The Scene of Violence

Cinema, Crime, Affect

Alison Young

• Publisher: Routledge-Cavendish
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134008711
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

In the contemporary fascination with images of crime, violence gets under our skin and keeps us enthralled. The Scene of Violence explores the spectator's encounter with the cinematic scene of violence – rape and revenge, homicide and serial killing, torture and terrorism. Providing a detailed reading of both classical and contemporary films – for example, Kill Bill, Blue Velvet, Reservoir Dogs, The Matrix, Psycho, The Accused, Elephant, Seven, Thelma & Louise, United 93, Zodiac, and No Country for Old Men – Alison Young returns the affective processes of the cinematic image to the study of law, crime and violence. Engaging with legal theory, cultural criminology and film studies, the book unfolds both our attachment to the authority of law and our identification with the illicit. Its original contribution is to bring together the cultural fascination of crime with a nuanced account of what it means to watch cinema. The Scene of Violence shows how the spectator is bound by the laws of film to the judgment of the crime-image.

Chapter 1
The crime-image

To understand contemporary culture and its pasts and futures, it is … necessary to develop a camera consciousness that makes it easy to jump between layers of time as well as between the actual and the virtual.

(Pisters 2003: 2)

When I was 18, I saw the movie Dressed to Kill, and was so scared by it that I had to sleep with the light on for several nights afterwards. A few years later, I saw Jagged Edge, and the same thing happened – sleepless nights with the light on. When the shooting starts after the bank robbery in downtown Los Angeles in Heat, I can remember how deafening the gunfire sounded in the cinema. I could not watch Psycho through to the end, so terrified was I by the scene in which Lila approaches Norman Bates’s house. I walked out of Copycat, unable to bear the way the camera was being positioned to align the spectator’s point of view with that of the killer. I can vividly recall a scene in The Insider, in which the soon-to-be whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand enters the office of his former employer at a tobacco company: the scene’s sounds were so acutely rendered that I could hear Wigand’s shoes squeaking on the office floor as he enters and his employer’s pen scratching on the table.

I love movies, and I love watching movies, for their vividness and intensity that seem to me to be unparalleled in contemporary culture. For many years, film was something that I enjoyed enormously but was separate from my working life; however, in the mid-1990s, I began teaching a course, called Crime & Culture, which centred on an apparent paradox: the dominant truisms of criminological research and public policy are that people fear crime, that crime is a ‘bad thing’, and that we should hold it at a distance: crime should be outlawed, prevented, and punished. Crime, however, constitutes a mainstay of popular culture, and we take great pleasure in its images: from television drama through news reporting and current affairs, through popular literature, to film. It is certainly not unprecedented that we should seek out that which we fear: sky diving, bungee jumping, mountain climbing and other activities are very much about encountering and conquering that which is frightening (heights, speed, death). Thus, the saturation of popular culture with images and stories of victimization, trauma, violence and death is not necessarily surprising, since it allows the consumer a sense of control over the source of fear – through information and through narrative resolution.

But more needs to be said about the paradoxical proximity we give to images of that which we outlaw. There is much more at stake than simply pointing out that popular culture helps people deal with a common fear through storytelling. It must be asked what kinds of stories are told about crime, and what shape we allow them to take; within these representations we must investigate common or recurrent symbolic devices and narrative patterns. These issues have been debated by many other scholars, and I do not propose to repeat them, for my enterprise lies elsewhere: my interest is in conjoining the cultural fascination with crime to an account of what it means to watch cinema (including the emotional, corporeal and memorial investments of the type described in the opening paragraph of this chapter). To that end, The Scene of Violence thinks through the spectator’s relation to the cinematic image in the context of representations of crime, and specifically crimes of violence. In what follows, I will focus upon the question of how we watch what I call the crime-image, and what this means for an understanding of judgment and justice after the encounter with visual violence. In offering a term such as ‘crime-image’, I am obviously indebted to the works of Gilles Deleuze on cinema (1986, 1989). Following Deleuze’s theory of cinema, in The Scene of Violence I emphasize the cinematic nature of cinema and its effects both on our interpretation of each cinematic representation and on the ways in which the spectator engages with this particular kind of image (as distinct from an artwork, or a newspaper report, or a short story). In short, my reading constructs the cinematic scene as an ‘encountered sign’, so that we might ask not so much ‘what does it mean’ or ‘how is violence depicted’ but rather, borrowing from Bennett, ‘how does it work?’ and ‘how do we watch?’ (2005: 45). Such an approach helps us to understand the implications of our pleasure in a medium (cinema) and an image (violence), when that pleasure depends upon our investment in an experience which is both distant (we look at an image of violence; we do not undergo the violence ourselves) and proximate (the cinematic crime-image registers sensation in our bodies and memories as we watch).

