Paul Kaplan and Daniel LaChance's "Crimesploitation"

Paul Kaplan is Professor of Criminal Justice in the School of Public Affairs at San Diego State University. He is the author of Murder Stories: Ideological Narratives in Capital Punishment (2013). Daniel LaChance is Winship Distinguished Research Professor in History at Emory University. He is the author of Executing Freedom: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States (2016).

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Crimesploitation: Crime, Punishment, and Pleasure on Reality Television, and reported the following:

Page 99 consists entirely of two pictures--still images taken from the popular and critically acclaimed Netflix series Making a Murderer. Making a Murderer told the story of a man called Steven Avery's wrongful conviction for a serious crime, exoneration after a long stay in prison, and conviction for a second crime--a murder. The first image on page 99 is of decaying automobiles with weeds growing around them, a representation of the scrapyard where Steven Avery lived with his extended family. The second image is of Steven Avery's father, Allen Avery, standing in his overgrown garden while stuffing a piece of lettuce into his mouth.

Crimesploitation explores the cultural significance of crime-focused reality television. The book considers both lowbrow crime TV, such as Cops, and also 'middlebrow' programming, which we argue is exemplified by Making a Murderer. The images on page 99 illustrate a central theme of Making a Murderer, the impoverished nature of Steven Avery's social world. Avery lived literally in a junkyard; his father behaved in a slightly unseemly way while being filmed for the program. Making a Murderer embodied a kind of 'poverty porn' in its destitute portrayals of the Avery family and its environs. We argue that this theme in middlebrow crimesploitation, exemplified by Making a Murderer, exploits its subjects and is designed more for voyeurism than critical documentary. To the extent that these two images capture that part of crimesploitation's argument, the test works well. Of course, absent any text (except the Figure Captions) these images lack explanation and context. In that sense, the test fails.

The main thrust of Crimesploitation is that crime-focused reality TV exploits viewers' fears and desires around crime. These programs are a major feature in the Anglo-American cultural mosaic that has grown alongside a neoliberal political-economic regime that promotes fear-based racist and exclusionary law-and-order politics. But with too much order, inhabitants of controlled societies seek ways to experience freedom from the iron cage. As Jack Katz explained, crime can be seductive and sometimes fun. Page 99 of our book captures a small but important part of the story of crimesploitation, an example of the limits of corporate entertainment to critically engage the legal system.

Learn more about Crimesploitation at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue