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Urban Crime Control in Cinema: Fallen Guardians and the Ideology of Repression
 3031129776, 9783031129773

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
1: Introduction
Overview
Cinema, Cities, Critique
Critical Criminology and Critique of Criminology
References
2: Cinema
Cinematic Realism
Cinematic Narrative Justice
Capitalist Realism
References
3: Cities
Urban Social Science
Urban Abstractions
Urban Cinema
References
4: Critique
The Fallen Guardian
Spatial Illusions
Notes on Critique
References
5: RoboCop
Alex Murphy, the Perfect Cop
Violence Work and the Formation of the Dangerous Class
Labour and Automation in Detroit
From Detroit to Delta City
References
6: Minority Report
Chief John Anderton
Sprawling City, Splintered Space
PreCrime
References
7: Batman
Batman, the Vigilante Counterinsurgent
A Prison City
‘Mass’ Incarceration
References
8: Blade Runner
Officer KD6-3.7
Manufactured Dystopia
Retirement Divisions
References
9: Conclusion
Overview
Crime Control, Cinema, and the Ideology of Repression
References
INDEX

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CRIME, MEDIA AND CULTURE

Urban Crime Control in Cinema Fallen Guardians and the Ideology of Repression Vladimir Rizov

Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture

Series Editors Michelle Brown Department of Sociology University of Tennessee Knoxville, TN, USA Eamonn Carrabine Department of Sociology University of Essex Colchester, UK

This series aims to publish high quality interdisciplinary scholarship for research into crime, media and culture. As images of crime, harm and punishment proliferate across new and old media there is a growing recognition that criminology needs to rethink its relations with the ascendant power of spectacle. This international book series aims to break down the often rigid and increasingly hardened boundaries of mainstream criminology, media and communication studies, and cultural studies. In a late modern world where reality TV takes viewers into cop cars and carceral spaces, game shows routinely feature shame and suffering, teenagers post ‘happy slapping’ videos on YouTube, both cyber bullying and ‘justice for’ campaigns are mainstays of social media, and insurrectionist groups compile footage of suicide bomb attacks for circulation on the Internet, it is clear that images of crime and control play a powerful role in shaping social practices. It is vital then that we become versed in the diverse ways that crime and punishment are represented in an era of global interconnectedness, not least since the very reach of global media networks is now unparalleled. Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture emerges from a call to rethink the manner in which images are reshaping the world and criminology as a project. The mobility, malleability, banality, speed, and scale of images and their distribution demand that we engage both old and new theories and methods and pursue a refinement of concepts and tools, as well as innovative new ones, to tackle questions of crime, harm, culture, and control. Keywords like image, iconography, information flows, the counter-visual, and ‘social’ media, as well as the continuing relevance of the markers, signs, and inscriptions of gender, race, sexuality, and class in cultural contests mark the contours of the crime, media and culture nexus.

Vladimir Rizov

Urban Crime Control in Cinema Fallen Guardians and the Ideology of Repression

Vladimir Rizov University of Winchester Winchester, UK

ISSN 2946-3912     ISSN 2946-3920 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture ISBN 978-3-031-12977-3    ISBN 978-3-031-12978-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12978-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This book is dedicated to my grandmother. Thanks to everyone who has supported me while I was writing this book. Special thanks are due to Rafe McGregor without whom this book would not exist. I owe a lot to Aurėja Stirbytė for all of the support and countless re-reads. Many thanks also to Gareth Millington’s support and for starting me on this path in his cinema, crime and cities module. Thank you also to Leonardo Sandoval Guzman for his friendship and conversations throughout the years. Thanks are due to Viswesh Rammohan for his camaraderie and support, and both to Viswesh and Rijul Ballal for the intellectual home during the last few years. Thanks to Jack Munayer for the countless discussions of films, without which this book will not be the same. Thanks also for the friendship to Giuseppe Troccoli, Angélica Cabezas Pino, and Rosa. I also thank the editorial team at Palgrave Macmillan for their patience and support in the process of writing this book.

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Contents

1 I ntroduction  1 2 C  inema 15 3 C  ities 45 4 C  ritique 71 5 R  oboCop101 6 M  inority Report131 7 B  atman159 8 B  lade Runner189 9 C  onclusion217 I ndex225

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1 Introduction

Overview This book originated in a long-standing interest in visual culture and the representation of criminal justice. From action movies to thrillers, police procedurals to never-ending CSI series, true crime documentaries and historical biopics of people on either side of the law, visual culture is saturated with crime. Its narration is ubiquitous, as is its routine transformation into spectacle. A near-constant aspect of contemporary culture appears to be the incessant, meticulous scrutiny of what, how, and where crime takes place. In this book, I seek to demonstrate how this saturation of crime media is integral to the reproduction of some of the biggest problems in the criminal justice system. Issues such as police brutality, police discretion, ‘justice’, or even order, are all key elements to such representations. This is not coincidental, as the representation of such issues in media tends to sanitise them, individualise problems, and ultimately resolve them neatly. The viewer is reassured that the problem was indeed solvable, the criminal was truly evil and beyond help, and if a police officer did something wrong, then it was a matter of corruption or greed. There is no need to ask further questions about changing the system—those

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. Rizov, Urban Crime Control in Cinema, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12978-0_1

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involved in it know best. It is this that Louis Althusser referred to as ideology, ‘the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’ (2020:36; cf. Linnemann & Jewkes, 2017:42). Ideology relies on Ideological State Apparatuses such as the media, religion, the university, which seek to ensure that this ‘imaginary relationship’ reproduces these same real conditions. Put simply, ideology has the task of making sure that nothing changes. This perspective is at the core of this book. In this text, I approach the representation of crime control and justice by way of an eclectic body of literature, frequent retrospective comparisons with the history of policing, and a consistent focus on the very ideology that makes us ask these questions—what crime is, what has caused it, and how best to fight it— all the while providing us with readymade answers and making inquiry into causes exceedingly difficult. Important is also the question why representations of criminal justice in popular cinema tend to follow exceedingly similar plot points, narrative conventions, and aesthetic influences. I do so with a singular focus—the figure of the fallen guardian. The term itself draws on Plato’s Republic (1992) and its description of a complex social order, in which the workers know their place and do nothing but work, who are themselves protected by the auxiliaries, its guardians for the sake of simplicity, and ruled by the philosopher-king. The guardians are interesting as they are supposed to be deprived of self-interest, precisely because they are the most dangerous class—the one capable of upending the order. They are dangerous because their task is the protection of the very order from external enemies and internal threats. As such, I draw a parallel between the Platonic guardian and contemporary forms of policing. Of interest here, however, is the fallen guardian—not just any police character in any crime film. This particular cinematic figure is the protagonist, who in the course of the film’s narrative undergoes a fall from grace—he transforms from a guardian of the system to which he belongs to its enemy. As it will be shown, the figure rarely deviates from their original supposedly benevolent moral position. Rather, the system itself is revealed to be wrong, misguided or corrupt. All four of the films that will be used to demonstrate this—RoboCop (1987), Minority Report (2002), The Dark Knight Rises (2012), and Blade Runner 2049 (2017)— are also set within a dystopian context.

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It is this book’s goal to take these four case studies and relate them to actually existing crime control measures. By doing so, I seek to situate the cinematic representations in relation to the history of actual policing and demystify the ways in which popular cinema reinforces prevalent ideological constructions of justice. With regard to actually existing crime control measures, each film will be discussed in relation to a specific crime control measure or phenomenon. In Chap. 5, RoboCop will be used to argue that policing has consistently relied on the construction of a ‘dangerous class’ and racialization, and is best conceptualised as ‘violence work’ (Seigel, 2018). It will also be used to discuss the phenomenon of private policing and its representation in the film. In Chap. 6, Minority Report (2002) is used as a case of predictive policing. As such, at the core of the chapter is a discussion of surveillance and social control. In Chap. 7, The Dark Knight Rises (2012) presents the problem of mass incarceration and the manner in which carcerality and punitiveness remain the unchallenged foundation in many narratives of justice. The role of Batman also allows for a discussion of the idea of vigilante justice and an analysis of the ways in which it reinforces the criminal justice system just the same. Finally, in Chap. 8, Blade Runner 2049 (2017) provides the case of extra-judicial killing and assassination. A key example is the use of death squads in conjunction to police strategies of pacification and counterinsurgency. The argument in each of the case studies, despite having its own separate focus, is cumulative. Beginning with a historical overview of policing as violence work that relies on racialisation and the repression of labour in RoboCop, privatisation as the tool for increasing efficiency in ensuring a crime-free world finds its logical progression in a system of total surveillance in Minority Report. Through the construction of risk factors and other signifiers of likeliness to commit crime, Minority Report straightforwardly sets up as a consequence of its practices the problem of mass incarceration. Depicting a point in time where this mass incarceration is an established reality, The Dark Knight Rises poses the question of incarceration as a valid strategy. Carceral punishment, Batman’s narrative seems to imply, is an inconvenience—a constant threat that could yet again raise its head and disturb the peace for which Batman and the Gotham City Police Department fight so hard on the streets of the Gothic city. All the

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while, the temptation haunts the narrative—what if Batman could kill criminals? Blade Runner 2049 unflinchingly presents this as a reality. The protagonist, himself a manufactured android, unceremoniously does his job as an assassin of runaway or rebellious androids. At the core of all four cases is violence and its work, in the form of policing, to maintain the established order unchanged. It is in this sense that what was earlier introduced as ideology is inseparable from repression. As the subtitle of this book suggests, a key focus is exactly their intersection—the ideology of repression. In conjunction with the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), Althusser highlights the function of Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs) such as the prison, the court system, or the police. If the former function by the capture of one’s imagination, then the latter work by force. The difference in name, however, points to a difference in degree, not so much a difference in function altogether. Both ISAs and RSAs work through ideology and repression— the prison’s existence relies on ideas which justify it as much as a school is an institution that actively disciplines students. Importantly, the RSAs are characterised by unity, as they tend to in much greater degree to be integrated within the state—perhaps illustrated best with the criminal justice system. The ISAs, on the other hand, are lot more likely to be partial, and do not necessarily need to be part of the state, for example, private media, the family, and so on. This interplay between ideology and repression, as well as their intersection, is understood through an interdisciplinary framework that draws primarily on critical criminology, urban sociology, and Marxist literary criticism. I posit that crime control in these four case studies needs to be analysed as reflective of inequality, as almost exclusively urban in character, and that its formal narrative qualities are ‘ideological manoeuvres’ that misrepresent said inequality and urban space. In such terms, the monograph seeks to engage with the criminology of cinema, the role of urban space for both crime control and its cinematic representation, and the broader framework in which narrative representation can be understood to formulate ‘a representational structure’ (Jameson, 2002:14) of reality that is ideological. This theoretical basis for the monograph constitutes Part I of the book, where the following three chapters cover my approach to cinema, urban space, and the general critical framework,

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respectively. The four case studies and each juxtaposition of film and crime control measure constitute Part II and, respectively, make up the subsequent four chapters. For the remainder of this chapter, I will outline the contents and goals of the book with reference to its theoretical framework in Part I and its ideological analysis in Part II.

Cinema, Cities, Critique Jean Baudrillard (1989:55) remarked that ‘The American city seems to have stepped right out of the movies.’ The connection between cinema and cities seems to be as old as the cinematic medium itself. Many scholars have commented on the ways in which modernity with its emphasis on urban order and visuality gave rise to the very aesthetics and background that shaped what cinema has become (AlSayyad, 2006; Millington, 2016; Mennel, 2019; cf. on photography, Rizov, 2020). The notion of ‘the cinematic city’ has become so common that ‘the widespread implicit acceptance of its importance has mitigated against an explicit consideration of its actual significance’ (Clarke, 2009:1). Notions of the city can either veer towards treating space as a container in which actions take place or towards the idea that space itself is an active determinant that shapes what can take place (Lefebvre, 1974). This tension is at the core of what others have referred to as ‘cinematic space’ (AlSayyad, 2006:4). Both a tension and a promise, the relation between acting in space, space’s potential to shape events becomes even richer when put together with the capacity to capture and represent space on film. It is in such a context that Siegfried Kracauer (1960:255) described the true film artist, who: may be imagined as a man [sic] who sets out to tell a story but, in shooting it, is so overwhelmed by his innate desire to cover all of physical reality – and also by a feeling that he must cover it in order to tell the story, any story, in cinematic terms […]

While many perspectives would point to the assumed distinction between the actual, the real city, and the represented, the city on screen,

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Kracauer evocatively speaks to the richness of urban experience that is already cinematic in character. There is something about being in the city that is suited to being in it with a camera in hand. As Penz and Lu (2011:9) note, through the aesthetic codifications of cinema and its power to frame reality, any simple recording of ‘anonymous and banal’ urban space could be transformed from naïve to ‘expressive space’. The city itself, cinematic in how one experiences it, is thus especially liable for capture on a screen. Understood this way, cinema is both screen and mirror—it both crystallises new structures of meaning or signification and captures those already existing. In this sense, I follow AlSayyad (2006:4) in employing the term ‘cinematic space […] both as an analytical tool and an object of critique’. Shiel (2001:4) aptly summarises this by stating that cinema should be understood ‘as a set of practices and activities, as well as a set of texts’. In this context, Chap. 2 will continue this line of reasoning and engage with the tools provided by Marxist literary criticism (Foley, 2019) and the framework of capitalist realism (Fisher, 2009). This assumed contradistinction between actual and virtual, what AlSayyad refers to as ‘real and reel’ (2006:xii), is of special significance in relation to ideology. Stanley Corkin notes that film encapsulates ‘a dense fabric of spatial relations’ (2011:12), which speak to a broader ‘moment of origin’ (2011:15). For Corkin (2011) this means that cinema can frequently be operationalised within other discourses or histories. In many ways, this can be demonstrated in the ways in which films play on the visual as presence, thereby also exploiting the signifying potential of omission. One can imagine examples such as Dirty Harry (1971) and Death Wish (1974) as films that contribute to the formation of ‘a representational structure’ (Jameson, 2002:14), in which criminals are irrational and sadistic, and good citizens should be allowed extra-judicial powers to wield guns with the goal to enact revenge and distribute justice. Both examples also speak to a not-so-subtle reformulation of the Western genre in the urban metropolis—the frontier has changed, but racialisation is ever-present—from Native Americans and enslaved African-Americans to muggers and gangs. It is in this sense, that following AlSayyad (2006:xii) I posit the distinction between real and reel as mutually constitutive, where ‘reel space’ is both representational and generative. In this sense, we can see the ways

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in which these concerns regarding space can be related to the study of crime. One key example in which this will be shown in this book is the representation policing as heavily reliant on the traversal of space. In the utopian societies portrayed in the case studies, there are multiple examples of technology and skills that are revealed as essential to crime control. All of the protagonists, as enforcers of crime control, are shown to need the capability to move through space, as well as to understand it, dissect it, and analyse it. Beyond simple movement, space is also presented as the site of struggle for social control. Certain areas, such as slums, ghettos, or urban sprawls are represented as lost, impenetrable or otherwise opaque. Others are presented as transparent and produced in alignment with some kind of intended order. Both aspects speak to the core focus of Chap. 3 and the work of Henri Lefebvre (1974) in terms of the production of space and the dual illusions of opacity and transparency. This dual tension is also evident in relation to the recurring theme of surveillance. In essence, traversal is rendered nearly synonymous with surveillance, as the crime control enforcers in all four cases need both in order to enact their respective crime control measure. In terms of Foucault’s work, the intersection of space and visuality is evident in the prevalence of mechanisms of panopticism, defined by Foucault as ‘a generalizable model of functioning’ for repression (Foucault, 1995:205). A final element of this project’s critical framework is the aspect of interiority (Lowe, 2015), defined as the capacity for intimacy and empathetic engagement with others. This is significant with regard to cinema, since Diken and Laustsen (2008) note that the experience of film, both in spatial and temporal terms, allows for one to experience being someone different. While I agree with the point, I seek to problematise this process of identification by way of a critical framework that critiques identification’s basis in empathy. Following the work of Lauren Berlant (1998), I posit that cinematic experience is indeed intimate in the sense that it can provoke personal sensations and feelings as well as teach one how to relate to said feelings and intimate experiences. As Berlant notes, intimacy is rooted in ‘tacit fantasies, tacit rules, and tacit obligations to remain unproblematic’ (1998:287). In Chap. 4, I argue that these tacit obligations manifest in a restrictive way where one’s capacity for empathy is

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limited by their own experience. Moreover, drawing on the work of Lisa Lowe, the capacity for intimacy is best understood as a capacity for interiority, which manifests in knowledge of self and others (Lowe, 2015:21). Thus, to contradict Diken and Laustsen, while cinema provides the opportunity for novel experience and empathy, viewers’ pre-existing capacities for these are predetermined and limited. A clear illustration of this are the protagonists in the four case studies—all of them exclusively abled, white, heterosexual men employed in violence work—a group that is by default less susceptible to vulnerability than most others. The protagonists, all of them fallen guardians in their own right, are the fulcrum of this project. Each main character provides a narrative experience of a different crime control measure. The fallen guardians experience the measure first as an enforcer, and then as a target. As such, the capacity for empathy is central. However, the ideological critique proposed here seeks to disarticulate the ways in which this empathy is produced on the formal level of narrative in order to reproduce a representational image of justice that conforms to established beliefs and practices, thus contributing to the normalisation of crime control as a whole.

 ritical Criminology and Critique C of Criminology A key theoretical tool, by which this critique will be done, is the framework of the sociological imagination. C. Wright Mills starts the influential first chapter of his eponymous book with ‘the promise’ of sociology—the idea that the ‘sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society’ (2000:6). It is understood as both a task and a promise. In this book, I have tried to avoid the traps of individual experience and the ways in which it can preclude understanding of broader structural phenomena such as policing, incarceration, or criminal justice. Even more so, I have attempted to utilise this same imagination in trying to pick apart the very notion of justice that permeates the films examined in this book. The

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tools for this task have been interdisciplinary and far-reaching. I have frequently referred to historical accounts of both significant moments and ones deemed insignificant. The result is perhaps an unconventional analysis of film through the lens of history, urban sociology, and literary criticism with a focus on the critique of crime control and ideology. History is important, as any given conjuncture cannot be understood otherwise than a moment in which multiple historical forces, material conditions, and discursive formulations come together. Moments such as these are always already sites of struggle, and my approach has been to speak to the presences of these struggles in each instance of popular culture (cf. Frauley, 2010). In this sense, cultural criminology and its inherent interdisciplinarity has been key to my approach. It has expressed itself in an engagement with the significance of the visual (both the image and the cinematic, for the former, see Carrabine, 2012; for the latter, Rafter, 2007), narrative (Presser, 2016; McGregor, 2018, 2020, 2021), and the affective consequences of such experiences. Cultural criminology is interdisciplinary as it draws on a multitude of disciplines, including urban studies, continental theory, cultural and human geography, and political theory among others (Ferrell et al., 2015:8; cf. Rafter, 2014:130). More directly relevant to the focus of this book, cultural criminology is in many senses a criminology of popular culture. As Rafter (2007:147) notes, it is important to acknowledge ‘popular criminology as a criminological discourse in its own right’, since popular imaginations already delimit or provide the basis for understandings of crime and its control. Popular culture and its discourse of crime control are, in fact, sources of ‘cultural information’ (Rafter, 2007:416; also, see Martin, 2018:44); as Katz notes, ‘as a cultural resource, crime is far too valuable to be left to criminals’ (2016:235). For Rafter, some of this ‘cultural information’ also ‘feeds into our ideologies and other mental schemata’ (2007:416; cf. Jameson’s definition of the former in terms of ‘a representational structure’, 2002:14). Presser (2016:145), in her engagement the effect of culture, has drawn attention to the ways in which ‘selves [become] realized through crime’, thus further deepening engagement with culture and narrative in their generative aspects. In this sense also, visual criminology, as the study of ‘the ways in which all things visual interact with crime and criminal justice’ (Rafter,

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2014:129; also, see Brown & Rafter, 2013), is key to unravelling the ways in which crime control is normalised, imagined on personal and structural levels, and reproduced. Throughout this book, I have sought to utilise an approach described by Brown (2014:181) as a ‘visually attuned criminology’ that engages deeply with political issues, questions of ethics, and the social practices rooted in the production and consumption of representations of crime control in visual narrative form. More specifically, the significance of the visual in diegetic and representative terms will be made evident in the course of analysis. Namely, many instances of policework, such as investigation, surveillance, or arrest, are explicitly visual—RoboCop utilises a machine view of a Heads-Up Display (HUD) and consistently scans multiple police networks and uses facial recognition, as do Anderton in Minority Report and Batman in The Dark Knight Rises. In Blade Runner 2049, the protagonist, K, is rendered an obedient subject by his very willingness to repeat excerpts from a narrative poem while his gaze is transfixed on a camera. As multiple scholars have pointed out (Rafter, 2007; Brown, 2014; Carrabine, 2012), the cultural aspect of crime and its control cannot be separated from the visual, nor its narrative representation. I follow this position and draw on the work of criminologists of culture on policing and crime control (such as Salter, 2014; Wall, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2021; Wall & Linnemann, 2020; Linnemann, 2017, 2019; Linnemann & Wall, 2013; McClanahan & Linnemann, 2018; Fiddler et  al., 2021; Alexandrescu, 2021; McHarris, 2021; Sze, 2021; Neocleous, 2021). This approach is also rooted in what Jock Young (2011) has referred to as the criminological imagination. Illustrative of this is Young’s evocative list of ten ironies in criminology. He lists the following (2011:215–6): (1) ontology; (2) the dyadic nature of crime and deviance; (3) socialisation; (4) contradiction; (5) function; (6) seriousness; (7) selectivity; (8) decentring; (9) counter-productivity; and (10) secondary harm. Although in no way exhaustive, Young aptly outlines the ways in which criminology is rife with contradictions. For one, it purports to study crime, while for a long part of its history, it has ignored the ways in which crime is reified as a construction through the very practices of criminal justice. More than this, Young points to the multiple ways in which criminal justice itself is unproductive in delivering justice, but productive in the sense of

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determining and quantifying crime, and acting on said phenomenon by way of the very institutions that produce it. In this sense, the criminological character of this monograph is primarily in the subfield of critical criminology with roots in the Marxist tradition. That is to say, a core position is that crime and race are the two central notions around which the work of policing revolves (Schrader, 2019:39). Both notions are reified constructs—crime is not something that the police fights, but a product that arises out of the criminal justice system; race is likewise a construct, whose character is often subsumed in the role of a cause of criminality, when it is in actuality an effect of police practice in particular and the criminal justice system in general. Policing is thus best understood as ‘an engine of intertwining discourses and practices of criminalization and racialization’ (Schrader, 2019:39); it was designed as ‘a tool to exploit, punish, and control Black and other racially and class marginalized communities’ (McHarris, 2021:50). One key instance of these discourses is popular culture (Hall, 2016). The primary engagement with this has been the use of Louis Althusser’s work on ideology (2020). Namely, the protagonists have been interpreted as ideological subjects, themselves in complex relationships to the ideological order in which they find themselves. Their position in said order is hinging on what Althusser calls interpellation, the process through which one is constantly, always already, hailed as a subject. That is to say, one is asked to recognise oneself as part of that order, in relation to others, and thus always be enmeshed in the material practices that perpetuate this process. An element that should not be underestimated is the ways in which popular culture in general, and film in particular, interpellate us, the viewers. We are constantly asked to imagine the internal lives of characters, to find them relatable or oppose them morally. We are always asked to recognise ourselves in relation to what is seen on the screen. In view of this, I have tried to rearticulate and recontextualise each film in relation to the world beyond the screen. The book is written as a pedagogical tool for seeing films and reading them as texts with a constant reminder that they are powerful forces that shape our understanding of ourselves, the world, crime, and justice. At its core, this is a text that seeks to promote the above-mentioned imaginations. Ultimately, this is a book on crime control and Marxism, refracted through cinema. Although

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there is no explicit abolitionist argument present, in the sense of what should come after the end of policing and criminal justice, this book is very much written in the spirit of abolition and the hope for a different world.

References Alexandrescu, L. (2021). Violence, Crime Dystopia and the Dialectics of (Dis) Order in the Purge Films. Crime, Media, Culture, Online First. AlSayyad, N. (2006). Cinematic Urbanism: A History of the Modern from Reel to Real. Routledge. Althusser, L. (2020). On Ideology. Verso Books. Baudrillard, J. (1989). America. Verso Books. Berlant, L. (1998). Intimacy: A Special Issue. Critical Inquiry, 24(2), 281–288. Blade Runner 2049. (2017). Directed by Denis Villeneuve. US: Alcon Entertainment, Columbia Pictures, Sony. Brown, M. (2014). Visual Criminology and Carceral Studies: Counter-Images in the Carceral Age. Theoretical Criminology, 18(2), 176–197. Brown, M., & Rafter, N. (2013). Genocide Films, Public Criminology, Collective Memory. British Journal of Criminology, 53(6), 1017–1032. Carrabine, E. (2012). Just images: Aesthetics, Ethics and Visual Criminology. The British Journal of Criminology, 52(3), 463–489. Clarke, D. (2009). Introduction: Previewing the Cinematic City. In The Cinematic City, ed. David Clarke. Routledge. Corkin, S. (2011). Starring New York: Filming the Grime and the Glamour of the Long 1970s. Oxford University Press. Death Wish. (1974). Directed by Michael Winner. US: Dino De Laurentiis. Diken, B., & Laustsen, C. B. (2008). Sociology Through the Projector. Routledge. Dirty Harry. (1971). Directed by Don Siegel. US: The Malpaso Company. Ferrell, J., Hayward, K., & Young, J. (2015). Cultural Criminology: An Invitation (2nd ed.). Sage. Fiddler, M., Kindynis, T., & Linnemann, T. (2021). Ghost Criminology. In M.  Fiddler, T.  Kindynis, & T.  Linnemann (Eds.), Ghost Criminology. New York University Press. Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books. Foley, B. (2019). Marxist Literary Criticism Today. Pluto Press. Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books.

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Frauley, J. (2010). Criminology, Deviance, and the Silver Screen: The Fictional Reality and the Criminological Imagination. Springer. Hall, S. (2016). Notes on Deconstructing the Popular. In R.  Samuel (Ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory (pp. 227–241). Routledge. Jameson, F. (2002). The Political Unconscious. Routledge. Katz, J. (2016). Culture Within and Culture About Crime: The Case of the “Rodney King Riots”. Crime, Media, Culture, 12(2), 233–251. Kracauer, S. (1960). Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Oxford University Press. Lefebvre, H. (1974/1991). The Production of Space (D.  Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Blackwell. Linnemann, T. (2017). Proof of Death: Police Power and the Visual Economies of Seizure, Accumulation and Trophy. Theoretical Criminology, 21(1), 57–77. Linnemann, T. (2019). Bad Cops and True Detectives: The Horror of Police and the Unthinkable World. Theoretical Criminology, 23(3), 355–374. Linnemann, T., & Jewkes, Y. (2017). Media and Crime in the US. Sage. Linnemann, T., & Wall, T. (2013). ‘This is Your Face on Meth’: The Punitive Spectacle of ‘White Trash’ in the Rural War on Drugs. Theoretical Criminology, 17(3), 315–334. Lowe, L. (2015). The Intimacies of Four Continents. Duke University Press. Martin, G. (2018). Crime, Media and Culture. Taylor & Francis. McClanahan, B., & Linnemann, T. (2018). Darkness on the Edge of Town: Visual Criminology and the “Black Sites” of the Rural. Deviant Behavior, 39(4), 512–524. McGregor, R. (2018). Narrative Justice. Rowman & Littlefield. McGregor, R. (2020). Introduction to the Narrative Justice Symposium. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 54(4), 1–5. McGregor, R. (2021). A Criminology of Narrative Fiction. Policy Press. McHarris, P.  V. (2021). Disrupting Order: Race, Class, and the Roots of Policing. In D. Correia & T. Wall (Eds.), Violent Order: Essays on The Nature of Police. Haymarket Books. Mennel, B. (2019). Cities and Cinema (2nd ed.). Routledge. Millington, G. (2016). Urbanization and the Migrant in British Cinema: Spectres of the City. Palgrave Pivot. Minority Report. (2002). Directed by Steven Spielberg. US: Twentieth Century Fox. Neocleous, M. (2021). The Monster and the Police: Dexter to Hobbes. In D. Correia & T. Wall (Eds.), Violent Order: Essays on The Nature of Police. Haymarket Books.

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Penz, F., & Lu, A. (2011). Introduction: What Is Urban Cinematics? In F. Penz & A. Lu (Eds.), Urban Cinematics: Understanding Urban Phenomena Through the Moving Image. Intellect Books. Plato. (1992). Republic (G. M. A. Grube & C. D. C. Reeve, Trans.). Hackett. Presser, L. (2016). Criminology and the Narrative Turn. Crime, Media, Culture, 12(2), 137–151. Rafter, N. (2007). Crime, Film and Criminology: Recent Sex-Crime Movies. Theoretical Criminology, 11(3), 403–420. Rafter, N. (2014). Introduction to Special Issue on Visual Culture and the Iconography of Crime and Punishment. Theoretical Criminology, 18(2), 127–133. Rizov, V. (2020). The Photographic City: Modernity and the Origin of Urban Photography. City, 23(6), 774–791. RoboCop. (1987). Directed by Paul Verhoeven. US: Orion Pictures. Salter, M. (2014). Toys for the Boys? Drones, Pleasure and Popular Culture in the Militarisation of Policing. Critical Criminology, 22(2), 163–177. Schrader, S. (2019). Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing. University of California Press. Seigel, M. (2018). Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police. Duke University Press. Shiel, M. (2001). Cinema and the City in History and Theory. In M. Shiel & T.  Fitzmaurice (Eds.), Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context. Blackwell Publishers. Sze, J. (2021). The White Dog and Dark Water: Police Violence in The Central Valley. In D. Correia & T. Wall (Eds.), Violent Order: Essays on The Nature of Police. Haymarket Books. The Dark Knight Rises. (2012). Directed by Christopher Nolan. US: Warner Bros. Wall, T. (2014). Legal Terror and the Police Dog. Radical Philosophy, 188(2), 2–7. Wall, T. (2016). Ordinary Emergency: Drones, Police, and Geographies of Legal Terror. Antipode, 48(4), 1122–1139. Wall, T. (2017). Unmanning the Police Manhunt: Vertical Security as Pacification. In T. Wall, P. Saberi, & W. Jackson (Eds.), Destroy Build Secure: Readings on Pacification. Red Quill Books. Wall, T. (2021). Inventing Humanity, or the Thin Blue Line as “Patronizing Shit”. In D. Correia & T. Wall (Eds.), Violent Order: Essays on the Nature of Police. Haymarket Books. Wall, T., & Linnemann, T. (2020). No Chance: The Secret of Police, or the Violence of Discretion. Social Justice, 47(3/4), 77–93. Wright Mills, C. (2000). The Sociological Imagination. Oxford University Press. Young, J. (2011). The Criminological Imagination. Polity.

2 Cinema

Cinematic Realism The cinematic world of Len Wiseman’s Total Recall (2012) is a dystopia in which there has been a global chemical war at the end of the twenty-­first century. In what can be summarised as a fascist fantasy, the United Federation of Britain (UFB) has conquered western and northern Europe, the only remaining inhabitable land in the Global North. The UFB also controls the only other land that can support human life, the Colony, located in three-quarters of what was formerly Australia. In an interesting way, the imagined fascism of tomorrow is represented as both a reflection of the colonialism of the past and the existing examples of European fascism. The Nazi project of Fortress Europe is presented as a given and its counterpart is the labourers of the Colony on the other side of the globe. In a near literal parallel to the Global North and Global South divide, the relationship between fascism and colonialism outlined so neatly by Aimé Césaire is clear (2000). As Comolli and Narboni (1971a:30) argue, ‘the cinema “reproduces” reality: this is what a camera and film stock are for — so says the ideology.’ How this is done will be the focus of this chapter. When Carl Hauser (played by Colin Farrell) walks onto his apartment balcony in the beginning of the film, the camera looms above him at a

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high angle and then dips down in a diagonal sweep, providing the audience with their first impression of the Colony. The camera remains motionless for a single second, which is long enough to provide a vivid spectacle of the Colony as a seemingly endless, dark, and dirty metropolis. The Colony has been constructed along multiple vertical and horizontal axes in order to exploit every conceivable space for human habitation, creating a claustrophobic complex of interconnected low- and high-rise buildings that block out the sun. A few seconds later, this oppressive mass of criss-crossing stacked concrete strata is viewed from street level and conditions in the Colony will later be contrasted with those in the more affluent, albeit still overcrowded, UFB. The message is implied, but clear—the individual subject is submerged in the plurality of the metropolis, the camera itself representing the vertiginous experience outlined a century ago by Georg Simmel (1903). Even more so, the implicit invitation for a Malthusian,1 that is, fascist, prejudice of ‘over-­ population’ is not far behind. Concerns such as this, in view of the topic of this book, perhaps already court controversy and invite a number of questions about cinema. The most basic—what is it called? and what type of thing is it?—are fraught with conceptual dangers. To take the second first, is the type of thing under discussion a mode of representation, a medium of representation, an art form, or some combination of the three? ‘Cinematic’ is often used to identify the specific character of a visual narrative that is of interest in this monograph. However, this need not be exclusive to film, as it can easily be applied to multiple instances of remediation (Bolter & Grusin, 2000) with examples such as videogames (Girina, 2013), or even literature (cf. Huyssen, 2015). Aaron Smuts (2013) identifies two descriptive uses of ‘cinematic’, general and specific. The former is synonymous with ‘film’ or ‘filmic’, that is, related to motion pictures, and the latter to ‘some cluster of characteristics found in films featuring the following: expansive scenery, extreme depth of field, high camera positioning, and elaborate tracking shots’ (Smuts, 2013:82). The specific meaning was used to distinguish cinema (the big screen) from television (the small screen) in  By Malthusian here, I point to the discourse of supposed ‘excessive reproduction of the poor, which threatens access to resources by the rich’ (Tilley & Ajl, 2022:14n). 1

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the latter half of the twentieth century. In the context of the current work, of interest is the general use, that is, ‘filmic’ and ‘cinematic’ as synonymous and as referring to a mode of representation. I employ mode of representation instead of medium because the mode of representation is constituted by a variety of media, as this seeks to be inclusive of aesthetic codifications that are not specific to a certain medium2 and is open to understanding media as porous and part of a multi-directional process of remediation in a historical, that is to say social and political, context. In simple terms, the videogame God of War (Sony, 2018), with its one-shot ‘cinematography,’ is no less cinematic than Lady in the Lake (1947, directed by Robert Montgomery). To take the cinematic work with which we began this chapter, it is relatively straightforward to claim that Total Recall provides a representation of some combination of global inequality, neo-colonial policies, and migrant labour exploitation. What if, however, we were to interpret the work as an indictment of undercover policing practices? Or, alternatively, if Wiseman were to state in an interview (based on, for example, the conclusion of the director’s cut) that the work was an endorsement of the benefits of virtual reality? There are multiple interpretations possible, but these interpretations, I shall argue, are more or less compelling to the extent that they are evinced in the work itself, as well as the broader frames of knowledge that inform it, which henceforth shall be referred to as its ideological context. Even more so, I will seek to demonstrate in this chapter, the very lacunae and omissions in a given film’s engagement with a topic, regardless of authorial intention or not, are equally, if not more, constitutive of a film’s message. Broadly, this project seeks to utilise a reading of films both with and against the grain, thereby revealing the ideological character of a given ‘text’ (Bewes, 2010). The films which will be examined in the following chapters are all fictional. The distinction between fiction and non-fiction is usually conceptualised as significant, but this delineation is not essential to the argument presented here. For instance, there is no essential difference between  I point to Rancière’s refusal of “one of modernism’s main theses: [that] the difference between the arts is linked to the difference between their technological conditions or their specific medium or material” (2004:31; cf. Rizov, 2020). 2

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imagining the (actual) events in the United States depicted in 13th (directed by Ava DuVernay, 2016) and imagining the (fictional) events of the future depicted in Total Recall. The significant aspect that should be noted is that such engagements with the topic remain formal in scope, and thus quite limited—as 13th could easily be understood as truthful, while also omitting key information regarding the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, such as Joe Biden’s involvement in the bill. The production of a cinematic work of fiction is to employ conventions within the practice as well as to rely on established aesthetic codifications which constitute a code that is more or less legible to the audience and as such invites a set of expectations in response. Granted, the expectations associated with the practice of fiction differ from those associated with the practice of non-fiction. When compared to other modes of representation, there is an immediate and obvious sense in which cinema is more realistic, that is, in which cinema seems to reproduce rather than represent reality. André Bazin stands out as a film theorist associated with realism and was one of the founding editors of the influential Cahiers du Cinéma (Notebooks on Cinema) in 1951. Bazin (1958) wrote of thirteen different kinds of realism, but nonetheless associated realism in the arts, including cinematic art, with resemblance. He (1958:21) championed what is now known as the deep focus style over the montage style on the basis of the former’s ‘integral realism’, that is, its ability to reproduce reality as it is rather than reality as it is interpreted by a director. Siegfried Kracaueris is considered to be responsible for the first systematic and most comprehensive realist film theory. Kracauer wrote of six different kinds of realism, all of which were also based on the photographic medium of film. Kracauer’s (1960:255) cinematic realism was in fact camera-realism and his clearest definition of the concept is presented in his definition of the true film artist, who: may be imagined as a man [sic] who sets out to tell a story but, in shooting it, is so overwhelmed by his innate desire to cover all of physical reality – and also by a feeling that he must cover it in order to tell the story, any story, in cinematic terms – that he ventures ever deeper into the jungle of

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material phenomena in which he risks becoming irretrievably lost if he does not, by virtue of great efforts, get back to the highways he has left.

Bazin and Kracauer were concerned exclusively with the photographic aspect of film and placed the emphasis on reproduction (of reality as it is) over representation (of reality as it is interpreted by a director). While either perspective opens itself up to a different type of critique, of key concern here is the ideological function of realism in the sense that it claims to represent events, choices, and settings. Whether this representation is accurate or not, exaggerated, or not, etc., the representation itself, however qualified, is based on some kind of relationship to the signified. In the later period of the Cahiers du Cinema, Jean-Louis Comolli and Narboni advocated for a different perspective on cinema (1971a, b). Comolli and Narboni, in their influential editorial upon the start of their tenure as editors, highlight several key points about cinema and its relation to ideology and criticism. Namely, they posit (1971a:30) that: every film is political, inasmuch as it is determined by the ideology which produces it (or within which it is produced, which stems from the same thing).

By doing so, they define a need to engage with the cinema of their time by outlining a typology of films in relation to their relation to representation and ideology. With reference to the former, they reject the idea that a film camera is impartial, but note that it registers ‘the vague, unformulated, untheorized, unthought-out world of the dominant ideology’ (1971a:30). In a strict Althusserian framing, their editorial points to the manner in which films express an imaginary representational structure that obfuscates the audience’s real relationship to the conditions of their existence. The typology consists of five main types: (1) films imbued with ideology through and through (1971a:31–2); (2) films that engage with political content with the goal of attacking ideology (1971a:32); (3) films, which by virtue of their form and the critique they generate, become political; (4) explicitly political films that nevertheless ‘unquestioningly adopt [the ideological system’s] language and its imagery’ (1971a:32); (5) films which present ideology straight in a sense that also

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ends up revealing some of its core contradictions. A more thorough engagement with the character of ideology will be provided later in this chapter. However, for the time being, some examples of the cinematic types might prove elucidating. Examples of the first type are the majority of films produced within the Hollywood system, but the majority of filmmaking would also fall into this category, regardless of themes (true crime, romance or historical drama, etc.), aesthetics (realist, arthouse, etc.), technological innovation, or position on the fiction/non-fiction spectrum. A prominent example of the second type would be Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966; see Brown & Rafter, 2013), Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga (1972), Ousmane Sembene’s Mandabi (1968) in terms of fiction, or The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975 (2011) or Raoul Peck’s Exterminate All the Brutes (2021) in terms of documentary. The Third Cinema movement illustrates this best through engagement with the labour of filmmaking, its distribution, and direct political action against colonialism and capitalism (Solanas & Getino, 2014). The third type would contain films such as Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) or the oeuvre of Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick, and their critical value is best illustrated by the popularity of Slavoj Zizek’s analyses in Sophie Fiennes’ The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) of their psychoanalytical richness. The fourth type includes examples such as Costa-Gavras’ Z (1969) or Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008), where in the latter, war is condemned, but primarily so in terms of the personal drama of an American soldier, with little consideration afforded for Iraqis or other victims of US imperialism. Finally, the fifth type and its ambiguity are of most interest to this monograph. In essence, all four films which will be analysed in Part II of this monograph fit into this type, Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop (1987), Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002), Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises (2012), and Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017). The ambiguity of these films’ relation to ideology is potent. On one side, Verhoeven’s original RoboCop is a satire that presents the ideology of criminal justice in a direct way—in Comolli’s and Narboni’s terms (1971a:33), it ‘lets us see it, but also shows it up and denounces it.’ In a way, so does Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 as it straightforwardly functions in the genre boundaries of cyberpunk and neo-noir, thereby demarcating the exaggeration of capitalist dynamics at

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the core of ideology. On the other side are Spielberg’s Minority Report and Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises. Both dystopian in setting and narrative, but only partially critical of capitalism or criminal justice. The former seems to have a problem primarily with the crime of homicide, but very little interest in police killings or social murder. The latter’s reservations regarding criminal justice and capitalism are, for the most part, a matter of functioning within a system rife with corruption. In essence, all four cases manifest an internal tension, which opens up the films to criticism in a manner that most other films do not. In such terms, the four case studies, as it will be shown, are not exclusively ideological or especially so, but rather they are explicitly revealing of ideological tensions in the notion of justice and repression. All films are ideological, not just the case studies, but the selected four are especially relevant due to their engagement with criminal justice. Moreover, the concept of ‘realistic’ representation once faced with the discourse of ideology becomes a subject of critical and philosophical inquiry for at least two reasons. First, the association between realistic representation and mass consumption. In his essay, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch,’ Clement Greenberg (1939) identified realistic representation in art with populism, dumbing-down, and kitsch, which he regarded as the consequence of mechanical reproduction and the drive for profit. Walter Benjamin (2009:259) also remarked on the alienation that arises out of this development, where humanity’s ‘alienation from itself has reached a point where it now allows its own destruction to be savoured as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.’ For Benjamin, the principle according to which reality was stripped from its aura in photography was through the incisions that the camera inflicts on the world. In the same essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ Benjamin (2009) compares a camera operator to a surgeon, who, in order to operate, must break apart a person’s body, penetrate into it, and, ultimately, does not address the one operated on otherwise than through the very operation (see Gilloch, 1996:186). Understood this way, Benjamin is describing the operation as a way of knowing, both of accessing and enacting knowledge. In this sense, the second and most substantial reason for continued interest in realism is in seeing it as an ideological effect of the encoding of a given text as a representation. Broadly speaking, if as Etienne Balibar

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and Pierre Macherey note that ‘all literature must be realist, in one way or another, a representation of reality, even and especially when it gives reality an image outside immediate perception and daily life and common experience’ (Balibar & Macherey, 1981:91), then ‘realism’ itself is ideological in the sense that it is both a quality of and an effect of the text, and as such it is an expression of a representational structure that supposedly says something about one’s place in the world. When one combines these two reasons, the full significance of realistic representation is revealed: any mode of representation that is characteristically realistic is a potentially powerful tool for the education—or miseducation—of a mass audience.

Cinematic Narrative Justice The case studies of cinematic works that make up the focus of this monograph are not only all fictional representations, but also all narrative representations. As such, they follow certain formal conventions and general aesthetic codifications that are common to all narratives. In this section, I will seek to outline some key considerations that elucidate how narratives are structured as well as the ways in which said structure is ideological. I seek to follow in the footsteps of Rafe McGregor’s series of critical interventions on the topic of ‘narrative justice’ (2018, 2021a, b, c; 2022; also, see Rizov, 2020; McGregor, 2020). McGregor argues in favour of the possibility of political education through aesthetic engagement by approaching the problem from a perspective at the intersection of analytical philosophy and critical criminology (2018). McGregor’s Narrative Justice focuses on the experience of narratives and the idea that it leads to a sensibility toward narratives, their content, and the interaction between a given narrative’s form and content. According to McGregor, the experience of narrative is cognitively, ethically, and politically valuable; and it produces individuals who are more capable of making those subsequent evaluations. McGregor has focused on the notion of criminal inhumanity, by way of his analysis of the narratives of “white genocide” and the “crusader,” ultimately demonstrating the equivalence between narratives

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of white supremacy and jihadism (2018); more recently, he has also argued for a criminological criticism of complex narratives that are constituted as fourfold allegories (2021a, c; cf. Jameson, 2020). In two examples, Narrative Justice (2018) and Critical Criminology and Literary Criticism (2022), McGregor provides careful readings of popular culture texts and their criminological significance. In addition to McGregor (2018, 2021a, 2022), I follow Foley (2019) in terms of literary analysis undertaken in a Marxist framework. Foley notes that, from a Marxist perspective, the intention of a creator (regardless of whether conceptualized as a single agent or a collective) is largely insignificant (cf. Jameson, 2002; Althusser, 2020). Namely, a writer or a director might be very much unaware of a given text’s role in reinforcing social control. A focus on intention would be inevitably also ignoring ‘the disparity between intention and consequence, as well as the invisible hold of the second-order ideological mediations in which their writings are enmeshed’ (Foley, 2019:126). This perspective goes back to Marx and Engels themselves, especially so in their praise of conservative author Balzac, whose work, in their view, could not but include the tensions inherent to Balzac’s own political view (Petrey, 1988; cf. Foley, 2019:72). It is from such a position that authors such as Pierre Macherey (1986) have pointed to literature as something that is produced; in the field of cinema, Comolli and Narboni have noted similar concerns (1971a:30). Key to this consideration, however, is the issue of form and formal unity. In simple terms, Foley describes formal unity of a given literary text as the manner in which ‘the literary text coheres around a synthesizing principle of order’ (2019:91). In practical terms, one can clearly imagine this in the example of the three-act narrative structure so common to Hollywood cinema—a beginning, a middle, and an end. At the end of Total Recall Hauser is redeemed by his sincere adoption of the Colony’s cause and his ultimate sabotage of the UFB’s plan to destroy its colony. Such sequential ordering is key to emplotment, what McGregor calls ‘the process by which a sequence of events is transformed into a narrative representation’ (2021:10) as well as the process of ethical judgement outlined above. In terms of narrativity, I will posit that both the cinematic works mentioned so far and the ones making up the case studies in Part 2 of this

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monograph are narratives in so far as they conform or otherwise engage with literariness albeit in cinematic form. Foley (2019:90–91) provides a list of frequently invoked criteria for what constitutes literariness. Those are: (1) fictionality; (2) density of language; (3) depth; (4) concreteness and particularity; (5) showing, not telling; (6) defamiliarization; (7) universality; (8) extension of experience; (9) exploration of the inner self; (10) confirmation of group affiliation; (11) formal unity; (12) autonomy; (13) beauty; (14) greatness. A cursory examination of these is necessary in order to clarify the approach to be undertaken in this monograph. First, fictionality refers to the imaginative character of narrative representation, the ways in which a story represents events in a certain manner, and the way in which this differs in fictional stories from factual ones. Second, density is described by Foley as ‘the fact that literary works often compel us to slow down and be aware of language as language’ (2019:97). In the case of cinematic works, the density is both in the sense of a text that is produced as a mixture of visual and verbal language—be it semiotics, as shall be discussed in reference to the work of Stuart Hall (1980) in Chap. 4, or the cinematographic language of composition, camera movement, editing, etc. Third, depth is key to the ideological critique put forward by this monograph. Namely, it implies a distinction between both appearance and essence, and counterposes depth with surface. The bridge between these two oppositions is a matter of interpretation and an outcome of the project of critique. Fourth, concreteness and particularity are at the core of what has been so far discussed as realist representation. As Foley notes, the dialectical treatment of the two is at the core of Marxist critique as ‘concrete and particular images and characterizations often point to larger conclusions that the reader is invited to infer about the world beyond the text’ (2019:100). Fifth, the clichéd writerly advice of ‘show, not tell’ speaks to a manner of writing explicitly, but implicitly arises out of a context of ideological struggle that seeks to preclude didacticism and the exposure of injustice (cf. McGurl, 2009; Bennett, 2015). Sixth, defamiliarization, which can also be referred to as estrangement, is an indicator of the manner in which a text can disturb expectations and invite a reader or viewer to reflect on prejudice and assumptions. A key example is the subversion of expectation in the original Blade Runner film (1982), where Deckard

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is revealed to be a replicant himself. Seventh, universality refers to the capacity of narratives to elicit emotions, as well as its capacity to represent abstract notions and experiences. Eight, empathy is about the manner in which narratives afford for ‘an imagined identification with people inhabiting times, places, and social positions quite unlike our own’ (Foley, 2019:107)—an idea that will be discussed in more depth in Chap. 4. Ninth, individuality is the aspect of dominant narratives that privileges the representation of the individual, as well as roots identity in a purely individualist frame. A key example in which this aspect manifests is the hegemonic prevalence of the individual protagonist. Tenth, with regard to group identity, Foley notes the dual aspect of both privileged groups, for instance how all directors of the four case studies are white men from the Global North, and the manner of writing from the perspective of subalternity where narratives possess a critical function, in the sense that ‘the effects of hierarchy and oppression’ are not omitted (Foley, 2019:111). Eleventh, the definition of formal unity has already been noted, but broadly it is a consideration of the text’s structure and logic, and scholars such as Raymond Williams have pointed out its roots in genre (2009). Twelfth, autonomy is to do with the text’s independence of extra-textual reality, its creator, or its source. This is a key consideration in terms of both the formal unity of a given cinematic work and its representative character. For instance, autonomy opens up an interesting question in the case of Blade Runner 2049 in terms of both the sequel’s relationship to the original film, and to the source text of Philip K.  Dick’s ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ (2010) Thirteenth, beauty can be understood as the subjective experience of the formal unity of a given work, but is also historically contingent, and as such best understood as a socially mediated judgement on the basis of established aesthetic codifications that contingently exclude certain people from access to either the codifications or the ability to judge them. Fourteenth and finally, the greatness of a given text refers to a categorical judgement with reference to either formal mastery of the above-mentioned characteristics and aesthetic codification, and it often seeks to exclude a larger body of work from possessing the characteristics of greatness. Ultimately, the question posed by Foley in relation to greatness is one of politics and ideology. What would it mean to consider racist films such as D.W. Griffith’s The

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Birth of the Nation or Nazi ones such as Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will as great cinematic works? For this monograph, the aesthetic or formal judgement of greatness is of little consequence, but the matter of formalism’s and aesthetics’ inseparability from politics and ideology is highly pertinent. In simple terms, the greatness of a given film in terms of formal qualities or aesthetics needs to be understood in relation to the types of films in relation to ideology outlined by Comolli and Narboni (1971a, b). At the core of this consideration is the notion of justice. Both the desire for it, on an ethical level, and that is to say formal level of narrative, and on a social level. The characteristics of narrativity outlined above are key ideological tools for the production of consensus as to what constitutes justice. In a given text, such as the cinematic works that are explored in this monograph, one of the key effects of its formal unity is its ethical dimension. While McGregor (2021a:11) points to an attitudinal perspective when examining a given narrative’s ethical content or value: Both the ethical and the political values of a complex narrative are a function of its attitudinal structure, the attitude that is embodied, enacted, or endorsed by the framework and which the reader or audience is invited to accept or adopt.

