Urban Crime Control in Cinema.

Fallen
Guardians and the Ideology of
Repression Vladimir Rizov
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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 rec-
ognition that criminology needs to rethink its relations with the ascen-
dant power of spectacle. This international book series aims to break
down the often rigid and increasingly hardened boundaries of main-
stream 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 suffer-
ing, teenagers post ‘happy slapping’ videos on YouTube, both cyber bul-
lying and ‘justice for’ campaigns are mainstays of social media, and
insurrectionist groups compile footage of suicide bomb attacks for circu-
lation 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 crimi-
nology 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, cul-
ture, 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 cul-
ture 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
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 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.

v
 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

vii
 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 satu-
rated with crime. Its narration is ubiquitous, as is its routine transforma-
tion 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 solv-
able, 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 1

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
2 V. Rizov

involved in it know best. It is this that Louis Althusser referred to as ide-

ology, ‘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’ repro-
duces 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 polic-
ing, 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 rep-
resentations of criminal justice in popular cinema tend to follow exceed-
ingly 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, pre-
cisely because they are the most dangerous class—the one capable of
upending the order. They are dangerous because their task is the protec-
tion 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.
 1 Introduction 3

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 ideo-
logical 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 ‘vio-
lence 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 incarcera-
tion 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 sepa-
rate 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 surveil-
lance in Minority Report. Through the construction of risk factors and
other signifiers of likeliness to commit crime, Minority Report straightfor-
wardly sets up as a consequence of its practices the problem of mass incar-
ceration. Depicting a point in time where this mass incarceration is an
established reality, The Dark Knight Rises poses the question of incarcera-
tion 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
4 V. Rizov

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 insepa-
rable 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, how-
ever, 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 inter-
section, 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 charac-
ter, 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 under-
stood to formulate ‘a representational structure’ (Jameson, 2002:14) of
reality that is ideological. This theoretical basis for the monograph consti-
tutes Part I of the book, where the following three chapters cover my
approach to cinema, urban space, and the general critical framework,
 1 Introduction 5

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 frame-
work 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 schol-
ars have commented on the ways in which modernity with its emphasis
on urban order and visuality gave rise to the very aesthetics and back-
ground 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 wide-
spread 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 deter-
minant 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,
6 V. Rizov

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 mir-
ror—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 criti-
cism (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 fre-
quently 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 repre-
sentational structure’ (Jameson, 2002:14), in which criminals are irratio-
nal 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 dis-
tinction between real and reel as mutually constitutive, where ‘reel space’
is both representational and generative. In this sense, we can see the ways
 1 Introduction 7

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 exam-
ples of technology and skills that are revealed as essential to crime con-
trol. 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, tra-
versal is rendered nearly synonymous with surveillance, as the crime con-
trol 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 panopti-
cism, 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 inte-
riority (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 spa-
tial and temporal terms, allows for one to experience being someone dif-
ferent. 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 pro-
voke 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 obliga-
tions manifest in a restrictive way where one’s capacity for empathy is
8 V. Rizov

limited by their own experience. Moreover, drawing on the work of Lisa

Lowe, the capacity for intimacy is best understood as a capacity for inte-
riority, 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 pro-
posed here seeks to disarticulate the ways in which this empathy is pro-
duced 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 frame-
work of the sociological imagination. C. Wright Mills starts the influen-
tial 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
 1 Introduction 9

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 cul-
ture (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 conse-
quences of such experiences. Cultural criminology is interdisciplinary as
it draws on a multitude of disciplines, including urban studies, continen-
tal 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 crimi-
nology 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 fur-
ther 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,
10 V. Rizov

2014:129; also, see Brown & Rafter, 2013), is key to unravelling the ways
in which crime control is normalised, imagined on personal and struc-
tural 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 specifi-
cally, 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 recogni-
tion, 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 narra-
tive representation. I follow this position and draw on the work of crimi-
nologists 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) decen-
tring; (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
 1 Introduction 11

determining and quantifying crime, and acting on said phenomenon by

way of the very institutions that produce it. In this sense, the crimino-
logical 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 rei-
fied 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 under-
stood as ‘an engine of intertwining discourses and practices of criminal-
ization and racialization’ (Schrader, 2019:39); it was designed as ‘a tool to
exploit, punish, and control Black and other racially and class marginal-
ized 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 ideo-
logical 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 oth-
ers, and thus always be enmeshed in the material practices that perpetu-
ate this process. An element that should not be underestimated is the
ways in which popular culture in general, and film in particular, interpel-
late 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 peda-
gogical 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
12 V. Rizov

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 differ-
ent world.

