Crime Drama and Priming: Teaching Viewers How to Recognize the Bad Guy

This week, FOX premiered their new Batman derived TV series GOTHAM, focusing on Detective Jim Gordon’s arrival to the corrupt (and completely non-functional, given Batman’s entire 75 year history of Gotham Police failing to do their jobs) Gotham Police Department. This show joins the countless other series on TV focusing on the drama of being a police officer, and providing viewers with stories about what crime looks like, and more importantly giving faces to the heroes and the criminals.

As described in a 2008 study published by Travis L. Dixon, which focused on television news stories specifically, despite declining numbers, crime continues to be a concern for Americans due to overrepresentation of crime stories in news reporting. Furthermore, overrepresentation of race, as in disproportionate reporting on African Americans as perpetrators with white people in positive roles or as victims, causes increased anti-African American sentiments when it comes to crime and punishment of African American perpetrators. To simplify, the skewed representation of people of color as perpetrators and whites as victims or heroes starts to prime viewers to understand people of color as a threat while they begin to sympathize more with whites, and will take the side of the whites in favor of harsher punishments for people of color.

The news latches on to these stories in order to entertain their viewers, and they begin to form master narratives out of crime that feature whites as victims to perpetrators of color. This kind of crime story needs to be created in order to compete with the alternative of cop and crime drama shows, many which feature the same types of priming but in a more stylized manner. Many of these shows and news reports activate a schema that exists inside of viewer’s minds, or preconceived ideas about a “type” of person being shown, so that the viewer can easily and readily identify who is the criminal. The viewer needs to differentiate between good and bad so that they can more easily be entertained.

The reason GOTHAM intrigues me is that in a way it breaks the formula of association with bad as black and good as white. There still is a focus on two male cop protagonists as the good guys, but the criminals they face, as they have always predominately been in the Batman mythos, are other white folks. There are white victims (like um, Batman’s parents, who I have now seen murdered so many times in so many mediums that I’m just kind of desensitized to Batman’s entire purpose of existence), but the people committing the crimes are also white, and break the typical form set by the media of a hyper aggressive black male going after the poor defenseless whites.

Now there are a few things that I am still trying to put together, one of which is the role of Jada Pinkett-Smith as Fish Mooney, who was created specifically for this show outside of the comic source material. Mooney is an African-American character who does not fit into any major “types” for African American women. However, what is problematic is that she fits perfectly into the “Dragon Woman” stereotype usually assigned to Asian American women characters. The Dragon Woman is mysterious, she’s deceptive, she’s in a position of power which she executes in a brutal fashion, and she’s shady as hell. Mooney fits all of these descriptions, and for Christ’s sake, her lair is in Gotham’s China Town. So although GOTHAM breaks form so far by representing crimes in a non-typical manner, it is partially due to the fact that there are just not many black actors cast, and the biggest one that is cast is being characterized in a fashion usually reserved for Asian women. This could be positive in the way that applying a stereotype to someone it doesn’t apply to normally diversifies representation by showing no one group or people fit into that type, which in this instance is the Dragon Woman Type. It could also still be just as negative by portraying a woman of color in power as villainous and shifty, as well as continuing to reinforce the elements of the stereotype for further production.

The other thing that caught my attention was the inclusion of Renee Montoya, a fan favorite from the comics, the only major person of color besides Mooney, and an openly gay character. As a reader of the comics I knew about her sexual orientation and wondered if they would directly reference her as Lesbian, in the first episode nonetheless. SPOILER ALERT! I was disappointed that when her sexuality was written into the show, it was written in a way that her dialogue with the male protagonist’s fiancé about their past gay relationship turned her sexual orientation into something mysterious and shameful. The show managed to use Montoya’s sexual orientation as just another device to assist in creating the mysterious crime Noir atmosphere that they are attempting to create. Something like that begins to prime viewers to view homosexuality, or bisexuality in the case of future Mrs. Gordon, as illegitimate. It becomes just another mysterious element of a character’s past as opposed to a sincere identity that can function within the hetero-normative hegemony of the rest of the show.

This is all only after the first episode, so it will be interesting to see what direction the show takes what was introduced here, but they have an opportunity to showcase a different kind of crime paradigm. Instead of showing the person of color vs. white victims that viewers are all too familiar with, there is an opportunity to diversify the face of crime in Gotham. This also means though that they cannot keep showing white perpetrators as poor whites, or as just insane and misunderstood. With origin stories for Batman’s Rogues Galery underway, the path of white folk who aren’t really criminals, just misunderstood, or financially poor white people who are just as much of a problem as other disenfranchised groups, could easily be followed. Gotham can break the mold that primes audiences to see certain types as perps and certain types as victims, but they have a long road ahead of them still.

You can watch GOTHAM for yourself here.

“That Queen” Lafayette Reynolds: Developing Personhood Within A “Type”

 “Everybody else in this fucking town’s falling in love, and getting engaged, and having babies. Has it ever fucking occured to you that Lafayette, that Queen that make all you white heterosexuals laugh and feel good about yourselves, has it fucking ever occured to you that maybe I want a piece of happiness too?”  

