Wild footage from a wild world
Television and other screen cultures have always exhibited a preoccupation with law-breaking and the powerful tensions that it engenders. Both their fictional and factual productions offer audiences innumerable variants of crime: its operation, its protagonists and its effects. During the 1980s and 1990s in Britain, true crime television programming such as In Suspicious Circumstances, Michael Winner’s True Crimes and Expert Witness (all ITV) offered dramatised reconstructions of crimes of violence and murder whose representational charge resided in the extra-textual knowledge that these events really did happen and that the criminals were caught. Their authority as crime programmes rested in their commitment to the infallibility of the law. All three programmes presented cases that had been solved and part of the viewing pleasure lay in the alliance between presenter, police and audience in the reconstructed narrative of the detection, pursuit and capture of the criminal. None of these programmes represented the aftermath of the arrest; trial and punishment are both rendered invisible, and the voice of the criminal subject remains silenced. So even where non-fiction television allows for the use of reconstructions which can re-play events usually obscured from cameras, the emphasis is on the crime not the punishment.
Other programmes perhaps more properly described as ‘law and order’ programming follow this emphasis, working in conjunction with police and deploying both reconstructions and real footage of criminal acts and criminals to piece together stories of crime (see Biressi 2001: 203). UK programmes such as
Crimewatch UK, Crime Monthly, Crimestoppers (ITV) and in the
US America’s Most Wanted, which promote themselves as extensions of the law by inviting viewers to help solve crime, provide dramatic reconstructions which allow viewers to ‘see’ a real crime take place, offering an experience unavailable to consumers of either news programming or crime fiction (see Schlesinger & Tumber 1996). They allow viewers to encounter the traumatic moment of criminality either by re-playing CCTV and police camera footage or through dramatisation.
As with the observational documentaries and docusoaps discussed in
chapter 3, true crime and law and order programmes occupy a controversial place in the industry’s value-laden hierarchy. Nick Ross, one of the presenters of
Crimewatch UK, is keen to distance himself from true crime, saying, ‘
Crimewatch and its sister programmes are in the public interest.
True Crimes by contrast, for all its skilful use of television arts, could only be of interest to the public’ (in Hill 2000a: 219). The distinction made by Ross is revealing. It is plain that the show needs to demonstrate a public service role through the resolution of crime but this cannot be effected in isolation from the requirement to entertain its audience. After all, only a handful of the people viewing the programme could have personal knowledge that might help solve the crime; everyone else will need to form connections of an entirely different nature in order to sustain their interest in the programme. On an earlier occasion Ross and co-presenter Sue Cook described how the makers of
Crimewatch have a very shrewd idea of what is wanted in the show: ‘with a quarter of a million crimes recorded every month you would think
Crimewatch would be spoilt for choice. In fact it is remarkably difficult regularly to find three crimes worthy of reconstruction’ (Ross & Cook 1987: 29). What constitutes ‘worthiness’ is not elaborated on but it must be the case that the crime chosen has to be ‘reconstructable’ and of interest to a broad audience. But there is an awkward paradox in that a programme that seeks to solve cases with the aid of the public is also a ‘show’, an entertainment whose success is reflected in viewing figures of up to twelve million. It is dependent upon the very crimes that it seeks to solve for its success. By the time it is ready for broadcasting this paradox is painfully apparent: ‘Frankly, at this stage, with all this investment in time and effort, not to say the BBC’s resources, we pray that the crimes are not solved just before we go on air’ (Ross & Cook 1987:34).
As reality footage focuses on the criminal act and sometimes its resolution, it is far less common for viewers to be able to follow the criminal beyond his/her arrest to trial and imprisonment. Plainly there are practical reasons why cameras are unable to penetrate court and prison boundaries. Consequently, where the criminal on trial can be viewed in media culture this spectacle has taken on huge cultural significance. The classic example is the televised trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in 1961, which represented a major landmark in US television history (see Shandler 2000). Only much more recently, with the advent of
Court TV in the US, have television arbiters such as Judge Judy and filmed trials such as the serialised O. J. Simpson hearings of 1994 been able to go further in revealing the processes of the law without recourse to any dramatic reconstructions. In the case of
Judge Judy, the mundane domestic dispute, neighbourhood conflict or minor financial claim are all unpacked before a television audience. Viewers witness the fine detail of interpersonal clashes and legal debates, the petty wrangles of life brought to juridical arbitration and filmed subjects are made accountable to the judge’s and the television audience’s discerning scrutiny. Similarly, the O. J. Simpson case brought to mass audiences the processes and discursive practices of the courtroom, seemingly through the fixed, impartial eye of the camera but directed through extensive and detailed commentary.
