Crime Culture: Figuring Criminality in Fiction and Film (Continuum Literary Studies)

Crime Culture

Continuum Literary Studies Series Also available in the series: Active Reading by Ben Knights and Chris Thurgar-Dawson Adapting Detective Fiction by Neil McCaw Beckett’s Books by Matthew Feldman Beckett and Phenomenology Edited by Matthew Feldman and Ulrika Maude Beckett and Decay by Katherine White Beckett and Death edited by Steve Barfield, Matthew Feldman and Philip Tew Canonizing Hypertext by Astrid Ensslin Character and Satire in Postwar Fiction by Ian Gregson Coleridge and German Philosophy by Paul Hamilton Contemporary Fiction and Christianity by Andrew Tate English Fiction in the 1930s by Chris Hopkins Ecstasy and Understanding edited by Adrian Grafe Fictions of Globalization by James Annesley Joyce and Company by David Pierce London Narratives by Lawrence Phillips Masculinity in Fiction and Film by Brian Baker Modernism and the Post-colonial by Peter Childs Milton, Evil and Literary History by Claire Colebrook Novels of the Contemporary Extreme edited by Alain-Phillipe Durand and Naomi Mandel Postmodern Fiction and the Break-Up of Fiction by Hywel Dix Post-War British Women Novelists and the Canon by Nick Turner Seeking Meaning for Goethe’s Faust by J. M. van der Laan Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad by Jeremy Hawthorn Such Deliberate Disguises: The Art of Phillip Larkin by Richard Palmer The Imagination of Evil by Mary Evans The Palimpsest by Sarah Dillon The Measureless Past of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida by Ruben Borg Women’s Fiction 1945-2000 by Deborah Philips

Crime Culture Figuring Criminality in Fiction and Film

Edited by Bran Nicol, Eugene McNulty and Patricia Pulham

Continuum Literary Studies

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Bran Nicol, Eugene McNulty, Patricia Pulham and contributors 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 9780826432353 (hardcover) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group

Contents

Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction: Crime Culture and Modernity Bran Nicol, Patricia Pulham and Eugene McNulty Part I: Breaking Boundaries: Games, Art and the Image 1. Playing Dead: Crime as a Social System Mark Seltzer

vii viii 1

13

2. Psychopathology as a Game: J. G. Ballard and Conceptual Crime Benjamin Noys

36

3. Crime, Abjection, Transgression and the Image John Lechte

51

Part II: Revisiting Noir 4. The Female Side of Crime: Film Noir’s Femme Fatale and the Dark Side of Modernity Elisabeth Bronfen 5. Post-War American Noir: Confronting Fordism Andrew Pepper Part III: Vixens and Victims: Criminal Femininities 6. Dead Dolls and Deadly Dames: The Cover Girls of American True Crime Publishing Lee Horsley 7. Contemporary African American Women’s Crime and Mystery Novels Linden Peach Part IV : Angels of Death: Criminal Masculinities 8. Killer Boys: Male Friendship and Criminality in The Butcher Boy, Elephant and Boy A Páraic Finnerty

71

90

109

122

141

vi

Contents

9. The Angel of Death: Targeting the Hitman Andrew Spicer Part V: Reading the Criminal Other 10. Risk Management: Frank Abagnale, Jr, and the Shadowing of Pleasure Christopher P. Wilson

155

175

11. ‘Police Thy Neighbour’: Crime Culture and the Rear Window Paradigm Bran Nicol

192

Bibliography Index

210 229

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank all the contributors for being such a pleasure to work with; the delegates of the conference ‘Crime Cultures: Figuring Criminality in Literature, Media and Film’ which took place at the University of Portsmouth in July 2008, and formed the inspiration for this collection; the Centre for European and International Studies Research and the Centre for Studies in Literature at the University of Portsmouth for their support; Mark Seltzer and the University of Chicago Press for permission to reprint (in a shortened form) his article ‘Parlor Games: The Apriorization of the Media’, which was first published in January 2009, in Critical Inquiry, 36, 1, 100–33.

Notes on Contributors

Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Zurich and, since 2007, Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. A specialist in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature she has also written articles in the area of gender studies, psychoanalysis, film, cultural theory and visual culture. Her book publications include Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester University Press), The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents (Princeton, 1998) and a collection of essays Death and Representation, co-edited with Sarah W. Goodwin (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Páraic Finnerty is Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Portsmouth. He is the author of Emily Dickinson’s Shakespeare (University of Massachusetts Press, 2006) and has published articles on topics ranging from transatlantic literature to terrorism in journals such as Genders, Prose Studies, Reconstruction, The Emily Dickinson Journal and Symbiosis. He is currently working on a monograph titled Transatlantic Affinities: Dickinson and Victorian Poetry. Lee Horsley is Reader in Literature and Culture at Lancaster University, where she teaches two specialist crime courses and co-supervises numerous Ph.D. students in both English Literature and Creative Writing. Her publications include Political Fiction and the Historical Imagination (Macmillan, 1990), Fictions of Power in English Literature 1900–1950 (Longman, 1995) and Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (OUP, 2005). An expanded paperback edition of The Noir Thriller (Palgrave, 2001) was published in 2009. Lee is co-editor, with Charles Rzepka, of the Blackwell Companion to Crime Fiction (Blackwell, 2010). She also created and edits (jointly with Katharine Horsley) one of the largest websites devoted to crime fiction and film, www.crimeculture.com. John Lechte is Professor in Sociology at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. He is a specialist in Continental philosophy, including the work of Kristeva, Bataille and the role of the image and violence. He has published on Deleuze and cinema and has recently published on French philosophy and technologies of the image, particularly in relation to the work of Bernard Stiegler. His Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers (Routledge, 2008) has come out in a revised second edition.

Notes on Contributors

ix

Eugene McNulty lectures in English at St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra (Dublin City University). His main research interests focus on nineteenthand twentieth-century Irish literature and culture; he is the author of The Ulster Literary Theatre and the Northern Revival (Cork University Press, 2008), as well as articles in journals such as The Irish Review and Irish University Review. His current research concerns the conceptualization of the law in Irish theatre. Bran Nicol is Reader in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Portsmouth, where he is also Director of the Centre for Studies in Literature. His publications include Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2nd edition, 2004), Stalking (Reaktion Books, 2006), The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and the forthcoming The Private Eye: Detectives in the Cinema. Benjamin Noys is Reader in English at the University of Chichester. He is the author of Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction (Pluto, 2000), The Culture of Death (Berg, 2005) and The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Theory (Edinburgh University Press, 2010). Linden Peach is Professor of Modern Literature at Edge Hill University where he is also responsible for research in Arts and Sciences. His previous appointments include positions at the University of Gloucestershire, Loughborough University where he was awarded a Personal Chair, and London University. He is the author of Masquerade, Crime and Fiction: Criminal Deceptions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and a number of essays on crime writing. He is well known for his work on African American women’s writing, particularly Toni Morrison for which he has been twice honoured by the Toni Morrison Society, University of Georgia. He is especially interested in interrelationships between the various forms of contemporary African American women’s writing. In addition, his major research interests are in Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter and contemporary Irish and Welsh fiction. He is an Honorary Research Fellow of Swansea University, a Fellow of the English Association and an elected Member of the Welsh Academy. Andrew Pepper lectures in English and American literature at Queen’s University Belfast. He is the author of The Contemporary American Crime Novel (Edinburgh University Press, 2000) as well as numerous articles on crime fiction. He is also the author of a series of crime novels set in London between 1829 and the late 1840s including The Last Days of Newgate (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006), Kill-Devil and Water (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008) and The Detective Branch (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2010). Patricia Pulham is Senior Lecturer in English Literature, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Studies in Literature at the University of Portsmouth. She is the author of Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Tales

x

Notes on Contributors

(Ashgate Press, 2008), and co-editor of Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales (Broadview Press, 2006), Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). In addition, she has published on a range of nineteenth-century writers including Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde and Olive Custance in academic journals such as the Yearbook of English Studies and the Victorian Review. Mark Seltzer has taught at Cornell, Stanford, the Humboldt University, and the Free University in Berlin, and is currently Evan Frankel Professor of Literature at the University of California at Los Angeles. His most recent books include Bodies and Machines (Routledge, 1992), Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (Routledge, 1998) and True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity (Routledge, 2006). The piece in this collection is part of a forthcoming book, The Official World. Andrew Spicer is Reader in Cultural History in the Faculty of Creative Arts, University of the West of England and Director of the Visual Culture Research Group. He has published widely on British cinema, including Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema (I. B. Tauris, 2001/03) and Sydney Box for the British Film Makers series (Manchester University Press, 2006) and is working on a critical study of the producer Michael Klinger based on archival material. His other specialism is film noir and crime films and he has written Film Noir (Longman, 2002) and the Historical Dictionary of Film Noir (Scarecrow Press, 2010) and edited European Film Noir (Manchester University Press, 2007). He is currently co-editing the Companion to Film Noir for Blackwell. Andrew is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of British Cinema and Television and of the Journal of Screenwriting. Christopher Wilson is Professor of English and American Studies at Boston College. He writes on late nineteenth-century US literatures and culture, crime and police power, and literary non-fiction. His Learning to Live with Crime: American Crime Narrative in the Neoconservative Turn is forthcoming from the Ohio State University Press in 2010.

Introduction: Crime Culture and Modernity Bran Nicol, Patricia Pulham and Eugene McNulty

The intersection of crime and cultural production has a long history. The filmic and fictive crime worlds explored in this collection are populated by characters that seek to break or subvert the codes that regulate modern society. It is an impulse that is, arguably, common to us all – its prevalence going some way to explaining the long-standing popularity of cultural productions obsessed with crime’s breach of the normative rules of existence. ‘Crime’ has forensic, social and political dimensions; there are crimes that are ‘illegal’, and can be challenged in a court of law, and there are ‘crimes’ that bear more fluid definitions, determined by the moral laws constructed by polite society. Criminals, formally charged or otherwise, were the focus of hugely popular fictionalized biographies in the early eighteenth century, such as the lurid Newgate Calendars and related fiction by Daniel Defoe, and, later, John Gay and Henry Fielding, while nineteenth-century literature is continually preoccupied with criminality: not only in the popular genres which emerged in the period, such as the detective story and ‘sensation’ drama and fiction which produced prototypes of the noir femme fatale (e.g. Lucy Audley in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret [1862] and Lydia Gwilt in Wilkie Collins’s Armadale [1866]), but also in novels written by writers considered more ‘literary’, such as George Eliot, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. The cultural impulse to deal with crime is most notable in ‘crime fiction’, the well-established genres and modes of crime narrative which, from the advent of Conan Doyle in the late nineteenth century to the present day, have been a fixture of the cultural landscape: ‘whodunits’, ‘hard-boiled’ detective fiction, noir thrillers, police procedurals, ‘true crime’, murder novels, Scandinavian crime fiction, parodic detective stories, and pulp novel after novel about families and females in jeopardy. The enduring popularity of literary crime genres is paralleled by those in the cinema: vigilante films, heist movies, spy thrillers, serial killer films, and so on. Like modern fiction, crime themes were also central to the development of cinema in its earliest days, as in the French Nick Carter adventures in 1908 and the Fantômas series in 1913–1914. A contributing factor to the ‘Golden Age of Hollywood’ in the 1930s and 1940s was the popularity of gangster movies such as Little Caesar (1930), Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932). The great age of film noir, conventionally seen as stretching from Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) to Welles’s A Touch of Evil (1958), and its

2

Crime Culture

second wave, 1980s ‘postmodern’ noir, is founded on a fascination with low-lifes and criminals, while some of the most influential Anglo-American directors of the late twentieth century, such as Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and John Woo, are gripped and enthralled by crime. The ubiquity of crime fiction and film shows that criminality is something people habitually consume, and have done for centuries. Watching imaginary crime is as much a staple of our cultural diet as stories of love and courtship. This continual immersion in crime complements and contradicts the ‘encounters’ with crime we continually have via the news media, where criminality is similarly ubiquitous but even more real (albeit arguably just as framed and constructed as fiction). All this leads to a key question: why is it in the last two centuries that the fascination with crime has driven cultural production? In order to answer this question, we must surely acknowledge that the points at which crime becomes central to popular modes of narrative coincide loosely with the advent of modernity, that is, the 300 years stretching from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century in which life becomes progressively more urban, more and more shaped by technology, more focused on the aspirations of the individual, and beholden to the aspirations and tensions of the ‘Enlightenment project’, an umbrella term used to categorize a range of developments in post-eighteenth-century philosophy, culture and science marked by a teleological, humanist, positivist view of society and history. However one chooses to define modernity, and wherever one chooses to fix its historical parameters, the claim that criminality is inextricably linked with the conditions of modernity is a common one among cultural critics who have turned their attention to the connections between crime and cultural production. In a recent study, Masquerade, Crime and Fiction: Criminal Deceptions (2006), Linden Peach has argued that criminality is an inversion of the ideals of modernity, capable of mimicking features of capitalism, the definitive modern economic system – the aspiration towards power, control and the promotion of ruthless competition, resulting in criminality being ‘forever a symbol of [modernity’s] failings . . . [C]riminality mimics and mocks modernity, holding a mirror up to its fragmentation, its excesses and what it mythicizes and denies’ (p. 174). Moreover, crime culture as a model for understanding modernity necessarily concerns itself with the systemic forces that generate the meaning of terms such as crime, criminality, anti-social behaviour and the ‘aberrant’ subjectivities that are the criminal, the deviant, the fraud, the terrorist, and so on. The relationship between crime and culture is more complex than the latter simply acting as a recorder of the former – as if crime were enacted against an otherwise neutral background of existence. Rather the crime/culture complex brings into focus what is at stake in cultural production – in terms of how we organize, control and make sense of the world around us. In terms borrowed from Slavoj Žižek’s recent analysis of violence, crime as a cultural event is only understandable when read against the sublimated ‘dark-matter’ (taboo, morality, law) of modernity (2008, p. 2). It might be suggested, then, that criminality is not simply one

Introduction

3

aspect of modernity, an inevitable by-product, but its underside, something from which it cannot be separated. Cultural depictions of crime frequently portray it as such. Gomorrah, Roberto Saviano’s 2006 study of the Camorra, the Neopolitan mafia and the 2008 film adaptation, shows how uncannily organized crime mirrors the processes of capitalist production, capital accumulation, the mechanics of importing and exporting – in fact more efficiently and effectively than the legitimate businesses it shadows (Saviano, 2008). Similarly, Christopher Wilson’s chapter in this collection draws attention to the indistinct line between criminality and legal procedure as he documents the process by which the activities of private security firms, which often involve criminal methods, have become absorbed into the processes of ‘normal’ social existence. Both crime and its detection seem at some level to rely on the collapse of boundaries between private and public selves, between our interior and exterior realities, and between the externalized codifications of law and those more internalized senses of law which in turn reveal crime as a problem of self and other. Criminality does not merely mirror or shadow modernity; arguably, modern culture shapes or even produces forms of criminality. It would be a mistake to assume that crime fiction or film – or any cultural work for that matter – simply ‘responds’ to social reality, that movies and books directly take as their focus something that is occurring in real life, in the manner of newspaper supplements or TV current affairs programmes. Cultural representation does not function as a kind of second-order process of reflecting and recording what goes on in the wider world, but culture actually intervenes in everyday reality and helps shape it. In a series of books and essays published over the past decade, Mark Seltzer, another contributor to this volume, has argued that contemporary crime and violence is marked by the ‘reflexive turn’ which characterizes modernity. Just as modern literature and present day mass media are distinguished by continual self-reflexivity (what he exemplifies in his chapter here as ‘the reporting on the news becomes the news reported on’), so modern violence is ‘reflexive violence’ (2004, p. 559). Crime fiction and film might well refer to crimes which have actually taken place, but real crime is also played out according to a ‘script’ written by cultural production of all kinds (films, books, media) – not in the simplistic way imagined by tabloid newspapers, in which violent films or computer games form the ‘inspiration’ for violent acts (see the Columbine and Bulger cases discussed in this collection by Páraic Finnerty). Rather it functions according to a more complex process examined in Seltzer’s ground-breaking study of crime culture, Serial Killers (1998). Serial killing works along the lines of a ‘feedback loop’ whereby serial killers construct their identity not only from already-existing cultural depictions of serial killers, but from how notions of identity and intimacy are scripted by the reflexive processes of modernity. As he puts it in his contribution to Crime Culture, the serial killer ‘is a sort of nonperson, a man without content. He is not merely one among an indeterminate number of others, but the third person in person – one who does not exist apart from the conditions of existence provided by the technical

4

Crime Culture

media and union of cultural techniques’ [original emphasis]. In his book, Seltzer cites the example of a serial killer’s confession sent anonymously to an Ohio newspaper in 1991 which contains the line ‘Technically I meet the definition of a serial killer (three or more victims with a cooling-off period in between) but I’m an average-looking person with a family, job and home just like yourself’ (1998, p. 9). Selzter notes how strangely impersonal this is for a confession, as the author ‘experiences the technical definition of the serial killer as a selfdefinition’ and ‘takes the FBI’s composite picture or standard “profile” of the serial-killer as a self-portrait’ (1998, p. 9). The interface between modernity and crime is no doubt one reason for the continued appeal of noir to both film viewers and academics. Noir is a notoriously difficult term to define, with the majority of those who have sought to do so in agreement that it is better used to denote a kind of sensibility which colours a range of novels and films (and also other cultural production, such as visual art and music) rather than a consistent set of generic conventions. But the fact that noir cannot be confined to the question of genre is one reason behind its enduring value in cultural criticism. In one of the earliest definitions, their classic essay ‘Towards a Definition of Film Noir’ (1955), Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton contend that film noir is whatever is ‘noir for us; that’s to say, for Western and American audiences of the 1950s’ (2002, p. 5). Indeed something about the ‘darkness’ brought on by modern social conditions prevalent in the post-war period is powerfully yet mysteriously captured by the moods and narratives in films noirs. The world of noir is a crime culture; one described by Raymond Chandler in another classic essay, ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ (1944). In his tribute to Dashiell Hammett’s ‘hard-boiled’ fiction, a world of gangsters, covert lawlessness, and urban threat and indifference that constituted a major influence on film noir, Chandler argues that Hammett rescued crime fiction from the genteel English world of ‘Surbiton and Bognor Regis . . . dukes and Venetian vases’, making it relevant to modernity (1973, p. 197). Crime, then, may be more integral to modernity than simply one of its effects. Similarly, the focus on crime in novels and films might usefully be regarded as more pervasive and influential than simply the element which knits together a range of crime genres in literature and cinema. This is clear from considering contemporary prose fiction. A feature of the second half of the twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries is that the conventions, motifs and themes of crime genres appear to have reached such a degree of popularity that they have ‘spilled out’ into other kinds of writing and cinema. Some of the most important authors of literary fiction in the post-war period, such as Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon or Italo Calvino, have drawn at some point on crime-fiction conventions, as have many of the most fêted examples of serious fiction in recent years – for example, by Martin Amis, Sarah Waters, Paul Auster, Cormac McCarthy, Iain McEwan. Something similar appears to be at work in cinema, if we consider recent films as diverse as Hidden (2005), There Will Be Blood (2007), No Country for Old Men (2007), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert

Introduction

5

Ford (2007), Pride and Glory (2008) or A Prophet (2009). Conversely, just as serious literature has imported elements from generic crime-thrillers, so the popularity of Scandinavian crime novels by writers such as Henning Mankell or Stieg Larsson, which function as sober inquiries not simply into the state of modern Sweden but into modernity itself, indicates that genre fiction has attained a new respectability in ‘serious’ literature as a powerful and direct way of addressing pressing social and political issues. In her book Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (2001) Gill Plain provides a compelling counterpart to this argument. Addressing the question of the ‘implosion’ of crime fiction, she contends that, paradoxically, the increased popularity and ubiquity of crime fiction throughout the twentieth century actually plunged the genre into crisis. Where traditionally the crime genre (and all its subgenres) was predicated on the importance of keeping ‘the other’ outside the text (i.e. the female body, the criminal body, perhaps even death itself, or at least an authentic representation of it), in post-war crime fiction the genre gradually begins to incorporate within its universe what was previously ‘other’ to it: femininity, homosexuality, uncontrollable criminal desire, and most noticeably, an excessive concentration on ‘variously dismembered, decomposed, displayed and eroticised bodies’ (2001, p. 245). The result is that, in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century crime fiction, there is a lack of the monstrous rather than an excess of it. The outcome is that ‘[w]hat began as a mode of restoring order – a series of fictional fantasies that envisaged agency and order even in the midst of chaos – has evolved into a narrative mode that embraces exactly that which it initially sought to exclude’ (2001, p. 247). Explicating the cultural scene of crime inevitably leads, then, to a consideration of the boundaries that mark crime from not-crime; a boundary most obviously mapped by legal, pseudo-legal and social categories of the licit and the illicit. The sense that crime convention has exceeded generic boundaries and that the crime genre itself has imploded has an important implication for the study of crime fiction and film. Critics have tended to regard crime fiction as a kind of narrative which produces escape not by presenting the reader with the unknown, as in other forms of fiction, but with the ‘already known’ (Plain, 2001, p. 6; Eco, 1984, p. 160). This suggests that it is a genre we never seek to re-read, feeling that we have it interpreted and categorized already. But, ironically, the increasing wealth of literary criticism devoted to crime genres over the past few years has played a part in perpetuating this approach to the field. Crime fiction, once considered something of a ‘niche’ area of literary study occupying a shadowy zone between literary analysis ‘proper’ and ‘cultural studies’, is now established as something approaching a core subject on English curricula, as well as an expanding, exciting field of research. A number of good introductions to crime fiction and film are now available (Knight, 2000; Scaggs, 2005; Rzepka, 2005). One reason for the upsurge in scholarly attention (as the writers of these recent books often acknowledge in different ways) is the awareness that notions of criminality, pathology and deviance are increasingly central

6

Crime Culture

to our understanding of culture. Yet this recognition, as well as the ‘arrival’ of crime fiction and film as part of the material analysed on undergraduate courses in universities, means, paradoxically, that the conventional generic approach to crime fiction has come to appear too constrained. Recognizing the role of crime fiction and film in shaping modern notions of criminality – rather than simply reflecting them, or allowing us to escape them – demands a more wide-ranging approach than simply the study of genre (as valuable as this is). This is the rationale behind this volume of chapters. Rather than an exploration of ‘crime fiction’ or ‘crime film’, our collection is about crime in fiction and crime in film. In the diverse range of books and films which its contributors analyse, we see how criminality becomes a ‘figure’, a trope, by which wider social, cultural and political processes can be understood. In some chapters this involves a study of what are representative figures of crime in another sense: the femme fatale, the ‘conceptual’ criminal, the killer boy, the hitman, the conman, the killer neighbour. Other chapters aim to extend the framework by which crime has been explored: complementing psychoanalytic and Foucauldian approaches by using the work of others, such as Baudrillard (Noys) and Kristeva (Lechte). Still others offer a fresh examination of established genres and modes such as mystery fiction (Peach) and noir (Bronfen, Horsley, Pepper), place previously analysed crime texts – for example, Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley (Pepper) and Ripley’s Game (Seltzer) – in radically different contexts, or consider crime in non-generic texts, such as the fiction of J. G. Ballard (Noys), Kazuo Ishiguro (Seltzer) or films such as Catch Me if You Can (Wilson) or The Butcher Boy (Finnerty). In these ways, all the chapters in this collection deal with ‘crime culture’ in a broader sense than crime genres. The book is divided into five parts; in Part I: Breaking Boundaries: Games, Art and the Image, Mark Seltzer, Benjamin Noys and John Lechte examine the borderlines between crime and culture using game theory, conceptual art, and ideas of the image and abjection. Mark Seltzer’s chapter, ‘Playing Dead: Crime as Social System’, builds upon previous work referred to above, such as Serial Killers (1998) and ‘The Crime System’ (2004), in exploring how crime, violence and crime fiction are symptomatic of wider patterns in modernity. Here, Seltzer analyses Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game (1974) (the third novel in her hugely successful series about the cold yet disturbingly appealing killer, Tom Ripley) alongside works by the pop-theorist Malcolm Gladwell and the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro to demonstrate how social interaction in the ‘second machine age’ (Reyner Banham’s term for ‘the age of domestic electronics and synthetic chemistry’ [1960, p. 5]) involves ‘small and sequestered, discrete but comparable worlds’ which operate like games – parlour games, war games, murder games (as in Highsmith) – predicated on the activities of observation and selfobservation. Crime fiction itself, Seltzer argues, is a discrete scale model of society which in its particular self-reflexivity and rules, functions according to this logic.

Introduction

7

In ‘Psychopathology as a Game: J. G. Ballard and Conceptual Crime’, Benjamin Noys argues that the work of the British author J. G. Ballard formulates the possibility of the ‘conceptual crime’, a crime which, in a parallel way to ‘conceptual art’, offers a model of the ‘crime’ as idea or concept, a virtual crime that resists being actualized in a form amenable to existing penal codes. The ambivalent figure of the conceptual criminal – who features in various places in Ballard’s writing but is, in earlier works such as The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard himself – simultaneously interrogates the criminality of fiction itself, in its formal capacities to ‘script’ new modes of criminality, and also explores the possibilities of architectural and spatial forms to figure as locations for ‘crime without crime’. John Lechte’s contribution, ‘Crime, Abjection, Transgression and the Image’, engages with its central concerns of the abject and the transgressive in order to investigate the role of the image in the capturing and/or articulation of a culture built upon crime. The chapter opens by establishing the law as Janusfaced, standing in opposition to crime and yet founded on a now hidden crime (e.g. Agamben’s homo sacer, or Freud’s father-slaying in the primal horde), before explicating the relationship between this covert crime and the communicative networks upon which modernity rests. Drawing on these discourses, and taking Orson Welles’s film A Touch of Evil (1958) as its touchstone text, the chapter reveals the modern rendering of criminality as underpinned by forces (philosophic and psychological) born out of pre-existing networks of taboo that stand at the boundary between the sacred and the profane. In Part II: Revisiting Noir, Elisabeth Bronfen and Andrew Pepper offer new thoughts on an established mode. Bronfen examines the emergence in noir – the cinematic mode which expresses the ‘dark side’ of modernity and subjectivity – of a particular manifestation of what she argues is a long-running cultural association between femininity and the night. This is the femme fatale, a familiar figure in noir criticism, but one who, she contends, ‘takes modernism’s claim for unrestrained self-definition to an extreme, and in so doing finds herself in conflict not only with communal needs but also all personal sense of survival’. Andrew Pepper’s chapter also engages with a key aspect of modernity. In ‘Post-War American Noir: Confronting Fordism’ he powerfully re-engages American noir with the economic models shaping the world that produced it. Supplementing the more usual psychoanalytical approaches to noir film and fiction, Pepper focuses his attention on the dominance of Fordist economic logic as a model for structuring American society in the wake of the Second World War. Taking as his main examples the film version of Double Indemnity (1944) and the novels The Talented Mr Ripley (1953) and Pick-Up (1955), Pepper locates noir’s revelation of modernity’s underbelly as a response to the social and cultural anxieties that accompanied the dominance of Fordist economics praxis in the organization of everyday life in post-war America. Part III: Vixens and Victims: Criminal Femininities and Part IV: Angels of Death: Criminal Masculinities offer chapters that reassess existing gender models

8

Crime Culture

associated with crime culture and raise new questions that couple crime with issues of gender, race and sexuality. Lee Horsley’s chapter, ‘Dead Dolls and Deadly Dames: The Cover Girls of American True Crime Publishing’ looks at the cover images of true crime magazines and pulp fiction. Discussing texts that span a 50-year period from the early 1930s to the late 1970s, Horsley shows how these eroticized images of women express both fears of female empowerment and function as corrective comments on female behaviour. As Horsley notes, pulp covers are ‘a condensation of the clichés of the dangerous and endangered woman – categories that seem, by implication, to be inseparable, with sexual recklessness leading directly to death’. Focusing on depictions of the crime victim, the gun moll and the femme fatale, Horsley draws attention to the ways in which these images reinforce textual and filmic representations of women in crime genres, and points to the revision of such representations in women’s crime writing. Women’s crime fiction is the topic of Linden Peach’s chapter, ‘Contemporary African American Women’s Crime and Mystery Novels’. Peach highlights two key aspects of these genres that have received relatively little attention: ‘the overlap between crime and romantic/erotic fiction’ and ‘the privileging of hate crime and victimhood’. Commenting on the works of writers such as Frankie Bailey, Nikki Baker, Adrianne Byrd and Charlotte Carter, Peach demonstrates the diversity and complexity of the genres and the plurality of black female experience they depict, while exploring their value as responses to black feminist struggles and the Civil Rights movement in America. Páraic Finnerty’s chapter, ‘Killer Boys: Male Friendship and Criminality in The Butcher Boy, Elephant and Boy A’, examines the phenomenon of ‘killer boys’ in fiction and film focusing on The Butcher Boy (1997), Neil Jordan’s film adaptation of Patrick McCabe’s 1992 novel of the same name; Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003), based on the Columbine High School massacre; and John Crowley’s film Boy A (2007), based on Johnathan Trigell’s 1994 novel that draws on the James Bulger murder. Looking closely at the representation of male friendship, Finnerty shows how, in these texts, the bonds that lead to murder are subtly homoeroticized, and argues that such representations function as a tacit recriminalization of homosexuality, safely contained within the liminal figure of the adolescent male. Like Finnerty’s, Andrew Spicer’s chapter, ‘The Angel of Death: Targeting the Hitman’, also centres on an aspect of masculine criminality that has been relatively ignored: the hitman, in particular an aestheticized version of the hitman which Spicer calls the ‘angel of death’. Spicer traces the history of this figure, locating the seeds of development in Arthur Conan Doyle’s adventurer, Colonel Sebastian Moran, before focusing on four films that he identifies as significant for the construction of this particular incarnation: This Gun for Hire (1942), Le Samouraï (1967), Die xue shuang xiong (The Killer, 1989) and Collateral (2004). Spicer argues that ‘the angel of death has emerged as a potent figure of modern myth’ which functions as ‘a highly masculine fantasy of total selfsufficiency’, evading conventional forms of containment and control.

Introduction

9

The final part of the collection: Reading the Criminal Other, focuses on the problematic line between the self and the invasive criminal entity. Christopher Wilson’s chapter, ‘Risk Management: Frank Abagnale, Jr, and the Shadowing of Pleasure’, unpacks the power relations that shadow the autobiography – Catch Me if You Can (1980) – of security expert, and one-time conman, Frank Abagnale. Wilson’s analysis of Abagnale’s complex career – one which has taken him from a picaresque life of seemingly victimless frauds to his current status as one of America’s foremost security consultants – charts the links between the conman narrative, the fraud turned informant, and the emergence of a model of societal control based on the surveillance of self and other. Throughout the piece another intriguing layer is added by Wilson’s interest in the politicality of these narratives; and in particular he dissects with great precision the relationship between the need for not just personal but personalized security – as promoted throughout Abagnale’s career – and the prominent representation of crime as all-pervasive, and potentially invasive, within neo-conservative ideology. Informants and social surveillance are also prominent themes in Bran Nicol’s contribution, ‘Police Thy Neighbour: Crime Culture and the Rear Window Paradigm’. Against the background of the Foucauldian move from the society of spectacle to a modern society of surveillance, the chapter posits the idea that post-war American cinema (from Rear Window [1954] to the recent films Arlington Road [1999], Civic Duty [2006] and Disturbia [2007]) reflects an anxiety that the modern neighbourhood – that is, the ‘normal’, middle-class community, not simply deprived inner-city no-go areas – is a centre of crime culture in that it is an ideal location in which criminality might lurk undetected and trigger a paranoid desire to pry. At one level, the title of this collection simply refers to the vast concentration of cultural production which deals with the subject of crime. But the chapters in our volume also proffer another sense of the term ‘crime culture’: they demonstrate that the culture of modernity is informed by criminality to a profound degree, and suggest that the study of how we represent crime to ourselves can help us understand modernity. Crime culture is the point where no easy separation between the criminal and the normal or non-criminal is possible: politics, society, perhaps even modernity itself is shaped by criminality and is impossible to divorce from it. Crime culture incorporates the fluid definition of crime in the modern period – it responds to changing identifications and perceptions of what constitutes crime and revises, redefines, and questions them in artistic production.

This page intentionally left blank

Part I

Breaking Boundaries: Games, Art and the Image

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 1

Playing Dead: Crime as a Social System Mark Seltzer

‘“There’s no such thing as a perfect murder”, Tom [Ripley] said to Reeves’, opening Patricia Highsmith’s remarkable novel Ripley’s Game (1974): ‘“That’s just a parlour game”’ (1999, p. 5). Yet it’s not hard to see that the relation between murder and game – between real worlds and parlour games – is a good deal more complicated here. And not least in that the modern scene of the crime always resembles a gamespace.1 Three questions: What does it mean to talk about murder as a parlour game? What does it tell us about modern forms of both violence and games? And what does it tell us about their place in making up modern social systems, what they look like and how they work? In the pages that follow I will be taking up these questions about game and world through a sampling of several very different scenes – initially, Highsmith’s crime novel Ripley’s Game; next, a recent best-seller that is in effect a popularization of systems thinking – Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking; and, briefly, Kazuo Ishiguro’s recent novel about a newly normal violence and the social ecologies of ignorance that go with it, Never Let Me Go. The focus across these scenes is first, via Highsmith, parlour games; second, via Gladwell, war games; the third, via Ishiguro, form games. These are, I mean to suggest, scenes that remain remarkably stable across their different scenographies. Each appears as the subset of a structure that persists through its variations: encounters of a performance and a syntax – or, more exactly, the emergence of comparable conditions in diverse systems, which is a defining attribute of modernity. These scenes then will make it possible to map these games, their rules and their media – and the social territory they at once model and realize.

Parlour Games Can we get certain pathological phenomena as well-defined games? . . . I don’t believe any game that can’t be played as a parlour game. Martin Shubik, RAND Corporation

14

Crime Culture

Why perfect murders and parlour games, then? For one thing, modern game theory, and the game-theoretical world-view that goes with it, takes off from John von Neumann’s 1928 paper, ‘Zur Theorie der Gesellschaftsspiele’ – ‘On the Theory of Parlour Games’. The attempt, in Von Neumann’s account, is to put on a mathematical basis the little games in which (unlike, say, playing dice) one is not merely playing against the odds but playing against others. This is a game, like poker or chess, in which we move against opponents whose intentions, or what look like them (bluffs), enter into the form of the game. This is a complex game in that one must observe and measure and misinform self-observing observers who are doing the same: that is, one must observe what and how the observed observer can’t observe – and whether he can observe that or not. In short, the effects of playing the game must be included in it. It is (on von Neumann’s account) ‘the game as played by perfectly intelligent, perfectly ruthless operators’, (Wiener, 1965, p. 159; see Galison, 1994) like oneself. It is a game then like the Kriegsspiele, or war games, that von Neumann (a prototype for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove) will go on to model. It is then something like a play-at-home version of the fog of war, or dress rehearsal for what has come to be called the military-entertainment complex (Lenoir, 2000). This is to suggest that parlour games, games played for leisure and that contain their own outcome – ‘social games’, as the literal sense of the idiomatic Gesellschaftsspiele indicates – are already and from the start more than that. ‘The problem’, as von Neumann puts it, ‘is well known’: and there is hardly a situation in daily life into which this problem does not enter . . . A great many different things come under this heading [the theory of parlour games], anything from roulette to chess, from baccarat to bridge. And after all, any event – given the external conditions and the participants in the situation (provided the latter are acting of their own free will) – may be regarded as a game of strategy if one looks at the effect it has on the participants. (von Neumann, 1959, pp. 13–42) The theory of parlour games (the mathematicization of games of strategy) becomes, in von Neumann’s and Oskar Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1947) the basis for the game-theoretical modelling of economic and other real world behaviour (von Neumann and Morgenstern, 2007). We might say that deficiency of the game model (at least as popularly understood) comes into view from the start – the presumption of the rationality of actors or operators – the perfectly rational and perfectly ruthless; the reliance of the model on the assumption of perfect information; on the self-conditioned efficiency of the markets; on the tendency towards self-correcting equilibrium; and so on.2 Or we can reverse the picture. Then we might say that the deficiency of the world, and hence the attraction of the game world, here immediately comes into view – not least for gamers looking for a better or more perfect

Playing Dead: Crime as a Social System

15

world, or at least one that plays by the rules. We might say too then that this game outlook on life amounts to ‘expanding the game to the whole world’ (Wark, 2007) or that a world that’s like a game is thus part rules and part fiction – or ‘halfreal’ (Juul, 2005) – as two recent, and influential, accounts of gamer theory have it. But both notions – the notion of the expansion of the game to the whole world, the division of real life by halves – are too crude to do much work with. For one thing, in both the unity of the difference between game and world is left uninterpreted. For another, so are the social conditions that make for the form of the distinction in the first place.3 Consider, for example, the film Avalon (2001), directed by Mamoru Oshii (director too of the anime film Ghost in the Shell). Avalon is familiar enough in the canon of recent reality game films. The plot involves a potentially lethal virtual-reality war game played by addicted combatants – with the goal, it turns out, to arrive at the game stage ‘Class Real’. There is no doubt a canonicity to the subset of such films – and their rehearsal, or retesting, of the distinction between the game world and the real one. But the film inquires into the very problem of this distinction, and the conditions that enable it from the start. It does so in part by doubling it at the level of form – the form of the cinematic medium. That is to say, in Avalon, the virtual reality of the film medium – the mechanized doubling of observation and act that cinema posits as its condition and mode of operation and that makes up the reality of motion pictures – here arrives as its own theme (see Baecker, 1996, p. 561). It is not merely that we view the world viewed – the observed observer in the act of observation and the so the continual reproduction of the act via its observation (what might be described as the modalization of the world). And it is not merely that this doubling continually reproduces itself via the technical process that implies a second order of vision. The afterimage, for early film-theorists, was taken to emit to viewers their own processes of perception. The transformation of stills into motion appears as the special effect of a cultural technique: in effect, a becoming-medial of the psychophysiology of vision. Form and medium feed back into each other. These feedback loops between the human senses and the media, and between observation and act, thus take on the theme of the game/world distinction. The difference between the film world and the game world looks like the difference between the real world and a fictional one. The difference between real and fictional reality then oscillates – between discourse and story, fabula and sjuzhet. And the point not to be missed is that the unity of the difference becomes visible precisely via an oscillation between media. Reality – ‘real life’ – can only be spoken of by contrasting it to something else from which it is distinguished – say, fictional (or statistical, or mathematical) reality.4 (And it’s worth remembering that the term ‘real life’ itself comes to us from eighteenth-century fiction.) The internal articulation of reality in the film makes it possible, or necessary, to distinguish real and fictional reality: they are

16

Crime Culture

copied into each other. Hence the paradoxical determination of ‘class real’ (the real as one classification among others) itself becomes visible. And given what appears here as the preference for violence over paradox, it is not surprising that it becomes visible as war game. That is to say, the choice of the game enters into it: Which is the better game? Which would you choose given the choice? The sort of game that you think you can win but can’t. Or, alternatively, one that seems to be impossible, but isn’t. Maintaining a delicate balance somewhere in between throughout every level of the game, that’s what keeps it going. (Vogl, 2008) The balancing between the necessary and the possible defines the self-defining space of the game. In short, what defines the game form is its contingency, its self-conditioning and its deliberate self-complication. It’s contingent in the sense that the rules of the game are neither necessary nor impossible. It’s selfconditioned in that rules, measure and outcome are defined by the ‘sort of game’ chosen and by what’s possible, or impossible, in it. It’s deliberately complicated to relieve the boredom of that self-conditioning. These are the ‘sandbox elements’ that prolong the play – the gratuitous difficulties that ‘keep it going’, that seduce players to continue to play. This is (as Roger Caillois expresses it, in his account of play and games) ‘the pleasure experienced in solving a problem arbitrarily designed for this purpose’ – like probing a toothache with one’s tongue, playing with one’s own pain (Caillois, 2001, p. 29). ‘We lead’, as the microsociologist of these little worlds, Erving Goffman, puts it, ‘an indoor social life’ (1959, p. 244). It is in this sense that the parlour game is a scale model of the modern social field – or, more exactly, of its small and sequestered, discrete but comparable, worlds. These small worlds are themselves working models of the ‘sequestration’ of modern life – to the extent that it is modern (see Giddens, 1991, pp. 144–80). And games such as these – parlour games, crime games, war games, and the rest – are, in short, models of a self-modelling world. They are scale models of the modern social field, which is then, in effect, a life-size model of itself.

The Rules of Irrelevance The game strategist of the perfect murder in Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game is Reeves Minot, who plans the crime, as Tom Ripley puts it, ‘just to start the ball rolling’ (1999, p. 62). In short, ‘he plays games’ (1999, p. 128). Reeves, we are told, is ‘like a small boy playing a game he had invented himself, a rather obsessive game with severe rules – for other people’ (1999, p. 112). The point, however, is not quite that Reeves exempts himself from the rules by determining them and so seeing through them. The real point is that seeing through the

Playing Dead: Crime as a Social System

17

game and obsessively playing the game are not at all at odds here. For if one does not see, and see through, the rules one cannot play by the rules: seeing through the game is part of it. That is to say, in order for self-determinations to counts as self-determinations, they have to be seen as such. And, in a selfvalidating world, the crime story, its prolonged suspense and its surprising outcome, must work the same way: it requires suspense in the sense of a selfgenerated uncertainty and surprise in the sense of a self-dispelled mystery. The paradox, catch, or trick, of the expected surprise is its form game. One thing the novel allows then is for this circular causality to take the form of form. ‘Word did get around, he realized’ (1999, p. 23). This is how the circuits of communication and realization continually reproduce (and re-enter) each other. ‘I’m just telling you what Jonathan told me’ (1999, p. 223). This is how the novel conveys information, or news of difference. It continually switches back and forth between act and observation, story and discourse – such that, as with the news today, the reporting on the news becomes the news reported on. ‘It was a matter of protecting – what had gone before’ (1999, p. 227). The sentence’s short circuit is the syntax of recursive causal systems – feeding back outcomes into intentions, effects into causes. This is simply to observe, once again, that second-order observation is first tested in novels, which become the models for trying out the modalization of the world with serious consequences. That makes for the generic preference for characters (as modal terms: self-observing observers). It also makes for the novelistic preference for affects that include their self-reflection as part of their operation: sympathy (or envy), for example, which posits the social reflection of pleasure (or pain) in the pain (or pleasure) of others, via a reciprocity of observation and self-observation. The formality of the game is in part what looks like its suspension of external reference – or what Erving Goffman calls its rules of irrelevance. Games, for Goffman, ‘illustrate how participants are willing to forswear for the duration of the play any apparent interest in the aesthetic, sentimental, or monetary value of the equipment employed, adhering to what might be called rules of irrelevance’. In this way, the real world conditions of the game or the material that the game is made of – for example, ‘whether checkers are played with bottle tops on a piece of squared linoleum, with gold figures on inlaid marble, or with uniformed men standing on colored flagstones’ – can be suspended. Hence the ‘same sequence of strategic moves and countermoves’ can be made nevertheless – and still ‘generate the same contour of excitement’ (Goffman, 1972, p. 19). Yet from another point of view the rules of the game are scarcely a suspension of the way of the world, in that the same sequestration, and so the same rules of irrevelance, mark both. The first sentence of the first chapter of Ripley’s Game is about murder and parlour games. The last sentences of that opening chapter are about the game Reeves is playing – if, that is, he’s playing a game at all. It’s not at all clear that Reeves’s actions, or play, is more than strictly gratuitous – ‘toying’ with things is the novel’s repeated term for this. That is, it’s not at all

18

Crime Culture

clear that Reeves has anything classed real to get out of it – beyond, of course, just prolonging the play. Here then is the astonishing passage with which the initial chapter of the novel closes: Reeves might gain – according to Reeves, but let Reeves figure that out, because what Reeves wanted seemed as vague to Tom as Reeves’ microfilm activities, which presumably had to do with international spying. Were governments aware of the insane antics of some of their spies? Or those whimsical, half-demented men flitting from Bucharest to Moscow and Washington with guns and microfilm – men who might with the same enthusiasm have put their energies to international warfare in stamp-collecting, or in acquiring secrets of miniature electric trains? (1999, pp. 11–12) The first chapter of Ripley’s Game begins then with parlour games and ends with medial systems. But what links this antic series of activities? What draws into relation stamps, model trains, photography, information, spies and war by other means? What makes it possible for these miniature systems of information and body-and-message transport (electric trains, stamp collections, microfilm, etc.) to make up a world? What makes it possible for these little medial systems to work as conditions and techniques of existence? To operate via scale models and working models that are models both of the world and in it? When, that is, did the communication of words and things become the modern medial system before our very eyes? 1839: the annus mirabilis of the network of modern matter and message transport systems (and the criteria of speed, regularity, predictability and reproducibility). The first commercial electric telegram, in 1839, constructed by Wheatstone and Cooke for the Great Western Railway; the first Baedeker guide (to the Rhine), 1839; and the first national railway timetable (Bradshaws), in 1839; the invention of photography – and its use in guide books, among other things – in 1839 (by Daguerre in France; and, in 1840, Fox Talbot in England); and the first national postal system Rowland Hill’s Penny Post (based on the invention of the prepaid stamp), in Britain, in 1840.5 What spreads throughout the social field, what makes up the infrastructure of the modernizing social field, is the intensified self-organization of a system of self-organizing systems: what the author of an article in the Spectator (February 1839) titled ‘Self-Operating Processes of Fine Art: The Daguerreotype’ calls ‘self-acting machines of mechanical operation’ (see Snyder, 2004, pp. 195–221). This begins to indicate the medial genealogy of a modernizing world, one tending towards, and more and more conditioned by, speed and repeatability, and by a permanent and asymptotically continuous connectedness – a media union. It’s possible to fill out this genealogy a bit more: first, by way of specifying how what might be called the apriorization of the media in these operations is bound to forms of observation and self-observation – and their systemic and

Playing Dead: Crime as a Social System

19

reciprocal conditioning; second, by way of locating how the differences of medium and form, model and scale, fundamentally structure these operations; and, third and finally, by way of sorting out what we might then make of the whimsical, half-demented, insane links – ‘International warfare in stampcollecting’!; ‘Acquiring secrets of miniature electric trains’! – that make up Ripley’s game: that is, both modern parlour games and modern crime games. Stamp-collecting. The ‘closing of the postal system as a system’ occurs with the shift from the individual registration of letters (and their rates) to postal standards (and the mass-reproducibility of stamps); with the shift from names of places to street numbers; with the appearance across the social field of systems-integral standards at every level – a working diagram for the conveyance of communications (from place to place, on time). The postal system is no longer person to person: ‘The postage stamp made the sender’s presence at the postal counter just as superfluous as the recipient’s presence at delivery’ – the mailboxes and mail slots that are the standard inputs and outputs for sending and delivery processes, irrespective of persons.6 The standardized post, its collection, sending, delivery neutralizes the idea of distance (within standardized zones), just as the railroad annihilates time (standardizing those zones). The very existence of prepaid and mass-produced stamps implies a media union: a postal system. Ripley’s Game: ‘He dropped the letter in a yellow box en route to his shop. It would probably be a week before he heard from Alan . . . He thought of his letter, making its progress to Orly airport, maybe by this evening, maybe by tomorrow morning’ (1999, p. 20). The purpose of letter writing, we know, is to mark absences, absent writers for absent readers. With the advent of a postal system, the significance of a theory of communication, and its deferrals, can then be formulated (and so deconstructed).7 With the advent of telegraphy and then telephony, and systems of communication that do not depend on the sending of things or bodies, the transportation of people and information divide – which allows for a period in which they (functionally or nostalgically) track each other, as for a period telegraph lines ran alongside railway lines. Spies and secrets. By then we are in the zone of the detective story, its encrypted secrets and purloined letters. ‘From the point of view of the cryptanalyst’, as one of the founders of communications systems theory, Claude Shannon observed, ‘a secrecy system is almost identical with a noisy communication system’ (1992, p. 113). It is not merely that the modelling, in Shannon’s theory of communication, of transmitter and receiver as encoder and decoder explicitly identifies ‘communication with cryptanalysis’ (Edwards, 1996, p. 201). Or, that there are the tight couplings between the take-off point of communication theory and computational analysis, on the one side, and espionage and codebreaking, on the other, during the Second World War.8 The inverse relation between the probability of the message and the information it gives means that ‘the uncertainty about the value of individual bits that is called forth by interference on the channel is more or less indistinguishable from the uncertainty produced by enemy codes’ (Siegert, 1999, p. 262). On that logic the problem

20

Crime Culture

of modern literary interpretation – the uncertainty as to whether something is an intended/coded message or simply interference on the line (noise) – is tightly coupled to the form of the secrecy system too. Miniatures and models. No doubt the mechanical toy may excite the thrill and panic of the ‘self-invoking fiction’. And the miniature – the miniature railway, for example – may be ‘nostalgic in a fundamental sense’ – a movement ‘from work to play, from utility to aesthetics’. But that fiction now provides too a working model of the self-steering and self-modelling social field. The collection – stamps or trains or toys – may ‘replace history with classification’, and present a ‘hermetic world’ ‘self-sufficient and self-generating’; and it may provide a ‘narrative of interiority’, one made up the ‘complete number of elements necessary for an autonomous world’ (Stewart, 1993, pp. 57, 58, 151, 159, 158, 152). But for precisely these reasons its formalism appears not as the alternative to the modern social field but the form of the modern social field, and its small worlds. The form of the scale model is a matter both of modelling and of scale. It makes visible the relation of observation to itself – and so its contingent and self-referential structure.9 And, in the search for America’s next top model, it may then be well worth taking into account the way of the modern world as a self-mapping and self-modelling one.

The Medium in Person The doubling of the object or world in the model – the doubling that allows the world to appear in the world – means that the world can be observed in different (rival or correspondent) ways, and so recast by the existence of alternatives. There are three basic consequences to this. First, it marks the relativity of the observer, who observes himself as an observer among others. Second, one is then asked to distinguish ‘real’ reality from other kinds (fictional or statistical, for example). Third, the matter of scale makes observation itself visible: seeing itself seen, albeit out of the corner of the eye. The photographic – which, it seems, ‘permits a blow-up any scale’ – epitomizes that, from the microfilmic to the big close-up of the human face: the filmic close-up is a solicitation to observe what the observed observer observes (see Rose, 1968, pp. 80–91).10 What the photographic brings into view are scales of viewing: modernity ready for its close-up. And that induces a second-nature reflexivity, installing it as a medium and framework of perception, or cultural technique (see Vogl, 2008 and Siegert, 2008). The little models that proliferate in, and as, the world of Ripley’s Game, for example, show the self-modelling of that world, and how it operates. Here the historia rerum gestarum coincides with the res gestae, the story of events with the events themselves (if we recall that the res gestae is not exactly the event itself but

Playing Dead: Crime as a Social System

21

instead in itself the coincidence of the event and its observation). The novel is in effect nothing but this self-modelling and self-sampling, and, for that reason, several small and rapid examples can suffice here. 1. ‘His hobby was naval history, and he made model nineteenth-century and eighteenth-century frigates in which he installed miniature electric lights that he could put completely or partially on by a switch in his living room. Gerard himself laughed at the anachronism of electric lights in his frigates, but the effect was beautiful when all the other lights in the house were turned out’ (1999, p. 47). History and model, war and game, hesitate each other here, not least via the anachronism of electric lights. (And the notion of anachronism itself is media-dependent, an effect of the ‘typographical persistence’ of print [see Goody and Watt, pp. 27–68 and Eisenstein, 1993].) 2. So the scale can be reversed: ‘Little boats bobbed gaily at anchor, and two or three boats were sailing about, simple and clean as brand-new toys’ (1999, p. 67). These little boats are life-size and miniature at once, shifting in scale from one to the other. 3. Or, again, since the act takes shape in its recording or registration, making for the relays between game and world in the modern crime story: ‘He’d done little jobs for Reeves Minot, like posting on small, stolen items, or recovering from toothpaste tubes . . . tiny objects like microfilm rolls’ (1999, p. 6). In passages such as this, scale itself becomes thick and palpable – an element in the concreteness of the medium of representation. 4. Or, yet again, consider what living life and living space look like in Ripley’s Game: ‘Jonathan carried a second cup of coffee into the small square living room where Georges was now sprawled on the floor with his cut-outs. Jonathan sat down at the writing desk, which always made him feel like a giant’ (1999, p. 19). The geometry, the small square, of real space; the boy and his cut-out models; the writing desk that scales between writing and world: all are graphs of a self-graphing world. And the writing desk, like the light switch in the living room that turns on and off the lights of the model, is a switchpoint between two worlds. One finds, across all these examples, an oscillation between form and medium; between model and world; between map and territory. The closing or cancellation of the distinction between map and territory is centrally here the denudation of the distinction between game and world, a self-invented game with its own canons of credibility. (‘Or was it even a game that Tom was playing? Jonathan couldn’t believe it was entirely a game’ [1999, p. 189].) This is what Poe, early on, called the ‘half-credences’ that make believable parlour games, like the murder story (see Seltzer, 2007, pp. 57–90). In short: we know, first, that the map is not the territory (the effect is not the cause). We know that, second, because it’s always the map and never the territory that we deal with (there’s no

22

Crime Culture

doing without codes and transforms). But, then, third, what of the media ensembles, distributed across virtual and real landscapes, making up the material and formal infrastructure of modern society? Is the medial system (in a territory full of maps) map or territory? The object of media theory ‘is then not an object but a difference’ – the difference between medium and form (with all the paradoxes that involves). The difference between medium and form ‘oscillates from one side to the other and is never univocally defined, because each side depends on the other’ – and can only be observed through the other (see Esposito, 2004). In Ripley’s Game, a novel and game world so relentlessly given over to observing media of observation and self-observation, and to the conditions of what can be seen and what can’t, it is not at all surprising that the medium of visibility – light itself – re-enters as its own theme. It would be possible to point to its arrivals again and again across the novel. But the becoming-medial of the medium occurs late in the story, after Ripley has entered into the game and made it his own. Here Ripley and Jonathan, the pawn in Reeves’s game, have just murdered a couple of murderers and are about to do away with the bodies: Tom’s car stopped. They had gone perhaps two hundred yards from the main road in a great curve. Tom had cut his lights, but the interior of the car lit when he opened the door. Tom left the door open, and walked towards Jonathan, waving his arms cheerfully. Jonathan was at that instant cutting his own motor and his lights. The image of Tom’s figure in the baggy trousers, green suede jacket, stayed in Jonathan’s eyes for a moment as if Tom had been composed of light. Jonathan blinked. (1999, p. 210) ‘Composed of light’: this is the puncta inflata of the novel’s optics. The term ‘composed’ – in its terminological change of state, or indifference, between matter and form – could not be more exact: in turn form and medium, oscillating (blinking) between them. Put simply, here ‘light and matter are on an equal basis’ (which is the modernist turn in physics) (Wiener, 1950, p. 20). Ripley is identified through medial techniques and transformations in the series of novels that carry his name. These novels operate entirely by way of cultural technologies of body and message transport, their commutability and their self-reflection. And they double the world via Ripley’s self-observed observation.11 Here Ripley becomes the medium in person. In that light and matter are on an equal basis, observation becomes its own object (a quasi-object, or materialized theoria). The motorized world stops for a moment, such that the medium apriorizes itself (and in doing so marks its own blindspot). The scene is in effect Ripley’s transubstantiation, or transfiguration (into ‘figure’ or ‘image’ or artwork): the moment at which the channel refers to itself. If light and matter are mutually contingent, there is no alternative to the modalization of the world. That modalization of the world introduces the observer at every

Playing Dead: Crime as a Social System

23

point. And it’s ‘impossible to introduce the observer without also introducing the idea of message’ (Wiener, 1950, p. 20). That means that the world and its communication are on an equal basis too. Under the conditions of a modernizing and technogenic age, anthropological grounds are transposed into historical ones, and historical grounds into media techniques. This can also be played in reverse: media self-reflexivity can be taken, or mistaken, for self-reflection or subjectification. It’s played in reverse via characters in novels, for example – not least via Highsmith’s epochal character Tom Ripley. Ripley (like other serial killers, fictional and factual) is a sort of non-person, a man without content.12 He is not merely one among an indeterminate number of others, but the third person in person – one who does not exist apart from the conditions of existence provided by the technical media and union of cultural techniques. The character without qualities gives those techniques a proper name – albeit the name of a reality game, Ripley’s Believe It or Not!

The Systems Turn There’s another toy in Ripley’s Game: ‘The gyroscope Jonathan bought for Georges in Munich turned out to be the most appreciated toy Jonathan had ever given his son. Its magic remained, every time George pulled it from its square box where Jonathan insisted that he keep it.’ The ‘delicate instrument’ is a scale, and working, model, of ‘a larger gyroscope’ that ‘keeps ships from rolling on the sea’. And, ‘to illustrate what he meant’, Jonathan ‘rolled over on the floor, propped on his elbows’ (1999, p. 139). The embodiment, or anthropomorphization, of the little self-correcting machine is clear enough, and not merely in the tendency towards self-illustration (the tendency for acts to trace their own diagram) at work in this little scene. The sociologist Daniel Riesman, for example, in his 1960s best-seller, The Lonely Crowd, had identified the gyroscope as the analogue of what he calls the ‘inner-directed’ person: a new psychological mechanism is ‘invented’: it is what I like to describe as a psychological gyroscope. This instrument, once it is set in motion by the parents and other authorities, keeps the inner-directed person, as we shall see, ‘on course’ even when tradition, as responded to by his character, no longer dictates his moves. (Riesman, 1989, p. 16) Something more then is at stake than the bid for scientific aura implicit in a loose coupling of sociology and mechanics. The gyroscope here is both a toy and a world-view: the gyroscope thus might be seen as a Gedenken-experiment, or better, a Gedenken-machine, with many forms of life. If Ripley, composed of light, is the channel or medium reflecting

24

Crime Culture

on itself, in this scene self-reflection is itself reflected on – via one of the defining instruments of the second machine age. The gyroscope, put simply, is a mechanism that links self-governing to selfobserving – and mechanizes both. The term meaning literally ‘to view the turning’, the gyroscope is introduced in 1852 by the physicist Leon Foucault (finding its first notable use in the device to demonstrate the earth’s rotation, Foucault’s pendulum). Its application to steering mechanisms takes a half century (Elmer Sperry’s development of the gyrostabilizer and gyrocompass for the US Navy) (see Beniger, 1986, pp. 302–7). That application is then one of the delays of the second machine age (see Sachs, 1933). The ‘principle of feedback’ remained like a fish out of water for a period, and unable as yet to find a place to breathe. That is, the self-observing and self-steering instrument; the reciprocal flow of information back into a controller; the ‘control of a machine on the basis of its actual performance rather than its expected performance’ (Wiener, 1950, pp. 151, 24); the need to take into account what the machine has already said, such that effects of events can be carried all around to produce changes at the point of origin (Bateson, 1979, p. 116) – these escalating or vicious circles remained for a period unthinkable.13 It was not yet possible to arrive at a theory of self-reflection that was not also a theory of subjectification. It was not yet possible, put simply, to inhabit the conditions of second-order observation: that, first, whatever is said is said by an observer; that, second, whatever is said is said to an observer; and hence that, third, reflexivity (observing the turn) is not the logical paradox on which the operation of the system founders, but, instead, the temporal condition of possibility that founds it (see Glanville, 2007, pp. 189–96). The modalization of the world is part of that – and the move to periodization via observing modes of seeing: epochs appear as ‘turns’ (in turn, the linguistic turn, the cultural turn, the affective turn) – and thus bound to the distinct forms of media that steer them (from print culture to the age of technical reproducibility to digital culture). This is what it looks like to become acclimated to systems that feed back outcomes into inputs and do so by observing the turn and observing themselves doing so – hence entering into the sequestered, contingent and self-conditioned form of Gesellschaftsspiele, and other social games. These are the conditions of Highsmith’s murder games – and what might be called Highsmith’s cold war. If there is any doubt about this, Highsmith makes the connection as explicit as possible. In this novel about artificial, forged and self-reliant worlds – with all its train and air and postal schedules; all its little regimes of body and message transport and assessment – from readouts of blood counts to the feedback of news reports on the murders (command and control via communication); all its maps and ‘paper places’ and art shops and frame stores – italicizations of the cultural techniques of the media (its necessary self-framing of what it maps and frames); all its ‘endless corridors’ administered by ‘omniscient specialists’ in life and death management – the little life

Playing Dead: Crime as a Social System

25

support systems of an indoor social life; and, in sum, all its observations on these modes of observing and reflection – given all this, here then is the description of Gauthier, ‘the art supply man’ with an artificial eye, and what his way of seeing looks like: Gauthier’s shiny glass eye did not laugh but looked out from his head with a bold stare, as if there were a different brain from Gauthier’s behind that eye, a computer kind of brain that at once could know everything, if someone just set the programming. (Highsmith, 1999, p. 31) These are the technics of a second order of vision, a seeing and knowing via the protocols of a program. A form of binocular vision that provides the feedback links between the human senses and media, this is a complex system of discrete processes that is also a differential relation of observation to itself. The doubling back of seeing and knowing on itself could not be more emphatic than in the later part of the novel, when, for example, ‘a bomb through that window’ is called – ‘Unthinkable!’ (1999, p. 189) – and when the observation of what cannot be observed – ‘double-think’ (1999, p. 233) – is named. We know that observing and observing what cannot be observed – ‘thinking the unthinkable’ – emerges as the very form of cold war thinking (‘the bomb’, brinkmanship and its war games). These are the code words for the cold war world. The looping of thinking back on itself, such that effects feed back into causes, so that the effects of events can be carried all around to produce changes at the point of origin: this thinking the unthinkable is of course epitomized and renamed by a cold war novel, Catch 22 (with ‘22’ as the ordinance of double-think – along with the trick, or catch, of the continuous reentry of the outcome into the intent). We might call that literary reflection on the form of a modernity exasperated with the failure of its own self-description ‘postmodern’; or we might say that it represents something like the R & D phase of R & D.14

War Games At this point it becomes possible to set out, with a bit more detail, the ties between these violence games and what I earlier referred to as form games (literary and otherwise). I want to do so by way of another account of the war game strategy for thinking the unthinkable, this time drawn from the New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell’s recent best-seller, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking. Gladwell presents a series of case studies that amount to something like a ‘gee whiz’ version of systems theory. The same could be said about another New Yorker book, James Surowiecki’s adept The Wisdom of Crowds – which might have been titled ‘the wisdom of systems’. These case studies proceed via a toggling between close-ups (little anecdotes) and pattern (the big picture),

26

Crime Culture

and, by way of these shifts in scale, the first, as if spontaneously, seems to give the second. That is to say, the narrative form of that process arrives as its subject (the power of thinking without thinking; the wisdom of crowds). In both, a recursive and systemic ecology of ignorance (unthinking or non-knowing) yields wisdom, or at least, allows for the appearance of a knowledge a bit more trivial than wisdom – information. It allows for, that is, what Gladwell defines as ‘creating structure for spontaneity’ – the paradox of a meaning that appears without intention, and its implications (Gladwell, 2005, p. 99). It is the art of war that comes into focus in Gladwell’s centring chapter, ‘Paul Van Riper’s Big Victory’. More precisely, what comes into view is the war gamer’s way of creating form for improvisation: the surprise of thinking without thinking that makes for blink-of-an-eye ‘pattern recognition’, and so decision, in games of strategy. Van Riper, a veteran Vietnam War battalion commander and former head of the Marine Corps University at Quantico, was recruited play the ‘rogue commander’ in the most expensive war game in history: Millennium Challenge ’02. It cost a quarter of a billion dollars to play out, and amounted to a ‘full dress rehearsal for war’ – that is to say, for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Here is the way one of his soldiers described Van Riper in action: He was always out in the field . . . figuring out what to do next. If he had an idea and he had a scrap of paper in his pocket, he would write that idea on the scrap, and then, when we had a meeting, he would pull out seven or eight pieces of paper. Once he and I were in the jungle a few yards from a river, and he wanted to reconnoiter over certain areas, but he couldn’t get the view he anted . . . Damned if he didn’t take off his shoes, dive into the river, swim out to the middle, and tread water so he could see. (2005, p. 100) There is something of a resemblance between this double-entry system of observation and act, seeing and recording, and Gauthier’s computer eye. But there is something of a resemblance as well to the patients that the psychiatrist Charcot, in his account of fin de siecle maladies of energy and will (‘fatigue amnesia’), described as ‘l’homme du petit papier’: men with little pieces of paper, who arrived for sessions, ‘with slips of paper endlessly listing their ailments’ – as they knew how they felt and what they saw only by reading about it. The recording of the act enters into the act, such that the act consists both of itself and its registration. What appears in Charcot as a modern malady of agency here appears as the art of thinking without thinking, and a selective adaptation to the second machine age.15 One observes by recording, which makes the act and its recording two sides of a single formation. There is a live transfer between them. There is, therefore, a routinized non-distinction between training and fighting (‘believe it or not . . . we would practice platoon and squad tactics or bayonet training in the bush. And we did it on a routine basis’ [2005, p. 104; emphasis mine]). That is, there

Playing Dead: Crime as a Social System

27

is a routine coming down of the distinction between dress rehearsal and act – or between war game and war: ‘Sometimes when Blue Team fired a missile or launched a plane, a missile actually fired or a plane actually took off, and whenever it didn’t, one of forty-two separate computer models simulated each of those actions so precisely that the people in the war room often couldn’t tell it wasn’t real’ (2005, p. 104). This doubling of observation and act (and so the doubling of reality) structures these war game scenarios.16 The games themselves migrate between military and entertainment industries, as part of what has been described as the military-entertainment complex. (And Millennium Challenge was not just a run-up to the war in Iraq; its engineered outcome scripted the war plan – and its marketing.) Familiar too by now is the sequestration, or self-suspension, of game worlds and their rules of irrelevance: the war gamers set up shop in ‘huge, windowless rooms known as test bays’ (2005, p. 103) in the Joint Forces Command building – windowless black-boxed monads. Thus, Van Riper discovers that the ‘only difference’ between stock traders on Wall Street and those who ‘played war games on computer’ is that ‘one group bet on money and the other bet on lives’ (2005, p. 108). The war game, in short, is a ‘management system’ (2005, p. 119) mixing ‘complexity theory and military strategy’ (2005, p. 106). It operates via a predictive and recursive guide system – but one without ‘specific guidance’, intents, or effects: ‘I mean that the overall guidance and the intent were provided by me and the senior leadership . . . but the forces in the field wouldn’t depend on . . . orders coming from the top . . . I never wanted to hear the word “effects” . . . We would not get caught up in any of these mechanistic processes’ (2005, p. 118). The war game is then one of the parlour games (Gesellschaftsspiele) in which one must observe what the opponent observes or can’t observe, and whether or not he can observe that: ‘What my brother always says is, “hey, say you are looking at a chess board. Is there anything you can’t see? No. But are you guaranteed to win? Not at all, because you can’t see what the other guy is thinking”’ (2005, p. 144).17 It’s not hard to see then how parlour games enter into social games, and war games. But it is the form of these games – these form games – that concerns for the moment. To understand the ‘internal computer’ that creates structure for improvisation or spontaneity (the power of thinking without thinking) is, for Gladwell, to understand that improvisation ‘is an art form governed by a series of rules’ (2005, p. 113). And here ‘art form’ comes to mean then the paradox of improvised form: the ongoing reproduction of action out of action. This art form governed by serialized rules is part of an aesthetic of cold war modernism. One historian of brinkmanship (or blinkmanship), in the ‘intuitive science’ of thermonuclear war, Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, lucidly sets out the terms of analysis sponsored by the RAND corporation: ‘Setting the terms for gaming and man-machine simulations in the 1950s and later, RAND analysts commended these techniques for sharpening intuition, stimulating creativity,

28

Crime Culture

offering insight into complex fields of interaction, exploring intersubjective exchanges in an interdisciplinary research setting, instilling tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainties, and heightening sensitivity to the practitioners’ own blindspots and rigidities’ (Ghamari-Tabrizi, 2005, p. 170). That setting of the terms puts R & D in the orbit of an aesthetic modernism premised on art as paradox: the paradox of structure and spontaneity, which one can call ‘art’ (or the paradox of ‘form and intent in the American new criticism’, which one can then deconstruct).18 We might see this, I’ve suggested, as another of the delays of the second machine age. That’s to see modern literature (or literature from the standpoint of modernity) as something of a preadaptive advance on the social systems of reflexive modernity (an advance that can then be played out with real social consequences). And I am referring again as well then to the delays in its recognition or theorization: that is, why it takes until the development of cybernetics – and new critical formalism (and its deconstruction) alongside that – for the self-evidence of autopoietic and recursive literary form to become evident. In this way the little game world of the poem or novel (like the little game worlds of the world) realize modern society – as an exceptional and at the same time exemplary case. We know that literature was always already and from the start a form game – such that the non-recognition of that seems as strange as the inability (in the paradox of Maxwell’s demon) to understand informationprocessing as real work, or, correlatively, as strange as the inability (in the paradox of feedback) to understand that the effect is not the cause (and so the form not the intent).19 Here one moves from dice games to games of strategy; from the calculus of probabilities to recursive systems theory; from the great probability salesman of the nineteenth century, Laplace, to the great cybernetics booster of the twentieth, Wiener. I have tracked elsewhere (Seltzer, 2007) the first, via Poe and his advent crime story about the death of a beautiful woman – ’The Mystery of Marie Roget’ – and, along the way, about structure and motive in modern crime. The second, in these pages, via Highsmith. The crime story, with its dependence on the topoi of motive and surprise, is of course the happy hunting ground of intention (the motive of the crime) and outcome (the form of its surprise). Hence it provides an economical way of dramatizing (or overdramatizing) the feedback loops between structure and spontaneity – and the tautological repetition that secures the genre as genre. For Poe, for example, ‘accident forms part of the superstructure’. And the reinhabiting of intentions a way of apprehending the criminal by reverse-engineering the plot. But this from the start appears as a trick or paradox (not least the paradox of waiting to be surprised). In ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, for example, the doubling of motive and act means entering into the motives of an actor who cannot properly have motives or perform acts (an orangutan: providing a version of what Poe elsewhere calls ‘motive not motivirt’). One can either start from the form side or from the intent side, and either way keep discovering that structure and motivation, form and intent, keep

Playing Dead: Crime as a Social System

29

shifting sides. This is (I’ve elsewhere suggested) something like another game about intent and outcome: the very young child who plays hide-and-seek by saying, ‘I’m going to hide here, now you try to find me.’ Or it is like the looping effects of an historical interpretation by which persons and acts illustrate the conditions that make up the persons who act that way. Or, it is like the paradox of the work of art as at once exceptional and exemplary, with respect to reflexive modernity. ‘In explaining the work of art’, as Niklas Luhmann frames it, ‘one frequently draws on the artist’s intention in producing the work, but this is trivial, a tautological explanation, because the intent must be feigned, while its psychological correlates remain inaccessible’ (1995, p. 68). Since the artwork, and its production, can only be comprehended as intentional, ‘this raises the issue of how to dissolve the tautological construct of productive intent and unfold this tautology in ways that yield intelligible representations.’ The work’s ‘artificiality provokes the question of purpose’ in that it displays ‘something unexpected, something inexplicable, or as it is often put, something new’ and so creates structure for spontaneity (1995, p. 309). The unfolding of the tautology of purpose or intent, and all the paradoxes it provokes, raise further questions, some of which I have taken up here. What then is the status of these form games in modern social systems? Or, more exactly, what is the status of the work of art in the age of reflexive social systems – systems marked by the apriorization of the media? For one thing, the unfolding of that tautology then means that, in understanding ‘art as a social system’, one understands that ‘the art system realizes society in it own realm as an exemplary case’ (1995, p. 309).20 But, for another, if the art system (and its form games) then reflects reflexive modernity, the notion of the autonomy of art and the notion of the exemplarity of art enter into each other at every point. Luhmann expresses that paradoxical re-entry in these terms: ‘The theme of reflection does not define the meaning of the autonomy of art, but the meaning of the doubling of reality (Realitätsverdoppelung) in which this autonomy established itself’ (1995, pp. 312–13). That is to say, the theme of reflection arrives as its own theme – and, collaterally, the medium appears (or stages itself) as its own object. Put as simply as possible, this means it’s not that art explains society or that society explains art. If one takes seriously the form of recursive causal systems (form games), then the explanation is precisely that, an explanation, and not what is explained. The effect is not the cause – which is to say, the artwork works like a black box.

Form Games; Or, 2 + 2 = 5 The black box is a conceptual machine that makes possible ‘that most magical of tricks, a way of acting confidently with/from the unknown/unknowable’

30

Crime Culture

(see Glanville, 2007, p. 189). Consider, for example, a simple version of black box theory, this one from Ross Ashby’s Introduction to Cybernetics: The child who tries to open a door has to manipulate the handle (the input) so as to produce the desired movement at the latch (the output); and he has to learn how to control the one by the other without being able to see the internal mechanism that links them. In our daily lives we are confronted by every turn with systems whose internal mechanisms are not fully open to inspection, and which must be treated by the methods appropriate to the Black Box. (1956, p. 86) The difference between input and output means that there is a before and an after, and that this is a difference that makes a difference. The job is then to find a causal connection between them. (Thus, the centrality of the notions of regularities in behaviour and pattern recognition – and the shift from discourses governed by meaning and sense to those driven by pattern and code [see Kittler, 1990].) It means too that whitening the black box (to see how it really works) or eliminating it (by positing a simple equivalence between outputs and inputs – for example, intention = meaning) is to posit a simple equivalence between map and territory and so between cause and effect. The contemporary differentiation of knowledges and their rival media of communication (from the conflict of the faculties to the extreme narrowness of inter- or transdisciplinary citation circles) make that clear enough. The owl of Minerva may still take flight at dusk, but now there are a lot of them (and, as in Harry Potter stories, they just deliver the mail). These ecologies of ignorance are black boxes – ways of acting confidently, and building descriptions of the world, out of the unknown and out of ‘knowing about non-knowing’, since there is no alternative anyway. Here one might return to the question of observation in the formation of knowledge (and self-knowledge). For example, one way of making use of the seeing-machine, or panopticon, set out in Foucault’s account of Bentham’s architectural mechanism, might be to ‘try out pedagogical experiments’: in particular to take up once again the well-debated problem of secluded education, by using orphans. One would see what would happen when, in their sixteenth or eighteenth year, they were presented with other boys or girls; one could verify whether, as Helvetius thought, anyone could learn anything; one would ‘the genealogy of every observable idea’; one could bring up different children according to different systems of thought, making certain children believe that two and two did not make four or that the moon is a cheese, then put them together when they are twenty or twenty-five years old; one would then have discussions that would be worth a great deal more than the sermons or lectures on which so much money is spent; one would

Playing Dead: Crime as a Social System

31

have at least an opportunity of making discoveries in the domain of metaphysics. (1977, p. 204) But if, in these experiments, one can make persons believe, say, that 2 + 2 = 5, this necessarily means something a bit different than that power = knowledge. That is, to the extent that such experiments issue in discoveries and not simply tautologies this means something other than that ‘knowledge follows the advances of power’. (Or, again, that the cause is simply the effect.) The little games that Foucault here describes are games of strategy. And that means that the seeing-machine must deal with what the machine has already seen and already said, and take cognizance of that: the seeing-machine is a black box in that the players see that too. Or, as the narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro’s recent novel Never Let Me Go puts it, ‘We lost ourselves completely in our game . . . And yet, all the time, I think we must have had an idea of how precarious the foundations of our fantasy were, because we always avoided any confrontation’: ‘we all played our part . . . in making it last as long as possible’ (2005, pp. 47, 52). The prolonging of the play, in Never Let Me Go, is a prolongation of knowing not knowing. (And Ishiguro is perhaps the great contemporary novelist of nonknowing, and the little social systems that make it up. And in that sense, if no other, ‘Jamesian’.) The small worlds of the novel – the playing field, the school, the hospital and the art world: each a ‘smart cosy self-contained world’ (2005, pp. 157–8) – are the scenes of a Bildungsroman of sorts. And the pedagogical experiments in the novel – a boarding school centres it – provide something of a limit-case of persons brought up according to different systems of thought. The case resembles in part ‘playing in a sandpit’, with all its sandbox elements; or, alternatively, the playing of a ‘chess game’ and the attempt to ‘teach the game’ – but without knowing how to play it, since one observed the play with no sense of the rules, and so made them up from that. The novel thus proliferates maps and models of how to play its games, from ‘scaled down [and scaled up] versions’ (2005, p. 66) to ‘life-size skeletons’ (2005, p. 83) to ‘secret games’ (2005, p. 90): it multiplies small worlds, and, in doing so, proliferates scale models of a self-modelling world – and cases of defective knowledge.21 These are then parts, or, we discover, ‘spare parts’, of a world. And the pedagogical experiment is a limit-case in making up persons according to different systems of thought in that it’s not quite clear that they are exactly persons. These schoolchildren are, we learn (or learn that we already knew), ‘clones – or students, as we preferred to call you’ (2005, p. 261). They are grown for spare parts, the ‘donations’ that will ‘complete’ their lives and prolong the lives of others. And the ‘first-person’ narration by one of the students (named ‘Kathy H.’ – as if she were a real character in a novel: that is, an artificial person or clone) is a way of not seeing and not knowing and (one of the novel’s code words, or terms of art) ‘deferring’ that.

32

Crime Culture

Never Let Me Go is thus a modern murder mystery of sorts. It is a story about making up and taking lives, and, along those lines, about the media-cultural techniques – the biopolitics, and art – of life and death. The art world is one of the artificial small worlds of the novel, albeit not merely one among others: creating ‘your art’, and then showing it on the market, ‘will reveal your inner selves’ (2005, pp. 175, 254). The art work, in short, is what makes perception, and self-perception, available for communication: it will tell us ‘what you were like inside’ (2005, p. 260). The art work – and the art scene and market that determines what works as art – thus betoken the entitlements of personhood and its observation, and self-observation. But the relation of part to whole – and of what’s inside to what can be observed – are here bound to something else. ‘That homo has a brain’, as the cybernetics theorist Ross Ashby expressed it, ‘no more entitles him to assume he knows how he thinks than possession of a liver entitles him to assume that he knows how he metabolises’ (Ashby, 2004). If art then is the measure of interiority in Never Let Me Go, this is not exactly because it reveals that one has an interior of a particular kind. It’s designed to reveal that there is a difference between interior states and bodily ones, and so between self-reference and other-reference. (Here the difference between utterance and information is the felt difference between having and knowing.) That conserves the place value of an opacity and an ignorance – a black box – that makes it possible to keep going (and for parts of one body – say, a liver – to keep the life of an other going.) Hence whitening the black box turns out to be the same thing as explaining the art work. And explaining the work of art becomes the same thing as doing away with the distinction between observing others and observing ourselves. That would mean seeing not merely what the other guy is thinking but seeing what we are thinking – and seeing that, without deferral, opacity or reserve. It would be as if our insides could be turned inside-out and opened to view, like the parts of a simple machine, one that turns inputs into outcomes (and intent into form) with nothing changing in-between. This amounts to an imaginary machine that works like a white box: a perpetual and immortal machine, one that runs on an endless loop – like the tape-recordings of the song that gives the novel its title and refrain, ‘never let me go’. That dream machine is one that runs with a perfect continence, since it loses nothing and gains nothing along the way. But if 2 + 2 = 4, the game, of course, is over.

Notes 1

2

This not merely, it will be seen, in that the observed scene of the crime – a demarcated and ruled zone of motive and act, outcome and information – looks like the scene of the game. I am here picking up from the postscript to my True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity (Seltzer, 2007). For a useful summary of game theory and its discontents, see Poundstone, 1992, pp. 167–78.

Playing Dead: Crime as a Social System 3

4

5

6 7

33

The games I am considering here are pathological games – ‘funny games’ in the sense that Michael Haneke gives to violent play in his film of the same name. In a 1952 letter to Norbert Wiener, Gregory Bateson observed: ‘What applications of the theory of games do, is to reinforce the players’ acceptance of the rules and competitive premises, and therefore make it more and more difficult for the players to conceive that there might be other ways of meeting and dealing with each other . . . Von Neumann’s “players” differ profoundly from people and mammals in that those robots totally lack humor and are totally unable to “play” (in the sense in which the word is applied to kittens and puppies).’ For example: historical reality (singular persons and events that are real but accidental and inessential); fictional reality (persons and events that are unreal but representative or essential); and real – that is, mathematical or statistical – reality (numbers are, of course, the first virtual reality). The co-emergence of the realistic novel (fictional reality) and the calculus of probabilities and statistics is well known; so too the collateral emergence of the fictional and the historical turns (not least in the rise of historical fiction). As Niklas Luhmann concisely puts it, ‘Modernity has invented probability calculations just in time to maintain a fictionally created, dual reality . . . what are we to make of the fact that the world is now divided into two kinds of reality – a world of singular events and a world of statistics (or of inductive references), a reality out there and a fictional reality?’ (1995, pp. 70, 175) And, in the early 1840s, the first scheduled oceanic steamship service; the first railway hotel (in New York), along with railway station book shops; the earliest department stores; the first modern urban system for the separate circulation of water and sewage (Chadwick in Britain); the first ‘package’ tour – Thomas Cook’s, between Leicester and Loughborough. And so on. For a useful summary of these systems tending towards total mobilization, see Urry, 2007, pp. 3–16. See also Beniger, 1986. It should be clear that ‘1839’ is then a relay-point, not a point of origin: what I will take up as the apriorization of the media as ground of existence, a self-referential (self-observed) media union. I am indebted here to Siegert, 1999, pp. 110, 109 et passim. The second chapter of Ripley’s Game opens by italicizing precisely this shift from meaning and sense to pattern and code: ‘So it was that some ten days later, on 22 March, Jonathan . . . received a curious letter from his good friend Alan McNear . . . Jonathan had expected – or rather not expected – a sort of thank-you letter from Alan for the send-off party’ (1999, p. 13). We might read this as a little lesson in the rudiments of information theory. ‘So it was’ is then the renovated idiom of a now postally sponsored fate, keeping its appointed rounds. The postal friend then – one who is near but also far (‘mcnear’) – is less a subject than a position, a position in the communicative circuit . And what then makes possible the paradoxical equivalence of the expected and the not expected here is the pattern of expectations that yields the sort of thank-you letter, its technical conditions of possibility: ‘The more probable the message, the less information it gives . . . The transmission of information is impossible save as a transmission of alternatives. If only one contingency is to be transmitted, then it may be sent most efficiently and with the least trouble by sending no message at all’ (Wiener, 1950, p. 12). The epistolary novel and the detective/crime novel are the two basic forms of narrative fiction. Here they are braided together: in Highsmith’s crime novels,

34

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

Crime Culture there is a proliferation of letters, copied into the narrative. The love letter (which communicates the incommunicable) and the thank-you note (which says what goes without saying) approach the minimal trouble of the greeting card. In that curvature towards standardized values and the efficient regulation of mutual involvement, the channel represents itself in the channel. A typology of the postepistolary (the postal squared) novel might be set out, from, say, Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) – both gothicized epistolary novels – to Highsmith’s Ripley novels – criminalized ones. Consider, to take two obvious fictional examples, its rehearsals in Thomas Pynchon’s novel of war and information, Gravity’s Rainbow, or Neil Stephenson’s about war games and Turing machines, Cryptonomicon. My concern in this piece is with what this looks like in parlour games like the murder novel. In systems-theoretical terms, it turns to second-order observation – the observation of observation – and so to a second order of vision. As Michael North has reminded me, the notion of the photograph as scale-free network is misleading, voiding its material conditions. The blow-up instead makes visible the distinction between medium and form. I touch on Ripley’s mediality in my True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity (Seltzer, 2007, pp. 113–16). The italicized phrase is drawn from Giorgio Agamben’s The Man without Content (Agamben, 1999). These self-steering mechanisms (Wiener’s term ‘cybernetics’ is, of course, derived from the Greek word for steersman) involve ‘a method of controlling a system by reinserting into it the results of its past performance’ – feeding back of outcomes into input; it involves, that is, ‘the unpurposeful random mechanism which seeks for its own purpose through a process of learning’ (Wiener, 1950, p. 38). The cold war think-tank – the operations centre of contemporary war gaming – is, of course, the RAND Corporation, and RAND, of course – in what Marcuse called our administrative ‘syntax of abbreviation’ – is an acronym for researchand-development. On Charcot, see Rabinbach, 1990, p. 160. I examine these pathologies of agency and maladies of will in Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (Seltzer, 1998, pp. 74–81). The point not to be missed is that the re-entry of observation into act is the real innovation of the managerial/control revolution: the observation and registration of the work process enter into the work process, or, better, emerge as the work process itself (the transference between the act and its registration, combining the symbolic and the real). That is, the ‘gee whiz’ effect in these reality games is – Believe it or not! – constitutive: the construction of reality and the reality of construction are continually differentiated, and go on in and through each other. The connection between the name Ripley and the reality show is explicit in The Talented Mr. Ripley. Or, in the terms of Ripley’s Game: ‘How much did the enemy know?’ (1999, p. 167). And: ‘Was it even a game?’ (1999, p. 189). I am here referencing Paul de Man’s unfolding of the premises of American new critical formalism in his Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (1983, pp. 20–35). It goes without saying that such arguments will convince no one for whom the aesthetic difference is precisely abiding in ambiguity – or better living through undecidability.

Playing Dead: Crime as a Social System 20

21

35

The point not to be missed is that this is to raise the question of art ‘as’ social system, not to posit their identity. For Luhmann, society consists in communications and nothing else. But the notion that art ‘makes perception available for communication’ and the notion of art as social system (and so distinct from perceptual systems) remain in paradox in Luhmann’s account. That account is relatively uninterested in the cultural techniques via which media take form. How those cultural techniques enter into and register perception is part of what I have been setting out here. The novel thus tacks closely to the genre of the Bildungsroman, with its secluded microsocieties – and their ‘miniaturization’ in the ‘aesthetic harmony of the individual’ (see Moretti, 1987, p. 36). It tacks closely to its history of a self-modelling on a model-picture (Bild), with the difference that the genre here epitomizes itself: it is a Bildungsroman told from the standpoint of a clone, or picture-model. The microsociety of the novel is a society that sees itself as self-constituting and, therefore, self-observing, via career ‘carers’ and ‘donor’ figures – death, and life, thus making up the dark side of a career. In short, the novel continues to play out the semantic vocation of the Bildungsroman after its story of social and individual harmonization has been officially abandoned.

Chapter 2

Psychopathology as a Game: J. G. Ballard and Conceptual Crime Benjamin Noys

The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd, with his belly at barrel level. André Breton, The Surrealist Manifesto, 1924 A criminal’s lawyers are seldom artists enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of the deed to the advantage of him who did it. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886 Every work of art is an uncommitted crime. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, 1951

Introduction A report in The New York Times of 18 December 2002 by Michael Kimmelman concerned 25-year-old Clinton Boisvert, who placed 37 black boxes with the word ‘Fear’ on them around Union square subway station for a student art project. The boxes caused a panic, which led to the police shutting down the station and calling in the bomb squad; they also led to Manhattan district attorney’s office bringing charges of reckless endangerment against Boisvert after he had surrendered. Kimmelman chooses to first comment on the paucity of the quality of the boxes as a work of art: The state of public and political art has now declined to the point that plenty of people who follow it simply presumed last week that what happened at Union Square must be a work of art, not a fake bomb by a terrorist or a threat by a union member contemplating a transit strike. In the 1960’s, people

J. G. Ballard and Conceptual Crime

37

might have guessed it was a loony labor activist; in the Son of Sam 70’s, a loony loner. Yesterday’s loony loner is today’s Conceptual artist. (Kimmelman, 2002) If we look beneath the tone of schadenfreude at Boisvert’s fate we can read here the strange metonymic equation between the labour activist, the terrorist, the serial killer and the conceptual artist: here are all the folk-devils of neoliberalism. The figuration of crime has passed from political protest, through nihilistic violence, to the purely conceptual. J. G. Ballard had already picked apart the possibility of such a conceptual crime in an interview given in 1982. He remarked upon the incident at the 1981 ‘Trooping the Colour’ in which a man fired six blank shots at Queen Elizabeth II: [A] young man fired six shots at her from one of those replica pistols [actually a starting gun] – they fire blanks. He was arrested. I thought it was a wonderful conceptual act actually, to fire a replica pistol at a figurehead – the guy could have been working for Andy Warhol! (Ballard, 1984a, p. 7) Ballard formulates the conceptual nature of the crime as a version of the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ – the uncanny revelation of the ‘empty’ nature of symbolic power through another symbol. At this point a literal crime is still being committed, and it is noteworthy that the young man had originally tried to acquire a real gun. Ballard, however, argues that we could go further: I wondered if you held up a sign with the word ‘Pistol’ on it, would that constitute an offense? . . . Even the word might be offensive. Or a sign saying ‘Assassination’. Does the sign itself constitute an offensive act? It’s hard to say, because fantasy and reality are no longer separable, are they? (1984a, p. 7) In this case the ‘crime’ becomes purely conceptual: detaching the sign from its referent, crime passes over into the intentional construction. The inseparability of fantasy and reality, however, means that such a conceptual crime can easily be read as an actual criminal act. Ballard’s provocative comments offer a retrospective key to read his work of the late 1960s and 1970s as the probing of the possibilities of ‘crime’ in the context of the destabilization of the boundary between fantasy and reality. This involves a radicalization of the status of the conceptual. In his seminal ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ (1967) Sol LeWitt wrote that: In conceptual art the idea of concept is the most important aspect of the work . . . all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. (2005, p. 180)

38

Crime Culture

While LeWitt suggests the possibility of art becoming purely conceptual, Ballard instead explores the situation in which a conceptual art confronts an increasingly conceptual ‘reality’. If, as Ballard noted in his 1974 preface to the French edition of Crash, ‘[w]e live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind’ (Ballard, 1985b, p. 8), then the nominative power of the post-Duchampian conceptual artist to decide that this particular idea is art seems fundamentally compromised. The unfortunate Boisvert foolishly relied on such a power, when a reading of Ballard might have suggested more caution was advisable. We have become overly familiar with describing the situation of the destabilization of fantasy and reality as ‘postmodernism’; Ballard, more sardonically, prefers to call it ‘boredom’ (Ballard, 2008). Boredom results, in part, from the fact that any original artistic conceptualization is always threatened with being pre-empted or outflanked by the conceptual nature of reality itself. If the conceptual crime is treated as merely conceptual then it can be absorbed within the image-bank of post-modernity, however if it is treated as crime then it can be folded within the discourse of law. As an experimental writer who deliberately embraced the genre of science fiction, the genre of the future, it comes as no surprise that Ballard should be acutely sensitive to this double-bind. A return to Ballard’s fiction of the early 1970s, and especially his 1970 anti-novel The Atrocity Exhibition, offers the opportunity to defamiliarize the boring familiarity of this situation. In that work Ballard developed highly original artistic strategies of conceptualization, which function as what he would later call a ‘predictive mytholog[y]’ (1984b, p. 42; original emphasis), and that aim at trying to radically ‘out-conceptualize’ and outbid an already conceptualized ‘reality’. In particular Ballard probes the possibility of the refiguration of crime, which is already dilated through this destabilization of reality and fantasy, as a truly ‘conceptual crime’.

Elective Psychopathy The Atrocity Exhibition is Ballard’s most radical attempt to analyse and refigure the colonization of the life-world by the ‘society of the spectacle’ (Debord, 1983). Aping the fragmented and yet continuous form of the stream of mediatized images it forms a kind of ‘wild psychoanalysis’ of what Ballard selfconsciously, and not without humour, identifies as: ‘Sixties iconography: the nasal prepuce of L.B.J., crashed helicopters, the pudenda of Ralph Nader, Eichmann in drag, the climax of a New York happening: a dead child’ (1985a, p. 20). The singularity of such a listing suggests the perverse, yet coolly neutral, tone of the work; a deliberate mix of the neutrality of the scientific journal with the bizarre clashes of tone characteristic of the surrealists. In this way Ballard becomes a pioneering analyst of what we could call the ‘media unconscious’ – the site in which the Freudian drives and the Jungian archetypes are externalized and condensed in the figures of mediatized desire (circa the 1950s and

J. G. Ballard and Conceptual Crime

39

1960s): John F. Kennedy, Madame Chang Kai-shek, Jayne Mansfield, Marilyn Monroe and Ronald Reagan (see Gasiorek, 2005, p. 60). In a world ruled by media fictions and the commodity the writer no longer has a monopoly on the production of fiction, and instead ‘[t]he writer’s task is to invent the reality’ (Ballard, 1985b, p. 8). To invent reality does not require the positing of some truer reality that is concealed by these fictions, but rather a ‘new realism’ that recurs to the only remaining piece of reality available to the writer: ‘the contents of his own head, he offers a set of options and imaginative alternatives’ (Ballard, 1985b, p. 9). In the face of the disintegration of the boundary between the ‘inner’ world of the psyche and the ‘outer’ world of reality the writer can only compete with the constant materialization of our desires in the form of new images and commodities by a kind of absolute alienation and externalization of their ‘own’ psyche. In a state where we have no ‘inner’ world, the contents of our head are a profoundly ambiguous resource: at once shaped and colonized by external ‘reality’, but also offering the only small space of freedom for use to rework and reshape that reality. In this situation criminality also becomes delinked from its usual referent of the criminal act, and so to think criminally can become a form of criminal activity. Of course there have been many situations where certain forms of thinking have been criminalized, notably ‘dissident’ religious and political views. Modern legal systems, however, have enshrined freedom of thought as a key right; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed by the United Nations on 10 December 1948, guarantees the ‘the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion’ in article 18 (UN, 1948). If thought and reality can no longer be treated as separable we face the reversible situation in which thought can become crime, and crime be treated as a kind of disordered thought. The Atrocity Exhibition examines this expansion of the category of criminality into the psyche, the potential criminalization of desire itself, through a focus on psychopathology and perversion. Although such categories are not necessarily criminal, if thought becomes a site of crime then our own ‘pathologies’ and our own ‘perversities’ can be immediately incited and structured as crimes in status nascendi. Rather than abandoning such pathologies and perversities for some new asceticism, Ballard instead suggests that we inhabit and radicalize them in an act of ‘elective psychopathy’ (2008). Instead of trying to restabilize a modernist distinction between inner and outer, thought and reality, crime and law, Ballard’s fiction pursues a further destabilization: ‘he moved deeper into his own psychosis’ (1985a, p. 9). Peopled with psychiatrists and their patients, Ballard’s characters face the question ‘Was he a doctor, or a patient? Neither category seemed valid, nor for that matter mutually exclusive’ (1985a, p. 47). In particular, the conceptual becomes the means by which his ‘characters’, and the fiction itself, probe a radicalization of pathology and perversity: conceptual death (1985a, p. 18), the conceptual car crash (1985a, p. 21), conceptual assassination (1985a, p. 38), conceptual flight (1985a, p. 55), conceptual sex (1985a,

40

Crime Culture

p. 56), conceptual war (1985a, p. 11). These possibilities represent the desperate attempts to reclaim ‘reality’ in the form of excessive conceptualization that can resist actually existing conceptual reality. In this way the ‘conceptual crime’ tries to hold the elements of conceptualization and crime together as the truly inventive moment, and prevent their rupture into either mere concept or mere crime. Ballard multiplies strategies to this effect. Perhaps the most familiar is the deployment of perversity to encourage a new conceptual logic of transgression that ruptures with artistic and legal norms. If, in classical modernism, sexuality, and especially perverse sexuality, could figure what Alain Badiou calls ‘the passion for the real ’ (2007, p. 32; original emphasis), now, in post-sexual liberation, it loses that function. Ballard’s answer is that this liberation of sexuality into the conceptual is not something to be regretted, say in the name of a return to a ‘natural’ sexuality, but something to be taken further: ‘Now that sex is becoming more and more a conceptual act, an intellectualization divorced from affect and physiology alike, one has to bear in mind the positive merits of the sexual perversions’ (1985a, p. 56). Ballard retools transgression from its previous taboobreaking function, into a new form of the sexual act in which it becomes possible to imagine that we might desire to ‘sodomize the Festival Hall’ (1985a, p. 57). Prefiguring his later novel Crash (1973), Ballard singles out the ‘conceptual car crash’ as a site which condenses and marries together sex, death and perversion: Apart from its ontological function, redefining the elements of space and time in terms of our most potent consumer durable, the car crash may be perceived unconsciously as a fertilizing rather than a destructive event – a liberation of sexual energy – mediating the sexuality of those who have died with an intensity impossible in any other form. (1985a, p. 23) In this case we can see the ambiguity of Ballard’s strategy. On the one hand, Ballard plunges us further into the conceptual, but, on the other hand, this seems to promise a new form of ‘liberation’ – the re-enchantment of ‘reality’ in the form of a superior passion. Jean Baudrillard, writing on Crash, pointed out the precise nature of this ambiguity: Ballard’s attempt to instantiate a ‘new perverse logic’ was in tension with his embrace of a non-transgressive strategy of engagement with hyperreality (1994, p. 113). The difficulty with the strategy of transgression is that it remains locked into giving the world a new meaning, and, in terms of the conceptual crime, remains locked into the spiral of incitement of the law. In this case ‘conceptual crime’ never really destabilizes the relation of crime and law, but instead operates in the promise of some mythic crime that would somehow escape law while all the while such a crime relies on law for its effect (and affect). This, according to Baudrillard, ironically returns Ballard to the position of moral critic (1994, p. 119). Ballard wants to save sexuality for liberation, to return it to a moral

J. G. Ballard and Conceptual Crime

41

purpose, in a strange kind of humanism in which ‘[t]he only way we can make contact with each other is in terms of conceptualizations’ (1985a, p. 77); as Ballard retrospectively remarked that ‘The Atrocity Exhibition tried to find a new sense in what had become a kind of morally virtual world’ (2008). The car crash then, no longer tries to hold together the ‘conceptual crime’ as an unstable amalgam that further destabilizes conceptualization by the conceptual. Instead, it returns to the quasi-Weberian task of re-enchanting a disenchanted reality. The character Travers, for example, ‘has composed a series of new sexual deviations, of a wholly conceptual character, in an attempt to surmount this death of affect’ (Ballard, 1985a, p. 80). In this case transgression seems to promise a means to challenge our reduction to ‘mere extensions of the geometries of situations’ (Ballard, 1985a, p. 80). Ballard was self-aware enough to note the difficulty. Creating a ‘Festival of Atrocity Films’ the character Talbot is forced to the realization that ‘the results were disappointing; whatever Talbot had hoped for had clearly not materialized. The violence was little more than a sophisticated entertainment. One day he would carry out of Marxist analysis of this lumpen intelligentsia’ (Ballard, 1985a, p. 19). The transformation of the transgressive desire for re-enchantment into ‘sophisticated entertainment’ indicates the potential fate of such a strategy: feeding the stream of media images by being treated as a mere game. In this case conceptual crime circulates between law and the image, unable to escape from either.

The Assassination Weapon The fate of any ‘festival of atrocity’ appears to be the celebration of the image as site of redemption, which then simply makes the image available for recuperation, and leaves us with only the fantasmatic promise of liberation. Instead of holding together the strange conjunction of the conceptual and crime, they threaten to fly apart, with the crime posed against the conceptual. The pursuit of some ultimate crime, of some truly conceptual crime, runs aground on the recuperative powers of capitalism to subsume and reterritorialize any such image. Of course, the result then would appear to be pessimism, à la certain moments in Baudrillard, in which we must simply embrace conceptualization as such. There is, however, another strategy at work in Ballard’s text. This strategy can be best explored in terms of what Gilles Deleuze has argued is ‘the traumatic depersonalization and defamiliarisation demanded by art’ (Hallward, 2006, p. 108). Instead of the transgressive search for an irrecuperable crime, this strategy involves a radicalized subtraction of crime from the usual forms of criminality. Looping crime through the conceptual would allow us to accede to a formal conceptualization of crime as a subtractive and even ‘spiritual’ experience. Ballard belongs, I will argue, to the series of Deleuze’s exemplary artistic subtractions: a smile without a cat (Carroll), a scream without occasion (Francis

42

Crime Culture

Bacon), a childhood without experience (Proust) and now a crime without law (Ballard) (Hallward, 2006, p. 107). Such a reading is apposite as Deleuze himself evinced considerable hostility towards the concept of transgression, which he regarded as a reactive and religious experience too bound to the law it claimed to be breaking.1 In contrast, an aesthetic of subtraction implies a formal experimentation, which aims at constituting an extra-worldly conceptual and spiritual space. In Proust and Signs (1964) Deleuze argues that Proust subjects the ‘signs of the world’ to ‘dematerialization’ (1973, p. 13), and in doing so creates new signs of art that ‘give us a time regained, an original absolute time which includes all the others’ (1973, p. 24). In a strictly comparable fashion, I want to suggest, Ballard dematerializes the ‘signs of crime’, and allows us to regain the possibility of an ‘absolute crime’ that includes all other forms of crime – the crime of art itself, which can reveal and render the ‘spiritual’ essence of crime (see Deleuze, 1973, p. 41). Of course this search for an ‘absolute crime’ might simply seem to recompose the problem of transgression – the search for some exceptional moment that can save or redeem us. There is no doubt that Ballard’s strategy of subtraction is deeply ambiguous, and is intertwined with, and confused with, the strategy of transgression. My aim is not to suggest some purified artistic solution, as Deleuze’s more modernist framings of subtraction perhaps intimate. The point rather is that subtraction is a deliberately ambiguous strategy for the refiguration of crime, one that seeks out ‘a set of options and imaginative alternatives’ (Ballard, 1985b, p. 9), without prejudging their success, or implying some simplistic liberation or artistic immunity. In a way the subtractive strategy plunges even further into the highly ambiguous space of pure experimentation where: ‘what our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths’ (Ballard, 1985b, p. 5). One exemplary instance of this subtractive strategy in The Atrocity Exhibition is the section ‘The Assassination Weapon’ (Ballard, 1985a, pp. 31–8). In a far more radical way than Ballard’s later musings on the possibility of holding up a sign saying ‘Assassination’ as a conceptual crime, the character Traven tries to ‘re-assassinate’ John F. Kennedy by the means of a series of documents. First, of course, we have the problem that this crime has already happened, and perhaps nothing could better indicate the conceptual and subtractive nature of Traven’s crime. In response to the objection that Kennedy is dead Dr Nathan, Traven’s psychiatrist, replies that: ‘This is an attempt to bring about the “false” death of the President – false in the sense of coexistent or alternate. The fact that an event has taken place is no proof of its valid occurrence’ (Ballard, 1985a, p. 35). Certainly, we could regard this as another instance of re-enchantment, as another character remarks of Traven: ‘he wants to kill Kennedy again, but in a way that makes sense’ (Ballard, 1985a, p. 38). This is always a possibility, but I want to suggest that this reactivation of an initial trauma, which functions like the Freudian Nachträglichkeit, in fact destabilizes the ‘sense’ of crime. Hence the

J. G. Ballard and Conceptual Crime

43

final chapter of the novel in which Kennedy’s assassination is reimagined, in the style of Jarry, as a downhill motor race (Ballard, 1985a, pp. 108–10). Instead of ‘closure’ such a subtractive conceptual crime produces a new resignification of the initial crime, not by returning it to ‘reality’ but by opening it to further conceptualization. In this way an alternate future is made available, and the media-stream of the commodified image is ruptured. At the same time this radical subtraction of ‘crime’ from its usual signification by further conceptualization also takes place in the ‘weapon’ that Traven has designed. It consists of a series of documents: (1) a spectroheliogram of the sun; (2) tarmac and take-off checks for the B29 Superfortress Enola Gay; (3) electroencephalogram of Albert Einstein; (4) transverse section through a Pre-Cambrian Trilobite; (5) photograph taken at noon, 7 August 1945, of the sand-sea, Qattara Depression; (6) Max Ernst’s ‘Garden Airplane Traps.’ (Ballard, 1985a, p. 34) This is only one of a series of such itemized lists in the novel, and we could speculate that these ‘terminal documents’, as well as the novel itself, all correspond to some reconceptualized crime, psychopathology or perversion, more, perhaps, that the obvious instances of such activities. To be more precise, we could say they subtract from the obvious instances a more radicalized or virtual conceptual crime. As an assassination weapon this obviously still has a referential relation to crime, so we do not witness the attempt to simply discover an absolute or ultimate crime beyond criminality. Instead, the erasure of the boundary between the fictional and the real entails the invention of a conceptual weapon that can actually bring about what has already happened in (mediatized) reality, but in a form which releases new possibilities and alternatives to that event. Ballard does not try to resist the logic of capitalist commodification and capture, which proceeds by its own abstractive logic of emptying through ‘real abstraction’,2 by trying to find a superior ‘reality’, or even ‘surreality’. In fact, Ballard’s own examples of the conceptual are focused around precisely those features of finite human biological existence – sex and death – that are usually taken as points of resistance. His opening of alternative possibilities does not depend on suggesting that these moment incarnate a superior reality – such as the Lacanian ‘Real’ – but that in their very conceptualization, all the way down, they become available for new subtractive reconceptualizations.

The Conceptual Criminal The desire to achieve a subtractive and purely conceptual criminality through the dematerialization of signs, especially the spatial signs of capital, places a particular burden on the figure of the conceptual criminal. The very

44

Crime Culture

mysteriousness of Traven’s ‘assassination weapon’ seems to require the supplementary naming of it as such a ‘weapon’. Of course, we have already noted that Ballard tries to confront a situation in which this nominative power is no longer secure. Therefore, Ballard’s own role as a writer, and that of his characters who articulate and incarnate these experimental strategies of subtraction, is to negotiate the cramped space for the artist to rework or reform those capitalist ‘real abstractions’. Of course, the difficulty is that this capacity is limited by the reformation and saturation of the subject by such abstractions. Lacking external principles for a new realism, or reference to some ‘Real’ that escapes commodification, the artist seems to be completely vulnerable to immersion in the mediascape. In a key exchange Travers, a disturbed psychiatrist, asks Karen Novotny, ‘the gun moll of intellectual hoodlums’ (Ballard, 1985a, p. 70), ‘wouldn’t you like to be in the movies?’ Her reply is: ‘We’re all in the movies’ (1985a, p. 70). This disintegration of subjecthood is explored in the various narratives that compose The Atrocity Exhibition by creating a series of virtually interchangeable and indistinguishable characters, particularly the series of ‘Travis, Talbot, Travers, Traven’ – patient and psychiatrist, and ‘protagonist’, if that term did not seem so ill-advised. These characters are all ‘moving in a complex of undefined roles’ (Ballard, 1985a, p. 70), and yet this appearance of randomness and fragmentation is also haunted by the possibility of manipulation. It may be that these characters are ‘moving about in other people’s games’ (1985a, p. 70). The Atrocity Exhibition stages a recurring series of games of manipulation in which the roles of ‘victim’ and ‘criminal’, usually figured in terms of doctor and patient, are constantly destabilized and change places. The privileged role of the manipulator appears to be that of the doctor, and especially the psychiatrist – a figure that constantly recurs in Ballard’s later work. The figure of the manipulator returns us, ironically, to that cramped space of freedom in which we might stage a ‘conceptualized psychopathology’ (1985a, p. 99). Of course this figure of the manipulator opens on to another cliché: that of the author-God manipulating his or her characters. For all the supposed playfulness and anti-authoritarian drift of post-modern fiction it is noteworthy that, contra Barthes, the author continues to often play the dominant role of textual manipulator, in both senses. In the case of Ballard’s fiction, if the role of the author is to become the conceptual criminal, pulling the strings of all the characters embodying that function in the text, the result is one of a metadestabilization. Instead of the writer deliberately choosing to abandon the role of the author-God this loss of authority is forced on the writer by a cultural landscape in which their fictions are relegated to second-class status in relation to the primacy of the media. To become a conceptual criminal is to respond to this situation by producing fictions that function as conceptual crimes: a new predictive mythology that probes the destabilized boundary between fantasy and reality. To do so Ballard actively deploys this series of interchangeable and barely characterized avatars of his own authorial self qua conceptual criminal.

J. G. Ballard and Conceptual Crime

45

The attenuation of character is the sign of the subtractive logic at work in the text. This does not simply lead to the inflation of the role of the author, but rather the author too is subject to a ‘traumatic depersonalization’ in their own text. The externalization of the writer’s psyche involves the voiding of his presumed individuality, an anti-humanist strategy of the disintegration of the co-ordinates of the self and their dispersion in the impersonal field of socialized desires. This strategy of depersonalization is always vulnerable to a reductive reading in terms of authorial psychopathology, and the inflationary externalization of the ‘inner’ psyche reinternalized in the figure of the author. It is possible to read Travers, who like Ballard was interned in a Japanese camp (1985a, pp. 73–4), as a thinly veiled authorial surrogate. According to his psychiatrist: Travers’s problem is how to come to terms with the violence that has pursued his life – not merely the violence of accident and bereavement, or the horrors of war, but the biomorphic horrors of our own bodies, the awkward geometry of the postures we assume. (Ballard, 1985a, p. 77) When submitting Crash an editor at Ballard’s publishers is reputed to have written that: ‘This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish!’ (Livingstone, n.d.). Ballard has authorized the possibility of such a reading strategy in his own autobiographical works: Empire of the Sun (1984) permits the reading of his conceptual criminality as being the result of the trauma of his wartime incarceration;3 The Kindness of Women (1991), devoted to the post-war period and including the time in which Ballard wrote The Atrocity Exhibition, lends credence to understanding it as a result of the channelling of the ‘madness’ of the 1960s. Iain Sinclair has noted that these autobiographical fictions allow ‘the humanizing of a profoundly misanthropic oeuvre that had never been contained in genre reservations’ (Sinclair, 1999, p. 18). In another example of heeding D. H. Lawrence’s advice to trust the tale and not the teller, we have to take seriously Ballard’s own experimental traumatic depersonalization of art as more radical than any personal trauma, or pathology. It is only through Ballard’s conceptualization of crime that we can understand this work as breaking away from any authorial psychopathology towards a probing of collective psychopathology. The irony is that this collective dimension can only be reached through the singularization of the figure of the conceptual criminal. The ‘author’ as conceptual criminal is, like his characters, constantly probing the question posed by Karen Novotny in The Atrocity Exhibition: ‘Are you writing me into your scenario[?]’ (Ballard, 1985a, p. 26). This question is dictated by our vulnerability to the rule of fictions that compose ‘the dreams that money can buy’ (Ballard, 1985b, p. 8). The intersection of these fictions within the psyche is what permits their re-externalization and transformation by the writer, but no longer subject to the mastery of the ‘author-God’. Instead the ‘individual’

46

Crime Culture

recognizes that they are composed by these impersonal and multiple fictions and desires, as the writer is also subject to being ‘written in’ to another scenario. The aim of the conceptual criminal is precisely to release crimes that do not remain safely nestled within the text, but are staged to bleed out into reality. In this way they try to evade being written into a scenario by creating a more powerful and persuasive one. In the case of Ballard his success in such a strategy is attested to by the coinage ‘Ballardian’. His conceptualization of the anonymous spatial tropes of capital have come to form an authorial landscape that itself seems to model or predict reality itself, including the reality of new forms of criminality (see Sellars, 2007). ‘Ballard’ writes reality, rather than being written by it, but only through his rewriting of the existing fictions of commodity capital.

Predictive Mythology We noted that Ballard regarded the strategies of his fiction as one of constituting a ‘predictive mythology’. Of course, the difficulty is that the better the predictive success of such a mythology the more likely it will be absorbed and outdone by reality, or hyperreality, itself. If ‘Ballardian’ comes to signify our world – ‘a nexus of endless highways, a terrain of billboards, car marts and undisclosed destinations’ (Ballard, 1985a, p. 69) – then it becomes dispensable. Even worse, Ballard’s own techniques of subtractive hyperconceptualization now seem to have become strategies available to both capitalism and the state. For example, his probing of the sexual psychopathology of advertising and marketing, in which Vietnam combat films shown with a muzak soundtrack create an environment ‘in which work-tasks, social relationships and overall motivation reached sustained levels of excellence’ (1985a, p. 94), now seem to be the operant myths of advertising itself. The very Ballardian fashion photo shoots of Steven Meisel illustrate the point nicely, most notably his 2008 editorial, supposedly based on the 1970s photographs of Japanese exhibitionists by Kohei Yoshiyuki, which was refused by Italian Vogue (Lin, 2008). These images of models in sexually explicit poses are linked to the British (and very Ballardian) invention of ‘dogging’, sexual exhibitionism usually carried out in car parks or after meeting-up by car. Here a supposedly ‘transgressive’ jolt becomes a carefully studied gesture to generate the requisite amount of controversy. In fact, on the side of the law as well, we find that crime is becoming increasingly conceptual. New legislation, especially in relation to sexuality, pornography and terrorism, constantly blurs the lines between fiction and fact, intention and reality. In one striking recent case Samina Malik, a self-described ‘lyrical terrorist’ who penned pro-Jihadist poetry, was given a nine-month suspended sentence in 2007, overturned on appeal in 2008, for possessing material ‘likely to be useful in preparing an act of terrorism’ under section 58 of the 2000 Terrorism act (Colley, 2008). This ‘material’ was largely her own poetry and the

J. G. Ballard and Conceptual Crime

47

usual ‘terrorist manuals’. What seems to be developing in the wake of the ‘war on terror’ is a new capacious category of ‘pre-terrorism’ (Toscano, 2009), whereby the state has effectively conceptualized crime by making the contemplation or thought of crime, no matter how fantastic or unlikely these ‘crimes’ might be, illegal. This is indicative of the impasse which is built-in to the very concept of a predictive mythology: the more it is successful at prediction the more it will be surpassed by ‘reality’. The writer appears to simply be playing another perverse variant of the losing game of transgression, in which their reconceptualization of crime merely refigures new possibilities of criminality. Again Ballard was prescient about recognizing this risk: ‘At the logic of fashion, such oncepopular perversions as paedophilia and sodomy will become derided clichés, as amusing as pottery ducks on suburban walls’ (1985a, p. 80). The spiral by which the artist reconceptualizes an already conceptualized reality seems to be always open to another turn, by which that reconceptualization is reabsorbed as another strategy. Discussing deviance and crime in the 1983 interview, Ballard noted that: ‘It’s really difficult to be a “real rebel” anymore, isn’t it? Because that rebellion immediately gets taken up – five minutes later it’s being commercialized and hawked along the King’s Roads or the Carnaby Streets of the world’ (1984a, p. 9). In a retrospective reflection on his work of the 1960s and 1970s he argued that the embracing of the imagery of violence and sensation as a means of liberation was finally, and fatally, naïve (Ballard, 2008). Deleuze and Guattari also recognized this danger, considerably later than J. G. Ballard, in their final joint-work What is Philosophy?: Marketing has preserved the idea of a certain relationship between the concept and the event. But here the concept has become the set of product displays (historical, scientific, artistic, sexual, pragmatic), and the event has become the exhibition that sets up various displays and the ‘exchange of ideas’ it is supposed to promote. The only events are exhibitions, and the only concepts are products that can be sold. (1994, p. 10) The atrocity exhibition, as we have regularly witnessed with a number of recent artists, can be rendered as a commodified sales-room of atrocity. Unlike Deleuze and Guattari, however, Ballard does not oppose the event and the concept to the exhibition and the product. Instead Ballard pursues the difficult labour of returning the exhibition and the product to the status of event and concept. He does so through a dangerous outbidding and dematerialization of these products, while recognizing that no writer’s atrocity exhibition could outdo, in material horror, the nightly televised images from the Vietnam War. Instead, all the writer can imagine is the further perfection of these atrocities: ‘an optimum torture and execution sequence’ (Ballard, 1985a, p. 93). Of course such strategies court the cynicism that they contest. The issue here is the degree of the embrace of capitalist dematerialization of reality to achieve

48

Crime Culture

the artistic dematerialization of the ‘signs of crime’. Ballard’s position, in the mode of experimental science fiction, predates and predicts works like Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972), Jean-François Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy (1974) and Jean Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976). These works all, in very different forms, argued that to rupture capitalism it was necessary to accelerate its own tendencies towards disintegration and psychic collapse. Lyotard’s work, itself highly reminiscent of Ballard’s fragmentary fiction, stated this case in its most extreme form: ‘there are errant forces in the signs of capital. Not in its margins as its marginals, but dissimulated in its most “nuclear”, the most essential exchanges’ (Lyotard, 1993, p. 110). For Ballard too, the lines of ‘errancy’ lie in the capitalist stimulation of desires through media fictions – ‘the dreams that money can buy’. While it might be possible to distinguish the strategy of subtraction from a strategy of transgression, we could argue that this is only a way station to a higher-level recuperation in a strategy of acceleration. Critiquing the persistence of such accelerationism among contemporary thinkers, A. Kiarana Kordela points out the dangerous assumption ‘that replicating and reinforcing the structures of capital, far from supporting it, amounts to accelerating the advent of its end as an exploitative, oppressing system’ (Kordela, 2007, p. 3; see also Noys, 2010). In fact, we could argue that this accounts for the political ambiguity of Ballard’s fictions, which tread an uneasy line between critique and an ecstatic celebration of the ‘liberating’ powers of capitalism. In trying to exceed reality along its own tendencies or Deleuzian ‘lines of flight’, his extra-worldly dematerialization of crime becomes an all-too-worldly replication of the tendencies of capitalism itself; as Ballard remarked in an interview: ‘I’m somebody who stands by the side of the road with a sign saying, Dangerous Bends Ahead – Slow Down.’ He pauses. ‘Although it is true that I sometimes seem to be saying Dangerous Bends Ahead – Speed Up.’ (Brown, 2006, p. 20)

Conclusion Ballard’s refiguration of ‘conceptual crime’ seems to exist in a very cramped space. The ‘series of conceptual games’ (Ballard, 1985a, p. 79) played by The Atrocity Exhibition can only be deeply equivocal because the very possibility of these conceptual games or crimes is dependent on a new mediatized capitalism, which they then claim to accelerate beyond. We can read Ballard’s later fictions as a self-criticism of this problem. In his fictions of the later 1970s and 1980s, such as High Rise (1975) and Running Wild (1988), crime still featured as the means to break out of the stifling constraints of bourgeois conformity. The sanitized spaces of capitalist life, especially the suburb, demand violence as the path back to ‘a more brutal and more real world of the senses’ (Ballard, 1988, p. 46). While these crimes are still conceptual they are far more literal, such as

J. G. Ballard and Conceptual Crime

49

the children’s killing of their parents in Running Wild in a variety of inventive ways. They are also much more confined to these microcommunities of contemporary life, which echo Ballard’s wartime experience of Langhua prison camp. In this case, however, we still seem to live with the promise of an ‘absolute crime’ that will break the regime of boredom that characterizes capitalism. The real break comes with his fictions of the 1990s and 2000s, which identify a more perverse twist on the scenario of conceptual crime. In a series of what can loosely be described as ‘crime-thrillers’ – Cocaine Nights (1996), Super-Cannes (2000), Millennium People (2003) and Kingdom Come (2006) – Ballard explored how the incitement of crime could serve to maintain and stabilize these closed communities by providing them with the requisite dose of palliative violence (see Noys, 2007; 2008). Analysing the problem of recuperation in these fictions a sinister conceptual criminal, often a psychiatrist, manipulates those in the new closed communities of contemporary capitalism – the business park, the holiday village, the gated community – to practice criminality as a social release valve. In these later texts, Ballard recognizes that the manipulator may not be the artist, but simply another device of social management – something implicit is his description in The Atrocity Exhibition of the Vietnam War as a ‘psychosexual module’ by which the United States ‘can enter into a relationship with the world generally characterized by the term “love”’ (1985a, p. 96). Conceptual crime figures, in a full-blown expression of cynicism, as the final turn of the capitalist screw. Certainly Ballard’s recognition of the malleability of conceptual crime, which is no longer the preserve of the avant-garde artist but becomes another tool in the armoury of the avant-garde manager, is salutary. To analyse this situation in terms of actual crimes, with actual victims, also permits Ballard to engage far more acutely with the political ambiguities of conceptual crime. He probes the class privileges required to play psychopathology as a game, as these microcommunities are bastions of the new upper middle-class; the ways in which such ‘games’ are vectored along the usual lines of class stratification, with the poor as victims; and how such crimes serve to prop-up the social order of the closed environments of business parks, gated villages and holiday resorts. They are far more conventionally critical works, but this more nuanced political scepticism is gained at the cost of both the loss of the experimental form of the conceptual crime, and at the cost of the disturbing effect of a subtractive strategy that plays along the destabilized line between fiction and ‘reality’. While Ballard was right to doubt the capacity of elective psychopathy to ‘change the world’ (2008), his abandonment of the experimental form of The Atrocity Exhibition resulted in a loss of artistic inventiveness, and the loss of the imaginative possibilities offered by his refiguration of art as an ‘absolute crime’. The tighter spatial focus of the later fiction may closely reflect the reality of the stratified social forms of contemporary capitalism, offering a veritable catalogue of the ‘evil paradises of neo-liberalism’ (see Davis and Monk, 2007), but it therefore lacks the global cartography of desire found in The Atrocity Exhibition.

50

Crime Culture

So, although necessarily problematic, considering the cultural forms with which it engages, I would argue that The Atrocity Exhibition stands as one of the few examples of Fredric Jameson’s new aesthetic of ‘cognitive mapping’ (Jameson, 1988).4 While it is doubtful Ballard is in agreement with Jameson’s political aims, his retooled surrealism was able to capture the surreality of capital itself, and so to map the disturbing possibilities of the future. In fact, the deconstructive virtue of Ballard’s refiguration of conceptual crime lies in its very impossibility of achieving stabilization. Tracing this unstable fault-line through an unsurpassed predictive mapping, the fact that ‘reality’ has tried to outdo Ballard’s fiction can be read not only as a sign of its failure, but also as a sign of its success. In a situation where, it seems, we are all potential conceptual criminals, Ballard’s elective choice of this fate in the form of fiction may, once again, have proved its uncanny prescience.

Notes 1

2

3

4

In his Dialogues with Claire Parnet, Deleuze makes clear his attitude: ‘“Transgression”, a concept too good for seminarists under the law of a Pope or priest’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987, p. 47). Roberto Finelli characterizes contemporary capitalism as operating through a logic in which ‘the abstract occupies and itself invades the concrete, filling it according to the exigencies of its expansive-reproductive logic’ (2007, p. 66). These experiences make a fleeting appearance in The Atrocity Exhibition (Ballard, 1985a, pp. 73–4), giving further evidence of how this early fiction contains nearly all of the later themes and concerns of Ballard’s later fictions. Andrzej Gasiorek argues that the fragmentation of Ballard’s experimental fiction prevents the kind of totalizing cognitive mapping Jameson aspires to (2005, p. 209). I would argue, however, that the fragmentation of Ballard’s fiction perfectly captures the mode in which capitalism appears as a totality of distributed differences, fragments and images.

Chapter 3

Crime, Abjection, Transgression and the Image John Lechte

Introduction1 The key terms of the title of this chapter point, it will be argued, to things that are fundamentally linked to each other. Invoking Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection we are able to understand crime as abject in the sense that it ultimately relates to morality – or amorality – and dissolves boundaries, particularly legal boundaries. Through abjection crime takes on a fundamentally cultural aspect. Abjection thus opens up the idea of ‘crime culture’. Abjection, however, is essentially negative; Georges Bataille’s theory of transgression related to the sacred is a more positive force. Within Bataille’s framework, transgression is not simply breaking the law, ignoring rules, or refusing to submit to taboos; rather, it is linked to the exuberance of carnival and sacred feast days, occasions which amount both to the breaking of the taboo and its confirmation. Transgression is not abject because it is an entirely open challenge to the law, while the abject tends to be its opposite: an underhand, insidious opposition to law, including the moral law. Crime, then, cannot be divorced from culture. Such are the key theoretical underpinnings of this chapter. But what are we to make of the image and its status? The relationship of the image to violence and sexuality has been at the centre of a debate (notably in France) about the graphic portrayal of violence, particularly rape. The question raised is whether cinema (and maybe art in general) enables a presentation of abjection, or whether, on the contrary, it deviously transgresses moral norms in the guise of being a more honest presentation of the violence of the real world. In short, the question is whether or not films of violence can, or could – qua images – justifiably claim a kind of transgressive, carnivalesque status which would free them from submission to the norms of everyday life, or whether such films exploit this possibility in a sensationalist manner. A brief elaboration of the arguments here will be given later in the text.

52

Crime Culture

In considering the image for its own sake the aim is to gain an insight into its nature, and, in particular, into its relation to violence in the context of cinema. As concerns the latter, I give an analysis of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958) and reveal how abjection is a key element in this film; but this is done in order to show, too, how abjection, violence and the image are linked. Here, we will see that it is as if the corruption (= abjection) and violence of the key protagonist occurs only to give full scope to the autonomy of the image – especially the blurred, dark and murky image, exemplified by the scene of the murder, in the darkened hotel room, of crime boss, ‘Uncle’ Joe Grandi, by Hank Quinlan, chief police detective. Behind the exterior of corruption as presented by Welles’s masterpiece, there is the proposition – if one wants to look for it – that, in fact, positive law (as opposed to natural law), even in its day-to-day unfolding, is fundamentally underpinned by violence, a fact which keeps it in touch with transgression. A key aspect of Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection concerns crime, even if, in its anthropological version, abjection connotes more than crime, as the latter is usually understood. It evokes ‘purity and danger’ (see Douglas, 1966) and a notion of the sacred experienced as a way of dealing with borders (especially of the body), transitional states (youth to adulthood), ambiguity and the in-between (the cadaver). For Kristeva, abjection is exemplified by crime to the extent that crime puts the subject in question in its symbolic and representational guise. It is what the subject, in its formative stage, seeks to expel, rather than include within itself, as is the case for the symbolic entities of identification. The abject, then, is visceral (can induce nausea) and at the antipodes of identification. Heroic crime – with which it is possible to identify – is not the kind of crime evoked by abjection. Abject crime is underhand, deceitful, dishonest in the deepest sense. In other words, the abject brings crime into contact with the moral order of culture and society. For this reason, in particular, abjection offers itself as a vehicle for communicating with an aspect of crime that goes beyond its legal incarnation. Moreover, abjection raises the spectre of the law’s origin in the moral and political order, an order that Giorgio Agamben has drawn to the attention of a wider public with his image of the homo sacer (sacred man): the one who could be killed without the killer committing homicide (1998). Homo sacer, as with the death of the father in Freud’s primal hoard, is at the origin of the law. Fundamentally, the violence hidden in the law as the upholder of non-violence is its abject side. In this sense there is no law without abjection. Abjection also reminds us of Georges Bataille’s notion of transgression and aspects of carnival as ‘interior experience’ and crime. For, carnival plays with the law all the more to confirm it. Such an approach connotes the possibility of an even deeper insight into the workings of crime and the image than is possible if one remains with Kristeva’s theory, interesting though this is. With regard to crime cultures, the challenge that Bataille poses is seen when he writes in On Nietzsche that: ‘Thus “communication”, without which nothing exists for us, is

Crime, Abjection, Transgression and the Image

53

guaranteed by crime. “Communication” is love, and love taints those whom it unites’ (1992, p. 18; original emphasis). Bataille is here referring, in light of Nietzsches’s preoccupation, to the crucifixion of Christ (which Christianity considers to be the greatest evil) but, more broadly, communication is ‘guaranteed by crime’ to the extent that society is founded by violence – violence as an original murder (cf. Freud), as part of the sacred. The law in general, then, works with and against its (sacred) origin. This may be contrasted with specific, secular, crimes in society as already in existence; this is the sort of crime that interests Julia Kristeva in her theory of abjection. So in the broadest metaphysical sense, we have then not just crime culture but culture founded in crime, an idea which unites Bataille with his contemporary, Walter Benjamin (1996), as well as with Freud (1972). With the link between abjection and nihilism, Nietzsche also enters the picture. In Nietzsche, we have the development of Kristeva’s notion of the abject as that which ‘does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a savior’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 4). For Nietzsche, this is nihilism that cannot acknowledge its debt to ‘will to power’. This is a notion, I propose, that is close to ‘communication’ in Bataille’s sense, to the extent that, like abjection, it goes beyond a legal understanding of crime.

Aspects of the Abject According to Kristeva Crime as abject must include, Kristeva suggests, Nazi crime, where children and the infirm became victims of Nazi politics science. Nazi crime is not transgression in the sense that the abject is a permanent rather than a temporary aspect of it. More generally, the way that crime renders visible the vulnerability of borders emerges through the distinction between sincerity and deceit, simulation and truth. These very distinctions, or variants of them, raise the question of how abjection can be represented – or, more rigorously, be presented. Indeed, as Kristeva says, the abject is not an object and thus poses a problem for representation, experienced as mediation, as opposed to the immediate impact of the abject. Apart from the psychoanalytical take on the abject, where what is expelled from the body/self takes precedence, both chronologically and materially, over what is incorporated (desired) – as is the case for the object – Kristeva refers to typically perverse – abject – scenes from everyday life with a moral inflection, as well as to ritual in the context of the sacred and the fragile opposition between purity (= ritually clean) and impurity (= ritually unclean), where prohibition comes into play. This is abjection occurring in conjunction with the sacred in religious contexts. As indexed above, considering abjection and the sacred evokes aspects of Georges Bataille’s concept of transgression. Transgression not only suggests

Crime Culture

54

transgression of the law, but it does so in a way which ushers in a more profound operationalization of abjection than is proposed by Kristeva. In short, Bataille offers a potentially more political take on the sacred and abjection. I will elaborate further on Kristeva’s theory below before moving on to Bataille on transgression and thence to Nietzsche on nihilism and ‘will to power’. For transgression as ‘inner experience’ erases the boundaries of the discontinuous, ego subject in ecstatic states evoked by laughter, giddiness, intoxication, nudity, orgasm, eroticism, anguish, poetry (= poeticizing), nausea and carnival. In other words, there is a loss of self (as discontinuity) to the point of death: ‘death means continuity of being’ (Bataille, 1986, p. 13). ‘Continuity of being’ is also ‘interior experience’, which Bataille calls communication. Even crime, as we noted earlier, is a communication for Bataille to the extent that it is linked to evil (1992, p. 20). And evil, says Bataille, figures more prominently than anything else in Nietzsche’s work. Indeed, it would be interesting to know whether Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ is closer to communication in Bataille’s sense than to anything to do with an ego’s acts of will. In favour of such an interpretation is Nietzsche’s point in section 485 of The Will to Power (1967) that the subject is a fiction. Again, in section 692, Nietzsche writes that ‘the will of psychology hitherto is an unjustified generalization’. On this basis, the will to power is not the will of a discontinuous individual, but approximates the state of ecstasis, or intoxication, within which discontinuous beings are swept up. Communication thus puts at risk discontinuous existence (= individual, autonomous existence). Crime, as connected to sacrifice, would thus put discontinuous existence – the realm of law as commonly understood – at risk.

The fluidity of abjection Specific crimes – as opposed to crime as violence in the metaphysical sense – are abject because they do not ‘respect, borders, positions, rules’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 4). But, in particular, the abject appears in hypocritical crime, crime that pretends to be on the side of the law and is not, crime that is absolutely deceitful, premeditated and underhand but appears to be the exact opposite, the epitome of rectitude: the judge who harshly sentences paedophiles and pornographers, but who has child pornography on his hard-drive. Above all, perhaps, abjection is exemplified (if this is possible) by Nazi crime which killed children in the name of science and purity. Abjection also relates to perversion, including corruption, illustrated by the way it plays with prohibitions, rules and the law: abjection, says Kristeva: turns them aside, misleads, corrupts; uses them, takes advantage of them, the better to deny them. It kills in the name of life – a progressive despot; it lives at the behest of death – an operator in genetic experimentations; it curbs the other’s suffering for its own profit – a cynic (and a psychoanalyst); it establishes

Crime, Abjection, Transgression and the Image

55

narcissistic power while pretending to reveal the abyss – an artist who practices his art as a ‘business’. Corruption is its most common, most obvious appearance. That is the socialized appearance of the abject. (1982, pp. 15–16) Perhaps more than behaviour that is proven to be corrupt, abjection is the difficulty, or even impossibility, of determining where sincerity and honesty end and corruption begins. We can think here of criminals who have helped the police, but more importantly, for the ambiguity of abjection, of police and judicial figures who have become criminal. Straddling criminal and moral abjection is Bertolucci’s conformist, Marcello Clerici, in the film of the same name (see Il Conformista [The Conformist], 1970). The conformist has no moral bearing of his own as he depends entirely on the external world for moral sustenance. A key scene in The Conformist takes place in the woods, when Clerici’s former professor, Quadri, known for his antifascism, is knifed to death by Mussolini’s secret police in a manner reminiscent of Caesar’s assassination, each of the half-dozen or so agents plunging a knife into Quadri’s body. When Quadri’s wife, Anna, who witnesses the murder, and with whom Marcello has had an affair, comes to his car to beg for protection, her former lover simply looks at her through the closed car window with an expressionless face until she runs, terrified, into the forest. Clerici has no moral strength or courage, no moral identity. He simply drifts from one endeavour to conform to another, apparently oblivious of the feelings of those around him. He becomes the incarnation of abjection. Corruption, we know, often occurs at the conjunction of the profession of noble motives by public figures and their real self-interest. The situation, says Nietzsche, is complicated by the fact that ‘lack of courage’ ensures that ‘will to power’ (= life) is never actively proclaimed. In effect, nihilism is never actively proclaimed. I shall elaborate upon this a little later in a discussion of nihilism and morality, where the aim is to deepen our grasp of the relationship between abjection and crime. With Nietzsche’s notion of a compact between nihilism and the will to power comes the idea that conventional crime (not related to transgression) itself is essentially fluid like abjection.

Abjection and the sacred The abject as it relates to the play of ‘purity and danger’, as the title of Mary Douglas’s book (1966) has it, is inextricably linked for Kristeva to what are, sociologically speaking, essentially pre-modern social and cultural forms, although, as a psychological force, it seems that the sacred still has relevance in secular societies. Generally, Kristeva addresses the question of the rationale for certain ritual practices of prohibition. The cadaver in particular is abject and must be purified through ritual: ‘The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life’ (Kristeva, 1982,

56

Crime Culture

p. 4). Ritual is thus deemed crucial in cultures with elementary symbolic structures – so that the separation from (= expulsion of) the mother, in psychoanalytic terms, can be problematic. A number of French feature films of the 1990s have opened up a debate about whether certain art practices, which appear to celebrate violence in the absence of ritual prohibition, have fallen into an abject state, or whether such works, in rejecting existing limits as to what is permitted to be presented, are genuine instances of transgression in Bataille’s sense. Are they nihilist for the sake of being nihilist, or do they provide a way of dealing with the violence and trauma that has hitherto been subject to taboo and thus repressed? The issues have been discussed in an illuminating way in relation to two Philippe Grandrieux films – Sombre (1999) and La Vie nouvelle (2002) – by Martine Beugnet (2005), who says, inter alia, of the general tendency represented in part by Grandrieux, that: ‘Usually categorised as art or auteur cinema, these works construct heterogeneous forms mixing elements from “sub-genres” such as the gothic, gore, horror and pornography with references to high art and literary and artistic underground trends’ (p. 175). In the case of Grandrieux, his ‘radical shift in the approach to film-making . . . helps to put into context the appearance of a contemporary cinema of evil [a phrase evoking Bataille’s title, Literature of Evil (Bataille, 1993)]’ (Beugnet, 2005, p. 175). But in a text referred to by Beugnet, James Quandt (2004) puts a counterview, dismissing the artistic and political pretensions of films claiming aesthetic sophistication, but in which explicit violence and sexuality feature largely – including Sombre and La vie nouvelle – films labelled by Quandt as the ‘New French Extremity’.2 As foreshowed earlier, the question arises as to whether such cinema is truly transgressive, or whether, on the contrary, it is essentially abject in its refusal, or inability, to respect borders and prohibitions. We should bear in mind that Georges Bataille’s notion of transgression (linked to the sacred) is still an open question for modern social formations even if it brings issues to a head in a more potent fashion than does Kristeva’s ‘abjection’. Indeed, the affirmative, ‘transgression’, which Bataille emphasizes, can be compared to the more negative, ‘prohibition’, emphasized by Kristeva. In a statement which goes to the heart of the matter, Bataille famously says: ‘The transgression does not deny the taboo [prohibition] but transcends it and completes it’ (1986, p. 63). Moreover: ‘The taboo is there in order to be violated’ (1986, p. 64); and ‘Organised transgression together with the taboo make social life what it is’ (1986, p. 65) – or what it was, if transgression is no longer part of modern society. Thus, transgression simultaneously breaks rules and goes beyond limits as it ‘maintains these limits just the same’ (1986, p. 67). As Foucault put it in 1963, not long after Bataille’s death, transgression is not negative: it affirms the limit as it transcends it. This makes it different from the usual negative understanding of transgression as a threat to the very existence of limits and rules (see Foucault, 1963, p. 756).