For McGregor, this invitation has its provenance in the creator of the work, or the agency of a given character. However, the gap between intention and consequence is crucial here, as the character of what a text omits can determine its ethical content as much as what is present. While the omittance can be intentional, it does not necessarily have to be so. For instance, Foley points to a scene towards the end of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, where Elizabeth Bennett is pouring coffee after dinner while wondering whether Fitzwilliam Darcy will return. Foley notes the surface elements of Bennett ‘performing the conventional female role’ as well as the stakes of uncertainty ‘whether the foundering courtship between these two tongue-tied lovers will resolve itself as both of them clearly desire’ (2019:191). Foley aptly comments on the formal aspect of narrative closure, where the general manoeuvre, in McGregor’s terms, from is-but-ought-not-to-be shifts into is-and-ought-to-be. Remaining

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purely on the formal level, the ethical judgement can only be on the basis of the actions of the characters and the codifications inherent to the genre of the text. However, Foley’s analysis also acknowledges the omitted mention of the origins of the coffee and the reality of oppression and exploitation that has brought the commodity to Elizabeth Bennett’s table. It would be naïve to assume that either author or character are aware or even care about this, but the point stands that the foundations of the world in the text (and of the author) are omitted completely. Such omissions cannot be reasonably considered part of the narrative framework, as they are what is clearly excluded from it. An interesting visual parallel can be made to Zourgane’s observation that in images taken between 1956 and 1958 stored in the photographic archive of the French army, there was a noted ‘absence of landmarks such as minarets and mosques, the absence of Arabic script, the absence of specific buildings or villages that have been razed’ (Zourgane, 2017:136). Omissions, thus, can also be understood as erasures. The aspects of narrativity bear even higher significance once understood in the formulation of ethical problems of justice in extra-textual social reality. One such example is the narrative of ‘police brutality.’ As the term implies, the brutality seeks to designate something out of the ordinary, an excess or a break in the status quo. It also tends to individualise the perpetrator—the out-of-the-ordinariness is something that is not characteristic to the entire system, therefore the perpetrator must not be representative. As Dylan Rodríguez notes, the narrative of ‘police brutality’ assumes ‘an abrogation of the police officer’s law-sanctified entitlement to exercise state-legitimated violence’ (2021:149). Such a manoeuvre seeks to obfuscate the numerous layers in which policing constitutes what Micol Seigel refers to as ‘violence work’ (2018) and the ways in which it functions almost exclusively on racialised, gendered and classed basis. In this sense, the obfuscation directs attention away from the reality of ‘anti-­ Black, racial-colonial state violence as unexceptional, [and the] physiologically and trans-generationally violent, systemic and sustained conditions of modern socialities’ (Rodríguez, 2021:149). This point also brings to the fore the distinction between particularity and universality, as well as depth and surface. In simple terms, the ‘police brutality’ narrative obscures the commonness of the phenomenon through

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particularising it and individualising it. While astute in his framing of the topic, Rodríguez is not the first to challenge this narrative. Among similar interventions are political works on the intersections of social science and political activism such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s ‘The Red Record’ (2021), the ‘We Charge Genocide’ petition to the UN (Patterson, 1952; cf. Rodríguez, 2021:149), or the work of W.E.B. Du Bois (1996, 1998, cf. Gibran Muhammad, 2019). Moreover, many writers and thinkers in the tradition of the Black Liberation Movement as well as the abolition movement, both construed broadly, have challenged the very notion of justice understood purely in the form of existing criminal justice systems. Joshua Briond (2020), in an essay on police abolitionism drawing heavily on the work of George Jackson, notes that policing itself cannot be separated from its roots in slave patrols and heavily class-based forms of social control. In essence, individual narratives of justice where a police officer is brought to ‘justice’ for actions constituting ‘police brutality’ in essence merely perpetuate the system by individualising the officer as exceptional. Briond notes (2020:np): “Justice” under this racial capitalism, is an impossibility—an ideological liberal mystification. The scarcity in the realm of political imagination that [neo]liberalism champions leads to a reality in which many people’s analysis and understanding of “justice” is merely individualized imprisonment and tepid-at-best liberal reforms. Advancing our collective understanding beyond the individual “bad” or killer cop toward an understanding of structural violence, is crucial to building an abolitionist politic grounded in empathy and community.

In order to be able to apply such considerations to the cinematic works of interest in this monograph, and thus reframe abstract ethical evaluations as ideological instrumentalizations of the notion of justice, I will draw on the tradition of ‘symptomatic reading’ outlined by Louis Althusser (2020, and later developed by Fredric Jameson in the notion of a text’s ‘political unconscious’ (2002). ‘Symptomatic reading’ is Althusser’s own definition of his reading of Marx where the interpretive reading ‘divulges the undivulged event in the text it reads, and in the same

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movement relates it to a different text, present as a necessary absence in the first’ (2016:8). For Althusser, this notion of ‘different text’ was both understood in the lacunae in the work of the targets of Marx’s critique, such as Adam Smith or David Ricardo, but also what Marx left unsaid or posed as questions in other works. The practice of symptomatic reading designates an interpretative framework where a given ‘text’ is read in relation to other works and the multiple dimensions they reveal as latent, tacit, or obscured in the original text of interest. In the case of this monograph, the relationship between representation and narrative is problematised in the sense that these ‘different texts’ are understood to be both a given cinematic work’s reflection of history, urban space and crime control and the text’s relationship to form, and other instances of the genre. For instance, in RoboCop the robotization of a police officer with a police strike as a major plot point and in the city of Detroit are especially meaningful in view of the context of the narrative. Namely, the history of worker struggle in Detroit is displaced and inverted by becoming a struggle for better working conditions of the violence workers that have historically oppressed the city’s industrial and other workers. Moreover, the history of worker opposition to automatization, due to its enhancing of productive forces at the expense of higher levels of worker exploitation and a strategic decrease of labour organisations’ power, is also removed from its original context and placed (1) on the individual level of a single person; and (2) in the field of violence work, that is, policing. In such terms, the film can be read symptomatically with its inversion of actual historical problems into exaggerated satirical representations of police work. As this example shows, the history of actual urban space can also be read as a secondary, ‘different text’ that reveals the gaps in a text under critique. The unsaid and the gaps in the text once placed in their proper context are shown to be symptoms of the film’s relation to the ideology it presents (cf. Comolli & Narboni, 1971a). It is in this sense that Althusserian ‘symptomatic reading’ seeks to ‘identify behind the spoken words the discourse of the silence, which, emerging in the verbal discourse, induces these blanks in it, blanks which are failures in its rigour, or the outer limits of its effort’ (2016:86). In a specific sense, many of the cinematic works to be examined are themselves readings of other ‘texts’— RoboCop (1987) is contrasted with Robocop (2014); Spielberg’s Minority

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Report with Philip K.  Dick’s story of the same name; Nolan’s Batman trilogy is both a multi-layered reading of a number of graphic novels, but also other cinematic adaptations; and finally, Blade Runner 2049 as both sequel to Blade Runner and in relation to Philip K.  Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Moreover, Althusser’s symptomatic reading is a practice rooted in his understanding of ideology as ‘the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’ (2020:36). Jameson has neatly rephrased this as a ‘representational structure which allows the individual subject to conceive or imagine his or her lived relationship to transpersonal realities such as the social structure or the collective logic of History’ (2002:14–5). In yet another sense, ideology is understood as the readymade answers that society provides to questions one might pose about the way the world works. As Comolli and Narboni note, in relation to cinema, ‘the film is ideology presenting itself to itself, talking to itself, learning about itself ’ (1971a:30) and ideology ‘has all the answers ready before it asks the questions’ (1971a:31). In practical terms, this has already been implied by way of the discussion of omission and ‘police brutality’. The solution, once the case of police violence has been individualised, is clear—punish or discipline the individual police officer. Thus, it is important to highlight that, for Althusser, ideology, as a representational structure that contains answers and permissible action, is manifested through ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) such as media, religion, the family, trade unions, etc. The ISAs are complementary to the repressive state apparatuses (RSAs) such as prisons, police, schools and courts. It is not so much that the RSAs are not ideological, in fact they are (e.g. one needs an ideological notion of justice for a court or prison system to function), nor that the ISAs are not repressive, they are as well (e.g. the heteronormative family carries its own repressions within and without). In this sense, the notion of ‘justice’ inherent to a narrative such as ‘police brutality’ is both ideological inasmuch as it represents the world in a way that is distorted and repressive inasmuch as it perpetuates the working of the system as it currently is. In Althusser’s own terms, if one ‘believes in Justice, he [sic] will submit unconditionally to the rules of the Law, and may even protest when they are violated, sign petitions, take part in a demonstration, etc.’ (2020:41).

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In essence, symptomatic reading is the interpretative practice in which the relation between repression and ideology can be revealed, as well as the process through which a given text’s relation to ideology can be articulated and thus allow for its disarticulation. So, the exercise in symptomatic reading outlined here is an attempt at engaging with what Jameson (2002) has referred to as ‘the political unconscious’, that is to say the symptoms either latent or manifest in a given ‘text’ and their significance for a reading with a particular intention behind it. In the context of RoboCop, such symptoms are automatization, policing as work, and the general history of industrial labour in Detroit. For Jameson, the ‘political interpretation of literary texts […] conceives of the political perspective […] as the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation’ (2002:1). As Foley observes (2019:132), ‘the political unconscious of a text testifies to the ways in which both the form and the explicit propositions embedded in it function strategically to contain—that is, encompass and control—social contradictions that defy reconciliation in the world beyond the text’. This idea of ‘the political unconscious’ is a characteristic of narrativity for Jameson—both films and texts possess it, just as novels’ symptoms are discernible both on verbal level (choice of words, phrasing, etc.) and imagery (what Foley would refer to as depth). Thus, the application of narrativity as a defining characteristic to cinematic works is evidently, relatively, uncontentious. In a certain sense, as Timothy Bewes argues (2010:18), reading ‘against the grain involves, simultaneously and to the same degree, reading with the grain’. That is to say, in order to determine the symptoms within a given ‘text,’ regardless of whether cinematic or not, one must also take what it says seriously. For example, Total Recall points to specific relations between labour, exploitation, and crime control. Namely, that the labourers are tasked with the production of mechanical police officers that are, in turn, tasked with the repression of labour. It even points to the realities of fascism and the multiple forms in which it is present outside the text of the film in the present moment, that is, nostalgia for the British Empire or the Nazi project of Fortress Europe (Hage, 2016). It is only by taking this seriously can we begin to understand its conceptualisation of justice, and subsequently judging it ourselves if it lives up to the standards it professes.

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Capitalist Realism The primary purpose of this monograph is to demystify measures of crime control in contemporary capitalist societies. To do this, the cinematic figure of the fallen guardian is argued to be a centripetal point of the narrative framework—a point to which I return in Chap. 4; in order to achieve this demystification, the critique expounded here can be summarised as the clarification of the relationship between particular exceptional crime control measures and social control more generally. The normalisation of an exceptional measure of crime control requires a material context for its inauguration and an ideological justification for its sustainment and reproduction. In consequence, matters of ideology are of great concern here. Following in the footsteps of established Marxist formulations, ideology is best understood as the expression of the ruling class’s ideas to create a false understanding that there is necessarily rather than contingently no alternative to these ideas. In Louis Althusser’s terms, ideology, building on the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The German Ideology (2000), is ‘the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’ (2020:36). My concern with ideology here is twofold, with material conditions and with social practices. First and foremost, my ideological analysis is rooted in an engagement with a particular film’s representation of society, the relations of production at the core of that society, and the struggle of the classes that constitute the society. In this way, the goal is to illuminate the role that guardians fulfil in these societies, the character of the various enemies to whom guardians are opposed, and the extent to which violence against certain individuals or groups is legitimated or sanctioned by the state. While the fallen guardian is an individual, they nevertheless remain a stand-in for the state and its powers to use violence and discipline. At a first glance, the ideological function of the guardian role is to draw a distinction between the legitimate powers of the state, and law enforcement in particular, and that which threatens the safety of society.

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As we shall see throughout the monograph, a more in-depth look at this ideological function would also be telling of the various ways this latter side of the distinction is flexible and malleable—affording law enforcement the necessary adaptability of always being on the right side. Stuart Hall (1980:95) qualifies realistic representation as follows: Naturalism or “realism” – the apparent fidelity of the representation to the thing or concept represented – is the result, the effect, of a certain specific articulation of language on the “real”.

Realism thus lies in the field of semiotics and is ‘the result of a discursive practice’ in which discursive knowledge should be taken to mean an ‘articulation of language on real relations and conditions’ rather than a transparent representation of those conditions (Hall, 1980:95). In other words, despite its seeming transparency, realist representation is itself an effect of a certain representational structure present in a given text. In the terms articulated by Balibar and Macherey (1981), realism is an effect that a text produces. Regarding social practices, Raymond Williams (1977:212) aptly defines realism as ‘that method and that intention that [goes] below [the] surface to the essential historical movements, to the dynamic reality’ (cf. Millington, 2016). This allows for an engagement with the case studies at a greater depth than the level of their formal elements or the intentions of the directors. Hall’s characterisation of the role of the media in relation to ideology, which draws attention to the media’s role in the reproduction of social relations by emphasising existing material conditions, is particularly relevant here. Hall (1980:91) problematises the simplistic, linear sender-message-receiver structure and proposes a more complex understanding of ‘production, circulation, distribution/consumption, reproduction’ instead. In this alternative articulation of media, Hall delineates the importance of (1) the encoding of meaning, (2) the production of ‘meaningful’ discourse, and (3) the decoding of meaning. Encoding and decoding are to be understood as separate ‘meaning structures’ that are themselves determined by frameworks of knowledge, relations of production, and technical infrastructures. In John Tagg’s (1988:3) terms, to understand cinema in this way is to recognise the mode of representation

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as ‘a material product of a material apparatus set to work in specific contexts, by specific forces, for more or less defined purposes’, but also as a particular instantiation of Althusser’s ISA. These structures of meaning and their intended uses or effects are what ultimately inform the criteria for ‘production, circulation, distribution/consumption, reproduction’ and, as such, are at the root of what constitutes a ‘meaningful’ discourse of a given medium. For Hall, this emphasis on the production—that is, encoding—of what is ‘meaningful’ is significant because it is also a matter of ensuring its intended decoding. Namely, the issue is one of producing ‘decoded meanings which ‘have an effect’, influence, entertain, instructor persuade, with very complex perceptual, cognitive, emotional, ideological or behavioural consequences’ (Hall, 1980:93; emphasis added). In order for a ‘meaningful’ discourse to be received/decoded as intended, there is a requirement that the separate meaning structures of encoding and decoding are to some degree symmetrical, and it is this symmetry— or its lack—that results in ‘understanding’ or ‘misunderstanding’ the communicative function of the given medium. For example, in Mad Max: Fury Road, the film’s narrative framework invites the audience to approve of the establishment of an egalitarian society that is directly opposed to the deeply patriarchal and despotic society of Immortan Joe (played by Hugh Keays-Byrne). As already demonstrated in this chapter, the movement from the condition of is-but-­ ought-not-to-be to the condition of is-and-ought-to-be is an ethical one. This ethical framing is, however, firmly rooted in the material conditions and social practices represented in the film. If one were to remain at the level of formal critique, a discussion of the contents of this narrative movement would likely be omitted. By elucidating the contents of the narrative movement and the character of both the material conditions (the scarcity of water and fuel) and the social practices (the enslavement of women in a society based around a tributary mode of production) represented in the film, the proposed critique can engage with what is immediately given and what is straightforwardly assumed in the society represented onscreen. This, in turn, allows for the examination of the codes that constitute the ‘meaningful’ discourse of the film’s narrative structure, its ethical emplotment, and representation. The entire cinematic narrative is in fact premised on a revolutionary opposition to the

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existing society by a collective of women, led by Furiosa (played by Charlize Theron), who imagine a way out by radically challenging the system via acts of sabotage and escape. Even if one sets aside the material conditions on which the narrative is premised, the opposition between Furiosa and Joe is not on the same ethical ground: the former seeks redemption and liberation while the latter pursues domination and repression. In other words, the movement from is-but-ought-not-to-be to is-and-ought-to-be is itself determined by a number of narrative parts, which, in turn, reflect given social practices and are shaped by material conditions. In Herbert Marcuse’s (1965:89–90) formulation: This common and historical “ought” is not immediately evident, at hand: it has to be uncovered by “cutting through”, “splitting”, “breaking asunder” (dis-cutio) the given material – separating right and wrong, good and bad, correct and incorrect.

The relationship between material conditions and ethical emplotment of ‘justice’ is important because the meanings of right and wrong should be contextualised as products of given conditions and circumstances rather than essentialised as transhistorical truths. For instance, Fredric Jameson’s now clichéd claim that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism (1994:xii; cf. Beaumont, 2014) speaks to exactly this issue—the ideological lies in the distribution of roles and the representation of social practices. In terms of the extra-­ textual context, or what has so far been referred to as what is omitted from a given text, the actual events of the shooting of the film speak to a patriarchal distribution of roles, in which many of the women involved in the film felt uncomfortable due to threatening behaviour by Tom Hardy (who plays the titular Max) and inflexible set management by director George Miller, ultimately necessitating mediators and attempts at on-set conflict resolution (Buchanan, 2022). Contextualisation further allows for an engagement with the intended decoding of a given film narrative. Broadly construed, this is what can be referred to as the effect of ideology, where ‘a mentality is created for which right and wrong, true and false are predefined wherever they affect the vital interests of the society’ (Marcuse, 1965:95). In Hall’s (1980:98)

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work, this is ‘the (ideological) effect of concealing the practices of coding which are present’ that results in ‘a pattern of “preferred readings”’. This self-same effect includes (Hall, 1980:98): the whole social order embedded in them as a set of meanings, practices and beliefs: the everyday knowledge of social structures, of “how things work for all practical purposes in this culture”, the rank order of power and interest and the structure of legitimations, limits and sanctions.

The concealed encoding and embedding produces a situation in which communication between the broadcasting elite and its audience is necessarily distorted. This ‘systematically distorted communication’ reveals itself to be the product of structural conflict (Hall, 2019:257). Hall (2019) identifies four types of decoding: (a) Hegemonic code: the receiver accepts the message in terms of the reference-code in which it was encoded by the producer. (b) Professional code: the receiver focuses on the technico-practical elements of the message, working within the hegemonic code. (c) Negotiated code: the receiver accepts the hegemonic code as legitimate, but recognises exceptions within this code, combining adaptation and opposition. (d) Oppositional code: the receiver first detotalises the message and then employs an alternative reference-code to retotalise it. Hall (1992) differentiates his approach to popular culture from previous approaches in terms of a movement away from a concern with the way in which the media misrepresents reality to the way in which the media is partly constitutive of the reality it represents. The operation of this relationship in cinematic fiction can be described as follows (Hall, 1992:15): These narratives function much more, as Claude Lévi-Strauss tells us, as myths do. They are myths that represent in narrative form the resolution of things that cannot be resolved in real life. What they tell us is about the “dream life” of a culture. But to gain a privileged access to the dream life of a culture, we had better know how to unlock the complex ways in which narrative plays across real life.

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It is important to note that the first three of Hall’s four codes all accept what Mark Fisher (2009:2; cf. Dean, 2020) calls ‘“capitalist realism,” or: […] the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it’. In Fisher’s cultural criticism of music, film, and popular culture, reality itself is stripped down to its essence as the product of the capitalist imperative. Fisher (2009:2) sees a culture in which the ‘world that it projects seems more like an extrapolation or exacerbation of ours than an alternative to it’ in music and film. His examples include gangster rap, gangster films, and dystopian fiction, all of which seem to ‘have stripped the world of sentimental illusions and seen it for “what it really is”’ but in Hall’s terms fail to respond to the hegemonic systematic distortion in the oppositional code (Fisher, 2009:11). Fisher (2018) maintains that capitalist realism is both a belief and an attitude. The belief is that there is no alternative to the capitalist mode of production and that all other economic systems are simply impractical. The attitude adopted to this belief is one of resignation, a fatalism in which the best-case scenario becomes the containment of capitalism’s worst excesses. Fisher (2009:12) describes the effect of this combination of belief and attitude as the creation of a culture of ‘interpassivity’. Robert Pfaller (2017:55) defines interpassivity as a form of engagement with an artwork that demands neither activity nor passivity on the part of the observer, but where the experience or sensation of the engagement is delegated by the observer to something or someone else ‘in the sense of delegated pleasure, or delegated consumption’, such as canned laughter in a television sitcom. This has a political effect and should be recognised as a political tool; in other words, it is an illustration of Marcuse’s description of the ideological effect where ‘true and false are predefined’ as much as what is funny or sad (1965:95). Fisher (2009) mentions Frank Miller’s graphic novels and how their hyperbolic saturation of violence is representative of the stripping of the world of sentimental illusions. In The Dark Knight Returns, for example, Miller (1986) appears to strip the American metropolis of any illusions of community and conviviality to

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reveal a viscerally violent reality at its core. This kind of narrative realism could not be separated from the justification of Reaganomics and the replacement of a culture of correctionalism with a culture of control, both of which occurred in America in the 1980s (see Davis, 1992; Garland, 2001). As the case studies will reveal, ‘capitalist realism’ primarily focuses on a world in which ‘a stripping back of the state to its core military and police functions’ is central (Fisher, 2009:2). A re-examination of Mad Max: Fury Road through the lens of ‘capitalist realism’ supports Fisher’s claims regarding contemporary culture. The film performs anti-capitalism, anti-­ patriarchy, and climate change commentary for the audience, allowing the audience to interpassively delegate its ethical judgement to the screen. As Marcuse, Hall, and Fisher show, popular culture represents reality as much as it reproduces it. The task of this monograph is to develop a critique of the logic of crime control practices through an analysis of their cinematic representation. The danger in this task lies in what Marcia Landy (1994:11) describes, in a framework inspired by the work of Antonio Gramsci, as the extremes of ‘economism’ and ‘ideologism’. The former privileges the ‘linear analyses of events’ at the expense of questioning the very conditions that cause the events or even considering the interrelated nature of economics, politics, social order, and subject formation (Landy, 1994:15). The latter fits into contemporary neoliberal narratives of individualism, responsibility and agency; as such, it is liable to omit the configuration of social forces and practices, as well as the economic influences on subjectivity. With respect to Mad Max: Fury Road, the former approach would explicate the ethical movement of the narrative through a discussion of water and fuel shortage, that is, the role of natural resources in the primitive tributary economy of Joe’s society; the latter would place the emphasis on Furiosa’s individual qualities as the leader of a rebellion, an agent of anti-patriarchal liberation and personal redemption. The ground between these two approaches is the starting point of the analyses proposed in the following chapters. As Marcuse (1965) points out, both extreme explanations already make sense, because they are automatically and immediately given to the film’s audience as intelligible in relation to established knowledge, that is,

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the empowerment of women is good, while the abuse of natural resources is bad. For Antonio Gramsci (1947), this is a clear example of the manner in which ‘common sense’ is ‘a form of “everyday thinking” which offers us frameworks of meaning with which to make sense of the world’ (Hall & O’Shea, 2013:8). Kate Crehan (2016:43) explains ‘common sense’ as an integral part of social practices that should be understood as the ‘accumulation of taken-for-granted “knowledge” to be found in every human community’. More than this, common sense works as a dominant form of knowledge—which is, according to Landy (1994:16), ‘often unrecognized or valorized as critical wisdom, [and in virtue of this, it] eradicates the possibility of alternatives, presenting as natural, inevitable, and intelligible the present state of affairs’. This ultimately results in what Marcuse (1965:96) calls ‘repressive tolerance’, where challenges to the existing social order are likely to be made sense of and evaluated in terms of the hegemonic, liberal public discourse. From this perspective, any radical action can only be imagined as a distant possibility. This monograph’s task is to examine closely the abstracted imagination of exceptional measures of crime control and return it to reality. That is to say, reality is constituted by existing historical movements, social forces, and dynamic tensions between dominant and subaltern discourses exemplified in abstract form in the cinematic case studies. In order to achieve this aim, Landy’s (1994:14) Gramscian approach to film is useful as it privileges the ways in which political positions are articulated in common-sensical terms relevant to people’s experiences of the ‘melodramatic narratives of suffering, justice and vindication’ typical of popular instantiations of cinema. This chapter has identified both the focus of analysis in this monograph and the way in which this analysis shall be approached. The former concerns the cinematic representation of reality, understood as representation by means of encoded meanings. A cinematic work is thus an ideological apparatus. My approach to the cinematic fictional narratives that I employ as case studies revolves around an ideological critique. The critique comes from a Marxist position, where narrativity is understood as possessing certain characteristics which can be read symptomatically in their relation to other works, social reality, and material conditions. Moreover, the narrative form is acknowledged as ethical, that is, the

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cinematic work entails a manoeuvre from is-but-ought-not-to-be to is-andought-to-be. The cinematic work is also seen as contextual, that is, as requiring a material context for its emergence and an ideological justification for its successful production and reproduction. Capitalist realism seeks to challenge the belief in the necessity of the capitalist mode of production and the concomitant resignation to making the best of a bad situation. Moreover, capitalist realism is both represented and reproduced by means of the systematically distorted communication employed in the feature films to be examined. With my approach to cinema thus established, I now turn to the second element of my approach, the city.

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Gilloch, G. (1996). Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City. John Wiley & Sons. Girina, I. (2013). Video Game Mise-En-Scene Remediation of Cinematic Codes in Video Games. In International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (pp. 45–54). Springer. God of War. (2018). PlayStation 4 [Game]. Santa Monica: Santa Monica Studio. Gramsci, A. (1947/1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Q.  Hoare & G. N. Smith, Trans.). Lawrence & Wishart. Greenberg, C. (1939). Avant-Garde and Kitsch. Partisan Review, 6(Fall), 34–49. Hage, G. (2016). État de siège: A Dying Domesticating Colonialism? American Ethnologist, 43(1), 38–49. Hall, S. (1980). Encoding/Decoding. In S. During (Ed.), The Cultural Studies Reader (pp. 90–103). Routledge. Hall, S. (1992). Race, Culture, and Communications: Looking Backward and Forward at Cultural Studies. Rethinking Marxism, 5(1), 10–18. Hall, S. (2019). Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse. In Essential Essays Volume 1: Foundations of Cultural Studies (pp.  257–276). Duke University Press. Hall, S., & O’Shea, A. (2013). Common-Sense Neoliberalism. Soundings, 55(Winter), 8–24. Huyssen, A. (2015). Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film. Harvard University Press. Jameson, F. (1994). The Seeds of Time. Columbia University Press. Jameson, F. (2002). The Political Unconscious. Routledge. Jameson, F. (2020). Allegory and Ideology. Verso Books. Kracauer, S. (1960). Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Oxford University Press. Lady in the Lake. (1947). Directed by Robert Montgomery. US: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Landy, M. (1994). Film, Politics, and Gramsci. University of Minnesota Press. Macherey, P. (1986). A Theory of Literary Production. Routledge and Kegan Paul. Mad Max: Fury Road. (2015). Directed by George Miller. US: Warner Bros. Pictures. Mandabi. (1968). [Film] Directed by Ousmane Sembène. Senegal, France: FilmiDomirev, Comptoir Français du Film Production. Marcuse, H. (1965/1969). Repressive Tolerance. In R. P. Wolff, B. Moore Jr., & H. Marcuse (Eds.), A Critique of Pure Tolerance (pp. 81–123). Beacon Press.

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Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1846/2000). The German Ideology. In K. Marx (Ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings (pp. 175–208). Oxford University Press. McGregor, R. (2018). Narrative Justice. Rowman & Littlefield. McGregor, R. (2020). Introduction to the Narrative Justice Symposium. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 54(4), 1–5. McGregor, R. (2021a). A Criminology of Narrative Fiction. Policy Press. McGregor, R. (2021b). James Ellroy’s Critical Criminology: Crimes of the Powerful in the Underworld USA Trilogy. Critical Criminology, 29(2), 349–365. McGregor, R. (2021c). The Urban Zemiology of Carnival Row: Allegory, Racism and Revanchism. Critical Criminology, 29(2), 367–383. McGregor, R. (2022). Critical Criminology and Literary Criticism. Bristol University Press. McGurl, M. (2009). The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Harvard University Press. Miller, F., Janson, K., & Varley, L. (1986/2006). The Dark Knight Returns. DC Comics. Millington, G. (2016). Urbanization and the Migrant in British Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan. Minority Report. (2002). Directed by Steven Spielberg. US: Twentieth Century Fox. Patterson, W. L. (Ed.). (1952). We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief from a Crime of the United States Government Against the Negro People. Civil Rights Congress. Persona. (1966). Directed by Ingmar Bergman. Sweden: AB Svensk Filmindustri. Petrey, S. (1988). The Reality of Representation: Between Marx and Balzac. Critical Inquiry, 14(3), 448–468. Pfaller, R. (2017). Interpassivity: The Aesthetics of Delegated Enjoyment. Edinburgh University Press. Rancière, J. (2004). The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Continuum. Rizov, V. (2020). Narrative Redemption: A Commentary of McGregor’s Narrative Justice. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 54(4), 26–35. RoboCop. (1987). Directed by Paul Verhoeven. US: Orion Pictures. Robocop. (2014). Directed by José Padilha. US: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Rodríguez, D. (2021). White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide. Fordham University Press. Sambizanga. (1972). Directed by Sarah Maldoror. Angola, France: Isabelle Films.

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Seigel, M. (2018). Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police. Duke University Press. Simmel, G. (1903/2010). The Metropolis and Mental Life. In G.  Bridge & S. Watson (Eds.), The Blackwell City Reader (pp. 103–110). Wiley-Blackwell. Smuts, A. (2013). Cinematic. The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, 46, 78–95. Solanas, F., & Getino, O. (2014). Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World (Argentina, 1969). In Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures (pp. 230–250). University of California Press. Tagg, J. (1988). The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Palgrave Macmillan. The Battle of Algiers. (1966). Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo. Italy, Algeria: Igor Film, Casbah Film. The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975. (2011). Directed by Göran Olsson. Sweden: Story AB. The Dark Knight Rises. (2012). Directed by Christopher Nolan. US: Warner Bros. The Hurt Locker. (2008). Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. United States: Voltage Pictures, Grosvenor Park Media, Film Capital Europe Funds, First Light Production, Kingsgate Films, Summit Entertainment. The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. (2006). Directed by Sophie Fiennes. United Kingdom: Amoeba Film, Kasander Film Company, Lone Star Productions, Mischief Films. Tilley, L., & Ajl, M. (2022). Eco-socialism Will Be Anti-eugenic or It Will Be Nothing: Towards Equal Exchange and the End of Population. Politics, Online First. Total Recall. (2012). Directed by Len Wiseman. US: Colombia Pictures. Wells-Barnett, I. B. (2021). The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics & Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States. Read Books Ltd. Williams, R.  R. (1977/2014). A Lecture on Realism. In J.  McGuigan (Ed.), Raymond Williams on Culture and Society. Sage. Williams, R. (2009). Marxism and Literature. Oxford University Press. Z. (1969) Directed by Costa-Gavras. France, Algeria: Valoria Films, Reggane Films, Office National pour le Commerce et l'Industrie Cinématographique. Zourgane, P. (2017). Programming the Landscape: Pacification Through Landscape Management. In T. Wall, P. Saberi, & W. Jackson (Eds.), Destroy Build Secure: Readings on Pacification. Red Quill Books.

3 Cities

Urban Social Science The common story of the origin of the social sciences in the Global North has its roots in thinkers of early modernity who were concerned with the new social reality brought about by the processes of industrialisation, urbanisation, and the expansion of the state. The growing waves of industrialisation concentrated in urban hubs, which required the migration of a large number of people from rural to urban space. This, in turn, led to the rapid expansion of cities on an unprecedented scale. Urban expansion was heralded as a new phenomenon at both the social and individual levels, meriting a new approach and method in order to be understood. The initial works of thinkers such as Auguste Comte and Adolphe Quetelet (Beirne, 1993) were concerned with setting out a trajectory for the new queen of science, sociology, as an explicitly scientific endeavour that was rooted in the history of all heretofore existing knowledge and, in consequence, capable of mapping out the future. This social scientific process can be expressed in three theses: (a) social science is rooted in the history of all other science, and, as such, is capable of retrospectively analysing society; (b) social science is a decidedly positivist science that can determine laws through empirical observation; and (c) on the basis of the

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two previous theses, social science can accurately foresee the future and thus be utilised to shape society. This view was a clear product of the Enlightenment as well as a harbinger of modernity (cf. Adorno, 2002). In Comte, as well as in French successors such as Emile Durkheim, there was little hesitation in placing Western Man at the centre of the universe. Rationality was assigned and delimited on a planetary scale, justifying the existing social order. Raewyn Connell (1997:1511) outlines the ‘broad cultural dynamic in which tensions of liberalism and empire were central’ at the time of sociology’s institutionalisation, by which she refers to the Western European project of sociology in its infancy as largely consisting of scientific work that justified the work of empires and colonisation.1 L’Année sociologique, for example, was little concerned with Modernity or urban space, with only 28% of its reviews focusing on Europe and North America and even less on the industrialisation of society (Connell, 1997:1516)2: Studies of holy war in ancient Israel, Malay magic, Buddhist India, technical points of Roman law, medieval vengeance, Aboriginal kinship in central Australia, and the legal systems of primitive societies were more characteristic of “sociology” as seen in L’Annéesociologique than studies of new technology or bureaucracy.

Connell refers to this focus as a preoccupation with a production of knowledge that perpetuates global difference. Despite the fact that received wisdom about early sociology’s focus on the new urbanised and industrialised society is erroneous, Connell (1997:1516–1517) retains the urban in her outline, framing global difference as a ‘difference between civilization of the metropole and an Other whose main feature was its  Connell (1997) critically explores the notion of the sociological canon and incisively outlines the manner in which it has been constructed in the past century as the dominant narrative of the three father-figures of Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Karl Marx—with occasional mention of Ferdinand Tönnies, Georg Simmel, or W.E.B. Du Bois. 2  Granted, there are exceptions to the rule, key among them being Friedrich Engels with his sustained and radical engagement with urban and working class issues. Georg Simmel was also interested in the novel character of urban experience and the types of subjectivity it produces, albeit from a different perspective. Additionally, W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Philadelphia Negro (1899) was a pioneering work of scholarship engaging with crime, sociology, and history. 1

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primitiveness’. The metropolis was to remain a central element in establishing the progressiveness of Western Europe and North America. Connell’s cultural dynamic, albeit critical of established notions of the sociological canon, is hardly surprising to readers aware of the work of thinkers such as Durkheim or Ferdinand Tönnies. Both sociologists were concerned with charting a path from one type of society—a primitive one, with its own laws, norms, and social organisation—to another, a modern one, in which social organisation is excessively complex, ambiguous, potentially dangerous, and requiring management. Unsurprisingly, the simpler society was equated with the past of developed countries such as France and Germany and the present of underdeveloped societies across the world (e.g. see Rodney, 2018). The social scientific apologia for imperialism was that it constituted progress, a notion that was profoundly rooted in liberal politics: The poor and underdeveloped abroad must be rendered objects of study, but the poor and underdeveloped at home should also be ameliorated in their conditions as much as kept under surveillance and policed. Leonard Hobhouse’s Liberalism (1964) was central to this project because his focus on many kinds of liberty was regarded as progressive and desirable while standing in direct tension with the existing material privilege of the practitioners of social science and liberalism (cf. Connell, 1997). The contradiction here is between the values of liberalism and the material reality for those who consider it an ideology of progress for the underprivileged. Namely, liberalism was pronounced as a discourse of universal equality, which, in reality, served the interests of the practitioners, since it was itself premised on the exploitation and underdevelopment of colonialism as well as exploitation of the working class at home (cf. Losurdo, 2014). Thus, the tension is both between the supposed liberties for the working classes in the imperial core and their deprived material conditions, as well as between the actual liberties and affluent conditions of the middle classes (the main practitioners of social science). The former needed to make sense of an evident contradiction, while the latter needed to justify it. Similarly, while the myth of underdeveloped societies being primitive reinforced the social scientists’ position of prestige, their opposition to the working class at home posed a challenge to their assumed moral

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superiority. This, in turn, necessitated a social scientific engagement with the urban poor that took on the form of justifying the existing social order. An important early attempt at engaging with the reality of urban poverty was by Friedrich Engels, who employed a radical rather than liberal approach. In Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), he provided an early ecological approach to understanding the urban space of industrial Manchester in the north of England. Engels identified a central commercial district that was emptied completely at night, a Manchester proper that was predominantly working class, and an outside that was for the middle and upper bourgeoisie. Importantly, he highlighted crime as one of the rebellious responses to an existing social order characterised by stark inequality. Faced with a reality in which a process of colossal centralisation could not be ignored, Engels (2010:329) described the great towns as follows: The very turmoil of the streets has something repulsive, something against which human nature rebels. The hundreds of thousands of all classes and ranks crowding past each other, are they not all human beings with the same qualities and powers, and with the same interest in being happy? And have they not, in the end, to seek happiness in the same way, by the same means? And still they crowd by one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one another, and their only agreement is the tacit one, that each keep to his [sic] own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honour another with so much as a glance. The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest, becomes the more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together, within a limited space.

Engels is a clear outlier in the history of the urban social sciences, particularly with respect to his focus on street-level experience, the group dynamics inherent to cities containing millions of people, and the malaise of indifference that is a direct result of industrial capitalism. His research was, furthermore, conducted sixty years before Georg Simmel’s famous essay on The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903) and eighty years before the concentric zone model of Robert Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and

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Roderick D. McKenzie (1925) in the Chicago School of Sociology. Both Simmel’s argument for the alienation, indifference, and restraint of metropolitan life and the Chicago School’s ecological model of the city as comprised of differentiated zones of industry and criminality were anticipated in Engels’ early analysis. More importantly, Engels’ urban writings deviated from the prevailing liberalism, addressing crime in a number of forms—including ‘social murder’ (i.e. starvation, severe illness, or death due to working and living conditions), crime as futile rebellion, and the relationship between crime and the machinery of industrialisation—with the intention of highlighting the revolutionary potential of collective action. David Harvey (1973) comments on the lost opportunity for urban criminology and sociology to look past the Chicago School, noting that Engels sketches how cities such as London, Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester grew in such a way as to suit the capitalist class without the need for state control. A structural analysis that considers material reality as a product of concrete forces, rather than the cultural forces proposed by the Chicago School, is required to illuminate the relationship between capitalism and urbanisation. My intention is to continue the trajectory from Engels, extending this monograph’s engagement with the city. Engels’ description of the great towns rightly emphasises the experience of the crowd and the inevitability of confronting the gaze of others. The metropolitan areas of the period were the products of huge expansions— of population, industry, and scale of organisation. The city is to be seen as an encounter with these forces (Rizov, 2021). As Simmel (1903:11–12) points out in his essay on urban psychology, the city introduced the conditions of a ‘tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life’. The chaos of sensory experience—the crossing of a street filled with cars, billboards, shopfronts, and advertisements—requires a detachment on the part of the individual, which is exacerbated with respect to other individuals, since the metropolis is primarily full of strangers and people one is not likely to see again. In contrast to Engels, however, Simmel, failed to draw attention to the political significance of this double detachment. Subsequent to Simmel, the Chicago School entrenched an apolitical approach to urban space in the social sciences that lasted until the 1970s.

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The 1970s saw the spatial turn in the social sciences, initiated by Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1974) and Michel Foucault’s essay Of Other Spaces3 (1984), which were both preceded by Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1957). In French, the turn continued with Michel De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1988), and in English with Harvey’s Social Justice and the City (1973), Doreen Massey’s Spatial Divisions of Labour (1985), Saskia Sassen’s The Global City: New  York, London, Tokyo (1991), and Edward Soja’s Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (1996). Foucault (1984:22) provided a pithy summary of changing epochs, from the nineteenth century as the epoch of history to the twentieth century as the epoch of space: ‘an epoch of simultaneity […] of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed’. This monograph draws on Lefebvre’s contribution to the spatial turn, most importantly his argument that space is socially produced and requires a triadic schema for analysis. The main impetus behind Lefebvre’s (1974) argument is his desire to move beyond treating space as a container for and of social relations, actions, and meaning to an understanding in which space is constructed through a variety of processes of perception, conception, and experience. He describes the following three aspects of space production: 1. Spatial practices: what presupposes space and what is perceptible about space, that is, the production and reproduction of space. In Lefebvre’s (1974:33) terms, spatial practice ‘ensures continuity and some degree of cohesion’. Examples include ‘the routes and networks which link up the places set aside for work, “private” life and leisure’ (Lefebvre, 1974:38). Spatial practices are always partial and fragmented, relying on metonymic representation to represent parts of space as the whole of space. 2. Representations of space: the conceptions of space (such as maps, artworks, and frameworks) which, while tied to the relations of production, are ultimately the expression of space in the form of knowledge (including signs, codes, and metaphors).  The text was first published in French in 1984 and in English in 1986, while its original form was a lecture delivered in 1967. 3

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3. Representational spaces: the provenance of meaning, the ‘under ground side of social life’ (Lefebvre, 1974:33); that is, ‘space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols’ and thus the site of struggle between appropriating one’s space through inhabiting it or passively experiencing it (Lefebvre, 1974:39). Put simply, the triad expresses itself in the perceived-conceived-lived dimensions of space. In terms of the production of space, the triad can be understood as: Spatial practices consist of the material production of space, representations of space are the knowledge of space, and representational spaces are sites for the production of meaning. Another aspect of continuity in the Marxist approach from Engels to Lefebvre is centralisation. As Engels observes, the formation of the great towns is a process of colossal centralisation, understood as both centres of population and industry as well as the means by which capital is centralised in the hands of the propertied few. For Lefebvre, the very notion of the urban is centrality—in the senses of the centralisation of people, resources, power, and capital. To establish a centrality is, furthermore, to imply a periphery, i.e. a depth behind the surface of the visible, a colony exploited for the metropole, an interior behind the façade. This is why it is important to draw a distinction between the urban and the city. While the latter is concrete and refers to a discrete entity, the former can encompass the entirety of the urban fabric and its constitutive components of periphery, suburb, and conurbation and the urban fabric is evocative of all the ways in which the dominance of the city extends beyond its specific borders: ‘[A] vacation home, a highway, a supermarket in the countryside are all part of the urban fabric’ (Lefebvre, 1970:4). The danger of treating the city as a discrete entity is twofold. On the one hand, it constitutes a rejection of all that makes up the non-city, such as the periphery and the countryside. On the other hand, it constitutes treating space as either a surface or a container, that is, as a place or a background in or against which actions and relations occur or develop. Both of these errors approach the city as a site of coherence, despite often dealing with its partial elements in what Lefebvre describes as spatial practice. Jean-Paul Sartre (1946:129) demonstrates spatial practice in a short essay on his experience of visiting the city of New York for the first time:

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You never lose your way in New York; one glance is enough for you to get your bearings; you are on the East Side, at the corner of 52nd Street and Lexington Avenue. But this spacial precision is not accompanied by any precision of feeling. In the numerical anonymity of the streets and avenues, I am simply anybody, anywhere. No matter where I may be, my position is marked out in longitude and latitude. But no valid reason justifies my presence in this place rather than in any other, since this one is so like another. You never lose your way, and you are always lost.

For Sartre, this experience of the American city was part of what he called seriality, the ‘mode of cultural production directed simultaneously toward everyone and no one’ (Dimendberg, 2004:60). Seriality, in turn, produced a form of isolation that was particular to city life: ‘[I]solation becomes […] the real, social product of cities’ manifested in ‘isolated behaviour in everyone – buying the paper as you leave the house, reading it on the bus, etc.’ (Sartre, 1946:257). Likewise, the repetition of building façades, the numbering of streets in the grid system, the countless advertisements, the public transport, and the inevitability of the crowd further exacerbate the partial aspect of spatial practice and its role in the experience of space as fragmented and fraught with what Engels called brutal indifference. As rich as spatial practice can be in its enumerative capacity (of practices, encounters, and groups), it rarely penetrates beyond surface relations and practices. As such, spatial practice remains a classic but flawed sociological treatment of space and cities as containers for social activity. In contrast, I intend to treat the urban as a productive force that does not merely shape what takes place within it, but also generates class positions, intervenes in social relations in a material way, and is more often than not an apparatus closely aligned with the state. In Lefebvre’s (1970:15) words: ‘Space and the politics of space “express” social relationships but react against them.’ An urban space is a product of social relationships, ‘primarily relationships of production’, and to ignore this fact is to accept the contingency of space without critical examination (Lefebvre, 1970:1).

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Urban Abstractions A key problem in dealing with the urban is the question of what exactly constitutes urban reality, that is, how to avoid confusing its lived and material dimensions with its representation, the streets with the map. In the mind of the planner, the artist, or the philosopher, the abstract conception of the city tends towards the model, from Plato’s circular Atlantis in Criteas to the grid system of numbered streets and avenues in New York in which Sartre could not but feel lost. As Lefebvre (1974:38) points out, these are representations of space and can be described as the identification of ‘what is lived and what is perceived with what is conceived’—tread-on streets become lines on a map; houses must be demolished in order to expand a boulevard; grids, boundaries, and land plots are produced (see Rizov, 2020, 2022). If spatial practices are fragmentary and partial, focused on the material, then representations of spaces are theoretical and abstract, preoccupied with systematised knowledge. While the former tends towards the metonymic, the latter’s tendency is reduction into schema. The parallel with both content and form and economism and ideologism is evident. It is on the basis of representations of spaces that one is able to speak of cities for cars, of demarcated crime hotspots, or of a concentric zone model. Abstraction can also be seen as concealment by the substitution of acts, relations, or positions with symbols: cars stand for humans, spaces become criminogenic, and discrete and demarcated areas are created. In his attempt to define the nature and utility of justice in the Republic, Plato (1992) maps out the perfect city, Kallipolis. The city is important to Plato for two main reasons: first, as an analogy of the individual soul, ‘observing the ways in which the smaller is similar to the larger’ (1992:369a); and second, it represents a principle of social organisation, a division of labour which is based on the premise that ‘none of us is self-­ sufficient, but we all need many things’ (1992:369b). For the purposes of this monograph, the spatial organisation of society is inevitably linked to its material reality, distribution of labour, and social organisation—which constitute its spatial practices. For Plato, a just city is one that observes strict regulation of these three aspects and the Republic is thus an early

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defence of social control premised on inequality. Considering the monograph’s focus in exceptional measures of crime control, the role of the guardian outlined by Plato in the Republic provides a rich foundation on which to build a critique of ideas of crime control in relation to their material context and ideological justification. Moreover, the abstract conception of a city in accordance with a theoretical model is itself evidence of the tension between perceived spaces and conceived spaces. Put simply, the perceivable space is already somehow conceived and thought of, just as much as what is conceivable is made possible by what materially exists.4 The just city in Plato is a complex ideal, indicative of what justice is, why justice is a virtue, and the shape justice takes in the individual (the ‘soul’ in his terminology). It is important to understand Kallipolis as a thesis that underpins both thought and action on both the individual and the societal levels. The just city demonstrates that the city is something which one encounters and produces in one’s social being. For Plato, the city is not just a container, but ‘an image of the world, or rather of the cosmos, a microcosm’ (Lefebvre, 1968:160). As such, it reveals the aspects of the conception of space that are explicitly concerned with control and order. This is closely aligned with ideology: ‘If space is a product, our knowledge of it must be expected to reproduce and expound the process of reproduction’ (Lefebvre, 1974:36). Conceived space is, furthermore, the domain of domination, intimately linked to society’s relations of production and thus to power. Two centuries before Plato, the city-state of Athens saw the beginning of its democratisation under the rule of Cleisthenes. The city was divided into social groups, with separate spatial regions, which were secularised into a novel notion of civic space that was manifested in the reinvigorated role of the agora. Cleisthenes’ Athens expanded suffrage and inaugurated isonomy, described by Pierre Lévêque and Pierre Vidal-Naquet (1964:22) as ‘a regime in which those who participate in public life do so on an  Pierre Lévêque and Pierre Vidal-Naquet (1964:134) note that Plato’s just city in the Republic ‘presents Plato’s utopia in its purest form, that is referring only theoretically to the material substratum of the polis’. Adi Ophir (1991:78), however, points to the ‘material substance in the city’ that one finds in the Republic with regard to spatial differentiation. Abstract and material, utopian and concrete, Plato’s ideal city is first and foremost characterised by a commitment to the spatialisation of justice that merits a more detailed unpacking. For Lefebvre (1968:97), in both the Republic and Laws, ‘Platonic utopia is tempered by very concrete analyses.’ 4

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equal footing’. Significantly, Lévêque and Vidal-Naquet note that while the processes set in motion by Cleisthenes were clearly for the purpose of consolidating his power by allying himself with the demos, they nonetheless marked a shift in Athenian politics in which the city (and the state) was governed by its institutions and laws (nomos) rather than tyrants or aristocrats. The levelling out of the city in terms of power (i.e. democracy and isonomy) was achieved through a spatial rearrangement of its regions, civic space, and demographic composition. This is the historical context of Plato’s Kallipolis. Although the Republic seems to be primarily concerned with the notion of justice, a great deal of its exposition and argument involves the description of the city’s inner workings in terms of the division of labour, property rights, and social control. The just city is constructed on the basis of three classes: artisans/workers, auxiliaries, and rulers, the latter two collectively referred to as guardians. The system is premised on a hierarchy in which the philosophers are the rulers, the auxiliaries support them in maintaining order, and the workers obey the orders and satisfy the needs of the city as a whole (Roochnik, 2003). The workers are at the lowest rung of this hierarchy and each worker ‘was to work all his life at a single trade for which he had a natural aptitude and keep away from all the others, so as not to miss the right moment to practice his own work well’ (Plato, 1992:374b). Above them are the military class of the auxiliary guardians, who, due to their civic role in protecting the city from external and internal enemies, are required to be selfless. The relationship between the auxiliary guardians and the workers appears to be reciprocal: the workers provide goods to the auxiliary guardians, who offer them protection in return (cf. Ophir, 1991). Since justice is the ‘practice of minding one’s own business’, the workers’ role, which requires the virtue of temperance, is exclusively to work (Plato, 1992:433a). This role provides the justification for the roles of the other two classes. The workers must do what they are told and nothing else, that is, a shoemaker can only ever be a shoemaker. This requires intensive regulation, which necessitates the role of the auxiliary guardians. The lower rung of the guardians—the auxiliaries—is the dangerous class, as it is for all intents and purposes a policing class with a monopoly on legitimate violence. Consequently, the auxiliary guardians must thus themselves be controlled. According to Plato, the auxiliary guardian class

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should be trained in the good, that is, undergo ideological indoctrination. In other words, they must be taught to protect this city rather than another city and they must be vigilant against potential disturbances of the existing order from without and within. As such, their role includes both self-defence and counter-insurgency. The auxiliary guardians must obey the existing order selflessly, in consequence of which they are prohibited from handling money and possessing property or land and are required to live at public expense in barracks. Were the auxiliary guardians to acquire wealth or land, their interests would be dictated by material concerns such as profit, which would lead them into temptation to become despots. In Jacques Rancière’s (2003) terms, if the workers are the class that must do nothing other than practice their craft, the auxiliary guardian is of the class that could be something else. This danger of being something else is premised on an understanding that a powerful class with material interests would be abusive rather than selfless. The solution that Plato (1992:414c) advances by recourse to Socrates is ‘a Phoenician story’ (i.e. a falsehood) in which (1992:415a): “All of you in the city are brothers,” we’ll say to them in telling our story, “but the god who made you mixed some gold into those who are adequately equipped to rule, because they are most valuable. He put silver in those who are auxiliaries and iron and bronze in the farmers and other craftsmen.

