During a midnight screening of Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises in 2012, 24-year-old James Holmes entered a multiplex cinema in Colorado, United States of America, opened fire and killed 12 people and wounded over 70 others. Early reports of the incident—one of the bloodiest mass shootings in United States history—suggested that Holmes had dyed red hair, and when arrested by police told them that he was the Joker, fictional super-villain and Batman’s nemesis.
A year later, and on another continent, a group of young people in Marseille, France, set up a petition calling for Batman to help tackle crime (http://www.unbatmanpourmarseille.fr/). One of the founding members of the group, Jean-Baptiste Jaussaud, was reported as saying that calling on Batman to help defend the city was no more ridiculous than recent calls for the army to occupy housing estates, or for military drones to be used to control drug dealers. These ideas, he said, were about as credible as ‘expecting Batman to swoop down and solve the city’s problems in a day’ (Willsher 2013). These were sentiments later echoed by playwright and critic Bonnie Greer when she tweeted: ‘In the era we live in, you kinda wish that Robin Hood or Zorro or somebody would turn up.’
Not only have those in contact with the criminal justice system caught the popular imagination; concerns with crime, justice and punishment have long been a staple of popular cultural entertainment. Through these characters and stories the concepts of wrongdoing and justice are played out in computer and video games, films, TV programmes, songs and books—the popular culture—that we consume. From tragedy to comedy, such stories demonstrate the viscous and porous nature of the relationship between popular culture and real-life action. The dividing line between what is ‘real’ and what is ‘fictional’ is less clear-cut than may at first be thought. There is permeability, absorption, glueyness and stickiness to our lived experiences and the wider discourses and structures that swirl around us.
Battle arena-based League of Legends was the most played PC game worldwide in 2015 (Statistica 2015), while shooter game Call of Duty was the bestselling video game all but one year between 2009 and 2015 (Morris 2016). Based on unit sales, fantasy war game franchise World of Warcraft holds three of the top ten positions of best-selling PC games of all time. The roll call of the most popular TV programmes of the last few decades1 includes: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, Breaking Bad, CSI, NCIS, Dexter, Making a Murderer, Orange is the New Black, The Sopranos, True Detective, The Walking Dead and The Wire. Films include The Shawshank Redemption, The Dark Knight, The Godfather (parts I and II), Pulp Fiction and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. For the UK specifically, the most popular TV shows include Game of Thrones, Sherlock, Luther and Doctor Who. Such lists demonstrate the dominance of the United States in terms of the classification, production and consumption of popular culture. It is also apparent, however, that despite the diversity of genres, ranging from the historical and humorous, to science fiction and fantasy, computer games, TV shows and films share a number of similar themes: crime, corruption, gangsters and outlaws, war, incarceration, policing and detective work. Clearly, explorations of punishment and justice are staple ingredients for a whole variety of popular media.
Popular culture, which may appear mundane, innocuous and everyday, offers provocative and telling cultural and ideological information about society (Nama 2011). Important philosophical questions are explored–—not in some remote area of academia—but on the screens in front of our eyes, in the music that we hear, and through the diverse technologies at our fingertips. The viscous connections between popular culture, social, political and economic structures, and the narratives of male ex-prisoners, are, therefore, the focus of analysis. There are a number of reasons for this. Men dominate the criminal justice system, accounting for significantly more arrests and convictions and making up the majority of prisoners across all geographical locations and throughout time.2 Analysis of masculinities should be an important feature in criminological study. Furthermore, ex-prisoners have experienced the whole of the criminal justice system, including the most severe punishment used in a number of jurisdictions. It is also worth noting that popular culture is saturated with gendered experiences. For example, gender is relevant in thinking about representations in art galleries, gaming, novels, music and film, as well as in the production and consumption of different popular cultural forms. Nonetheless, the power/gender dynamic is problematized in considering men and incarceration, where men dominate amongst those who are punished.
Much ink, or more accurately, much finger tapping has been spent considering the impact of the mass media and crime. Such considerations can broadly be set out under three general themes. Firstly, research that examines the impact of violent mass media consumption, particularly computer games, horror films and some styles of music, on increasing violent behaviour (Villani 2001; Hopf et al. 2008). Secondly, studies which have focused on the influence of the news media in creating moral panics and the associated scapegoating of particular groups or forms of behaviour in society (Cohen 1972; Hall et al. 1978; Young 1971). Finally, research has explored mass media representations of crime and whether this promotes a more punitive penal policy (Mason 2006a, 2006b). These are all fruitful lines of inquiry. This book, however, takes a somewhat different approach to the topic. It explores both cultural and individual understandings of issues relating to crime, punishment and justice and does this through the intertextual analysis of the narratives of ex-prisoners and the way these are embedded within, and understood through, references to popular culture.
