The hypotheses of Francesco Casetti's view on cinematographic

enunciation
Author(s):Silviu Serban
Source:Contemporary Readings in Law and Social Justice. 6.1 (Jan. 2014): p621.
Document Type:Article
Copyright:COPYRIGHT 2014 Addleton Academic Publishers
http://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/contemporary-readings-in-law-and-socialjustice/journals/crlsj/about-the-journal.html

Abstract:
This paper frames an analysis of the premises from which Italian semiotician Francesco Casetti
started in building his conception on cinematographic enunciation. These premises are borrowed
by Casetti from three interrelated domains: linguistics, communication sciences and semiotics.
From linguistics there comes Benveniste's theory of enunciation with its principles that the
enunciation is considered as an individual act to use language, assumed by an "I," through
putting language into action within the speech, and that any act of enunciation is also an
allocution, the locutor "I" addressing always to a "you," present or absent. From communication
sciences there comes the new conception on addressee within the semiotic models of
communication, where the transmission of messages is substituted by the exchange of
meanings. Finally, text semiotics is the one that provides the central notion of text that, unlike
Saussure'sstructure, includes both linguistic and extralinguistic elements.
Keywords: enunciation; discourse; narrative; spectator; film; text

Full Text:
1. Introduction
Benveniste's theory of enunciation was one of the main view (with Austin's speech act theory
and Peirce's semiotics) that opens the study of language, until then restricted by the well
determined frames of Saussure's structuralism, towards the communication sciences through the
pragmatic-semiotic direction of linguistics. One of the ways through which the cinematographic
enunciation enters into the research area of the filmic discourse is the linguistic-pragmatic one
inaugurated by Benveniste. The Italian semiotician Francesco Casetti undertakes the principles of
Benveniste's conception and places them into his own view on the cinematographic enunciation.
But out of French linguist's theory, Casetti hangs on two others fundamental perspectives from
semiotics and communication sciences. First, it is the reconsidering of the addressee into the
communication process from semiotic perspective, then the transition in the semiotic research
area from structuralism to text semiotics.
2. The Concept of Enunciation
The concept of enunciation is formed on the field of linguistics and subsequently valued
especially by pragmatics and discourse analysis. Structural linguistics had entailed the isolation
of the study of language from its relationships with mind and world through the classical
distinction made by Saussure between langue and parole. The linguistic sign, as relation between
signified and signifier, let out the research of the extralinguistic elements of language with which
the linguistic components interact within the use of language. Focusing on the study of language
as system and ignoring the use of language within the speech, notions such as enunciation and

discourse was excluded from linguistics (Moeschler and Reboul, 1999: 73-74). Criticizing the
structuralist conception of language, Emile Benveniste reconceives the limits of linguistics
bringing back in the focus the concepts of enunciation and discourse. Starting from the study of
the personal pronouns the French linguist establishes within the language two correlative
oppositions: first, the correlation of personality, in which the pronouns "I" and "you" are
opposed, by indicating person, to "he/she" characterized by the absence of person; then,
included in the first, the correlation of subjectivity, where "I" as mark of subjectivity is opposed
to "you," the non-subjective person, to which it is external and transcendent (Benveniste, 2000c:
215-225). First-person and second-person pronouns are nothing but instances of discourse,
"namely discrete acts and every time unique, through which language is actualized in speech by
the locutor" (Benveniste, 2000e: 239). The statement that contain "I" and "you" belongs to the
pragmatic level of language, the referents of two pronouns being mobile and variable, dependent
on the partners involved in the use of language. "I" cannot be defined except by the act of
locution and "you," except by the one of allocution: "I" refers to the person who utters the
instance of discourse that contains the linguistic instance "I," and "you" refers to the person
whose "I" speaks to in the instance of discourse that contains the linguistic instance "you"
(Benveniste, 2000e: 240). Personal pronouns "I" and "you" are not the only deictics (linguistic
elements whose meaning depend on the context of enunciation). Adverbs of time and place and
verb tenses belongs to the same category, and they all allow the distinction between language as
system of signs and language as discursive instance assumed by an "I" and carried out within a
communicational situation (Benveniste, 2000e: 241-242). An analysis of the distribution of verb
tenses in the two distinctive and complementary systems led Benveniste to relieve two different
levels of enunciation, narrative(historical) and discourse, the former proper to writing, the latter,
to oral expression (Benveniste, 2000b: 226-238). Whilenarrative refers to events that occurred
in the past without the intervention of the speaker, using the aorist mode (= passe simple), the
past tense, the past perfect tense and third-person pronouns (the present tense, the present
perfect tense (=passe composse) and first-person and second person pronouns being excluded),
discourse implies a speaker and an auditor, the former having intention to persuade the latter,
and uses all personal pronouns and verb tenses except the aorist mode. Thus, if in narrative the
temporal mark is given by the time of event, in discourse it is given by the time of statement.
Discourse, therefore, means to put language into practice and is specific to communicative
situation (Benveniste, 2000a: 245-248). The personal pronouns "I" and "you" are nothing but
signs of communicative use of language. None of the two terms can be conceived in isolation
within discourse. The existence of one implies the existence of the other. Benveniste frames in
"The Formal Apparatus of Enunciation" some general conclusions of his theory (Benveniste,
2000d: 67-74). First, the enunciation is considered as an individual act to use language,
assumed by an "I," through putting language into action within the speech. The discourse is the
result of the manifestation of enunciation. Thus, Benveniste builds a bridge between the levels of
language radically separated by Saussure, langue and parole, enunciation mediating between
them. Secondly, any enunciation is also an allocution, the locutor addressing always to a "you,"
present or absent. Thirdly and lastly, the enunciation expresses a certain relation to the world
through the presence of deictics (including personal pronouns), the referent becoming thereby
integrant part of the use of language.
3. The Spectator as Interlocutor
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Francesco Casetti's first theoretical step on the way to his conception of cinematographic
enunciation is the definition of the spectator, a true "nodal point located at the intersection of

