Urban nightmares: the media, the right, and the moral panic over the city

394 Pages·2006·4.566 MB·English

by  Macek, Steve

Urban Nightmares
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Urban Nightmares
The Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic over the City
Steve Macek
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
The section of chapter 5 on David Fincher’s Sevenwas Wrst published, in somewhat different form,
in College Literature26, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 73–90; reprinted here with permission.
Copyright 2006 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Macek, Steve, 1965–
Urban nightmares : the media, the right, and the moral panic over the city / Steve Macek.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4360-8 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8166-4360-1 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4361-5 (pb : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8166-4361-X (pb : alk. paper)
1. Cities and towns—United States—Public opinion. 2. Inner cities—United States. 3. Cities and
towns in mass media. 4. Urban policy—United States. 5. Fear of crime—United States. I. Title.
HT123.M14 2006
307.76´0973—dc22
2006004278
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
12 11 10 09 08 07 06 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction: A Landscape of Fear VII
1. The Origins of the Crisis: Race, Class,
and the Inner City 1
2. Inventing the Savage Urban Other 37
3. Catastrophe Is Now: The Discourse
on the Underclass 71
4. Crack Alleys and Killing Zones:
News Coverage of the Postindustrial City 139
5. The Cinema of Suburban Paranoia 199
6. Wouldn’t You Rather Be at Home?
Marketing Middle-Class Agoraphobia 257
Conclusion: Awakening from
Urban Nightmares 291
Acknowledgments 307
Appendix: Selected National Television
News Stories about the Urban Crisis, 1989–97 311
Notes 317
Bibliography 325
Filmography 351
Index 355
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I N T R O D U C T I O N
A Landscape of Fear
The cancer of fear has taken over. We have government by fear.
We have a fear economy. We have a landscape of fear. We have a
mass media that sells it.
—William Upski Wimsatt, “The Fear Economy,” Adbusters
To put it crudely, the “moral panic” appears to us to be one of the
principal forms of ideological consciousness by means of which a
“silent majority” is won over to the support of increasingly coer-
cive measures on the part of the state, and lends its legitimacy to a
“more than usual” exercise of control.
—Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis
Two Timemagazine covers from the early 1990s reXect what many con-
temporary observers agreed was a growing climate of apprehension sur-
rounding the American city. The Wrst, for the September 17, 1990, issue,
features a painting of a dark New York City composed entirely of hive-
like apartment buildings, adult bookstores, X-rated Wlm theaters, and
looming skyscrapers (see Figure 1). In the windows of these buildings
can be seen silhouettes of people Wghting, crying, brandishing knives,
shooting up drugs, and holding pistols to their heads; on the streets, the
illustration shows someone being mugged, a bum drinking while sprawled
out on the sidewalk, a hooker plying her trade, and a police car pulling
over a motorist. “The Rotting of The Big Apple” reads the headline hov-
ering over this dismal scene, and the related feature story inside reveals
breathlessly that “frightened residents now wonder if Gotham’s trea-
sures are worth the hassle—and the risk” (Attinger 1990, 36). The story
goes on to cite a 1990 Time/CNN poll that found that 78 percent of
VII
VIII– INTRODUCTION
New York City residents feel the city is dirty, 73 percent say it is a dan-
gerous place to live, and 59 percent would rather live somewhere else
(39–40).
The second cover, for the April 19, 1993, issue of the magazine,
boasts a foreboding rendition of Los Angeles at night painted in the same
style (see Figure 2). Appropriately, there are no skyscrapers in this land-
scape, only highway overpasses and the Xat architecture of the strip mall.
But, as with the cover about New York City’s decline, all manner of
criminal mischief is depicted taking place on L.A.’s broad thoroughfares
and silhouetted against the windows of its buildings: guys pointing guns
at each other, people being robbed, drug deals being made, and so on. In
the distance, at the foot of the Hollywood hills, Wres burn (no doubt an
allusion to the Wres started during the so-called Rodney King riots of
1992). “Los Angeles: Is the City of Angels Going to Hell?” asks the
headline. The accompanying story is full of bad news about L.A., which
is described as living “in the grip of racial tension, red ink and cynicism”
(Lacayo 1993, 28). Together the two Timecovers (along with the feature
stories they announce) paint a picture of the nation’s cities as violent and
out of control, as populated by murderers, muggers, drug addicts, and
lowlifes, as places where the rules of normal, decent behavior no longer
apply.
Time magazine was hardly alone in its bleak portrayal of urban
reality during the 1980s and 1990s. Television news programs and “real-
ity” police shows like the Fox network’s Copspresented a similarly scary
picture of inner-city neighborhoods overrun with crime and vice. So did
Wctional television dramas like NYPD Blueand Homicide. Hollywood Wlms
like Batman (1989) and Seven (1995) projected creepy images of dark,
dilapidated cities incubating every conceivable evil. Syndicated colum-
nists George Will and John Leo regularly bemoaned the mounting hor-
rors of urban life in their columns. Talk shows routinely debated how
awful things in the urban core had become and argued over the reasons
forthe decline. Intellectuals worried that the disorder and violence of Amer-
ica’s postindustrial slums signaled the impending collapse of civilization
itself. From feature-length Wlms to 30-second television commercials,
INTRODUCTION – IX
from newspaper editorials to best-selling books, representations of “the
city as nightmare” circulated through every arena of the media.
The anxious mood surrounding the American metropolis showed
up in national opinion polls as well. For example, one 1991 Newsweek/
NBC poll found that fully 88 percent of the nation saw cities in negative
terms and 42 percent identiWed crime and drugs as the urban core’s
biggestproblems (Morganthau and McCormick 1991, 42). Anxiety about
the spread of urban lawlessness drove millions to move to “gated com-
munities,” to invest in home security systems, and to support punitive
“crime-Wghting” legislation like the so-called Clinton Crime Bill that
passed through Congress in 1994. Indeed, it could be argued that hyste-
ria about urban violence and degeneracy became a deWning feature of
every level of American politics in the late 1980s and throughout the
1990s. In 1993, in the wake of the Rodney King riots, Richard Riordan,
a white Republican, was elected mayor of heavily Democratic and decid-
edly multicultural Los Angeles by selling himself as “Tough Enough to
Turn L.A. Around” and pledging to hire three thousand new police ofW-
cers to patrol the city’s neighborhoods (Davis 1993, 49). A few months
later, law-and-order crusader and former prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani
was elected mayor of New York after promising to wage a “10- to 15-
year war on crime” and swearing that he would take Manhattan’s streets
back from homeless “squeegee men” (Kambler 1994, 44). Even as such
conservative politicians celebrated those aspects of big city life that
appealed to tourists and afXuent professionals (gentriWcation, revitalized
downtowns, new entertainment districts, upscale museums, pro sports
teams),they consistently demonized and denigrated the legions of urban-
ites who were indigent or working class. At the national level, every pres-
ident from Ronald Reagan (1980–88) to Bill Clinton (1992–2000) scored
political points and boosted his approval ratings by denouncing promis-
cuous ghetto “welfare queens,” announcing a commitment to wage a
“war on drugs” centered on minority neighborhoods, or by ostenta-
tiously putting hundreds of thousands of new cops on the streets to com-
bat youth gangs.
The political ramiWcations of all this divisiveness can be traced in