This serves a mimetic function by analysing wider cultural understandings about crime, punishment and justice through these, and other, narratives. In doing so, three particular areas of exploration are developed: criminalized lifestyles, prison experiences and becoming an ex-prisoner. Analysis begins with outlaw and gangster stories and how these connect to, and draw upon, our understanding of criminality and alternative lifestyles. Secondly, comics and the gothic are used to consider the way prisoners are hidden from view and made into ghosts, the grotesque process of monstering, and the bodily transformation that the incarcerated often go through. Finally, mythological archetypes involving metamorphosis and shapeshifting are used to examine what it means to be an ex-prisoner. In doing this, I argue that we need to recognize the viscous nature of all the various systems and structures of power that shape identity and understanding, including the role of popular culture.
Intertextuality and Intersectionality: Moving Towards a Viscous Understanding of Culture
Can I do it [the interview] like Pulp Fiction? Like jumping backwards and forwards. Or it could be like the Count of Monte Cristo. I’m going to tell it like that, so I’m in a cell and my cell-mate dies and I pretend that I’m him and they throw me off into the sea.(Paul)
This book is based on lived experiences. It is about the trajectories of a group of people caught in a culture that criminalizes certain behaviours and certain sections of the population, and chooses containment as a method of control. It is about the viscous cultural contamination between the stories we are told, the stories we tell and the stories that we listen to. It is also about resistance and the pressures, difficulties and adventures that exist, for all of us, in trying to achieve livable lives.
The concept of ‘viscous culture’ is used to explore the sticky connections between the various systems of power exercized through social, political and economic structures, individual identities and wider cultural understandings of criminal justice. Viscous culture recognizes that although such structures constrain they may also offer opportunities. Systems of power that operate around dimensions of class, gender, ethnicity, age and so forth may not be experienced as a solid, unrelenting block. Destinies can be shaped – although strong forces of power are exerted upon us. Crucially, it is frequently in the cultural sphere that new possibilities and different ways of being and understanding are played out. It is important to recognize this aspect of lived experience and how various structures that shape us are permeable, amorphous; they absorb, resist and are open to change. Dominance and power have subversion and challenge written into them. Significantly, it is popular culture that gives us a sense of other possible worlds beyond our own, providing access and insights into the unfamiliar. I argue that analysis of popular culture and individual narratives allows us to move beyond the false binaries of society/individual, subject/object and fact/fiction.3 In doing this I draw on intertextuality and intersectionality to move towards a viscous understanding of culture.
Intertextuality
In its most simplistic terms intertextuality refers to the way in which all texts are made out of other texts, and how there is a shaping, or even transformation of meaning, through referencing one text with another. In bringing intertextual analysis and criminology together, a viscous network of cultural phenomena and ‘real’ life experiences can be explored. It has long been argued that it is impossible to analyse one text without considering its relationship to other texts (Bennett and Woollacott 1987), thus, this book seeks to (re)connect a range of ‘real’ life narratives with narratives from popular culture and beyond. The aim of this is to theorize critical criminological concepts in a manner that demonstrates, in a concrete, as well as theoretical way, the mimetic function of all texts that contribute to the production, coproduction and reproduction of shifting and contested understandings of crime, punishment and justice.
Initially employed in literary criticism, intertextuality was used to show that the extraction of meaning from a work of literature goes beyond the process of reading or interpretation. Individual works of literature have their foundations in previous works of literature and are built upon traditions, systems and codes that are crucial to the meaning of the work. Drawing on the earlier work of de Saussure and Bakhtin, Kristeva sought to combine the ideas of these theorists and articulated intertextuality as a way of disrupting notions of objectivity and stability in meaning and interpretation. According to Allen (2000), intertextuality highlights that meaning exists between texts as part of a network of textual relations. Unsurprisingly given this, literary and critical theory was at the forefront of the development of poststructuralist theories.4
A key aim of this text is to open up the space to consider the experiences of those who have been punished, through the analytical mesh of a popular culture in which we are all caught. Keep in mind too, that whilst intertextuality has attracted a great deal of debate5 and criticism regarding its value and meaning as theory—within popular culture—facets of intertextuality have been readily adopted in the form of sampling, referencing, remaking, parody and pastiche.
Intertextuality is intrinsically viscous. It has been claimed, for example, that after watching the film The Godfather, real-life Mafiosi altered the way they spoke to more closely resemble Vito Corleo...