numerous, complex and diverse paths. This individual, notes Casetti, is present as a witness to
potential contradictions rather than as a subject of consensus, an object of doubt rather than a
secure referent, a piece of a puzzle rather than a finished design" (Casetti, 1998: 1). Most
writings about cinema between 1910 and 1950 refer to the spectator without putting the
problem of the nature of his status that was considered the evident one. What is pointed out in
these texts are rather the actions of medium than the variations in interpretation, the typologies
of films replacing the problematization of what means the presence at the projection of a movie,
describing the realist or oniric nature of picture without analyzing the different ways through
which these expressive forms entail the place of spectator (Casetti, 1998: 2). However, within
these context dominated by a mechanistic understanding of the spectator, Casetti discusses
several "voices" who deviated from the general line and put more emphasis on the reception on
the film by the spectator (Casetti, 1998: 2-3). The first pointed is Hugo Munsterberg who in
1916, in The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, treated not only the mental processes by
which film entails the place of the spectator, but insisted also on the actions that the one who
look at the screen must to carry on so that the film may function as such. The Russian formalist
Boris Eichenbaum, in a paper published in 1970 in Cahiers du cinema, suggests the notion of
"inner speech" to explain how the sequence of stimuli that appears on the screen is transposed
into the psyche of the receptor, where the string of photograms and shots makes sense. In the
mid-1930s Walter Benjamin, in a paper entitled "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction" suggests that "age of mechanical reproduction" led both to the change of the
nature of the work of art and to the characteristics of its receptor. So that he/she turned from a
passive participant in receiving the pictures into the spectator who engages in an act of visual
consumption being in the same time present and detached. Finally, in the 1950, Edgar Morin in
Le cinema ou l'homme imaginaire defined the cinema as a "symbiosis," a mechanism that
combines the linguistic with the psychic elements. Acting in accordance with his/her dispositions
and particular emotional needs, the spectator tries to compensate the apparent coldness of
images from the screen, revealing their deep meanings. All these voices led gradually to the
consolidation of a direction in conceiving the spectator, he/she turning into an object of study,
into someone or something capable of being understood by means of empirical facts, and whose
essential characteristics would be described on the basis of the objectives proposed and the
research tools used. From an assumed presence, the spectator became an existence with a
determined face and a specific constitution.
This theoretical and methodological transition in conceiving the nature of the spectator has two
consequences (Casetti, 1998: 4). On the one hand, there is a disproportion about the references
to the spectator. If in the writings of the "mechanistic" period the references were scattered in
different works without to form into specific issues, within the new direction they constitute a
determined case related to being spectator of film. On the other hand, the second consequence
is connected with the multiple characteristics of the identity of the spectator. In the past, the
systematic way in which the spectator was described suggested that he/she featured a reality
with the same meaning for everyone. In the new conditions, the choices determined by the
domain of discipline and the research method entail the diversification of the ways of
investigation. Every researcher has his own object of study given by the nature of discipline and
method, and so every researcher will have his own spectator. The conclusion of this
complexification and simultaneously fragmentation owed to the plurality of perspectives is that
the spectator will must have in the future a multiple face.
But this plurality of perspectives on the spectator recurs also into the field of semiotics, a domain
of research divided in two large sections (Casetti, 1998: 5). On the one hand, the spectator is

viewed as decoder, as someone who decodes a group of images and sounds, a participant who
aims to recover the meaning of representation, a person who translates a coded message. On
the other hand, the spectator may be understood as interlocutor, as recipient of a
propositionalstructure, from who are expected signs that message was understood. In this case
the spectator is nothing but a subtle accomplice of the character that appears on the screen, a
partner whose may be assigned a task and who will truthfully perform it. These two definitions
belong to different frames of semiotics, but also to different understandings of communication.
As in communication theory there was a transition from mechanistic to organicist models of
communication, in semiotics there was a transition from structure to text.
4. Film as Text
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The understanding of spectator as decoder is closely related to the definition of communication

as linear transmission of messages and the mechanistic understanding of communication
process. Within these approaches the process of reception was considered the marginal and
secondary one, where the spectator had a determinate but limited function. "The transmission of
messages" understood as apart from "the exchange of meanings" had within semiotics the effect
of partition of analysis in the study of communication and meaning. Umberto Eco is the one of
theoreticians who set up the unification of the two fields of research, considering that when we
speak of man as the recipient of a communication process, the study of communication cannot
be separated from that of meaning, but conversely (Eco, 2008: 22-23). Since the '70s more and
more texts begin to emphasize the shortcomings of the definition of spectator as decoder.
According to Casetti "these were undertaken essentially in two forms. One involved a complex
conceptualization of the state of reception, while the other entailed an analysis of the text itself
for evidence of the reception process" (Casetti, 1998: 6). This duality is exemplified by various
conceptions: the idea that "to read is to rewrite" recognizable in Barthes's, Althuser's or Derrida's
writings, the postulate "to read means to interpret" representative to German theories of
interpretation based on hypotheses borrowed from hermeneutics and phenomenology, the
concept of "implicit reader" from works of Wayne Booth, Wolfgang Iser, Seymour Chatman, Maria
Corti; the notion of virtual public derived from Lotman's writings and developed especially in the
field of narratology. These two variants are also visible in the works on cinema. Christian Metz in
Langage et cinema speaks of a plurality of levels in the interpretation of a movie, each of them
being circumscribed to a principle of decoding determined by the subjective choices and
directions. By this Casetti alludes to the tension in Metz's work between "an empirically driven
attempt to identify and classify filmic elements and the semiotic activity of modelling the
underlying system that organize these elements" (Buckland, 2000: 59). In the same work, the
French semiotician describesfilm semiotics as an activity that aims "to understand how films are
understood," a process named by both Metz and Casetti as "metareading."
This emphasis on text and the conditions of receiving entails in semiotics the transition from
structuralism to text semiotics (Casetti, 1998: 7-8). Text becomes equivalent to discourse and
both are opposed to Saussurian separation between langue and parole (about varied
relationships of meaning between text and discourse in Rovenla-Frumucam, 2005: 70-73). A
description of this transition in the semiotic field is given by Umberto Eco in his Lector in fabula,
and in the domain of theory of film, by Gianfranco Bettetini in his work Tempo del senso. The
transformation in researching the profile of spectator generates some results, Casetti identifying
three of them (Casetti, 1998: 7-8). First, the way of conceptualizing the presence of spectator is
modified. If in the past the spectator had been only to the margin of representation (as an

