I’ve noticed an odd trope lately - in many movies set in the 1980’s, a cop protagonist lives at the beach or at a marina. I’m not sure why this is so prevalent - I’m sure we could Baudrillard/Zizek it to death and tie it into the yacht rock movement and other leisure tropes of 1980’s media - but I find it both amusing and deeply interesting.
Rockford, a private detective, also lived at the beach. He was kind of at odds with the cops a lot of the time. It may be a way to show the independent nature of the cop, the single man living a surfer lifestyle, but it also leaves a simple way to have the guys home be blown to smithereens without the expensive of blowing up a whole house in a crowded neighborhood.
Harry Orwell, played by David Janssen in Harry O, first lived in a beach house on Coronado Island in San Diego, then in a beach house on Pacific Coast Highway near Malibu.
Didn’t he live in a trailer, that was bigger on the inside, by the beach? I remember the bad guys shooting it to pieces in Lethal Weapon 2 from a helicopter. They also killed his cute South-African girlfriend, the bastards.
The titular main character of The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, played by Andrew Dice Clay, lived in a bungalow by the beach. A pretty nice place for a private detective who’s, supposedly, hard for cash.
Both Rockford and Riggs lived in a trailer that was parked on the beach in what looked like Malibu.
As a teen watching these flicks from land-locked Arizona, I planned to move to California, buy a trailer, and park it on the beach like they did and live cheaply!’
I later learned you can’t even park your car for more than an hour on beachfront property and they would haul your trailer away forever if you tried parking it on the beach…
You might be thinking of that other 80s action film, Sleepless in Seattle, where a hardened cop (Tom Hanks) tries to raise his son alone while being stalked by a dangerous obsessive woman (Meg Ryan).
In CHiPs, Ponch moved into a Marina Del Rey apt. That’s almost a beach house.
I actually think it was the same apt complex I lived in when I lived in LA. However, I was a ruggedly individualistic engineer rather than cop/PI. I hope that still counts…
Rockford’s trailer was actually in the parking lot of the restaurant there, so we can assume he got permission or was paying lot rent.
So, did 2007’s Burn Notice use this meme? Our Hero was ex-CIA doing PI work to survive, not a cop. But he lived above a dingy club on the Miami waterfront.
I seem to remember the show not holding up in the long run but it had its moments. And Bruce Campbell…
