At least in terms of its scope, Rafter’s work on crime films and society marks a watershed in criminological studies of recent years (Rafter, 2000; 2006; Rafter and Brown, 2011), presenting an inventory of films related to crime spanning several decades and different continents. The first two books on the subject are supported by a film scholar’s contributions to the history of crime film (Todd, 2000; 2006), while Rafter himself focuses on classifying crime films into homogeneous categories. The underlying assumption is that crime films tend to ‘reflect’ the criminological theories at the period they were produced (Rafter, 2000, 48). This assumption is partly legitimate in that criminological theories can be used as theoretical frameworks for watching, debating and enriching the interpretations of films. Some of the inevitable limitations of looking for criminological theories ‘reflected in’ films can be bridged by contributions from a film studies perspective - as Rafter’s collaborative effort exemplifies very well.
Rafter’s main thesis on films is based on the concept that they are ideological messages. In other words, her analysis deals with ‘assumptions about the nature of reality that are embedded in film narratives and imagery’ (Rafter, 2000, 7; 2006, 8). She divides crime films into two major groups: one related to entertainment and pleasure, the other as an alternative, critical tradition. In the former category there are films based on a safe social critique and sanitised rebellion, that tend to flatter either their characters or their audiences (Rafter, 2000, 9; 2006, 11). Included in the latter category, on the other hand, are a number of angry or cynical movies that reveal unflattering aspects of social reality and human nature, among them film noir (Rafter, 2000, 11; 2006, 15). In the second edition of her work Rafter expands the section on film noir, which was insufficiently elaborated in the first edition, and discusses the pleasures as well the fears, fascination and ambiguities that such a ‘critical’ group of films can generate (Rafter, 2006, 110).
Throughout her work, Rafter stresses that crime films provide a source of information about criminal nature, motives and protagonists, and in particular introduce intermediary figures in their narratives. These figures are ones who frequently assume the role of a cultural authority in explaining the mystery of crime (Rafter, 2000, 61). She stresses the role of crime film in mediating
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the traffic of information about crime between the public ‘real world’ and the private one of the imagination (ibid. 69). More importantly, following this perspective, crime films are treated as a sort of popular criminology that operates parallel to, but at some distance, from academic criminology, ‘where the rejection of the former by academics often seems tinged with a lofty disdain for the prurience of such work’ (Rawlings quoted in Carrabine, 2008, 120).While providing a good introduction to crime films from a criminological point of view, Rafter’s contribution suffers from the limitation of introducing too many films in her analysis, confining herself to describing their stories without their narrative devices (plots),6 and classifying
them according to criminological theories. For example, when she focuses on the noir film The
Postman Always Rings Ttwice, she assigns the film to the criminological category of ‘Rational
Choice’ theory. This approach to explaining crime behaviour is based on the rational motivations of the offender in committing crime, with the aim of securing advantage through the criminal act (Pease, 2001, 235-236). From this perspective, the plan of the two lovers to kill the husband and live together is the result of a rational choice, even though characters in the films are ‘torn by ethical dilemmas’ (Rafter, 2000, 58) about the outcome of their decisions. To my mind, this analysis is informed by the vocabulary available within the criminological field, which is quite narrow and highly controversial in itself (Beirne, 1993, 9). Using these academic categories to explain the motivations of fictional characters curtails other possibilities of film analysis that draw on other fields of expertise such as psychology, according to which some of the decisions human beings make are not rational, but express deeper unconscious feelings (Freud, 2005, 59). Moreover, the reasons, say, for two fictional characters killing another character might well be left to the viewer’s opinion; or equally could be seen in terms of the author’s motives in accentuating certain narrative aspects. The way a film articulates motives and characters in a story, despite its internal limitations, might be a more interesting starting point for connecting that story to the economic, social and moral events that informed its production, reception at that particular time, and place in history. More importantly, not all films noir fit with the Rational choice theory, as in some of them
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6 Story is intended to mean the sum total of events to be related in a narrative, while plot is the arrangement
of these events through the use of a variety of stylistic devices (like flashback, in medias res construction, retardation, parallel plots, ellipsis etc.) (Stam et al., 1992).
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the murder, if there is one, is just a background event as the story unfolds. This is true of classic films noir like Laura (1944) or In a Lonely Place (1950), to name only two.In her most recent work on crime and films, in collaboration with Brown (Rafter and Brown, 2011), Rafter has analysed a short list of films. In doing so, she avoids the endless list of visual stories which prevented her from carrying out an in-depth film analysis in her previous work. However, the films under scrutiny have become a visual illustration of the various theories in criminology, thus reducing any potential reciprocal contribution between film analysis and social science. Despite its limitations, this last work emphasises how cultural values, in the form of crime films, are produced and circulated to the point of becoming a tradition, some sort of unavoidable
visual heritage7 for us to come to terms with, whether as an ordinary spectator or as an academic.
My study is specifically concerned with this international visual heritage, and I will try to show how a different approach to film studies is more useful in disclosing the extent to which crime films, and noir in particular, are related to issues of punishment and social control.
1.1.8 Film noir as metaphor: cultural criminology
The pervasive presence in our lives of social media forces us to engage with them, and acknowledge how they already form part of our identity, culture, knowledge and information (Stevenson, 1995, 132). In this sense, cultural criminology, a trend which emerged in crime studies about ten years ago, expresses the need for a renewal of theoretical debate, methodological tools and the political agenda in criminology (Young, 2011, 103). Defined simply, it aims to study the cultural construction of crime and crime control, importing some of the insights of cultural studies with specific reference to their contribution to subcultural symbolism and mediated social control (Ferrell, 2001, 75). As we have seen, the contribution of the Birmingham Centre for Criminology has not been without its critics. However, this does not refute the validity of its work, and the wide
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7 I am using here a concept based on McGuigan’s study on the relationship between national heritage and the
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scope of its efforts and dialogue with other disciplines. Following this example, cultural criminology tries to widen its horizons of research by ‘exploiting’ the toolbox of a discipline largely concerned with the study of images. Similarly, my approach will seek a quality that some sociologists call reflexivity: ‘the reflexive monitoring of action’ (Giddens, 1990, 36). Such a project involves each individual or group involved in a complex social context or programme of action continually articulating - so as to examine - their initial thoughts or actions in the light of reciprocal influences and development. Moreover, I will show how, and to what extent, this quality is a property intrinsic to the topic I am going to analyse. Film noir has been praised, in fact, for its high degree of reflexivity, as it had to diversify its format continuously to adapt to changing social and political circumstances - such as reduced production budgets, hostile audiences, strict censorship control and politically unfavourable social events. All these conditions made this group of films extremely sensitive to the social and political circumstances within which they were produced and staged, and responsive to previous successful attempts or failures of like kind. In this sense, then, my dissertation will try to learn reflexivity from film noir narratives, as well as from the general social project of modernity, from which film noir derives.In this perspective, film noir can be seen as a metaphor for a way of articulating some alternative instances within a major paradigm. In other words, when some cultural criminologists claim that criminology aims to cross the borders between crime and culture, thus engaging with the cultural fluidity and global porosity of our society (Ferrell et al., 2004, 3), it is easy to recognise some similarities with noir. Like noir cultural criminology defies national and intellectually parochial borders, accepting in full the interdisciplinary challenge of this postmodern period (Hayward and Young, 2007). And like noir, it reveals the political agenda of dominant practices within a system of representation, or social theory. Film noir unmasks the shortcuts and limitations of the Hollywood system, or of an authoritative visual regime, while cultural criminology defines itself in opposition to the ‘needs of the crime control industry’ (Ferrell et al., 2004, 1), which are served by a proportion of criminologists and social theorists, thus uncovering what I later refer to as the political unconscious of certain practices (Jameson, 2002). Some authors have argued for limiting emphasis on (conscious) reflexivity in order to stress the role of the unconscious in
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uncovering the limitations of rational beings (Jewkes, 2002, 37). Such a psychological approach extends the investigation of human beings to include irrational and unconscious fantasy life as important constituents of our personality (Craib, 1989, 100).Similarly, in my analysis I have developed an ongoing dialogue with other disciplines, to enable different aspects of a social situation to converse with each other, as is essential for promoting dialogicity. According to Bakhtin, in fact, dialogism provides a forum where different social ‘accents’ are brought together in a conversation with each other, as in the nineteenth-century novel (Vice, 1997, 45). The novel at that time was a new artistic form that favoured discussions between different views, in line with the revolutionary and democratic spirit of that time. In this sense the notion of dialogicity has provided a useful heuristic tool for conducting a social or textual analysis that cultivates a conversation between different symbolic practices and social inequalities (Saukko, 2003, 149). In a way this is the aim of cultural criminology as well, whose reference to Bakhtin is well established (Presdee, 2000), especially with reference to the concepts of carnival and popular culture.
This comparative research assumes a certain degree of inter-disciplinary dialogue (dialogicity or dialogism) since the involvement in it of two different departments should provide us with ‘the presence of two distinct voices in one utterance’ (Vice, 1997, 45). That is to say, my work can count on a multiple perspective from which I can examine and analyse my ‘data’, as if there were a constant dialogue between different points of view on the same subject. In this way, from the American Studies side of the story, these films are integral to a certain culture, a particular type of literature that tends to reveal the dark side of the so-called American dream (Susman, 1989, 30). At the same time, the sociological contribution to this tradition of study can provide a more socially critical edge to a field sometimes too self-enclosed in internal theoretical concerns. Moreover, the psychoanalytic dimension will provide a critical view in the sense mentioned above, preventing film studies remaining too focused on their own internal dynamics rather than on the relationship between a film narrative and the social and psychological environment it derives from (May, 1989, 9).