I recently came across an archive of interviews on BBC iPlayer, curated by the late TV host Michael Parkinson.  Clicking through further suggested content on the site reveals an amazing library of footage from the last century.  These include episodes from a programme called Face to Face, which ran between 1959 and 1962, and was resurrected again from 1989 to 1998; clips from Late Night Line Up, Man Alive (or its spin-off, ‘The Man Alive Report’), as well as from talk shows with popular male interviewers Wogan, Frost and Parkinson himself.* 

In 1955, American film director and actor Orson Welles (1915-1985) is interviewed on a panel interview show called ‘Press Conference’.  The questions are put by three journalists and focus on his work, but also try to probe his political views.  For context, 1955 is the height of the ‘Red Scare’, with concern about the threat of communism in America.  The period is associated with hearings held by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and congressional investigator Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.  Hollywood became a particular target, with actors and directors perceived to be sympathetic to communism ‘blacklisted’.   While the Press Interview journalists appear to criticize McCarthyism, they repeatedly ask Welles why he has recently been in Spain (then run by Communist leader, General Franco) – “it’s just a filming location,” he shrugs. In a line of questions on anti-Americanism, one of the panel interviewers asks Welles, “Do the French criticize the Americans for the right reasons or for the wrong reasons?” to which he replies: “Don’t you think with countries, or races and big national generalizations like that, that the criticisms are always for the wrong reasons?” “Yes, I do” says the interviewer quickly, “And I am very glad you think so too”.  There follows the slightest of awkward pauses in an otherwise teasing and fast-paced interview.  Welles was well known for his opposition to racism and segregation.

Finally, raising concerns about ‘horror comics’, one interviewer asks Welles whether he thinks American culture has anything to do with the spread of ‘juvenile delinquency’.  Welles’ response speaks to the general question of the moral boundaries of art, and the criminological question of the relationship between violent representation and lived behaviour:

Interviewer: “You wouldn’t say that children are imitative, and they tend to imitate what they see or read?”

Welles: “If they were, they would have come from the bear pits of the Globe Theatre and committed some rather extraordinary acts in the Elizabethan age.”

In a 1959 Face-to-Face episode featuring Edith Sitwell (1887-1964), the interviewer asks the poet how she responds to the popular perception of her as “remote, eccentric, forbidding and rather dangerous”.  He suggests they first start with discussing her appearance.  There is the slightest of smiles below the painted eyebrows and fanned headpiece, as Edith explains that she is “a throwback to remote ancestors”.  A woman not of her time.  She tells of a privileged though unhappy childhood. Edith is a stickler for manners, though does not tie these straightforwardly with class.  She praises American society, claims friendship with Marilyn Monroe and passionately defends Monroe’s appearance in a calendar when it is raised by the interviewer:

Sitwell: “Well, there have been nude models before now: it means absolutely nothing against a person’s moral character, at all.  If people have never been poor, perhaps they don’t know what it is like to be hungry?” 

Rather, she blames those around Monroe who have treated her “most unchivalrously”.

Featuring in the second run of Face-to Face in 1994, Maya Angelou (1928-2014) is questioned about her engagement in sex work, which she wrote about in her second memoir, ‘Gather Together in My Name’ (1985).  She tells the interviewer that young people need to know that adolescence and youth are tough and that people make mistakes, including their own parents.  As a modern viewer, you wince at the directness, the quick changing and often gendered line of questioning (at one point, Angelou tells the interviewer to wait while she develops her thought; similarly Sitwell refuses to answer a question on whether she ever came close to marriage).  But these interviews are extraordinarily revealing, filmed Mastermind-style with an unwavering close-up of the subject on a chair.  The male interviewer is largely unseen, only an occasional back-of-head shot in shadow.  As each question lands, the camera picks up the interviewee thinking and responding: small movements in the eyes, brow and mouth, and each intake of breath.

The interview with Martin Luther King (1929-1968) is particularly compelling. We might feel we know something of him from the 1963 ‘I have a dream’ speech or from reading his sermons or books.  But it is different to see King speaking in this quiet studio in 1961.  He is calm, deliberate, reflective.  Similar to the Sitwell and Angelou interviews, the line of questioning and language used is jarring to contemporary ears.  For example, the interviewer is keen to move on from King’s memories of social exclusion as a child and ask, “but was anyone actually cruel or violent to you”, and later, “but nobody ever beat you personally?”  It is not clear whether the questions are meant to elicit a defining moment to explain King’s commitment to civil rights, or to minimize his experience.

