Course Idea

I've had this idea for a while now.  These days it seems a little more timely.

What if we took a semester and each week watched a popular movie that features a fictional police officer.  We then step through the actions of that character as they go through the movie and evaluate their actions based on the governing rules of conduct.

John McClane blows up a building in Die Hard.  He blows up a plane in Die Hard 2.  The one I remember most from Die Hard 3 was where he's walking up the aqueduct tunnel, about to encounter one of the drivers and shoots him and takes the truck:

There's a real body count in that line.  I went a long way along with Die Hard before I started to wonder about the justification of some of the shoots (among other interventions).

I know it is just entertainment, but I do wonder about where the center of gravity is on the thing.  We've come a long way from Dirty Harry to John McClane - and McClane was more than 20 years ago.

It does seem different when it is fantasy or science fiction.  Trinity and Neo kill a lot of people too - although they are revolutionaries not law enforcement.  Die Hard and Lethal Weapon ostensibly take place in the real world.  Does it make any sense to have them have to function in a way we would expect from real police?

Maybe it isn't a course.  Maybe it is a TV show.  There used to be this show Ethics in America.  I would love to see films critiqued by a learned panel, not with regard to if they were good or bad films but rather with regard to if the behavior of the characters was legal.  The panel would need police, government, legal scholars, all the people that govern what the proper application of force is supposed to be.

Like it or not, the impression that many people have of what real police work looks like is from movies and TV.  Maybe we would be better off if movie and TV police work was less sensationalized.