Cop Shows & Althusser's Law (was Re: surplus and other stuff)

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Mon Jan 25 15:43:55 PST 1999


Hi Paul:
>But "Homicide" and "Law & Order" don't work like this.
>
>(Have you ever seen them, BTW?)

Only several episodes.


>They work AGAINST this. Not all the time, of course, not mechanically,
>but that's part of what's at the very heart of those shows. They
>undermine these very categories over and over and over again. They try
>to draw us in, not set us up as disinterested. They set up our
>expectations, and then veer off in a totally different direction,
>leaving us to deal with our own FALSE certainty, and reflect on that
>false certainty something fierce.

I know. So do Fritz Lang's _M_ and _Fury_, Orson Welles' _Touch of Evil_, etc. That's why I said neither the basic detective genre nor its deconstruction don't get us out of ideology of judgement. The deconstructive types of crime fiction lead us to make smarter, more reflective judgments, but nonetheless, they are working with the same categories I mentioned: guilt and innocence, crime and punishment.

Yoshie



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