Dirty Harry and Rafter: Chapter 4

Dirty Harry was another awesome movie to watch. Harry is known as a risk taker and also as a corrupt police officer who thinks he is never wrong and can do whatever he wants. The movie portrays him as invincible, like in the scene where he is eating a hot dog and just runs out in the street with no protection and guys are shooting at him and he doesn't get shot once and kills everyone with perfect aim and never misses. The movie also shows you that Harry is better than any cop in their field and he is in charge and never follows rules because he has his own. I also liked the scene where he gives up his badge at the end. This shows me that he doesn't need to deal with other peoples shit and that he doesn't need to be a police officer to show people he can still be a hero in his own mind. Also, thought the movie was very sexist in many ways.
Rafter:
Dirty Harry set the stage for all the cop films after that movie was released. Clint Eastwood is know for does western movies and was still able to put a western feel in Dirty Harry with scenes on who can draw their guns faster, which was always Harry of course.

Kasinsky Reading

My favorite part of the reading was "The Stuart Murder" case. When driving home from a birthing class his wife ends up being shot and killed. The husband tells police that she was shot by a unknown African American man who fled the scene. He gave the police a description of the man and the Police found a black man that fit his description and took him to jail. The detectives on the case were portrayed in the media as heroes. 3 months later Mr. Stuart was found dead in his home with a note saying he was the one who shot his wife. This just shows you how police aren't accurate in taking the right measurement in doing their job and how they are so quick at pointing their fingers at innocent people just to close a case. This also shows us that the media is willing to publish information that isn't true and backfires back in their face later on. But this also shows us how the media has to support the cops and their finding and how they couldn't work independently without the cops. They both have similar ways to project themselves.

Rafter: Chapter 2

I really enjoyed reading chapter 2. It was filled with a lot of information explaining if movies can cause someone to commit crimes and he also gave explanations to why someone might commit crimes with different criminological theories.  When Rafter mentions that many crime films show little interest in the causes of law breaking, I found it very true.  One movie that I've seen recently did show why she committed crimes. In Columbiana the reason why she committed crimes was because of abnormal psychology theory.  Her parents were killed right in front of her at a very young age. This traumatized her and made her grow up as an "assassin" getting revenge on all the people who were involved with her family's death. I think the best theories used today in explaining crime would have to be environmental theory and rational choice theory because there are many people in our society who lack opportunities in their life and they feel they have no other choice. Also, many people can influence people into committing crimes and I believe everything around you can shape you being a criminal, demographically, your friends and family members.

Menace to Society

When the film fist  starts it succeeds in painting a disturbing picture of violence in my head, one in which the characters have a lack of remorse but one thing I like is that most of the violence that is being filmed is realistic and unfolds in real time in LA. I can't image myself ever living in a place like that, where drugs and violence is happening daily.  Just the feeling of being unsafe and scared is frightening. One of the many things I noticed was that women in this film was totally excluded from the story.  I didn't really appreciate it ha ha. I also, didn't really understand why? I know many women suffer in the same kind of environment and it would have been nice to see them being representing. The movie represents an endless cycle of violence and the violent surroundings they lived and grew up in were difficult to escape and made survival harder as time went on. Human life for them had little value to them and they didn't really care if they died because they had nothing fortunate to live for. This movie is one of the few that does a good job at representing factual events happening all over and how it is a big social issue with drugs and violence.

Ray Surette Reading

Ray describes in his reading that crime isn't seen as a social issue but more as an individual issue. And when media is representing theses predators, it ignores the bigger person and is obsessed with individualism. In our media and culture, social problems are generated  and solved at the individual level and because of this we lack the cultural resources to deal with these problems. We perceive predators as a separate breed in society, encouraging the perception of social and economic factors as irrelevant. We as a person never want to get involved in crime and we leave it to the government, unless it effects us personally or someone we know. As long as it is founded on individualism, crime and justice policy is mostly a government concern. We see the justice system as a natural solution to crime problems in though it has been proven that it isn't working and predators most likely have a repeating cycle. The basic effects of the predator icon are to generate fear, degrade social networks, increase reliance on the media and foster social problems. We see actually more predator icons on TV, than we do in reality which misleads people perceptions on certain criminals.  Also, the media can make the icon more credible if they seem themselves on TV and it just shows us that we are the most violent country overall.