Such an approach is also necessary because questions of law, legitimacy and violence get under our skins and keep us enthralled. A crucial question, then, in the analysis of the crime-image concerns how we identify with, in and as the illicit and the legitimate. This is not so much a question of whether law arrives at its destination, but rather the means by which justice achieves its ends. The approach taken in this book to such a question opens up and gives access to the affective processes of the crime-image. The affective character of the crime-image arises in large part because crime compels as much as it repels. Crime is not simply something that the community censures. Bound up with disapprobation and distaste for crime is an intense interest in its forms, its motivations and impacts. This doubled relation, oscillating between censure and desire, can be called fascination. Over the last two to three decades, there has been an increasing interest in the cultural representation of crime and justice. Much of this initially centred on the news media (due, no doubt, to an implicit hierarchy in which ‘factual’ representations were privileged over the lower order that is fiction), and news stories were examined for what they could reveal of the ways in which the media ‘distort’ events or ‘package’ stories (for example, see Soothill 1991) or as suspected causes of widespread fear about crime (see Schlesinger and Tumber 1994). The privileging of fact over fiction declined as scholars discovered the capacity of crime narratives to offer ‘a set of stories which address certain social anxieties in its audience’, stories which ‘render the messy and troubling complexities of law enforcement pleasurable by assigning them to the ancient simplicities of crime and punishment’ (Sparks 1990: 123).¹

Early interest in fictional images of law and justice was often tied to the questions of whether those images accurately portrayed reality. Suspicion of an image/reality mismatch animated many analyses of films and television programmes.² These concerns derived from the emphasis placed on the cultural text relative to legal practice or to social reality: law was seen as feeding popular culture by providing a source of stories and a range of colourful characters and scenarios, so that popular culture could contribute to public awareness of legal issues.³ However, more recently there has developed a burgeoning interest in the texts themselves (see for example Hayward 2009; Hayward and Presdee 2009); an interest shared by The Scene of Violence, which investigates the implications of the encounter between law and violence in film.

Such an encounter could be staged in a number of ways. First, film can be read for its narrative, in much the same way as a novel, newspaper article,

1 Scholarly analyses have now been carried out on, for example, television crime drama (see Sparks 1990; Brown 2003) and literature ranging from detective fiction to the novels of Jane Austen (MacNeil 1998; Young 1996). The law and literature movement in particular has a long history that must be acknowledged. However, interestingly, law and literature scholars for a long time cordoned off the study of literary forms, maintaining a sphere of analysis that was quite separate from the developing interest in cultural forms more generally.

2 See especially the work of Macaulay (1987, 1989) and Friedman (1989). To a certain extent, the same suspicion can be found today: see, for example, Thomas (2006) on whether CSI: Crime Scene Investigation correctly represents forensic practices.

3 A version of this perspective can be found in the more recent work of Silbey, who writes of the trial film as ‘an instrument and conduit of popular legal consciousness’ (2001: 116).

short story, or, indeed, a case report.⁴ In the context of cinematic representations, the demands of recounting and critiquing complex plot scenarios (what happened, who did it, what was the consequence and so on) can lead to lengthy narrative exegesis, leaving little space in which to consider other aspects of the text. Although a sense of the symbolic reality of film is retained in this approach, what is lost is the specificity of the medium of film, the cinematographic dimension which distinguishes a film from other cultural texts, such as a short story or novel.

The cinematic encounter between law and violence could also be analyzed for its relation to an empirical sociological reality, an approach less concerned with narrative and character than with assessing filmic images in terms of their relation to social realities.⁵ In this approach, film can be typologized, with a view to revealing patterns and shifts in its dominant representations that might correspond to empirical social changes.⁶ Once again, the specificity of the medium, its cinematographic nature, is lost. This approach also tends to regard film as containing within itself a window on to alternate realities. Thus, Sarat, Douglas and Umphrey write:

The moving image attunes us to the ‘might-have-beens’ that have shaped our worlds and the ‘might-bes’ against which these worlds can be judged and towards which they might be pointed. In so doing film contributes to both greater analytic clarity and political sensitivity in our judgments of law.

