END OF WATCH

         

            End of Watch is an American crime drama film written and directed by David Ayer. Brian Taylor and Miguel Zavala are partners in the Newton Division of the LA Police Department. The film is shot documentary-style and it follows the daily grind of the two young cops. Both, patrol the streets as Latino gangs are in a power struggle with the Black community. Everything goes fine until the police officers mess with the wrong people, and the leader of the cartel orders their deaths. At the end of the movie, Miguel dies shot by the people from the cartel, leaving his pregnant wife with no dad for her kid.

            As Rafter says, cop films serve as a medium for the definition of masculinity, participating in the construction and reconstruction of gender on the national and even international level, influencing how we react to men and how we ourselves “do” gender when we dress, walk, talk and act in general. There’s one scene where both police officers talk about their girls, and they do it in a really sexual way. Rafter says that cop action nowadays is saturated with sexuality, that involves displays of half-naked male bodies, spurting blood, constant “fuck you”s, anal rape jokes, all kind of jokes about women and their sexuality… On the other side, the movie gives a somewhat different perspective of the cops because the movie is shot by one of them with it’s own camera for a project. That gives us a sense of proximity, because we are with them all the time. We see how they act in the car when there is no crimes to attend to, we see how they act when one of the guy gets shot and dies, we see everything that is going on in their world, and that is something new and other films do not have it.

            On the other side, Rafter talks about “buddy love”. During the past years the “buddy love” is a phenomenon that has been in almost every single cop film. We can see it in scenes such as when they have deep conversations I in the cop car, or even when Miguel gets shot and we see Brian cry for the loss of his best buddy. Sometimes that buddy love goes so far that it makes us even wonder their sexuality. Rafter says these films overflow with intense buddy love- and it is love between two men who, although they don’t make a big deal of it, cannot help but notice that the other is impossibly attractive. Producers though, refuse to label any of them as straight, gay, or bisexual and as Rafter says, irrespective of what their sexuality preferences may be when they are with their wives and girlfriends, cop action heroes when they are with each other enjoy sex through beatings, rippings, and sexualized banter.

            In films as in real life, police tends to see black arrestees as more dangerous then white arrestees. That to me is a sign that racism isn’t over in the United States. Producers often try so hard not to make distinctions between black and white but somehow the bad boys end up being the black community almost every time. At the same time it is hard for producers to make the right choices because as Rafter says, if there are no African American characters at all in a movie, people of color may be more aware than whites of watching “segregated” film, but in movies with some African American actors and characters people of color may be more conscious than whites of the racial hierarchy in which members of their group seldom qualify as the hero.