Now that this survey of crime subgenres has ended, it is time to
return to the question that haunted its opening chapter: What
is illuminated by considering a given film like The Godfather
(1972) or Murder on the Orient Express (1974) or Fargo (1996) as a
crime film rather than a gangster film or a detective story or a black
comedy? More generally, what is gained by defining the crime film as
a strong genre that not only incorporates but logically underpins such
better-known genres as the gangster film, the private-eye film, the film
noir, and the police film? Discussing crime comedies like Fargo as
crime films that happen to be humorous rather than comedies that
happen to involve crime seeks to expand the range and resonance of
the crime genre at the risk of choosing examples many viewers might
dismiss – and indeed of diluting the genre as a whole. Many viewers,
perhaps most, do experience The Thin Man (1934) or Charade (1963)
or Fargo as crime films with comic relief, but how many viewers, after
all, would categorize Arsenicand Old Lace (1944) or The Trouble with
Harry (1955) or Some Like It Hot (1959) as crime films rather than comedies?
The point of discussing such films as crime films is not to inflate the
importance of one genre at the expense of another but to indicate the
ways in which previous definitions of crime films may have been unwisely
parochial. No extant definition of crime films prescribes solemnity
as a criterion of the genre, yet historians of crime films regularly
ignore crime comedies, presumably on the grounds that they are not
really crime films.1 Such distinctions between more and less real members
of a given genre, however, are as futile as they are inevitable, not
because genre films cannot be consensually categorized, but because
these distinctions ignore the nature and purpose of generic classification
in the first place.
Whatever grounds they take as their basis, all attempts to distinguish
real crime films fromthe less real, like all attempts to distinguish
crime films categorically from members of other genres, assume that
genres are essential and logical, parallel and mutually exclusive, like
Platonic norms. But because generic categories are as culturally constructed
as the works they are intended to categorize, they are always
historically situated, ad hoc, subjective, and inflected by (indeed rooted
in) a particular agenda. This is the real point of Rick Altman’s distinction
between semantic and syntactic genre markers, as he notes
in proposing that “the relationship between the semantic and the syntactic
constitutes the very site of negotiation between Hollywood and
its audience, and thus between ritual and ideological uses of genre.”2
Although Steve Neale aptly notes that many accounts of Hollywood
genres “have been driven by critical and theoretical agendas rather
than by a commitment to detailed empirical analysis and thorough industrial
and historical research,”3 the whole project of genre theory,
from the construction of films as members of a genre to the attempt
to synthesize genres or their rationales in the service of a more general
theory of communications, remains by its very nature agendadriven.
It seems clear, then, that the question of what good is the conceptual
category of crime films is really another, and more illuminating,
way of posing an apparently simpler question: What good are crime
films? The business of this final chapter is to indicate briefly what sort
of cultural work crime films as a genre do for the corporations that
produce them, the viewers that consume them, and the society that
authorizes their currency, and how the answers to those questions are
connected to the questions of what counts as a crime film and why –
why the category might be useful in revealing some of the films’ leading
family connections and motives, which depend on what Altman
has called “the uses to which members of the family are put.”4
The most obvious features crime films of different subgenres share
are a grammar of typological situations and a cast of stock characters.
Whatever their subgenre, most crime films present events, twists, and
revelations that are so formulaic not only in themselves but in their
interrelations that they can truly be called a grammar (or, in Altman’s
terms, a syntax). Part of this consistency, of course, stems from Holly-
wood’s injunction that crime does not pay. Thus gangsters rise only
to fall; an ambitious, well-planned robbery involving a gang of thieves
working closely together will invariably go wrong sooner or later; the
most mysterious crime, whether or not it is presented as a mystery
to the audience, will always be resolved by a close examination of the
evidence, even when that evidence is inconclusive, as in the Claus von
Bülow case; and crooked policemen are inevitably brought down by
the institutional power of the police force, even though that same
force, once it is corrupted, is no match for a single crusading officer.
Crime films are equally consistent in the opportunities they offer criminals:
Unstealable jewels like the Pink Panther, protected by state-ofthe-
art security systems, are nothing more than a trope, an invitation
to theft; informers and undercover police officers are sure to have
their lives threatened, even if they elude these threats; and nervous,
secretive characters who beg for official protection are marked for
death whatever their subgenre.
