I watched First Blood this past weekend, one of those random 80's movies I somehow never got around to seeing. (First off, it doesn't hold up. It's not a good movie.)
The thing that struck me was how, in a film obviously targeting men and with an overtly pro-military message, the town police force was portrayed as cartoonishly evil. I get that it's symbolic of the supposed poor welcome Vietnam vets received after the war, but it's still striking and I can't imagine the narrative of "small town police force harassing war vet" playing in a film today.
It got me to thinking about the unflattering portrayal of cops in film around that time and in a lot of mainstream 70's / early 80's pop culture. Aside from First Blood, you had Dukes of Hazzard, Smokey and the Bandit, Cannonball Run... plenty of other examples. I'm not even talking about films like Serpico which were based on actual police corruption. I'm talking about common, even low brow entertainment, generally consumed (and still beloved) by rural southern types. , there was an entire genre of music devoted to "outlaws" in the 70's. "Convoy" became one of the dumbest songs ever to top the Billboard Hot 100.
The image of police officers from that period seems to range from fat, incompetent fool to psychopathic piece of . In some ways, they represented the control of the state and were the an hesis of freedom. They were the foil to our protagonists' good time. We cheer for our white, southern heroes or military vets to escape those bad cops.
We still have ty cops portrayed in entertainment today but it's usually found more in your urban or liberal-skewing TV and film (inb4 "everything Hollywood makes is liberal"). There are no country songs about running from the law anymore. Network TV is littered with dozens of cop shows about heroic officers who occasionally have a bad apple in the force. COPS was on the air for 30 years so the rubes could watch regular cops ramble about their jobs and beat up a few alleged criminals.
At some point, the view of rural white Americans towards police seems to have gone from "They're anti-freedom tools of the state" to "They're here to protect us and we shouldn't question them." Today, cops are heroes who put themselves at great risk to protect us from the criminal element that would obviously overrun society if not for them.
So when did this change happen? Was it a result of Reagan-era law & order policy? Did the more nuanced portrayal of cops in shows like Hillstreet Blues and LA Law swing the pendulum the other way? Would a "White male on the run from the law who's out to get him for no good reason" film still play in a southern Back the Blue household?