(2005: 2)

4 For examples within this narrative-focused approach, see Berkowitz (2004) on cinematic images of prosecutors; Chase (2004) on the cinematic depiction of due process; Christie (2004) on the courtroom drama; Clover (2000) on juries and the jury-like role of the audience; Greenfield, Osborn and Robson (2001) on films about lawyers, judges, private eyes and so on; Kamir (2005) on atrocity and the legal process in Death and the Maiden, and (2006) on issues concerning women and law as represented in various films; Rafter (2007) on films about sex crime, and (2000, 2006) on films about policing; Sherwin (2000) on public disenchantment with the legal process as manifested in Cape Fear.

5 Such an approach often explicitly counterposes itself against the textual analysis of film. Macaulay warned against what he called ‘armchair self-analysis of our own reaction’ (1989: 1545); while Gies has criticized the textual analysis of popular cultural narratives as ‘verg[ing] on hubris’ (2005: 170), claiming that it proffers only one authentic meaning despite the heterogeneity of the cinematic audience.

6 Taxonomies have been drawn up by, for example, Kellner and Ryan (1988); Hale (1998); Rafter (2000, 2006). See also Tzanelli et al (2004), who emphasize the different readings that can be generated in response to a filmic text. For these authors, the fact that different readings are possible becomes the central teleological point of their filmic analysis, in order to argue that the meaning of the category ‘crime’ gets articulated and negotiated within film in a manner which reflects the ambivalences about crime in society in general. For more on this, see Yar (2009, forthcoming).

While offering a useful analytical frame in which a film’s narrative scenario can be, as it were, adjudicated, we must acknowledge the consequences of viewing a film as something to be measured against absent past, present and future possibilities. In this approach, film is being treated as a metaphorical plaintiff – its narrative bringing issues to be judged through the camera of film in order to better inform the camera (the closed courtrooms) of the law. The risk here is that film becomes a mere resource – whether that be a resource for the assessment of law or of social realities. When film is viewed as a resource, it is constructed as something that exists to be utilized: mined for its allegories of justice, or condemned for its repetition of dominant stereotypes and associations.

In this book, my analysis is situated in the vicinity of these two approaches, and draws at times on ideas both about cinematic narrative and about the relation of the cinematic image to the social world, but I am more particularly interested in the spectator’s ‘registration’ of the crime-image; that is, how the crime-image depends for its meaning and value upon the address of cinema to the viewer. In that spirit, then, I approach film as a spectator and this book concentrates upon the spectatorial relation engendered by film, unique among cultural forms in its deployment of an image which is always more than visual: a medium which is always image, sound, affect, memory, plot, episode, character, story and event. Let me elaborate upon what is involved in such an approach.

The Scene of Violence is located within a way of thinking of representation and crime which I have elsewhere termed criminological aesthetics (Young 2008) and which engages with the ways in which our ambivalence about crime manifests itself in the images we produce of it.⁷ The starting-point of criminological aesthetics is that ‘crime’s images are structured according to a binary logic of representation. Oppositional terms (man/woman, white/ black, rational/irrational, mind/body and so on) are constructed in a system of value which makes one visible and the other invisible’ (Young 1996: 1). In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze characterizes representation as requiring ‘a conceived identity, a judged analogy, an imagined opposition or a perceived similitude’ (1994: 138), so that any idea has meaning only in its difference from or similarity to another idea (‘young’ is ‘not-old’; ‘woman’ is ‘not-man’ and so on).

The notion of a system of value, structured through the logic of binary oppositions and subject to varying shifts in the social economy of representation, moves the theorizing of culture away from a framework which constructs acts as having symbolic meaning (in an epiphenomenal relation to

7 For examples of scholarship which adopts this way of thinking about crime and the image, see Biber 2007; Hutchings 2001; Lippens 2004; Phillips and Strobi 2006; Valier 2003; and Young 1996, 2007.

their literal effects) and individuals as actors arrayed around the social field at a greater or lesser distance from the dominant centre. Criminological aesthetics emphasizes practices of interpretation over the generation of meaning (which tacitly relies on a conception of truth, authenticity or actuality), processes of signification rather than symbolization (which posits a zero sum relation between meaning and image), and affect instead of emotion. The imagination of crime is an affective process, which does things to the bodies of individuals (whether criminals, the agents of criminal justice, victims, judges, or the cinema audience) as much as it has effects in the evolution of practices of criminal justice or paradigms of criminological thought.

Criminological aesthetics thus bespea...