None of this is surprising or especially illuminating; it is merely an
indication of the extent to which the subject of crime, bracketed by
Hollywood’s official morality and its imperative to sensationalism,
generates a formula that transcends specific subgenres. What is more
revealing is the changing role the stock characters of crime films play
in different subgenres. The no-nonsense cop who plays by the book,
for example, is a staple of the crime film; but he (or, very occasionally,
she) has radically different roles in different subgenres. In private-eye
films like Lady in the Lake (1947) and Chinatown (1974) he is the hero’s
antagonist; in victim films like Fury (1936) and Suspicion (1941) he is
either a menace or a failed protector to the beleaguered hero. In some
police films, like Touch of Evil (1958) and The Untouchables (1987), he
is the hero; in erotic thrillers whose heroes happen to be police officers,
like BasicInstinc t (1992), he is the loose-cannon hero’s conscience
or his nemesis. Lawyers are the heroes as well as the villains
of lawyer films, but in police films and private-eye films their penchant
for legalism always makes them untrustworthy. A Perfect World (1993)
even manages to create an evil victim who is much more dangerous
than the good-hearted fellow-convict who kills him [Fig. 75]. To a remarkable
extent, the subgenres of the crime film are distinguished
from each other not by the stories they tell but by the attitudes they
adopt toward those stories.
A stock question gangster films raise, for example, is why people become
criminals. These films suggest that the reasons are specifically
Conclusion: What Good Are Crime Films? 291
sociopathic: an alienation from a remote or uncaring society combined
with an overreaching vanity or megalomania. But just as different
westerns adopt very different attitudes to the conflict they all
share between the frontier and the coming of civilization (so that, for
instance, the civilizing rancher heroes of Red River [1948], become the
anticivilizing outlaws of Shane [1953]), police films and lawyer films
tend to peg criminal behavior much more narrowly to greed, films
noirs to sexual victimization by a predatory woman, erotic thrillers
to masculine hysteria. Hence police heroes pursue criminals who deserve
to be caught or killed because they have chosen to be criminals,
but films noirs and erotic thrillers present criminals who cannot help
but kill. Caper films like The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and nihilist neonoirs
like The Grifters (1990) bring the question full circle by suggesting
that the question is beside the point, since there is no reason to
look for an explanation for any particular criminal behavior when society
itself is necessarily criminal.5
Criminal behavior, then, is the fault of a cruelly alienating society,
or of ethnic self-identification, or vaulting personal ambition, conscious
avarice, sexual beguilement, male hysteria, the fatal need for
the company of others – not just a warped society, but the social impulse
as such. In every case, the subject of criminality is used to focus
the problematic relationship between individual and social power and
justice, but each adopts a different point of view that restricts it to telling
only part of the story. To tell the full story, even if it were possible,
would far exceed Hollywood’s recipe for mass entertainment.
The full story, however, continues to haunt the partial story each
subgenre presents, for every film in every crime subgenre is marked
by numberless traces of the alternative crime story it could have
been. A crime comedy like Arsenicand Old Lace, which sets its batty
maiden aunts against their dangerously sociopathic nephew, is filled
with intimations of the serious crime film it could have been, and may
still (but probably will not) turn into. Fargo, going still further, is a
crime comedy whose every sequence toys with the possibility of consequential
terror, even at its most disturbingly amusing. The kidnappers’
trip to Brainerd is filled with jokes that break the tension but
do not prevent them from kidnapping and eventually killing Jean Lundegaard.
What’s more, if every crime comedy is potentially a crime
melodrama, the reverse is equally true. The Godfather, for all its tragic
pretensions, could have been a comedy – a possibility explored intermittently
by GoodFellas (1990) and released full throttle by Jane
Austen’s Mafia! (1998). Indeed, if parodies in general, from Dead Men
Don’t Wear Plaid (1982) to the three Naked Gun films (1988–94) are
considered to release the comedy repressed by their progenitor texts’
self-seriousness, then it is no wonder that crime films have so often
been parodied, since cultural repression is as central to their agenda
as cultural analysis.