Later, the interviewer asks what more is needed, given the advance of rights for African-Americans in the United States in recent years. “We have moved on a great deal but we still face token integration,” replies King, before telling the interviewer that African-Americans continue to endure economic insecurity, inconsistent criminal justice and police brutality (for more on the context in 1961, see: The Modern Civil Rights Movement and the Kennedy Administration | JFK Library) and listen to era defining songs from the 1930s-1960s such as (Mississippi Goddam by Nina Simone and Billy Holiday’s Strange Fruit).  The interviewer presses King on whether he has any misgivings about his role – aged only 32 – as leader of the civil rights movement in the United States, and whether he can hold people together under the banner of non-violence?  King replies to all these questions with disarming honesty and composure: yes, he acknowledges, it is a heavy responsibility but he is sustained by the belief that the cause is just.

The question of pursuing violent or non-violent approaches to social change are explored also in a 1968 discussion, chaired by Joan Bakewell, between Lady Asquith (Violet Bonham Carter, 1887-1969, Liberal politician and BBC Governor) and Lady Stocks (Mary Danvers Stocks, 1891-1975, academic economist and women’s campaigner).  The two guests debate whether it was the constitutional or the militant suffragettes which delivered the vote for women in Britain, and indeed, whether militancy delayed the cause. Both speakers appear to agree that the advent of the First World War was pivotal in moving women into the labour force and into public life, and in turn strengthening the demand for women’s suffrage. Stocks and Asquith discuss the exploits of Emmeline Pankhurst and Constance Lytton not as historians but as acquaintances: Asquith was daughter of the British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith 1908-1916, who initially opposed votes for women, and Stocks joined Millicent Fawcett’s moderate National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS).

Other footage from the 1960s reflects a similar interest in social issues.  In the 1967 episode of The Man Alive Report, Michael Dean hosts a discussion about ‘homosexuality’, following the airing of two episodes on BBC2 looking at the lives of lesbians and of gay men.  Four guests are invited to discuss the issues and the programme coincides with the passing of the Sexual Offences Act 1967, decriminalizing sexual relations between men aged 21 and over.  A GP, writer Maureen Duffy, social psychologist Michael Schofield and Conservative MP Ray Mawby discuss the ‘causes’ and ‘risks’ of being lesbian or gay.  There is a particular preoccupation with the risk of being sexual blackmailed and it is worth afterwards reading the contributors’ biographies for context.

All of these interviews touch on social issues which intersect with the criminal justice system: restriction of rights due to gendered or racialised identities; moral concern about art, about intimate practices or sexual labour; methods of protest and resistance. But why should we be interested in watching these voices from the past? 

The sociologist Max Weber introduced the term verstehen, which means a deep and empathic understanding of another person’s situation. We might think of Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird (by Harper Lee, 1960) telling his daughter Scout, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb in his skin and walk around in it.”  Verstehen is central to ‘ethnographic’ methods, a form of researching the social world by immersing oneself in the context of interest using, for example, observation, reading relevant texts, and unstructured interviewing.  In visual criminology, Keith Hayward advocates the use of audiovisual verstehen (i.e. film and documentary-making) to:

[Intensify] traditional ethnographic attempts by employing digital technologies to capture people’s experience  sensorily (not just written down) in order to fill in some of the gaps that have traditionally been absent from criminological knowledge (Hayward, 2018, p.144).

As a resource, the BBC archive has two features which arguably enhance their verstehen value.  First, interviews are filmed in close-up observational mode (drawing on Nichols, 2017), devoid of artistic sets and embellishments, which combine to suggest intimacy and perceived truthfulness for the audience.  Second, these are films of individuals directly connected with what we now consider ‘historical’ events, including individuals born at the end of the 19^th century.  The films generally have good visual and sound quality, which has the effect of closing the temporal gap between the subject and the viewer, and concentrating our attention on what they are saying.  This is a new (in the scheme of human history) and evolving resource for social research: it means that contemporary footage will be available in 2500 in a way that it is not possible, today, to understand audiovisually life in 1500.

