It says a lot about the time we're living in when I can watch a movie like Serpico and feel it doesn't go far enough. Serpico is one of the most anti-police mainstream movies of its era, the true story of former cop Frank Serpico's decade of work to expose the corruption within the New York Police Department. In these momentous times of unprecedented strife and worldwide calls to revolution, I find it important to look to movies that have illustrated the unrest to remind or reveal to myself that this is nothing new, that the anger and misery has been embedded for decades and is once more bursting forth with passion. It comes perhaps with being obsessed with movies and media, and feeling obligated to educate myself through looking at films by Oscar Micheaux, documentaries on the Black Panthers, French social films that feel eerily relevant, etc. I think it's not too hyperbolic to say that we (or at least we in the west) are at a threshold that we can either cross or be forced back from -and on its front lines is the institution of the police. That constant conflict between movements to abolish the police and the police force themselves (as well as a public willfully ignorant to what "abolish the police" actually means) grows more every day, due in some part to the police -far from trying to alleviate their image- growing only more openly hostile and antagonistic and violent towards a public they're theoretically supposed to protect.
So once again I look to a movie to see if it has anything useful or relevant to say about our current situation. Choosing to watch Serpico, I found it doesn't really. I like the movie and applaud it for taking the police force to task at all, but the issues that Frank Serpico fights to address we now understand to be only a fraction of the reality -it's hard for any depiction of a rotten police force from the age before they were heavily militarized to be in any way applicable, quite frankly.
And yet I still think it's a film worth talking about, not only for its' politics, which are in some ways resonant, but in how it illustrates the corrupting influence of the police, the power they assert over the vulnerable, and the manner in which the film itself and its' choices function within the time period it was made and set in to the contradiction of some of its own themes -which fall short of condemning the police wholeheartedly. It's also a Sidney Lumet movie, so of course there are artistic and technical aspects devoid of the narrative context worth appreciating.
Serpico stars Al Pacino in his first major movie after The Godfather, and it’s a pretty meaty role for him too -one of his first really big and zealous characters. Like The Godfather though, it’s a journey. The story of Serpico begins from the vantage point of him being rushed to hospital in a critical state -shot in the face in the line of duty in 1971. The bleeding, bearded, rugged figure then gives way to the clean-shaven, unwearied officer fresh out of the academy some ten years earlier. His first exposure to the underlying violence of the NYPD is when he witnesses a senior officer beat up a culprit he brought in. Subsequently, he obtains a confession and list of accomplices through calm interrogation. As the years wane on, he sees more and more violence and corruption from his fellow officers, as well as just ignorance and outright bigotry. In Greenwich Village, a couple misunderstandings and his unconventional masculinity has him labeled as a homosexual -though nothing ever really comes of this. Gradually, Serpico becomes more brow-beaten and far less passive towards the rest of the force. Indeed, he becomes downright confrontational and angry.
In 1971, Clint Eastwood introduced audiences to a new kind of cop character in Dirty Harry. One whose moral sense of justice overrode that of the police force he served, breaking protocol and law himself to bring in criminals. And it’s not difficult to see that the filmmakers behind Serpico, especially producer Dino De Laurentiis, who specialized in sensationalism, sought to make their hero a more polished version of that archetype. Serpico doesn’t go nearly as far as Harry Callahan, but he does very much become the righteous, angry cop going his own way. Very clearly this is the result of existing within a system that is fundamentally unjust, having little success in changing that; and you could argue the movie is a critique of the excessive violence and lawlessness of police officers that Dirty Harry typifies. But Serpico himself becomes more violent, to the point he himself beats up a prisoner he feels the other officers are going too easy on. This trickles over into his personal life as well, ending relationships both with his friend and his girlfriend. He becomes merely the inverse of what he hates, and it hammers home that idea of the inherent toxicity of the police force. However through this, he’s still framed as the hero because he’s right, and whatever he does is thus justified. It’s still a version of that archetype of the cop who is above the system. He wants to expose the corruption of the NYPD, which is good, but he’s resorting to shades of that very corruption to do so. That idea of the infallibility of ones’ personal sense of justice is dangerous, and is one of the things that has allowed cops to act as vigilantes.
It also provides a convenient way around condemning the police as a force. Serpico does recognize and address the institutional problems: how other cops think nothing of abusing prisoners, how accepting bribes is just part of the job, even the general trigger-happiness such an occupation facilitates when two officers nearly shoot Serpico while he’s chasing a perp undercover. And of course, the atmosphere of cops protecting one another from consequences, as epitomized in this terrific exchange between Serpico and an officer in Greenwich:
“You’d never hurt another cop, right?”
“Depends on what he did.”
“That’s the wrong answer, Frank.”
This aspect of police culture proves to be Serpico’s biggest obstacle in getting an investigation into police corruption off the ground. His captain misleads him that his charges have been reported to the commissioner, and other officers become openly hostile to him to the point it’s implied his public testimony will get him killed. When the commissioner does find out, he leaves it to the division to deal with matters. Even the district attorney stifles Serpico during a grand jury. All of it effectively communicates the labyrinth of systems in place to hinder accountability -Lumet makes sure that no corner of the NYPD is free of this.
But of course for as satisfying as this is, there is a major elephant in the room in this movie about police misconduct during the 1960s. Not once does the movie ever openly address racism, and the racism that is embedded into the history of the American police force. And yet there is a notable African-American presence that is troubling. That first culprit who Serpico brought in and saw beaten by his superior was in fact a black man, one of a group of black men Serpico and his partner caught attempting to rape a black woman. And it isn’t the only illustration in the movie of black people engaged in a crime. In fact most of the people Serpico and other cops go after or arrest in the film are non-white -and never is it suggested these people are being profiled. You could argue that the beating was severe out of racial motivation, but the film never insinuates the people of colour being targeted are innocent. This is the most offensive thing in the film: that it never questions this dynamic and seems to posit that these people, regardless of skin colour (though make no mistake, it’s certainly significant so many are black), are simply bad people -if not worse, than at least no better than the corrupt cops.
And that is where Serpico fails as a piece of media relevant now. Its’ police force is an aberration, not the norm. It isn’t that people of various persuasions are being disproportionately targeted, falsely charged, or hurt for no reason, it’s that these cops maybe shouldn’t go quite as far as they do. Police brutality may be the thing that sets Serpico off on his prerogative, but it’s not ultimately dealt with much next to bribery, unprofessional behaviour, abuse of power, and occasionally turning a blind eye -as happens when a cigar-smoking F. Murray Abraham chooses not to intervene when Serpico is caught in the situation that leads to his injury. I mean we see it today. Serpico’s investigation did lead to reforms, but none that prevented an NYPD officer from driving into a crowd of protesters.
And so watching Serpico now isn’t as satisfying as it might once have been. As anti-cop as it is on the surface, it is in a way “copaganda” itself. It either doubles back on its own themes or doesn’t push them hard enough. The complete absence of racism as a strong part of the corrupt police machine makes the film feel disingenuous at best. It is baby steps towards confronting the institution of police and their history of corruption and violence. But of course, baby steps meant a hell of a lot more in 1973. And Serpico has still sadly done more to dismantle the idea of cops as heroes than most movies about police that have come since. Through these conflicting values, I will reiterate I do like the film. It’s a great Pacino performance and Lumet’s direction and visual storytelling remains superb. And it’s a movie very worth thinking about, in spite of it being out of date and counter-intuitive to the modern conversation about law enforcement. We can all learn from Serpico regardless.
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