Why institutional police corruption stays offscreen: Production of a cultural blind spot

• In Event: 20420 - Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 5: Materiality and Affordances

Abstract

A production of culture perspective, centered on state regulation of and distribution pipelines in the film and television industry, explains why generations of critical and counter cultural filmmakers have been unable to depict pervasive police corruption on screen in the U.S. This failure extends into the windows for critical portrayals opened by such social movements as Black Lives Matter, which otherwise shook the industry out of its regular portrayals of police. Early cinema regulation turned the heroes of crime cinema into cops, while feature-film storytelling style focused on one or two protagonists at a time. The episodic nature of television series and feature films prevented depictions of ongoing defeats of the protagonists by institutional forces. Only during the brief window for prestige television did multi-season series aim to depict institutional rot. And only by dropping the focus on cop heroes in movies about cops can a feature film depict pervasive corruption. These instances are rare and do not correlate with social movement pressure on Hollywood, which suggests the enduring force of industry constraints on popular storytelling.

Author

• Neal King, Virginia Tech