Political realities are often reflected in dramatic presentations in terms of the way the story is developed, the way characters interact, the way society is depicted, and so on. This can be seen in elements of the films Men Should Weep, an episode of the Cracker television series, and Brotherly Love.
Men Should Weep is a police drama that shows the workings of the police department in England and that therefore points to the kinds of laws passed by the people of that society, the way those laws are enforced, the values embodied both in the laws and in their enforcement, and the limitations placed both on citizens and on the police as public security is sought. Public security is the primary goal of the Public Laws subfield of Political Science, but it is also one of the goals of Political Science itself. Theorists indeed have speculated that the reason society and government exist at all is to create public security, as noted by men like Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke, who believed that the Social Contract came into being essentially to protect each member of society from his or her neighbors so that some measure of the freedom everyone had in nature is ceded to government in exchange for this protection. In practice, laws, police, and courts provide one level of that protection, while governments do so in terms of armies and navies and the protection of borders.
How security is achieved depends on the society and on how much security is challenged. Clear differences can be seen between the way police operate in America and in England, for instance. On the one hand, America is a more violent society so that police need guns, while in Britain there is no gun culture on the same level and the police do not carry guns. On the other hand, the same constitution that allows citizens in America to own guns places many restrictions on the actions of the police that are not the case in England, and while suspects in America have...