All-American TV Crime Drama

Feminism and Identity Politics in Law and Order: Special Victims Unit

Sujata Moorti, Lisa Cuklanz

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781784534295
• eBook ISBN: 9781786721617
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Television
• Index: Social Sciences

Law and Order Special Victims Unit (SVU) is more popular than any other American police procedural television series, but how does its unique focus on sex crimes reflect contemporary popular culture and feminist critique, whilst also recasting the classic crime narrative? All-American TV Crime Drama is the first dedicated study of SVU and its treatment of sexual violence, gender and criminality. The book uses detailed textual and visual analyses of episodes to illuminate the assumptions underpinning the programme. Although SVU engages with issues pertaining to feminism and gender it still relies upon traditional and misogynistic tropes such as false rape charges and the monstrous mother to undermine positive views of the feminine. The show, and its backdrop, New York City thus become a stage on which national concerns about women, gender roles, the family and race are carried out. Moorti and Cuklanz unpack how the show has become a crucible for examining current attitudes towards these issues and include an analysis of its reception by its many fans in over 30 countries.

1

A Very American Story

Hi my name is Alexis I’m 10. Ive been a big Law & Order svu fan my entire life. and the woman who plays Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) really inspires me to try my hardest to achieve my dreams and when I’m older I wanna come to newyork and work in the svu squad.and if you know her or if she sees this I want her to know that her character made me who I am today. She made me strong and independent before that I was so shy but she made me get rid of that shy person …¹

This fan comment in a feminist magazine encapsulates the structure of appreciation that has evolved for SVU. Although the youth of the fan may be unusual, the emotions she evokes offer some explanation for the series’ continuing success 18 years after it was first launched in 1999. The admiration for the female detective and the work conducted by this once largely unknown branch of the police propels our analysis in this book. By virtue of its focus on sexual assault, the series engages with feminist concerns. Rather than espouse a consistent stance towards feminism, the series has offered a multitude of positions, sometimes hostile to the ideology and the women’s movement and at other times permitting a prime time airing of feminist ways of thinking about how the body, violence, and sex intersect. It is this complicated engagement with feminism that renders SVU remarkable. This prime time series has become a site from which a new millennial understanding of sexual violence, albeit inchoate and protean, is being crafted.

In the chapters that follow, we contend that SVU offers a cacophony of feminist understandings of sexual violence while operating within a postfeminist televisual setting, one that assumes that feminist goals have been attained and so sexism is impossible. The makers of the series do not espouse a feminist stance, but through the narration of sexual assaults individual episodes engage with the ideology that has enabled such a discussion. Due to its longevity, SVU is a site from which we can observe shifting understandings of sexual assault, from an era when the slogans ‘No means No’ and ‘rape is about power, not sex’ dominated public discussions to more recent conversations about ‘legitimate’ rape. The series offers a vantage point from which to observe how neoliberal societies address feminism, crime, and the state. As we discuss later in this chapter, the tendency to privatize state functions in neoliberal societies has produced new understandings of sexual violence. Similarly, the feminism that has emerged under such conditions, neoliberal feminism, centers on a subject who accepts full responsibility for her own well being and self care with no expectation of structural change.²

In a television landscape that has changed dramatically since its debut season, it is easy to forget that SVU marked the beginning of the crime drama franchise, a phenomenon that exploded with the popularity of CSI (CBS, 2000–2015) and NCIS (CBS, 2003–present). Buoyed by the success of the original Law & Order series, NBC asked producer Dick Wolf for a spinoff, which resulted in SVU, a scripted series dedicated to crimes of sexual assault and rape. In the 18 years that followed, the original Law & Order series as well as various other spinoffs have gone off the air but SVU maintains its popularity and is the lone remnant of a once thriving Law & Order franchise.³ SVU was recently extended for a seventeenth season, making it one of the longest-running prime time series in US television.

With its ‘ripped from the headlines’ storylines, SVU centers on cases undertaken by a police unit modeled after the New York City Police Department’s Special Victims Unit.⁴ Although in recent seasons, the storylines have devoted considerable time to the judicial processes involved in prosecuting crimes of sexual assault, SVU remains primarily a police procedural. Shot on location in New York City, SVU shares several of the signature elements of the franchise: scene-setting labeling accompanied by the chung-chung, two-note signature sound; hand-held camerawork; sudden shifts in scenes; and ‘the succession of close-up interview scenes that begin in media res.’⁵ The solemn voice over that begins every episode declares the gravity of the crimes under consideration:

In the criminal justice system, sexually-based offenses are considered especially heinous. In New York City, the dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious felonies are members of an elite squad known as the Special Victims Unit. These are their stories.

