At the end of the twentieth century, the bookstores are full of
books on crime, though this title will certainly not find a place
on the same shelves. In the massive Waterstones bookstore in the
city of Manchester, England, where I lived through most of the
1990s, the ground floor display area was rearranged in 1995 so as
to accommodate, right at the front of the store, several hundred
new titles, on topics like Serial Murderers and Sexual Crimes of
the Twentieth Century.l Several of these new books are companion
volumes to movies on release in the city's cinemas or, in some
instances, are simply the original text on which the movies are
based. The movies in question - Shallow Grave, Silence of the
Lambs, Reservoir Dogs, Natural Born Killers and others - focus
heavily on interpersonal violence and murder and also place great
emphasis in the manner of many earlier cinematic genres - on the
idea of the 'criminal mind' (not least, as a way of dramatizing the
detection of the originating criminal act) but also - to a
significant extent, these are movies which emphasize the idea and
contemporary social presence of evil. Similar moral and
psychologistic preoccupations are now also widely apparent on
primetime television - most notably, in Britain, in the
extraordinarily powerful Cracker series, produced by Granada
Television in 1994 and 1995, watched by over 15 million people, and
featuring, inter alia, the forensic investigation' of serial and
sexual murders, some of them extremely graphically displayed (Crace
1994).2 The prominence of 'Gothic' themes in movies about violent
death is not new in itself: there is a long history of interest in
the cinema in horror and, indeed, in 'transgression' and evil. What
may be definitive about the present genre of movies as well as the
range of fictional and non-fictional titles in the bookstores about
crime is the overwhelming focus on murder and killing represented
in very contemporary and mundane, ordinary and, indeed,
'respectable' settings, and the powerful suggestion that these
movies are a representation of the risks and dangers involved in
everyday life at the end of the twentieth century. The bookstore
display in Waterstones is straightforwardly called the 'Real
Crimes' section.
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