Crime, Abjection, Transgression and the Image

57

For Bataille, transgression properly speaking is never absolute, is never about the transformation of society as a whole, and is always limited in time. This is why it is very different from revolutionary practices which aim at the complete overthrow of the existing social order. Breaking a taboo gives rise to the anguish which plays a role in ensuring its maintenance. This is the religious aspect of transgression. In fact, taboos are kept in the profane world and broken (= transgressed) in the sacred world. Transgression ‘is the world of celebrations, sovereign rulers and God’ (Bataille, 1986, p. 68). Celebrations are the transgression of the law, not its observance. The sacred for Bataille is thus extremely ambiguous: ‘The taboo would forbid the transgression but the fascination compels it’ (1986, p. 68). On this basis, crime culture in cinema and literature would be one thing (possibly exemplifying transgression, like carnival does), while crime in secular society at large would be quite another. Although it sounds odd to say it, crime in secular, profane society – crime that pays no attention to law or taboo (e.g. the homicide with which we have become only too familiar) – is never transgressive. Only in quasi-sacred contexts – of which art in general is a part – can transgression in Bataille’s sense be realized. As a carnivalesque phenomenon, art may well confirm the rule, the taboo, the prohibition; but it can also reveal and contain the violence and potential conflict integral to every social fabric.3 Cinema should thus be understood in this sense. Obviously, the question of what constitutes art here becomes central. For as soon as a practice that one takes to be art breaks away from a quasi-sacred heritage – that is, as soon as it ceases to be transgressive – it becomes another secular practice potentially participating in and exacerbating violence, rather than being a mechanism for its containment.

Crime, Law, Image and Abjection Transgression as sacrifice entails violence; but it is also the containment of violence (within the carnival period, for example). When approaching crime and the image, the notion of ‘crime’ should be understood in terms of the moral law as well as the positive law of the State. The foundation of law as we have seen earlier in relation to Freud (1972), Walter Benjamin (1996), then latterly by Giorgio Agamben (1998) and Jacques Derrida (1992), is one of violence – or at least, no foundation of the law can be discussed independently of violence. Bataille, too, points out that violence is integral to human society and that transgression is a mechanism for keeping it within bounds. For secular society, violence places things immediately into a moral context. As Benjamin noted, violence weakens the law rather than strengthens it; yet, violence is also a secret precondition to the extent that law is what articulates a way of life. This is a more revolutionary conception of violence than we find in Bataille. Violence for Benjamin is more than transgression. The hidden face of the law, therefore, could be thought to be doubly evil: on the one hand, the law, to

58

Crime Culture

come into being and to exist, has to call upon violence to assist it and, on the other hand, it works to keep this fact secret, a point that Kieslowski’s A Short Film about Killing (1988) well demonstrates, as the execution of the young murderer – despite the ardent efforts of his lawyer, who opposes capital punishment – constitutes reciprocal violence. Violence, I have suggested, thus implies that abjection is also at the origin of the law.

Image and crime The image, too, is important here. If it is an object in its own right (which implies that it is ultimately opaque – a position that semiotics attempted to sustain) it will hardly reveal the abject: only itself. Or at least, if it does denote something, it is also riven with connotations. Thus, we will possibly have an abject image, but not an image of the abject. The abject, because it is not an object, is not a form of mediation and thus puts the symbolic itself into question. However, it is no doubt important to recognize that the image is as much linked to Kristeva’s ‘semiotic’ (which is drive-based, centred in affect exemplified by the rhythms and musicality of language) as it is part of the symbolic order (which is very much based on the code as a system of differences). Roland Barthes’s early characterization of the photographic image is thus pertinent to the image in general: ‘it is a message without a code’ (Barthes, 1979, p. 17; original emphasis). And before Barthes, there was Sartre, who also argued for the transparency of the image in order to avoid it becoming an object, as happens with the error of the ‘illusion of immanence’ (2004, p. 5), the assumption that there is a reality of the image as well as an image of reality. In his early book on imagination, Sartre calls this a ‘naïve ontology’ (1989, p. 5). While the abject cannot be represented (because it is not an object) an image cannot at all be reduced to a representation. There is thus a kind of co-habitation of the image and the abject: both are forms of immediacy before being mediation. On this basis, the abject can appear in cinema or photography, a point which serves to legitimate the references in what follows to certain forms of cinema and the abject. On this basis, too, as the cinema image is not reducible to a representation, it can be argued that the abject can appear directly in cinema.

Nihilism and abjection To be a nihilist in Nietzsche’s sense is to recognize that the highest values have devalued themselves. This implies that the pursuit of one value, or even set of values, will come into conflict with others. Truth is a key value that, according to Nietzsche, turns against morality: ‘among the forces cultivated by morality was truthfulness: this eventually turned against morality, discovered its teleology, its partial perspective’ (1967, section 5). Another example is based on the

Crime, Abjection, Transgression and the Image

59

interdiction against killing. Again, this issue is addressed in Kieslowski’s Short Film about Killing, where the senseless, slow and nihilistic murder of a taxi driver by a young country boy provokes the State to respond with meticulous preparations for his execution by hanging. So, it is not just that modern society has become indifferent to morality, but that moral values themselves are in a state of tension with each other. Only by explicitly embracing this tension is some sort of moral value sustained and the abject kept at bay, albeit in a European and Western kind of way. As Kristeva writes: He who denies morality is not abject; there can be grandeur in amorality and even in crime that flaunts disrespect for the law – rebellious, liberating, and suicidal crime. Abjection, on the other hand, is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sells you up, a friend who stabs you . . . (1982, p. 4)4 The other mode of nihilism, however – one, no doubt, more in accord with the popular imagination – is that based in a refusal to choose to the point of indifference – in a refusal to decide or to judge, in a position of absolute vacillation resulting in acting without conviction. Because one starts by declaring that there are no absolutes there is also no basis upon which to choose, to decide or to judge. The absence of absolutes thus gives rises to absolute relativism, or at least to the belief that the latter is inevitable. Such a position evokes pacifism and the point when not acting can lead to worse (even violent) consequences than acting. This is the position that effectively embraces abjection: for it says that there is no need to choose. There can be peace without violence, truth without lies, the good without the bad, and so on. But now, moral, epistemological, political – even artistic – borders are no longer sustained or sustainable (there are no credible rituals or other mechanisms left to sustain borders). In its more spectacular forms, abject relativism is manifest in the quasi-legitimation of revisionist history (denial of the Gas Chambers), Creationism (denial of Darwinian theory) and New Age therapies (denial of medical anatomy and physiology). This form of nihilism, with its lack of grandeur, enables abjection to flourish. Let us not deny that Nietzsche, although ostensibly proclaiming his nihilism and thus identifying with what we might call a noble form of nihilism – one, paradoxically, with some moral bearing – also promotes the abject form by casting suspicion on all claims to truth in philosophy, the arts, sciences, politics and morality. Every claim to truth is, for Nietzsche, nothing more – nor less – than an assertion of the will to power. On one level Nietzsche says: you must have the courage to judge; on another level he says: every judgement is a will to power. Thus, with regard to actual philosophers, ‘[t]heir ‘knowing’ is creating, their creating is a law-giving, their will to truth is – will to power (1974a, sections 211, 123; original emphasis). The world is will to power and nothing besides, claims

60

Crime Culture

Nietzsche at the end of his volume of notes on the subject. Truth, then, is the duplicity itself based on the need to believe and to find happiness as opposed to the strength to engage in inquiry and the courage to accept the truth of the will to power. In the end, lack of courage, lack of strength, even lack of honesty, are the characteristics of our time. This also implies a lack of any real moral bearing. The thing is that philosophers and others work extremely hard to convince the world that they are sincere and that what they say about the world is true. But, in truth, what philosophers say is really geared to shore up their power, a fact that is in keeping with a religion which tells people what they want to hear. And what are we to make of Nietzsche himself? Does he not propose to be telling us, in light of his inquiries, what is the case? Or does he really mean that he, too, is staking out his will to power? To try to answer this question would take us too far afield. Suffice to say that, in its incapacity to find any sure anchor point, while yet holding out the possibility of genuine illumination, Nietzsche plays with borders leaving us feeling that it is impossible to know which way to turn, and that, even by accepting the impossible one is still accepting a truth out of weakness and cowardice. There is no doubt that Nietzsche’s views on morality and truth have influenced a number of contemporary film makers who see themselves as revealing the hypocrisy of the attempt to shield audiences from facing the violence and horror of the real world. They thus see themselves as having some sort of moral ambition.5

Cinema: Crime and the Abject The challenge for art concerning the abject thus becomes obvious, even if, in America with the work of artists such as Cindy Sherman, the abject has been represented (so people think) with alacrity in painting, installations and photography. I do not deny that the abject can appear in artistic presentations; and certainly Kristeva’s work claims as much. But how it does so is a key element in making contact with it, much as the ugly poses a conundrum for art of the beautiful when presented artistically. If the abject is in art content this can also be a way of muting it, in the sense that a symbolic form (an interpretation) would enable it to see the light of day, as it were, the manifestation of that which otherwise remains hidden, secret, indistinct, just as the unconscious is rendered relatively benign by language. Where does the abject lie in the horror movie, for example? I preface my answer to this by saying that dealing with horror – with the fear it evokes – is not (necessarily) an experience of the abject. Rather, I propose that the abject emerges in its fullest sense when something is shown (or presented) that should not be shown. So while a battle scene (cf., Eastwood’s Iwo Jima, 2006) might be violent and explicitly so, it is not necessarily abject. By contrast, abject might be the rape scene in Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2002) because such an event would not normally be shown in the way it is shown.

Crime, Abjection, Transgression and the Image

61

In fact, all the latter’s force stems from its abject status: the sense that the director is in a wager with the audience, playing on its fascination, challenging it to deny that this is reality and ‘you don’t want to see it!’ This links up to the earlier reference to certain French films of the 1990s as opening up a cinema of transgression or of evil (see Quandt, 2004, pp. 127–8, cited above). Even though, as we saw in the discussion of abjection and transgression, the issues here are complex, it has to be said that for specific artistic practices to be a true transgression and more than a momentary infringement of the law, art has to be a legitimated and designated sphere of transgressive practices as, for example, carnival is and has been. Or at least, the artist him- or herself has to proclaim art as the sphere of transgression if certain art practices are not to become, as has been argued, ‘a blind celebration of murderous impulses and the death drive’ (Beugnet, 2005, p. 176, n. 5) and the epitome of self-indulgence and abjection. The problem is that transgression arose within – even if also in opposition to – a religious context that an essentially secular society cannot easily revive. Whereas, in the past, two worlds – the sacred and the profane – existed side by side, now, all must come under the auspices of the secular law6 so that transgression, like carnival, would have to come under the auspices of the State. Maybe abjection, which weaves its way between borders and thrives on ambiguity is thus the lot of contemporary society. As a consequence, we seem to be poised between transgression, which can have a certain grandeur, and abjection, which has none.

Horror in cinema, catastrophe and the abject From a different angle, Barbara Creed evokes Kristeva in a much-cited essay analysing the abject in horror films. For Creed, the horror film (whether based on a crime or not) is ‘an illustration of the work of abjection’ (2004, p. 39) because, apart from its evocation of the feminine and the fragility of borders, it ‘abounds in images of abjection, foremost of which is the corpse’ (2004, p. 39). Creed is thus quite clear that abjection can be (re)presented, and points, in evoking both Bataille and Kristeva, to the fascination effect of such films as Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Hannibal (2001), which deal with (the crime of) cannibalism (2004, p. 36). That the abject can be revealed, made manifest, through the visual image would be confirmed by the point made above in reference to Barthes and Sartre, to the effect that, contrary to a media view, the image is essentially transparent: a form of immediacy. Aaron Kerner, in a book which touches on the theme of the image and representability, points out that there is a connection between catastrophe and abjection in relation to crime. Catastrophe, ‘a product of human agency’ for Kerner, is then characterized as the ‘horrors of the Second World War, ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda, the Killing Fields in Cambodia, the American firebombing of Tokyo that burned to death 100,000 people in

62

Crime Culture

one night’ (2004, p. 2). Like the abject, catastrophe (which can have an abject content) ‘constitutes a crisis in representation because it is about trying to give form to “unimaginable” suffering, “unspeakable” horror, “incomprehensible” violence’ (Kerner, 2004, p. 2). Catastrophe (the Holocaust and Hiroshima), for Kerner, can never be unproblematically presented; but, on the other hand, one has to have the moral courage to continue in the attempt, using ‘traditional rhetorical strategies’ (including the performative ‘middle voice’, evoked by Roland Barthes) even in the knowledge of failure. The catastrophes that Kerner evokes, then, are crimes that constitute a crisis for representation. These crimes, we can add, are deeply embedded in post-modern, Western culture. They are crimes that are in an ongoing struggle with the image.

Crime and the abject in Welles’s Touch of Evil Those who act politically by openly breaking the law, or who act immorally in opposing conventional morality (cf. Nietzsche), are in a different category to those who are corrupt: the judge on the take, the priest who abuses his parishioners’ trust, or the politician whose private life and public pronouncements are secretly in conflict (think of some representatives – such as Jesse Helms – of the moral majority in America who have been pilloried in the art of Hans Haake; think of the scandals regarding politicians’ self-interested expenses claims in the British parliament in 2009 forcing the resignation of the Speaker of the House of Commons). Corruption – and we should define this broadly to include the corruption of the self – is always to some degree devastating because it can never be predicted in the particular case: it is the unexpected par excellence – especially because it is secret. In short, corruption arises where it is least expected, and so does the abject. The expression, ‘all politicians are corrupt’, far from being a truism, is the sign of a need to anticipate corruption in order to cope with it. However, if all politicians were known to be corrupt, they would certainly be less abject and maybe not even truly corrupt to boot, for it would be similar to an accountant who placed a notice in the press to publicize his practice of fraud by ‘fiddling the books’. How we deal with abjection is thus both a psychological and social issue, because, most of all, it is a threat to identities and subjectivities, as I hope my foregoing remarks have clearly implied. In particular, it is a loss of grandeur. It remains now to investigate Orson Welles’s film, Touch of Evil (1958) which, in its own way, is a statement about a certain kind of corruption and the abject – about the ‘dirt’ of corruption and thus of the abject. The theme of dirt and rubbish – detritus – and how it is dealt with in Touch of Evil has been masterfully described in an early essay by Eric M. Krueger (1972).7 Krueger writes: ‘Touch of Evil is a seedy experience. Orson Welles drags us through the dirt, dust and garbage of his characters’ existence; and therein lies his mise en scène: a world where filth, garbage and disarray become metaphors for evil’ (1972, p. 57).

Crime, Abjection, Transgression and the Image

63

Although, for Krueger, dirt is to be understood literally (everything really is dirty – the border town where the events take place, but especially the antihero and sheriff, detective Hank Quinlan; corruption is dirty); however, it really does not take much of a tweak for things to evoke ritual uncleanliness, or what Kristeva would call abjection. Indeed, the ‘Evil’, as well as ‘Touch’ (= contamination),8 in the title can be seen as switch words simultaneously evoking the dirt of corruption (the literal interpretation), ambiguity and the lies behind appearances (evil as abjection) and corruption as the transcendence and confirmation of positive law (transgression). While abjection would seem to be the term best suited to describe corruption in a secular setting, the actions and character of detective Hank Quinlan (played by Welles) seem to transcend the law. Quinlan, acting in almost complete freedom to do things the way he wants, begins to assume a demigod status, albeit, to be sure, one with clay feet. But Krueger is no doubt right in one sense: for dirt does have a primarily literal significance in modern, secular societies. Dirt can be defined scientifically as the vehicle of bacteria and disease. Ritual taboos and prohibitions have been all but evacuated from modern experience. By placing ‘evil’ in the title of his film, therefore, Welles goes against an absolute secularization and leads the viewer to contemplate something more evocative of the sacred, so that dirt might also evoke the idea of morally or spiritually ‘unclean’ as well. Moreover, even secular times evoke the question of how one deals appropriately with a corpse, such as the one Quinlan will become when he tumbles backwards into the sludge and murky water of the rubbish dump. Violence always occurs at night, if not literally in the dark, then in a context evocative of evil as a dark force (its metaphysical side), engendering the general promiscuousness, eroticism and disorder of night life. More generally, darkness heightens ambiguity and the fluidity of borders. In this sense, darkness functions as a further evocation of the abject. The scenario, then, plays on the various meanings of border (‘All border towns bring out the worst in a country’, says a key protagonist, ‘Mike’ Vargas) – not only on the geographical border between Mexico and the United States, but also on the border between criminality and law enforcement, friendship and betrayal (cf. the relationship between Quinlan and offsider, Pete Menzies), fact and fiction (as relates, for example, to Quinlan’s biography and in particular to the death of his wife), the moral and the immoral (cf. actions of Mexican drugs detective, Ramon Vargas, in collecting evidence against Quinlan), violence and non-violence (cf. Quinlan’s actions in apprehending and interrogating suspects), justice and injustice. Thus, when the investigating authorities have responsibility for crime committed on one or other side of the border, it is a matter of jurisdictions. For the law, the maintenance of borders is fundamental. Justice, though, might be another matter. Ramon (Mike) Vargas, with his wife, Susan, crosses the Mexican border into the United States just before the fatal dynamite bombing of businessman, Rudi Linnaker and his girlfriend’s car. Vargas, being in the United States at that

64

Crime Culture

moment, is out of his bailiwick and has to face Quinlan, who is in his. Later, however, Quinlan has to come to Vargas’s hotel room to face accusations of corruption. Quinlan is then out of his comfort zone, a fact signified by Quinlan accidentally squashing a pigeon’s egg which dribbles down the front of his suit (an event of abjection as the egg becomes dirt on Quinlan’s clothing). Quinlan, however, also enters Mexico – moves out of his jurisdiction – in the interest of ‘justice’. One bends – transgresses? – the rules, then, supposedly in pursuit of justice. But when he is caught out by Vargas, who twigs that the dynamite evidence against suspect Sanchez has been planted in the shoe box, Quinlan attempts, with the help of the underworld Grandis family to frame Vargas’s wife, Susan (and, by implication, Vargas himself), as a drug addict (recall here that Joe Grandi, the father, is finally murdered by Quinlan). Quinlan then reveals himself to be ultimately self-serving, even though he proclaims that the ‘fine print’ of the law should not be allowed to stand in the way of capturing criminals. Quinlan claims to be breaking rules and crossing boundaries in the interest of the greater good – of justice. In any case, Quinlan’s personal tragedy, as he tells it – his wife having been strangled by a still unknown assailant – suggests that he is barely able to pursue the course of justice because, despite a rebellious persona, deep down, Quinlan is racked by self-pity. His claim to be pursuing justice thus rings hollow. But is Quinlan a totally abject figure as a corrupt police officer wallowing in the dirt? In a number of respects the answer is ‘yes’. To begin with, he tries to frame Vargas because the latter has evidence of Quinlan’s penchant for framing suspects. It is in revenge for Vargas attempting to bring evidence of his corruption to the notice of his superior and the District Attorney that the Grandis are employed to administer drugs to Vargas’s wife while she is staying in their hotel. ‘Uncle’ Joe Grandi thinks that he is working on an equal basis with Quinlan in the effort to discredit Vargas, when, in the same room where Vargas’s doped up wife is lying, Quinlan strangles Uncle Joe after alerting his loyal offsider, Pete Menzies. Quinlan is abject, not just for what he does – for Vargas uncovers the corruption and Menzies finally turns against him – but also for what he is: large and oily, greedy, dirty. When Quinlan finally shoots Pete, he, in a phobic manner, scrubs off the blood in the polluted water of the rubbish dump – blood, like saliva, being one of the key fluids generating prohibitions. Earlier, we recalled the scene where, while facing his accusers, Quinlan had casually found a pigeon egg on the window sill of Vargas’s hotel room and then had clumsily broken it over his suit front in the kind of gesture that Welles seems to relish.9 Water runs right through the rubbish tip, the place where Quinlan himself finally ends up after Pete, mortally wounded, fatally shoots him. Quinlan ends up in the detritus and rubbish: his body, being on the border between inside and outside social life, should be the subject of ritual as protection against the negative force of abjection. Pete’s blood again drips on Quinlan, who can’t wash it off this time. And so Quinlan ends up in the shit. Tanya (Marlene Dietrich), owner

Crime, Abjection, Transgression and the Image

65

of the bar with the piano player, and with whom, we are led to believe, Quinlan long ago had a relationship, asks whether someone will retrieve Quinlan’s bloated body – not just leave it there like another piece of rubbish. In effect, Quinlan, the corpse, requires ritualized attention in order that he not be the personification of abjection which his actions led him perilously close to becoming. Not justice, not the law, not friendship or loyalty, but violence finally rules the day in Welles’s film. Of the relationship between the image and violence, JeanLuc Nancy has written: ‘Violence always appears in an image’ (2003, pp. 43–4), and violence is ‘always realised in an image’ (p. 44). The reason, apparently (Nancy is coy about providing an extended explanation), is that an image is always the index of something that has been missed. Violence is the trauma – which is connected to truth (Nancy, 2003, p. 39) – that always by-passes perceptual and intellectual channels. We can never know violence, only its effects – in the showing of its effects. Thus we can never know what is at the basis of images. Violence, to strike a Lacanian chord, is the missed encounter with the real. The illusion, of course, is that we perceive violence as violence. Someone gets shot. We see the blood. Image and violence thus once again play themselves out. In the film, violence as killing is explicitly portrayed when Quinlan strangles Uncle Joe Grandi in the same hotel room where Vargas’s drugged wife, Susan, is lying on a bed. As she gradually regains consciousness Susan, looking up, is confronted by the contorted face – eyes bulging, tongue extended – of the dead Grandi whose head hangs over the bedstead above Susan’s face. Violence is also explicitly portrayed in the final scenes, where Quinlan shoots Pete Menzies, and the latter, with his last breath, shoots Quinlan, who is about to shoot Vargas. Earlier, we saw that for Sartre, an image is the way a thing comes into presence (this is the meaning of the image as ‘transparent’). For Nancy, things are similar: no thing can be manifest, or show itself other than via an image. The image is the showing of the thing. And when this thing is violence, the image becomes the way violence shows itself. To push the analysis even further in the hope that illumination will result, the manifestation of violence through the image is disruptive (in the sense that it cannot be anticipated) and, in particular, it becomes disruptive of borders and distinctions giving rise to ambiguity (cf. Nancy, 2003, p. 42). The whole scene in Touch of Evil in the hotel room where Quinlan kills Uncle Joe is an exemplification of the blurring of borders. It is thus also an exemplification of the abject. For the room light is turned off, so that the flashing sign outside is the only illumination, something which in itself gives the black and white images an astonishing ambiguity, with the two protagonists frequently disappearing into the gloom as the exterior light goes off. Quinlan, the policeman an upholder of the law, becomes the murderer, and the breaker of the law, while Grandi, the criminal, becomes the victim. The abject thus disrupts the distinctions that are supposed to obtain. If this blurring of distinctions itself is abject, the scene in the room is its manifestation in images.

66

Crime Culture

Conclusion Through its narrative force, Orson Welles’s film provides an insight into crime, the image and abjection. It shows us crime culture as a culture mixing profoundly with abjection. The image, for its part, is not something mimetic or representational, but is the way violence and the abject become manifest. There is no abject image as such, but there is no abject available without the image. Crime culture, then, would be, above all else a culture of the image: for the image, as I have endeavoured to show, is foreign neither to crime nor to abjection. Is the image equally implicated in transgression? If, following Bataille, we link transgression with violence and the sacred, we can be equally sure that the image is also involved. However, if transgression mixes with the abject, it does not become abject; rather, it becomes a mechanism for keeping abjection at bay (e.g. through rituals and thus carnivalization). But as modernity stands for the recession of transgression and the sacred, it is possible that abjection will become even more pronounced, and that the future of society will be mirrored in its crime culture.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

An earlier version of this chapter was given in August 2008 at Flinders University, Department of Sociology. I wish to thank Anthony Elliott and the post-graduates for a stimulating discussion. Thus, Quandt writes: ‘The critic truffle-snuffing for trends might call it the New French Extremity, the recent tendency to the willfully transgressive by directors like François Ozon, Gaspar Noé, Catherine Breillat, Philippe Grandrieux – and now, alas, [Bruno] Dumont [in Twentynine Palms (2003)]. Bava as much as Bataille, Salo no less than Sade seem the determinants of a cinema suddenly determined to break every taboo, to wade in rivers of viscera and spumes of sperm, to fill each frame with flesh, nubile or gnarled, and subject it to all manner of penetration, mutilation, and defilement. Images and subjects once the provenance of splatter films, exploitation flicks, and porn – gang rapes, bashings and slashings and blindings, hard-ons and vulvas, cannibalism, sadomasochism and incest, fucking and fisting, sluices of cum and gore – proliferate in the high-art environs of a national cinema whose provocations have historically been formal, political, or philosophical (Godard, Gouzot, Debord)’ (2004, pp. 127–8). The key question is whether or not art in contemporary society is a realm apart (like carnival), or whether, on the contrary, it is an integral part of society and, ultimately, of everyday life. What seems to stand out most of all is the real ambiguity of this situation. Cf. Nietzsche’s reference to the ‘grand style’ as an expression of the will to power in The Will to Power (section 341). Those who cannot attain to the grand style in their ‘crimes’ (e.g. petty criminals) risk being thrust back into abjection. Even if, like Philippe Grandrieux, they speak of a morality of forms, rather than, as Grandrieux sees it, of social or psychological morality (see Brenez, 2003).

Crime, Abjection, Transgression and the Image 6

7 8 9

67

‘During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom’ (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 7). Krueger (1972, p. 57) also gives a useful synopsis of the plot of Touch of Evil. I thank the readers of the chapter for this indication. In Citizen Kane (1941), for example, Kane, in the posthumous newsreel footage, accidentally pours cement over himself when turning the ‘first sod’ of a new building. In the same film, the crucial scene where Kane meets his second wife, Susan, is prefaced by Kane being almost totally splattered with mud from a passing vehicle.

This page intentionally left blank

Part II

Revisiting Noir

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 4

The Female Side of Crime: Film Noir’s Femme Fatale and the Dark Side of Modernity Elisabeth Bronfen

As Vivian Sobchack pointedly notes, ‘it is now a commonplace to regard film noir during the peak years of its production as a pessimistic cinematic response to volatile social and economic conditions of the decade immediately following World War II.’ While the narrative resolution of women’s melodramas from the home front, such as Mrs. Miniver (1942) or Since You Went Away (1944), celebrate the reunion of the family, film noir highlights how precarious the veteran’s homecoming can be. Indeed, as Sobchack goes on to argue, film noir can be seen as ‘playing out negative dramas of post-war masculine trauma and gender anxiety brought on by wartime destabilization of the culture’s domestic economy and a consequent “deregulation” of the institutionalized and partriarchally informed relationship between men and women’ (1998, p. 130).1 The heroes of film noir repeatedly find themselves penetrating the dark world of an urban war zone and venturing into a disorienting, fascinating, and at the same time threatening counterworld of corruption, intrigue, betrayal and decadence from which they can escape only through death. Paul Schrader, who in such films as American Gigolo (1980) and Light Sleeper (1992) reconceived the genre of film noir to foreground the criminal streak of the economic bubble of the 1980s, in turn, argued that the psychological and social anxieties portrayed by this genre not only articulate a disillusionment that was a response in part to the false optimism of war propaganda produced by the Office of Strategic Services once the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, drawing Hollywood into its war effort, but that these films also register the suspicions and conspiracy theories that emerged as a result of the new international enmity called the Cold War. Schrader, however, goes on to suggest that film noir can also be seen as a cogent response to the demand by post-war realism for a more honest and harsh view of the social antagonisms subtending the troubled domestic economy of the period. Recalling how much the noir style in post-war Hollywood can be attributed to the presence of immigrant actors, directors, screenplay writers and technicians, whose schooling in German Expressionism inflected

72

Crime Culture

the cinematic language of distortion privileged by this genre, he claims: ‘When in the late Forties, Hollywood decided to paint it black, there were no greater masters of chiaroscuro than the Germans’ (Schrader, 1996, p. 55). As film noir comes to reconfigure the classic Warner Brothers gangster films of the 1930s, it also sheds a darker light on the ever more sinister enmeshment between the world of crime, political corruption, and an obsessive investigative urge on the part of the FBI and other police institutions. Indeed, crime culture emerges as a particularly useful trope for an economic expansion gone awry, where the thin line between individual resourcefulness and transgression of the law comes to be more and more blurred, as upward mobility becomes an opportunity as much as a fatal lure. Hollywood’s crime culture, as Michael Wood has pointed out, effectively broke down the class division on the level of fantasy, offering stories of economic success. Yet the stories it told remained deeply conflicted: ‘They show us what life would look like if crime did pay; and more powerfully and more ominously, they hint that crime . . . is probably the only road to a life like this. And the conclusion of such logic, since crime and the taming of terror are out for most of us, is that this life is out for most of us.’ Given that these dark films of the 1940s and 1950s were as much a source of admonishment as dreams to emulate, he concludes, they show the good life which the American pursuit of happiness yearns for, only here it is ‘seen to be striped with shadows, and although we perhaps don’t have much sense of what the shadows mean while we are at the movies, they are unmistakably there for us, converting these comfortable homes and promising streets into a scenery of fear’(Wood, 1975, p. 103). It follows that the flourishing of these dark b-pictures cannot simply be reduced to the gender discontent of post-war American culture. Rather, the popularity of this fatalistic vision of the world draws our attention to the manner in which this particular film genre came to fruitfully negotiate the dark side of the modern condition humaine in more general terms: the disaffecting anonymity of urban centres, the sense of estrangement at the work place caused by increasing industrialization, indeed the dispossession and displacement of large sectors of the American workforce, as industry moved randomly from one locality to another. Indeed, it is too limiting to locate the sense of a paranoid universe transmitted by film noir – the impression that its protagonists were fatefully trapped in a disempowering world that denied them all agency – only in the context of the transitional and politically unstable historical period stretching from 1941, when America entered the Second World War, to the late 1950s post-war and Cold War era. Instead, it is equally fruitful to ask how film noir both reflects and contests the blanc modernism of 1930s Hollywood, with the glamorous three-point lighting of its stars, the witty dialogues of the sophisticated comedies, the escapist fantasies of its musicals, and the uncontended optimism of its melodramas. I suggest thinking about the sense of lightness transmitted both formally and narratively by such genre films in relation to what I am calling a white dimension of the modernist movement – namely those

Femme Fatale and the Dark Side of Modernity

73

forces concerned with the hope of innovation, emancipation and progress. In this I am picking up on Jacques Rancière’s discussion of modernity as an aesthetic anticipation of the future, as ‘the idea of the potentiality inherent in the innovative sensible modes of experience that anticipate a community to come’ (2006, p. 30). Taking the notion of constant self-transformation and selfreliance to its extreme, film noir thrives on the dark side of this American dream, disclosing that an unencumbered insistence on defining oneself according to ones desires may allow those not as privileged as the splendid rich of the leisured class to break into wealth. Yet this economic breakthrough often results in precisely the enmeshment of creativity with violence, characteristic of the vitality and resilience of the American immigrant story. Pursuing ones right to prosperity, success and happiness in the way Emerson and Thoreau argued one could by disassociating oneself from the conventions of society, may mean going to the limit, regardless of the costs. But where the transcendentalists could still imagine this as a gesture of self-liberation, anticipating white modernity’s narratives of economic, aesthetic or ethic self-transformation, film noir focuses on the impossibility of escape except in death. Known for its two-point and low-key lighting, producing long shadows on walls into which sinister characters could disappear, its drawn shades, enclosing characters in shady nets so as to signal their fateful imprisonment in sombre machinations, film noir privileges shades of darkness for both its visual and its thematic tones. Many films belonging to this genre begin with a credit sequence that shows the bright lights of an urban city, and even if their narratives include scenes that take place during the day, one has the impression that once a character has given in to the fascinating promise of crime, he or she perceives the world now through a nocturnal lens. The film technique of noir mirrors this as well. Because nocturnal filming was still an anomaly in the 1940s, a special filter was necessary to simulate a nocturnal world, in a technique called ‘day for night’, even though the scenes were actually shot in the day. If, then one focuses specifically on how the night comes to serve as a stage for states of transgression and fatality in film noir, the toxic underbelly of the blanc world of classic modernity, with its celebration of technology, urban freedom and gender, class and race emancipation, comes ever more into focus. The nocturnal settings of film noir open up a cinematic site for heists, fatal love stories, or murder plots. At the same time, one of the impulses of film noir follows the command, ‘Let there be light.’ Thus the night also serves as a time zone one enters so as to disclose not only individual crimes, but also political corruption and with it the dark side of the law. Sometimes those who enter this nocturnal world are cops, sometimes private detectives or journalist, sometimes the friends of a man unjustly charged with a crime. The voyage to the end of the night all these characters undertake is meant to bring to light what others had sought to cover up, often in the form of a confession. Whether they are sitting alone in a dark room or together with an officer of the law in an interrogation room, the stories the strangely disaffected heroes and heroines of film noir tell shed light on

74

Crime Culture

nocturnal events, even while we see these as flashbacks on the screen. The illumination their confession affords corresponds to the beam of light of the projector, as it passes over a strip of film, projected onto a white screen in a dark space. To revisit film noir in an effort to map its use of the night as stage and state of mind for transgression proves, however, to be particularly revealing in relation to the question of a gendering of the night, so that the issue of sexual difference returns, though on a different level. Indeed, let us return once more to Sobchack’s claim that central to film noir’s sober view of American culture’s effort to reassert the lost social order of peacetime was a rethinking of the domestic space, which, owing to the economic independence given to women during the war period, could not be reconvened without factoring in a change in feminine self-definition. Called upon by American politicians to give back their job to the G. I. Joes returning home, American women were compelled to return to the domestic sphere. Because they were often dissatisfied about their removal from the workplace and the economic self-esteem that went with it, the idealized home emerged not only as a mythic construct, but more importantly a new site of contention, now not between Americans and their external enemies in combat, but between American men and women exploring new modes of co-existence. If the women who had so efficiently worked on the home front could never be sure that the returning veterans had curbed the lust to kill, for which they had been trained in boot camp, the veterans themselves had to contest with a feminine insistence on self-empowerment. As a trope for this destabilization of the feminine home-maker, the self-assured femme fatale, willing to do what it takes to acquire the money and freedom she desired, however, not only reflected on the situation of women at the end of the Second World War. She also questioned how stable, secure and ideal the domestic world had been before the war, implicitly recalling the new women of the pre-war period; the urban flapper, the successful showgirl, as well as the resourceful worker of economic success stories such as John Stahl’s Imitation of Life (1934). Indeed, as a figure of social instability, the femme fatale came, in retrospect, to occupy the site where Hollywood could negotiate the fears invoked by the successful, empowered and independent working woman that had helped America get through the Great Depression. If, as part of the war effort, ‘Rosie the Riveter’ had proved her metal in the factories set up all over the country by the war department, it is precisely this resilient ingenuity, which resurfaced in a dark mode at the heart of narratives about the crime culture, which came to displace both the external and the internal front once the war had been won. If the night is the privileged stage for the narratives of a fatal pursuit of happiness, power and prosperity, which film noir focuses on, is there a specific connection between this dark world and femininity? If the culture of antiquity had imagined the night as a maternal figure, cradling her children to death and sleep in her arms, this feminine embodiment of the night didn’t only have a cultural survival in the painting of the nineteenth century, where we see Nyx

Femme Fatale and the Dark Side of Modernity

75

huddled inside a cave (Joachim von Sandrart’s ‘Allegory of the Night’ [1650]), or flying above an idyllic landscape (Karl Friedrich Schinkel ‘Night, wrapped in a wide cloth, floating over the golf of Naples’ [1834]). Rather, it is my claim that this mythic figure returns in the nocturnal world of film noir as the femme fatale. Representing the dark side of justice, which punishes the transgressions of the night in the night, and as such uncovers social and cultural antagonisms inscribed within the project of modernity and its claim to universal emancipation and self-determination, these fatal women force the noir hero to acknowledge the consequences of his transgressive desire. However, while noir heroes violate both the laws of the everyday and those of rationality, the femme fatale follows a didactic project. Luring her deluded lover into the dangerous world of crime, she ultimately forces him to recognize that he had wanted to be betrayed by precisely the nocturnal dreams and ambitions she had embodied for him. Within a culture in which the American dream had moved ever closer to crime, she emerges as the dark side of modernity that works in the night for a new day, for a dream of America that is achievable, but not yet achieved. In Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1948), the dream of glamorous success in New York City, as well as the fatal failure of those infected by this promise, is negotiated over the tragic fate of Jane Dexter. Shot in the style of a documentary film, Dasin’s story begins the morning after her murder and depicts two days of the police investigation, in which the city, the night and the transgressive woman emerge as mutually implicated. What the detective assigned to her case discovers is that Jean was the head of a band of jewellery thieves, who ultimately fell victim to their own naked violence. Her unabashed desire for money and glamour are thus presented as the result of the seduction of the neon-lights of the big city. At the same time, she is herself complicitous with this fatal force, given that she infected others with her transgressive desire. Conflating a dangerous feminine will to self-determination and economic success with the sparkling lights of nocturnal New York, the role Jean plays in the fantasies of her survivor is ambivalent. For the readers of the daily newspaper, she is only a brief event, for the police merely one of many victims of the naked city. For her parents she is a sad example of the American dream gone awry. But to her fiancé she appears at night as a phantom lady. We will never know whether he will be able to resist the lure of the big city. But what we do know is that she inspires him to dream about the fatal woman and her demise. Her escape from the small town conventions and petit bourgeois constraints, fatal as it was, is one he still dreams of achieving. Many films noirs have a male voice-over, offering a commentary on why the hero fell for the allure of a woman, who called forth fantasies about how, for once, he might be lucky. Noir heroines, in turn, rarely take centre stage and more often than not have no say in how their story comes to be told. Nevertheless, these fatal seductresses dominate the fate in store for all those who embark upon nocturnal adventures, because they not only confuse, betray, warn, teach and sometimes even save the noir heroes. They are also the ones who draw

76

Crime Culture

these men into experiences that can only end in failure, destruction and death, and in so doing embody the dark side of modernity, foregrounding a fatalistic understanding of human existence. Indeed, one might say that, precisely because the narration of these stories is focalized by men who want to be duped, the noir heroines not only mirror the desires and anxieties of their deluded lovers. Their mysterious attraction also corresponds to the unfathomability of the night itself. Given that their story exceeds what the male voice-over has to tell, they function as the dark vanishing-point of a narrative which they call forth, even while it never fully contains them. My contention is that, to look at film noir under the auspices of the night, brings to the foreground a significant gendering of this chronotopos in relation to what I want to call a dark condition moderne: noir heroines, inhabiting the night with a confidence lacking in their male counterparts, offer a panoply of ways in which modern human existence is influenced by accident and fate. If film noir presents us with a differentiated palette of shades of the colour black, so, too, the manner in which the noir heroine embarks upon her idiosyncratic pursuit of happiness is everything but single coloured. This means that noir’s femmes fatales cannot be reduced to any simple formula. At stake, instead, is the relation these dark women entertain to the manner in which the night as stage and state of mind conjoins protection, fantasy work and death in a way to correct the optimism of blanc modernism. In contrast to the showgirl, the secretary, the business woman or the glamorous femme du monde we find in other genre films of the period, the femme fatale of film noir chooses neither the stage, nor the workplace nor a wise marriage to improve herself in accordance with her dreams for worldly success, prosperity and happiness. Instead, she turns to crime as her way out of stifling living conditions, be this a boring home, an unpromising job or an emotionally dissatisfying marriage. Rather than trusting in her family, her community or her work to help her develop her inherent potential for self-improvement or self-realization, she seeks to emancipate herself by transgressing social codes. Yet although she is driven by a keen individual desire for freedom (beyond the constraints her family and her society impose) and money (beyond what she can legally earn), and as such seemingly outside the collective drive towards improvement which both Roosevelt’s New Deal and then the war effort came to stand for, the femme fatale does not recede completely into a subjective world of transgression. Rather, she comes out on the side of the law, albeit not the law of diurnal cultural codes, but the law of disclosing all codes as constraints, even if symbolically necessary to hold the community together. She does not break into wealth or happiness, nor does she break down into madness, delusion and self-destruction. Her decision to move into crime – and it is always a conscious one, not a spontaneous impulse – is an ethical choice to break out of a condition she cannot tolerate. It disregards its impact on the future, and lacks any concern for a community to come. One must thus ask: If these noir heroines long for self-expenditure, is it different from the jouissance that drives their blinded lovers into the night? It is,

Femme Fatale and the Dark Side of Modernity

77

indeed, my contention that the femme fatale obliquely represents diurnal law, because by luring the hero into his destruction, she brings about not only his punishment but insists on a recognition of the impossibility to transgress cultural laws, even if – or precisely because – to insist on one’s freedom one must strive against all cultural restraints. Indeed, in the world of film noir, where actions occur accidentally on purpose, the femme fatale functions both as the screen for fantasies of omnipotence and as the agent who, by ultimately facing the consequences of her noir actions, comes to reveal the fragility not only of any sense of omnipotence that transgression of the law affords, but, indeed, of what it means to be a modern subject. Hers is precisely the refusal to be fully subsumed by symbolic laws, which according to Mladen Dolar, is the sign that the process by which an individual turns into a subject interpellated by ideology is never complete. She refuses, even if it means she pays with her life. As Dolar explains, ‘there is always a part of the individual that cannot successfully pass into the subject, an element of “pre-ideological” and “pre-subjective” materia prima that comes to haunt subjectivity once it is constituted as such’ (1993, p. 77). While the femme fatale (as an embodiment of what I am calling noir modernity) has subscribed of her own free will to the cultural laws which interpellate her, by living her life within the constraints of what is determined to be legal action, she is, at the same time, haunted by desires for forbidden pleasures, for illegal actions, which she initially fosters in the intimacy of her psychic reality. When, however, the chance to act on and indeed fulfil these fantasies suddenly, and to a degree unexpectedly opens up, she acts without hesitation because she has always anticipated this moment. Mladen Dolar, indeed, asserts that the subject is not so much what makes ideology work. Rather, the ‘subject merges where ideology fails’. Given that ‘all the formations of the unconscious have this in common, they are accompanied by a “this is not me”, “I was not there”, although they were produced by this subject. They depend on the emergence of an ‘alien kernel’ within subjectivity, an automatism beyond control, the break-down, in certain points, of the constituted horizon of recognition and sense’, (Dolar, 1993, p. 78) and, I would add, binding legal, social codes. If then, subjectivity ultimately marks the failure to fully become a subject of a given ideology, it is this dark side of the subject the femme fatale puts on display by moving into crime – in her case specifically the dark side of an American dream aimed at working in and for a community to come. As such, the femme fatale emerges as a dark figure of enlightenment. Blind optimism, she suggests, is not a viable option. In Double Indemnity, a film that came out one year before the Second World War would come to an end, Billy Wilder chooses his nocturnal heroine as the ethical centre of a tale about how, once one has embarked on the dark path of illegality, it is straight down the line for all involved. One afternoon, Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), agent for the All Risk Insurance Company, happens to ring the doorbell of Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), seeking to renew the policy on her husband’s car. In the opening sequence, this femme fatale leans over the railing on the second floor of her

78

Crime Culture

home and gazes at the young man, who has followed her housekeeper into the entrance hall. He has disturbed her sunbathing, and she, wrapped only in her bathing towel, towers over him like a love goddess. The excessive blond hair leaves no doubt in our mind that she is not to be trusted. In the shadow of her living room a verbal sparring match unfolds, during which feminine seduction and masculine desire for risk entwine. They talk about insurance, yet safety is precisely what neither of them is after. Phyllis promises erotic bliss, but the contract she proposes to Walter is of a different nature. He is to trick her husband into signing a life insurance policy with a double indemnity clause, and then help her murder him to get the money. Although their first encounter takes place in the afternoon, the artificial lighting of the living room highlights the fact that both have entered a fatal scene of fantasy. Initially, Walter is able to leave without compromising himself, but Phyllis has recognized that he is only waiting to be deceived by her. She waits for night to visit him in his apartment, where he is sitting alone in the dark, as though their meeting that afternoon had plunged him into a mental darkness only she can illuminate. Upon entering, she turns on the light, but he remains in the shadows as he listens to her talk about the unbearable marriage she violently wishes to bring to an end. At the same time, her story is also illuminating to us, given that we come to realize how fully cognizant she is of the consequences of her actions. She is willing to pay any price for her freedom, while not deluding herself about what Walter’s true interest in her case is. Although he pretends that he is after the love and the money this dangerously alluring woman seems to promise, their accidental meeting offers him a different opportunity he has been longing for. As an insurance agent he has been obsessed with finding a way to trick his company and thus prove he is more clever at fraud than the men and women who have tried to deceive him. What is therefore significant about the fatal bond the two noir lovers enter, then, is not only the fact that the murder of Mr Dietrichson allows them to realize their respective clandestine desires. Rather what Billy Wilder reveals is that these desires are not the same, and indeed not even compatible. Important for my claim that Wilder’s femme fatale emerges as a complex character, with a subjectivity of her own, is the fact that while she beguiles Walter, Phyllis is at no point herself deluded. She does not think of herself as an innocent victim of dark circumstance, but rather shamelessly manipulates her lover, even while recognizing the fatality of her actions. It is for this reason that Billy Wilder offers us a series of close-ups of his femme fatale. In the first instance she is standing lost in thought on the threshold to her home after her husband has unwittingly signed his own death warrant. The murder she is dreaming about at this point will also be referred to via a subtle facial gesture. While, a few weeks later, Walter strangles Mr Dietrichson from the back seat of his car, Wilder again offers us a close-up of his femme fatale. Initially we see her thinking soberly about the reality of the killing she has provoked, then suddenly quiet joy spreads across Barbara Stanwyck’s face.

Femme Fatale and the Dark Side of Modernity

79

On the evening after the inquest, in which the judge declares the death of her husband to have been an accident, she visits Walter but waits to enter his home, because she hears the voice of his colleague (Edward G. Robinson) coming from inside the apartment. Charged with investigating the Dietrichson insurance claim, Keyes is angrily vociferating that he would like to hand the widow over to the police. In her face we see signs of trepidation at the thought that the law might, after all, catch up with her. At the same time we get a sense that she is privy to the way Walter will sacrifice her to protect himself. For this reason she asks him to come to the supermarket they have chosen as their clandestine meeting point. Initially wearing sunglasses to shade her eyes (Figure 4.1), she takes these off as she declares that she will not withdraw her claim. ‘We went into this together, and we are getting out together’, she assures him. ‘It’s straight down the line for both of us.’ In her uncompromising gaze we are asked to recognize that she will not cede her lethal desire, even if it means she will pay with her life. While she thus recognizes the fragility of her nocturnal pursuit of happiness, Walter, by contrast, foolishly believes that he can absolve himself of guilt by killing off the woman who inspired his dark fantasies. They meet one last time in the darkened living room of her home. Because she rightly assumes that he has come to kill her, she has placed a gun underneath her seat and with it fires the first shot. At this point, however, she drops the gun. One last time Wilder offers us a close-up of her face, while, having begun to embrace her faithless lover, she confesses, ‘I never loved you nor anybody else. I used you, just as you said, until the minute when I couldn’t fire the second shot.’ For Billy Wilder’s

Figure 4.1 Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944)

80

Crime Culture

femme fatale, to inhabit the night with confidence means to recognize the moment when one must relinquish all deception and look one’s fate straight in the eye. Walter, in turn, tenaciously holds onto his delusions and fires his gun. We see a flicker of astonishment on Barbara Stanwyck’s face and then she briefly winces at the pain she has begun to feel. Death, the counterpart of her dream of freedom, is not terrible to her. She has acknowledged her tragic fate as the necessary consequence of her actions, because at this point she has relinquished all self-delusion. As an embodiment of the dark side of modernity, the femme fatale comes to acknowledge her responsibility for her fate, while the hero she involves in her transgressive plot is characterized by the exact opposite attitude, namely a desire to stave off knowledge of his own fallibility at all cost. Though from the moment they lay eyes on each other, both find themselves looking at their world through the dark lens of their desires, the manner in which the law of causation catches up with them is radically different. If the contingent turn from free choice to inevitability is aligned with a masculine gaze appropriating a seductive feminine body, one must not overlook the fact that as bearer of the hero’s look, it is the femme fatale who manipulates the outcome of their fatal meeting. It may be a coincidence that this particular man has caught her in his field of vision, but she has been expecting someone like him to do precisely that. She knows all along that she is fated and can, therefore, turn what is inevitable into a source of power. Or put another way, precisely because she does not deny the lethal consequences of a refusal to cede her desire, she is a figure of insight, not denial. Indeed, the classic femme fatale has enjoyed such popularity because she is not only sexually uninhibited but also unabashedly independent and ruthlessly ambitious, using her seductive charms and her intelligence to liberate herself from the imprisonment of an unfulfilling marriage. Furthermore, though she gains power over the noir hero by nourishing his sexual fantasies, her own interest is only superficially erotic. She entertains a narcissistic pleasure at the deployment of her own ability to dupe the men who fall for her, even as she is merciless in manipulating them for her own ends. Duplicity thus emerges as her most seminal value, insofar as she is not simply willing to delude anyone in order to get the money and the freedom she is after, but because she will never show her true intentions to anyone, especially not the hero she has inveigled, even if this entails not only his death but also her own. One could speak of a dark modern subjectivity in conjunction with the femme fatale in part because she inevitably comes to recognize that her radical insistence on independence is a delusion, which was meant to stave off a recognition of her own fallibility. Even though, as Paula Rabinowitz notes, ‘She is false, a double-crosser, so even if she is after the goods, they will elude her’, (2002, p. 143) at the moment of anagnorisis, she can recognize her desire for freedom as attainable only in death. At the same time, in that she uses her seductive powers to lead the noir hero from the sunlit exterior into a nocturnal world of transgressions, betrayals and, ultimately, his demise, she also embodies the proximity

Femme Fatale and the Dark Side of Modernity

81

of modern existence and the death drive, as Freud put it. On the one hand, one could speak of her as a figure of male fantasy, articulating both a fascination for the sexually aggressive woman, as well as anxieties about feminine domination. As Joan Copjec argues, in order to indemnify herself against the dangers of sexuality, the noir hero treats her as his double, to which he surrenders the fatal enjoyment he cannot himself sustain (1993, p. 193). On the other hand, the femme fatale is more than simply a symptom of the hero’s erotic ambivalence. She sustains his self-delusion, but also gives voice to a feminine desire that may include him in order to attain its aim, but also exceeds his fantasy realm. In her insistence that ‘it’s straight down the line for both’ of them, she can be understood as moving towards an ethical act meant to radically undercut the blindness of self-preservation her lover seeks to entertain at all costs. Thus, regardless whether one chooses to read her as a symptom within a male fantasy or as a subject moving beyond male fantasy, the femme fatale renders visible the dark side of the American dream, that brings the death inscribed in any dream of wealth into the foreground (as Holbein’s Ambassadors had already done anamorphotically at the beginning of modernity). If read as a symptom, she is denied humanity in the totalitarian fantasy scenario of the hero, whose aim is to avoid an acknowledgement of his own fallibility by transferring it to her body. If read as a subject moving beyond a totalizing fantasy threatening to engulf her, she emerges as the figure in the noir narrative who ultimately comes to accept her being towards death (Heidegger) as the logical consequence of insisting on a radical pursuit of personal freedom in which a desire for wealth rests upon the murder of someone else. Standing in opposition to a strand of American optimism that sees individuals as masters of their own destiny, with a right to pursue happiness at all cost without paying the price, she insists not only on opening the eyes of her lover but also on opening ours, those of the viewers. In the world of film noir one can, however, also find delusion and betrayal cast in a mirthful tone. In Charles Vidor’s Gilda (1946), Rita Hayworth uses her ravishing beauty to spur on a lethal love contest, even while the nocturnal phantasmagoria she inspires has nothing fatal about it. Buenos Aires at the end of the Second World War, the city where she suddenly turns up as the wife of nightclub-owner Ballin Mundson (George Macready), functions as a liminal site between war and peace, as well as between the exotic and the familiar. As in Double Indemnity, the narrative begins in the afternoon, only in this case it is her husband who brings home the young man whom he has just hired as his new right hand. Initially the two men stand in the shadow before her door and listen to her singing to herself. As they enter the brightly lit interior of her private room, they see her practicing her art of seduction in front of a mirror. As her gaze falls on Johnny (Glenn Ford), whom Gilda immediately recognizes as her former lover from New York, her smile freezes into the mask of smooth elegance. She triumphantly stares at the man whom she knows to be utterly surprised to find her married, thus signalling to him that this is her revenge for his having abandoned her.

82

Crime Culture

However, as was the case with the close-ups Billy Wilder gives to his femme fatale, so, too, Charles Vidor moves his camera towards Gilda’s face and we recognize that within seconds her sparkling confidence has transformed into worried annoyance. The appearance of the two men will force her into playing a game, in which it is as yet unclear who will win and who will lose. She allows Ballin to kiss her, while focusing on Johnny with her gaze, because she is only too aware that the marriage she had entered upon in the hope of finding an easy life has suddenly transformed into a dark love intrigue. The casino, in which Gilda will aggressively display her charm, emerges as the stage for a dangerous competition. She chooses to don the role of the infamous femme fatale Johnny takes her to be, ostentatiously flirting with other men. But she also uses this nocturnal stage to attack her former lover with her wit, and in so doing displays an intimacy from which he cannot withdraw. Significant in this version of the femme fatale is the way Gilda is driven by a mixture of courage and despair, because in this nocturnal world she is utterly alone. She has appropriated feminine guile as her form of masquerade, believing this to be her only viable weapon in the ménage à trois in which her suspicious husband has involved her and her former lover, testing his wife by finding out how Johnny will deal with his hurt pride. Gilda’s strategy consists in consciously calling forth her former lover’s anger. She hopes that by forcing him to recognize his passion for her, hate might again turn into love. The casino sets the perfect stage for a world in which Gilda can only trust her luck, giving herself up completely to a game of deception, in which she can shamelessly exhibit her feminine charms, because all else lies beyond her control. This love comedy is noir not only because the backdrop to the lover’s quarrel is a sinister battle for the global market of tungsten light, but also because of the logic of love it unfolds. Gilda seeks to perform the darkest fantasies Johnny has of the deceptive femme fatale, so that having come to the heart of darkness of his jealousy, he recognizes his hate to be the result of his heated imagination. If Gilda requires the artificial light of the casino to sparkle at the roulette table and the dance floor, she also requires his blind rage as the dark backdrop, from which she can emerge as his true love. At the height of a carnival night, she will finally get Johnny to give in to her seduction. That same night her husband will feign an airplane accident in order to disappear, given his sinister connection to fascist politicians in South America. At this point in the story, Johnny is not yet ready to wake up from his jealousy. Although he marries Gilda, he still wishes to punish her. She, however, knows how to retaliate, turning their noir romance into parodic excess. During what became an infamous striptease scene, Gilda (Figure 4.2) appears on the dance floor of the casino dressed in a tight, sleeveless satin gown. Her song invokes the figure of an originary femme fatale, mother of all catastrophe. ‘Put the blame on Mame’, she repeatedly declares, while reducing all the wickedness of the world to the sensual body movements of a nightclub dancer. Cinematographically, the charm of the scene resides in the fact that Rita Hayworth is clearly

Femme Fatale and the Dark Side of Modernity

83

Figure 4.2 Charles Vidor’s Gilda (1946)

enjoying her celebration of the erotic power of the femme fatale. Her Gilda ironically smiles at the camera, as the spot light tracks her across the dark stage, signalling to us that she knows she is holding our attention. Impersonating feminine fatality, she is fully confident that she knows how to unleash her lover’s jealousy. During her performance she slowly takes off only one glove, but once she is finished with her routine, she quickly throws the second one into the audience and follows this up by asking whether anyone can help her with her zipper. She knows that Johnny will intervene in this scandalous spectacle, staged to force him to confront the truth of his dark fantasies about her. Ironically of course, after Look put Hayworth on its cover on 11 August 1941 she was to become one of the most famous pin-ups of the Second World War. The atom bomb, which the US military tested in the Bikini Atoll in 1947, was called Gilda and bore an image of this ‘Love Goddess’. In what can only be called a dubious tribute to her star quality, the GIs and their superiors were so enthralled

84

Crime Culture

with the feminine seductress of Charles Vidor’s film noir that they were willing to feminize the instrument of military destruction par excellence, the Bomb. Rita Hayworth vehemently protested against the use of her star image for military purposes, and within the film narrative, her song about the destruction men attribute to feminine sexuality does call forth an act of real aggression on the part of her husband. And yet, while the violence with which Johnny pulls his Gilda from the stage and slaps her may encompass an act of humiliation, the femme fatale is anything but passive. Rather, Gilda has consciously provoked him, seeking to force him to recognize that at the heart of his violent outbreak of passion lies true love. In this noir spin on the classic blanc sophisticated comedy of the 1930s and 1940s, the femme fatale successfully corrects the deluded gaze of her lover. The tears with which she responds to Johnny’s violence renders visible the complexity of her nocturnal charm. She has taken upon herself the seductive power of the night, in part because she felt she had no other alternative, in part because erotic self-display is what she enjoys. Like Phyllis in Double Indemnity, she is willing to risk everything, even if this means she will get hurt herself. But in contrast to Phyllis – and therein lies the significant difference between the tragic and the comic noir tone – her performance of feminine infamy has actually opened the eyes of her faithless lover. Faced with an enactment of his worse fantasies, Johnny has not only utterly lost control. He resorts to a slap in the face not a shot in the heart, and is thus able to wake up from his dream of an all-encompassing jealousy. When they meet for the last time in the casino, Gilda is no longer wearing a glamorous evening gown. She is soberly dressed for the quotidian life in America she is about to return to. Johnny humbly asks her to take him with her, and relieved, she accepts. No further excuses are necessary, because as they walk arm in arm into the lit corridor at the end of the hall, the film ends. The transition into the mutual everyday they are about to embark on remains beyond our sight, which means that perhaps a new carnival is about to begin in post-war America. According to Janey Place, film noir should be read as a ‘male fantasy’ and the femme fatale as the mythic ‘dark lady, the spider woman, the evil seductress who tempts man and brings about his destruction’, and who has been haunting our image repertoire since Eve and Pandora. Yet Place stresses a poignant contradiction. Even while film noir offers a stage for the dangerous woman, embellishing her seduction and her desire for power, it also relentlessly plays out her demise. This is because ‘the myth of the strong, sexually aggressive woman first allows sensuous expression of her dangerous power and its frightening results, and then destroys it, thus expressing repressed concerns of the female threat to male dominance’(Place, 1980, p. 35). Yet, looking at Gilda one might also say that even though she loses her nocturnal allure on the diegetic level (she allows herself to be denigrated by her husband) and on the visual level (Rita Hayworth’s sexuality is ultimately domesticated as she exchanges her strapless nightclub gown for a sober tweed costume), the fascinating power she embodies remains until the end. The restitution her taming is meant to bring about is inevitably

Femme Fatale and the Dark Side of Modernity

85

riddled with fissures. Throughout the film, Gilda, like other femmes fatales, successfully undermined the hegemonic morality of family values prevalent in the post-war period. Even though her glamorous life in a nightclub in Argentina ultimately comes to an abrupt end, her transgressions against masculine authority – her shameless enjoyment of her public self-display as well as her insistence to beat her jealous husband at his own game – is what tarries in our memory. As Sylvia Harvey notes, ‘Despite the ritual punishment of acts of transgression, the vitality with these acts are endowed produces an excess of meaning which cannot finally be contained. Narrative resolutions cannot recuperate their subversive significance’ (1998, p. 31). Poised between the tragic femme fatale and her comic counterpoint, film noir, however, offers a third position: the female investigator. Even if women only rarely work as police officers or detectives in the films Hollywood produced in the 1940s and 1950s, we find in film noir heroines seeking to light out the dark net of intrigue they find themselves embroiled in. Significantly they often find themselves at the navel of this fantasy scenario. Alone in her luxurious New York apartment, we once again encounter the actress Barbara Stanwyck in Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), this time playing the hysteric invalid Leona, daughter of a wealthy businessman. Dressed in her elegant lace night gown she is waiting in vain for her husband Henry (Burt Lancaster) to come home. Resting comfortably on the bed she has not left for months, she tries one last time to call him at his office. Because the line continues to be busy, she is about to hang up, when she suddenly hears the voices of two strangers, telling each other that a woman will be murdered at a quarter past eleven. While the police, whom she immediately calls, can do nothing with her meagre information, Leona persists in thinking about the strange conversation she overheard, not knowing that her husband has secretly left the city because he is, in fact, the man who ordered the murder and she is the intended victim. Her bed emerges as the control station in a double voyage of discovery, because in solving the mystery of Henry’s absence she also solves the question of her own lethal desire. We see the first signs of fear as she begins to breathe more heavily, while wiping beads of sweat from her brow with her lace handkerchief. Nevertheless she is, at this point, still able to get up from her bed, to fetch the note-pad from her desk, where her servant has written down the calls that came in that day for her husband. There she finds the name of her former college roommate Sally and her face begins to beam. She proudly remembers how, many years ago, she used her charms and guile to steal Henry from her and marry him herself. Leona’s ambition, we slowly discover, had always consisted in getting what she had imagined for herself, and in this unwillingness to give way on her desire Barbara Stanwyck recalls her performance of Phyllis Dietrichson. Sally’s voice, reaching out to Leona through the telephone, pits a picture of the collateral damage her friend’s ruthless egotism has produced in her husband against this initial self-confidence. In order to gain financial independence from his wife, Henry has got himself involved in the illegal trade of prescription

86

Crime Culture

drugs. Initially, Leona decides not to believe her former friend. Only when she receives the telegram from her husband telling her that he will not be home for the next two days, does she fall into a state of emotional disarray, in which terror is mingled with masochistic pleasure. As her perfectly coiffed hair slowly comes undone, her breath grows heavier and her face comes to be covered with pearls of sweat, Leona clearly enjoys the state of abandonment she suddenly finds herself in. Relying utterly on her own will power, yet without leaving her bed, she uses the telephone to follow the lead Sally has given her, as though she were a detective in her own case. As the night breaks in, she is able to call forth confessions from her various interlocutors, which we are shown as flashbacks, so that we share with her the film unfolding before her inner eye. What this reveals, against the backdrop of a dark night enfolding her with its darkness, is the story about her husbands transgressions, as he followed his dark American dream. He has not only been trading illegally with drugs stolen from her father’s pharmaceutical company, but also with her life. Believing her to be suffering from a fatal heart disease, Henry had hoped to raise money on her life insurance. Once he discovered, however, that her physical disability was purely hysteric, he decided to hire a contract killer, so as to cash in on her inheritance. Although this is a reversal of the scheme from Double Indemnity, it is still fruitful to read Leona as a femme fatale. While she is not the instigator but rather the victim of murder, her actions also have fatal consequences that hinge upon her willingness to acknowledge the fatality of her unyielding desire. With the help of the voices she hears through the telephone, Leona is able to reconstruct not only her husband’s crimes but more importantly her own egotistic blindness. She is forced to recognize that her hysteria not only called forth her husband’s lethal desire to be rid of her. As in the case of Gilda, dancing her mock striptease, we can also call this enactment of the hysteric body noir, because it, too, focuses on the destructive side of modern feminine subjectivity. Leone is forced to concede that she had staged her own physical fragility in order to impose her will on her husband, regardless of the consequences. Her own vanity thus emerges as the origin of her tragic fate, since obliquely she is herself responsible for the murderous contract Henry committed himself to. If her unconditional egotism had always been nourished by her fear that Henry would leave her, she now experiences this fantasy to excess. She discovers that he is even willing to kill and thus rid himself of her, in order to cover up his shady deals. At the same time her husband was not alone in using deception in order to keep up the illusion of success. Leona’s hysteria, after all, is also a form of life-sustaining deception, only one in which she has been using her illness to manipulate her husband and feed her egotistical ambitions. Like Billy Wilder’s femme fatale, so brilliantly enacted by the same actress, Leona will pay with her life for the conviction that she must not renounce her desire for selfdetermination.

Femme Fatale and the Dark Side of Modernity

87

The bitter irony of Litvak’s film noir is that because his femme fatale insists on the fantasy of being ill, and thus entitled to force her husband to comply with her wishes, she not only signs her own death sentence but also his. During their final telephone conversation Henry begs her to leave her bed and call out for help, only for her to refuse. In this intense state of vulnerability she continues to be driven by her ruthless will power. After all, to refuse to prohibit the murder her husband has designed for her is not a sign of resignation. Refusing to accept survival at the cost of giving up her self-image emerges as the grandiose apotheosis of a fanatical dream of modern feminine self-determination. Like other femmes fatales, Leona holds the thread to her life in her own hand, even while the voice of the contract killer signals the end of all noir dreams. Having realized that the police have caught up with him, Henry had called back his wife, because her death was now unnecessary. The voice that answers his call replies ‘Sorry, wrong number’, the code to indicate to him that the murder had been successfully completed. Only now this message is also a code for the fact that Leona continues to possess her husband even from beyond death. Henry will also not escape his due punishment, in this case not just for theft but for murder. As Litvak’s Sorry, Wrong Number moves towards midnight, not only fate but also justice catches up with all the nocturnal players. The three femmes fatales chosen as paradigmatic examples for the way the noir heroine inhabits the nocturnal world allow one to draw the following typology. At one extreme we have Phyllis Dietrichson, ready to accept all risks in order to enforce her dangerous desire for self-determination. She thus comes to represent an inescapable necessity of fate born in and borne by the night. In the centre position we find Gilda, who stands for a more mirthful game of deception and self-delusion. This queen of nightclubs trusts in the transformatory power of the night, in order to force her blinded lover to wake up from his fantasy of jealousy. She plays for him the role of infamous seductress he desires, in order, in the end, to unveil the spectacle of the femme fatale as the embodiment of an imaginary creature. This imaginary being is drawn out of the darkness of the casino stage explicitly by a spot light, implicitly by her lover. At the other extreme we find Leona, holding onto her dream in bodily incapacitation with such tenacity because her life is fatefully entwined with it. In all cases, recognizing the necessity of fate, and with it the demise of their dreams (even if not always their lives) these femmes fatales insist on not giving way on their desire, even if – as in the two versions performed by Barbara Stanwyck – they prefer the freedom of death over a return to a new day. In all cases what is significant is that they know of the dark side of fantasy work, indeed are willing to respond to its lethal call, even while in so doing they are neither innocent nor blind. Instead they cultivate a vigilance in the night, which film noir casts as the dark side of modernity. While the femme fatale embodies to the gender discontent of post-war America, contingent upon the fact that neither the veterans returning from the

88

Crime Culture

front nor the women sent home from the work force could return to social conditions prevalent before the war, the cultural association between femininity and the night discloses a crisis of the American dream already prevalent in the historical period leading up to the Second World War. While the gangster films of the 1930s function as a trope for the dangers of capitalist expansion at all cost gone awry, film noir casts the night as the dark side of modernity to uncover the cultural limitation placed on modernism’s project for universal emancipation, progress and prosperity in anticipation of a community to come. At the same time, it also reveals a side of modern subjectivity which resists collective advancement, by pitting a noir hero, riddled with transgressive ambitions as well as paranoid delusions against a femme fatale, who takes modernism’s claim for unrestrained self-definition to an extreme, and in so doing finds herself in conflict not only with communal needs but also all personal sense of survival. The resilient ingenuity with which American women got the United States out of the Depression and through the Second World War, has as its flip side an equally resilient drive towards freedom, aimed not at sustaining the home, in the name of which the war was fought, but rather sustaining a dream of unencumbered individuality antagonistic to the home. In the context of post-war social and economic realities, film noir not only paints a claustrophobic world in which crime emerges as perhaps the one sure way to attain the freedom, prosperity and happiness upon which the American Dream is grounded on, but also shows the irrevocable limit of this dream. If breaking into wealth by virtue of crime means breaking out of the social world, it is straight down the line for all involved. The only possible way of breaking free from the forms of imprisonment noir’s heroes and heroines fight against is death. Such criminalization of the American Dream undermines the optimism of modernity’s emancipatory project and yet it thrives on the same vitality. The heroes and heroines of the nocturnal world of film noir insist on walking towards their dreams by facing, and ultimately embracing the fatality of this desire. That they die in the process puts into question not the dream itself, but the conditions under which it is realizable. Crime culture not only reflects postwar political paranoia and economic corruption, but also serves as a trope for what it means to resist the totalizing drive of ideology, by trusting in the most seminal of all-American values: individual self-reliance. As such it testifies not to the death of the American Dream but to its aporia. To insist on walking steadily towards ones dreams, regardless of all hindrances, means walking not towards a shared future community but towards a radical individualism which can never be part of this communality. The death film noir’s heroes and heroines find at the end of this path is the price American culture must pay to reinstall the cultural necessity of consensus and community. On screen, the dark side of modernity is not only revealing but cathartic, a necessary cultural intervention in the reality of American violence – one we can only try to mitigate but can never block out.

