Search for a film:

April 01, 2008

Police Academy 3

Iron Fist in a Velvet Glove

By Andrew

This post is a part of the 2nd Annual White Elephant Film Blogathon

Police stories generally lend themselves to the grind of the procedural plot due to the very majestic fairy tale that is the Law, and by extension, the police work that follows from it. Plots are fiction, as is the State. The notion of an “open and shut” case fits the narrative requirements of the three-act like a glove, or rather, as Crime and Social Justice Associates titled their 1982 study of U.S. police militarization, an Iron Fist in a Velvet Glove.

Yet while CSJA’s study remains a common citation for concerned critics looking to unravel the prescribed simplicity that the State enforces upon our daily lives, narrative media which undertakes the same task runs scarce, as if a smokescreen of sorts wafts out of Dirty Harry’s .44 magnum, shading the State from critical inquiry. When the State and the Plot collide, the authorities always get their man.

Enter premium cable. Televison shows like The Wire or The Sopranos purport to portray things down and dirty: not just good versus evil, cops versus robbers, but cops versus politicians versus junkies versus developers versus sex workers versus Italians versus dealers versus longshoreman versus traffickers versus robbers. Indeed, more verses than a Wu Tang song. So critics be all over the premium cable like white on coke – it isn’t like television, they say, it’s like The Novel.

Yet, in their rush to herald novelty -- newness is news, and news is newness, after all -- critics mistake the plot-driven hooks of premium cable series for urgency, immediacy, and social and political need. If we recall Michel Foucault's discussion of the novel in Discipline & Punish, we know that the State is printed across every page with the construction of crime and the criminal. So "novel," yes, but only The Novel in that no one watches these shows for reality, they watch for drama; while coke and curse words distract our thinking faculties, the three-act creeps in through the backdoor.

The Police Academy Series is, for one, on the surface, a police serial not unlike today’s premium cable; it extended into seven self-contained films, and further spread into television and direct to video ventures in the decade following its debut. But unlike premium cable serials, Police Academy relied not on the Plot for its furtherance. Rather, Police Academy depended upon the punch-line, continual but ever-changing riffs on seemingly simple characterizations and physical humor, which with the right appreciation, can be likened to the jazz horn on top its backbeat. Like Jean Vigo's Zero de conduite and the Marx Brothers before it, every punch Police Academy executes is a potential point struck against the false, fatal coherence and totality of both the State and the Plot.

For critical inquiry’s sake, the third Police Academy film, Police Academy 3: Back in Training, is not a poor point of departure; not only does it attempt a synthesis of themes and personae established previously at odds in the earlier films -- as when former enemies Sweetchuck and Zed are reconciled as Academy roommates. It also represents the point at which the series reached its mass appeal, demonstrated by the descending severity of the films’ Motion Picture Association of America ratings. The inaugural Police Academy was rated “R,” ostensibly marking it for mature audiences; at PG-13, Police Academy 2 addressed a broader audience, netting a previously untargeted teenage demographic; while Police Academy 3 arrived with a PG rating, "fun for the whole family" as it were, clearly a general appeal to the public.

The entire thesis of thePolice Academy Series, underlying its pantheon in gross, is the extent to which the State can contain the explosive contradictions and multiplicities that exist among us, and as Deleuze and Guattari insisted, within us: “Since each of us was several,” they write in their A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, “there already was quite a crowd.” (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. 3) A new mayoral policy states that the Police Academy -- in thematic essence, the State in training -- is to accept all individual applicants, irrespective of age, size, gender, criminal history, race, nationality, mental health, i.e. humanity in multiplicity. Reality intrudes on the State’s imposed restrictions of citizenships: all are human, no is illegal. "Quite a crowd," indeed.

The first two Police Academy films establish various personae, while Police Academy 3 calls them back in to the fold -- “Back in Training” as the subtitle has it -- to defend their alma mater. A new mayoral policy announces one of the city’s two police training institutions will be shut down; of the two institutions, each embodied by a single Commander, only one will remain.

On the side of Panoptic totality stands Cmndt. Mauser. His recruits are invariably men, butch and well-built, clad in constant uniformity, and who never, ever dance. The Cmdnt.’s name even summons reference to the acclaimed, haunting graphic Holocaust-themed graphic novel Maus.

Mauser will stop at nothing to defeat his Hegelian opposite, the strange and wonderful, uncanny even (in the Hoffmanian sense) Cmdt. Eric Lassard. Under Lassard’s command are the archetypes that tear at the State’s ability to contain. These include Sgt. Steve Guttenberg, a libidinous women’s basketball couch; violent survivalist Sgt. Eugene Tackleberrry; Lt. Debbie Callahan, a woman whose shirts do not fit; and Sgt. Moses Hightower, a black man.

While multiplicity is inherent in the experiential personae put forth here, Police Academy 3 takes care to construct situations that represent social conflicts prevalent in its era, across gender to class to race. Early in the film, a young woman flees her home to attend the academy, despite the verbal and physical assaults of her husband: “I’m the breadwinner in this family, your place is in the house.”

Later, the social construction of masculinity is performed between sgt. and cadet. “Give me a chance, and I’ll make you into a man, even if it kills you,” an instructor tells a diminutive recruit, who proceeds to kill a fly. “Feel good?” He nods yes (Masculinity feels good). Other narrative inventions strike at race: these include a wealthy white individual mistaking a police of color for a porter; and Mausser addressing his Japanese exchange student as “Fu Manchu.” Later, as the academic police world turns, the sensitive issues of interracial coupling are pursued, as are master/dog relationships and karate.

These moments of multiplicity are, in fact, nearly enough to make one forgot that, in the end, Police Academy 3 never does wholly subvert the State, nor its need for narrative control: the Plot resolves with the Academy of misfits violently suppressing a busboy strike and Guttenberg getting laid. While the absurdity of the resolution implies a world of the impossible, it never fully embodies it. It is revealed, at last, that this is not no is illegal; this is everyone is legal: a potential police. This is Parental Guidance Suggested. This is a picture of the future, a boot stamping on a human face -- forever.

Back to Top