In the 44-minute storylines that follow, the series has seemingly explored every possible variation on the phrase sexual assault; it has tackled hot-button issues and adopted controversial positions in narrating sexual violence. The appeal of a weekly narration of sexual assault has now been well established, but the longevity of the series is derived as well from the franchise’s unique syndication policy, repurposing, whereby episodes are first aired on the network and later on the US cable channel.⁶ In this book, we parse out some of the ways the series maintains viewer interest.

Rising from a Stupor

In the US, Law & Order (1990–2010) is credited with reviving network interest in crime dramas. While this genre has been a staple of television schedules, since the 1990s crime dramas have populated the prime time program in greater numbers (competing with reality television shows for viewers) and have addressed crime and punishment through a range of innovations.⁷ Scholars have contended that the efflorescence of this genre in the new millennium serves as a public forum to work ‘through the trauma of living in a violent culture.’⁸ Crime dramas are symptomatic of a wound culture, wherein the very notion of sociality is bound to the public display of torn and wounded bodies. They are representative of a pathological public sphere, in which stranger intimacy and vicarious violation become models of sociality.⁹ Others argue that contemporary crime dramas address the war on terror not so much as a political question but as a mode of addressing a visceral threat to the nation.¹⁰ These assessments have produced significant scholarly debate. For our purposes, what is most relevant is that crime dramas and their popularity are inciting widespread academic and network interest. These television programs speak to and reflect prevalent structures of feeling.

Law & Order established certain features that have become key to television crime drama in the ensuing two decades. The ripped-from-the-headlines narrative style, which the series proudly proclaimed, helped modify the crime drama genre. The franchise pivots on storywriters’ ability to cull news stories for ideas of crime and criminality. Although the writers modify the news events, often melding a few in a single episode, the franchise does not hide its indebtedness to ‘true crime.’ Consequently, the storylines tend to focus on the unique and the exceptional. These journalistic qualities are the bedrock of the franchise’s claims to realism. Ironically, each episode includes a disclaimer that characterizes the storyline as fictional in that it ‘does not depict any actual person or event.’¹¹ The hand-held cameras and the focus on gray, gritty New York locales compound the sense of verisimilitude. Apart from these stylistic innovations, narratively the original Law & Order addressed in a single episode the policing and judicial aspects of crime solving, thus offering insights into the multifaceted ‘war on crime’ waged in the US. Often the storylines offered none of the satisfaction of moral resolution normally associated with crime dramas; the police always apprehended a culprit but the legal processes inevitably revealed the systemic nature of the problem (or at least the shared responsibility for the problem). Further, unlike previous crime dramas the original Law & Order eschewed any exploration of the private lives of its protagonists; the ensemble cast sought audience identification through their job performance (as cops and lawyers). Each episode was self-contained with no loose threads or continuing plot lines.

SVU is distinguished from other crime dramas and Law & Order by its subject matter, which reprised decades-long feminist discussions of violence against women. In addition, this spinoff series was primarily concerned with the detectives who pursue crime and criminals. SVU also marks its difference from other series in the franchise by highlighting the effects of the job on its protagonists’ private lives. Increasingly, too, individual narratives are not contained within the space of a single episode. In effect, SVU offers a significant variation on the signature features of the franchise even as it maintains continuity with the genre.

Rewriting a Masculine Genre

SVU has used its casting choices as well to rewrite the format of the televised crime drama. For the first 12 seasons, the male–female cop protagonists of Detectives Elliot Stabler (Chris Meloni) and Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) marked a radical shift in televised police procedurals (see Figure 1.1). Since season 15, Benson has been promoted as the commander of the squad. In 2015, there are other television policewomen who head departments but the gender shift in leadership is still significant in terms of the police procedural, as we discuss below.¹²

Figure 1.1:Detectives Eliot Stabler and Olivia Benson, the protagonist cop-duo for the first 12 seasons. Screenshot of Law & Order: SVU, NBC, 1999.