References
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 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 fas-
cism. 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

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 15

V. Rizov, Urban Crime Control in Cinema, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and
Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12978-0_2
16 V. Rizov

high angle and then dips down in a diagonal sweep, providing the audi-
ence 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 metropo-
lis. The Colony has been constructed along multiple vertical and hori-
zontal 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 experi-
ence 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 litera-
ture (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

1
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).
 2 Cinema 17

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 syn-
onymous 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 rela-
tively 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 con-
clusion 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 fic-
tional. The distinction between fiction and non-fiction is usually concep-
tualised as significant, but this delineation is not essential to the argument
presented here. For instance, there is no essential difference between

2
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).
18 V. Rizov

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 con-
ventions 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 immedi-
ate 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 real-
ism, 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 art-
ist, 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
 2 Cinema 19

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 representa-
tion 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 rela-
tion 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 representa-
tion and ideology. With reference to the former, they reject the idea that
a film camera is impartial, but note that it registers ‘the vague, unformu-
lated, 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 ‘unques-
tioningly adopt [the ideological system’s] language and its imagery’
(1971a:32); (5) films which present ideology straight in a sense that also
20 V. Rizov

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 documen-
tary. The Third Cinema movement illustrates this best through engage-
ment 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 psychoana-
lytical richness. The fourth type includes examples such as Costa-Gavras’
Z (1969) or Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008), where in the lat-
ter, 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
 2 Cinema 21

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 engage-
ment 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 aes-
thetic 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 knowl-
edge. 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
22 V. Rizov

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 real-
ity an image outside immediate perception and daily life and common
experience’ (Balibar & Macherey, 1981:91), then ‘realism’ itself is ideo-
logical 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 poten-
tially 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 mono-
graph are not only all fictional representations, but also all narrative rep-
resentations. 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 narra-
tives 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 ana-
lytical 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 experi-
ence 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 inhuman-
ity, by way of his analysis of the narratives of “white genocide” and the
“crusader,” ultimately demonstrating the equivalence between narratives
 2 Cinema 23

of white supremacy and jihadism (2018); more recently, he has also

argued for a criminological criticism of complex narratives that are con-
stituted as fourfold allegories (2021a, c; cf. Jameson, 2020). In two exam-
ples, 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 (regard-
less 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 synthesiz-
ing principle of order’ (2019:91). In practical terms, one can clearly
imagine this in the example of the three-act narrative structure so com-
mon 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 nar-
rative representation’ (2021:10) as well as the process of ethical judge-
ment outlined above.
In terms of narrativity, I will posit that both the cinematic works men-
tioned so far and the ones making up the case studies in Part 2 of this
24 V. Rizov

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) uni-
versality; (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 mix-
ture 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 cinemat-
ographic 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 dialecti-
cal 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 man-
ner 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
 2 Cinema 25

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 inhab-
iting 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 codifi-
cations 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 aes-
thetic 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
26 V. Rizov

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 consti-
tutes 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 per-
spective when examining a given narrative’s ethical content or value:

Both the ethical and the political values of a complex narrative are a func-
tion 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 inten-
tion 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
 2 Cinema 27

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 men-
tion of the origins of the coffee and the reality of oppression and exploita-
tion 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 omis-
sions 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 under-
stood 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 individu-
alise 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 bru-
tality’ assumes ‘an abrogation of the police officer’s law-sanctified entitle-
ment 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] physio-
logically 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’ narra-
tive obscures the commonness of the phenomenon through
28 V. Rizov

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 analy-
sis 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 evalua-
tions 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
 2 Cinema 29

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 rela-
tion 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 mono-
graph, the relationship between representation and narrative is problema-
tised in the sense that these ‘different texts’ are understood to be both a
given cinematic work’s reflection of history, urban space and crime con-
trol 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 mean-
ingful in view of the context of the narrative. Namely, the history of
worker struggle in Detroit is displaced and inverted by becoming a strug-
gle for better working conditions of the violence workers that have his-
torically 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 dis-
course, 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
30 V. Rizov

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 impor-
tant to highlight that, for Althusser, ideology, as a representational struc-
ture 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 heteronor-
mative family carries its own repressions within and without). In this
sense, the notion of ‘justice’ inherent to a narrative such as ‘police brutal-
ity’ 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).
 2 Cinema 31

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 read-
ing 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 con-
tain—that is, encompass and control—social contradictions that defy rec-
onciliation 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 labour-
ers 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.
32 V. Rizov

Capitalist Realism
The primary purpose of this monograph is to demystify measures of
crime control in contemporary capitalist societies. To do this, the cine-
matic 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 sum-
marised as the clarification of the relationship between particular excep-
tional 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 vio-
lence 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 disci-
pline. 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.
 2 Cinema 33

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 enforce-
ment 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 discur-
sive 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 particu-
larly relevant here. Hall (1980:91) problematises the simplistic, linear
sender-message-receiver structure and proposes a more complex under-
standing of ‘production, circulation, distribution/consumption, repro-
duction’ 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 produc-
tion, and technical infrastructures. In John Tagg’s (1988:3) terms, to
understand cinema in this way is to recognise the mode of representation
34 V. Rizov

as ‘a material product of a material apparatus set to work in specific con-

texts, 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, ideologi-
cal 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 dem-
onstrated 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 cine-
matic narrative is in fact premised on a revolutionary opposition to the
 2 Cinema 35

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)
36 V. Rizov

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 neces-
sarily 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 ele-
ments of the message, working within the hegemonic code.
(c) Negotiated code: the receiver accepts the hegemonic code as legiti-
mate, but recognises exceptions within this code, combining adapta-
tion 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 previ-

ous 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.
 2 Cinema 37

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 polit-
ical 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 extrapola-
tion 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 cap-
italism’s worst excesses. Fisher (2009:12) describes the effect of this com-
bination 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 descrip-
tion 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 repre-
sentative 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
38 V. Rizov

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 representa-
tion. 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 condi-
tions 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 subjec-
tivity. 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 primi-
tive tributary economy of Joe’s society; the latter would place the empha-
sis 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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