Femme Fatale and the Dark Side of Modernity

89

Note 1

See also Bronfen, 2004. For an overall discussion of the emergence and development of film noir, see Naremore, 1998, as well as Phil Hardy’s discussion of the change in women’s economic and social power brought on by the onset of war (Hardy, 1997, pp. 130–1). See also Walker, 1994, for a discussion of the historical context of film noir.

Chapter 5

Post-War American Noir: Confronting Fordism Andrew Pepper

Fordist Noir Just eight years separate the initial publication of James M. Cain’s novel Double Indemnity (1936) and the film version directed by Billy Wilder and starring Fred McMurray and Barbara Stanwyck. Like The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), Cain’s novel is firmly rooted in Depression-era California, a world of material deprivation and human desperation. One of the most striking aspects of the film, released in 1944 at the height of wartime scarcity and rationing, therefore, is the material abundance on view: the supermarket shelves are vertiginous with produce and everyone drives a shiny, new automobile. As Marling notes: ‘A final disparity between film noir and reality is material deprivation . . . But none of this privation appears in the world of film noir. Its protagonists have new cars and never wait in gas lines. Indeed, the Fred McMurray character, in its darkest film, lives in a consumer cornucopia’ (1995, pp. 268–9). Nonetheless Marling goes on to suggest that certain aspects of a film like Double Indemnity ‘accurately’ depict the socio-economic logic of capitalist organization: ‘[t]he rationalization of the workplace, the “legalization” of society . . . the jobs in statistics, insurance, and service industries’ (1995, pp. 268–9). In my chapter, I want to use this disjuncture as a starting-point to examine the landscape of post-Second World War American noir, particularly Wilder’s film, Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley (1953) and Charles Willeford’s Pick-Up (1955). There is much excellent recent scholarship that situates film noir and the American roman noir in the context of shifting political frameworks (McCann, 2000) or in an explicitly materialist context (Irwin, 2006; Marling, 1995) or, in the case of Seltzer’s book on serial killers (1998), as a manifestation of mechanized forms of cultural and economic production. That said, the critical reaction to ‘noir’ in general has generally tended to privilege psychoanalytic approaches (or at least ones that focus on the linkage between sexuality and transgression). Building on the example of McCann, Irwin and Seltzer, part of my aim here is to challenge this orthodoxy. By arguing that these novels and

Post-War American Noir: Confronting Fordism

91

films explore the disjuncture between the freedom promised by a world of material abundance and the consequences of what we might call the Fordist regime of capital accumulation, I want to suggest that they constitute an important but little analysed series of attempts to map the relationship between the domain of work and leisure and between the emergence of new forms of consumption and new models of masculinity and sexuality (also see Breu, 2005). While American noir, in all of its diverse literary and filmic manifestations, defies straightforward characterization (see Horsley, 2009, p. 6) and while it is perhaps unwise to try and shoehorn novelists as diverse as Cain, McCoy, Highsmith and Willeford into the same descriptive straightjacket, there are, as I have argued elsewhere, similar thematic and political preoccupations that unite these writers (Pepper, 2010). These include the meaninglessness and absurdity of existence, anxieties about masculinity and the bureaucratization of public life, a fascination with the psychological and the workings of the subconscious, and above all the corrosive effects of money. Attempts to flesh out this last point have, with a few notable exceptions, been disappointingly vague; Haut, for instance, talks merely about the ability of what he calls ‘pulp culture writing’ to chart ‘capitalism’s ability to erode community turning its citizens into a disparate band of self-centred and alienated individuals’ (1995, p. 10); while Cochran argues that Willeford and others created ‘a world in which the predatory cannibalism of American capitalism provides the model for all human relations’ (2000, p. 40). But how might we begin to characterize American capitalism in the immediate post-war period? What are its essential features and what kind of socio-political critique are these writers and filmmakers offering? Partial answers to these questions can be found in McCann’s well-judged attempt to read American hard-boiled crime fiction in relation both to liberal theory and the centrality of the law, and more particularly to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s efforts ‘to adjust liberalism to the special demands of an industrialized economy and an urbanized nation’ (2000, pp. 6–7). Still, even here the specificity of McCann’s otherwise excellent analysis of New Deal liberalism in the United States from the 1930s to the 1950s and of the failure of popular reformism yields, in places, to worryingly open-ended references to ‘the corporate concentration of economic power’ or a ‘universal predatory desire exemplified by the rapacious power of tycoons and the banal appetites of consumers’ (2000, pp. 16, 29). I want to flesh out McCann’s ideas here to show that American noir writing and filmmaking responded, or tried to respond (often in highly critical ways), not merely to the iniquities and deadening effects of capitalism but rather, and quite specifically, to changing practices of work and leisure and the reorganization of American life in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War (i.e. 1945–1955) according to the principles of Fordist capital accumulation. Associated primarily with the rationalization of economic life in the United States after the First World War and the intensification of these process in subsequent decades, Fordism refers, in very broad terms, to what Heffernan

92

Crime Culture

calls ‘the durable balance between the mass production of standardised goods on the one hand, and the mass consumption of such goods on the other’ pioneered by Henry Ford (2000, p. 3). More specifically, Jessop identifies four distinctive features of this general dynamic. First, it is a ‘type of labour process’ involving ‘mass production . . . based on moving assembly line techniques’; second, it is ‘a stable model of macroeconomic growth’ based on mass production, rising productivity, higher wages and increased demand; third, it is ‘a mode of social and economic regulation’ based on ‘the separation of ownership and control in large corporations’; and finally, it can be seen ‘as a general pattern of social organisation’ involving ‘the consumption of standardised, mass commodities in nuclear family households and the provision of standardised . . . goods and services by the bureaucratic state’ (Jessop, 2000, pp. 253–4). In making this connection between cultural practice and economic organization, I am not trying to suggest that writers like Highsmith ever consciously sought to mount a critique of Fordism or that the kind of doomed parables of personal failure that one most readily characterizes as ‘noir’ should be seen as straightforward attempts to reflect, accurately or otherwise, particular features of post-Second World War economic processes. Rather, it is to claim that novels like The Talented Mr Ripley and Pick-Up are best understood both as generalized responses to social and cultural anxieties generated by the consolidation of a particular mode of economic life, and attempts to subvert some of the normative features associated with what Jessop calls Fordism as ‘a general pattern of social organization’ (2000, p. 254). As such, I am drawing upon work undertaken by Harvey (1989) and Heffernan (2000), both of whom explore the ways in which social and economic changes are registered in, and help to shape, narrative cultural forms. If Harvey and Heffernan are more interested in tracing the political and cultural consequences of a shift from Fordism to post-Fordism or a ‘a more flexible regime of accumulation’ (Harvey, 1989, p. 124), and want at least to identify post-Fordism and post-modernism as intertwined descriptions of cultural change, I want to keep my focus primarily directed at the cultural effects of Fordism. This, of course, runs the risk of constituting Fordism as a kind of cultural dominant and in arguing for the cultural significance of a particular form of economic organization, I do not want to propose that the consolidation of Fordism in the post-war era necessarily produced a new form of (acquiescent) culture or (critical) counterculture. Rather, in the same way that Rabinowitz (2002) identifies noir as a form of ‘pulp modernism’, I want to argue that writers like Highsmith and Willeford responded in imaginative, critical and usually indirect ways to the consensuses developing around the apparently positive manifestations of Fordism and in doing so transformed popular or ‘pulp’ culture into a critical and politicized enterprise. It is perhaps inevitable that an anti-utopian cultural practice such as noir – premised, as Schmid (2008) puts it, on ‘its opposition to all cultural, economic and political orthodoxies’ – should respond with such anxiety to a system of economic rationalization bristling with utopian intent (i.e. whereby ‘better’

Post-War American Noir: Confronting Fordism

93

modes of existence are, potentially at least, created through changing work practices). To put this another way, if important shifts in patterns of production and consumption ended up privileging the worker and consumer as the most valued subjectivities in post-war US life, writers like Highsmith and Willeford deliberately set out to create protagonists who did not fit into these prescribed roles and who actively flouted the assumptions informing their privileged status. It was Antonio Gramsci who first noted that the rationalization of work and the regulation of subjectivity both inside and outside the workplace were connected to Fordist practices. As Gramsci argued, the restructuring of the workplace in the United States that gathered pace from the 1920s onwards constituted ‘the biggest collective effort to date to create, with unprecedented speed, and with a consciousness of purpose unmatched in history, a new type of worker and of man’ (1971, p. 302). Gramsci, of course, was specifically writing about the period following the end of the First World War but, as I will try to demonstrate, his arguments about the creation of a new type of worker and man become even more relevant when Fordism reaches its zenith or high point in the years following the Second World War. Gramsci was intrigued by but deeply suspicious of these rationalizations and in so far as ‘noirists’ like Willeford and Highsmith shared his scepticism, I will argue by way of conclusion that an important affinity existed between ‘noir’ as a category and a critical outlook developed out of Marxism.

Crooking the House The afore-mentioned lack of material deprivation on view in Billy Wilder’s film of Cain’s novel Double Indemnity permits us to make one seemingly reasonable assumption: insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred McMurray) and bored housewife Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) do not kill Phyllis’s husband because they absolutely need the money. It is true that Mr Dietrichson, at least according to Phyllis, has not provided her with a generous weekly allowance and Walter – a ‘good insurance man’ with a salary to match – is comfortable rather than well-off. But with the spectre of the Depression still iridescent in the collective US imagination, Walter’s spacious apartment and automobile, and Phyllis’s Spanish-style mansion, speak about an affluence which, in turn, makes it difficult to conceive of their murderous plot simply in terms of need. Perhaps it is worth putting the question of Phyllis’s motivation to one side and concentrating on Walter, not least because as a femme fatale she functions primarily as the distorted manifestation of the noir male’s insecurities: what Janey Place calls ‘the psychological expression of his internal fears of sexuality’ (1980, p. 41). Walter’s ‘deathbed’ confession to his boss Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) that ‘I did it for the woman and I did it for the money’ and that ‘I didn’t get the woman and I didn’t get the money’ invokes (and by implication blames) his transgressions on the familiar lures of sex and financial reward.

94

Crime Culture

But his seeming lack of interest both in Phyllis as sexual object (once and even before the murder has been committed) and the remuneration from his insurance company as a result of the ‘double indemnity’ clause in Mr Dietrichson’s life policy, would seem to tell another story. The amorphous nature of Walter’s motivation combined with the film’s highly self-conscious deployment of emphatic visual signifiers derived from what Krutnik (1991, p. 45) calls the ‘popularisation’ of Freudian psychoanalysis in American culture by the 1940s has led many critics to turn to psychoanalytic paradigms – not necessarily to explain action and behaviour but to draw attention to the uncanny impulses and inexplicable urges that seemingly stand-in for rational explanation (Thomas, 1992; Kaplan, 1997). As Krutnik puts it: ‘Individuals are not in control of the criminal desires within themselves, and the solution becomes to project them outwards into a universe made hostile, a universe of forces beyond control and beyond reason’ (1991, p. 53). Krutnik, therefore, offers an explanation of Double Indemnity which reads Walter’s revolt primarily in Oedipal terms as directed against ‘the “castrating” power of the Law of the Father’ – i.e. Keyes – who ‘functions quite clearly as Walter’s superego’ (1991, p. 138). A more sophisticated variation is provided by Claire Johnson who argues that Walter’s identification is split between Keyes as idealized or imaginary (‘pre-Oedipal’) and symbolic (‘castrating’) father and that the film ‘traces the precariousness of the patriarchal order and its internal contradictions precisely in this split between Symbolic and Imaginary’ (1993, p. 138). In part the film lends itself to these kind of readings with its knowing deployment of visual signifiers such as Walter lighting Keyes’s cigar and Keyes’s description of his internalized lie-detector as his ‘little man’. But herein, I would argue, lies the problem: psychoanalytic frameworks are not laying bare what is hidden in Double Indemnity but rather are responding to highly self-conscious attempts on the part of the film’s makers to circumnavigate censorship codes and in a very general way create what Borde and Chaumeton call ‘a latent, vague and polymorphous sexuality’ (Krutnik, 1991, p. 50) by transfiguring salacious material into ‘icons, gestures, stage business, costuming, lighting, expression and intonation’ (Marling, 1995, p. 254). Krutnik is partly right, I think, to characterize Walter’s transgression – his desire to ‘crook the house’, as he puts it – as an assault against what Keyes stands for: not simply an idealized or symbolic father-figure but rather the claims investigator who ‘functions quite clearly . . . as a powerful and punitive agent who unites both the patriarchal and economic systems of law’ (1991, pp. 138–9). One of the strengths of the film – and arguably its greatest weakness – is Edward G. Robinson’s humane and brilliantly comic turn as Barton Keyes; a performance that makes it far easier to see him as surrogate father-figure than emblematic of an emerging logic of economic rationality and capitalist organization. Therefore what I want to do here is foreground the materialist or economic logic of Neff’s relationship with Keyes –one that is lost in the kind of psychoanalytical critique offered by Krutnik and Johnston. Notwithstanding the warmth

Post-War American Noir: Confronting Fordism

95

and humour of Robinson’s performance, it is undeniably true that Keyes’s skill as a claims adjuster is founded upon the same logic that underpinned the consolidation of the modern, bureaucratic state and the kind of ‘Taylorist’ approach to industrial planning production that made the United States such fertile territory for Fordism (see Gramsci, 1971, pp. 277–318). As Copjec remarks about the importance of numbers and statistics to the development of the modern, bureaucratic state: Entire bureaucracies grew up around these numbers to count, cross-reference and analyse them . . . Statistics structured the modern nations as large insurance companies that strove, through the law of large numbers, to profit from the proliferation of categories of people, the very diversity of its citizens, by collectivizing and calculating risk. (1993, p. 170) It is in this context I want to place Walter’s expressed desire to ‘crook the house’: not as part of a sublimated desire to transgress Keyes’s patriarchal authority but rather as an instinctive assault on his function as actuary and by implication on the system of capitalist economics founded on rational organization – and concomitantly on normative Fordist claims about efficiency, rationality and the general welfare (or at least the greater good) of the population. Ostensibly, then, the function of firms like Pacific All-Risk is a macroeconomic one: the management and regulation of the economy and of people as workers and consumers according to bureaucratic principles. This – and the apparently virtuous circle generated by productivity and wages increases and by rising demand for mass-produced goods – has resulted in what Marling calls the ‘consumer cornucopia’ that Walter seems to take for granted. Still, in the noir universe that Walter inhabits, this regime of capital accumulation does not necessarily produce the stability that most associate with Fordist economics. This is where the critical focus of the film is most apparent: Walter and Phyllis’s murderous assault on the family – to quote Harvey, ‘one of the ideological cornerstones of western industrial society’ (1998, p. 36) – is also part of their acting against the kind of ‘consumption of standardised, mass commodities in the nuclear family’ that Jessop (2000, pp. 253–4) identifies as central to Fordist patterns of social organization. As if to reinforce this point, the office itself is represented in grimly dystopic terms: row upon row of desks contained within a gloomy, claustrophobic space. Therefore Walter’s desire to ‘crook the house’ and his refusal to take up a job under Keyes constitutes an instinctive acknowledgement that this rationalization of the workplace has produced a social environment characterized by control on the one hand, and emptiness and alienation on the other. Walter’s revolt is never systematized – that is to say, he never fully grasps his alienation in, let’s say, explicitly class-based terms. Nonetheless, it serves to draw our attention to some of the more coercive aspects of the Fordist project, not least because Walter’s primitive or instinctive rebellion (hence the vagueness of his motivation) must fail. To put this another

96

Crime Culture

way, Walter’s rebellion constitutes the most critical aspect of the film but in so far as he remains a deluded and weak figure doomed to fail (i.e. not at all the wisecracking tough guy he imagines himself to be) and if, as a result, our sympathies as an audience are transferred from Walter to the far more charismatic Keyes, then the ending is depoliticizing because it suggests that, in the final analysis and despite the critical thrust already outlined, the film sides with the political and economic system that Keyes is paid to defend. It is perhaps unfair to expect a Hollywood movie – as opposed to a novel like The Talented Mr Ripley which I want to turn to in the next section – to pursue a wholly oppositional or critical stance. Like all Hollywood filmmaking, film noir was made possible by the same ‘massive economic and technical change[s] in the means of production’ (Marling, 1995, p. 246) that in part ushered in a new era of Fordist regulation and organization and, as such, there are limits as to the medium’s subversive potential. As such, Walter’s transgression cannot be allowed to go unpunished and his death (significant in so far as it takes place on the property of the Pacific All-Risk firm) is a stark reminder of the ability of a system of rational organization and capitalist economics to perpetuate itself in the face of potential opposition. In the next section, I want to suggest that The Talented Mr Ripley is a more critical text than Wilder’s film (perhaps because Highsmith as novelist enjoyed more artistic freedom than Wilder as filmmaker) but that Highsmith’s novel is responding to the same kind of anxieties that animate Double Indemnity: anxieties produced in reaction to a strengthening consensus in the mid-1950s that the mass production and mass consumption of durable goods would indeed create a better worker and better man.

Dickie Greenleaf’s Refrigerator In his book Homosexuality in Cold War America, Corber argues that the rise of the ‘organization man’ first identified by C. Wright Mills, William Whyte and David Riesman – and the kind of domestication of masculinity that Walter Neff tries to resist in Double Indemnity – ‘facilitated the transition to a Fordist regime of capital accumulation’ (1997, p. 6) founded on the consumption of durable goods for the home. Corber’s formulation is useful for examining post-war American noir in general, and Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley in particular, because it draws attention to the ways in which cultural products enacted a form of popular resistance to these increasingly narrow conceptions of masculinity. In order to illustrate the subtlety of Highsmith’s critique, it is worth pausing to consider her protagonist Tom Ripley’s reaction to the decision of his friend Dickie Greenleaf to purchase a new refrigerator. A little summary is required. Having travelled from New York to southern Italy to persuade Dickie to return to the United States (a trip bankrolled by Dickie’s father), Tom moves in with Dickie and imagines using their combined income to travel around Europe. Dickie has settled in a small Neapolitan village and has befriended

Post-War American Noir: Confronting Fordism

97

Marge Sherwood, an aspiring writer who, Tom believes, has romantic designs on Dickie. Initially Tom is lukewarm about Dickie’s plans to use some of his father’s money – money given in the first instance to Tom – to buy a refrigerator because to do so, we are told, ‘would cut down their traveling money’ (Highsmith, 1997, p. 230). Shortly afterwards Dickie ignores Tom’s protestations and purchases a new refrigerator which Tom is forced to confront in Dickie’s kitchen: The huge white form of the refrigerator sprang out of the corner at him . . . He had spent a whole day in Naples with Dickie and Marge, looking at refrigerators, inspecting ice trays, counting the number of gadgets, until Tom hadn’t been able to tell one refrigerator from another, but Dickie and Marge had kept at it with the enthusiasm of newlyweds . . . And now Marge was popping in and out more than ever, because she stored some of her own food in it, and she wanted to borrow ice. Tom realized suddenly why he hated the refrigerator so much. It meant Dickie was staying put. (pp. 239–40) Typically Highsmith infuses this passage with a myriad of complicated and finely nuanced sentiments. Tom detests the fridge because it is big and ugly; because it has brought Dickie and Marge closer together; because it means that Marge will call in on him and Dickie more frequently and because the refrigerator signifies permanence – it means that Dickie is unlikely to join him on a potentially expensive trip to Paris. Tom hates the refrigerator because it signifies a specific type of permanence: it invokes the possibility, however unlikely, of Dickie’s marriage to Marge. Indeed, this is what newlyweds do: they shop for refrigerators. Throughout these exchanges, Highsmith seems to infer that what underpins Tom’s hostility to Marge, the refrigerator and eventually to Dickie himself, and what culminates in Tom’s murder of Dickie on a boat in Sam Remo, could be construed as repressed homosexual desire. However just as Wilder’s Double Indemnity proposes (and perhaps rejects) sexual desire as motivation for Walter Neff’s actions, Highsmith may not wholly discount repressed homosexual desire as a motivating factor in Tom’s murder of Dickie but the novel is directed primarily at attempts to categorize masculinity according to the highly limited logic of Fordist consumption and an implicit desire to create a new type of worker, consumer and indeed man. As I will try to show, Highsmith intriguingly characterizes Tom’s desire in ways that bind it to the master-code of bourgeois aspiration (i.e. desire for material objects) and, in turn, undermine attempts to create a new type of productive worker and consumer along the lines proposed by the post-Second World War Fordist regime of capital accumulation. In one sense, therefore, critical approaches that foreground issues of sexual desire and those that seek to link cultural production and economic organization are linked. Ripley’s ambivalent sexuality – what led Slavoj Žižek to call him ‘a male lesbian’ (Cassuto, 2009, p. 136) – means that he never quite fits the domesticated, heterosexual norms that produced an increasingly straight

98

Crime Culture

jacketed version of masculinity in the post-war years. Still, to focus exclusively on the former, I would argue, is to miss the subtlety and political urgency of Highsmith’s novel. Certainly it is true that for much of the first part of The Talented Mr Ripley, Highsmith seems intent on explaining Tom’s motivations through implicit and explicit references to his (homo)sexuality. When he first visits Dickie’s father, we are told that the family photograph album ‘was not interesting to him until Richard got to be sixteen or so, long-legged, slim, with the wave tightening in his hair’ (p. 176). Likewise, memories of his Aunt Dottie’s by no means subtle assessment both of his sexuality and genealogy – ‘He’s a sissy from the ground up. Just like his father!’ (p. 192) – compel us to at least consider his sexual orientation. A little later these hints become even stronger: after fending off Marge’s accusations of homosexuality, he travels to San Remo via Cannes where he watches a troop of male acrobats clad just in G-strings and remembers with ‘a sharp thrust of shame’ (p. 243) both Marge’s accusations and Aunt Dottie’s taunts. Therefore a short while later, after Dickie has seemingly lost interest in him, Tom’s assault and murder of Dickie with a boat oar would appear to be the result of what Cochran describes as ‘the potentially pathological effects of the return of the repressed’ (2000, p. 125): especially since Tom, just prior to the attack, has admitted he ‘could have hit Dickie, sprung on him or kissed him’ (p. 247). For a writer of Highsmith’s considerable power and subtlety, however, these references are far too self-evident for us to take them absolutely at face value. Indeed, a more careful examination of her descriptions of Tom’s exchanges with Dickie would seem to inflect his desire in more allusive and acquisitive terms. One of the first things that Tom notices about Dickie are his two rings. ‘He liked them both: a large rectangular green stone set in gold . . . and a signet ring’ (p. 201). It is instructive that just before Tom acknowledges that he ‘wanted to kill Dickie’ and that it ‘was not the first time he had thought of it’ (p. 244), he again comments favourably on Dickie’s rings and the first thing Tom does, having clubbed Dickie over the head with an oar, is remove both rings. In this sense, Tom’s desire is less for Dickie per se than for what Dickie possesses. This is to suggest, as I have argued elsewhere, that sexual desire is bound up with class envy and bourgeois aspiration (Pepper, 2010). What gives Tom a sexual charge is not imagining himself with Dickie but rather imagining himself with Dickie’s money and possessions. ‘Tom had an ecstatic moment’, we are told, after the murder, ‘when he thought of all the pleasures that lay before him now with Dickie’s money, other beds, tables, seas, ships, suitcases, shirts, years of freedom, years of pleasure’ (p. 254; emphasis mine). Therefore the act of killing Dickie is not simply the ‘pathological effects of the return of the repressed’ (Cochran, 2000, p. 125) but also the complex manifestation of sexually tinged material and aesthetic desire (hence the description of him ‘caressing’ the ‘white, taut sheets of his berth on the train’ and his subsequent ‘ecstatic moment’) and a carefully calculated plan to assume Dickie’s identity in order to possess what Dickie possesses.

Post-War American Noir: Confronting Fordism

99

It is here that we need to turn our attention back to the refrigerator because more so than the rings, fountain pens and cotton sheets that Tom covets, it is the most exemplary symbol of a regime founded upon the mass production and mass consumption of standardized, durable goods (Corber, 1997, p. 6). In this sense, what bothers Tom most is its emblematic status as consumer ‘durable’ par excellence and consequently the domestication of masculinity vis-à-vis an increasingly hegemonic Fordist regime of capital accumulation. In other words, Tom’s opposition is founded upon his dislike of an object which emblematizes Fordist conformity. Tom’s outlook is hardly revolutionary, and in certain contexts it would be hard to characterize it even as subversive. In so far as he wants to accumulate possessions – ‘not masses of them, but a select few . . . [n]ot ostentation but quality’ (p. 370) – his aspirations, one could say, are conventionally bourgeois and even elitist. For example, his finely honed aestheticism or what enables him to discriminate between different types of Etruscan pottery functions in opposition to the crass commercialism of mass consumer culture. If the Fordist regime of capital accumulation stands accused of (re)producing the kind of identical, standardized products that Tom despises, we might try to think about Tom’s hostility towards Dickie’s refrigerator in the context of his desire to copy or imitate Dickie’s mannerisms and become a better or improved version of Dickie. Here, Highsmith is not so much reinforcing a Fordist logic by constructing Tom both as consumer and albeit improved facsimile of Dickie as ironizing this logic (i.e. the interchangeability between Tom and Dickie is suggestive of an assembly line masculinity that Highsmith is, to some extent, ironizing). Tom’s work – if it can be called work – is not conducted within the carefully regimented space of the factory or office but in the holiday destinations of the Mediterranean and his own efforts at self-improvement via travel and reading have no productive value in purely economic terms. Highsmith is not mounting a direct critique of Fordism and of the United States’s emblematic status as Fordist regime par excellence. Rather, a novel like The Talented Mr Ripley is best understood as indirectly illuminating some of the consequences of a shift from one stage of capital accumulation (based on notions of deferred gratification and self-discipline) to one dependent on the mass production and mass consumption of what During calls ‘safe, standardized products geared to the demands of the capitalist economy’ (1991, p. 29). The fact that this regime is primarily associated in Highsmith’s mind with the United States, and the fact that she is critical of it or is treating it in ironic terms, is suggested by her coolly dismissive account of Americans abroad who are described in terms of their crassness, their commercial instincts and their lack of discrimination. Thus, the private detective hired by Mr Greenleaf to find out what really happened to his son is dismissed because he ‘looked like a typical American automobile salesman . . . able to talk baseball with a man or pay a stupid compliment to a woman’ (p. 381). More to the point, Marge is subjected to Tom’s withering scorn not necessarily because she is a woman who has her designs on Dickie but because her vapid enthusiasm suggests both an inability

100

Crime Culture

to discriminate and a lack of refinement (she ‘guzzles’ her Martinis, p. 364) and because her ‘gourdlike’ figure (p. 358) and the memory of her ugly bra ‘hanging over the windowsill in Mongibello’ are descriptively linked to the ‘huge white form of the refrigerator’ (p. 239). Likewise Dickie is such a disappointment to Tom precisely because he lacks any originality both as a painter and even as conversationalist: ‘He was waiting for something profound and original from Dickie’, we are told early in the novel (p. 215). Most intriguing of all is Tom’s repudiation of his own American persona and, having been Dickie for a few months, what upsets him about reverting to being Tom is feeling ‘incompetent’ (p. 320), averagely dressed and banal on account of his nationality: ‘The idea of going to Greece, trudging over the Acropolis as Tom Ripley, American tourist, held no charm for him at all’ (p. 312). In the ironic register of the novel, therefore, Tom’s decision to kill Dickie is premised on the assumption that he can become an improved version of Dickie: and what Highsmith is ironizing, first and foremost, is the assumption underpinning Fordism that changes in working practices can create, to quote Gramsci, a new worker and man. In this sense, what informs or enables self-improvement is not the rationalization of the workplace and the restructuring of the economy along Fordist lines but Tom’s brutal murder of his so-called friend. By becoming a better version of Dickie, Tom is not simply reproducing or replicating the stultifying logic of the marketplace (i.e. his Dickie Greenleaf is not simply ‘a safe, standardised’ copy of a copy; another refrigerator). Rather his ambition, and by extension Highsmith’s, is more far-reaching: Tom’s appropriation is a direct challenge to the very logic of domesticated masculinity and the rise of the US ‘organization’ man that, for Corber, underpins ‘the transition to a Fordist regime of capital accumulation’ (1997, p. 6). In this sense, Tom’s anger at Dickie is not primarily motivated by sexual disgust (which, according to Dollimore (1991, p. 247), always ‘bears the imprint of desire’) but because Dickie, by shopping for refrigerators with Marge and leading her to believe that marriage may one day be an option, is in danger of succumbing to the domesticating imperatives of Fordism as a mode of social organization. As someone who simply wants the finer things that bourgeois culture can offer, Tom makes an unlikely radical, but in so far as his aspirations expose both the inadequacies of mass culture, Highsmith’s novel constitutes a repudiation of the assemblyline notion of mass culture (and masculinity). There are shades of Adorno and Horkheimer in this repudiation, though it is perhaps worth pointing out that their critique of the culture industry – ‘[a]ll mass culture under monopoly is identical’ (2002, p. 95) – produces what is, for me, a problematic claim about the political efficacy and emancipatory qualities of avant-garde art (i.e. that only this kind of art can produce an oppositional politics). As a corollary, we might ask how far we are meant to map Tom’s elitist sensibilities onto the novel as a whole. After all, like Pick-Up which I want to address in the next section, The Talented Mr Ripley is, first and foremost, a crime or genre novel. This is a moot point, I suppose, because there is nothing derivative about Highsmith’s novel.

Post-War American Noir: Confronting Fordism

101

Rather her cool amorality is constantly disquieting for readers and always politically significant: for if it is acceptable to quietly cheer for a cold-blooded murderer, as we arguably do throughout The Talented Mr Ripley, and if Tom is ultimately positioned by Highsmith as antidote to a normative Fordist masculinity, then it would be fair to say that, by the end of the novel (where Tom quite literally gets away with murder), the boundary between what constitutes licit and illicit and productive and unproductive behaviour is blurred beyond recognition. In the next section, I want to argue that Willeford’s critique of mass culture and normative conceptions of masculinity and ‘the worker’ mean that, unlike Ripley who escapes to Greece at the end of the novel, his protagonist Harry Jordan quite literally has nowhere left to go.

Harry Jordan’s Non-Objective Designs There are a few very obvious differences between Willeford’s Pick-Up and Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley that are worth commenting on at the outset. It may be too much of a stretch to argue for Ripley as existential hero: that in a world devoid of God and fixed moral absolutes, he best exemplifies the Sartrean imperative that ‘man is nothing else but that which he makes himself’ (Sartre, 2007, p. 30). In other words, Ripley may well reject the ugliness and plasticity of mass culture for a cerebral aestheticism but whether there is ultimately anything nourishing about collecting fine objects remains open to question. Still, Ripley does manage to carve out a space for himself, inauthentic or otherwise, shielded from what he and by implication Highsmith would see as a philistine mass culture. Willeford’s protagonists may exhibit some of Ripley’s aestheticism but, finding no respite from the marketplace and no effective means of self-fashioning, they are always on the verge of psychic collapse. After an unsuccessful double suicide pact, Harry Jordan and Helen Meredith decide to walk from Harry’s San Francisco boarding house to the Saint Paul’s Hospital where they hope to be treated for their ‘loss’ of perspective. Along the way they are confronted by what we presume are typical scenes of suburban plenitude: ‘Bright, shiny, new automobiles, chromium-trimmed, two-toned, silent . . . House-wives in house-dresses, their arms loaded with groceries in brown-paper sacks’ (Willeford, 1997, pp. 458–9). Still, what Harry, a former artist and now short-order cook and full-time alcoholic, actually sees is very different: ‘nonobjective designs created with charm and simplicity on every wall, every fence, every puddle of water . . . the designs of unconscious forms and colours, patterns waiting to be untrapped by the artist’s hand’ (p. 459). Harry’s artistic vision, here, transfigures what he sees as commodifying imperatives of post-war life: he turns the world of suburban plenitude (as emblematization of the post-war economic boom and the Fordist regime of capital accumulation) into non-objective or non-mimetic designs that are yet to be realized and hence cannot be co-opted into the all-consuming logic of the marketplace. Here, as in

102

Crime Culture

Willeford’s oeuvre as a whole, artistic endeavour is set against the deadening imperatives of the workplace, a potentially transfiguring high art against a debased mass culture. While Willeford and his protagonists – Jordan in Pick-Up, Russell Haxby in High Priest of California (1953), Richard Hudson in The Woman Chaser (1960) and James Figueras in The Burnt Orange Heresy (1971) – may want to position themselves on the side of the angels, inevitably their efforts are stymied by and beholden to the commodification of existence that Willeford time and again identifies as the common denominator in post-war American life. As McCann remarks of Willeford’s first novel: ‘Haxby is the high priest of California in two senses; first, as the modernist mandarin who looks down with disdain upon the shallow lives and bad taste of the masses; and secondly, as the used-car salesman who, rather than triumphing over postwar mass culture, exemplifies its most fundamental qualities’ (2000, p. 238). The effect of this is to situate Willeford’s character in a disorientating, seemingly meaningless universe where nothing ‘seems to have much purpose’ (p. 442) and as such, it is sorely tempting to characterize Harry and Helen’s decision to commit suicide in the terms set out by Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus: ‘Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the inane character of that daily agitation and the uselessness of suffering’ (p. 13). Camus, of course, ultimately rejects the logic of his own reasoning, arguing that in spite of life’s meaninglessness, the point of life is simply to ‘stay there’ and as such his question is answered within Willeford’s novel. Harry’s inability to gas himself – he ‘accidentally’ leaves a vent open – is implicitly attributed to ‘a primeval desire to live’ (p. 510) and to what Porfirio describes as ‘a stubborn perseverance despite the absurdity of existence’ (1996, p. 81). Still, this whole mode of analysis is, I would argue, too vague and solipsistic to do justice to the economic and perhaps racial particularities of Willeford’s novel. I say perhaps because the volte-face that Willeford performs at the end of the novel (whereby Harry is casually revealed to be black, a fact that has been largely withheld from us up to this point) is more a narrative trick, and perhaps even a red herring, than a convincing explanation for his alienation: the fact Willeford has to treat the discrimination Harry may or may not suffer from obliquely (in order to surprise readers at the end) means that the racism he experiences cannot be conceived as constitutive of his identity. That said, I would not want to suggest that Harry’s alienation is strictly classbased or located in his status as worker either. For Marx, alienation is expressed in ‘the estrangement . . . in the activity of labor itself’, in that the worker ‘only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself’ and his labour is ‘therefore not voluntary but coerced’ (1970, pp. 110–11). Harry, though, is quite content when working, even in menial jobs like cook or car park attendant, and reaches his lowest ebb when it becomes apparent he cannot simultaneously work and look after Helen. Nor can Harry’s disillusionment be attributed to what Cochran calls ‘the predatory cannibalism of American

Post-War American Noir: Confronting Fordism

103

capitalism’ (2000, p. 40), even if this model explains why individuals in Willeford’s universe are set against one another. Rather than railing against the structural injustices of capitalism, Willeford’s fiction is best understood as a lament against the restructuring of the public realm and workplace along Fordist lines that took place in the post-war period and the concomitant production of new forms of domesticated male subjectivity. For if, as Corber argues, the domestication of masculinity after the Second World War was a necessary step in the transition to an intensified regime of capital accumulation – and mass culture played an important role in instructing men ‘in the responsibilities and pleasures of middle-class fatherhood’ and encouraging consumption ‘as recompense for corporate jobs that many men found monotonous’ (1997, p. 7) – Harry Jordan’s point blank refusal to participate in this process is an important political statement: although, as we shall see, it is a position that leaves him, and arguably Willeford, with nowhere to go. Harry is a returning Second World War veteran who has studied art at Mills College and the Chicago Art Institute where, by all accounts, he was an artist of some promise. As we find out when Harry peruses an old copy of ‘The Modern Artist’, one of his old teachers reckoned he ‘could do more with orange and brown than many painters can do with a full palette’ (p. 467). According to Corber’s formulation, the assimilation of the returning veterans into the workplace and domestic sphere, especially via the Serviceman’s Readjustment Bill of 1944 (the GI Bill), was part of a federal initiative to reorientate masculinity to the overall service of the Fordist goals of the economy. Following his time in Chicago, Harry reveals that he attended the L. A. Art Center ‘for a year under the G.I. Bill’ (p. 538) before taking up a teaching post at a private art school, but he makes an important distinction between his vocation as artist and his duties as husband. ‘I didn’t want to live up to the responsibility’, he tells a psychiatrist following a second failed suicide attempt. ‘It was more important to paint instead. An artist paints and a husband works’ (p. 537). For Harry, being an artist absents him from the related responsibilities of husband and worker and sets him apart from the Fordist regime of capital accumulation that the entire postwar economy has been geared towards servicing. Harry’s suicidal outlook is the result of witnessing how this restructuring has orientated artistic practice towards particular economic imperatives; indeed, he is fired from his teaching post after encouraging ‘the more inept students’ to ‘quit painting’ and thereby potentially robbing the school of a vital source of income (p. 539). Harry isn’t, therefore, a failure as an artist as he seems to think, but rather a failure as a proper subject under Fordism: he cannot adjust himself to what Jessop describes as the general pattern of Fordist social organization involving ‘the consumption of standardised, mass commodities in nuclear family households’ (2000, pp. 253–4). The art market – in which people ‘buy pictures in the same place they get their new furniture’ (p. 456) – is, for Harry, wholly distinctive from the realm of artistic endeavour, but the encroachment of marketplace into art (and of the public sphere into the private space of individual creativity) has robbed

104

Crime Culture

art of its meaning. Harry’s refusal to produce art for the mass market, therefore, constitutes a very particular rejection of the normative assumptions underpinning the transition of one phase of capitalist development to another (i.e. what Corber calls an intensified regime of capital accumulation). McCann is quite right, I think, to argue that Willeford’s novels are best understood as baroque laments for the loss of ‘the private and individual’ realm (especially of the artist and of high art in general) in the face of ‘a voracious mass culture’ and that the individual – almost always identified with a particular kind of creative male figure – is under siege both from ‘the image of a terrible, castrating heterosexuality’ and mass culture itself, inevitably coded as ‘feminine’ (2000, p. 229). Thus McCann shows us how Richard Hudson’s ambitions as a serious filmmaker in The Woman Chaser are predicated first and foremost on conceiving the women he comes across ‘as predatory combatants determined to sap men of virility’ (2000, p. 231), and how Russell Haxby’s attempt to negotiate the world via his albeit limited understanding of high culture (notably Joyce’s Ulysses) in High Priest of California is set against his would-be girlfriend Alyce who is ‘a pathetic embodiment of middlebrow sensibility’ (2000, p. 236). McCann’s suggestion that Willeford perversely celebrates ‘an elitist sensibility that imposes its will with sheer, nasty glee’ (2000, p. 236) correctly identifies a potentially productive misogyny in his work (i.e. productive because Willeford’s heroes and their modernist pretensions are more often than not ruthlessly exposed), but two further qualifications are perhaps needed. First, the problem for Willeford is not merely that the freedom of the male artist has been eroded by a ‘feminized’ public sphere and the spectre of a castrating heterosexuality, but rather that these conditions are themselves the product of the kind of transition to a Fordist regime of capital accumulation where male (and female) behaviour must be reorientated to the consumption of mass-produced goods. And second, as McCann in part acknowledges, Willeford makes identification with his masculinist protagonists so problematic that one wonders how seriously we should take his apparent valorization of creative masculine power, however sympathetically it seems to be rendered. The Cockfighter (1962) is brilliantly and exemplarily unsettling in this respect. Throughout the novel, Willeford nurtures our identification with Frank Mansfield who justifies his participation in what would seem to be a cruel blood sport via the care and perhaps even love he invests in his birds – and who refuses to be domesticated by his girlfriend Mary Elizabeth. Her criticisms (‘cockfighting is wrong, morally wrong, legally wrong and every other kind of wrong!’ Willeford, 1995, p. 468) are understandable, but in light of the respect we see expressed by Frank towards his birds perhaps a little myopic (even if Frank’s attitudes towards her are resolutely recalcitrant and blatantly sexist). Still, in the final few pages and after Frank’s prize cock, Icky, has lost its climactic fight and Frank tears off its head with his bare hands, it is Mary Elizabeth’s assessment of Frank that finally convinces, forcing us to reassess Frank in light of what we now have to recognize as his distinctly unreliable narrative. ‘I didn’t

Post-War American Noir: Confronting Fordism

105

watch those poor chickens fight, Frank’, she tells him, ‘I watched your face. It was awful. No pity, no love, no understanding, nothing! Hate!’ (p. 600). Pick-Up’s unmasking of Harry Jordan is much less equivocal but our identification with him, secured on the grounds of his nihilistic romanticism and unyielding aestheticism, is shaken by an unexplained impulse to infantilize Helen. This impulse is revealed first when Harry’s painting of her turns out to be ‘the portrait of a young girl’ (p. 439) and later, with more unsettling paedophilic undertones, when we are told that Harry’s wallet contains ‘a small snapshot of Helen taken when she was seven years old’ (p. 514). Ultimately Willeford draws back from this particular abyss and Harry’s point blank refusal to participate in the Fordist regime of capital accumulation in the end marks him as romanticized outsider, even if he has been herded into a critical space so diminished by the end of the novel that his future, as an unco-opted artist, is negligible and resolutely bleak. By a quirk of fate, Harry’s trial for murdering Helen as part of a suicide pact is abandoned when it is revealed that she died of heart failure before he strangled her and he is released. His freedom, though, is characterized not in terms of the opportunity to create but ‘to wash dishes again . . . to smash baggage, carry a waiter’s tray, dice up chile beans as a counterman’ (p. 567). Harry’s seemingly revolutionary position outside of capitalism and the marketplace is rendered moot and arguably like Willeford, he ends up performing menial tasks far beneath his status as artist.

One-Dimensional Society and Noir’s Great Refusal Viewed in isolation, Harry Jordan’s great refusal is as pitiful as it is impotent: the death-gasps of a man whose fate mirrors that of noir writers like Willeford. Caught between the elitism of high art and a debased mass culture, there is nowhere left for Willeford and his protagonists to go. Noir writers never saw themselves as offering any kind of direct political critique but in light of the increased centralization and coercive capacities of the regulatory domain in operation in post-Second World War US life, it is hard not to see Harry Jordan’s refusals or Tom Ripley’s aestheticism as anything but a repudiation of an entire mode of economic organization and regulation. Written just after Pick-Up, and as Cochran (2000, p. 51) has shown us, Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man made the reasonable point that the ‘development of the productive forces on an enlarged scale’ or the ‘growing satisfaction of needs for a growing number of people’ (1964, p. 255) (i.e. Fordism in all but name) both nurtured new needs and potentialities of existence and also produced new exclusions and enhanced coercive capacities. In all of this, the space for genuine artistic selfexpression, as Harry Jordan finds, is very much diminished. But what does one do – what can one do – in the face of so much power? Marcuse’s answers are not exactly hopeful but he makes some instructive observations. First, he notes the ‘increased irrationality of the whole’ (i.e. greater waste, exploitation, colonial

106

Crime Culture

expansion, etc.) and wonders about the long-term stability of a system riven by so many structural contradictions; and second, he points to the ‘the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races’ whose ‘opposition is revolutionary even if their consciousness is not’ (1964, pp. 252, 256). As Cochran has already pointed out, these are the protagonists of post-war American noir – its Harry Jordans, Walter Neffs and even its Tom Ripleys: marginal men whose opposition is muted but nonetheless significant (2000, p. 51). A few years after Marcuse’s book, and responding to the first significant crisis in Fordist organization since the Second World War, Marxist thinkers like Nikos Poulantzas (1978) sought to ‘explain the paradox within capitalism between its inherent tendency towards instability, crisis and change, and its ability to coalesce and stabilize around a set of institutions, rules and norms’ (Amin, 2000, p. 7). Noir writers may not have had the desire or indeed the analytical skills to provide an intricate critique of particular modes of economic organization, but through their doomed parables of individual and collective failure they could delineate the effects of living in a debased society which, in turn, offered increasingly restricted modes of subjectivity. At the height of the Fordist regime of capital accumulation in the 1950s, when Willeford and Highsmith were embarking on their literary careers, the notion that crisis or change was imminent must have seemed a long way off. Still, even though noir’s ‘great refusals’ are in the end quite slight, their anti-heroes both contested the dominant position of masculine worker/consumer and made us think differently about their perceived criminality and deviance. This challenge gave noir its political frission and suggested both that darker times lurked just around the corner, and that the flawed system would perpetuate itself come what may.

Part III

Vixens and Victims: Criminal Femininities

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 6

Dead Dolls and Deadly Dames: The Cover Girls of American True Crime Publishing Lee Horsley

Like the pistol in a private eye’s pocket, a dame ought to stay in her place, within easy reach of a man who knows how to handle her. In Dead Reckoning (1947), Captain ‘Rip’ Murdock (Humphrey Bogart) caricatures male fantasies for the benefit of ‘Dusty’ Chandler (Lizabeth Scott): You know, I’ve been thinking: women ought to come capsule-sized, about four inches high. When a man goes out of an evening, he just puts her in his pocket and takes her along with him, and that way he knows exactly where she is [. . .]. And [. . .] when he wants her full-sized and beautiful, he just waves his hand and there she is, full-sized . . . But if she starts to interrupt, he just shrinks her back to pocket-size and puts her away. (Cromwell, 1947) Rip’s masculine reverie about exerting total control over the sexually alluring woman ‘without danger of interruption’ is entirely understandable: Dusty is a seductress whose steamy, corrupt sexual attractions will soon draw him into a web of deceit and death. But the femme fatale, like other transgressive women of the last half century, has shown herself ever more reluctant to shrink obediently back into a male pocket. In both transgressor-centred and investigative fiction, the defiant, independent woman has in many ways taken centre stage. Contemporary criticism of crime fiction has further emphasized female agency: in the present volume, Linden Peach, for example, explores the representation of the ‘deviant’ nature of black women’s experience in contemporary African American crime novels; film critics have examined the ways in which film noir achieves its potent, problematic embodiment of female self-assertion; and others have discussed the numerous fictional strategies for subverting stereotypical images. Writers and critics alike have increasingly attended to the subjectivity of women who challenge male power, violate normative behaviour and talk back to a male-dominated tradition.1 The iconic female figures of pulp publishing have often, however, been given little opportunity to talk back, especially when encapsulated in the lurid cover

110

Crime Culture

art of crime magazines and, from the late 1940s on, paperback originals. Voluptuous, tantalizing and dressed to kill, they voicelessly tempted generations of men to buy the stories of their death or disgrace. Like Rip Murdoch’s pocket-sized beauty, the crime magazine cover girl is a woman who does not interrupt a man by parading her inner complexities. Objectified, silent and frozen in a moment of intense emotion, she is a very faithful embodiment of the established iconography: a man can be sure of knowing ‘exactly where she is’. Pulp covers are a condensation of the clichés of the dangerous and the endangered woman – categories that can seem, by implication, to be inseparable, with sexual recklessness leading directly to death. They offer bold, suggestive embodiments of the sexual dynamic that so often drives both ‘true’ and fictional crime narratives. The four-inch-high woman, first employed to sell true crime magazines from the 1930s on, spent the next several decades as one of the most marketable fantasies in American publishing history. The covers of such true crime magazines as Real Detective, Inside Detective, True Crime and Leading Detective2 are often designed to focus attention on the link between female transgression and female victimization. Cover art, however lacking in subtlety, characteristically presents the viewer with a compressed narrative, and one of the most familiar of these implies a sequence of guilt and retribution: victims are themselves criminalized in visual representations that combine death or extreme female endangerment with emphatic suggestions of wantonness and of self-endangering violations of social norms and constraints. The Inside Detective story reporting the murder of one of their own models, for example, makes such a connection explicit, in an issue that disturbingly captures the confusion of life and art that constitutes an important part of the appeal of true crime journalism. In a four-page piece titled ‘Veronica Gedeon Model for Inside Detective is Murdered!’, West F. Peterson, the magazine’s editor, writes: Even while the fingers of a sex-maniac were throttling the life out of her body, Veronica Gedeon’s picture appeared in the April issue of Inside Detective which could have been purchased at the newsstand a block from her home. For this illustration she posed in the semi-nude in an attitude of shame and humiliation. (Inside Detective, July 1937, n. p.) Before her death Veronica Gedeon posed for pictures used to illustrate an ‘eerily prophetic’ first-person exposé of a vice ring, and the report of her own murder is illustrated both with her ‘cringing and shame-stricken . . . last pose’ and with a selection of other ‘fearful and violent poses’ (1937, n. p.) taken during her working life – a life which, the article implies, was as out of control as her semi-undress on the cover of their magazine would seem to indicate. The cover picture of this issue (Figure 6.1) echoes the poses of the ‘real life’ photographs – a self-protective gesture and an expression of fear, but also, in her half-open mouth and voluptuousness, an embodiment of alluring and destructive sexuality.

The Cover Girls of American True Crime Publishing

111

Figure 6.1 Cover image, Inside Detective, July 1937

The fact that Veronica Gedeon was an actual victim as well as a ‘model victim’ fortuitously helped Inside Detective to heighten the kind of ambiguity on which it thrived, and which pulp-realist cover art was devoted to creating. The true crime magazine combines art work and photographs, in later decades moving towards the use of photographs as cover art, and confusion is compounded by the lush style of the articles themselves (‘No flashing neon sign beckoned nocturnal adventurers to Eleanor Thompson’s honky-tonk. Like a rattlesnake’s den, it nested in darkness’ (American Detective, July 1936, p. 54). Consistently blurring the distinction between fiction and reality, these magazines proclaim realism (in titles like All True Fact Crime) while at the same time offering readers the melodramatic heightening of action and the artistic intensification of erotic imagery. In its representation of women – whether they are victims or aggressors – true crime cover art aims for the frankly sensual, with seductively exposed flesh and provocative dishabille; it employs a vibrantly coloured, hyperreal style

112

Crime Culture

that has ‘the gut-level appeal of a tabloid flashgun photo, with headlines to match’ (Server, 1994, pp. 61–2). In the dramatic heightening of gesture and expression, the artist almost invariably seeks to suggest that the woman depicted is a source both of arousal and danger, whether to herself or to any man involved with her. Our knowledge that there is a man involved is an integral part of the effect, although the man himself is generally present only by implication. In their first two or three decades (1930s–1950s), true crime covers reify the dangerous sexuality of the woman, but tend to represent the man, if at all, only synecdochically, perhaps as a sinister hand reaching into the picture from above, an ambiguous figure partially and less realistically drawn (e.g. the darkly Gothic hands reaching down to kill Veronica Gedeon; the huge red outline of a hand on the cover of Detective Cases, October 1956). The intruding male hands may seem to signify the commodification of the woman (e.g. the hand proffering jewellery on the cover of Women in Crime, July 1949) or may threaten to kill her (e.g. the sinister hand about to drown a bound girl on the cover of Real Detective, July 1940): in either case, the man is largely left to the viewer’s imagination. Or perhaps, more accurately, this male figure, in being outside the frame, is placed alongside the male voyeur who purchases the magazine, and both equally conceive of themselves as at the mercy of the voluptuous reality of the woman herself. These are magazines of guilty pleasure, both arousing in their audience and representing in their cover pictures desire for the hazardous attractions of the strongly sexual woman. The pulp magazine covers hugely influenced the cover art of the paperback originals that began to be produced in their hundreds at the end of the 1940s, and like these mass market crime novels they repeatedly return to images of desire and excess, helping to establish in the popular imagination the often contradictory stereotyping of female victims and transgressors at a time when women’s social and occupational roles were changing dramatically. The emasculating fear of women who were no longer confined to their traditional domestic functions, who seemed to threaten usurpation of male power, is repeatedly glimpsed in the images of deadly dames who seem all too seductive, and whose independence and resourcefulness have carried them beyond the conventional bounds of respectability. From the 1930s on, one of the most powerful images of the woman out of control is the gangster’s moll. Aggressive broads shooting .45s or even submachine guns, or stamping with spiked heels on a man’s hand, stride on to the covers of true crime magazines and of their fictional contemporaries like Black Mask and Dime Detective. In both the ‘real’ and fictional worlds portrayed, these are women characterized by a paradoxical combination of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ traits – ‘potent’ women, appropriating masculine powers, alternately threatening the male and arousing his desire. On the front of Real Detective, for example, in June 1930 (Figure 6.2), the cover girl wears an expression that is calculating and predatory, her sleek beauty projecting both sexual sophistication and the indifference of a dominatrix; her breasts, like

The Cover Girls of American True Crime Publishing

113

Figure 6.2 Cover image, Real Detective, June 1930

those of many a murderous woman in pulp fiction, are a feminine attribute that seem endowed with a male potential for violence and aggression – the sort of contradiction embodied, for example, by Clara in Duke Linton’s Crazy to Kill (1950), with her ‘two ivory-hued mounds of feminine dynamite exposed . . . to an inch above the hard, detonating nipples’ (p. 24). As with representations of the American gangster himself, these are images that offer the viewer the double satisfaction of vicarious participation in gangland vice and of the moral disapproval of criminals popularly perceived as ‘the root of evil’, with the frisson of danger generally contained within a retributive frame. The image itself, however, seems indestructible, and the gangster’s moll, holding either a smoking gun or a smoking cigarette and more than a match for the men who try to take her on, is one of the most durable figures on the early true crime covers: a raven-haired beauty in a low-cut red dress holding a gun on the cover of Real Detective, for example, in November 1933 (Figure 6.3); or her twin sister disposing of a smoking gun on the cover of American Detective

114

Crime Culture

Figure 6.3 Cover image, Real Detective, November 1933

in July 1936. The staying power of the stereotype is evident in her continued appearances on the covers of the 1940s: Gangsters Gunmolls and G-Men, for example, in January 1949, depicts a gun moll with threatening bosoms, both gun and cigarette smoking, unquestionably the dominant figure on a cover where the male gangster is a crouching, inadequate-looking background figure whose tiny pistol is pathetic in comparison to the gun moll’s massive machine gun. Like the gangster’s moll Mabie Otis in the 1949 novel Miss Otis Throws a Come-Back, this statuesque, confident woman projects a ‘an underlying suggestion of strength and cruelty . . . An experienced dame, you would say’ (p. 3). Images of the violent women of gangland are obviously very closely related to – sometimes indistinguishable from – images of ‘ordinary’ women who have gone to the bad. The femme fatale, the most familiar figure on the crime fiction covers of the 1950s, emerges in the pulp magazines at about the same time as does the gangster’s moll and is repeated with countless minor variations, the immodest icon for a period during which sex increasingly became one of the major ingredients of mass market publishing. This is the decade that saw the beginning, both in film and pulp literature, of a great outpouring of femme fatale

The Cover Girls of American True Crime Publishing

115

plots, in which an apparently ‘normal’ woman turns out to be ‘unnaturally’ sexual, aggressive and ultimately death-dealing – Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity (1944) or Mrs Grayle in Murder, My Sweet (1944), (Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely [1940]). When she belongs outside the world of organized crime, the hard-bitten, capable woman, exceeding the structures of social control, is associated with more wide-spread degenerative forces at work in the whole of the society and culture. On the make, but not explicable as part of a criminal subculture, she exploits her newly won freedoms in the social and economic spheres to subvert the established hierarchies in ways that are ‘inappropriate, deviant . . . and unlawful’.3 The elements of this image constitute a kind of visual shorthand for torrid attraction, danger, corruption. Even more than the gangster’s moll, it is an image associated with an explicitly erotic iconography: this is a sexual predator drawing in men who suffer loss of control and destabilization of identity. On the covers of mid-century true crime magazines, the femme fatale appears in countless guises, her dress and expression often suggesting a perverted innocence or ruined domesticity. So, for example, on the cover of Leading Detective in May 1947 (Figure 6.4) we see a blonde,

Figure 6.4 Cover image, Leading Detective, May 1947

116

Crime Culture

white-clad woman who might pass as angelic except for the fact that she wears, like the gun moll, a calculating expression and clutches a weapon – a bottle of poison in place of a smoking gun, but presumably equally lethal for the smug older man whose self-satisfied air suggests insufficient awareness of the risk he is running. The men endangered, by implication, often provide financial inducements to female corruption, but the women themselves display an alarming capacity for being corrupted and expertly manipulate men’s desires in order to exert control over their would-be corruptors. The True Crime issue of May 1949, for example, uses an explicit caption to reinforce the image of a woman who preys on men (‘My body is my Lure – Thrill Mad Playboys are my Suckers!’), stuffing their money between her ample breasts. Even where the image of the corrupting power of male wealth is there more strongly – as in Women in Crime, July 49 – the image of the woman herself is sufficiently slatternly to make it perfectly clear that when she says ‘I had nothing to lose but my virtue’, she indeed values that commodity little in comparison to the jewellery that a male hand holds out at the side of the picture. As in film noir, the corruption of the femme fatale is dangerous to the woman herself as well as to her male victim. A Special Detective (September 1948) cover, for example, on which an obviously sinful woman displays her undergarments and her ample cleavage, frames the main picture by a warning and an additional picture: a dead woman sprawls as the ‘final clause’ to a sentence that starts, ‘All her schemes, all her pretended passion, all the men she had loved and cheated . . . They all led the gorgeous two-timing Beauty to this.’ Especially once her untrammelled sexuality has been equated with prostitution, the femme fatale seems likely to pay the ultimate penalty for her excessive desires, her sexuality and her deceptiveness. It is a short step from such a narrative of ‘just deserts’ to that most ambiguous and controversial of all true crime cover images, the female victim. The style of pulp cover art itself accentuates one of the most recurrent themes in the pulp fiction and true crime representation of the woman as victim: she was asking for it. True crime covers almost invariably stress the woman’s sexual allure, and the combination of this with her victimization implies that the woman has invited her fate by making herself too available: like the hapless Veronica Gedeon, female victims have flaunted themselves, tempting men to acts of violation and violence. The cover of the July 1940 issue of Real Detective (Figure 6.5), for example, which represents a bound girl about to be pushed under the water by a male hand, shows the (presumably doomed) girl in a pose as sensual as that of the standard ‘dangerous woman’ cover, her semi-reclining torso floating towards the viewer, her blonde curls spread out, her mouth open in what, under other circumstances, would be a sexually provocative expression. Countless other true crime covers manipulate this sort of sado-masochistic image: America’s Detective Annual (1944) portrays a bound woman, her scanty black negligee ripped, her pose and expression again a mixture of the helpless and the provocative; Crime Detective, April 1943, depicts a

The Cover Girls of American True Crime Publishing

117

Figure 6.5 Cover image, Real Detective, July 1940

very phallic dagger protruding from a scarlet cushion, while the girl herself is caught in a pose somewhere between fright and submission. The covers representing women as victims are those which change in the most problematic ways over the next few decades. From the 1950s on there is a tendency for the sadistic elements in these pictures to become more explicit. From very stylized, fairly minimal indications of impending death, the covers move to a much more direct representation of the actual process of inflicting physical harm: so, for example, an early 1950s magazine, the Homicide issue of August 1951, depicts a highly sexualized struggle, as the ‘Lethal Lover for the Bad Girl’ grips an anguished-looking woman in a tense, violent encounter that is far more visceral than the cover images of female victims in earlier decades; Detective World, May 1953, shows a bound woman with a male hand reaching into the picture, but on this occasion to burn the woman with a smouldering cigarette; the True Police Yearbook (volume 1, 1953) presents another bound woman, far more dishevelled than earlier female victims tended to be, and in an awkward enough posture to suggest that she really is a ‘tortured beauty on

118

Crime Culture

the murder rack’ who ‘paid for the secret locked behind her lips’. It is in covers of this sort that a confusion between life and (photographic) art began to raise serious questions in the public mind about the possible influence of such images on potential perpetrators of actual crimes. In the true crime magazines of the 1960s through the 1980s, the process of heightening the depiction of the sadistic torture of a female victim was carried much further, its disturbing impact increased by the use of photos rather than art work and by a growing tendency to bring the deviant male himself into the cover vignette. Startling Detective, in July 1965, for example, presents the standard earlier image of the bound woman whose charms are fairly fully displayed, but accompanies this by cover blurbs that focus attention on sexual sadism, which becomes one of the recurrent themes of these later covers (‘Sex and the Sadist Criminal: the shocking documented study of the ecstasies that some human beings find in the infliction of pain!’). Best True Fact Detective, March 1978 (Figure 6.6), has a photograph of a girl held by a man who, though mostly out of frame, is a much more threatening presence than the disembodied hands of earlier covers:

Figure 6.6 Cover image, Best True Fact Detective, March 1978

The Cover Girls of American True Crime Publishing

119

tightly bound, a hand covering her mouth, and a large pair of scissors about to descend on her, the woman is posed next to the caption ‘Slaughter of the Virgin Coeds’ – the plural here suggesting a serial killer. The serial killer becomes, as in fiction and true crime reporting generally, an increasingly familiar figure during this period. Inside Detective, in November 1974, for example, prints a photograph depicting a savage-looking man pursuing a clearly terrified woman up a stairway – a ‘Marine Peeping-Tom’ who ‘cut her up just like he did those girlie photos’; Front Page, in July 1979, like many earlier covers, depicts a strangling, but here with a vicious male face just entering the picture from above, and a caption that draws the reader’s attention to acts of sadistic ‘overkill’, offering a catalogue of violations of the woman’s body: ‘strangled, beaten, shot and abused’. This turn towards the representation of the violence of the male sexual sadist introduces a kind of ambiguity far more troubling than those to be found in the earlier decades of true crime publishing. Sensationalized violence is combined with a marked eroticization of the sufferings of the female victims. It was a trend that led ultimately to a movement away from the publication of female victim covers, after worries were voiced (e.g. by the forensic pathologist Park Dietz) about the effects of the pornography of violence on any member of the male readership who, after looking at the true crime cover’s mixture of reality and fantasy, might be prompted to seek gratification ‘through actual, not fantasized, brutality’ (Keiger).4 By this time, adding to the discomfort such images provoked, there had been an almost complete shift from artistic representation to photographic realism. The boldly stylized covers of mid-century pulp publishing worked by provocative implication rather than explicit representation. The staged ‘true crime photos’ that gradually replaced the artwork of earlier decades were obviously still some distance from actual photographs of crime and its consequences, but like true crime photography5 could easily be accused of exploiting the medium’s capacity for shocking spectacle and of objectifying the victims of crime in an even more thoroughgoing way than the pulp iconography of earlier decades, particularly as multiple murder grew to be the most saleable of all true crime topics. David Schmidt argues in a forthcoming Blackwell Companion essay that the serial killer is perennially in demand in a form of publishing that relies on what Tom Weyr calls an ‘unstable combination of attraction and repulsion’, generated by a mixture of crime, sex and violence that is ‘very visceral’ – ‘the more gruesome and grotesque the better’ (2010, pp. 198–9).6 In a photograph like the one illustrating the ‘Slaughter of the Virgin Coeds’ (Figure 6.6), the link between sexual allure and violence is impossible to miss: the female victim is marked out as a temptress (wearing a comehither red dress, black nylons revealed as the dress is pulled up), an object of desire who stands accused of having invited the fate that befalls her; at the same time, as one of many victims, her individual agency is very fully erased. The strong, independent femme fatale of earlier cover art has little place on the photographic covers of later decades, increasingly supplanted by women who are

120

Crime Culture

entirely powerless but nevertheless culpable – as the pull quote proclaims on the Police Detective cover of March 1962, alongside a scantily clad dead body hanging out of a car seat, ‘That Dame was a Nympho!’ Ranging through half a century of pulp covers, we form a vivid impression of the stereotypical women who have corrupted, connived, killed and been killed in both ‘true’ and fictional crime publications. They are flashily effective embodiments of some very tenacious judgements, and women crime writers, in particular, have played against these pop cultural images in their explorations of female identity under pressure. From the 1940s on – for example, in Margaret Millar’s The Iron Gates (1945) – the psychological turmoil of the female transgressor has been represented and contrasted with the face she makes up for her mirror and the world. In the twenty-first century, writers like Megan Abbott have created complex, compelling female protagonists who conform to the look of the clichéd femme fatale: Abbott’s novels, published with bold pulp covers by Simon & Schuster’s Pocket Books, are especially striking in their ability to draw attention simultaneously to the durability of the image and the inner contradictions underlying female performance and empowerment. And it is not, of course, only women capable of talking back who have been given a strong presence in contemporary crime fiction. Investigative fiction has developed a tendency to take us – literally – inside the completely disempowered victims represented on later true crime covers, most obviously in the hugely popular contemporary procedural novels focusing on the work of the forensic pathologist. Patricia Cornwell, Kathy Reichs and others structure their narratives around investigations of the deaths and identities of the serial killer’s (most often female) victims, confronting readers with the reality of the dead body and enabling them, as the novels reach their resolutions, to understand the perspective of the killer’s prey. These intense inner explorations derive some of their impact from the wide currency of superficial but memorable oversimplifications like those of pulp cover art. The aim of many female-authored, female-centred crime novels over the last several decades has been to recapture the subjectivity and restore the experience of both transgressors and victims. Their detailed, sympathetic representations of deviant and damaged female identities are given point by their oppositional nature – by their implicit challenge to one-dimensional images of female guilt, subjection and transgression.

Notes 1 2

See Place, 1980, pp. 35–6; Horsley, 2009, pp. 125–31. Due to the fly-by-night nature of these magazines, it is difficult to offer publication details and page references for most of those referred to in this chapter. All attempts have been made to provide relevant dates and further information where possible: American Detective, July 1936; America’s Detective Annual, 1944; Best True Fact Detective, March 1978; Crime Detective, April 1943; Detective Cases, October 1956;

The Cover Girls of American True Crime Publishing

3

4

5 6

121

Detective World, May 1953; Front Page. July 1979; Gangsters Gunmolls and G-Men, January 1949; Homicide, August 1951; Inside Detective, July 1937; November 1974; Leading Detective, May 1947; Police Detective, March 1962; Real Detective, June 1930; November 1933; July 1940; Special Detective, September 1948; Startling Detective, July 1965; True Crime, May 1949; True Police Yearbook, Vol. 1. 1953; Women in Crime, July 1949. Cynthia S. Hamilton, Western and Hard-boiled Detective Fiction in America: From High Noon to Midnight (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1987), p. 34, quoted by Walton and Jones, 1999, pp. 192–3. Dale Keiger, ‘The Dark World of Park Dietz’, http://www.jhu.edu/~jhumag/ 1194web/dietz.html, accessed on 13 December 2009. See Buckland and Evans, 2001. Tom Weyr (1993) ‘Marketing America’s Psychos’, Publishers Weekly 12: 38–41, quoted by David Schmid, ‘True Crime’, in Rzepka and Horsley (2010).

Chapter 7

Contemporary African American Women’s Crime and Mystery Novels Linden Peach

As literary critics Hans Bertens and Theo D’haen have observed, it was not until the 1990s that African American women writers ‘had an impact on the crime writing scene’ (2001, p. 190), almost a century after the publication of the first novel featuring a black female detective, Pauline Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter (1901–1902). However, this phenomenon, and the radical representation of black women in contemporary African American women’s crime writing, or mystery writing as it is more widely known in the United States, has only recently begun to be recognized in black feminist cultural criticism. Susanne Dietzel has pointed out that, although African American popular authors ‘have become household names’ and have made ‘a contribution to the African American literary tradition and to mainstream commercial fiction’, African American cultural studies ‘continues to privilege rap, hip-hop, and black film over romance, mystery, or science fiction writing’ (2004, pp. 168, 156). By way of an introduction to a large subject, this chapter focuses on aspects of African American women’s crime writing which have been relatively neglected. First, the overlap between crime and romance/erotic fiction which highlights shared concerns with the way in which the black female body has been traditionally represented; second, the privileging of hate crime and victimhood in contemporary African American women’s crime writing.

