Urban Crime Control in Cinema: Fallen Guardians and the Ideology of Repression

234 Pages·2023·4.345 MB·English

by  Vladimir Rizov

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CRIME, MEDIA AND CULTURE
Urban Crime Control
in Cinema
Fallen Guardians and
the Ideology of Repression
Vladimir Rizov
Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture
Series Editors
Michelle Brown
Department of Sociology
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, TN, USA
Eamonn Carrabine
Department of Sociology
University of Essex
Colchester, UK
This series aims to publish high quality interdisciplinary scholarship for
research into crime, media and culture. As images of crime, harm and
punishment proliferate across new and old media there is a growing rec-
ognition that criminology needs to rethink its relations with the ascen-
dant power of spectacle. This international book series aims to break
down the often rigid and increasingly hardened boundaries of main-
stream criminology, media and communication studies, and cultural
studies. In a late modern world where reality TV takes viewers into cop
cars and carceral spaces, game shows routinely feature shame and suffer-
ing, teenagers post ‘happy slapping’ videos on YouTube, both cyber bul-
lying and ‘justice for’ campaigns are mainstays of social media, and
insurrectionist groups compile footage of suicide bomb attacks for circu-
lation on the Internet, it is clear that images of crime and control play a
powerful role in shaping social practices. It is vital then that we become
versed in the diverse ways that crime and punishment are represented in
an era of global interconnectedness, not least since the very reach of
global media networks is now unparalleled.
Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture emerges from a call to
rethink the manner in which images are reshaping the world and crimi-
nology as a project. The mobility, malleability, banality, speed, and scale
of images and their distribution demand that we engage both old and
new theories and methods and pursue a refinement of concepts and tools,
as well as innovative new ones, to tackle questions of crime, harm, cul-
ture, and control. Keywords like image, iconography, information flows,
the counter-visual, and ‘social’ media, as well as the continuing relevance
of the markers, signs, and inscriptions of gender, race, sexuality, and class
in cultural contests mark the contours of the crime, media and cul-
ture nexus.
Vladimir Rizov
Urban Crime Control
in Cinema
Fallen Guardians and the Ideology
of Repression
Vladimir Rizov
University of Winchester
Winchester, UK
ISSN 2946-3912 ISSN 2946-3920 (electronic)
Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture
ISBN 978-3-031-12977-3 ISBN 978-3-031-12978-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12978-0
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
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Acknowledgements
This book is dedicated to my grandmother.
Thanks to everyone who has supported me while I was writing this
book. Special thanks are due to Rafe McGregor without whom this book
would not exist. I owe a lot to Aurėja Stirbytė for all of the support and
countless re-reads. Many thanks also to Gareth Millington’s support and
for starting me on this path in his cinema, crime and cities module.
Thank you also to Leonardo Sandoval Guzman for his friendship and
conversations throughout the years. Thanks are due to Viswesh
Rammohan for his camaraderie and support, and both to Viswesh and
Rijul Ballal for the intellectual home during the last few years. Thanks to
Jack Munayer for the countless discussions of films, without which this
book will not be the same. Thanks also for the friendship to Giuseppe
Troccoli, Angélica Cabezas Pino, and Rosa.
I also thank the editorial team at Palgrave Macmillan for their patience
and support in the process of writing this book.
v
Contents
1 I ntroduction 1
2 C inema 15
3 C ities 45
4 C ritique 71
5 R oboCop 101
6 M inority Report 131
7 B atman 159
8 B lade Runner 189
9 C onclusion 217
I ndex 225
vii
1
Introduction
Overview
This book originated in a long-standing interest in visual culture and the
representation of criminal justice. From action movies to thrillers, police
procedurals to never-ending CSI series, true crime documentaries and
historical biopics of people on either side of the law, visual culture is satu-
rated with crime. Its narration is ubiquitous, as is its routine transforma-
tion into spectacle. A near-constant aspect of contemporary culture
appears to be the incessant, meticulous scrutiny of what, how, and where
crime takes place. In this book, I seek to demonstrate how this saturation
of crime media is integral to the reproduction of some of the biggest
problems in the criminal justice system. Issues such as police brutality,
police discretion, ‘justice’, or even order, are all key elements to such
representations.
This is not coincidental, as the representation of such issues in media
tends to sanitise them, individualise problems, and ultimately resolve
them neatly. The viewer is reassured that the problem was indeed solv-
able, the criminal was truly evil and beyond help, and if a police officer
did something wrong, then it was a matter of corruption or greed. There
is no need to ask further questions about changing the system—those
