Compare the 1950s film noir of Fritz Lang - or TV's Dragnet, for that matter - to the criminal brutality of police in contemporary depiction.
In While The City Sleeps, a movie of 1956, police search desperately for a serial killer who, from what we are told, would today be described as a sexual sadist.
We are shown a few minutes of them questioning a suspect they have been grilling for hours.
They never touch the man, crowd him, or seem to threaten violence.
There is no bullying, at all.
There is no profanity, and they don't even raise their voices.
He's not the guy, and when they finally trap the real killer they handle him with minimal force.
Too, we are shown a crime scene.
An actress in disheveled clothes plays dead.
No blood, not much mess, no nudity.
Police behavior in the classic, The Naked City, is much the same.
The contrast with contemporary depiction could hardly be more egregious.
Blue Bloods is one of TV's more "wholesome" cop shows and its hero, Danny Reagan, is a sociopathic brute who regularly beats people, sometimes to obtain a confession, and in nearly every episode violates someone's rights out of irrepressible rage in his never flagging refusal to work within the law.
And then there is Low Winter Sun.
Whatever this change says about our society, whatever it does to it, I suppose it can't be good.
To begin with, it makes the piece artistically worse, substituting for dramatic representation matter primarily appealing to the prurient interest - entirely appropriate for porn and sex shows - or the sadism and vicarious brutality of boxing and other fight shows.
Think of it as a rule.
Artistic representation is not the real thing, and vice versa.
Watching what is unmistakably an artistic representation for entertainment is psychologically different from watching the real thing, or even a visual recording of the real thing, and sometimes radically so.
Was that not the lesson of 8 Millimeter?
I refer both to acts of violence and to sexual acts and displays.
If there is a sort of continuum, then the more realistic the portrayal the more the experience approaches that of watching the real thing, and so the less it is an experience of art.
Hence the use of color rather than black and white is rarely an aesthetic improvement.
But in the matter of this change in the depiction of the police and their everyday work, something else is also at stake.
I refer to the public perception of the police, public expectations of them, and public expectations regarding our own treatment at the hands of the police.
Are they the guys next door, our neighbors, the decent fellows we might invite over for a Labor Day barbecue, people we and our families are safe with?
Or are they thugs and riff raff employed by the state to repress the rest of society's trash, those the state does not employ?
People you would certainly not feel comfortable having too close to yourself or your family?
And which, for that matter, do we want to be true?
Do we want our police to be law abiding, decent fellows or sociopathic brutes?
And which do our rulers want?
Sure, many of us want it both ways.
We want the cops to be savages with the savage but mild and safe as Mister Rodgers with us and our own.
But can you ever really trust an attack dog bred to rip people apart and to kill?
Are Plato's guardians, here as well, a kind of Jeckle and Hyde pipe dream?
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