episodic participant or simple consumer), now he/she is seen as someone called to participate to
the construction of the intrigue. The spectator becomes both a genuine receiver (in so far as the
story is revealed for him) and an obligatory reference point (because he/she enters within the
intertexture of representation). Secondly, there is a simultaneous change in conceptualizing the
manner of interaction with film. If in the past the interpretation of images and sounds assumed a
code (namely, a system of signs, a list of correspondences between signifier and signified and a
table with rules by which signs are combined), now becomes necessary to know the whole
situation for a complete understanding, anticipating the results and apprehending the
particularities that will follow. It requires an open knowledge with syntax and a lexicon like an
encyclopedia, and this new kind of analysis is not anymore based on the notion of code, but
rather competence, that is "an ensemble of rules which, in its totality, restores the richness
underlying a discourse's production and reception." Thirdly, there is a modification in the
spectator's field of action. "If what appears on the screen had formerly been understood as an
ordered combination of elements and as a construction turned in on itself, it would henceforth be
conceived as an organism which both submits to and influences its context." The film is no
longer understood as message, but as text, a notion that suggests the conception of a dynamic
construction, an open and complex structure of an intended object.
The "spectator as interlocutor" and "film as text" becomes the main hypotheses of Casetti's
theory of cinematographic enunciation. Meeting the potential critics, the Italian semiotician
shows that the problem of temporal and spatial distance between the components involved, the
filmmaker, the film projected on the screen and the spectator, is only apparent (Casetti, 1998:
8-9). Far from being a closed and autonomous universe, the film has really an inherent
availability long before being consciously discovered by any viewer. This fact is confirmed
continuously even in the most elementary moments of the viewing process: "for example, when
divisions are sutured and gaps filled with the collaboration of the spectator attending the show;"
"moments when information is ruled by the function of a system of expectations;" "instances
when all the possibilities of an image multiply even with the least bit of participation on the part
of the spectator;" "finally, moments when figures of substitution emerge with regulate access to
the narrative" (Casetti, 1998: 8-9). The film directs continuously to the outside the sights and
voices that live into it, towards someone whose existence is assumed and whose response is
expected. "The film, in sum, offers itself to sight" (Casetti, 1998: 8-9). As the spectator, he/she
gets through the same trajectory in reversed direction. The person who looks at
the film contributes actively to what is happened on the screen. "This occurs, for example, when
he puts together all sorts of scattered elements to construct a character or place..., when he
frames the events in a way that endows them with a meaning., when he passes through the
visual field retaining only what is essential and discarding the accessory., when he fills the gaps
in thenarrative to give coherence to the intrigue" (Casetti, 1998: 8-9). In conclusion, the
spectator "becomes engaged in the act of gazing, responding to the availability of the screen's
world by assuming certain responsibilities according to the demands of a true vocation." Bearing
in mind the two hypotheses, Casetti defines the interlocutor as both a symbolic occurrence and a
concrete reality, embracing Benveniste's explicative model of first-person pronoun, where "I"
designates simultaneously a concrete existence and a grammatical element that points out the
presence of subjectivity (Casetti, 1998: 10-12).
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All these suggest that to speak simultaneously about interlocutor and text is not paradoxal, but
both refer to the same phenomenon. So, a theory based on these two hypotheses, "the spectator
as interlocutor" and "the film as text" is not an eclectic one, but represents a pertinent approach

that avoids the extremes by choosing an equilibrated point of view. Casetti alludes, on the one
hand, to the structuralist approach that binds behavioristically the spectator in a fixed position
from which he/she have no other solution but to react mechanically to the action of stimuli, and
on the other hand, the cognitivist approach that places the spectator above other elements and
the film becomes nothing else than his/her construction.
5. Conclusion
Benveniste's theory of enunciation comes to bind the levels that Saussure once separated,
langue and parole. In communication theory the designs are shifting from the communication as
process, highlighting the transmission of information, to the communication as exchange of
meanings based on codes (systems of rules) through Peirce's semiotic perspective, where the
emphasis moves from the sender to addressee. Finally, the structuralist view is substituted in
linguistics by text semiotics which directs the research towards a pragmatic aim including also in
its domain the extralinguistic components. All these constitute premises that Casetti's theory on
cinematographic enunciation is based on. If the meaning becomes the main component of
communication process, then the addressee, the spectator in the cinematographic
communication case, can no longer be understood as simple and passive receiver, but must be
seen as a partner as active as the sender, an interlocutor, not a decoder.
The semiotic perspective on film assumes that the impression of unity and continuity every
spectator experiments at the cinema is due to the existence of a system of codes that includes
underlying non-perceptible characteristics that the perceptible structures (the particular films)
are based on, ensuring its intelligibility at the perceptive level. The first researchers
on film semiotics applied the methodology of structural linguistics of segmentation and
classification in order to identify the underlying non-perceptible system of film. The
establishment of this hierarchy--between the perceptible level of film and the non-perceptible
system of codes that the first is based on--is the main contribution that the semioticians had it
within the film theory. Semiotics, in fact, allows to the film semioticians to initiate a separation
between film and its referent, to cancel the assumed hypothesis about the existential
relationship between them, and to argue that filmic meaning are the consequence of the invisible
system of codes and not of the relation between the image and its referent. Casetti's theory
overthrows this structuralist view of film semiotics and builds a pragmatic direction by which, like
Benveniste, binds the two levels radically separated, the perceptible and the non-perceptible,
through the notion of text that includes both linguistic and extralinguistic elements.
REFERENCES
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Problems in General Linguistics (Probleme de lingvistica generala), vol. 1. Translated by Lucia
Magdalena Dumitru. Bucharest: Teora: 245-252.
Benveniste, Emile (2000b), "Relations of Tense in the French Verb (Relajiile temporale in cazul
verbului francez)," Problems in General Linguistics (Probleme de lingvistica generala), vol. 1.
Translated by Lucia Magdalena Dumitru. Bucharest: Teora: 228-237.
Benveniste, Emile (2000c), "Relationships of Person in the Verb (Structura relajiilor de persoana
in cazul verbului)," Problems in General Linguistics (Probleme de lingvistica generala), vol. 1.
Translated by Lucia Magdalena Dumitru. Bucharest: Teora: 215-227.

Benveniste, Emile (2000d), "The Formal Apparatus of Enunciation (Aparatul formal al enunjarii),"
Problems in General Linguistics (Probleme de lingvistica generala), vol. 2. Translated by Lucia
Magdalena Dumitru, Bucharest: Teora: 67-74.
Benveniste, Emile (2000e), "The Nature of Pronouns (Natura pronumelor)," Problems in General
Linguistics (Probleme de lingvistica generala), vol. 1. Translated by Lucia Magdalena Dumitru.
Bucharest, Teora: 238-244.
Buckland, Warren (2000), The Cognitive Semiotics of Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Casetti, Francesco (1998), Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and Its Spectator. Translated by Nell
Andrew with Charles O'Brien. Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press.
Eco, Umberto (2008), A Theory of Semiotics (O teorie a semioticii). Translated from English by
Cezar Radu and Costin Popescu. Bucharest: Trei.

