Bad cops and true detectives: The horror of police and the unthinkable world
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480617737761 |
| Date | 01 August 2019 |
| Published date | 01 August 2019 |
| Author | Travis Linnemann |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480617737761
Theoretical Criminology
2019, Vol. 23(3) 355 –374
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480617737761
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Bad cops and true detectives:
The horror of police and the
unthinkable world
Travis Linnemann
Eastern Kentucky University, USA
Abstract
The first season of the HBO series True Detective has drawn attention to Eugene
Thacker’s horror of philosophy trilogy and his tripartite mode of thinking of the world
and the subject’s relation to it. This article is an effort to read Thacker’s speculative
realism into a critique of the police power. Where the police concept is vital to
sustaining the Cartesian world-for-us, a world of mass-consumption and brutal privation,
the limitations, failures or absence of police might also reveal horizons of disorder—
primitivism, anarchism—the world-in-itself. A critical reading of True Detective and other
police stories suggests that even its most violent and corrupt forms, as inseparable
from security, law and order, the police power is never beyond redemption. What is
rendered unthinkable then is the third ontological position—a world-without-police—as
it exposes the frailties of the present social order and the challenges of thinking outside
the subject.
Keywords
horror, ontology, police, speculative realism, True Detective
In the title role of the 1992 film Bad Lieutenant, Harvey Keitel plays a vicious and deeply
compromised NYPD detective. Known only as “the Lieutenant”—a move that announces
and reaffirms his alterity—he engages in all the behaviors police insist they guard against.
An unfaithful husband, absent, abusive parent, alcoholic, junkie, degenerate gambler,
Corresponding author:
Travis Linnemann, Eastern Kentucky University, 467A Stratton, Richmond, KY 40503, USA.
Email: travis.linnemann@eku.edu
737761TCR0010.1177/1362480617737761Theoretical CriminologyLinnemann
research-article2017
Article
356 Theoretical Criminology 23(3)
thief, rapist, racist, sexist, there is no bridge too far. This is not a man with a name, this is
a cop—a bad cop. Assigned to investigate the brutal rape of a Catholic nun, the Lieutenant
metes out his own brand of street justice, while juggling his estranged family, sex and
drug habits and gambling debts. As one critic remarked, in a world, where “everyone
seems to do drugs” and the “system lets young hoodlums walk and no one cares, he may
be a bad cop, but he’s just one of many” (Howe, 1993). The brutality and desperation
embodied by the Lieutenant distinguished the film from its genre contemporaries, win-
ning it critical praise and a sustained cult following. While it is meant to be a journey into
one man’s self-degradation and death, there is another reading of Bad Lieutenant, which I
will suggest animates nearly all “police stories”.1 While clearly not a “good cop” by any
measure, waging a revanchist campaign in dogged pursuit of two street kids, the Lieutenant
remains indisputably a cop. With few exceptions, this rule guides the police story—no
matter how bad the cop—liberal understandings of law, order and violence remain the
symbolic core of the police project. Because the police power is inseparable from domi-
nant understandings of safety, security and social order, its adjoining stories, even those
taking up the subject of the bad cop tend to somehow reaffirm the symbolic order2 and
bourgeois ideology. This is why police, as theatrical prop and material practice, has proven
indispensable for political power. Yet this is not simply a question of ideology, as an alter-
nate reading of the figure of police hints at other, perhaps deeper ontological tangles.
Another police story, the first season of the acclaimed HBO series True Detective,
has drawn attention to philosopher Eugene Thacker’s (2015) Horror of Philosophy3
trilogy, which he elaborates through a critical reading of supernatural horror films,
novels and related texts. However, the horror of Thacker’s concern is not the genre
itself, but “those moments in which philosophy reveals its own limitation and con-
straints […] the horizon of its own possibility” (Thacker, 2011: 2). In other words, the
genre provides a heuristic landscape upon which to engage unraveling and unthinkable
ontological worlds. For Thacker, there is a human-centered world in which we live,
what he calls the world-for-us. This is an ontological prison of sorts, difficult to escape
because it is we humans who think it (Thacker, 2011: 2). The world-for-us is the
Cartesian world of order, inseparable from its economies and institutions, least of all
police. Where police is vital to sustaining the “civilized” world of mass-consumption
and brutal privation, the limitations, failures and absence of police might also reveal
horizons of disorder—primitivism, anarchism—the world-in-itself. This is an objec-
tive state of nature, one beyond the reach of human interference, or the world that
returns following it. To reckon the cultural texture of the world-in-itself, one need only
consider a few of the many contemporary films and novels taking up disaster, the
apocalyptic and dystopian (see Yar, 2015). In Cormac McCarthy’s (2006) novel The
Road, for instance, the lawless, violence of its post-apocalyptic landscape can be read
as precisely the inverse of the late capitalist world-for-us, a world utterly dependent
upon the police power. Similarly, in the graphic novels and subsequent television
series, The Walking Dead,4 the struggle to reestablish social order amid hordes of rapa-
cious “biters”, is led by Rick Grimes, who before the fall worked as a small town cop.
Grimes, who commands and polices his fellow survivors and uses violence indiscrimi-
nately in order to ensure their survival, thereby reminds, not so subtly, that the police
power is essential to the survival of western capitalist civilization.
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