Coronel Lockjaw (Steven J. Lockjaw): The uniform that mistakes order for virtue

Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, the reactionary soldier played by Sean Penn in One Battle After Another (Una batalla tras otra) by Paul Thomas Anderson, is not a villain who feels like a villain. That is what is disturbing. Lockjaw believes he protects, that he watches over, that he defends a sacred line against the threat —obsessed with border control and with an idea of "security" that justifies almost anything—. He has a uniform, a chain of command, and the conviction that the law backs every single thing he does. For right realism, men like him represent the seductive and dangerous face of order: the one who promises to protect us tonight in exchange for not asking too much about the price. And that price, in Lockjaw, has a name: the dehumanization of whoever is left on the other side of his moral wall.

// The theoryForget the causes: order must be kept

Right realism crystallized in the United States in the 1970s and 80s, above all with James Q. Wilson and his Thinking About Crime (1975). Its thesis is as simple as it is popular: to seek the "root causes" of crime in poverty or inequality is, besides being dubious, an excuse that protects no one today. People commit crimes because they choose to; victims are real; and while the academics argue, someone has to deter, watch, and punish. Hence the cult of order as a good in itself —the "broken windows" idea: visible disorder invites greater crime, so even the smallest infraction must be pursued—. It is the criminology of common sense, effective in the short term… and the one that most easily slides toward abuse. Lockjaw is the exact point of that slide. To his realist logic he adds something older and darker: what the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno and his team described in 1950 as the authoritarian personality —a character made of rigidity, blind submission to hierarchy, aggression against what is perceived as deviant, and a thinking incapable of nuance that divides the world into pure and impure, us and them—. Where Wilson sees crime policy, in Lockjaw a character structure beats: the need for an enemy to subdue in order to feel on the right side.

// The subjectThe rigidity that disguises itself as duty

What is revealing about Lockjaw is how his traits fit, one by one, the portrait of the authoritarian personality. Rigidity: there is no gray area, no doubt, no particular case worthy of review —the world is arranged in fixed categories and whoever does not fit is, by definition, the problem—. Submission to hierarchy: his identity is welded to the chain of command, to the flag, to the authority that legitimizes him; obeying and enforcing obedience is his way of existing. Aggression toward the deviant: all the hostility that the authoritarian personality does not direct upward —toward the powerful it venerates— is discharged downward, onto the weak, the foreigner, the different, turned into a repository for its fears. And black-and-white thinking, which spares him the discomfort of thinking: strong or weak, pure or impure, loyal or traitor. His zeal is not born of cold sadism, but of something more everyday and therefore more contagious: the sincere conviction that he is doing his duty. Lockjaw does not see himself abusing power. He sees himself using it well. That is precisely the alibi that right realism serves up on a platter: when the law backs the one who watches, abuse can disguise itself as diligence and prejudice as professionalism.

// The crackTo explain the authoritarian personality is not to excuse it

The crack with Lockjaw is twofold. The first temptation is to psychologize him until he dissolves: to turn "the authoritarian personality" into a clinical destiny, a label that works as an alibi —"that's just how he is"— and lifts the weight of every decision off him. Adorno does not say that. He described a type of character in order to recognize and fight it, not to absolve it: the authoritarian still chooses whom to harass, whom to dehumanize, where to draw the line, and whom to leave out. Having a rigid character structure explains his disposition, it does not exempt him from his acts. To explain is not to excuse. The second crack is the opposite, and the most dangerous politically: to believe that Lockjaw is an anomaly, an isolated fanatic. Right realism reminds us that the problem is not only the hard individual, but the system that authorizes him —a law, an institution, a culture of "security" that hands him power over other bodies without demanding that he account for it—. Lockjaw does not watch alone: he is backed by a uniform, a chain of command, and a consensus that has decided certain people are worth less. The comfortable monster is the one who acts alone; the real monster is the one who signs reports with everyone's approval.

The honest reading holds both things at once. Lockjaw is responsible —for every humiliation, for every person reduced to a threat, for every right he tramples in the name of order—. And his figure denounces something larger: that the rights the iron fist despises do not protect the "enemies," they protect us all from the State, and whoever suspends them for the one who crosses the border suspends them, sooner or later, for the neighbor next door. The memory that matters here is not that of the colonel who believed himself the bulwark of civilization, but that of those whom his zeal turned into figures, into suspects, into objects to be contained. Those names —not his— are the ones that should not be erased.