|
Article Excerpt
INTRODUCTION
I. CRIMINAL MADNESS AND CULTURAL ICONOGRAPHY II. THE AGE OF EUGENICS: CRIMINAL DEGENERATES, SEX FIENDS, AND IRRESISTIBLE IMPULSES III. THE AGE OF HITCHCOCK: THE RISE AND DEMISE OF THE FREUDIAN PSYCHOPATH IV. THE NEW MONSTERS: THE RISE (AND RISE AGAIN) OF THE IMPLACABLE PSYCHOPATHIC KILLER CONCLUSION
INTRODUCTION
From Euripides to Shakespeare to Hitchcock, criminal madness has played a central role in the most popular and influential media of the day. (1) This is, perhaps, not surprising. Not only is criminal madness an intrinsically powerful melodramatic plot device, it touches upon fundamental social and psychological issues central to cultural conceptions of justice, proper social organization, and the self. Criminal madness also has posed a hard problem for law, evidenced by the timeless controversy over the boundaries of criminal responsibility, the basic meaning of the insanity defense, and the broader problem of what to do with people whose mental, intellectual, or psychological attributes diminish their ability to abide by the law.
There is a vast literature tracing, debating, and analyzing the legal tests brought to bear by judges and juries to determine if a criminal defendant is legally insane and hence not responsible for his or her criminal conduct. Far less has been written, however, about the cultural iconography of criminal madness--that is, the array of images, narratives, and symbols that popular culture deploys to enable it to tell stories about the kinds of disturbances to the social order that result from "madness" (however that concept is defined). (2) That omission deserves redress. One of the assumptions of this Article--and one shared by those working in the growing field of law and culture studies--is that the development and transformation of cultural iconography does not play out in a vacuum any more than the development and transformation of "law." Obviously, neither popular culture nor law would make any sense understood as a purely autonomous phenomenon. What is perhaps less obvious is the possibility that important insights about the law--specifically, the law of criminal madness--can be gleaned from the evolution of its cultural iconography. (3) What follows is an effort to trace the iconography of criminal madness by reference to popular cinema and an attempt to link it with the law's development over the same span. Part I provides some prefatory observations about the relation of film and culture to law. Part II explores the depiction of criminal madness in the 1930s, primarily through the monster movies of the era. Part III describes the growing embrace of psychological and psychiatric theories in midcentury cinema, which occurred precisely during a period in which the insanity defense was liberalized and constitutional checks on the state's power to institutionalize mad criminals were recognized. Finally, Part IV examines dramatic post-1970s changes in cinematic portrayals of criminals, the criminal justice system, and mad criminals, and explores ways in which the new iconography of criminal madness contributed to a dramatic shrinkage of the rights of mentally ill offenders.
I. CRIMINAL MADNESS AND CULTURAL ICONOGRAPHY
There are ample reasons to believe both that changes in law reflect changes in popular values, as well as beliefs, interests, ideas, stereotypes, attitudes, preconceptions, and fears, and that those changes, in turn, are reflected in, and shaped by what I refer to as "cultural iconography." Before proceeding, let me first clarify what I mean by that phrase. If iconography is understood as "pictorial material relating to or illustrating a subject," or "the traditional or conventional images or symbols associated with a subject," (4) then "cultural iconography" might be understood as the visual or symbolic representation of particular subjects through the main or popular cultural media. (5) Taking an iconographic approach to the study of law and film means paying special attention to the physical aspects of actors and characters and to imagery depicting the milieu in which a narrative is situated. (6) It assumes that a careful analysis of the pictorial or symbolic imagery associated with particular phenomena in popular cinema provides insight into the treatment of those same subjects when they become the subject of law.
Scholars working in the area of law and film, or law and culture more broadly, need not assume that law is in any direct sense the product of cinematic or cultural imagery. Certainly, few law and culture scholars would suggest that any neat causal arrows can be drawn, and I am not making such a claim here. (7) Indeed, it may be that cultural iconography more often is a product rather than a producer of law. Perhaps the strongest and most accurate description of the causal relationship between culture and law is captured in the notion of the "feedback loop." (8) Cultural iconography is influenced by law, and law is influenced by cultural iconography in a kind of endless process of production and reproduction. Although the idea of feedback loops suggests causal bidirectionality, we can hypothesize a number of quite plausible accounts in which culture does have a unidirectional causative impact on the shape of law in general, and of insanity law in particular.
