As the 1990s wore on, however, it became clear that however cynical
Americans may have grown about the justice system, they were even
more frightened of criminals. After years of polls in which fewer than
10 percent of respondents listed crime as the nation’s most important
problem, it abruptly shot to the top of the 1994 Gallup Poll, with some
40 percent of respondents listing it as most important.26 The recreational
use of drugs, taken for granted by a generation of upper-class
college students in the 1960s and 1970s, had been stigmatized by
crack cocaine, whose low street price and well-publicized rush of euphoria
made it the drug of choice among the black underclass. As legislators
imposing mandatory minimum sentences, and police officers
under heavy pressure to clean out crack houses and preserve decaying
cities moved against the epidemic with a series of Wars on Drugs,
the prison population skyrocketed. For the first time since Prohibition,
a large number of Americans were jailed for an activity openly enjoyed
by an even larger number. This time, however, public attitudes toward
drugs were divided far more closely along class lines. America’s inner
cities, reeling from the effects of the exodus to the suburbs, were widely
associated with poverty and crime. Unlike Prohibition audiences,
who could always be relied on to find some point of contact with the
fictional surrogates of the criminals who supplied liquor to every social
class, citizens who endured or read about drug-related crimes like
robbery and burglary now found themselves identifying with victims
rather than criminals – not because members of the middle and upper
classes had never used drugs, but because they had never used the
highly addictive crack that was subject to the most severe criminal
penalties.
Drug abuse, which had once been reserved for message dramas like
The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) and Bigger Than Life (1956), had
by now become a trope for corruption (La Bamba, 1987; The Five
Heartbeats, 1991; Casino, 1995; Basquiat, 1996; Boogie Nights, 1997) and
hard-core criminality (GoodFellas, 1990; Rush, 1991; One False Move,
1991; Bad Lieutenant, 1992; Point of No Return, 1993). One of the most
striking differences between the 1932 Scarface and Brian De Palma’s
1983 remake is between Tony Camonte, who makes a fortune by selling
beer but is never shown drinking, and Marielito Tony Montana,
shown at one point collapsing in a pile of his product, undone as much
by consuming as by selling cocaine. The 1983 Scarface traded on the
forbidden glamour of drug use as a token of the economic success
that both confirmed the characters’ arrival among the upper classes
and prepared for their downfall [Fig. 9].
Audiences proved similarly conflicted in their attitudes toward
screen violence. On the one hand, the violence of movies, along with
that of children’s television programming and video games, was in-
8. My Cousin Vinny: The antilawyer turned lawyer hero. (Marisa Tomei, Fred
Gwynne, Joe Pesci)
creasingly condemned as a trigger for the violence of youthful “superpredators”
and high-school terrorists. On the other hand, violence
was more and more successful, and more and more in demand, in selling
movies to a generation of teenagers who had grown up with remote
controls that had sharpened their impatience, discouraged the
deferred gratifications of slow-moving films, and reintroduced Mack
Sennett’s eighty-year-old principle of slapstick comedy: The introduction,
buildup, and payoff of each joke had to take less than a minute.
These deepening divisions in audiences’ attitudes toward violence,
criminals, and the law – divisions, however often staged as debates
among different people, that clearly ran deep within many individual
audience members – produced a rich array of contradictory films and
contradictory responses. In 1991, in a show of Academy unanimity
matched only in 1934 and 1975, The Silence of the Lambs swept all four
top awards, along with a writing Oscar; yet the film’s success was anything
but unanimous, blasted as it was by reviewers like Michael Medved
who insisted that it was disastrously out of step with mainstream
American values.27 The ensuing decade produced important and hotly
debated films about the relations between criminals and the police
9. Scarface (1983): Marielito Tony Montana (Al Pacino) wasted by the drugs
that mark his success.
(One False Move; Heat, 1995), a continued updating of the neo-noir
tradition in the erotic thriller (Basic Instinct, 1992; Body of Evidence,
1993), a postmodern renewal of the gangster film (Reservoir Dogs,
1991; Pulp Fiction, 1994), a return of the unofficial detective (Devil in
a Blue Dress, 1995) and the innocent man on the run (The Fugitive,
1993), and the reemergence of the lawyer film (the John Grisham industry,
with its prodigious influence on popular fiction as well as popular
film).
Among the welter of these releases, a few developments stand out
with particular clarity. First is the adaptation of the gangster film to
the gangs sociologists and citizens alike find peculiar to the nineties:
young, urban, African-American street gangs. The pivotal success of
Spike Lee, whose films from Do the Right Thing (1989) to Summer of
Sam (1999) tend to treat crime peripherally, encouraged African-
American directors like Mario Van Peebles, John Singleton, and Ernest
Dickerson to present their own versions of contemporary gang life.