In the same way, crime films are haunted by the visual traces and
tones of other crime subgenres. Just as the gold lighting used to invoke
the nostalgic past in The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II
(1974) is invoked by the ubiquitous wood-paneled train interiors in
Murder on the Orient Express, the low-key lighting characteristic of
films noirs haunts private-eye films and police films as well, sometimes
by its presence (Experiment in Terror, 1962), sometimes by its
absence (Chinatown), and the expressionistically cluttered spaces of
Fritz Lang are echoed by Double Indemnity (1944), modulated by Kiss
Me Deadly (1955), or resolutely refused by Fargo. Moreover, Fargo’s
vertiginous comedy serves as a reminder that every crime film is
shadowed by the farce it might have been if the criminals’ petty obses-
Conclusion: What Good Are Crime Films? 293
75. A Perfect World: Escaped convict Butch Haynes (Kevin Costner), a killer
whose rapport with lonely Phillip Perry (T. J. Lowther) brings out his gentler
side.
sions had been considered from a different angle. Every crime film is
informed by an enriching awareness of the alternative subgenres it
invokes, if only by contrast. The crucial importance of the crime-film
genre is that it foregrounds the ambivalence that makes these alternative
ways of seeing bad cops or the past or petty obsession essential
to each subgenre’s and each individual film’s presentation of its stock
elements.
Although each crime subgenre is haunted by implicit possibilities
explicitly realized by other subgenres, these possibilities, helpful as
they are for ad hoc classification, cannot be used to distinguish different
crime subgenres categorically from each other. Even within a
given subgenre, typological figures will assume ambiguities based on
their affinities to other subgenres. In L.A. Confidential (1997) it is obvious
that Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) is the loner cop familiar from hundreds
of earlier movies; but will he turn out to be a vigilante cop like Frank
Bullitt, a crooked cop like Capt. McCluskey in The Godfather, or a suspicious
cop like Det.Williams in Blue Velvet? For most of the film’s running
time, the answer is ambiguous. Even after L.A. Confidential has
run its course, its police hero remains indelibly marked, as each of
his progenitor heroes is marked, by the possibilities of what he might
have been.
Grouping well-established crime genres like the gangster film and
the film noir together under the more comprehensive, albeit synthetic,
genre of the crime film illuminates many of their formulaic family
resemblances; but reversing the procedure and defining these genres
as subsets of a more global crime genre goes further to explain the
abiding source of their power. It is only the crime genre itself, and not
any single subgenre, that accounts for the enabling ambiguity at the
heart of all crime subgenres and every film within them: the easy recognition
of the genre’s formulas coupled with a lingering uncertainty
about their import.
Even films that are not normally considered crime films can benefit
from this enrichment if they are considered hypothetically as crime
films. It is clear from the beginning of Unforgiven (1992) that the retired
gunslinger William Munny (Clint Eastwood) will overcome his reservations
about returning to violent ways and ride out to Big Whiskey
to claim the bounty the local whores have offered for killing the two
cowboys who disfigured one of their number and were let off by Sheriff
Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman) with a fine payable to the saloonkeeper
whose place was disturbed. It is equally obvious that the film
will end with a confrontation between Munny and Little Bill that Little
Bill can hardly survive. What remains in doubt until the film’s unsettling
ending, and perhaps beyond, is how viewers will feel about the
climax they have been awaiting for two hours, when an eerily selfcontained
ex-killer who insists that all that is behind him goes up
against a genially crooked sheriff who represents, along with Munny’s
dead wife and the whores’ thirst for vengeance, the closest thing to
moral authority in the film. Unforgiven has rightly been considered
a meditation on the Hollywood western; but like Rancho Notorious
(1952) and The Naked Spur (1953), it is also haunted by its affinities
with contract-killer films like Murder, Inc. (1960), avenger films like
D.O.A. (1950), and vigilante police films like those featuring Clint Eastwood’s
most recognizable hero, Dirty Harry Callahan.