For starters, popular culture is a source of information and competes with other informational sources--schools, churches, social groups, the "street," parents, and, of course, viewers' personal experiences--in influencing popular beliefs or conceptions. However, popular culture has an advantage over other informational sources in its universality and pervasiveness. All other informational sources are parochial and anecdotal. Popular culture, in contrast, is international in scope and, if not wholly systematic in its presentation, purports to present a coherent worldview. (9) Because it implicitly purports to show the world "as it is"--indeed, the narrative conventions of dramatic fiction require a plausible construction of plot, character, and motive to enable the viewer to at least momentarily suspend her disbelief (10)--it likely has the greatest impact on the public's understanding of unfamiliar topics, ones which most people don't frequently encounter in their daily lives and about which they lack alternative information sources. Some topics, such as the criminal justice system, are pervasively the subject of popular media and constitute the primary source of information for the vast majority of people. (11) Most people have little exposure to criminals and even less to do with persons who are "mad" or "insane." It would not be surprising, therefore, if media images of criminal madness--a popular and recurrent subject of film and television--have a particularly powerful impact on the public's understanding of those subjects. (12)
The "public" or "popular" view of criminal madness is manifested in law in a variety of ways. First, popular views matter because law, or more precisely, laws are the product of a majoritarian political process. Informed or not, legislators draft and enact laws in response to expectations about how those laws will be perceived by voters. If voters' preferences and concerns are shaped by popular culture generally, and more specifically, by the media, then so will be the penal code. (13) How the media depicts subjects of law ultimately shapes both the content of law and its reach; it draws--or at least impacts the drawing of--the most critical legal distinctions, including who is "normal," what conduct is punishable, and where and for how long criminally irresponsible individuals are quarantined.
Equally important, application of those distinctions in particular cases requires individual jurors to infuse sterile legal rules with concrete meaning, and those jurors will be drawn from and be representative of that same public. Concerns that jurors are unduly influenced by culture, and especially by the popular media, are as old as popular culture itself, and the recent highly publicized concern with the so-called "CSI effect" is only the latest iteration of the theme. (14) In being asked to figure out "what happened" in any given case, jurors necessarily use "cultural knowledge," which itself is partially constructed by the media, "to orient and guide their narratives about what happened." (15) These concerns have been given special emphasis in the context of legal standards governing the treatment of mentally ill criminals. Countless scholars have observed that jurors' preconceptions about mental illness, criminality, and their interplay are almost entirely a product of popular media imagery. (16) To the extent that those preconceptions are erroneous, and most agree that they often are, informed or reasonable handling of mental illness, the insanity defense, and the criminally insane becomes substantially more difficult. (17) Even if legal rules are judiciously crafted, distorted popular preconceptions can significantly limit the effective implementation of formal legal rules. (18)
In at least some areas of law, cultural preconceptions not only influence the application of legal standards, they may supplant them altogether. This phenomenon has been documented by researchers who, after studying the impact of different insanity tests on jury decision making, have consistently concluded that the actual legal formulations do not make much of a difference. (19) Jurors tend to decide cases consistently regardless of the specific legal standards that supposedly govern their decision making. If "official" legal formulations do not actually matter, jurors must draw upon some other set of rules. It may well be that legal rules in at least some contexts are functionally drafted and enacted not through the formal political or judicial process but rather through some sort of informal cultural consensus-building mechanism. If so, insanity law may in a very direct sense be a cultural artifact, a product of the collective, extralegal understanding of criminal responsibility.
In addition, perhaps to an extent not fully appreciated by lawyers and legal scholars, court decisions tend to follow popular opinion. (20) This is true for several reasons, including that public opinion is essential to the legitimacy and efficacy of courts, and that the composition of courts is strongly affected by electoral politics. (21) If media imagery shapes popular opinion, then that imagery will also inevitably affect how courts decide cases.
