Case study: true crime and fictional crime
This case study compares the generic form of the police series with factual programmes that use actuality footage of criminality (such as Police, Camera, Action or Car Wars). Narratives in the police and detective genre begin with a disturbance in the social world depicted in the programme. A disruption, such as a murder, a robbery or an attack has taken place, unsettling a family, community or business. It is the task of the police or detective to restore the equilibriumof the social world by:
- finding the explanation for the disturbance
- removing the destructive force (usually a person who has committed the crime)
- providing the conditions for the restoration of order and balance.
The ideological work that the police series does is therefore to provide a means of representing society as a fundamentally ordered and balanced network of relationships, introducing a challenge or threat to society, and dramatising the ways in which this threat can be removed. In order to do this, the central character of the police officer or detective has to be established in the narrative as the representative of law and order. The police officer or detective embodies the values that are acceptable to the audience as the consensusview of right and wrong, and by his or her actions shows how ideological, common-sense justice works in practice to keep society on a more or less normal and comfortable track.
But the ideology of society is not a single or stable structure. In the police series genre the conflicts within the central character, among the workers in the police institution and conflicts between the upholders of the law and the criminals they pursue are often equally of interest. In Inspector Morse, for example, Morse sometimes overlooked the guilt of a murderer and let him or her go because of his respect or even admiration for the perpetrator of the crime. His sense of fair play, and moral justice, were occasionally at odds with the letter of the law and demonstrated that the character’s ideological position could conflict with the normally unquestioned rightness of the law. The work of the narrative, establishing the central character in a complex and realistic way, can produce such a strong identification with the character that he or she appears superior to the system of law that he or she is engaged in supporting. It is commonplace in the police and detective genre for there to be conflicts between the central character and his or her superior within the police institution. The requirement to play by the rules of police procedure can in itself be an obstacle to upholding the law and solving a crime. The characteristics and forms of action used by the perpetrators of crime can be very similar to those of the policemen or detective. Telling lies, casual violence, disrespect for authority and rules are all characteristics which can be found both in the central characters and in the criminals whom they pursue. What distinguishes the police officer or detective from the criminal is the effectiveness of the methods they use, and the aim that justifies their behaviour. John Fiske and John Hartley (1978: 29) have argued that this similarity between police and criminal, and the value placed on efficiency, are symbolic means of presenting ideological conflicts:
What the police versus criminal conflict may enact symbolically, then, is the everyday conflict of a competitive society in which efficiency is crucial . . . The common concern that television police are becoming more and more like the criminals in their methods and morals, means that the few factors that distinguish them take on crucial significance. Of these distinctive features, efficiency is the most marked.
The aim of a criminal might be to solve an emotional problem, for example by murdering a man with whom his wife is having an affair. Or the aim might be to make money by dealing in illegal commoditiessuch as drugs or guns. In the first case the criminal has a misplaced sense of justice, and in the second case the criminal is misusing the capitalistsystem of business and exchange. Narratives in the police and detective genre establish some activities as criminal and excessive, as the misapplication of the principles that underlie a law-abiding society. The representation of crime on television is a means of defining the boundaries between the legal and the illegal in terms of the reasonable versus the excessive, though the desires and motivations behind legal and illegal behaviours may be very much the same.
The mechanism for identifying the criminal and bringing him or her to justice is the acquisition of information. The process of the narrative is unusually taken up mainly in this process of acquiring different kinds of information, such as:
- the testimony of witnesses
- scientific forensic evidence
- observing the behaviour of suspects.
The task of the police officer or detective is to assemble this information into a narrative of the crime. So the narrative of the programme is occupied with the construction of this other narrative whose events occurred usually either before the beginning of the programme or in its opening few minutes. The closure of the narrative and the resolution of the programme are achieved when the police officer or detective has completed the assembly of the narrative of the crime. This narrative of the crime is presented to the perpetrator, or perhaps to a court or to the detective’s superior. The programme can end when this narrative of the crime is confirmed as true, most often by the confession of the criminal. At this point the ideologically correct positions of the characters can be established: the criminal is captured, justice is done for the victims, the police officer or detective has done his or her job and the superior officer is satisfied. The stability of society and the security of the positions occupied by the various characters are confirmed.
The central characters of police and detective series often work in teams of two or more. One reason for this is that it provides opportunities for explaining plot points, evaluating the behaviour of witnesses and suspects and assessing evidence. Conversations between the central characters deal with the difficulty of following the internal cognitive processes by which the police officers or detectives go about solving the crime. In terms of the structure of characters, the difference between one and the other not only serves to create possible tension for the audience, but also enables each character to make up for the insufficiencies of the other and supply his or her own special knowledge. Buddy teams in television police series include, for example, a younger and an older man, a man and a woman, a married woman and a single woman or a black man and a white man. Until the 1970s, the central characters of police series were most often unmarried men, and the work of restoring the ideological values of society, solving the problems represented by crime and embodying the values of justice were associated with heterosexual white masculinity. The introduction of buddy teams of police officers and detectives in more recent years has represented the challenge to the ideological centrality of white masculinity. Single central characters have been personally vulnerable in physical and emotional terms, and the individual members of buddy teams have been unable to function successfully as the vehicles of police genre narrative without the assistance of their partners to provide the knowledge and characteristics that they lack.
