Naked Gun, Abolitionist Text

Sometimes you’re allowed to say the truth if you’re joking

“Since when do cops have to follow the law?” crusty rugged police veteran Frank Drebin, Jr. (Liam Neeson) scoffs to his desk jockey superior at the beginning of The Naked Gun. “Who’s going to arrest me? Other cops?”

That’s a joke; The Naked Gun, as fans of the franchise from the 80s no doubt remember, is an empty-headed gag reel which satirizes police/noir genre tropes (“She had a bottom that would make any toilet beg for the brown”) and/or just throws pointless nonsense at the wall (“You can’t fight city hall.” “No, it’s a building.”) It has no particular political agenda and no particular deeper meaning besides a sincere effort to get you to snork soda up your nose. This is a movie in which the secret evil tech is literally labelled “P.L.O.T. Device” and in which Weird Al Yankovic shows up playing himself as the entertainment for the evil billionaires in the post-apocalyptic bunker.

And yet, the very fact that the movie has no actual moral commitment beyond the next punchline allows it to at least at times come closer to an actual critique of police and policing than virtually any other American film or television narrative. The Wire, True Detective, Bad Lieutenant—they all make the police look like models of public rectitude compared to the bumbling vortex of human rights abuses that is Frank Drebin.

Obviously, The Wire is a much more realized work of art and critique than The Naked Gun. That’s in part why it has difficulty capturing the real downsides of policing, though. Serious works of art generally treat their subjects…well, seriously. The Wire presents policing as a complicated, messy, often broken job staffed by complicated, messy, often broken people. The drama is in the way the system grinds up good intentioned individuals, or in the way that less than good intentioned individuals take advantage of a broken system. There’s a tough job that needs to be done in there, but greed, prejudice, incompetence, and the day-to-day slog of violence take its toll. The gap between hopes and reality, between aspiration and failure—that’s what makes it art.

None of that is in play in Naked Gun. Drebin’s barely a person; he’s just a bunch of hoary cop clichés stapled together—thus his first internal monologue in which he mutters craggily about weeping into his cop coffee in the morning over his dead cop wife. The corruption or inadequacy of the police department isn’t a Dickensian social problem; it’s just slapstick. Drebin drives through police barricades or picks up evidence with his ungloved hand or knocks civilians off high balconies to their death with the same nonchalance with which he and his girlfriend Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson) summon an evil sentient snowman in their weekend getaway montage. Police racism, like everything else in the film, is just a throwaway laff.

Bartender: You don’t remember me, do you?

Frank Drebin Jr.: Should I?

Bartender: My brother. You shot him in the name of justice.

Frank Drebin Jr.: It can literally be thousands of people.

Bartender: You shot him in the back as he ran away.

Frank Drebin Jr.: Hundreds.

Bartender: Unarmed.

Frank Drebin Jr.: At least fifty.

Bartender: He was white.

Frank Drebin Jr.: So you’re Tommy Roiland’s brother! How’s he doing?

Bartender: Are you serious? Bad.

That’s callous and awful, not least because it treats white supremacist violence as a giggle. But of course white supremacist violence is callous and awful. In The Wire or Hill Street Blues or any number of dramatic police procedurals, a subplot about a cop shooting a fleeing suspect in the back would delve into the tension and terror of the moment, the stress and/or alcoholism and/or conflicted racism of the cop, the conflicting testimony of witnesses. But The Naked Gun is freed from that need to add complexity and depth and purpose. Drebin shoots people in the back because he can; he thinks it’s fun and funny. Like the white people who posed with the corpses of lynching victims, he doesn’t even really understand, or try to understand, why anyone would find it offensive or off-putting. Shooting people in the back is what cops do. It’s what they’re there for. Sometimes they even shoot a white person by mistake; these things happen.

Again, The Naked Gun isn’t actually intended to make a statement—and that’s so much the case that it doesn’t even really bother to systematically avoid making a statement. More than its 80s predecessors, this iteration has a pretty standard action movie/James Bond plot chassis on which to hang its jokes. Richard Cane (Danny Huston), an Elon Musk-esque villain, plans to use a sonic doohickey to revert people to primal violence so that billionaires can start over and rule the world more than they already do. In between Drebin’s incompetent property damage and maybe murders, he displays amazing martial arts prowess (also a somewhat unwelcome innovation in the series) to stop the bad guys and win the girl.

There are a few moments in which the hoary old tropes seem, almost by accident, to dead end into insight. Cane repeatedly tells Drebin that the two of them are alike, because that’s the sort of thing that villains always tell heroes in cop movies—but also because techbro billionaire assholes and cops both have an interest in preserving a status quo in which they can abuse everyone else and defy the law with impunity. At the end of the film, Drebin muses about how old white guys really are better and sexier than everyone else, right before he’s sent off to be investigated by Internal Affairs at an Internal Affairs spa where he can canoodle with Beth and be pampered for cutting a swath of havoc across the city he was supposed to protect.

The coda of the film is a repeat of a gag from the original films; you watch a police car drive off the road onto the sidewalk, scattering pedestrians; then it heads indoors, up and down stairs, cruises into a bowling alley to knock over some pins, and finally finishes its swath of destruction by pulling up to a donut shop.

This isn’t a trenchant critique of institutions or a searing exposé of corruption. It’s just a dumb joke about how cops have impunity to kill people, are lazy jerks indifferent to public safety, and obsessed with free snacks. But the dumb joke gets at a truth that more sober treatments miss. Cops serve no purpose—except maybe (snicker snicker) the purpose of keeping the status quo in place via excessive force. No one’s going to arrest Lt. Frank Drebin. He’s the guy with the naked gun.

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