Does the “Dirty Harry” Franchise Make Real-World Sense?

Vern Scott
11 min readMay 25, 2023

Have you watched a Clint Eastwood/Dirty Harry movie lately? Far from being an exercise in right-wing police fantasy, they are actually a clinic on cutting through red-tape bullshit to assert a kind of broad and fair justice (aside from the alleged failures to read Miranda Rights and Illegal Searches). I was also surprised at how much less gratuitously violent they were than many modern shows streamed on our TVs. They are also surprisingly inclusive of women and minorities. Could “Dirty Harry” actually be a model for how to reimagine modern policework?

Is Harry Callahan/Clint Eastwood a kind of one-man Centrist, urban-blight army?

In these times of right-wing fascist MAGA, its easy to forget that the “tough-guy” Clint Eastwood and Arnold Schwarzenegger films of the 70s-90s were actually pretty tame and sensible compared to many today. Eastwood and Schwarzenegger themselves (who both subsequently got involved in Republican California politics) also seem quite politically centrist in today’s lens, even though they were once thought to be “right wing”. It seemed troubling at the time that SF Police Detective Harry Callahan (Eastwood) was kind of willy-nilly shooting bad-guys, but given all the recent gun violence directed at innocent people, he seems the lesser of the evils and a kind of .44-toting sheepdog. Additionally, most of the Harry vitriol was reserved for deranged political Hippies (also white), plus liberal…

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Vern Scott

Scott lives in the SF Bay Area and writes confidently about Engineering, History, Politics, and Health