The majority of television police series are set in urban environments. The city is a place where people do not know each other and where people are mobile and can be difficult to trace. The plain clothes police officers and detectives are characters who can merge with the locality in which they work, and can work semi-independently of the hierarchy of the police institution. It is possible for the plain clothes police officers to go undercover and simulate the behaviour of the criminals whom they are seeking, and to operate in the same world with the same rules. In the confusing, anonymous and mobile environment of the city, the police officer or detective needs to take on some of the ambiguity, anonymity and mobility which enable criminals to commit their crimes. In this environment appearances are deceptive. The narrative has to work hard to establish that, despite the apparent difficulty in distinguishing between the detectives and the criminals (in terms of their physical appearance, their behaviour, their attitudes), the police officers are fundamentally supporters of normality and justice, whereas the criminals are forces of violence, disorder and destruction. It is important that the central characters of the police genre are established as having an innate sense of justice. The detectives’ success in catching criminals and doing the right thing is proof of their efficiency and the appropriateness of the ideologies that underlie their actions. The satisfying shape of the narrative, moving from an initial problem or disruption through to investigation and the gathering of information, to a final resolution where balance and harmony are restored to the represented world, is itself part of the ideological work of the police genre. The ordered structure of the narrative, its movement from beginning to middle to end, is itself a kind of proof that the assumptions and actions of its central characters are justified. The world of the police genre programme is set up so that the events in that world justify the behaviour of its central characters. The structure of the narrative supports the structure of ideology.
It is interesting to compare the ideological work of fictional police series drama with the ideological implications of programmes in the genre of factual programmes that deal with law and order. Police, Camera, Action (ITV) is a factual programme which has connections with both news and police drama. It consists of a collection of extracts from police camera footage linked by the narrating voice of Alastair Stewart. Stewart is a former newsreader, and the programme gains some of its connotations of public servicefrom his association with the values of objectivity, seriousness and reliability that derive from television news programmes. The footage in the programme comprises mainly of shots from the cameras installed in police cars, as they follow or chase drivers who are either engaged in criminal activities (such as making a getaway from a robbery) or committing dangerous driving errors. Television police series fiction revolves around identifying illegal acts and their perpetrators. What the policeman and detectives do is to discriminate between the innocent and the guilty, creating justice by finding out how crimes have been committed and capturing the people responsible for them. Television is a visual medium, and television drama relies particularly on following the point of view of the protagonist and on providing information through dialogue. The central characters of police series gather evidence by watching and observing. Observing the scene of the crime and watching the behaviour and body language of suspects enable the central characters to establish the evidence that points to the guilty. Discussions between police officers and detectives give order and structure to the unfolding narrative of the case, while interviews and confrontations with witnesses and victims provide clues by spoken language, and also opportunities to observe the physical signs that might point to the guilty person. These processes in the police and detective genre place the central characters in a similar position to that of the television viewer. Both the viewer and the detective assemble fragments of information, and read clues and signs which promise to solve the case and to bring the narrative to a close. Programmes using police camera footage sometimes also include closed-circuit television pictures from shops or other premises, and footage from police helicopter cameras used to track suspects who are being pursued. The car chase is of course a conventional element of the police drama series, especially American action police drama, where the chase normally occurs in the third quarter of the drama as a prelude to the capture of the criminal. Carchase sequences in Police, Camera, Action do not have the several camera set-ups available to drama programmes, or the reverse shots showing the drivers of the police car, or of course shots representing the drivers who are being pursued inside their own cars. The visual quality of the police camera footage is less polished than professional television pictures and there is little alternation between points of view or manipulation of narrative time. But despite these important differences between this police camera footage and television narrative fiction, the function of the chase is still as an action sequence prelude to the capture of an offender.
Dramatic music is used to underscore this excitement and anticipation, and the voice-over narration by Alastair Stewart adopts a point of view that mediates between the pursuing police’s commentary and the anticipated reactions of a normative viewer. Stewart points out the stupidity of errors made by drivers, the recklessness of criminals attempting to escape from a chasing police car, the danger posed to other road users by these drivers and the damage and danger caused to the public. Since it is customary for police pursuit drivers to give a running commentary on their actions as they pursue an offender, there is also a diegetic soundtrack running alongside the pictures that helps to explain the action and provides Stewart’s narration with a means of access to the police understanding of events. Police, Camera, Action draws connotations of public service and authority from news; it draws music, the narrative functions of the car chase and pursuit from the police drama series, and the visual conventions of the surveillance camera and found actuality footage from documentary. It is a hybrid composed of the codes of several different television genres. Graeme Turner (Neale and Turner 2001: 7) has explained the conflicting forces at work in situations such as this by arguing that
The ‘liveness’ of television, its investment in immediacy and provisionality, is in direct conflict with the regulated production imperatives implied by genre and format. Further, the cultural richness of the television message, its capacity to carry an excess of meaning for its viewing audience, means that the television message is always difficult to control.
While genre is a way of drawing boundaries between one kind of programme and another, the television industry’s perpetual search for new combinations of generic elements and the audience’s skill in ‘reading’ genre in complex ways mean that genre boundaries are always being redrawn by viewers and programme-makers.