Crime, Violence & Media
New York University
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Crime stories are rarely about individual crimes or even about the larger problems of crime itself. We craft and circulate them in particular contexts. We are drawn to and respond to them because they speak to deep-seated fears, resentments, senses of belonging and justice. Whether they take the shape of news bulletins, gangster movies or gangsta rap, documentaries or video games, the people who produce and deploy these stories do so in cooperation with those who consume them. The stories themselves can also dramatically reshape the very social milieus, institutions and cultural forms from which they emerge.
Grounded in a number of sensational American crimes to which the media have devoted considerable attention—the murder of the prostitute Helen Jewett in early nineteenth century New York City; Margaret Garner’s slaughter of her three-year-old daughter when slave catchers cornered her and her family shortly after their escape from bondage on the eve of the Civil War; journalist Ida B. Wells’s Jim Crow era anti-lynching crusade; the photographs of Emmett Till’s mutilated corpse that birthed the Civil Rights Movement; the social “syndrome” the press invented to memorialize a dying Kitty Genovese’s unanswered cries for help; and, more recently, the media spectacles that preceded the wrongful convictions of the Central Park Five and followed the murder of Matthew Shepard —this course will explore not merely the gruesome events themselves, but the symbolic processes, communities and conversations that surround them.
We’ll also look at the figures of the gangster and police officer, the prison system, and the explosion of podcasting and docuseries, new media that form part of a longer tradition of true crime storytelling and have spurred official reexaminations of more than one problematic case. Finally, we’ll consider how citizens and activists have used media to expose racial, police and sexual violence to public scrutiny and built entire movements from #BlackLivesMatter to #MeToo.
LEARNING OUTCOMES
Students will come away from this course with a richer understanding of different ways of representing criminals, victims, police and the justice system in the media as well as the ways that those representations are historically contingent and do important cultural work. They will learn to analyze a variety of crime stories—both fact-based and fictional—in their different contexts, to locate them within particular storytelling traditions and to compare different treatments of the same events and similar events across different eras and media. They will be able to take into account a broad range of factors that go into shaping such media narratives and ask pertinent questions about their production, reception and roles in processes of social reproduction.
READINGS
Introductions
Bruce Shapiro, “One Violent Crime,” The Nation, April 3, 1995.
Syllabus
Online Survey
True Crime
Caroline Fraser, “Murder Is My Business.” New York Review of Books, 22 July 2021, pp. 4-8.
Joy Wiltenburg, “True Crime: The Origins of Modern Sensationalism.” American Historical Review 109: 5 (December 2004): 1377-1403.
art spiegelman, “Ephemera vs. the Apolcalyse” Indy Magazine, Autumn 2010
Murder: Crime as news and a site of public contention. (Print)
Andie Tucher, Froth & Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness & the Ax Murder in America’s First Mass Medium
Patricia Cline-Cohen: The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life & Death of a Prostitute in 19th Century New York. New York: Vintage, 1998
Saidiya Hartman, “The Dead Book.” Chap. 7 in Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007.
Steven Weisenburger, Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery & Child Murder from the Old South
JoAnn Wypijewski, “A Boy’s Life: For Matthew Shepard’s Killers: What Does It Take to Be a Man?” Harper’s, Sept. 1999, pp. 61-74.
Stephen Jimenez, The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard. Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 2013
Gangsters (Film/Music)
Howard Hawks, Scarface (1932) 94 mins.
David E. Ruth, “Criminal Businessmen” & “Dressed to Kill,” Chaps. 2 & 3 in Inventing the Public Enemy: The Gangster in American Culture, 1918-1934, pp. 37-86.
Darby Wheeler, et al. Hip Hop Evolution, Season 1, Episode 4 “The Birth of Gangsta Rap” (Netflix) 45 mins.
Rape
Helen Benedict, Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes, Chap. 1 “Rape Myths, Language, and the Portrayal of Women in the Media,” pp. 13-24. 1992.
Jodi Kantor & Meghan Twoey, “Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades,” New York Times, Oct. 5, 2017
Ronan Farrow, “From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories” The New Yorker, Oct. 23, 2017
LynNell Hancock, “Wolfpack: The Press & The Central Park Jogger.” Columbia Journalism Review (Burns doc; Roundtable; Duvernay series)
Political Violence/Documentary
*Phil Bertelsen & Rachel Dretzin, Who Killed Malcolm X? (Netflix 2020);
Hope & Fury: The Media, MLK & the Movement (NBC 2018)
William Grimes, Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice
Timothy Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017
Göran Olsson, The Black Power Mixtape
Ava DuVernay, 13th . (2016) Netflix
Haskell Wexler, Medium Cool
Jelani Cobb, ed. The Essential Kerner Commission Report. New York: Liveright, 2021
Police (TV)
Mark Greif, “Seeing Through Police,” n+1, no. 22 (Spring 2015), pp. 10-19
June Jordan, “Nobody Mean More to Me Than You & the Future Life of Willie Jordan” in On Call: Political Essays, 1985, pp. 123-139
Natalie Neptune, “What Happened to My American Dream?” in Things Get Hectic: Urban Teens Write About the Violence That Surrounds Them, Youth Communication, Philip Kay, Andrea Estepa, et. al., eds. 1998.
Tim Stelloh, “Bad Boys: How Cops Became the Most Polarizing TV Show in America,” The Marshall Project, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/01/22/bad-boys
Aaron Doyle, “Reality Television and Policing: The Case of Cops,” Chap. 3 in Arresting Images: Crime and Policing in Front of the Television Camera. pp. 32-63. 2003
Prison
Michelle Alexander, “The Lockdown,” Chap. 2 in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, 2010.
Michelle Alexander, “The Injustice of This Moment Is Not an ‘Aberration.’ From mass incarceration to mass deportation, our nation remains in deep denial.” New York Times, Jan 17, 2020
Jennifer Gonnerman, “Before the Law” New Yorker Oct. 6, 2014; Kalief Browder 1993-2015; Remembering Kalief Browder