When we watch these interviews, we cannot help but notice the attitudes and tone embedded in how interviewers choose and ask their questions, and we may find some of the language problematic.  That is important to recognise and reflect on.  What is of central interest however is hearing interviewees describe their experience and understanding of the world in ways which are both historically situated but also surprisingly contemporary and resonant.  They point to the perennialism of social concerns.  In terms of inequality and injustice, they remind us how far society has come, but how much remains to be done.

*For readers without access to BBC iPlayer, try typing e.g. ‘Face to Face Martin Luther King’ in YouTube to find freely available versions of the interviews.

© Natasha Mulvihill and Criminology Tales, 2023. 

I am currently reading David Olusoga’s book ‘Black and British’ (Pan, 2016). The book is brilliant and shocking and it is the author’s ability to pick out the human detail from his research that makes the narrative so vivid.

Olusoga takes us first to Bunce Island, at the mouth of the Sierra Leone River. Here, in the seventeenth century, English slave traders established a slave fortress. Tens of thousands of Africans were brought to this fortress before being take on to slavery in North America and the West Indies. African captives were brought to the beach at the eastern end of the island. From there, the traumatised men, women and children were marched up the path from the beach to the Sorting Yard:

The clearing was where the buying and selling was done. Here the slave-traders displayed their wares – captive human beings, but also ivory, gold and camwood, from which a coloured dye was extracted. The British agents came out to meet their trading partners, bringing with them bottles of wine and rum to help lubricate the coming negotiations. In exchange for slaves and other valuable commodities the British offered glass beads, bundles of cloth, gunpowder, European metal goods, tobacco pipes, bottles of liquor and European weapons. Until a few years ago, the ground of the Sorting Yard was littered with tiny glass beads and fragments of pottery that had been dropped and discarded by both buyers and sellers centuries earlier. Most of these grim souvenirs have been hoovered up here by tourists who travel out to Bunce Island from Freetown, but many more relics of the trade lie beneath the soil, along with iron nails used to attach shackles and chains to African arms and legs, and broken wine bottles. (Olusoga, 2016, p.3)

It was the beads that got me: both the exchange of human life for glass beads and then, the idea of tourists – perhaps not knowing exactly what they meant? – picking up and taking home these tiny remnants of blood and misery. Perhaps in homage to enslaved ancestors, but a dark tourism indeed.

In early December, I showed my first year Criminology students the David Redmon documentary Mardi Gras: Made in China (2008, Carnivalesque Films) You can see for free an abridged version here, with Redmon’s commentary. The documentary is a criminological ethnography exploring the lives of Chinese factory workers who make bead necklaces. The beads are packaged and shipped to the United States, where Mardi Gras participants ‘throw’ the beads from floats and exchange them with fellow revellers.

Alternating sequences between Louisiana (in the US) and Fuzhou (in China), the documentary contrasts the long, relentless, factory hours of the young Chinese women workers, often migrants from rural areas living in onsite dormitories, working unsafe machinery with blistered fingers, trying to keep up the production tally chart demanded by the manager, Roger Wong; with the carefree, noisy scenes on the festival streets, where the crowds cheer and chant for women to show their breasts, and the lights of floats and filming mobile phones illuminates the scene.

Where do the beads come from, the producer Redmon asks the Louisiana partygoers? Nobody knows. Where do the beads go to, Redmon asks the factory workers? They don’t know either.

The journey of the beads reflects the story of globalisation, of inequality and of waste. At the end of the parades, many necklaces are discarded in bins, and on the street. They have little significance to the consumers once the party is over.

I wonder on how many shelves or in how many wardrobe boxes or set into how many pieces of costume jewellery around the world sit the glass beads of Bunce Island. Their owners unaware of the desperate genesis and use of these small shiny objects.

© Natasha Mulvihill and Criminology Tales, 2021.

In the week before Christmas, I read ‘Catcher in the Rye’ by J.D. Salinger (1951). I can remember my old copy, which was the silver cover 1969 Penguin Modern Classics edition. It had the spine ripped away and the front cover hanging precariously: I had probably picked it up in the thrift basket of a second-hand book shop. That I can recall the physical book but not the story is interesting. Perhaps because it’s predominantly a collection of memories and reflections recounted over just a few hours in the life of 16-year old Holden Caulfield.