Such exercises reveal not only the elastic boundaries of the crime
film but the ways in which the genre’s cultural work is linked to the
recognition of individual gangster films and police films and crime
comedies as first and foremost crime films; and they help to explain
the rise and fall of the different subgenres within the constant popularity
of the crime genre. Crime films are always likely to be popular in
liberal democracies because such cultures place the debate between
individual liberty and institutional power at the heart of their constitutional
agenda. Indeed, the very idea of a constitution is already a
privileged site for such a debate. Unlike utopian cultures, which would
have no need of crime films, or repressive regimes, which would not
tolerate the antisocial fantasies they license, liberal democracies renegotiate
the relations between individual liberty and institutional
power ceaselessly, in every new political campaign and election, every
law and trial and arrest. Most of these actions, of course, involve competing
institutions – corporations, aspiring beneficiaries of government
funding, ethnic and racial groups, governments – rather than
individuals; but crime films, like elections, personalize this process by
focusing it on a small number of individuals, even (or especially) if
they are set against faceless groups like the police, the law, or the
Mob. The constant ferment liberal democracies prescribe over private
rights and the public weal explains the success of crime stories in
such cultures as England, whose abiding fascination with crime-story
heroes from Richard III to Magwitch, from Sherlock Holmes to Jack the
Ripper, far outpaces the occurrence of actual crimes.
Within this context, however, different crime subgenres flourish or
recede depending on a multitude of factors: studios’ economic imper-
atives; institutional censorship; the power of their nonfictional forbears
(the decline of the Hollywood gangster is mandated by a moratorium
that corresponds to both the enforcement of the Production
Code and the repeal of Prohibition); viewers’ changing attitudes toward
the government and their own majoritarian culture (as the social
conformism of The Desperate Hours [1955] gives way to the antiauthoritarianism
of Bonnie and Clyde [1967] and the brooding nostalgia of
the Godfather films); the shifting attraction to or revulsion from the
power of the law (from the righteous social engineering of To Kill a
Mockingbird [1962] to the cynical distrust of lawyers and all their
works in films based on John Grisham novels); the will to social belonging
or estrangement (from the yearning for trust and acceptance
by the hero of “G” Men [1935] to the impatience with the system in
The French Connection [1971] and the disillusionment with the system
in Serpico [1973]); and disruptions in the social order too deep for government
to cure (the wartime threat of working women in films noirs,
the backlash against women’s broader claims to empowerment in
erotic thrillers). It is no mystery why so many of the staple crime subgenres
often flourish at the same time, as they have during the 1990s,
since their partial, apparently inconsistent views of the conflict are as
logically compatible as the assumption in individual films like Reversal
of Fortune (1990) and A Few Good Men (1992) that lawyers are both
crusading heroes and the scum of the earth.
Still, the crime genre, like all popular genres, is not simply parasitic
on political or social history; it has a history of its own that acts as
another engine of change. Each genre has a logic of its own that is constantly
subject to retrospective change by three closely related kinds
of development. The arrival of a new work, if it is accepted as part of
the genre, encourages viewers to reconsider previous members of the
genre in its light, as The Godfather and Chinatown not only extended
the gangster and private-eye genres but spearheaded a critical reassessment
of them, and Psycho (1960) inaugurated a revival of the
horror film by setting a new standard for onscreen violence that was
in turn rapidly outmoded. New developments in contemporary social
history may awaken viewers to a new sense of the parallels or contrasts
between their time and that represented in earlier films, as Bonnie
and Clyde’s use of the Depression as a mirror to the social and institutional
estrangement of America’s youth in the sixties provoked
debates about both the sixties and the thirties, even to a new interest
in the heroes’ Depression chic fashions. In addition, contemporary
arguments by film theorists and analysts can function, as effectively
as new additions to a film genre, as intertexts that cast new light on
old genres, often in unintended ways. Laura Mulvey’s influential “Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” for example, ends its argument
about the exclusion of female viewers from the movies by expressing
the wish that demystifying this exclusion will lead to a decline in such
sexist commercial cinema that female viewers will greet with no more
than “sentimental regret.”6 In the twenty-five years since Mulvey
wrote, commercial cinema has certainly not changed in the directions
she hoped; but critics seeking to theorize a place for female viewers
and to liberate the repressed female voices of older films have revolutionized
the ways contemporary viewers watch films noirs, reordering
the genre and making it central to an understanding of American
film.