Space and the amateur detective in contemporary Hollywood crime

film
Author(s):Luis M. Garcia-Mainar
Source:Journal of Film and Video. 65.3 (Fall 2013): p14.
Document Type:Report
Copyright:COPYRIGHT 2013 University of Illinois Press
http://www.press.uillinois.edu/journals/jfv.html

Full Text:
THE CRIME FILM HAS TRADITIONALLY BEEN DEFINED through spatial concepts that point to
social issues metaphorically, from the urban underworld of gangsters and private eyes to the
hostile foreign territories traveled by spies. The macrogenre of the crime film itself can be
tentatively explained as a narrative structure that expresses views about the conflicting
relationship between personal initiative and the social organization of communal life by tracing
the lives of the agents of crime: criminals, victims, and law enforcers. The gangster film, the
suspense thriller, and the detective/cop film deploy these agents as protagonists of stories where
we witness the passage from a social space, troubled by fantasies of power and
disempowerment, to a space of adventure that serves as the escape from social oppression. In
this process the self is asserted through violence. (1) Since space is so intimately related to the
form, content, and cultural significance of the genres of crime, analysis of it should open ways to
understand the aesthetic, thematic, and ideological changes undergone by crime films.
Within the detective/cop subgenre of contemporary Hollywood, the procedural and the
detective film are still, despite their long tradition, the most relevant variations, and both have
their roots in literary forms. The procedural appeared as an offspring of the mystery novel in
which the classic private eye was replaced by a group of investigators (the police team), and
methods that relied on logical analysis or tenacity were replaced by police routines. Based on the
real activities of the police, the procedural is the only kind of detective fiction that was not born
out of a purely literary tradition, a fact that set limits on the degree of fantasy that can be
included in the novels and makes them realistic by nature (Dove 4, 47-55). The change from the
earlier form of the private-eye narrative to the police procedural has been explained as a
consequence of that need for realism: the marginal, limited perspective of private eyes made

impossible the degree of verisimilitude that was provided by a group of investigators inserted in
the social system of fighting crime. Abandoning the isolated heroism of the private eye in favor
of the police allowed complex interrogations of social order and the institutions that support it
(Messent 2, 89, 97). In attempts to explain the social role of the genre, definitions have tended
to include the variable of space. For Gary J. Hausladen, the police procedural turns space into
a narrative element that he calls its "sense of place," by which he means "all the physical and
human characteristics of the place--the physical and human landscapes, the ways in which
people interact, the formal and informal institutions that structure the society, including family,
church, and political and economic institutions" (23). Space is thus not only a physical but also a
social and institutional dimension, and the presence of the procedural's detectives in that space
leads the texts to reflect on social issues, produce the impression of realism, and show that the
complexity of the real world does not always allow mysteries to be solved.
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The detective not integrated into a group such as the police carries different cultural
connotations. The already classical work by Thomas Schatz and the more recent one by Philippa
Gates have defined the detective film by referring to the role of space in it, but they view
detectives as characters who are isolated from their space and whose intervention succeeds in
resolving or containing the conflicts when the investigation reaches its end. Still, Schatz argues
that, as in the police procedural, those conflicts are intrinsic to the space of detective films,
whose stories actually reflect the physical and ideological struggle for control of the space
(Schatz 24-29; Gates, "Always a Partner in Crime" 28, Detecting Men 24-25). This function of
space as a signal of the conflicts in detective narratives is also implicitly admitted by definitions
that nevertheless view detectives as intimately related to their spaces. Thus, one-time or
amateur detectives such as the protagonist of Blue Velvet (1986), ordinary characters who are
thrown into the role temporarily, see their domestic sphere invaded by crime, which prompts
their characteristic emotional involvement in the investigation (Leitch 182). Lone detectives thus
exhibit a wider range of possible relations to space, which is associated with their degree of
formal training in the job: contrary to the police detectives of the procedural, in the case of lone
detectives, less training implies more integration in their space and consequently more capacity
to serve as vehicles of social concerns.
This article is interested in the area where the conventions of the procedural and the amateurdetective film overlap, an area of shared cultural significance since both subgenres are capable
of foregrounding social issues. More specifically, it proposes to explore the ways in which space,
constructed by means of narrative and visual strategies, interacts with these two subgenres of
the crime film in order to voice both a contemporary cultural discourse about the abandonment
of individuals by political and social institutions and the responses to it. The article centers
on films whose detectives are unusual because they are not necessarily private detectives, and
even when they are, they do not match the tough look, alienation, or capacity to solve conflicts
generally associated with private detectives. These amateur-detective filmsconstruct spaces that
yield different rapports with their main characters, which in turn result in different recreations of
what geographer Gary J. Hausladen has called "sense of place."
The article concentrates on two texts that illustrate two broad tendencies in the construction of
sense of place in contemporary crime films: Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone (2007) and Paul
Haggis's In the Valley of Elah (2007). Gone Baby Gone is based on Dennis Lehane's novel of the
same title, published in 1998, the fourth in a series featuring private investigators Patrick Kenzie
and Angle Gennaro. In the film, which Lehane liked because he felt it kept the spirit of his novel,

the characters--played, respectively, by Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan--are slightly

