Happy Monday: new sidebar content over there, my freshly uploaded "muxtape." If you have any other web 2.0 crap for me to try out and put in my sidebar, comment away.

We watched Dirty Harry for the first time last night. Pretty good action movie, aside from the semi-ludicrous "criminals shouldn't have rights because Clint Eastwood says so" moral of the story. The movie is old enough too that it falls in the category of proto-action movies---the movies that invented the various cliches and plot devices we get to take for granted in our modern action movies. (Other example springing to mind: the first Die Hard.)

The other effect of being a proto-action movie is that Dirty Harry has a palpably different visual style from other movies with the same general plot. I'm not a huge movie buff, so I don't usually notice these things unless they're pointed out to me, but the style of the first 3/4 or so of the movie struck me as worth talking about.

image from Google Image search -- surprisingly work-safe for "Dirty Harry"

The outdoor scenes at the beginning of the movie are very bright. Harry is wearing a sweater and a jacket, but other than that, you might imagine it to be mid-summer. (It doesn't hurt that the opening shot is of a woman swimming in a roof-deck pool.) As night falls and Harry goes out to look for the woman's shooter (oops, spoiler alert), the scenes become so dark that it is actually impossible to see what is happening. Harry fumbles trying to stand on a trash can in a dark alley, and we only know this is happening from the sound effects.

The lighting struck me particularly because I had kept thinking about one of the opening shots, where the camera sees the sniper from behind, the woman in the pool on another roof some distance away, and then pulls back to show a remarkably wide view of some San Francisco streets and rooftops.

If I were a real movie blogger, I would have a screenshot or something, but I'm not so I don't so too bad.

The sniper's vantage point effectively lets him see all of San Francisco, threatening both individuals (that swimmer) and society as a whole (the traffic below). For most of the rest of the movie (save the last 1/4 or so that I don't want to spoil for you), Dirty Harry is about the power of seeing versus being seen. Given that basically every character in the movie is armed, seeing gives one physical power over the seen. As soon as a line of sight is established, the one seen is disabled: the getaway car driver that Harry notices during lunch, the killer when he is spotted by police helicopter, Harry himself, when he is seen on the trash can by some angry neighbors.

The publicity material for the movie shows this effect as well---you'd be hard-pressed to find a promo shot of Clint Eastwood as Harry not looking down the barrel of a gun.

Google Image Search for "Dirty Harry" at your own maybe-work-safe risk!

Not much to add to that, I guess. Also, out of recognition that this is probably the most obvious observation about Dirty Harry ever, I didn't bother to search for other similar analysis. It's easy being a dilettante sometimes.

[update: the whole seeing/being seen thing is also obviously about sex. see: killer's flouncy walk, gay man on street, cruiser in dark park and Harry's dead wife.]