Public fascination with the Simpson case, of course, began much earlier than the televised trial, with the filmed high-speed car chase in which the suspect took flight from the police. This scene, reminiscent of so many fictional crime thriller movies, is actually quite representative of reality crime footage: powerfully charged for viewers with the knowledge that this is real, charged with the ‘here and now’ immediacy which is the always potential technological precondition of television as a form (see Fiske 1996). Recent programming such as Chopper Coppers, Cops and Shops, Robbers and Videotape deploys the same kind of footage; presenting a spectacle apparently grounded in the authentic and the immediate moment that characterises both realism and television itself.
Since the 1990s, new reality genres of crime and emergency services programming have appeared. These rely even more heavily on amateur, CCTV or police footage to present a montage of criminality and emergency services drama and, unlike law and order programming, they make little claim to help prevent or solve crime. These shows made a real impact on American schedules and they soon went on to constitute a steady presence in Britain. Series such as
Blues and Twos (Carlton, 1993),
Coppers (Sky, 1994),
Police! Camera! Action! (Carlton, 1996) and
999 (BBC, 1992) became popular family viewing and garnered high viewing figures.
1 These newer forms of reality crime entertainment have extended the arena of the preoccupation with crime and pursuit as display. They constitute a new spectacle of criminality in which it is not the punishment but the scene (seen) of the crime itself which is present and made highly visible in the public sphere. Criminality, which we would expect to be hidden from view, is made visible and frequently seen to be dramatic, apparently random and unprovoked. Yet it can be re-wound, re-played and slowed down for viewers to appreciate just like a sports programme. Reality crime footage also constitutes a form of exchangeable currency within media networks. Current reality programming consists of hybrid genres that are recombinants of earlier forms, including dramadoc, straight to camera interviews, news and police footage, CCTV, expert opinion and spectacular set-piece scenes of criminal behaviour, pursuit and capture. Each component: video clip, interview, still image etc., variously sourced and infinitely reproducible, has been extracted from its cultural context to become a unit of exchange, a small piece of an electronic televisual assemblage.
Unlike news, contemporaneity is not important here, and programmes will often present a mixture of footage and stories up to a decade old. This combination of footage can be understood partly as a popular archive, a new, more populist extension of the established disciplinary archives of the law such as the forensic, medical and prison or reform photography that historically captured and categorised the criminal subject (see Tagg 1988). But unlike previous archives, whose authority was dependent on their status as ‘documents’, these films, while shot through with the televisual and filmic codes of realism, are also infused with the extra-diegetic props of fictional or tabloid crime stories. They represent a fusion of the objectifying and disciplinary photographic imperative with the tabloid journalism agenda of entertainment and diversion. The aesthetics of realism (badly framed images, poorly lit shots, images caught against bright light) underpin and authenticate the immediate realism and documentary posture of the footage. But added to the mix is music to accentuate action, dramatic editing, emotional to-camera speeches and the juxtaposition of similar events (street muggings, car chases and so on) to build up the drama and enhance the seamless pleasures of a flow of criminal scenes unfolding before the spectator’s eyes. This combination constitutes the sense of ‘wild footage from a wild world’ (Ellis 2000:98) – reality with an entertaining inflection.
These programmes, aimed at a family audience, have attracted extensive criticism from media critics and some viewers (see Hill 2000a: 219–20 and 2000b: 133–7). As a form of ‘tabloid television’ they represent all that is generally condemned in popular culture; tending towards the reactionary and the retributive, exciting, exploitative, voyeuristic and entertaining. They are also considered to be symptomatic of the tabloidisation of news and current affairs where the ‘discourse of sobriety’ has been forsaken for ‘infotainment’. As such they blur the boundaries between the public and private sphere, amalgamating the primary aims to inform and to entertain into one unique package. And the informational content, such as it is, is expressed within ‘common sense’ discourses about justice and law and order that produce a knowledge about victimhood and criminality which is usually retributive and highly conservative.
