Showdown at the Actually Pretty Crap Corral
https://youtu.be/Xy-eMIXT4LM?si=9nHfVWwg6WfcVvdF
Dirty Harry was memorably spoofed in Hollywood Shuffle. A satirical movie about a black actor (played by the writer director himself) trying to make it in Hollywood despite all the racist crap. The Wire then restores the racist crap, even making it worse, but packed with an alibi: the scene is now traditional in Western and Urban Western that's also here disavowed and expropriated for the white MacArthur grantee creator (‘clever and original!’ the package copy claims).
The pretext the fan audience is given and reliably recites for their enjoyment of all the sadistic lynching is it's 'realistic,' and watching it is a kind of education and solemn duty toward the imagined real referents of this fiction, and then this broad post-satire skit comedy is served up to condone the liberal hipster audience's relish of racist pleasures they used to feel frowned-upon for enjoying.
The genealogy of this Wire scene: the ‘iconic’ moment of Dirty Harry II (a Reaganite manifesto and model of right wing Urban Western) supplanted by Hollywood Shuffle, its very successful (albeit belated) send up (after a decade+ of textual critique/mockery) then supplanted by this Revanchist Return: now the white guy central to the scene has transcended. He's everywhere Unseen. Specifically he is behind the camera (Simon, Pelicanos, Price) and in front of the screen (viewer).
On screen the scene is replayed with a face-off of two comic book characters 'Little' vs 'Bowtie.'
Degenerate evocations of Malcom X, before/after conversion to NOI.
(Needless to say all this crass ideology is covered over in the ivy of wonderful performances by the leads who transcend the scripts and endow these characters with an intense individuality that - in the ultimate exploiter betrayal of their art - serves as the necessary lure enabling the audience ecstasy in their torture and murder etc, and the excuse after the fact.)
What’s being dished out here is corny lib civ-mission post-Reaganite racist revival: the battle is no longer black vs. white. It is the bad blex vs. the good blex (and the white civilization above it all failing to acquit its Responsibility to Protect the humble simple folk from the uppity brutes who ‘prey on their own.’)
The Urban Western gun battle is delivered as this Mirror in Jungle, two Uppity Semi-Evolués: the legit and competent White Sheriff is absent, abdicated, retreated from this 'dark corner of the American Experiment' leaving the hapless, good blex abandoned and defenseless, to become collateral damage of the power struggle between uppity defective predatory travesties of heroes/leaders/Men.
(I should add of course Mouzone is modelled visually on Farrakhan who is simply in this discourse presumed continuation of Malcolm X’s project tho entirely politically opposed and likely having taken part in his assassination.)