Context The historical moment in which black women’s writing began to have an impact on crime fiction has been interpreted in different, but not necessarily contradictory, ways. The acclaimed African American crime writer Paula L. Woods sees contemporary crime fiction as part of the ‘Third Renaissance of black thought and writing’ which reflects the ‘diverse range of black experience’ (1996, p. xvi). Andrew Pepper argues that it is the product of the new status,

African American Women’s Crime and Mystery Novels

123

authority and influence acquired by groups, especially black women, who were previously marginalized, resulting in: A corresponding increase in the number of non-white, un-straight, female crime writers and of course readers – a reflection of changing social patterns and demographics and an acknowledgement of important shifts in the social status of women, gays, lesbian and ethnic minorities. More significantly, though, this shift is part of a sustained and proliferating contemporary interest in writing which calls into question traditional boundaries not just between ‘high’ and ‘low’ but also between ‘centre’ and ‘margin’. (2000, p. 32) Almost a decade earlier, Cornwell West went further than Pepper, highlighting the discontinuity and disruption of the particular historical moment under discussion. He identified a ‘new cultural politics of difference’ that had been concerned: To trash the monolithic and homogeneous in the name of diversity, multiplicity and heterogeneity; to reject the abstract, general and universal in the light of the concrete, specific and particular; and to historicize, contextualize and pluralize by highlighting the contingent, provisional, variable, tentative, shifting and changing. (1993, p. 1) Robert Entman and Andrew Rojecki point out that although many of the overt stereotypes and caricatures of previously marginalized peoples have largely disappeared, the ‘face of race is now cloaked in a chameleon-like form, an ever-changing camouflage that obscures its force’ (2001, p. 1). But they also take a more socio-economic approach, suggesting that in the late twentieth century there is tension between the fact that some African Americans have ‘crossed over to highly visible acceptance, even veneration, among Whites’ and that many ‘still lived apart from whites and lagged seriously behind in income, housing, health and education’ (Entman and Rojecki, 2001, p. 1). Sheri Parks suggests that the term ‘caste’ is more appropriate than ‘class’ in discussing socio-economic mobility among African Americans. Whereas, as Parks says, ‘class membership is perceived as relatively fluid and subject to individual initiative’, in a caste system, individuals are deemed to be alike and bound to a social system constituting class, culture, ethnicity and power. Parks argues that for African Americans caste membership is assigned at birth and does not change in the face of class mobility’ (2001, p. 113). Thus, African American mystery writing may be seen as part of a black literary and intellectual renaissance to which women writers have made a substantial contribution. It reflects the changing status of previously marginalized groups and the increased opportunities for African American women in the late twentieth century. However, the emergence of African American women’s

124

Crime Culture

crime fiction in the late twentieth century has a further context which has been overlooked.

Romantic/Erotic Fiction Crime fiction written by women in the 1990s followed, but not immediately, radical changes in the traditional representation of African American women in popular cinema in the 1970s. Stephane Dunn points out that in black female action movies such as Cleopatra Jones (1973), Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974), the black female protagonist is ‘a sexy, streetwise, tough woman who shows no fear, takes on powerful whites and men, and, according to the genre’s expectations wins’ (Dunn, 2008, p. 3). But the resurgence of African American women’s crime writing in the 1990s also coincided with the publishing of new romantic/erotic fiction by African American women. Indeed, many popular African American novels blur the boundaries between mystery and romance fiction. A familiar plot in both genres juxtaposes a black woman’s involvement in criminality, as a participant or an investigator, with her involvement in a passionate relationship. Two recent best sellers which exemplify the conflation of these genres are Beverly Jenkins’s Edge of Midnight (2004), in which an African American woman becomes involved in diamond smuggling and accidentally shoots a government agent who is obsessed with her, and Adrianne Byrd’s Forget Me Not (2008) in which the detective protagonist’s investigation of her partner’s killing is the basis of a narrative that interweaves police corruption and attempts to criminalize her with an exploration of her relationship with her former partner’s best friend, an FBI agent. Novels, such as these, that cross the boundaries between the crime/mystery and romance/erotic genres, deconstruct discourses around the black body in ways that further the representation of black sexuality and femininity. There are obvious differences between the fantasy in black action movies and in romantic/erotic fiction and between the type of black female protagonist to be found in African American crime fiction and in the black female action movie. However, each is an example of how African American popular culture in the last third of the twentieth century provided a space for exploring new issues concerning black female identity and sexuality. Stephane Dunn argues that the representation of African American female protagonists in the black female action movies of the 1970s ‘acknowledge the impact of feminism and black feminism and, at the same time, the anxieties that they provoked’ and ‘became a space where competing notions about traditional gender roles, femininity and masculinity . . . could be safely and fantastically engaged’ (2008, p. 4). It is possible to argue that women’s African American crime and romantic/ erotic fiction took over where the black female action movie left off. The African American crime writer Frankie Bailey has pointed out that contemporary black crime fiction resists stereotyping black femininity and sexuality while

African American Women’s Crime and Mystery Novels

125

suggesting that the prevalence of past stereotypes assign black women to ‘a category of criminal offenders who often become victims in the course of their routine activities’ (2008, p. 133). Bailey, quoting the black activist and scholar Angela Davis, maintains that the black woman is stereotyped as a ‘creature motivated by base animal-like sexual instincts’ (2008, p. 132). Citing a study of the work of Chester Himes, she argues that there is a ‘long and enduring history of literary and popular cultural images of black female figures as emasculating, bestial, unnaturally masculinized, and consequently, ugly women’ (Bailey, 2008, p. 194). Although African American erotic/romantic writing, like the nineteenth-century English sensation novel, provides a vehicle for subjects too risqué for serious literature, it challenges the legacy of white American and African American male culture that has objectified African American sexuality and explores the female body through an ‘interiorized’ African American female gaze. Moreover, African American women’s writing reclaims female eroticism within African American experience and culture. Audre Lorde points out that: The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has often been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. (2001, p. 286) It is important to think of eroticism, as Lorde argues, in a broad sense. Eroticism, and female eroticism especially, has been ‘feared’ and relegated to the bedroom because ‘erotic knowledge empowers [women], becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence’ (Lorde, 2001, p. 288). It is this broader view of eroticism, in which it is interwoven with female knowledge and empowerment, which is at the heart of the way in which both these genres develop our understanding of the African American female body from a female perspective. Lorde explains: Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening at its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea. (2001, p. 289) Within this African American female gaze, contemporary crime and romantic/ erotic fiction explore desire, love and sexuality in non-stereotypical ways and through social contexts with which African American women readers can identify. In doing so, they challenge traditional links between African American female sexuality and criminality which has permitted the black female body to

126

Crime Culture

become, in fiction and real crime, the object of sexism, violence and rape. However, this is not to say that, in moving beyond the way in which the black female body has been conventionally portrayed, contemporary crime fiction does not address the criminalizing of the black female body. As Paula Woods argues, ‘The literary inheritors of Pauline Hopkins . . . use the mystery form to explore issues of black identity, racism, crimes against women, infidelity, color consciousness, and sexuality’ (1996, p. xvii). Indeed, this linking of the sexualized African American body with taboo, transgression and criminality remains a recurring motif in both genres and in black women’s writing generally. But contemporary crime and romantic fiction explore areas of black female sexual experience that the understandable emphasis on ‘sociopolitical’ issues raised by Woods may have marginalized. Eva Lennox Birch points out that, in black women’s writing, the exploration of ‘the ambiguities of female experience’ has led not only to the ‘taboo’ in terms of what is criminal, such as female rape and incest, but what is/should be no longer criminalized such as lesbianism (1994, p. 242). One of the most innovative and acclaimed mystery series developed around the female black body and the stereotypical linking of black sexuality, ‘transgression’ and ‘taboo’, is Charlotte Carter’s Nanette Hayes novels, featuring a young, free-wheeling, French-speaking, saxophone-playing street musician who becomes involved in investigating crime mysteries. At one level, Nanette’s blues and jazz playing reminds us that it was through this music that the criminalization of oppressed black women was resisted. Black female sexuality became synonymous with transgression through its power to overturn the mythic and ideological structures that oppressed and criminalized it. Although Nanette becomes involved with men, sometimes in casual relationships, the ‘sexualizing’ of the black female in this series extends to the way in which Nanette sees other black women, for example, her closest friend and erotic dancer, Aubrey. In Coq Au Vin (1999), Nanette describes Aubrey’s body in a way that ‘womanizes’ the kind of linguistic conceit which hard-boiled crime writers such as Raymond Chandler often employed to ‘criminalize’ the femme fatale and the assertive, sexually independent woman. Nanette describes Aubrey’s ‘Kraft caramel thighs and her cascades of straightened hair and her voice like warm apple butter’ (Carter, 1999, p. 7). Subtly, she alludes to the way in which light African American skin was generally perceived, even in the 1990s, as more attractive than dark skin and to the way in which African American women since the 1920s frequently employed skin lightening creams and hair straightening techniques to conform to white standards of beauty. More significantly, she suggests the role which the interracial ‘transgressions’ of Harlem’s exotic night spots played in publicly breaking down traditional racial, cultural, gender and sexual binaries. As a character, Aubrey is ‘deviant’, to introduce Deborah McDowell’s word to describe the way in which black women’s culture has been perceived as subverting the largely white social norms that define and constrain black people

African American Women’s Crime and Mystery Novels

127

(Bobo, 2001, pp. 25–6). She exhibits and flaunts her body for paying customers and does so in a New York underground club that has mafia connections. She stands in contradistinction to the other moral guardians in Nannette’s life. These include her mother, with whom she has a problematic and rebellious relationship (her mother believes her daughter is teaching part-time in a university), and her ‘deviant’ Aunt Vivian of whom she says: Vivian, my father’s sister, had been my idol when I was a kid. Breezing into town and swooping me up, Aunt Vivian meant trips into Manhattan and eating exotic food and hanging with her hip friends and my first sip of beer and every other cool thing you can imagine when you’re ten years old and your father’s baby sister is a sophisticated sometimes fashion-model who drinks at piano bars and parties with people who actually make the rock ’n’ roll records you hear on the radio. (Carter, 1999, pp. 12–13) Aubrey and Vivian demonstrate Lorde’s point, referred to earlier, that the female body through ‘erotic connection . . . stretches to music’ (Lorde, 2001, p. 289). But a further moral guardian emphasizes this dimension of black sexuality by denying it. In Rhode Island Red , the imagined spectre, whom Nanette calls ‘Ernestine’, invokes the African American Bible culture that played a part in rendering the erotic ‘fearful’: ‘Honey, some doors are closed for a good reason. Crack this one a little bit more, and your heart’s truly gone to be ready for Satan’ (Carter, 1997, p. 36). Nanette wryly observes ‘kind of tough to be a wanton when four hundred years of history have been grooming you for that place on the church pew’ (Carter, 1997, p. 24). Although a key trope in African American mystery writing generally, the ‘taboo’ in African American female sexuality, which Birch notes, features most overtly in African American lesbian crime writing which might be seen as extending McDowell’s concept of African American women’s culture as ‘deviant’. McDowell places the emphasis mainly, but not exclusively, upon black women’s culture subverting the white social norms that determine black female sexuality. But the African American lesbian crime novel focuses also upon the heterosexual norms within black culture that deny, even criminalize, lesbianism. This is a topic deserving of a chapter in itself, and one which I can deal with only briefly here. In one of the first influential African American lesbian crime novels Nikki Baker’s The Lavender House Murder (1992), the scenario of a murder committed by someone staying in the same hotel as the amateur detective is drawn from classic detective fiction. But it employs the kind of innovative conceits associated with hard-boiled fiction to represent radical black sexual experience: Her legs were apart and her thighs were in my face. I found their meeting and she smiled when she caught me at it. Her smile was pornographic and her legs made me remember Em’s [Ginny’s ex-partner], as straight and tall as

128

Crime Culture

columns to a cool white temple, pale and hard as fascist art. On the inside of her thigh, Joan had a small tattoo; it was a tiny red rose with petals and thorns. (Baker, 1992, p. 76) Ironically, the sex here is eventually ‘criminalized’ in that the lover becomes a murder victim and the sleuth a murder suspect. But through solving the crime, and exonerating herself, the novel’s protagonist deconstructs and subverts the mythologies which criminalize black lesbian sexuality and play a ‘key role’ in discourses that render black women victims.

Victimhood One of the consequences of a hegemony of power and money, where those with power make the laws that affect those who are without power, is that the law impacts upon different groups disproportionally. This raises issues which are addressed in African American crime writing, not least the one posed by Frankie Bailey: ‘Should the achievement of a just society be seen as the ultimate solution to the crime problem?’ (Bailey, 2008, 145). In other words, black women’s crime writing is concerned not simply with a crime problem but with the way in which criminality and delinquency flag up wider issues pertaining to social justice. Thus, the relationship between law, order and justice in African American women’s crime writing is problematic. Bailey points out that ‘the concept of “blind justice” rendered without bias or prejudice is not one that many African Americans believed in because of the “dual system” of justice that developed as a structural artefact of the institution of slavery and that remained in place even after the demise of that institution’ (2008, p. 144). Black crime writing addresses the way in which police investigation of criminal activities of African Americans involves ‘racial’ rather than ‘criminal’ profiling (2008, p. 148). Walker and others argue that the Civil Rights Movement had the greatest impact on the criminal justice system in the South: Under the old system of institutionalized segregation, the entire criminal justice system was an instrument for maintaining the subordination of African Americans. Disenfranchised as voters, African Americans did not serve on juries and had no voice in the election and appointment of officials who ran the criminal justice system. (1996, p. 80) But if the black male is distrustful of the criminal justice system, the black woman has more reason to be so because of the ways, as described previously, in which black female sexuality is perceived. In affirming black women as an active social presence, African American crime writing examines the African American woman’s position in relation to racial, social and cultural forces that are always in conflict, of which one of the most important is law and order.

African American Women’s Crime and Mystery Novels

129

In black women’s mystery writing, transgression of any kind, including criminality, is a complex subject involving the way in which African American women suffer criminal activity, are sometimes themselves ‘criminalized’ for stepping outside dominant social values and are part of the fractured nature of the African American community. However, the relationship between African American women and criminality is further complicated because while the law impacts upon different groups disproportionately, it also impacts upon different individuals within these groups disproportionately. Marjorie S. Zatz and Nancy Rodriguez, considering the risk of victimization, argue ‘we must consider cultural differences [such as age and education] as well as the intertwining of race, ethnicity, culture, and class’ (2006, p. 41). They suggest that ‘rarely are identity politics, let alone the problems of coding race in a multiracial society, raised in criminal justice and criminology research’ (2006, p. 40). In black women’s crime writing, criminal investigation involves exposing the institutional and ideological processes that render black women invisible as victims and reveal what we might call a ‘hierarchy’ of victims in which, for example, the black prostitute and the elderly woman come at the bottom. Some readers may be familiar with arguments in Northern Ireland, pertaining to the different ways in which acts of violence involving Catholics and Protestants have been (or have not been) represented, that a concept of a hierarchy of victimhood should be enshrined in law. But the concept has also been important to African American women’s mystery fiction. An important work in this respect is Penny Micklebury’s Night Songs (1995), one of the first African American crime novels to interweave the concept of a hierarchy of victims with that of hate crime. In doing so, Micklebury’s novel raises issues about the concept of race hate crime which are pursued in subsequent black women’s crime fiction. The concept itself is problematic. As Dave Goldberg points out, the notion of racism in terms of hate did not exist in the 1950s and 1960s when ‘racism was formatively understood . . . as a prejudice, as an irrational premodern bias based on arbitrary and scientifically vacuous distinctions between biologically conceived racial groups’ (1997, p. 19). He argues that concepts such as ‘hate speech’ and ‘hate crime’ ‘make racist expression turn on a psychological disposition, an emotive affect(ation), a disorder’ whereby it is rendered ‘abnormal and unusual’ (1997, p. 19). From the point of view of the victims, this concept displaces ‘collusive racializing’ and the ‘terror visited on [a particular] group’ (1997, pp. 18, 19). One of Penny Micklebury’s female investigators in Night Songs, Gianna Maglione, is in charge of a Hate Crimes Unit which is responsible for investigating crimes motivated by hatred. The very existence of her unit acknowledges that certain victim groups are rendered invisible under the law while others receive preferential treatment on account not only of their race but also their gender, class or age. Night Songs is primarily concerned with the investigation of the murders of black prostitutes that turn out to be committed by the sons of white senators and members of the judiciary. The victims are killed by hunting knives thrown from a convertible jeep and the murders become known as the

130

Crime Culture

‘Daniel Boone murders’. The subject of the criminal investigation is not only the killings themselves but the way in which no one has connected them because they involve women who are themselves marginalized on account of their race and doubly excluded because of their status as sex workers. They are not afforded the protection which has been given their killers who come from influential, white wealthy families. In one respect, the murders of the prostitutes in Night Songs exemplify how black women engaged in a sexual related activity are likely to become victims of violent crime. However, these killings also demonstrate how the concept of hate crime can displace what Goldberg calls the ‘collusive racializing’ involved (1997, p. 18). While the white perpetrators clearly feel hatred towards black female prostitutes who display their sexuality, this hatred is not abnormal or unusual, as Goldberg believes the term ‘hate crime’ might suggest, but the product of a racialism that informs white society. While Micklebury highlights racial hatred, the novel focuses increasingly on the collusion that protects the perpetrators of racialized crime and which allows such crimes to happen in the first place. Through the prostitutes and victims of other hate crimes investigated by Maglione’s unit, Night Songs (1995) examines the capacity of the concept of hate crime to embrace not only a collective racialism but the way members of particular groups, as Goldberg suggests, are systematically terrorized. Night Songs is an important novel which, through its central lesbian relationship between an Italian American police officer and an African American investigative reporter, challenges and explores what Goldberg calls ‘race based exclusions (or inclusions) putatively licensed by (claimed) racial membership’ (1997, p. 20). Through the different hate crimes represented, it extends the notion of race based inclusions and exclusions to encompass class, gender, sexuality and age. Gianna Maglione’s gay colleague Tim McCreddy fights prejudice by being the ideal police officer in terms of procedures; ‘detailed, organized, resourceful, and persistent’ (Micklebury, 1995, p. 36). Ironically, as a child, one of the prostitute victims, Sandra King, was ‘neat and orderly’ (Micklebury, 1995, p. 12) and when this information is revealed, Sandra, who was previously seen only as a black prostitute, appears to move to a higher ‘class’ and acquires a higher social status as a victim. However, there is a tension throughout this novel, as in contemporary African American crime writing generally, between the African Americans who have achieved social mobility and those who have not. Gianna’s African American girlfriend Mimi Patterson, an investigative reporter, dresses to blend into a suburban neighbourhood which is ‘trendy, upwardly mobile’ (Micklebury, 1995, p. 20). Approached by a man looking to have sex with a street walker, who associates Mimi’s blackness with wanton sexuality and prostitution, Mimi demonstrates Parks’s point that being African American and female are more significant defining characteristics for a black woman than class. The absent present here is the way in which ‘stereotyping is built into police work’ in which ‘perceptual shorthand’ is based on visual cues such as ‘dress, demeanor, context, gender, and age’ (Walker et al., 1996, p. 104).

African American Women’s Crime and Mystery Novels

131

In other words, there is a hierarchy of suspects as there is of victims. In the course of the novel, George Thomas, a downtown African American hotel owner, who exists at the boundary between the ‘respectable’ and the ‘criminal’, complains that despite the ‘elegant perfection’ of his clothes, the police saw only a black man ‘who catered for low-lifes’ (Micklebury, 1995, pp. 7–8). How important the concept of a hierarchy of victims is to African American crime fiction is evident if we take into account writers such as Micklebury, who sympathize with victims at the bottom of the hierarchy, and other well-known African American women crime writers who explore the topic through victims who, in Entman and Rojecki’s words invoked earlier, have ‘crossed over to highly visible acceptance, even veneration, among Whites’ (Entman and Rojecki, 2001, p. 1). Critically regarded novels in this latter category include Pamela Samuels Young’s Murder on the Down Low (2008), in which a murderer targets some of Los Angeles’s prominent citizens, and Paula Woods’s Stormy Weather (2001), concerned with the murder of a pioneering African American film director. These novels are part of an approach to African American criminality pioneered in the 1990s by Barbara Neely’s Blanche among the Talented Tenth (1995), part of a series concerned with an African American domestic worker cum amateur detective. In this novel, Blanche’s children win places at a private school which enables her to witness at first hand the colour and class divisions among the black elite. Diversity and tensions within the African American community, such as Neely’s novel highlights, have led to the emergence of forms not usually associated with African American mystery writers: the campus novel, exemplified by the work of Pamela Thomas-Graham, that provides a means of mirroring African American, middle-class society as whole, and legal fiction, as in Pamela Samuels Young’s Vernetta Henderson novels, that combines the depiction of a fractured black community, corporate greed, violence and deceit with the personal struggles of an African American female attorney. Thus, through a wider range of genres than is commonly recognized, African American women’s mystery fiction challenges a racially biased legal system, codes of practice that have survived from a more overtly apartheid society, a hierarchy of victims and preconceptions about black female sexuality and identity. This ‘resistance’ is complicated by the diverse and fractured nature of the African American community itself. However, the topos of resistance is most pronounced in black women’s mystery writing which draws on the vernacular tradition, fiction that invokes concepts of collective memory and transcendent identity, and writing which uses personal biography to challenge the notion of ‘public’ history.

Resistance and the Black Vernacular Tradition Keith Byerman points out that the African American vernacular has a ‘critical and subversive authority’; he argues: ‘What better perspective than the point of view of those forced to exist below the authority figures of the society?’

132

Crime Culture

(2004, p. 254). Through the vernacular tradition, Charlotte Carter’s Nanette Hayes novels provide a vehicle for asserting, or reasserting, African American identity and community, often perceived as more homogeneous than it is, and resisting forces that oppress or criminalize black Americans. Pepper points out that the Nanette Hayes novels are ‘an assault on essentialist racial and gendered tropes’ (2000, p. 88). At one level, Nanette looks back to the assertive, female protagonist of the black female action film of the 1970s which, as seen earlier, Stephane Dunn has described as ‘sexy’, ‘tough’ and ‘streetwise’ (Dunn, 2008, p. 3). The fact that Nanette Hayes is a jazz saxophonist is itself a trope that undermines traditional black expectations of women: in Rhode Island Red (1997), Nanette observes: ‘Ask any Negro. They’ll tell you: a woman does not play a saxophone’ (Carter, 1997, p. 1). Reflecting on her drinking in a Paris Café in the same novel, Nannette sees herself as other black women might see her: ‘Drinking in a tavern in the middle of the day – something no properly raised black woman would ever do – it was acting nasty, acting like trash’ (Carter, 1997, p. 43). However, in Carter’s work, there is tension between what Pepper calls ‘an assault on essentialist racial and gendered tropes’ and the search for frameworks within which to explore not only racial divisions between and within African American and white cultures, but the possibilities of a transcendent, collective African American identity that acknowledges difference and diversity. In Rhode Island Red (1997), the title refers to a saxophone, to a specific place and also to a particular breed of chicken. The latter provides the novel with a significant image that is always in the background. The Rhode Island Red, which dates back to the 1830s in America, is a product of crossing different breeds of chicken from overseas (Shanghais, Malay and Red Javas) with local birds and, as such, is an image not only of hybridity but also of survival that encapsulates the strength of black people and African American women in particular. It mirrors miscegenation in African American history, but can also be a metaphor for interculturality, exemplified by Nanette herself who is French speaking and considers Paris her second home. It reflects other aspects of African American history, too, being known as a survivor of poor housing conditions and diet. Moreover, despite the fact that it is a hybrid, the Rhode Island Red has a recognizable identity. In the Nanette Hayes novels, the difficulty of occupying complex public and personal spaces frequently reveals itself in her Chandleresque wisecracking. Carter’s (or Nanette’s) technique is to employ arresting, extravagant conceits like a jazz improvisation. In Coq au Vin, Nanette, confronted by criminals and criminality, describes the gangster Gigi Lacroix as a thin fellow with a thin moustache, a bad haircut, and a line of bullshit as long as a summer day in Stockholm’ (Carter, 1999, p. 78). Her verbal ingenuity functions, as the black critic Henry Louis Gates Jr says of a particular type of verbal play in black writing, ‘to redress an imbalance of power, to clear a space, rhetorically’ (Gates, 1989, p. 124). She seeks to redress the balance of power through images that,

African American Women’s Crime and Mystery Novels

133

in Gates’s term, subversively ‘play’ on, or ‘signify’, transgression and criminality: ‘Suddenly I knew who I reminded myself of: a monster-gold-earring-wearing gangsta girl on the IRT, hunching her shoulders, threatening, gesticulating wildly, using her high-polished fingernails like a garden trowel as she read out some enemy in subliterate slang’ (Carter, 1999, p. 36). ‘Signifyin’ is an important trope in African American women’s crime writing where it critiques personal and public history, including the behaviour conventionally expected of black women, in order to challenge inherited historical meanings and narratives. The radical nature of this aspect of black women’s crime writing becomes clear when we remember the importance of family allegiances and ‘collective’ responsibilities to African American culture. Sheri Parks has pointed out that ‘group identity with the culture and the family are historically significant tools of survival for Black people’ (2001, p. 109). But what are tools of survival for African American culture in general can be sites of oppression for black women whose aspirations, desires and behaviour are constrained by traditional female roles and expectations. While the emphasis in African American women’s crime writing is inevitably upon criminal investigation, even outside of vernacular writing, it is interwoven with the personal life of the key female protagonist in which she has to deal with a range of personal issues arising from the radical space which she inhabits. These range from her partner having an affair, to the pressure of being a single parent, to coming to terms with suppressed motives from her own past in pursuing a particular case. Hard-boiled feminist crime writing by non-African American women, featuring assertive female detectives (such as Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone series, Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone novels and, especially, Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski novels) also displays an interest in the personal lives of the female protagonists. But there is a more overt and sustained dynamic between the ‘personal’ and the ‘public’ or ‘collective’ in African American women’s mystery writing. Here ‘existing cultural frames of reference’ for black women, to employ Jacqueline Bobo’s words, are reworked so as ‘to redefine a skewed perspective that has somehow cast more than two-thirds of the world’s people – and their culture – as “minority”’(2001, p. 173). Kathleen Brogan points out that in ethnic writing ‘collective memories, however stabilizing to group identities, are in fact repeatedly reinterpreted over time in answer to changing needs, so that the present is informed by a past that is in turn continually revised by present perspectives’ (1998, p. 130).

Resistance and Professionalism It is difficult to discuss the, often problematic, dynamic between African American collective identity and individualism within black women’s crime writing further without reference to another subgenre of crime writing which has prioritized this subject, police procedural fiction. At one level, the police

134

Crime Culture

procedural novel focuses on the obstacles and frustrations facing the ambitious African American. But, at another, it is about juggling the demands of a professional and private life, providing the black author with a vehicle for exploring the tensions between the individual black woman’s desires and aspirations and the collective demands and responsibilities she cannot ignore as an African American. Within this category, the series which is most overtly focused on this latter dilemma is Eleanor Taylor Bland’s Marti MacAlistair novels, based around a black, widowed police officer who is a single mother with two children. Exploring this dilemma is not unique to African American women’s crime writing. Indeed, similar conflicts to those explored in the Marti MacAlistair series are examined in the Guatemalan born American writer P. M. Carlson’s Martine ‘Marti’ Hopkins series (the name betrays Bland’s influence), about a deputy Sheriff in Nichols County, Indiana. However, in Bland’s work, the awareness of professional and social inequalities is compounded by the history of black women and the expectations which have been and are placed upon them. This history includes, as is usually the case with those who have been previously marginalized or dominated as the ‘other’, not only the history which has occurred but the history which might have unfolded if it were not repressed by situation and circumstance. In her Marti MacAlistair novels, Bland takes an additional and fresh perspective on the professional black woman. The exploration of how black women who enter the professions may be forced to accommodate themselves to so-called white norms is interwoven with the way in which African American women face prejudices on account of their gender, their race and their personal identities. In Bland’s Dead Time (1992), Marti is the ultimate professional, methodically examining the crime scene and even taking photographs. Her organizational abilities are misunderstood by her male partner, Vik, who believes that forensic science is men’s work and that a woman’s role is in conducting interviews where she may draw upon her feminine intuition. His views are used in the series to explore the complex nature of prejudice against black females in professional roles. His assumption that women should work at the ‘people end’ of criminal investigation is based upon a sexist view of women’s place being in ‘soft’ roles. His criticism that Marti relies upon intuition conflates two prejudices: that women are intuitive while men are logical and scientific, failing to recognize that scientific investigation is as dependent upon hypothesis as deduction, and, second, that African Americans possess special intuitive powers. In its emphasis upon organizational skills and the way in which it configures ‘intuition’, the Marti MacAlistair novels stand in contradistinction to Stephen Soitos’s argument that, in African American mystery fiction, black detectives draw upon a ‘powerful combination of intuitive hoodoo and trickster qualities’ (1996, p. 70). As in Carter’s Nanette Hayes novels, there is tension between the way in which MacAlistair sees herself and the way in which observers place her in particular narratives from the past. As she enters the crime scene at the Cramer Hotel, in Dead Time, she is observed by other black women: ‘Now ain’t that a sight, Betty? Black and a woman and not wearin’ no uniform’ (Bland, 1992, p. 21). When

African American Women’s Crime and Mystery Novels

135

Marti comes home to her daughter, Joanna, rolling pastry in preparation for Christmas dinner, she is surprised to discover that she is using her grandma’s recipe. What particularly surprises Marti is that this does not fit with her ‘health’ conscious daughter. But Joanna has not rejected the recipe only amended it by substituting oil for lard: ‘My God, lard. It’s a wonder you’re still alive’ (Bland, 1992, p. 241). At one point in Dead Time, MacAlistair’s concern for the homeless child witnesses for whom she and her team are searching causes her to reflect upon her childhood and where she has come from. Here, the text highlights the racism and sexism which a black female professional has to negotiate virtually on a daily basis, as well as the invisibility of certain types of victims. MacAlistair, as a vehicle for black feminist social and cultural criticism, is located in a present in which traditional frames of cultural reference for black women are being redefined and in which family identity continues to be an important tool of survival: There were nights when they ate pinto beans and rice and corn bread for supper, poor fare compared to what her children ate now. They had a cramped apartment filled with odds and ends, not a nice, roomy house like this. But in that city, on those streets, she had been safe . . . Even though they felt secure, this was not a safe or caring world if you were a child. It was a place where three little boys became invisible because so few chose to see that they were there. (Bland, 1992, pp. 149–50)

Rewriting the ‘Histories’ Thus, in African American women’s fiction, scenes of crime and of family and personal life are interwoven in shared concerns with reinterpreting collective assumptions and conventions in response to changing needs, new concepts of race and ethnicity and greater recognition of diversity that have been seen, as I said at the outset, as defining the historical moment in which African American women’s mystery writing emerged. The importance of the revision of existing historical and cultural frameworks to African American mystery writing by women is evident in a number of works published since the mid 1990s. These include a new series by Frankie Bailey featuring an African American detective who is herself a historian, Pamela Thomas-Graham’s Nikki Chase series, mentioned above, featuring a Harvard economics professor/private eye; and a new series by Charlotte Carter, the Cook County series, based more specifically around events in black history than her Nanette Hayes novels. Even this brief summary highlights how the past is revised differently across different types of African American mystery writing. But invariably in each of these types of writing, the continuous rearticulation of crime cultures, based on the reconfiguration of African American identity as multiple and heterogeneous, is determined by the past, circumstance and popular discourse. This, as much as its pioneering, explicit articulation of same-sex desire among black women,

136

Crime Culture

made Nikki Baker’s The Lavender House Murder such a ground-breaking text. One of its central images is the ‘breakwater’ on which walking, we are told, ‘will take you well out of your way’ (Baker, 1992, p. 87). This epitomizes how African American mystery novels frequently depart from conventional narratives in terms of private biographies and public history. But equally important to the novel are the contents of the breakwater in which the fragmentary nature of the personal lives of the detective, the criminal and the victim and American histories are reflected: ‘On the planes of the stones, there are broken shells and bits of crab the birds have picked over. There is straw pushed in between the rocks to fill the gaps’ (Baker, 1992, p. 87). The Lavender House Murder is set in Provincetown and its beach at the tip of Cape Cod. It is a text which is geographically, racially and sexually on the edge. As previously suggested, Lavender House is a location which is very familiar in British classic detective fiction, the guest house. The guest house as a scene of crime enables amateur detectives on vacation to become involved in the investigation of one if not more murders which because of the diverse, itinerant population of guest houses take them outside their usual social spheres. But, even allowing for this, Baker’s guest house, run for lesbians by a white woman who was once in a relationship with the central protagonist’s black female lawyer friend, is a much edgier place than is to be found in British classical detective fiction. The guest house is a good choice of location for a murder mystery because it brings together not just a variety of different people but interweaves different histories and ostensible motivations, as the boundaries of the murder victim’s life are pushed back and more and more is revealed of the various guests. Baker’s guest house brings together different female histories and experiences, but also different sexual, political and racial persuasions. The murder in Baker’s novel occurs at a construction site near the beach which, like all beaches, is an interzone between boundaries and boundarylessness and between clothed and naked. In this environment, the characters in the text become mentally as well as physically more naked. Ginny remembers what it was like to be one of the few black families on the beach near where her father, pursuing a white middle-class dream, had bought a condo: My own memories were lukewarm and lonely, as I was an African-American princess with the fatal flaw of kinky hair. What I saw at twelve as the major disadvantage of my race could not be rectified by money or privilege and little black girls with their hair on end do not want to hear about black pride when they are taught on movie screens that what is beautiful is straight and white and western. (Baker, 1992, pp. 8–9) What the beach also signifies is a space where boundaries are less rigid and called into question: The crowd had segregated itself more or less into gays and lesbians, and straights and gays. The lesbians were near the parking lot . . . the gay men

African American Women’s Crime and Mystery Novels

137

were a little ways south towards Wood End Lighthouse with a preference for privacy; and the straights both male and female were camped out north . . . At the boundaries, the lines of separation blurred and the various groups looked across the beach at one another with confusion and amusement [. . .] (Baker, 1992, p. 51) The construction site, where Joan, who becomes Ginny’s friend and with whom she has stand-up sex, is murdered, occupies an in-between position like the beach itself: ‘Construction on the site has stopped as if the developer had run out of money half way through’ (Baker, 1992, p. 77). It seems to be outside of time, with no relevance to the immediate present. In this regard, it parallels the Pilgrim Monument, the signing place of the Mayflower Compact, as it is seen by Ginny standing significantly on the breakwater, looking at the shore: It is a country in which I can find no memorialized evidence of my own less auspicious landing some one hundred years after the mooring of the Mayflower at Provincetown. A legacy of exploitation and adversity, survival and resourcefulness. My absence in history and memorial is not surprising when people want to read stories with happy, unambiguous endings. (Baker, 1992, p. 89) In other words, the monument and what it ‘commemorates’ belongs to a history that at one level is remote from and yet, at another, interweaved with Ginny’s. In this novel in which linguistic puns are played off against each other ‘shore’ is double edged. The monument ‘stands like a fortress against the ways of other peoples’ and ‘watches over the town; it smiles down on the brisk pace of trade’ (Baker, 1992, pp. 88, 89). In summary, the approach to crime and criminality in contemporary African American women’s crime fiction, like the genre itself, is complex and diverse. Too large a subject to do justice to in a single chapter, African American women’s mystery writing, like romantic/erotic fiction with which it sometimes overlaps, is a movement beyond essentialist, straightforward models of black identity and community (while still maintaining a dialectical relationship with them) and the women’s and civil rights struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. Occupying a socio-psychic space that is more difficult than the former and eschewing a totalizing view of black experiences in favour of one that is post-feminist and postCivil Rights, it explores what it means to be an African American woman in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries through different, sometimes quite radical, concepts of ‘advancement’; diverse professional and private experiences; criminality and the hierarchy of victims.

This page intentionally left blank

Part IV

Angels of Death: Criminal Masculinities

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 8

Killer Boys: Male Friendship and Criminality in The Butcher Boy, Elephant and Boy A Páraic Finnerty

A killer boy is a contradictory notion: boyhood is predominantly associated with innocence, which is, or we think should be, incompatible with criminal homicide. If a killer boy is an evil glitch in our conception of youthful incorruptibility, a partnership of killer boys is another turn of the screw of social shock and disbelief. The murder of James Bulger in 1993 by two 10-year olds, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, and the perpetration of the Columbine High School massacre in 1999 by two teenagers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, horrified the world and confirmed the phenomenon of boys who kill. These incidents generated much debate in Western culture about the nature of childhood and the socialization of children, and affected the subsequent representation of boyhood in films and novels. This chapter focuses on the depiction of killer boys in three such texts: The Butcher Boy, Neil Jordan’s 1997 film version of Patrick McCabe’s 1992 novel; Elephant (2003), Gus Van Sant’s fictionalized versions of the Columbine High School massacre; and Boy A, John Crowley’s 2007 film version of Jonathan Trigell’s 1994 novel based on James Bulger’s murder. It explores the investment these killer boys make in male friendship and the way homosociality itself becomes the impetus for their crimes. More specifically the chapter highlights the boys’ imitation of a culturally endorsed version of male bonding, which is expressed and confirmed through acts of violence, and celebrated in Westerns and war films. But the friendships of the killer boys are also presented through imagery and ideas associated with homosexuality, which clearly differentiate these friendships from those prescribed by the cinematic genres the boys imitate: in most buddy-themed films male bonds produce and then counter homoeroticism, usually by accompanying it with displays of heterosexuality, homophobia and misogyny (Russo, 1987, pp. 86–9).1 This means that although the killer boys are not homosexuals, their violent crimes support a long-standing cinematic tradition that links criminality and murder with homoeroticism and homosexuality (Russo, 1987, pp. 91–4, 162–3). In fact, through these killer boys, the films covertly recriminalize homosexuality and reassociate it with deviancy and monstrosity. In the process, the films

142

Crime Culture

obscure the more salient connection between the workings of normative male homosociality and violent criminality.

Killing Childhood In contemporary culture children are usually thought of as the victims of crime rather than its perpetrators (Aitken, 2001, pp. 11–14). A killer boy or pair of killer boys must be explicated to preserve Western culture’s investment in childhood innocence and innate benevolence (D’Cruze et al., 2006, pp. 70–4).2 After the murder of James Bulger and the Columbine High School massacre, the backgrounds of the killers were scrutinized in the search of an explanation for their crimes. Poor parenting skills, dysfunctional homes, bullying at school, low IQs and exposure to violent films were given as reasons why Venables and Thompson killed James Bulger (Young, 1996, pp. 138–43; Morrison, 1997, pp. 112–14). Nihilistic rock music, the oppressive hierarchies in high school, bullying, violent video games and films, and the availability of guns were thought to have inspired Harris and Klebold’s shooting spree, which killed twelve students and one teacher (Larkin, 2007, p. 14; Cullen, 2009, p. 107). The alternative explanation for these crimes was that these killer boys were ‘pure evil’: they were the embodiment of the demonic children in films such as Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976); they were monstrous deviants from whom the general public must be protected (Morrison, 1997, pp. 21–2; Wilson, 2008, p. 130).3 The media frenzy their crimes generated transformed all boys and male adolescents into figures of suspicion and potential threat, placing the onus on parents, teachers and law-makers to ensure that boys, who could no longer be regarded as innately or essentially good, were forced to conform to ideals of childhood ingenuousness (Young, 1996, pp. 101–3).4 In both America and the United Kingdom these killers became signs of the horror of contemporary society and the collapse of traditional values and standards; both incidents led to harsher punishments for juvenile crime, new measures to combat truancy, the censorship of violent films and music, and, in America, renewed calls for stricter gun control laws (Larkin, 2007, p. 226; Young, 1996, pp. 146–7). Prior to these events, the dominant cinematic representations of boys explored their transition from innocence or mischievousness to worldly experience and adult responsibility; while applauding the socialization of boys and their achievement of manly ideals, these films nostalgically lamented this process (Pomerance and Gateward, 2005, pp. 1–10). Even films that depicted male juvenile delinquency portrayed confused, angry boys or male adolescents going on a rampage of violence, crime, drugs and sex, which, in most cases, ended with the boys reforming and making restitution (Shary, 2005, pp. 35–7). The films under discussion present a new type of boy or male adolescent who is irredeemable and whose background and character predispose him to commit

Killer Boys: The Butcher Boy, Elephant and Boy A

143

extreme acts of violence and homicidal crimes (Shary, 2005, pp. 22–3). In The Butcher Boy, Francie kills and dismembers his neighbour Mrs Nugent; in Elephant, Alex and Eric go into their high school and kill students, teachers and finally themselves, and in Boy A, Philip and Eric, two 10-year-old boys, brutally murder Angela Milton, a 10-year-old girl. There is no redemption for the killer boys in Elephant or Boy A: only death; and although, The Butcher Boy ends with Francie Brady being finally released from a mental institution, there is a sense in which his redemption has cost him his life. As in the social reactions to the true crimes, there is an attempt in each film to explain the crimes by examining the troubled and dysfunctional environments of the killers (Doherty, 2002, pp. 96–101). In The Butcher Boy Francie is raised by an alcoholic and violent father and a severally depressed mother; both parents die in the course of the film: his mother commits suicide and his father dies of an illness brought on by excessive drinking; Francie is sent first to a correctional school where he is sexually abused by a priest and then to a medical institution where he undergoes electric shock therapy. Although the boys in Elephant are not neglected by their respective families there is a clear lack of parental surveillance of their activities. Moreover, the film suggests that both boys have been verbally or physically abused in the high school environment: they are outcasts in this organized, sterile place of social control and conformity, where one’s sense of self is connected with the judgement of others (Scott, 2005, para. 17).5 Like Francie, the boys in Boy A are from disadvantaged backgrounds and are mistreated by those around them. Eric’s father drinks and his mother has cancer, and he is being severely bullied and humiliated by a gang of older boys; Philip comes from a broken home presided over by his violent and sexually abusive older brother. Each film also examines the ways in which a close male friendship offers each boy a sense of belonging, self-esteem and dignity in a world where they feel isolated, neglected or abused. In so doing, these films follow a cinematic pattern of representing male bonds that foregrounds friendship and comradeship based on loyalty, support and even mutual vulnerability, and, on one level, this emphasizes the ordinariness of the killer boys (Dennis, 2006, pp. 35–6).6 In the first part of The Butcher Boy, Francie and his best friend Joe Purcell are a pair of typical cinematic boys, stealing Mrs Nugent’s apples and her son Philips’s comics; they are unruly pranksters: an Irish version of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. But Joe outgrows this boyhood friendship while Francie’s childish pranks become increasingly violent and criminal. Just as Francie and Joe are initially presented as normal, Alex and Eric in Elephant are presented as archetypal American teenagers: they call each other ‘dude’ and demonstrate their closeness by exchanging knowing looks in the presence of Alex’s parents. They recall other cinematic dude pairings in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) and Wayne’s World (1992), in which male friends mirror each other in terms of dress, speech and manner, suggesting that masculine intimacy is often characterized by narcissistic mimicry (Troyer and Marchiselli, 2005, p. 266).

144

Crime Culture

Within the private realm of their friendship, we learn that Alex is artistic and plays classical piano and that Eric, although less intelligent than his friend, enjoys reading. Juxtaposed with these images of ‘ordinary’ adolescence are the boys’ more disturbing activities: they watch a documentary about Nazism, play violent video games, and order a shipment of guns from the internet. In Boy A Eric conceptualizes his friendship with Philip through reference to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, thinking of himself as Tom Sawyer and Philip as Huckleberry Finn. Together the boys commit petty crimes such as shoplifting and truancy, which bring them closer together. Philip tells Eric: ‘Mate, I think you’re the best friend I ever fucking had’ (Crowley, 2007); he then proceeds to become emotional as he describes his brother’s sexual abuse of him. Similarly, Eric confides in Philip about his mother’s cancer. Eric recalls the way he and Philip shared endless days together, living in the ‘shadows, under the ring road . . . where you could do what you wanted, and no one would stop you. Where you were powerful’ (Trigell, 2004, pp. 86, 235). In all three texts, the male friendships are solidified by mutual disaffection and detachment, and an investment in a shared imaginary world where anything is possible. For Francie in The Butcher Boy and the boys in Elephant and Boy A, friendship becomes such a priority that for its sake and within its terms they become willing to kill (Benshoff and Griffin, 2003, pp. 260–1).7

Homosociality as Crime Scene If hegemonic masculinity is exemplified by violent, aggressive, physically strong and emotionally detached men, who seek to dominate others, then one recurring factor shaping this model of manhood is the homosocial bond (Connell, 2005, pp. 76–82).8 This is confirmed by popular cinematic genres; for example, war films demonstrate ‘the adaptation of the individual to the demands of a ritualistic male group’ (White, 2006, p. 205);9 but in addition Westerns, crime or action thrillers and gangster movies show men bonding together to eliminate shared antagonists (Lang, 2002, pp. 1–13).10 The cinematic attention given to bonds within all-male groups and the ‘intimate partnerships’ between two heterosexual men has a major influence on the killer boys (Fuchs, 1992, pp. 195–6).11 These models allow the boys to legitimize and justify aggressive, warrior-like behaviour towards those who are their enemies (Donald, 2001, pp. 171, 179). Although The Butcher Boy remains faithful to the novel on which it is based, it makes Francie’s friendship with Joe the central motive for the murder he commits (MacCabe, 2007, pp. 43–4). Like the novel, the film begins with Francie recalling, ‘When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs Nugent’ (Jordan, 1997). Francie’s voice-over is accompanied by images of him and Joe dressing as Native Americans and running through a green forest under a blue sky and by a lake; here we have an idealized boyhood friendship

Killer Boys: The Butcher Boy, Elephant and Boy A

145

set against the most idyllic and beautiful of landscapes (Potts, 1999, p. 93). The next sentence, going further than the sentiment of the novel, states ‘If she hadn’t poked her nose in between me and Joe, everything would have been alright’ (Jordan, 1997). Here Jordan (with the agreement of his co-screenwriter, the novel’s author Patrick McCabe) makes explicit that Francie’s act of homicide is a result of the loss of this boyhood paradise. Throughout the film Francie longs to return to what he calls the ‘old days’, to a world of ‘beautiful things like snowdrops and roses and Flash bars . . . and me and Joe by the lake (Jordan, 1997). As Francie kills Mrs Nugent, he tells her: ‘Don’t worry, Mrs Nugent. You won. Joe’s gone’ (Jordan, 1997); in contrast, at this point in the novel Francie also blames Mrs Nugent for the death of his mother and the break-up of his family (McCabe, 1992, pp. 2, 195). The opening credits of The Butcher Boy feature an array of comic book heroes: the cowboy, the spaceman, the detective, the superhero and the soldier; these idealized male figures are a central part of Francie and Joe’s shared world of fantasy and adventure (McLoone, 1998, p. 32; Scaggs, 2000, p. 57). At first the boys’ attitude towards Mrs Nugent is framed by such discourses: she is their antagonist. For example, we see Francie and Joe watching the television series The Fugitive by peeping through Mrs Nugent’s window and it is clear that both boys identify with and are on the side of Dr Richard Kimble, and they regard Mrs Nugent as equivalent to his nemesis, the one-armed man (Zucker, 2003, p. 205; McCabe, 1992, p. 38). In the novel, Joe tells Francie, ‘watch out Francie we’re in the wars with the Nugents’ (McCabe, 1992, p. 3); and this war for Francie, in particular, is understood through the Cold War rhetoric of the time that postulated the existence of unambiguous foes, dangerous figures of extreme otherness who must be destroyed. Referring to the Russian communists, one neighbour tells Francie, ‘The thing is Francie, you don’t know the type of people you’re dealing with’ (Jordan, 1997). Supplementing his antagonism towards Mrs Nugent are science fiction films; while watching one such film in which an alien takes possession of a doctor’s body, Francie jokes that the doctor has really been possessed by Mrs Nugent, whom he later refers to as ‘the greatest alien of all time’ (Jordan, 1997). When Joe denies outright that he is Francie’s best friend, Francie thinks that Joe has been taken over by aliens: ‘that wasn’t Joe . . . it looked like him but it wasn’t . . . maybe the communists took him? Was it the Nugents? Maybe the aliens? One thing for sure it wasn’t him’ (Jordan, 1997). Francie transforms Mrs Nugent into the embodiment of all evil who must be stopped for the sake of humanity. But Francie also regards his murder of Mrs Nugent as a personal act of revenge, conceptualized through ideas derived from Westerns. At the beginning of the film, Joe is Geronimo and Francie is Sitting Bull, imitating war cries and ‘look[ing] around for white men’ (Jordan, 1997). Such identification suggests the boys’ feelings of difference from those around them, and these Native American figures might have been especially attractive because they were often depicted in popular culture as threatening, blood thirsty savages

146

Crime Culture

(Benshoff and Griffin, 2003, p. 102). Francie and Joe also identify with cowboys and are particularly devoted to John Wayne: both boys repeat the line ‘Okay, fellas, we’re riding out!’, which they attribute to him (McCabe, 1992, pp. 184, 187). When Francie is being ejected from a dancehall, he imagines his enemies as being ‘like the Apaches over John Wayne’ and he cries out to Joe: ‘call up the posse. Get the cavalry’ ( Jordan, 1997). Imitating the terms and imagery of the Western, the boys call each other kemo sabe, meaning faithful friend, and compadre, meaning companion or friend; Joe makes Francie swear on the blood of the Apache that he will leave the Nugents alone, cutting both their palms to make them ‘blood brothers . . . until the end of time’ (Jordan, 1997). When Francie breaks into Joe’s boarding school in Bundoran, Francie shouts, ‘I’m here, Joe, come on, let’s saddle up. We’ll ride out, Joe. We can ride out to the mountain, eh, Joe? We can track for days. We can listen to the coyotes at night’ ( Jordan, 1997). After Joe’s rejection of him, Francie says ‘So long Tonto, it’s your old pal the Lone Ranger’ (Jordan, 1997), evoking the television series The Lone Ranger and Tonto, which ran between 1949–1957 and placed supreme significance on the ‘enduring friendship of the duo’: the Lone Ranger was ‘never alone because Tonto was his trusty and loyal partner regardless of the circumstances’ (Donaldson, 2005, p. 39). For Francie, Mrs Nugent has destroyed a male–male relationship, which holds a privileged and revered position in Westerns and is something for which the cowboy is willing to kill or be killed (Packard, 2006, p. 3).12 For Francie, his extreme act of violence is the only suitable expression for his sense of loss (Donald, 2001, p. 179).13 Like John Wayne, Francie is the cowboy who having demonstrated remarkable restraint must now engage in acts of violence to reaffirm his masculinity and achieve justice (Mitchell, 1998, pp. 40, 154–5).14 In a similar manner, Elephant connects criminality with the imitation of ideal masculinity and the comradeship depicted in war films. The film begins with a conversation between a father and son, in which the father suggests they go hunting with a gun from the Second World War, the ‘old Jap’ that his own father used on the Truck Islands in the South Pacific (Van Sant, 2003). This relates male bonding to hunting and warfare, and reminds viewers that the killer boys are part of a generation for whom war and its consequences are ‘unreal’ occurrences mediated through film, television and video games (Sofair, 2006, p. 15). Like Francie’s murder of Mrs Nugent, Alex and Eric’s careful planning of their shooting spree is part of their fantastic re-enactment of visual models (Scott, 2005, para. 19). Their arrival dressed as soldiers and their elaborate arsenal of explosives and guns suggest they see themselves as an army of two. While Francie’s passionate hatred of Mrs Nugent transforms her into his mortal enemy, for Eric and Alex everyone who works at or attends their high school is an enemy and the school itself is a combat zone. The massacre is a military-style operation that proves the boys’ mutually reinforcing identification of themselves as soldiers capable of risk taking, organization, boldness, aggressiveness and self-sacrifice. Drawing on war films, which traditionally centre on the limited perspective of individual soldiers or groups of soldiers,

Killer Boys: The Butcher Boy, Elephant and Boy A

147

and obscure the broader historical, political, ideological and moral issues (Slocum, 2006, p. 9), Eric and Alex are only concerned with their experience of ‘battle’. Alex says before they go into battle: ‘Most importantly, have fun, man’ (Van Sant, 2003); they both shoot classmates and teachers with the indifference of sniper-video-game players. Their military style of dress allows them to perform a wartime masculinity of physically toughness, discipline, aggressiveness and emotionally detachment. Of course, many war films focus not only on battle scenes, but also on the process through which recruits become soldiers and the resulting friendships that emerge between these men (Kimmel, 2001, p. 278). Like cinema’s army recruits, the killer boys grow closer because they see themselves as cut off from society and removed from civilian life and its rules (Barrett, 2001, pp. 80–2). The abuse Eric and Alex experience at school is equivalent to the degradation and humiliation experienced as part of the testing of a soldier’s endurance and masculinity, all of which is vividly portrayed in films such as Full Metal Jacket (1987) (White, 2006, pp. 204–30; Barrett, 2001, pp. 96–7). In Elephant, the high school equivalent to this tactical bullying leads to the boys bonding against their perceived oppressors with devastating and violent consequences. Their friendship is cemented by their planning of and preparation for this attack. As in The Butcher Boy and Elephant, in Boy A the boys understand their friendship as an empowering force that validates their fantasy world of unrestricted possibility. Unlike the mutual mischievousness of Francie and Joe, Eric and Philip’s friendship is from their first meeting connected with death, crime and violence. The boys, who are both playing truant from school, meet in a graveyard, and Philip, presumably to impress Eric, throws a bottle over a wall on to an unseen, busy road. Complicit in his crime, Eric is immediately attracted to Philip’s abandon and excited by their outlaw status. When they subsequently meet the boys who have been relentlessly bullying Eric, Philip stands up for his new friend by viciously attacking them in a display of extreme and aggressive violence. Eric associates his friendship with Philip with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1968); a Western that, along with Easy Rider (1969) and Midnight Cowboy (1969), instated the buddy movie in which homosocial bonds are privileged over heterosexual ones (Benshoff and Griffin, 2003, p. 274). Eric reflects ‘He was no longer Davy Crockett, no longer a loner; he had a partner. More of a Butch and Sundance affair . . . A considered B to be the better Sundance, the surly dangerous one. He should be Butch Cassidy, who was handsome and popular’ (Trigell, 2004, p. 229). Eric is particularly intrigued by the ending of this film in which the outlaws, who charge out of their hiding place into a shower of bullets, are ‘Forever just about to die’; as the boys follow Angela Milton, Eric describes her as being ‘shadowed at a distance by Butch and Sundance’ (Trigell, 2004, p. 229, 232). This buddy film validates the importance of male friendship but also normalizes its association with criminality and violence. The film version of Boy A, first shown on Channel 4 on 26 November 2007, tends to weaken the mutuality and equality of the boys’ friendship as it is

148

Crime Culture

presented in Trigell’s novel. It makes Philip the main perpetrator of the crime and Eric his reluctant accomplice (Billen, 2007, p. 19; Hanks, 2007, p. 22), and presents their victim Angela Milton as the one who confronts the boys and is aggressive towards them. By never showing Eric’s participation in the crime, the film ensures that he is presented as a vulnerable, innocent young man who is easily led astray by those he loves, a sympathetic character seeking redemption. But in the novel, the boys follow Angela Milton, confront her and drag her under the bridge because she calls them ‘sick little spying shit-bags’ and threatens to make their lives miserable (Trigell, 2004, p. 235). As Boy A (Eric/Jack) recalls ‘It was B (Philip) who first drew blood. He must have started the game. But together they killed an Angel’ (Trigell, 2004, p. 236). Like the killer boys in The Butcher Boy and Elephant, Eric and Philip initially understand male friendship as a partnership in spectacles of violence. Despite having served his prison sentence and undergone rehabilitation, Eric – now called Jack – continues to express friendship through aggressive behaviour; this is emphasized by the way Boy A intercuts the amity between Eric and Philip with Eric/Jack’s new friendship with workmate Chris. In one scene, at a party, Jack steps in to protect Chris and savagely attacks Chris’s aggressor, imitating the level of violence he saw Philip using to defend him. Jack’s intervention cements his relationship with Chris, who gives him the nickname ‘bruiser’: ‘Come on, Bruiser. You’re a hero’ (Crowley, 2007). Another workmate who is also at the party ecstatically proclaims ‘What a night! What a fucking night!’; he calls Jack ‘Steven fucking Seagal’ and refers to what he did as a ‘bit of Van Damage’ (Crowley, 2007). In the novel, the savagery of the attack increases Jack’s popularity at work: ‘as people gradually heard about the fight they warmed to him . . . No one thought he was a monster. Couldn’t he see? Everyone respects someone who stands up for a mate’ (Trigell, 2004, p. 92). Later, Chris tells Jack: ‘You’re a good guy you are Jack. A good mate. That thing that you did for me at the party . . . jumping in there’ (Crowley, 2007). The idea that loyalty to one’s male friend authorizes violence and crime is an often unmentioned component of the buddy theme. Within this context, the boys’ violent act towards Angela Milton, like Francie’s murder of Mrs Nugent, can be justified. Eric/Jack repeats this notion when he intervenes to protect Chris; however, this time Jack’s violent expression of homosociality, while possibly criminal, is rewarded, increasing the bond he has with Chris and his status among his other workmates. In all three films, when the boys kill it is from their internalization of popular culture’s legitimization of aggressive male alliances.

Criminalizing the Homoerotic In traditional buddy movies, homoerotic connotations are avoided through the presence of a female body or female figure of desire (Troyer and Marchiselli, 2005, p. 270; Sedgwick, 1985, p. 38). Typically, the woman is ‘the socially and

Killer Boys: The Butcher Boy, Elephant and Boy A

149

sexually acceptable object who substitutes for a sexually taboo male object’ (Studlar, 2005, p. 141). In contrast, in The Butcher Boy and Boy A the female figures, Mrs Nugent and Angela Milton, are brutally murdered and in Elephant, Michelle is the first casualty of Alex and Eric’s crime. This, of course, makes the male bonds all the more prominent and places their exclusivity and intimacy under scrutiny. In The Butcher Boy Francie seeks vengeance on the person he blames for robbing him of the kind of male bond which Eric and Philip, and Alex and Eric have. Francie’s obsession with Joe and unrequited desire to make their friendship a dominant factor in both their lives make him a figure akin to the male homosexual. In Elephant and Boy A, the friendships are alliances that sanction criminal and deviant behaviour. In Elephant the closeness of the criminal partnership is symbolized by a homosexual act, in Boy A it is connoted by homoerotic language. It should be no surprise that Neil Jordan presents the loss of Francie’s boyhood friendship through the language and imagery of romantic love, as his films often feature male friendships that are homoerotic without being explicitly homosexual, for example, The Crying Game (1992), Interview with a Vampire (1995) and Breakfast on Pluto (2005) (Giles, 1997, p. 65). Going further than the novel, Jordan prioritizes Francie’s affection for Joe. At the correctional school, Francie says he is ‘going to be good’ so that he can be ‘right back at the fountain with the one and only Joe Purcell, king of all time’ (Jordan, 1997). At the school, Francie is overjoyed to receive a letter from Joe, only to be filled with jealousy and incomprehension on hearing of Joe’s new friendship with Philip Nugent (Scarlata, 2005, p. 238). When Francie witnesses at first hand this new friendship, it causes him great pain, and he becomes preoccupied by ways of winning Joe’s friendship back. In one key scene, having been given an injection by Doctor Boyd, Francie hallucinates that he has woken up to find Joe by the lake, as Frank Sinatra sings ‘Where are you?’ The romantic lyrics reinforce the idea that Joe is the love of Francie’s life: Where are you? Where have you gone without me? I thought you cared about me . . . Where’s my heart? Where is the dream we started I can’t believe we’re parted . . . All life through Must I go pretending? Where is that happy ending? Where are you? Jordan, 1997 At this moment, the lake blows up and Francie uses his body to shield Joe from the blast. The boys then wander amid the post-atomic town destroyed by the

150

Crime Culture

combined force of the communists and aliens. Despite this, Francie is happy because he is with Joe: ‘Thank God I had Joe. Me and Joe Purcell, the last two in the universe . . . on this bitter, bitter day for the lovely town . . . when the world had ended’ (Jordan, 1997). The dream ends when the boys meet an alien wearing a priest’s cassock, who says ‘You’ve unlocked something very, very precious Francie’ (Jordan, 1997); this line had been spoken earlier in the film by Fr Sullivan, who sexually abused Francie. Francie’s dream of finding Joe again is not shattered by the atomic bomb, but by a combination of something sexual and alien entering the world of boyhood: this marks the real apocalypse for Francie. The alien priest symbolizes not just deviant sexuality, but that Francie and Joe have entered the world of sexual knowledge, which makes their boyhood friendship less important. Earlier in the film, when Francie describes what Fr Sullivan did to him, Joe is embarrassed and refuses to listen, suggesting his awareness of the sexual implications of Francie’s descriptions, which Francie fails to understand. It is obvious in the film that the boys have aged; when Francie returns from the correctional school to the town’s fountain, he finds that it belongs to two younger boys. Francie is now responsible for looking after his father and their home and has a job as Mr Leddy’s butcher boy; meanwhile Joe is a boarder at secondary school. Joe has outgrown the world of comics, sweets, hideouts and dressing as Native Americans and becomes increasingly troubled by Francie’s persistent attempt to restore this world of boyhood (Sussman, 2004, pp. 162–3); he tells Mrs Nugent’s brothers: ‘I’m not hanging around with him. I used to hang around with him. He keeps calling. He won’t leave me alone’ (Jordan, 1997). Joe has other interests: at the carnival, as Francie is attempting to win goldfish for Joe, two girls approach him; one says, ‘You’re a friend of Joe Purcell’s aren’t you?’, the other adds, ‘She fancies him’ (Jordan, 1997). Francie is oblivious to this world of adolescent crushes and he doesn’t understand why the girls ask him to give Joe a message from them. In the novel, Francie is devastated when he sees Joe in the café with Philip Nugent and these girls; Joe looks at him like ‘someone [he] half-knew or someone [he] didn’t know at all’ (McCabe, 1992, pp. 128–9). Francie’s murder of Mrs Nugent is a result of misdirected anger at the onset of heterosexual socialization, when boys become less interested in each other and more interested in girls: ‘Only for Mrs Nugent, it’d be all okay. All like the old days, way back long ago, like the way it used to be’ (Jordan, 1997). Jordan foregrounds Francie’s prohibited wish to return to and make eternal his relationship with Joe, associating it with homosexuality without necessarily implying anything about Francie’s sexual identity. Francie’s growing infatuation with Joe is most evident from the fact that every time the Virgin Mary appears to him, she reassures him of Joe’s friendship: ‘sure that’s the best one yet. How could Joe be gone on you? Aren’t you blood brothers?’ (Jordan, 1997). This demonstrates that the friendship has entered the world of illusion and unreality (Sussman, 2004, pp. 149–50).15 Francie’s feelings for Joe might be

Killer Boys: The Butcher Boy, Elephant and Boy A

151

characterized as a ‘homoromance’; a same-sex crush which is possible because it pre-exists homophobic conditioning and any consciousness of homosexuality (Dennis, 2007, p. 13). The extreme importance Francie gives to this bond is confirmed by the film’s ending, which unlike the novel’s, presents Francie being released from a mental institution, having finally gotten the ‘Not-aBad-Bastard-Anymore award’. Before he finally joins the ‘real world’, the Virgin Mary appears to him and tells him ‘Joe loves you too, Francie. But the world goes one way and we go another’ (Jordan, 1997). This underlines that what Francie wants separates him from the quotidian world of others. His difference is a result of his unrealistic wish to preserve a childhood friendship, which functions as an implicit refusal of heterosexuality. This makes Francie equivalent to the homosexual figure and, problematically, associates same-sex love with immaturity, psychosis, crime and death. In Elephant Van Sant, one of the few openly gay directors in Hollywood, follows Jordan in associating criminality with homosexuality. Van Sant depicts the intimate nature of the bond between Alex and Eric by showing them showering together and kissing, and presumably engaging in a sexual act (Wolf, 2004, pp. 46–7). The earlier glances and affectionate touches between them are given full expression in this the most private scene in the film. The eroticism of this act of cleansing before battle and death exceeds the expected behaviour of wartime comrades. While war films demonstrate how the powerful bonds between men are established, there is ‘a strict homophobic code to follow in expressing this amity’; and soldiers must continually prove that they are not sissies or homosexuals (Donald, 2001, p. 179).16 The homoerotic element, usually repressed, trivialized or neutralized in buddy movies, is made explicit in Elephant as the war ‘buddy’ and the sexual partner become one (Baker, 2006, p. 4). The shower scene ‘queers’ their later performance of militarized masculinity and draws attention to the way in which war films create an ‘intense and even intimate emotional and physical proximity between men otherwise prohibited in Hollywood cinema or other normative social spaces’ (Slocum, 2006, p. 9). In war films, a scene of emotion, affection, intimacy and physicality between men is permitted only when one’s comrade is dying or dead, for as Easthope argues: In the dominant versions of men at war, men are permitted to behave towards each other in ways that would not be allowed elsewhere, caressing and holding each other, comforting and weeping together, admitting their love. The pain of war is the price paid for the way it expresses the male bond. War’s suffering is a kind of punishment for the release of homosexual desire. (1986, p. 66)17 But the homoerotic tenderness between the killer boys has a price of pain and death, paid by themselves and others. The deadly criminality of Eric and Alex, like that of Francie, is a result of an excessive homosociality that draws on signifiers of same-sex desire and implicates them in the process.

152

Crime Culture

This erotic encounter between the boys is a new experience for both of them. As Eric joins Alex in the shower, he says ‘I guess this is it. We’re gonna die today. Yeah, I’ve never even kissed anybody. Have you?’ (Van Sant, 2003). Van Sant suggests that the kiss ‘is more about their age and their resignation to the attack and the idea they’re going to die, which provokes a “tenderness” in the midst of chaos’ (Said, 2004, p. 16). There is no evidence elsewhere in the film that these characters are gay, but their familiarity with bullying and humiliation at high school might be considered comparable to that experienced by a student who is identified as gay. Alex is humiliated in the classroom and Eric tells the principal Mr Luce: ‘the next kids that come up to you with their problems . . . that they’re being picked on, you should listen to them . . . no matter what twisted shit they say’ (Van Sant, 2003). Earlier in the film those attending a meeting of the Gay-Straight Alliance discuss whether it is possible to know if someone is gay by looking at them. The film highlights the danger of categorizing people based on appearance, a process endemic to high school and later life; such categorization fails, as one student at this meeting puts it, to capture a person’s ‘spirit’. The shower scene does not confirm anything about Eric’s or Alex’s sexual orientation because no one action can; just in the same way as no one factor or characteristic can explain why these boys planned and perpetrated mass murder. What is most daring is Van Sant’s deliberate use of homoeroticism to represent the closeness that the boys’ crime necessitated; for him, the scene humanizes the killers, showing a moment of intimacy, vulnerability and tenderness. However, its inclusion confirms homophobic associations between samesex affection and crime; and as in Jordan’s film the monstrosity and abnormality of the killer boys is intensified by the fact that their imitation of the bonds between normal, heterosexual males leads to that which is most abhorrent to such bonds: homosexuality. In Boy A, the two boys become inseparable from the moment they meet; they are not just best friends, their friendship is exclusive. Their bond is strengthened by their petty thieving, their discussion of sex and their killing of an eel. Their murder of Angela is the ultimate expression of the sense of power they feel, the result of their solitary and fantasy-fuelled friendship beyond the supervision and limits of normal society. Although only implicit in the film, the novel uses a language usually associated with love and eroticism as a means of representing this partnership: They shared the remains of the day. Outlaws, confirmed in petty shoplifts and pointless vandalism. Acts that nonetheless bonded them, blended them. Separation from the world brought them to each other. People who saw them, while they walked homewards, would swear they were a pair. They fitted together those two boys, with letters where their names should be. A and B, united by their difference, intrinsically linked, like pen and paper, salt and pepper, accident and emergency. (Trigell, 2004, p. 16)

Killer Boys: The Butcher Boy, Elephant and Boy A

153

In the novel, the media are astounded by ‘the unlikelihood of finding two such freaks in a school so small’ and refer to their crime a ‘Folie à deux’ (Trigell, 2004, pp. 106–7). As in The Butcher Boy and Elephant the suggestion here is not that the killers are homosexuals but rather that their friendship, because of its criminal goals, has an atypical intensity, which has no available vocabulary except a homoerotic one.

