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Space and the Amateur Detective in Contemporary Hollywood Crime Film

Space and the Amateur Detective in Contemporary Hollywood Crime Film luis m. garcía-mainar the crime film has traditionally been defined through spatial concepts that point to social issues metaphorically, from the urban underworld of gangsters and private eyes to the hostile foreign territories traveled by spies. The macrogenre of the crime film itself can be tentatively explained as a narrative structure that expresses views about the conflicting relationship between personal initiative and the social organization of communal life by tracing the lives of the agents of crime: criminals, victims, and law enforcers. The gangster film, the suspense thriller, and the detective/cop film deploy these agents as protagonists of stories where we witness the passage from a social space, troubled by fantasies of power and disempowerment, to a space of adventure that serves as the escape from social oppression. In this process the self is asserted through violence.1 Since space is so intimately related to the form, content, and cultural significance of the genres of crime, analysis of it should open ways to understand the aesthetic, thematic, and ideological changes undergone by crime films. Within the detective/cop subgenre of contemporary Hollywood, the procedural and the detective film are still, despite their long tradition, the most relevant variations, and both http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of Film and Video University of Illinois Press

Space and the Amateur Detective in Contemporary Hollywood Crime Film

Journal of Film and Video , Volume 65 (3) – Aug 30, 2013

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Publisher
University of Illinois Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.
ISSN
1934-6018
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

luis m. garcía-mainar the crime film has traditionally been defined through spatial concepts that point to social issues metaphorically, from the urban underworld of gangsters and private eyes to the hostile foreign territories traveled by spies. The macrogenre of the crime film itself can be tentatively explained as a narrative structure that expresses views about the conflicting relationship between personal initiative and the social organization of communal life by tracing the lives of the agents of crime: criminals, victims, and law enforcers. The gangster film, the suspense thriller, and the detective/cop film deploy these agents as protagonists of stories where we witness the passage from a social space, troubled by fantasies of power and disempowerment, to a space of adventure that serves as the escape from social oppression. In this process the self is asserted through violence.1 Since space is so intimately related to the form, content, and cultural significance of the genres of crime, analysis of it should open ways to understand the aesthetic, thematic, and ideological changes undergone by crime films. Within the detective/cop subgenre of contemporary Hollywood, the procedural and the detective film are still, despite their long tradition, the most relevant variations, and both

Journal

Journal of Film and VideoUniversity of Illinois Press

Published: Aug 30, 2013

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