Plato (1992:416a) continues: The most terrible and most shameful thing of all is for a shepherd to rear dogs as auxiliaries to help him with his flocks in such a way that, through licentiousness, hunger, or some other bad trait of character, they do evil to the sheep and become like wolves instead of dogs.

One cannot help but be aware that this is a dialogue between philosophers devising methods of shepherding the masses more effectively. This relationship is particularly obvious in Plato’s analogy between auxiliary guardians and dogs. It is through the dangerous figure of the dog and its position of ‘a precarious balance between wolf-like ferocity toward

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enemies and gentleness toward its own’ that the role of the philosopher-­ ruler becomes even more explicit (Deane & Shuffelton, 2016: 497). The philosopher becomes necessary in order to protect the auxiliary guardians from bad influences. The dogs must do what they are told and protect their master’s property. The guardian is thus revealed to be an intermediate, unstable figure on whose successful education the entire system depends. This is achieved through instilling the ‘belief about what things are to be feared, namely, that they are the things and kinds of things that the lawgiver declared to be such in the course of educating it [the city]’ (Plato, 1992:429c). Thus, the guardians’ ‘superiority lies not in their occupation but in their nature insofar as the formation of this nature is the specific task, the masterwork, of the philosopher-king’ (Rancière, 2003:14). This nature is of course a falsehood inculcated by the philosopher for the purpose of creating the need for the philosopher and, by the creation of that need, providing an argument for the philosopher’s right to rule. The pedagogical inculcation of the guardian (as much as the worker) is, in fact, the hierarchy qua knowledge (and vice versa) produced by the philosopher-ruler and essential to the ‘regulation of the simulacrum’ (Rancière, 2003:17). In effect, if the worker is only to work and the guardian only to identify and eradicate threats, the philosopher’s task is to produce the knowledge and criteria for the successful maintenance of the order. In these terms, ‘the image of justice is the division of labour’ as well as ‘an order of dependence that is also an order of fiction’ with its own complex spatial arrangement (Rancière, 2003:25). As a centralised city, Plato’s Kallipolis is an ordered discourse according to which material space and social relations are to be determined and policed. Although the example is from Ancient Greece, Plato’s just city contributes to contemporary urban studies by emphasising the significance of control. The philosopher is a ‘centre of decision-making, wealth, information, of the organisation of space’ (Lefebvre, 1973:17). This very logic has been essential to the development of capitalism and the state more generally. The centrality is produced through the discourse of the hierarchy, which at its core consists of a focus on growth (of finance, space, and knowledge) and the construction of a bureaucratic, institutional rationality as a necessary manager:

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The centre organises what is around it, arranging and hierarchizing the peripheries. Those who occupy the centre and hold power, govern with the benefit of effective knowledge and principles. The centre-periphery relation only emerges indirectly, out of the previous struggles of classes and peoples. It gives birth to apparatuses which seem rational and coherent, and which were so, originally. […] The centre attracts those elements which constitute it (commodities, capital, information, etc.), but which soon saturate it. It excludes those elements which it dominates (the “governed”, “subjects” and “objects”) but which threaten it. (Lefebvre, 1973:17–18)

Such was the context in which the Chicago School set out to investigate human behaviour in the urban environment, map the growth of the city, and propose an ecological approach to the study of communities (Park, 1925). For Park, (1925:1, emphasis added), the city is more than the material reality of its spatial practices, more still than its institutions—it is ‘a state of mind, a body of customs and traditions, and of the organized attitudes and sentiments that inhere in these customs and are transmitted with this tradition.’ Burgess (1925) continues the argument with the abstraction of the concentric circle zone model of city expansion, which is largely focused on the personality types that emerge from this environment. As noted previously, what the Chicago School sociologists, unlike Engels, missed was the relationship between the development of the city and the interests of the capitalist class and the state. The city and the process of centralisation that it entails is actively produced by the ‘expanded state complex’, the formation of institutions, practices, and forms of documentation that comprise the effort to manage the growing population of cities by means of policing and resource management (Tagg, 1988:63). An important example of this is the transformation of the growing urban population into an abstract statistic, an ‘object of knowledge’ (Tagg, 1988:11). This abstraction is for the purpose of control and expresses itself in ‘the question of controlling centrality [as well as] that of centrality becoming an instrument of control’ (Stanek, 2011:76). The equivalence of control and centrality attains an even greater significance once we depart from the realm of philosopher-rulers to engage with the modern capitalist state more explicitly, especially in

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terms of Lefebvre’s triad—in which conceived and perceived space are two aspects of the production of space. Ultimately, it is through intervention in ‘social space and in its production, and by thus taking on body therein’ that ideology achieves consistency (Lefebvre, 1974:44). Lefebvre (1974:94, emphasis added) furthermore notes: [T]here is a total subject which acts continually to maintain and reproduce its own conditions of existence, namely the state (along with its foundation in specific social classes and fractions of classes). We also forget that there is a total object, namely absolute political space – that strategic [conceived] space which seeks to impose itself as reality despite the fact that it is an abstraction, albeit one endowed with enormous power because it is the locus and medium of Power.

Abstract conceptions of space must thus be understood as strategic, as arising out of certain interests and class positions. Plato’s goal is clearly strategic; he does not merely treat the space of the just city as a container for the just society, but understands the spatial order of Kallipolis as a productive force that is capable of sustaining a new order of social relations, class, and division of labour. Although over two millennia old, Plato’s socio-spatial order remains a spectre in a significant part of twentieth century thought: symbols of democracy and isonomy such as the agora persist to this day, while the hierarchy’s exclusion of women, enslaved people, and foreigners remains unacknowledged.

Urban Cinema The intersection of cinema and cities is an early one, with some scholars arguing that cinema itself is an urban art form (cf. Gold & Ward, 2005). In particular, the development of photography was intimately tied to the development of modern cities in the nineteenth century (Rizov, 2020, 2021, 2022). During the silent cinema period, the intersection of cinema and cities was evinced by the genre of the city symphony,5 which was  For an engagement with a contemporary instance of the genre, see Martin’s engagement (2021) with the work of Mark Cousins. 5

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popular from the 1920s to the 1940s. Films such as Charles Sheeler’s and Paul Strand’s Manhatta (1921) and Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, a City Symphony (1927, Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt in the original German) are examples of a genre of cinema dedicated exclusively to urban reality. Much of the genre consisted of a single day in the city and included the commute to the city via train (Berlin) or ferry (Manhatta), the entry into the factory, the crowds on the street, shopfronts, and the general chaos of urban life in the modern metropolis. The city symphony imagined all parts of the city working together as an organic whole constituted by a multiplicity of complementary parts. The foregrounding of labour was matched with a background of its products—skyscrapers, railways, and other feats of construction. The genre was understood as an early form of the documentary film, a way of capturing the reality of the city, its life, and its movement. Berlin is an example par excellence of the city symphony, an avant-­ garde non-fiction film created from documentary footage in which ‘the city […] is the protagonist of the film – it is its primary focus, its impetus, the very material of which the film is fashioned’ (Jacobs et  al., 2019:3). The genre was a modernist endeavour and, as such, strived to fully engage with the present conditions of its making, the dynamics of the Western metropolis: ‘The city symphony is not only a film about the modern metropolis; its formal and structural organization is also the perfect embodiment of metropolitan modernity’ (Jacobs et  al., 2019:15). Like the tension between liberalism and imperialism in the social sciences, early documentary filmmaking could not escape the political context of privilege and exploitation, both in the metropolis and in the colony.6 In some ways the city symphony was an illustration of Durkheim’s organic society and the complex division of labour that relies on an excess of specialisation—a so-called solidarity in which the workers coalesce into the mass of a labour force. On the one hand, Berlin can be seen as  With regards to context, is it important to note that Walter Ruttmann repurposed urban footage from Berlin into Blut und Boden: Grundlagen zum neuen Reich (Walter Ruttmann, Rolf von Sonjevski-Jamrowski & Hans von Passavant, Blood and Soil: A Basic Concept of National Socialism, 1933), ‘a propaganda film […] in the service of an anti-cosmopolitan message consistent with fascist ideology [that] augured a radical shift in how the modern metropolis was understood and represented’ (Jacobs et al., 2019:34; cf. Martin, 2021). 6

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the manifestation of progress, of the superiority of urban life with its implied opposites in the countryside and the colony. On the other hand, there is an omission at play, the foregrounding of ‘the unpent million-­ footed city-spirit’ as an ideology, ‘a figurative superimposition, an imaginative overcoding of individual need with collective form, an ornamental narrative of solidarity, or as Clement Greenberg put it, the “illusion that the masses actually rule”’ (Stimson, 2020: 181). While the city symphony was clearly distinct from films about colonised peoples (e.g. Robert J. Flaherty’s 1926 Moana), the genre nonetheless contributed to the glorification of urban reality as progressive. In an essay on the first principles of the documentary, John Grierson (1976) criticises Berlin for its rote structure and lack of depth with regard to the representation of the constituents of city life. Siegfried Kracauer (1947, 1960) similarly draws attention to the combination of a documentary method that combines the inclusion of the detritus of the city with editing that juxtaposes simultaneous shots. He (1947:185) claims that parallels such as the contrast of hungry children in the street with lavish dinner plates are: not so much social protests as formal expedients. Like visual analogies, they serve to build up the cross section, and their structural function overshadows whatever significance they may convey.

For Kracauer, Berlin is formalist in design, with editing in which ‘the objects pictured function mainly as the constituents of such and such relationships so that their content threatens to evaporate’ (Kracauer, 1960:207). The elements are thus rendered meaningful only in the framework of the film’s form, as Ruttmann ‘superimposes upon them a network of ornamental relationships that tend to substitute for the things from which they are derived’ (Kracauer, 1960:207). In Grierson’s critique, Berlin merely enumerates the components of everyday life in the city without seeking to say anything about it or contribute anything to it. In the terms we have outlined in this chapter, Berlin is primarily concerned with the spatial practices of the German metropolis—the partial, the metonymic, and the visible—what Kracauer refers to as the surface

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culture of the city. As such, it is informative only as a superficial analysis, specifying contents, connections, and coherences. Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929, Человек с кино-­ аппаратом in the original Russian) is a Soviet film that focuses on the Soviet city, a construct composed of Kiev, Kharkov, Moscow, and Odessa. Like Ruttmann, Vertov seeks to capture a variety of aspects of city life in the new urban form of Soviet society, using innovative editing (both rhythmic and symbolic), a multiplicity of perspectives, and the continuous foregrounding of industry and labour. The film engages in an explicit pedagogical project, not just depicting links but exploring them in greater depth than Ruttmann’s simplistic symbolism and reflecting Soviet society as itself a work in progress. As such, Man with a Movie Camera is exemplary of the city symphony genre as primarily concerned with new cities and with the demonstration of ‘a process of rapid growth and radical modernization’ (Jacobs et al., 2019:16). One of the most significant tensions in the city symphony was between the individual and the environment. Films such as Berlin did not acknowledge the individual but instead focused on larger social patterns that constituted the city’s spatial practices. Since the city is depicted as a collective endeavour requiring reproduction, it is also a site of labour. The representation of labour—in spite of a manifest range of class positions—is portrayed as a collective whole by means of the metonymic parts of street-sweepers and white-collar workers (see Jacobs et  al., 2019). This collective is usually represented by the crowd rather than the mob, the former possessing a more peaceful and normative connotation than the latter with respect to upholding the existing social order. In representing the experience of being in a crowd, the city symphony represents an experience that is characteristic of city life. This representation highlights a core function of the genre, to present a readymade coherent whole of the urban experience and, in so doing, produce a model of citizenship. Simmel’s (1903) living by the abstract time of one’s watch or the factory clock, Engels’s aversion to others’ gaze and brutal indifference (2010:329), and Sartre’s proto-seriality (1946) are all laid bare in films such as Berlin. More than anything else, the city symphony demonstrates cinema’s ability to represent spaces as they appear and thus serve as an apparatus for the reproduction of ideology. In terms of omission and the reduction of

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urban reality, the abstraction of space as symphony is not very different from the abstraction of a map. It is also important to keep in mind Neocleous’ claim that ‘the construction of colonial space and exercise of imperial violence’ is inseparable from the map (2003:418). It is from the city symphony that film noir emerged, both chronologically and thematically. The city as protagonist was juxtaposed with the individual, represented as indifferent, anxious, and full of cynicism. While the detective film existed prior to the noir of the 1940s, the noir protagonist was completely new. The noir detective possesses a unique subjectivity whose ‘peripatetic’ prototype appeared in Man with a Movie Camera, an individual capable of moving through the city in consequence of their liminal status and thus akin to the camera itself. This protagonist was produced by the combination of a new urban reality with a conscious effort to convey an ‘impression of real life, of lived experience’ that was profoundly urban (Nino Frank as cited in Dimendberg, 2004:5). If the city symphony cultivated an urban audience seeking to make sense of everyday existence, then film noir cultivated an urban audience that was already sensitive to the chaos of that existence. The noir detective is sensitive to the reality of the environment, capable of reading the urban fabric, and fully aware of its contradictions. The detective is thus the main vehicle through which the spatial practices of the city are revealed and their relations to each other made explicit. In film noir, the detective provides the only link among spatial practices that are otherwise isolated from one another. The subjectivity of the detective, as well as that of the narrative’s characteristic retrospection and reflection, acts as a suture for the fragmented spaces of the city. In this manner, the fragmented subjectivity of the narrator is reflected in the space and the narrative. Film noir also attempted to interpret new urban phenomena. The centripetal force of the early modern city, its centralisation and growth, was in decline in the 1940s, being replaced by the abrupt transition into centrifugal space evinced by suburbanisation, slum clearance, and gentrification. These urban phenomena are reflected in the cynicism of the noir detective, who is all too familiar with human nature, the adversities of social relations, the exploitation of the underprivileged, and the cruel indifference of capitalist growth. Needless to say, films in the genre are not optimistic and are often riddled with implicit nostalgia for the urban

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configurations of the past and the social relations they engendered (Dimendberg, 2004:7): Pervasive cinematic and spatial figures such as aerial or long-shot skyline views of the metropolis, crowd sequences filmed from ground level, postwar homecomings to the city, and escapes from the urban center underscore the ideological significance of spatiality in the film noir cycle. To articulate what its films do not and could not say, the silences and unspoken desires through which their spatial meanings take shape, is to grasp their import to American culture of the 1940s and 1950s.

The cynicism and disenchantment are expressed in and by the private detective, who is actively involved in the frustration of social relations while nonetheless secretly harbouring nostalgia for a distant and more innocent age. In a typically modernist manner, the detective reveals that truth is always subterranean, that truth and its pursuit are always rife with contradiction, and that one must dismantle both the surface of spatial practice (perceived space) and the representations of space (conceived space). For Frank Krutnik (2005:102–3), film noir is: A mode of signification that privileges connotation over the denotative, cause-and-effect logic of linear narrative, the highly-wrought noir aesthetic ensures that the ‘meaning’ of the noir city is not to be found in the narrative’s surface details but in its shadows, in the intangibilities of tone and mood.

While the aesthetics of the city symphony were appropriated and amplified by film noir, the new genre was entirely innovative in manifesting the multiplicity of orders in urban space—in terms of class, gender, and racial differences. The sensitivity to the diversity of lived experience is an abstraction of the detective’s investigation in which the poor, the murdered, and the abused are nothing more than unlucky individuals who failed to understand the world of which they were a part, often because they were insufficiently cynical or rational. In film noir, the city is no longer a coherent whole or a discrete entity, but a fragile order ever at the point of collapse. The urban is thus both a disenchanted space and

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‘a highly rationalized and alienating system of exploitative drudgery permitting few possibilities of escape’ (Dimendberg, 2004:13–14). The cinematic urban fabric reflected the centrifugal forces of the metropolis in the 1940s and 1950s, which increased the number of centreless suburbs and hollowed out the remains of the urban centre, the latter leading to slum clearance and urban renewal projects such as Bunker Hill in central Los Angeles (Davis, 1990). Preoccupation with lack of visibility and the dangers it posed resulted in the destruction of the centre, which was abandoned to the poor and underprivileged. Film noir’s representation of the city had a direct impact on the centrifugal development of Los Angeles. As Eric Avila (2004:72) notes, noir contributed to producing a spectacle of the urban centre by emphasising ‘a world in which promiscuous interactions among the city’s diverse strangers had disastrous, often deadly consequences’. Particular places were often employed to represent criminal practices; for example: ‘Film noir cast Bunker Hill as Southern California’s heart of darkness, a site that harbored crime, fear, and psychosis’ (Avila, 2004:77). Films such as John Farrow’s The Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948), Robert Siodmak’s Criss Cross (1949), Joseph Losey’s M (1951), and Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955) all sought to criminalise Bunker Hill metonymically and it was little wonder that the neighbourhood quickly became part of the country’s ‘nocturnal imagination’ (Davis, 2001:33). Film noir is a genre of stark contrasts, playing with black and white, light and darkness, in order to reproduce the spatial tension between urban and suburban, centre and periphery. These two oppositions are paralleled in terms of race, class, and gender. The dangers of the urban centre unmistakably took on the meaning of Blackness as suburbanism was associated with the affluent white family, itself likewise produced through policy and capitalist interests. The disenchantment and cynicism of film noir is thus underpinned by the recognition of the contingency of both space and the social order. Racial, capitalist, and misogynist undertones are omnipresent in this cynicism. As much as anything else, film noir represents a white, suburban fear of the racial other; a concern to maintain privilege through policing of the poor; and a fear of the dissolution of the nuclear family and desire to oppress women. The violence of the genre tends to reflect the same lines of power differentiation.

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Suburbanisation in the United States is largely understood to have occurred in two waves, the 1920s and the 1950s, the second of which was causally linked to the ubiquity of the automobile. As a product of centrifugal space, suburbanisation was characterised by decentralisation and spatial practices of mobility, speed, and limited visibility—from the suburb one could use highways to reach shopping centres without entering or even seeing the downtown area of the city (Dimendberg, 2004). Suburbanisation was not only a spatial reorganisation, but a reconfiguration of the way in which space was experienced. In spite of their decentralisation, however, suburbs were simply a reformulation of the representations of space. As Herbert Marcuse (1941:143) noted, to drive a car is ultimately to rely on a map, on a knowledge of the city that is external, the subordination of one’s ‘spontaneity to the anonymous wisdom that ordered everything’. The official noir cycle came to an end in the 1950s with Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958). The figure of the private detective, who had been under constant police surveillance, was replaced by the police officer, whose role involved an increased ‘dramatic complexity’ (Straw, 2005:122). Touch of Evil is paradigmatic in this respect, with a protagonist and antagonist who are both police detectives. The 1950s also marked a shift from an individual protagonist as the focus of the cinematic narrative to the collective representation of vice and corruption in a single place—what Will Straw (2005) refers to as the urban confidential film—in which the police have a larger role. Andrew Spicer (2002) adds that the 1950s saw film noir set in the suburbs, with attention turned to family and community rather than the individual. The changes identified by both Straw and Spicer hastened the decline of film noir and the rise of the police procedural in its place. The tensions at play in both the cinematic symphony and the film noir—what is visible and how it is represented, or content and form— reveal the existence of a constant contradiction between how things seem to be and how a detached and strategic capitalist interest desires them to be. In the city symphony, the visible portrays the harmony of many parts, the connection between workers and the product of their labour. This appearance is, however, only produced by abstracting the material reality from its context so that hunger, for example, becomes an abstract idea rather than a painful reality. In the film noir, the visible is shown to be

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both superficial and obfuscatory, a distraction and a concealment. While the detective’s role is to reveal the hidden depth, the narrative remains an abstraction in which one particular experience—that of the protagonist—speaks for the totality of urban experience. The tensions in both genres are concerned with the lived space of the urban, which, while not in the films, is nonetheless an active force on the film’s meaning. Recall that perceived space is about the material production of space, conceived space about the production of knowledge, and lived space about the production of meaning. Lived space is alive and ‘it speaks’, it is ephemeral and easy to co-opt7 (Lefebvre, 1974:42). Examples of this include graffiti on a building’s wall, the personal experience of a real space captured in the film, or even an aspirational affinity to an aspect of a given interior. To talk about a film’s space without engaging with its lived space would result in an impoverished analysis—even more so with regard to the political critique of crime control or a spatial practice.

References Adorno, T. W. (2002). Introduction to Sociology. Polity Press. Avila, E. (2004). Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles. University of California Press. Bachelard, G. (1957/2014). The Poetics of Space. Penguin. Beirne, P. (1993). Inventing Criminology: Essays on the Rise of ‘Homo Criminalis’. State University of New York Press. Berlin, a City Symphony (Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt). (1927). Directed by Walter Ruttmann. Germany: Fox Europa. Burgess, E. (1925/1984). The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project. In R. Park, E. W. Burgess, & R. D. McKenzie (Eds.), The City. University of Chicago Press.

 Lefebvre’s (1974:42) description, on which I will base my critique in the following chapter, is as follows: ‘Representational space is alive: it speaks. It has an affective kernel or centre: Ego, bed, bedroom, dwelling, house; or: square, church, graveyard. It embraces the loci of passion, of action and of lived situations, and thus immediately implies time. Consequently it may be qualified in various ways: it may be directional, situational or relational, because it is essentially qualitative, fluid and dynamic.’ 7

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Connell, R. W. (1997). Why Is Classical Theory Classical? American Journal of Sociology, 102(6), 1511–1557. Criss Cross. (1949). Directed by Robert Siodmak. US: Universal Pictures. Davis, M. (1990). City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. Verso. Davis, M. (2001). Bunker Hill: Hollywood’s Dark Shadow. In M.  Shiel & T.  Fitzmaurice (Eds.), Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context (pp. 33–45). Blackwell. De Certeau, M. (1988). The Practice of Everyday Life (S.  Randall, Trans.). University of California Press. Deane, S., & Shuffelton, A. (2016). Plato and the Police: Dogs, Guardians, and Why Accountability is the Wrong Answer. Educational Studies, 52(6), 491–505. Dimendberg, E. (2004). Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity. Harvard University Press. Engels, F. (2010). The Conditions of the Working Class in England. In Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 3 4 (1844–1845). Lawrence & Wishart. Foucault, M. (1984/1986). Of Other Spaces (J. Miskowiec, Trans.). Diacritics, 16(1), 22–27. Gold, J. R., & Ward, S. V. (2005). Of Plans and Planners: Documentary Film and the Challenge of the Urban Future, 1935–52. In D. B. Clarke (Ed.), The Cinematic City (pp. 61–85). Routledge. Grierson, J. (1976). First Principles of Documentary (1932–1934). In R. M. Barsam (Ed.), Nonfiction Film Theory and Criticism (pp. 19–30). Dutton. Harvey, D. (1973/2009). Social Justice and the City. The University of Georgia Press. Hobhouse, L. T. (1964). Liberalism. Oxford University Press. Jacobs, S., Kinik, A., & Hielscher, E. (2019). The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity Between the Wars. Routledge. Kiss Me Deadly. (1955). Directed by Robert Aldrich. US: United Artists. Kracauer, S. (1947/2004). From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton University Press. Kracauer, S. (1960). Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Oxford University Press. Krutnik, F. (2005). Something More Than Night: Tales of the Noir City. In D. B. Clarke (Ed.), The Cinematic City. Routledge. Lefebvre, H. (1968/1996). Right to the City (E. Kofman & E. Lebas, Trans.). In H. Lefebvre, Writings on Cities (pp. 61–181). Blackwell. Lefebvre, H. (1970/2003). The Urban Revolution (R.  Bononno, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press.

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Lefebvre, H. (1973/1976). The Survival of Capitalism: Reproduction of the Relations of Production (F. Bryant, Trans.). St. Martin’s Press. Lefebvre, H. (1974/1991). The Production of Space (D.  Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Blackwell. Lévêque, P., & Vidal-Naquet, P. (1964/1997). Cleisthenes the Athenian: An Essay on the Representation of Space and Time in Greek Political Thought from the End of the Sixth Century to the Death of Plato (D. A. Curtis, Trans.). Humanities Press. Losurdo, D. (2014). Liberalism: A Counter-History. Verso Books. M. (1951). Directed by Joseph Losey. US: Columbia Pictures. Man with a Movie Camera (Человек с кино-аппаратом). (1929). Directed by Dziga Vertov. Soviet Union: VUFKU. Manhatta. (1921). Directed by Charles Sheeler & Paul Strand. US: Unknown. Marcuse, H. (1941/1982). Some Social Implications of Modern Technology. In A.  Arato & E.  Gephardt (Eds.), Essential Frankfurt School Reader (pp. 138–162). Bloomsbury. Martin, D. (2021). Letting the Brush Lead: Mark Cousins, Film-Maker of the Floating World. Emotion, Space and Society, 39, 100770. Massey, D. (1985/1995). Spatial Divisions of Labour: Social Structures and the Geography of Production. Routledge. Neocleous, M. (2003). Off the Map: On Violence and Cartography. European Journal of Social Theory, 6(4), 409–425. Night Has a Thousand Eyes. (1948). Directed by John Farrow. US: Paramount Pictures. Ophir, A. (1991). Plato’s Invisible Cities: Discourse and Power in the Republic. Routledge. Park, R. (1925/1984). The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment. In R. Park, E. W. Burgess, & R. D. McKenzie (Ed.), The City. University of Chicago Press. Plato. (1992). Republic (G. M. A. Grube & C. D. C. Reeve, Trans.). Hackett. Rancière, J. (2003). The Philosopher and His Poor (J.  Drury, C.  Oster, & A. Parker, Trans.). Duke University Press. Rizov, V. (2020). The Photographic City: Modernity and the Origin of Urban Photography. City, 23(6). Rizov, V. (2021). Eugène Atget and Documentary Photography of the City. Theory, Culture & Society, Online First. Rizov, V. (2022). A Walk in Thomas Annan’s Glasgow: Documentary Photography, Class and Urban Space. Journal of Urban History, Online First. Rodney, W. (2018). How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Verso Books.

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Roochnik, D. (2003). Beautiful City: The Dialectical Character of Plato’s Republic. Cornell University Press. Sartre, J. P. (1946/1962). Philosophical and Literary Essays (A. Michelson, Trans.). Collier Books. Sassen, S. (1991). The Global City: New  York, London, Tokyo. Princeton University Press. Simmel, G. (1903/2010). The Metropolis and Mental Life. In G.  Bridge & S. Watson (Eds.), The Blackwell City Reader (pp. 103–110). Wiley-Blackwell. Soja, E. (1996). Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Blackwell. Spicer, A. (2002/2018). Film Noir. Routledge. Stanek, L. (2011). Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory. University of Minnesota Press. Stimson, B. (2020). The Idol of Imagination: Manhatta. In A. Morris-Reich & M. Olin (Eds.), Photography and Imagination (pp. 176–187). Routledge. Straw, W. (2005). Urban Confidential: The Lurid City of the 1950s. In D. B. Clarke (Ed.), The Cinematic City (pp. 113–130). Routledge. Tagg, J. (1988). The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Palgrave Macmillan. Touch of Evil. (1958). Directed by Orson Welles. US: Universal International.

4 Critique

The Fallen Guardian In Plato’s Republic (1992), the guardian class is created for the dual purpose of controlling the workers and justifying the rule of the philosophers. Recall that the guardians are the dangerous class as they exercise the monopoly on legitimate violence in the city (cf. Seigel, 2018). In contemporary terms, guardians combine the roles of the military and the police, protecting the city from external enemies by force of arms and enforcing the law of the land within the city limits by maintaining civic order. Guardians possess an in-between, mediational status, both a part of and apart from the city. They are tasked with the securing of space, protecting ‘against external enemies and internal friends, so that the one will lack the power and the other the desire to harm the city’ (Plato, 1992:414b). I take both of these groups against which the guardian must guard, enemies and friends, to constitute the notion of an enemy, understood as an enemy of the state whether foreign or domestic. While in no way normative, this claim will at first be taken at face value and only subsequently unpacked in each case study. Congruently to this, a significant part of the guardian role, if not its core, is counter insurgency. The pairing guardian/enemy introduces the cinematic figure I shall employ in Part II of this book, the fallen guardian. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. Rizov, Urban Crime Control in Cinema, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12978-0_4

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The fallen guardian is a character who occupies both roles—guardian and enemy—in the course of a cinematic narrative, making a transition from the former to the latter, and then back to the original role again. In each cinematic narrative, the experience of the film constitutes an invitation to sympathise, empathise, or identify with the fallen guardian. Essential to this is the regard of the fallen guardian as benevolent rather than malevolent, even if the protagonist is rendered the enemy of the system. The fallen guardian’s prototype has many roots, but its clearest outline is the cinematic figure of the rogue cop. Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry (1971) is the first of a series of five films featuring Inspector ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan (played by Clint Eastwood) of the San Francisco Police Department and marks a shift from law enforcement cinema’s focus on the ‘“investigative process” to “the obliteration of criminals”’ (Lichtenfeld as cited in Tasker, 2015:109; cf. Rafter, 2000:73–6). Aesthetically, the film1 inaugurated the rogue cop as a cinematic protagonist, a role that would also be fulfilled by the vigilante, for example Paul Kersey (played by Charles Bronson) in Michael Winter’s Death Wish (1974). Dirty Harry glorified extra-judicial brutality and killing as acceptable means to achieve supposedly just ends and many critics have commented on the film’s fascist2 aesthetics and function as ideological pornography (Roberts &  Eastwood’s own political trajectory is one of intermittent conservatism and libertarianism (Orr, 2012). Besides serving a two-year term starting in 1986 as mayor of Carmel, California, a town with a population of less than 5000 and a largely Republican history, Eastwood’s political activity is heavily tinted by his filmmaking career (Street, 2016). Sterritt (2014:16) has commented that Eastwood has been intermittently chastised by the right for his early westerns, then by the left for his rogue cop movies, and then again by both the right and the left for his later cinema. 2  Following Walter Benjamin’s (2009:257) comment that ‘Fascism leads logically to an aestheticization of political life’, Koepnick (1999:np) describes fascist aesthetics as concerned with 1

how to hold out—manly and heroically—in the face of total destruction. It reshaped common ideas of beauty in order to render aesthetic pleasure a direct extension of political terror: a form of violence in the service of future warfare. It is not difficult to see the reflection of this in the glorification of violence in the Dirty Harry series, regarding which one critic noted ‘Perhaps Eastwood’s determination to see predators punished is so deeply ingrained that he doesn’t even think of it as political’ (Grenier, 1994:np).

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Goodman, 2013). The plot revolves around a serial killer who calls himself Scorpio (played by Andrew Robinson), a not-so-subtle allusion to the Zodiac Killer (see Kolker, 2011). The cinematic experience of Dirty Harry involves a direct engagement with the city of San Francisco: Scorpio’s use of a sniper rifle represents the verticality of the city as a site of danger, continuing the wartime legacy of aerial bombardment and strategic synoptic view common to the noir cycle of cinema (see Dimendberg, 2004). Shortly after the first murder, Harry traverses the city and comes across a bank robbery while on his lunch break. He immediately starts shooting at the Black suspects in the middle of a heavily populated urban area, killing all but one of them. Harry confronts the survivor, lying in a puddle of blood on the pavement, and challenges him to reflect on the futility of trying to fight. The brief vignette introduces Harry’s brand of policing as capable and relentless: courting danger from the rooftops to the street, from the abstraction of determining a sniper’s position to the violence of foiling a bank robbery on a major boulevard. He is also alone, even when provided with a partner by the system that later takes him away, and always ready to break the law if it prevents him from doing his job. As such, the film sets Harry on a single-minded trajectory to ‘justice’, enacting the theme that the end justifies the means. Intended as ‘a remarkably singleminded attack on liberal values, with each prejudicial detail in place’, Dirty Harry (Kael, 1972:np) provides direct commentary on the ‘checks and balances’ on modern policing in a scene in which Harry is reprimanded by the District Attorney: DA: ‘What I’m saying is, that man had rights.’ Harry: ‘Well, I’m all broken up about that man’s rights.’

The narrative invites a positive affective and moral response to Harry and the standard mode of engagement with the film involves accepting that ‘the law is guilty of protecting the rights of a homicidal psychopath’ (Parenti, 1991:116). Michael Parenti (1991) has identified several key characteristics of dominant narratives in the entertainment industry that maintain the combination of positive affective and ethical evaluations. Those characteristics are adapted here as follows (1991:2):

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(i) An emphasis on individuals in contrast to collective action, both in the sense of a protagonist and ‘individual malefactors’. (ii) A glorification of material and monetary success, presenting capitalism as the most reasonable economic system in existence. (iii) US military and law enforcement agencies as benevolent and civilising forces that are morally superior in virtue of (ii) and thus able to solve problems that have been individualised in virtue of (i). (iv) The main threats to the system are: (A) external enemies presented as a collective (and thus representative of systems of thought such as communism) and (B) internal enemies presented as individual and abnormal. The fallen guardian is a subject who opposes either a collective enemy from abroad or an internal conspiracy motivated by the greed of a single official. The character may not make explicit reference to economics, but the relationship between their personal success and the capitalist system is nonetheless implicit. Labour that reproduces the system, such as automation in RoboCop, is often erased or demoted to the background. There is no evidence of industrialisation in Detroit in the form of functioning factories, only derelict ruins of former industry. In the 2014 remake, Robocop, labour in the production of the protagonist’s mechanised body is implied, but situated abroad, in the People’s Republic of China. Labour is often rendered foreign, archaic, or implicitly both—it appears to have no place in the United States. In the case of Total Recall, labour is relegated to a designated colony, itself forced to produce the robotised cops that violently police it. Moreover, fallen guardians are neither poor nor disenfranchised in any other way. This has led to the figure being portrayed as white, able-bodied, heterosexual men, thus also inseparable from orientalism, patriarchal homosocial hegemony, and patriotism. As Parenti (1991:2) notes, popular entertainment has tended to present ‘women and ethnic minorities not really as capable, effective, or interesting as White males’, while perpetuating the idea that ‘all Americans are equal, but some (the underprivileged) must prove themselves worthy of equality’. The fallen guardian is thus only representative of a small part of the population on a global scale and the perspective presented by the figure is one privileging individual subjectivity, like that of the noir

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detective. From a critical criminological perspective, the significance of the fallen guardian lies in the political connotations of the narratives of each of the case studies. Especially so, as the individual protagonist of each case study, as typified by the character of the fallen guardian, is a figure of affective alignment. Put simply, the four case studies are the stories of the main characters—even when confronted with larger-than-life conspiracies, such as the ones in RoboCop or The Dark Knight Returns, these are material through which the protagonist progresses along the narrative arc. As such, these are not narratives about privatised policing, preventative policing, mass incarceration or extra-judicial killing, but about the protagonists involved in and experiencing those phenomena. Quite simply, the storyline is seen through the eyes of the character, and its stakes are often the life of the protagonist—it is not too speculative to posit that an audience’s experience will match that of the character. As such, there is an aspect of the narratives that invites the audience into a relationship of a certain kind of intimacy with the protagonist. As Lauren Berlant notes, ‘institutions that produced collective experience, like cinema and other entertainment forms, came to mix the critical demands of democratic culture with the desire for entertainment taken for pleasure’ (1998:284) in the sense that ‘liberal society was founded on the migration of intimacy expectations between the public and the domestic’ (1998:284) to do with tacit rules of social order and heavily informed by popular culture entertainment. Following Berlant, I take intimacy to be more complex than the purely personal, but rather also constitutive of relationships such as ‘when citizens feel that the nation’s consented-to qualities are shifting away’ or ‘when newsreaders or hosts of television shows bow out of their agreement to recast the world in comforting ways’ (1998:287). Both of these cases point to Berlant’s use of intimacy as a way of alluding to the affective dimensions of hegemonic order. Understood this way, a nationalist belief is a product of an intimate relationship with a certain order (or the idea of it) and it speaks to multiple other considerations such as power, identity, exclusion, etc. In reference to the latter example, ‘the bow out’ aspect points directly to what Hall (1980) has referred to as the hegemonic coding of a given message, and, broadly, to hegemony itself. As Berlant puts it, ‘intimacy reveals itself to be a relation associated

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with tacit fantasies, tacit rules, and tacit obligations to remain unproblematic’ (1998:287). In this latter sense, the ‘unproblematic’ is of special significance as it points to the function of the fallen guardian in the regulation of the acceptable. While at this stage the defining characteristic of the figure is one of disrupting the status quo, this monograph seeks to demonstrate that this very rupture is a regulatory mechanism. Even more so, as a mixture of entertainment and pleasure, cinema also carries a connotation as one of ‘the pedagogies that encourage people to identify having a life with having an intimate life’ (Berlant, 1998:282) and is a key institution in the formation of ‘hegemonic comfort’ (1998:287). Berlant notes that this idea of ‘an intimate life’ is itself a hegemonic notion, largely informed by heteronormativity, whiteness, etc. In this sense, the persistent characteristics of the fallen guardian in terms of identity are not trivial or inconsequential. As such, it would not be uncontroversial to speak of viewers being privy to a certain kind of intimacy with characters such as RoboCop or Batman, and this too in a context of aspiration, acquiescence, and hegemonic consent. To link this back to Gramsci, Crehan notes that the use of ‘common sense’, not far from Berlant’s ‘hegemonic comfort’, is to do with a ‘comforting set of certainties in which we feel at home, and that we absorb, often unconsciously, from the world that we inhabit’ (2016:118). It is on this basis that such certainties, pleasures, and comforts are used to explain the world. As such, they are ideological in the Althusserian sense defined earlier. All of this speaks to an idea of the liberal individual, which is significant here to the extent that it points to Lisa Lowe’s development (2015) of Berlant’s work, where intimacy is found to exist on the basis of the notion of interiority. This latter notion, in the framework of liberalism, is seen to be the unique possession of ‘the liberal possessive individual’ (see Macpherson, 1962)—where the subject is understood to be capable of exercising agency, has definite property relations with others, and represents a particular point in the liberal social order (one in which liberal ideals unproblematically were commonly integral or reconciled with the realities of slavery and colonialism). This political framing of the liberal individual is particularly relevant in view of the discussion of individualism in narratives in Chap. 2. I note that ‘intimacy as interiority is elaborated in the philosophical tradition in which the liberal subject observes,

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examines, and comes to possess knowledge of self and others’ (Lowe, 2015:21). It is this liberal subject that is expressed in the protagonist and their role in shaping the formal order of a given narrative representation, that is, the story is shaped by the protagonist’s privilege over others, as the unique possessor of a story (cf. Lowe, 2015). In this sense, cinema is understood to be both a study of cinematic figures’ interiority and the pedagogy of understanding this as a viewer, thus formulating one’s own ‘sense of individual belonging in liberal society’ (Lowe, 2015:21). In other words, ‘fantasy, sentiment, and desire in literature and popular culture produce the contours of intimacy that mediate the individual’s inhabiting of everyday life in social relations’ (Lowe, 2015:21). Following Berlant, Lowe also uncovers the mystified and reified character of this process—there are multiple intimacies on which the universalisation of the ‘Anglo-American liberal individual’ is built (Lowe, 2015:21). To be blunt, intimacy is understood as the production of affinity, and its distribution as a possession (Lowe, 2015:18); as such, there are people who by the very character of this process of production are excluded. If related back to Parenti’s framework, the important contextualisation would be that it is primarily, if not exclusively, that the fallen guardians possess interiority and the concomitant capacity to evoke intimacy. The guardians’ enemies do not. Thus, the production of intimacy is also ideological, as it clarifies one’s relation to oneself and others. The manner in which this intimacy is achieved is of utmost significance. While I have noted the capacity for affective alignment in a viewer with a narrative, the most rudimentary way this is achieved is through empathy, which itself relies on an individual who is capable of possessing interiority. At times, empathy is not afforded to all, and it has clear delimitations. Collective enemies, for example, are clearly deprived of this capacity and can be easily, and/or brutally, dispensed with. In other cases, there can be secondary characters that are presented as incapable of understanding the reasons for the protagonist’s actions. They either possess limited capacities, or, like the individual enemies, are misguided in their application thereof. Thus, to speak of individualism in a narrative is only one dimension, while interiority speaks to the manner in which an individual is designated as special. The affective implications of this are clear, but it should be noted that this also points to the likelihood of a

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positive ethical evaluation as well. In a sense, interiority is also equated with worth and in a practical sense points the audience’s attention to worthwhile characters. ‘Empathy’ and ‘sympathy’ are usually distinguished on the basis that the former involves feeling with (i.e. experiencing another’s sadness oneself ) and the latter feeling for (i.e. experiencing sadness in response to another’s misfortune) another. Empathy involves imagining oneself in another’s place, becoming ‘aware of the other’s feelings, needs, and wants’, and has been proposed as the basis for and of social justice (Moses, 1985:135). I posit that empathy should be understood in terms of affective subjects and structures of feeling (Ahmed, 2010; Pedwell, 2012). This would entail recognising that the imaginative capacity for what another is going through is limited when it is rooted in one’s own already existing experiences. Carolyn Pedwell (2012:294) discusses the consequences of this limitation: Strong feelings of identification, care, and/or concern are likely be generated within and through […] shifting neoliberal structures and circuits, but often with an orientation towards maintaining – rather than contesting  – the exclusionary operation of normative political and economic forms, such as the American nation and the multinational corporation.

Empathy that is rooted in an individualist liberal structure is compatible with collective oppression, exploitation, or abuse, and it is unlikely to lead to either genuine compassion or political change. Moreover, one’s empathy with another’s suffering means little in broader terms if the recourse to action is invoking the police, an institution that exposes many groups to violence (Seigel, 2018; Puar, 2017). All four of the case studies rely on an empathetic experience of an individual, the protagonist, going through exceptional measures of crime control: private policing in RoboCop, preventative policing in Minority Report, mass incarceration in The Dark Knight Rises, and extra-judicial killing in Blade Runner 2049. In each film, the primary means by which one finds out about the crime control measures is through empathetic engagement with the fallen guardian. It is because the audience empathises with Murphy, Anderton, Batman, and K that they understand what

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being in the positions of both an agent and target of the same crime control measure is like. Moreover, it is through the guardians’ own fall that they become capable of empathising with victims of the respective crime control measures. As a critical criminologist, I am concerned with the consent-producing implications of this empathetic engagement. Robin D.G. Kelley (2020:np) rejects empathy altogether, replacing the concept with solidarity: I think what I’ve been calling “empathy” was really, if you get down to it, solidarity. One thing about empathy is that it often pivots around taking a singular story, someone’s singular experience, and then, from that, projecting out. As if that singular experience – empathizing with the individual – then allows us to understand everyone who might be suffering from a particular set of circumstances or struggles. It gets you into the problem of “innocence.” That is, you empathize with victims and not so much with understanding the people who are not identified as victims, not “innocent,” but as perpetrators. I agree that what I try to do is to understand other positions.3

Roseann Liu and Savannah Shange (2018:190) differentiate between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ solidarity: the former is ‘based on notions of shared suffering [and] often creates a false equivalence between different experiences of racialized violence’ while the latter is ‘a kind of solidarity that mobilizes empathy in ways that do not gloss over difference, but rather pushes into the specificity, irreducibility, and incommensurability of racialized experiences’. Thick solidarity integrates differences into the possibility for collective action rather than glossing over them and encouraging apathy. While the empathetic aspect of watching the case studies is rooted to some extent in an invitation to empathise with being a target of the exceptional crime control measures, it also fails to recognise the humanity of the antagonists, the role of the police in oppression, and the justice system’s ideology (and function) of repression. It is on this basis that I follow Kelley in distinguishing empathy from solidarity and I argue  Kelley (2020:np) also states that ‘part of solidarity is the people you don’t recognize. The people who you don’t see yourself in. And we’re raised in this particular era of liberal multiculturalism to see ourselves in others.’ 3

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for the latter rather than the former in this monograph’s critical framework. Solidarity, which I use to refer to Liu and Shange’s thick solidarity, is premised on a willingness to commit to collective action and thus has the political significance that empathy and thin solidarity lack. One of the aims of this book is to contribute to a political understanding that provides a basis for practical forms of solidarity rather than the superficial empathy or ineffectual sympathy typical for responses to Hollywood cinema. All four of the case studies are science fiction, and their capacity for the representation of social problems is extended by the removal of the constraints of contemporary technology. Due to genre, the four case studies all contain elements that are either utopian or dystopian, sometimes both. As such, the worlds created in the case studies are not simply variations of crime control measures, but variations that extrapolate the logic of those measures to their imaginative conclusions: robotised policing rather than private policing, pre-crime rather than preventative policing, mass marginalisation rather than mass incarceration, and a death squad staffed by its targets. While the imagined forms of crime control in the case studies can easily be conceptualised as exceptional, they nevertheless are forms of existing practices and procedures. In a sense, they are extreme as they demonstrate a system revolving around a singular aspect of criminal justice, not so much because they are unrealistic. One of the aims of my critique is to demonstrate that they are to an extent realist because they have already been conceived and implemented, as well as based on existing logics and practices of repression. As such, the crime control measures in each of the case studies are ideological as they both exceptionalise and individualise problems, thereby obscuring their real-life parallels present in actual criminal justice systems. For a direct parallel, recall the brief discussion of the narrative of ‘police brutality’ in Chap. 2. As fallen guardians, Murphy, Anderton, Batman, and K experience the crime control measures first as agents and then as targets, integrating perspectives from within and without on each. The audience is provided with contradictory perspectives of each crime control measure by means of empathising with the fallen guardian. The fact that these contradictions are neatly resolved at the end of each of the films points to ideological manoeuvres that seek to pass formal resolutions in a narrative as

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solutions to problems in political and social reality. Ultimately, the narrative resolutions in conjunction with the fallen guardian figure work in favour of reforming the problem, rather than rooting out its causes. As such, the fallen guardian remains distinct from Rafter’s notion of the outlaw hero or criminal hero (2000:150). In all four films, the protagonist returns to the role they were in originally in some form, regardless of the revelations about the corruption of the system they are embedded in reproducing. This is why this critical framework is driven by a privileging of solidarity over empathy and the ideological over the formal question of ethics, as neither empathy nor the ethical even offer to provide a solution.

Spatial Illusions In Chap. 3, I identified the basis for this monograph’s spatial analysis of cinematic representation in Lefebvre’s (1974) triad of perceived, conceived, and lived space and applied that analysis to some pertinent examples from the history of cinema. The production of space is central to the cinematic representation of space and crime control. A film presents cinematic experience as the experience of a concrete space. Despite the fact that this space is created by means of fragments—some shot with green screens, some on elaborate studio sets, and others on location—the space is presented as continuous and whole. Cinema slices and sutures space into an ostensible totality. The totality of the cinematic event is problematic because cinematic space has the potential to both produce illusions and perpetuate already existing illusions. For Lefebvre, illusions are either interpretative practices or epistemological positions that obfuscate the character of space (or text). As such, we can broadly take them to be ideological in the Althusserian sense. It has already been noted that an exceptional measure of crime control requires a material context for its inauguration and an ideological justification for its sustainment. The material context is itself a product of the combination of ideological conception, material production, and social practice—all of which are contingent. Recall the contingency of ‘the cinematic city’ in the discussion of the cinematic shift from the city symphony to the film noir in Chap. 3.