These programmes also play a significant role in the more general contemplation of crime event as mass media entertainment. For as soon as a notable or exceptional crime hits the headlines it becomes circulated within media formats with astonishing speed to become a media spectacle. As Kevin Glynn notes in his account of American tabloid television:
The vortex of representation swirling around the crime events, the characters involved in the events, the characters involved in the fictionalisation of events, and the characters involved in the reporting on the fictionalisation of events all become part of a single simulacrum, within which it becomes virtually impossible to neatly disentangle the various levels of reality and representationality involved. (2000:46)
The pleasures of watching reality crime TV have been subject to much speculation. As a result of her research into American audiences S. Elizabeth Bird suggests, for example, that far from viewing these dramas with an ironic or amused detachment or with a carnivalesque enjoyment viewers approach these forms as they would any other kind of factual television (2000: 215). They ask themselves, ‘How does this story apply to my life and why should I pay attention?’ This kind of question points to the likely connection made by viewers to crime narratives through processes of identification, such as ‘Could I too become the victim of crime?’ or ‘What would I do in that situation?’ British audience studies corroborate this. Researcher Annette Hill quotes a woman who declares, ‘These true life stories are great. If I had more time … I would watch as many of these types of programmes as I could. They make you appreciate life’ (2000:131).
These kinds of identifications also beg the question of to what extent the fascination with these programmes is rooted in the ways in which they generate a more general fearfulness and caution. Richard Sparks has observed that the expansion of television and related industries has coincided with long-term and sometimes acute anxiety about crime (1992: 16). It becomes impossible therefore to unravel the relationship between television as an instigator of fearfulness and the broader cultural preoccupation with crime, risk and endangerment. Moreover, as television brings a putatively public sphere issue into the private domain of the home the demarcations between external events and personal experience, between objective fact and subjective knowledge become ever more muddied. Nonetheless, it can be argued that the narrativisation of crime in both fact and fictional forms provides a secure container for fear and those things that incite fear – the other, the alien and so on, shaping it and directing it into manageable formations.
Moreover, it is a complex business, with crime genres as with horror genres, to understand where fear ends and pleasure begins. Many reality crime programmes show dramatic footage of criminals abandoning moral and legal codes in spectacular fashion and some younger viewers especially find this stimulating.
2 But where the pleasures of witnessing crime, disaster and other life-threatening occurrences are somewhat vicarious, these are at least partially off set by the moral discourses of criminal justice, the address to the responsible citizen and overt support for the emergency services employed in many of these shows (Goodwin 1993; Biressi 2001: 77–88). Such discourses of reassurance and moral authority also act as a counterweight or palliative to the viewer’s possible sense of helplessness in the face of apparent criminal mayhem. An ideological framework is provided by the programmes’ dramatic structure that demonstrates that either the camera’s evidence or police intervention will lead to the arrest of the criminal and the arrival of a ‘guilty’ verdict. This is reinforced by the ‘reputable’, usually male, television presenter whose commentary works hard to preclude an easy identification with the criminal rather than with the victim and society more generally. Consequently, while the visual image is emphasised as the primary hook in attracting viewers (signalled in programme titles
Police! Camera! Action!, Shooting the Crime, Crime Caught on Tape) there is also an attempt to subordinate the multiple potential interpretations of this imagery to a single indisputable reading of the events. So although there may be some pleasures to be had in witnessing the many challenges to the law and social norms evident in these shows there is no way that these programmes can be said to present a
thorough-going critique of the law. In fact, the programmes work hard to provide a cultural prop for the law’s authority and much of the footage is provided by law enforcement agencies. If the law is challenged in these programmes, it is only through the depiction of a relentless catalogue of criminality that suggests that the law’s job is never done, that complete lawfulness is always an unfinished project – but even then, of course, its very incompleteness is a further justification for the law.
The use of surveillance technology and the dissemination of film footage on reality TV have produced new ethical dilemmas and new inflections of the citizen’s imaginary relationship with the law. Firstly, reality programmes expand the membership of law enforcement to include supposedly vigilant and supportive televisual citizens whose active interest and ‘assistance’ validates the filming and screening of criminal spectacles. Secondly, programmes invite the viewer to collude in the entrapment of the ‘criminal’ and the closing down of this violently chaotic world. Thirdly, they provide access to the vicarious pleasures and dangers of the criminality but do so
under the cover of a ‘responsible’ factual programming agenda. In these ways they interpolate the individual viewer as a crucial co-producer of the new realism of reality crime television, highlighting the complex operations of viewer engagement with these forms.