Conclusion There has been speculation that James Bulger’s murderers had a sexual motive in abducting him and that Dylan Klebold, one of the Columbine High School killers, had homosexual feelings towards his accomplice Eric Harris (Morrison, 1997, pp. 190–2).18 While the films under discussion do not confirm such theories, they do validate a correlation in Western thought between same-sex love and death and the apocalyptic eradication of populations (Sedgwick, 1990, pp. 127–30; Dollimore, 1998, pp. 270–91). Yet through this tacit recriminalization of homosexuality these films conceal that the boys’ crime-inducing friendships are a version of conventional male bonds, and from a queer perspective what is fascinating about these films is what they reveal about the workings of normative male homosociality (Butler, 1990, p. 110). The films confirm the correspondence between male homosociality and crime, sanctioned by buddy movies, Westerns and war films in which loyalty to one’s friend and the violent obliteration of a shared enemy are one and the same thing. The films suggest that criminality and violence lie at the heart of Western constructions of heterosexual masculinity and male homosociality – the two roots of patriarchy, which are essential for its continued functioning. Moreover, the films point to the limitation of terms with which to describe affectionate, non-sexual relationships between men that exceed the limits of the homosocial bonding without straying into the realm of the sexual (Lang, 2002, p. 87; Eberwein, 2007, pp. 148–53). In The Butcher Boy Francie’s love for Joe can find no expression except in criminality and eventually homicide, and the criminal partnerships in both Elephant and Boy A produce a closeness between the boys that has no available vocabulary except an erotic one. Implicitly, the eroticization of the relationships of these killer boys regulates male friendship, making excessive intimacy between men at best juvenile and immature and at worst abnormal, violent, criminal and deadly.

Notes 1 2 3

See also Wyatt (2001, pp. 52–5) and Donaldson (2005, pp. 93–4). See also Paul (2003, pp. 5–25). See also Larkin (2007, pp. 151–2, 130).

154 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Crime Culture

See also Larkin (2007, pp. 8–9) and Aitkin (2001, pp. 146–8). See also Pomerance (2007, p. 215) and McKibbin (2004, para. 9). See also Troyer and Marchiselli (2005, pp. 265–6) and Strikwerda and May (1996, pp. 81–3). See also Donald (2001, pp. 170–2). See also Barrett (2001, pp. 79–80) and Whitehead and Barrett (2001, p. 10). See also Morgan (1994, pp. 174–9). See also Eberwein (2007, pp. 20–4) and Studlar (2005, pp. 120–45). See also Donaldson (2005, pp. 1–12) and Mellen (1978, pp. 43–4, 286, 311–12). See also Baker (2006, pp. 135–42) and Mellen (1979, pp. 10–15). See also Eldred (2006, pp. 53–67). See also Benshoff and Griffin (2003, p. 104). See also Potts (1999, p. 242). See also Kimmel (2001, p. 277) and Messner (2001, p. 258). See also Simpson (1994, p. 214) and Donald (2001, p. 179). See also Paul (2003, pp. 147–9), Cullen (2009, pp. 155–6) and Larkin (2007, pp. 146–7).

Chapter 9

The Angel of Death: Targeting the Hitman Andrew Spicer

Big Babe Lazich (Zero Mostel): ‘Now I’m ready for the big stuff. Maybe even a killing’. Joseph Rico (Ted de Corsia): ‘Never say that. A murder is a contract, a hit the sucker that gets killed. Remember those words and use them’. The Enforcer, 1951 Rayburn (Christopher Walken): ‘A man can be an artist at anything . . . It depends on how good he is at it. Creasy’s art is death. He’s about to paint his masterpiece.’ Referring to John W. Creasy (Denzil Washington), Man on Fire, 2004 Martin Q. Blank (John Cusack): ‘A psychopath kills for no reason. I kill for money. It’s a job.’ Grosse Pointe Blank, 1997

Introduction The hitman has become a familiar figure in crime films, one of its conventional cast of characters that is routinely used; the Internet Movie Database lists nearly 500 examples. Depictions of hitmen range historically from While the City Sleeps (1928) through to the present, as in No Country for Old Men (2007); from art house, Seijun Suzuki’s Koroshi no rakuin (Branded to Kill, 1967), to populist, Smokin’ Aces (2006) whose tagline was ‘let the best hitman win’; and stylistically from the grubby naturalism of Little Odessa (1994) to the high-tech orchestration of Bangkok Dangerous (2008). Indeed, hitmen are everywhere: not only in films, but on television, for instance ITV’s recent series Rough Justice (2008); in popular fiction, including Parnell Hall’s novel Hitman (2007) and Garth Ennis and Joel McCrea’s graphic novel series Hitman; and in video games, notably Eidos’s bestselling Hitman series which, in 2007, spawned a novelization by William C. Dietz and a film spin-off starring Timothy Olyphant as Agent 47, a genetically enhanced clone trained to assassinate targets. From at least The Assassination Bureau (1969)

156

Crime Culture

onwards there have been comedic/parodic versions, a sure indication of the maturity and popularity of a figure, including Charley Partanna ‘the All-American Hood’ (Jack Nicholson) in Prizzi’s Honor (1985), Martin Q. Blank (John Cusack) in Grosse Pointe Blank (1997), or Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson) in the intelligent and enjoyable In Bruges (2008), ordered to lie low in the picturesque Belgian town after Ray had bungled an assignment. Despite this proliferation of hitmen, the figure – unlike the serial killer, another embodiment of the ultimate transgressor who dispenses death – has elicited virtually no critical analysis. There is a short entry by Kim Newman in The BFI Companion to Crime (in Hardy, 1997, p. 166), Andrew Horton’s overview chapter on ‘Political Assassination Thrillers’ (Horton, 1994, pp. 310–18), a few parenthetical comments in studies of the American gangster and a brief and deliberately provocative newspaper article by Kevin Mather which argued that audiences enjoyed the hitman’s ‘deadly authority and glamour’ and the ‘thrill of power’, and listed his choice of ‘10 best hitmen’ (Mather, 2008). Many seminal hitman films, including Get Carter (1971), The Day of the Jackal (1973), Nikita (1990) and Pulp Fiction (1994), have elicited extensive critical commentary – as have the films focused on in the present chapter – but these accounts do not discuss the hitman itself as an evolving cultural type (for discussion of types, see Spicer, 2003, pp. 1–5). In what follows, my aim is to provide a cultural history of the hitman, discussing its origins, development and its possible significance as a complex and highly ambivalent form of masculinity. However, rather than attempt an inevitably superficial overview, I shall focus on what I would argue is the most thrilling, disturbing and complex type of this multifaceted figure – the ‘angel of death’, the hired killer who is not only a consummate professional, but also an artist of execution, possessing a distinctively masculine beauty. In order to do this, I shall examine four influential films over a 60-year period that have helped to create this figure: This Gun for Hire (1942), Le Samouraï (1967), Die xue shuang xiong (The Killer, 1989) and Collateral (2004), all of which star male leads noted for their good looks: Alan Ladd, Alain Delon, Chow Yun-Fat and Tom Cruise respectively. As will be immediately obvious, the angel of death is a transnational figure; however, each instance discussed bears the marks of both particular national cultures and specific historical moments. Therefore I shall explore significant differences as well as continuities in what I will argue has become an important figure of modern urban myth, a tragic anti-hero who embodies power and a glamorous self-sufficiency but also a destructive death drive. As there has been so little critical discussion of the hitman, it is necessary to define terms, map out the general terrain, discuss the origins of the figure and trace its emergence as a modern icon before embarking on detailed analysis of particular examples.

Definition, origins and popularization The hitman is someone paid to kill, hired, by an individual, an organization or a government, to perform the contracted ‘hit’. The hitman may be distinguished

The Angel of Death: Targeting the Hitman

157

from the vigilante who takes the law into his or her own hands, usually for personal reasons; the mercenary who is always part of a group; the revenger who has an explicitly personal motivation; the special/secret agent who, even if he is ‘licensed to kill’, is not employed solely for that reason; and the psychopath, who, as Martin Q. Blank in my third epigraph is keen to point out, kills for no reason. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the earliest use of the term ‘hitman’ was in John Philips’s novel Nightmare at Dawn (1971), but the term ‘hit’ was in circulation from at least the 1920s onwards and, of course, hitman is a modern term for the ancient craft of the assassin.1 The Western gunslinger on the payroll of cattle barons was a generic variant, but for reasons of space I have chosen to focus on the modern urban hitman and the criminal, rather than the political, assassin. The lineaments of the type began to emerge in Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation, Colonel Sebastian Moran, whom Sherlock Holmes describes in ‘The Adventure of the Empty House’, the opening story in The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1903–1904), as the ‘second most dangerous man in London’ after his paymaster Professor Moriarty (Doyle, 1981, p. 492). Moran was an Eton and Oxford educated scion of the upper class, son of Sir Augustus Moran the Minister to Persia and had a military career in India where he developed his ability as a marksman – ‘the best heavy-game shot our Eastern Empire has ever produced’ (p. 494) – before being hired by Moriarty as a long-range assassin. Moran is therefore not so much a product of modern society, but of an inexplicable corruption in the genes of the English aristocracy: ‘some strong influence which came into the line of his pedigree’ (p. 494), as Holmes diagnoses. The hitman as a specific product of modern urbanism derived from the development of organized crime in America in the 1920s. As David Ruth argues, by the mid-1920s, crime was no longer being portrayed as the random exploits of desperadoes, but as rational, calculating, professionalized and hierarchical. Modern gangs or mobs required the co-ordinated efforts of various specialists, experts in their field, one of which was the gunman – also referred to as the ‘strongarm’, ‘torpedo’ or ‘dropper’ – who was a highly paid specialist killer (Ruth, 1996, pp. 28–51). The notorious St Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929 was widely reported as being perpetrated by hired killers orchestrated from afar. Early newspaper reports from the late 1920s popularized and mythologized the figure, which migrated into sensational reportage – Herbert Astbury’s lurid accounts of criminal organizations in various American cities beginning with The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld (1928) – and then into radio and film (see Ruth, 1996, pp. 57–62). The hitman’s role gained greater prominence through the revelations concerning Murder Incorporated or Murder, Inc., in the 1930s and 1940s. Murder, Inc. was a journalists’ term for murders carried out on behalf of the National Crime Syndicate, which was run by infamous gangsters – Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Segal, Meyer Lansky, Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter and included notorious hitmen such as Abe ‘Kid Twist’ Reles and Emanuel ‘Mendy’ Weiss. Although the reality was a loose association of New York gangsters prepared to kill for a fee, Murder,

158

Crime Culture

Inc. was mythologized into an invisible criminal empire that specialized in wholesale killing (Woodiwiss, 2001, p. 253). Ernest Mandel argues that corporate crime introduced the idea of murder as a business and of the ‘killer [as] a professional, an expert, a technician in crime . . . With the concept of “contract”, murder proclaims loud and clear its common ground with general commercial practice, motivated by the pursuit of profit’ (Mandel, 1984, p. 104). However, although the hitman had become a semi-mythic figure at the heart of organized crime, contract killers were infrequently represented in fiction and films during the 1930s. This is because interest in the hitman was overshadowed by a fascination with the gangster, whose image provided, especially for Depression audiences, a compelling fantasy, albeit a criminal one, of the great American success story, the rags to riches rise of the individualist entrepreneur. As John McCarty notes, although ‘the shadowy figure of the contract killer had lurked about the edges of the gangster film almost from the beginning, the details of his occupation, including his motives and methods, had gone largely unexplored by filmmakers, even during the genre’s heyday of the 1930s’ (2004, p. 210).

English beginnings: Edgar Wallace In Britain, by contrast, where interest in the gangster was less pronounced, a more developed interest in the hitman was first shown by Edgar Wallace who had featured a quartet of assassins in his first novel, Four Just Men (1905). It is worth pausing on Wallace, now an undeservedly neglected writer but who was hugely popular during the interwar period in both Britain and America (Glover, 1994, pp. 144, 148; Watson, 1987, p. 75). Wallace’s short visit to Chicago in 1924 and his familiarity with the sensationalized reporting of American corporate crime became the raw material for the plays-turned-novels On the Spot: Violence and Murder in Chicago (1930/1931) and When the Gangs Came to London (1932). On the Spot – the title deriving from the phrase ‘putting on the spot’, the place where the victim is to be murdered – was preoccupied by the figure of the gangster, Tony Pirelli (played on stage by Charles Laughton), but had hitmen as important ancillary figures. These include Ricardo, Pirelli’s ‘favourite machinegun chopper’ (Wallace, 1985, p. 845) who embodied the new ethics of the contract killer who kills for money or survival: ‘when we bump off a man there’s a reason, and when we do it, it’s been worth doing’ (p. 852). When the Gangs Came to London focused more specifically on the contract killer, Albuquerque ‘Kerky’ Smith who works for one of the two rival Chicago Gangs which are invading London. Captain Jiggs Allerman of the Chicago Detective Bureau, sent to stiffen Scotland Yard during this crisis, explains to Chief Inspector Terry Weston: ‘That’s the kind you don’t know in England – killers without mercy, without pity, without anything human to ’em! . . . You don’t know the cold-bloodedness of ’em – I hope you never will’ (Wallace, 1974, pp. 19–20). In view of later developments, it is important to note that although Smith is a cool, fastidious and

The Angel of Death: Targeting the Hitman

159

immaculately dressed professional – ‘perfectly tailored in a large-pattern grey check’ – Wallace depicts him as ugly: ‘His hair was close-cropped; his long, emaciated face, seamed and lined from eye to jaw, was not pleasant to look at, and the two scars that ran diagonally down the left side of his face did not add to his attractiveness’ (pp. 17–18).

The anti-hero: Graham Greene’s A Gun for Sale Graham Greene admired Wallace and was influenced by his prescient interest in the new phenomenon of organized crime. However, A Gun for Sale (1936) discards the sensational, journalistic aspects of Wallace’s presentation in order to explore the hitman in depth as a pathological case. For Greene, the most disturbing aspect of the contract killer is his anonymity as well as his moral indifference to killing: ‘Murder didn’t mean much to Raven. It was just a new job . . . He carried an attaché case. He looked like any other youngish man going home after work; his dark overcoat had a clerical air’ (1963, p. 5). A Gun for Sale, Greene noted in his autobiography Ways of Escape, was written in a period when patriotism had become discredited for thinking people and when the wholesome Buchanesque hero of his youth had become untenable (Greene, 1981, p. 54). Hence the need for a new figure, an anti-hero that would condense into itself feelings of doom and disillusionment in a society seemingly poised on the brink of war, a disturbing product of that dark and seedy world of drab mundaneness infused with a deep sense of dread that critics have dubbed ‘Greeneland’. In parallel with American hard-boiled writers, Greene modernized the English thriller so that it could accommodate psychologically disturbed protagonists, at odds with society or pursued by nebulous threats, wracked by guilt and paranoias and with thwarted sexual desires. Raven is one such figure, an unattractive loner whose harelip that ‘had been badly sewn in infancy, so that now the upper lip was twisted and scarred’ (Greene, 1963, p. 5) is a repulsive disfigurement that partially explains his resentment, his fear of women and his cold, calculating ruthlessness. Although symptomatic of a dislocated society heading for war, Raven has also been forged by a destructively dysfunctional family: ‘He had been made by hatred; it had constructed him into this thin, smoky, murderous figure in the rain, hunted and ugly. His mother had borne him when his father was in gaol, and six years later, when his father was hanged for another crime, she had cut her own throat with a kitchen knife; afterwards there had been the home’ (p. 66). Raven is haunted by dreams and nightmares that stem from this trauma, and longs, as he confesses to Anne, the showgirl who befriends him, for the ministrations of a new type of doctor, a psychoanalyst, who would interpret his dreams and release him from their thrall. In a deeply ironic plot, Raven is contracted by a wealthy industrialist to kill a socialist minister thereby provoking a war in which the armament

160

Crime Culture

manufacturer can make a huge profit; but, in his determination to be revenged on his employers who pay him in marked notes, Raven becomes the unwitting agent of a form of justice in foiling the industrialist’s schemes. However, as he dies following a fatal hesitation occasioned by a reluctance to shoot Anne’s policeman boyfriend, what Greene emphasizes is not Raven’s redemption, but his existential anguish: ‘Death came to him in the form of unbearable pain. It was as if he had to deliver this pain as a woman delivers a child, and he sobbed and moaned in the effort. At last it came out of him, and he followed his only child into a vast desolation’ (p. 170). Death is the only respite for Raven’s profound alienation, the only ‘cure’ for this tormented figure.

The emergence of the ‘angelic killer’: Alan Ladd Interest in the possibilities of filming Greene’s novel was very rapid: Paramount acquired the rights to A Gun for Sale even before its publication in America as This Gun for Hire. But because Raven is such a deeply disturbing figure, the studio did not develop a script until 1941, after Warner Bros. had released The Maltese Falcon and thus when the beginnings of film noir – a form that James Naremore astutely characterises as the fusion of ‘blood melodrama’ with the existential complexities of European modernism (pp. 64-81) – began to enable, more profoundly than the gangster films, an exploration of the dark underside of American society. Screenwriters W. R. Burnett and Albert Maltz

Figure 9.1 The ‘angelic killer’: Alan Ladd in This Gun for Hire (1942)

The Angel of Death: Targeting the Hitman

161

retained the basic structure of Greene’s novel, though unsurprisingly the action is switched from Europe to the American West Coast and the villains, following Pearl Harbour, turned into profiteers selling chemical formulae to the Japanese. However, the key difference was to make Raven an attractive figure. His harelip has gone, replaced by a deformed wrist, and he is played by the handsome 27-year-old Alan Ladd in his first major role (Figure 9.1). Ladd’s prominence in the story was enhanced after director Frank Tuttle viewed the first day’s rushes and realized the quality and potential of Ladd’s performance (Falk, 1984, p. 28). Ladd’s minimalist performance, what Foster Hirsch aptly describes as his stiff movements, mask-like face and parched, expressionless voice (Hirsch 1981, p. 147), is superbly effective as a paranoid killer for whom every gesture is a potential betrayal or sign of weakness, but they also lend Raven a grace and beauty absent in Greene’s delineation. This Gun for Hire was an important film in the development of the characteristic noir aesthetics, and cinematographer John Seitz uses mirrors, odd angles, low-key lighting and fog bound exteriors to help create a sense of schizophrenia and entrapment that externalize Raven’s psychological disturbance; his face is often shot half in shadow, half in light, or with shafts of light falling across his body.2 This rich chiaroscuro enhances the sculpted beauty of Ladd’s face, particularly in the central scene in the deserted warehouse. Surrounded by the police dragnet, just as in the novel, he confesses to the showgirl (renamed Ellen and played by Veronica Lake) of his longing for a ‘psych-something’ who will end the terror of his dreams; it is a key moment that helps evoke sympathy for his character. This aestheticization of Raven is part of a general softening of his character in Burnett and Maltz’s adaptation. His pathology is glossed more conventionally as the result of killing his evil stepmother who beat him regularly and smashed his wrist with a red-hot iron. The ending is also sentimentalized with Raven asking Ellen for reassurance that he did well in killing Brewster the corrupt industrialist and thus aiding the war effort, and dying with a contrite little-boy smile that is a world way from Greene’s terrifying ‘vast desolation’. Even so, Ellen’s overemphatic clinch with her boyfriend Lieutenant Crane (Robert Preston) suggests that she is genuinely distressed by Raven’s death, compounding the frisson that they established as an ‘outlaw couple’ and undermining Hollywood’s investment in the lawful couple bound for marriage and domestic bliss. The film’s subsequent publicity also emphasized the beauty of Ladd in the repose of death, with Lake gazing over his figure as if in mourning. In their ground-breaking critical conspectus Panorama du film noir américain (1941–1953) published in 1955, Raymonde Borde and Etienne Chaumeton recognized the singularity of Raven and understood his importance: In his role as the solitary hit man, Alan Ladd is a truly remarkable creation. His slight frame and his overly docile baby face, with its limpid eyes, its gentle unobtrusive features, appear to have come from some other planet, after all

162

Crime Culture

the huge and brutal killers who peopled prewar gangster films. Only his expressionless features in situations of great tension reveal a fearsome, inhuman frigidity in this fallen angel. Alan Ladd, ‘angelic killer’, has become part of noir mythology . . . a new kind of murderer. (pp. 37–8) However, the real significance and potential of the ‘angelic killer’ was not recognized in Hollywood at this point. Alan Ladd was used subsequently in much more conventional tough guy roles and the cycle of hitman films that developed in the 1950s, beginning with The Enforcer (1951), featured ugly and brutal killers, including Eli Wallach’s Dancer in The Lineup (1958) or Peter Falk’s incarnation of Abe Reles in Murder, Inc. (1960).3 Indeed, it was a French director, Jean-Pierre Melville, who sensed the mythopoeic possibilities of the ‘angel of death’ and, in Le Samouraï (1967), shed much of the melodramatic baggage of Hollywood cinema in favour of a pared-down and uncompromising European modernism.

The tragic artist: Le Samouraï Melville, well known for his Americanophilia, was careful to dissociate his films from mere pastiche: ‘I make gangster films, inspired by gangster novels, but I don’t make American films, even though I like the American films noirs better than anything (Nogueira and Truchaud, 1968, p. 119). Le Samouraï – which forms a loose trilogy with Le Cercle Rouge (The Red Circle, 1970) and Un flic (Dirty Money, 1972), all starring Alain Delon – was Melville’s attempt to extend and develop the figure of the ‘angelic killer’ from This Gun for Hire. In Le Samouraï Delon plays Jef Costello, a contract killer who, as in the earlier film, is doublecrossed by his paymasters who try to eliminate him as a bad risk after he is arrested and then released by the police. In homage to Ladd and the American gangster, Delon dresses in trench coat and homburg, becoming, as Stella Bruzzi notes, an epigrammatic distillation of the cinema gangster myth whose essence is a series of ‘citations and gestures’ (1997, p. 76), most famously expressed in his adjustment of the precise curve of his hat brim in the mirror before going out to complete a hit. However, these exquisitely executed movements are more than mere citation: they exemplify the arrogant detachment of the dandy whose every gesture is exact, expressive of the man who has turned his whole existence into a work of art. Jef inhabits a world, as Ginette Vincendeau argues, at once quintessentially French – the Citroën DS that Jef steals to make his hits or the extended chase on the Parisian underground – and mythic, a generic world already constructed iconographically by American crime-thrillers, as in the extended presentation of the criminal line-up after Jef is arrested that is a direct allusion to the scene in John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1951) (Vincendeau, 2003, p. 179). Jef was a role specifically written for Delon4 whose persona in French cinema habitually signified a lone wolf and an homme fatal; he frequently played

The Angel of Death: Targeting the Hitman

163

characters who are victims of their own misfortunes or mistakes (Hayes, 2004, pp. 46–7, 52–3). Delon had a dangerous, cruel, predatory beauty that was profoundly ambivalent, combining malevolent cynicism and sadistic cruelty with a wounded, melancholic masculinity. His liquid blue eyes, seemingly on the verge of tears, attested to a softness that, like his avatar Jean Gabin, appropriated a feminine vulnerability into a virile persona (Vincendeau, 2000, pp. 176, 180–1). Like Ladd, Delon’s acting style was minimalist, complemented by Henri Decaë’s austere cinematography with its muted blue-greys – where the colours of even ordinary objects such as the label on the bottle of Vichy water, or a Gauloise cigarette packet are grey-black copies of the brightly coloured originals – that provides the visual equivalent to Delon’s beauty, cold and still. In Melville’s conception, Jef is neither the product of social dislocation – ‘I was careful not to make him a parachutist washed up after the war in Indo-China or Algeria, who had been taught to kill for his country!’ (Nogueira, 1971, pp. 126–7) – nor of a dysfunctional family, but a schizophrenic: ‘a hired killer . . . is by definition a schizophrenic . . . neither crook nor gangster . . . He is an “innocent”, in the sense that a schizophrenic doesn’t know he’s a criminal, although he is a criminal in his logic and his way of thinking’ (p. 126; original emphasis). Melville tries to capture this schizophrenic logic by what Colin MacArthur has called a ‘cinema of process’ in which events and procedures unfold in a way that is significantly closer to ‘real’ time than Hollywood cinema (MacArthur, 2000, p. 191). Hence the obsessively detailed texture of the film, including the scenes where Jef steals his getaway car, laboriously trying one key after another in the ignition. Melville also frequently halts a conventional tracking shot but continues with a zoom before starting to track again in order to create a disturbingly ‘elastic rather than classical sense of dilation’ that is expressive of Jef’s schizophrenia (Nogueira, 1971, p. 130). However, if Jef is a portrait of a schizophrenic, he is also a samurai, the modern version of a noble and honourable warrior caste. Melville and Delon had a shared passion for samurai iconography and values (Nogueira, 1971, p. 129; Vincendeau, 2000, pp. 175–6). Jef embodies the Japanese feudal code, grounded in historical realities but elevated through fiction to the level of myth, which gives value and status to this lonely, self-possessed figure, as delineated in the opening quotation from Melville’s invented text, Bushido (The Book of the Samurai): ‘There is no more profound solitude than the samurai’s, except that of the tiger in the jungle . . . perhaps.’ Jef is a modern ronin, a ‘wave man’, an outcast who wanders from place to place but, like all samurai, is utterly dedicated to the exactitudes of a code which demands that a duty – even a contracted hit – be performed whatever one’s personal feelings. It is a code that approves of suicide and the nobility of failure, recognizing that the samurai is engaged in a doomed struggle that will lead inevitably to his death but who, in the process, becomes a tragic, sacrificial hero (Desser, 1983, pp. 14–15, 21–5, 33–6). But, as J. L. Anderson remarks, the Japanese conception of tragedy is not an Aristotelian catharsis but an exploration of the beauty of melancholia (1967, p. 7).

164

Crime Culture

Figure 9.2 Dying as an art form: Alain Delon in Le Samouraï

This melancholic beauty is realized through the inexorable logic of Jef’s eventual death, presaged in the opening scene where, in a long still take of his darkened room, he eventually rises from his bed like a corpse awakening, embodying, as Melville remarked, death in motion (Nogueira, 1971, p. 130). Valérie (Caty Rosier), the black pianist who fascinates Jef, is an allegorical figure of death itself – ‘a black Death in white, hold[ing] the charm that captivates’ (p. 134), and therefore functions as a metaphor for Jef ‘fall[ing] in love with his own death’. Jef knows that his second contract to eliminate her is a set-up, but it is one in which he actively colludes because he can now choose the place and time of his death. In a slow-paced ritualistic scene, Jef is shot by police marksmen as he points his gun at Valérie in the nightclub, crossing his elegantly white-gloved hands over his chest as he collapses (Figure 9.2). When the police inspector reveals that there were no bullets in his gun, we recognize that it was a deliberate suicide. By carrying out the hit to the point of the actual killing, Jef has proved that he could, if he so wished, have completed his contract, thus preserving his honour and the samurai code. Thus, in Le Samouraï, the hitman becomes what he could not be in American cinema with its psychological realism and relentless demands for causality, the abstract embodiment of an inexplicable but profoundly masculine solipsistic existentialism that to Melville was the logical development of Alan Ladd’s ‘angelic killer’. His deliberately chosen and beautiful demise is of a piece with a life dedicated to the artistry of death.

The romantic loser: Die xue shuang xiong/The Killer (1989) Melville’s conception of the hitman as an honourable but tragic figure influenced several Hollywood directors (Vincendeau, 2003, p. 185), but Le Samouraï’s

The Angel of Death: Targeting the Hitman

165

combination of Western and Eastern traditions meant that its impact was felt nowhere more powerfully than in the films of John Woo, another director who combined a reverence for American cinema with a strong sense of national identity in his development of what has been called Hong Kong’s ‘heroic bloodshed’ cinema, contemporary action thrillers that could compete with American cinema on its own turf (see Logan, 1996). Woo has acknowledged that: ‘Melville is God for me . . . Le Samouraï is one of the foreign films which had most influence on Hong Kong cinema, especially that of the younger generation’ (Hall, 2009, p. 50). Woo borrowed the iconographic look of Melville’s hitman in his breakthrough film, A Better Tomorrow (1986), but although The Killer (1989) uses Melville’s basic storyline – in both films the professional killer allows himself to be identified and therefore must be eliminated resulting in his double pursuit by both police and criminal gang – the influence of Le Samouraï goes much deeper. Woo read Melville’s film as more about ‘the way a gangster thinks and feels [than] about how he behaves’, seeing Jef as ‘a criminal who is facing death and coming to terms with a life devoted to violence’, who ‘achieves a kind of redemption at the end by accepting his fate gracefully. To me, this is the most romantic attitude imaginable’ (Hall, 1999, p. 55). Thus the hitman Ah Jong (Chow Yun-Fat) in The Killer is Woo’s attempt to create a similarly mythopoeic figure, another beautiful, poised artist of death who incarnates a complex set of attitudes and values that are contemporary but with deep cultural roots. It is a figure that exemplifies the cultural and ideological hybridity of Hong Kong itself as a contradictory entity, both Chinese and capitalist.5 Although Ah Jong is a thoroughly contemporary figure who wears a succession of Armani suits that bespeak a cosmopolitan consumerism (Baron, 2004, pp. 298–9), Woo regarded him as a contemporary incarnation of the ancient Chinese knight errant, which, like the samurai, although wandering and lawless, possessed a tradition of chivalry, honour and loyalty (Liu, 1967, pp. 1–2, 4–7 and passim). Although heroic, the knight errant, again like the samurai, is fated to follow a path that is predetermined and unchangeable in which he has to recognize the fragility of life and the need to prepare for death (Bliss, 2002, p. 9). Woo commented that his characters ‘are often solitary, tragic figures, who have a rendezvous with death’ (Hall, 2009, p. 50). Thus, although there is ample fast-paced action, an abundance of sadistic cruelty and violence in The Killer, its most characteristic timbre is melancholic, infused by the nostalgic longing for a vanished world, expressing Woo’s sense that ‘people have lost traditional values’ and paradoxically that the professional killer was the repository of those vanished values that Woo thought it was his ‘duty to bring . . . back’ (Bliss, 2002, p. 113). Ah Jong, first glimpsed in a church that symbolizes Woo’s embrace of Western Catholicism, is engaged on a path of spiritual redemption, anxious to break with his Triad connections, a task made all the more urgent when, in the film’s first hit, he accidentally blinds a beautiful night-club singer Jennie (Sally Yeh). He takes on one final hit in order to raise sufficient funds for the operation to restore her sight.

166

Crime Culture

If Melville’s Jef provided the palimpsest for Woo’s hitman, Woo’s syncretic post-modern visual style – that eclectically combines genres and techniques derived from a broad variety of sources and directors – is radically different. Building on the tradition of wuxia pain (Chinese swordplay) and kung-fu films, Woo choreographs an operatic gunplay in Ah Jong’s triumphs against seemingly impossible odds. As Woo remarked: ‘When I have my hero diving in the air, or shooting with two guns, it’s pretty much like ballet’ (Bliss, 2002, pp. 111–12). Woo’s penchant for a mobile, moving camera, circling and zooming, and his frequent slow-motion sequences inspired by Scorsese and Peckinpah, creates a world of heightened theatricality in which the hyperbolic violence is dominated by the spectacle of Chow Yun-Fat’s sumptuously clothed body, from the full-length black evening coat and a long, billowing white scarf of the first scene to the white Armani suit in which he fights the final battle. The action sequences, though, have a function beyond that of visceral spectacle, they are an expression of the characters’ inner compulsions and frustrations and are used as one of the forms of male bonding that characterize Woo’s films. Although Woo draws attention to the inner solitariness of his protagonists, The Killer, unlike This Gun for Hire or Le Samouraï, is not so much about loneliness as about male friendship – the literal translation of the film’s Chinese title is ‘Two Heroes Battling with Gangsters’. Ah Jong has a long-standing bond with fellow hitman Fung Sei (Chu Kong) who, under pressure from his Triad bosses, betrays their friendship but later redeems himself and reaffirms their bond even at the cost of torture, brutal beatings and eventual death. Ah Jong is also paired against Inspector Li (Danny Lee), the rule-bending policeman who tries to capture him. In the course of his pursuit, Li becomes more and more obsessed with Ah Jong, desperate to understand him. Both are filmed in identical poses in their respective apartments, listening intently to the soulful ballads sung by Jennie. During the course of the film, Li and Ah Jong become firm friends, revealing their mutual admiration for each other’s daring, skill and professionalism. They even invent pet names for each other, first to deceive Jennie and then to express their friendship. In the protracted shoot-outs where the pair battle the Triad gang led by the venal gangster Wong-Hoi (Shing Fui-On), Ah Jong and Li are frequently shown firing their weapons in harmony, moving in synchronized time and motion. The shoot-outs are complemented by gentler scenes, as in the aftermath of the first battle where Li treats Ah Jong for a gunshot injury – in Le Samouraï Jef tends his own wound – a tender moment of male love in which they are united as men of honour in a fallen world (Figure 9.3). It parallels an earlier scene in which Ah Jong and Fung Sei, on a roadside overlooking the beauty of Hong Kong harbour, muse on the impermanence of life and the overriding importance of loyalty and friendship; themes that are also presented in the numerous flashbacks that punctuate the action. Woo represents a new kind of male action hero, offering a protagonist who is both violent and sensitive, combining male and female qualities, and struggling as much with his own inner compulsions as his adversaries (Hanke, 1999, pp. 39–47). As Jillian Sandell notes, in Hong

The Angel of Death: Targeting the Hitman

167

Figure 9.3 Homosocial bonding: Danny Lee tends to Chow Yun-Fat in The Killer (1989)

Kong cinema this male bonding can suggest an erotic charge ‘without the associated anxiety such relationships often trigger within the Hollywood action genre’, with Woo’s heroes nostalgic for a time when male intimacy was a celebrated and valorized aspect of masculinity (Sandell, 1996, p. 30). However, Woo’s presentation of the redemptive qualities of male bonding and his nostalgic conception of an heroic warrior masculinity is conditioned by his sense, derived from Melville and from his Chinese sources, of the inexorability of fate. In the final gunfight, in the church where the film started, Ah Jong is not only killed but blinded so that, even in death, he cannot pass on his eyes to Jennie and right his wrong. Woo overrode Yun-Fat’s suggestion that they should die in each other’s arms in favour of the now blind pair crawling past each other without contact because: ‘It will make it more tragic, and more like they have been played by fate’ (Elder, 2005, p. 80). However, as Woo also acknowledged, the final shot is of Ah Jong playing the harmonica, which symbolized ‘an unforgettable friendship’ (Elder, 2005, p. 80). Thus despite Woo’s ‘angelic killer’ failing, his life is redeemed by his capacity to inspire the loyalty and friendship of his male associates.

The deracinated global professional: Collateral (2004) Although Woo’s delineation of the angelic killer was highly influential (see Hall, 2009, pp. 57–71), Hollywood’s subsequent development of the figure shed the

168

Crime Culture

‘excessive’ elements of male bonding in favour of a focus on the lone assassin. Thus although Michael Mann’s Collateral (2004) has similar highly orchestrated set piece shoot-outs, its killer, although still the beautiful angel of death (played by Tom Cruise), is in many ways a return to This Gun for Hire and the anonymity of the hitman. The crucial difference was that Mann’s hitman exists in a thoroughly contemporary context of deracinated global capitalism and the action takes place in the diffuse modern metropolis of Los Angeles. Mann adapted Stuart Beattie’s The Last Domino that depicted the clash between a ruthless hitman, Vincent (Cruise), and Max (Jamie Foxx), an indecisive African American cabbie who inadvertently becomes the assassin’s courier as Vincent sets about killing five key potential witnesses in one night before the Grand Jury trial the following morning.6 Although he admired the ‘highly poetic symmetry and intensity’ (Feeney and Duncan, 2006, p. 169) of Beattie’s story and left its structure intact, Mann changed the location from New York to Los Angeles in order to explore the dispersed multiculturalism of this city with no centre, a ‘series of tenuously interconnected zones that are not contiguous’ (Olsen, 2004a, p. 15). As Michael J. Anderson notes, the denouement takes place in the postmodern urban landscape of the ‘New Downtown’ sector of Los Angeles with its orgy of post-1960s steel and glass. This depopulated core, anonymous and dehumanized but visually beautiful (Anderson, 2004), is thus expressive of the dissociated emptiness that characterizes Vincent himself. It is a night-time Los Angeles, shot almost entirely on high-definition video (HDV). Mann chose HDV because of its far greater sensitivity to nocturnal light than conventional celluloid and much greater depth of field, and also because of its ‘painterly’ qualities (Olsen, 2004b, p. 16), which enabled Mann to change the contrast and adjust the colour in order to make the nocturnal city ‘three-dimensional’, at once realistic but also dreamlike, hypnotically beautiful but cold and alienating. In many ways Vincent seems to be the ideal person to navigate this new environment: the free-wheeling, stateless professional, flying into Los Angeles airport like the angel of death from some unspecified location in the pay of an offshore drugs cartel and moving relentlessly from one target to the next, needing no connection or place of belonging. Vincent, as Steven Rybin argues, is the ultimate critique of the American dream of unfettered individual enterprise whose life, defined by his work, has come to have no meaning, who adheres to the possibility of completely controlling one’s destiny but also affects to believe in a vast cosmic indifference that renders actions pointless (Rybin, 2007, p. 174). Vincent is one of Mann’s long line of self-destructive anti-heroes – as in The Thief (1981), Heat (1995) and Miami Vice (2006) – whose consummate but obsessive professionalism becomes emotionally and psychologically damaging. Cruise’s performance is a masterpiece of contained, unspectacular athleticism where every action is so precisely co-ordinated as to appear automatic, operating as if by instinct, able to shift from friendliness to extreme aggression at the snap of a finger, and to fire off five shots in less than three seconds (City of Night, 2004).

The Angel of Death: Targeting the Hitman

169

Figure 9.4 The contemporary assassin: Tom Cruise in Collateral (2004)

Although outwardly immaculate in a neat grey suit, carefully trimmed beard and manicured grey hair, Vincent is, in Mann’s conception, ‘rough trade in a smart suit’ (City of Night), beneath whose cool, elegant surface of the successful executive seethes a deep-seated instability and vulnerability (Figure 9.4). The cracks start to appear through his encounter with Max, whom Vincent initially patronizes and derides because of Max’s inability to make something of his life, his long-cherished but unrealized dreams of running a fleet of limousines. In the course of their enforced partnership – their relationship that of an inverted buddy movie – Vincent begins to reveal himself as damaged goods. Mann spent three months building up Vincent’s character – the backstory of his brutal upbringing in Gary, Indiana, with no recollection of his mother and experiencing the violence of an abusive, alcoholic father, living in a series of foster homes before spending over a decade in Special Forces where he learned the arts of killing. This detailed characterization meant that the story could come through in his exchanges with Max rather than through exposition or flashbacks that would interrupt the concentrated intensity of the action (City of Night). These instabilities are revealed in key moments – the regret at killing the jazz club owner who embodies the creativity that Vincent lacks; his desperation to make contact with Max’s hospitalized mother whom he insists they visit in order to preserve Max’s nightly routine. Max feeds off Vincent’s weaknesses, growing in strength and determination so that he can finally defeat him after the two exchange gunfire in a chance power-cut on the subway. As Max walks away with the girl of his dreams, Assistant US Attorney Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith) who

170

Crime Culture

was to be the fifth victim, the dead Vincent is left on the subway car, doomed to ride unnoticed for six hours just like the man in the story he told Max at the film’s opening, and which for Vincent summed up Los Angeles’s ‘disconnected sprawl’ where nobody knows or cares about each other. However, although Max’s triumph is that of the ordinary Everyman able to defeat the hitman who is implicitly acknowledged as the destructive product of white technocracy, Vincent’s death, collapsing gracefully forward in his seat in recognition that his hour has come, has an austerely tragic dimension that lingers in the imagination.

Conclusion As I emphasized in the introduction, this discussion of the hitman has only considered one type, in my view the central and most powerful one, of a complex and constantly mutating figure that is capable of migrating across national cultures as well as historical periods. A more comprehensive account than I could offer here would need, in particular, to analyze the comedic hitman and also the female assassin. That said, I should like to review the present argument and to offer some tentative conclusions to what is an exploratory enquiry. The contemporary hitman is the product of modern urbanism and the development of organized crime in America during the 1920s that saw murder becoming a commercial business performed by a new professional elite. The cultural significance of this figure was eclipsed in the 1930s by the dynamic image of the gangster, but in Britain Edgar Wallace, then, much more significantly, Graham Greene, sensed the immense potential of the hitman as an image of dislocated modernity, a tormented anti-hero who embodied the social, sexual and familial dysfunctions of a society about to come apart under the threat of war. Hollywood cinema was unable to accommodate such a disturbing figure until the 1940s and the development of film noir, but in the process of adapting This Gun for Hire a change occurred with the image of Alan Ladd whose grace and beauty elicited sympathy as well as fear, transmuting the hitman into the angel of death, a mythopoeic figure whose demise carried with it the sense of tragic waste. This development was truncated in America, but picked up in France by the ‘American in Paris’, Jean-Pierre Melville in Le Samouraï, which partially abstracted the figure into a generic, mythic space where the aesthetic aspects dominated. Melville’s melancholy hitman was a modern samurai, a man of honour whose ultimate hit is to choose the hour of his own death, dying gracefully, his integrity uncompromised. The image of the hitman as a man of honour had to migrate again to another national culture in order to be developed further. John Woo’s The Killer positioned the lonely samurai within a hybrid cultural mix that celebrated operatic gunplay but also male bonding which affirmed the sovereign values of loyalty and friendship in a world where they appeared to be in retreat. No such nostalgia for a past world pervades Michael Mann’s Collateral whose hitman is a

The Angel of Death: Targeting the Hitman

171

product of a thoroughly contemporary stateless global marketplace run by anonymous offshore corporations. Mann’s hitman has the beauty and grace of the artist of death but one who has retreated into a solipsistic nihilism and can be defeated by the African American Everyman. Although mutating historically and culturally, the angel of death has emerged as a potent figure of modern myth, a symbol of the perverse logic of capitalist enterprise, of a consummate but destructive professionalism dedicated to the art of killing. He is glamorous and powerful, but, more disturbingly, a figure of awe and wonder, beautiful and yet remote, unable to be contained within conventional social codes and bonds. In essence, I suggest, the figure is a highly masculine fantasy of total self-sufficiency, an inviolable completeness and the desire for absolute control over one’s life and environment without any distracting ties, moral, emotional or social. He is thus a compelling figure of desire but also fear, because his loneliness is profound and his life dominated by the certainty of violent death. It is this complex ambivalence that makes the hitman such a potent figure which continues to fascinate audiences across the globe.

Notes 1 2

3

4

5 6

See Belfield, 2008, pp. 59–70 and note 9, pp. 289–90; see also Lewis, 2003. As Sheri Biesen argues, the driving force behind the film’s innovative visual style was art director Hans Dreier who had been trained at UFA and was familiar with German Expressionism (Biesen, 2005, pp. 50–3). For an overview see Clarens, 1997, pp. 234–58; see also Bernstein, 2002, pp. 61–83. Although Le Samouraï is often stated as being based on Joan McLeod’s novel, The Ronin, as Vincendeau notes (2003, p. 176), this source cannot be located. She is therefore of the opinion that it should be recognized as an original screenplay by Melville. For further discussion of this point see Williams, 1997. For an extended discussion of Beattie’s story see Goldsmith, 2004.

This page intentionally left blank

Part V

Reading the Criminal Other

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 10

Risk Management: Frank Abagnale, Jr, and the Shadowing of Pleasure Christopher P. Wilson

In the mid-1970s, following a brief three-year hitch in the intelligence division of the US Army, I lived abroad, in West Germany. After a few futile months trying out employment in civilian white-collar venues – sales, human resources, even a miserable two weeks in a failing public relations firm – I returned to work for the military, this time as a consultant-liaison within the US Military Police (USMP), on the outskirts of Berlin. The charge of this office was to oversee jurisdictional disputes arising from the petty scrapes that inevitably occurred when American soldiers spent their days (and nights) in a foreign, cosmopolitan city: prostitution busts, domestic calls, nightclub fights – largely public nuisance crimes. Despite the petty scale and grim routine of these days, however, I liked the work: peacemaking amid the ruins of war. Actually, none of the above is true. I have never served in the military, lived in Europe, nor worked as a peace officer of any kind. I spent the 1970s in college and graduate school, where many of my days (and nights) were spent in library cafeterias, studying American literature and culture against the background hum of vending machines and artificial lighting. The gambit above occurred to me when I began reading the book co-authored – I guess you can say co-authored (Seiler, 2002; Schaefer, 2001)1 – by Frank W. Abagnale, Jr, titled Catch Me if You Can (1980), recently reissued in paperback to accompany the commercially successful Stephen Spielberg film of 2002. As the many fans of that film know, Catch Me if You Can tells the story of how, in the early 1960s, the young Frank Abagnale – while still only a teenager – had become a criminal imposter, a criminal who created fraudulent identities. Before his mid-twenties, Abagnale had posed as a Pan Am pilot, a Louisiana lawyer, a Florida doctor, a Utah sociology professor and more, all the while carrying out counterfeiting schemes and other white-collar frauds. After being caught by French authorities, he served time in prison in Europe and the United States before turning his life around. As Spielberg’s film adaptation would have it, Abagnale (Leonardo DiCaprio) was reformed under the caring eye of a dogged, shoe-leather FBI investigator named Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks), a composite figure originally dubbed

176

Crime Culture

‘O’Riley’ in the book. Today, back in the real world, Frank Abagnale has become a security consultant, a man who now advises Staples, Disney, Bank of America, Discover Financial Services – indeed, by his own account, over half of today’s Fortune 500 corporations, as well as the FBI itself (Clark, 2003; Sampey 2006). This is a man, then, who may well be the best-known American personal and corporate security expert of our day. It is a remarkable story, to say the least. In this chapter, I want to track some of this story’s literary antecedents – to examine the cultural and political work Catch Me if You Can performs – as well as open up this text’s relationship to Abagnale’s subsequent career as a security analyst. But by my provocation above – as it were, my own excursion into the risky pleasures of identity fraud – I also mean to foreground, from the get-go, how much any analysis of Abagnale’s story-telling is entangled with his criminal expertise. How do we, in other words, come to terms with the autobiography of an identity thief? – much less accord him authority about criminality or private security? What are the circuits of knowledge and power crafted when a man confesses his criminal past in order to construct expertise in combating such crimes? And thus, more broadly, in a world where we increasingly depend on experts like Frank Abagnale, how do we know what we think we know, about identity theft, its frequency and its methods? How does a narrative like Catch Me if You Can orchestrate our knowledge and our fear of criminality? Finally, and perhaps less obviously, how does it marshal the perverse pleasures of reading about criminal transgressions? These and other questions are part of a larger project I’m currently completing, one that I’m calling ‘Learning to Live with Crime’. This title, as many readers will know, derives from a catchphrase frequently invoked by neo-conservative US law enforcement officials, and their theorists in political and social science, since the mid-1980s. The phrase invokes the argument that crime has become so pervasive that citizens must learn to accommodate themselves to its inevitable presence (Scheingold, 1999, p. 886; Cronin et al., 1981, p. 164; Garland, 1996, p. 2). That is, in conjunction with the rejection of root-cause approaches to crime, the moral backlash against liberal permissiveness, the ratcheting up of criminal penalties, and the turn to incarceration as the punishment of choice – trends widely documented in social science and criminology in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada – neo-conservatives have also crafted a less remarked upon appeal to the US public. This appeal emphasizes, most prominently, citizen vigilance, or what David Garland (1996) has called ‘responsibilization’ – and, along with that emphasis, a more pragmatic, tactical, one might say micropolitical (Foucault, 2003, pp. 28, 30) approach to crime: the approach often described as ‘risk management’. By this last phrase, analysts refer to both private and public law enforcement strategies that, primarily, manage threats to citizens by ‘taming chance’: by designing measures that project past criminal patterns into proactive or preventive action by the police, with the aim of reducing the risk of crime rather than simply reacting to its occurrence after the fact (see Simon, 1997; Hudson, 2003;

Frank Abagnale, Jr, and the Shadowing of Pleasure

177

Ericson and Haggerty, 1997, esp. pp. 28–9). In an era in which, as Jonathan Simon has suggested, there has been a turning away from the ‘great collectivizing risk-distribution systems’ of the welfare state, recent crime experts have favoured, instead, smaller-scale ‘steering mechanisms’ that reduce crime threats while ‘minimizing the appearance of coercive social control’ (1997, pp. 177–9). Rather than relying only on centralized police authority, these mechanisms commonly share information about criminal patterns or offender profiles across public–private partnerships. Using a hidden video surveillance to locate and arrest criminals is, fundamentally, traditional crime-busting; having store owners themselves display a camera in the open, where it discourages criminals and makes citizens more alert, is risk management. Relying on citizens to report crimes to their police department is a state-centred, centralized approach; polling their experiences of crime through so-called victimization surveys, as neo-conservatives have repeatedly argued, produces data on habits that citizens themselves can be urged to avoid (Stanko, 2001), as well as on supposedly ‘high risk’ repeat offenders (James Q. Wilson, 1983, pp. 128–9). In its darker manifestations, risk management can result not only in stigmatizing certain neighbourhoods – as, for instance, in categorizing certain areas as ‘high crime’ and therefore subjecting them to more aggressive policing – but also in legitimizing the incorporation of intelligence from criminals themselves through pleabargaining, criminal informing or witness protection (Curriden, 1991). What is fascinating about Frank Abagnale’s trajectory, in fact, is how it coalesces so many of these strategies. As a personal and state security expert, Abagnale demonstrates how each of us can learn to incorporate criminal learning and expertise in-house, into our own management of crime’s threats to our persons. Moreover – to turn my own opening around – the significance of Frank Abagnale’s profile is that it offers a popular story: a narrative arc of personal reform and maturation. By using the form of confessional memoir, Abagnale folds his narrative into a historical recuperation of a more permissive past. Catch Me if You Can does so, I will argue, by making that story pleasurable. I cannot, of course, capture all of the dimensions of Abagnale’s case here. His text obviously has many antecedents in the early-modern picaresque, in the showmanship of P. T. Barnum (Harris, 1973), or in the tactics of contemporary salesmanship and ‘impression management’ (Susman, 1984). Here, I simply want to suggest how a close examination of his work – again, his literal work as a security consultant, and his performance in the cultural fantasy of Catch Me if You Can – might help us rethink the terms under which the neo-conservative turn has been promulgated. In particular, I want to strike a counterpoint to the commonplace assumption in political histories, and much media analysis, that this turn was generated solely by an appeal to public fear and moral outrage. While there is little denying the centrality of these two planks of neo-conservative crime talk, they each turn out to have a curious inapplicability to the figure of the white-collar con man. Indeed, when cultural studies or social science analysis is directed at the cultural representations of this particular criminal,

178

Crime Culture

the more frequent complaint is that his criminality is not fearful enough: unlike the common street criminal, he is depicted as an unthreatening or even slightly appealing rogue (Griffin, 2002). Or, to put it another way, analysts often complain that such portraits minimize the seriousness of white-collar crime. As I hope to show, this reading – or what I would call a half-reading – stems from the ways in which we tend to interpret a story like Abagnale’s primarily through received genres: specifically, as a con man narrative with a long and perhaps too familiar history. In using that lens, we also perpetuate, I would also suggest, a split between our understanding of private and public approaches to crime management. We do so even though a story like Abagnale’s seems to enact a more reciprocal process: the adoption, as it were, of the former realm into the latter. In this chapter, I want to demonstrate the affinities of Catch Me if You Can not only with those traditional con man stories, but with what I will call ‘shadow’ narratives, the stories of private undercover operatives who emerged in the industrial era, primarily to monitor white-collar criminals, labour activists and migratory tramps. Specifically, I will explore the affinity of Abagnale’s story with romances of the tramp-detective and former con man, Josiah Flynt, who himself went on the road as an imposter while still in his teens. Along the way, I will suggest Flynt and Abagnale’s affinity with Michel Foucault’s idea of the delinquentturned-informant, the mobile observatory and recorder of supposedly habitual criminality. Then, I will turn to the actual security services that Abagnale offers, and examine how they represent, again, a micropolitical set of tactics that work within the interstices of state, corporate and consumer activity. I will suggest that Abagnale embodies not simply a nostalgic return to the days of personal responsibility, but a future in which the private sphere incorporates the state’s premium on fatalistically entertaining crime’s possible occurrence against an actuarial calculus of risk. Citizens were encouraged, in other words, to recognize that crime was inevitable, and to incorporate that awareness into their everyday lives. Meanwhile, under the banner of a populist identification with everyday citizens and potential victims of crime, neo-conservatism actually constructed ways to supplement state authority while seeming to diminish it. In turn, private security, especially in the hands of an expert like Frank Abagnale, means to show us the power and pleasure that can be secured by such co-operation.

Turning Criminality Inside-Out: Josiah Flynt Traditionally, a text like Catch Me if You Can would be read through its genre conventions – simply put, as a con man narrative, a version of the picaresque that centres on a deceptively amiable criminal who cultivates trust with a gullible victim. As social scientists, historians and literary critics tell us, this criminal masters a type of thievery that constructs a ‘confidence’ with a so-called mark, often by building up a shared fellowship that draws upon the victim’s own taste for chicanery. As Gary Lindberg puts it, the confidence man not only makes

Frank Abagnale, Jr, and the Shadowing of Pleasure

179

belief, he embodies the wish of his victim (1982, p. 7). As such, his game or grift leads to a voluntary surrender of goods, often without violence or even its threat (Maurer, 1999). Conning, however, is a malleable art. In the eighteenth century, for example, the con man was variously a rogue imposter, faux gentleman, picaro or escape artist. As social and geographical mobility increasingly marked the industrialcapitalist order, he came to manipulate the elusive boundaries between fraud, everyday white-collar business speculation, and contract relations (Lenz, 1985). In darker Victorian imaginings, therefore, the confidence man’s arts were associated with urban seduction and contamination of the young, the rural and the innocent (Haltunnen, 1982). As if the dark twin of sanctioned capitalist heroes, the con artist was a man for whom class origin was not fate – a man who could, like the struggling heroes of Victorian self-help literature, miraculously make something out of nothing. In so doing, the con artist often demonstrated how easily occupations like teaching, doctoring or lawyering could be mastered without any genuine professional apprenticeship. Catch Me if You Can’s partly comic story thus often seems akin to that of The Great Imposter (Crichton, 1959), the story of the famous con man Ferdinand Demara, the son of a movie house projectionist whose imposture of a Navy surgeon, prison warden, psychology professor, and even Trappist monk, which was made into a movie starring Tony Curtis in 1961. Indeed, invoking other Hollywood con artists who (like Professor Harold Hill of The Music Man [1962]) sell cures to River City, Abagnale himself became a movie projectionist in prison; compared himself to James Thurber’s dreamer, Walter Mitty (1980, p. 234); and, in a play on the title of Donald Trump’s best-seller, The Art of the Deal (1987), named one of his personal security handbooks The Art of the Steal (2001). In my view, however – especially when read from the vantage point of where Abagnale ends up – Catch Me if You Can shares a more covert kinship. It bears a debt to what I have called the shadow narratives of nineteenth-century private detectives – and further back than that, to tales of the famous ‘thief taker’ Jonathan Wild. As I have said, Abagnale’s most telling forerunner may be Josiah Flynt (Willard), the Chicago-born tramp expert who began, in his own teens, as a roving hobo and confidence man, and then reformed himself into a private operative, memoirist and muckraker. By way of books like Tramping with Tramps (1899), Notes of an Itinerant Policeman (1900) and My Life (1908), Flynt had become famous by inverting his own past as a Victorian lost boy. These texts chart how he retooled his youthful skills from tramping and con games into undercover surveillance for railroads and, eventually, for middle-class magazines. Operatives like Flynt patrolled the fringes of the industrial marketplace, circulating in realms left to them by local police, untouched by formal law, or problems deemed by largely-corporate clients to need private handling. Commonly called ‘shadow men’ (though women also worked in this role), they watched over the tramps who latched onto railroads; the beggars or con men who moved from city to city to find new marks; the embezzlers who simply left

180

Crime Culture

town only to start over with new identities. As these specializations suggest, private detective work had arisen at a historical moment when both criminality and private capital became too geographically dispersed to rely on local, public policing alone (Scull and Spitzer, 1977). In nineteenth-century America, as Flynt’s own titles suggest, ‘police’ was in fact a term applied both to public and private detective work. Industry leader Allan Pinkerton was often credited with modelling techniques soon adopted by famous public police detectives like New York City’s Thomas F. Byrnes (Wilson, ‘Rough Justice’, forthcoming); Flynt himself displayed a range of newly scientific techniques like cataloguing criminals by their modus operandi, or constructing compendia of underclass lingo to accompany his memoirs. Originally, however, industrial-era private detective agencies refined their techniques by mimicking the confidence men they pursued. Listen to how, for instance, Allan Pinkerton describes the public misunderstanding of the term ‘shadowing’ itself, which he said was at the centre of the detective’s art: Most people may suppose that nearly any one can perform the duties of a ‘shadow’, and that it is the easiest thing in the world to follow up a man; but such is not the case . . . It will not do to [merely] follow a person on the opposite side of the street, or close behind him . . . Of course such a shadow would be detected in fifteen minutes. Such are not the actions of the real ‘shadow’, or at least, of the ‘shadow’ furnished by my establishment [the Pinkerton agency]. (1875, p. 26) Instead, Pinkerton goes on to explain, to shadow meant not merely to follow or mirror, but to enter fully into the criminal’s world. A detective must do the work of establishing a new identity, circulating with the thief or embezzler’s associates, and – here Pinkerton was particularly blunt – learning to ‘adopt generally the character of a fast man’ (1875, p. 25). To ‘shadow’, in fact, is an interesting verb: in material practice it meant to duplicate or copy criminal behaviour; as a literary practice, it seems to have meant injecting a darkness, perhaps even a shadow of guilt, into one’s popular portrait of criminal licentiousness and excess. In print, shadowing often meant to display crime while also providing the reader with a safe or regulating distance. As any reader of Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op stories knows, shapeshifting was at the heart of the shadowing technique. Much as in the sensational cheap reading of this era, Pinkerton work often relied on class masquerade and secret identities (Denning, 1988; Slotkin, 1998). Labour unions and others, understandably, commonly equated such practices with provocation; genteel Americans sometimes regarded undercover work even by police officers as immoral. Yet Allan Pinkerton himself tended, in his many memories, to celebrate this practice as the heart of a co-ordinated, quasi-military style of operation. Moreover, he readily understood how smaller, instrumental and lessintrusive techniques were useful in attaining private remedies. For instance, in

Frank Abagnale, Jr, and the Shadowing of Pleasure

181

tracking down an embezzler, he would employ the figure called a ‘roper’ who first pulled the sucker into the (fraudulent) confidence game restaged by the agency (Pinkerton, 1875, p. 26). Recruiting men and women suitable for this work thus often meant dipping into a talent pool of operatives with alreadydisreputable résumés: past work as a vigilante, for example, or in the recovery of property for a fee, or in local political shenanigans. Track through the apprenticeship of the famous ‘Cowboy detective’ and Pinkerton agent Charlie Siringo, and one finds a story, like Abagnale’s, blurring the lines between adventure, boy-sleuthing and white-collar crime. Siringo had gravitated to the Pinkerton agency, while still in his teens, from the shady world of corporate ranching, cattle rustling, private posses and vigilantism. Like James McParlan, the famous Pinkerton agent who infiltrated the Pennsylvania coal fields to bring down the Molly Maguires, Siringo developed a trademark skill in adopting fraudulent identities, commonly working his way into gangs by posing as a criminal on the run, or informing on others from within prison (Lamar, 2005). Usually, of course, these tactics were used to track down criminals (or sometimes simply political opponents) identified by Pinkerton clients. But in this deployment of boy delinquents – the character type also inverted by Flynt’s reform – the shadowing strategy also recalls Michel Foucault’s meditation (1977) on the integration of criminality, especially petty and mobile criminality, into policing and surveillance systems in the modern era. By the ‘delinquent’ (délinquant), Foucault invokes not only the frequent offender, but – more to the point – the offender who leveraged his pending criminal penalty back into service of the state. The delinquent often uses informing (a term we might see as related to knowledge work) to get out of prison. In the layered rendering of Discipline and Punish, the static walls of a physical place (a prison) thus became permeable, and power itself more mobile, individuated – in Foucault’s formulation, ‘a means of perpetual surveillance of the population . . . [of] the whole social field’ (Foucault, 1977, p. 281). Though he might as easily have chosen Wild, Foucault’s primary example is his countryman, Eugene-Francois Vidocq, who put his former criminality in the service of new police practices based on monitoring criminals, using them as informants, and at times incorporating them into the emerging police apparatus: Vidocq marks the moment when delinquency, detached from other illegalities, was invested by power and turned inside out . . . the disturbing moment when criminality became one of the mechanisms of power . . . The Shakespearean age when sovereignty confronted abomination in a single character had gone; the everyday melodrama of police power and of the complicities that crime formed with power was soon to begin. (Foucault, 1977, p. 283) Delinquency becomes, in this way, a new form of power-knowledge, a ‘political observatory’ (p. 286) for moving across private and public boundaries, and between criminality and respectability alike. Flynt, too, was mobilized by his

182

Crime Culture

employers into supervision (and even new classification) of his own delinquent past: the criminal class he had once occupied. Of course, the nineteenth-century term ‘delinquent’ probably did not carry the connotation (or, eventually, the shorthand) of juvenility it would in twentieth-century America. But for that reason alone, it is intriguing how – right at the moment late-Victorian, Anglo-American culture began to argue over the emerging figure of the adolescent – Flynt would choose to marshal his own juvenile biography (or legend) into his new expertise. As its punning title suggested, a book like Tramping with Tramps presented both nostalgic renderings of Flynt’s own youthful adventures and case studies in what he deemed ‘professional’ criminality; it is principally the reversal of his own life, captured through memoir into a reading experience, which set the template for his police work. Having learned the ‘bluster and bluff’ of confidence men through adopting his road persona of ‘Cig’ (1908, p. 82), Flynt reapplied his verbal and physical disguises to his new craft as detective and, in time, undercover muckraker. As his closest associate (one Alfred Hodder) described this art, ‘It was [Flynt’s] habit to get under the guard of everyone he met, to turn them inside out and inspect them’ (Hodder, as qtd in Flynt, 1903, pp. 344–5). These practices also shaped his view of conning as the very heart of criminality generally. To Flynt, for instance, even the most impoverished of beggars were professional criminals, ‘voluntary’ vagrants who conned the taxpayer into paying, essentially, involuntary taxes through unscientific charity and the costs of policing (Flynt, 1899, p. 290). Conversely, Flynt habitually equated his employers’ interests – those, for instance, of the railroad owners – with that of the general public (1899, p. 308). Turning the criminal into a man who victimized marks made him into the anti-type of the more vigilant citizen that, reciprocally, Flynt’s shadow man now came to model. But here is where my earlier reflections on our own climate of contemporary fear and moral backlash come into play. To read only a grim vigilance in Flynt’s story-telling is to truncate it at least by half. Much of Flynt’s middle-class appeal derived from the way he engineered a half-comic reduplication of the criminal act. Conning was now put in the service of tramping understood as recreation: re-creation of the vagrant’s parasitism, but also a rediscovering, through undercover return, of the leisure (or play) he still loved. For Flynt, acting was a boy’s game; yet, as for Tom Sawyer, acting was also being himself, in all his permanent boyishness. In other words, Flynt both modelled vigilance and allowed his citizen-readers to experience, through the virtual powers of reading, the pleasures that the road, and indeed criminality itself, had once conferred upon him. Readers also partook of the new pleasure of knowing that his delinquent past was now a source of power. Flynt’s own half-reformation was a matter of retelling (through writing) how he had learned to simulate what he had once done naturally: in essence – in a tactic terribly relevant to Abagnale, as we shall see – how he had learned to become a fraud of a fraud. Nostalgia also played a crucial role in Flynt’s craft, since his memoirs affirmed the legitimacy of the homes that, like famous aunt Frances Willard,2

Frank Abagnale, Jr, and the Shadowing of Pleasure

183

he ultimately claimed to defend. At times like the forlorn protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tale ‘Wakefield’, he would return to look in on his former life as a member of the educated middle class, relishing the concern over other lost boys’ disappearances (1908, pp. 359–60). Perhaps the most revealing moment in Flynt’s memoirs comes when he recounts such a visit, while still a beggar on the road, back to a middle-class home: How odd it seemed! I almost felt at home, and had to be on my guard to keep up my role as a vagabond. For it was certainly a temptation to relieve myself then and there, and have an old-time chat on respectable lines. I had been so long on the road that I was really in need of some such comfort, but I dared not take advantage of it. So I answered their questions about my home, my parents, and my plans as professionally as I could, and spun my story, not entirely of fiction, however . . . (1899, pp. 162–3) When Flynt learns that his hosts have lost a boy of their own, he is clearly moved: ‘I hope they have him now, for they certainly deserve surcease of sorrow on his account’ (1899, p. 164). As a reformer, however, he must also chastise their sentimental impulse to charity: ‘There are people like this in every town, and it is the tramp’s talent to find them.’ When he finds them, Flynt writes, the tramp will make a ‘note’ on them: ‘He thus becomes a peripatetic directory for the tramp world, which lives on the working world at a cost which it is worthwhile to consider’ (p. 164). But the text we’re reading, of course, is the inside-out version of that former con. Now, as a tramp expert, Flynt has become the mobile observatory, creating books that are much like municipal ledgers, emerging out of his own half-reformed delinquency. His new profession repays the host of his earliest rebellions – with pleasure.