One result of this constant change from different sources is that although
genres like the crime film look stable both from a distance and
at any given moment, they are constantly subject to revisionist debate,
and one viewer’s revisionist update (e.g., Reservoir Dogs, 1992;
Pulp Fiction, 1994) is another viewer’s rejected offense against the
genre, and a third viewer’s classic against which to measure even
more contemporary updates like 2 Days in the Valley (1996) and Suicide
Kings (1998). So it might seem that the crime-film genre is nothing
but a mirage that dissolves on close examination. What all this historical
jostling really indicates, however, is simply that the crime genre,
though as real as each viewer’s opinion and as predictable as viewers’
broad consensus, cannot be defined categorically or ahistorically. It
is whatever studios, filmmakers, and viewers think it is, and over the
years they have felt free to think it was many different things – usually
several things at once.
Such a broad critical categorymight well be further expanded to include
all movies in which crime plays however minor a role. On the
other hand, if crime films are those that use crimes to figure problems
of social justice or institutional power or moral guilt in specifically
legal terms, the crime genre might become more illuminating, as it
would certainly become more powerful, if it were reconfigured as the
injustice genre, the social-disorder genre, the power genre, even the
action genre. Although to do so would risk stretching it to its breaking
point, there would be gains as well as losses in such a procedure.
Alternatively, the crime film could well be organized around different
subgenres this book has neglected. The most obvious of these, the
man-on-the-run story, has been analyzed at length not only by Charles
Derry and Martin Rubin7 but by forty years’ work of commentary on
Alfred Hitchcock. To emphasize the importance of such films fromThe
39 Steps (1935) to The Fugitive (1993) to the crime genre would foreground
questions not only about the fugitive’s and the pursuing system’s
moral complicity but about the range of tactics fugitives employ
to keep one step ahead of the law. To emphasize films about white-
collar criminals, which invert the world of The Asphalt Jungle, would
raise questions about the relation between normal business practices
and criminal practices, and ultimately about the fetishizing of workspace
and the work ethic, whether the heroes are innocents caught in
unethical situations that skirt illegality to a greater or lesser extent (All
My Sons, 1948; Executive Suite, 1954; Patterns, 1956; The Apartment,
1960;Wall Street, 1987 [Fig. 76]; The Hudsucker Proxy, 1993; Disclosure,
1994) or businesspeople whose turn toward literal criminality indicts
their professional milieu metaphorically (The Lavender Hill Mob, 1951;
The Bad Sleep Well, 1960; A Shock to the System, 1990; Glengarry Glen
Ross, 1992; American Psycho, 2000). Films about outlaws – sympathetic
lawbreakers like Robin Hood, Jesse James, and the protagonists of
Thelma & Louise (1991) – provoke debates about the morality of the
established order. Films about prisons like those in The Big House
(1930), 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932), and Brute Force (1947) present
them as social microcosms from which escape, the convicts’ one obsession,
is no more possible than from life itself; even when Tom Connors
(Spencer Tracy) does escape from Sing Sing, he is obviously fated
to return. The doomed capers in The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing
(1956), whose gangs are assembled, like pickup ball teams, for the purpose
of pulling off one big job, exchange the romantic fatalism of the
gangster film’s promethean, system-defying individual hero for a cynical
fatalism about social organizations themselves.
All these subgenres focus on contradictions within the social order
the heroes are constrained to serve, imitate, or flee. Linking M (1931),
Gun Crazy (1949), Psycho, Cape Fear (1962/1991) [Fig. 77], Repulsion
300 Crime Films
77. Cape Fear (1991): Robert De Niro’s downscale sociopathology. (De Niro,
Nick Nolte)
(1965), Badlands (1973), The Killer Inside Me (1976), The Shining
(1980), Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1990), The Silence of the Lambs
(1991), Single White Female (1992), Natural Born Killers (1994), Speed
(1994), and To Die For (1995) [Fig. 78] – customarily parceled out
among diverse subgenres – as films about sociopathic or psychopathic
criminals would raise questions about the psychopathology of
crime, its status as a mark of social alienation or of internalized conflicts
typical of an alienating society itself. Finally, giving pride of place
to the subgenre of superheroes and supercriminals from Dr. Mabuse
to Superman, Batman, and Darkman would recast what have most often
been considered action fantasies as allegories that examine the
relations between institutional and physical laws and the limits of the
humanity constructed by earthly powers.