Crimes can even be actively produced in order to feed a programme. Programmes such as
Rat Trap (Carlton, 2000) actually set up a potential crime scene in order to film the ensuing thievery and mayhem before asking viewers to identify the criminals being filmed. On some occasions the scenes were without any potential legal outcome at all as the protagonists were too young to have their faces shown on screen. Executive producer Sarah Caplin, who was called upon to defend the programme, argued, ‘We are not creating the crime, nor are we inviting people to steal … We are replicating normal activities … and using cameras to see what happens next.’
3 This ‘replication’ of ‘normal activities’, neither wholly an
authentic crime in real social space nor wholly a
fictional crime in media space, constitutes a new social/media public forum and with it an invitation to think through the ethics and etiquette of its inhabitation. As viewers, we know the preconditions of the crime, that it is a ‘sting’ or ‘lure’ established to catch criminals in the act and to open up the scene (usually of necessity hidden) to public view. These activities may not be unusual, but despite Caplin’s assertion, neither are they ‘normal’ because they are outside of the acceptable bounds of civic behaviour; indeed it is the aberrance of crime that invites such avid curiosity.
The law and media culture
The ethical complexities of these new forums of social/media space shift, depending upon the relationship between the individual subject of film footage and the uses made of the film within its local context. For example, in 1995 media debate arose over the case of Geoff Peck, a resident of Brentwood in the English County of Essex, who walked into the street and cut his wrists in an abortive suicide attempt. His actions were caught on camera and the police were soon on the scene. The footage, however, was sent out by the council in a press pack to promote its surveillance system (‘cameras save lives’), sold to the BBC and ITV and finally circulated in forums such as local and national papers and a reality crime show. Peck turned on his TV set only to see himself trailing a true crime programme. The title of one of many newspaper articles expressing doubts about this and other cases ‘the all-seeing eye that understands nothing’ (Conrad 2000) summarises the disquiet over this seemingly impartial but actually highly invasive technology. Media journalists and alternative media groups such as Undercurrents (1997) have asked, for example, at what personal cost is this footage released into the public sphere.
Media culture’s relation to the law underpins anything that might be learned about the inhabitation of the new social/media space of CCTV-dependent reality programming. Michel Foucault’s reflection on the strategies of power may be useful here. He notes:
Law is neither the truth of power nor its alibi. It is an instrument of power which is at once complex and partial. The form of law with its effects of prohibition needs to be resituated among a number of other, non-juridical mechanisms. (1972:141)
In Britain, the law’s self-image is of a practice that is neither partial nor instrumental but rather as one that has arisen organically from ‘natural’ justice, developed through precedent and argument and which sustains social order. In its ideal-typical form it is regarded as unpolluted, necessarily avoiding complicity with pragmatic politics or populist agendas. In fact, the media and media technologies are co-extensive with the law and operate in dialogue with it as supportive non-juridical mechanisms. The success of tabloid newspaper campaigns alone in gaining the rapt attention of British Home Secretaries past and present attests to the media’s role in the formation of law-making and criminal justice policy.
But more complexly, the conditions of public intelligibility and acceptance of the law and policing as prohibition resides in the law’s relation to media culture more generally. The media is one of the central mechanisms through which our knowledge of the law and law breaking is produced, circulated and naturalised into common sense. The examples of Peck’s attempted suicide on film, of the boys captured in a pseudo-crime for Rat Trap or of a presenter reassuring viewers that the thieves were caught at the end of the car chase scene in Police! Camera! Action! all point to the complex interactions between law and media. The law has merged with the broader disciplinary apparatuses of contemporary society from privatised corporate CCTV to entertainment-based reality TV and is arguably no less powerful for this incorporation. Geoff Peck’s case foregrounds this problematic, begging the question of whether by taking a personal, but ‘antisocial’, action in a surveyed public space he forfeited any right of media privacy.
The near omni-presence (in Britain at least) of the camera creates a new power relation between subject, action and space in the course of everyday life; a relation that always potentially posits a new dimension through the possible presence of mediated witnesses.
