Thomas Leitch,
Crime Films.
Cambridge University Press, 2002.
ISBN: 0 521 64671 5
400pp
Au$59.95 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by Cambridge University Press)
The cover of this academic study presents two immediately arresting qualities. First there is the title, Crime Films, so short and sweet in announcing the topic at hand. Then there is the black and white shot of Kyle McLachlan peering through the slits of a closet through which he spies upon the form of Isabella Rosellini. In this frozen moment from Blue Velvet (US, 1986), McLachlan’s hands reach forward to finger the so-very-noir slats of the screen separating him from the woman’s body, just as a Hitchcockian beam of light cuts through to focus on his glazed eyeball. Is the actor’s gesture trying to re-assert a sense of distance, to reinforce the fragile boundary that protects his own body from a reciprocal gaze, or is he, to the contrary, toying with the possibility of revealing himself as his digits begin to delve provocatively into the tilted slots? McLachlan is at once the perfect voyeur, drinking in the sight of a female body unable to acknowledge or return his gaze, and a wilful victim about to let everything reverse, so that his own form will soon become a passive and tormented object of scrutiny.
The image presented on the cover of this book well evokes the defining condition of the crime film spectator described within. At the most general level, we are told, the crime film allows us to enjoy the ‘romance of crime’ whilst ultimately preserving a sense of moral security and separation from the scene of the crime. Leitch’s contention is that it makes sense for film studies to recognise the integral existence of a broadly defined genre of ‘crime film’ that effectively transcends familiar distinctions between the police film, the gangster film, the lawyer film, the private eye film, the unofficial detective film, the erotic thriller, the crime comedy, and the film noir. The point of this theoretical move, however, is evidently not to simply dissolve these traditional forms of generic definition, since all these designations are reasserted as chapter headings structuring the presentation of Leitch’s argument. The aim is rather to incorporate and integrate existing divisions at a higher level of description, that will allow both for differentiation and interpenetration.
At the heart of the crime genre is the perpetual problem of separating and identifying the innocent and guilty through the mediation of legal force. It recapitulates in its own way the philosophical dilemma according to which we are all simultaneously addressed as sovereign individuals and as docile subjects by legal instrumentalities that inevitably embody the very violence they promise to contain.
By projecting problems of law and violence onto familiar, reassuring generic schemas and reducing their social complexity to the terms of a simple dualism amenable to resolution through the heroic acts of anointed individuals, Crime Films render a profound and perpetual problem as a satisfying form of mass entertainment. Importantly, however, the ideological function of the crime film is never an open and shut case: each film (at least potentially) negotiates its own passage through the paradoxes constitutive of the genre. There is always the possibility of a point of risk, a moment in which all the moral polarities threaten to reverse and the game seems about to shift towards self-interrogation.
This is no accident. Crime films repeatedly return to a scene in which victims take the law into their own hands and become vigilantes, gangsters merely replicate and amplify prevailing social norms, the police force is riddled with corruption, the one cop really dedicated to upholding the law is forced to break all the rules, lawyers are just more sophisticated criminals, and criminals often end up sacrificing themselves in the hope of somehow narrowing the gap between justice and law. The crime film is a perpetual motion machine built around all these slippery slides between the licit and the illicit, the normal and the abnormal. The identity of this genre, then, far from being compromised by the shifting definitions and identities of its major players, is precisely defined by them. It is about this very problem: the permanently ambivalent and constantly renegotiated relationship between the legal and the criminal. The lasting “fascination” of the genre, according to one of Leitch’s most felicitous formulations, thus arises not from the “mere expression or availability of these positions”, but in the experience of their various contradictions, played out “in a way that no analysis can capture” in a prescriptive fashion.