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 1
V. Rizov, Urban Crime Control in Cinema, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and
Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12978-0_1
2 V. Rizov
involved in it know best. It is this that Louis Althusser referred to as ide-
ology, ‘the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions
of existence’ (2020:36; cf. Linnemann & Jewkes, 2017:42). Ideology
relies on Ideological State Apparatuses such as the media, religion, the
university, which seek to ensure that this ‘imaginary relationship’ repro-
duces these same real conditions. Put simply, ideology has the task of
making sure that nothing changes.
This perspective is at the core of this book. In this text, I approach the
representation of crime control and justice by way of an eclectic body of
literature, frequent retrospective comparisons with the history of polic-
ing, and a consistent focus on the very ideology that makes us ask these
questions—what crime is, what has caused it, and how best to fight it—
all the while providing us with readymade answers and making inquiry
into causes exceedingly difficult. Important is also the question why rep-
resentations of criminal justice in popular cinema tend to follow exceed-
ingly similar plot points, narrative conventions, and aesthetic influences.
I do so with a singular focus—the figure of the fallen guardian. The term
itself draws on Plato’s Republic (1992) and its description of a complex
social order, in which the workers know their place and do nothing but
work, who are themselves protected by the auxiliaries, its guardians for
the sake of simplicity, and ruled by the philosopher-king. The guardians
are interesting as they are supposed to be deprived of self-interest, pre-
cisely because they are the most dangerous class—the one capable of
upending the order. They are dangerous because their task is the protec-
tion of the very order from external enemies and internal threats. As such,
I draw a parallel between the Platonic guardian and contemporary forms
of policing. Of interest here, however, is the fallen guardian—not just any
police character in any crime film. This particular cinematic figure is the
protagonist, who in the course of the film’s narrative undergoes a fall
from grace—he transforms from a guardian of the system to which he
belongs to its enemy. As it will be shown, the figure rarely deviates from
their original supposedly benevolent moral position. Rather, the system
itself is revealed to be wrong, misguided or corrupt. All four of the films
that will be used to demonstrate this—RoboCop (1987), Minority Report
(2002), The Dark Knight Rises (2012), and Blade Runner 2049 (2017)—
are also set within a dystopian context.
1 Introduction 3
It is this book’s goal to take these four case studies and relate them to
actually existing crime control measures. By doing so, I seek to situate the
cinematic representations in relation to the history of actual policing and
demystify the ways in which popular cinema reinforces prevalent ideo-
logical constructions of justice. With regard to actually existing crime
control measures, each film will be discussed in relation to a specific
crime control measure or phenomenon. In Chap. 5, RoboCop will be
used to argue that policing has consistently relied on the construction of
a ‘dangerous class’ and racialization, and is best conceptualised as ‘vio-
lence work’ (Seigel, 2018). It will also be used to discuss the phenomenon
of private policing and its representation in the film. In Chap. 6, Minority
Report (2002) is used as a case of predictive policing. As such, at the core
of the chapter is a discussion of surveillance and social control. In Chap.
7, The Dark Knight Rises (2012) presents the problem of mass incarcera-
tion and the manner in which carcerality and punitiveness remain the
unchallenged foundation in many narratives of justice. The role of
Batman also allows for a discussion of the idea of vigilante justice and an
analysis of the ways in which it reinforces the criminal justice system just
the same. Finally, in Chap. 8, Blade Runner 2049 (2017) provides the
case of extra-judicial killing and assassination. A key example is the use of
death squads in conjunction to police strategies of pacification and
counterinsurgency.
The argument in each of the case studies, despite having its own sepa-
rate focus, is cumulative. Beginning with a historical overview of policing
as violence work that relies on racialisation and the repression of labour
in RoboCop, privatisation as the tool for increasing efficiency in ensuring
a crime-free world finds its logical progression in a system of total surveil-
lance in Minority Report. Through the construction of risk factors and
other signifiers of likeliness to commit crime, Minority Report straightfor-
wardly sets up as a consequence of its practices the problem of mass incar-
ceration. Depicting a point in time where this mass incarceration is an
established reality, The Dark Knight Rises poses the question of incarcera-
tion as a valid strategy. Carceral punishment, Batman’s narrative seems to
imply, is an inconvenience—a constant threat that could yet again raise
its head and disturb the peace for which Batman and the Gotham City
Police Department fight so hard on the streets of the Gothic city. All the