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to mock him and to illustrate a psyche more tortured than that of the criminal.
In ''Beyond the Law'', as Mailer takes on the role of a cop, anxieties about Jewishness, being seen, and the voice come together. Beyond the Law tells the story of one night in a police precinct in which a number of criminals are interrogated, ranging from a motorcycle gang, to a man who murdered his wife with an axe, to the members of a sadomasochistic whipping club. The film takes us back and forth between the precinct, where we see the cops in action, and a bar, where we see the cops off-duty, having drinks. Toward the film’s conclusion, these spaces intersect as Lieutenant Pope brings one of the women from the whipping club, a stunning Syrian woman named Lee Ray Rogers, to the bar. Rogers’ tripartite name, cobbled together from pieces of Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray, 14 suggests that she too will be an assassin of sorts, or at least that she will bring the little death of orgasm to Lieutenant Pope. Just before Rogers arrives, Pope (Mailer’s Irish-American cop, whose rank and name suggest that he is only slightly less than the Bishop of Rome) and Mickey Berk (Mickey Knox’s Jewish-American cop, feminized through a last name that is cockney rhyming slang for cunt)15 have a heart to heart in the men’s room in which Pope remarks, “I used to have no respect for the Jewish cops until the Israelis showed the Arabs where to go. And then I said to myself, maybe Berk has more than even I thought.” Pope then mutters under his breath for a couple of minutes, and quietly says to himself, “The Irish never won a war."