The Scene of Violence: Cinema Crime Affect.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Duncanson, Kirsty
• Date: 01 August 2010

The Scene of Violence: Cinema Crime Affect

Alison Young

Abingdon: GlassHouse Routledge, 2010.

In The Scene of Violence, Alison Young rethinks the investigation of cinematic representations of criminal violence by not simply engaging in a comprehensive interdisciplinary analysis of the intersections of film and crime, but by applying a richly complex understanding of cinematic spectatorship. In this way, Young not only pushes the boundaries of criminological study into a field with which it has been very hesitant to engage, but also the boundaries of cinema studies.

Young develops a new conceptual framework, the 'crime-image', which takes better account of cinema as a series of interactions incorporating the body of the spectator in the creation of textual meaning. This framework challenges criminological explorations of relationships between crime, media and the consumer that depict violence as causing further violence, providing comfort for the audience or misinforming the public about the 'truth' of crime, policing or legal process. Instead, Young reveals how different cinematic representations of crime engage and implicate the spectator in the depicted criminal act to various levels and with markedly different consequences. In this way, she demonstrates that there is no straightforward link between representation and effect.

Criminology has shown a traditional scepticism towards the study of media. However, in recent years there has been increasing recognition of the importance of examining media as part of the criminological project. While analysis of news production has been integral to critiques of political 'law and order' campaigns and the generation of 'moral panics', fictional representations of crime, policing and law have concerned criminologists interested in 'accuracy' and the potential for public 'mis-education'. At the same time, concerns about the harmful criminogenic effects of represented violence have persisted across the intersections of criminology and psychology. More recently, criminologists have started to note the prevalence of crime in popular culture and realise that the pervasiveness of criminal images has significance in itself for the study of the phenomenon of crime in the social world.

Important studies have revealed connections between media representation and changes to policy, sentencing and imprisonment rates; parallel undulations between particular social anxieties and crime narratives; and cultural...