these are their stories
an introductory law & order: special victims unit reader
i. me & (sv)u
Trauma Queen: The pulp appeal of “Law & Order: SVU | Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker
This season included a script that was a pastiche of recent campus rape stories, opening with a hot drunk girl being assaulted by frat-boy predators. Although the episode ended on a stirring note, with silent protesters holding the school’s administration accountable for a coverup, along the way it wavered uneasily, as SVU often does, between P.S.A. and pornography. Cinematic sex has always worked that way: when you record something, you create a fantasy. At its greasiest, SVU becomes a string of rape fantasies, justified by healing truisms. On the other hand, in a fantasy the world is controllable. That’s the appeal of all fiction, but it’s even more strongly the allure of pulp.
All-American TV Crime Drama: Feminism and Identity Politics in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Television's “New ” Feminism: Prime-Time Representations of Women and Victimization | Sujata Moorti and Lisa Cuklanz
... SVU constitutes a new brand of televisual feminism... [we] characterized as ‘misogynist feminism’; SVU parses the televisual grammar of rape from a feminist perspective while simultaneously denigrating feminine qualities... disparag[ing] the feminine even while promoting feminist condemnation of sexual assault. In crime dramas, which are traditionally associated with vindicating hegemonic masculinity, the vilification of feminine qualities and the association of women with horrific crimes within the family counteract the feminist perspective presented in many episode narratives in relation to rape and rape reform. We contended then that the cumulative effect of the anti-feminine traits makes the series appear more misogynist, or even anti-feminist, rather than feminist.
The Bittersweet Lessons of Law & Order: SVU | Megan Garber, The Atlantic
SVU gets away with a lot, though, because of the kind of work it is doing. At its best, the show is modeling a better world. It rips its stories from the headlines, yes, retelling many of them as faithfully as defamation laws will allow. Many of the conclusions it writes, however, engage in savvy revisionism. That is how you get so many scenes of abusers getting handcuffed. That is how you get an episode that culminates in a Steubenville-style rapist apologizing to his victim in court, his voice shaking with regret. Catharsis is the show’s currency: SVU offers the justice that reality too frequently fails to provide. Its moralisms are tinged with magic. The show is a gritty police procedural; its true genre, however, is the fairy tale.
Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU | Carmen Maria Machado, The American Reader
“I wrote the story, surprisingly, in a pretty straightforward way. I was thinking about sexual violence, how we talk about and portray sexual violence, and I got to funnel all these thoughts into one piece.” [x]
“Sacrifice”: Benson leaves her handsome date at the table, in the restaurant, waiting for the drinks. She walks down an empty side street. She takes off her shoes and walks down the center of the road. It is too hot for April. She can feel her feet darkening from the blacktop. She should be afraid of broken glass but she is not. In front of a vacant lot, she stops. She reaches down and touches the pavement. It is breathing. Its two-toned heartbeat makes her clavicle vibrate. She can feel it. She is suddenly, irrevocably certain that the earth is breathing. She knows that New York is riding the back of a giant monster. She knows this more clearly than she has ever known anything before.
Saying Goodbye to Law & Order | Jordan Calhoun, The Atlantic
Growing up, I wanted to work in law enforcement. Actually, what I wanted was based on a television franchise I began watching as a teenager: Law & Order... In particular, I fell in love with Law & Order: Special Victims Unit... Benson and Stabler made me want to be one of those good guys, but it was their colleague Detective Odafin Tutuola, the street-savvy black cop on the same elite squad, who welcomed me... My teen naïveté was obvious, but a media culture that fetishizes law enforcement reflects a long-standing cultural disconnect from black Americans. Too often, cop-centered stories portray its stars as heroes and ignore the broader failures that leave black people on the receiving end of police bias. And while it would seem easy to take predominantly white police stories and diversify them with black actors—a plug-and-play approach to representation—that method becomes a double-edged sword when fictional black police bolster a status quo narrative.
Color of Rape: Gender and Race in Television's Public Spheres CH 1: Introduction | Sujata Moorti
Law & Order, Special Victims Unit, an hour-long television show devoted to the apprehension of rapists, is emblematic of both the changes in attitudes toward sexual assault and the resilience of some problematic features... viewers understand the despicable nature of the crime primarily through the responses of the two cops; rape has once again become a backdrop against which the talents of this male-female cop duo are showcased... I would argue that rape itself is reduced into an object and a spectacle. We do not receive the female experience of sexual violence, it is always mediated through legal discourses or framed by the concerns of the criminal justice system. Law & Order, Special Victims Unit highlights the significance of this topic and simultaneously undercuts its relevance by reducing rape to a narrative device that could augment audience ratings.
Commentary: ‘Law & Order’ is lost without Stabler and Benson. Here’s why their pairing works | Carmen Maria Machado, The LA Times
I have long marveled over my adoration of Stabler, a character who I should by all accounts dislike — a straight white Catholic man from Queens, a second-generation cop and former Marine with five kids and an anger problem. But Meloni’s performance is endlessly captivating — he is muscular and righteous and eager to do good no matter what the cost; a bulldog with love-me-daddy energy for days. The two of them pass their vulnerabilities and secrets back and forth to each other like a baby bunny in cupped hands, closer than any marriage.
