Argues that the Dirty Harry series sheds critical light on the culture and politics of the post-1960s era and locates San Francisco as the symbolic cultural battleground of the time. Joe Street maintains that the films themselves became active participants in the culture wars, paying particular attention to the films' representation of crime, family and community, sexuality, and race.

Street argues that depictions of tough-on-crime character Harry Callahan, in multiple ways and over the course of five films, embodied the growing disagreements with twentieth-century postwar liberal policies that were supposedly promoting moral decay in contemporary American society.