Holden has been thrown out of Pencey prep school – and it’s not his first expulsion. He is sensitive, hyper-reflective and critical of people. He is particularly averse to ‘phonies’ – people who are insincere, shallow or fake – even if he is a little phony himself at times.

Following a fight with a school peer, Holden gets on a train back to New York. He cannot go home because his parents do not yet know he has been thrown out of school, so he pays for a room in a hotel. Having spent the night drinking in familiar bars and walking the streets, he returns to the hotel where the ‘elevator guy’ procures him a ‘girl’.

Holden is initially excited: he changes his shirt, brushes his teeth and puts some water on his hair. He starts to to think about all the nearly-but-not-quite encounters he has had with the opposite sex.

Finally, somebody knocked on the door, and when I went to open it, I had my suitcase right in the way and I fell over it and damn near broke my knee. I always pick a gorgeous time to fall over a suitcase or something (Salinger, 1958, p.102).

The girl at the door is not much older than Holden and seems nervous to him. She sits on a chair “jiggling her foot up and down“. She is not interested in small talk.

“Ya got a watch on ya?” she asked me again, and then she stood up and pulled her dress over her head.

I certainly felt peculiar when she did that. I mean she did it so sudden and all. I know you’re supposed to feel pretty sexy when somebody gets up and pulls their dress over their head, but I didn’t. Sexy was about the last thing I was feeling. I felt much more depressed than sexy.

“Ya got a watch on ya, hey?”

[…]

“Don’t ya feel like talking for a while?” I asked her. It was a childish thing to say, but I was feeling so damn peculiar. “Are you in a very big hurry?” (Salinger, 1958, p.103)

In the event, Holden asks the girl – ‘Sunny’ – if they can skip anything physical: “I’ll pay you and all“. He lies that he’s just had an operation and that he had under-estimated his recovery time. Sunny is not too impressed, asks for more money than was agreed, and Holden has a second and painful encounter with her the following day – this time with the elevator guy.

Much of my academic research has focused on sex work and so this episode of the book interested me. It captures the peculiar mix of emotions and mundanity that must sometimes characterise such meetings. How some buyers may seek to pay for sex but are really paying for company or intimacy, or seeking something else they cannot define. How a peremptory remark from a time-pushed seller can puncture fantasy and expectations.

I am currently writing a new third year undergraduate Criminology unit called Sex Power and Consumption which will explore the contradictory intersections between sex, power, intimacy, money and markets. These relationships extend beyond the sex industry and have occurred through time.

Often debate on this topic can be difficult, even prohibitive. There can be a significant gap between the experiences of those involved (as articulated in their own voices) and the discussions that occur at the level of academic theory, politics and media. There are lots of truths about the sex industry, but they don’t neatly dovetail into a single truth.

It is through understanding more about everyday experiences of those involved – across the different settings and contexts where sex is exchanged for money or something else – that we can learn more about whether and where harm lies. We can learn that through listening to people’s individual stories. Perhaps that’s why the scene in this book is interesting to me. Fiction is a sourcebook for real life.

© Natasha Mulvihill and Criminology Tales, 2021.

In a Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (2003 [1859], Penguin), there is a character called Jeremiah (“Jerry”) Cruncher, who is a porter at Tellson’s Bank in London. Reading the book last year, it took me a while to twig the nature of the business that he and his young son engaged in at night. We know that Jerry carries something on his conscience as he is enraged and violent each time his wife takes to praying on her knees. He is in fact a body snatcher or ‘resurrection man’.

Initially employed by anatomists in the 18th and 19th centuries who required bodies for dissection, body snatchers exhumed the bodies of the recently dead. They were grave robbers. As the number of teaching centres and hospitals grew, so did their trade.

In 1752, Parliament passed the Murder Act which allowed the bodies of executed criminals to be made available for dissection, rather than public display. However, the demand for bodies was unsated and grave robbers interestingly operated in a grey zone: human corpses were not legal property so could not be stolen or owned, as such.

