police on screen: cinematic representations of police in regards 2 carceral capitalism and necropolitics

Well the title says it all; give it a listen and see below for the films referenced as well as links to all the essays/articles I read for this show! 

The Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway

The Cyborg Manifesto is an uncanny text, it never fails to resonate with me day to day. It is particularly exciting in regards to Robocop; Haraway's assertion that cyborgs are always products of the patriarchal, industrial and military systems is real nice for understanding the failures of Verhoeven's critique of the American prison industrial complex (if you use the figure of the cyborg more loosely it also works really well with BlackKklansman; 'the cop itself is technology of the state').

Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe

'This essay assumes that the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. Hence, to kill or to allow to live constitute the limits of sovereignty, its fundamental attributes. To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.' 

Carceral Capitalism by Jackie Wang - The Cybernetic Cop: RoboCop and the Future of Policing

This essay was amazing and there are many brilliant quotes I discuss in the show;

'RoboCop—naive, quixotic in his belief that the role of the police is to protect the citizenry—represents a certain idea of the police that circulates as a public fact. When RoboCop was programmed, his three primary directives were to serve the public trust, protect the innocent, and uphold the law.The fourth classified directive: No fucking with your creator.'

'What is the future of law enforcement? RoboCop is it. It is the place where the violence and coercion of prisons and police meet soft counterinsurgency. On the one hand, the militarization of the police. On the other, cybernetic forms of control. The old Detroit of RoboCop, devastated by the effects of Reaganomics, becomes the corporation’s testing ground for technologies of war. Nowadays, data mining and predictive analytics work alongside these instruments of brute force.

'RoboCop’s pursuit of the truth of his origin laid bare a technocratic capitalist conspiracy.'

BlacKkKlansman: The liberal blind-spots of a visionary filmmaker by Hamid Dabashi

Flesh and Emptiness: or, 42 Ways of Looking at Paul Verhoeven 

a still from Robocop: the animated series (1988)

Films referenced

Robocop (1987) dir. Paul Verhoeven

BlacKkKlansman (2018) dir. Spike Lee

I don't have a big watchlist to share for this show but check out this Letterboxd list by Zeno if you fancy some anti police films...

slackers and burnouts

Discussing nihilistic teen films from the late 80's to the mid 90's. Examining moral panic around 'killer teen' films such as River's Edge and how American coming of age fiction fetishises white youth. I wanted this show to be quite personal as I had a really intense visceral reaction to River's Edge, Kids was also a really formative film for me as a teenager. However... I am not very skilled at articulating deeply personal reactions to film so my failure to communicate it has led to a year long obsession with stories that centre slackers, burnouts, 'degenerates' and other poor kids left to fend for themselves. Consequently, I will be revisiting this theme on the show soon! 

(Anytime I tell people I love Kids I have to give a non disclosure about the infamous date rape scene, the fact that I love a film that mostly follows predatory 15 year old boys... but idk, has anyone actually hung out with teenage boys or been one before? Don't you remember?)

I've always been ashamed of how much I love his films as they are often labelled as crude, exploitative and perverse due to the often salacious content. His films are lurid, grimy and confrontational; I think a lot of people hate Larry Clarke because they just think he's a pervy old man leering at teens, his fixation on youth and teenage sexuality provokes audiences disgust for obvious moralistic reasons. But, like all the films mentioned in this show and this write up, the disgust is a weird defence mechanism. These films are populated with first time actors, they're closer to neo realism then they are exploitation flicks* (despite the constant labelling of teensploitation) and they are largely based off real crimes and lived experience.

It was only watching Bully on the Girls, Gut's, & Giallo live stream a couple months ago that I realised how maligned these films are; I recommend signing up to the Patreon to access the notes that host Annie Rose Malamet provides, there's some great essays reccs about these films in the context of transgressive cinema!

American teen film is rife with mcmansions and the ultra rich, often the only depictions of anyone even marginally lower class become caricatures of white trash; it's refreshing to watch films that treat their subjects with care and nuance, films that aren't solely poverty porn. I find them comforting as much as they disturb me, cathartic almost. 

There is no McMansion fantasy, just a dirty  mirror.

Essays of interest:

The Sense of an Ending: Youth Apocalypse Films

Oral history of River's Edge

Oral history of Bully

Why Do Sex and Murder Follow Girls to Florida?

An interview with Rebecca Godfrey

Films Referenced

River's Edge (1986) dir. Tim Hunter

Kids (1995) dir. Larry Clark

Other slackers and burnouts on screen...

Out of the Blue (1980) dir. Dennis Hopper

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (1982) dir. Lou Adler

Bully (2001) dir. Larry Clark

Thirteen (2003) dir. Catherine Hardwicke

Under the Bridge (2005) by Rebecca Godfrey (book)

Fish tank (2009) dir. Andrea Arnold

White Girl (2016) dir. Elizabeth Wood

Skate Kitchen (2018) dir. Crystal Moselle

*I would like to clarify that I have no beef with these films being labelled teensploitation, I just feel they are lumped into this genre as a way of delegitimizing the emotional empathy these films have for being a teen! No faux angst here, it's all raw teen terror!