Abstract
On September 19, 2022, a Baltimore court set Adnan Syed free after 23 years of incarceration for a murder he has consistently claimed he did not commit. It is doubtful whether Syed's bid to reopen the case, let alone vacate the conclusion, would succeed had his case not been extensively profiled in the first season of the podcast Serial. It was particularly poignant, therefore, to spend this week reading and reviewing Paul Kaplan and Daniel LaChance's book Crimesploitation, a book focused on cultural representations of crime.
There are abundant TV shows, films, podcasts, and other media about crime, many of them reality based. Kaplan and LaChance's inquiry focuses on those that exploit the more lurid aspects of the public's fascination with crime. The crimesploitation genre, to them, “represents a synthesis of two forms of boredom alleviation: the consumption of mass media and the commission of crime. It offers audiences the opportunity to alleviate boredom by consuming the crimes of others, by vicariously stepping into the shoes of the criminal and achieving the relief from boredom that the criminal act enables … Crimesploitation is a particularly potent form of mass media because it captures the desire to consume and appropriate the criminal to satisfy one's own needs.” (43–44).
Kaplan and LaChance make two claims about crimesploitation reality shows: first, that they “invite viewers to think about criminals and authorities in ways that reinforce the new, neoliberal status quo that emerged in the late twentieth century,” namely, that crime is the inevitable corollary of individual or cultural pathology, rather than of broader sociopolitical or economic trends; and second, that they “offer[] audiences varied ways to vicariously experience several different kinds of freedom in an age of growing inequality and punitiveness,” such as by identifying with power-wielding and violent police officers, rooting for the suspects and arrestees who resist their authority, or fantasizing about unrestricted freedoms in their own lives (9).
This web of contradictions encompasses a variety of shows reviewed in the book: shows exotifying “night creatures” and other pathological misfits such as To Catch a Predator or Intervention; shows exploiting tropes and clichés (and their countertropes and counter-clichés) like Lockup, Lockdown, and Dog the Bounty Hunter; and shows focusing on particular miscarriages of justice such as Making a Murderer. But the first, and arguably most emblematic, show they analyze in detail is Cops, a program that follows police officers’ interactions with suspects. Kaplan and LaChance use vignettes from the program to show how the narrative is crafted to infantilize the suspects and portray the cops as exasperated adults, encouraging “smug superiority” in the spectators (p. 35.) They also voice a moral concern: by turning the subjects of this show into objects of fantasy and projection, we are violating the categorical imperative by using these subjects as means to an end—particularly given the show's emphasis on humiliation. This observation is difficult to argue with, but it does raise questions about narrative boundaries: In an era in which even voluntary participation in reality programming (a-la Big Brother or The Bachelor) has a strong involuntary component, and the thin illusion of “reality” belies a machine of artifice and manipulation playing loose with the rules of consent, do crimesploitation shows truly differ, qualitatively, from other exploitative, manipulative reality shows? Furthermore, if the network executives who greenlight and produce these shows are to blame for their exploitative content, can we make a clear distinction between the reactions and emotions they elicit from the public and those garnered by images of law enforcement—including gruesome police brutality—democratized through cellular phones and shared via YouTube for a variety of motivations (including consciousness raising)?
LaChance and Kaplan's critiques of these shows is complex and, at times, self-contradictory and nonfalsifiable. When observing the mix of black and white “rakes” featured in Cops, they note the stereotypically racist portrayal of the former, as well as argue that depicting the latter shows whites as challenging the purity of whiteness. This contradiction might have been resolved had the analysis focused more prominently on poverty and class, but depicting poor people is also riddled with contradiction: it “romanticizes” them even as it is “poverty porn.” When the protagonists of shows like Dog the Bounty Hunter voice sadism and schadenfreude toward the people they apprehend, they communicate and condone lack of mercy; when the same protagonists, or their interlocutors, express compassion and empathy toward the same people, this legitimates the overall merciless aspect of the system. Lowbrow shows about incarceration like Lockup and Lockdown dehumanize incarcerated people; middlebrow shows like Making a Murderer, which evoke sympathy for their subjects and call for justice, “fail[] to achieve the goal of critiquing the substance and structure of the criminal justice system and the bigger picture of hegemonic power relations in the United States that supports it” (94).
Far from being “bugs” in this particular book, these seemingly self-contradictory critiques are features of Marxist criminology, and particularly reminded me of Douglas Hay's observations about executions in eighteenth century England: the monarch's mercy toward some of the condemned served to legitimize the executions of many others under the Black Act (1975). While these complex takes on this complex material ring true and interesting, they lead the reader to the inevitable conclusion that the only way to exit this matrix of vicarious pleasure and indoctrination is through media that admonishes its viewers for their complicity in the creation of the carceral state, a view that most of Kaplan and LaChance's readers likely share, but which I doubt would make for widely marketable television.
Crimesploitation's most complicated critique is lobbed against wrongful conviction shows: focusing on “the protection of factually innocent people from the devastation of incarceration,” they argue, becomes the most pressing criminal justice policy imperative, leaving untouched the question of why such a devastating punishment is so easily and readily meted out.” On this particular week, in which the power of Serial's deep-dive into Syed's case has been amply demonstrated, this critique reads somewhat unfair: must everyone who illuminates a particular injustice also provide a multidimensional critique of all injustices? And yet, Kaplan and LaChance remind us that lowbrow has not cornered the market on tropes and spectacle, making me think that TV perspectives on crime (both fictional and nonfictional) have shifted largely to suit the tastes of the audience. The 1990s public, clamoring for law-and-order content lionizing police and prosecutors, was rewarded with dozens of Law and Order franchise seasons following a predictable model. Today's audience, galvanized by protests against police outreach and much more aware of the inequality dimensions of law enforcement, is rewarded with Making a Murderer, Serial, and their ilk.
As I was finishing Crimesploitation, I chanced upon an interesting episode of the CBS show The Good Fight. Liz Reddick, the managing partner of a large African-American BigLaw firm, is approached by a plucky documentarian who wants to interview her as a “powerful Black Woman”; gradually, though, Liz comes to realize that the documentarian is trying to create a crimesploitation film that argues that Liz contributed, in her previous job as a prosecutor, to a wrongful conviction. It almost feels as if Liz (the fictional character!) benefitted from reading Kaplan and LaChance's book: she realizes that the documentarian is focusing on visual evidence of high emotional valence and is trying to paint a Manichean picture of the defendant's trial, casting Liz as the villain. To me, this attests to the importance of encouraging not only academics, but viewers of all stripes and political affiliations, to adopt Kaplan and LaChance's critical perspective and keen eye for narrative tropes and employ it to all that we see and consume.
