On Copization (Odd Columns #4)

When you get down to it, the ideal cop portrayed in pop culture began as a bureaucrat with a gun. It’s only later that this figure was replaced by the “loose cannon” and we don’t need that at all.

There’s been a lot of discussion about Copaganda lately – propaganda aimed at painting the police in a positive light, and I’m guessing you can figure out my position on it. I’ve heard, though don’t have the statistics to back it up, that something like 60% of prime time television is centered around law enforcement in one way or another. The grandfather of all of this is Dragnet, created by Jack Webb, though the reigning patriarch of the genre is undoubtedly Dick Wolf, the creator of the various Law & Order series.

I’ll be honest with you, my love for Disco Elysium and The City & The City aside, I’m not a terribly big fan of the police procedural genre. I’ve given it plenty of time to win me over – I spent a fair amount of time with Amazon Prime’s Bosch playing in the background, but it couldn’t really hold my attention and my eyes slipped down to my phone repeatedly.

Recently, I’ve been on a bit of a cyberpunk kick, revisiting some undervalued classics of the genre – I’m most of the way through Jeff Noon’s psychedelic epic Vurt, and I just got a used copy of Trouble and Her Friends by Melissa Scott, which is on my docket to read next. But I’ve noticed something, in revisiting these undervalued classics: the genre has – in many ways – stayed locked in to the same aesthetic channel, while growing more and more calcified around an odd narrative framework that isn’t really present in its earliest iterations: Altered Carbon, Ghost in the Shell, Anon, Judge Dredd, the various Deus Ex games – all are stories about police dressed up in cyberpunk drag.

Which is strange, because basically the only police-centered early (I would say “proto-”) cyberpunk stories that featured cops were Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Blade Runner, and Electric Sheep was inspired directly by Dick doing research on the Nazi mindset in preparation for writing The Man in the High Castle – he isn’t positing Rick Deckard as being someone meant to be emulated or admired.

I’m given to understand that the game is fairly nuanced, but I’m still tired of the Lovecraftian P.I. genre.

Let’s jump track. H.P. Lovecraft, dodgy old racist that he is, had only one story that I can recall that featured a policeman in a protagonist’s role – “The Horror at Red Hook.” But, looking at a lot of the more high profile adaptations and homages that have come out, you would be surprised to know this: the video games Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, Call of Cthulhu (2018), and The Sinking City all feature private investigators in lead roles. Even our beloved season one of True Detective starts off with the two protagonists being employed by the Louisiana State Police.

It seems clear to me that the same process is at work in both of these areas, and recent events have made me rethink this – instead of just feeling that it’s a boring trend (because I really, really, really do feel that it’s a boring trend and I want it to stop,) I feel that it’s somewhat sinister and suggestive of a mindset in our culture that is somewhat discomfiting.

When I brought this up to Edgar this morning, they immediately thought of a case: the ending of the Harry Potter series, and how the title character essentially turned out to be the trust-fund jock who married his high school sweetheart and became a cop (wizard edition.) We had a good laugh about how this was one of many signs that Rowling was not all that she was cracked up to be.

Consider, also: they’re making a series based on Snowpiercer, and have decided to make one of the central portions of it a police procedural. Nothing in the source material suggests that sympathy with the police is congruent with the ideas put forward. No one asked for post-apocalyptic train cops.

I label this process “Copization,” to parallel it to the evolutionary biology phenomenon of “carcinization”, which is described by English Zoologist L.A. Borradaile as “one of the many attempts of nature to evolve a crab.” You see, in the environment of the ocean, there are a complex of evolutionary pressures that lead ten-legged arthropods to develop into remarkably crab-like forms.

Time for crab. (Image taken from wikipedia, originally from J. Antonio Baeza - Baeza, J. Antonio (10 March 2016). "Molecular phylogeny of porcelain crabs (Porcellanidae: Petrolisthes and allies) from the south eastern Pacific: the genera Allopetrolisthes and Liopetrolisthes are not natural entities". PeerJ 4: e1805. DOI:10.7717/peerj.1805. Used under a CC BY 4.0 license.)

Copization, on the other hand, is the phenomenon whereby genre stories that feature violence as a central component have a tendency to evolve into a form that more closely resembles a police procedural. It isn’t one thing, or a planned thing, it’s a constellation of different pressures that make unrelated stories into a kind of Copaganda.

The character, for those few of you who haven’t seen the movie, is essentially “cyborg violence Jesus” which is perhaps the most American thing I can think of.

Let’s go back, and look at cyberpunk for a second: how does the Copization work there? I would argue that it’s the influence of Blade Runner, probably followed up by the influence of Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop. Now, while neither of these movies is necessarily too complementary towards the police as an institution, both are much more police-friendly than earlier cyberpunk literature, which tended to be from the perspective of criminals and marginalized populations – it’s hard to be pro-status-quo when you’re adopting a subaltern position.