– Lafayette Reynolds, True Blood, Season 7 Ep. 5

The summer of 2014 welcomed the final season of the HBO vampire/horror/fantasy/soft-core porn series True Blood, and as a viewer since its inception, I have to say it was not disappointing. Don’t get me wrong though, that’s not meant in a good way. It had been on a downhill slide for a while now, and it successfully maintained that momentum all the way to the end, which was just a few dancing Ewoks away from being completely disingenuous and emotionally inauthentic cheese. (Just kidding. You know I love me some Yub Nub.) However, one moment genuinely shocked me, when after being caught having sex with Jessica’s (a hetero-female character) boyfriend, Lafayette was given dialogue so unsubtle that it borderline shattered the fourth wall, where the character directly addressed the pervasive problem, throughout all media, of Queer “type” characters and their limited dimensionality as human beings.

“Type” characters are seen not just with LGBTQ characters, but with racial minorities, as well as with gender and class, and they are seen anytime a character is acting the way that dominant society repeatedly tells us they are supposed to act. There are select traits and features are emphasized to more easily identify the character as Other than what is dominant, and there is no development or growth in terms of the character’s story, or in terms of their internal development as a person. In other words, the character exists mainly as an object that reinforces what is normal by explicitly acting out what is familiar as different and therefore odd.

Examples of the “Type” characters can often be found in mainstream representations of Queer characters, where they mainly exist to inform the heterosexuality of the main characters as normal. As Angelique Harris discusses in her essay titled “I’m a Militant Queen”: Queering Blaxploitation Films, in many films of the 70’s, the Queer characters were used for comedic relief and for juxtaposition with the protagonists as a reminder of just how masculine or how NOT Queer the main characters were. Derogatory words like faggot were used not just to refer to Queer characters, but to insult the hetero-masculine characters, as if equating them with the “faggots” is a threat to their masculinity and to their being “normal.”

The legacy of this comedic Queer, which Harris names “The Jester,” whose comedy is rooted only in their sexuality and their Otherness from the “normal” main characters has survived past the Blaxploitation era films that Harris discusses, and is most currently personified in Lafayette. Lafayette exists primarily as comedic relief, with most of his comedy being based on his sexuality and the outgoing and constantly gleeful personality that is suggested to accompany being a gay man. Because he is an African American gay man he is made into a “queen” by being given flamboyant gestures and an emphasized accent. He is dressed in makeup and clothes that would be considered feminine, and he is a deviant to social norms through being a drug dealer and user, which can be equated with the deviancy of his sexuality from the hetero social norm. However, although Lafayette fits so perfectly into the comedic Queer, or Jester “type,” I believe that what True Blood has done with the character is managed to successfully renegotiate the place of that “type” within a narrative, and give multiple dimensions to develop Lafayette into a human being, beyond being only defined by his “type.”

The creative team behind True Blood used the “type” character of Lafayette as an opportunity to have an open discussion with audiences about Queer representation in the media. I think it’s evident by the fact that Lafayette was supposed to die early on, as he does in the Sookie Stackhouse books, but instead is kept around until the very end (spoiler alert?), that the writers understood the unique opportunity they had with this type of character and the creative freedom granted to them on a premium channel like HBO to redefine what the comedic queer character could be. The show has offered alternatives to Lafayette’s Queer representation throughout the seasons by offering multiple Queer characters, vampire and human both, who don’t so easily and directly fit into historic Queer “types,” and have given Lafayette storylines and interactions that move beyond his sexual orientation. Lafayette always maintains signifiers of his “Queerness,” but it becomes less about reinforcing the heteronormativity of the rest of the cast, and more about maintaining that although his Queer identity is a major part of his character it is not what completely defines him. His Queer identity at certain points even allows the writers to directly address bigotry and homophobia beyond the metaphor of humans prejudice toward vampires. Essentially, Lafayette is a multi-dimensional character, just like the rest of the cast, but also has to deal with the added problems of prejudice that accompany being Queer.

The pinnacle of the writers using Lafayette to address Queer representation came in the episode I have discussed, where he directly attacks the possible one dimensionality that his character could so easily become trapped in. When Lafayette asks Jessica if it has occurred that he wants love to, his character is openly negotiating between the audience and his “type,” asking at the very least that he can be recognized as more than a comedic prop. There is room for a Queer character who acts like a “Queen” and who finds comedic value within his or her persona, but what the True Blood writers argue through Lafayette is that these character types are unique individuals, and that they are actual human beings with fears and struggles and success and relationships, just like the main hetero-normative characters. Lafayette may fit into a “type,” but he is just one Queer representation among options as infinite as all of humanity. Lafayette exists within True Blood to start to make room for more complex and diverse Queer representation, starting with one familiar “type,” sending a message that whether a Queer character fits into a certain defined role or not, they are a fully developed human being, and should be treated as such.