Indeed, the (secular) status of the body after death remains in some legal and philosophical limbo. As Ellen Stroud (2018, p.115) neatly summarises:

The central puzzle of the law of the dead is that a corpse is both a person and a thing. […] Scholars generally divide the law of the dead body into the three intertwined realms of defining, using, and disposing of the dead, and debates in each realm center on where and how to draw the line between person and object. The thing-ness of the dead human body is never stable or secure.

The poor were most likely to fall victim to these resurrectionists, as were abandoned children, infants, and suicide victims. Deals could be struck with prison and gallows officials over recently dead or condemned prisoners.

The rich were able to secure their graves with mortsafes (iron cages around the coffin or iron boxes), with booby traps or pay a night watchman to patrol the cemetery.

In 1832, the Anatomy Act ended the tradition of anatomising felons but did allow for people to give up their bodies for dissection after death. There is evidence that this was abused by some of those managing workhouses, who facilitated for payment the journey of the unwilling but dead paupers to the anatomist’s table (Sen, 2017).

Captive populations, the poor and vulnerable remain at risk of corporal exploitation: in China, there have been allegations of organ harvesting among Falun Gong detainees; in the United States, the Arkansas Prison Plasma Scandal saw prisoners paid for blood donations, infecting thousands across the world with Hepatitis C and HIV (Chase, 2012), to devastating effect in the UK and elsewhere; in hospitals in Liverpool and Bristol, it emerged that for decades the organs of babies and children were systematically removed after they died, without their parents’ knowledge or consent (Bauchner, 2001).

While work on violence, punishment, trafficking, abuse and so on is concerned with incursion into, and exploitation of, the physical body, corporal dignity after death deserves attention too. I think of this today following the news of four deaths of migrants, including two children, in the English channel. Media coverage referred back to the death of 3-year old Alan Kurdi, whose small drowned body was photographed and disseminated around the world in 2015. Published on the pretext of ‘shocking the world into action’: no action came.

Resurrectionists are the grotesque characters of a Dickens novel: a macabre chapter of history. But we should be alert to the contemporary ways in which bodies continue to be stolen and misused.

© Natasha Mulvihill and Criminology Tales, 2020. 

References

Bauchner, H., 2001. What have we learnt from the Alder Hey affair? That monitoring physician’s performance is necessary to ensure good practice. British Medical Journal, 322(7282): 309–310. Available at:  https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.322.7282.309

Chase, S., 2012. The Bloody Truth: Examining America’s Blood Industry and its Tort Liability Through the Arkansas Prison Plasma Scandal. William & Mary Business Law Review, 3(3). Available at: https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmblr/vol3/iss2/6

Sen, S., 2017. From Dispossession to Dissection: The Bare Life of the English Pauper in the Age of the Anatomy Act and the New Poor Law. Victorian Studies, 59(2), pp.235-259. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/victorianstudies.59.2.02

Stroud, E., 2018. Law and the Dead Body: Is a Corpse a Person or a Thing?Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 14, pp.115-125. Available at: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-110316-113500

“When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home” (Hinton, p.1)

This opening line will resonate for many who read The Outsiders (London: Penguin Books, 2016; originally USA: Viking Penguin, 1967) as a teenager and perhaps also watched the 1983 film directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

The story is narrated by Ponyboy, a fourteen year old member of the ‘Greasers’, who fight running battles with the rich-kid ‘Socs’ on the streets of Tulsa, in the United States. What is extraordinary is that Susan Eloise Hinton wrote the book as a teenager while at high school, although it was not published until she was 19. She was advised to publish under the name S.E. Hinton in case male book reviewers dismissed her writing as a female.

Ponyboy is a sensitive, bookish dreamer, though is also fiercely loyal to his older Greaser peers and gets stuck into the periodic, often brutal, street brawls with the Socs. His parents are recently dead and he lives with his two older brothers who seek to keep Ponyboy in school, maintain boundaries and keep a clean house. Their home is in a down-at-heel area and his older brothers have dropped out of school to work and pay the bills.

The wider Greaser gang members have their share of troubles at home – alcoholism, emotional neglect and violence – although as Hinton shows so well, the rich Soc kids have their troubles too.

One night, a terrible incident changes everything for Ponyboy and we follow him through a heart breaking and intense few weeks. Hinton wants us to understand, if not like, all of the characters. She reminds us of the struggles of growing up through teens and into early twenties: amplified for those who do not have a safe anchor and resources at home.