When crime dramas migrated from radio to television in the 1950s, they featured the lone male cop trying to restore the social order by tracking down evil (Dragnet, NBC, 1951–9, 1967–70 and Untouchables, ABC, 1959–63). These shows provided audiences with an insider’s perspective into the world of detection – the storylines foregrounded organizational structures, the jargon used by the police as well as the technical and legal concerns that shaped cop work. While the early shows were whodunits, by revealing the identity of the criminal at the beginning and spending an entire episode divulging how the crime was committed and how the police would arrest the criminal, Columbo (NBC, 1971–8; ABC 1989–2003) offered a different perspective within this well-established genre. Steven Bochco’s Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1981–7) offered the next major innovation to the genre. Instead of foregrounding a single police officer, Hill Street Blues offered viewers an ensemble cast of recurring characters. Any given episode was devoted to a number of intertwining storylines and the show thematized the blurred boundaries between the home and the work sphere. Drawn by the popularity of Hill Street Blues, many cop shows started to feature ensemble casts, however Cagney & Lacey (CBS, 1982–8) and Miami Vice (NBC, 1984–9) foregrounded a cop duo as their protagonists. The dual protagonist narrative device permits storylines to explore the tensions generated by a pair of mismatched police officers with radically different temperaments working together on a case. Cagney & Lacey elaborated on this narrative structure by showcasing two women police officers. Responding to a number of workplace reforms initiated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as well as pressure from various women’s groups, the CBS series illustrated how the police procedural is transformed by having two women as its lead characters. Julie D’Acci’s excellent analysis of the series illuminates how the show was able to focus on the sexism women experienced within the police force and the individual difficulties they encountered in balancing work and family life.¹³ By contrast SVU remains parsimonious in its casting innovations and exemplifies what Todd Gitlin has identified as network television’s recombinant strategies, incorporating elements of a successful program with minor modifications.¹⁴ SVU gambles on the popularity of the cop-duo genre even as it draws on some of the characteristic features of the ensemble cast of characters. The presence of a heterosexual pair elaborates on the teamwork and conflicts inherent in the dual cop structure, but also adds the frisson of a possible office romance.

The dual cop structure has been deployed historically to offer two contrasting personalities and their different approaches to policing. This generic conceit helps literalize the good cop–bad cop format wherein one officer is an empathetic figure while the other is dour. Such a pairing also allows shows to thematize different attitudes toward law and order institutions, with one officer adhering to the rules while the other tends to be skeptical of procedures and constantly breaks them in the pursuit of justice. Together, though, such a pairing restores faith in existing judicial systems and institutions. SVU’s pairing of Benson and Stabler (and later other partners) reiterates many aspects of this narrative formula. However, the two do not serve as foils to each other but throughout the series oscillate between the positions of good and bad cop. They are each skeptical of policing processes at any given point and one partner has to recuperate the other back into the fold. Once the series had established itself, storylines highlighted conflicts between the two protagonists. They are nevertheless shown as being devoted to each other. In season 7, Benson requests a new partner, believing their partnership is no longer working (‘Fault’ 7: 19). The two detectives are reunited soon and regain the equilibrium that characterized their professional lives until the Stabler character is written out at the end of season 12.

Olivia Benson’s presence as a competent professional complicates quite dramatically the trajectory of this dual-protagonist procedural. She is introduced in the pilot episode as a newcomer to the special victims squad and yet is depicted as polished, proficient, and self-sufficient. Benson is also consistently portrayed as an empathetic and compassionate officer, zealous but seldom overbearing. Storylines repeatedly remind viewers that Benson’s mother’s unsolved rape, which resulted in her birth, motivates her in this difficult job. She is able to connect with victims to elicit information and to persuade reluctant victims to help the police and themselves in ways that her male counterparts are unable to achieve. The female police officer often voices feminist understandings of rape but never addresses police work from such a perspective. As was true for her television predecessors and most contemporary postfeminist television, SVU storylines erase any structural barriers or workplace sexism even as they highlight the struggles Benson encounters in bringing her insights and experiences to bear on her detective work.¹⁵

We make a brief digression here to offer some definitional clarity. The term postfeminism has acquired a chameleon-like quality over the past two decades, as scholars have struggled to demarcate changes in media representations of women and feminist discourses. In many instances, the ‘post’ marks a periodization, signaling a passage of time. In these understandings postfeminism refers to an ill-defined moment from t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author Bio
• Endorsement
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Figures
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Introduction: All-American Crime Drama
• 1 A Very American Story
• 2 Family Matters: Criminal Mothers and Fathers
• 3 The Violence of Race
• 4 A Foreign Affair: The Global Turn to Gaze at the Self
• 5 Images of Truth: The Science of Detection
• 6 Paratexts and the Afterlife of SVU
• Conclusion: The Story Continues
• Notes
• Bibliography