One could go still further by exploring the complementary genres
of espionage and international intrigue, which are clearly related to
crime films.8 Most of the early James Bond films, for instance, involve
some form of international blackmail by terrorists who have stolen
something dangerous or irreplaceably valuable, and much of Bond’s
time in Goldfinger (1964), Thunderball (1965), and Diamonds Are Forever
(1971) is spent in detective work as he tries to figure out just
what SPECTRE or its allies are up to this time. These affinities become
even more pronounced in films like The Parallax View (1974) and Betrayed
(1988), which meld domestic terrorism with undercover detective
work.
Alternative theories of the crime film, then, could readily be constructed
by postulating the primacy of any of these genres. Any film
in which a crime occurs can fairly be considered a crime film; the test
of the classification, as of the resulting definition of the genre, depends
on its usefulness in illuminating individual examples and the relations
among them. More generally, crime films could certainly, as noted earlier,
be redefined as injustice films or social-disorder films or power
films or action films. The best reason to resist any of these labels is
suggested by the last one: Action films all involve the attempt to right
some perceived wrong through physical action, and therefore have a
great deal in common with crime films; but assimilating one category
to the other would achieve only a single purpose – underlining these
similarities, in order, for example, to explore the morality of power exchanges
in mass culture – at the cost of putting one of two enormously
popular genre labels out of business. Studies of the relations between
the two genres, perhaps overlaying one of them hypothetically on the
other, are therefore far more likely, because more useful, than a consensual
redefinition of either one in terms of the other.
In the same way, redefining the crime genre as the injustice genre,
the social-disorder genre, or the power genre would make it virtually
coextensive with what David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin
Thompson have called “classical Hollywood cinema” – fictional narratives
in which an individual or group of people struggle to overcome
obstacles toward a clearly defined goal whose decisive success or failure
marks the end of the story. Hence Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson
argue that the narrative and stylistic deviance of film noir, which
“no more subverts the classical film than crime fiction undercuts the
orthodox novel,” can readily be recuperated within the Hollywood
paradigm.9 Several years earlier, Steve Neale had already argued that
the leading Hollywood genres are all “modes of . . . [a] narrative system”
that “mainstream cinema produces as its commodity.”10 Broadening
the crime genre to the extent of identifying it with this entire
narrative system would indicate the degree to which Hollywood narrative
is rooted in social problems that have specifically illegal manifestations,
but at the cost of erasing the crime film’s distinctiveness
from other Hollywood narratives.
What is the point in maintaining this distinctiveness if the crime
film’s frontiers are so ragged? The answer is that the genre is not defined
by its borders but by its center, its core appeal to different viewers.
Not everyone laughs at the same things, but nearly everyone recognizes
the importance of laughter in defining comedy.11 In the same
way, though not everyone will agree what counts as a crime film, this
volume’s survey of crime subgenres suggests that most viewers for
any popular genre are responding to an appeal most economically encapsulated
by Poe’s representation of the criminal and the detective
as mirror images of each other: to turn cultural anxiety into mass entertainment.
Although this imperative may sound peculiar, it is behind
all the great Hollywood genres, which gain their power not by ignoring
or escaping from viewers’ problems but by exploring, and usually
attempting to resolve, social and psychological problems that are far
more intransigent outside the movies. The western and the war movie
romanticize problems of masculinity, violence, and national identity
by transplanting them to a mythic past or projecting them onto a geopolitical
canvas that makes them necessary for survival. The domestic
melodrama, like its television cousin, the soap opera, heroically inflates
the problems of family life and the domestic sphere in order to
make the corresponding problems of its homebound target audience
more palatable, even glamorous. Romantic comedies mine the uncertainties
of courtship for laughs; musical comedies show the triumph
of self-created performers over their doubts and inhibitions.