On 16 September 2020, the Government published a White Paper ‘A Smarter Approach to Sentencing‘. In the section of the paper concerning youth sentences, The Rt Hon Robert Buckland QC MP set the tone in his accompanying speech:

Judges’ hands are too often tied in handing down sentences to young offenders that are too lenient and potentially put the public at risk. 

While the Government recognises in the document that more must be done to tackle the causes of crime and the inequalities in the youth justice system, the only concrete details relate to punitive measures: for example, increasing the minimum release point from custody for the most serious offences from half-way through the sentence, to two thirds.

Moreover, political commentary in the lead up to the White Paper’s publication had raised the case of Hashem Abedi, who helped his brother Salman plan the Manchester Arena bombing. Hashem was jailed in August 2020 for life and ordered to serve at least 55 years in prison. Yet because he was under the age of 21 at the time of the murders, a whole-life order was not an option open to the courts. Writing in the Sunday Express, the Prime Minster Boris Johnson cited the Abedi case and said that if a young person is involved in a plot to kill dozens of people “then it doesn’t matter if you’re ‘only’ 18, 19 or 20 when you do so”. And so the new White Paper proposes whole life orders to be a sentencing option from aged 18.

The Abedi case is a high profile, terrible, and mercifully rare event. However, the application of whole-life orders for 18 year olds is not the most pressing issue in youth justice (whether you agree with the proposal or not).

More pressing issues in England and Wales include:

• around a quarter of the youth custody population are children who are on remand, and 66% of that group do not go onto receive a custodial sentence (Youth Justice Legal Centre, 2020);

• around half of the current youth custody population are Black, mixed heritage, Asian and other ethnicities (other than ‘White’ – which the Youth Justice Statistics define as including White British and White ethnic minorities);

• for the year ending March 2019, children and young people had the highest reoffending rate of all age groups at 38.4%, compared, for example to 28.5% for adults (aged 21 and over);

• fewer than 1% of all children in England are in care, but they make up
around two-fifths of children in secure training centres (44%) and young offender institutions (39%).

The number of young people in custody has ebbed and flowed over the decades – up in the thousands in the 2000s and down to hundreds now in 2020, for example – although this number has less to do with the level of overall youth offending as much as how the state responds.

Containment may be required for the most serious cases, but the vast majority of young offenders are troubled and experiencing significant personal and social difficulties. They are more likely to be from urban, deprived areas and they are more likely to be to be Black or Asian, as these groups are more intensely policed. They may be chaotic, insecure and angry and it can take time to undo the self-protective behaviours and attitudes that develop while growing up under stress.

The public do deserve protection from harm: likewise, young people deserve protection from social and family harm. Punitive sentences incapacitate and have symbolic value in signifying retributive justice, but they are unlikely to deter or to disrupt youth offending patterns.

Governments talk about tackling the social causes of crime, but we know this work is difficult and long term, beyond the electoral cycle. It requires investment in the 0-5 age group through children’s centres and family and parenting support; it requires an enabling rather than punitive approach to welfare and benefits; it requires a rapid response to children struggling at school to avoid exclusion (including early diagnosis and intervention for learning barriers and disabilities); and it requires adults of all ages to get involved in mentoring young people, supporting them to make positive choices and being a listening ear. It takes a village to raise a child, they say.

Some will accuse Hinton of a youthful optimism at the close of the book, when Ponyboy reflects that every young person could be turned around. But it is an indictment on all of us if we cannot muster the policy and personal investment to at least try.

Suddenly it wasn’t only a personal thing to me. I could picture hundreds and hundreds of boys living on the wrong sides of cities, boys with black eyes who jumped at their own shadows. Hundreds of boys who maybe watched sunsets and looked at stars and ached for something better. I could see boys going down under street lights because they were mean and tough and hated the world and it was to late to tell them that there was still good in it, and they wouldn’t believe you if you did. It was too vast a problem to be just a personal thing. There should be some help, someone should tell them before it was too late. (Hinton, 2016, pp.214-215)

© Natasha Mulvihill and Criminology Tales, 2020. 

This week I read for the first time ‘The Stepford Wives’ by Ira Levin (1972, my edition is 2011, published by Corsair).