Research into cognitive psychology also suggests that media imagery affects judges and jurors because people tend to believe facts that are consistent with their prior beliefs. (22) Common cognitive constructs, including confirmation bias and the availability and representativeness heuristics, predispose people to beliefs that accord with, or are heavily influenced by, their prior experiences. (23) If both judges' and jurors' initial exposure to criminal madness is through popular media, their perceptions about the facts in individual cases are likely to be influenced by those earlier exposures. (24) Media imagery might subconsciously influence which facts seem important to a legal decision maker. It might even explain why some propositions strike a judge as implausible, while others simply seem like "common sense."
Finally, in less easily definable but more definitive ways, popular cultural attitudes and assumptions can translate into differences in the ways that legal problems are conceptualized, or even recognized. As Lawrence Friedman has observed:
In society, there are general ideas about right and wrong, about good and bad; these are templates out of which legal norms are cut, and they are also ingredients from which song- and script-writers craft their themes and plots. As general social norms shift over time, themes of the legal system shift with them; and so too of popular culture. Art, sub-art, and law move in parallel directions--more or less. (25)
Over the course of the twentieth century, changes in public attitudes toward persons with mental illness in such areas as standards for institutionalization and the availability of the insanity defense mirrored larger changes in public attitudes toward the competency of behavioral scientists, the limits of social science more broadly, and the efficacy of social reform. (26) This larger narrative, which is the product of culture in the most expansive sense (indeed, it may ultimately be culture), strongly determines the general trajectory, if not the specific details, of the path of the law. (27)
Although popular culture in this larger sense is obviously the product of a wide variety of influences, this Article focuses on one particularly potent source of cultural iconography: popular cinema. During the first half of the twentieth century, film was the only mass visual medium. (28) After 1950, film was forced to share that title with television, and beginning in the 1990s, with video games and the Internet. Nonetheless, even today, Hollywood exerts a powerful grip on the popular imagination. As one critic has noted, "[w]ith their bigger-than-life impact on rapt, passive spectators spellbound in the dark, movies are peculiarly well suited to translate social values into felt needs that seem as authentic as the memories of childhood .... [W]e tend to accept the frames of reference they supply." (29) It makes sense to pay attention to popular culture's treatment of legal subjects, because, as one scholar has argued, those who influence the symbol-creating and symbol-defining engine of popular culture "create the social reality of that society." (30) With that in mind, the Article recounts the historical evolution of the figure of the mad criminal in popular cinema parallel to the treatment of the mad criminal in the law.
The films discussed below were selected based on three criteria. First, I attempted to identify all feature films that were released in the United States during the period 1930-1990 in which criminals were depicted as irrational actors. (31) Many crime films released during this period depict crime as economically rational conduct. The gangster films of the 1930s, for instance, depict gangsters as basically rational economic actors. Films about great bank and train robberies do the same. Although such films are an important source of cultural iconography about crime and criminals, they do not directly concern the topic of this study--mad criminals--and thus were largely excluded from consideration. Second, I attempted to choose films that were significant box-office successes. (32) The point of the study is to elucidate the role of widely viewed cinematic imagery in shaping legal norms, and as such, films that may have been artistically significant but that reached few viewers were excluded. Finally, within this class of films, I placed special emphasis on films that pioneered new genres, subgenres, or recognizable film formulas, and less emphasis on films that fell within well-established preexisting genres or which, for whatever reason, failed to make a noticeable impact on cinematic fashion or to inspire others to adopt their formulas. (33) The main films discussed in this Article all, by and large, met these criteria, in that they featured transgressive villains or protagonists who were identifiably "mad" in some way, were very popular at the box office, and inspired sequels and spin-offs.
As the discussion below demonstrates, although criminal madness has provided a recurrently popular film narrative, the types of popular films in which criminal madness was explored or depicted have varied over time. "Excavation" of the history of this image in popular film is intended to elucidate changes in popular stereotypes regarding mad criminals and of the law's capacity to protect society from them. In so doing, this exploration provides striking evidence that cultural iconography is a useful referent of legal understanding and likely plays a critical role in channeling the ultimate path of the law.
