Criminal World Culture & the Movies

I wrote about the impact of film on the criminal world in my first book, The Criminals Search for God: Criminal Transformation, Catholic Social Teaching, Deep Knowledge Leadership, and Communal Reentry (2006).

An excerpt.

“The criminal world has grown very powerful in the past five decades in America. As a result of social trends that are long-rooted but accelerated in the 1950’s; film, music, and fashion converged to enhance the attractiveness of rebellion and crime to youth. A corresponding inability of the traditional American socializing institutions to imbue youth with respect for the simple religious-based values that internally restrained so many generations of children has contributed to this situation.

“The visual and audio world of film and music has great power to shape the interior lives of criminals, which Klavan (2005) notes in relation to the evolution of films portraying crime, violence, and evil: “It was probably 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde that first showed screen violence not as a representation of actions between people but as the movement of filmed objects more or less beautiful to look upon. …Similarly, the balletic shootouts in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch …connected him to his world and us to his vision. In short, both Peckinpah and Bonnie and Clyde’s Arthur Penn were directors trained in the old school of filmmaking…By the time we reach the films of Tarantino we’re dealing with a director whose personal preference points seem not to be found in life but only on the screen. Pulp Fiction, as the title implies, is not a film about gangsters; it’s a film about gangster movies. …Sin City is the natural next step. It’s no accident that it takes its structure from Pulp Fiction or that Tarantino was brought in to direct a single sequence in which a dead man is reanimated. This is a film in which death has no sting because the characters have no lives to lose. It’s an exercise in camerawork, and its meaningless but beautiful violence invites us to relate to its victims as aesthetic objects. (Klavan, A. (2005). The sin of Sin City. City Journal, 15(3), 72-78. p. 76-77)” (Lukenbill pp. 94-95)

The Ethics & Public Policy Center has begun a summer series of films and remarks on crime and punishment which we will be following.

The first film is The Public Enemy and here is an excerpt from the opening remarks.

“This week we're once again kicking off with a movie from the early 1930s, William Wellman's classic gangster film The Public Enemy, starring James Cagney and - well, a bunch of other people whom nobody but film buffs now remembers….

“The audience of 1931 was as impressed by Cagney as we still are today, and his role as Tommy Powers, the eponymous Public Enemy, made him into the star he remained for the rest of his life. If modern screen acting begins with this role, so does the gangster film which has remained a hardy Hollywood perennial ever since, down to and including Scorsese's own Goodfellas (1991) to which tonight's movie bears a certain resemblance. But there is also an important difference between it and the movies that come after it.

“Most gangster movies, Goodfellas among them, derive their emotional force from the sense of belonging - familial, tribal, ethnic - that they romanticize. The family drama of The Godfather or The Sopranos is at least as big a part of their attraction as the daring deeds of their magnetic central characters. Cagney's Tommy Powers in The Public Enemy forms strong bonds with particular people, but he is very much at the center of things as an individual. Even his close friend and constant companion, Matt, he often dismisses as nobody or nothing. "I don't even know you're here," he says when they meet Mamie and Kitty in the nightclub. The family, in this film, is not what draws him into a life of crime but what tries, without success, to draw him away from it, while "the mob" is often referred to but is in fact almost invisible as such.”