So inspired by the point made by Spin earlier on, I've ended up falling down a couple of rabbit holes as far as both content and YouTube video essay.
Well, actually, I've also been on a huge jag of videos dunking on providence gospel movies, but that's unrelated.
Copaganda.
I've always been a fan of crime fiction and crime shows, and lately I developed a real taste for it after watching one called
Unforgotten that I think is the only one I've seen that I would even consider suggesting Spin watching for not being Copaganda - except that simply having the police in it being good people may be enough to exclude it.
So I just keep watching cop show after cop show because I am becoming fascinated by the form, and I'm trying to find a single example of a crime TV series that doesn't eventually (or abruptly) result in the protagonists operating outside the law, with us expected to be cheering them on because in this case we know the law is Bad Apples or Bad Laws, so we can ignore those ones, because we have seen footage of the bad guy being a bad guy. But that's a nightmarish implication, and even shows that I held in hitherto high esteem like
Line of Duty, a show which is about the unit within British police that investigations police corruption, ends up having to go against the rules. In this case, the Deputy Chief Constable is actually corrupt and we know he is, but that's not how real life works, real people don't get to see the footage and show it the whole public and show that this was the case all along so operating outside the law is fine.
This brings to mind a show which I semi-binged over the last few months,
The Shield. I think this one may be damn near the closest one to having any kind of realistic view of police, but it requires you to watch the entire seven seasons of the show for that to pay off.
The main character is an outrageously corrupt police officer who covers himself extremely effectively, claiming the motivation was protecting and providing for his family. He also plants evidence and murders his colleagues and all sorts of other shady shit. This culminates in the final episode of the season with him managing to get a full pardon for all the terrible illegal shit he did in order to work for ICE, burying his 3rd best friend in the process. When he outs all of his shit in the interview before the pardon, ICE just move him into an admin job where he gets to do paperwork and wear a suit. His 3rd best friend goes to prison cursing his name. His very best friend has already committed suicide and killed his own family having already murdered their 2nd best friend when they all thought he might rat them out to internal affairs. His wife has gone into witness protection with his family to escape him. He has nothing, and he deserves every last bit of it. It is absolutely harrowing and the ending the show and the character deserved.
It makes me even angrier when I think back at
Luther, a show I am beginning to enjoy hating because of how much it represents everything I think is wrong with crime fiction in the UK. It's like a direct window into the mortal fears of a Daily Mail acolyte.
And then the Copaganda examinations I've watched have shown me just how alarming this shit goes in things I haven't seen, like how the Dirty Harry movies constantly move the goalposts in response to the criticism the last movie faced, or how a show like
Blue Bloods, and I am still in shock albeit unsurprised by this, had an episode where a white police officer threatened to throw a black suspect out of the window
so the black suspect jumped to frame him for police brutality.Once you know what Copaganda is, and start looking for its hallmarks, it is one of the most morbidly, horrifyingly fascinating things.