4 The subject becomes an object in the field of vision captured by the camera and his/her actions may be thrown open to public view. When footage is sold on, it is extracted, organised and acted upon so that it is endowed with meaning and re-situated in contexts that purport to present a critical ontology and regulation of ourselves: we have been warned that should we undertake these anti-social actions we will not only be penalised but specularised. The viewing subject needs to decide how to ethically engage with and understand this footage in the context of the programme package. It may be justified within critical discourses of freedom and empowerment (i.e. the public’s right to know, to be reassured and to
witness the effective operations of the law). But it should also provoke debate and a censure of power for its instrumental colonisation of public space and the dangers of incorporating such ambiguous images into ‘infotainment’ packages.
Questions of media ethics need to be examined in the light of the new complexities of the relationship between law and media and through a scrutiny of the media technology that functions as part of a general social disciplinary network. Joost van Loon has argued, for example, that technology needs to be understood ethically not simply as an enabling tool but as an instrumental way of revealing, ordering and ‘enframing’ the world. Thus technology itself, most explicitly with the example of Rat Trap cited above, has to be regarded as constituting the violent event at the threshold of visibility:
For example, in the videotaped beating of Rodney King it is quite clear that what the case was actually about was not the beating as such but its meaning in the light of the videotape which allegedly captured it. Without the tape, there would never have been a case to begin with. (2000: 62)
This does not mean, of course, that Rodney King was not ‘taken down’ by law enforcement officers but rather that the amateur footage renders the event ‘something else’. For van Loon video technology functioned with what he calls the ‘media-ensemble’ or technologies of police brutality (cars, lights, helicopters and so on) to produce a hybrid media form, a ‘revelation via shock therapy’ (2000: 64–5) which had real consequences in the social world. In cases such as this the ‘ethical sensibilities of enframing’ need to be understood and taken on board by media workers. This will not eliminate ‘distortion’, which is in any case impossible, but work to engage audiences in the processes of mediation and prevent televisual technologies being dismissed as purely instrumental, as simply the ‘all seeing eye that understands nothing’.
These ethical issues are also embedded in broader civic questions about the demarcation of public/private space within a heavily mediated modern social sphere. New technologies have extended the field of vision within public space, creating a new psychogeography of lived space. Broader global issues of media technology and image exchange are crosscut with the local and national issues of politico-economic-legal investment in surveillance technology and the specific fantasies as well as realities of crime that fuel this. Britain, for example, boasts at least a million security cameras – the greatest number in Europe and CCTV has arguably attained the ‘status of icon of the emergent post-social zeitgeist’ (Hughes
et al. 2000:332).
5In Britain the spread of cameras arguably police the divisions between the ‘the good citizen’ and its criminal ‘other’ through highly subjective visual social clues. For example, surveillance control room operators may focus on individuals who are either in the ‘wrong’ place or the ‘wrong’ time, or who belong to certain (i.e. ‘wrong’) social groupings (see Norris & Armstrong 1997a and 1997b). Cameras are often situated in areas where property and corporate interests are given priority over community affairs and they are often operated by private security organisations which further muddy the boundaries between the public and the private. Does the ‘good citizen’ register the presence of the surveillance camera on urban streets? Do ‘innocent’ citizens regard themselves as invisible, thinking the camera merely marks and captures the criminal subject and leave them at the edge of the frame? The public’s understanding of surveillance camera presence is seriously under-researched but where it has been it seems that in Britain, at least, filmed subjects seem unconcerned (see Honess & Shandler 1992).
It is unsurprising in the light of the encroachment of scopic technologies in everyday life that two of the crime cases which became most prominent through the attention of the British media, the murders of James Bulger in 1993 and Damilola Taylor in 2001, featured film footage. The last public scenes of the boys’ lives were captured in Bulger’s case on CCTV from a shopping precinct, a construction company camera and Taylor’s case in the civic space of the library and social housing estate. For understandable reasons, of the more than thirty people who witnessed James Bulger being pushed and dragged to his death by two older boys, only one person tried to intervene. What was more perplexing perhaps was the sense, voiced both in Bootle where James lived and more broadly, that because the abduction had been filmed it should have been prevented.
There was, as Sarah Kember describes it, frustration and confusion about the role and efficacy of video surveillance as policing. She notes, ‘We become angry at a technology which failed to police our own boundaries between who in society is responsible and who is not; who is to be protected and who is one to be protected from’ (1995:121). There was a growing realisation too that cameras are actually installed to protect property and facilitate commerce rather than to prevent unforeseen inter-personal crime.
