Overview
- Focuses on a recurring Hollywood narrative that showcases a rugged individual, usually a white, male with few ties to family but a profound connection to freedom
- Looks at how and why the archetype was born and what the archetype’s endurance reveals about the American mindset, from the nation’s ascendency through its continuing struggle to remain an effective and preeminent global superpower
- Draws attention to the mutual reinforcement of cultural products and American political discourse that either advocate or critique a similar “rogue” mentality
- Establishes a working model that unpacks the key identity factors and moral imperative at the core of American crimefighter narratives, which will serve as an effective analytical framework to apply to future screen stories
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Table of contents (11 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book analyzes Hollywood storytelling that features an American crimefighter—whether cop, detective, or agent—who must safeguard society and the nation by any means necessary. That often means going “rogue” and breaking the rules, even deploying ugly violence, but excused as self-defense or to serve the greater good. This ends-justifies-means approach dates back to gunfighters taming the western frontier to urban cowboy cops battling urban savagery—first personified by “Dirty” Harry Callahan—and later dispatched in global interventions to vanquish threats to national security. America as the world’s “policeman often means controlling the Other at home and abroad, which also extends American hegemony from the Cold War through the War on Terror. This book also examines pioneering portrayals by males of color and female crimefighters to embody such a social or national defender, which are frustrated by their existence as threats the white knight exists to defeat.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Marilyn Yaquinto was an interdisciplinary professor at Truman State University and former journalist who shares in the Los Angeles Times’ Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 1992 riots. She is also author of Pump ‘Em Full of Lead: A Look at Gangsters on Film and co-editor of books about race in media.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Policing the World on Screen
Book Subtitle: American Mythologies and Hollywood's Rogue Crimefighters
Authors: Marilyn Yaquinto
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24805-5
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-24804-8Published: 20 November 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-24805-5Published: 08 November 2019
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIV, 311
Number of Illustrations: 15 illustrations in colour
Topics: American Cinema and TV, Genre, American Culture, Ethnicity, Class, Gender and Crime, Popular Culture