Criminology Goes to the Movies: Crime Theory and Popular Culture

1. Introduction: Taking Criminology to the Movies

| 1 1 Introduction Taking Criminology to the Movies What is the relationship between criminology and crime films? What kinds of intellectual enterprises occur at the intersection of criminological theory and cinema? What sorts of encounters might occur were criminology to go to the movies? These questions lie at the heart of this volume. Theory—whether it be theory of crime or of the image—has a bad reputation . Students often find theory dry and abstruse, and they discover that it is difficult to relate theory to practice. Scholars are in part responsible for theory’s bad reputation, for too often they take a narrow and rigid view of theory, positioning themselves in relation to a particular set of propositions that they then spend their lives elaborating. But theory, as we understand it, is exciting terrain —dynamic, fluid, plural, accessible, and part of the lives of ordinary people . In other words, theory is not confined to academic criminology. Criminological theory is at work all around us—in daily conversation, news media, prime-time television, music, cyberspace, mystery novels, and film. In this volume, we begin with the assumption that criminology is hard at work in culture and that culture is hard at work in criminology. To illustrate this process, we focus on the cultural site that exemplifies this engagement perhaps better than any other—Hollywood cinema. We hope to show how ideas about crime develop in the cultural imagination and, in turn, shape and are shaped by theory as well. We argue that criminological theory is produced not only in the academic world, through scholarly research, but also in popular culture, through such vehicles as film. Our goal is to reconceptualize criminological theory in relation to culture—and, in particular, cinema. This book builds upon an article in which criminologist Nicole Rafter asserted that crime films play an important role in relation to criminology, constituting a “popular criminology, a discourse parallel to academic criminology and of equal social significance.”1 Here we set out to examine the space where popular culture and academic criminology meet (see Figure 1.1). We are 2 | Introduction not merely interested in showing how crime theories constitute a subtext in many films. We are much more interested in demonstrating that popular culture can expand formal theory—and that the encounter of theory with cinema is an engagement that leaves both fundamentally transformed. Using crime films to investigate the overlaps of criminology and popular culture, we analyze how these domains interpenetrate and cross-fertilize one another. Figure 1.1. Popular Criminology: Where Academic Criminology Meets Popular Culture Academic Criminology Popular Culture Popular Criminology In what follows we first discuss how academic criminology can benefit from closer connections to popular culture. Next we address the compelling role that crime plays in the popular imagination and ordinary life. The third of the following sections is devoted to a discussion of popular criminology, the innovative discourse that emerges from the intersection of academic criminology and popular culture. This chapter concludes with an overview of the volume and a note on the topsy-turvy manner in which the book can be read. Academic Criminology “Academic criminology can no longer aspire to monopolize ‘criminological ’ discourse,” write two of the field’s most sophisticated observers, “or hope to claim exclusive rights over the representation and disposition of crime.”2 Yet most academics who write and teach about causes of crime ignore popular culture, perhaps because they do not know how to concep- Introduction | 3 tualize their relationship to it. Others use film snippets in classes or write about cases famous in popular culture—but without theorizing the interrelationships between the examples and scholarly work. At the same time, specialists in popular culture, while increasingly engrossed by criminological matters, lack a conceptual scaffolding for bridging the two fields. This volume shows how to deal with such problems through a move beyond descriptive efforts toward a rigorous theoretical interpretation of popular culture. The first question in such a pursuit is one for academic criminology , and it is a question of the image’s significance: Why take seriously “criminology in the image”?3 The first and foremost answer to this question is found in the overwhelming presence of crime in popular culture. To ignore cultural representations of crime is to ignore the largest public domain in which thought about crime occurs. (In fact, if our diagram were drawn to show the relative importance of...