Van Peebles, whose father had made Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss
Song twenty years earlier, followed the plot of Scarface surprisingly
closely in New Jack City (1991), warning of the false promises of drug
use and the culture it spawned [Fig. 10]. Boyz N the Hood (1991), which
made Singleton the youngest director ever to be nominated for an
10. New Jack City: An equal-opportunity drug culture. (Allen Payne, Wesley
Snipes, Christopher Williams)
Oscar, was even more searingly realistic in its portrayal of the allure
of gang life as the only community open to black ghetto kids, and the
ambiguities surrounding two meanings of the word “gangs”: the social
units young people always tend to form, and the criminal organizations
contemporary audiences use the term to identify.28
Unlike the blaxploitation films of the seventies, these films, though
targeting primarily African-American audiences, had far more crossover
appeal; but they were never as commercially successful as the
series of comedy/action vehicles for Eddie Murphy (48 Hrs., 1982;
Another 48 Hrs., 1990; Beverly Hills Cop, 1984, its sequels, 1987, 1994)
and the salt-and-pepper team of Mel Gibson and Danny Glover (Lethal
Weapon, 1987, and its three sequels, 1989–98). The box-office enthusiasm
that greeted standup comic Murphy’s debut as a foul-mouthed
convict-turned-detective in 48 Hrs. and the small effort required to
turn him into a Detroit cop in the later franchise attested to audiences’
hunger for antiauthoritarian authority figures [Fig. 11] – a hunger Lethal
Weapon, which featured the relatively rooted family man Roger Murtaugh
(Glover) barely restraining his “lethal weapon” police partner,
the manic maverick Martin Riggs (Gibson), was designed once again
to feed. The more modest success of the seven farcical Police Academy
films (1984–94) showed that the formula demanded not toothlessly
comical cops but wisecracking and independent action as the
logical responses to dramatic tension and social oppression; the
threat had to be as real as the release.
The most ambivalent of all nineties crime films, however, were the
postmodern fables of David Lynch, Joel and Ethan Coen, and Quentin
Tarantino. Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), which mingled cloyingly saccharine
glimpses of small-town Americana with horrific revelations about
its psychosexual underside, marked a watershed in the history of
criminal nightmares whose dark joke was that they seemed much
more real than the supposedly normal surface above. The Coen brothers,
beginning with Blood Simple (1984), set their seal on a new round
of ironic crime comedies so dark that many audiences could not explain
why they were laughing. Tarantino’s startling Reservoir Dogs
(1991), which uses the caper-gone-wrong to examine the nature of
male posturing and male loyalty, attracted notice mainly for its unflinching
violence, but his masterly Pulp Fiction, whose gangster heroes
always had time in between their last round of killing and the
next unanticipated trapdoor about to open beneath their feet to debate
such moral quiddities as the meaning of a foot massage or the
personality a pig would have to have to be edible, offered an exuberantly
comic counterpoint to Lynch’s nightmare vision of middle America.
Tarantino’s trademark moments – the plunging of a hypodermic
into the breast of the untouchable, accidentally overdosed gangster’s
wife Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman), the double-crossing boxer Butch
Coolidge (Bruce Willis) and his mortal enemy Marsellus Wallace (Ving
Rhames) taken prisoner by a pair of homosexual rapists much more
dangerous than they are, the accidental point-blank shooting of the
gang member being asked by Vincent Vega (John Travolta) whether
he believes in miracles – treat criminal violence as a cosmic joke
whose point, like the threat of nuclear holocaust in Dr. Strangelove
(1964), is precisely that jokes are an inadequate response to death,
chaos, and annihilation. The nature of Lynch’s and Tarantino’s jokey
send-ups of contemporary social anxieties by translating them into
impossibly elaborate criminal plots inaugurated a hip new subgenre
of ironic crime comedies like 2 Days in the Valley (1996) [Fig. 12], Happiness
(1998), Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels (1999), Go (1999),
and Nurse Betty (2000).
As Hollywood addressed Americans’ indecision about whether
crime should be treated as a social epidemic or a sick joke by com-
Historical and Cultural Overview 49
11. Beverly Hills Cop: Eddie Murphy (center) as anti-authoritarian authority
figure.
bining both perspectives in films like Blue Velvet and Pulp Fiction, popular
fascination with the law soared to new heights. Although Americans
regularly affirmed their disillusionment with courts and lawyers,
they responded eagerly to fictional representations of the law. Fueled
by Scott Turow’s novel Presumed Innocent (1987), which turned a criminal
prosecutor into the defendant in a high-profile murder case, and
John Grisham’s The Firm (1989), which allowed a rookie lawyer to
disentangle himself from his mob-connected Memphis firm, the legal
thriller became a best-selling literary genre for the first time since Robert
Travers’s Anatomy of a Murder (1956). Nor was this triumph restricted
to fictional courtroom drama. The success of Court TV and
the replacement of the heavily fictionalized television program Divorce
Court by the real-life proceedings of The People’s Court and Judge
Judy groomed a new audience for an apparently limitless succession
of unofficial Crimes of the Century, each of them minutely described,
analyzed, cataloged, and second-guessed in the news media by the
few legal experts who were not busy grinding out their own novels.
O. J. Simpson’s two trials, for murder and for violating his murdered
wife Nicole Brown Simpson’s and her late friend Ronald Goldman’s
12. 2 Days in the Valley: Ironic crime comedy in the tradition of Pulp Fiction.
(Glenne Headly, Greg Cruttwell, Danny Aiello)
civil rights – the acknowledged landmark in this series of court cases
– set a pattern for fairy-tale characters, exotic backgrounds, inexhaustible
plot twists, an epic sense of scale and duration, strong partisan
interests along preexisting lines of race and class, and a colorful array
of legal personalities, most of whom wasted no time when the case
was over in rushing into memoirs or novels revealing themselves even
more fully to a waiting world. Secure in their knowledge that lawyers,
loved or hated, are always opposed by other lawyers who can be hated
or loved, audiences for this endless soap opera of real-life justice
could find in it just the magic carpet to keep their ambivalence toward
the law aloft indefinitely.
Crime Films/Thomas Leitch/ http://www.cambridge.org
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