Outside Example and Chermak Reading

When watching movies and TV shows one thing you always notice is that police and news reporters don't ever get along and they are try to keep stuff from leaking out to the news reporters. In the Chermak reading, that wasn't the case at all. He mentions that the police are the primary source used by the media and that the information provided is partial to their own interest and particular to their own version of the crime. He also mentions that not all reporters will publish what the police want them to publish because it could effect their reputation or news paper. I find these facts fascinating because I always assumed police hated all sorts of reporters and that reporters would do anything to get a story published because any news is great news to them. After reading this article, I was watching Nancy Grace on TV she was reporting on 3-year-old Missouri girl who vanished while riding her pink bicycle with training wheels. Also, about 3 and a half year old boy vanishes in Oswego Ill from his home while his entire family was home. Children missing, rapped, or killed will always be on the top of the news list, like Chermak ties to explain in his reading. Crime news is among the most popular topics for both the media and the public and for  it to make it newsworthy there has to be a plug, a twist, or a lead. You would rarely see crime media on someone stealing a car because it isn't fascinating to the public unless its was a recurring event that need to be addressed to the public.

Rafter: Introduction, "Crime Films and Society"

After reading the introduction the first thing that popped in my head were the last two movies I watched Batman and Colombiana (great movie) all for my pleasure to escape from the world. In Batman the ending is sad and a good guy turns evil and portrays to you that the law system is corrupt and in Colombiana she kills everyone who had something to do with killing her whole  family, which can be debatable on a happy ending or sad ending. To me it was a happy ending because she didn't get caught nor did she die. I put myself in her shoes and I probably would have done the same thing and get revenge and watch all the other people suffer like she has suffered her whole life. In today's crime films you never know how the ending will end.....some are good and some just boggle your mind, leaving you wanting to watch more. Like in Alice Young's reading, every movie wants you to have feeling on what crime is occurring in movies. You wouldn't watch a movie if you didn't feel anything from it, if it's a happy or disturbed.

Majid Yar and Alison Young Readings

Out of the Content Analysis approach explaining mass media representations on crime and Postmodern Pluralism readings, my favorite was the content analysis. Counting crime scenes in different movies over a period time can show a lot about what movies we prefer in our society and the rest of the world. It seem that more crime movies are being made more often than lovey dovey and comedy  movies because our society craves action filled movies where normal people just like us are breaking the law. It would be a great experiment if they could link crime related movies to the actual criminal behavior going on in our world today. I would believe the rise in violent crimes has been caused by public exposure to ever more frequent images of violence in crime films and crime related television shows. It would be cool to find out how many crime television shows were on from 1990-2000 and compare it with all the new crime television shows on from 2001-2011 I bet it has tripled. The movies and TV shows enforce ideas on us that  are run by big corporations, they choose what we see in movie theaters and on TV and without those crime related movies and so on, who knows what we would think now a days or where the media would be at.

I never really thought about how a movie can make me feel during a horrible scene and after watching Kill Bill in class made me realize that movies like that try to make us have some sort of feelings on what crime is happening in different scenes. When I watch scenes that have killing or raping scenes, I usually can't look at the screen and my body cringes. I feel sympathy for the victims and always try to image my self in that scene and try to wonder what I would do or not do.  Next time I watch a crime related movie I will take in affect criminological aesthetics and try to find the relationship to the images I am seeing and how it makes me feel and write it down in my next blog.

Keith Hayward: Opening the Lens: Cultural Criminology and the Image reading

In Keith Hayward's reading I agree with everything he mentioned. I feel that all types of media ranging from newspaper articles to reality TV shows all try to portray something that really isn't happening around the world or 100% true.  They tend to do this because they know our culture loves drama and so they try to incorporate that in any possible way they can.  I feel the most misrepresentations come from TV shows like CSI, and SVU. I notice they like to describe their victim and attacker as Caucasian which we obviously know isn't true due to the statistics. Also, television series like to portray their attacker or killer as someone they didn't know but typically the victims know their assailant. What we see on TV and read, we automatically think it's true and don't ever question what is really happening. Like Keith mentioned, " Instead of  simply studying 'images' we need a new methodological orientation towards the visual that is capable of encompassing meaning, affect, situation, symbolic power, and efficiency in the same frame.