On vigilante movies and real life

An interesting take on vigilante films, such as Death Wish and for that matter, Dirty Harry:

"But film critics are such inveterate moralists, directing their principled scorn on every deviation from strict correctness and crossing with the light, right? Not in any world we've seen. Something in the vigilante film seems to foment a strident exception to typically (and reasonably) agnostic views toward violence in the review community. There's a limitless history of criminal anti-heroes, and their violence never seems to invoke much explicitly "moral" response. Pauline Kael hated Dirty Harry and loved Bonnie and Clyde. To brand (frequently murderous) "youth on the run" films as objectionable would only earn rapid branding as a hopeless scold, while ex cathedra warnings against the evils of vigilante cinema seem almost a critic's sworn duty. How to explain this double standard? It's, well, simply a strain to explain this without looking to the political connotations of the works in question."

A problem that I, as a classical liberal, have with vigilante films is how sometimes the issue of due process of law tends to get mocked a lot. There is a line from Dirty Harry where our Clint, in his legendary way, takes the piss out of the "Miranda" rule about searches and so on. Various Amendments are shown to be jokes. And let's remind ourselves that when you watch a film starring Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood shooting down a bad guy, you, the viewer, know that the bad guy is a bad guy and naturally cheer the flinty-eyed man with his .44 revolver. But in real life, the guilt of that odd-looking person is not so obvious. Hence why we have things like laws, Habeas Corpus, juries, search warrants, and all the rest, and why the likes of us get angry when these things are violated, or mocked by the likes of Tony Blair as signs of "19th Century values". Indeed, take the case of investigative journalist Radley Balko in the US, who has made a career of showing how the War on Drugs and other campaigns have, when combined with the militarisation of the US police, created a series of disasters.

I can therefore feel the moral force of a film which shows a person taking the law into their own hands when I know, for the brief lifetime of a movie, that the person who gets the bullet is guilty. These are often powerful films about morality, and the better ones also highlight some of the ethical dilemmas well, as the better Eastwood ones often do, for instance; even the old Bruce Lee martial arts films play to that sense of rectifying injustice. All great, in my view. But the problem, of course, is that life is not like a film where guilt is always known. It's a lot messier, and that is why vigilantism is not generally consistent with a civil, pro-freedom order. This is why, even under stateless societies, some form of order has to exist and someone has to say that "this is how we establish guilt and punish the guilty".

To make it absolutely clear in case anyone brings this up, vigilantism in my view is not the same at all as the freedom to use potentially deadly force if necessary in self defence. I am talking about people who, having seen or suffered a crime, decide at a later date, on their own initiative and without any process of law, to exact a form of punishment, deadly or otherwise.