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According to Lefebvre (1974:27), ‘(social) space is a (social) product’. The social production of social space is, however, obscured by the double illusions of transparency and opacity, which provide alternating understandings of the spatial. Both illusions have their basis in the modernist triad of ‘readability-visibility-intelligibility’ in which ‘many errors [and] many lies’ have their root (Lefebvre, 1974:96). That is to say, space, as seen from the view of both modernity and modernist representations, should be immediately legible as to its purpose—this is evident in the grand projects of Haussmannisation, and slum clearances as both urban and crime-prevention policies. The purpose of space includes more than simple utility, and critical analysis reveals the classed, gendered, and racialised character of space. The illusion of transparency is the notion that space is intelligible and that it gives ‘action free rein’ (Lefebvre, 1974:27) in the sense that space is something that can be actively shaped by a subject, such as a state, an architect, or urban planner. Lefebvre (1974:28) maintains that in this illusion ‘everything can be taken in by a glance from that mental eye which illuminates whatever it contemplates’. The illusion of transparency tends to privilege the discerning Subject, understood in terms of the Subject’s projected view on space, the Subject’s faculty for interpretation, and the Subject’s ability to deploy itself in a process of creating spaces. In other words, a space is what it looks like because it was intentionally made to look that way. As such, the transparency illusion runs parallel to the philosophical tradition of idealism. The second illusion is that of realism, substantiality, and opacity. The illusion of opacity is the notion that space is full of things that have their own substance, which can be discovered and known (Butler, 2012). In the opacity illusion, it is things and their material reality that matter rather than the Subject. This illusion implies that space requires analysis, that is, the essence of things can and must be discovered through a process of scrutinising the appearance of things. Understood this way, space is obfuscatory and possesses hidden depths. In contrast to the illusion of transparency’s links to idealism, opacity is rooted in the philosophical tradition of realism. If the illusion of transparency is concerned with the appearance of things, a counterpart to the spatial practices discussed in Chap. 3, then the illusion of opacity is concerned with the depth of urban

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reality, a counterpart to the representations of space, also discussed in Chap. 3. It is at work in the spaces that are presented as mysterious and ‘dark’—the places that resist forces that try to shape them. Examples could be found in Total Recall’s Colony, the ‘Green Place of Many Mothers’ in Mad Max: Fury Road, or the multiple dark streets in any Batman film, the slum of the drug-sellers in Minority Report, or the deindustrialised areas of RoboCop. In view of these two illusions, Lefebvre (1974:94–95) explains the problem with thinking of space in terms of dualities: Here we have a double or even multiple error. To begin with, the split between “real” [i.e. space as conforming to the illusion of opacity] and “true” [i.e. space conforming to the illusion of transparency] serves only to avoid any confrontation between practice and theory, between lived experience and concepts, so that both sides of these dualities are distorted from the outset.

Lefebvre (1974:30) does not claim that one illusion is preferable to the other, nor that they are opposites, rather that: ‘each embodies and nourishes the other’ and ‘the shifting back and forth between the two […] are thus just as important as either of the illusions considered in isolation’. Moreover, the two illusions tend to be intimately interwoven with particular subjectivities or particular modes of inquiry. For example, the person on the street might be faced with the everyday opacity of buildings but lack an understanding of the cartographic logic of the city’s formal order despite having dwelled in it for years. Conversely, the cartographer might be capable of rendering the city transparent according to a formal spatial order without possessing the everyday knowledge acquired by walking in the city. The transparency of public spaces is a characteristic accessible primarily to the state—a street is a street for the inhabitants of the city, but a strategic apparatus for the police (Scott, 1998; see also Weizman, 2012). Thus, at one level, the two illusions are useful in articulating experiences and ways of acting on and in space depending on the position of the agent in a given social order. Furthermore, Lefebvre’s theoretical lexicon provides conceptual tools that are useful for the expansion of the discussion of cinematic space from the particular to the

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general, from the cities of Detroit, Washington, New  York, and Los Angeles to modern capitalist urban reality. Lefebvre (1974:97) points out that ‘wherever there is illusion, the optical and visual world plays an integral and integrative, active and passive, part in it’. Space and its relation to cinematic representation can only be fully grasped in terms of the constant shift between treating space and its representations as either transparent or opaque. In keeping with Lefebvre’s (1974:89) work on space, I seek to replace the triad of readability-­ visibility-­intelligibility with the triad of perceived-conceived-lived space in order to draw attention to space as a product of material, ideological, and social practice. The productivity of this former triad and its domination over space has been heavily reliant on the modern state and its extension into the ‘expanded state complex’ (Tagg, 1988:63; also, see Rizov, 2022). Lefebvre’s triad of spatial practice, representations of space, and representational spaces apprehends space as something that is produced—something that is, like representations themselves, created rather than found. Lefebvre is clear that the three elements do not constitute an abstract model or schema, but rather a means to the end of understanding the relationships between distinct and interconnected forces and practices. As such, the triad is an attempt at engaging with urban reality as a totality, both the totality of a given city and the totality of a given film’s urban space, which is, in turn, the representation of an actual urban space. The two illusions open up an important discussion on which to define the analysis of the following case studies. The illusion of transparency is in interplay with opacity, the same way idealism is in opposition to realism. At this point, it is important to address that the discussion of ideology throughout this monograph positions my critique as conforming to the illusion of opacity, that things are not exactly as they seem. Put simply, urban space itself, much like a text or a film, possesses its own symptoms that speak to other texts, other levels of meaning, and, most importantly, are ideological in the sense that they reproduce a (Jameson, 2002:14–15): representational structure which allows for the individual subject to conceive or imagine his or her lived relationship to transpersonal realities such as the social structure or the collective logic of History.

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However, the tension between the two illusions thus formulated can prove productive when applied to the level of Lefebvre’s triad. Namely, this is done by pointing attention to the way that these symptoms of the broader representational structure that is ideology are made evident in the manner in which people are represented to commute, the way in which the spatial logic of the world is conceptualised, and the way in which characters make sense of and live in said space. A clear parallel is that of Total Recall, with Hauser’s commute (spatial practice and perceived space) across the gravity elevator from the peripheral Colony to the metropole UFB (representations of space and conceived space) as well as the conditions of high-rise living (spaces of representation and lived space). The relevance of the tension between the two illusions can be demonstrated further. For example, the referential function of New  York in Snyder’s Watchmen is that the city being represented is the actual city. On this level, we can watch any scene in the film and see every fictional aspect of the city that has no basis in reality in relation to all that we know of the real New York. This knowledge of the real New York can of course itself be entirely based on what we have (previously) seen in (other) films—in a sense, a New York true to the idea of the city. As discussed in Chap. 2, a cinematic representation of New  York, like most cities, is never just itself—it also symbolises or instantiates one or more of: the United States, centralisation, power, or the very concept of the urban. The apparent totality of New York in Watchmen (2009) produces an idea of New York that incorporates the real as well as the fictional city. The fact that a particular scene has been shot in Vancouver (in British Columbia, Canada), on a sound stage, or on a green screen is not relevant since the film, on a visual level, represents New York City as a whole. It would be useful to note here the manner in which these elements work to produce a sense of obvious literalness—this is New York. This assumption is clearly manufactured, and there are multiple symptoms, to refer back to Althusser and Jameson, that reveal this. Engaging with the illusion of transparency reveals the fragmentary nature of cinematic representation—a cut from one place to another is as much a speeding up of events that are not essential to the narrative as it is an incision in space—and the ways in which disparate fragments are

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combined to produce a totality. Recall that in the film noir aesthetic, a singular, discerning Subject, that is, the protagonist, is both the centre of meaning and the provenance of interpretation. The fragmentary character of the city (its spatial practices) and the partial experience of the protagonist converge in the interplay of the illusions to the extent that the film is realistic and comprehensive, with the detective sometimes a victim of and sometimes an accomplice to the crimes depicted. For example, in Stanley Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss (1955), a chance urban encounter has unpredictable and disastrous results. Davey Gordon’s (played by Jamie Smith) scarf is stolen while he is waiting for his lover, Gloria (played by Irene Kahn), to settle a final debt with her abusive employer. The theft leads to a case of mistaken identity, which results in the murder of an innocent person, Gloria’s kidnapping, and the subsequent unravelling of the romance between her and Gordon. The implication is that the temporary absence of the protagonist leaves the city unchecked to act in its characteristic aleatory and chaotic manner, what Penz and Lu refer to as the transformation of naïve space to expressive space (2011:9). The illusion of transparency, rooted in idealism, finds its limits here, as the film suggests that the city’s inner workings act out spontaneously in the absence of control. As such, the example of Killer’s Kiss is not so much one of transparency, but its logic—the dangers of the city are its chaos, its opacity, hence the need for transparency. The illusion of opacity is concerned with depth, that is, with things being more than they appear to be, and Thom Andersen’s cinematic essay, Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), provides a paradigmatic example in featuring an anonymous Angelino who narrates facts about the city’s cinematic history and fictionalisation. In the first fifteen minutes of the film, a series of temporary signs for film crew navigating their way through the city to pseudonymous film projects are depicted. A city made visible since the dawn of cinema is thus quickly revealed to operate on a subtle, everyday level that is experienced by everyone who lives in or drives through the city but completely unknown to cinematic audiences. Los Angeles Plays Itself argues for a contingency of place that is more profound than mere historical circumstance because it is crucially concerned with cinematic space. Indeed, the city plays itself in multiple roles and the variety of meaning that a specific place such as the Bradbury Building carries

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changes from film to film and context to context—from its utopian socialist design by Sumner Hunt in 1892 to an insurance office in Double Indemnity (1944) and an apartment building in Blade Runner (1982). In essence, the Bradbury Building demonstrates the utility of a symptomatic reading of urban space, as the building itself is something constantly re-­ read in each film, be it actual or dystopian Los Angeles. In contrast to Los Angeles, Vancouver rarely ever plays itself (Every Frame a Painting, 2016). As a relatively cheap North American city for filming, Vancouver is made to stand for other places, with fragments of its streets, offices, cityscape, and suburbs used to represent the spatial practices of Chicago, New York, Detroit, San Francisco, or Los Angeles. Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq (2015) engages similarly with the interplay between the illusions of opacity and transparency. The narrative is inspired by Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, providing political commentary on the Iraq War by means of a fictionalised gang war between the Spartans and the Trojans in the city of Chicago.4 Chicago is rendered as Chi-Raq, a reference to the rate of homicide in Chicago exceeding US combat deaths in Iraq. The film is problematic with respect to gender in reproducing Lysistrata with only a minimal degree of critique and with respect to an American exceptionalism that ignores the destruction of Iraq and its people. Chicago stands as yet another important place that illustrates the salience of urban space in the eyes of repressive violence—the IDF’s urban counter ­insurgency training camp bears the name of the city as well (Weizman, 2017). Thus, Chi-Raq makes an important point about the fungibility of space: places that are geographically separate can be shaped by the same social, political, and economic forces, from Chicago to Tel Aviv to Baghdad, from policing to counter insurgency to urban warfare.5 The shifts between emphases on opacity and transparency are readily demonstrated with the examples of the city symphony and the film noir  About halfway through the film, a man approaches Chi-Raq (played by Nick Cannon) and asks him to reflect on his life and the consequences of the gang war. This is followed by a truncated city symphony montage of urban scenes providing an overview of the city of Chicago while the titular song plays. 5  Another space whose boundaries are porous with Chicago is Israel Defense Forces’ camp of Tze’elim in the Negev desert (Weizman, 2012:205). The training for urban warfare against Palestinians that takes place here is echoed by the Chicago Police Department’s violence against people of colour. 4

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in Chap. 3. The city symphony reproduces spatial practices—fragments of everyday life in urban space—and suggests that the meaning lies not in these fragments but in the whole, the totality of labour and its supposed solidarity. I have already highlighted how this move from the part to the whole idealises both aspects and obscures the essential exploitation of labour in the city. The film noir reproduces the whole through the particular subjectivity of the protagonist, using voiceover, retrospection, and narrative cutting to present urban reality as an object for the discerning, cynical subject to scrutinise, investigate, and ultimately interpret. The urban space of film noir (cf. Dimendberg, 2004) is one in which illusions are created by discerning subjects (the protagonist, the innocent, the antagonist) and inanimate objects (a murder weapon, a ransom note, trace evidence), constantly shifting between opacity and transparency. Lefebvre (1974:39) notes, however, that any ‘two elements boil down to oppositions, contrasts or antagonisms’, in consequence of which: Social space can never escape its basic duality, even though triadic determining factors may sometimes override and incorporate its binary or dual nature, for the way in which it presents itself and the way in which it is represented are different. Is not social space always, and simultaneously, both a field of action (offering its extension to the deployment of projects and practical intentions) and a basis of action (a set of places whence energies derive and whither energies are directed)? (Lefebvre, 1974:191)

This interplay is, furthermore, found in the experience of the discarded, the common, and the everyday. As Kracauer (1947) notes, cinema is particularly capable of capturing the detritus of urban reality—that which is not meant to be seen and is taken for granted. The visual aspect of cinematic space employs repetition, focus, and background to represent the visual culture of the city as purposeful. Take for example, the ubiquity of USA Today vending machines in films shot in Vancouver as a tool for maintaining the illusion of the urban space being in the United States (Every Frame a Painting, 2016). The presence of advertisements, posters, and placards also points to another form of experience of space that is intimately tied to the visual and to perception. According to Stefan Kipfer (2008:199), everyday life and the reproduction of capitalism are

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‘saturated by the routinized, repetitive, familiar daily practices that make up the everyday in all spheres of life: work, leisure, politics, language, family life, cultural production’. Understood in this way, the repetition of practices exists in a dialectical relationship with repetitive spaces: Both forms of repetition work to produce homogeneity and create the impression of continuity. In ideological terms, we can summarise this process thus—the production of a representational structure of totality.

Notes on Critique In Chap. 2, I identified the focus of this inquiry as the cinematic representation of urban crime control and delineated the approach I shall employ to the cases in terms of: narrative, ideology, and capitalist realism. In this section, it is vital to highlight the ways in which the ideological context of the cinematic representation manifests itself in a given film, in space, and in the project of critique that I outline. Representation, as much as media communication, is systematically misunderstood, being encoded in a hegemonic discourse and decoded within the hegemonic code, which accepts the framework created by the producer of the message. Furthermore, this process occurs informed by wider frameworks of knowledge and the general representational structure of ideology that informs the former. As it has been argued, hegemonic, professional, and negotiated codes of decoding accept, affirm, and promote capitalist realism. The belief is that there is no alternative to the capitalist mode of production and that all other economic systems are simply impractical. The manifestation of this is in resignation, a fatalism in which the best-case scenario becomes the containment of capitalism’s worst excesses. This is why the term ‘exceptional crime control’ has been used to draw attention to the manner in which excess and exception are within the remit of repressive tolerance and make up the language of liberal reform. More broadly, this can be understood as a culture of interpassivity, where the desire and the satisfaction of the cinematic event are delegated or relegated by the audience to someone or something else. Interpassivity is a means to a political end in which the world—particularly, but not exclusively, the world of the modern capitalist

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metropolis—is stripped of any and all sentimental illusions in order to endorse a state that is itself stripped back to its core policing and military functions (Hall, 1980, 2019; Fisher, 2009). My critique of such measures of crime control is made by means of analyses of their representation in cinematic fictions. This analysis is undertaken within a critical framework which explores the territory between economism and ideologism (Landy, 1994). Economist critique focuses on narrative causal connections at the expense of the material conditions that underpin them, and ideologist critique focuses on individual agency at the expense of the social practices within which that agency is executed. Pete Travis’s Dredd (2012) provides an illuminating example of the manner in which crime control is both exceptionalised and ideological. The film draws heavily on a number of tropes including the rogue cop, the hostage film, and it even features voiceover narration in the style of a noir film. Its focus on urban space is clear—Mega City One is an imagined future urban sprawl in the United States in which more than double the current population of the country is crammed into less than two percent of its territory. The representation of urban space was created by applying CGI to photography of contemporary Johannesburg, South Africa’s largest metropolitan area, itself overwhelmed by extreme poverty and hyper-violence (Miller, 2012). The narrative opens with several aerial shots of Mega City One during which Judge Dredd (played by Karl Urban) introduces a post-apocalyptic America, the megalopolis, mega-­ blocks (vertical slums), and the criminal justice system (in which the functions of police, jury, and judiciary are combined in the figure of the judge). As the camera tracks up the edifice of the Hall of Justice, Dredd concludes: ‘Only one thing fighting for order in the chaos: the men and women of the Hall of Justice…juries, executioners, judges’ (Dredd, 2012). The world of Mega City One is a fortress, a return to more direct forms of repression,6 which are immediately justified by the state of the world and the commonality of violence. The implications by omission are abundant. First, the history of the mega-blocks and the landscape refers tacitly by omission to the history of  McMichael (2017:149; 157–8) gives an example of a 1979 issue of the comic in which citizens are subjected to a ‘crime blitz’—a term directly referring to the Nazi conquest of Europe.

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South African apartheid and its particular form of racial capitalism (Go, 2021). Second, the world of Dredd is in the wake of a nuclear war following confrontation with the Soviet Union with survivors congregating into Mega City One, itself a Malthusian image, not unlike the high-rises of Total Recall, implying over-population of the poor and racialised. Interestingly, in the original comic books written by John Wagner and drawn by Carlos Ezquerra, the character of Judge Dredd is genetically engineered for the purposes of enforcing the law to the letter. He is a hulking figure and ‘a hypermasculine ideal of toughness and dominance’ (Connell, 1987:80) as well as asexual. He wears body armour fitting for a dystopian society and is supported by his Lawmaster, a highly militarised voice-commanded motorcycle, and a Lawgiver, a self-loading handgun with multiple types of ammunition. The denotation of Dredd’s two chief tools is an interesting allusion of what Walter Benjamin refers to as the two functions of violence—law-making and law-preserving (1996). Unsurprising, as the context of the narrative is one of perpetual war on crime to the point of manufactured police being the norm—an image that is aligned with Plato’s obedient guardian. Early in the film, patrols of judges are shown to depart the Hall of Justice for their tours of duty at the beginning of their shift. Singled out are Dredd and Cassandra Anderson (played by Olivia Thirlby), a trainee-­ judge. Dredd informs Anderson of their task ahead: ‘“Twelve serious crimes a minute, seventeen thousand per day. We can respond to around six percent’” (Dredd, 2012). The final scene of the film returns to this opening, with two aerial shots of the megalopolis and Dredd’s voice, which repeats part of the film’s opening: Mega City One: eight hundred million people living in the ruin of the old world and the mega-structures of the new one. Only one thing fighting for order in the chaos: judges.

The individualisation of the judges in contrast to the masses of criminals is clear, as is its fascist framing of legitimate violence as a bulwark of ‘civilization’ with real-world parallels in zero tolerance policing. As Judge Dredd’s writer John Wagner notes the context of the character’s creation: ‘This was back in the days of Dirty Harry and with [Margaret] Thatcher

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on the rise there was a right-wing current in British politics which helped inspire Judge Dredd’ (Wagner as cited in Oliver, 2002:np). Dredd is a model law enforcer, completely convinced of the moral necessity of his role, neither exercising discretion nor employing extra-­ judicial force. In contrast, Anderson has doubts about both her ability and the role, being selected solely on the basis of the potential value of her extra-human psychic powers. What might be called the formal ethical framing of the ideological content of Dredd is focused on Anderson’s moral maturation, from her uncertainty about non-discretionary policing to her extended confrontation with Kay (played by Wood Harris), a senior member of the Ma-Ma organised crime group, to her embracing of the necessity for non-discretionary policing and flourishing in its execution. This change is partly constituted by a withdrawal of sympathy for the residents of the Peach Trees mega-block, something Anderson originally possessed due to her own background of growing up in a similar environment. In one example, Anderson responds to Dredd’s cynical attitude towards the underclass residents by reminding him that she was herself born in a mega-block. From a critical perspective, the individual is singled out from the dangerous collective in a symbolic act of defence that in reality is a defence of the individual. Anderson appears to be quite clear in pointing out to Dredd that she has managed to rise into the status of a ‘liberal possessive individual’ so others could too. This can be understood in two ways—it either opens up the potential for empathy, rather than challenging its withdrawal completely, or it further vilifies the criminals for not having managed to avoid criminal activity (in stark contrast to Anderson). As the conclusion of the film shows, the two points are not contradictory and the tension is only artificial, the criminals, as Anderson ‘matures’ and learns, should be dehumanised. In the second example, later on in the film, Anderson appears to empathise when she interrupts Dredd’s brutal interrogation of Kay. Instead of reducing the level of coercion, however, she amplifies it, using her psychic abilities to frighten him into complete compliance. The implication is intriguing as it points to two relevant dimensions of the ideological critique defined in this monograph. First, the contrast between Dredd and Anderson can be facilely read as reflection of liberal and conservative views on crime and its enforcement. The example of ‘police

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brutality’ was mentioned already, but a direct reference can be made to what Rodríguez refers to as ‘white reconstruction’ (2021), the period of carceral expansion and militarisation of the police in direct response to the limited success of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. This period, and its relevance to criminal justice, is discussed by Lisa Murakawa in terms of ‘the backlash thesis’ (2014:5–8;10) The idea being that white Americans’ political projects following the 1960s, both liberals and conservatives, that is to say Democrats and Republicans, had their own reaction to the essentialisation of race to do with crime, mainly in the case of African-Americans. This leads to my second point, as Marcuse (1965) has noted liberalism tends to function by the repressive tolerance of issues that pose a challenge to its order. Namely, one extreme is juxtaposed with another, but the resolution tends to be in favour of the status quo. For example, the framing of ‘war is bad’ against ‘war is good’ inevitably leads to ‘some war is necessary’. In the case of ‘the backlash thesis’, AfricanAmericans are ‘criminal due to their environment’ of the Democrats against African-Americans are ‘criminal due to a biological essence’ of the Republicans leads to the realities of the bipartisan support for the prisonindustrial complex, the militarisation of policing, and its incessant, excessive over-funding (Rodríguez, 2021; Murakawa, 2014; Gibran Muhammad, 2019). The case of Dredd and Anderson is illustrative as the opposition is simply in methods of torture, not a qualm about torture itself. In such terms, Dredd is best understood as a reflection of a right realist criminological framework, where zero tolerance policing and the increased use of custodial sentences are employed in response to increases in violent crime (Kelling & Wilson, 1982). The endorsement of this criminological framework underpins the production and reception of the film, the acceptance of a causal relation between right realist criminal justice policies and the sustained decline in crime on both sides of the Atlantic in the two decades preceding the film’s release (Sharkey, 2018). Moreover, the relevant context of the release of Dredd in the UK combines the culture of control with neoliberalism and austerity. David Garland (2001) notes the transatlantic change in criminal justice culture from mid-century welfarism to a fin de siècle culture of control, motivated and sustained by the twin pillars of market discipline (neoliberal economics) and moral

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discipline (conservative politics). Dredd both represents and reproduces these circumstances, both endorsing the violence work of police practice and providing a rationale for and justification of an increasing use of force. The ideological context is further reinforced by several narrative elements. The antagonist ruler of the Peach Trees mega-block, Ma-Ma, is using her gang and the residents in order to produce the drug Slo-Mo, providing, as the name suggests, the experience of slowed down time. The drug is notably used by Ma-Ma in her own application of spectacular justice where a person is skinned alive, while on the drug, and then thrown from the top floor of the mega-block. The experience, due to the drug, is shown to be equivalent of hours of extreme pain and torture. The final resolution of the film is Dredd’s confrontation with Ma-Ma, where she is defeated, given the drug and thrown out of the mega-block. Although she is not skinned alive, as she did to those she punished, the parallel is clear. Dredd, though the opposite of the criminal, is in his core function not different from those he opposes. This is even clearer in the first Dredd film (Judge Dredd, 1995), where Dredd (played by Sylvester Stallone) is wrongly assumed to have gone on a killing spree because of confusion with his identical, also genetically engineered brother Rico (played by Armand Assante). The lack of concern for civilian life in the original film is also present with Dredd unscrupulously killing his former colleagues who now hunt him. The juxtaposition of Dredd with his identical brother Rico in the original, and that of Ma-Ma and Dredd in the more recent remake, again indicates a productive polarisation for Marcuse’s repressive tolerance (1965). Any critique of either Dredd or one of his enemies would inevitably leave the violence work of policing unchallenged as it would the dehumanisation of those criminalised. As Althusser notes (2005:147): [I]n the struggle the hero belonged to the opponent as much as the opponent did to the hero, the opponent was the hero's double, his reflection, his opposite, his night, his temptation, his own unconscious turned against him. Hegel was right, his destiny was consciousness of himself as of an enemy.

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Mark Neocleous (2021) demonstrates this relationship outlined by Althusser in the TV series Dexter (2006–2013). Namely, the show reveals the blurry boundary between the protagonist Dexter, a forensic blood analyst and serial killer, and official police work. Dexter only kills those who deserve to be killed. A particularly significant parallel to policing is the manner in which Dexter methodically follows procedural practices. As Dexter says, his work ‘brings order to the chaos,’ where ‘work’ is both forensic analysis of blood splatter and serial killings (see Neocleous, 2021). In such sense, Dexter’s own statement speaks to a broader discourse that policing itself is about the fabrication of social order (Manning, 1977; McHarris, 2021; Neocleous, 2021). For Neocleous, this also speaks to the Hobbesian distinction between Leviathan representing the order of the state and Behemoth representing disorder and insecurity (2021:150). In this sense, as it will be shown throughout the analysis of specific films in Part II of this monograph, crime control often allows itself to become monstrous in order to fight what it perceives as a bigger threat to the status quo. This tension between guardian and monster/enemy is present in the original film with Dredd falsely being identified as a criminal, while in the remake he is targeted by corrupt judges working for Ma-Ma. The killing of his colleagues in both films poses no moral qualms for Dredd. Interesting, however, is the role of Anderson in the above-mentioned journey of ‘moral maturation’. It has been noted that Anderson’s partial disapproval of physical torture does not appear to contradict her use of psychical torture—perhaps an interesting reflection to liberal endorsements of non-lethal weapons, who nevertheless take lives, target discriminatively, and produce similar effects (see Davison, 2009; Schrader, 2019)—a theme that will be discussed at further length in the following chapters. Moreover, it is Anderson’s kidnapping and subjection to violence by Ma-Ma’s gang that leads her to reassess her willingness to sympathise with criminals. She also witnesses and assists Dredd’s confrontation with his corrupt colleagues. In Althusserian terms, her maturation is best understood as the realisation that the best way to fulfil her ideological position (broadly that of law enforcement and criminal justice) is best done through repression. That is to say, the tension between her moral issues and the methods of ‘justice’ has been resolved because the victims

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of justice are revealed to be deserving. As noted above, her background and the exceptionality that it implies primarily serves to reinforce the justification of violence for those who are not like her. Thus, the narrative development of Anderson as a character who opposes Dredd’s form of policing to one who has acquired an appropriate cynical position after the labours of violence work is particularly telling of the ideological character of the narrative. Anderson is an ideological subject that, despite failing Dredd’s test (i.e. she loses her weapon which is failing offense), has learnt the practice of enacting said ideology through violence and repression. As such, Anderson is a potential stand-in for the audience—a reassurance that if she approves, then surely you, the interpellated viewer, ought to too. As Althusser notes, we are always already ideological subjects. In essence, Judge Dredd (1995) is also a paradigmatic example of a fallen guardian, but it fails to provide a case of a particular measure of crime control. As such, we leave the analysis here and move on to Part II and the examination of the specific cases. The four case studies that I explore in Part II all engage with examples of measures of crime control in a somehow dystopian setting. The experience of this engagement is mediated by the figure of a fallen guardian, a protagonist who undergoes a fall from grace in the social order of criminal justice and thus experiences the system as both enforcer and victim, both guardian and enemy. Ultimately, however, as the example of Judge Dredd indicates, the fallen guardian figure does little to challenge the logic of the problem at its core and, in fact, serves an ideological function of justifying existing real-world crime control. Ideology is understood to be a representational structure, of which there is no opting out without an oppositional project of Marxist critique. Put simply, the films mentioned and the ones making up the four case studies are not exceptionally or exclusively ideological, rather they are particularly illustrative of an ideological focus on criminal justice. It is in this sense that the way in which the logics of private policing, preventative policing, mass incarceration, and extra-judicial killing have been extrapolated to dystopian representations in the cinematic narratives are reflective of an ideology that is present everywhere in notions of justice, where bad cops are punished, and good cops protect people and guard the social order. As it has been argued so far, this is not the case. While the cinematic narratives point to problems in crime control, the films serve an ideological

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function by separating the fictionalised measures from their material reality, in much the same way that narratives of ‘police brutality’ strike a line between exceptional violence and regular policework, thereby obscuring the routine brutality of the latter. In order to reflect this, I use exceptional and extreme crime control measures alternatingly. First, the particular measure is rendered exceptional through its fictionalisation, simultaneously drawing on its real-life relevance and detaching it from its context of origin, political discourse, and existing critique. Second, the crime control measures are rendered extreme in order to appear that they are detached from actual policing. This project of critique consists of extrapolating backwards, from the cinematic crime control measure to the reality upon which it is based, and it is to this task that I turn next, beginning with an overview of the history of policing as violence work as way of starting the discussion of private policing.

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Penz, F., & Lu, A. (2011). Introduction: What Is Urban Cinematics? In Urban Cinematics: Understanding Urban Phenomena Through the Moving Image. Intellect Books. Plato. (1992). Republic (G. M. A. Grube & C. D. C. Reeve, Trans.). Hackett. Puar, J. (2017). The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Duke University Press. Rafter, N.  H. (2000). Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society. Oxford University Press. Rizov, V. (2022). A Walk in Thomas Annan’s Glasgow: Documentary Photography, Class and Urban Space. Journal of Urban History, Online First. Roberts, V., & Goodman, M. (2013). Dirty Harry as Pornography: Revealing the Unrevealed. Media Watch, 4(1), 74–83. RoboCop. (1987). Directed by Paul Verhoeven. US: Orion Pictures. Rodríguez, D. (2021). White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide. Fordham University Press. Schrader, S. (2019). Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing. University of California Press. Scott, J.  C. (1998). Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press. Seigel, M. (2018). Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police. Duke University Press. Sharkey, P. (2018). Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence. W.W. Norton & Company. Sterritt, D. (2014). The Cinema of Clint Eastwood: Chronicles of America. Columbia University Press. Street, J. (2016). Dirty Harry’s America: Clint Eastwood, Harry Callahan, and the Conservative Backlash. University Press of Florida. Tagg, J. (1988). The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Palgrave Macmillan. Tasker, Y. (2015). The Hollywood Action and Adventure Film. John Wiley & Sons. The Dark Knight Rises. (2012). Directed by Christopher Nolan. US: Warner Bros. Total Recall. (2012). Directed by Len Wiseman. US: Colombia Pictures. Watchmen. (2009). Directed by Zack Snyder. US: Warner Bros. Pictures. Weizman, E. (2012). Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. Verso Books. Weizman, E. (2017). Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability. Princeton University Press.

5 RoboCop

Alex Murphy, the Perfect Cop In RoboCop (1987), cops are presented without any veneer as violence workers at the behest of private interests.1 The film follows protagonist Alex Murphy (played by Peter Weller), a police officer recently transferred to one of Detroit West’s private police precincts, currently run by the company Omni Corporation Products (henceforth, OmniCorp), which has been given control of the city due to a rising level of crime and financial ruin. Murphy appears reserved; he is a husband and a father, and appears to be approving of his new partner’s, Anne Lewis (played by Nancy Allen), violent handling of arrestees. Shortly after his transfer, Murphy engages in a car chase of the infamous criminal Clarence Boddicker (played by Kurtwood Smith) and his gang. He confronts them in an abandoned industrial building, and is ultimately killed in a brutal  Alex Murphy as the perfect cop is best understood as occupying the space between two statements. First, the movie’s own position on labour and police work, exemplified by Sergeant Warren Reed, who, upon hearing of his police officer mention the idea of a strike early on in the film, remarks: ‘I don’t wanna hear any more talk about strike. We’re not plumbers, we’re police officers. And police officers don’t strike’ (RoboCop, 1987). And second, the political text written by Charles Denby (1960:2), who aptly summarises the process of automatization: ‘Automation is the machine, we know that, but it is also making the man a machine too.’ Murphy is the police officer made perfect—the one who merely fulfils orders. 1

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fashion by the gang. From the very beginning of the narrative, Murphy’s story is counterposed with the inner workings of OmniCorp, where plans are revealed by Senior Vice President Dick Jones (played by Ronny Cox) for a new robotised law enforcement in the form of an ED-209 droid which is supposed to supplant the existing police force and allow for the inauguration of Delta City, a crime-free utopia. Upon ED-209’s failure (leading to the death of an executive board member), an ambitious junior executive Bob Morton (played by Miguel Ferrer) circumvents the Senior VP and proposes to the CEO, only known as ‘The Old Man’ (played Daniel O’Herlihy), the RoboCop programme, where a human police officer will be transformed into a cyborg that would be more efficient than the all-mechanical droid. It is at this point that the corporate narrative and the personal one of Murphy converge and Morton transforms the murdered police officer’s body into RoboCop, thereby removing all memory of a past life. It is this tension that is at the core of RoboCop as an individualisation of the practice of violence work—he is supposed to be better than the all-mechanical ED-209 because of his capacity for human discretion, yet his bosses constantly seek ways in curtailing said discretion and autonomy. Discretion2 in policing appears to be a worthwhile façade for OmniCorp, but a nuisance in practice. Ultimately, all discretion lies within the executive room of OmniCorp. RoboCop stands as a perfect manifestation of a violence worker as he is an elaborate near-invulnerable machine. Much like Judge Dredd, he carries an oversized handgun and is plugged in real time to crimes being reported to the police, is capable of running facial recognition and is bound by four preprogrammed directives. One of the directives is hidden and dormant, while the other three are explicit: (1) serve the public trust; (2) protect the innocent; and (3) uphold the law. None of the directives get in the way of Murphy, as RoboCop violently crushes criminals in a series of vignettes on his first patrol—he withstands machine gun fire from a convenience store robber and beats him up, leaving him  In their discussion of discretion, Wall and Linnemann (2020:79) point to the manner in which ‘quite often discretion symptomatically reveals, in the form of outright enmity and racialized animus, the very worst of human prejudice’. 2

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unconscious; he defends a woman attacked by two men in a dark alley under a billboard advertising Delta City, in so doing symbolically castrating one of the assailants by shooting him in the crotch in a standoff with the victim as hostage, and subsequently unable to show empathy to the victim beyond signalling a rape crisis centre; finally, RoboCop handles a besieged building by punching through a wall and arresting the offender, a former city councilman who had taken a number of hostages, among them the mayor, in Detroit City Hall. From his ‘first mission’, RoboCop’s function is true to his directives, while also firmly rooted in the unquestioned violence of policing (Seigel, 2018a, b). The criminals are often cartoonish and exaggerated, clearly lacking motivation beyond sadism, irrational anger, or lack of respect for the existing social order, while RoboCop is shown as upholding the law of the city and violently overpowering its enemies. The moral is clear, if only implied at this point, for those who find the violence distasteful—RoboCop is merely reacting to the criminals in the perpetual War on Crime. Eventually, RoboCop is recognised by Lewis, his former partner, as well as Emil (played by Paul McCrane), a member of Boddicker’s gang, which leads to RoboCop visiting Murphy’s former home, his wife and son now gone. The moment of recognition is significant; it marks both a moment of intimacy and a hint of interiority, quite literally underneath the mechanised armour. Lewis recognises Murphy because he sees RoboCop do the gun-twirl gesture Murphy used to do before holstering his weapon. Prior to his death and transformation, Murphy explained to Lewis that he does the gesture as a way of living up to his son’s favourite TV character TJ Lazer, who does the same move ‘every time he takes down a bad guy’ and because ‘role models can be very important to a boy’. The significance of the example is twofold: first, a direct indictment of the violence of role models, RoboCop being one in the vein of TJ Lazer.3 To follow Hall’s discussion of violence in media, the representation of violence should be understood as ‘messages about violence’ (Gerbner as cited in Hall, 1980). In this sense, the code of conduct dictated by TJ Lazer diegetically, and  Rafter asserts that RoboCop himself cannot be separated from the image of Dirty Harry: ‘The robotic officer parodies the concept of an Eastwoodian supercop who feels nothing, fears nothing, and shoots everything in sight’ (2000:79) 3

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RoboCop on a meta-narrative level, is one of efficiency in crime control and moral benevolence, rooted in an aggressive ‘acting out’ only superficially separated from its roots in the settler colonial logic of ‘cowboys-andInjuns’ (Hall, 1980). Althusser uses the notion of ritual to illustrate the material practice of ideology. Althusser paraphrases Pascal, (2020:42): ‘Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.’ The rituals of media, as an ideological state apparatus, express themselves in the symbolic games they represent and reproduce. The ritual of the gun-twirl is both a role-play, both of a cowboy and TJ Lazer, and a ritual that reinforces the doer’s moral position. Broadly understood, both TJ Lazer and RoboCop are ‘presenting models of behaviour’ (Halloran as cited in Hall, 2021:238). Second, the ubiquity of media is evident throughout the film with frequent news broadcast intermissions and advertisements in the plot, thus further indicating the satirical character of the narrative, where due to the frequent meta-communication the viewer is continuously reminded that they are not only watching a film, but a conscious exaggeration of reality at that. Following the recognition of RoboCop as Murphy, the plot unravels quickly—Jones orders Boddicker to kill Morton, while RoboCop traces his own murder to Boddicker, which, after a violent confrontation, leads to the latter confirming that he works for Jones and was serving the interests of OmniCorp all along. At this point, the hidden fourth directive is exposed as RoboCop attempts to arrest Jones in the OmniCorp HQ and is unable to due to a failsafe command that RoboCop cannot act against an OmniCorp executive. The corporate and the personal are interwoven to the point that the protagonist must confront that he was wronged by not simply an individual—either Morton’s ruthless machinations or Boddicker’s sadist violence—but a structural force in the form of a giant corporation that is virtually identical with law enforcement. In this sense, RoboCop ceases to be a guardian of the system, as the system turns against him at the exact moment it is revealed as corrupt. As a fallen guardian, with his benevolence intact, RoboCop is now attacked by an ED-209 and the police force, both controlled by Jones. Lewis, however, helps him escape, while due to the OmniCorp’s poor management, the police go on strike and riots break out, as Jones releases Boddicker’s gang and arms them with powerful weapons to use against RoboCop. After a final showdown, in which

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RoboCop and Lewis take on the gang, Lewis is injured, while RoboCop manages to kill all of the gang, despite ending up injured. Finally, in the OmniCorp HQ the Senior VP Jones is confronted by Robocop in the middle of a board meeting, resulting in the revelation of the murder of Morton. Jones takes ‘The Old Man’ hostage, but is quickly fired by him, which allows RoboCop to circumvent the fourth directive and kill him. With the corrupt VP taken out, the arc of recognition and identity wraps up too with ‘The Old Man’ congratulating RoboCop and asking him for his name, to which RoboCop replies, ‘Murphy’. There are several strands, and it is important to pick them out at this point before going into a more in-depth analysis in the following sections. First, there is the theme of recognition. Murphy as an individual represents a journey of self-discovery and identity reaffirmation against the odds of a corrupt system and a crime-ridden, hostile world. The role of the individual in liberal narrative cannot be overstated—as Lowe (2015) notes, the literary genres of autobiography and the novel, alongside economics and political philosophy, worked to mediate and resolve liberalism’s contradictions (Lowe, 2015:46). More so than this, the story of the individual’s overcoming, in Lowe’s case Equiano’s Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789), both expressed the ‘structure of feeling’ of the time (Lowe, 2015:48) and ‘exemplified a fluency in the languages for defining and delimiting humanity’ (Lowe, 2015:49). Although in a vastly different context, some of the characteristics of the liberal aesthetics of the narrative of overcoming hardship to do with ‘the emancipation of the individual as if it were a collective emancipation’ remain (Lowe, 2015:50, emphasis in original). Alex Murphy is deprived of his identity at a pivotal point that is simultaneously the moment of his murder and his resurrection into an impersonal servant. For a short time, while RoboCop is unaware of his personal history, he does not possess a story and thus an individuality; he lacks interiority. It is through intimacy that RoboCop reassembles his identity into the memory of Alex Murphy. Interestingly, it is not a personal relationship that results in Murphy being recognised, but his enemy and his colleague. Despite the process of ‘returning-toMurphy’, he still remains bounded in the limits of police work exclusively—the boundaries of intimacy are those contained within police

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work. As such, Murphy is an example of a fallen guardian par excellence as he is the liberal individual stand-in put without a choice against the forces of society, against which he is fated to be ultimately successful and, by doing so, achieve a higher degree of authenticity as a person. Even more so, despite his fall, Murphy never ceases to be morally right, that is, ideologically adjusted, in the framework of the film, despite the satirical exaggeration of violence.

 iolence Work and the Formation V of the Dangerous Class If the history of the city of Detroit is the history of the US, as the dictum goes, then it surely is also a history of US policing. Set in a dystopian, Reagan-era-inspired Detroit, Michigan, Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop (1987) is equally indicative of the history of modern policing. In this section, my argument seeks to demonstrate the ways in which the dangerous class was formed as a reason to justify the institution of modern policing. I posit policing to be violence work (Seigel, 2018a). That is (Seigel, 2018b:26): Police realise−they make real−the core of the power of the state. That is what calling police ‘violence workers’ can convey. […] It is about what their labour rests upon and therefore conveys into the material world. It takes work to distribute state violence. Somebody has to do it.

As Seigel clarifies, this definition is based on the Weberian claim that the police represent the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence (2018b:26). This section will seek to argue that although the distinction between private and public policing can appear to be useful, it also hides the reality of violence and its reliance on the construction of a ‘dangerous class’. I will demonstrate this by exploring a noted example of private policing, the Bow Street Runners in England, and of public policing, slave patrols in the US. By doing so, I will provide a foundation for the analysis of the film and for engagement with further problems of policing practices in the following chapters.

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Privatisation is a recurring question in discussions on policing. In the context of England, it is not unusual to start with an emphasis that early forms of policing were almost exclusively private such as thief-catchers. The most well-known example being the Bow Street Runners (Cox, 2020:18), founded in 1754 by Henry Fielding, noted novelist and magistrate, and later taken over by his younger brother, Justice John Fielding, who expanded the activities of the organisation in 1772 into a freely available newspaper entitled The Quarterly Pursuit (later also known as The Police Gazette, and later still as Hue & Cry). Interestingly, the Bow Street Public Office (used synonymously with Police Office) also undertook international activities such as pursuing criminals abroad and, in the case of Sir Richard Ford’s tenure during 1801–1806 as chief magistrate of the Bow Street Public Office, in close proximity to the Alien Office, itself created following the Aliens Act in 1793 with the goal of policing borders (Cox, 2020:21). Interestingly, Bow Street was funded directly by the Treasury since 1753, and its chief magistrates were appointed by the government (see Cox, 2020). This precedes the institution of modern policing and still possesses characteristics of informal police forces. A more detailed description on this will be provided later in this chapter. Nevertheless, the Bow Street Public Office remains an example par excellence of a case that delineates the final stages of this very transition. In fact, this transition is best understood as continuation since the Runners were incorporated in the London Metropolitan Police upon its creation in 1829 (Cox, 2020). As a precedent to modern policing, historiography has delineated an ‘informal’ stage of policing (cf. Reichel, 1988), where, unlike examples such as Bow Street, policing relied primarily on a vague assumption to do with a ‘collective conscience’. Because of it, policing faced fewer barriers than it does now and could readily elicit cooperation from the public (Reichel, 1988:52). Spitzer and Scull (1977:20) point to a significant problem in this period of no centralised administration and professionalisation where payment was often done on the basis of results (that is, return of stolen property), which created the incentive for collaboration between thieves and police. The case of RoboCop is pertinent to this line of inquiry as it represents police privatisation. While it is easy to explain it with the context of its production being a period of increased

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neoliberalisation, the history of private policing reveals that the private/ public distinction can be obfuscatory as it can put emphasis on the private, or the neoliberal, as a problem, rather than the police. This is significant as it hides the continuity to policing’s reification of ‘a dangerous class’ that necessitates policing. Engaging with Lundman’s history of policing can demonstrate the construction of this reification. Lundman (1980) has suggested a three-­ stage model for the development of policing—(1) informal, (2) transitional, and (3) modern. The first stage in Lundman’ sociological model is Durkheimian in character and is premised on the distinction of mechanical and organic solidarity (and respective forms of social organisation with differing degree of complexity) expressed in the notion of a ‘collective conscience’ that is inherent to ‘primitive societies’ (1980:14). In other words, ‘primitive’ societies were more harmonious in nature due to ‘common or jointly shared set of values and life style’ (1980:14), and as such they did not require a formalised police profession as transgressors were punished by the collective. The third stage is characterised by the supposed radical change in social problems stemming from urbanisation and industrialisation such as urban riots, public drunkenness, and the emergence of a dangerous class (Lundman, 1980). The assumption here is that this class necessitated a modern police force that would be equipped to deal with it. However, I posit that the police and the dangerous class are co-constitutive, in the sense that the dangerous class was reified as a justification for the existence of the police. The reality of policing did not substantially change as many private police services, such as the Bow Street Runners, got incorporated into their modern successors. There does not appear to be a meaningful distinction that police changed its function from protecting the interests of a capitalists and property owners to something else. This can be demonstrated with an example of what technically could be termed a form of ‘transitional’ police—slave patrols (Reichel, 1988; cf. Durr, 2015). The transitional, second stage in the model is the period in which there were attempts at responding to the changing social reality, what Lundman describes as the shift from mechanically to organically organised societies as per Durkheim, but nevertheless lacked the key characteristics of modern police. Lundman goes on to argue that public consent for the police

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was hard-won and did not occur immediately due to ideas around personal freedom and societal liberty. The factor of elite involvement and private interests are also not to be ignored. Importantly, the institutionalisation of the police, even once afoot, took on an uneven distribution geographically with differences such as 1838  in New  York to 1861  in Washington, DC. For Lundman, the transitional stage of policing was characterised by (1) police officers who are not employed full-time; (2) lack of continuity in office and in procedure; and (3) no accountability to ‘a central governmental authority’ (Lundman, 1980:19–20; cf. Reichel, 1988:66). This period also coincided with a proliferation of vigilance committees or other vigilante groups (Schneider, 1980), which were xenophobic in character, anti-abolitionist, or generally white supremacist—indicating a continuity in reifications of a dangerous groups that need to be policed, albeit informally. Lundman’s model of the history of policing presents similar problems to those discussed and outlined in Chap. 3 on ‘urban social science’. Namely, that liberal social science in the Global North was concerned either with justifying the existing colonial order or with discovering ways of policing the urban poor. Racialisation was at the core of both. Recall that Connell (1997:1511) describes the ‘broad cultural dynamic in which tensions of liberalism and empire were central’, but rather than remaining simply on the cultural level of ideas, as per Durkheim and Lundman, it is important to note the material ways in which this historiography is misguided, and the direct ways in which it perpetuates the ‘global difference’ in the sense of a ‘difference between civilization of the metropole and an Other whose main feature was its primitiveness’ (1997:1516–1517). In particular, this difference possesses a domestic character within the US—the urban origin story of the modern police (for example, see Schneider, 1980, on the history of Detroit) is one of the Northern US and as such it is starkly different from the slave states in the South. Reichel (1988) aptly challenges Lundman’s historiographic model (1980) by outlining the institutionalisation of slave patrols in the colony of Carolina as early as 1704’s patrol act. This early instance of public policing was primarily concerned with runaway enslaved people, while subsequent iterations gradually incorporated a focus on policing uprisings and a merge of patrols with the colonial militia, the separation of said patrols, the

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substitution of paid patrolmen to volunteers, and the introduction of women into the patrols. Developments which speak to a pronounced public element in the sense that general population, with the exclusion of the group reified as dangerous and in need of control, could be mobilised for the purpose of policing in the interests of property and by means of violence. Importantly, said violence is always presented as ‘defensive in nature while making unruly populations as not merely transgressors of positive law but as hostis  humani generis: “enemies of all humankind”’ (Wall, 2021:15). The colonial continuity also illustrates the critique highlighted by Connell above. In essence, the slave patrols were an established system of social control that preceded the formulation of modern policing and, in many significant ways, served as the basis for modern police forces. Thus, in a clear precedent to the modern forms of policing, slave patrols, as a public service, speak to a wider characteristic of amorphousness of police power and its capacity to expand its capacities on the basis of a dangerous group. As Reichel notes (1988:66), the slave patrols only partially correspond to the characteristics outlined by Lundman in the sense that (1) people involved in the patrols were not employed full-time and (2) patrols were only somewhat continuous and their procedure was regularly modified; (3) the patrols, however, did report to a central authority, unlike common examples of transitional policing such as the private institution of Fielding’s Bow Street Runners (see Lundman, 1980:16–17; also, Cox, 2020). As such, slave patrols were not entirely professional, but were public and modern for most intents and purposes. Also, Reichel notes elsewhere (1992:5, emphasis added): In various times and places, patrols were accountable to county court justices (North Carolina), town commissioners (Tennessee), parish judges (Louisiana), justices of the peace (Arkansas and Georgia), and county boards of supervisors (Mississippi). Interestingly, several of these government authorities are the same ones that would eventually supervise formal police organizations.