In just 139 pages, Levin weaves a gripping story about Joanna Eberhart who moves with her husband and two children to the perfect suburb of Stepford, full of beautiful home-loving wives and successful husbands. Joanna is a feminist, committed to the goals of the National Organisation of Women, and an amateur photographer. She looks for like-minded women to establish a NOW chapter or to develop a women’s group, but they are all too busy waxing floors or attending to laundry.

At the centre of town life is the Men’s Association, run by ex-Disneyland employee Dale Coba and attended most nights by the town’s menfolk. The Stepford husbands are employed in the tech and chemical businesses on the nearby Route Nine. The Association building is imposing and highly secure: no women permitted.

Joanna’s husband Walter initially agrees with Joanna that the Association is outdated, but argues change can best be achieved from within. He therefore starts to attend, occasionally at first, but becomes increasingly active.

Meanwhile Joanna finds two women who, like her, do not buy into the domestic perfection of Stepford: Bobbie Markowe and Charmaine Wimperis. Like Joanna, both are recent arrivals at Stepford. The women get together for tennis at Charmaine’s – she is rich and bored and dislikes her husband. Later in the book, Charmaine confides that she and Ed are having a ‘weekend together’, which she is dreading as it will involve sex. But Ed is due at a conference the following week – ‘Thank God’ she says – so they agree to catch up then. Yet, Charmaine does not call.

When Joanna, concerned, turns up at her house, her friend has changed dramatically. The house is spotless, Charmaine is relaxed, apron-clad and smiling. She leads Joanna outside to show her beloved tennis court being turned into a putting green for her husband, Ed:

‘My God,’ Joanna said, looking at the men working on the cutter handles. ‘That’s crazy, Charmaine!’

‘Ed plays golf, he doesn’t play tennis,’ Charmaine said.

Joanna looked at her. ‘What did he do to you?’ she said. ‘Hypnotize you?’

‘Don’t be silly,’ Charmaine said, smiling. ‘He’s a wonderful guy and I’m a lucky woman who ought to be grateful to him’. (Levin, 2011, p.61)

The story ratchets up to an inevitable but horrifying conclusion. Joanna is positioned as the hysterical woman, a charge so often made at women who seek to find out the truth (I was reminded of this watching an interview with environmental campaigner Erin Brokovich on Channel 4 News).

The truth of what is happening at Stepford remains elusive and I discovered through some internet searching afterwards that it is considered part of the science fiction genre.

While I had been waiting for explanation of those curious cartons that Gary Claybrook is seen unloading outside the Men’s Association near the start of the book, ultimately, I felt the more terrifying conclusion than water pollution, drugs or animatronics was that the women were simply acquiescing in patriarchy. In other words, Joanna (and Bobbie and Charmaine) is the outlier and for many of the readers of this book – published in 1972 – Stepford is more mirror than horror. The book could be read as a straight commentary on women’s struggle for liberation and the nature of backlash.

The book reminded me too of a recent Unreported World episode ‘Trump’s Housewives‘. Reporter Karishma Vyas meets her first interviewee in Modesto, California, who shows her around her family-photo and US memorabilia-filled house:

“My heart’s desire was to get married, to start a family and be at home and I took my job as a wife and as a homemaker super-serious.”

The women in the documentary are proud-homemakers, take a strongly heteronormative view of gender and sexuality and charge feminism with many of society’s ills. The irony that these women are actually living out the very feminist choice of combining motherhood and political and social activism, is not lost on the viewer.

Feminism is about enabling women to flourish in every way they wish, unobstructed by structural and cultural barriers. (It goes without saying that men should experience the same: generally through history, they have. Thus the need for feminism). Feminists can stay home raising a merry brood of children; they can fight in a boxing ring; or they can be a tree or a cardiac surgeon – or at some point choose to do all of the above. But they do so with critical awareness and with deliberate autonomy.

The real poison of patriarchy is how it turns women against each other: judging each other by different yardsticks of feminism or anti-feminism. This creates distraction and weakens focus on the collective prize: freedom, fulfilment and safety for all.

© Natasha Mulvihill and Criminology Tales, 2020. 

