Crime and Media in Contemporary France

Chapter One: Crime and Sensation in Contemporary France

1 Chapter One Crime and Sensation in Contemporary France The late 1980s and early 1990s were an era of heightened crime awareness in France, a precursor for the hyper-focus on security and délinquance that would characterize the turn of the century. With the introduction of the word “serial killer” into the French language, the emerging popularity of “reality TV,” and an increasingly pervasive media discourse focused on public insecurity, French society consumed crime as fast as the media could reproduce it. While stemming in part from American cultural capitalism, French society has nonetheless incorporated and followed similar trends in the perception and representation of crime. Yet, as Tricia Rose explains, “Crime and violence have become the central focus of popular attention , not because more and more people are the victims of crime, but because more [people] vicariously experience violence through the repetition of tabloid, televised news, and other reality-based programming” (149). In other words, criminal acts have not actually multiplied, but the increased mediation of crime has heightened the public’s perception of violent acts and in turn increased its concern. It is this mediated (omni)presence of crime that I will interrogate throughout this book, through an analysis of the complex processes of production, reception, and artistic rearticulation that contribute to the representation of violence in contemporary French society. Through their appearance in a variety of media forms that circulate with increasing velocity, violent images and discourse have become a defining part of the public’s daily news diet. The rapid and constant circulation of these images combines to create what Bill Nichols calls an “aesthetics of immediacy” that threatens conventional historiography. As he explains, “The aesthetics of immediacy, conjured in a timeless, spaceless telescape of mediated reality, drowns out the descriptions that urge us to further actions beyond exclamation or dismay. Its claims of authenticity, its construction of an endless ‘now,’ its preference for the chronicle, the random and unforeseen over the order and cohesion of historiography, and the problem solving discourses of a technocratic order all come at a time when master narratives are a target of disparagement” (59). By focusing on the immediate, the media absolves itself of its role in creating and baiting a fearful public, and instead shifts the blame elsewhere. During 2 Chapter One the 1980s, movies, books, and plays depicting violent acts fell under the media’s increasing scrutiny and were blamed for their negative influence on children, young adults, and criminal offenders. Ironically, the same media that produces these violent images has been the largest mouthpiece for its criticism: newspapers devote articles to increasingly violent discourse, television shows critique the cinema’s realistic portrayal of murder, and news magazines interrogate the brutality of violent images. These attacks on artistic depictions of violence are relative only to literature’s long relationship to violence, however, as these criticisms are recycled arguments that have long plagued art and literature. Since its emergence, literature has been associated with the crime story; we need only turn to the Bible for early examples. In French literature in particular, writers such as Villon, Stendhal, and Flaubert have re-inscribed murder in their works, and the twentieth century provides no exception: Jarry, Breton, Prévert, Camus, Gide, Sartre, Genet, Duras, and Le Clézio and have all authored texts based on real crime stories. Like its literary counterpart, French cinema has focused on real crime since its inception. One of the most famous silent films is L’Histoire d’un crime (Ferdinand Zecca, 1901), based on an 1882 display of photographs at the Musée Grevin in Paris in which a woman asks her husband to kill her lover. Other examples include Nouvelles en trois lignes (Félix Fénéon, 1906), La Danse héroïque (Alice Guy, 1914), Le Feu follet (Louis Malle, 1963), Stavinsky (Alain Resnais, 1963), Que la bête meure (Claude Chabrol, 1969), and Moi, Pierre Rivière (René Allio, 1979), which later became the subject of a book edited by Michel Foucault (Moi, Pierre Rivière ayant égorgé ma mère, ma sœur et mon frère, 1973). Clearly, it is not new to fictionalize crime. What is new is how more recent works critique the mediatization of the crime story by calling into question the sensationalized interpretation of reality. Bertrand Tavernier’s 1995 film L’Appât, for instance, retells the story of three middle-class teenagers who spend their days watching violent American films and...