I think the shift came because it was filtered through the prism of the film industry. The American film and television industries, for a variety of reasons, tend to be socially conservative. Partnership with the police is what made Dragnet possible, and partnership with the Military gave us Top Gun and pretty much every Marvel movie. Structurally, no major movie studio is going to be critical of these institutions because they literally cannot afford to – and even if they wanted to be critical of the police and military, how would they ever manage to depict them? Have you ever price-checked an aircraft carrier?

So, to even be able to depict these institutions, they must be presented in a positive light. This is direct Copaganda. Copization is the second-hand effect of this, what I would argue Copaganda is designed to produce: non-associated works that take up a similar perspective because of their influences. It gets repeated over and over again, until a large portion of the most visible works of a genre are police-centered.

That’s one theory. But why with the Cthulhu mythos stories? Those have only rarely been put on the screen, so they’re no subject to the same second-hand copaganda effect. At least, not in the same way.

See: Tracer Bullet, from Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Waterston.

My theory is that, at the core of most Lovecraftian fiction is the mystery that should remain unsolved, and many people associate it with the 1920s. The combination of time period and mystery motif leads, almost inevitably, to the figure of the private investigator: this is the person that unravels mysteries, and they do it with guns, fists, and a drinking problem. For many creators, it seems like a natural fit.

Two caveats: first, one could easily say that hardboiled fiction is, itself, anti-cop – there’s a natural rivalry between private investigators and the police, and this is borne out in most works from the actual period in which they’re set – in first decades of the 20th century, Foucault’s Boomerang was in full effect, and many of the police forces in North America were patterned off of the constabulary established in the Philippines. Second, this is lost because we don’t tend to have a lot of popular consciousness of actual hardboiled fiction – it’s filtered first through the movie studios, then through television and film pastiche: a degraded copy of a copy of a copy.

I think this is where we arrive at the problem: it is the constraints of film and television that are causing the issues that we are seeing. It’s fairly natural, I would say: it’s not simply an alliance between the establishment and Hollywood (that leads to direct copaganda,) but in the constraints of our narrative media itself. Despite the way people talk about film and social media, we are still living through the age of television, and the episodic format lends itself to a particular type of storytelling: medical and police procedurals exist because they fit this episodic structure: police and doctors are perceived as having discrete units of “adventure” making up their job. A series of problems arise, one after another, and it is their job to unravel it.

So it’s not anything sinister causing this problem, even if I consider the results to be noxious. It’s simple laziness. This is the first tool on the pile of ways to create an episodic narrative, so we’re just going to pick it up and apply it everywhere. This is tragedy, because it would be easy enough to do something different if you just applied a bit of effort.

I’ve heard it described as “Hayao Miyazaki’s Ghost in the Shell” and that made me want to see it — check VRV if you have access.

Why not a cyberpunk television series about criminals? You could do a crime procedural as easily as you do a police procedural. Or why not break out of the Cops-Robbers dichotomy and show something different? The anime series Dennou Coil does a good job of this – the central characters are all children (which might not seem to fit with cyberpunk, but the central premise of cyberpunk is “High Tech, Low Lives” and unsupervised children would qualify, as they are, by definition, subaltern.)

Why not a Lovecraftian fiction story about working-class people? To many members of the working poor, the wealthy can seem as distant and alien as the great old ones of Lovecraft’s fiction. This is one of the true failures of True Detective season 1, (SPOILERS) where a cult holds institutional power in Louisiana, and there’s a chain of religious schools run by a wealthy pastor where children are being abused, but the true villain is...an evil redneck. I love the series, but that was a misstep (END SPOILERS.) There’s been a fair amount of fiction that looks at this through a racialized lens: I’m given to understand that the series Lovecraft Country does that, though I haven’t seen it, but I would highly recommend Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, previously mentioned here, which flips Lovecraft’s most overtly racist story, “The Horror at Red Hook” and gives a sympathetic examination of the titular Black Tom, who is portrayed as having made a faustian bargain to try to escape from the racist society he lives in.

There are other options, and generally speaking, these fresher options are much better to pursue, because they give people something new to experience. In a column I wrote last year about the Principle of Minimal Contradiction, I explain why: people like the familiar, but they remember the different. By introducing new elements, you can improve a story or other work of art. By simply repeating what was done in Ghost in the Shell or Akira or that one Call of Cthulhu game you played with your friends, you’re not doing anything new: you’re engaged in an act of recording, not of creation. You’re just falling victim to nostalgia.

Let the tape run out. Try something new.

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