In each case the basic recipe for manufacturing entertainment is the
same. First, anxieties about violence or personal identity or the dignity
of home life are projected onto a typological, and thus reassuringly
familiar, generic canvas, preferably one whose mise-en-scène is comfortably
remote from the audience’s own – as in the western, which
takes place long ago and (for many) far away; or the animated cartoon,
in which unendingly homicidal conflicts are played out against
a drawn background whose two-dimensional unreality and promise of
magical transformations render it doubly reassuring; or the film noir,
which follows the mean streets of a stylishly seedy modern city.
Next, the anxieties that give the genre its cultural currency are simplified
from multifaceted dilemmas into conflictual dualities. Having
transported Dorothy Gale from the intractable problems of the Depression
to the magical land of Oz, her film transforms the sorts of
questions that bedeviled her at home (How can she keep Miss Gulch
from taking Toto away? How can she get the adults in her world to take
her seriously? Where can she find her heart’s desire?) into simpler
choices she can use to define her direction and her goal under the
guidance of the good witch Glinda and the yellow brick road that leads
her to adult surrogates who do take her seriously because she has rescued
them of her own accord. More generally, popular genres reduce
the anxieties they engage by redefining them in terms of dualities that
can be more simply resolved. The passengers in Stagecoach (1939)
cannot defeat the Indians, but the cavalry can; the problems of how
to domesticate romance without killing it are resolved in Hollywood
romantic comedies either by treating marriage as a conclusion that resolves
all problems, preferably by rescuing one of the lovers from an
unsuitable alternative match (It Happened One Night, 1934) or by giving
married couples a chance at a second courtship (The Awful Truth,
1937; The Palm Beach Story, 1942). Musicals from Top Hat (1935) to
The Band Wagon (1953) allow their singing and dancing principals to
overcome their inhibitions and express the emotions that would otherwise
leave them painfully vulnerable through performance. Action
films reduce the complexities of geopolitics to a series of showdowns
between Us and Them.
The genius of these dualities is that they not only give viewers a
strong rooting interest in a radically simplified moral conflict but also
can easily vindicate either party to the conflict by demonizing the other,
and present an unqualified triumph through decisive action. The
hero’s triumph or heroic defeat is a vindication not only of the social
order but also of the audience’s psychic health, a wish-fulfillment fantasy
that manages to celebrate both individualism and social action
even as it valorizes the movies’ tendency to convert social or psychological
stalemates, like Frank Bullitt’s conflicts with politician Walter
Chalmers, into Bullitt’smore thrilling, visually arresting, and easily resolved
car chase through the streets of San Francisco.
All the genres of popular entertainment are celebrations of individual
heroic action as a way of cutting through the complexities of moral
dilemmas; but all genres also acknowledge the limits of this heroic
stance by somehow criticizing or undermining their enabling dualities
as simplistic and individual heroism as an all-purpose recipe for problem
solving. Since, as American classics from The Gold Rush (1925) to
Citizen Kane (1941) to Do the Right Thing (1989) show, the dialectic between
the celebration and the critique of heroism is Hollywood’smost
enduring subject, it is hardly surprising that this dialectic animates
so many Hollywood genres and provides the impetus behind their historical
evolution.
In the case of the crime film, this complication is joined by another
one constitutive of the genre. Although all crime films focus on a heroic
individual, they vary widely not only in their attitudes toward that
individual (as in the criminal heroes of gangster films or the antiheroes
of film noir) but in the character positions they choose to anoint as
heroes. It is rare to see self-professed enemies of love as the heroes
of romantic comedies, or Native Americans cast as the heroes of westerns
like Cheyenne Autumn (1964) or Dances with Wolves (1990) that
question the heroism of ethnic European settlers; yet criminals are as
likely to be the heroes of crime films as detectives or avengers, and
far more likely than victims. The active heroic role is more important
than the nature of the character who fills that role.