Put simply, Reichel demonstrates that slave patrols were public in the sense of state-run. The continuity between slave patrols and modern

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policing is clear, and the distinction in historiographic terms appears to be more formal than substantial. I posit that slave patrols, much like the Bow Street Runners, are the foundation on which modern policing grew to formulate its capacity and impose limits on its discretion. Both predecessors relied on the construction of a dangerous class and served the interests, regardless of whether public or private in character, of a property-­owning class. This continuity is evident even once modern policing was established, as many of the reforms in the 1800s (for example, see Glasgow in 1866, Rizov, 2022) were to do with returning powers to the modern police that the slave patrols possessed—the expansion of police discretion and historical examples of no-knock raids. The important undercurrent here is the policing of property by reifying a certain group as dangerous; regardless of whether policing is private or public, the constant function remains. It is hardly surprising that the earliest form of modern policing was in fact the social control of enslaved people and the ensuring of their status as property to a wealthy class. In Detroit’s case, the context preceding the founding of the city’s metropolitan police force in 1865 was one of clear spatial segregation along ethnic lines, a prominent vigilance committee, and a relative lack of urban unrest (Schneider, 1980). In addition to the vigilance committee, a key precursor along the lines of the Bow Street Public Office was the Merchants’ Police set-up in 1857 via knowledge exchange from Chicago’s Merchants’ Police (Schneider, 1980:63). Moreover, this function of maintaining the property and labour relations notedly took on the characterisation of enslaved people as especially dangerous, and in Detroit, specifically, the Civil War period saw an increase in concern about raids from the South. However, it is exceedingly important to qualify this characterisation—in direct reference to the South Carolina law of 1686—that the danger should be understood as exclusively directed towards whiteness; hence the efforts at mobilising the entire white population in the state with the duties of policing people running away from enslavement. The example of Detroit, although different from the Southern states, still speaks to this as one of the city's first major episodes of urban unrest was in 1863 where the high-profile trial of a Black man accused of rape, accusations which were later deemed false, necessitated the involvement of the army, and it ultimately escalated into a urban unrest in which a mob targeted the

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Black population of the city, with property damage reaching dangerously close to the fashionable districts (Schneider, 1980:70–6). The first officially recognised institutions of modern policing, if we were to put slave patrols aside, served a similar function of property protection and targeting particular classes and ethnicities. In this sense, it is also important to add that xenophobia and the renegotiation of the boundaries of the category of whiteness had a lot to do with what in general accounts of urban development has been called urban riots—seen as the evidence of ‘the dangerous class’ in the form of a crowd. For instance, one of the first major incidents of such kind was the Lager Beer Riot in Chicago in 1855, where following an increase in liquor licence fees and restrictions in the selling of alcohol on Sundays, a crowd of angry German immigrants, used to drinking beer on Sundays, protested in front of Chicago’s courthouse. The recently elected mayor Levi Boone, who had campaigned on a Law and Order ticket heavily focusing on temperance (restrictions on alcohol consumption), lacked a force to enact said temperance restrictions, as the city employed only 70 part-time watchmen in contrast to a population of 80,000 (Mitrani, 2013:14–5). Thus, upon taking on the role of mayor, Boone hired 80 special policemen, all of them native-born and accountable to him. It was the very same police force that was ordered to break up the crowd of German protesters in front of the courthouse. While they managed to do so relatively easily, another group of protesters grouped together to free arrested compatriots, which escalated Boone’s reaction to deputising another 150 police officers, ultimately resulting in violent altercations, the declaration of martial law, and the strategic cutting off of escape points—all parts of the events later known as the Lager Beer Riot of 1855. Ostensibly, it is easy to explain away this example, which led to the formation of the Chicago Police Department, as xenophobic legislation that discriminated against German and Irish immigrant workers in the growing wage labour economy of the city and that privileged the native-born Anglo Puritans. However, Mitrani (2013) points to the context of the political economy and the type of labour done by Irish and German immigrants in comparison to the more affluent Anglo citizens of Chicago, the former being primarily proletarianised and undertaking wage labour, while the latter of merchant backgrounds and property owners. Moreover, the temperance

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policies, although clearly religious in character, also had the function of further policing the behaviour of a very specific class of migrant labourers. The formation of early forms of policing in both examples—Reichel’s discussion of slave patrols and Mitrani’s account of Chicago’s Lager Beer Riot—is in response to an increasing dangerous class and as a reaction to it, with the goal of increasing the tools at the hand of a propertied class to protect its interests. Ultimately, this led to the city of  Chicago’s Committee on Police explicitly creating a ‘military-style police department to keep order in the face of the threats posed by a mobile class of wage workers, not to fight crime’ (Mitrani, 2013:27). In fact, such accounts of modern policing are not uncommon. Detroit’s own first modern police department was quite clear in its legislative codification that, although it will be funded by taxes from all citizens, it will not seek to protect all of them. Primarily, it would be concerned with the central commercial areas and the richer neighbourhoods (Schneider, 1980). In this context, it is important to understand that modern policing was explicitly formulated as an institution with the goal of protecting property—crime as a general concern only subsequently became a concern, and, when it did, it always took on a racialised and classed character. As Mitrani aptly summarises the example of the Lager Beer Riot, ‘the police acted to preserve the businessmen’s understanding of order’ (Mitrani, 2013:32; cf. McHarris, 2021), not unlike the slave patrols’ enforcement of plantation owners’ interests. The result of this is what Schrader (2019:39) has described as the police’s central mystifications that serve to legitimise its existence: Police power relied on two static reifications, crime and race, which became mutual surrogates. Construed as a fungible activity intended to achieve security, policing was an engine of intertwining discourses and practices of criminalization and racialization.

In fact, transition from slave patrols to modern policing’s control of foreign and racialised populations can directly be related to the social restructuring following the abolition of slavery in the US.  As Kahlil Gibran Muhammad notes (2019), the period following abolition saw an increase in white supremacist and liberal alike theorisations of the

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essential criminality of African Americans, driven by influential sociological thinkers such as Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism (2019:24). The sociological construction of reality towards the end of the nineteenth century also saw  the mobilisation of statistics, notably in the work of Frederick L.  Hoffman (Gibran Muhammad, 2019:35), as yet another ‘proof ’ of inherent criminality in African Americans, select groups of foreigners, and more broadly in notions of a ‘criminal class’ in the works of eugenicist figures such as Francis Galton and Cesare Lombroso in Europe. Once the powers of slave patrols were removed by virtue of the abolition of slavery, US policing required a reformulation of its capacities to police African Americans once established as citizens. It is this process of incorporating African Americans into the boundaries of ‘a dangerous class’ as well as racialising crime that Kahlil Gibran Muhammad demonstrates (2019). In essence, crime was constructed as a social problem that necessitates policing, but once viewed from a structural perspective the function of the construction reveals to be the perpetuation of policing. That is to say, the maintenance of the status quo at the expense of racialised, classed, disenfranchised, or otherwise exploited groups, including women and queer people. It is this that Seigel refers to as ‘violence work’—‘work that relies upon violence or the threat thereof ’ (2018a:9). It is in this sense that, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore notes, this violence expresses itself in ‘the cause of premature death’ (2007:28) as much as it ‘produces political power in a vicious cycle’ (Gilmore, 2002:16). As Seigel further adds, the police make real ‘the core of the power of the state’ (2018b:26). Importantly, as it will be shown throughout the case studies, the ‘state’ could be broadly understood to be synonymous with the established social order as it could very well be that private actors, vigilantes, or lynch mobs/slave patrols are the ones sanctioned to inflict violence. The contingency of whether the police is privatised or public changes little about this core function of violence, once placed in the historical context in which criminalisation was understood. In reference to RoboCop, the matter can be clearly illustrated with the historical background provided here in mind. Namely, the film’s narrative reveals the interwoven nature of policing and capital, where capital is put at the service of policing, that is, the police stations are privatised so that they can be better managed by OmniCorp, with the goal of eliminating crime by a

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techno-­solutionist logic. However, this is revealed to be a moment of injustice by individualising the corruption in OmniCorp, and thereby displacing the contradiction onto a formal resolution—the Senior VP is killed and the film ends happily with Murphy’s recognition arc complete. The problem of a ‘bad cop’ is transposed onto the corporate structure and resolved through an informal death penalty of sorts. The conditions of private ownership remain unresolved and, more importantly, unchallenged. All of this goes against the immediate context of the 1980s and Detroit’s deindustrialisation as well as the growing shadow of Reaganomics and neoliberalism. Seigel notes, as neoliberalism exacerbated inequality, police-inflected violence expanded and intensified (Seigel, 2018a:182). In simple terms, Seigel’s argument (2018a:187) reinforces the critique put forward here against the discursive manoeuvre that is evident on the level of the film’s narrative: All this points to a sobering clinch: inasmuch as protests against police militarization or incidental police racism grant the categories that sustain the fiction of a benevolent state, autonomous from the market, they reinforce the damage they hope to curtail. Terrible power conceals itself behind the consequential myths of the criminal justice system, beginning with “crime” but extending immediately to those myths that posit police violence as exceptional: “police militarization,” “paramilitarism,” “police racism,” “racial profiling,” “excessive use of force,” “police brutality,” “police state,” “police privatization,” and, underlying all of these, “state” and “market” as autonomous realms.

With all of this in mind, the absence of race in RoboCop, its criminalisation, or the complete erasure of labour militancy, especially with regards to working conditions and automation, is particularly telling and merits discussion. For an unaware viewer, the placing of RoboCop in Detroit might appear entirely arbitrary as a catch-all for a deindustrialised, crimeridden city. The next section addresses this in relation to the ideological manoeuvre at play in the film.

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Labour and Automation in Detroit The city of Detroit is a few steps away from Plato’s perfect city. In the narrative world of RoboCop, the creation of the perfect city requires the solution to the problem of crime. From a historical perspective, it remains a significant moment in the history of US industrialisation, its subsequent deindustrialisation, and the concomitant white, capital flight, and underdevelopment of Black communities. The history is rich but so as to not go into too much detail, the foremost important aspect of the history of Detroit in this examination of RoboCop is the history of worker struggle in opposition to private forms of policing. The question is raised: Are the police workers? In a Marxist sense, the simple answer is that the police is at the service of capital and is directly opposed to the cause of labour—the previous section in this chapter attests to this. Historically, since its formation in the Global North’s cities, modern policing has been preoccupied with the maintenance of social order (McHarris, 2021), a classed, patriarchal, and racialised notion that was weaponised against immigrants, ethnic and racial minorities, and women. The police’s definition of order, much like in Plato’s conception, coincided with that of business, robber barons, and politicians. Disorder and crime also relied on the concomitant reification of race, especially following the end of the Reconstruction period with the formalisation of new forms of social control on Black Americans in the form of the Black Codes and Jim Crow segregation. In broader terms, the OmniCorp of Detroit is unequivocally the mirror image of the Ford Motor Company. A city shaped by private industry, Detroit remains a case study of the havoc that capital can wreak upon a single place in terms of surveillance, repression, and worker immiseration. The changes in the auto industry, commonly referred to as Fordism, in the early 1900s put in place by the Ford Motor Company, transformed both automobile manufacture and the city itself. This included the first moving assembly line and the novel forms of ‘scientific management’ of labour known as Taylorism (Jay+Conklin, 2020:78). As early as 1914,

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Ford’s share of the automobile market was nearly 50 percent (2020:78), and, for the most of Detroit’s history, the others in the Big Three, General Motors, and Chrysler followed. Following the 1910s, in parallel to increasing manufacture speed (the Ford T Model reportedly took 7 hours to assemble in 1910, while by 1914 it could be assembled in 90 minutes—Jay+Conklin, 2020:78) and increase in sales,4 the working conditions were severely exploitative and the turnaround of workers was common, as were injuries and hatred of bosses, foremen, and supervisors. With the increase of advances in Taylorisation, the deskilling of the work was at the core of the efficiency in manufacture. As Charles Denby remarks (1960:1) at the opening of his summary of automation: ‘The intellectual—be he scientist, engineer or writer—may think Automation means the elimination of heavy labor. The production worker sees it as the elimination of the laborer.’ It was in January 1914 that the Ford Motor Company announced it would provide a $5 salary for autoworkers, effectively doubling their existing wages (Meyer, 1981). The implementation of the policy was not as straightforward as the raise in wages suggest. Rather, it consisted of the existing salary and a profit-sharing scheme, to which only certain workers and only in specific conditions would be eligible. This development was done in parallel to the institution of Ford’s own Sociological Department. Its explicit goal was to investigate the lives of workers and their characters. In reality, it often stimulated patriarchal structures, where men would be penalised if women were not staying at home, as well as allowed a paternal role for the Ford Motor Company in de facto putting in place systems of surveillance of its workers and having a direct hand in shaping their spending and lifestyles. The scheme put forward by the Sociological

 Jay+Conklin (2020:78) point to the following numbers:

4

While 10,600 Model Ts were sold in all of 1909, 16,000 were sold per month by 1913, and in 1924 Ford’s factories produced 7000 autos per day. From 1908 to the early 1920s the price of the Model T dropped from 1850 to 1290.

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Department5 was an attempt at indoctrinating immigrant workers into ‘an “American standard of living,” which it felt was the basis for industrial efficiency’ (Meyer, 1981:6). By the early 1920s, the Sociological Department’s mission of elevation of workers gave way to sole concern for production and sociology gave way to the Service Department, for all means and purposes a private police force led by Harry Bennett (Norwood, 1996:372). The Service Department was meant to control, among other Ford Motor Company plants, the notable River Rouge plant, which in the 1920s contained 100,000 workers, remaining the world’s largest factory throughout the 1930s. The Service Department, consisting mainly of former boxers or gangsters, had unprecedented powers including hiring and firing personnel, even against the wishes of foremen and supervisors (Norwood, 1996). The Ford Servicemen often used violence against workers, both as a quotidian management tactic in factories and in larger protest events such as the famous Ford Hunger March in 1932 (where former workers marched to factories to demand their rehire) and the Battle of the Overpass in 1937. The Servicemen were often supported by the local police, be it the Detroit PD or the police in Dearborn (the location of Ford’s HQ). In direct continuity to the issues of privatisation raised in the previous section in this chapter, the mayor of Dearborn in 1929 was Clyde Ford, Henry’s cousin, while the Dearborn chief of police was Carl Brooks, a former Ford Serviceman. In addition to the Servicemen who would violently crush pickets, the police were often hired to assist strike-­ breakers past picket lines (Jay+Conklin, 2020:83). On a more general level, and in a direct parallel to the Detroit Merchants’ Police, all of the major automobile manufacturers such as Ford, General Motors, Dodge Motors, Studebaker, and Packard worked with the Employers’ Association of Detroit and relied on labour spies and blacklisted workers—they also had a roster of 44,000 strike-breakers as early as the 1920s (Jay+Conklin,  Such an approach is also central to counterinsurgency and the practice of pacification (to be discussed further in Chap. 8). Namely, Toews points to counterinsurgency’s demand for the development of ‘capacities to understand the so-called human terrain’ (2017:60). This capacity is rooted in social, cultural, and linguistic knowledge. As such, it is key to counterinsurgency’s focus on ‘hearts and minds’ and was evident in the deployment of ‘Human Terrain Teams’ in Iraq and Afghanistan (Toews, 2017:60). 5

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2020:86). In the period of the Servicemen, who had a US-wide presence, Jay+Conklin (2020:90) point to the inordinate increase in incarceration by 73 percent between 1925 and 1935. As early as 1944, there were about a dozen strikes per week (Jay+Conklin, 2020). This was no accident either, as worker exploitation and its group differentiation on the basis of race remained prevalent in the decades after. At a certain point in time, regarding the workplace injuries,6 in Michigan alone ‘one workplace death, five amputations, and one hundred serious injuries occurred per day in 1944’ (Jay+Conklin, 2020:100). This, in turn, was evident in the power of the multiple militant worker and revolutionary organisations such as the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (and the Chrysler, Ford, etc. revolutionary union movements), and the Black Panthers. As Conklin and Jay point out (2020), this was a key moment of what they call ‘the dialectic of integration and repression’—as workers strived towards better working conditions, and African Americans more generally towards civil rights and liberation, the state increased its capacity for repression whether through gun laws (in California 1967, following comments directly relating gun laws to the Detroit Rebellion of 1967, see Leonardatos, 1999:972–980) and the expansion of policing’s capacity for the extent and scale of violence through SWAT teams (Schrader, 2019:214). In Detroit specifically, there is ‘Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets’ (STRESS), an initiative by the Detroit Police Department launched in 1971 (McCoy, 2021).  Jay and Conklin (2020:162) further add:

6

A 1973 report found that significantly more people died each year inside U.S. factories than on the battlefields in Vietnam. The report “estimated 65 on-the-job deaths per day among auto workers, for a total of some 16,000 annually. Approximately half of these deaths were from heart attacks. There were also 63,000 cases of disabling diseases and about 1,700,000 cases of lost or impaired hearing. These statistics did not include many long-term illnesses endemic to foundry workers and others exposed to poisonous chemicals and gases, nor did they include deaths and injuries made by accident.” These 16,000 deaths pale in comparison to the toll of industrial diseases, which the Public Health Service estimated took 100,000 lives each year. Foundry workers, machinists, and coarse-metal finishers had a significantly greater chance of having fatal heart disease and lung disease than other workers. These were the jobs that Detroit’s Black workers were primarily assigned.

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In terms of automation, Charles Denby’s work on a special issue of Detroit’s News & Letters on the topic demonstrates the reality of the process for workers. Widely heralded as ‘progressive’ and ‘the future’, Denby meticulously demonstrated his own experience of automation and that of other workers in Detroit’s auto-, rubber, and other factories. The reality was the reduction of labourers with many corporations reducing their factory employees in the hundreds of thousands. Denby clearly demonstrates how: Detroit has been put on the depressed areas list. At the very same time the “Big Three” in auto—G.M., Ford, Chrysler—have revealed that their executives have been given enormous rewards in bonuses and dividends

More than this, the commonplace injuries that increased in concert with the productivity during World War II (Jay+Conklin, 2020:100) were to multiply with the onset of automatisation. Denby outlines the ways in which the worker is continuously put in situations where any lapse of attention is likely to result in either injury or penalty imposed by a foreman. This is in conjunction with an increasing practice of isolating the worker as well as alienating them from their mental faculties due to the rote, repetitive work, thereby resulting in a day-long situation in which ‘you’re fighting in your own mind and every minute you look up to see what time it is’ (Denby, 1960:2). Automation is thus the actual impoverishment of workers within and without the factory done in the financial interests of corporations. There remains much to be said about Murphy’s role in relation to this history. On a literal note, the rich labour history of the city of Detroit is reversed in the name of the film’s eponymous hero. Namely, the word robot derives from the Czech for ‘forced labour’ [robota], originally used by Karel Čapek in the play R.U.R: Rossum’s Universal Robots (Petersen, 2007:44). Thus, Murphy’s robotisation is to be understood as both a deindividuation (through the loss of his memory) and a mechanisation, thereby making him an improved cop—one without autonomy and identity, and thus no potential of developing interests that might go against the system. In a certain way, RoboCop is an automatised worker— he is in constant danger, he is isolated from others, and he is alienated

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from himself. RoboCop, more importantly  however, is a violence worker—he is someone who would have been deployed in the interests of any of the first automatising corporations, the ‘Big Three’ of Ford, General Motors, or Chrysler. This is the main ideological reversal that takes place in RoboCop, the reshaping of the history of Detroit. Both labour struggle and automation are put at the forefront of the film, but both are warped to represent police work. The reality is that Detroit remains one of the first battlegrounds against industrial automation and its meaning for workers. RoboCop obscures this. With reference to RoboCop, the historical parallels here might need further clarification. First, the role of sociology has been noted in its management of one of the key contradictions of liberalism—the discourse of equality. In both the examples mentioned in Chap. 3 as well as the case of the Ford Motor Company, it is evident that the poor and underdeveloped had to be ameliorated in their conditions as much as studied, kept under surveillance, and policed. As Jay and Conklin point out (2020; cf. Escobar, 1993), this manifested itself in a dialectic of repression and integration, where as much as there were gains in worker rights or Black liberation, there was also an increase in the repressive powers of the police. Second, the transformation of the Sociological Department into the Service Department is not extraordinary—the function of worker control and repression remained the same; only the manner in which it was enforced changed. To evocatively capture the story of labour in Detroit and its presence in RoboCop, it is important to note that the film refers to the nameless OmniCorp CEO as ‘The Old Man’—an allusion to both Ronald Reagan and Henry Ford.

From Detroit to Delta City The looming shadow of the Great Rebellion of Detroit in 1967 remains present in RoboCop, despite there being no mention or engagement with the events of the uprising. Even when the police force goes on strike in the final act of the film and a riot breaks loose, it is simply an image of sadistically violent gangs driven by greed destroying the city. This is in stark contrast to the reality of events surrounding Detroit 1967

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(Jay+Conklin, 2020; Jay & Leavell, 2017), where the violence of the police provoked people to protest. When the police could not manage the situation and were reported to only escalate the violence, the army and the National Guard were deployed to assist the police in crushing the Great Rebellion. The events of 1967 remain a pivotal moment in the understanding the function of policing as violence work. Moreover, the events of the Great Rebellion contributed significantly to the Kerner Commission Report, which was key in the spread of non-lethal weapons among the police with the purposes of policing urban space and public order. In typical Hollywood fashion, the solution to crime is better technology and bigger weapons on the side of the ‘good guys’, who, by the end of the film, are also revealed to be ‘the guys in suits’. The cinematic imagination of a dystopian Detroit as a projection of 1980s Reaganomics is one of towering corporate fortresses and decrepit rust-covered factories, modernist architecture, and industrial ruin. OmniCorp’s tower is vertically imposing with glass elevators leading up to boardrooms overseeing the city’s skyline. The industrial ruins are its opposite and appear almost subterraneous, abandoned long ago, and now used as criminal hideouts or drug factories. There is no reference to the Kerner Commission Report following the urban uprisings in the 1960s and the Commission’s recommendation for policing to move away from scattershot firing into crowds and towards non-lethal weapons such as teargas. Likewise, there is no reference to the multiple debates around the carceral state, the DPD, and the STRESS initiative  (see McCoy, 2021), let alone increasing police use of military technology with the explicit goal of overpolicing Black people. RoboCop is simply a member of the Crime Prevention Unit, thus further reifying the notion of crime. Crime is the problem; killing criminals is the solution. The issue of non-lethal weapons is absent in RoboCop, and there is a similar lack of concern for life in RoboCop 2, where the wildest fantasies of right realist criminologists are given primetime coverage and implemented by private companies. The first urban scene in RoboCop 2 shows a night diorama of Detroit’s depravity—a mohawked punk injects the nuke drug into his neck; the camera pans sideways to reveal a mother sitting on the street feeding her baby a bottle of milk; an elderly woman is pushing a shopping cart full of garbage and the camera follows her as a biker gang speeds past on the boulevard. As the woman crosses the street,

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a car speeds towards her and crashes into the cart. A man swiftly rushes to the woman and robs her, only a moment later to be beaten up and robbed by two sex workers down the street. The two women walk past gangs beating up people on the side of the street in front of a porn shop. An explosion in the gun shop next door blows open the shopfront and two men run into it stealing as many guns and ammo as possible. As the group of men are looting, picking up bazookas and AK-47s, they hear police sirens and run out of the shop. They gleefully blow up the police car, unwitting that the near-invincible RoboCop is inside, one of the few police officers currently not on strike. If the world depicted in Dredd was a right realist fantasy, then the Detroit of RoboCop 2 (1990) is not far behind. The city is presented as an independent force that is unchecked and antagonistic to order. A veritable Wild West, in which RoboCop, much like in a game of cowboys, twirls the gun in his right hand before holstering it on his thigh. The lines are drawn; the enemies are unsophisticated and lacking individuality beyond their glee in mindless ultraviolence. There is no engagement with why people might do drugs or commit crime, only an attempt to strike fear into the viewer of what lawlessness looks like. As noted, this complements RoboCop’s status as the perfect cop, since he is both invincible to attacks and impervious to the seductions of corruption or hedonism. As such, he is also the perfect strike-breaker, a Platonic guardian dog of a worker, much like the genetically engineered Dredd. With reference to the latter, there is little recourse to judges or juries; in a similar fashion, RoboCop simply acts and neutralises the threat in front of him. The reciting of Miranda rights is as robotic and mechanic and as empty as every other pretence for protocol. Delta City, the utopian construction of OmniCorp, is very much the desired order of ‘The Old Man’. RoboCop’s task is described clearly by Plato’s analogy between auxiliary guardians and dogs. Wall has commented on the role of the police dog in maintaining racialised terror (2014), and Sze has observed the ideological terrain in which racism, policing, and animals meet (2021:56). It is through the dangerous figure of the dog and its position of ‘a precarious balance between wolf-like ferocity toward enemies and gentleness toward its own’ that the role of the philosopher-ruler becomes even more explicit (Deane & Shuffelton,

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2016). In effect, if the worker is only to work and the guardian only to identify and eradicate threats, the philosopher’s task is to produce the knowledge and criteria for the successful maintenance of the order (2016:497). In the case of the film, it is exactly OmniCorp that gets to define what the problem is with the city and it is OmniCorp that funds the criminal organisations that produce said problem, that is, crime. To paraphrase Marx in a tongue-in-cheek manner: Who could deny that crime is productive? Having achieved a baseline of a problem, OmniCorp offers the solution—its own guardians, capable of policing themselves through the hidden directive, thus reinforcing the idea that crime can be solved with technology via a solutionist discourse that fits their interests. Notably, such framing, needless to say, is ideological, as it produces a representational structure of the city where its social problems and their roots in economic inequality and exploitation are obscured. The obscurity of the depiction—the city as powerful individuals fighting for their interests in a cut-throat competition—hides the material basis of labour exploitation and capital accumulation in the hands of ‘The Old Man’ of OmniCorp. Even more so, the obscurity acts as a formal restriction on RoboCop’s character and abilities. In other words, the obscurity of the fourth directive is contrasted with RoboCop’s ability to render space transparent. The complexities of economic problems are rendered irrelevant—RoboCop is chiefly a traversal machine that interrupts and makes the problem of crime manifest as the key concern. This is clear in the Levebvrean spatial practice of Detroit and its police. Particularly, this is revealed in a section detailing RoboCop’s first patrol as the robotised law enforcement powerhouse he becomes. RoboCop’s movement through the city is incisive—he crosses barriers and police tape without ceremony, sneaks through a besieged town hall full of hostages, and scans radio signals as he traverses the urban space of Detroit. In short, his law enforcement is reactive—in his first mission, he interrupts an armed robbery, stops a sexual assault, and neutralises a disgruntled political candidate who has taken hostages. In all cases, RoboCop interrupts the crime in progress, thereby demonstrating the efficiency of police work. The victims have not only been threatened but have actually experienced the criminal acts themselves without the involvement of law enforcement. In other words, the fear of the crime is justified, since the

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crime problem is real, and because without the existence of RoboCop the crime would have remained uninterrupted. This example is best illustrated with the third crime in RoboCop’s ‘first mission’—the hostage negotiation scene, where an armed former city councilman has taken over the Detroit City Hall building and is holding the mayor and his staff hostage. RoboCop drives to the scene of the hostage crisis and unceremoniously drives through police tape restricting access to the scene and directly contravenes the leading police officer responsible for the siege and sneaks into the building. Upon RoboCop’s instructions, the negotiator keeps the former councilman, now described as a terrorist, busy and placates him by agreeing to unrealistic promises such as a new car, reinstating him in his old job, and so on. RoboCop uses thermal vision and punches through a wall, thereby neutralising the terrorist in a tactic reminiscent of contemporary IDF practices (Weizman, 2012; Puar, 2017). The visualising of RoboCop interrupting crimes is ideological as it serves to illustrate the manner in which policing is most efficient, that is, stopping crime as it happens. Building on the earlier point about Murphy as a perfect cop, this interruption further complements the reification of crime by demonstrating its existence. By situating law enforcement in such a way, harsh measures are implicitly justified as there is not merely the potential of a crime occurring, but it is in progress. Moreover, this is further complemented by RoboCop’s augmented mobility through the city—a normal police officer would simply have not been as efficient in getting to the scene of the crime, handling the crime, or able to circumvent hierarchy in the manner in which RoboCop did. Put simply, it appears that RoboCop does not follow rank, does not need permission to harm suspects, and can use a number of tools that allow him to do this beyond the scope of what a normal police officer could—heat vision, visual scanning and facial recognition, near-impenetrable armour, and so on. As such, RoboCop stands as an illustration of an ideal police officer—efficient and capable, controlled by key tenets, but nevertheless free to exercise one’s own discretion and harm suspects when they ‘deserve’ it. A discretion, however, that is persistently curtailed and delimited by OmniCorp. It is important to note, Wall and Linnemann (2020:79) show that police discretion is rooted in the ‘always racialized and patriarchal, prerogatives of police in liberal democracy’. As Neocleous defines it,

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‘the exercise of police discretion defines who is deviant in any social context and how that deviance is controlled’ (2000:99). In terms of Lefebvre’s work on space, it is easy to see that RoboCop reveals something about how space is rendered transparent through policing. As we have observed, the cop film draws heavily on the film noir codifications of the discerning subject of the detective, where the protagonist’s relationship to space is one of an interplay between the two illusions defined by Lefebvre. And it is through his ability to traverse space, investigate, and neutralise threats that RoboCop is capable of reaching the limits of this capacity for transparency at the moment he encounters the obscure fourth directive. It is in this sense that the transparency, the given social order integral to policing and with whose protection policing is tasked, is revealed to be a product of a certain class and, for all the talk of cyborg autonomy in opposition to a purely mechanical being, discretion is given clear parameters. Parameters which end at the point where the existing social order is questioned. It is in this sense that the spatial reality of Detroit is both transparent and opaque. Since ‘(social) space is a (social) product’ (Lefebvre, 1991)—when we talk about space, we are inevitably also talking about social structure. Even more so, the film reveals that when we are talking about space we are also talking about crime—a point to which I shall return in the following chapter. And when we cast our eyes to the image of space that the film presents us with, the narrative reveals that we are seeing a world in the image of OmniCorp. Itis important to reflect, for instance, on the immediately apparent narrative, which is that there is a logic for a number of the developments we are introduced to in the film: (1) police departments are being managed by OmniCorp as a way of increasing efficiency; (2) new crime control measures and tools (such as ED-209) are justified as a way of allowing the creation of the crime-free Delta City; (3) a mechanised person is more efficient than ED-209 as they present the image of officer discretion (an image that manifests as empty in RoboCop 2, where a criminal is made into a newer version); and (4) there is an increase in violent crime exemplified by Boddicker’s gang. However, in the course of the film’s narrative, the audience understands that Boddicker’s gang is not merely a

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cause for OmniCorp, but a fabricated tool used by the corporation for the justification of its expansion of powers. More importantly, the utopian consideration of mechanising people as a way of facilitating a better society is deeply reactionary with parallels to Ford’s Sociology Department and Taylorisation. As Jameson notes (2007), most utopian narratives must somehow engage with the problem of labour and employment. On the one hand, how does one guarantee employment in order to divert people away from the distractions of ‘crime, war, degraded mass culture, drugs, violence, boredom, the lust for power, the lust for distraction, the lust for nirvana, sexism, racism’ (Jameson, 2007:147). On the other, utopias are still products of labour— the question of how the utopia is produced must be addressed. In this sense, the spectre of labour haunts the film on multiple levels. In one way, the automatisation of cops is a practice that seeks to render policing immune to the dangers and appeals listed by Jameson above. In the second film, the drug nuke is even used in an attempt to control the newer version of RoboCop. The general thematic consistently returns to labour—RoboCop 2’s focus on drugs has comments as to how ‘urban slaves prepare this poison’, and Cain, the villain who later becomes robotised, notes that the drug would make ‘made in America’ mean something again. The example of the remake, Robocop (2014), also features this theme by placing the manufacture of Murphy’s machine body in the People’s Republic of China. It is such lacunae and mere implications on the level of the text that RoboCop is actively and consistently demonstrating the core of its thematic—the exploitation of labour and the role of policing in maintaining this.

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Deane, S. & Shuffelton, A. (2016). Plato and the Police: Dogs, Guardians, and Why Accountability is the Wrong Answer. Educational Studies, 52(6), 491–505. Denby, C. (1960, August–September). Workers Battle Automation. News & Letters, 5(7). Durr, M. (2015). What Is the Difference Between Slave Patrols and Modern Day Policing? Institutional Violence in a Community of Color. Critical Sociology, 41(6), 873–879. Escobar, E.  J. (1993). The Dialectics of Repression: The Los Angeles Police Department and the Chicano Movement, 1968–1971. The Journal of American History, 79(4), 1483–1514. Gibran Muhammad, K. (2019). The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. Harvard University Press. Gilmore, R.  W. (2002). Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography. The Professional Geographer, 54(1), 15–24. Gilmore, R. W. (2007). Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. University of California Press. Hall, S. (1980). Encoding/Decoding. In During, S. (Ed.). The Cultural Studies Reader (pp. 90–103). London: Routledge. Hall, S. (2021). Writings on Media: History of the Present. Ed. by Charlotte Brunsdon. Duke University Press. Jameson, F. (2007). Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fiction. Verso Books. Jay, M., & Leavell, V. (2017). Material Conditions of Detroit’s Great Rebellion. Social Justice, 44(4 (150), 27–54. Jay, M., + Conklin, P. (2020). A People’s History of Detroit. Duke University Press. Lefebvre, H. (1974/1991). The Production of Space. Trans. D. Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell. Leonardatos, C. D. (1999). California’s Attempts to Disarm the Black Panthers. San Diego Law Review, 36, 947. Lowe, L. (2015). The Intimacies of Four Continents. Duke University Press. Lundman, R. (1980). Police and Policing: An Introduction. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. McCoy, A. (2021). “Detroit under STRESS”: The Campaign to Stop Police Killings and the Criminal State in Detroit. Journal of Civil and Human Rights, 7(1), 1–34. McHarris, P.  V. (2021). Disrupting Order: Race, Class, and the Roots of Policing. In D. Correia & T. Wall (Eds.), Violent Order: Essays on the Nature of Police. Haymarket Books.

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Meyer, S., III. (1981). The Five-Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908–1921. Suny Press. Mitrani, S. (2013). The Rise of the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict, 1850–1894. University of Illinois Press. Neocleous, M. (2000). The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power. Pluto Press. Norwood, S. (1996). Ford’s Brass Knuckles: Harry Bennett, The Cult of Muscularity, and Anti-Labor Terror–1920–1945. Labor History, 37(3), 365–391. Petersen, S. (2007). The Ethics of Robot Servitude. Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 19(1), 43–54. Puar, J. (2017). The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Duke University Press. Rafter, N.  H. (2000). Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society. Oxford University Press. Reichel, P.  L. (1988). Southern Slave Patrols as a Transitional Police Type. American Journal of Police, 7, 51. Reichel, P.  L. (1992). The Misplaced Emphasis on Urbanization in Police Development. Policing and Society: An International Journal, 3(1), 1–12. Rizov, V. (2022). A Walk in Thomas Annan’s Glasgow: Documentary Photography, Class and Urban Space. Journal of Urban History, Online First. RoboCop. (1987). Directed by Paul Verhoeven. US: Orion Pictures. RoboCop 2. (1990). Directed by Irvin Kershner. US: Orion Pictures. RoboCop. (2014). Directed by José Padilha. US: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Schneider, J.  C. (1980). Detroit and the Problem of Order, 1830–1880: A Geography of Crime, Riot and Policing. University of Nebraska Press. Schrader, S. (2019). Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing. University of California Press. Seigel, M. (2018a). Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police. Duke University Press. Seigel, M. (2018b). Violence Work: Policing and Power. Race & Class, 59(4), 15–33. Spitzer, S., & Scull, A. T. (1977). Privatization and Capitalist Development: The Case of the Private Police. Social Problems, 25(1), 18–29. Sze, J. (2021). The White Dog and Dark Water: Police Violence in The Central Valley. In D. Correia & T. Wall (Eds.), Violent Order: Essays on The Nature of Police. Haymarket Books. Toews, R. (2017). Counterinsurgency as Global Social Warfare. In T.  Wall, P. Saberi, & W. Jackson (Eds.), Destroy Build Secure: Readings on Pacification. Red Quill Books.

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Wall, T. (2014). Legal Terror and the Police Dog. Radical Philosophy, 188(2). Wall, T. (2021). Inventing Humanity, or the Thin Blue Line as “Patronizing Shit”. In D. Correia & T. Wall (Eds.), Violent Order: Essays on The Nature of Police. Haymarket Books. Wall, T., & Linnemann, T. (2020). No Chance: The Secret of Police, or the Violence of Discretion. Social Justice, 47(3/4), 77–93. Weizman, E. (2012). Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. Verso Books.

6 Minority Report

Chief John Anderton Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002) is set in Washington, D.C., in 2054. PreCrime, a crime prevention programme, has been functioning for six years at the start of the film’s narrative. The programme originated with genetic experimentation conducted by Dr Iris Hineman (played by Lois Smith) for the purpose of healing the neurotrauma suffered by the children of women addicted to neuroin, a powerful opiate that was becoming popular in the illegal drug market. The intervention was unsuccessful, with most of the children dying, but unintentionally provided three of the survivors with the power of prevision. These ‘precogs’ (Minority Report, 2002), pre-cognitives, developed the ability to envision murders—and only murders—up to four days in advance of their occurrence. This mutation was exploited by the District of Columbia’s criminal justice authorities, who use the precogs as ‘pattern recognition filters’ to drive an apparently efficient, albeit unverifiable, predictive policing programme under the directorship of Lamar Burgess (played by Max von Sydow) (Minority Report, 2002). PreCrime is maintained by sequestering the precogs in a room called the ‘temple’ in police headquarters, where their neural activity is permanently monitored while they are kept in a

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. Rizov, Urban Crime Control in Cinema, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12978-0_6

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state of semiconsciousness, semi-immersed in a tank of amniotic liquid. Their visions are projected onto a screen that police detectives use to solve the crime before it occurs, and the programme involves both judicial and penal participants, with a judge and forensic expert witnessing the detection and detention by videolink and arrested suspects are  sent to the Department of Containment, where they are incarcerated in a similar state of semiconsciousness to the precogs for the rest of their lives. PreCrime has been operational for six years and appears to have been an immediate success, reducing the murder rate in Washington, D.C., by 90 percent in its first month and 100 percent ever since. The projected visions of all three of the precogs, Agatha (played by Samantha Morton) and identical twins Arthur and Dashiell (played by Michael and Matthew Dickman, respectively), are always complementary, and the balance of probability of the available evidence suggests that they have always been accurate to the extent that there have been no false positives. Occasionally, the precogs see the same murder more than once, but these echoes are easily identifiable and disregarded by the detectives; PreCrime is widely recognised as a perfect crime prevention programme. The narrative opens at a crucial stage of its development: despite opposition from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Attorney General is considering expanding it from a municipal to a national initiative and has sent a Justice Department agent, Danny Witwer (played by Colin Farrell), to subject it to a final scrutiny. Minority Report introduces Chief John Anderton (played by Tom Cruise), who is the head of the Department of PreCrime, the small unit of police detectives that is responsible for investigating, detaining, and containing suspects identified by the precogs. Anderton was selected by Burgess because of his passion for the programme, which was born out of personal tragedy: six months before its launch, his son was abducted from a public swimming pool (and presumably murdered). Anderton has been separated from his wife, Lara (played by Kathryn Morris), ever since and has dedicated his life to perfecting PreCrime operations so that no one else suffers the pain he experienced. The logic of the individual subject and his commitment to the ideological project is prominent in Minority Report as Anderton’s flaws are exactly what makes him a staunch defender of the system. On the psychological level, the motivation for PreCrime

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from Anderton’s perspective is compensatory in the sense that the larger system makes up for his own limits. Much like RoboCop’s ability to render space transparent was bounded by the obscurity of OmniCorp’s motives. Just like the transparency of RoboCop was produced by OmniCorp, thus indicating a symbiotic relationship, so is the case with Anderton and PreCrime. Once, the subject is rendered dependent on the system in such a way, the ideological alignment follows. That being said, in spite of his enthusiasm for and commitment to PreCrime, Anderton is aware of both its moral and legal flaws. The lives of the three precogs have been sacrificed for the protection of society without their consent, and they are condemned and contained to the same extent as those convicted of precrime. When Anderton takes Witwer on a tour of the temple, he says: ‘It’s better if you don’t think of them as human.’ The precogs, as the name almost implies, are rendered as cognitive machines and pattern recognition filters, and in the process dehumanised and deprived of their autonomy much like Murphy as RoboCop was. This process, although rendered fantastic in both depictions, is common to police discourse and practice. As Wall argues, the mythology of ‘the thin blue line’ is a clarifying example of the ways in which policing, on the basis of its racialising and capitalist function, is ‘synonymous with a violently narrow conception of humanity’ (2021:17). Unbothered by dehumanisation, Anderton is still presented as aware that precrime, as both crime prevention and legal offence, involves detaining and convicting individuals for crimes that they have not committed. He is able to reframe this problem as convicting individuals for crimes that they have not yet committed, and is genuinely convinced in both predetermination and the ability of the precogs to detect the predetermined future with complete accuracy. The techno-solutionism of RoboCop is rendered here as a reality. Importantly, Anderton is tormented with both grief and guilt as he was present when the abduction of his child took place, and while he is a zealous believer in PreCrime, he has also become a neuroin addict. There is clearly a compensatory element on the level of the individual protagonist in a psychological dimension, where Anderton’s inability to see the abduction of his son is addressed by the apparatus of a society-wide Panopticon that is the PreCrime Unit. On the individual level of psychology, the protagonist’s life appears to be on hold,

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fully fixated on the work of the police unit. Much like Murphy as RoboCop, the extent of his intimate life is contained in memory and zealous dedication to his occupation. Anderton lives in an expensive apartment, but its state of upkeep suggests that he does not spend much time there, and his sole leisure activity appears to be watching hologram home videos of his former life with his son and Lara while on neuroin. While Burgess is aware of Anderton’s addiction and warns him that Witwer could use it to take charge of the programme, the former’s dependence relies heavily on what has been termed the ‘logic of empathy’— Anderton might be a flawed individual in some ways, but his flaws are understandable as they are more likely to invite empathy, or sympathy at the very least, rather than condemnation. If nothing else, Anderton’s dedication to the notion of justice cannot be doubted. For instance, if the audience were to see Anderton’s drug dependence as somehow contradictory with his law enforcement role, this remains only a problem on an abstract, symbolic level as Anderton is a proficient investigator and a committed subject of the system, willingly undertaking its tasks and enforcing its function. In fact, the use of neuroin is presented as a procedural tool that Witwer could use to discipline Anderton, but not really challenge or undermine his actual work. The plot of the film is set in motion during the scene in which Anderton is showing Witwer the precogs. When Anderton lingers behind the others, his empathy—or perhaps just curiosity—provoked, Agatha emerges from her semiconscious state, grabs hold of him, and projects images of the attempted drowning of a woman. Anderton does not recognise the case, which appears to be a very early one, and investigates at the Department of Containment. There, he finds that the woman’s name was Anne Lively (who will subsequently be revealed as Agatha’s mother) and that the imprisoned suspect could not be identified by the surveillance system used by the police, which relies on eye scans, because he had an eye transplant. Anderton asks the custodian to isolate Agatha’s prevision, but he can only find the twins’ files. Anne was a neuroin addict who was treated for her addiction before being reported missing, and her current whereabouts are unknown. Anderton investigates further, finds that there are a total of 13 cases with missing prevision files, and visits Burgess at home. He tells Burgess that he is concerned about the missing files in

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consequence of Witwer’s auditing of the programme, but Burgess is more concerned about Anderton’s addiction, and there is no further discussion of the previsions. Anderton returns to headquarters to find that PreCrime has its first premeditated murder case in several years, which is predicted to occur in 36 hours, and the victim is a man named Leo Crow (played by Mike Binder). Anderton sees himself committing murder on the screen and is identified by the precogs as the murderer. While attempting to leave the building, he meets Witwer. Anderton thinks Witwer has set him up for murder for political reasons, but Witwer only wants to confront him about his neuroin addiction. When Anderton escapes, Witwer takes temporary charge of the Department of PreCrime and leads Anderton’s team in the hunt for him, just like any other precrime suspect. Using his expert knowledge of their tactics and tools, Anderton is able to escape, leaving the city for Dr Hineman’s rural estate. Now that he himself has been subjected to predetermination by the precogs, he doubts his belief in determinism over free will for the first time. Hineman points out that his attempts to find Crow in order to explain the prevision will only bring Anderton into his proximity and, in consequence, enable the murder he claims he has not planned. He asks her how a prevision can be faked, and her reply is the fulcrum upon which the whole plot pivots: ‘The precogs are never wrong…but, occasionally, they do disagree.’ In rare cases, Agatha’s previsions do not match those of the twins and these minority reports are destroyed. ‘Obviously, for PreCrime to function there can’t be any suggestion of infallibility’ (Minority Report, 2002). Hineman explains what this means, which is that in cases where there is a minority report there is the possibility of an alternative future for the victim and perpetrator. Importantly, this introduces a significant dimension to the film where predetermination is presented as a matter of consensus.1 Hineman also sets him on what will be his mission for the second half of the narrative: abducting Agatha from the temple and retrieving all of her minority

 This is different in the short story, where the assessment is not collective but individual and sequential. That is to say, the first precog provides one image of the future, which in itself can change the future, thus making it possible for a second precog to see an alternative future, and so on. 1

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reports, which will both reveal his own alternative future and destroy the whole premise of the PreCrime programme. Anderton returns to the city to have an eye transplant, evades the PreCrime Unit once again, and succeeds in abducting Agatha, apparently only now realising that he is in fact rescuing her from physical and mental imprisonment. PreCrime are now in pursuit of both him and Agatha, and his flight takes them to the federal housing block he saw in the prevision. He meets Crow, who claims to be a paedophile serial killer and to have murdered Anderton’s son. Just as Anderton is about to execute him, he changes his mind and starts reading him his rights. The tension with what has been defined so far in this monograph as violence work is significant (Seigel, 2018). Ultimately, Anderton opts against killing, or rather executing, Crow, but the point stands that in many ways the act would not have appeared as an injustice or a deviation from the role of policing. The formal resolution of the tension happens only on the level of the narrative, where the individual protagonist exercises his free will. Still, the structural pattern of ‘police brutality’ and police killings point to the reality that this tension is at the core of policing (Rodríguez, 2021). It is in this sense that the film speaks to an ideological reproduction of justice as that of the current social order exemplified in the institution of policing. Namely, the fact that US police rarely go a day without killing a person (Mapping Police Violence, 2022), an actually existing problem within the criminal justice system, is resolved through once again privileging the discretion, that is, agency, of the individual police officer who knows what is ‘right’. It is in such a way that films help construct the representational structure of justice where individuals given the privileges of violence work ultimately know best. It also implies that in such framework certain acts of violence are justified. At this moment, Crow, seeing that Anderton deviates from the expected script, breaks down, and tells Anderton that he has been recruited to let Anderton kill him in return for a substantial payment to Crow’s family. When Crow realises that Anderton is not going to kill him, he grabs hold of Anderton’s gun and shoots himself while they are struggling for control of it, fulfilling the predetermination of the prevision. Anderton flees the city once again, taking Agatha to Lara’s house on the Chesapeake Bay. When Witwer arrives at the scene of the crime, he is

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suspicious of the ‘orgy of evidence’ he finds and suspects that Anderton is in fact being framed. He finds Agatha’s minority report of Anne Lively’s attempted murder and realises that someone took advantage of the echoes experienced by the precogs to actually murder her once PreCrime had arrested the suspect. He asks to meet Burgess at Anderton’s apartment, and Burgess murders him. The fact that Burgess has already manipulated PreCrime for his own ends once suggests that he murdered Anne and set up Anderton. Anderton is apprehended at Lara’s house, where he is arrested for the actual murder of Witwer, and Agatha is returned to the temple. Lara suspects that Burgess is not being honest with her, however, and rescues Anderton from the Department of Containment. Anderton confronts Burgess at a dinner party held in his honour following the expansion of PreCrime to a national programme: he has worked out that Anne was Agatha’s mother, and that once she had recovered from her neuroin addiction, she began fighting to regain custody of her child. There is a tense stand-off between the two that recalls the earlier dilemma regarding the relationship between Anderton and Crow—Anderton’s murder has been previsioned: if Burgess kills him, he will spend the rest of his life in containment, but PreCrime will be a success; if Burgess does not kill him, then he will not be charged but PreCrime will be revealed as flawed. Anderton demonstrates his complete reversal of opinion about the predetermination as Burgess holds him at gunpoint. ‘Except…you know your own future, which means you can change it if you want to. You still have a choice, Lamar, like I did’ (Minority Report, 2002). Burgess shoots himself, asking for Anderton’s forgiveness as he dies. The film ends with a voiceover in which Anderton describes the abandonment of the PreCrime experiment, the pardon and release of all those contained, and the resettlement of the precogs to an undisclosed location where they could spend the rest of their lives in peace. The images that accompany the narration reveal that he and Lara have reunited and that she is pregnant with a second child. It is in these final moments that we are capable of retrospectively understanding the narrative manoeuvres that reproduce the repressive ideology exemplified in the film. Althusser points to a fourfold structure of ideological interpellation and reproduction that revolves around the

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idea of the subject. For Althusser (2020:44–5), the subject is always already an ideological subject—this is the first stage of the model (2020:55) where all individuals are interpellated as subjects, that is, as subject to the state’s repressive and ideological apparatuses such as PreCrime. The famous example of interpellation given by Althusser of a cop hailing an individual on the street is here rendered as precogs identifying a metaphysically distinct impulse to commit homicide, which is subsequently enacted as a hailing by officers such as Anderton. It is this reshaping of interpellation that illustrates the second point in Althusser’s model—the idea that individuals are subjected to the Subject, a larger entity of which they are a mirror reflection. In this case, the Subject could be understood as the following: Burgess as individual representation, Anderton as the repressive arm, or precogs as the interpellating arm. In simple terms, the subject is the very notion of PreCrime’s justice—recall the example of how one’s belief in ‘justice’ leads one to act in certain ways when there is ‘injustice’. This is similar to Althusser’s example of Pascal (2020:42): ‘Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.’ So it is in the case of this fourfold model, where the Absolute Subject (with capital S), of which all other subjects are mirror-images, is the position out of which, like God in Althusser’s analogy, interpellation stems from. One’s prayer, in essence, is one’s recognition of their relationship to the Absolute Subject that God represents. Interpellation, for Althusser, implies one’s readiness to recognise oneself as someone who is interpellated. It is in this sense that the religious analogy to ideology that Althusser uses is apt in this case too as it fits appropriately with the metaphysical basis of precognition. For the purposes of this critique, the broader perspective posits that the Absolute Subject in this context is the notion of ‘justice’, but it should not be underestimated that it is the precogs and Anderton that interpellate potential murderers on behalf of this metaphysical ‘justice’. It is in this context that what happens when Anderton is interpellated as a murderer by the precogs is significant, his notion of ‘justice’ clashes with his individual position of autonomy. In the moment of interpellation, he refuses to recognise himself as someone subjected to this system. The moment is telling as it speaks to an inherent contradiction in criminal justice, one to which I shall return in the following chapters, but it

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has also been discussed briefly in relation to Dirty Harry (1971), Death Wish (1974), and the vigilante—the idea that an individual could know better than the system and is capable of remaining true to ‘justice’ outside of the system. This moment is the third point of Althusser’s fourfold system (2020:55), described as ‘the mutual recognition of subjects and Subject, the subjects’ recognition of each other, and finally the subject’s recognition of himself ’. Namely, Anderton’s fall expresses itself in his rejection of this mutual recognition, where the very core notion of justice is challenged. And it is in this sense that Althusser’s fourth point is revealed (2020:55), the essential core of ideology’s function—‘the absolute guarantee that everything really is so, and that on condition that the subjects recognize what they are and behave accordingly, everything will be all right’. By breaking away at the third point, Anderton challenges the existing order and his belief in it is undermined, that is, the fourth moment. For Althusser, these moments are simultaneous, and a careful reading of the film reveals their consistent interweaving. In this duplicate mirror structure, where the order of a larger subject, a metaphysical entity that is obscure to most, is ultimately revealed to be a manipulation by a corrupt individual, the philosopher-king Burgess with his own Platonic ‘discourse of order’ (1992) and the ‘necessary lie’ of falsifiable predictions (Rancière, 2003). It is in this sense that ideological subjects such as Anderton always ‘work by themselves’ (Althusser, 2020:55–6) unless a situation unravels where ‘the exception [is] of the “bad subjects” who on occasion provoke the intervention of one of the detachments of the (Repressive) State Apparatus’ (2020:55). Anderton’s fall from grace as guardian is exactly this—he becomes a bad subject, one who is not aligned with the system. In essence, subjects working by themselves, be it violence work or not, work by the rules of ideology. It is in this sense, that ideology expresses itself in material practices and rituals, whether it is an attachment via compensatory relationships to the system such as Anderton’s, the performative enactment of popular culture heroes as in RoboCop, or the belief in ‘justice’ and its concomitant necessary practices of ensuring it, regardless of whether within or without the parameters of the law. As Hineman points out to Anderton, the precogs are never wrong, but they do disagree—consensus is at the core of the representational structure of

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PreCrime. More importantly, this consensus is always manufactured and reproduced through practices amounting to acquiescence. Anderton’s refusal to recognise himself in the moment of interpellation is a break from the underlying logic. Ultimately, it is this exceptional individual, only coincidentally a cop, who is capable of revealing the inherent injustice to the system. It is, however, only one form of policing, that is, PreCrime, that is revealed as problematic—the general system that allowed for this to happen need not change. It is this final moment of Anderton’s return to acquiescence to the existing order that marks the closure of the film. And his reward for this is not insignificant—Anderton is rewarded with a return to his heteronormative nuclear family—the restoration of intimacy is thus the fulfilment of the subject as a complete interiority, an interiority that does not challenge the ideology it lives by. As Anderton in Philip K. Dick’s short story that inspired the film tells Witwer: ‘You’ll be a good police officer. You believe in the status quo’ (Dick, 2017).