younger, but the story is essentially the same: based in their old neighborhood of Dorchester,
one of the toughest areas of Boston, and used to dealing with petty crime, Patrick and Angle are
hired to look into the disappearance of Amanda McCready (Madeline O'Brien), a four-year-old
child being raised by her drug-addict mother Helene (Amy Ryan). Police detectives Bressant (Ed
Harris) and Poole (John Ashton) reluctantly collaborate with the investigators in what looks like
an abduction that then leads to a climactic scene at a Quincy quarry in which Amanda is
apparently killed, although her body is never found. Weeks later, while working again with
Bressant, Patrick finds out that Amanda didn't die but that, appalled at the kind of life that
awaited the child, Bressant had taken her away and brought her to his captain, Jack Doyle
(Morgan Freeman), who kept her in his own home. Patrick then faces the ethical dilemma of
whether to allow Doyle to keep Amanda, who seems happy with her new family, or obey the law,
arrest Doyle, and return her to Helene. Against Angie's opinion, he chooses to return Amanda,
who in the closing sequence is seen to be neglected again by her mother. This account shows
that Gone Baby Gone deviates from the genre of the procedural: although the story carefully
follows the process of investigating the case in a methodical way, a staple convention of the
procedural, Patrick and Angie are presented as amateurish variations of traditional detectives,
and the film relates this condition to their rapport with urban space; they are young, they are in
love with each other, and they know both victims and suspects because they actually live in
Dorchester too.
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The film articulates this amateur status through their physical and emotional involvement in the
space they inhabit. Gone Baby Gone insists on describing the space of the story in ways that
point to a real city and a specific neighborhood, which in turn allows it to describe the grim social
conditions that account for events and characters. This social dimension is first provided through
construction of an identifiable geography of the city of Boston. Thus, Dorchester's locations speak
to us, but so do Chelsea (where the house of Ray Likanski, played by Sean Malone, is set), Tobin
Bridge, Cheese's (Edie Cathegi) district of Roxbury, and the quarry in Quincy, and they tell us
about ethnic ghettoes, social unrest, crime, and drugs. This use of realistic space in order to
point to the social appears as early as the initial credit-title sequence, where Patrick's
commentary is heard over views of the streets and the inhabitants of Dorchester. This section
was not present in Lehane's novel but was added in the screenplay written by Ben Affleck and
Aaron Stockard, which proves their interest in using Patrick's close relationship with his space as
a key element of the film. What we see is a working-class community living a large part of its life
in the streets, meeting one another, watching from windows, or standing on porches of the
typical three-story houses of the area, a view of a factory's outline against the sunset, graffiti on
the walls, children riding bicycles; and people playing baseball in the park. Patrick, the detective,
is seen walking these streets too and greeting people while he describes himself as one more
neighbor. The sequence quickly sets the story in a recognizable space with well-known
connotations of economic disadvantage and criminal life. In fact, the film's attachment to the
specificity of its space is evident throughout in the choice of non-actors to fill some secondary
roles, such as Helene's best friend Dotty (Jill Quigg), in the bars, the restaurants, and the streets
of Dorchester generally; and in the attempt to use real locations recognizable to anyone familiar
with Boston's central and southern districts.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The intrinsic capacity of these realistic views to dissect the social conditions of unemployment,
educational failure, drug traffic, and broken family structure is aided by the film's tendency to
draw attention to the specific realizations of that social texture through mise-en-scene, framing,
and editing, in scenes that at the same time express the amateurish status of the protagonists.
Good examples of this tendency are the characters' inspection of Amanda's room and the
following scene at the Fillmore, in which the actual investigation begins with a visit to one of
Helene's usual hangouts. Both scenes repeat what becomes a pattern in many sections of
the film: the introduction of the scene not with an establishing shot but with a shot of a small
portion of its total space, which only later is followed by more general shots. The initial shot in
Amanda's room shows us a detail of the corner where the four-year-old child had glued starshaped cutouts to the wall, a sign of her need to escape the dreary life for which the barely
furnished room and the whole apartment act as metaphors. The scene closes when Jack Doyle
appears and, surprised by the youthful looks of the private eyes, asks Patrick about his age,
implying that he is not a suitable investigator for this kind of case. The Fillmore scene begins on
a close view of the customers, men who sit at the bar sipping their drinks in silence. The obese
face of one and the tracheotomy scars of another tell us of alcohol and tobacco addiction, of lives
lost on the edges of society. The film is interested in transforming the mere physical space where
the events are to develop into accurate analyses and descriptions of the social space that
surrounds the main characters and that may help to explain their behavior and the story events.
The scene ends when the detectives have to pull out their guns and run, after being threatened
by the patrons, who resent being asked about Helene McCready.
The structure of these scenes is common in contemporary cinema, but here the film uses it in
order to INVEST those views with evident social commentary. Even when the scenes get going,
the film tends to insert slightly unmotivated detail shots that openly provide information about
the nature of that social space. At the Fillmore, for example, Patrick spots Steve Penteroudakis
(Jay Giannone) and calls him loudly; as he walks toward Steve and shakes his hand, Patrick
sums up his sense of Steve's life at the moment: beers and Keno at two in the afternoon,
implying that he is unemployed and spends his days playing the lottery. Patrick's mention of
Keno is followed by a shot of a patron checking a Keno ticket while he watches the results on
television. A short time later, Patrick and Angle meet Bressant and Nick Poole at a local diner, and
the view of them entering the building is followed by an unmotivated detail shot of the diner's
menu, whose cheap, barbecue-style food tells us that this is a typical neighborhood eatery and
that the police detectives are not very different socially from the rest of the customers in the
restaurant. Again, one of the themes of this scene is Bressant's skepticism about--even his open
scorn for--the capacity of Patrick and Angle as detectives: at one point he derisively tells Patrick
to go back to his Harry Potter book. It is through Patrick and Angle's familiarity with the space,
which apparently disqualifies them as detectives, that the text explains the connections between
physical and social space, thus creating what Hausladen calls its sense of place.
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Both this sense of place and the peculiar status of the detectives are generated by views of
pathos and sadness at the degradation of people's lives in such a marginal context. The
centrality of this pathos, as well as its capacity to connect the modified version of the procedural
with sense of place, is evident in the film's narrative structure, which fits Kristin Thompson's
paradigm of classical and contemporary Hollywood--composed of setup, complicating action,
development, climax, and epilogue (28)--but which changes the nature of its sections. In Gone
Baby Gone, what Thompson would call the complicating action--meaning the section that follows
the initial setup and where the film's central goals are recast as the protagonist faces a new

situation-leads Patrick and Angle to the trap set by Bressant and Doyle at the quarry. The night
meeting, in which they are supposedly going to exchange local drug lord Cheese's MONEY for
Amanda, goes wrong when Cheese is found dead and Amanda falls into the water. Although
Amanda's body does not appear, everybody assumes that she has died. The climax of this part is
followed by a sudden decrease in the pace of the narrative, as we are shown Angle in a hospital
bed, recovering from her desperate attempt to save Amanda, and Patrick lying by her side.
Patrick's voice-over comments and melancholy piano music accompany a montage of views in
which we are told about the consequences of that night: Doyle left the force without honors;
Amanda was pronounced dead; the events put a strain on Patrick's relationship with Angle, who
turned to a mournful spirit; and two months later, another child went missing. Pathos creeps in
as the sense of their incapacity to prevent Amanda from suffering the effects of social
degradation increases.
The melancholy mood is then abandoned when Patrick joins first Bubba (Slaine) and later
Bressant and Poole in the raid on Corwin Earle's (Matthew Maher) house. But Patrick's coldblooded execution of Earle launches him into the same languid, pensive, melancholy mood that
has afflicted Angle so far, only his state of mind is caused by his decision to kill Earle and the
moral questions prompted by it. Patrick is torn apart between his belief that crime has its origin
in social marginalization and his desire to punish criminals. To Kristin Thompson, the
complicating action is to be followed by the development--the part of the story where the
protagonist will struggle toward his or her goals, "often involving many incidents that create
action, suspense, and delay" (28). But in Gone Baby Gone this development works as a
melodramatic stretch that matches other similar elements in the film, which together define
much of its tone. In terms of dramatic structure, Gone Baby Gone is characterized by moments
of pathos that arrest the action. The film uses the suspense-producing mechanisms associated
with the detective film, but then these yield more pathos than action.
The proof is that the climax is devoted to Patrick's ethical predicament, which sends him into a
spell of sadness; he feels trapped by a dilemma that exceeds his capacity for action. The film's
moments of pathos thus influence the characterization of the detectives, who inhabit a sense of
place where social safety nets no longer exist. In this, the filmshows connections with the
tradition of the police procedural represented by Bressant and Doyle. However, the procedural's
typical articulation of the difficult relationship between citizens and social institutions is here
replaced by the degradation of the police and their lack of respect for the law. The police
represent here a more populist discourse about the ethical value of common sense and individual
action that contradicts the usual discourses of the procedural, which rely on attention to the
reality of police work and show a close rapport of police detectives with the world they
investigate. In Gone Baby Gone it is Patrick and Angle who illustrate the relevance of team work
and attention to detail that usually define the police procedural. They are the ones who, through
the sense of place articulated by their amateurism, voice the need for rules and norms, whereas
the police stand for the dissolution of the social. Patrick, left alone by Angle in his decision to
arrest the corrupt policemen, expresses the helplessness of an individual who is expected to give
an answer to the corruption of a system over which he has no control. The film's drift into pathos
in narrative parts that in a crime filmshould be filled with action is what voices the retreat of the
social.
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In the Valley of Elah shows similar representations and concerns, but in ways that can help us
further explore the deployment of sense of place in the contemporary Hollywood crime film. It