6 In addition, the importance of the camera as a
symbolic presence is often overlooked. Just as life-sized cardboard cut-outs of a uniformed police officer situated at the entrances of shops deter shoplifters so too dummy cameras act as totems of the law’s omniscience. Their very presence is an injunction towards self-policing which, when it fails, increases the public’s sense of fearfulness. Thus the scandal of the murder of Stephen Lawrence in South London was heightened by the knowledge that the cameras that witnessed his attack by a group of men were dummies.
The cases cited here all demonstrate – albeit with different emphases – that the alliance of television technologies with governmentality (local government, police, privatised security) produces a scopic colonisation of public space which, in turn, may then go on to appear in reality TV formats. These depictions in turn help form the imaginary relationship between policing and the public. In factual programming the police have become ever more strongly allied with televisual technology. The mythologisation in crime fictions of the police as possessing supernatural powers of observation, deduction and detection is further extended in reality forms so that the police, like television itself, seem to be ubiquitous, always present whether visible or not.
7Crime television and the modality of witness
John Ellis has argued that it is the distinctive experience of ‘witness’ which has been one of the abiding characteristics of twentieth-century media culture. He is speaking essentially about the increasing importance of the mechanical technology of photography and then audio-visual technologies of representation – cinema and television, and the ways in which they posit new relations between text and audience. The modality of witnessing as described by Ellis goes some way to explaining the experience of television. Features such as direct address, the technology of transmission, sound, live performance, the rhetoric of liveness, the promise of the immediate and the presence of TV audiences constitute, when taken together, the particularity of television. And it could be argued that more especially the spectacles of news, live media events, reality TV and other non-fiction forms, which purport to speak about the world, are the most typical – i.e. archetypal – forms of television. Twentieth-century technologies have put forward evidence of historical events, visually documenting war, genocide, famine, assassination and the lives of famous people and ordinary people to a degree that is unprecedented. He notes:
The feeling of witness … is one of separation and powerlessness; the events unfold, like it or not. They unfold elsewhere … So for the viewer, powerlessness and safety go hand in hand. In another sense, of course, the act of witness is nevertheless powerful. It enables viewers to overlook events …Yet at the same time … individuals … become accomplices in the events they see. Events on screen make a mute appeal: ‘you cannot say you did not know.’ (2000:11)
This points to the shifting field of involvement and distanciation, activity and passivity that others have described in relation to television viewing at large (Ang 1982: 96–102; Fiske 1987:173–6; Silverstone 1994:152–3). The ‘complicity’, the sense of being somehow an accomplice of televised events, becomes more pointed when these events are violent, traumatic and ‘real’.
Video Justice: Crime Caught on Tape (Fox, 1997) is one of the more controversial American reality crime programmes which has also been broadcast in the UK (2001). Like a number of British as well as American series on crime, policing and the emergency services Video Justice consists of a patchwork of shaky film footage sourced from CCTV and private security cameras, police cameras and home-video tapes. This is edited in with interviews with medico-legal experts, law enforcement agents and members of the public who have become the victims of crime. Extra-diegetic music is used to build suspense and cue emotional responses to the material shown.
The programme’s twin warning and invitation to viewers cautions that what they are about to see is ‘graphic, troubling and real’. It begins with a sequence of violent monochrome images anchored with a voiceover that notes, ‘There’s a war going on in America, a hidden war, between citizens and criminals. There’s a new weapon in that war – the video camera.’ Just as its relentless depiction of crime verges on the hyperbolic so too does its commentary which constantly asserts either that the criminal was caught or that ‘this film might be the only way to catch him’. The metaphor of a ‘war against crime’, commonly deployed by citizens, journalists and politicians alike, is given extra meaning when located in the US, whose mythological history is bound up with gun culture. Moreover, the condition of fearfulness embodied in the language of embattlement is arguably symptomatic of broader social anxiety. Christopher Lasch, in his ground-breaking work on the growing culture of privatisation and the increasing narcissism of American culture, explains the national condition of solipsistic self-regard as a response to the ‘warlike conditions which pervade American society, from the danger and uncertainty that surrounds us, from the loss of confidence in the future’ (1978:27).
The programme illustrates many of the issues raised so far. Its hour-long assemblage of video clips spliced together as an entertainment package presents the viewer with spectacles that, for British viewers at least, provoke both a sense of powerlessness and also of security. The events are located in an ‘other’ place, a country strongly associated in British television and Hollywood popular mythology with crime, widespread possession of firearms and urban danger. In contrast, for the American viewer, the programme’s direct address signals a world that is both frighteningly alien but also perilously close and unpredictable.