Sprawling City, Splintered Space Preventative policing as shown in Minority Report illustrates existing patterns around essentialising the criminality of space. The spatial dimension of the film is best understood through the tension between opacity and transparency. On the one hand, there are the traversal powers of the police and the power to render space transparent. On the other hand, there is the opacity of human intention that is central to the plot and the way it manifests spatially as the limits of the precogs’ gaze. In order to engage with this tension, more needs to be said on the film’s treatment of space in relation to police work. Minority Report is a film preoccupied with the notion of transparency, where any and all opacity is seen as a barrier to the project of surveillance and crime prevention. Considering this, the film’s spatial representation needs to be understood in terms of ‘transparent space’, where the precogs are concerned with rendering the future accessible, while the PreCrime Unit’s police officers are concerned with rendering space visible so as to bridge the gap between future and present more easily. In other words, the precogs merely identify the crime, while the police must still grapple with the

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complexities of space and the visual nature of the clues the precogs provide. Space must still be deciphered, understood, and acted upon—even if, in Virilio’s terms (1997:71), the virtualisation of the world in information form has ushered an ‘unprecedented temporal breakdown’. According to Foucault, space is rendered transparent due to the mechanism of panopticism as ‘a generalizable model of functioning’ (Foucault, 1995:205), otherwise understood as the prevalence and power of a sorting gaze. While in Minority Report and its representation of Washington, D.C., this process is figurative, the process of ‘the surgical opening up of cities to circulation, light and air’ (Vidler, 1993:84; cf. Rizov, 2020, 2021, 2022) has its real precedents in urban space. Moreover, the desire to be able to predict all crime (or all of a particular type of crime in the case of Minority Report) with perfect accuracy harks back to the positivist imperative of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which sociological, biological, and psychological variations of determinism aspired to forecast human behaviour with mathematical certainty. The idea is that if crime can be predicted with accuracy, it can be prevented with certainty, producing a crime-free utopia. This positivist view was embraced by the institution of policing late in the twentieth century in the form of what Lydia Bennett Moses and Janet Chan (2018:806) call ‘predictive policing’, a spectrum of analytic tools and enforcement practices that involves the forecasting of where and when future crimes will occur. This is evident in the first case the audience sees Anderton handle in the beginning of the film. Agatha provides a series of dreamlike images of Howard Marks (played by Arye Gross) murdering his wife Sarah Marks (played by Ashley Crow) and her lover Donald Dubin (played by Joel Gretsch) upon discovering their affair. The particular case is a crime of passion, and its lack of premeditation means that the PreCrime Unit has a short timeline to prevent it from happening. The supernatural clairvoyance of the precogs, however, is not perfect—the PreCrime Unit still needs to determine the address of the murder. After a hurdle with an old address being the only information about the perpetrator, the task falls on Anderton to investigate whatever spatial clue he can glean from the snippets of Agatha’s vision—he determines a series of characteristics (an exterior of the house with ‘original running bond brick pattern, streamlined early Georgian details [where] the brick has been repointed’) and

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notes the presence of cops, which provide the contextual cues to determine that the location is not near the capitol. This, together with the presence of a playground in the vicinity, allows him to deduce the exact neighbourhood. This is not sufficient as Anderton and the PreCrime Unit still lack the exact address, so it again comes to Anderton’s skills in deduction and visual recollection to determine the specific house. In short, the preternatural capabilities of the precogs are complemented by the impressive investigative work conducted by Anderton under time constraints and duress. Ultimately, it is Anderton’s ability to read space in terms of constituent elements, relations between spatial elements, and his awareness of a synoptic view of Washington that leads to the prevention of the murder. For Anderton, the space of Washington is both transparent and opaque. On the one hand, space is transparent as precogs are capable of glimpsing through all space, cutting through space and time, thereby extracting valuable traces of the future criminal act. On the other hand, space is still in need of deciphering. Put simply, Agatha is not capable of providing any direct geolocation information, but only the potential for clues, which Anderton, depending on his skill, can decipher. The significant aspect of spatial sense-making here is that this relation reveals the subordinate nature of the precogs to the PreCrime Unit—as merely tools for the police to use (cf. Salter, 2014). Interestingly, this points to an ideological framing, where the precogs do not indicate a future without police, but rather the opposite—a future heavily reliant on police. Moreover, an interesting point from the beginning of the film is Anderton’s ironic addressal of the precogs as ‘detective’, implying a similarity of function, if not investigative capabilities as well. Especially so in terms of space and time, with the precogs being able to ‘traverse’ time, while Anderton enforces the law on the basis of their clairvoyant visions through a traversal of space. Anderton’s role as a spatial sense-maker is exacerbated by an element of the film’s cinematography, the use of the camera to make circular movements that create what Buckland (2006:202) refers to as ‘sympathetic motion’. This technique creates a semi-subjective image that is externally focalised around Anderton so as to configure an empathetic response to him from the audience in the first scene in which he appears. As the

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narrative progresses, the film continues to explicitly represent the physical and social reality of its world from Anderton’s perspective. Moreover, the spatial fragmentation in the film is itself an echo of the narrative’s temporal fragmentation, which can be interpreted to be an indication of policing’s synoptic and panoptic power as well as ability to traverse space unimpeded. Intense moments of investigation take minutes and are full of tension, while crossing the city happens in a matter of seconds via an editing cut. Similar to Chap. 5 and RoboCop, the technology available to the PreCrime Unit allows for an unimpeded traversal of space—in this case vertically. The PreCrime Unit boards a futuristic hovercraft machine that takes mere diegetic minutes to cross the city and reach its suburbs as well as burst through the building’s ceiling when intervening in the predetermined murder to be committed by Marks. In essence, the way in which Anderton determines the location of the potential crime is exactly through an understanding of the city from a synoptic, top-down perspective. In many ways, Minority Report also draws on a number of aesthetic codifications as a way of recreating the visual style of classic film noir. James Naremore (2008) notes that there is little agreement on the referent of the term, which is used to describe a period, a genre, a cycle, and a style of film or filming. With respect to the last of these, he states that the ‘term is also associated with certain visual and narrative traits’ including low-key photography, images of wet city streets, pop-Freudian characterizations, and romantic fascination with femmes fatales’ (Naremore, 2008:9; 1995). Minority Report features Spielberg’s signature diffused backlighting with a post-production bleach—bypassing that reduced image colour. The desaturated colouration is complemented by the use of materials such as glass and chrome in the film’s interior sets (Buckland, 2006), which further emphasise a transparent, panoptic character to the environment. Warren Buckland (2006:201) describes Minority Report as a film with a futuristic film noir atmosphere created by low-key contrastive lighting, resulting in shadowy interiors and exteriors. This is one of the strongest instances in a Spielberg film where set design and cinematography work together to create organic unity.

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Anderton can be seen as an archetypal noir detective, whose subjectivity standardly dominates the narrative point of view, providing the audience with a pattern recognition filter to create meaning from the chaos of urban life in much the same way as Anderton himself describes the precogs as conduits for understanding. Frank Krutnik (1997:98–9) refers to the relationship between noir style and urban space as: ‘the highly-­ wrought noir aesthetic ensures that the “meaning” of the noir city is not to be found in the narrative’s surface details but in its shadows, in the intangibilities of tone and mood.’ The detective’s role is to investigate and uncover that meaning, to make the hidden plain as they make use of their knowledge and expertise to negotiate the complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty of urban modernity—or, in the case of Anderton, an urban utopia. Moreover, Anderton is an imperfect protagonist, guided by ‘a belief born of pain, not politics’ (Burgess in Minority Report 2002) in the PreCrime Unit as well as a capable investigator. While the former places him in a particular position for affective alignment by the audience, the latter bears a more explicit ideological function that is helpful for understanding the spatial dynamics of the film. According to Foucault (2001:351), the need for shaping urban space into a formal spatial order that is legible and standardised is connected to the growing prevalence of modernity’s ‘governmental rationality’ of the state. Scott (1998) has also commented on the modern state’s creation of an all-encompassing vision of its territory and resources, effectively simplifying the reality of its domain according to abstract principles of order and legibility. James C. Scott has referred to this as a ‘state simplification’ (1998), whereby through simplifications the state allows itself access to further control measures and surveillance. The point, however, is that the state needed to simplify the urban space in order to make it legible to itself, not necessarily to its inhabitants. More than that, the city needed to be recorded and incorporated into the various institutions of the ‘expanded state complex’ (Tagg, 1988:63)—a key part of which is the police, surveillance, and social control. Furthermore, Scott (1998) has commented that the abstract logic of the map (as a visualisation of the city from above) and its use in urban planning can be understood as one of the modern state’s ‘simplifications’, which aims to make an illegible space legible. This constructed legibility intends a viewer, such as

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Anderton, that is not familiar with the physical space and the built environment (Scott, 1998:53–54; Rizov, 2022). As Scott adds (1998:53), the map’s order was a construction that privileged one type of experience— that of abstracted and impersonal order such as policing. In what he calls ‘the fabrication of the politically visible’, Feldman notes that ‘the circuit formed by vision and violence is itself circumscribed by zones of blindness and inattention’ (1997:29). In such terms, Scott’s ‘simplifications’ should be understood as a productive process that creates targets, as much as it creates a surveillant such as Anderton.2 There are other examples of such ‘state simplifications’ and their use in policing. A significant example of such processes is identification documents (such as Howard Marks’ driver’s licence used in the first investigation at the start of the film), especially in reference to the prevalence of retinal/eye scans in the film. At a certain point in the narrative, when Anderton is on the run from the PreCrime Unit, he is forced to seek out the services of an ex-con doctor who replaces Anderton’s eyeballs in order to avoid retinal scan identification. The symbolic contrast between transparency and opacity, light and darkness, is further reinforced in this part of the film—Anderton is left with a blindfold and instructed not to remove it for a certain period of time, remaining without sight and trapped in a flat, just as the PreCrime Unit sends out small spider-like robots to inspect the building by scanning each inhabitant’s eyes. The theme of visibility is exemplified in the scene where the robots are about to reach the flat in which Anderton is hiding—he must hide, subsequently gets discovered, and has to risk exposing his eyes earlier than the doctor prescribed so that the robots can scan his retinas. The tension is both spatial and temporal: in terms of space, the tension is between the invasive power of the robots to render subjects visible and Anderton seeking to avoid this; in terms of time, the tension is about delaying discovery (the plot in micro form), both until it is safe to expose his eyes and until he gets to clear his name. Interestingly, the combination of architectural  In Dick’s short story, this dialectical relationship is implied to be more intimate than a first look might show. Anderton directly interpellates Witwer, his successor in the story, by warning him: ‘“Better keep your eyes open,” he informed young Witwer. “It might happen to you at any time”’ (Dick, 2017:102). As Neocleous suggests (2021), the criminal and the cop are both often presented as external to law. 2

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detail, the synoptic conceptualisation of the city, ID documents, facial recognition, registered addresses, and so on points to contemporary practices and tools for investigation such as the Palantir (Winston, 2018; Jansen, 2018:9) software or the work conducted retrospectively by the Forensic Architecture team (Weizman, 2017). The core of the film from a criminological point of view is the ‘sprawl’ of the fictionalised Washington, D.C., an underdeveloped (Marable, 2015) slum area, in which Anderton is shown to purchase drugs early in the film and must later hide in so as to evade the police. It is illustrative to compare it to the suburb of the double murder that was going to be committed by Marks in the first investigative scene. At 7 am on a workday, one sees an active playground, a newspaper delivery boy, Sarah Marks’ lover loitering in the nearby park, and two police officers patrolling the street on horseback. In the ‘sprawl’, there is none of this— Anderton runs through derelict buildings and rubbish-filled streets, and is approached from dark shadows by a drug dealer. Interestingly, the use of the small spider-like robots that can identify people is not even considered in the well-lit suburb, but it is applied straightaway in the block of flats in the sprawl in which Anderton later hides. If we were to push the parallel to RoboCop further, we could posit that the ‘sprawl’ was in fact once an industrial area of the city. The equivalence of light with public space, security, and control and its contrast with darkness as equivalent to danger, crime, and the limits of the state’s control are both a common discourse in Modernity and its understanding of urban space (Rizov, 2020). Chapter 3 acknowledged the significance of the constant shift between treating space and its representations as either transparent or opaque. As Lefebvre (1974:97) points out, ‘wherever there is illusion, the optical and visual world plays an integral and integrative, active and passive, part in it’. Minority Report, and Anderton’s engagement with the urban space in the film in particular, demonstrates the importance of apprehending space as something that is produced—something that is, like representations themselves, created in a particular context, rather than simply found. Ultimately, the order of PreCrime is revealed to be produced in the same way.

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PreCrime When agent Witwer, tasked with the scrutiny of the PreCrime Unit before launching it nationwide, first encounters the unit’s police officers, he poses the problem succinctly (Minority Report, 2002): I’m not with the ACLU on this […] but let’s not kid ourselves, we are arresting individuals who have broken no law.

The answer, apparently, is ‘absolute metaphysics’ since the precogs are never wrong. Predetermination happens all the time, Anderton sagely adds. The act of arresting a person for their predetermined act of murder is illustrated visually by Anderton with the roll of a ball, which Witwer catches before it falls to the ground. Predetermination is thus likened to gravity—the ball would have inevitably fallen. The ways in which predetermination takes on a metaphysical character that demands the faith of the officers have already been outlined. Predetermination thus is a substitute for what has been so far referred to as ‘justice’ or Althusser’s Absolute Subject. Pascal’s God demands one do the ritual and faith will come. Anderton’s predetermination asks the same and promises justice. A contrasting example can be found in The Matrix (1999), as seen in Neo’s first encounter with the Oracle, a sentient programme capable of foreseeing the future. The Oracle informs Neo that he should not worry about the broken vase, prompting Neo to confusedly look around and break a vase next to him. That vase, the Oracle sagely adds. Would Neo have broken the vase had the Oracle not warned him? As Ruha Benjamin strikes the parallel, ‘would cops still have warrants to knock down the doors in majority Black neighborhoods if predictive algorithms hadn’t said anything?’ (2020:84). In the case of Minority Report, from the discussion so far, one can see that ‘transparent space’ is equivalent to surveillance and social control. According to Benjamin Bowling, Robert Reiner, and James Sheptycki (2019), policing is an aspect of social control that is defined by the potential for conflict and the police are the agency with formal responsibility for both legitimate force and intrusive surveillance. In a sense, PreCrime

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begins before a crime has been committed, assumes the commission of non-imminent and unspecified future crimes, and justifies coercive state intervention on the basis of imaginative speculation. As such, PreCrime is not so much concerned with crime, but with factors that lead to crime. This, in turn, renders us an apt parallel to Anderton’s rolling ball and its inevitable fall—the prediction of crime is more about what set the ball in motion than how does one catch it. One such factor that leads to crime is the statistical construction of risk. That is to say, the statistical probability that one is likely to commit crime. As noted, Kahlil Gibran Muhammad (2019) has demonstrated how at the end of the nineteenth century, a number of race scientists sought to base their prognoses on the existing numbers of incarcerated Black Americans. The reality of inequality is rendered the basis for justifying it—the ball is in motion and is about to fall; do not ask questions about how it was set in motion. As Wang notes, this process of reifying crime retrospectively is constructive: ‘Predictions are much more about constructing the future through the present management of subjects categorized as threats or risks’ (Wang, 2018:43). Designating one as a risk is a production of risk as a tangible reality that needs to be dealt with within the parameters of policing. As Schrader notes (2019:141): Magnifying resources for punishment and policing rather than other types of state social programming, in a move toward risk management rather than risk eradication, meant that everyday experience with crime would predominate among people least able to affect the social conditions that gave rise to it.

This reification of risk (and the assumption of facile recourse to criminality) expresses itself outside of criminal justice also in the field of finance, both making loans more difficult and debt more likely, renting property or finding employment more difficult and ability to exercise worker or tenant rights less likely (cf. Wang, 2018). Wang provides the example of the COMPAS algorithm used for the calculation of probable reoffending by courts and parole boards in the US. As ProPublica’s investigation of COMPAS notes, Black Americans were twice as likely to be labelled as high risk for recidivism than white Americans (Wang,

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2018:49). The ideological reversion here is apparent, race is removed from the explicit framing, thus allowing for a colour-blind racism that has the same effect as the statisticians’ efforts to racialise crime (and criminalise race) outlined by Gibran Muhammad. It has already been noted that precrime relies on a pre-emptive logic which seeks to reify ‘risk’ into an imminent threat—and one that is best resolved via ‘exercises of state violence in the present’ (Miller, 2019:91). In legal terms, PreCrime poses a paradox as it simultaneously ‘indicates that no crime has taken place and that such crime is inevitable’ (McCulloch & Wilson, 2016:137). The usual problem identified in this statement is the extent to which a future crime can be considered inevitable, and this directs attention to the validity and reliability of the predictive methods upon which precrime must necessarily rely. A broader problematisation to do with the notion of ‘crime’ is necessary here as well. Namely, any discussion of crime must begin with the history of the construction and reification of ‘crime’ as a strategy of protecting existing property and labour relations as outlined in the previous chapter. This history is concomitant to processes of racialisation, xenophobia, and patriarchal and general exploitation of labour. As Schrader notes, ‘police power relied on two static reifications, crime and race, which became mutual surrogates’ (2019:39). Moreover, in the case of the history of police practice, ‘race is understood as cause, when it should be understood as effect’ (Schrader, 2019:39). Recall the discourse of ‘police brutality’ and the multiple challenges launched against it, some examples of which included the ‘We Charge Genocide’ campaign of 1952 and Chicago’s grassroots organisation ‘We Charge Genocide’ (Rodríguez, 2021:148–52). Minority Report’s rendering of the act of killing a person into a profound disturbance of the metaphysical fabric that binds humanity together is an ideological obfuscation that cannot but obscure the consistently high numbers of police killings and other risk-related factors such as debt collection, extradition, foreclosure, eviction, and so on that constitute what Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007:28) has referred to as ‘the exposure to premature death’ inherent to racial capitalism. With this in mind, predictive policing can be seen as a system that relies on (Scannell, 2019:111)

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[…] almost every conceivable measure of vulnerability and victimization under American racial capitalism. It translates lived realities of oppression into a speculated likelihood of something called “crime.” In doing so, it rationalizes the lie that black, brown, queer, and poor people and the places where they live are intrinsically threatening to the broader public.

The parallel to what in the nineteenth and early twentieth century was called a ‘dangerous class’ can easily be seen here, only once removed and outsourced to the notion of space. A key example in the case of predictive policing and this process of reifying crime is the concept of the ‘hotspot’. Hotspots are best understood as ‘modes of distributing harm [through] environmental logics whereby space and place are themselves rendered criminogenic—so saturated with racialized threat that persons within those spaces cannot be otherwise than suspect’ (Miller, 2019:96). As Miller adds (2019), the application of technologies such as PredPol tends to be in already racialised places with history of displacement, underdevelopment, and white flight—in the case of Atlanta, Peyton Forest. The implications of this in practice are especially problematic. For instance, The US Supreme Court has already ruled that grounds for reasonable suspicion are to be more flexible in areas with high crime rates (Scannell, 2019:112). In terms of predictive policing, Walter Perry and colleagues (Perry et  al., 2013:1–2) define predictive policing in a report for the RAND corporation as ‘the application of analytical techniques – to identify likely targets for police intervention and prevent crime or solve past crimes by making statistical predictions’. This definition is distinct from Bennett Moses and Chan’s exclusive focus on the occurrence of future crimes, but it is worth noting that all four of the predictive methods in Perry et al.’s taxonomy are focused on the reduction of future crimes rather than the solution of past crimes. Bennett Moses and Chan (2018) identify predictive policing as deploying new analytic tools within the existing framework of intelligence-led policing, citing Maguire’s (2000:316) characterisation of the latter as ‘a strategic, future-oriented and targeted approach to crime control’. McCulloch and Wilson (2016) draw on Philip K. Dick’s 1956 short story (2017), ‘Minority Report’ (upon which Minority Report is based), to describe what they consider to be a new and

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alarming development in criminal justice practice at the beginning of the twenty-first-century, precrime policing. Where pre-emptive policing aims to prevent a particular crime from taking place by taking a particular action, precrime policing aims at both the prevention of a particular crime and the attaching of criminal liability to that crime. Although ‘pre-crime’ as coined by McCulloch and Wilson (2016:2) involves the police and security services, it is fundamentally a legal paradigm, one of three distinct frames for criminal justice alongside post-­ crime and risk-oriented. While there has always been some degree of future orientation in the traditional, post-crime criminal justice frame (for example, in the prevention of imminent crimes and in sentencing as deterrence), the process begins after a specific crime has been committed, assumes innocence until guilt has been proved, and requires a standard of proof that is beyond a reasonable doubt. The legal paradigm, however, serves to obscure the number of ways in which counterinsurgency has been undertaken and enforced in both legal and extralegal ways. As R. Joshua Scannell (2019:121) points out, it is not unusual for the police, or the criminal justice system in general, to flaunt its capabilities to circumvent legal restrictions on its activities while also staunchly defending said legal restrictions. Moreover, the cultural aspect of predictive policing, especially in view of actually existing technologies, points to a larger problem, where, as Miller notes, the digital infrastructure for drone policing in Iraq, Afghanistan, North-West Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Syria mirrors that of ‘domestic police power and anti-Black violence in the United States’ (Miller, 2019:86; also, see Wall, 2016, 2017; Neocleous, 2013). Policing in general cannot be separated from a logic of both place-­ making and border-enforcing in the sense that ‘the generation of the police to pacify civil disorder cannot be disentangled from its honing and application in militarized, colonial governance practices’ (Miller, 2019:88). Interestingly, the representation of drones in Minority Report is primarily as non-lethal technology. As Wall observes that drones are associated with ‘targeted assassinations, kill lists, and dead civilians’ (2017:192), the representation of non-lethal drone technology already marks a strategic ideological move that aligns with policing’s interests, that is, the normalisation of drones in a domestic context.

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However, the differences between Spielberg’s Minority Report and Dick’s story of the same name are telling. For Dick, it is all crime that is predictable, not just murder. This introduces a logistical consideration— if all types of crime are predictable, then the police must choose what to follow up on. Considering that many of the actually existing predictive policing software programmes, such as PredPol or Zavea (see Scannell, 2019), are understood to a large extent as labour management tools for the police (Scannell, 2019), this becomes a problem for the ideological justification of crime control measure in the real world. Even in a fictional depiction, the prevention of all crime appears somewhat far-­ fetched. Moreover, the example of the rolling ball is a particularly apt one in relation to the history of criminalisation—in essence, the police are often aware that the inevitability of crime is a discourse dependent on the institution of policing. That is, crime is not an ontologically unique phenomenon, but a cultural and historical contingency that is produced through the criminal justice system and the institution and practices of policing. The differences between the film and the short story run even deeper. The punishment for a crime is not the sanitised Department of Containment in the film, where ‘potential criminals’, or a ‘dangerous marginal individual’ such as Anderton, are merely cryogenically suspended, but rather an elaborate system of concentration camps. The difference in effect is subtle, but the implication of PreCrime being wrong is exacerbated in the short story by the likely scenario of Anderton encountering the people he has incarcerated—their guilt now also cast into doubt. Most importantly, there is no Burgess figure that oversees PreCrime to whom the responsibility might be offloaded—in the short story the Absolute Subject to which one is rendered responsible is in general terms the status quo and in specific terms the police as tasked with preserving it. The implication of the two being closely aligned is significant. However, this responsibility is contrasted to the individual autonomy of the protagonist. The Anderton of the short story is at first reluctant to sacrifice his own life for the good of the police; he only does so when he discovers that the police have an enemy in the face of the antagonist Leopold Kaplan (whom Anderton is predicted to kill in the original story), a supposedly retired military general who runs an underground taskforce. In

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this sense, Anderton’s final act in the story is the actual murder of Kaplan as a way of protecting the status quo. It is this privileged position of being commissioner, and an autonomous individual, that serves as the ideological justification for Anderton’s exceptional status. It is only due to the privilege of having the information that he will kill Kaplan can he choose not to; the fact that he does commit the murder does not contradict but reinforces this, as he chooses to do so, once he discovers that the potential scenario of him refusing to do so would go against the status quo of the PreCrime Unit’s existence. Although with some differences, at the core of both narratives remains the concern with the established order remaining as it is. At the short story’s end, Anderton, now on the run, evocatively interpellates Witwer, his successor, by framing the responsibility of the guardian role as intertwined with  the potential of Witwer himself becoming a threat to the order. The task, in summary, is simple—protect the order at all costs, even if it means becoming an enemy. Bennett Moses and Chan (2018:807) argue that optimism about predictive policing is ‘often based on a mythological and unrealistic view of actual capabilities and practices’. They identify ten assumptions of all of the predictive tools employed by law enforcement through the cycle of data collection (for example, data used accurately reflect the reality), analysis (for example, the future is similar to the past), police operations (for example, the primary intervention should be police deployment), and criminal response (for example, police deployment prevents crime). Their point is that predictive policing as a crime reduction strategy can fail at any one of these steps and that all ten assumptions must be accurate in order for it to succeed. Bennett Moses and Chan conclude by reiterating the inconclusive nature of the existing evidence on predictive policing, while more recent studies, such as Tulumello and Iapaolo (2021:453), observe that the different outcomes of analysing the effects of predictive policing vary depending on the provenance of research—with research supporting the practice coming from corporations with vested interests in this form of policing, and little evidence of increased efficiency from public academics. In one of the relatively few published tests of predictive policing, George Mohler and colleagues (Mohler et al., 2015) claim that their field experiments in the US and the UK provided evidence of both

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crime and cost reduction. Their description of the typical means by which predictive policing reduces crime in practice is revealing in the light of Moses and Chan’s claims about assumptions (Mohler et al., 2015:1409): A representative scenario arises when an officer shows up at a location designated as high risk. An offender who lives or works in that area (Brantingham and Brantingham 1991) sees the officer and decides to lay low or even run (Goffman 2014). In that time they are laying low they are in no position to commit a crime. If the offender comes out a few hours later and again sees the officer in the same or a nearby hotspot, the deterrence effect may last well beyond those particular policing events.

The example given by Mohler, one of the creators of the PredPol software (cf. Tulumello & Iapaolo, 2021:453), demonstrates the need to situate in a broader frame the practice of predictive policing. Namely, there are more continuities than innovations with many practices being informed by the Broken Windows Theory, situational crime prevention (see Brantingham et  al., 2005), and the general influence of Rational Choice Theories of crime. In particular, as Tulumello and Iapaolo indicate (2021), the logic of predictive policing is profoundly mathematical and relies on a quantification of the aforementioned construction of crime; as such, it also relies on Broken Windows Theory as policing that is based on ‘discretionary crime prevention, [... and] stopping crimes that have yet to occur’ (Schrader, 2019:256). Much like the way that statistics of African American criminality post-abolition were seen as evidence of a criminal essence, and with Broken Windows Theory’s roots in similar shifts from criminalising race explicitly to spatialising it, the process is utilised here not to a population but to a specific space, itself often racialised. As Schrader notes, Broke Windows Theory ‘reworked the salience of race to policing, filling the void left by the outlawing of vagrancy arrests according to status with novel prognostic criteria for police intervention drained of racial meaning’ (Schrader, 2019:257). It is this shift that resulted in ‘racialization [which] works through such apparently nonracial forms of ascription of risk and threat potential’ (Schrader, 2019:257). Put simply, predictive policing is a rearticulation of the status quo of policing, which allows the police to expand their capacities and

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determine their boundaries with the readymade justification of data— data, which they produce. As noted, this fits clearly into a positivist framework, where measures of efficiency and its lack are seen as key guiding principles. In essence, this trivial observation is important as it can illustrate the manner in which, as Scannell argues, ‘predictive policing systems are labor management tools’ (2019:112). In turn, this points to a techno-determinist logic, often noted in the literature (cf. Tulumello & Iapaolo, 2021), where, as Scannell adds, ‘the conflicts and inequalities of the social world are ultimately [rendered as] an engineering problem born of human inefficiency’ (2019:117). The dream of crime-free utopia, as shown in RoboCop (1987), is not dead; it is simply rearticulated in order to justify the acquisition of more tools to produce it.

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Wall, T. (2017). Unmanning the Police Manhunt: Vertical Security as Pacification. In T. Wall, P. Saberi, & W. Jackson (Eds.), Destroy Build Secure: Readings on Pacification. Red Quill Books. Wall, T. (2021). Inventing Humanity, or the Thin Blue Line as “Patronizing Shit”. In D. Correia & T. Wall (Eds.), Violent Order: Essays on The Nature of Police. Haymarket Books. Wang, J. (2018). Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e) Intervention Series 21). Semiotext(e). Weizman, E. (2017). Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability. Princeton University Press. Winston, A. (2018, February 27). Palantir Has Secretly Been Using New Orleans to Test Its Predictive Policing Technology. The Verge. Available at: https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-­predictive-­policing-­ tool-­new-­orleans-­nopd

7 Batman

Batman, the Vigilante Counterinsurgent In the multiple iterations and representations of Batman on film across the twentieth and twenty-first century, Christopher Nolan’s trilogy stands apart as particularly significant—it has revived interest in the franchise (and superheroes more broadly), rendered the invariably gothic and occasionally grotesque atmosphere of Gotham into a more modern, ‘realist’ depiction of New  York, and relied on a somewhat more sophisticated psychologisation of characters. As the final instalment of the trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises engages on several levels with the function of Batman in the system of urban crime control in Gotham City. While Batman Begins is largely concerned with the maturity of Bruce Wayne (played by Christian Bale) and the necessity of Batman as a law enforcer on street level, it very much relies on the foregrounding of Bruce Wayne’s psychological journey. Having witnessed his parents’ murder as a child, the personal development of the protagonist manifests in a shift from a personal desire for vengeance to a general sense of injustice and move to vigilantism. The way the transition occurs is by way of Wayne’s indoctrination into a secret terrorist group—the League of Shadows, led

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by its enigmatic leader Ra’s al Ghul1 (played by Liam Neeson). In a certain sense, Batman Begins does not deviate too much from the traditional vigilante narrative, where the protagonist who has been wronged is left traumatised by the event and the only way imaginable out of the situation is a pursuit for revenge. In ideological terms, an interesting conflict is established on a symbolic level. As Althusser notes (2020:23), both ideological state apparatuses and repressive apparatuses are simultaneously repressive and ideological. In a straightforward sense, the criminal justice system is both a repressive institution and an ideological one that relies on a notion of justice. To wit (2020:41): If he [sic] believes in Justice, he [sic] will submit unconditionally to the rules of the Law, and may even protest when they are violated, sign petitions, take part in a demonstration, etc.

In other words, the subject’s ‘belief ’ in an ideology expresses itself in material practices. Then, if one believes in justice, they still will engage with the parameters of the law. The contradiction inherent to the figure of Batman appears to be one of tension between justice and its parameters—quite often, his position is outside the boundaries of the criminal justice system. This tension is evident in the first film and is allowed to accumulate throughout Wayne’s indoctrination into the League of Shadows. In Batman Begins (2005), the young Wayne seeks vengeance and is presented as immature and cowardly. It is only through his successful training at the League of Shadows does he become a vigilante proper. It is with the acquisition of power that Wayne’s final test is expressed in the task of executing a criminal, a test meant to prepare him for the ultimate goal of the League—the destruction of Gotham City.2 The tension here is made explicit—the value of a person’s life is counterposed to  A character, whose cinematic depiction, is best summarised by his view that ‘Criminals thrive on the indulgence of society’s understanding’ (Batman Begins, 2005) 2  There is a point to be made about the role of destruction in the justification of the overarching logic of policing and counterinsurgency. As Wall points out, ‘security capitalizes on devastation and insecurity by converting them into a plethora of opportunities for state power, social order and capitalist accumulation to be bolstered and reproduced’ (2017:195). Namely, it is not hard to imagine that a destroyed Gotham City would usher in a greater form of police power and counterinsurgent vigilantism. 1

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a fascist logic of extermination. However, posing the problem this way omits its actual content—at the end of both sides of the spectrum lies hidden the problem of crime. The question stands, should Wayne be able to legitimately end a person’s life because they have committed a crime? What about a whole corrupt structure that has enabled and reproduced crime? The tension is symbolic as it is both apparent, that is, it is a conflict with the League, and implied, that is, Wayne is forced to reflect on the character of vigilante justice. Wayne rejects the task, the true and evil character of the League is revealed, and Wayne symbolically overcomes the conflict by defeating the League’s leader Ra’s al Ghul. This symbolic tension is not uncommon for cinematic engagements with vigilantism. In the Dirty Harry series of films, for example, a similar tension can be observed between the eponymous original and the sequel, Magnum Force (1973). The representation of the rogue cop figure in Dirty Harry (1971)—already briefly addressed in Chap. 4—speaks to an underlying fascist logic, the glorification of violence, and a commitment to extrajudicial justice (Kael, 1972). The sequel, Magnum Force, introduced a contrasting example, where Inspector ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan is opposed to a fascist vigilante faction within the San  Francisco  Police Department. In view of cinema’s potential for eliciting affective alignment with protagonists, it is worth addressing that the sequel appears to be a reshaping of the boundaries of permissible ‘intimacy’. Namely, the fascist character of Harry’s actions in the first film requires the course correction of the second one, where, by virtue of being opposed to a fascist vigilante faction in his own police department, he is affirmed as not-afascist. The parallel to Nolan’s Batman trilogy and its beginning with this same juxtaposition is significant. Put simply, the audience has to be reassured that although Wayne desires justice at all costs, he is ultimately prepared to sacrifice this desire (what he imagines justice to be, in any case) for a set of procedures and regulations, albeit self-enforced. The individual’s autonomy appears to trump all. In such framing, this reassurance is also an invitation for the affective alignment with Wayne/Batman as protagonist, having established his moral fortitude and ethical position through the film’s narrative. Upon just superficial examination, however, it is evident that both Dirty Harry and Batman desire the ability to legitimately enact violence without restrictions.

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In the second film of the trilogy, The Dark Knight (2008), Batman is confronted with the limitations of his self-imposed rules through his confrontation with Joker, a chaotic figure, who seems to go out of his way to devise ways in which to challenge Batman’s code of nonlethality. The psychological aspect is similarly in the foreground here with Joker directly challenging Batman that they complete each other. On a superficial reading, it is possible to claim that Joker is deluded that he is playing a game with Batman, one that only the two of them are in on. However, it is important to stress the ways their encounter does, in fact, disrupt Batman’s code and ultimately results in his public disgrace. On a more thorough look, however, the binary opposition, with District Attorney Harvey Dent remaining an additional factor, seems to represent an example par excellence of Marcuse’s notion of ‘repressive tolerance’ (1965). In addition to the psychologisation of complementarity, there is also the mythologisation of the opposition, rendered explicit by the Joker as: ‘This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an unmovable object.’ This tension between chaos and order is played out on the scale of the individual. If Batman would not be changed, and if the Joker would not stop (or be stopped by Batman), then someone else will—Harvey Dent. While in one way we can see the opposition between the Joker and Batman as parallels with that of the Joker and Dent, the parallel between Batman and Dent is much more evocative.3 Namely, the former parallel speaks to Dent’s ultimate corruption and his transformation into a vigilante executioner. The latter parallel, however, points to the problem that it is very much the agent of the system, that is, the DA, that gets corrupted, not the vigilante outside the system. Moreover, the narrative  In an eloquent review published in the New  Yorker, Pauline Kael critically breaks down what exactly makes Harry Callahan ‘dirty’ (1972). She notes: ‘The dirtiness on Harry is the moral stain of recognition that evil must be dealt with; he is our martyr—stained on our behalf ’ (1972:np). The film’s narrative itself notes that his dirtiness comes from taking the jobs that no one else wants. Batman is similar—his willingness to work outside the law as a vigilante is shown as justified, because if he were to work within the law he would be constrained by a corrupt system. Moreover, the darkness of Batman, in distinction to Harvey Dent’s nickname ‘The White Knight’, is exactly this ‘moral stain of recognition that evil must be dealt with’. 3

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closure of The Dark Knight lies in what could be termed the ‘moral strength’ of Batman to take the blame for Dent’s, now Two-Face, killing spree. This, coupled with the psychologisation and mythologisation mentioned above, points to a glorification of the individual above and beyond the system. The message implied is that Batman, by virtue of being a better individual, resisted the temptation of vigilantism. It is not a system that restrained him, but an ambiguous conviction, itself rooted in a repressed desire to enact limitless violence. The parallel to Dirty Harry and Magnum Force still stands; the role of the guardian is defined by opposition to an external enemy—the serial killer Scorpio in Dirty Harry or the League of Shadows in Batman Begins—and by condemnation of an internal enemy—the fascist vigilante faction in Magnum Force and Two-Face, formerly DA Harvey Dent. At the core of the function of the guardian, revealed in both oppositions, is the perpetual renegotiation of violence and permissibility in the face of a threat to the city. That is to say, as much as Batman is portrayed as an extralegal figure, he is very much rooted in the framework of policing as violence work (cf. Seigel, 2018). In a brief parallel to the three myths of policing identified by Seigel (2018), Batman’s vigilantism is heavily militarised (though non-lethal), privately funded by the wealth of a billionaire, and international. In fact, both the private and military aspect are evident in Batman’s technology—be it the surveillance capabilities he develops in The Dark Knight, or the surplus military equipment developed by Wayne Enterprises in Batman Begins. Regarding the international aspect, The Dark Knight shows Batman conduct a kidnapping in Hong Kong. As such, Batman’s work is both vigilantism and deeply rooted in policing as counterinsurgency. If one follows the three core pillars of counterinsurgency as discussed by Schrader

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(2019:454)—(1) kill, (2) jail, and (3) control—it appears that Batman’s function is the last two elements. Considering what we know about violence work, and in direct reference to obscured mortality by police (and its omittance) in Minority Report (2002), we can suppose that Batman’s relationship with the Gotham City Police Department is complementary in the sense that their killings are not likely to be challenged by Batman. In fact, this latter aspect of Batman’s vigilantism, its parallels to counterinsurgency, is evident in his principles of non-lethality. What constitutes a ‘non-lethal’ weapon is a contentious topic, as the history of the term speaks to a discursive obfuscation of what such weapons are (see Davison, 2009). For example, Schrader (2019:195) notes that the qualifier was rarely used prior to 1964 and remained primarily a specialist term. In fact, the adoption of the term was done in direct reference to CS gas as a strategy of justifying US military actions in Vietnam (2019:195). Schrader (2019) further points to the term’s efficiency in blurring the boundaries between military and police use, the term becoming a qualifier for munitions in general as well as synonym for ‘riot control’. In fact, the term was further justified as a police tactic in the wake of the recommendations put forth  Schrader (2019:45) is referring to the following:

4

In the words of Frank E. Walton, a former Los Angeles Police Department deputy chief who helped supervise police assistance in South Vietnam, “Recognizing that the battleground here is people—how do we attack this problem? There are only three broad ways: (1) kill all of them; (2) jail all of them; (3) control them.” While there was an effort to provide security and protection to citizens, Schrader (2019:46) shows: Elbridge Colby declared in 1927 of any combat field commander’s judgment, which necessarily prevailed beyond those limits, “It is good to be decent. It is good to use proper discretion.” Law might sometimes apply, and to be civilized was to know the difference. But for Colby the discretionary decision to act within or outside the law—to economize on force or not—was insufficient in the face of an implacable enemy, knowable only as unknowable threat. Instead, the unknowable threat had to be systematically excluded from legal protection. As Colby discussed “poisonous and toxic” chemical weapons, and the killing of “‘non-­ combatants’—if there be any such in native folk of this character,” he concluded, “The inhuman act thus becomes actually humane, for it shortens the conflict and prevents the shedding of more excessive quantities of blood.”

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by the Kerner Commission (National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders—1968), where the tactic of scattershot killing of protests was finally accepted as inefficient in maintaining and restoring order. In a direct parallel to the representation of police violence in RoboCop (1987), where Murphy-as-RoboCop would often engage in gunfights, the Kerner Commission, following its analysis of the Detroit Rebellion of 1967, found that both the Detroit Police Department and the National Guard had indiscriminately killed Black people—including the previous uprisings in Harlem, Watts, Baltimore, and Newark, among others (Schrader, 2019:197–9; cf. Murakawa, 2014:24). The shift in police tactics was a strategic one; on the one hand, it demonstrated the flexibility of the state in response to civil rights protesters, while on the other it allowed for the solidification of designated riot control tactics with CS use becoming widespread as early as 1968 during the unrest following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination (Schrader, 2019:208). It was as this time as well, following the events of the Watts Rebellion in 1965, that the first Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) units were formed with the direct goal of ‘dealing with Black protest’ (Schrader, 2019:214). The extent to which this has permeated popular culture is evident throughout urban riot control in the US, one prominent example being protesters in the Battle of Seattle in 1999 who described riot cops as ‘Darth Vader’ or ‘robo cops’ (Herbert, 2007:610). In a practical sense, the similarities to Nolan’s Batman are clear—he is both equipped with a suit similar to riot police the world over, and he uses non-lethal tactics with the goal of incapacitation. He relies on military equipment and private funding, and he is an international agent. From RoboCop to The Dark Knight Rises (2012), the historical parallel is evident—the policing of urban disorder has grown less lethal. However, as the suggestion of Minority Report’s Department of Containment the logic of this shift is rooted in the expansion of the carceral state. Ultimately, this becomes explicit in The Dark Knight Rises as the culmination of the themes prevalent throughout the trilogy—the plot of destroying Gotham, the complete breakdown of social order and the inversion of social control institutions, and the mass release of incarcerated people. The plot of the film is premised on the supposed success of the Dent Act, which has allowed for the expansion of police powers and the criminal justice

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system in order to combat organised crime. However, the apparent order is disturbed by the terrorist Bane (played by Tom Hardy), who abducts nuclear physicist Dr Leonid Pavel from a CIA airplane somewhere above Uzbekistan. In contrast, Batman is no longer actively fighting crime and Wayne has disappeared from public appearances, while his company Wayne Enterprises is losing money. Bane allies himself with Wayne’s corporate rival, John Daggett (played by Ben Mendelsohn), and establishes a base in the sewers of the city. In turn, Bane solicits Daggett to obtain Wayne’s fingerprints leading to Selina Kyle, also known as Catwoman (played by Anne Hathaway), to steal them. The fingerprints allow Bane to attack the Gotham Stock Exchange and directly cause Wayne’s bankruptcy. It is at this point that Wayne returns as Batman and confronts Bane in the sewers of the city. The fight results in Batman’s defeat and crippling injury—Bane himself exclaiming ‘Peace has cost you your strength! Victory has defeated you!’ in what appears to be a quasi-fascist Oswald-Spengler-informed understanding (Thurlow, 1981) of Gotham’s civilisational decline with the simple implication that Bane represents Batman’s mirror image with regard to the use of illegitimate force. Granted, Bane is the successor of Ra’s al Ghul, but he is also similar to the Joker in the sense that he portrays Batman’s opposite in ideology, while remaining similar in method, though lethal. If the Joker failed to break Batman’s principles, then Bane succeeded in doing this physically. Batman’s defeat marks his fall as a guardian, where he is forced to experience both incarceration and physical incapacitation—what he has been doing to the multitude of criminals he has fought in the streets of Gotham. The prison is undisclosed, but clearly outside of Gotham, or even the US. The implication is clear, Bane has come from the periphery where the League of Shadows reigns, somewhere beyond the reaches of Gotham. The ideological implication here is significant as it points to a core-periphery relation not unlike that demonstrated in the contrast between RoboCop (1987) and Robocop (2014)—the periphery is the place where violence reigns supreme and is thus inferior to the centre, despite all of the latter’s corruption and crime. Even more so, the periphery is the place where law enforcement is improved and developed. In Robocop, the periphery is where RoboCop is manufactured (China) and where prototypes are tested in practice as counterinsurgent tools (Iran); similarly, in

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Total Recall (2012), the Colony is where workers live and where crime control technology is manufactured. For Batman, the periphery is both where he developed his skills in Batman Begins and where his fall takes place. With Batman gone, the centre is turned upside down by Bane— the police are tricked and subsequently trapped, that is, imprisoned, in the city’s sewers, while all of the prisoners in Blackgate Penitentiary are released. In an ostensible parallel to historical revolutions, martial law is declared, and people’s tribunals take place led by criminals. Furthermore, the bridges to the city are destroyed by Bane, thus making the entire Gotham City a prison, as well as weaponising Wayne Enterprises’ fusion reactor core into a neutron bomb with the help of Dr Pavel. It is in this way that all of the themes of Nolan’s Batman trilogy are brought together. First, the plot for the destruction of Gotham is revealed to be a continuation of the original plan of the League of Shadows, with the bait-and-switch of Bane being revealed to be the lieutenant to Ra’s’ daughter, Talia al Ghul (played by Marion Cotillard), who had posed as a businesswoman and Wayne’s lover. Second, the breakdown of social order is represented as an implicit critique of Batman’s principles of non-­ lethal violence—for the appropriately aligned viewer, since all of the Blackgate prisoners are represented as dangerous and prone to indiscriminate violence in support of a foreign terrorist group, should Batman have not disposed of them earlier?

A Prison City If Batman knew about this you would be in so much trouble! —Written on the separation wall in occupied Palestine

To write about Batman means to write about Gotham City. Whether as its secret protector, its playboy millionaire, or as its noble son, the character of Bruce Wayne is constantly defined in relation to the city. Both New  York City and something else altogether, Gotham is best understood as a simulacrum of NYC at its most Gothic and expressionist, where anything and anyone is in stark contrast to everything and everyone else, and where each thing casts a shadow. In a literal sense, Nolan’s

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Gotham City is part NYC, part Chicago, and part Philadelphia on the basis of where shooting took place, with the last city being most prominent. In a figurative sense, Gotham is a syncretic and anachronistic version of New York at its richest symbolic power, evocative of all kinds of cinematic representations, be it Manhatta (1921) or Fritz Lang’s nameless Metropolis (1927). The labour that maintains the city is, for the most part, absent, and there is only the implied danger of public space at night. The home, be it Wayne Manor, or Lieutenant Jim Gordon’s (played by Gary Oldman) house, is a place of stark contrast and under  the ever-­ present danger of invasion. Following Lefebvre (1974), it is easy to say that Gotham is opaque. It is dark and dangerous, even in the daylight. There are few spatial practices to be seen—during car chases in The Dark Knight streets are empty, for example—but the ones that are present speak to an implied indeterminacy and danger. In Batman Begins, the vertical parallel of the elevated monorail system is rendered the tool to be used in Gotham’s destruction. The monorail system, presented as an expression of Thomas Wayne’s benevolent capitalism, is best understood as a common good, a form of public transport that is central to people’s commute and traversal of the city. However, it is these same people that, once attacked by weaponised hallucinogens, become a mob—speaking to the dangers of public space and the fragility of social order. This reversal is significant as it speaks to the trilogy’s understanding of groups and collective action—for the most part, they are presented as a dangerous phenomenon that needs the guidance of a leader. In essence, the point being made is that everything is corruptible, unless safeguarded by a benevolent individual—an ideological manoeuvre quite similar to that of Minority Report. In fact, China Mieville’s observation (cited in Fisher, 2006:19) regarding Batman Begins’ treatment of public infrastructure is a salient one: The film argues quite explicitly (in what’s obviously, in its raised-train setting, structured as a debate with Spiderman 2, a stupid but good-hearted film that thinks people are basically decent) that masses are dangerous unless terrorised into submission (Spidey falls among the masses  – they nurture him and make sure he’s ok. Bats falls among them  – they are a murderous and bestial mob because they are not being *effectively scared

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enough*). The final way of *solving* social catastrophe is … by the demolition of the mass transit system that ruined everything by literally raised the poor and put them among the rich: travelling together, social-democratic welfarism as opposed to trickle-downism is a nice dream but leads to social collapse, and if left unchecked terrorism that sends transit systems careering through the sky into tall buildings in the middle of New  York-style cities—9/11 as caused by the crisis of *excessive social solidarity*, the arrogance of masses *not being sufficiently terrified of their shepherds.

