Dragnet (1987)

Dragnet arrives from 1987, a buddy cop parody that treats its source material with affectionate slapstick. The cultural weather of the era is present in every frame, and that weather did not include the progressive signifiers we now catalog with such diligence. The film is a vehicle for Dan Aykroyd's deadpan reconstruction of Joe Friday and Tom Hanks's loose-limbed counterpoint. It is not a sermon. It is not a corrective. It is a comedy about a cult called P.A.G.A.N. and a stolen shipment of pornography. The agenda, such as it is, is to generate laughs from the clash between anachronistic rigidity and streetwise improvisation.

The representation ledger is nearly blank. The principal cast is uniformly white. The only woman in a position of authority, Commissioner Kirkpatrick, is revealed as corrupt, and the central female figure, Connie Swail, is introduced as 'the virgin' and functions as a rescue object. No LGBTQ characters or themes appear. Racial consciousness is absent. Climate concerns do not intrude on a plot about a poisonous gas that is treated as a MacGuffin, not a planetary warning. The villains are a moral crusader and a politician, not captains of industry, and the pornographer is treated with sympathy, so the eat-the-rich impulse is nowhere to be found. Body positivity is inverted by jokes at the expense of models. A speech impediment provides a minor gag, but neurodivergence is not a theme. The film is set in its own present, so historical revisionism is not on the table. Lecture energy is minimal, because the film wants to entertain, not instruct.

This is not a criticism of the film's quality. Dragnet is a competent piece of 1980s studio entertainment, and its lack of modern social consciousness is a matter of historical record, not moral failure. But when we apply the contemporary yardstick, the result is a near-zero reading across the board. The film exists in a prelapsarian state, innocent of the categories we now impose. It is a relic, and we classify it accordingly.