The Spectacle of Punishment and the Melodramatic Imagination in the Classical-Era Prison Film: I am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932) and Brute Force (1947)

• In Event: Spectacles of Policing, Crime, and Punishment in the United States

Abstract

This paper analyzes the classical Hollywood prison film and its mobilization of the generic conventions of melodrama to expose the moral grounds and ethical stakes of modern forms of punishment. As one of the dominant forms of commercialized leisure in the twentieth century, classical Hollywood cinema participated in popular culture’s representation of the criminal justice system. The prison film’s representation of incarceration helped shape, influence, and change popular understandings of excessive and “just” forms of punishment, guilt and innocence, the need for “discipline,” and the ethical treatment of prisoners. This paper analyzes how prison films displayed sensational spectacles of punishment in order to elicit and enact judgments concerning the meaning of excessive violence, the standards of appropriate discipline, the exercise of power/control within a carceral setting, and the transparency of that power. Focusing on I Am A Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932) and Brute Force (1947), I show how the prison film located and revealed anti-modern practices and policies that operated within the penal system in the guise of the modern and, in the process, dramatized of the means by which such forces function all the more violently by virtue of what the genre imagines as the prison’s institutional opacity and sovereignty.

Author

• Kristen Whissel, University of California, Berkeley