Criminology Goes to the Movies: Crime Theory and Popular Culture

3. “He’s Alive!”: Biological Theories and Frankenstein

28 | 3 “He’s Alive!” Biological Theories and Frankenstein The very first efforts to explain crime scientifically—those made in the 1870s by the Italian psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso—held that the causes of crime lie inside criminals themselves: in the inherited, primitive quality of their bodies and brains. Lombroso’s theory of criminal anthropology caught the imagination of social reformers worldwide: it had a scientific ring at a time when people were turning to science for the answers to life’s big questions ; and it was literally spectacular, for Lombroso illustrated his books with grisly images of living and dead criminals whose twisted bodies seemed to mirror their twisted minds. By the end of the nineteenth century, disenchantment set in, not with efforts to explain crime scientifically, for those persisted, but with the specific biological theory of Lombroso. Thereafter theorists devised other biocriminological explanations—the “feeblemindness” theory of the early twentieth century; Earnest Hooton’s failed effort to resurrect criminal anthropology in the 1930s; William Sheldon’s bodytyping theory of the 1940s and 1950s—but on the whole, sociological theories dominated throughout the twentieth century . Indeed, after World War II, when people learned what the Nazis had done in the name of biology, the revulsion against biological reasoning of all sorts was so strong that to many, it seemed inconceivable that anyone would ever again endorse a biological theory of crime. “Never again!”—the vow not to permit another Holocaust—became, in social science, the vow “Never again permit human problems to be blamed on bad biology.” However, out of sight of mainstream sociological criminology, in the 1960s some psychologists started to revive the idea of the criminal body—a body with abnormalities that encourage criminal behavior—and today, advances in genetics and neuroscience are again bringing biological explanations to the fore. While it seems unlikely that biological theories will ever again be taken as the sole explanation of criminality, as Lombroso’s criminal anthropology and “He’s Alive!” | 29 Nazi biocriminology were, it seems very likely that as the twenty-first century progresses, biologists and sociologists will work out a biosocial explanation of crime tracing the origins of offending to an interplay of nature and nurture, biology and environment. Indeed, they are almost there already.1 The first of the following sections reviews biological theories of crime, from criminal anthropology through eugenic criminology to the emergence of biosocial explanations in the late twentieth century. The next section discusses the original Frankenstein (1931), the most successful depiction in film history of a biological theory of crime. It is followed by discussions of another film that draws on biological explanations, The Bad Seed (1956), and of a group of films that grew out of the feeblemindedness explanation of crime. In conclusion we point to several recent films, including Minority Report (2002) and Monster (2003), that reflect the genetic revolution in understandings of crime and crime control. The Criminal Body Lombroso’s Criminal Anthropology Criminal Man, whose first edition Lombroso published in 1876, argued that if criminology is to be a science, the object of study must be not criminal acts but criminals themselves. Criminals, Lombroso explained, are atavisms, throwbacks to an earlier evolutionary stage; they are more like dark-skinned “savages” than normal, law-abiding white people. “Primitive” in their bodies , minds, and morals, they can be identified by their physical and mental “anomalies” such as “low, sloping foreheads, . . . overdevelopment of the jaw and cheekbones, . . . oblique and large eye sockets, dark skin, thick and curly head hair, large or protuberant ears, . . . low sensitivity to pain, . . . laziness , absence of remorse and foresight, great vanity, and fleeting, violent passions .”2 The worst criminals—“born criminals”—are hopelessly criminalistic, Lombroso continued; they cannot stop themselves from offending time and again, from childhood through old age: Criminal anthropology, while not blaming the born criminal for his behavior, nevertheless prescribes for him a life sentence. We believe that those individuals least responsible for their behavior are most to be feared. Only sequestration can neutralize their innate, atavistic urge to crime.3 However, Lombroso maintained, there are also other categories—occasional criminals, political criminals, pseudocriminals, insane criminals—which 30 | “He’s Alive!” taken together make up 60 percent of all offenders. In their cases, social as well as biological factors cause criminal behavior. They have few, if any, anomalies and enjoy some degree of free will. Because Lombroso studied the bodies and culture of criminals...