For Leitch, the specific work done by the “synthetic genre” of the crime film is thus at once symptomatic and potentially critical. Crime films are usually most symptomatic in their resolutions, as they ritualistically reaffirm the parallel necessities of generic conventions, social institutions, and heroic identities. They thus act at once to articulate and ameliorate anxieties arising from the operation of the law. Crime films are usually most critical and reflective, however, “in the middle” as the boundaries between law and crime are tested and the criminal forever approaches the point of proving – as he almost always seems determined to do – that he and the cop are “really not so different”. Although Leitch never puts it quite this way, it seems fair to infer that this tension between closure and criticism, development and resolution, is irreducible for the genre, since the problem addressed by the crime film cannot itself be resolved. For full ideological satisfaction to be achieved, one can imagine, the image of crime would need to be at once renormalised, somehow neutered both as threat to order and promise of transgression, and simultaneously revealed as intrinsically abnormal after all, characterised by a violence wholly other to that “proper” violence exercised in the name of the law.
Questions of difference and identity are, of course, unavoidable for any genre study. Leitch himself has to anticipate and control definitional slippage at either end of his analytical net. At “the small end”, he needs to show that the broad concept of crime film validly embraces and illuminates the various sub-genre. At the “big end” of town, by contrast, he needs to prove that the crime genre is sufficiently autonomous and unified to avoid being swallowed by some larger designation. It is here that his arguments can seem a little defensive and arbitrary. Leitch admits, indeed, that his definition of the crime is just a whisker away from dissolving into the much broader field of “classical Hollywood cinema”, which could be justifiably characterised as a “genre” in which injustice is recognised and resolved through action. At the very least, it seems to this reviewer that war films, westerns, and science fiction films repeatedly address the same problems said to uniquely define the crime film, since all three genres also tend to develop in social spaces where the reign of law is not yet established by a universally binding contract and/or has been suspended by violence.
This reader finally comes away with the sense that Leitch has hit upon a valid and interesting analytical framework that could open up a host of fascinating tensions and interferences between the generic register and the achievements of particular films. Nonetheless, Leitch rarely dares to push his analyses as far as he might in either direction, with the result that his readings of specific films do not always seem particularly compelling or memorable. Discussions of such films as Chinatown (USA, 1976), Murder on the Orient Express (UK, 1974), Basic Instinct (USA/France, 1992), Blue Velvet, The Godfather (USA, 1972), Fargo (UK/USA, 1996) and Bullit (USA, 1968) are worthwhile and coherent, as far as they go, yet remain focussed largely on the possible permutations each sub-genre presents in its simultaneously symptomatic/critical negotiation of the central “problem”, rather than on the ways that each film generates excitement and draws the viewer into the action. My sense here is that Leitch perhaps too readily assumes that the “romance of crime” is something already given and available for exploitation as social symptom, rather than needing to be reinvented and evoked in the films themselves.
Despite the admirable insistence on the limits of generalising, prescriptive analytical frameworks, there is also sometimes a slightly self-satisfied feel to Leitch’s treatment of individual films. Here Crime Films can start read to like old-fashioned thematic criticism, not so much for its explicit proposals, than in the tone that comes with the assumption that one has already identified the hidden thread unifying an entire field. Ultimately, indeed, it may be that the paradoxes of law identified by Leitch define less a “genre” than a philosophical theme. It might have been more rewarding if Leitch had chosen to explicitly to explore a philosophical question or theme concerning the “antinomy of the law” across a range of films, rather than aspiring to exhaustively determine the form of “cultural work” performed by a sufficiently defined “genre”. In fact, his own passing comments sometimes gesture in this direction. Leitch, like Kyle McLachlan, seems to hesitate on the threshold of something genuinely exciting and dangerous: the risk of putting himself on the line and thinking through films, not just about them. For the moment, however, again like the figure on the front cover, he seems a little too well-contained and neatly trimmed. I kept waiting for Rossellini to burst through and turn everything upside down, maybe even for Dennis Hopper to show up and force Leitch to go somewhere he never meant to go. In dreams, I walk alone ..
Dr. William Schaffer
University of Newcastle.
Created on: Tuesday, 7 December 2004 | Last Updated: 7-Dec-04