Investigating cinema under the magnifying glass
From a look at classics like Psycho and Double Indemnity to recent
films like Traffic and Thelma & Louise, Nicole Rafter and Michelle
Brown show that criminological theory is produced not only in the
academy, through scholarly research, but also in popular culture,
through film. Criminology Goes to the Movies connects with ways in
which students are already thinking criminologically through engagements
with popular culture, encouraging them to use the everyday world as a
vehicle for theorizing and understanding both crime and perceptions of
criminality. The first work to bring a systematic and sophisticated
criminological perspective to bear on crime films, Rafter and Brown's
book provides a fresh way of looking at cinema, using the concepts and
analytical tools of criminology to uncover previously unnoticed meanings
in film, ultimately making the study of criminological theory more
engaging and effective for students while simultaneously demonstrating
how theories of crime circulate in our mass-mediated worlds. The result
is an illuminating new way of seeing movies and a delightful way of
learning about criminology.