At the same time, the footage also accentuates the volatile moment, the
excitement and, sometimes, the near-death experience of crime. Footage of speeding cars, teenagers smashing up immaculate showcase homes and street fights, arguably offer the viewer some of the transgressive pleasures of the accomplice looking on. The depiction of varied criminal acts – speeding drivers, property desecration, theft, beatings and robbery with violence – all heavily de-contextualised, tend to reduce all crime to the level of spectacle. The programme barely bothers, if at all, to differentiate between the degrees of seriousness of the different acts, comically juxtaposing drunks falling down in the streets with armed robberies. Across this wide spectrum of engagement with the various events of the text the way the footage is reconstituted and presented allows no discussion or contemplation of context: the emphasis is on the incoherence, plenitude and simultaneity of ‘the real’.
Video Justice also interestingly foregrounds the role of the camera as an accepted part of everyday life. Both victims and perpetrators frequently know the camera is present and sometimes interact with it. It can even be a provocateur and stimulant to action. Signs of performance provide evidence of this awareness of the camera. On Video Justice we see the corner store robber shielding his face from the camera as the store owner attempts to fight back; young men filming their violent attack on a passer-by and teenagers filming their rampant destruction of the show home. Most often though the photographer as controlling subject is, of course, non-existent in the case of much CCTV footage: the imagery replayed for a television audience after the criminal act seals its significance within the framing programme and invites the viewer to validate its status as evidence.
Taken as a whole the sixty-minute show, edited to present a ‘rollercoaster’ experience of speed and a variety of registers and illegal acts and misdemeanours, offers a ‘carnival of crime’ which is clearly entertaining as well as disturbing.
8 Besides the highly controversial scenes of shootings and beatings viewers are also offered scenes of social inversion, which temporarily test the bonds of ordered society. One section of the programme offers the spectacle of a group of exhilarated teenagers, male and female, demolishing immaculate new show homes with hammers, fists, paint and anything else they can lay their hands on. They filmed themselves in the act, arguably constructing an alternative home video that challenged the conventions of family photography and the ideal of domesticity. In another scene youths filmed themselves firing paint guns in a parody of drive-by shootings. Viewers are drawn into the game as they travel with the boys through the town at night and watch with glee the shocked faces of pedestrians, cyclists and homeless street people as they fall to the ground, hit with exploding paint balls.
A theatrical display of youthful transgression and the colonisation of public nighttime space is replayed in mediated form. It is difficult not to read this textual strategy as one imbricated with the pleasures of voyeurism and the forbidden gaze. The programme works hard to justify the broadcasting of footage that was originally shot by the criminal protagonists themselves. The voiceover reassures us that films such as these also often turn out quite fortuitously to constitute the incriminating evidence – that they were in fact scopic law enforcement technologies in disguise. But this reasoning of film as evidence can be subverted or at least challenged in disconcerting ways. For example, the boys who were prosecuted for paint-balling were indicted through their own camerawork which showed not only the shock of passers-by as they were hit but the gleeful pleasure of the offenders. It was stated that it was this visual and aural evidence of their pleasure in the act that inspired calls for a heavy sentence. In response the boys were advised by their defence team to be filmed as they apologised and were pelted with paintballs.
Appositely, Ariella Azoulay has discussed the role of the camera in constructing the ‘subject-hostage’ who wields the camera as apparently an autonomous agent capturing his or her actions and documenting the space of the act as fact. She suggests that the possession of the camera also constrains and perhaps provokes the action of the photographer who ‘becomes a captive to the camera’s activity’ (2001: 92). This process complicates the network of power relations between subject and object conventionally associated with the role of the camera as provider of evidence:
When a person assumes the position of the viewer who commands the field of vision and suddenly is viewed by others and also is activated like an object – like a camera or pistol, something else that attracts, tempts or repulses – the power relations between subject and object are reversed. (2001:62)
In the case of the paintball snipers, a video narrative of their own gleeful shootings became a video narrative of their guilt and was then counterpoised with a video of their contrition. As an act of counter-discourse it produced a new story about the boys which implied that the first video could not be regarded as a summate and final interpretation of events. Video Justice (together with the court), however, interpreted this film as suspect: its constructedness or artifice was simply more evidence of their guilt within the framework of the programme. Clearly then, in the social/media space of crime film footage, only film that appears to be spontaneous (the boys must, after all have planned to take a camera along with them) constitutes evidence for both court of law and law and order programming.
