Criminology Goes to the Movies: Crime Theory and Popular Culture

Notes

| 191 Notes Notes to Chapter 1 1. Rafter, “Crime, Film and Criminology,” 406. 2. Garland and Sparks, “Introduction,” 3. 3. Here, we borrow from Austin Sarat’s terminology, “law in the image,” as elaborated in his 1999 Law and Society Association presidential address. Sarat, following the line of argument that law is present everywhere in everyday life, insists that film is not simply a reflection of law but is a means through which to project alternative realities. For this reason , it is central to explorations of the legal imagination. See Sarat, “Presidential Address: Imagining the Law of the Father.” 4. Recently, film has been given a more pivotal place in the study of crime and society by way of specialized journals (Media, Culture, & Society; New Media & Society) and key volumes. Studies with criminal justice institutional focal points include Bailey and Hale, Popular Culture, Crime, and Justice; King, Heroes in Hard Times; and Wilson and O’Sullivan, Images of Incarceration. Studies focused on film, crime, and popular culture include Tzanelli, O’Brien, and Yar, “‘Con Me If You Can’”; O’Brien et al., “‘The Spectacle of Fearsome Acts’” and “‘Kill n’ Tell, and All That Jazz’”; Brown, “Prison Iconography; Simpson, Psycho Paths; Staiger, Perverse Spectators; Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight; Young, Judging the Image; Asimow and Mader, Law and Popular Culture; Chase, Movies on Trial; Freeman, Law and Popular Culture; Sherwin, When Law Goes Pop; and Greenfield and Osborne, Readings in Law and Popular Culture. More broadly, sociologist Norman Denzin’s work with cinema often attempts to integrate film with theoretical perspectives (see Images of Postmodern Society; The Cinematic Society; Reading Race). Meanwhile, within the fields of film studies and popular culture, books such as Leitch, Crime Films; Lenz, Changing Images of Law in Film and Television Crime Stories; and Campbell, Marked Women, as well as a wealth of film studies volumes focused upon film noir, feminist film theory, horror, and violence, all converge with criminological concerns. 5. See Brown, “Beyond the Requisites”; Jewkes, Media and Crime; Hebdige, Subculture. 6. See groundbreaking work by Cohen, Images of Deviance; Folk Devils and Moral Panics ; and States of Denial. See also Cohen and Young, The Manufacture of News; Hall et al., Policing the Crisis; and Fishman, “Crime Waves as Ideology.” Building from moral panic perspectives are these key social constructionist texts: Surette, Media, Crime, and Criminal Justice; Jenkins, Using Murder; Sasson, Crime Talk; Scheingold, Politics of Law and Order; Potter and Kappeler, Constructing Crime; Barak, Media, Process, and the Social Construction of Crime; Best, Random Violence; Chermak, Searching for a Demon: The Media Construction of the Militia Movement and Victims in the News; Chermak, Bailey, and Brown, Media 192 | Notes to Chapter 1 Representations of September 11; Reinarman, “The Social Construction of Drug Scares”; Beckett, Making Crime Pay; Sarat, When the State Kills. For contemporary critiques, see McRobbie and Thornton, “Rethinking ‘Moral Panic’ for Multi-mediated Social Worlds”; Garland, “On the Concept of Moral Panic.” 7. Criminological journals publish an increasing number of articles on crime films, and within the field of criminology a whole new specialty—cultural criminology—has sprung up, replete with its own journals (Crime, Media, Culture, for instance) and conferences. Cultural criminology is particularly well known for its analyses of texts, images, and discourse and for its detailed ethnographic reflections on criminality in everyday life. It encourages us to rethink media representations as not simply exaggerations or distortions of real-life crime but cultural forces in and of themselves, capable of creating and elaborating complex criminologies of their own. See Ferrell, “Cultural Criminology”; Ferrell et al., Cultural Criminology: An Invitation; Hayward, “Opening the Lens: Cultural Criminology and the Image”; Ferrell and Sanders, Cultural Criminology; Ferrell and Hamm, Ethnography at the Edge; Ferrell and Websdale, Making Trouble: Cultural Constructions of Crime, Deviance, and Control; Presdee, Cultural Criminology and the Carnival of Crime. 8. McRobbie and Thornton, “Rethinking ‘Moral Panic’ for Multi-mediated Social Worlds,” 571. 9. See Glassner, Culture of Fear; Furedi, Culture of Fear; Best, Random Violence; Jenkins, Using Murder; Schmid, Natural Born Celebrities. 10. Katz, Seductions of Crime. 11. Rafter, Shots in the Mirror. 12. See Rafter, “Crime, Film and Criminology,” 406. 13. Hayward, “Opening the Lens,” 9. 14. Carrabine, Crime, Culture and the Media, 120. 15. Rafter, “Crime, Film and Criminology,” 415. 16. Carrabine, Crime, Culture and the Media, 187. 17. Ibid. 18. Young, “The Scene of the Crime,” 87 (emphasis in original). 19. Ibid., 87–88. Notes to Chapter 2 1. It is worth noting that...