Charles Brown wrote:
> Paul:
> The Keystone Cops weren't "cops as fun", they were objects of oppression
> being portrayed derisively as clowns. They were made for immigrant
> communities for whom seeing cops in this light was a very liberating
> experience.
>
> Charles: You got it backwards. Cops are SUBJECTS of repression. They are main agents of the repressive apparatus of the state. By portraying them as clowns, the objects of repression, the masses of people, find them less threatening and accept the repression.
I think Charles has the best of this argument. I enjoy the Keystone Cops greatly: that compact bunch running about as though a single organism is one of the great images of film history. But if we are going to talk at all about film (or any other art) as propaganda we have to talk about it terms of the social relations and ideological manifestations of those relations within which the film is viewed. And in that context (whether 1910-1930 or in 1999) any art that makes cops cute (whether in contempt or admiration) is politically vicious. Think of the massacre in South Chicago when all those Republic Steel workers charged the cops running backwards.
My defense of the Keystone Cops (or of Homocide for those who like it) is that art (good, bad or indifferent) simply is not that important ideologically. But that is another long long argument.
Carrol