This point is driven home with particular emphasis by Traffic
(2000), Steven Soderbergh’s film about the Mexican–American drug
trade, which dramatizes the costs of heroin addiction by following
three separate stories whose characters, though unaware of each other,
repeatedly act out the slippery relationship among the roles of
criminal, victim, and avenger. The Mexican cop (Benicio del Toro) who
goes undercover in the attempt to exploit the rivalry between two
drug cartels relies on his criminal-looking behavior to preserve his life,
and sees his best friend killed when his criminal mask slips; the California
druglord’s wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones) whose husband is arrested
turns into a criminal herself in order to survive [Fig. 79]; and
the American judge (Michael Douglas) who is named to head the Drug
Enforcement Agency has to confront his own daughter’s drug use,
which ends up turning the nation’s top drug cop into a victim and a
would-be avenger himself. Once it has established the importance of
each of these leading characters, the film is able to maintain considerable
sympathy for them through several truly distorting transformations.
In both its synoptic view of the drug trade and its awareness of the
ways the trade changes the behavior and even the moral role of everyone
it touches, Traffic might be nominated as the complete crime film.
But although its view of the heroin trade is more comprehensive than
that of most crime films – though considerably less nuanced than that
of Traffik (1989), Alistair Reid’s BBC miniseries on which it is based –
it is no more complete than that of Scarface (1932) or Fury or The Godfather.
Crime films of every stripe present what might seem to be pat
social conflicts, moral questions sharpened by their parties’ alliance
with legal right and wrong; but their attitude toward that conflict is
sharply ambivalent, if only because they function on behalf of both the
socially repressive agendas of their capitalist distributors and the escapist
fantasies of the mass audience whose patronage they seek. In
their quest to make entertainment out of taboo behavior, they treat
crime as both realistic and ritualistic, a shocking aberration and business
as usual, a vehicle of social idealism and of social critique. But
although the nature of the character who embodies the heroic role the
genre prescribes can vary from one crime film to the next even in the
same multiplex, the genre itself is best defined in terms of a single constitutive
theme: the romance of criminal behavior. This behavior is
most often incarnated in a criminal, of course, whether that criminal
is an outsized gangster like Tony Camonte in Scarface, an unwilling
killer like Al Roberts (Tom Neal) in Detour (1945), or a tragically ailing
paterfamilias like Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Part III (1990).
Even when the crime film focuses on a victim or detective or avenger,
however, those heroes become interesting, admirable, and heroic
precisely to the extent that they begin to act like criminals – unlike
the criminals themselves, who may well end up acting like victims or
moral avengers but who need only act like criminals to hold viewers’
interest. Hence the criminal, more than the victim or the avenger, illustrates
the central function of the crime film: to allow viewers to experience
the vicarious thrills of criminal behavior while leaving them
free to condemn this behavior, whoever is practicing it, as immoral.
The continued fascination of the genre is not that it tirelessly inculcates
either or both of these positions for viewers that already understand
them to a fault, but that it encourages them to experience the
contradictions among these positions and their corollaries in a way
no analysis can capture.
The crime film is therefore well named, because of its three leading
figures – the victim, the criminal, and the avenger – it is the criminal
and the kind of behavior he or she represents that are primary, and
it is only to the extent that other characters are tempted by the criminal’s
example that their films become crime films: films whose specific
cultural task is to examine the price of social repression as imposed
by the institutions of the justice system. Joe Wilson struggles
with himself over whether he should emulate the mob that tried to kill
him in Fury. Double Indemnity’s Walter Neff and BasicInstinc t’s Det.
Nick Curran are drawn into criminal behavior through their involvement
in forbidden romance. J. J. Gittes confronts his own pettiness
and greed in Chinatown, and Jeffrey Beaumont his outlaw sexuality in
Blue Velvet, through their battles with monstrous antagonists; Det. Lt.
Frank Bullitt and Alan Dershowitz confront endless criticisms of their
work; Marge Gunderson restores law and order to Fargo by her failure
to understand the dark humor her story embodies; even Hercule
Poirot, in Murder on the Orient Express, ends by covering up a crime
committed by a group of vigilantes whose cause he feels is just. Each
of these films, like the subgenres they represent, appeals to the audience’s
own antisocial tendencies by cloaking them in the glamour and
mystery of the criminal, reassuring the audience that this fantasy is
only a waking dream, and leaving behind a lingering suggestion that
the duality of right and wrong that supported it may be due for a closer
look next week.
Crime Films/Thomas Leitch/ http://www.cambridge.org
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