Steve Macek,
Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic over the City.
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis & London, 2006.
ISBN: 0 8166 4361 X
US$22.95 (pb)
360pp
(Review copy supplied by the University of Minnesota Press)

Contemplating ‘urban nightmares’ while residing in a small New Zealand city seems to be a contradiction in terms. Certainly, the nation’s larger metropolitan areas are not immune to the kinds of urban decay and inner city crime that Steve Macek describes in his book. Nevertheless New Zealanders must inevitably turn to the news imagery and the popular culture that originates from North America in order to get a true sense of what Macek argues are mediated representations of inner cities as hell, both metaphorically and literally. Even then, image and reality do not necessarily coincide. Having devoured American films and television programmes for most of my life, I could be forgiven for believing that Manhattan is a dark and gloomy place, where corrupt businessmen rule the days and African-American street gangs rule the nights, where drug dealers and crackheads inhabit every corner and alley, where children carry guns to school, where prostitution runs riot, where the inhabitants lie in their beds awake at night listening to gunfire just outside their windows, and pedestrians risk getting struck down by the various car chases that can occur at any time.

I have been fortunate to have been to New York City twice in my life (to date). The first time, in 1986 when I was, admittedly, young and naïve, offered a perception of New York that closely matched its mediated construction. I remember Times Square as a haven of porn shops and cheap electrical goods, Central Park as a place never to venture too far inside, and the cavernous streets as never to be ventured into after sundown. Twenty years later, more mature and worldly-wise, I returned to New York to find a city that was more vibrant and alive, and cleaner and safer than the city I remembered from all those years ago. Times Square had become a sea of flashing lights, neon and big-brand stores, Central Park, even in the midst of (an admittedly mild) winter, appeared healthier and manicured, while the streets never felt unsafe at any time of day or night.

It is with these recent memories firmly in mind that I read Steve Macek’s account of the ideological and cultural construction of the American inner-city as a site of moral decay and uncontrollable violence. Obviously I only saw one of America’s major cities and then only as a tourist, and even though that view was directly at odds with Macek’s vision of urban hell, his account of the conservative analysis of the inner-city as poverty and crime stricken is compelling and convincing. New York may appear bright and safe, but at what cost to its inhabitants? Had Mayor Rudi Guiliani’s zero-tolerance policy towards crime made the city safe, or had it suppressed the marginalised and downtrodden to the extent that their plight was worse than it was before.

In his book, Macek works through the development and the perpetuation of this ‘landscape of fear’, in which right-wing political rhetoric and social policy emerging during the post-Vietnam War era served to enhance inner-city depravation rather than assist in its removal. This resulted in what Macek calls the ‘savage urban other’, the perception that the crime-ridden and impoverished inhabitants of the inner city created areas and classes of people that middle-America had to be fearful of and to avoid at all costs. Macek goes on to argue that journalists, filmmakers and advertisers directly engaged with the ideological construction of the inner city as dens of immorality and inequity, and continued to produce representations of the urban that matched this right-wing rhetoric. Television news consistently constructed the inner-city as decayed havens of drug-dealers, hookers, murderers, and broken families, movies followed by defining the inner-city as a kind of hell (see for example Se7en [USA, 1995] and Falling Down [France/USA, 1993] ), while advertisers strongly advised surburbanites to construct secure and alarmed fortresses to keep out the excesses of the urbanites and to buy SUVs that promised an escape from city life.

Macek convincingly argues that the political and ideological construction of inner city America and its ensuing moral panics, fears and degradation was developed by a conservative counterattack on the gains made by the civil rights movement and other democratic mobilisations of the 1960s and 1970s that evolved to become a demonization of the inner city that became central to right-wing thought and political strategy. He then goes on to analyse television news, films and advertising materials to discuss how this conservative stance has become entrenched in popular culture. Unfortunately, as Macek moves through his analyses of the different forms of media, his argument becomes less persuasive.
Macek’s analysis of television news coverage and how it maintains conservative values is strong. Beginning with the assumption (from Chomsky and Herman) that corporate news media serves the ends of a dominant elite, Macek reports that:

Systematic study after systematic study confirms the soundness of these offhand impressions: almost without exception, the mainstream news media showcase the voices and ideas of the wealthy, the educated, and the powerful; support the basic legitimacy of the political status quo; and marginalise political heretics, minorities, and the poor. (140)

Further, ‘The mainstream media’s coverage does more than simply associate particular minority urban neighbourhoods with “violence” or “crime”, it equates cities and urbanity in general with crime and bloodshed.’ Macek’s research bears this out; 52 per cent of all hard news stories about Los Angeles broadcast on nightly national news programmes in 1997 were specifically about crime, illegal drugs, gangs and violence. These included stories on the murder of Bill Cosby’s son, a bank robbery that ended in a fatal gun battle, a bust at a ghetto amphetamine lab, and a story about homeless men surviving by selling drugs and their bodies on the streets. Looking at a specific story aired on CBS on 22 September 1995, Macek points out how news coverage enhances the perception of the inner city as the origin of social blight. Ostensibly discussing ‘youth crime’, the broadcast strongly implied the correlation between this and the inner city; newsreader Dan Rather’s introduction citing murders in Central Park and Los Angeles, the footage of Hispanic gangs on the streets of LA that places the viewer in the privileged position of a voyeur surveying the misfortunes of others, followed by reporter Wyatt Andrews reporting from a graffiti-covered inner city alley, and interviewing welfare dependant mothers, before finishing with ‘reactionary’ solutions including increasing police numbers to instil order from chaos.

On the face of it, Macek argues that Hollywood has picked up the ball and run with it, also defining inner-city America as essentially diseased; deriving ‘their shared fantasy about contemporary urban reality largely from the conservative interpretation of street crime, gangs, and the “underclass” that became so prominent in news reporting and public discourse’ (203). The likes of Escape from New York (UK/USA, 1981) and Predator 2 (USA, 1990) define the American city as a police problem, as nightmares that require a strong armed presence to bring order to chaos. The ‘ghetto-centric’ film – such as New Jack City (USA, 1991) and Clockers (USA, 1995) – emphasises stereotypical racial violence and destruction over contextualization of ghetto poverty and deindustrialisation. While Falling Down and Judgment Night (USA/Japan, 1993) clearly states that the inner city is a place in which the white middle-class elite do not and cannot feel safe.

One of the primary faults in Macek’s argument is that he makes the assumption that Hollywood film constructs a dichotomous relationship between the urban and the suburban, them and us, evil and good. That is, the inner city is invariably a kind of living hell, while suburbia is defined by its manicured lawns and garden sprinklers as places of peace and tranquillity. Certainly, it is true that a majority of Hollywood films do define the city as dangerous, but Hollywood is also quick to point out that suburbia, the seat of white, middle-class excess, has a strong dark-side barely covered by the façade of respectability. Films such as Scream (USA, 1996), The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (USA, 1992), and American Beauty (USA, 1999), as well as many more, contradict Macek’s argument by offering the view that, albeit in different ways, suburbia is no safer than the inner city. Further, Macek makes no reference to the shift in perception after 9/11 by Hollywood towards the inner city as a place of, at worst, ambivalence (as seen in Collateral [USA, 2004]) and at best, a source of a stoic refusal to bow down to urban plight. The latter is highlighted in the last sequence of The Day After Tomorrow (USA, 2004) when survivors of a massive superstorm emerge onto Manhattan rooftops, to signify the city as the primary site of hope and rebirth.

Macek’s analysis of advertising is even more flawed, offering only a narrowly framed interpretation of the kinds of images to be found. Macek cites several ads for cars, including those for Jeep and Hyundai, which appear to suggest that inner cities in themselves are places that must be escaped from. That is, with the right vehicle, one can escape the horrors of the city for the wide-open spaces of the country-side. However, an equally valid interpretation of these same ads may be that the drive away from the city is less an escape from the city but from the self, and the drudgery of work, family and so on.
Overall, Macek offers an insightful interpretation of the political, social and cultural constructions of the inner city as places of violence and poverty – the basic ideas of which I fully agree with – but tends to be prone to looking at the argument from only one side and failing to see what other approaches and other interpretations may be made of the same material.

Neil Bather,
University of Waikato, New Zealand.

Created on: Saturday, 1 December 2007