a turbulent little soldier, a restless sharpshooter of order. His rebellion is a perpetual diversion, of the same type as those Trump and his band, in the purest Hitlerian style, ceaselessly stage—the diversion is an integral part of every fascist strategy, and the most disheartening thing is that the bigger it is, the better it works (Hitler or Trump under their seasonal masks of “pilgrims of peace,” for example).

Conclusion

Reading Dirty Harry and its sequels politically and in light of our disastrous present is a salubrious exercise whose resources one never exhausts. It is Harry who directly inspires the strategy of employing disproportionate force against an asymmetrical enemy (notoriously weaker), a strategy theorized and constantly implemented by Israeli military (“Dahiya doctrine”), a procedure aimed at stunning the adversary while striking him with stupor—thus, for example among many others, in The Enforcer, he eliminates the gaucho-terrorists’ chief with a bazooka rather than a handgun, provoking along the way a superb fireworks display. This annihilating use of violence bears the mark of fascism and, on the historical scale, of war crimes, crimes against humanity—the Blitz on London, the destruction of Coventry, and their equivalents on German and Japanese cities at the end of World War II. It is time to learn to rethink fascism’s proprium at the scale of practices rather than political regimes.

Another marker of Harry’s proto- or crypto-fascism is his solitude. No private life, few personal affections (but large and numerous enmities), except rarely a brief movement of sympathy toward a colleague. The vigilante is alone against all and fights on all fronts: criminals, his pusillanimous and blind chiefs, the political bigwigs, legalistic and spineless, the man in the street, voyeur thirsting for bloody news items and quick to back off as soon as his collaboration is required (“I don’t want to get involved!”); and this solitude again resembles that of the proto-fascist heroes (and martyrs) that Kracauer identifies in Weimar-era films and in which he discerns (retrospectively) the premises of the Nazi era.

Harry is a rebel in service of order restoration like the Hitlerjunge Quex (1933), with this difference: the inspector does not die, cannot die assassinated by bandits or terrorists—there must be a next sequel, even with an aging Eastwood always less nimble and bouncy in the car chases… The vigilante’s solitude, cultivating distance from legitimized forms of authority, is a component of fascist alchemy—the figure of the One-Alone occupies a central place there, from the visionary locked in his cell drafting Mein Kampf in the most rigorous isolation, to the omniscient and omnipotent Führer. One will note moreover that in all these films, Eastwood delivers a one-man show, appearing only surrounded by second-string actors without relief or particular notoriety, little likely to steal his spotlight.

Of all this, French film criticism and specialized publishing, in their overwhelming majority carried to celebrate ceaselessly the genius and inventive longevity of Clint Eastwood (as director as much as actor), has seen nothing. For over half a century, this obstinate and prolix nostalgic of a world where everyone stayed in their place, where authority stood straight in its boots and America held its rank—a world that never existed except in the phantasmagories of that white species—has produced images, plots, characters that sketched the identikit portrait of what, in the end, fell upon us with Trump, ardently calling for it. And now that the identikit has become reality, it would evidently take more to tear Eastwood’s unconditional admirers from their critical coma; from their state of perpetual Eastwoodian beatitude—truly critical, that one, for once…

Note :

1. Siefried Kracauer : De Caligari à Hitler, une histoire psycologique du cinéma allemand (1947), Klincksieck, 2019.