Representation of Crime: Part 1

I talked in a previous post about the difficulty many police and others involved with the criminal justice system have in relating their thoughts, expectations and feelings to those outside of it. It certainly is difficult, but by no means impossible. What I would like to talk about in this, and hopefully following posts, is about the representation in literature, TV and film of the police, the criminal justice system, and environment they work in.

Firstly I thought I’d like to talk a little bit about TV – crime and police dramas are huge entertainment. Crime drama, law drama, police procedural, posh country murders – there must be a dozen of these shows on TV in any one day. Of course, the quality varies hugely. Most British dramas with the odd exception (The Long Firm, Low Winter Sun) are, well, a bit light. At best we can say we have cornered the nostalgia market in posh country murders. Our police procedural dramas are little short of a well-known joke. Our shows often neither entertain nor come across as authentic.

It’s really the US that we look to for the best dramas on TV, best for entertainment, best for authenticity.If you want pop-corn for the eyes you don’t need to look further than the CSI franchise. It’s fast moving, flashy, exciting. I live for the droll pre-credit line; something along the lines of “the witness can’t talk, but unfortunately for them, the evidence can”. I could kiss the person who comes up with these.

The issue of authenticity is a tricky one because you don’t obtain it by direct replication - it's not as simple as that. No-one wants to watch an actual investigation - as per my previous post, most of it is boring. What you can do though is get the settings right, the characters right, their motivations right, and most of all, get the feelings right. When American dramas get it right as in Homicide: Life on the Streets and The Wire, you feel as if you are there, right there with them – there is no disbelief to suspend. It is hugely ambitious, aiming as high as it can artistically. The settings look real, the actors look and behave like the people who live there – the characters are often unlikeable and unsympathetic, you know, kind of like real people. Moral dilemmas are aired, ambiguity embraced. The Wire has been compared almost to a sociology lesson - a peon to a dying former working-class city. This is TV at its best - period - let alone the best crime drama on TV. But I'll come back in future posts to talk about The Wire, which more or less deserves it's own posting.

Homicide often achieves something similar with its interrogation scenes - you feel not just the realism of the crimes committed, the reaction of the criminal and the cops, but you also get to the root of the matter. Real interviews are considerably more boring, but in Homicide when Frank Pembleton rages at the suspect with raw angst - it is our angst, our disbelief, our anger at the injustice that people do this to each other, and often for the stupidest, most mundane reasons. It's almost got the raw intensity of theatre to it

This is why I think most British crime drama is a complete waste of time. We take most of our inspiration from Agatha Christie and produce tricky murder mysteries, though oddly enough, we often manage to distil out Christie’s acutely observant eye. It’s something to watch with family on a Sunday evening with the family, shortly after a re-run of Lovejoy. If The Wire is a challenging piece of art then British posh country murders are the intellectual equivalent of a sudoku puzzle – not wholly without merit, but a very momentary pleasure at best.

I'll come back to talk about this issue in further posts.