Movies play a central role in shaping our understanding of crime
and the world generally, helping us define what is good and bad,
desirable and unworthy, lawful and illicit, strong and weak. Crime
films raise controversial issues about the distribution of social
power and the meanings of deviance, and they provide a safe space
for fantasies of rebellion, punishment, and the restoration of
order.
In the first comprehensive study of its kind, well-known
criminologist Nicole Rafter examines the relationship between
society and crime films from the perspectives of criminal justice,
film history and technique, and sociology. Shots in the Mirror
begins with an overview of the history of crime films and the
emergence of various genres, surveying important films from the
silent era, the early gangster films of the '30s, classic film
noir, the work of Hitchcock, and recent innovations by Scorsese,
Tarrentino, and the Coen brothers.
Keeping pace with the evolution of crime films, Shots in the
Mirror has been updated to respond to recent developments, trends,
and shifting circumstances in the genre. This new edition expands
the scope and increases the depth and variety of the previous
edition by including foreign films in addition to American movies.
Rafter also integrates an entirely new body of literature into the
study, reflecting the rapid expansion of scholarship on law-related
films over the past three years. She has added a chapter on psycho
movies, a previously unrecognized subcategory of crime films.
Another new chapter, "The Alternative Tradition and Films of Moral
Ambiguity," focuses on recent sex crime films. This new final
chapter grows organically out of the first edition'sdistinction
between traditional crime films, with their easy solutions to
social problems, and those more unusual critical films which belong
to the bleaker, morally ambiguous, alternative tradition.
Rafter examines more than three hundred films in this study,
considering what they have to say, socially and ideologically,
about the causes of crime, and adding valuable contributions to the
on-going debate on whether media representations of violence cause
crime. Shots in the Mirror is both a marvelous history of crime
films and a trenchant analysis of their complex relationship to
larger society.
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