There is more to be said about the parallel transformation of Wayne Enterprises’ fusion reactor into a neutron bomb as well. It appears that in Nolan’s Batman trilogy, all public goods are assumed to be under threat of being transformed into weapons. As such, the film does seem to engage with the opposition of fear and justice (cf. Fisher, 2006) and do so in a framework informed by 9/11. However, it does so in a clearly reactionary way, where the danger lies in the people and collective action. It should not be ignored that Bane’s terrorist attack on Wall Street has been likened to the Occupy Wall Street movement and was even lauded by right-wing pundits (Fisher, 2012). The account of the individual reigning supreme is at the core of the quotation above—it is Batman’s reluctance and resistance to corruption that singles him out. It is this that Fisher (2006:21), in reference to Žižek, points to as ideology’s dependence ‘upon the conviction that what “really matters” is what we are, rather than what we do, and that “what we are” is defined by an “inner essence”’. This view is contrasted with the mobs into which Gotham’s citizens transform. This view of public space, and its presumed tendency to fall into mob rule, violence, and disorder, is key to the ideology of justice of interest here. As argued in Chaps. 5 and 6, violence work is rooted in the constructions of race and crime, as well as their constant reification through police practice. In view of the parallels outlined here to the changes in policing—wanton violence in RoboCop (1987) and non-lethal repression in Nolan’s Batman trilogy—Mieville points (cited in Fisher, 2006:19) to a similar parallel in Batman Begins where the film is concerned with:

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Fascism’s self-realisation, and the only struggle it undergoes is to admit its own necessity. BB [i.e. Batman Begins] argues for the era of the absolute(ist) corporation against the ‘postmodern’ social dilutions of shareholder capitalism (perceived here in old-school corporate paranoia as a kind of woolly weakness), let alone against the foolishness of those well-meaning liberal rich who don’t understand that their desire to travel with the poor and working class are the *causes* of social conflict.

The desire for the retreat back into a supposedly better, more benign version of capitalism is counterposed with the representation that Gotham’s problems stem from the failures of capitalism (finance capital, explicitly so), omitting that its successes are just as criminogenic, if not more (Fisher, 2006). Furthermore, the implied benevolence of Wayne Enterprises appears to be rooted in its monopoly of control and influence within the city—not unlike the cinematic parallel of OmniCorp in RoboCop or the Ford Motor Company in the real Detroit. The vertical aspect of social stratification is also at the core of The Dark Knight Rises. It is present both in Gotham—with the inversion of Bane’s occupation of the sewers to the imprisonment of Gotham’s police under the city—and in the unnamed prison in the periphery—with the vertical hole out of which Bruce Wayne must climb out. In a sense, the film points to an aspect of urban space that has not been discussed so far. While RoboCop primarily presented an urban space that requires better ways of policing and traversal, with pockets of inscrutability and danger, and Minority Report was similarly preoccupied with transparency and surveillance, the issue of opacity is foregrounded much more prominently in The Dark Knight Rises. The most relevant example being the transformation of Gotham City into a prison. In a certain sense, the careful reader will observe that the descent of Gotham City is one of increasing obscurity—thus further equating police’s function as that of the following: violence, as shown in RoboCop; surveillance and maintaining the established order, as shown in Minority Report; and social control, as shown in The Dark Knight Rises. On a superficial reading, the film lends itself to an interpretation of a critique of the Occupy movement (cf. Fisher, 2012). More generally, it fits into an idea common to liberal and reactionary discourse where the internal enemy is either corrupt or manipulated by a

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foreign one who is ideologically motivated (cf. Parenti, 1991; Hall, 1980). Moreover, the reversal of incarceration carries the implied message that it is unjust—a more general depiction of a fall, where both guardian and city go through it—also points to a far-right wing perspective common to calls for addressing structural inequality. The parallel to Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report is illustrative (2017). The short story quickly raises the question that if Anderton is indeed innocent, then others must have been as well. Anderton quickly rejects this, as his experience is extraordinary—nobody else would have been able to see the prediction of murder they will commit. Hence, only his predetermined arrest would be unjust as he had access to the information and could decide not to do it. Nothing is said about the idea of informing other potential criminals, Dick’s narrative manoeuvre seems to imply that the point is that Anderton is a privileged subject. Much like the Minority Report example, the reversal of the guardian’s position in The Dark Knight Rises speaks of a fear of injustice in a vague way, while leaving unchallenged the idea that incarcerated people are dangerous and should be locked away. The preferred decoding appears to be that incarceration of innocents is unjust, but that this only happens once there are evil individuals, such as Bane, in power. It is not so much that incarceration is unjust, but that its reversal is. Moreover, it needs to be stressed that the ideological content of the film is one of a powerful group, the police, being legitimately afraid of their practices being turned against them. The way this is managed in Nolan’s cinematic universe is through the apparent rendering of the police as under threat and lacking the power to act meaningfully against crime. An idea that stands in stark contrast to the NYPD annual budget of US$11 billion (NYCLU, 2022), at the time of writing (following two years of campaign for defunding the police), with an annual number of over 1000 people killed by police each year. This fear of an oppressive system by a group in power, such as mass incarceration in the carceral state in The Dark Knight Rises, speaks to contemporary discourses in the far-right such as white genocide, the great replacement theory, or anti-feminism. Moreover, The Dark Knight Rises can very clearly be described as an anti-abolitionist fantasy. The inevitable outcome of the disbanding of prisons could only be complete chaos, in which masses of criminals wreak revenge and seek to completely take over the city. Just like The Purge (for example, The Purge, 2013) series of films

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rely on a logic of the necessity of policing (Alexandrescu, 2021), The Dark Knight Rises is convinced that without prisons the faceless masses, in this case faceless pawns led by Bane, will rise up and seek misguided justice on Wall Street. It is important to stress that both the spatial imaginary of the film and its fear of reversal of incarceration point to an omission of engagement with prevalent colonial practices and an anxiety of their replication on behalf of oppressed peoples. It is this that Aimé Césaire referred to as ‘the boomerang effect’ of imperialism where commonplace colonial practices are then applied to the metropole: ‘the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss’ (2000:36). To Césaire, this expressed itself in the colonialism of Europe with its dehumanisation and incessant massacres throughout the globe returned to Europe in the form of Nazism. It has already been shown how such boomerang effects remain in multiple forms—not the least, the use of non-lethal weapons, CS gas, or drone surveillance, what Schrader (2019:192; cf. Go, 2020) has referred to as ‘the imperial circuit’ of, broadly construed, technologies of violence. There are multiple examples that can be highlighted as illustration, but it is important to stress the ongoing enclosure of Gaza (Fields, 2020; Pappé, 2017; cf. Puar, 2017; Azoulay, 2015; Weizman, 2012), the historic examples of colonial incarceration, and the general characteristics of what can be described as the imperial boomerang effect5 (Césaire, 2000). Historian Illan Pappé (2017:213) describes Gaza as the ‘ultimate maximum security prison model’, and it has also been referred to as the world’s biggest open-air prison (Fields, 2020). If there is something like the dreaded prison city created by Bane in existence, then Gaza is it. As the time of its cutting off from the world in 2005, Gaza had a population of over a million and a half in a territory of about 40 km2, effectively becoming ‘a dummy city for [Israeli] soldiers to experiment with the most recent and advanced weapons’ (Pappé, 2017:115) as well as ‘the most densely populated 40 square kilometres on the planet’ (2017:116), effectively  McMichael (2017:147) has challenged the idea of reappearance that the term ‘boomerang effect’ suggests. Instead, he suggests thinking of ‘a continuum of pacification, underpinned by the dream of ensuring cities of docile proletarians and occupied people, governed spaces of work and production’ (2017:147). 5

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making it ‘a maximum security prison camp’ (2017:117). Gaza as prison, however, is only a culmination of a process originating from the beginning of the Zionist project of the State of Israel. Namely, the events of the Nakba in 1948 saw the split of Palestinian people into groups that remained in the territory of Israel and groups who were driven out or forced to flee outside the borders of the new Israeli state. Among the first groups stands the example of the Bedouins of the Naqab Desert, who were, as described by Fields (2020:52), evicted from the desert en masse, while the remaining thousands were confined in a parcel of land known as the Siyaj, where: Dispossessed and confined in the Siyaj until 1966, Bedouins were without basic services, forbidden to build permanent housing, and required to obtain permits to enter and exit the Siyaj.

Among the second group of Palestinians mentioned above were the 750,000 people forced to leave their homes, about 200,000 of which were displaced to Gaza (Fields, 2020). The mass exodus was further reinforced by a number of policies enacted by Israel that saw strategies such as ‘a cordon of settlements’ around Gaza, as well as ‘shoot-to-kill orders, the laying of land mines, and the aggressive reinforcement of the lines of control [which] had a dramatic impact on refugee returns’ (Fields, 2020:54). As Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism demonstrates (2000), the incarceration of Palestinians into the Gaza Strip is not without historical precedent. Fields (2020) evocatively points to the processes of settler-­ colonialism in the US and its systematic displacement of Native Americans and their forced relocation into reservations as well as the spatial segregation characteristic of French colonialism in Algeria or the apartheid system in South Africa. As researchers such as Ariella Azoulay (2015) have pointed out, Israel’s strategy of displacement and containment often utilises the strictly codified practices of destruction—be it of infrastructure, housing, or reshaping access to the former two. Puar has described the ‘infrastructural warfare’ (2017:134; cf. Salamanca, 2011; Salamanca & Silver, 2022) waged against Gaza in the form of, among others, water restriction, internet infrastructure or housing. Gunaratnam also builds on this by

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pointing to the broader ways in which infrastructure inflicts racial violence, damages health, and causes debility (2021; cf. Puar, 2017). Achille Mbembe has also discussed necropolitics with reference to the strategies of ‘shutting down the enemy’s life-support system’ (2019:83). An example of this is the production of ‘sterile zones’ where Israeli Defense Force soldiers would invade Palestinian homes and take them over as a way of hiding from attacks, while leveraging claims of Palestinian insurgents for doing the same in order to justify destruction of housing (Azoulay, 2015; cf. Weizman, 2012). Moreover, the ‘dangers’ of public infrastructure in Nolan’s Batman are evident as a reality in Gaza in the form of tools for repression. It is in this context that the metaphor of ‘the production of space’ present throughout this monograph takes on a salient meaning— prisons, be it enclosures such as the Siyaj, the city of Gaza, or a modern supermax security prison in the US, are produced. As such, they are examples par excellence of transparent space. It is in this sense that Foucault used the panopticon as an example of transparency and wrote against the ubiquity of discipline along its principles of sight. As Berlant notes, infrastructure is ‘that which binds us to the world in movement and keeps the world practically bound to itself ’ (2016:394). In this sense, as policing is reliant on traversal and transparency, its repression and control manifests in the restriction of movement. Gaza remains an illustrative example in the examination of the The Dark Knight Rises in two main ways. First, it points to the way in which the fear of reversal is a deeply reactionary one. The content of this fear is of undergoing what one knows is inflicted elsewhere but somehow justified or ignored it. It is the fear of the boomerang effect described by Césaire (2000). In such sense, the transformation of Gotham into a prison city is an ideological reversal of the reality of existing spaces of incarceration and repression. This ideological manoeuvre seeks to hide the reality of injustice by ventriloquising those who have actually suffered through the injustices of incarceration—a point to which the next section is dedicated. The second way in which Gaza is an illustrative example in comparison to Gotham is evident in the further probing of the core-­ periphery relation. Namely, incarceration appears to be implicitly rooted in practices of the periphery with connotations of racialisation. The prison, known as The Pit, in which Bane and Talia al Ghul were born and

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raised is in an undisclosed location, but clearly implied to be somewhere in the Global South or Western/Central Asia (in reality, shot near the fortress of Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India). The racial undertones of an underdeveloped location with voices bearing accents foreign to the US are apparent. This fear of the boomerang effect of the periphery as a threat to the metropole is present in Batman: Knightfall (Dixon, 2012), the graphic novel that covers Bane’s origin story. In it, Bane is a child born within the confines of Peña Duro (alternatively misspelled as Pena Duro), a prison for the insurgents of ‘the Caribbean republic of Santa Prisca’ (Dixon, 2012:7). The racial undertones are not so implicit here with mentions of the fictional  Santa Prisca’s military junta taking inspiration from the Cuban Revolution, noting: ‘But the ruling junta here was not so lazy or so blind as the masters of Cuba’ (Dixon, 2012:8). It is in Peña Duro that Bane first encounters the powerful drug ‘Venom’, which gives him superhuman strength and renders him capable of outmatching Batman physically. As the core-periphery relation yet again shows, even in cultural representation, it is often used for the testing and application of novel weapons and tactics (see Weizman, 2012; Pappé, 2017; Fields, 2020). So is the case with Gaza, so it appears to be with the nameless periphery of Gotham City. To go back to the parallel between Batman and other vigilantes or rogue cops such as Dirty Harry, there is more to be said in relation to the idea of the periphery. The other pioneering example of the vigilante film is Michael Winner’s Death Wish (1974, based on Brian Garfield’s novel of the same name). The narrative portrays the transformation of a liberal architect, Paul Kersey (played by Charles Bronson), into a vigilante after his wife’s murder by a gang of thieves. The film’s narrative appears to implicitly reshape the thematic of the Western with Kersey receiving a gift of a 0.32 Colt Police Positive (Goddard, 1930) for successfully completing a job for a client in Tucson, Arizona; the gun bears several notches signifying that the revolver had been used to kill people. Upon receiving the gun and returning to New York City, he begins carrying the gun with him, and after a man attempts to mug him in Central Park at night, Kersey begins his serial killing of muggers at night. Central to the film is the similar tension between periphery and tension—Tucson and NYC on one level, but also the growing conflict between Kersey and Jack (played

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by Steven Keats), his son-in-law, about the legitimacy of violence in response to crime. Kersey mentions that maybe there is a solution to the problem of violent crime, hinting at vigilantism. To this, Jack responds negatively and asserts that ‘we’re civilized’ and that ‘we’re not pioneers anymore’ (Death Wish, 1974). The implication for Kersey is clear—the ‘old social custom of self-defense’ is what is at stake; that not doing anything is ‘being supine’. Jack notes evocatively that the vigilante, not knowing that it is Paul, must have a death wish. Read from the perspective of what we have examined so far in Batman, we can easily conclude that this is at the core of the vigilante—a death wish, but not for one’s own death, but for that of others. This violence is rendered extraordinary as it is in response to an emergency—what Wall calls ‘a specific type of ordinary emergency that cannot be subsumed under law’ (Wall, 2021:19). The context of pioneers and frontier justice, the notion of ‘being civilised’, all point to this self-same boomerang effect outlined by Césaire. It is clear that, in Kersey’s eyes, the muggers are racialised and dehumanised, what matters is that he as an individual subject is seen as capable—not supine, that is to say, not emasculated. A scene early on in the film has Kersey react to a colleague chastising him for his liberal sensibilities: ‘the underprivileged’, the colleague says, should be sent to a concentration camp. The persistent tension in vigilante justice is easy to see—incarceration is unsavoury, merely a plaster—it is far easier to get rid of criminals altogether. Thus, Batman’s rule is not without accident the only thing keeping him from becoming someone like Two-Face or Paul Kersey. It is unlikely, however, to expect him to be on the side of Gaza and Palestine. Batman’s task is to protect the metropole and police the periphery.

‘Mass’ Incarceration The crime control measures covered so far have had several salient characteristics that remain consistently of interest. First, the crime control measures discussed so far are all interconnected and complement each other. Starting from the history of policing as violence work as

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exemplified in RoboCop’s private police force through Minority Report’s surveillance apparatus of preventative neutralisation of potential criminals to the problem of mass incarceration in The Dark Knight Rises, one can easily track the definition of policing as counterinsurgency, provided by Schrader (2019:45), as kill, jail, or control. RoboCop exemplifies the police’s licence to enact violence in the multiple wars it wages, whether on drugs, crime, or even homelessness (cf. Seigel, 2018; Rodríguez, 2021). Minority Report speaks to the police function of maintaining social control and preventing disturbance to the status quo by way of obscuring police violence. The Dark Knight Rises points to the inevitable outcome of what happens to those individuals and communities targeted by policing—if they are not killed or kept under surveillance via statistical constructions of risk that reduce rights, privileges, or opportunities, they are bound to end up in prison. In simple terms, what has so far been referred to as criminalisation cannot be separated from the process and logic of incarceration. Importantly, the formulation of the problem that has so far been discussed as ‘mass incarceration’ is inaccurate as the ‘mass’ qualifier is a misnomer. As Rodríguez notes, the term is ‘descriptively subsuming incarcerated people under the notion of an undifferentiated “mass”’ (2021:182). It designates a disproportionality in incarceration along racial and ethnic lines that is not entirely representative of ‘mass’. Rather, a more correct formulation should be ‘mass black and brown incarceration’ (Rodríguez, 2021, 2016). The purpose of this section is to demonstrate this and to engage with the spatial aspect of how this phenomenon manifests. Before discussing incarceration in terms of space, however, it is important to restate the role of labour, both in policing and in urban space, as

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well as incarceration.6 Namely, the history of the prison remains the history of forced labour. In The Prison and the Factory, Melossi and Pavarini (2019) points to this long history of incorporating the coercion of labour within the early capitalist state in Europe and especially in relation to the criminalisation of vagrancy. Interestingly, while European pre-capitalist societies did not use imprisonment as a form of punishment, certain ‘embryonic forms of sanction were imposed by the Church upon erring clergy’ for breaking of canon law (Melossi & Pavarini, 2019:xxx). While in most other cases the rule of law was determined by feudal ideas of punishment along the lines of lex talionis (eye for an eye), the punishment for such crimes committed by clergy was confinement in a monastery for a determined period (Melossi & Pavarini, 2019). However, the early stages of capitalism saw the disbanding of feudal relations, the dissolution of the monasteries, and the enclosure of land—all of which ‘played their part in the great expulsion of peasants from the land in fifteenth- and sixteenth century England’ (Melossi & Pavarini, 2019:28). It was in England, in 1530, that Parliament passed an act which made the registration of vagrants mandatory, relying on the construction of two categories—the ‘impotent poor’ and ‘vagrants and bandits’7 (Melossi & Pavarini, 2019; see Hobsbawm, 2001; cf. Rediker, 2014). It was this development that led the Crown to consent to the use of Bridewell Palace to be used for the housing of both types of vagrants, including beggars, idlers, thieves, and petty criminals. Moreover, the goal of the institution was (1) to reform the inmates through compulsory labour, (2) to  Charles Denby in Workers Battle Automation(1960:2) noted his fellow workers’ opinions:

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As one of the men put it: “Automation is just a loophole for concentration. We don’t have concentration, camps here yet, where the man is forced to work under a gun. They don’t have a gun on us, but they force us to work by saying, ‘If you don’t do as we say, starve on the street.’” The only difference between this kind of working and living, and being in a cell block, is that we have more room to move about in. But they’re just waiting. When they take your car, and your house, and your little bit of money, it’s the same as being in jail. You can’t move around anyway.

 Interestingly, there were differences in the legal sanction of behaviour as to the two categories (Melossi & Pavarini, 2019). The former was allowed to beg, while the latter was criminalized. This distinction would also be made material in the later differentiation between poorhouses and workhouses. 7

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discourage vagrancy and idleness, and (3) to be self-sufficient through the means of incarcerated labourers (Melossi & Pavarini, 2019:30). Thus, the modern prison took root.8 Broadly, this period of transformation of former artisans and peasants into a proletariat that is pliable to capital’s needs demonstrated a general shift where ‘while the principle of authority becomes the very basis of capitalist production inside the factory, it contracts and withdraws from certain areas of external social life’ (Melossi & Pavarini, 2019:43). Namely, the more the struggle for liberalism and democracy advanced in general European society, the more a discourse of humanitarian punishment came to form. What this means, however, is quite clearly different from the dominant image of Liberalism as presented by bourgeois history or hegemonic social science. Rather, as Connell has argued (1997), it was a period of increase in inequality more broadly. Namely, it was a specific group of the working class that was being afforded more liberty as the process of proletarianisation advanced. This question of the ‘mass’ is at the core of all three Batman movies in Nolan’s trilogy. In Batman Begins, the example of the suspended rail system has already been discussed—Gotham’s citizens, albeit not to be  As the Bridewell example points, the beginning of the modern prison expressed a ruling-class concern with a working class that either was not productive, that is, generating profit, or saw an increase in power at the hands of labour. The context of vagrancy cannot be separated from the shift of the dominance of agricultural labour to a system of wage labour. At the core of this shift is a concern with labour supply and its management. It is not a surprise, then, that the development of Bridewell had direct parallels in places where mercantile capitalism was in full bloom. In the Netherlands, during the golden age of Amsterdam, that is to say the peak of its colonialism, the formulation of the function of the Rasp-huis was formulated in a Dutch Humanist framework where (Melossi & Pavarini, 2019:34): 8

in the principal pamphlet on vagabondage by D. V. Coornhert […he] reasons that since slaves in Spain are worth 100–200 guilders, free Dutchmen, the majority of whom were skilled in some way, ought to be worth more alive than dead. It would be more fitting, he argues, to put anybody committing crimes to work. The labour in the Rasp-huis was manufacture, and it consisted of ‘the pulverisation of with multiple-blade saw of a certain wood in dyeing textiles’ (Melossi & Pavarini, 2019:35). The work often led to injury and produced inferior product quality, but it was broadly understood as low technology manufacture suited to the supposed low intelligence of the workers, as well as consisting of low cost, maximum profit and a reliance on the state for monopolisation and the control of competition. In essence, both rasping and the workhouse in general served a function of ‘disciplinary training for capitalist production’ (Melossi & Pavarini, 2019:38).

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killed, were shown as potentially dangerous and susceptible to the influences of greedy criminals and corrupt politicians. In The Dark Knight, Batman uses intrusive surveillance by gaining access to Gotham citizens’ mobile phones in order to locate the Joker. The surveillance system, much like the rail system from Batman Begins and fusion reactor from The Dark Knight Rises, is deemed too dangerous to be used as it can fall into the wrong hands. The example of mass incarceration in The Dark Knight Rises’ prison city was already discussed above. At the core of all three films’ engagement with the people of the city is the assumption, shown to be true yet and yet again, that they cannot be trusted to govern themselves. In essence, Batman’s function on street level cannot be ignored. It has already been noted that what Batman does is vigilante violence work. However, the material conditions that afford Bruce Wayne to become Batman are one of capital accumulation, exploitation of labour, and supplying of military technology to the US Army and, one assumes, a number of police departments. Moreover, putting aside the villains such as Bane, Joker or Ra’s al Ghul, the primary targets of Batman are street-level criminals—much like Paul Kersey’s muggers in Death Wish. It is important to recall that ‘mugger’, as shown by the work of Stuart Hall and colleagues (2017), has consistently been used as a racialised and classed  concept. Although Batman clearly does not kill, it cannot be ignored that his violence is likely to leave many of the ‘muggers’ debilitated in some form. It is in this context that Jasbir Puar has drawn the distinction between the police’s ‘right to kill’ and practice of shooting to maim utilised by the Israeli Defense Forces (2017:x): Both are part of the deliberate debilitation of a population—whether through the sovereign right to kill or its covert attendant, the right to maim—and are key elements in the racializing biopolitical logic of security.

Batman’s functioning along the lines of police work raises further questions regarding what Puar refers to as ‘debility’. Namely, even if Batman is not killing Black and Brown people in the way the police is (Mapping Police Violence, 2022), then he is contributing to the likeliness of vulnerable groups to be exposed to further violence, either interpersonal or structural. It is in this context that it is important to understand that

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Batman’s function, even if understood as separate to the police, is one of complementing it. Policing and incarceration are also at the core of the racialisation of crime that has been a theme throughout this monograph. For example, the changes discussed here are not at all dissimilar with the changes in the expansion of police powers in the US following the abolition of slavery in the 13th amendment to the constitution. Namely, the criminalisation of vagrancy was a significant way of increasing the arsenal of police powers to target African Americans. Moreover, as Khalil Gibran Muhammad has noted, the very same period saw the development of a range of perspectives that sought to essentialise racial difference with criminality being at the core of Blackness (many scholars have demonstrated the continuity of this line of reasoning; for example, see Murakawa, 2014:5–8, on ‘the backlash thesis’; also, see Rodríguez, 2021, on ‘white reconstruction’). Scholars such as Loïc Wacquant have also formulated ‘mass incarceration’ as a stage with continuities in Jim Crow segregation (2000, 2001), as has Michelle Alexander with the term the ‘new Jim Crow’ (Alexander, 2012; cf. Benjamin, 2020) and the existence of slavery that preceded it. It has already been noted that slavery and its subsequent forms of segregation (cf. Massey & Denton, 1998) are themselves colonial in character and can be traced as predecessors to enclosures such as the Siyaj and the blockade of Gaza. On this basis, I posit that such continuities are best addressed in the framework of racial capitalism. Cedric J. Robinson (2020) aptly pointed to the prevalence of racial categories stemming from the early periods of feudal Europe and their continuity from the early days of mercantile capitalism to its contemporary forms. It is this that Cherisse Burden-­ Stelly (2020:3) has referred to as: modern U.S. racial capitalism [which is] a racially hierarchical political economy constituting war and militarism, imperialist accumulation, expropriation by domination, and labor super exploitation. The racial here specifically refers to Blackness, defined as African descendants’ relationship to the capitalist mode of production—their structural location—and the condition, status, and material realities emanating therefrom. […] Stated differently, Blackness is a capacious category of surplus value extraction

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essential to an array of political-economic functions, including accumulation, disaccumulation, debt, planned obsolescence, and absorption of the burdens of economic crises.

Such a formulation speaks directly to the interconnectedness of labour exploitation and racialisation. Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007:28) has framed this phenomenon of racial differentiation with regards to labour exploitation and incarceration as instrumental to the production and maintenance of a relative surplus population. In Marxist terms, this could be described as the ‘reserve army of labour’ (Engels, 2010:384): This reserve army […] is the “surplus population” of England, which keeps body and soul together by begging, stealing, street-sweeping, collecting manure, pushing hand-carts, driving donkeys, peddling, or performing occasional small jobs.

Engels’ example is an apt one as it highlights both the likeliness that people out of employment are more likely to be used to reduce the force of labour demands and the surplus population is often a group likely to be criminalised. It is in this sense, that a structural view of incarceration, as a continuation of the logics of police as violence work, allows one to see the multiple ways that violence stretches out from the system of criminal justice—it is not simply the violence that police inflict on the streets, though this is not negligible, but also the concomitant constructions of risk, likeliness to offend, and so on that result in what Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007:28) describes as ‘the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death’. It is in relation to this that Dylan Rodríguez (2021) has termed ‘white reconstruction’ the period since the end of the Civil Rights era in 1965, best understood as ‘a historically persistent, continuous, and periodically acute logic of reform, rearticulation, adaptation, and revitalization that shapes white social and ontological self- and- world-making’ (2021:3). In reference to labour, the multiple wins achieved by labour movements following World War I, such as those briefly mentioned in the context of Detroit, led to ‘the reorganization, or the termination, of many capital-labor relationships’ (Wilson Gilmore, 2007:70) where ‘all

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kinds of workers experience profound insecurity, as millions were displaced from jobs and entire sectors’ (Wilson  Gilmore, 2007:70). The period saw an increase in poverty and unemployment, in addition to what Wilson Gilmore (Wilson Gilmore, 2007:74) summarises: In the rubble of extensive restructuring, individuals and families have developed alternative modes of social reproduction, given their utter abandonment by capital. These modes include informal economic structures for the exchange of illegal and legal goods and services (W.G. Wilson 1987); social parenting, especially by women, in extended families of biological and fictive kin (Collins 1990; Stack 1996); and the redivision of urban space into units controlled by street organization (Bing 1991; cf. Fanon 1961). The “concentration effects” (W.J.  Wilson 1987) of sociospatial apartheid (cf. Massey and Denton 1993) also include high rates of intentional and accidental violence, leading to premature death from a wide range of causes (Greenberg and Schneider 1994; Bing 1991), and persistent but hostile interaction with state agencies, especially welfare, family services, courts and the police (W.J. Wilson 1987; R.W. Gilmore 1993)

This thorough description points to what, following Walter Rodney’s formulation (2018) of underdevelopment, Manning Marable (2015) has referred to as ‘the underdevelopment of black America’. This process, covered in How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, is an engagement with ‘the collective patterns of exploitation, the series of murders, the lynchings, the mutilations’ (2015:25) through deprivation of basic needs such as food, shelter, medical care to what could be summarised as a higher degree of likeliness to be exposed to violence, both from the criminal justice system and from capitalism in general (2015:95). In essence, what Marable is describing could be evocatively captured in a ‘view of the black ghetto as a colonized territory’ developed by the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (Tyner, 2006:113), a view parallel to theories discussing the conditions of African Americans in terms of an internal colony (Pinderhughes, 2010; cf. Blauner, 1969; Barrera, 1976). With such a view, Marable’s definition of underdevelopment along the vein of Rodney’s work and its distinction between core and periphery remains of great significance. In Marxist terms, the relation between core

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and periphery is characterised by imperialism (Patnaik & Patnaik, 2016) and it expresses itself in what Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik refer to as a double reserve army of labour—one in the core, the internal colony, and one in the periphery, the Global South. With this in mind, and in terms of space and incarceration, the phenomenon of mass Black and Brown incarceration is illustrative of the logic of enclosure on a national level. With Batman in mind, there is nothing in what he does within Nolan’s trilogy that separates him from the police’s function of repression, surveillance, and management of labour. More than this, Bruce Wayne remains a billionaire; his very wealth is a product of the exploitation of incarcerated labour and the reserve army of labour in the Global South. In simple terms, Bruce Wayne has a material interest in the process of underdevelopment. That is to say, the collection of phenomena—what Wacquant calls ghettoisation (2000; 2001), Marable (2015) calls the underdevelopment of Black America, Alexander (2012)  calls the  New Jim Crow—can be summarised conceptually by Field as ‘friction of space’ (Fields, 2020:43; Netz, 2004). Fields draws on Netz to highlight ‘friction’ on the level of property and its logic of trespassing and ownership, the level of borders and states, and, more directly, how ‘prisons create friction for the incarcerated within the bounded space of prison cells, and at the lines delimiting the perimeters of prison facilities’ (Fields, 2020:43; cf. Khalili, 2012). Ultimately, while policing functions through producing transparency and order, it complements this by producing opaque spaces of friction that either kill, keep under surveillance, maim, expose to risk, put in debt, or incarcerate. In the thematic of this monograph’s spatial analysis, this friction has been referred to as obscurity and opacity—something which has so far been revealed to be a barrier to the functioning of policing. And it is this obscurity that spatially produces the group differentiated exposure to premature death, structural violence, inequality, and exclusion from access to state institutions. The practice of rendering space transparent is always a matter of enforcing limits and producing opacity—spaces of underdevelopment such as ghettoes, spaces of incarceration, such as prisons, and borders with their own detention centres and tools for surveillance, violence, and management of labour power.

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McMichael, C. (2017). Urban Pacification and “Blitzes” in Contemporary Johannesburg. In T.  Wall, P.  Saberi, & W.  Jackson (Eds.), Destroy Build Secure: Readings on Pacification. Red Quill Books. Melossi, D., & Pavarini, M. (2019). The Prison and the Factory: Origins of the Penitentiary System. Palgrave Macmillan. Metropolis. (1927). Directed by Fritz Lang. Germany: Universum Film. Minority Report. (2002). Directed by Steven Spielberg. US: 20th Century Fox. Murakawa, L. (2014). The First Civil Right: How Liberals Build Prison America. Oxford University Press. Netz, R. (2004). Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity. Wesleyan University Press. NYCLU statement on the FY23 NYC Budget. (2022). New York Civil Liberties Union. Available at: https://www.nyclu.org/en/press-releases/nyclu-statement-fy23-nyc-budget (Accessed: November 29, 2022). Pappé, I. (2017). The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories. Simon and Schuster. Parenti, M. (1991). Make-Believe Media: The Politics of Entertainment. Wadsworth Publishing. Patnaik, U., & Patnaik, P. (2016). A Theory of Imperialism. Columbia University Press. Pinderhughes, C. (2010). How Black Awakening in Capitalist America laid the Foundation for a New Internal Colonialism Theory. The Black Scholar, 40(2), 71–78. Puar, J. (2017). The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Duke University Press. Rediker, M. (2014). Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail. Beacon Press. Robinson, C. J. (2020). Black Marxism, Revised and Updated Third Rdition: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. UNC press Books. RoboCop. (1987). Directed by Paul Verhoeven. US: Orion Pictures. Robocop. (2014). Directed by José Padilha. US: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Rodney, W. (2018). How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Verso Books. Rodríguez, D. (2016, Summer). ‘Mass Incarceration’ As Misnomer. The Abolitionist: A Publication of Critical Resistance, Issue 26: Obstacles and Opportunities. Rodríguez, D. (2021). White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide. Fordham University Press. Salamanca, O. J. (2011). Unplug and Play: Manufacturing Collapse in Gaza. Human Geography, 4(1), 22–37.

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Salamanca, O. J., & Silver, J. (2022). In the Excess of Splintering Urbanism: The Racialized Political Economy of Infrastructure. Journal of Urban Technology, 29(1), 117–125. Schrader, S. (2019). Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing. University of California Press. Seigel, M. (2018). Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police. Duke University Press. The Dark Knight. (2008). Directed by Christopher Nolan. US: Warner Bros. The Dark Knight Rises. (2012). Directed by Christopher Nolan. US: Warner Bros. The Purge. (2013). Directed by James DeMonaco. US: Blumhouse Productions. Thurlow, R. (1981). Destiny and Doom: Spengler, Hitler and ‘British’ Fascism. Patterns of Prejudice, 15(4), 17–33. Total Recall. (2012). Directed by Len Wiseman. US: Colombia Pictures. Tyner, J. A. (2006). “Defend the Ghetto”: Space and the Urban Politics of the Black Panther Party. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 96(1), 105–118. Wacquant, L. (2000). The New ‘Peculiar Institution’: On the Prison as Surrogate Ghetto. Theoretical Criminology, 4(3), 377–389. Wacquant, L. (2001). Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh. Punishment & Society, 3(1), 95–133. Wall, T. (2017). Unmanning the Police Manhunt: Vertical Security as Pacification. In T. Wall, P. Saberi, & W. Jackson (Eds.), Destroy Build Secure: Readings on Pacification. Red Quill Books. Wall, T. (2021). Inventing Humanity, or the Thin Blue Line as “Patronizing Shit”. In D. Correia & T. Wall (Eds.), Violent Order: Essays on The Nature of Police. Haymarket Books. Weizman, E. (2012). Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. Verso Books.

8 Blade Runner

Officer KD6-3.7 Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (2007 [1982]) is set in a near-future Los Angeles of 2019, and its sequel, Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017), takes place 30 years later. The two narratives unfold in the context of both accelerated environmental collapse and accelerated technological advancement. In response to mass species destruction and extreme climate change, humanity has colonised other planets, forging an off-­ world empire using androids called replicants, who are employed as soldiers, labourers, and sex workers. Nexus-6 model replicants are ostensibly identical to human beings, but much more robust and potentially infinitely durable. In order to prevent them from posing a threat to humanity, they are constructed with a built-in failsafe, a lifespan that is limited to four years from inception and an inability to procreate. The premise of Blade Runner is the replicant mutiny of Nexus-6 models in one of the Off-world colonies. They are declared illegal, and the Los Angeles Police Department establishes a death squad of Blade Runners to hunt down and ‘retire’ those who have either returned from Off-world or never left Earth. The film’s protagonist, Blade Runner Rick Deckard (played by Harrison Ford), is a replicant who—until the final few seconds of the

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film—thinks he is human courtesy of memory implants. There are only two other Blade Runner characters in Blade Runner, Gaff (Edward James Olmos) and Holden (Morgan Paull), both of whom appear to be human. Deckard’s identity as a replicant (a superior Nexus-7 model) explains why he is described as the best of the Blade Runners, and the suggestion is that the LAPD’s replicant death squad was staffed by humans and at least one replicant. At the core of the original film is the privileged position of the individual detective counterposed with the weakness of subjective experience. In typical noir fashion, Deckard is a detective who relies only on himself in the pursuit of meaning. Ultimately, this is revealing of the limitations of the subjective experience of such a position. Blade Runner 2049 introduces Officer KD6-3.7 (‘K’, played by Ryan Gosling), a Nexus-9 model Blade Runner whose job is to hunt Nexus-8 model replicants. The Nexus-8 models were the final model produced by the Tyrrell Corporation, which went bankrupt after replicants were proscribed by the state. The most significant change between the 8 and 9 models is that the latter are claimed by the new manufacturer, the Wallace Corporation, to be incapable of turning on their human masters. The Nexus-9 models are the focus of a short film 2036: Nexus Dawn (2017), which shows how Niander Tyrell (played by Jared Leto) convinced a group of government officials to legalise the new replicant model by demonstrating the new models’ complete lack of autonomy to the point of immediately taking their lives upon Tyrell’s order. The limited lifespan appears to have been phased out with the Nexus-6 models. Like other Nexus-9 models, K has memories of a childhood, but he understands that they are false and knows that he is a replicant. K is the only Blade Runner character in Blade Runner 2049, and very little information is provided about the death squad, except that it is called the Retirement Division and led by Lieutenant Joshi (played by Robin Wright), who is neither a Blade Runner nor a replicant. Nonetheless, the implication is that the experiment with using a Nexus-7 model to hunt Nexus-6 models in 2019 was considered a success and the hunting of Nexus-8 models in 2049 is exclusively by Nexus-9 models. It appears that K’s function is very much alike that of a manufactured violence worker such as RoboCop. The emphasis has changed, however, from RoboCop’s supposed capacity for discretion to K’s capacity for violence.

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There are several allusions to K’s betrayal of his fellow replicants in Blade Runner 2049. The Retirement Unit appears to be an organisation engaged primarily, if not exclusively, with counterinsurgency. There are also parallels to the practice of a pseudo-gang. While the Special Forces used former insurgents to pose as current ones in order to kill other insurgents, the fictional LAPD uses replicant police officers to kill illegal replicants such that there is no deceit involved. In addition, where the Special Forces ‘turned’, ‘tamed’, or ‘rehabilitated’ captured insurgents before recruiting them to pseudo-operations, K is manufactured for the purpose of hunting other replicants. As such, he is an almost-perfect example of Plato’s original conception of a guardian (1992; cf. Deane and Shuffelton, 2016). So significant is the education of the guardians that Plato devoted a substantial part of the Republic to it, including the whole of Book III and parts of Books II, IV, and X. Technological advancement has facilitated the replacement of this lengthy and fallible process with a synthetic one in which the finished product is guaranteed. The Wallace Corporation does not need to concern itself with indoctrination, as it is supposed to be able to produce ideological subjects readymade. In historical terminology, the film introduces K as a guardian of an imperial project, as well as a manufactured violence worker with the goal of pacifying disobedient workers. While the pseudo-operator analogy is evocative, and the parallel to a colonial logic is clear, K is not a colonised subject who kills other colonised subjects on behalf of the colonial power. Rather, K is best understood as one-man counterinsurgent death squad, an assassin, or an operative of an anti-labour private police force such as the Ford Motor Company’s Service Department. The narrative of Blade Runner 2049 consists of following K work on three interlinked investigations. The film begins in the middle of the first, with K en route to a protein farm to detain or destroy Sapper Morton (played by Dave Bautista), a Nexus-8 model. Morton is also a protagonist of a prelude short film Blade Runner 2048: Nowhere to Run, in which Sapper is identified in LA due to an altruistic act of helping a young girl being robbed. It is in this context that K is made aware of Morton’s location. Once confronted in BR2049, Morton refuses to come quietly, and K kills him in hand-to-hand combat. K closes the case, but his curiosity concerning Morton’s farm leads him to the presence of a single, dead tree

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on the farm. He discovers a small flower laid between its roots and a box buried underneath. K retrieves the flower, reports the box, and returns to headquarters to take a Post-Traumatic Baseline Test. The test is designed to ensure that K’s obedience is managed and that experience of a given case has not rendered him unstable, that is, likely to seek out autonomy. In this sense, K is directly interpellated by the Post-Traumatic Baseline Test, supposedly measuring his attitude towards humans, after completing each case (retiring another replicant). This casts doubt on the Wallace Corporation’s claim that Nexus-9 models are incapable of turning on their masters and their status as perfected guardians. In fact, it points to the production of consent in the Nexus-9 models while also reifying it as an inherent quality. As such, the Baseline Test is an interpellation into the representational structure—K is both acknowledged as a subject and tested whether he continues to relinquish his autonomy. Shortly after signing off duty, K is summoned by Joshi, who immediately assigns him his next case. The box held the remains of a Nexus-7 model (Rachael, played by Sean Young), and the urgency is in consequence of osteological evidence that she gave birth. The existence of a replicant child, should it be alive, threatens the entire Manichaean foundation upon which mid-twenty-first-century society is built. The ever-­ present spectre of Malthusianism and eugenics is evident here, if only in implicit form. Supposedly, the threat that the replicants possess as a potential surplus population is too great. In terms of the narrative framing of BR2049, birth is opposed to manufacture as the criterion for having a soul and the possession of a soul is presented as the criterion for moral status. This link is direct to what has already been introduced as interiority in Chap. 4. The notion of the liberal possessive individual is rendered here as soul and is the criterion for interiority, that is to say, humanity. The criterion of birth is something that is taken for granted by characters, it appears, despite the implication that it has been selected precisely because of the belief that it is impossible for replicants to procreate, guaranteeing the continuity of their lack of moral status and thus their indefinite exploitation as expendable labour. As such, the replicant child is a dangerous anomaly, and K’s second case is to find the child and destroy it. Unbeknownst to him, the Wallace Corporation is also seeking the child—in order to maximise their profit and influence by creating the

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next model of replicants, which will be able to procreate and, in consequence, expand the Off-world empire exponentially. The criterion for humanity, the soul, is thus revealed to be a contingent ‘necessary lie’ in the vein of Plato (1992; Rancière, 2003). Replicants’ ability to procreate would not render them immune to exploitation, but actually facilitate it. It is in this sense that replicants appear to be a reflection of the system of chattel slavery. The parallel is evident in both K’s role as a one-man slave patrol and in the dehumanisation of replicants. While investigating the child’s whereabouts, K finds evidence that he may be the child himself and tries to verify one of his implanted memories. The next morning K is arrested by the LAPD and brought back to headquarters for a Baseline test. It is this moment that thematically designates K’s fall as guardian—he becomes under suspicion at the very moment he puts in doubt the established system, of which he is an enforcer. Even more importantly, K’s fall is signified by the introduction of doubt regarding his own status within the system—the moment he begins to question his own supposed lack of humanity. K fails his Baseline Test, further solidifying the fall, and tells Joshi that he found the child and retired him. In recognition of this service, K is suspended from duty and given a 48-hour respite before taking the Baseline again, failure of which will result in retirement. K’s deception of Joshi confirms suspicions that Nexus-9 models are in fact capable of autonomy and self-determination. K has no intention of returning to the LAPD, however, and sets out to find Deckard, whom he believes to be his father. K falls into the trap of recognition, where he assumes that the way out of his predicament is to discover himself as exceptional. In terms of the ideological discussion in Minority Report (2002), K opts for shifting his recognition of the Absolute Subject of policing to that of an absent father figure. The illusion of the subject’s unique privilege remains. To pick up from Althusser (1971:180) on Plato where we left off above: Plato knew that the “people” had to be taught, from childhood, the “Beautiful Lies” that would “make it go” all by itself, and that those Beautiful Lies had to be taught to the “people” in such a way that the people would believe in them, so that it would “go”.

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In essence, K substitutes one ‘beautiful lie’ for another (cf. Althusser, 2020:45). In reality, the truth, or rather the true way out, would lie in K’s recognition that he is not exceptional and that is why he must act against the system. At this point, K is aware that he has become an enemy of the system and his fate will be one which he used to perform: ‘And if it were true [that is, if he is the child], I’d be hunted for the rest of my life by someone just like me’ (Blade Runner 2049, 2017). The reality of the realisation is a testament to the extent of the saturation of the established order’s justifying logic. By the middle of the twenty-first century all pretense of the polity’s independence of the interests of capital has disappeared—in reality, Wallace Corporation’s de facto death squads are the police. Even more so, the reality of BR2049 speaks to an oversaturation of disillusionment and the near-complete success of capitalist realism. It no longer appears that the police is even concerned with crime—it has refined its function to its essence, a biological determinism that is so dedicated to maintaining the status quo that it reveals the stagnancy of dreams of a crime-free utopia. In consequence, the someone like me who hunts K and Deckard is not another Blade Runner, but Luv (played by Sylvia Hoeks), Niander Wallace’s personal assistant and ostensibly the most powerful of the Nexus-9 models. After Luv has captured Deckard and left K for dead, K is rescued by the replicant resistance, which is led by Freysa (played by Hiam Abbas), a Nexus-8 model. Freysa along with Morton and a cadre of other Nexus-8 models were responsible for hiding the child, and are recruiting an army of Nexus-9 models that have managed to escape from the system and seek to free all replicants from servitude. Freysa tells K that the child is female, crushing his hopes for moral status and inadvertently revealing her identity as Ana Stelline (played by Carla Juri), whom K met during the course of his investigation. Freysa both recruits K to the resistance and gives him orders for his third and final case in the following monologue (Blade Runner 2049, 2017): A revolution is coming and we are building an army. I want to free our people. If you want to be free, join us. [She returns K’s handgun to him.] Deckard, Sapper, you, me – our lives mean nothing next to a storm that’s coming. Dying for the right cause is the most human thing we can do. You

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led Wallace to Deckard. You cannot allow Deckard to lead Wallace to me; you must kill Deckard.

In his first two cases, K is an imperial guardian, a replicant subject who serves the established order and does its violence work by killing other replicants. He kills Morton first, but then refuses to kill or surrender himself when he believes that he is the replicant child—on the basis that if he is the child, then he has been born, has a soul, has a moral status and capacity for interiority, and is not expendable. In his third case, K is a fallen guardian who is also interpellated by an insurgent group. K resembles a pseudo-operator, a former insurgent who poses as an insurgent for the purpose of killing or capturing others. In this third case, K, a Blade Runner, is recruited by the insurgency to pose as a former Blade Runner for the purpose of killing Deckard, another former Blade Runner. Ironically, this mirrors Deckard’s initial suspicions of K, that K was a Blade Runner posing as an ex-Blade Runner for the purposes of killing Deckard more easily. At the end of the film, the expectations created by K’s recruitment as an insurgent are subverted when K rescues Deckard instead of killing him. Moreover, the final action of a dying K is to reunite Deckard with his daughter, Ana. The narrative concludes with Deckard about to speak to his daughter for the first time. K’s last exercise of agency thus involves casting off both his role as an imperial guardian for the LAPD (in defecting to the resistance) and as a sleeper agent for the resistance (in disobeying Freysa’s orders). Freysa presents him with the opportunity to transcend his subjectivity when she returns his handgun and tells him to kill Deckard. The relevance of Marcuse’s repressive tolerance (1965) is evident here as well—the two opposites are reconstructed into a compromise, which ultimately perpetuates the status quo. Ana, the child, remains hidden, the ‘necessary lie’ about replicants remains unknown to the public, and the insurgent group is nowhere nearer to liberation. In reality, a situation that could only benefit the Wallace Corporation. K’s decision to rescue Deckard is thus a failure as he fails to escape from the ideological trap he has been born into. K does not simply run away or betray the revolution, but instead he privileges the experience of the individual subject—that of Deckard and Ana. He rejects the

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collective for the sake of the individual, as it was the dream of humanity that ostensibly freed him from his function as violence worker. In a sense, K’s decision to reject the role of insurgent is thus a rejection of the Manichaean foundations of replicant inferiority, which ultimately becomes a rejection of the revolution and an exercise of his own autonomy. In the framework of repressive tolerance, one might say that K rejects being a subject to the interpellation of another, thus equating Joshi with Freysa. However, this is at the core of liberalism’s repressive tolerance—the equation is false. While Joshi referred to K as a dog, Freysa offered him autonomy and the opportunity to join a collective seeking liberation. In summary, Blade Runner has little to do with crime in the strict, legal sense, or incarceration and pre-crime. However, it does say a lot about capitalist modernity and its need for accumulation through dispossession, the devaluing of human life to the point of artificiality, and the reification of subjective experience in the form of the liberal possessive individual. K, Blade Runner 2049’s protagonist, appears to be a reference to Kafka’s writings on the irrational and dehumanising power of the state in the twentieth century, yet oddly the state is never present in Blade Runner. Instead, one only sees a monopolised world where CEOs are virtually rendered godlike in their capacity to shape society.

Manufactured Dystopia The film opens with an aerial view of the protein farms, of which Villeneuve (quoted in Lapointe, 2017:45) states: ‘I came up with the idea of having an artificial landscape under a smoggy sky. It’s a claustrophobic image. It also tells us that Nature is dead, having lost the war against Capitalism.’ The sea is represented only as a threat, to human life in general, but as a mere inconvenience to Niander Wallace. The universe in which Blade Runner 2049 is set is explicitly the world as recreated by Wallace and his Corporation. It is a mythical dystopia that perhaps is unique out of the four cases covered in this monograph in the way that it heralds a profound shift in the utopian/dystopian world to come. Wallace’s win over Nature, both in the sense of climate collapse but also

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through the invention of the less-than-human replicants, illustrates the power of bourgeois ideology, described by Barthes (1972:140) as ‘the process through which the bourgeoisie transforms the reality of the world into an image of the world, History into Nature’ (cf. Beaumont, 2014). The history of Wallace’s shaping of the world happened in three phases. First, the corporation supposedly saved some or all of humanity (the prologue does not specify) with the invention of synthetic farming two decades prior to the opening of the narrative. Then Wallace bought the Tyrrell Corporation, exerted his substantial influence to reverse the laws proscribing replicants, and reinitiated the replicant programme with the Nexus-9 model. Finally, he used the new replicant army of labour to expand the human empire from the Off-world to the Outer Colonies, nine new planets fit for human habitation. Wallace represents the billionaire robber baron, a futuristic Henry Ford, and as such he is a personification of capitalism in its monopoly form, where competition has for all practical purposes ceased and technology is a tool at the service of individual interests. Earth appears to have been ravaged, if not destroyed, and the need for primitive accumulation appears to be at the core of the Wallace Corporation. Freed from the fetters of formal control by the government and informal control from competitive corporations, Wallace Corp rules supreme. In the following conversation, Niander Wallace reveals his dissatisfaction with only being able to colonise nine new planets in consequence of the shortage of replicant labour (Blade Runner 2049, 2017): Wallace: Nine. A child can count to nine on fingers – we should own the stars. Luv: Yes, sir. Wallace: Every leap of civilization was built off the back of a disposal workforce – we lost our stomach for slaves, unless engineered. But I can only make so many.