follows the consequences of the Iraq War on soldiers and their families. Hank, played by Tommy
Lee Jones, is a retired military policeman now hauling gravel in Tennessee. He drives to Fort
Rudd, New Mexico, when he is told that his son Mike (Jonathan Tucker), a young soldier just
returned from Iraq, has gone missing. When Mike is found dead, Hank decides to stay and find
out who killed him despite the skepticism and hostility of the local police, until police detective
Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron) allows him to collaborate with her. It turns out that Mike's own
friends, suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, killed him on a night out in town.
Interspersed with these events, we are shown the videos of Iraq that Mike took with his mobile
phone: they are views of the soldiers' inhuman behavior that explain their murderous instincts
back home.
Pathos connects the film's specific use of the conventions of the procedural with its sense of
place. From the moment Hank and Emily meet, and the procedural begins, the pace of
the film slows down, and the shots become lengthier. When, after Mike's body is found, Hank
waits outside Emily's office to be taken to the crime scene, the more or less average
cinematographic options of contemporary Hollywood that have predominated so far give way to a
long shot that draws attention to the space between Hank and Emily, a sign of the distance
between the two characters, and its thirty-eight seconds qualify it as a long take as well; both
aspects point to the undercurrent of emotion in the characters. A similarly emotive lengthy long
shot appears shortly afterward, after Hank takes his wife Joan (Susan Sarandon) to see the
remains of their son: they leave, slightly staggering until they stop and embrace each other while
the music turns more dramatic. They walk away from the camera, entering an aseptically white
corridor that suggests the emptiness of their lives now that their two sons are dead. The same
effect is achieved in similar ways from that moment on, shaping an impression of pathos that
emanates both from the rhythm of the film and from the quality of the spaces it foregrounds.
The film privileges Hank's point of view and, by following it and filling it with pathos, transforms
space into sense of place, only now this sense of place does not welcome the detective figure but
shows him at odds with his physical and social surroundings. Sense of place is here tinged with
the loneliness and stillness in which Hank is forced to live during his stay in Fort Rudd and which
in a way make visible the very contained, repressed emotions that he experiences. His gradual
discovery of the truth about Mike, and of the dehumanizing power of the army, leaves Hank
without the codes of self-discipline that have guided his life. The army becomes another example
of an institution that abandons individuals to their own devices, an idea that the film reinforces
through its representation of the police. The little interest the local police show in solving the
case of his son, the lack of sympathy for the suffering of a father, the hostility toward the military
police, and the open humiliation of Emily at the police station are very far from the traditional
representations of the procedural. There is no team work here, no camaraderie, and no personal
involvement in the investigation. Only Emily reacts with the degree of compassion one expects
from those who should serve citizens by immersing themselves into their physical and social
spaces. Hank contributes his skills at police work, but his sense of group has disappeared, and
he has become a lone wolf unable to relate to others. He is close to the alienated detectives
defined by Schatz and Gates, except that Emily works as his nexus with that hostile sense of
place that he forces himself to travel. She provides him with the procedural mechanisms to
conduct his own investigation and channel his emotional investment in a sense of place
represented by everything military. His status as an amateur detective is thus produced through
his interaction with sense of place. He is an amateur detective because he is too old to
understand the sense of place represented by the army, an institution that has guided his life but
that he does not recognize anymore, but also because he is not completely alienated from that

sense of place, since the film recuperates it for Hank through the remnants of the procedural
embodied in Emily. Like Patrick in Gone Baby Gone, Hank stands halfway between alienation and
integration. The conventions of the amateur detective function in similar ways in the two films:
they allow the representation of emotional investment in a sense of place whose lack of
institutional support and morality threatens the characters' regard of themselves and society.
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In the Valley of Elah resembles Gone Baby Gone in its distribution of pathos along Kristin
Thompson's five-part structure. Twenty-five minutes into the film, the complicating action
segment begins when Hank is informed that his son's body has been found, an event that makes
Hank reconsider his journey to the military base. But this section is invested with a powerful tone
of pathos, achieved in part by performance but also by the narrative arrangement of the story.
When Hank is shown the remains of his son, the film crosscuts the scene with views of police
detective Emily Sanders in her office, shocked at the photographs of the crime scene. Languid
music extends over the two episodes and into the following scene, in which Hank tersely
demands that Emily show him where the body was found. The same music accompanies the
following events too: they visit the site of the crime, where Hank provides clues that Emily and
the police had missed; Emily drops Hank at his motel; Hank phones his wife and tells her the bad
news while Emily is seen putting her son to sleep; and then Hank watches another video of his
son in Iraq and goes out for a sandwich dinner. The block lasts about fifteen minutes, and each
scene perfectly blends into the next one with the help of music and crosscutting. The rhythm has
slowed down, plunging the film into pathos.
The same tone extends over the development of the film, which begins when the case is finally
assigned to Emily and she looks for Hank's collaboration. The expected energy and suspense are
more salient than in the complicating action part, as the development approaches the form of the
procedural more clearly, but the account of the day's proceedings usually ends with views of
Hank alone in his motel room, watching Mike's Iraq videos with the anguished look of someone
who has discovered evil where it was least expected. This section strives to dramatize the painful
process through which Hank comes to realize the atrocity of war and his own incapacity to make
sense of it, mainly through his scene with Emily's son (Devin Brochu), in which he tells him the
story about David and Goliath that the film's title refers to. Hank proves that his notions about
the army and war are not valid anymore; they are old-fashioned ideas about rules and fighting
one's fear to act heroically, whereas the story his son's videos tell him and us is about despair
and psychological breakdown in the face of a struggle for which the young soldiers are no match.
The section then finishes with a scene that stresses Emily's sorrow over her incapacity to help
others. After the news comes that Bonner (Jake McLauglin), one of Mike's friends, has hanged
himself, a phone call informs Emily that a woman has been killed. She is the same woman who
came to the police station alarmed by her husband's violent behavior and whom Emily had to
invite to leave because no crime had been committed. When Emily visits the house where the
woman has been found dead at the hands of her husband, Charlize Theron's performance
suggests her feeling of guilt, a final acceptance of her own fallibility in a world that makes it
impossible for human beings to care for one another.
Overall, the expected suspense and action of this part are intertwined with key moments in the
development of the two characters, in which they have to face their disillusionment with a world
plagued by injustice and inhumanity. Even the film's climax--as Emily and Hank finally question
Mike's murderer, Penning (Wes Chatham), and he coldly tells them that it was all a consequence
of the war--and the epilogue, in which Hank drives back home to turn an American flag upside