Fiction, Philosophy, and Television: The Case of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit | Iris Vidmar Jovanović, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
... negotiations over how to classify an act are well-known to viewers [of SVU], as one of the central aspects of each episode is the Socratic question of what counts as an x—as an act of rape, an act of abuse, an awareness that certain conditions are met, an intention to do something, a consent to a certain type of behavior, a valid response to such behavior, and so forth. By having numerous characters advocate different perspectives (and arguing for different solutions), dialogue resembles philosophical conceptual analysis, and the variations of circumstances in which certain concepts are depicted serve as counterexamples to possible answers. Because the series keeps going back to these issues, they are probed and reprobed from various perspectives and couched in variations of different social circumstances.
Policing the Procedural (On Law & Order: Special Victims Unit) | Sarah Rebecca Kessler, The Georgia Review
If the cop show can’t alter its nature, if the police procedural’s structure is a foregone conclusion, why bother reforming it at all? … at the end of the day, as “Community Policing” and “Guardians and Gladiators” do indeed demonstrate, “cop shows will always be cop shows,” whether or not they remain hardline or feebly gesture toward reform. Both episodes “rip” stories about racial profiling from the headlines, but the ways those stories are told through cinematography and editing (also literally) frame the cops as not just “the main characters,” but the crimes’ true victims… What, then, might imagination look like, in [a] world without cops, without incarceration? What might television be in the absence of the promise of punishment on which so many of its genres, programs, and episodes hinge?
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: An Oral History | Rebecca Phelps, Marie Claire + 'How Many Stories Can You Write About Rape?': 20 Years of Law & Order: SVU, An Oral History | Hazel Cills, Jezebel
Amanda Green (technical advisor, producer, and writer): Everybody said, “You are going to run out of stories,” and I used to just laugh. It was never the rape of the week or the murder of the week; it was about people and issues and moral dilemmas and medical, legal, and ethical questions. I think when people would trivialize it, at first they were missing the point. On SVU, crime was a door to a world, and those worlds were unique.
ii. investigate, interrogate, write up a dd5: for further reading
The Innocence Project’s Is the “CSI Effect” Real? + the cited Purdue University 2009 study + The CSI Effect: Television, Crime, and Governance, CH 3 CSI and Law & Order : Dueling Representations of Science and Law in the Criminal Justice System
"Many people die as a result of being murdered in these types of shows, and we found the heavy TV-crime viewers estimated two and a half times more real-world deaths due to murder than non-viewers," Sarapin says. "People's perceptions also were distorted in regards to a number of other serious crimes. Heavy TV-crime viewers consistently overestimated the frequency of crime in the real world."
… The viewing of crime drama also can shape opinions about the world in general, Sparks says. "This kind of television viewing can lead to 'mean world syndrome,' where people start to think about the world as a scary place," Sparks says. "Some people develop a fear of victimization, and this belief can affect their feelings of comfort and security."
Horror Lives in the Body | Megan Pillow, Electric Literature
Many of us… know firsthand the pain of trauma and have no desire to inflict it, or even to see it inflicted, upon others. Why then do we watch? If those other viewers are anything like me, they watch horror movies because they recognize the horror, because its familiarity is strange and terrifying and unavoidable. It is the lure of the uncanny filtering into the cracks and crevices of the cinematic landscape and drawing us in.
An Unbelievable Story of Rape | T. Christian Miller of ProPublica and Ken Armstrong of The Marshall Project, ProPublica
Two and a half years after Marie was branded a liar [for reporting her rape, and then recanting], Lynnwood police found her, south of Seattle, and told her the news: Her rapist had been arrested in Colorado.
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema | Laura Mulvey
… the film opens with the woman as object of the combined gaze of spectator and all the male protagonists in the film. She is isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualized. But as the narrative progresses she falls in love with the main male protagonist and becomes his property, losing her outward glamorous characteristics, her generalized sexuality, her showgirl connotations; her eroticism is subjected to the male star alone. By means of identification with him, through participation in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her too.
The Case Against the Trauma Plot | Parul Seghal, The New Yorker
The trauma plot flattens, distorts, reduces character to symptom, and, in turn, instructs and insists upon its moral authority. The solace of its simplicity comes at no little cost. It disregards what we know and asks that we forget it, too—forget about the pleasures of not knowing, about the unscripted dimensions of suffering, about the odd angularities of personality, and, above all, about the allure and necessity of a well-placed sea urchin.
Black Looks: Race and Representation, CH 7 The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators | bell hooks "Whether we're talking about race or gender or class, popular culture is where the pedagogy is, it's where the learning is." [x]
Just as mainstream cinema has historically forced aware black female spectators not to look, much feminist film criticism disallows the possibility of a theoretical dialogue that might include black women's voices. It is difficult to talk when you feel no one is listening, when you feel as though a special jargon or narrative has been created that only the chosen can understand.
Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession, PART 1 Toward A Theory of a Dead Girl Show | Alice Bolin “I think that a writer has both ethical and artistic responsibilities to her audience, meaning that she should tell a good story without also telling a damaging one. This is at the heart of my criticism of the Dead Girl story. That it’s not only politically suspect—the catalyst is a teenage girl body quite literally objectified—but also artistically lazy. If we’ve seen it a million times before, is it still a good story?” [x]
In the Dead Girl Show, the girl body is both a wellspring of and a target for sexual wickedness… in the Dead Girl Show “the story will be over before it begins”; there can be no redemption for the Dead Girl, but it is available to the person who is solving her murder. Just as for the murderers, for the detectives in True Detective and Twin Peaks, the victim’s body is a neutral arena on which to work out male problems.
