BECAUSE IF YOU ACTUALLY WERE AS INNOCENT AS YOU PRETEND TO BE, WE'D NEVER GET ANYWHERE: When you stop to think about it, it's bizarre how much of our popular entertainment revolves around crime. We tease apart murder mysteries, we idolize violent gangsters, we reduce homicide to a plot device. Such criminal-minded popular culture first arose in the 19th century, when a growing secularization allowed writers like Edgar Allan Poe to examine crime not religiously but aesthetically. By the late Victorian era, the classical detective story was in full flower, most famously in the Sherlock Holmes tales, which were just as popular in America as in Arthur Conan Doyle's native Britain. The traditional formula of the detective story -- sharply analyzed in John Cawelti's Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture -- presented a brilliant sleuth for whom crime was merely an intellectual puzzle of witnesses, suspects, and clues, not a matter of moral concern. The victim and the criminal existed outside the detective's "normal" world and served only to push the plot along; crime was confined to the case at hand, and the detective's solution neatly reasserted the existing social order.
By the 1920s and 1930s, however, the popular mood had shifted. In an era of political corruption, economic chaos, celebrity criminals, and widespread lawbreaking by ordinary Americans, the Victorian ideal of the gentleman detective bringing order out of confusion became unsustainable. Instead, American audiences embraced two new pop-culture heroes -- the gangster and the hard-boiled detective -- each of whom reflected society's more cynical view of crime and punishment. As Robert Warshow explains in his landmark essay, "The Gangster as Tragic Hero," moviegoers often identified with gangsters, seeing them as classic American Dreamers who had simply transplanted their dreams to the world of crime -- seemingly the only avenue open to upwardly mobile strivers in the Depression. The early 'thirties saw dozens of gangster films, the most prominent being Edward G. Robinson's Little Caesar (1930), James Cagney's The Public Enemy (1931), and the original Scarface (1932), starring Paul Muni. Although these films purported to present gangsters as a "problem," they invariably made their heroes the most attractive figures on screen, and the main character's inevitable demise only slightly undermined the broader celebration of criminal achievement.
A few law-enforcement heroes did fight back against the pop-culture crime wave, most notably the dashing detectives Nick and Nora Charles, of the Thin Man books and movies. But fittingly for the times, the most popular detectives of the 'twenties and 'thirties were not drawing-room wits like Nick and Nora but hard-boiled private eyes like Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe. These were no armchair sleuths working out curious puzzles between sips of brandy. Spade and Marlowe found themselves immersed in a violent world of corruption and double-crosses, where partners or lovers could become victims or criminals, and a smart detective trusted no one but himself. On screen, the image of the hard-boiled detective was exemplified by Humphrey Bogart, who starred as both Spade and Marlowe in the film versions of The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Big Sleep (1946).
So if crime-as-entertainment adapts to fit its time, what can we surmise about contemporary American society from today's pop-culture roster of detectives and criminals? Do audiences in 2007 favor the forces of law and order, or do they side instead with the American gangster?
By the 1920s and 1930s, however, the popular mood had shifted. In an era of political corruption, economic chaos, celebrity criminals, and widespread lawbreaking by ordinary Americans, the Victorian ideal of the gentleman detective bringing order out of confusion became unsustainable. Instead, American audiences embraced two new pop-culture heroes -- the gangster and the hard-boiled detective -- each of whom reflected society's more cynical view of crime and punishment. As Robert Warshow explains in his landmark essay, "The Gangster as Tragic Hero," moviegoers often identified with gangsters, seeing them as classic American Dreamers who had simply transplanted their dreams to the world of crime -- seemingly the only avenue open to upwardly mobile strivers in the Depression. The early 'thirties saw dozens of gangster films, the most prominent being Edward G. Robinson's Little Caesar (1930), James Cagney's The Public Enemy (1931), and the original Scarface (1932), starring Paul Muni. Although these films purported to present gangsters as a "problem," they invariably made their heroes the most attractive figures on screen, and the main character's inevitable demise only slightly undermined the broader celebration of criminal achievement.
A few law-enforcement heroes did fight back against the pop-culture crime wave, most notably the dashing detectives Nick and Nora Charles, of the Thin Man books and movies. But fittingly for the times, the most popular detectives of the 'twenties and 'thirties were not drawing-room wits like Nick and Nora but hard-boiled private eyes like Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe. These were no armchair sleuths working out curious puzzles between sips of brandy. Spade and Marlowe found themselves immersed in a violent world of corruption and double-crosses, where partners or lovers could become victims or criminals, and a smart detective trusted no one but himself. On screen, the image of the hard-boiled detective was exemplified by Humphrey Bogart, who starred as both Spade and Marlowe in the film versions of The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Big Sleep (1946).
So if crime-as-entertainment adapts to fit its time, what can we surmise about contemporary American society from today's pop-culture roster of detectives and criminals? Do audiences in 2007 favor the forces of law and order, or do they side instead with the American gangster?
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