down, are suffused with a pathos that has already become the norm. The views of Hank's
contained pain and his relationship with Emily serve In the Valley of Elah to draw attention to his
different quality as a figure of detection and to the fact that this difference is in part produced by
his relation to the story's sense of place. The presence of pathos in parts of a crime filmthat
would promise suspense and action foregrounds both his helplessness and the ruthlessness of
that sense of place. As happened to Patrick in Gone Baby Gone, the ethical values that have
governed Hank's life seem obsolete in a world where institutions have abandoned individuals to
their own devices.
Pathos, sense of place, and the conventions of the amateur detective are thus deployed by the
two films in order to voice a similar concern about the helplessness of the contemporary
individual. Closer analysis of each film's visual style, its impact on the creation of sense of place,
and its connections with broader social and cultural trends reveals that the films provide two
different responses to that concern. The following paragraphs center on the discussion of the
two films' visual style and how they suggest those two responses. The unusual appearance of
the long take and the long shot to create a sense of place actually illustrates a widespread
tendency in In the Valley of Elah to privilege the role of the visual in the creation of emotionally
charged spaces. The saliency of the visual testifies to the relevance of another key factor in the
film's creation of meaning, one that inserts the film in a tradition of representation with national
undertones. The roads, Hank's motel, and the parking lots where several scenes take place are
highlighted through very careful long-shot compositions whose sharp definition and very
extreme, bleached-out, desaturated look evoke the documentary vocation of the New
Topographics and the New Color photography movements of the 1970s (Eauclaire). These two
movements drew attention to urban and suburban landscapes in an apparently detached manner
that could not conceal their mastery of composition and color. The same blend of devotion to the
real and to the slight stylization in terms of composition and color intensity is found in the 1970s
work of Robert Adams, Stephen Shore, William Eggleston, and Joel Sternfeld and in Roger
Deakins's photography for In the Valley of Elah. The specific look of these landscapes associates
them most closely with the photography of Stephen Shore, probably the figure who best
represents the meeting of the New Topographics and the New Color movements, in a way that
was somewhat implicit in his work. Although Shore's 1970s iconic photographs of the vernacular
American landscape managed to invest the everyday with beauty and dignity, they also recorded
what Christy Lange has recently called "a country that was on the verge of giving way to the
forces of commercialism and standardization" (41). In the film, the use of similarly wide-angle,
carefully staged compositions creates its sense of place: an atmosphere of loneliness and
alienation that relates Hank's experience to the physical and human geography of the United
States.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
This attention to the visual is also central to Gone Baby Gone. Its shots are slightly desaturated,
and its overall look is dark and gritty, close to a monochromatic tone from which, as the film's
colorist Skip Kimball has remarked, only dark greens and blues stand out (Frazer, par. 11). The
emphasis in the already mentioned choice of locations and the use of natural light is on realism,
but the shots at the same time dwell on carefully staged views of the neighborhoods, the people
in the streets, and their activities or on the canvases that cover the salt piles seen from Tobin
Bridge, proving that these shots are meant to provide not only context but also a visually
appealing world. Patrick dresses in a slightly planned street fashion of jeans, Fred Perry tracksuit
jackets, and Adidas trainers, all of them in dark, subdued colors such as dark green and brown.
The two films' combination of an almost documentary realism with touches of stylization

generates a look that has become a trademark of some recent Hollywood crime cinema. Found in
such films as Zodiac (2007), American Gangster (2007), and No Country for Old Men (2007) and
television series such as HBO's The Wire (2002-08), it is closely associated with the work of such
cinematographers as Roger Deakins and Harris Savides. It evokes the look of 1970s crime films,
a connection made by Savides himself when mentioning how he drew on Stephen Shore's
"unadorned photos of '70s Americana" for the aesthetic of Zodiac and on the gritty stylization of
1970s films such as The French Connection (1971) for American Gangster (Mottesheard, par.
16).
The blend of stylization and realism serves to voice different meanings in the two films. It has
the effect of making In the Valley of Elah rely on what has already become an expected
contemporary re-creation of the space of the Western that shows connections with the film's
statement about the values of US society. The drive from Hank's home in Tennessee to Fort Rudd
and the landscapes of Albuquerque where the Fort Rudd scenes are located show highways and
cars, motels and empty parking lots, launderettes and diners, bars, and nondescript offices at
police headquarters and the military base. Via Roger Deakins's photography and the presence of
Tommy Lee Jones, these spaces are associated with the new narrativesabout the West found in
No Country for Old Men and The Three Burials of Melquiodes Estrada (2005), films that exhibit
an aura of emptiness and stillness that demystifies the legendary status of the Western
landscape. Like these two films, In the Valley of Elah uses views of urban development as
signals for the transformation of the independent spirit of the Western into the kind of isolation
and in communication embodied by Hank. The presence of Tommy Lee Jones evokes the two
aforementioned films and in general the figure of the adventurer essential to the iconography of
the Western--that is, an adventurer who is now regarded as irremediably out of touch with his
time. Hank represents such good traditional American values as courage, discipline, and hard
work, but we soon realize that his ideas about the world are anachronistic: loyalty and discipline
have lost their currency, and as guiding principles they are too stern to teach new generations
how to face life. The war and the military, which Hank has regarded so highly, are not the sites
where human values are defended but the proof of their crisis.
The optimistic perspective on the civilizing potential of violence, as popularized by the Western,
is further destroyed by the eruption of Mike's videos. They have the quality of realistic document,
lent by the frantic movement and rough, pixelated look of mobile phone videos, and show what
Mike thought was worth keeping a memento of, but when Hank finally makes sense of them, he
realizes that they include nothing but signs of his son's inhuman behavior. In them Mike makes
fun of a dead corpse by placing a sticker on its head, aggravates the wounds of a prisoner, and
runs over a child and then stops to take a final picture of the body on the roadside. The videos
serve as proof of the breach of human rights that the infamous Abu Ghraib pictures of tortured
Iraqi prisoners brought to light in the course of the war, but at the same time they blame the
abuse on the strain suffered by soldiers, who are so desensitized by fear and the reality of war
that they become violent psychopaths. They function as what Rikke Schubart has termed
"historical pieces," which in the war film tend to perform a curatorial function by evoking the
past and structuring a collective process of resolving past traumas (280). In the film, the videos
filmed by Mike denounce the conduct of US troops but to some extent also justify it as the
consequence of the ruthlessness of war, which destroys the young soldiers' capacity for empathy.
The historical pieces integrate the experience of Iraq in a national process of coming to terms
with the reality of the war, also found in such recent films as Redacted (2007) and Rendition
(2007), in which we find a similar rapport between the more or less present space of the Iraq
War and its consequences back home.