Your First Line of Defense: Abagnale’s Security Work But what does this have to do with our own era? – as it were, with our own moment of global economic dispersion, a renewed quest by corporations for public hegemony, and the ever-expanding privatization of security? What are the connections with the crime of ‘identity theft’, so named only in recent decades? How would we describe, in terms relevant to Josiah Flynt, the services that Frank Abagnale provides? Right as Abagnale came of age, of course, corporate security consulting began its upward climb to its status, today, as a multibillion dollar industry. Well before 9/11, private security firms had responded to the globalization of corporate power; to market deregulation; to the rise of information technology; and, of course, to the attendant threats of terrorism and executive kidnapping (Knight, 1997; Lohr, 2002; Magnusson, 2003). (‘All of this uncertainty’, the president of industry leader Kroll Security Group has glumly observed, ‘is a natural driver

184

Crime Culture

for us’ [as qtd in Magnusson, 2003].) By 1997, there would be about 160,000 private security firms in the United States, up from 70,000 in 1980 (Brown, 1997). The American Society for Industrial Security now numbers over 36,000 members worldwide (ASIS International, 2009). Meanwhile, accelerating especially as identity theft became the subject of sporadic legislation in the 1990s, these security firms capitalized on what might be called a ‘moral panic’ and the political grandstanding that accompanied it. (Recently, for example, both the FBI and the Federal Trade Commission have called identity theft one of the fastest growing white-collar crimes in the United States, and a major source of consumer complaints to the government [Howard, 2005, p. 1294 note 4; Saunders and Zuker, 1999, p. 663; ‘New Plan’, 1976].) In truth, however, despite this public alarm, politicians have been reluctant to police identity theft through aggressive state or federal legislation. Fraud has traditionally been deemed a civil matter, and in the United States conservatives and liberals alike resist devices like national identification cards. Recent legislation, therefore, has often focused as much on the illegal production of fraudulent documents as on personal identity theft, an emphasis which points to terrorism as the main target (Pastrikos, 2004; Saunders and Zuker, 1999; Newman and McNally, 2005). Otherwise, the law has been content to fall back on the traditional standard of caveat emptor (Dalley, 1995). Such a gap allows Abagnale, as it were, to play the middle man. In this climate, he has thrived by nimbly shuttling between the preaching of consumer vigilance, the servicing of corporations, and the supplementing of state security and law enforcement. On the first front, as the author of several handbooks on personal security, Abagnale tutors individual consumers in the typical frauds performed by everyday confidence men: the lawn service that takes your personal check to the internet, and orders a new chequebook (2001, p. 29); thieves who steal payment cheques from mailboxes left with their postal flags up (p. 41); the smiling service provider who passes off phoney gift certificates, for a small fee, in a shopping mall (pp. 71–2). On the second front, Abagnale has invented various devices that secure contractual or financial obligations made by consumers with corporations that would otherwise bear the financial brunt of fraud. He has, for instance, designed SAFE cheques for companies; a water-resistant pen to thwart ‘cheque washing’; offered an identity-theft insurance program that reimburses victims’ cost of investigating and recuperating losses they might otherwise seek from banks and corporations; consulted on the efficacy of shredding machines and integrated payment plans. And, of course he has advised the FBI, as well as having consulted on the authentication of Passports (Clark, 2003; Grebb, 2004; Harmon, 2004; ‘Progeny to Market’, 2003). As is quite common in the recent literature of the privatization of crime control, Abagnale’s central faith is that these tactics depend upon the responsible and vigilant consumer. Again, in Garland’s term, he emphasizes personal ‘responsibilization’, the idea that the state should inculcate vigilance or crime

Frank Abagnale, Jr, and the Shadowing of Pleasure

185

control in citizens who will carry risk management within them, not unlike mobile undercover agents. Abagnale frequently tells his reader that he or she is all too likely to be the weakest link in everyday transactions: as one subheading puts it, ‘YOUR FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE IS YOU’ (2001, 56). Or, even more fantastically, ‘If you’re not doing anything about crime, you’re encouraging crime’ (as qtd in Grebb, 2004, p. 1). To a degree, this logic is a by-product of the recent tendency to define identity theft as an ‘opportunity crime’, one created by breaches in victims’ habits (Newman and McNally, 2005, pp. 38–9). Moreover, this individualist ethos reflects the way that neo-conservatism in the United States more generally presses upon us the fatalistic sense that the state can no longer provide for our welfare. As if in miniature, Abagnale’s platform seems to justify, or literally personify, the personal register in which so much of neo-conservative crime talk constructs citizen vigilance. Indeed, as some of our shrewdest analysts point out, identity theft is one crime category where we most often hear the recurrent lament that the state cannot or will not provide systemic solutions to our crime problems. That is, as Gary T. Marx (2006, p. 49) has shown, where we hear the ‘it’s up to you’ refrain enjoining the citizen-subject to work on him- or herself, to manage risks at the personal level (see also Cole and Pontell, 2006; and Stanko, 2001). (If we become victims of identity theft, few of us will think to call the police, at least at first.) In such a climate, we are instead treated to advertisements about identity theft in which we are reduced to dreary lives and jobs. As if mocking a public service announcement from the government, the ventriloquized voice of an identity thief gleefully describes a spending spree he or she has been on, with our credit card. Indeed, it is this context that allows Abagnale, as it were, to scale down the geographic mobility of the nineteenth-century shadow detective into the regulation of personal life. The security expert now enters into the interstices of the contract relation and, especially, personal consumption. He becomes, in Flynt’s formulation, the ‘peripatetic directory’ of cons, a municipal service or manual made a private property for each of us. Abagnale is thus quite literally a private expert, in that he secures the private realm, promises it peace of mind, offers to guard individual identities in transactions outside the state’s protections. And he seems to do this, in part, by fanning fear through his catalogue of crimes. Although Abagnale’s expertise more precisely reflects an ongoing category shift from identity fraud (counterfeiting an occupation or making up a person) to identity theft (posing as an actual person or stealing his or her information for nefarious purposes), he portrays such an act as more like a physical threat or violation. It is a burglary of selfhood. As someone who narrates potential crimes to consumers, he melds the language of consumer protection to the vocabulary of victims’ rights. He asks consumers to visualize their own potential victimization, but to see that victimization as redressed mainly by civil action on their own part.

186

Crime Culture

In these respects, Abagnale’s service philosophy threads its way through many of the larger themes of the US neo-conservative turn. A modern, marketplacedriven notion of risk management comes to seem as if it simply restores a bygone day of American self-help. Abagnale’s own individualism, his idiom of protecting the ‘little guy’ from everyday small frauds, is an appeal that lends a ‘mom-and-pop’ tenor to his consumer tutelage, an aura of resistance to modernity arriving, say, in the guise of electronic or internet crimes. In Abagnale’s rendering, meanwhile, crimes against consumers are also by-products of compulsion, metaphorically adolescent in character. And this is precisely why, as if crafting a first principle of American neo-conservatism, identity-theft crimes are defined as opportunities rooted in a permissive impulse culture (compare James Q. Wilson, 1983). As the counterpart of street thugs, who represent what neo-conservatives cast as ‘predatory’ criminality, the archetypal white-collar criminal becomes the computer hacker: the compulsive figure who seems to say that if a crime can be committed, it will be (cf. Pontell, 2002). Crime on both fronts is thus cast as ever-present, something we have to learn to live with. As with Flynt, however, underneath this fear-based appeal, a more subtle appeal is being crafted. As Ian Loader (1999) has suggested, much of the contemporary discourse of private security actually offers to empower the consumer as a sovereign citizen, often by creating social distinction and even pleasure around the acquisition of security. While citizens today still often look to the public police as a source of legitimate authority and crime management, the expanding security market encourages them to see the state as simply one player in that market. That is, as Loader describes it, the consumer is offered a choice of policing alternatives that he or she can use; he or she can express that preference without any necessary political justification; and, quite tellingly, he or she can exit from such protection if his or her consumer preferences remain unsatisfied. And thus, when security is a good not in the sense of a public value, but in the sense of a commodity, it offers a sense of power and control to the private buyer, a way to privately produce a separation between ourselves and an often-threatening world ‘out there’. That service, on its face, might seem quite compatible with the larger cultural work performed by a text like Catch Me if You Can. Doing your duty as a risk-informed consumer certainly seems compatible with growing up, in the way we assume that Frank Abagnale, former identity fraud, has. But here again, the example of Josiah Flynt is a telling one. It turns out that shadowing the identity thief’s own professional knowledge does not mean something as simple as disowning the past. Rather, in his as-told-to memoir, it means displaying that criminality, even enjoying the image of freedom that is supposedly being marked as criminal. To understand Abagnale’s cultural work, in other words, we have to understand how the older voice of authority hacks into its alter ego – replicates, even counterfeits him, becoming a fraud of a fraud – and then puts the pleasure of duplication into our social imaginations. The ‘art’ of the con thus may be a larger part of Abagnale’s ‘deal’ than we might otherwise suspect.

Frank Abagnale, Jr, and the Shadowing of Pleasure

187

Catch Me if You Can: The Pleasures of Risk Despite the future-oriented taunt of its title, Catch Me if You Can is a book shot through with nostalgia – so much so that it makes us feel as if the decade it recalls, the 1960s, is actually the 1940s. Indeed, in the memoir itself, we are never actually shown Abagnale’s capture or incorporation into the FBI; instead, we luxuriate in his criminal past. Even the older security man’s voice is saturated with a wistful use of retro diction like ‘threads’ or ‘goodies’. A woman can easily be described as a ‘fox’, or, in the collective, referred to as ‘broads’ (pp. 5, 10, 15). For his own earlier line of work, Abagnale evokes the argot of ‘rackets’, the slang term that, from the early twentieth century on, referred to both common professions and the elaborate swindles of criminals. As if we begin in the days of ward bosses, gambling dens, and New York hustlers, he even compares his father’s world to that of New York writer Damon Runyon (p. 9). Appropriately enough, Spielberg himself gives this story the aura of a Henry Mancini-scored caper movie. Catch Me if You Can, however, reaches even farther back in history, as I have said. Both the book and the film adopt many conventions common to juvenile tramping narratives of the nineteenth century, including Flynt’s. For instance, we watch as young Frank first escapes from a reform school (p. 17), flirts with jail, and then heads out on the road to seek his future. But soon – as in many a Victorian good–bad boy tale (cf. Mailloux, 1990) – that route is transformed into a journey of experience and personal self-development (Abagnale, 1980, pp. 20–1). As in a Horatio Alger tale, natural boyishness blurs into prankishness, and then prankishness seems like metropolitan savoir faire. We eventually discover that, like a dime novel hero, young Frank studies in libraries – ‘as diligently as any investor studies the markets available to him’ (p. 128), the older man says – but only to learn how to combine ‘personality, observation, and research’ (p. 130) into his criminal vocation. In one of his earliest cons, likewise, Frank poses as a cub reporter for a high school newspaper, only to trick a pilot into revealing airline security measures. Young Frank then sticks a logo from a plastic airplane model, appropriately enough, onto his first fake security ID. Catch Me if You Can also misses few opportunities to portray young Frank as a forlorn boy, driven by anxiety about a troubled home akin to those we saw in Flynt’s memoirs. If anything, Spielberg’s adaptation would accentuate these elements, often by taking more liberties with Abagnale’s upbringing than the memoir itself does.3 Meanwhile, Abagnale’s memoir begins to move 19-year-old criminality from the aura of adolescent high jinks into premature hypermasculinity, as an excellent analysis of the film version has recently observed (Tzanelli et al., 2005). Shifting gears from a fable-like and even folkloric feel – comparing his tricksterism to rabbits and bumblebees (pp. 28, 62, 75) – the young entrepreneur begins moving from woman to woman as well. Smoothing the transition, Abagnale begins to describe his own motivation as having always been hormonal.

188

Crime Culture

He begins his criminal career by using a tire-replacement and credit scam, for instance, to pay for gasoline so he can date girls (p. 27). (‘An inflated sex drive’, the older man intones, ‘has no conscience’ [p. 16].) Thus, as in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, conning is written off to supposedly normal male competitive instincts. At the same time, I think, it is difficult to overlook the developing tension that results between the narrating adult and this maturing rascal. The inside, retrospective narrative voice that we recognize from The Art of the Steal coyly notes others’ vanity, vulnerability, gullibility; yet – in the plot – young Frank can easily strike us, as he does his companions, as modest, generous, respectful and polished. Likewise, we are sometimes reminded that the adult Abagnale is (and says he always was) deeply conservative in personal matters, having outgrown (we are told) his bumblebee days. The narrator avers, for instance, that he dislikes ‘women’s lib’ (p. 11). Yet as we move from ‘fox’ to ‘fox’, Abagnale is quick to defend his former bedmates against the charge of promiscuity (p. 52). Perhaps to neutralize such tensions, Catch Me if You Can begins to depart from conventions we might associate with a con man narrative. Gradually it makes it seem as if young Frank had no marks (or leaves no marks) to speak of. With two very minor exceptions – a prostitute hoping to scam him (pp. 196–7), and one insufferable boss (p. 211) – Abagnale in fact never relishes in the classical ‘sizing up’ or ‘busting out’ that analysts like David Maurer (1940) famously posited as the signature elements of the confidence game. Abagnale even claims that he never stiffed an individual person (p. 197). But here is where the con man-boy seems to give way to the security expert shadowing these adventures. Removing the predatory tinge from his past allows Abagnale to cast his former crimes as merely passing along the costs to companies or banks rather than their customers or employees. We thereby learn more of the loopholes (or breaches) in corporate or bank or airline security than we do of any mark’s own propensities for larceny. Turned about in this fashion, Abagnale’s memories become object lessons in what is commonly called the ‘low hanging fruit’ theme of risk management. For instance, we are meant to conclude how easily the airlines ‘set themselves up’ (p. 59; emphasis mine) by creating vulnerable accounting practices, loose arrangements to house flight crews, and so on. Along the way, as well, our young hero basks in the perquisites of the jobs he acquires rather than their labour as such. To be sure, he cites the ‘ego boosts’ (p. 83) he gets from his adopted professions, again as if discovering a normative male competitive instinct anew. But he points more to the vicarious pleasures of these identities, rather than their skills or authority per se. He doesn’t love flying: he loves hotels, toadying waiters, and, as always, stewardesses. In point of fact, these faux identities are not stolen from another individual – a category shift again, disguised by our own hindsight. Indeed, that absence of identity theft as we know it is why Abagnale can pass off his various acts of counterfeiting – or perquisite-thefts – as not conning a person so much as taking funds from the corporations for which that person works. In this sense, the historical shuffling around sexual freedom and identity fraud in employment go hand in

Frank Abagnale, Jr, and the Shadowing of Pleasure

189

hand. In Abagnale’s boyish retrospect, the labour of the job is actually hollowed out, as if its perquisites, or the leisure it might produce, feed back into the experience of the job itself. When posing as a doctor in an Emergency ward, for example, Frank’s boss tells him to just ‘do anything you want: just be here!’ (p. 86). In many instances, Abagnale actually ‘passes’ in these occupations by playing the bad boy or the buffoon: not by mastering the craft, but by becoming Flynt’s happy-go-lucky tramp artist. The workplace, in other words, is given a prelapsarian innocence, like the bedroom – where the pleasures of sexual freedom (such as it is, in masculinist terms), reinfused with a little healthy masculine conning, can be restored by (a subtext never mentioned) the risk management of birth control pills. Abagnale’s adoption of these identities thereby returns us to the dream of professional status as itself a form of class exemption from hard labour – a motif we might now discern in those identity-theft ads mentioned earlier. It is as if the act of identity fraud has restored the promise of pleasure in modern whitecollar work – a joy that, say, worrying about malpractice insurance costs might actually threaten. Larceny becomes a way to refresh an everyman fantasy. Particularly in the recovery of the lost boy, criminality ostensibly allows readers (especially male readers) to re-experience the fruits of their labour, to see work as the achievement of their desires. In tandem with his mobile-directory security self, the younger Abagnale can claim to simply be returning to consumers the pleasures that others threaten to take from them – by becoming, as it were, joyously delinquent on everyday responsibility. He allows readers to rediscover what the identity thief fraudulently adopts by hacking into their lives. Reciprocally, Abagnale tutors his future clients to catch themselves in fantasies of pleasure, and implicitly remind them what is at risk. Abagnale asks readers and consumers to make the larceny in their soul a more open secret, take pleasure in it – so as, crucially, not to summon its full repression but to entertain the pleasures sustained by taking measured risks. The consumer-reader is enjoined to make risk assessment in order to take that risk, not to refuse it. Ultimately, in fact, what is remarkable about Abagnale’s rewriting of risk is that it actually removes most if not all of the disastrous consequences that might result from young Frank’s crimes. In one of his earliest airline flights, for example, 19-year-old Frank is asked to take over the plane’s controls – Oh No!! But then we learn young Frank can simply turn on the automatic pilot (pp. 3–4). When he poses as that Emergency Room doctor – Oh, No!!! – likewise, we soon learn that his assignment means that he won’t actually be treating patients, just supervising interns (p. 85). (In one of the book’s more comic moments, the interns are simply grateful that he lets them be ‘real doctors’ and actually treat the sick themselves [p. 92].) When he becomes a lawyer (p. 106), he says he is happy not to have to try any cases (though in fact he may well have).4 This is not, however, a simple minimizing of white-collar crime; rather, Abagnale’s fantasies of identity fraud pre-empt its risks while we are being entertained by his criminal craft. In an ‘adventure’ with comic kinship to the premise of a film like

190

Crime Culture

Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002b) – its futurist plot based on a Philip K. Dick tale about predicting crimes before they occur – the risk is managed in advance, in the shape of the fantasy itself. Spielberg is thus a very apt appropriator of Abagnale’s story. Reading the book is very much akin to those moments in Spielberg films when the moment of danger is neutralized by the look of an amusement ride: the risk is entertained, but managed by the invisible hand of a nostalgic adult, still overlooking the kids. (As, for example, in the famous moment when the threatening guns of the government, in the re-release of E.T., were erased and replaced by walkie-talkies as the boys ride their bikes into the moon.) It is as if Abagnale’s signature milieu – the hybrid, state-run yet mass private property space of the airport, which also has intrigued Spielberg, and which was one of the first public laboratories for modern risk management – is made akin to the second most influential space: Disneyland (Shearing and Stenning, 1981; Simon, 1997, p. 178). In the end, Abagnale’s shadow narrative thus betrays the signature byplay between the political nostalgia of neo-conservatism and its larger program of risk-managed ‘freedom’. To a large extent, Catch Me if You Can uses its juvenile conventions to forge an attachment to an entrepreneurial past. Much like Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, Abagnale’s boy-hero hearkens back to a world of open markets and professions. In this imagined past, the phrase ‘Catch Me if You Can’ refers to an existence supposedly beyond the reach of the liberal (and, with the figure of O’Riley, the paternal) state. Risk management offers to turn back the clock, to erase the new world disorder these days actually produce, as even the Kroll executive admits. But it is not simply that Abagnale’s fantasy takes us back to those days – whenever they were – when law, or medicine, or (imagine) academia were such open markets that employers were simply hiring job candidates off the street. Rather, it is that his nostalgia works to invoke a longing for the freedoms and personal (class) security of the very world his own marketing, and indeed his work with the FBI, proposes to resecure. I might offer a few parting thoughts, therefore, about Abagnale’s supposed recruitment by the FBI. In Abagnale’s version of events, the original site of his conversion to security consultant, it turns out, was the American prison. Having been first arrested in France, and then recaptured and placed in a US facility, Abagnale claims to have manipulated the ‘civil rights scrutiny’ of incarceration (pp. 268–9) into a ruse to create special treatment for himself. His con was to create suspicion among his jailors that he was what he calls a ‘Bureau of Prisons prober’ (p. 271), an undercover inspector of the prison itself. In other words, he supposedly posed as the person he would become, a risk assessment specialist. He tested the weakness of the system by posing as someone who could police it from the inside-out, to create distinction (and eventually freedom) for himself. Not surprisingly, then, in the book, he effects his final escape from our narrative inspection by posing as an FBI man to elude capture (pp. 272–6). All along, in fact, we can easily have the feeling that we have been witnessing, as it were, an audition more than an autobiography.

Frank Abagnale, Jr, and the Shadowing of Pleasure

191

Spielberg’s film adaptation, by contrast, would have us believe that Abagnale was reformed and recruited by the FBI. But as I have been suggesting, Abagnale’s imaginary memoir – what else can one call it? – actually scripts a somewhat different courtship between private security and the state. Instead, he portrays a state so hot upon his paper trail that it hopes to learn to live with crimes that he has modelled. Instead of showing himself tracked down by that relentless, middle-of-the-road FBI man – or revealing the fact that it was probably an FBI deal that freed him from prison – in the book, Abagnale concludes his story by suggesting he eluded state incorporation. We are left to conclude, from his title, that he ultimately decided to catch himself. By turning away from the juvenile play of ‘kiting’ checks to catching those who still do, young Frank will learn, we gather, to literally incorporate his fantasies and his talents, and fold himself into something more like a private–public contract. (It is Abagnale, after all, who lectures to the FBI, not the other way around.) In a sense, this is a fantasy in which the boy-hero and vagabond engineers his own (state) adoption, and now sells us freedom at the everyday-low-price of increased personal vigilance and security. In these ways, Frank Abagnale puts the con into neo-con.

Notes 1

2

3

4

Catch Me if You Can was written by the now-deceased Houston Chronicle reporter Stan Redding – as some reports have it, after interviewing Abagnale for only four days. Abagnale later claimed key elements of the book were embellished, overdramatized – or simply invented. Jeff Nathanson’s movie script took even more liberties (see Seiler, 2002). Frances Willard (1839–1898), the American temperance reformer, educator and suffragist, was most famously the president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. In the film, emphasizing the central theme of Jeff Nathanson’s script, Abagnale tells his dispossessed father (played by Christopher Walken) that he is going to get back everything the Internal Revenue Service had taken from the family. Abagnale’s father, however, was never in tax trouble; nor was young Frank an only child; nor did his mother immediately remarry (see Schaefer, 2001). Abagnale has admitted to practicing law in the Louisiana courts for about a year; see the interview on the DVD of Catch Me if You Can (2002).

Chapter 11

‘Police Thy Neighbour’: Crime Culture and the Rear Window Paradigm Bran Nicol

One of the foundational maxims of modern liberal democracy is ‘Love Thy Neighbour’, the biblical injunction which affirms the value of respecting one’s ‘fellow human’.1 By and large we adhere to this code without question, in the interests of social cohesion. Encounters with ‘neighbours from hell’2 occur, but they are statistically rare. When we consider how neighbours are depicted in popular thrillers, however, the truth appears to be quite the opposite. Cinematic depictions almost uniformly defamiliarize the figure of the benign ‘fellow human’ and make the neighbour into a menacing figure of disguised but potent criminal intent. Examples over the past two decades include Pacific Heights (1990), Shallow Grave (1994), Single White Female (1992), The Burbs (1989), Arlington Road (1999), Disturbia (2007) and Civic Duty (2006). More precisely these films express a common cultural fear, one Sandra Baringer has termed ‘a given of millenial America’: the ‘acceptance of the beast within’ (2004, p. 1). The fear that criminality lurks beneath the mundane exteriors of those ‘others’ with whom we share our world is manifested in the prevalence of mass-media bogeymen, such as the terrorist, the stalker and the paedophile. Most prominent of these over the past few decades has been the serial killer, one of whose defining characteristics (as Mark Seltzer shows in his book Serial Killers) is the capacity to figure as the ‘abnormally normal’ man, able to blend into the crowd, just like you or I (1998, p. 9). This chapter focuses on the last three of the movies listed above, each of which portrays the neighbour as ‘beast within’, in a neighbourhood which is imagined as a kind of crime culture. Each revolves around the psychology of a man (or, more precisely in the case of Disturbia, an adolescent) who becomes convinced that another man, a neighbour, is guilty of serious crime which he carefully masks through the appearance of ordinariness. In Disturbia this is serial murder, while in Arlington Road and Civic Duty it is terrorism. The suspense is drawn from the protagonist’s efforts to expose the neighbour’s crimes in the face of initial scepticism from friends and his partner, and, most significantly, the utter indifference or inadequacy of representatives of the law. In each case, although his behaviour is unethical and disturbingly obsessive – suggesting

Crime Culture and the Rear Window Paradigm

193

there is a fine line between ‘good neighbour’ and menace – the protagonist is proved right at the end of the film. This is perhaps the most surprising aspect in each case, for although each movie seems geared up to demonstrate that each individual acts through flawed logic and to gratify some deeply private desire, the ultimate message is that, where relations between neighbours in the late twentieth century is concerned, paranoia is justified. (Or: just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean your neighbours are not out to get you – and everyone else.) While there are traditions of movies which deal with dangerous, lawless neighbourhoods – mob movies such as Goodfellas (1990) or Once Upon a Time in America (1994) or ‘ghetto’ movies such as Boyz in the Hood (1991), Menace II Society (1993) or 8 Mile (2002) – what is striking about the films I will be discussing here is that they are set in what are clearly intended to figure as normal (or ‘abnormally normal’, to borrow Seltzer’s phrase), ordinary, middleclass, urban and suburban neighbourhoods, and thus provide a counterpoint to the more obvious ‘crime cultures’ depicted in either of these traditions. Where crime in the inner city is constantly present and visible, crime in the ordinary, outwardly respectable neighbourhoods which form the locations for the films discussed in this chapter, is submerged and hidden, and the dominant emotion switches from fear to paranoia.

‘Neighbourhood Watch’: Rear Window In its basic premise, narrative trajectory, and in many of its motifs and stylistic features, each of these recent films descends from the archetypal fearing-theneighbours film, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). Based on a 1942 Cornell Woolrich crime story, originally titled ‘Murder from a Fixed Viewpoint’ (Woolrich, 1994),3 the film tells of the convalescent photographer L. B. Jeffries or ‘Jeff’ (played by James Stewart) who, while confined to his apartment with a broken leg, witnesses what he is convinced is the murder of a woman by her husband, Thorwald, in the apartment across the yard, and his attempts to cover it up. Perhaps the most striking thing about Rear Window is the film’s replication of a confined lower middle-class neighbourhood in Greenwich Village, New York City. The set was designed in elaborate detail and constructed at great expense to achieve the utmost realism. Yet the detail, lighting and use of a telephoto lens mounted on a crane to give the sense of the smallest aspects yielding to Jeffries’s gaze, make it, at the same time, obviously, uncannily unreal. One effect of this is to emphasize the self-reflexive parallels the film draws between voyeuristic protagonist and cinema-viewer – the focus of much of the extensive academic discussion of the film. But another is to foreground the very mechanism of the neighbourhood, defamiliarizing something we are so used to in modern life and enabling us to scrutinize it as if it is a perfect architectural miniature in a museum. The film presents us with a typical neighbourhood, its status as type revealed somewhat paradoxically by its singular presentation.

194

Crime Culture

In the midst of this typical environment Hitchcock places what seems to be an unusual man, who develops an unhealthy obsession with another over the course of the film. Jeffries watches his neighbours without real fear of being watched in return, and the act of observing fuels voyeuristic desires which he is reluctant to acknowledge and perhaps only dimly aware of. Though his explanation for what he does is ethical – he watches Thorwald to do his duty as a citizen, as a good neighbour, and protect those he lives beside – those who have written about the film have tended to assume, as do Jeffries’s housekeeper Stella and his fiancée Lisa, that this rationale is disingenuous, for his activity is rooted in more shadowy, libidinal impulses (see, for example, Dolar, 1993; Brand, 1999). This is what Stam and Pearson termed the film’s ‘critique of voyeurism’ (1983) and is a common theme in readings of the film. It is related to a move which has been termed ‘de rigeur’ in analyses of the film (Coles, 2001, p. 344), to link Rear Window’s self-reflexive exploration of the nature of looking and the cinema to the Foucauldian theory of the panoptic regime. Foucault derives the idea from Jeremy Bentham’s 1787 design for ‘the Panopticon’, a circular prison with a central watchtower which would enable power to operate through visibility and unverifiability because the inmates are always potentially exposed to the guard’s gaze without being able to confirm at any moment whether or not they are actually being viewed (Bentham, 1995, pp. 29–95). As many critics have noted (Žižek, 1991; Dolar, 1992; Denzin, 1995), Jeffries’s situation in Rear Window is like a variation on this basic model. The apartments across the courtyard function like the cells in Bentham’s prison, that is (to quote Foucault), ‘like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible’ (1977, p. 200). Hitchcock’s neighbourhood-theatre reflects Foucault’s point that ‘[t] he panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately’ (Foucault, 1977, p. 200). Jeffries does ‘individualize’ and recognize his neighbours, something most obvious from his habit of giving them names out of familiarity and which denote their characteristic routines, such as Miss Torso, the ballet dancer, or Miss Lonely Hearts, the unhappy single woman. As in the Panopticon – though here it is of course voluntary – there is very little ‘lateral’ interaction between the people in the adjoining ‘cells’ (though there is a notable exception at the end, when Miss Lonely Hearts and the songwriter appear to be embarking upon a relationship). In such readings the comparison with the Panopticon strengthens the enquiry into the dubious psychology of the film’s protagonist, and by extension other viewers in film and in real life. Stam and Pearson draw the parallel between the power inscribed in the panoptic gaze and the control sought by the voyeur (1983); Denzin argues that the voyeur’s gaze ‘functions in this private prison as a warden’s look, protecting people from each other and discovering private crimes that would otherwise remain hidden’ (1995, p. 119); and the Lacanian theorists Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar argue that we ought to see the film as a reversal of the panoptic situation in that it portrays the ‘inmates’ as

Crime Culture and the Rear Window Paradigm

195

unterrorized, oblivious to the gaze of the law, while the ‘guard’ is, ironically, terrified that he might miss something (Žižek, 1991; Dolar, 1992). Without wishing to challenge the validity of these readings, I think what is noticeable is that they have tended to use the Panopticon comparison as a springboard to consider questions of voyeurism and the cinema without pursuing the Foucauldian logic further. My reading of Rear Window and its ‘descendents’ takes up the question of how the neighbourhood might function more fully as a disciplinary regime in Foucault’s terms, beyond one that simply provides a platform for voyeuristic obsession. This means focusing more on what these films say about the ‘arrangement of spatial unities’ which defines the panoptic regime than the particular dynamics of looking. It also requires that we envisage the protagonist of each film not just as a man in the grip of a personal obsession which marks him out as a departure from the norm, but as a typical inhabitant of the panoptic modern neighbourhood. His behaviour may be immoral and unusual, but it is sanctioned, made normative, if not natural, by the conditions of modern neighbourhood living.

‘Thousands of eyes posted everywhere’: Foucault’s Panoptic Neighbourhood According to Foucault’s well-known argument, discipline is a kind of power which becomes dominant in Western liberal society from the late eighteenth to the nineteenth century, and which chiefly involves, in the words of D. A. Miller, ‘an ideal of unseen but all-seeing surveillance’ and ‘a regime of the norm, in which normalizing perceptions, prescriptions, and sanctions are diffused in discourses and practices throughout the social fabric’ (1988, p. viii). It is symptomatic of a much wider shift in this period from a sovereign society where power is imposed on people from ‘above’, to the modern society in which power affects every individual because the social structure ensures relations between people are relations of discipline. Central to this process, and something which the Panopticon prison does with brutal efficiency, is to fix individuals in ‘an enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point’ (Foucault, 1977, p. 197) so they can be supervised and their actions observed, recorded, measured, analysed. This works most obviously through institutions such as the asylum, the prison, the approved school and the hospital, but a consequence of the rise of discipline in the nineteenth century is a ‘policing’ of the private and domestic sphere. This process requires the panoptic ‘gaze’, or at least some form of panoptic scrutiny, to penetrate into private space. The prospect of being subjected to ‘constant surveillance’ (Foucault, 1977, p. 199) induces a characteristic state of self-awareness in one who is the focus of this gaze. What made the Panopticon effective is the fact that the prisoners, as Anne Friedberg puts it, ‘were objects of an imagined scrutiny, where the internalized sense of surveillance changed the disposition of external power’ (1993, p. 19).

196

Crime Culture

Bentham’s Panopticon is actually only the ‘architectural figure’ (Foucault, 1977, p. 200) of this new social formation, ‘the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form’ (Foucault, 1977, 205). The Panopticon must be understood as a generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men . . . It is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposition of centres and channels of power, of definition of the instruments and modes of intervention of power, which can be implemented in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons. (Foucault, 1977, p. 205) This is where we can return to Rear Window and the modern neighbourhood. Just as Bentham’s Panopticon is the architectural figure of the more pervasive and far-reaching ‘panoptic machine’, so I think we can regard Hitchcock’s artificial neighbourhood in Rear Window as an exemplification of the essentially panoptic nature of the modern neighbourhood. As Stephen Jacobs has noted, in Rear Window [t]he voyeur sees a collection of anonymous metropolitans that are part of a Gesellschaft of autonomous individuals. The inhabitants rather live isolated from than with each other. Even the courtyard is not that of a single apartment block but consists of a number of individual back yards attached to distinct, architecturally different buildings on a single city block. (2007, p. 239) This arrangement of apartments is one obvious reason why, according to Norman Denzin, Rear Window ‘speaks to the impoverished, anomic character of mid-century urban American life. In this world there are no neighbours, only strangers who live in the same buildings with one another’ (1995, p. 118). At the same time, however, the specifically architectural comparison between modern neighbourhoods and the Panopticon can only go so far. It is obvious that the arrangement of the modern neighbourhood does not allow perfect visibility nor continual supervision. However, it does produce an effect of unverifiability and a sense of ‘imagined scrutiny’. To be a neighbour is to be aware that someone may be watching at any particular moment. The impact of this knowledge is really what makes Rear Window worth analysing from a Foucauldian perspective, in my view, rather than its specific commentary on looking. The neighbour is someone who regulates our existence, in a way which upholds social and moral norms and might also assist official disciplinary systems. To have a neighbour is to be aware that what we say or do can be overheard or witnessed, and this modifies what we do or say and how we act or speak. In a radical interpretation of the biblical injunction to ‘love thy neighbour’, which implies social cohesion can be maintained by treating a stranger as someone we are close to and can therefore love, psychoanalytic thinkers from Freud to Žižek

Crime Culture and the Rear Window Paradigm

197

have argued that the command actually necessitates a keeping of the neighbour at bay. ‘Loving’ our neighbours means creating a sense of imaginary empathy which paradoxically has the effect of limiting any encounter with their real otherness (Freud, 2002; Miller, 1997; Žižek, 2006, 2008).4 But here I am more concerned with how the neighbour functions as a different kind of other, more akin to the psychoanalytic figure of the ‘big Other’, the imaginary incarnation of Lacan’s ‘symbolic order’, ‘he’ who maintains the impersonal set of rules that co-ordinates our co-existence. In middle-class society the neighbour is an overseeing presence, the one who is always potentially observing or listening, a judge, the barometer of ‘ordinary’ opinion, potentially occupying the position of guard in the Panopticon. The resulting climate of mutual suspicion which typifies the neighbourhood is referred to directly in Rear Window in an exchange between Jeffries and his girlfriend Lisa about what she drily calls his ‘rear window ethics’. Reflecting on whether it is right to subject his neighbours to scrutiny, he points out that ‘they have the same chance. They can look at me like a bug under glass, if they want to’ (Hitchcock, 1954). This is the logic of the surveillance culture, central to the argument put forward in support of liberty-controlling devices such as the security camera or the national identity card: if you have nothing to hide then why would you object to being watched? But it is also part of being a neighbour in the modern, white-collar, United States. To be a neighbour is to be subject to an internalized apprehension of potentially constant surveillance by other neighbours. To an extent, I think we can take Jeffries’s claims at face value. He is simply subscribing to a typical logic. But, more than this, Rear Window shows how this internalized sense of scrutiny, both as bearer and object, extends beyond the straightforward seer-seen dyad which defines the Panopticon. In an intriguing passage in Discipline and Punish Foucault turns his attention to the particular role played by the police in the disciplinary episteme. Though the police, in common with other modern regimes of surveillance, work according to a practice of ‘unceasing observation’ accompanied by ‘a complex documentary organization’ (1977, p. 214), they cannot enjoy the fixed position and ability to survey a clearly demarcated space afforded the prison guard in the Panopticon. Unlike other institutions, such as the penitentiary, the police is an apparatus that must be coextensive with the entire social body and not only by the extreme limits that it embraces, but by the minuteness of the details it is concerned with . . . With the police, one is in the indefinite world of a supervision that seeks ideally to reach the most elementary particle, the most passing phenomenon, of the social body. (1977, pp. 213–14) Foucault explains that for modern policing to operate effectively ‘this power had to be given the instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance, capable of making all visible, as long as it could itself remain invisible. It had to be like a faceless gaze that transformed the whole social body into a field

198

Crime Culture

of perception: thousands of eyes posted everywhere, mobile attentions ever on the alert, a long, hierarchized network’ (1977, p. 214). In Paris in the eighteenth century – the example given by Foucault – this hierarchy involved a network of commissaires, inspecteurs, secret agents, informers and prostitutes. Their work created what Foucault calls the ‘immense police text’ which covered society, in the form of registering ‘forms of behaviour, attitudes, possibilities, suspicions – a permanent account of individuals’ behaviour’ (1977, p. 214). A distinguishing feature of this modern mechanism of supervision is that it was not simply directed ‘from above’, that is, from the king, but ‘was also capable of responding to solicitations from below’ (1977, p. 214). (This is why prostitutes and informers were part of the hierarchy.) Surveillance, then, as Foucault insists, is built into the structure rather than purely the responsibility of those in authority. The notion of ‘thousands of eyes posted everywhere’ conveys how, in spreading through the social body, into every neighbourhood, beyond the institutions specifically designed to effect discipline, the panoptic machine co-opts into its service not simply those in authority but otherwise insignificant, ordinary members of society, too. Where the network can be administered, directed by the police, it also functions of its own accord, given the way the disciplinary mechanism is woven into the social fabric. It is not difficult to posit the existence of an updated version of Foucault’s eighteenth-century network in today’s less obviously hierarchical society; and the middle-class neighbourhood is instrumental. Indeed formalized versions of the system exist. The logic of a thousand eyes underpins the ‘Neighbourhood Watch’ schemes begun in the 1960s in the United States and in the 1980s in the United Kingdom, which revolve around the conviction (as one website has it) that ‘Every day, we encounter situations calling upon us to be the eyes and ears of law enforcement.’5 It shows that the panoptic gaze can become diffused, refracted, ‘multi-optic’, less the property of a ‘voyeur-god’, in Michel de Certeau’s phrase, looking down on the world as ‘a text that lies before one’s eyes (1984, p. 92) than a network of collaborators and informers contributing to a constantly evolving police-text. To return to Rear Window, then, rather than considering Jeffries as someone who enjoys the power of the panoptic ‘voyeur-god’, we can see him as typical of any inhabitant of an ordinary (i.e. neither especially impoverished nor affluent) modern neighbourhood, that is, capable of bestowing a punitive gaze on his neighbours – but also subject to the gaze of another, as is demonstrated in the crucial scene, towards the end of the film, where Thorwald suddenly returns his look from across the courtyard. This implies that the power in the Rear Window neighbourhood, true to the nature of discipline insisted upon by Foucault, is structural rather than something possessed only by a privileged few. It is potentially available to all, for everyone is potentially the subject of a gaze. Rear Window suggests that the logic of the Foucauldian ‘dividing practice’ pertains in the modern neighbourhood: everyone is categorized as either lawbreaker or upholder of the law (though it would be more accurate to say

Crime Culture and the Rear Window Paradigm

199

that in a paranoid structure this effectively makes everyone potentially a lawbreaker). As either side of this binary, Jeffries and Thorwald might be regarded as typical examples of the inhabitants of the modern neighbourhood; we just happen to have been given an insight into their stories. I think this is a more plausible way of understanding Jeffries’s efforts to snuff out crime than to see him as functioning as a surrogate detective, as some critics have (see Brand, 1999). Unable to walk, never mind stroll, Jeffries is far from the flâneur-detective for he patently lacks the mobile gaze of flâneur or private eye. I prefer to consider Jeffries as someone who – like all urban dwellers – happens to be placed in the panoptic machine, and thereby comes to function as scrutineer, participating in the business of sorting out normal behaviour from abnormal. But at the same time, his own potential exposure means Jeffries is not equivalent to the guard in the panoptic tower. He is more of an ‘agent of detection’ rather than a fully fledged surrogate detective, the kind suggested by Foucault’s policing network of informers. I think this interpretation of his position is more in keeping with the pathos and curmudgeonliness which James Stewart brings to the part than that of hero-detective. The role of informer is not one which Jeffries inhabits fully (it is notable that he apparently has no intention of calling the police as he watches Miss Lonely Hearts preparing to kill herself) but nevertheless it is one he does perform literally at the climax of the film, when he calls the police, giving his name and number and informing them that ‘A man is assaulting a woman at one two five west ninth street. Second floor rear. Make it fast’ (Hitchcock, 1954). The end of the film depicts the weight of the law finally gathering behind one of its representatives, as a finally credulous Doyle (the ironically named detective) and police back-up arrive to save him and arrest Thorwald. One of the precepts of the panoptic regime which Rear Window neatly encapsulates is Foucault’s insistence that power is a ‘disindividualized’ form rather than something a specific individual can possess (Foucault, 1977, p. 202). The Panopticon is a machine that creates ‘homogeneous effects of power’ (Foucault, 1977, p. 202). Jeffries is bestowed with power simply by being placed in the machine. Foucault makes clear that disindividualized power also means that it does not matter who exercises power, for anyone can: ‘in the absence of the director, [it can be] his family, his friends, his visitors, even his servants’ (1977, p. 202). Nor does it matter ‘what motive animates’ the person who does: it may be ‘the curiosity of the indiscreet, the malice of a child, the thirst for knowledge of a philosopher who wishes to visit this museum of human nature, or the perversity of those who take pleasure in spying and punishing’ (1977, p. 202). What matters is that those who are caught up in the panoptic regime become inevitably part of a crime culture in which the bestower of the gaze and the one who is caught in the ‘trap’ of visibility take on the roles of policeman and criminal. The significance of this in relation to Rear Window is that it suggests that the question of Jeffries’s motives, the preoccupation of many of the film’s critics, is little more than a red herring.

200

Crime Culture

‘Fear thy neighbour’: Descendents of Rear Window One of the advantages of considering Rear Window as a crime film about an informer rather than a misguided voyeur or immobile private eye is that it reminds us that it is a product of the 1950s, a period where cultural production becomes especially marked by paranoia about the depraved other masquerading as an ordinary person, as exemplified in cold-war sci-fi films such as Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1956), or noir thrillers by writers such as Patricia Highsmith or Jim Thompson. Yet it also remains a useful way of approaching the recent string of films which demonize the figure of the neighbour but are the products of a new climate of paranoia in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Perhaps the most faithful echo of Rear Window is D. J. Caruso’s 2007 film, Disturbia. Disturbia transposes the original film’s 1950s Greenwich village setting to a generic US suburb in the present day, while overlaying the original noir story with the conventions of two later genres, the teen suspense/romance movie (as in 10 Things I Hate About You [1999], Never Back Down [2008], etc.), and the slasher movie/serial killer film (e.g. Halloween [1978], The Silence of the Lambs [1991]). Another twist is that its counterpart of L. B. Jeffries is this time himself a criminal. Placed under house arrest after the struggle to deal with the trauma of his father’s death causes him to assault his geography teacher, the teenage protagonist, Kale Brecht, starts to take a keen interest in the routine of his neighbourhood and spies on his neighbours through binoculars. He begins a relationship with one of them, Ashley, the girl next door (literally and metaphorically), and begins to suspect another, Robert Turner, of being a serial killer, having witnessed apparently troubling events in his house at night. Effectively only a little more mobile than Jeffries, Kale is similarly unable to gain the proof required to back up his suspicions. Like his predecessor, he has to enlist the support of his partner, Ashley, as well as his friend, the goofy Ronnie, to investigate on his behalf. Like Rear Window, Disturbia carefully defamiliarizes the ordinary ‘neighbourhood machine’. Early in the film, the confined protagonist discovers it as if for the first time. When Ronnie comes to visit, Kale asks him to share the view: ‘This is reality without the TV. There’s a world right outside my window’ (Caruso, 2007). He ‘introduces’ Ronnie to a range of neighbours and their routines: the man mowing his lawn, the tearaway kids, the women off to their tennis match. But the surveillance reveals that the daily routine involves secret, transgressive behaviour: one neighbour is having an affair with another while his wife is at her Thursday tennis lesson, a group of boys watch porn in their bedroom unbeknownst to their mother. The implication is that this pattern of normality masking hidden transgression is played out continually. At whatever time Ronnie had happened to arrive, Kale would have been able to show him the secret drama of the neighbourhood: ‘You see what I’m saying here?’, he asks Ronnie, rhetorically (Caruso, 2007).

Crime Culture and the Rear Window Paradigm

201

What he is saying is suggested by the Freudian portmanteau term which provides the film’s title. This indicates that, on one level, the film is a deliberate attempt to offer up a commentary on the secret but ubiquitous criminality of the modern, affluent suburban neighbourhood. It indicates, too, that the subject of the film is not simply the fact that – as its tagline puts it – ‘Every killer lives next door to someone’, but the whole idea of the neighbourhood as an uncanny locale. Where the suburban is conventionally synonymous with the mundane, this film puts forward the countersuggestion that, by definition, suburbia is disturbed or disturbing to those who care to scrutinize it. The word ‘disturbia’ itself is used once in the film as Kale and Ashley watch, through a camera Kale has hooked up to his computer to relay images in nightmarish, monochromatic close-up, Turner seduce a woman he has brought back from a nightclub and are convinced (rightly, as it turns out) that he subsequently kills. While they watch, Kale puts on some music to try to match the rhythm of her dancing and finds a perfect match: ‘Only in Disturbia’, he says. ‘Where else are you gonna get this kind of entertainment?’ (Caruso, 2007). Miran Božovicˇ has noted that Rear Window demonstrates that ‘the voyeur himself is always in the picture . . . fascinated by his own presence, by his own gaze in it’ (1992, p. 175). In Disturbia, Kale’s question about entertainment and his impulsive decision to give the scene a soundtrack suggests that his and Ashley’s own activity as secret viewers is part of the ‘disturbia’. It thus emphasizes Rear Window’s overall assertion that the neighbourhood is a world of illicit actors and illicit viewers, a kind of crime culture, in other words. Wherever we care to look – and indeed the desire to look is itself the product of this particular crime culture – a transgression of the law is being committed, whether it is voyeurism, children using porn, or murder. Kale’s interest, like Jeffries’s, leads his ‘accomplice’ (in this case Ronnie, where in Rear Window it is Lisa) to actual breaking and entering as he searches for proof of Turner’s guilt. But the connotations of the film’s title and its implicit case about the neighbourhood suggests that, like Rear Window, the film conceives of this underside as largely structural rather than the consequence of personal desire. Kale only becomes a voyeur because he is confined to his room. A clear difference between the two films, however, is that where everything is ultimately on view in Rear Window, the scrutineers in Disturbia need to penetrate further beneath the appearances outside their window. Proof of Thorwald’s guilt is exhibited for Jeffries to see – once Lisa has managed to tease it out by slipping Jeffries’s accusatory note under his door. But in Disturbia, the truth can only be discovered by penetrating the interior spaces of Turner’s apartment directly. His guilt is revealed only once Kale has used his technological prowess to magnify a grainy image until the face of a corpse is visible inside Turner’s garage. This is followed by a scene in which Kale enters Turner’s house (to save his kidnapped mother) and finds a whole series of false walls and hidden corridors within, which lead to a makeshift ‘mortuary’ room with tools and trophies, and a cellar water tank strewn with floating body parts. This kind of

202

Crime Culture

revelation in a domestic space is a familiar trope in the serial killer film since The Silence of the Lambs and undoubtedly dates back to key points in the Gothic tradition such as ‘Bluebeard’s Castle’ or Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’. But here it indicates that there is a deeper and more disturbing level of depravity at the heart of the neighbourhood. This is disturbia’s secret reality, the logical endpoint, or perhaps even the source, the motor, of the impulse to transgress which operates just beneath the surface of its mundane exterior. The architecture of the neighbourhood is structured around a deep, hidden core of evil. It is uncanny, in Freudian terms, for the urge to mutilate and destroy the other amounts to the frighteningly unfamiliar element at the heart of the workaday world of habitual, if isolated, co-existence. But, at the same time, this discovery is something which the protagonist – like the viewer of the film – always expected. It points to the uncanny truth about the kind of criminal investigation dramatized in Rear Window and Disturbia: the investigator uncovers what he always knew – because if he didn’t know it, he wouldn’t have been looking in the first place. And he is only looking because the neighbourhood structure compels him to. The desire to look is part of the crime culture created by the modern neighbourhood; the viewer is involved in the same disciplinary formation as the object of the gaze. In suggesting this, the film reveals an interesting parallel between the panoptic gaze and the Freudian notion of the uncanny. The kind of surveillance exemplified by the Panopticon is predicated on the idea that bringing what is hidden into the light will dispel its menace, and make it conform to the familiar codes of the disciplinary regime. The uncanny, however, involves a more unsettling bringing to light, one which both makes the familiar strange and defamiliarizes the known. This is the kind of ‘enlightenment’ we find in Disturbia: Turner’s crimes are brought to light but in doing so the familiar world of the affluent suburban neighbourhood is made disturbingly strange. Moreover, while it is just as histrionic as the ending of Rear Window, and even more indebted to stock movie convention, Disturbia’s climax nevertheless underlines more accurately a key dimension of the panoptic logic underpinning both movies: the hidden core of the neighbourhood escapes the view of even the most adept, dedicated surveyor. To uncover it, a more active, mobile, procedure is required than the gaze of the voyeur-god. When Kale leaves his ‘prison’ to rescue his mother from hers, naturally his electronic tag is triggered, alerting the police. The climax to the movie literally sees the protagonist penetrating the core of ‘disturbia’ and shining a light on its hidden depravity, its tools of destruction and its hidden corpses, before the police can take control.

A ‘heightened state of paranoia’: Arlington Road and Civic Duty Even though the film is directly concerned neither with terrorism nor politics, the impact of early twenty-first-century terrorist-panic is detectable in Disturbia.

Crime Culture and the Rear Window Paradigm

203

When Turner is warning the teenagers not to probe into his private life, he tells Ashley that ‘the world is . . . in a heightened state of paranoia’ (Caruso, 2007). Elsewhere in the film a parallel is drawn between Kale’s neighbourhood vigilance and the United States’s role as ‘global police-force’ (Caruso, 2007). When first tormented by the boys across the street, Kale refers to them as a ‘little shitbagger sleeper cell’, and at the end, once he has finally got revenge on them, he tells Ashley, ‘that’s just the first strike, though . . . it’s an ongoing offensive against neighbourhood evil’ (Caruso, 2007). Strictly speaking, it’s his second strike, having first dealt with the far more dangerous Turner. Following his achievement, we might be inclined to trust Kale’s instincts. But his determination to turn his attention to less threatening targets in future makes him conform to a familiar social type in the early twenty-first-century United States: the neighbour-informant. This is the individual interpellated by the 2002 ‘Citizen Corps’ scheme, introduced after the Patriot Act of 2001, in order to facilitate the provision of information by ordinary Americans relating to suspicious, potentially terrorist-related activity – thus casting the whole of the United States as one gigantic neighbourhood. This kind of citizen is at the heart of two other films from the past decade to deploy the Rear Window paradigm but which shift the concern with the domestic ‘enemy within’ directly – if not somewhat crudely – into the sphere of terrorism: Arlington Road (1999) and Civic Duty (2006). Although, as in Rear Window and Disturbia, the protagonist’s motivation and actions are questionable, his suspicions are nevertheless proved correct. The message is thus underlined: paranoia about the neighbour is justified, because the respectable neighbourhoods of America are likely to conceal criminality. In fact, these films suggest our neighbours are not simply criminals in disguise, but devious enough to ensnare us in the devastating consequences of their crimes. Nor is it a matter of a single threat lurking in the midst of a whole community which must be uncovered and snuffed out, but a hidden network of criminality – the obverse of the network of informers required to combat it. Arlington Road, with its emphasis on suburban normality, a world of barbecues and Discoverer camps functioning as fronts for nefarious activity, is in some ways less of a contemporary appropriation of the Rear Window paradigm than that of another classic 1950s paranoid neighbour film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). Instead of aliens, we have terrorists – not menacing MiddleEastern figures, but ones who don’t appear different at all on the face of it, because they are white, affluent, just like ‘us’. This is something of a departure for American popular mythology surrounding terrorism (a sharp contrast, for example, to the caricatured ‘Libyans’ who roam through 1984’s Back to the Future). The reason is made clear by the film’s thinly veiled references to three home-grown terrorist episodes in the 1990s: the siege at Ruby Ridge, Idaho in 1992, in which an out-of-control law enforcement team inadvertently triggered a massacre of FBI agents, suspects and innocent people; the Oklahoma bombing in 1995, a reprisal of sorts; and the capture in 1996 of the Unabomber,

204

Crime Culture

whose image appears in a course handbook a student is shown leafing through. The 1990s is the decade when terrorism ‘came home’ to the United States, years before the events of 9/11. The story of Arlington Road revolves around the suspicions harboured by the protagonist, the University Professor of American History Michael Faraday (curiously named after the great nineteenth-century British scientist) towards his neighbours, the ‘Langs’. This family is presented as the archetypal ordinary American family, hosting barbecues, looking after their neighbour’s children, concerned about the declining values of their country. Mrs Lang in particular is the perfect all-American housewife and mom (played by Joan Cusack in a way that resembles the sinister-because-ordinary domestic characters in Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Secretly, though, the Langs are part of the ‘anti-government movement’, prominent within American culture in the 1990s, and the trigger for the tragedies at Ruby Ridge and Oklahoma, where groups of white Americans vowed no longer to recognize the authority of the federal government. The idea of the white, ‘home-grown’ terrorist is not the only challenge to popular opinion mounted by the film. It also seeks to contest the ‘myth’ of the lone perpetrator of terrorist acts, emphasizing that in reality terrorism works through networks and communities. Civic Duty’s portrayal of the terrorist-neighbour reverts to a more familiar stereotype, the Islamic fundamentalist, but gives it a more urgent post-9/11 relevance by showing him at home in the United States. He is set against the film’s protagonist, Terry Allen, an angry disaffected individual, reminiscent of the ‘avenging’ right-wing heroes in vigilante movies, such as Falling Down (1993) and Gran Torino (2008). Allen is a young accountant, recently married, and planning to move into a beautiful house in the suburbs, when he loses his job. Besides the feelings of inadequacy this setback produces (he is sure his wife finds him boring) it means he spends more time confined to their small, dark apartment which overlooks a claustrophobic, empty yard. He becomes suspicious of his neighbour, a young Islamic graduate student, Gabe Hassan, who lives in one of the next door apartments. Allen thinks he is making chemical bombs and is being secretly funded by a powerful Islamic organization, the Sons of Benevolence, though his suspicions are also fuelled by sexual jealousy, after his wife becomes interested in Hassan. The twist is both expected because of the familiarity of Rear Window and Arlington Road, and surprising because it is delayed until after the action has apparently climaxed. Having impulsively taken Hassan hostage, partly due to his jealous rage, partly because the FBI do not appear to be taking his suspicions seriously, and having accidentally killed his own wife in the siege, Terry is convicted and imprisoned. It thus seems the reversal of the Rear Window paradigm: the suspicious watcher is actually the villain and the apparently sinister neighbour the innocent victim. Yet in the final scene Terry learns from the TV news that precisely the kind of plot he was convinced Hassan was co-ordinating has just been uncovered by the FBI.

Crime Culture and the Rear Window Paradigm

205

As with Disturbia the implication behind Arlington Road and Civic Duty is that the suburban neighbourhood is a breeding-ground for crime and also for the suspicion of crime. Each resembles the other films in providing, in the carefully evoked setting for its story, an anatomy of a modern neighbourhood – though ones which differ in important ways. Arlington Road’s interest in examining the modern neighbourhood is clear from its title, the name of the road upon which the two protagonists, Faraday and Lang, live, and which echoes the cemetery where US national figures and military casualties are buried, although the eponymous street is scarcely referred to in the film. The film’s ‘philosophy’ of neighbourhood living is emphasized by the tagline used to promote it, ‘Fear Thy Neighbor’. It opens with the son of the Langs walking through an empty, affluent, suburban street, blood dripping from a horrific stump at the end of his arm (which we later find out is caused by his parents’s terrorist activity). When he discovers him, Faraday’s hysterical cries for help remain ominously unheard. From the outset it seems this is a neighbourhood where no one cares. This impression appears to be contradicted soon after, with the first of two barbecue scenes in the film, to which Faraday and his family are invited to join the Langs and their neighbours in welcoming Brady home. But the second barbecue scene, taking place this time at night, full of shadows and shot in eerie slow-motion, reveals these apparently ordinary people actually to be the sinister members of an anti-government network, who we will see acting as part of the terrorist attack at the conclusion of the film. The suggestion is that no one is what they seem; the only reason for a community to get together is to participate in crime. This sense of emptiness suggested by the setting underscores the official message of the film – delivered via didactic episodes in which Faraday teaches his students about home-grown terrorism – that the idea of a lone terrorist is a consoling myth sustained by the authorities and the media designed to ‘give[-] us our security back’ when in fact terrorism is the result of a network of terrorists. Faraday himself – recalling Theodore Kaczynski, the reclusive former academic who became the ‘Unabomber’ – so easily fits the bill of a lone maniac but a subtle misanthropic reversal underpins the story: ‘friends’, that is, Lang and his network of Discoverer-organizing, party-throwing accomplices, are really enemies, while loners, like Faraday, are the mistreated. The neighbourhood in Civic Duty is equally devoid of community. In presenting it, the film provides more of a direct, subtly self-reflexive, contrast to Rear Window. Where the world outside Jeffries’s window is always alive (though there is little in the way of community interaction), Allen’s courtyard is cold, claustrophobic and bleak. While Allen’s apartment backs on to others, nothing is visible through their windows. At no point in the film, neither as the story is set up nor during the drama which ensues, are we aware of any other neighbours. What we have, rather than windows which reveal every minute detail of the interior and the lives in the inhabitants inside, as in Rear Window, are windows which reveal nothing. This applies even to the terrorists’s kitchen window, which is visible

206

Crime Culture

from Allen’s, but at a right-angle, and obscured by a curtain. This means that Allen (and the viewer of course) cannot catch anything but a glimpse of the suspect and this only if he happens to be at the window. Allen therefore has fewer and weaker clues with which to construct his case (such as Hassan emptying the bin unusually late at night, or receiving shady visitors) than Jeffries in Rear Window. His position is manifestly not that of the guard in the Panopticon. The existence of Hassan’s friends, though none of these are ever identified or dwelt upon by the film, also reminds us that the arrangement of apartments which constitutes the modern ‘neighbourhood-panopticon’ is no straightforward counterpart of Bentham’s panopticon, for they do permit lateral interaction – a conspiracy, in other words. Both movies thus present viewers with a world in which the panoptic gaze itself, the chief mechanism of modern discipline, is absent or incapable of doing its job. To return to Foucault’s analysis of the police, this means that discipline must operate throughout a more extensive and complex network of ‘a thousand eyes’. While much less emphasis is placed on the gaze in Arlington Road than in Rear Window or Disturbia, in that film, too, any view Faraday has of the Langs across the street only serves to emphasize their veneer of unthreatening normality – a smile, a wave. It means that in their role as part of a state network of informers, and in the face of unshakeable scepticism from their partner (unlike in Rear Window and Disturbia) each protagonist is forced to gather the information themselves. For this reason, the centrepiece of each film is an episode in which he must penetrate deep into the heart of the suspect’s private space to confirm his suspicions. Faraday takes advantage of Mrs Lang’s neighbourly hospitality while locked out of his house to snoop around Lang’s study. There he discovers proof that the plans for the shopping mall he is apparently working on are in fact those of a government institution. In Civic Duty, Allen enters Hassan’s apartment after he finds the door tantalizingly ajar. As soon as he enters, the apartment’s truth opens itself up to him. A cursory inspection is sufficient to reveal what Hassan is really up to (making chemical weapons and receiving large amounts of money in support) while there are also clues as to Hassan’s ‘real’ self: Terry discovers the flowers his wife had given Gabe as a gesture of friendship tossed in the bin. In terms of suspense movies, a scene in which the protagonist infiltrates ‘enemy space’ at the risk of being caught – which, of course, he or she duly is – is standard (see, for example, Blue Velvet [1986]). Against the background of panoptic paranoia, however, in these films, it underlines the logic inherent to Foucauldian ‘discipline’: that hidden places, invisible to the panoptic gaze, contain dark secrets and therefore must be exposed. It is in this context that Civic Duty invites the viewer to consider its title – a phrase which is never uttered in the film, and therefore implicitly is left for the viewer as a topic for debate, using the film as an example. What is one’s civic duty in a climate

Crime Culture and the Rear Window Paradigm

207

where terrorists pose as ordinary neighbours, and where the alienation of the modern neighbourhood functions as a shield for nefarious activity? How blurred is the line separating a sense of civic duty (what we might call a normative, ‘public’ desire, generated through the disciplinary field) from paranoid vigilantism (a private desire founded on a more complex, shadowy notion of otherness)? The former is represented in the film by the FBI agent Tom Hillary, the sympathetic portrayal of whom underlines the film’s conviction that the FBI is not necessarily the evil, punitive Big Brother entity it might be assumed to be, blindly acting out the punitive fantasies encoded in post9/11 legislation like the Patriot Act. Hillary admits to Allen during the last moments of the siege: ‘I wanna be that guy that knocks down every single door – to keep our citizens safe, to keep our families safe. I wanna be that guy, and it frustrates the hell outta me that I can’t, and it makes me very angry’ (Renfroe, 2006). But the implication here is that what prevents him from knocking down every door is precisely his official position, and, further, that the official panoptic mechanism requires amateur assistance in policing its blind spots. It thus reinforces the contradictory message which has led Allen to this course of action in the first place. This has been delivered repeatedly and relentlessly to him from the outset through the 24-hour news-media apparatus. The film’s opening scene-setting involves a background of continual cable news broadcasts in which issues of national security (e.g. increased security at ports, attacks on mosques, a new video tape released by Bin Laden) are referred to. The film’s use of 24-hour news also lays the blame for this firmly at the door of the prevailing panoptic regime, namely the US government under George W. Bush. Allen shows the effects of the climate of fear and sense of public obligation which is inscribed in The Patriot Act and supporting ideological statements by the Bush regime. The final scene of the film, as Allen bitterly recognizes that he was right all along, sees him walking away from the TV, having finally switched off the news, but with the voices of many broadcasts echoing in his head. The cacophony of voices which closes the film evokes the experience of paranoid hallucination. The last voice is that of President Bush himself declaring: ‘In all that lies before us, may God grant us wisdom, and may He watch over the United States of America’ (Renfroe, 2006). This was a line from the end of a televised speech delivered to a Joint Session of Congress and the American people on the evening of 20 September 2001, the address which announced imminent military action on Afghanistan in reprisal for the 9/11 attacks, as well as the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. In the speech the President pledged that ‘We will come together to give law enforcement the additional tools it needs to track down terror here at home.’ Terry, the most emblematic informer-figure in all the films we have been considering, is the very embodiment of one of these ‘additional tools’.

208

Crime Culture

Conclusion: ‘It Had to Be Murder’ In Discipline and Punish Foucault famously declares (challenging Guy Debord’s 1967 The Society of the Spectacle): ‘Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance . . . We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine’ (1977, p. 217). It is natural to interpret this statement as a summary of a shift between different kinds of fixed visual modes, from a spectacle staged by the few for the eyes of the many to a performance delivered by the many for the discriminating gaze of the few. The visual connotations of key terms such as the ‘panoptic’ and surveiller6 underline this conclusion. But while vision is of course central to the operation of the panoptic regime, Foucault’s classic study demonstrates that discipline and power operate as a more complex ‘type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another’ (p. 205), a fluid system rather than a fixed model of unseen observer and trapped, alienated, and constantly visible inmates. The function of the ‘voyeur-god’ performed by the original Panopticon is merely its ideal, a pure form of the system of surveillance which operates in a number of different ways. The effect of this more complex arrangement is something which needs to be understood when considering crime and the policing of crime in the modern world – and is something underlined in the films considered in this chapter, which warns each viewer to ‘fear thy neighbour’. Films such Disturbia, Arlington Road and Civic Duty update the Rear Window template to present us with microcosms of everyday life in the atomized, architecturally dense, modern urban and suburban world. But in doing so I think they invite an alternative reading from the obvious one, in which we see the protagonists as lone investigative heroes who, faced with the indifference or incompetence of the Law, have no option but to take matters into their own hands. Instead of playing the ‘private eye’, each protagonist acts as agent of surveillance in an implicit network of informers, that reinforces the disciplinary power which operates in the modern world. As well as affirming the dangers which lurk at the heart of the ordinary neighbourhood, each film also contends that the law is not the responsibility of a specially designated authority with the power to oversee like the guard in the Panopticon, but something which requires collaboration, ‘a thousand eyes’ instead of two. This is especially clear in the three more recent films, none of which replicate the specific architecture of the Panopticon in the manner of Rear Window. None of the protagonists has a consistent, clear view of the object of their suspicion and consequently need to penetrate the suspect’s interior world themselves in order to expose its secrets to the light. The price of such exposure is that any benefit to the community is counterbalanced by the occluded horrors that are revealed. Films such as these suggest that post-war cinema imagines the ordinary modern middle-class neighbourhood as a crime culture, part of the panoptic machine which defines our society, in which suspicion needs to be generated in order to police the potential lawbreaker. Once you enter the machine you become simultaneously an object of suspicion, and also, inevitably, the agent of

Crime Culture and the Rear Window Paradigm

209

surveillance. While the terrorist-movies Arlington Road and Civic Duty alter the Rear Window template by ending with their protagonists being ironically accused of the very crime they have suspected, the fact is that in all four of the films, the paranoia is justified. And this requires us to make one final challenge to critical orthodoxy about Rear Window. Many critics have assumed that the film is about exposing the flaws of its protagonist’s impulse to pry into his neighbours lives instead of resolving the problems in his own: the film mounts, to use Stam and Pearson’s rather odd phrase, a ‘critique of voyeurism’ (1983). But while Jeffries’s behaviour is clearly abnormal and obsessive, the ending of the film sees him vindicated rather than exposed as a fool. Thus, statements that Rear Window ‘enunciates a postmodern epistemology where things are real if they appear to be real’ (Denzin, 1995, pp. 118–19) or that Jeffries ‘watches, but does not see: is it a murder or just a series of coincidences?’ (Dolar, 1992, p. 143), or that the ending of the film is ‘bizarrely inappropriate’ (Brand, 1999, p. 132), miss the point about the effect of the film. The fact is that Jeffries is proved right: the crime is real, he does see as well as simply watch. The conclusion is stated in Woolrich’s alternative title for the original story (which also ends with Thorwald being proven guilty): ‘It Had to be Murder.’ As well as depicting a crime culture which operates in the modern neighbourhood, films such as these play their part in sustaining a crime culture on a different level: that is, the particular circuit by which popular culture’s continual depictions of criminality ‘feeds back’ into society. The paranoid, panoptic, way of life in the modern neighbourhood which these films dissect may be far from the peaceful, mundane reality of life in most modern neighbourhoods, but they subtly condition us to suspect crime in the most ordinary of places.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6

The commandment ‘thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’ first appears in Leviticus, chapter 19, and is then assimilated into Christianity, appearing frequently in the New Testament. This is the title of the long-running British television series, of which 21 programmes were broadcast from 1998–2004 (source: British Film Institute Film and TV Database: http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/series/29201). The story was retitled ‘It Had to Be Murder’ for magazine publication, and then ‘Rear Window’, when published in book form. This kind of empathy is ‘imaginary’ in the Lacanian sense, that is, taking place in the register by which we (mis)recognize ourselves in others. But the neighbour is also, according Žižek, encountered in the real, ‘as primarily a thing, a traumatic intruder, someone whose different way of life (or rather, way of jouissance materialized in its social practices and rituals) disturbs us, throws the balance of our way of life off the rails, when it comes too close’ (2008, p. 59). The National Sheriff’s Association, National Neighborhood Watch Programme: http://www.usaonwatch.org The original title of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish was Surveiller et Punir.

Bibliography

Abagnale, F. (2001), The Art of the Steal. New York: Broadway Books. Abagnale, F. with Redding, S. (1980), Catch Me if You Can: The Amazing True Story of the Youngest and Most Daring Con Man in the History of Fun and Profit (Reprint 2000). New York: Broadway Books. Agamben, G. (1998), Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel HellerRoazon. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. —. (1999), The Man without Content, trans. Georgia Albert. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Aitken, S. C. (2001), Geographies of Young People: The Morally Contested Spaces of Identity. London: Routledge. The American Society for Industrial Security (ASIS), at http://www.asisonline.org/ (accessed 3 June 2009). Amin, A. (2000), ‘Post-Fordism: Models, Fantasies and Phantoms of Transition’, in Post-Fordism: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Amit, R. (2007), ‘Trauma-Image: The Elephant Experience’, in A. Sarat, N. Davidovitch and M. Alberstein (eds), Trauma and Memory: Reading, Healing, and Making Law. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 78–94. Anderson, J. L. (1973), ‘Japanese Swordfighters and American Gunfighters’, Cinema Journal, 12, (2), 1–21. Anderson, M. J. (2004) ‘Before Sunrise, or Los Angeles Plays Itself in a Lonely Place’, http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/33/collateral.html (accessed 14 July 2009). Ashby, R. (1956), Introduction to Cybernetics. London: Chapman and Hall. —. (2004), Aphorisms, http://www. cybsoc.org/ross.htm Badiou, A. (2007), The Century, trans. A. Toscano. Cambridge: Polity Press. Baecker, D. (1996), ‘The Reality of Motion Pictures’, MLN: Modern Language Notes, 111, (3), 560–77. Bailey, F. (2000), Death’s Favourite Child. Johnson City, TN: Overmountain Press. Bailey, F. Y. (2008), African American Mystery Writers: A Historical and Thematic Study. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland. Baker, B. (2006), Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular Genres, 1945–2000. London: Continuum. Baker, N. (1992), The Lavender House Murder. Tallahassee, FL: Naiad Press. Bakhtin, M. (1984), Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Ballard, J. G. (1977), High Rise [1975]. London: Triad Panther. —. (1984a), ‘Interview by A. Juno and Vale (1982)’, Re/Search: J. G. Ballard, 8, (9), 6–35. —. (1984b), ‘Interview by Graeme Revell (1983)’, Re/Search: J. G. Ballard, 8, (9), 42–52.

