Criminology Goes to the Movies

Criminology texts are dull. Crime films are fun. The idea for Criminology Goes to the Movies grew from the authors' asking their university students whether specific movies might be helpful in teaching various criminological theories. One imagines how that initial dialogue must have played out: "Class, next week we can read 'Beyond Social Capital: Spatial Dynamics of Collective Efficacy for Children' by Sampson, Morenoff, and Earls - or we can watch Taxi Driver. Now, settle down, guys, stop all the cheering and waving ..."

Authors Nicole Rafter (professor and senior research fellow at Northeastern University) and Michelle Brown (assistant professor at the University of Tennessee and a fellow at Indiana University) have indeed come up with an effective way of keying theory to film. Think of The Godfather, Dirty Harry, A Clockwork Orange, and the iconic Warner Bros. crime sagas of the thirties. It's arguable that most of cinema's gripping, indelible moments have occurred in crime films. Which do you remember better, the "cute meet" in Sleepless in Seattle or the shower scene in Psycho - "the most celebrated scene in cinematic history"?

The authors do a thoughtful job of using the plots of well-known films to illustrate various theories of crime. Rational choice theories (crime as a delib-erate career path) are exemplified by Double Indemnity, although one might argue that Fred MacMurray's choice to cooperate in the murder of Barbara Stanwyck's husband was less a rational decision than a matter of the seductress sim-ply eating him alive.

Biological determinist theories, those of Cesare Lombroso and his intellectual progeny, are represented by Frankenstein and The Bad Seed. In the latter, film buffs may recall, the mother of the child in the title role discovers that she herself is the daughter of Bessie Denker, a notorious murderess. Some people, in the words of the movie's simpleminded psychiatrist, Dr. Reginald Tasker, are just "bad seeds, plain bad from the beginning, and nothing can change them."

Psychological theories? Psycho is the unsurprising choice, but the authors' analysis is exhaustive. How many movie fans understood that Hitchcock was making a cinematic reference to Norman Bates' bad toilet training?

The authors believe that "it has become increasingly difficult for academic criminology to maintain boundaries between itself and popular culture - to ignore the explanations of criminal behavior generated so powerfully and prodigiously by movies, novels, television and other cultural discourses." It is of course true that there is much more representation and discussion of crime in popular culture than in academe. "To ignore cultural representations of crime," they write, "is to ignore the largest public domain in which thought about crime occurs."

Rafter and Brown have managed to present a coherent summary of the most important theories that seek to explain crime, and to do it in a readable (sometimes even amusing) way. As a character in a noncrime film once observed, "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down."

---

Ben Pesta is a white-collar and criminal defense lawyer in Century City. His writing has appeared in Esquire, Playboy, Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times, and the American Bar Association Journal.

---