II. THE AGE OF EUGENICS: CRIMINAL DEGENERATES, SEX FIENDS, AND IRRESISTIBLE IMPULSES
My study begins in the 1930s, a period in which criminal madness was predominantly depicted metaphorically in the guise of movie monsters. (34) Those monster movies were extremely successful, and a relatively small cast of monsters, including Dracula, the personality-overloaded Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, and Dr. Frankenstein's creature, (35) claimed a virtual monopoly on audiences' attentions. Frankenstein and kin were featured in at least six major studio films released between 1931 and 1944; (36) Dracula and spawn also appeared in at least six. (37) Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was remade only ten years after its original release. (38) These three cinematic projects were similar in a variety of ways. All were adaptations of nineteenth-century novels. All had proved their dramatic potential in earlier theater stagings and film productions. (39) And all explored, in one way or another, the social upheaval wrought by the intermixing of tradition and modernity. In addition, and with remarkable precision, the villains of these three film franchises mapped the terrain of criminal madness and encoded the legal agenda confronting lawmakers and judges in their efforts to deal with it. During a decade which saw the nation rent by depression and on the verge of war, these films put a face to the great anxieties of the age and helped America to more clearly visualize its monsters.
Of the three, Frankenstein's monster was arguably the most paradigmatic. (40) Although originally conceived by Mary Shelley in 1818, (41) the Frankenstein that captured America's imagination in James Whale's 1931 production was unquestionably of its time. Pieced together out of the body parts of the dead and brought to life through the electrical wonders of modern science, Frankenstein's monster was, like the depression and the wars, quite literally a "man-made" problem. It was also a criminal problem. Upon escape from captivity, Frankenstein's monster commences a crime spree that would have justified an indictment for murder, child murder, attempted rape, and child molestation. (42) In Shelley's novel, Frankenstein's creature was not inherently evil, but rather was driven to criminality only after being socially rejected by its creator. (43) In contrast, Whale's film attributed the monster's criminality to its biology--Dr. Frankenstein and his assistant construct the monster from body parts stolen not only from graves, but, ominously, from gallows. Most significant was the provenance of the creature's brain--a medical school specimen taken from a degenerate criminal and used to teach students the scientific differences between "normal" and "abnormal" brains. (44) The accidental choice of a degenerate brain--Frankenstein's assistant had initially grabbed a normal brain but dropped it, forcing him to take the only other specimen available--was the chance occurrence that sealed the experiment's grisly fate. As British film historian Sir Christopher Frayling notes in his commentary to the film, (45) the plot detail concerning Frankenstein's "degenerate brain" was newly devised. Not only was it not part of Shelley's original story, it dramatically changed the entire meaning of the Frankenstein parable. No longer was the story about the Promethean tragedy of man's hubris in attempting the God-like task of creating life; it instead provided a lesson in the importance of good eugenic hygiene.
In adopting the "degenerate brain" plot device, the film merged the mythical monster with the supposedly "scientific" degenerate criminal that had long been part of the criminological discourse. Although the father of the theory of the "born criminal," Cesare Lombroso, was a nineteenth-century figure, his work continued to find important echoes among prominent criminologists of the 1930s. (46) Lombroso, who for many years served as a prison physician, developed his theories based on his studies of thousands of Italian prisoners in the course of seeking a method to quickly diagnose "criminality." (47) Although his views evolved markedly over time, the essence of Lombroso's criminological theory contended that "born criminals" could be identified by careful study of the individuals' physical features through the sciences of "anthropometry and physiognomy." (48) Like many in the fields of medicine and anthropology, Lombroso believed that "physical traits constituted visible signs of interior psychological and moral states." (49) Lombrosian theory certainly had a major impact among legal academics. Criminologists such as Harvard Law School Professor Sheldon Glueck continued to advance criminological theories based on eugenics in work published in the 1930s. (50) Indeed, Herbert Wechsler and Jerome Michael's landmark article on homicide law--which would have a major impact on twentieth century criminal law reform (51)--incorporated an approach to punishment that was quite consistent with Lombroso's theories. It especially embraced his abiding belief that punishment should "be tailored to individual criminals rather than to their crimes," and that "the law should allow wide discretion to judges to assess the degree of dangerousness posed by each defendant as a basis for issuing the appropriate sentence." (52)