Bibliography

211

—. (1985a), The Atrocity Exhibition [1970]. London: Triad Granada. —. (1985b), Crash [1973]. London: Triad Granada. —. (1985c), The Empire of the Sun [1984]. London: Panther. —. (1988), Running Wild. London: Hutchinson. —. (1991), The Kindness of Women. London: HarperCollins. —. (1996), Cocaine Nights. London: Flamingo. —. (2000), Super-Cannes. London: Flamingo. —. (2003), Millennium People. London: Harper Perennial. —. (2006), Kingdom Come. London: Fourth Estate. —. (2008), ‘An Exhibition of Atrocities: J. G. Ballard on Mondo Films: An Interview with Mark Goodall’. The Ballardian, http://www.ballardian.com/jg-ballard-onmondo-films (accessed 16 April 2009). Banham, R. (1960), Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. London: Architectural Press. Baringer, S. (2004), The Metanarrative of Suspicion in Late Twentieth-Century America. London and New York: Routledge. Baron, C. (2004), ‘Suiting Up for Postmodern Performance in John Woo’s The Killer’, in C. Baron, D. Carson and F. P. Tomasulo (eds), More than a Method: Trends and Traditions in Contemporary Film Performance. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, pp. 297–329. Barrett, F. J. (2001), ‘The Organizational Construction of Hegemonic Masculinity: The Case of the US Navy’, in S. M. Whitehead and F. J. Barrett (eds), The Masculinities Reader. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 77–99. Barthes, R. (1979), Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath. Glasgow: Fontana/ Collins. Bataille, G. (1986), Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights Books. —. (1992), On Nietzsche, trans. Bruce Boon. New York: Paragon House. —. (1993), Literature and Evil, trans. Alastair Hamilton. London, New York: Marion Boyars. Bateson, G. (1979), Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. Hialeah, FL: Dutton Press. Baudrillard, J. (1993), Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. —. (1994), Simulacra and Simulation, trans. S. F. Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Belfield, R. (2008), Assassination: The Killers and Their Paymasters Revealed. London: Magpie Books. Beniger, J. R. (1986), The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Benjamin, W. (1996), ‘Critique of Violence’, trans. Edmund Jephcott in Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (eds), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. I, 1927–1934. Cambridge, MA, and London: Bellnap Press of Harvard University Press. Benshoff, H. M. and Griffin, S. (eds) (2003), America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Bentham, J. (1995), The Panopticon Writings, ed. Miran Božovicˇ. London and New York: Verso. Bernstein, L. (2002), The Greatest Menace: Organized Crime in Cold War America. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press.

212

Bibliography

Bertens, H. and D’haen, T. (2001), Contemporary American Crime Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bertolucci, B. (Director) 1970, Il Conformista (The Conformist) [motion picture]. Italy: Mars Film. Beugnet, M. (2005), ‘Evil and the Senses: Philippe Grandrieux’s Sombre and La Vie nouvelle’, Studies in French Cinema, 5, (3), 175–84. Biesen, S. C. (2005), Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Billen, A. (2007), ‘Last Night’s TV’, The Times, 27 November, p. 19. Birch, E. L. (1994), Black American Women’s Writing: A Quilt of Many Colours. London and New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Biressi, A. (2001), Crime, Fear and the Law in True Crime Stories. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bland, E. T. (1992), Dead Time. New York: St. Martins Press. —. (2004), A Cold and Silent Dying. New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur. Bliss, M. (2002), Between the Bullets: The Spiritual Cinema of John Woo. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press. Bobo, J. (ed.) (2001), Black Feminist Cultural Criticism. Oxford: Blackwell. Borde, R. and E. Chaumeton, E. (2002), A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941– 1953, trans. Paul Hammond. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books. First published in French in 1955. Božovi , M. (1992), ‘The Man behind His Own Retina’, in Slavoj Žižek (ed.), Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan: But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock. London and New York: Verso, pp. 161–77. Brand, D. (1999), ‘Rear-View Mirror: Hitchcock, Poe, and the Flâneur in America’, in J. Freedman and R. Millington (eds), Hitchcock’s America. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 123–34. Brenez, N. (2003), ‘Body’s Night: An Interview with Philippe Grandrieux’, in A. Martin (ed.), Rouge 1, www.rouge.com.au/1/grandrieux.html (accessed 1 June 2009). Breu, C. (2005), Hard-Boiled Masculinities. Minneapolis, IN: University of Minnesota Press. Brogan, K. (1998), Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia. Bronfen, E. (2004), Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press. Brown, A. (1997), ‘Security Sweep’, Black Enterprise, 27, (9), 33. Brown, M. (2006), ‘From Here to Dystopia: Interview with J. G. Ballard’, Telegraph Magazine, 2 September, 16–22. Bruzzi, S. (1997), Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies. London: Routledge. Buckland, G. and Evans, H. (2001), Shots in the Dark: True Crime Pictures. New York: Bulfinch. Burke, R. G. (2001), An Introduction to Criminological Theory. Cullompton, Devon: Willan Publishing. Burman, E. (1995), ‘“What is It?” Masculinity and Femininity in Cultural Representations of Childhood’, in S. Wilkinson and C. Kitzinger (eds), Feminism and Discourse: Psychological Perspectives. London: Sage, pp. 49–67.

Bibliography

213

Butler, J. (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Byerman, K. (2004), ‘Vernacular Modernism in the Novels of John Edgar Wideman and Leon Forrest’, in M. Graham (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Byrd, A. (2008), Forget Me Not. New York: Kimani Press. Caillois, R. (2001), Man, Play and Games [1959]. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Camus, A. (1975). The Myth of Sisyphus. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Carter, C. (1997), Rhode Island Red. London: Serpent’s Tail. —. (1999), Coq au Vin. London: Serpent’s Tail. —. (2003), Jackson Park. New York: One World/Ballantine. —. (2005), Trip Wire. New York: One World/Ballantine. Caruso, D. J. (Director) (2007), Disturbia [motion picture]. USA: DreamWorks. Cassuto, L. (2009), Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories. New York: Colombia University Press. Chandler, R. (1973), ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ [1944], in Pearls are a Nuisance. Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 181–99. Clarens, C. (1997), Crime Movies: An Illustrated History of the Gangster Genre from D. W. Griffith to ‘Pulp Fiction’. Updated by Foster Hirsch. New York: Da Capo Press. Clark, K. (2003), ‘Preventive Medicine: Can Corporations Find a Hollywood Ending for Fraud?’, Chain Store Age, 79, (9), 74. Cochran, D. (2000), American Noir: Underground Writers and Filmmakers of the Postwar Era. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. Cole, S. A. and Pontell, H. N. (2006), ‘“Don’t Be Low Hanging Fruit”: Identity Theft as Moral Panic’, in T. Monahan (ed.), Surveillance and Security: Technological Politics and Power in Everyday Life. New York: Routledge, pp. 125–47. Coles, G. E. (2001), A House Made of Light: Essays on the Art of Film. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Colley, J. (2008), ‘Lyrical Terrorist Wins Appeal’, The Independent, 17 June 2008, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/lyrical-terrorist-wins-appeal848869.html (accessed 21 April 2009). Connell, R. W. (2005), Masculinities (second edn) Cambridge: Polity Press. Copjec, J. (1993), ‘The Phenomenal Nonphenomenal: Private Space in Film Noir’, in J. Copjec (ed.), Shades of Noir: A Reader. London and New York: Verso. Corber, R. (1997), Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Creed, B. (2004), Pandora’s Box: Essays in Film Theory. Melbourne: Centre of the Moving Image. Crichton, R. (1959), The Great Imposter. New York: Random House. Cromwell, J. (Director) (1947), Dead Reckoning [motion picture]. USA: Columbia Pictures. Cronin, T. E., Cronin, T. Z. and Milakovich, M. E. (1981), U.S. vs. Crime in the Streets. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Crowley, J. (Director) (2007), Boy A [motion picture]. United Kingdom: Miriam Collection. Cullen, D. (2009). Columbine. New York: Hachette Book Group.

214

Bibliography

Curriden, M. (1991), ‘Making Crime Pay: What’s the Cost of Using Paid Informers?’, American Bar Association Journal, 77, (6), 42–6. D’Cruze, S., Walklate, S. and Pegg, S. (2006). Murder: Social and Historical Approaches to Understanding Murder and Murderers. Cullompton: Willan. Dalley, P. J. (1995), ‘The Law of Deceit, 1790–1860: Continuity amidst Change’, American Journal of Legal History, 39, (4), 405–42. Dassin, J. (Director) (1948), The Naked City [motion picture]. USA: Hellinger Productions. Davis, L. and Dannenbaum, J. (Directors) (2004), City of Night: The Making of Collateral [documentary]. USA: DreamWorks. Davis, M. and Monk, D. B. (eds), Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism. New York: The New Press. de Certeau, M. (1984), The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall. Los Angeles: University of California Press. de Man, P. (1983), Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. Minneapolis, IN: University of Minnesota Press. Debord, G. (1983), The Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red. Deleuze, G. (1973), Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard. London: Allen Lane/ Penguin. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1983 [1972]), Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis, IN: University of Minnesota Press. —. (1994), What is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson. London: Verso. Deleuze, G. and Parnet, C. (1987), Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: Athlone. Denning, M. (1998), Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture. New York: Verso. Dennis, J. P. (2006), Queering Teen Culture: All-American Boys and Same-Sex Desire in Film and Television. London: Routledge. —. (2007), We Boys Together: Teenagers in Love before Girl-Craziness. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Denzin, N. (1995), The Cinematic Society: The Voyeur’s Gaze. London: Sage. Derrida, J. (1992), ‘Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority’, trans. Mary Quaintance, in D. Cornell, M. Rosenfeld and D. G. Carlson (eds), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. New York and London: Routledge. Desser, D. (1983), The Samurai Films of Akira Kurosawa. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press. Dietzel, S. B. (2004), ‘The African American Novel and Popular Culture’, in M. Graham (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doherty, T. (2002), Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Dolar, M. (1992), ‘A Father Who is Not Quite Dead’, in Slavoj Žižek (ed.), Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan: But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock. London and New York: Verso, pp. 143–50. —. (1993), ‘Beyond Interpellation’, Qui Parle, 6, (2), 75–96. Dollimore, J. (1991), Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Bibliography

215

—. (1998), Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Donald, R. R. (2001), ‘Masculinity and Machismo in Hollywood’s War Films’, in S. M. Whitehead and F. J. Barrett (eds), The Masculinities Reader. Cambridge: Polity Press. Donaldson, M. (2005), Masculinity in the Interracial Buddy Film. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Douglas, M. (1966), Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Doyle, Sir A. C. (1981), The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Dunn, S. (2008), ‘Baad Bitches’ and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. During, S. (1991), ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in S. During (ed.), The Cultural Studies Reader. London: Routledge. Easthope, A. (1990), What a Man’s Gotta Do. Winchester, MA: Unwin Hyman. Eberwein, R. (2007), Armed Forces: Masculinity and Sexuality in the American War Film. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University. Eco, U. (1984), ‘Narrative Structures in Fleming’. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 144–74. Edwards, G. (1998), A Toast before Dying. New York: Random House. Edwards, P. N. (1996), The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Eisenstein, E. L. (1993), The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elder, R. (ed.) (2005), John Woo: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Eldred, L. G. (2006), ‘Francie Pig vs. the Fat Green Blob from Outer Space: Horror Films and The Butcher Boy’. New Hibernia Review/Iris Éireannach Nua: A Quarterly Record of Irish Studies, 10, (3), 53–67. Entman, R. and Rojecki, A. (2001), The Black Image in the White Mind: Media and Race in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ericson, R. V. and Haggerty, K. D. (1997), Policing the Risk Society. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Esposito, E. (2004), ‘The Arts of Contingency’, Critical Inquiry, 32, 7–25. Falk, Q. (1984), Travels in Greeneland: The Cinema of Graham Greene. London: Quartet Books. Feeney F. X. and Duncan, P. (eds) (2006), Michael Mann. Hong Kong: Taschen. Finelli, R. (2007), ‘Abstraction versus Contradiction: Observations on Chris Arthur’s The New Dialectic and Marx’s ‘Capital’, trans. Peter Thomas. Historical Materialism, 15, 61–74. Flynt, J. (1899), Tramping with Tramps: Studies and Sketches of Vagabond Life. New York: Century. —. (1900), Notes of an Itinerant Policeman. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press. —. (1908), My Life. New York: Outing. Foucault, M. (1963), ‘Préface à la transgression’, Critique (Hommage à Georges Bataille) (August–September), 751–69. —. (1977), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

216

Bibliography

—. (2003), ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–76, trans. David Macey. New York: Picador. Freud, S. (1972 [1960]), Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. —. (2002), Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. David McLintock. London: Penguin Classics. Friedberg, A. (1993), Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA and London: University of California Press. Fuchs, C. J. (1993), ‘The Buddy Politic’, in S. Cohen and I. R. Hark (eds), Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema. London: Routledge, pp. 194–210. Galison, P. (1994), ‘The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision’, Critical Inquiry, 21, 228–66. Garland, D. (1996), ‘The Limits of the Sovereign State: Strategies of Crime Control in Contemporary Society’, British Journal of Criminology, 36, (4), 445–71. —. (2001), The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gasiorek, A. (2005), J. G. Ballard. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Gates, H. L. Jr (1989), The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ghamari-Tabrizi, S. (2005), The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Giddens, A. (1991), Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Giles, J. (1997), The Crying Game. London: BFI Publishing. Gladwell, M. (2005), Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking. New York: Little, Brown. Glanville, R. (2007), ‘A (Cybernetic) Musing: Ashby and the Black Box’, Cybernetics and Human Knowing, 14, (2–3), 189–96. Glover, D. (1994), ‘Looking for Edgar Wallace: The Author as Consumer’, History Workshop Journal, 37, (1), 143–64. Godtland, E. and Hanson, D. (2008), True Crime Detective Magazines. New York: Taschen. Goffman, E. (1959), The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books. Goldberg, D. T. (1997), Writing on Race in America. London and New York: Routledge. Goldsmith, D. (2004), ‘Collateral: Stuart Beattie’s character-driven thriller’, Creative Screenwriting, 11, (4), 50–3. Goody, J. and Watt, I. (1968), ‘The Consequences of Literacy’, in J. Goody (ed.), Literacy in Traditional Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 27–68. Graham, M. (ed.) (2004), The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gramsci, A. (1971), in Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith (eds), Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. London: Lawrence &Wishart.

Bibliography

217

Grandrieux, P. (Director) (1999), Sombre [motion picture]. France: Arte. —. (Director) (2002), La Vie nouvelle [motion picture]. United Kingdom: Blue Light. Grebb, M. (2004), ‘Crime: Forgotten Fraud: Counterfeit Checks’, Bank Technology News, 17, (4), 1. Greene, G. (1963), A Gun for Sale. Harmondsworth: Penguin. —. (1981), Ways of Escape. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Griffin, S. (2002), ‘Actors or Activities? On the Social Construction of “White-Collar Crime” in the United States’, Crime, Law and Social Change, 37, (3), 245–76. Hall, K. E. (1999), John Woo: The Films. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. —. (2009), John Woo’s ‘The Killer’. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Hall, S. (1992), ‘What is This “Black” in Black Popular Culture?’, in G. Dent (ed.), Black Popular Culture: A Project. Seattle: Bay Press. Hallward, P. (2006), Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation. London: Verso. Haltunnen, K. (1982), Confidence Men and Painted Women. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hanke, R. (1999), ‘John Woo’s Cinema of Hyperkinetic Violence: From A Better Tomorrow to Face/Off’, Film Criticism, 2, (1), 39–59. Hanks, R. (2007), ‘Last Night’s TV: Hug-a-Hoodie Drama Gets an A-Minus’, The Independent, 27 November, p. 22. Hardy, P. (ed.) (1997), The BFI Companion to Crime. London: BFI Publishing/ Cassell. Harmon, J. (2004), ‘Speaker Puts Focus on Fraud Prevention’, National Mortgage News, 28, (20), 13. Harris, N. (1973), Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harvey, D. (1989), The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell. Harvey, S. (1980), ‘Women’s Place: The Absent Family in Film Noir’, in E. A. Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir: Both Sides of the Camera. London: British Film Institute, pp. 22–34. Haut, W. (1995), Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War. London: Serpent’s Tail. Hayes, G. (2004), ‘Framing the Wolf: The Spectacular Masculinity of Alain Delon’, in P. Powrie, A. Davies and B. Babington (eds), The Trouble with Men: Masculinities in European and Hollywood Cinema. London: Wallflower Press. Heffernan, N. (2000), Capital, Class and Technology in Contemporary American Culture: Projecting Post-Fordism. London: Pluto. Highsmith, P. (1997), The Talented Mr. Ripley, in R. Polito (ed.), Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s. New York: Library of America. —. (1999), Ripley’s Game [1974]. London: Vintage. Hirsch, F. (1981), The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press. Hitchcock, A. (Director) (1954), Rear Window [motion picture]. USA: Paramount Pictures. Hope, T. and Sparks, R. (eds) (2001), Crime, Risk and Insecurity. London: Routledge.

218

Bibliography

Hopkins, P. (1988), Hagar’s Daughter [1901–1902]. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press. Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T. W. (2002), Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Horsley, L. (2009), The Noir Thriller (updated edn). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Horton, A. (1994), ‘Political Assassination Thrillers’, in G. Crowdus (ed.), The Political Companion to American Film. Chicago and London: Fitzroy Dearbon, pp. 310–18. Howard, H. (2005), ‘The Negligent Enablement of Imposter Fraud: A CommonSense Common Law Claim’, Duke Law Journal, 54, (5), 1263–94. Hudson, B. (2003), Justice in the Risk Society. London: Sage. Irwin, J. (2006), Unless the Threat of Death is behind Them: Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Jacobs, S. (2007), The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers. Jameson, F. (1988), ‘Cognitive Mapping’, in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, pp. 347–58. Jenkins, B. (2004), Edge of Midnight. New York: Harper Collins/Harper Torch. Jessop, B. (2000), ‘Post-Fordism and the State’, in A. Amin (ed.), Post-Fordism: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Johnson, C. (1993), ‘Double Indemnity’, in A. Easthope (ed.), Contemporary Film Theory. Harlow: Longman. Jordan, N. (Director) (1997), The Butcher Boy [motion picture]. United Kingdom: Warner Home Video. Juul, J. (2005), Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kaplan, E. A. (1997), Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film and the Imperial Gaze. London and New York: Routledge. Kerner, A. (2004), Representing the Catastrophic. Lewiston, NY; Queenstown, Canada: Edwin Mellen Press. Kieslowski, K. (Director) (1988), A Short Film about Killing [motion picture]. Poland: Zespol Filmowy ‘Tor’. Kimmel, M. S. (2001), ‘Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity’, in S. M. Whitehead and F. J. Barrett (eds), The Masculinities Reader. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 266–87. Kimmelman, M. (2002), ‘Critic’s Notebook; in New York, Art is Crime, and Crime Becomes Art’, The New York Times, 18 December 2002. Kittler, F. (1990), Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. M. Metteer and C. Cullens. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Knight, J. (1997), ‘Gumshoe Gets Wingtips: Private-Investigator Business Takes on a Corporate Identity’, Washington Post, 21 August, p. E01. Knight, S. (2000), Crime Fiction, 1800–2000: Detection, Death, Diversity. London: Palgrave. Kordela, K. A. (2007), $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan. Albany: State University of New York Press. Kreuger, E. (1972), ‘Touch of Evil: Style Expressing Content’, Cinema Journal, 12, (3), 57–63.

Bibliography

219

Kristeva, J. (1982), Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Krueger, E. M. (1972), ‘Touch of Evil: Style Expressing Content’, Cinema Journal, 12, (1), 57–63. Krutnik, F. (1991), In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity. London: Routledge. Lamar, H. R. (2005), Charlie Siringo’s West. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Lang, R. (2002), Masculine Interests: Homoerotics in Hollywood Film. New York: Columbia University Press. Larkin, R. W. (2007), Comprehending Columbine. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Lenoir, T. (2000), ‘All but War is Simulation: The Military-Entertainment Complex’, Configurations, 8, 289–355. Lenz, W. E. (1985), Fast Talk and Flush Times: The Confidence Man as a Literary Convention. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Lewis, B. (2003), The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam. London: Phoenix. LeWitt, S. (2005), ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ (1967), in Donna De Salvo (ed.), Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970. London: Tate Publishing, pp. 180–1. Lin, J. (2008), ‘See the Steven Meisel Editorial That was Too Racy for Italian Vogue’, New York Magazine, http://nymag.com/daily/fashion/2008/11/v_editorial.html (accessed 16 April 2009). Lindberg, G. H. (1982), The Confidence Man in American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. Linton, D. [Stephen Frances?] (n.d. [1950?]), Crazy to Kill. London: Scion. Litvak, A. (Director) (1948), Sorry, Wrong Number [motion picture]. USA: Hal Wallis Productions. Liu, J. J. Y. (1967), The Chinese Knight-Errant. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Livingstone, D. B. (n.d.), ‘J. G. Ballard: Crash: Prophet without Honour’, Spike Magazine, http://www.spikemagazine.com/0899ballard.php (accessed 19 April 2009). Loader, I. (1997), ‘Thinking Normatively about Private Security’, Journal of Law and Society, 24, (3), 377–94. —. (1999), ‘Consumer Culture and the Commodification of Policing and Security’, Sociology, 33, (2), 373–92. Logan, B. (1996), Hong Kong Action Cinema. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press. Lohr, S. (2002), ‘In New Era, Corporate Security Goes beyond Guns and Badges’, New York Times, 27 May, p. C1. Lorde, A. (2001 [1984]), ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’, in J. Bobo (ed.), Black Feminist Cultural Criticism. Oxford: Blackwell. Luhmann, N. (1995), Art as a Social System, trans. Eva Knodt. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lyotard, J-F. (1993), Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant. London: Athlone. MacArthur, C. (2000), ‘Mise-en-scène Degree Zero: Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samuraï (1967)’, in S. Hayward and G. Vincendeau (eds), French Film Texts and Contexts (revised edn). London: Routledge, pp. 189–201. MacCabe, C. (2007), The Butcher Boy. Cork: Cork University Press.

220

Bibliography

McCabe, P. (1992), The Butcher Boy. London: Picador. McCann, S. (2000), Gumshoe America: Hard-boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press. McCarty, J. (2004), Bullets over Hollywood: The American Gangster Film from the Silents to ‘The Sopranos’. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press. McDowell, D. E. (2001 [1980]), ‘New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism’, in J. Bobo (ed.), Black Feminist Cultural Criticism. Oxford: Blackwell. McKibbin, T. (2004), ‘Too Cool for School: Social Problems in Elephant’. Senses of Cinema: An Online Film Journal Devoted to the Serious and Eclectic Discussion of Cinema, 32, http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/32/elephant. html (accessed 21 August 2007). McLoone, M. (1998), ‘The Abused Child of History: Neil Jordan’s The Butcher Boy’, Cineaste: America’s Leading Magazine on the Art and Politics of the Cinema, 23, (4), 32–6. Magnusson, P. (2003), ‘Your Jitters are Their Lifeblood: Corporate Security Advisers are in Demand’, Business Week, 14 April, p. 41. Mailloux, S. (1990), ‘The Rhetorical Use and Abuse of Fiction: Eating Books in Late Nineteenth-Century America’, Boundary 2, 17, (1), 133–57. Mandel, E. (1984), Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story. London: Pluto Press. Mann, M. (Director) (2004), Collateral [motion picture]. USA: Paramount Pictures. Marcuse, H. (1964), One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Society. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Marling, W. (1995), The American Roman Noir: Hammett, Cain and Chandler. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Marx, G. T. (2006), ‘Soft Surveillance: The Growth of Mandatory Volunteerism in Collecting Personal Information – Hey Buddy Can You Spare a DNA?’, in T. Monahan (ed.), Surveillance and Security: Technological Politics and Power in Everyday Life. New York: Routledge, pp. 37–56. Marx, K. (1970), Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, D. Struik (ed.). London: Lawrence & Wishart. Mather, K. (2008), ‘Why the Screen Loves a Deadly Assassin’, The Times, 12 April. Maurer, D. M. (1940), The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man. Reprint 1999. New York: Anchor Books. Mellen, J. (1978), Big Bad Wolves: Masculinity in the American Film. London: Elm Tree Books. Melville, J-P. (Director) (1967), Le Samouraï [motion picture]. France: Compagnie Industrielle et Commerciale Cinématographique. Messner, M. A. (2001), ‘Friendship, Intimacy and Sexuality’, in S. M. Whitehead and F. J. Barrett (eds), The Masculinities Reader. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 253–65. Micklebury, P. (1995), Night Songs. Tallahousie, Florida: Naiad Press. Millar, M. (1960 [1945]), The Iron Gates. New York: Dell. Miller, D. A. (1988), The Novel and the Police. Berkeley, CA, and London: University of California Press. Miller, J-A.(1997), ‘Extimité’, in M. Bracher, M. W. Alcorn, R. J. Corthell and F. Massardier-Kenney (eds), Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure and Society. New York: New York University Press.

Bibliography

221

Mitchell, L. C. (1998), Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Monahan, T. (ed.) (2006), Surveillance and Security: Technological Politics and Power in Everyday Life. New York: Routledge. Moretti, F. (1987), The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. London and New York: Verso. Morgan, D. H. J. (1994), ‘Theatre of War: Combat, the Military, and Masculinities’, in H. Brod and M. Kaufman (eds), Theorizing Masculinities. London: Sage, pp. 165–82. Morrison, B. (1997), As If. London: Granta. Nancy, Jean-Luc (2003), Au fond des images. Paris: Galilée. Naremore, J. (1998), More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. Berkeley: University of California Press. —. (2008), More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (revised edn). Berkley: University of Los Angeles Press. Neely, B. (1995), Blanche Among the Talented Tenth. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ‘New Plan to Combat False-Identity Frauds’ (1976), U.S. News and World Report, 28 June, 63. Newman, G. and McNally, M. (2005), ‘Identity Theft Literature Review’, http:// www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/210459.pdf (accessed 9 August 2009). Nietzsche, F. (1967), The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books. —. (1974a [1973]), Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin. —. (1974b [1968]), The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols and The Anti- Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin. —. (1996 [1994]), On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Carol Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nogueira, R. (ed.) (1971), Melville on Melville. London: Secker and Warburg. Nogueira, R. and Truchaud, F. (1968), ‘A Samuraï in Paris’, Sight and Sound, 37, (3), 119–23. Noys, B. (2007), ‘La libido réactionnaire?: The recent fiction of J. G. Ballard’, Journal of European Studies, 37, (4), 391–406. —. (2008), ‘Crimes of the near Future: Baudrillard/Ballard’, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 5, (1), http://www.ubishops.ca/BaudrillardStudies/vol5_1/ v5-1-article8-Noys.html (accessed 16 April 2009). —. (2010), The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. O’Brien, G. (1997), Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir (expanded edn). New York: Da Capo Press. Olsen, M. (2004a), ‘It Happened One Night’, Sight and Sound, (10), 14–15. —. (2004b), ‘Paint It Black’ (Interview with Michael Mann), Sight and Sound, (10), 16. Packard, C. (2006), Queer Cowboys and Other Erotic Male Friendships in NineteenthCentury American Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Parks, S. (2001), ‘“In My Mother’s House”: Black Feminist Aesthetics, Television and A Raisin in the Sun’, in J. Bobo (ed.), Black Feminist Cultural Criticism. Oxford: Blackwell.

222

Bibliography

Pastrikos, C. (2004), ‘Comment: Identity Theft Statutes: Which Will Protect Americans the Most?’, Albany Law Review, 67, (4), 1137–57. Paul, J. (2003), When Kids Kill. London: Virgin Books. Peach, L. (2006), Masquerade, Crime and Fiction: Criminal Deceptions. London: Palgrave. Pellington, M. (Director) (1999), Arlington Road [motion picture]. USA: Arlington Road Productions Corps. Pepper, A. (2000), The Contemporary American Crime Novel: Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Class. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. —. (2010), ‘The American Roman Noir’, in C. Nickerson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peterson, R. F., Krivo, L. J. and Hagan, J. (eds) (2006), The Many Colors of Crime: Inequalities of Race, Ethnicity, and Crime in America. New York: New York University Press. Pinkerton, A. (1875), The Expressman and the Detective. Reprint 1976. New York: Arno Press. Place, J. (1980), ‘Women in Film Noir’, in E. A. Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir. London: British Film Institute, pp. 35–68. Plain, G. (2001), Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Pomerance, M. (2007), ‘Pachyderm’s Progress’, in T. Shary and A. Seibel (eds), Youth Culture in Global Cinema. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, pp. 207–21. Pomerance, M. and Gateward, F. (2005), ‘Introduction’, in M. Pomerance and F. Gateward (eds), Where the Boys are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, pp. 1–20. Pontell, H. (2002), ‘“Pleased to meet you . . . won’t you guess my name?”: Identity Fraud, Cyber-Crime, and White Collar Delinquency’, Adelaide Law Review, 23, (2), 305–28. Porfirio, R. (1996), ‘No Way Out: Existential Motifs in Film Noir’, in A. Silver and J. Ursini (eds), Film Noir Reader. New York: Limelight Editions. Potts, D. (1999), ‘From Tír na nÓg to Tír na Muck: Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy’, New Hibernia Review/Iris Éireannach Nua: A Quarterly Record of Irish Studies, 3, (3), 83–95. Poulantzas, N. (1978), State, Power, Socialism. London: New Left Books. Poundstone, W. (1992), Prisoner’s Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb. New York: Anchor Books. ‘Progeny to Market AIG Identity Policies’ (2003), American Banker, 168, (117), 11. Quandt, J. (2004), ‘Flesh and Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema’, Artforum, (February), 127–32. Rabinowitz, P. (2002), Black & White & Noir: America’s Pulp Modernism. New York: Colombia University Press. Rancière, J. (2006), The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. London and New York: Continuum. Renfroe, J. (Director) (2006), Civic Duty [motion picture]. USA: Intandem Films. Riesman, D. (1989), The Lonely Crowd [1961]. New Haven: Yale University Press. Rose, B. (1968), ‘Blow Up – the Problem of Scale in Sculpture’, Art in America, 56, (4), 83–91. Russo, V. (1987), The Celluloid Closet. New York: Harper and Row.

Bibliography

223

Ruth, D. E. (1996), Inventing the Public Enemy: The Gangster in American Culture, 1918– 1934. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rybin, S. (2007), The Cinema of Michael Mann. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Rzepka, C. (2005), Detective Fiction. Cambridge: Polity Press. Rzepka, C. and Horsley, L. (eds) (2010), The Blackwell Companion to Crime Fiction. Oxford: Blackwell. Sachs, H. (1933), ‘The Delay of the Machine Age’, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2, (137), 404–24. Said, S. F. (2004), ‘Shock Corridors’, Sight and Sound, 14, (2), 16–18. Sampey, K. (2006), ‘Former Thief Helps Retailer Build Trust’, Adweek, 47, 23 October, p. 9. Sandell, J. (1996), ‘Reinventing Masculinity: The Spectacle of Male Intimacy in the Films of John Woo’, Film Quarterly, 49, (4), 23–34. Sarto, B. [Frank Dubrez Fawcett] (n.d. [1949?]), Miss Otis Throws a Come-Back. London: Modern Fiction. Sartre, J. P. (1989 [1936]), L’imagination. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. —. (2004 [1940]), The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, trans. Jonathan Webber. London and New York: Routledge. —. (2007), Existentialism and Humanism. London: Methuen. Saunders, K. M. and Zucker, B. (1999), ‘Counteracting Identity Fraud in the Information Age: The Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act’, Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy, 8, (3), 661–75. Saviano, R. (2008), Gomorrah: Italy’s Other Mafia, trans. Virginia Jewiss. London: Pan Macmillan. Scaggs, J. (2000), ‘Who is Francie Pig? Self-Identity and Narrative Reliability in The Butcher Boy’, Irish University Review: A Journal of Irish Studies, 30, (1), 51–8. —. (2005), Crime Fiction. London: Routledge. Scarlata, J. (2005), ‘Carnivals and Goldfish: History and Crisis in The Butcher Boy’, in R. Stam and A. Raengo (eds), Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 233–51. Schaefer, S. (2001), ‘Former Con Man Catches a Few Fallacies in Film Bio’, Boston Herald, 24 December, p. 39. Scheingold, S. (1999), ‘Constructing the New Political Criminology: Power, Authority, and the Post-Liberal State’, Law and Social Inquiry, 23, (4), 857–95. Schmid, D. (2008), ‘Noir and Its Heretics’ (keynote address, Noircon conference, Philadelphia, 3 April). Schrader, P. (1996), ‘Notes on Film Noir’, in A. Silver and J. Ursini (eds), Film Noir Reader. New York: Limelight Editions. Scott, N. (2005), ‘Sublime Anarchy in Gus Van Sant’s Elephant’, Senses of Cinema: An Online Film Journal Devoted to the Serious and Eclectic Discussion of Cinema, 36, http:// archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/05/36/elephant.html (accessed 21 August 2007). Scull, A. and Spitzer, S. (1977), ‘Privatization and Capitalist Development: The Case of the Private Police’, Social Problems, 21, (1), 18–29. Sedgwick, E. K. (1985), Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press. —. (1990), Epistemology of the Closet. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

224

Bibliography

Seiler, A. (2002), ‘Here’s the Catch: True Tale isn’t’, USA Today, 22 December, http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2002-12-22-catch_x.htm (accessed 4 June 2008). Sellars, S. (2007), ‘The Rats that Ate Mill Park’, The Ballardian, http://www. ballardian.com/the-rats-that-ate-mill-park (accessed 16 April 2009). Seltzer, M. (1998), Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. London and New York: Routledge. —. (2004), ‘The Crime System’, Critical Inquiry, 30, Spring, 557–83. —. (2007), True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity. New York and London: Routledge. Server, L. (1993), Danger is My Business: An Illustrated History of the Fabulous Pulp Magazines: 1896–1953. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. —. (1994), Over My Dead Body: The Sensational Age of the American Paperback: 1945– 1955. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. Shannon, C. E. (1992), ‘Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems’, in N. J. A. Sloane and A. D. Wyner (eds), Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers. New York: Wiley-IEEE Press. Shary, T. (2005), ‘Bad Boys and Hollywood Hype: Gendered Conflict in Juvenile Delinquency Films’, in M. Pomerance and F. Gateward (eds), Where the Boys are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, pp. 21–40. Shearing C. D. and Stenning, P. C. (1981), ‘Modern Private Security: Its Growth and Implications’, Crime and Justice, 3, 193–245. Siegert, B. (1999), Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System, trans. Kevin Repp. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. —. (2008), ‘Cacography or Communication? Cultural Techniques in German Media Studies’, Grey Room, 29, Winter, 26–47. Simon, J. (1997), ‘Governing through Crime’, in L. M. Friedman and G. Fisher (eds), The Crime Conundrum: Essays on Criminal Justice. New York: Westview Press, pp. 171–89. Simpson, M. (1994), Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity. London: Cassell. Sinclair, I. (1999), Crash. London: BFI Publishing. Slocum, J. D. (2006), Hollywood and War: The Film Reader. London: Routledge. Slotkin, R. (1998), Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in 20th-Century America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Snyder, J. (2004), ‘Res Ipsa Loquitur’, in L. Daston (ed.), Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science. New York: Zone Books. Sobchack, V. (1998), ‘Lounge Time: Postwar Crises and the Chronotope of Film Noir’, in N. Browne (ed.), Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sofair, M. (2006), ‘Elephant: The Physics of Violence’, Cine Action, 68, 11–17. Soitos, S. F. (1996), The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Spicer, A. (2003), Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema. London: I. B. Tauris. Spielberg, S. (Director) (2002a), Catch Me if You Can [motion picture]. USA: DreamWorks.

Bibliography

225

—. (Director) (2002b), Minority Report [motion picture]. USA: DreamWorks. Stam, R. and Pearson, R. (1983), ‘Hitchcock’s Rear Window: Reflexivity and the Critique of Voyeurism’, Enclitic, 1, Spring, 136–45. Stanko, E. A. (2001), ‘Victims R Us: The Life History of “Fear of Crime” and the Politicization of Violence’, in T. Hope and R. Sparks (eds), Crime, Risk and Insecurity. London: Routledge, pp. 13–30. Stewart, S. (1993), On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham: Duke University Press. Strikwerda, R. A. and May, L. (1996), ‘Male Friendship and Intimacy’, in Rethinking Masculinity: Philosophical Explorations in Light of Feminism. Lanham, MD; London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, pp. 79–94. Stubblefield, T. (2007), ‘Re-Creating the Witness: Elephant, Postmodernism, and the Neorealist Inheritance’, in L. E. Ruberto, and K. M. Wilson (eds), Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema. Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television Series. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, pp. 226–41. Studlar, G. (2005), ‘A Gunsel is Being Beaten: Gangster Masculinity and the Homoerotics of the Crime Film, 1941–1942’, in L. Grieveson, E. Sonnet and P. Stanfield (eds), Mob Culture: Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 120–45. Susman, W. (1984), ‘“Personality” and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture’, in Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon Books. Sussman, H. (2004), ‘On the Butcher Block: A Panorama of Social Marking’, CR: The New Centennial Review, 4, (1), 143–68. Thomas, D. (1992), ‘Psychoanalysis and Film Noir’, in I. Cameron (ed.), The Movie Book of Film Noir. London: Studio Vista. Thomas-Graham, P. (1998). A Darker Shade of Crimson. New York: Simon &Schuster. Toscano, A. (2009), ‘The War against Preterrorism: The Tarnac 9 and the Coming Insurrection’, Radical Philosophy, 154, 2–7. Trigell, J. (2004), Boy A. London: Serpent’s Tail. Troyer, J. and Marchiselli, C. (2005), ‘Slack, Slacker, Slackest: Homosocial Bonding Practices in Contemporary Dude Cinema’, in M. Pomerance and F. Gateward (eds), Where the Boys are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth. Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television Series. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, pp. 264–76. Tuttle, F. (Director) (1942), This Gun for Hire [motion picture]. USA: Paramount Pictures. Tzanelli, R., Yar, M. and O’Brien, M. (2005), ‘“Con Me if You Can”: Exploring Crime in the American Cinematic Imagination’, Theoretical Criminology, 9, (1), 97–117. United Nations (1948), ‘The Universal Declaration of Human Rights’, United Nations website, http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/ (accessed 7 August 2009). Urry, J. (2007), Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press. Van Sant, G. (Director) (2003), Elephant [motion picture]. United States: Optimum Home Entertainment. Vidor, C. (Director) (1946), Gilda [motion picture]. USA: Columbia Pictures Corps. Vincendeau, G. (2000), Stars and Stardom in French Cinema. London: Continuum. —. (2003), Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris. London: BFI Publishing.

226

Bibliography

Vogl, J. (2008), ‘Becoming-Media: Galileo’s Telescope’, Grey Room, 29, Winter, 14–25. von Neumann, J. (1959), ‘On the Theory of Games of Strategy’, [‘Zur Theorie der Gesellschaftsspiele’, 1928], in A. W. Tucker and R. D. Luce (eds), Contributions to the Theory of Games, Volume IV. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 13–42. von Neumann, J. and Morgenstern, O. (2007), Theory of Games and Economic Behavior [1944]. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Walker, M. (1994), ‘Film Noir: Introduction’, in I. Cameron (ed.), The Movie Book of Film Noir. London: Cassell, pp. 8–37. Walker, S., Spohn C. and DeLone, M. (1996), The Color of Justice: Race, Ethnicity and Crime in America. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company. Wallace, E. (1974 [1932]), When the Gangs Came to London. London: Arrow Books. —. (1985), Selected Novels. London: Hamlyn. Walton, P. L. and Jones, M. (1999), Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wark, M. (2007), Gamer Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Watson, C. (1987), Snobbery with Violence: English Crime Stories and Their Audience. London: Methuen. Welles, O. (Director) (1958), Touch of Evil [motion picture]. USA: Universal International Pictures. West, C. (1993), Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America. New York: Routledge. White, S. (2006), ‘Male Bonding, Hollywood Orientalism, and the Repression of the Feminine in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket’, in M. Anderegg (ed.), Inventing Vietnam: The War in Film and Television. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Whitehead, S. M. and Barrett, F. J. (eds), The Masculinities Reader. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 170–83. —. (2001), ‘The Sociology of Masculinity’, in S. M. Whitehead and F. J. Barrett (eds), The Masculinities Reader. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 1–26. Wiener, N. (1950), The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. New York: Doubleday. —. (1965), Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine [1961]. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wilder, B. (Director) (1944), Double Indemnity [motion picture]. USA: Paramount Pictures. Willeford, C. (1995), The Charles Willeford Omnibus. Harpenden, UK: No Exit Press. —. (1997), Pick-Up, in R. Polito (ed.), Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s. New York: Library of America. Williams, T. (1997), ‘Space, Place, and Spectacle: The Crisis Cinema of John Woo’, Cinema Journal, 36, (2), 67–84. Wilson, C. (forthcoming), Learning to Live with Crime: American Crime Narrative in the Neoconservative Turn. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. —. (forthcoming), ‘Rough Justice: Crime, Culture, Governance’, in C. Bold (ed.), U.S. Popular Print Culture 1860–1920. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson, J. Q. (1983), Thinking about Crime (revised edn). New York: Vintage. Wilson, S. (2007), Great Satan’s Rage. Manchester: Manchester University Press. —. (2008), Great Satan’s Rage: American Negativity and Rap/Metal in the Age of Supercapitalism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wolf, D. (2004), ‘Review of Elephant by Gus Van Sant’, Film Quarterly, 58, (2), 45–8.

Bibliography

227

Woo, J. (Director) (1989), Die xue shuang xiong [motion picture]. Hong Kong, China: Film Workshop. Wood, M. (1975), America in the Movies. New York: Columbia University Press. Woodiwiss, M. (2001), Organized Crime and American Power: A History, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Woods, P. L. (1996), ‘Introduction’, Spooks, Spies and Private Eyes: An Anthology of Black Mystery, Crime and Suspense Fiction of the 20th Century. Edinburgh: Playback Press. —. (1999), Inner City Blues. New York: Fawcett. —. (2001), Stormy Weather. New York: One World/Ballantine. —. (2003), Dirty Laundry. New York: One World/Ballantine. Woolrich, C. (1994), ‘Rear Window’, in Rear Window, and Other Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 1–40. Wyatt, J. (2001), ‘Identity, Queerness, and Homosocial Bonding: The Case of Swingers’, in P. Lehman (ed.), Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture. New York: Routledge, pp. 51–65. Young, A. (1996), Imagining Crime. London: Sage. Young, D. (2008), ‘Skin Deep, or, Getting inside (Your Head): My Loose Thread’, in P. Hegarty and D. Kennedy (eds), Dennis Cooper: Writing at the Edge. Brighton, England: Sussex Academic, pp. 32–51. Young, P. S. (2007), Firm Pursuit. New York: Harlequin. —. (2008), Murder on the Down Low. New York: Independent Publishers Group. Zatz, M. S. and Rodriguez, N. (2006),‘Conceptualising Race and Ethnicity in Studies of Crime and Criminal Justice’, in R. F. Peterson, L. J. Krivo, and J. Hagan (eds), The Many Colors of Crime: Inequalities of Race, Ethnicity, and Crime in America. New York: New York University Press. Zedner, L. (2001), ‘The Pursuit of Security’, in T. Hope and R. Sparks (eds), Crime, Risk and Insecurity. London: Routledge, pp. 200–14. Žižek, S. (1991), Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press. —. (2006), ‘Neighbors and Other Monsters’, in S. Žižek, E. L. Santner and K. Reinhard (eds), The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology. Chicago: Chicago University Press, pp. 134–90. —. (2008), Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books. Zucker, C. (2003), ‘The Poetics of Point of View: Neil Jordan’s The Butcher Boy’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 31, (3), 203–8.

This page intentionally left blank

Index

Page numbers in bold denote figures.

8 Mile 193 Abagnale, F. Jr 9, 175–9, 181–91 The Art of the Steal 179, 188 Catch Me if You Can 175, 178–9, 186, 187–91 Abbott, M. 120 abjection 51–66 and crime in Touch of Evil 62–5 image and crime 58 Kristeva’s notion of 53–62 nihilism and 58–60 Adorno, T. W. 100 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (by Mark Twain) 144 The Adventures of Nick Carter 1 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (by Mark Twain) 188 African American Women’s crime writing 122–37 hate crime in 129–30 justice and 128 resistance and the Black Vernacular Tradition 131–3 and professionalism 133–5 romantic/erotic fiction 124–8 Agamben, G. 52, 57 Alger, H. 187 alienation 39, 95, 102, 160, 207 American Detective 113 American Dream, the 73, 75, 77, 81, 86, 88, 168 American Gigolo 71 America’s Detective Annual 116 Amis, M. 4 Anderson, J. L. 163

Anderson, M. J. 168 angelic killer 160, 162, 164, 167 Arlington Road 192, 202–7 Ashby, R. 30, 32 Introduction to Cybernetics 30 The Asphalt Jungle 162 assassination 39–44 The Assassination Bureau 155 The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford 4 Astbury, H. 157 The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld 157 atom bomb 83 Auster, P. 4 Avalon 15 Badiou, A. 40 Bailey, F. 8, 124–5, 128, 135 Baker, N. 8, 127 The Lavender House Murder 127, 136 Ballard, J. G. 6–7, 38, 40, 42–3, 45–8 The Atrocity Exhibition 7, 38–9, 41–2, 44, 48–50 Cocaine Nights 49 Crash 40 Empire of the Sun 45 High Rise 48 The Kindness of Women 45 Kingdom Come 49 Millennium People 49 Running Wild 48–9 Super-Cannes 49 Bangkok Dangerous 155 Baringer, S. 192 Barnum, P. T. 177 Barthes, R. 58, 61

230

Bataille, G. 51–2, 54, 56–7, 61, 66 Literature of Evil 56 Baudrillard, J. 6, 40 Beattie, S. 168 Benjamin, W. 53, 57 Bentham, J. 30, 194, 196 Bertens, H. 122 Best True Fact Detective 118 betrayal 63, 71, 80–1, 161 A Better Tomorrow 165 Beugnet, M. 56 Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure 143 biopolitics 32 Birch, E. L. 126 Black Mask 112 blanc modernism 72, 76 Bland, E. T. 134 Dead Time 134–5 ‘Bluebeard’s Castle’ 202 Bobo, J. 133 the body 53 Boisvert, C. 36, 38 Borde, R. 4, 94, 161 boundaries 3, 5, 51, 54, 64, 123–4, 136–7, 179, 181 Boy A 8, 141, 143–4, 147–9, 153 Boyz in the Hood 193 Božovicˇ, M. 201 Braddon, M. E. 1 Lady Audley’s Secret 1 Breakfast on Pluto 149 Brogan, K. 133 Bronfen, E. 7 Bruzzi, S. 162 buddy movies 148, 151–3, 157 Bulger, J. 141–2, 153 The Burbs 192 bureaucracy 91–2, 95 Burnett, W. R. 161 Bush, G. W. 190, 207 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 147 The Butcher Boy 6, 8, 141, 143–5, 147–9, 153 Byerman, K. 131 Byrd, A. 8, 124 Forget Me Not 124 Byrnes, T. F. 180

Index Cain, J. M. 90–1, 93 Double Indemnity 90 Calvino, I. 4 Camus, A. 102 The Myth of Sisyphus 102 capitalism 2, 41, 46, 48–9, 91, 103, 105–6, 168 Carlson, P. M. 134 carnival 51–2, 54, 57, 61, 82, 84, 150 Carter, C. 8, 126, 132, 134–5 Coq Au Vin 126, 132 Rhode Island Red 127, 132 Caruso, D. J. 200 catastrophe 61–2, 82 Catch 22 (by Joseph Heller) 25 Catch Me if You Can 6, 9, 175–6 catharsis 163 Chandler, R. 4, 115, 126 Farewell, My Lovely 115 ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ 4 Chang Kai-shek (Mayling Soong) 39 Chaumeton, E. 4, 94, 161 child killers 141–53 the city 75, 81, 85 Civic Duty 192, 202–7 civil rights 128, 137, 190 Cleopatra Jones 124 Cochran, D. 91, 98, 102, 106 Coffy 124 cold war 25, 27, 71–2, 145, 200 Collateral 8, 156, 169, 167–70, 170 Collins, W. 1 Armadale 1 commodity 39, 46, 116, 186 community 9, 49, 73, 76–7, 88, 91, 129, 131–2, 137, 203, 205, 208 Conan Doyle, A. 1, 8, 157 The Return of Sherlock Holmes 157 conceptual Crime 36–50 conceptual criminal 43–6 The Conformist 55 conman 6, 9 conning 179, 188 consumerism 91, 93, 95, 97, 99, 106, 165, 178, 184–6, 189 containment 8, 57 control 2, 8–9, 24, 30, 77, 115, 143, 177, 184, 186

Index Cooke, W. 18 Copjec, J. 81 Corber, R. J. 96, 100, 103 Cornwell, P. 120 corporations 92, 171, 176, 183–4, 188 corruption 52, 54–5, 62–4, 71–3, 88, 115–16, 124, 157 court of law 1 cover art 109–20 cover girl(s) 111, 113–15, 117, 118 Creed, B. 61 crime and the avant-garde 49 and children 141–53 and gender 141–53 and individualism 133, 186 and marginalization 130 and sexuality 141–53 crime culture 2, 9, 51, 66, 72, 88 Crime Detective 116 crime fiction hard-boiled 1, 4, 91, 126–7, 133, 159 murder novels 1 noir thrillers 1 parodic detective stories 1 police procedurals 1 Scandinavian crime fiction 1, 5 true crime 1 whodunits 1 crime in cinema heist movies 1 the hitmen and 155–71 male bonding and criminality 141–53 paranoia in cinema 202–9 the Rear Window paradigm 192–209 serial killer films 1 spy thrillers 1 vigilante films 1 crime prevention 40, 176 crime scene 5, 13, 52, 60, 134–6 homosociality as 144–8 ‘The Crime System’ 6 the criminal deviant 2, 118 fraud 2, 9, 175, 182–91 terrorist 2, 36, 37, 46, 192, 202–9

231

criminality 2, 126 and modernity 2–3 Crowley, J. 8, 141 Cruise, T. 156, 168, 169 The Crying Game 149 Curtis, T. 179 Dassin, J. 75 Davis, A. 125 The Day of the Jackal 156 Dead Reckoning 109 death 5, 8, 24, 28, 32, 39–43, 52, 54–5, 61, 71, 73–4, 76, 78–81, 87–8, 96, 109–10, 115, 117, 120, 143, 145, 147, 151, 153, 156, 160–71, 200 Decaë, H. 163 deception 80, 82, 86, 87 de Certeau, M. 198 Defoe, D. 1 Deleuze, G. 41–2, 47 Proust and Signs 42 Delon, A. 156, 162–3, 164 Denzin, N. 196 depersonalization 41, 45 Derrida, J. 57 desire 5, 9, 38–41, 43, 45–6, 48–9, 75–81, 84–8, 91, 94–5, 97, 98–100, 102, 106, 112, 116, 119, 125, 133–5, 148–9, 151, 159, 171, 189, 193–4, 201–2, 207 detective 1, 52, 73, 85 Detective World 117 D’haen, T. 122 Dickens, C. 1 Dietz, W. C. 155 Dietzel, S. 122 Die xue shuang xiong (The Killer) 8, 156, 164–5, 167, 164–7, 170 Dime Detective 112 Disneyland 190 Disturbia 192, 200–3, 205–6, 208 Dolar, M. 77, 194 domesticity 115 Double Indemnity 77, 79, 81, 84, 86, 93–4, 97, 115 Douglas, M. 55 ‘Purity and Danger’ 55 Dunn, S. 124, 132

232

Index

Easthope, A. 151 Easy Rider 147 economics 95–6 Einstein, A. 43 Elephant 141, 143–4, 146–9, 151, 153 Eliot, G. 1 Emerson, R. W. 73 The Enforcer 162 Enlightenment, the 2, 77 Ennis, G. 155 Entman, R. 123, 131 Ernst, M. 43 existentialism 164 The Exorcist 142 Expressionism 71 Falling Down 204 fantasy 8, 37–8, 44, 76, 78, 81, 84–7, 119, 124, 145, 147, 152, 158, 171, 177, 189–91 Fantômas series 1 fear (of crime) 193 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 4, 72, 176, 191 femininity 5, 7, 74, 88, 124 feminism 124 black feminism 124 femme fatale 1, 6–8, 109, 114–16, 119 and the dark side of modernity 71–88 Fielding, H. 1 film noir 1, 4, 71–88, 116 postmodern noir 2 Finnerty, P. 8 Flynt, J. 178, 180–3, 185–7 My Life 179 Notes of an Itinerant Policeman 179 Tramping with Tramps 179, 182 Ford, H. 92 Fordist economics 7, 95 Fordist Noir 90–106 Foucault, L. 24 Foucault, M. 30, 56, 178, 181, 194–5, 197–9, 208 Discipline and Punish 181, 197, 208 Foxy Brown 124 Freud, S. 52–3, 57, 81, 196 Friedberg, A. 195

Front Page 119 The Fugitive 145 Full Metal Jacket 147 games black box 29–32 parlour games 13–16 rules of irrelevance 16–20 game theory 6, 14 gangster movies 1, 72, 88, 144, 158, 160, 162 gangsters 4 Garland, D. 176, 184 Gates, H. L. Jr 132 Gay, J. 1 Gedeon, V. 110, 116 Get Carter 156 Ghamari-Tabrizi, S. 27 Gilda 81, 83 Gladwell, M. 6, 26–7 Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking 13, 25 Goffman, E. 16–17 Goldberg, D. 129–30 Goodfellas 193 gothic 56, 202 Gramsci, A. 93 Grandrieux, P. 56 Gran Torino 204 Great Depression 74, 88, 90, 93, 158 The Great Imposter 179 Greene, G. 159–61, 170 A Gun for Sale 159–60 Ways of Escape 159 Guattari, F. 47 Hall, P. 155 Hitman 155 Hammett, D. 4, 180 Hannibal 61 Harris, E. 141–2, 153 Harvey, D. 92 Harvey, S. 85 hate crime 8, 122, 129–30 Hawthorne, N. 183 Hayworth, R. 81–4 Heat 168 Heffernan, N. 91–2

Index Hidden 4 Highsmith, P. 6, 13, 16, 20, 23, 90–3, 96–101, 106, 200 Ripley’s Game 6, 13, 16–17, 21–3 The Talented Mr Ripley 6, 90, 92, 96, 98–101 summary of 96–7 Himes, C. 125 Hirsch, F. 161 Hitchcock, A. 2, 193–4, 196 hitman 6, 8, 155–6, 164 defined 156–8 Hitman (novel series by Garth Ennis and Joel McCrea) 155 Hitman (game series by Eidos’s) 155 Hollywood 1, 71–2, 74, 85, 96, 151, 161–4, 167, 170, 179 homo sacer (sacred man) 52 homosexuality 5, 8, 97–8, 141, 149–53 homosociality 141–2, 151, 153 as crime scene 144–8 Hong Kong cinema 165 Hopkins, P. 122, 126 Hagar’s Daughter 122 Horkheimer, M. 100 horror 45, 47, 56, 60–2, 142, 208 Horton, A. 156 Hudson, R. 102, 104 Huston, J. 1, 162 identity-theft 176, 183–8 as an opportunity crime 185 ideology 9, 77, 88 illegal 1, 47, 77, 85–6, 181–4 image 51–66, 84, 87, 109, 112–20, 125, 132, 136, 141, 144, 158, 170, 186, 201 Imitation of Life 74 imposter 175, 178–9 incest 126 industrialization 72 informer 198, 198–200, 203, 206–8 Inside Detective 110, 111, 119 insurance 78–9, 86, 90, 93–5, 184, 189 Interview with a Vampire 149 Invasion of the Bodysnatchers 200, 203 Irréversible 60

233

Irwin, J. 90 Ishiguro, K. 6, 13, 31 Never Let Me Go 13, 31–2 Jacobs, S. 196 Jenkins, B. 124 Edge of Midnight 124 Jessop, B. 92, 95 Johnson, C. 94 Jordan, N. 8, 141, 149 journalism 73, 110, 157, 159 justice 63–5, 75, 87, 102, 128, 146, 160 Kennedy, J. F. 39, 42–3 Kerner, A. 61, 62 Kieslowski, K. 58 Kimmelman, M. 36 Klebold, D. 141–2, 153 Koroshi no rakuin 155 Kristeva, J. 6, 51–4, 59, 61, 63 Krueger, E. M. 62–3 Krutnik, F. 94 Lacan, J. 197 Ladd, A. 156, 160–4, 170 Laplace, P. S. 28 Larsson, S. 5 The Last Domino 168 La Vie nouvelle 56 law 3, 7, 38–42, 46, 51–4, 57–9, 61–5, 72–3, 75–7, 79–80, 91, 94–5, 128–9, 142, 157, 176, 179, 184, 190, 192, 195, 198–9, 201, 207–8 Lawrence, D. H. 45 Leading Detective 110, 115 Le Cercle Rouge 162 Lechte, J. 6, 7 Lee, D. 167 Le Samouraï 8, 156, 162–6, 170, 164 LeWitt, Sol 37–8 ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ 37 liberalism 91 lighting 94 Light Sleeper 71 Lindberg, G. 178 The Lineup 162 Linton, D. 113 Crazy to Kill 113

234

Index

Little Caesar 1 Little Odessa 155 Litvak, A. 87 Loader, I. 186 Lorde, A. 125, 127 Luhmann, N. 29 McCabe, P. 8, 141 The Butcher Boy 8 McCann, S. 90–1, 102, 104 McCarthy, C. 4 McCarty, J. 158 McCoy, H. 91 McCrea, J. 155 McDowell, D. 126–7 McEwan, I. 4 machine age 6, 24, 26, 28 machines 18, 175, 184 McMurray, F. 90 McParlan, J. 181 male bonding and criminality in films 141–53 Malik, S. 46 The Maltese Falcon 1, 160 Maltz, A. 161 Mandel, E. 158 Mankell, H. 5 Mann, M. 168, 170–1 Mansfield, J. 39 Marcuse, H. 105–6 One Dimensional Man 105 Marling, W. 90, 95 Marx, G. T. 185 Marx, K. 102 Marxism 93 masculinity 91, 96–101, 103, 124, 144, 146–7, 151, 153, 156, 163, 167, 187 Mather, K. 156 Maurer, D. 188 media 2–4, 13, 18–19, 21, 61, 142, 177, 207 Meisel, S. 46 melancholia 163 Melville, J-P. 162–7, 170 Menace II Society 193 metaphysics 31 Miami Vice 168

Micklebury, P. 129, 131 Night Songs 129–30 Midnight Cowboy 147 military-entertainment complex 14, 27 Millar, M. 120 The Iron Gates 120 Miller, D. A. 195 Mills, C. W. 96 Minority Report 190 Miss Otis Throws a Come-Back 114 models 7, 16–18, 20, 27, 31 modernism 7, 27–8, 40, 88, 160, 162 modernity 2–9, 13, 20, 25, 28–9, 66, 73, 75–6, 80, 87–8, 170, 186 molls 8, 44, 112–6 Monroe, M. 39 monstrosity 141, 152 morality 51, 55, 58–60, 62, 85 Mrs. Miniver 71 murder 8, 13–14, 16–17, 21, 24, 52–3, 55, 59, 75, 78, 81, 85–7, 94, 97–8, 100, 110, 119, 127–30, 136, 141–53, 157–9, 170, 193, 201, 208–9 Murder, Inc. 162 Murder, My Sweet 115 murderer 22, 58, 65, 101, 131, 162 myth 8, 40, 46, 84, 156, 162–3, 171, 204–5 Nabokov, V. 4 Nader, R. 38 The Naked City 75 Nancy, J-L. 65 Naremore, J. 160 Nazism 53–4, 144 Neely, B. 131 Blanche among the Talented Tenth 131 neighbours 192–4, 196–8, 200, 203–5, 207, 209 neighbourhood 193–209 neo-conservatism 178, 185–6, 190 New Deal 76, 91 Newman, K. 156 The BFI Companion to Crime 156 Nicol, B. 9 Nietzsche, F. 52–5, 59–60 The Will to Power 54

Index nihilism 53–5, 58–9, 171 Nikita 156 No Country for Old Men 4, 155 Noé, G. 60 noir 4 Novotny, K. 44 Noys, B. 6–7 Olyphant, T. 155 The Omen 142 Once Upon a Time in America 193 organised crime 56 Oshii, M. 15 Pacific Heights 192 paedophilia 47 panopticon 30, 194–7, 199, 202, 206, 208 Panorama du film noir américain (by R. Borde and E. Chaumeton) 161 paranoia 88, 159, 193, 200, 202–7 Parks, S. 123, 133 pathologies 39 Patriot Act of 2001 203 Peach, L. 2, 8, 109 Masquerade, Crime and Fiction: Criminal Deceptions 2 Pepper, A. 7, 122–3, 132 perversion 39–40, 43, 47, 54 Peterson, W. F. 110 Philips, J. 157 Nightmare at Dawn 157 Pick-Up 7 Pinkerton, A. 180 Place, J. 84, 93 Plain, G. 5 Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction 5 Poe, E. A. 28, 202 ‘The Black Cat’ 202 ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ 28 ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’ 28 police 36, 52, 55, 64, 72, 75, 79, 85, 87, 124, 128, 130–1, 133, 175–7, 179–82, 184, 186, 190, 197–9, 202–3, 206 Police Detective 120 politics 9, 53, 59, 100, 123, 129, 202 pornography 46, 54, 56, 119

235

The Postman Always Rings Twice 90 postmodern, the 25, 38, 168, 209 Poulantzas, N. 106 power 31, 55, 59–60, 74, 80, 83–4, 91, 123, 128, 132, 176, 178, 181, 195–6, 195–9, 208 Pride and Glory 5 primal horde 7 prison 148, 175, 181, 190–1, 194–6 private detectives 73, 85, 133–4, 136, 179 private security 3, 176, 178, 183–4, 186, 191 profane 7, 57, 61 A Prophet 5 psychopathology 36, 39, 43–6, 49 Public Enemy 1 pulp fiction 1, 8, 91, 109–16, 119–20 Pulp Fiction 156 punishment 58, 77, 85, 87, 142, 151, 176 Pynchon, T. 4 Quandt, J. 56 Rabinowitz, P. 80, 92 Rancière, J. 73 rape 51, 60, 126 Reagan, R. 39, 190 Real Detective 110, 112, 113–14, 116, 117 reality 3, 9, 15, 20, 23, 38–50, 58, 61, 90, 111, 119 Rear Window 193–5, 203–4, 206 rebel 47, 59, 64, 95–6, 127, 183 Reichs, K. 120 relativism 59 religion 39, 60 representation 3, 8–9, 52–3, 58, 110–1, 113, 116–17, 119–20 repression 56, 84, 97–8, 134, 189 Riesman, D. 23, 96 The Lonely Crowd 23 risk management 175–91 Robinson, E. G. 94–5 Rodriguez, N. 129 Rojecki, A. 123, 131 romantic/erotic fiction 124–8 Roosevelt, F. D. 76, 91

236

Rosemary’s Baby 142 Rough Justice 155 Runyon, D. 187 Ruth, D. 157 Rybin, S. 168 sacred 7, 51–7, 61, 63, 66 Sandell, J. 166 Sartre, J. P. 58, 61, 65 Saviano, R. 3 Gomorrah 3 Scarface 1 Schmid, D. 92, 119 Schrader, P. 71 science 2, 27, 54–5, 59, 134 science fiction 38, 48, 145, 200 Scorsese, M. 2 secular crimes 53 Seitz, J. 161 Seltzer, M. 3–4, 90 september 11th 183, 204, 207 serial killer(s) 3–4, 119 Serial Killers 3, 6 sexism 126, 135 Shallow Grave 192 Shannon, C. 19 Sherman, C. 60 A Short Film about Killing 58 Silence of the Lambs 61 The Silence of the Lambs 202 Simon, J. 177 Since You Went Away 71 Sinclair, I. 45 Single White Female 192 Siringo, C. 181 Smokin’ Aces 155 Sobchack, V. 71, 74 social organisation 92 society 1–2, 6–7, 9, 22, 28–9, 38, 52–3, 56–7, 59, 61, 66, 73, 76, 90, 95, 105–6, 115, 128–31, 142, 147, 152, 157, 159–60, 170, 195, 197–8, 208–9 Soitos, S. F. 134 Sombre 56 Sorry, Wrong Number 85 Special Detective 116 spectacle 9, 83, 87, 119, 148, 166, 208

Index Spectator 18 Spicer, A. 8 Spielberg, S. 187, 190–1 Stahl, J. 74 Stanwyck, B. 85, 90 Startling Detective 118 subjectivity 7, 77–8, 80, 86, 88, 93, 103, 106, 109, 120 suburbia 201 Surowiecki, J. 25 The Wisdom of Crowds 25 surrealism 43, 50 surveillance 9, 143, 177, 179, 181, 195, 197–8, 200, 202, 208–9 Suzuki, S. 155 symbolic /imaginary 94 symptom 81 systems criminal justice system 128 postal 18–19, 24 railway 18–20 surveillance 181, 208 telegraph 19 systems theory 25, 28 taboo 7, 40, 51, 56–7, 63, 126–7, 149 Tarantino, Q. 2 technology 2, 73, 183 television 145–6, 155 terrorism 46–7, 183–4, 192, 202–9 Terrorism act of 2000 46 Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (by J. von Neumann and Oscar Morgenstern) 14 There Will Be Blood 4 The Thief 168 This Gun for Hire 8, 156, 160, 161–2, 166, 168 Thomas-Graham, P. 131, 135 Thompson, J. 200 Thompson, R. 141–2 Thoreau, H. D. 73 Thurber, J. 179 A Touch of Evil 1, 7 Touch of Evil 62 ‘Towards a Definition of Film Noir’(by Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton) 4

Index tragedy 64, 163 transgression 51, 53–4, 57, 76, 126, 200 trauma 42, 45, 56, 65, 71, 159, 200 Trigell, J. 8, 141, 148 true crime 1, 8, 109–20 True Crime 110, 116 True Police Yearbook 117 Trump, D. 179 The Art of the Deal 179 Tuttle, F. 161 uncanny 37, 50, 94, 201–2 unconscious 38, 60, 77, 101 Un flic 162 urbanism 157, 170 Van Sant, G. 8, 141, 151–2 Venables, J. 141, 142 victim(s) 8, 44, 49, 53, 65, 75, 78, 85–6, 110–2, 116–20, 125, 128–31, 135–7, 142, 148, 158, 163, 170, 178–9, 184–5, 204 victimhood 8, 122, 128–31 video games 142, 144, 146, 155 Vidocq, E-F. 181 Vidor, C. 81, 82 Vincendeau, G. 162 violence 2–3, 6, 13, 16, 25, 32, 37, 41, 45, 47–9, 51–4, 56–60, 62–3, 65–6, 73, 75, 84, 88, 113, 116, 119, 126, 129 , 131, 141–3, 146–8, 153–8, 165–6, 169, 179 von Neumann, J. 14 ‘Zur Theorie der Gesellschaftsspiele’ (‘On the Theory of Parlour Games’) 14 voyeurism 195, 201, 209 Walker, S. 128 Wallace, E. 158–9, 170 Four Just Men 158 On the Spot: Violence and Murder in Chicago 158 When the Gangs Came to London 158 war 7, 18, 21, 26–7, 45, 61, 71–2, 74, 76, 77, 81, 83, 88, 91, 93, 103, 106, 146, 151, 163 on terror 47

237

war films 141, 144, 146, 147, 151, 153 war games 6, 13–16, 25–9 Waters, S. 4 Wayne’s World 143 Welles, O. 1, 7, 52, 62, 66 Touch of Evil 52 West, C. 123 Westerns 141, 144–6, 153 Weyr, T. 119 What is Philosophy? (by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari) 47 Wheatstone, C. 18 While the City Sleeps 155 White collar crime 178, 181, 184, 189 Whyte, W. 96 Wiener, N. 28 Wilder, B. 77–9, 82, 90, 93, 96–7 Willard, F. 182 Willeford, C. 90–1, 93, 101–6 The Burnt Orange Heresy 102 The Cockfighter 104 High Priest of California 102, 104 Pick-Up 90, 92, 100–2, 105 The Woman Chaser 102 Wilson, C. 3, 9 The Woman Chaser (movie) 104 Woo, J. 2, 165–7, 170 Wood, M. 72 Woods, P. L. 122, 126, 131 Stormy Weather 131 Woolrich, C. 193 ‘Murder from a Fixed Viewpoint’ 193 worker 93, 95–7, 100–3, 106 World War I 91, 93 World War II 71, 7, 19, 61, 71–2, 74, 77, 81, 83, 88, 90–3, 97, 103, 105–6, 146 Yoshiyuki, K. 46 Young, P. S. 131 Murder on the Down Low 131 Yun-Fat, C. 156, 166, 167 Zatz, M. S. 129 Žižek, S. 2, 97, 194, 196