TheDaak review

Book: Criminology Goes to the Movies: Crime Theory and Popular Culture by Nicole Rafter and Michelle Brown, New York University Press, 2011, 236 pages, ISBN: 978-0814776520, Rs. 2589

By Aiswarya Pradeep

A layperson’s most customary induction to the meaning, consequences, and perception of complex crimes is often through popular media. Though these tinselling representations of crime often become a matter of interest for cultural studies and media scholars, seldom do academics in criminology find these cultural productions worthy of scholarship. The relevance of cultural criminology as a field of study comes from its keenness to explore this often overlooked  “convergence of cultural and criminal processes in contemporary social life” (Ferrell 1999, 395). Nicole Rafter, a Feminist Criminology professor at Northeastern University, was one of the first proponents of the subject matter to survey the intersection of crime and cinema through her 2007 study titled Crime, film, and criminology: Recent sex crime movies. In the same year, through her book Criminology Goes to the Movies: Crime Theory and Popular Culture, co-authored with Michelle Brown, she went on to question the imperious apprehensions and puritanical prejudices of mainstream criminologists. Through the work, the authors present a subversive spin to the discipline where popular culture meets criminological theories- popular criminology. Rafter defines this branch of discipline she began as a discourse parallel to academic criminology, and of equal significance. 

The book has twelve chapters, each of which deals with important streams of thought in criminology, such as rational choice, biological, psychological, social disorganisation, strain, social learning, labeling, conflict, feminist, and life course theories. These conceptually dense theories are explained in relation to some of the most well-noted Hollywood crime movies of all time in order to make them look more alluring to the readers. Thus, the authors highlight and celebrate the “dynamic, fluid, plural, and accessible” (Rafter and Brown 2011, 1) nature of crime theory, which is inherently connected to the daily lives of ordinary people. For example, in chapter six, Rafter and Brown illustrate various strain theories developed over time through the movie Traffic (2000). As a researcher who has no academic background in criminology, strain theory has always intrigued me with its immensity. The pedagogical approach adopted by the authors proved very functional while reading the book as a humanities student who has little to no acquaintance with criminological concepts such as Merton’s Modes of Adaptation. By using a movie such as Traffic, which features a huge number of characters from various walks of life, all five possible modes of adaptations, as well as their relationship with cultural goals and institutionalised means, are elucidated elegantly.   

Being one of the seminal works in the nascent area of popular criminology, the book is setting the ground for aspiring researchers by laying out a framework for applying the academic theories of crime in popular cultural sites, especially cinema. The relevance of the work comes from the inseparable nature of society from the media, as well as the mutually symbiotic relationship between real-life crimes and their representations. In this mediated age of twenty-four-by-seven news channels that pry upon the market value of a sensational crime story and life-like depictions of violence on screen, it is often strenuous to differentiate whether the media is mirroring reality or vice versa. While many of the crimes that receive media attention (especially murders) inspire many cultural productions, including true crime podcasts, documentaries, and movies, there also have been instances of real-life criminals getting influenced by the modus operandi portrayed in a crime movie or series. Apart from this confusing terrain of the hyperreal existence where reel and real are intertwined,  Rafter and Brown also stress how cinema becomes an important tool of study for criminologists because of its unique ability to project the cultural anxiety surrounding a particular crime. In Chapter 8 of the book, they refer to the 1980s moral panic over recurring cases of child sexual abuse in the United States of America while speaking about the true crime documentary Capturing the Friedmans and the labeling theory. Echoing the opinions shared by the thinkers such as Stan Cohen and Stuart Hall, the authors also try to analyse the nature of the shifting media environment that redirected the investigation against the Friedmans. While acknowledging the success of the chapter in explaining various aspects of the labeling theory, one has to address its failure in indicating the difference in impacts made by a crime movie and a true crime documentary on the audience. As the only true crime documentary analysed in the book, Rafter and Brown could have referred to the features of the genre.

At the same time, it is also to be noted that the book’s focus on the theories of crime does not come at the cost of absolute denial of the technical language and the “cinematic nature of the medium of the film” (Young 2017, 87). Especially during the analysis of movies considered classics such as Psycho, City of God, Taxi Driver, and Thelma & Louise, the authors have made some conscious attempts to keep this promise they have made in the introduction not to overlook “[the] cinematic nature of the medium of the film” (as quoted in Rafter and Brown 2011, 9). Thus, the book becomes an interesting read for students of criminology, especially the researchers who work at the intersection of crime and cinema. 

Reading Criminology Goes to the Movies as a South-Asian scholar who specialises in the popular representation of crime within the geographical landscapes of India often left me to wonder about the South Asian scholarship in criminology. How do some of these Western theories function for a post-colonial nation that houses a population that had been systematically oppressed and criminalised for centuries by foreign invaders?  Both the criminal behaviours of the post-colonial Indian subject and its cultural representations are deeply enmeshed in a complex network of class, caste, gender, and region. A classical example is Phoolan Devi, the Indian dacoit, whose criminality is rooted in the strains and stress of manifold marginalisations she faced throughout her life. When it comes to cultural productions, Delhi Crime (both seasons 1 and 2), Darlings, Karnan, etc., are some examples of films that look at crime through an intersectional lens. Another complication that has often been featured in many of the Indian television crime shows like Sansani, Vardaat, etc., and which several of the Indian crime movies do not hesitate to delineate, is the nature of Indian crime as a melodramatic event with moral corruption at its heart (Ibrahim 2015, 344). Nicole Rafter and Michelle Brown’s book, thus, unintentionally points toward the lack of a South-Asian, especially Indian, perspective in the intersection of popular culture and academic criminology. This apparent sightlessness maintained by the Western academia of criminology is definitely a possibility for further study for Indian scholars of not only criminology but also popular culture.

Visual is the standard routine of a hypermediated world where the boundary between facts and fiction is blurry and indistinct. Written and visual accounts that are centred around violence or crime have been relegated to the margins as meaningless pulp narratives since time immemorial. But what makes these much-loved narratives of blood and gore non-negligible is the multiplicity of meanings they carry within themselves to disseminate over time and place. This fluid as well as subjective spirit carried by cultural productions, including movies, places them in direct contrast with the concrete and objective nuclei of academic criminology. Combined together, this is one of the most overlooked academic crossover brimming with scholarly possibilities. Thus, the book Criminology Goes to Movies: Crime Theory and Popular Culture is not only imposing the theories upon movies for pedagogical advantages; rather, it has inspired a streak of academic research that explores the convergence of popular culture and academic criminology. So, instead of addressing it as a dubious pedagogical experiment in mainstream criminology, I would approach it as a promising sign board that can lead researchers towards novel possibilities in cultural criminology. 

References

Ferrell, J. “Cultural Criminology”. Annual Review of Sociology, 25, no.1 (1999): 395-418. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.25.1.395.

Ibrahim, Amrita. “The Not-so-happy Ever After: Crime as Moral Corruption in the Family in Hindi Television News.” Contributions to Indian Sociology 49, no. 3 (2015): 344-368. https://doi.org/10.1177/0069966715593825.

Young, Alison. “The scene of the crime: Is there such a thing as ‘just looking’?.” In Cultural Criminology: Theories of Crime, edited by Jeff Ferrell and Keith Hayward, 249-264. London: Routledge, 2017.