The movie's adoption of a Lombrosian etiology of crime was not accidental. Whale's Frankenstein--a big, lumbering, imbecilic killer, more "wild beast" than man--literally represented the ill effects of bad breeding. The film's makeup artist, Jack P. Pierce, explained that he studied criminology, among other subjects, to help him conceptualize the look of the character. (53) The physical appearance of Frankenstein's monster certainly conjured a quintessential Lombrosian image. The monster's protruding brow was intended to suggest "evolutionary regression," (54) as were its large stature, oddly shaped cranium, and exposed forehead. Similarly, the monster's "work clothes and asphalt-spreader's boots" graphically represented the lower-class origins of the criminal degenerate class. (55)
Director Rouben Mamoulian relied on similar imagery in his 1931 Hollywood adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Like Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll was a man of science who, although warned of the dangers of overreaching, employed science (chemistry, in Dr. Jekyll's case) to create a monster. (56) As in Frankenstein, the monster created by the mad scientist turns out to harbor irrepressible criminal tendencies. Even more so than Frankenstein, Hyde was a sex fiend, a rapist, and a murderer who well illustrated Lombroso's idea that crime and madness are closely linked. (57)
The physical depiction of Mr. Hyde echoed that of Frankenstein's monster. When Jekyll swallowed his potion, he underwent a mental and a physical change, like Frankenstein enacting the Lombrosian notion that criminality is not merely a state of mind or a disposition, but manifest in the physical body. (58) The physical changes that occur--Dr. Jekyll's high hairline creeps low on his forehead, the color of his skin darkens, his straight hair becomes curly, his straight and symmetrical teeth grow jagged and uneven, his brow flattens and his nose broadens--were clearly infused with racial (indeed, racist) overtones. (59) The new physiognomy followed Lombroso's description of criminals as "resembl[ing] savages and the colored races." (60) Although Dr. Jekyll initially controlled his physical transformations, he quickly lost that control, and became incapable of preventing the emergence of his baser "other" self, particularly in the face of sexual temptation. Both depiction and narrative in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde thus illustrated the basic Lombrosian claim that "the most horrendous and inhuman crimes have a biological, atavistic origin in those animalistic instincts that, although smoothed over by education, the family, and fear of punishment, resurface instantly under given circumstances." (61)
Indeed, Jekyll's transformation into Hyde unmistakably conjured the notion of criminal degeneracy. "Degeneracy," a concept which "tremendously influenced turn-of-the-century thinking about the nature of social problems," was widely understood as a biological degradation of the "germ plasm" or "blood." (62) It manifested the "tendency to devolve to a lower, simpler, less civilized state," one that could be "brought on by immorality (e.g. drinking, gluttony, or sexual excess)." (63) Mamoulian defined Hyde's degeneracy through these sins--Hyde's transformation was triggered through drink and he is seen in several scenes eating gluttonously, including one scene in which he first devoured his victim's dinner and then proceeded to physically torment her. In addition, his physical regression was profoundly intertwined with his inability to contain his sexual impulses. Untethered from the controlling influence of moral restraint, Hyde was the "morally insane" sex fiend, a characterization with racial as well as criminological overtones. (64) As one commentator has observed, Hyde's monstrousness played upon popular antimiscegenationist sentiment and fear of the "black rapist"; his malevolence ultimately seems defined by his "determination to appropriate the sexuality of white womanhood." (65) Hyde's character thus represented the linkage between race, degeneracy, and immorality, particularly in respect to highly salient Prohibition-era cultural concerns regarding intemperance and hypersexuality that were popularly understood to be both causes and consequences of degeneration. (66)
These same themes also appeared without much variation in the werewolf films, such as Werewolf of London and The Wolf Man, (67) which, like the other monster movies, were extremely popular during the decade. (68) If anything, the werewolf is an even more explicit metaphor for the mad criminal than Hyde. With his transformation into a murderous beast who prowls the streets to kill and devour his victims only when the moon is full, the werewolf is a literal instantiation of the "lunatic"--a word reflecting the traditional belief that temporary insanity might be caused by phases of the moon. (69) In both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Werewolf of London, the exaggerated physical changes that characterize the mad criminal: the protruding brow, hairy knuckles, and fanged teeth, for example, graphically illustrated a conception of the mad criminal as a readily identifiable biological primitive, and criminal madness itself as a physically innate inability to control one's "uncivilized" impulses. The filmmakers efforts to exaggerate the physical deformity of the mad criminal ironically mirrored Lombroso's own efforts to prepare engravings illustrating criminal physiognomies. As one scholar has...
|