Similarly, their submission to the camera’s scrutiny did not bear the same evidential weight as the footage of their distressed victims. Such use and re-use of video footage prompts careful analysis of reality TV for the multiple potential constellations of power-knowledge that the vantage point of the victim, perpetrator, camera, camera operator, editor, lawyer, police officer and jury may throw up against one another. And of course raises the enduring question of the defining features of realism and the camera image.
Inevitably perhaps, since very few of the cases shown on these programmes remain unsolved, these and other law-breakers are seen to be brought to justice. The viewing pleasures of carnivalesque criminality are consequently fleeting, framed as they are by generic codes that demand that the law’s sovereignty remains paramount. One comic scene confirms this, reinforcing the implacability of the law in the face of a challenge of the most everyday kind. A speeding driver is pulled over by a highway patrol cop and given a ticket. The driver responds by completely losing his temper, shouting and shaking with rage to such an extent that his truck rocks. In the face of the driver’s near apoplectic fury the cop remains laconic and imperturbable; even making the driver get out of the vehicle to pick up some litter that he has dropped. Eventually the driver, having lost a decidedly one-sided argument, drives away deflated. We watch the whole scene via the camera installed in the patrol car parked behind the truck. Consequently we never see the face of the cop and the driver’s face is deliberately blurred. The exchange is between the driver – the ‘unknown citizen’ who is utterly humiliated and the cop who is an emblematic implacable figure of the law. The scopic technology seems to confirm the law’s status as paramount, irrefutable and adamant. The driver is anonymous, we are denied any visual evidence of the speeding offence for which he was stopped and we do not hear whether he challenged the fine in court. The story of the citizen and the law is truncated so that the law’s power is incontestable.
While the potential pleasures here are as various as the scenarios depicted they are all arguably rooted in the intersection between three things: that the events depicted are ‘real’, that they focus on the transgression of legal limits and that the law is seen generally to be re-established. These are scenarios of power; its illegal adoption and its legal reassertion in social/media space. And as with the mediated events cited above, an imaginary relationship between public and police is formulated and sustained through the privileging of visual technology in which little seems to escape the eye of the law.
Finally, reality TV unites the public sphere of law enforcement with screen entertainment via a highly attractive and ubiquitous trope in media culture – dramatic criminality. While the primary function of the police is to maintain social order these stories and programmes of legal/media pursuit underwrite the more popular misconception of the law as highly interventionist against dramatically violent crime. The ultimate justification for the public deployment of cameras is founded upon the notion that they can protect the public and diminish fearfulness and fearfulness can be a unifying modality in contemporary culture.
Our belonging comes not from the fact that we are all criminals but rather from the shared fact of victimisation. It is through our victimage that we come to belong to the social body. To be a victim is to be a citizen. (Young 1996: 55)
The reassurance that ‘justice’ has been done in the majority of cases recounted in Video Justice does not obviate the threat of personal vulnerability that weaves through the narrative. The ‘war’ going on in America needs victims, and as Alison Young suggests in the quotation above, it is the collective victimage of viewers, that posits them as citizens allied with the police in the battle against crime. The apparent fascination with the seemingly relentless catalogue of crime on reality TV is arguably predicated upon personal fear of injury and victimhood. This is seen most graphically and most movingly in the scenes where the victims of crime speak directly to camera, their voiceovers used to direct viewers’ understanding of visual material and inviting empathetic identification.
The status of the reality recorded by surveillance technology and replayed for television audiences prompts the important ethical and political questions signalled in this chapter. One of the structuring principles of broadcasting has been the division between fact and fiction; the former’s status resting on the accumulation of evidence, legitimated sources, documents, professional journalistic practices of objectivity, aesthetic and generic practices of camerawork, authorial voice and so on. The omnipresence of video cameras and the proliferation of surveillance footage as the medium of the real event further complicate the divisions between generalised surveillance and reality entertainment. With reality TV a hybrid artefact is produced in which the boundaries between evidence and entertainment, media and social space are transgressed. Ultimately reassurance is afforded only to the domestic viewer who chooses to view the apparent ‘successes’ of ‘video justice’ without questioning the practices, protocols and limitations of surveillance cameras in our public spaces and the circulation of their footage in media space.