The shortage of expendable labour will, he hopes, be rectified by finding the replicant child and using it to design a new model of replicants that can manufacture others by procreation. Following the previous chapter and the multiple frameworks that situate the prison in the history

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of the exploitation of labour including chattel slavery, colonialism, and segregation, the parallel here is clear. Wallace’s goal is to engineer a new stage of this continuous history of exploitation. Wallace has rebuilt Greater Los Angeles as his own Kallipolis, with replicants as workers, Blade Runners as purpose-built guardians who execute non-compliant workers, and himself as philosopher-king. Greater Los Angeles is a megacity stretching from San Francisco to San Diego, protected from the rising oceans by the Sepulveda Sea Wall, and can be divided into concentric zones in a similar manner to Ernest Burgess’ (1925) and Mike Davis’ (1998) urban models. The core of Greater Los Angeles is the Wallace Corporation itself; it completely dominates the landscape and constitutes an imperial citadel (Lapointe, 2017). The Corporation is surrounded by the inner city, consisting mainly of administrative buildings (such as LAPD headquarters), affordable housing (such as the Moebius Apartments where K lives), and business premises (including street markets). There is little evidence of wealth in the inner city, which is surrounded by the outer city, which is in turn bordered by the Sea Wall on one side and the Outskirts on the rest. The outer city, which includes the Los Angeles Hills, is a hyper-populated conurbation of buildings crammed into every available space. Like all large cities, Greater Los Angeles is served by and parasitic upon its periphery. The periphery includes the Outskirts (flooded suburbs unprotected by the Sea Wall), the artificial vastness of Wallace’s protein farms, and the Pacific Ocean. The Outskirts have been turned into waste processing centres, where orphanages are in fact child labour camps and the megacity’s outcasts scavenge a subsistence-level existence from detritus and flotsam. Beyond the core (Greater Los Angeles and its periphery) lie the Mohave Desert and Las Vegas, perpetually shrouded in a cloud of radioactive dust following the detonation of a radiological dispersal device. In contrast to Greater Los Angeles, Las Vegas is Deckard’s world. Like Wallace, Deckard has his own citadel, the casino penthouse. Beyond the desert on the one side and the sea on the other are Wallace’s planets, Off-world and the Outer Colonies. Neither Off-world nor the Outer Colonies are ever seen in either of the films, but the extraterrestrial empire is referred to as a kind of utopia, in stark contrast to the ruined Earth. In its character, LA remains ridden with contradictions—itself a periphery to the Off-world

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utopia, but at the same time a core to all of Greater Los Angeles. Power appears to take on the form of a centre (Lefebvre, 1973). In Lefebvre’s terms, ‘[t]o say “urban space” is to say centre and centrality’ (Lefebvre, 1974:101). Namely, ‘[s]tate capitalism and the state in general need the “town” as centre (centre of decision-making, wealth, information, of the organisation of space)’ (Lefebvre, 1973:17). This centrality is generated through a strategic logic that consists of a discourse of growth (of finance, space, knowledge, etc.) and the construction of a bureaucratic, institutional rationality as its necessary manager (Lefebvre, 1973:17–8): The centre organises what is around it, arranging and hierarchizing the peripheries. Those who occupy the centre and hold power, govern with the benefit of effective knowledge and principles. The centre periphery relation only emerges indirectly, out of the previous struggles of classes and peoples. It gives birth to apparatuses which seem rational and coherent, and which were so, originally. […] The centre attracts those elements which constitute it (commodities, capital, information, etc), but which soon saturate it. It excludes those elements which it dominates (the “governed”, “subjects” and “objects”) but which threaten it.

Understood this way, space is something that is actively produced by the ‘expanded state complex’ (Tagg, 1988), in which policing and social control have been enmeshed with since the very beginning of the state. However, a key issue is ‘the question of controlling centrality [as much as] that of centrality becoming an instrument of control’ (Stanek, 2011:76), where, in the case of BR2049, the state designates the Wallace Corporation. For all intents and purposes, Wallace Corp constitutes both the supreme Ideological State Apparatus and the supreme Repressive State Apparatus. Wallace’s sovereignty is represented in multiple ways, from the impregnability of Wallace Towers to humans, replicants, and even the ocean; to his monopoly over all replicant life; to his appropriation and extension of the extraterrestrial empire. The status of the LAPD is unclear in Blade Runner 2049. The department is run by neither the Corporation nor any evident civic or federal governance and exerts considerably less authority than the Corporation. As soon as Wallace realises that K is searching for the replicant child, he sends Luv to LAPD headquarters to destroy all

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evidence of its existence, in the course of which she murders Coco (played by David Dastmalchian), a forensics technician. When Luv thinks that Joshi has succeeded in killing the child, she kills her in retribution, despite the fact that Joshi is a commissioned officer in the LAPD in her office at police headquarters. As Wallace’s agent, the power Luv exerts is represented by the ease with which she penetrates the space of others, saving K from scavengers in the Outskirts, murdering Coco and Joshi in police headquarters, and landing her Spinner in Deckard’s penthouse.1 The power of the law is explicitly and overtly secondary to or supervenient upon the power of capital. The dream articulated in RoboCop (1987) is manifest here. An additional point is Wallace’s desire to create reproducible replicants—an undertaking that, for him, takes on the spiritual character of divine creation. For Wallace, replicants are a more morally acceptable form of slavery, but one that comes at a great cost in terms of manufacture. The power of sexual reproduction would alleviate this problem without in any way changing the social hierarchy of the world. This is directly mirrored in K’s internal strife with the potential of a replicant, but especially so himself, possessing a soul. While for Wallace the possibility of sexual reproduction is an extension of his power, K sees this as a potential for personal liberation. It is here that the affective aspect of K’s narrative is intriguing as it ultimately humanises K as something more than a professional killer. He may be treated as a soulless machine, a ‘skin-­ job’, a ‘skinner’, and called ‘attaboy’ by his direct superior (later even called ‘good dog’ by Luv), mimicking quite directly Plato’s parallel between dogs and guardians (cf. Deane & Shuffelton, 2016), but it is this exactly that humanises him as a protagonist who is searching for meaning. Furthermore, K is directly placed in contradistinction to the divine figure of Wallace, he becomes a witness to a ‘miracle’ (replicants reproducing sexually), and his very soul is at stake in the course of his investigation. The parallel to Althusser’s Absolute Subject is salient here, as K’s actions from the very moment of transgression are situated into the position of ‘having witnessed a miracle’, i.e.  something that does not conform to the established order.  A Spinner is a multipurpose paramilitary vehicle that operates both in the air and on the ground, that is, a flying car (Lapointe, 2017). 1

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Sandra Lapointe (2017:64) refers to Blade Runner 2049 as ‘Neon Noir’ rather than science fiction, and there is ample evidence for this description in the style and form of both the sequel and the original. As a film noir detective, K is sensitive to the reality of Wallace’s dominion and repression, capable of reading the fabric of Greater Los Angeles, and well aware of the public and personal contradictions within that fabric. The narrative follows K in his investigative work, so it is through him that the audience can witness the spatial practices of the core, inner city, outer city, and periphery, suturing the discrete locations together with his subjectivity in order to create the illusion of transparency, which is that the representation is exactly as it appears to be. This illusion is occasionally emphasised by sequences that offer a bird’s-eye, synoptic view of the urban landscape as K traverses the sky in his Spinner. These representations of space as transparent position the problem of opacity elsewhere, in the interiority of the individual protagonist. Recall that discussions of transparent order so far has led to conclusions about its production by a repressive power. While in all other cases examined, the guardian protagonist falls from grace with the dominant system, K’s falling out of grace with his police department is a minor plot point. He does not leave Los Angeles because he is on the run, but because he has no time left to complete his investigation into Deckard, who he also believes to be his father. For K, the stakes remain personal—on an existential level of meaning—at first, he is only concerned with the ideological contraption of a ‘soul’; subsequently, he is then enmeshed in an investigation of his own memories guided by the ostensibly implanted memory linking him to the replicant who gave birth on Sapper Morton’s farm. The memory later turns out to be real, convincing K that he is the replicant child, that is, the miracle, resulting in him deviating from his baseline test, lying to his superior, and going on the run. It is only when he tracks down Deckard, which inadvertently leads to Luv capturing Deckard, does K encounter the replicant resistance who respond with empathy and understanding to his deluded imagining he was the child. The rebel group appears to be aware that K’s empathetic way of relating is individual, and thus limited. A recurrent mention in the plot is the event of the Blackout, where a conspiracy of replicants sabotaged a rocket dramatised in Black Out 2022 (2017), thereby producing an

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electromagnetic pulse that shut down all electronics and allowed for replicants to destroy all physical databases. It is this overarching opacity that stretches from the events preceding the plot of the film that K is forced to deal with and seek a way out of. It is the Blackout that allowed replicants like Sapper Morton to hide and that gave the chance to the replicant resistance to disappear the child. In reference to the argument in this monograph for equivalence of transparency with the forces of the state and social control, opacity here is clearly expressed as a form of resistance to the records of ‘state simplifications’ (Scott, 1998) and the regime of segregation it produced. The emphasis on the illusion of transparency over the illusion of opacity is suggestive of K’s limitations as a guardian and as an enemy. His role as a guardian is revealed to be increasingly powerless as the full extent of the Wallace Corporation’s terrestrial and extraterrestrial hegemony unfolds. The spatial dominance of K, Blade Runners, and the LAPD is completely subordinate to the Corporation, as Luv demonstrates when she penetrates Joshi’s office and the headquarters building. While K is the protagonist, his status is little more than that of an interloper in the imagined sequence of events in their entirety, which are ultimately concerned with Wallace’s attempts to capture Ana. The narrative closes on an ambiguous note, with K dead and Deckard meeting his daughter without either the Corporation or the rebellion’s knowledge. Interestingly, K’s causal role in the sequence of events has placed Ana in more danger than she was when the narrative opened. His astute discovery of Rachael’s remains set a sequence of events in motion that have not only alerted Wallace to Ana’s existence but placed her and Deckard in danger. As such, K is another instrument of Wallace’s domination and disruption, unwitting and unwilling, but none the less effective than Luv. Moreover, Deckard is no different than a pawn as well, since Wallace explicitly states that his meeting with Rachael was predetermined by Tyrell. In this framework, the only possible resistance is shown to be sabotage and obscurity.

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Retirement Divisions To say that we need to return to violence work in this section would wrongly imply that this monograph ever stopped engaging with the notion. Violence has been shown to be at the core of private policing, preventative policing, and mass incarceration. The example of the retirement division in Blade Runner 2049 is, however, a specific example that highlights the extent to which violence work often expresses itself in the act of ending a life. At the time of writing, the Mapping Police Violence (2022) project has reported data in the US on 1155  police killings in 2021 and, at the time of writing, 486 in 2022 (November 2022). Drawing on the same dataset, DeAngelis (2021:8) has demonstrated that ‘the threshold for being perceived as dangerous, and thereby falling victim to lethal police force, appears to be higher for White civilians relative to their Black or Hispanic peers’. While this monograph was being written, Derek Chauvin, a police officer from the Minneapolis Police Department, had just knelt on the neck of George Floyd for over eight minutes, resulting in Floyd’s death, regardless of the numerous protests that he cannot breathe. Chauvin was convicted for second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. Nearly 30  years prior, Sylvia Wynter (1994:1) cited Daryl Gates, LAPD police chief and originator of the Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams: You may remember too that in the earlier case of the numerous deaths of young Black males caused by a specific chokehold used by Los Angeles police officers to arrest young Black males, the police chief Darryl Gates explained away these judicial murders by arguing that Black males had something abnormal with their windpipes.

In the same essay on Rodney King’s beating by the LAPD, Wynter engaged with the established practice at the time where police officers would note ‘NHI’ (no human involved) in their reports, described by Rodriguez and De Cesare (1995:70) as:

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Police agencies in the Los Angeles area instituted several efforts to suppress gang membership and generated computer files on about half of the teenage male population-close to 50,000 young men in South Central L.A. Police reportedly began using the letters NHI (No Human Involved) to designate gang members who have been shot or killed.

Wynter aptly articulates how this practice demonstrated the extent and normalcy of dehumanisation prevalent in US policing generally and the LAPD in particular. Drawing on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, she notes (1994:2) that ‘we see each other only through the “inner eyes” with which we look with our physical eyes upon reality’. Ellison’s term ‘inner eyes’ aptly summarises the manner in which ideology has been discussed so far, as the representational structure which allows one ‘to conceive or imagine his or her lived relationship to transpersonal realities such as the social structure’ (Jameson, 2002:14–5). The point being that the dehumanisation of King, or of the thousands of young men, often jobless, poor and in the inner city, primarily Black and Brown, but also poor white Americans, all members of ‘the underclass’ (Wynter, 1994:2), was already prefigured and present in the representational structure integral to violence work. Citing Helen Fain’s work, Wynter further points to the ‘universe of moral obligation’ that was shown to exclude Black Americans, as the police acronym of NHI and its concomitant practices of extrajudicial and lawful killing, from ‘that circle of people with reciprocal obligations to protect each other’ (Wynter, 1994:2). This hierarchisation is not separate from the significance of labour to the status quo as race itself, and its implied construction of human nature, ‘functions to systemically pre-­ determine the sharply unequal re-distribution of the collectively produced global resources’ (Wynter, 1994:6) as well as the task of producing said resources. In fact, the hierarchisation expresses itself on the level of the subject as well in the sense that what has been noted as ‘interiority’ is, for Wynter, ‘our present middle class mode of the subject’ (1994:12). For Wynter, the matter of ‘humanity’ is best understood as a narrative/ discursive formulation, that is, ‘a descriptive statement’ (Wynter, 2003:264). As such, it is a social construction that is shaped by discourse and narrative. Recall the ways in which Anderton commented on the precogs that ‘It’s better if you don’t think of them as human’. While

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absent in its explicit form, dehumanisation is present in RoboCop and the Batman trilogy—how else would reckless lethal violence in the former and debility, incarceration, and infrastructural violence in the latter be justified? As Denise Ferreira da Silva argues, certain deaths serve as ‘necessary because they are caused by the state’s legitimate deployment of its self-preserving forces’ (2009:230). It is this process that Wall refers to as  police’s enactment of a ‘violently narrow conception of humanity’ (Wall, 2021:17). Wynter tracks the contingent development of such descriptive statements from the theocentric idea of a Judeo-Christian God in Europe through the ratiocentric idea of the Enlightenment to the current biocentric model of race and its eugenic logic. That is to say, the manner in which what is understood to constitute humanity has always been ‘extra-­ humanly determined’ (1994:7), that is, perceived by those same ‘inner eyes’ as something external. The parallel here to Plato’s ‘beautiful lies’ (1992:415a) and Althusser’s ideology as ‘the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’ (2020:36). Wynter notes (1994:7) that humanity is perceived as ‘extra-humanly determined’ as we only have access to ‘truths’ that reflect ‘our knowledge of the social reality of which we are subjects (and therefore always already subjected and socialized agents/observers)’. At the core of this position is Wynter’s sociogenic principle, building on Fanon’s idea of sociogeny as the process of ‘our social production of our world’ (McKittrick, 2015:147). This principle is described by Mignolo as ‘the process of languaging and knowing’ (2015:115) and is essential to Wynter’s argument that ‘all literature, indeed all human narrative, functions to encode the dynamics of desire at the deep structural level of the order’s symbolic template’ (as cited in Eudell, 2015:230). Understood in the framework of this monograph, this use of ‘desire’ in relation to symbolic order informs the ideological critique on many levels—on a general level, desire speaks to interiority (Lowe, 2015) and intimacy (Berlant, 1998); on a particular level, it speaks to K’s desire to be human, as well as his desire for intimacy and the capacity to see himself as human. In this sense, desire is revealed to be ideological as it is invested in the ‘representational structure’ (Jameson, 2002:14) of the established order.

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In terms that will be directly familiar to the reader of this monograph, Wynter’s descriptive statement, particularly illustrated through its religious parallel of (the Judeo-Christian) God as the Absolute Subject of which all other subjects are a mirrored reflection, is very much aligned with what has so far been described as ideology and the manner in which the process of the social reproduction of the material conditions is maintained through the subject’s buying into an always-already present imaginary relation to themselves, others, and their conditions. For Wynter, however, this imaginary relation expressed itself as the construction of a generic ‘normal humanness’ that was ‘ostensibly expressed by and embodied in the peoples of the West’ (2003:266), and thus denied to others. This denial is at the core of the function of the ‘descriptive statement’ as it ‘must ensure the functioning of strategic mechanisms that can repress all knowledge of the fact that its biocentric descriptive statement is a descriptive statement’ (Wynter, 2003:325–6). To put it simply, repression is necessary in order to prevent awareness or critique of the fact that the idea of race as a biological reality is nothing more than a discursive formulation that is socially produced. Blade Runner 2049 offers a contradiction-ridden instance of this interplay between a ‘descriptive statement’, that is, the replicant as less-than-­ human, and the repressive mechanisms of policing, ideological indoctrination, and capitalist exploitation. There are two levels in which replicant humanity is operationalised. First, the narrative level, in which they are oppressed; and second, the level of ideological reformulation where the actual history of the enslavement of Black people has been sanitised into a discourse about ‘replicants’. With regard to the first level, this tension is central to the film as a significant element is the indistinguishability of replicants from humans. In the short film Blade Runner 2022: Blackout, a key plot point is the destruction of the records of existing replicants as well as the printed serial code on the right eyeball of every Nexus-9 model. Both examples are significant as they are, in terms of this  monograph’s framework, instantiations of transparency, and ‘state simplifications’, that is, tools of surveillance. The short film further adds that the public records of replicants resulted in human supremacy movements that are shown to publicly lynch and kill replicants in a vigilante fashion. The significance of the Blackout is aptly summarised by one of

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the insurgent replicants involved in it, Trixie, affirming that without a record, that is, an official ‘descriptive statement’, she would be ‘almost human’. With regard to the second level, the condition of the replicants is made to appear as a historical parallel to the enslavement and dehumanisation of African people. In this way, the film aestheticises the problem of racialisation, and detaches it from its history and renders it an abstract, formal element of the narrative. In this sense, the reality of slavery and the plantation (Wynter, 1971) are sanitised and fictionalised. Blade Runner 2049 points to several tensions at the core of policing as violence work. Chapter 5 started with an overview of the history of violence work by way of outlining its function in repressing labour and producing racialisation. However, with the discussion of violence work articulated throughout Chaps. 5, 6, 7 and 8, we can confidently summarise that it is the case that violence work both relies on the ‘descriptive statement’ of humanity and is one of the institutions that represses critique of the validity of a given ‘descriptive statement’. This repression is evident on the individual level of K. The significance of the Baseline Test was already mentioned, but an engagement with its content can prove elucidatory in terms of Wynter’s argument for the sociogenic principle. Recall that in Althusserian terms, the Baseline Test is a process of interpellation, where K is both under surveillance and hailed as a subject who must recognise himself within the structure he functions. As noted, ideological interepellation relies on a process of recognition of an Absolute Subject, by whom one is interpellated, and a self-recognition of oneself as an interpellatable subject. In such structural terms, K is clearly a guardian until he encounters a challenge to the established order in the form of the ‘miracle’ of an android child. More importantly, K’s encounter with this extraordinary phenomenon is through misguided self-recognition. In terms of Wynter’s metaphor, it is clear that K’s ‘inner eyes’ conform to the ‘descriptive statement’ of humanity being beyond access to himself. In a very specific sense, this manifests itself in the manner in which the Baseline Test is a pedagogical calibration of K’s interiority (or rather, capacity for it). Namely, the test that K is asked to repeat by a minimal camera-like interface is a poem from Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (2000). The importance of literature, as Wynter notes, is to ‘encode the dynamics of desire’ (Wynter as cited in Eudell, 2015:230).

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Literature is a tool used against K in shaping his subjectivity. The act of repeating the novel is significant in terms of the fact that the book is shown in K’s private apartment. In essence, the Baseline test is an interpellation in the sense of an intervention in K’s relationship to himself, in his moments of leisure and aesthetic experience. In simple terms, interpellation is revealed to function as repression on the most intimate level of privacy and the individual’s interior life. The fact that K’s partner is a holographic AI sold as a commodity by the Wallace Corporation also speaks to the multiple dimensions of alienation within which K finds himself. In relation to a more general function of repression, K’s relationship to the ‘descriptive statement’ of humanity in Blade Runner 2049 is telling as it speaks to a general practice of policing through consent. As mentioned in Chap. 7, counterinsurgency has tended to rely on three main strategies (Schrader, 2019:45): (1) kill, (2) jail, and (3) control. Clearly, if Batman’s function was to control through fear and violently confront everyone, thus resulting in their incarceration or hospitalisation, then K’s function is to kill. In essence, the general function of K as an assassin is understood best in reference to the policing practice of pacification. Pacification is also a clear example of the boomerang effect of imperialism, where urban pacification practices were utilised against Los Angeles gangs, also referred to as a domestic ‘Viet Cong’ (McMichael, 2017:146; see Davis, 1992). Schrader points to pacification as an important shift in the administration of violence work, much like the shift from essentialised racial criminality to risk factors in Chap. 6, policing following the 1960s shifted ground into ‘a new ideology and legal apparatus of civic equality’, in which ‘the racialized would face violence, possibly destruction, because they had chosen to face it’ (2019:48). In other words, the shift from prejudice to rational choice and volition is a construction of autonomy very much instrumentalised in the interests of right realism and policing based on Broken Windows Theory. Pacification is, thus, an ‘aspiration to create rational actors who would make cost-benefit calculations’ (2019:48) and with it comes a shift towards ‘a pastoral biopolitics of social improvement’. To refer once again back to Plato, indoctrination would be extended beyond the guardian class, as people would have to be interpellated as guardians of themselves and each other. The obscured,

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complementary side to this, both in the case of BR2049’s K and historic examples of pacification, is the practice of violence which seeks ‘to clear the social field of those who would not be amenable to self-government’ (Schrader, 2019:48) through repressive and extrajudicial means. As Wall notes, the practices of pacification point to a few underlying concerns— ‘who is being pacified, why this is so, and for what particular objectives, while simultaneously presupposing subjects that resist efforts at their pacification’ (2017:196). In an even more significant sense, the practice of pacification is a process that relied on ‘affective intimacy and spatial proximity’ (Schrader,  2019:48), including surveillance and ideological representation in discourse. The primary reason for this is simple—the difficulty in determining who is an insurgent and who can be recruited into counterinsurgency. Schrader notes an important example of the British attempts at pacification in Malaya which struggled to distinguish innocent people from guilty via stop and search tactics, so the US Office for Public Safety advisors sought to address this problem by introducing a national identity card in South Vietnam for all adults (Schrader, 2019:159). Identity cards in this sense were a tool for the surveillance of the population, an early form of risk management and predictive policing, and, in metaphoric terms, a tool for rendering the occupied population transparent. The parallel to the record system managed by the Tyrell Corporation on all replicants in Blade Runner 2049 is clear. Furthermore, the distinction between a dominant majority, humans, and a subdued minority that is less than human is evident in the practice of the retirement division itself. Namely, the LAPD does not have to risk human lives hunting down and retiring dangerous Nexus-8 models because it can use Nexus-9 models such as K, who are more robust than humans and whose deaths do not matter because they have no moral status and are thus expendable. Importantly, the logic of the retirement divisions is one of zero-sum, where each replicant manufactured as a counterinsurgent operative is in fact a replicant more fully indoctrinated into the system. Moreover, the figure of the fallen guardian is a character who experiences a change of role during the cinematic narrative and thus instantiates both guardian and enemy in one individual. K’s transition in Blade Runner 2049 is from a guardian who is part of a death squad

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targeting non-compliant replicants to an enemy employed as an insurgent on behalf of the replicant rebellion. The use of a single character to fulfil the role of extrajudicial assassin and insurgent reveals the conceptual link between counterinsurgency and extrajudicial killing; it also represents the latter as the extrapolation of the former to its logical conclusion. The use of death squads is an aspiration to the counterinsurgent. As Schrader shows, the strategies of pacification, much like predictive policing, were often to do with logistics, political frailty, and a desire to avoid challenges to the legitimacy of the state (Schrader, 2019:49). More so a lack of capacity to use death squads, than a rejection of them. Referring back to the discussion in Chap. 7 on the reserve army of labour, extrajudicial killing as a counterinsurgency tactic or crime control measure is underpinned by the conception of the target population as fundamentally expendable. Wallace is explicit in his application of a ‘descriptive statement’ about replicants in the dialogue quoted earlier in this chapter, referring to them as a disposable workforce. Replicants, like colonised or enslaved populations, are essentialised as disposable, while rebellious replicants or ‘insurgents’ are doubly disposable, a problematic part of a disposable population that is most efficiently disposed of by other elements of the same population. Wallace’s comment recalls Marx (1867:517) on the surplus population and disposable industrial reserve of capitalism: But if surplus labouring population is a necessary product of accumulation or of the development of wealth on a capitalist basis, this surplus population becomes, conversely, the lever of capitalistic accumulation, nay, a condition of existence of the capitalist mode of production. It forms a disposable industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost. Independently of the limits of the actual increase of population, it creates, for the changing needs of the self-expansion of capital, a mass of human material always ready for exploitation.

More to this point, recall the origin of the Blade Runner function— the forced retirement of runaway replicant workers. The shift from Blade Runner to Blade Runner 2049 is one where workers become insurgents. A

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straightforward transition when the prevalent logic of repression in the dystopia ruled over by Wallace is clear—labour is a disposable necessity. To further restate the parallel to Chap. 7 and its discussion of mass incarceration, prison is non-existent in BR2049. It is unnecessary, as there is no need to force labour by the means of incarceration. This brings us to an important point regarding the capacities of policing—in Blade Runner 2049, Blade Runners are not strictly speaking extrajudicial assassins because the extermination of Nexus-8 models has been legalised. Similarly, the use of death squads by the military and police of various regimes since World War II has not always been illegal under the law of those states. For obvious reasons, details of extrajudicial killing as either a counterinsurgent tactic or crime control measure are extremely difficult to acquire, but there is extensive evidence that numerous states have endorsed extrajudicial killing or employed death squads. In the UK, the Armed Forces as well as the Force Research Unit (since, Joint Support Group) were deployed to Northern Ireland from 1969 to 2007 to support the Royal Ulster Constabulary. From 1970 to 1994, this support included the use of Special Forces to execute rather than arrest the Irish Republican Army insurgents identified as a threat (Urban, 1992; McNab, 2008; McCallion, 2020). The Israel Defense Forces and Israel Police have been accused of using death squads for the same purpose in Palestine (Puar, 2017). The LAPD has also frequently been accused of using the Special Investigation Section (SIS), Robbery-Homicide Division’s tactical surveillance unit, to kill violent offenders that it cannot convict (Human Rights Watch, 1998; Lait, 1998; Escobar, 1993; cf. Bloom & Martin, 2016). The SIS consists of 20 detectives led by a lieutenant and operates by conducting long-term surveillance on suspects, waiting for them to commit a crime, and then arresting them while the crime is in progress or immediately after it has been perpetrated (LAPD, 2020). Detectives use a controversial three-car jamming technique that justifies pouring shotgun rounds into a vehicle if all suspects therein do not immediately raise two empty hands when confronted. The unit has a higher proportion of shootings, dead suspects, and lawsuits than any other in the LAPD. In this book, the analysis of extreme crime control measures has been restricted to those primarily in the US (though its reach is much broader), and in this chapter the

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examples are restricted to the use of extrajudicial killing as both a crime control measure and a COIN tactic, as they cannot meaningfully be separated in light of the framework of policing as violence work. In spite of these restrictions and the secrecy and deniability associated with the measure, there is sufficient research to demonstrate that its employment is confined to neither science fiction nor history. In such examples, the conception of extrajudicial killing established in Blade Runner 2049 is clear: the target population is a demographic that is regarded as disposable, and the aim of the death squads is not just to liquidate and neutralise this population, but to dominate the very logic of its existence by putting into doubt its humanity and recourse to membership in the established order. In closing this chapter, I return briefly to the conclusion of the film, in which K as a fallen guardian rejects his role as an insurgent and member of the replicant rebellion. While his decision to rescue instead of to execute Deckard is represented as an exercise of his autonomy, it has been shown that K’s actions are formally resolved on the level of the narrative, thus keeping him firmly trapped in the ideology of repressive tolerance—both sides of the conflict are bad. The implication of this choice is clear as, despite making an attempt to fake Deckard’s death, K’s failure to join the revolution is likely to result in the interest of Wallace. Given the level of technology possessed by the Corporation it seems highly unlikely, if not impossible, that Wallace will be fooled by the limousine crash. Similarly, in the context of the long and painful sacrifice Deckard has made to keep his daughter safe, it seems highly unlikely that he would approve of being taken to her after his rescue. K’s lack of solidarity with the rebellion is thus not useful and is most meaningful to himself. As such, for all its merits, Blade Runner 2049 reproduces the ideological apparatus that was identified as capitalist realism in Chap. 2. In Mark Fisher’s (2018:145) terms, the film is ‘unable to envisage an alternative to capitalism’. As represented in K’s exercise of free choice, the rebellion does not provide a feasible alternative to Wallace’s manufacture dystopia. There is no alternative to the Corporation; there is only life in the world Wallace has recreated—or death. And in choosing to take Deckard to Ana, K may well be guaranteeing the defeat of the rebellion.

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Nabokov, V. (2000). Pale Fire. Penguin Classics. Plato. (1992). Republic (G. M. A. Grube & C. D. C. Reeve, Trans.). Hackett. Puar, J. (2017). The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Duke University Press. Rancière, J. (2003). The Philosopher and His Poor (J.  Drury, C.  Oster, & A. Parker, Trans.). Duke University Press. RoboCop. (1987). Directed by Paul Verhoeven. US: Orion Pictures. Rodriguez, L. J., & De Cesare, D. (1995). The Endless Dream Game of Death. Grand Street, 61–77. Schrader, S. (2019). Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing. University of California Press. Scott, J.  C. (1998). Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press. Stanek, L. (2011). Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory. University of Minnesota Press. Tagg, J. (1988). The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Palgrave Macmillan. Urban, M. (1992). Big Boys’ Rules: The SAS and the Secret Struggle Against the IRA. Faber & Faber. Wall, T. (2017). Unmanning the Police Manhunt: Vertical Security as Pacification. In T. Wall, P. Saberi, & W. Jackson (Eds.), Destroy Build Secure: Readings on Pacification. Red Quill Books. Wall, T. (2021). Inventing Humanity, or the Thin Blue Line as “Patronizing Shit”. In D. Correia & T. Wall (Eds.), Violent Order: Essays on the Nature of Police. Haymarket Books. Wynter, S. (1971). Novel and History, Plot and Plantation. Savacou, 5(1), 95–102. Wynter, S. (1994, Fall). “No Humans Involved”: An Open Letter to My Colleagues. Forum N.H.I.: Knowledge for the 21st Century, 1(1). Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337.

9 Conclusion

Overview This monograph has argued for the significance of the representation of urban crime control in film. It has done this by arguing in favour of an understanding of popular culture that is interwoven with the ideological reproduction of established order. This monograph has explored the interconnections between cinema, urban crime control, and the ideology of repression through four case studies. Each case study juxtaposed a film with a specific crime control measure. The book consisted of two parts, Part I provided the theoretical framework and Part II provided the analysis of the four case studies. In summary, Part I outlined the theoretical framework of the book and provided the basis for the application of the analysis in its three modalities—cinema, cities, and ideology. The book started with an outline of its approach to cinema in Chap. 2. Central to this was the significance of realism as an effect produced by a given cinematic text. I outlined how this realistic representation can be understood as ideological in the sense that it both conforms and perpetuates a ‘representational structure which allows the individual subject to conceive or imagine his or her lived relationship to transpersonal realities such as the social structure or the

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collective logic of History’ (2002:14–5). Chapter 3 then demonstrated the way this representational structure can be operationalised in urban social science, philosophy, and cinema. The urban, it was argued, is a discourse, as much as a material reality, and can easily lend itself to strategies of repression, social control, or imagination. That is to say, the urban itself is a significant tool for the manipulation of and a setting for the ‘the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’ (2020:36). On a material level, cities are the spaces in which the practices of surveillance, policing, and social control in general manifest. Chapter 4 sought to expand on the preceding two chapters and outlined the manner in which cinematic representations of urban crime control produce formal narratives that elicit certain responses. Empathy, the notion of interiority, and the capacity for intimacy are key elements to these responses as they work alongside each other to produce a favourable reaction to the protagonist’s actions. As viewers, we are guided into a relationship with the protagonist, in which the latter is seen as benevolent and relatable. Certain limitations have contributed to the shape of the monograph, and should be acknowledged. First, I have focused on popular culture from the United States, so almost all of the films cited, and all of the four case studies, are produced in the United States. This does not result in an engagement with a representative sample of global popular culture, but all four films that make up the case studies are popular and well established, both written about and widely watched. Second, the historical perspective utilised throughout the book has sought to demonstrate continuity in function and effect with regard to policing, carcerality, and criminal justice. However, this has been at the expense of in-depth engagement with current developments in crime control. Regardless, in this monograph I have sought to treat films from several decades ago as relevant to the present moment by connecting them to both historical sources and current critical scholarship. Third, as much as violence and repressions are its focus, in many ways this book does not engage sufficiently with violence against women, queer and transgender people. While the book often discusses at length violence work and its effect on the basis of class, race, and ethnicity, more could have been said about said effects in terms of how they intersect with gender, sexuality, and ability. Andrea J.  Ritchie has highlighted the ways in which ‘racialized

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gendered violence (both interpersonal and institutional)’ (2017:xi) remains invisible and under-analysed. Overall, this book has been a focused, if eclectic and interdisciplinary, attempt to highlight the ways in which violence work permeates popular culture. Not only this, but also to show that this prevalence has a function—the normalisation of crime control. The analysis of the specific crime control measures, interdisciplinary and historical at times, has had the goal to demystify them and demonstrate their contingency. This has been done by engaging with the role of ideology, specifically the ideologies around criminal justice which manifest in repression. I have also sought to show that this very prevalence is strategic, and it speaks to the production, maintenance, and reproduction of the individual’s imagined position in the wider social order and their relationship to themselves and others (cf. Jameson, 2002:14–5). The ideology in question here is thus the function through which answers are already predetermined, no matter the question. Cinema, far from naïve popular culture, is oversaturated with crime and the efforts to control it—it is easy to see how the imagination arising from watching films, such as the ones covered in this book, is limited. The answer is always repression.

 rime Control, Cinema, and the Ideology C of Repression The arguments in this monograph indicate two key points: (1) the character of urban crime control; and (2) its relationship to cinema. At the core of both is the ideology of repression. First, urban crime control is premised on violence and the reification of race and crime. Policing hinges on these fungible constructions in the sense that it is driven by ‘an engine of intertwining discourses and practices of criminalization and racialization’ (Schrader, 2019:39). Regardless of whether private or public, predictive or reactive, policing is inherently linked to carcerality and the logic of deprivation and enclosure. More than this, urban crime control has been shown to manifest violence in numerous ways—from ‘police brutality’ (Briond, 2020) to algorithmic

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risk assessments (Wang, 2018) and mass discriminate incarceration (Rodríguez, 2021). At the core of all these examples is the negotiation of the boundaries of violence—all films flirt with this tension and imply that, only if they could, they would go further. Vigilante justice has been shown to never be far away from such concerns. In cases such as Batman and The Dark Knight Rises, including Dirty Harry (1971) and Death Wish (1974), vigilantism haunts the very practice of urban crime control, hinting at its role in the formation of modern policing. This argument culminated in the engagement with Blade Runner 2049 (2017), where death itself was the normalised function of the violence work undertaken by the film’s ‘retirement divisions’. It is in this sense that Ruth Wilson Gilmore notes that violence expresses itself in the group-differentiated exposure to, that is, on the basis of gender, race, class, sexuality, or ability, ‘premature death’ (2007:28). Second, the role of cinema has been posited from the very beginning as ideological. As Comolli and Narboni have argued (1971:30): every film is political, inasmuch as it is determined by the ideology which produces it (or within which it is produced, which stems from the same thing).

They add, “cinema ‘reproduces’ reality” (1971:30). The films that have been examined in this book have been of the type described by Comolli and Narboni as films which present ideology straight. By doing so, as Marx and Engels commented on contradictions in Balzac (Foley, 2019:72), the films cannot but end up revealing some of the core contradictions of the ideology in question. This type of relation between ideology and film has been proven as especially rich in unveiling the function of the ideology of repression. In essence, all four films which have been analysed in Part II of this monograph fit into this type: Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop (1987), Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002), Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises (2012), and Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017). Not only do these films present their ideology straightforwardly but they also do so with a great degree of ambiguity. In Comolli’s and Narboni’s terms (1971:33), this type of film ‘lets us see [ideology], but also shows it up

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and denounces it’. All four films possess a number of contradictions and a sustained internal tension, which has allowed for the opening up of the films to criticism. It is important to remember that the four case studies, as it has been shown, are not exclusively ideological. Rather, they are explicitly revealing of ideological tensions inherent to the notions of justice and repression, as well as their representation. All films are ideological, to echo Comolli and Narboni a final time, but the selected four are especially so with regard to their depiction with criminal justice. The intersection of urban crime control, cinema, and the ideology of repression has been found in the notion of the fallen guardian. The fallen guardian in the four films—RoboCop (1987), Minority Report (2002), The Dark Knight Rises (2012), and Blade Runner 2049 (2017)—has been exclusively the protagonist who has also been exclusively a white, able-­ bodied, heterosexual man. The fallen guardian is someone who occupies both roles—guardian and enemy—in the course of a narrative. He goes through a fall from grace, where his status is denigrated from guardian to enemy only to ultimately be restored to his original role again. In each case study examined, the experience of the film constituted an invitation to sympathise, empathise, or identify with the fallen guardian. The guardian protagonist was presented as suffering loss of memory and his identity (RoboCop, 1987), drug-addiction (Minority Report, 2002) and personal trauma (both Minority Report, 2002; The Dark Knight Rises, 2012) and dehumanisation (Blade Runner 2049, 2017). Essential to this is the regard of the fallen guardian as a benevolent figure. Even when the protagonist becomes the enemy of the system, it is the latter that is revealed to be corrupt. It has been argued at length that contemporary narrative leans heavily on the fulcrum of individuality (see Chap. 2). This is inseparable from what Althusser terms subjectivity, the idea that to say individual is to say subject. One is always already interpellated by ideology (Althusser, 2020). Which brings us to a point raised at the very start of the book—the interpellation of each viewer of a film. Foley notes (2019:76) that: The key effect of interpellation is that individuals, in acknowledging the hailing, internalize the category of identity in question; they police ­themselves, thereby taking the burden for social control off the coercive policies of the state.

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As Althusser noted, we live these ideologies as they are at the core of the process that reproduces the established order. It is important to remember, however, that one can always refuse this interpellation. This book has sought to practice this at every step. There are several directions in which the topic and argument of this monograph can be developed in the future. Three potential developments can be highlighted at this time. First, the role of the ideology of repression is not limited to the dramatization of the action film. Rather, as indicated in Chap. 1, crime is at the core of a number of genres, including true crime, documentary filmmaking, and even video essays on platforms such as YouTube. A more sustained, and general, engagement with the ideology of repression across different genres of film, and not limited to the role of the fallen guardian, would prove elucidatory. Second, the popularity of cinema notwithstanding, videogames are an even more widely popular medium. The depiction of crime is likewise common (see Lynes et al., 2020: cf. Yar, 2010). An important aspect that is currently still under-explored is the element of interaction and the role playing of committing crime or fighting it (see Rizov, 2020; cf. Hall, 2019). Third, and finally, this monograph hopes to open up space for work that is sociological in focus with regard to the three themes of cinema, urban crime control and ideology—and their intersection. Namely, there is still a lot left unsaid here about the ways in which said ideologies, representations, and images are actually used and made sense of by people in their everyday life. Images of RoboCop, Batman, or Marvel’s vigilante The Punisher contribute to the understandings of people on both sides of violence work. Philips (2022:470) demonstrates this perspective in terms of police officers’ adoption of the Punisher’s skull logo, while Herbert (2007:610) has shown the ways in which the policed see the police in the image of those same characters. It is in view of the goals outlined above together with the hope for potential development of this book’s concerns into further research, that I once again restate the promise of the sociological imagination. It is the idea that the ‘sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society’ (Wright Mills, 2000:6). This book has sought to demonstrate exactly this in the context of urban crime control.

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References Althusser, L. (2020). On Ideology. Verso Books. Blade Runner 2049. (2017). Directed by Denis Villeneuve. US: Alcon Entertainment, Columbia Pictures, Sony. Briond, J. (2020, July 6). Understanding the Role of Police Towards Abolitionism: On Black Death as an American Necessity, Abolition, Non-Violence, and Whiteness. Hampton Institute. Available at: https://www.hamptonthink. org/read/understanding-­the-­role-­of-­police-­towards-­abolitionism-­on-­black-­ death-­as-­an-­american-­necessity-­abolition-­non-­violence-­and-­whiteness Comolli, J.  L., & Narboni, P. (1971). Cinema/Ideology/Criticism. Screen, 12(1), 27–38. Death Wish. (1974). Directed by Michael Winner. US: Dino De Laurentiis. Dirty Harry. (1971). Directed by Don Siegel. US: The Malpaso Company. Foley, B. (2019). Marxist Literary Criticism Today. London: Pluto Press. Gilmore, R. W. (2007). Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. University of California Press. Hall, S. (2019). Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse. In Essential Essays Volume 1: Foundations of Cultural Studies (pp.  257–276). Duke University Press. Herbert, S. (2007). The “Battle of Seattle” Revisited: Or, Seven Views of a Protest-Zoning State. Political Geography, 26(5), 601–619. Jameson, F. (2002). The Political Unconscious. Routledge. Lynes, A., Kelly, C., & Hoffin, K. (2020). Video Games, Crime and Next-Gen Deviance: Reorienting the Debate. Emerald Publishing. Minority Report. (2002). Directed by Steven Spielberg. US: Twentieth Century Fox. Philips, M. (2022). Violence in the American Imaginary: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Superheroes. American Political Science Review, 116(2), 470–483. Ritchie, A. J. (2017). Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color. Beacon Press. Rizov, V. (2020). Narrative Redemption: A Commentary of McGregor’s Narrative Justice. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 54(4), 26–35. RoboCop. (1987). Directed by Paul Verhoeven. US: Orion Pictures. Rodríguez, D. (2021). White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide. Fordham University Press. Schrader, S. (2019). Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing. University of California Press.

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The Dark Knight Rises. (2012). Directed by Christopher Nolan. US: Warner Bros. The Punisher. (2015–2018). Netflix, Marvel Television. Wang, J. (2018). Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e) Intervention Series 21). Semiotext(e). Wright Mills, C. (2000). The Sociological Imagination. Oxford University Press. Yar, M. (2010). Screening Crime: Cultural Criminology Goes to the Movies. In K. J. Hayward & M. Presdee (Eds.), Framing Crime: Cultural Criminology and the Image (pp. 80–94). Routledge.

INDEX1

A

B

Alexander, Michelle, 181, 184 Algeria, 173 Althusser, Louis, 2, 4, 11, 23, 28–30, 32, 34, 85, 94–96, 104, 137–139, 147, 160, 193, 194, 200, 205, 221, 222 Ideological State Apparatus (ISAs), 2, 4, 30, 34, 104, 160, 199 interpellation, 11, 137, 138, 207, 221, 222 Repressive State Apparatus (RSAs), 4, 30, 139 Automation, 74, 101n1, 115–121, 178n6 Charles Denby, 101n1, 117, 120, 178n6

Barthes, Roland, 197 Batman Batman Begins, 159, 160, 163, 167–170, 179, 180 The Dark Knight, 162, 163, 168, 180 The Dark Knight Rises, 2, 3, 10, 20, 21, 78, 159, 165, 170–172, 174, 177, 180, 220, 221 Baudrillard, Jean, 5 Bazin, André, 18, 19 Benjamin, Walter, 21, 72n1, 91 Berlant, Lauren, 7, 75–77, 174, 205

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. Rizov, Urban Crime Control in Cinema, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12978-0

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226 Index

Blade Runner 2049, 2–4, 10, 20, 25, 30, 78, 189–191, 194, 196–199, 201, 203, 206–212, 220, 221 Blade Runner, 24, 30, 87, 189–212 Burden-Stelly, Charisse, 181 C

Césaire, Aimé, 15, 172–174, 176 Comolli, Jean-Luc, 15, 19, 20, 23, 26, 29, 30, 220, 221 Connell, Raewyn, 46, 46n1, 47, 91, 109, 110, 179 Counterinsurgency, 3, 118n5, 151, 160n2, 163, 164, 177, 191, 208–210 Critical criminology Chicago School, 49 cultural criminology, 9 urban social science, 45–59, 109, 218 D

Death Wish, 6, 72, 139, 175, 176, 180, 220 Detroit, 29, 31, 74, 84, 87, 106, 109, 111, 113, 115–127, 170, 182 Dick, Philip K., 25, 30, 102, 132, 140, 145n2, 150, 152, 171 Dimendberg, Edward, 52, 63–66, 73, 88 Dirty Harry, 6, 72, 72n1, 73, 91, 103n3, 139, 161, 163, 175, 220 Magnum Force, 161, 163

E

Engels, Friedrich, 23, 32, 46n2, 48, 49, 51, 52, 58, 62, 182, 220 F

Fallen guardian, 2, 8, 32, 71–81, 96, 104, 106, 195, 209, 212, 221, 222 Fisher, Mark, 6, 37, 38, 90, 168–170, 212 capitalist realism, 6, 37, 38, 212 Foley, Barbara, 6, 23–27, 31, 220, 221 Ford Motor Company, 116–118, 121, 170, 191 Foucault, Michel, 7, 50, 141, 144, 174 G

Gibran Muhammad, Kahlil, 28, 93, 113, 114, 148, 149, 181 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, 114, 149, 182, 183, 220 Gramsci, Antonio, 38, 39, 76 H

Hall, Stuart, 11, 24, 33–39, 75, 90, 103, 104, 171, 180, 222 J

Jameson, Fredric, 4, 6, 9, 23, 28, 30, 31, 35, 84, 85, 127, 204, 205, 219 Judge Dredd, 94, 96

 Index 

227

K

N

Kracauer, Siegfried, 5, 6, 18, 19, 61, 88

Narboni, Paul, 15, 19, 20, 23, 26, 29, 30, 220, 221 Neocleous, Mark, 10, 63, 95, 125, 145n2, 151

L

Lefebvre, Henri, 5, 7, 50–54, 54n4, 57–59, 67, 67n7, 81–85, 88, 126, 146, 168, 199 Linnemann, Travis, 2, 10, 102n2, 125 Los Angeles, 65, 84, 87, 189, 201, 203, 204, 208 LAPD, 198, 203, 204, 211 Lowe, Lisa, 7, 8, 76, 77, 105, 205

P

Palestine, 167, 176, 211 Gaza, 172–176, 181 Parenti, Michael, 73, 74, 77, 171 Plato, 2, 53, 54, 54n4, 55–57, 59, 71, 91, 116, 123, 191, 193, 200, 205, 208 Republic, 2, 53, 54, 54n4, 71 Preventative policing, 75, 78, 80, 96, 140, 203 Puar, Jasbir, 78, 125, 172–174, 180, 211

M

Macherey, Pierre, 22, 23, 33 Manhatta, 60, 168 Man with a Movie Camera, 62, 63 Marcuse, Herbert, 35, 37–39, 66, 93, 94, 162, 195 Marx, Karl, 23, 28, 29, 32, 46n1, 124, 210 Mass incarceration, 3, 75, 78, 80, 96, 171, 176–184, 203, 211 McGregor, Rafe, 9, 22, 23, 26 Melossi, Dario, 178, 178n7, 179, 179n8 Minority Report, 2, 3, 10, 20, 21, 29–30, 78, 83, 131–155, 164, 165, 168, 170, 171, 177, 193, 220, 221 Murakawa, Lisa, 93, 165, 181

R

Rafter, Nicole Hahn, 9, 10, 20, 72, 81, 103n3 Rancière, Jacques, 17n2, 56, 57, 139, 193 RoboCop, 10, 76, 102–105, 103n3, 115, 120–127, 133, 134, 139, 165, 166, 190, 222 Rodney, Walter, 47, 183, 203 Rodríguez, Dylan, 27, 28, 93, 136, 149, 177, 181, 182, 203, 220 S

Schrader, Stuart, 11, 95, 113, 119, 148, 149, 154, 163, 164, 164n4, 165, 172, 177, 208–210, 219

228 Index

Scott, James C., 83, 144, 145, 202 Seigel, Micol, 3, 27, 71, 78, 103, 106, 114, 115, 136, 163, 177 Surveillance, 3, 7, 10, 47, 66, 116, 117, 121, 134, 140, 144, 147, 163, 170, 172, 177, 180, 184, 206, 207, 209, 211, 218 T

Tagg, John, 33, 58, 84, 144, 199 Taylorisation, 117, 127 Total Recall, 15, 17, 18, 31, 74, 83, 85, 91, 167

V

Vigilantism, 159, 160n2, 161, 163, 164, 176, 220 Violence work, 3, 8, 27, 29, 94, 96, 97, 102, 106–115, 121, 122, 136, 139, 163, 164, 169, 176, 180, 182, 195, 203, 204, 207, 208, 212, 218, 219, 222 W

Wacquant, Loïc, 181, 184 Wall, Tyler, 10, 102n2, 110, 123, 125, 133, 151, 160n2, 176, 205, 209 Wang, Jackie, 148, 220 Weizman, Eyal, 83, 87, 87n5, 125, 146, 172, 174, 175 Wynter, Sylvia, 203–207