In recent years, many of us will have enjoyed TV series such as The Killing, The Bridge or Borgen or read Larrson’s Millennium series or Mankell’s Kurt Wallander books. They form part of cultural genre known as ‘Nordic noir’, a term believed to have been coined by Guardian critic Sam Wollaston in 2012.

In July 2020, Keith J Hayward and Steve Hall published an article in the British Journal of Criminology entitled Through Scandinavia, Darkly: A Criminological Critique of Nordic Noir. They identify three elements, popularly associated with this genre.

First, the melancholy aesthetic of ‘landscape, atmosphere and Scandinavian imagery’ (p.4), which is often heightened with colour tinting and sombre music through production. Further the Scandi interior style depicted is associated with a natural, stripped-backness, signifiying purity and simplicity.

Second, is the use of both male and female ’emotionally complex or psychologically troubled lead characters’ (p.5). Interestingly, it is suggested that male leads in this genre tend to be more emotive and female leads more tough. This perhaps links to the idea that Scandinavian societies are less stratified by gender.

Third, this genre is deemed ‘realist’ and ‘gritty’ because it is said to offer a trenchant critique of the Scandinavian welfare model. Often viewed by Western democracies as an exemplary society, Nordic noir appears to point to a darker underbelly and indeed the substitution of welfarism with neoliberalism.

So to summarise, Nordic noir is a genre which represents a nostalgic longing for the social democracy and homogeneity that is believed to have characterised Scandinavian countries and, at the same time, a critique of this supposed golden age (p. 9). Drawing on both ultra realism and cultural criminology (which are not obvious bedfellows), Hayward and Hall suggests that this orthodox reading of Nordic noir is missing something.

Ultra realism problematises identitarian ‘social movements’ approach to criminology (preoccupied, for example with gender, ethnicity or penal abolitionism) and return to Criminology’s fundamental question, which it claims is, “why do some individuals and groups risk harm to others as they pursue their instrumental and expressive interests?” Ultra realists call for criminologists to move beyond sociological and constructionist ways of understanding the world and look to cognate disciplines such as “history, economics, politics, philosophy, anthropology, psychology and psychoanalysis”, as well as pursuing more ethnographic approaches to make sense of lived reality.

An interview with Steve Hall (Injustice, 2018)

Cultural criminology “views crime and the agencies and institutions of crime control as cultural products or as creative constructs”, which carry meaning. It is particularly focused on late modern culture and how contemporary forms of capitalism, anomie, state activity, power, resistance, crime and crime control play out in cultural artefacts, practices and ideas. Cultural criminology is inter-disciplinary and action-focused.

Cultural Criminology by Keith Hayward (Oxford Bibliographies, 2018)

Hayward and Hall argue that, rather than gritty realism, Nordic noir has lost its grip on reality. It has done this in two ways. First, there is an increasing retreatist element to the genre, with action set in rural communities, seemingly insulated from the globalised world. Second, the storylines are increasingly sensationalist, with macabre and unlikely plot lines (p.10). The authors attribute this shift to a recognition by Scandinavians that they are unable to recover a romanticised past, yet also unable to adapt in a progressive way to the reality of the neo-liberal globalised order. Drawing on Lacan’s work, Hayward and Hall suggest that the Symbolic Order – that is the shared set of understandings and relations (language, law, culture, religion etc.) that define a society – is malfunctioning. Scandinavia has lost its binding story and purpose. They argue that the escape route from this impasse is expressed culturally through sensationalism, fantasy and retreatism. These sentiments are reflected in “modernity’s vigilant and powerful engines of mythology—TV, film and popular fiction” (p.14).

The article is theoretically complex and I hope I have simplified it, while retaining its essence. The central argument is internally coherent and fascinating. At the same time, I think a malfunctioning Symbolic Order characterises most neo-liberal economies – that is the late modern predicament. From that perspective, Scandinavia and Nordic noir is but one case study.

The key takeaway for those interested in crime and its representation is how it is possible to relate socioeconomic shifts at the global level with specific cultural artefacts and practices at the regional and local level. It is not necessary to ‘prove’ these relationships in a scientific sense: rather the intellectual exercise of tracing the ‘loops and spirals’ (Ferrell, Hayward and Young, 2015, p.155) between art and life opens up new ways of understanding crime and crime control.

© Natasha Mulvihill and Criminology Tales, 2020.