This almost mythical space of the United States tainted by the distant Iraq War is a variation of a
broader prominent space in contemporary crime drama: that threatened by the globalized world,
which, within the restricted generic area of the amateur detective film, is probably best
represented by Bordertown (2006), Silver City (2004), and The Constant Gardener (2005). The
three films feature more or less amateurish investigators, played by Jennifer Lopez, Danny
Huston, and Ralph Fiennes, respectively, who are alienated from their surrounding spacesrespectively, the Mexican border city of Juarez, a Colorado city with a significant community of
Mexican immigrants, and Kenya. These spaces contribute to a sense of place that points to a
newly globalized world that has not produced an extension of human rights but has certainly
extended the influence of a global economy and multinational companies. These companies and
their lust for profit determine the lives of individuals, to the point of exploiting them, sexually in
Bordertown, at work in Silver City, and as guinea pigs for pharmaceutical experimentation in The
Constant Gardener.
Gritty stylization has a different consequence in Gone Baby Gone and establishes different
connections too. The phrase "gritty stylization" is used by Joe Chappelle to explain the took of
HBO series The Wire, of which he was director and executive producer. It is not raw
documentary, like the previous series Homicide was to him, but not stylized either. A balance
between realism and slight stylization constitutes the appeal of its aesthetic. Gone Baby Gone
and The Wire actually exhibit an emphatic version of what David Bordwell has called "intensified
continuity" in order to render visually appealing compositions that remain committed to an
almost documentary realism. Their use of the long lens produces flat spaces that emphasize the
color and quality of the setting and the actors, lending them a pictorial look, whereas fast
editing, reliance on close shots, and a moving camera produce a visual texture not unlike the
documentary.
Gone Baby Gone and The Wire share this texture with the work of numerous crime writers who
are committed to a similarly gritty stylization, with an evident interest in real, recognizable
spaces in their novels: Dennis Lehane, the author of the novel on which Gone Baby Gone is
based, and also George Pelecanos and Richard Price are probably the most significant of them,
the three having written episodes for The Wire. In their novels they tend to locate their crime
stories in, respectively, Boston, Washington, DC, and New York and New Jersey, real cities and
areas whose spaces the authors use in such a way that readers can directly or indirectly identify
with specific streets. Those spaces contribute to the novels' overall purpose of describing the
social fabric behind the lives of those affected by crime, and crime is presented as a
manifestation of the dismantling of the social that characterizes these worlds, plagued by drugs,
child abuse, inner-city degradation, and unemployment (Jennings 17). At the same time, the
novels of Lehane, Pelecanos, and Price also qualify these cities as positive and comforting in as
much as they provide a sense of belonging to the community, a feeling of being part of a group
whose identity rests on spatial proximity and a common past lived in the same streets. Similarly,
in the film version of Gone Baby Gone, chief of police Doyle's behavior functions as a sign of the
cancer at the heart of social institutions, but his argument that he kidnapped Amanda for her
own good comes out forcefully because it is justified by our knowledge of Amanda's family and
surroundings. The real danger posed by the dissolution of the social is not only that institutions
have collapsed but also that society itself and the people are suffering the effects of a poverty
that undermines the system. Drugs and unemployment--and the whole culture of marginalization
in which Amanda's mother lives--are the real danger, and for this nobody in Dorchester would be
to blame. The views of the city in the initial sequence and Patrick's rapport with the people in the
area direct the film's sympathy toward everybody who has shared these difficult conditions,

attended the same schools, and lived similar lives in the same streets. Like The Wire and the rest
of the novels by Lehane, Pelecanos, and Price, Gone Baby Gone shows us how crime comes to
happen, and the reasons are to be found in a sense of place that denounces the degradation of
the social while establishing a current of sympathy for those involved in crime.
To conclude, these two films combine conventions of the amateur-detective film with pathos in
ways that, rather than show the escape from a social space to the space of adventure typical of
crime films, create a sense of place that voices anxiety in the face of the contemporary
dissolution of the social. I have argued elsewhere that this anxiety is part of a broader discourse
in contemporary Hollywood cinema about the helplessness of the individual, one that is
articulated most forcefully through a mixture of pathos and the crime film in such films as Silver
City, Crash (2004), Syriana (2005), Lord of War (2005), The Constant Gardener, The Good
Shepherd (2006), The Departed (2006), Bordertown, and Michael Clayton (2007), to name just a
few, and that would extend to television in HBO's The Wire. These cultural products illustrate
what Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert have called "New Individualism," a negative view of the
possibilities of the individual probably best defined in the work of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman.
According to Bauman, contemporary life is characterized by the dissolution of social and political
institutions, which no longer guarantee personal welfare (6-8, 18-22, 32-34). New Individualism
texts reflect these concerns by presenting crime as the catalyst for an action that openly
comments on the social origin of trouble and by using pathos to voice the absence of a social
safety net when that trouble appears. Instead of the heroic figures of crime genres, who have
traditionally found self-assertion through violence and escape from the social, these films and
television series offer helpless characters tortured by ethical predicaments, since they are
expected to provide answers to problems that, being social, exceed their scope of action.
In the Valley of Elah points to the effect of supranational threats on local sense of place, and
Gone Baby Gone expresses a desired return to the local as a reaction to the powerlessness of the
individual. Both make meaning by engaging with the aesthetic of the cinema and culture of the
1970s, as if pointing to the link between that decade's urban degradation and the experience of
today. The prominence of the amateur detective and the indirect presence of the police
procedural speak to us about the films' awareness that the relation of individuals to their sense
of place is of great relevance to these issues. These representations are particularly visible in
New Individualism crime films, but they are not exclusive to them. Sense of place as a vehicle
for social anxieties may appear in combination with other generic forms in other film texts, but
the links of the crime film--and more specifically, the activity of detection--with social aspects of
space make this genre a particularly relevant site for its analysis.
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Bordwell, David. The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies. Berkeley: U of
California P, 2006. Print.
Chappelle, Joe. Commentary to episode 3/11 of The Wire. HBO, 2007. DVD.
Dove, George N. The Police Procedural. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1982.
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Eauclaire, Sally. The New Color Photography. New York: Abbeville, 1981. Print.

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Frazer, Bryant. "Modern Video Film Finds a Post Workflow for Gone Baby Gone." Studio Daily.
N.p. 24 Oct. 2007. Web. 25 Aug. 2011.
Garcia-Mainar, Luis M. "Contemporary Hollywood Crime Film and the New Individualism."
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Gates, Philippa. "Always a Partner in Crime: Black Masculinity in the Hollywood Detective Film."
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Leitch, Thomas. Crime Films. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print.
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NOTES
Research for this article was FUNDED by research project FFI2010-15263 (Ministerio de Ciencia
e Innovacion, Espana) and the FEDER program of the European Union. I would like to thank the
anonymous Journal of Film and Video reviewers for their comments and suggestions on an
earlier version of the article.
(1.) I am drawing here on Deborah Thomas's notion