I can understand why he would think this. What separates SVU from “vanilla” Law & Order is the fact that it wallows in a kind of crime that is, per the opening narration, “especially heinous.” If we weren’t interested in something about the representation of those crimes, the show would not find an audience. And if you pay attention to the casting choices… well, there’s kind of an unspoken law for casting directors in America, which is that—barring extraordinary circumstances—any actor or actress cast on a TV show shall be wicked hawt. This applies for SVU as much as for any other show if not more. And whether it’s intentional or not, this means that the actress who will portray the victim of a sex crime is going to be chosen partially so that she can serve as a desire-object. So Wrather’s argument seems to make sense. But there are three problems with it.
1) If everything on SVU other than the illicit sex is just a pretext, then we should expect to see an overwhelming diversity of pretexts.
Consider another argument with the same formula: “Well, people enjoy BLTs, but the lettuce and tomatoes are just a veneer, therefore, people must get BLTs because of the bacon.” If you carry it through to the implied conclusion—that people would really prefer to just get a stack of bacon on bread, no veggies, mayo optional—it flies in the face of our actual experience. While the lettuce and tomato are definitely subordinate elements of the sandwich, that doesn’t mean that they are optional: anyone who’s had a really well done BLT knows that the vegetables are integral to the experience. And there is, after all, a reason why BLTs are available everywhere, and the Bacon, Bean-Sprout, and Cilantro sandwich (which I just now made up) is available nowhere.
Why are there no shows about an escort service that specializes in abduction fantasies, with the audience’s pretext being that “it wasn’t really rape”? Or hell, take the episode of Glee where Rachel develops a crush on Mr. Schue. This is still a representation of illicit sex (if a rather sublimated one), where the pretext is that “nothing really happened.” Before you accuse me of arguing against myself, note that this was just one episode of a single show, while SVU is an entire series. Show me an entire series about a high school teacher flirting with his students but never actually doing anything, and then we’ll talk. Until then, Occam’s Razor dictates that we assume that SVU’s specific “pretext” is crucial to its success, which stretches the definition of pretext more than a bit.
2) If illicit sex is the real point of Law & Order SVU, shouldn’t we expect it to appear in every episode?
The bacon analogy works nicely because bacon, like illicit sex, is something that many people are fascinated by, but know they should not really be having. However, not all sandwiches are BLTs, and not all episodes of SVU are about sex. Some are about non-sexual child abuse, or the murder of children. There was a ripped-from-the-headlines baby shaking case, and at least one baby-in-the-dumpster-on-prom-night. Sometime they’ll even tell a story with no connection to sex crimes or crimes against minors, by setting up an awkward pretext for Benson and Stabler to take the case. Want to do a drug trafficking episode? Fine: just throw in a drive-by shooting where a stray bullet happens to hit a fifth grader.
Remember that Wrather’s account of the show is that people watch the show because they want on some level to commit the crime. This could makes a certain amount of intuitive sense for the sex cases, if you take a dim view of humanity… but do we all secretly want to shake a baby? Do we all secretly want to accidentally shoot a fifth grader in a drive-by? Even the explicitly sexual cases tend to cover too broad of a spectrum for the sublimated-sex model to really work: the audience member who feels an illicit thrill while contemplating the “nubile cheerleader” is not likely to feel the same thrill while contemplating the eight year old boy. But both appear as victims on SVU, and the viewing experience (drawing from a sample size of one, granted) is not particularly different.
For that matter, it’s not particularly different from the experience of watching regular Law & Order, which is about murder rather than sex. Now, I suppose you could argue that murder too is something that the audience could want to live out vicariously. But recently they had an episode about a guy who was running a scam where he sold saline solution as H1N1 vaccine. I think it’s safe to say that none of us have ever wanted to do that, not even on “some level.” Not because the act’s too vile, because it’s too specific. And frankly, a little too boring. Nevertheless, the episode felt like Law & Order. They all feel like Law & Order.
3) If Law & Order is really about the crimes, shouldn’t we expect it to occasionally depict the crimes?
If the Law and Order on SVU is just a pretext, then the show is 90% pretext by weight. Keep in mind, Law & Order: SVU is an extremely fastidious procedural where the criminals are pretty much only EVER seen as they interact with the police and lawyers. We are given to understand that the crime has occurred, but we never see it occurring. And this isn’t just a matter of getting it by the censors. Compare SVU to Criminal Minds, which salts the action with grand-guignol cutaways to the psycho doing whatever it is that he does.
You do have to dance around sex more than you have to dance around violence on network TV, true, but the strategy they use on Law & Order is a circuitous foxtrot by anyone’s standards. Whenever an offense is represented on Law & Order it is always through a process of narration. You know these scenes if you’ve watched any of the shows more than a few times. The camera slowly zooms in on the perp as he describes the crime (periodically cutting to a Mariska Hargitay reaction shot for variety), the droning electric violin music kicks in, and the actor gives an intense, vivid account of the act, complete with tears, trembling lips, cracking voice, and all the other accoutrements of melodrama.
This moment of narration is the crucial, defining moment of any episode of any Law and Order show, as definitive for the genre as the money shot is for pornography. Notice that when the lawyers have a suspect who is ready to plead guilty, one of their conditions is always, always that he allocute to the crime. I can’t imagine that this happens in real life. I mean, yes, it would be important in cases where there are family members or other victims who need closure, or where there is an accomplice that will be incriminated by the testimony. But it happens on Law and Order even when there is only one suspect, and only one victim, and no family members. It’s there so that they can justify the speech. It’s there so that the audience can get closure.
Presumably under the “SVU is sublimated sex” argument, the confession sequence would just be a Freudian return-of-the-repressed, standing in for the actual money shot which society will not allow us to depict, and allowing the audience to experience the rapist’s actions through his words. But the problem again is that these narrations also show up in the non-sexual episodes of SVU, in Law and Order Classic™, and—somewhat less consistently—in various epigoni such as Bones and Cold Case. Nor are they always delivered by the criminal.
There are actually three types that I’ve noticed. I think the one I’ve described above, where the criminal confesses, is the most common. But it’s also quite common for the crime to be described by the victim (especially on SVU, where the victim is less likely to be dead), often as a crucial last-minute piece of testimony in court. Least frequently, it can be delivered by the cops or prosecutors themselves. This pops up in those rare epsiodes of Law & Order where the real criminal gets away with their crime by convincing the protagonists (and the jury, and the audience) of their innocence. At the very last minute (usually after the verdict has been delivered, and thus too late for any practical effect), one of the lawyers will catch them in a lie and confront them with it, staging a confrontation that has no purpose other than to deliver that all-important rehearsal of the crime.
To summarize what I’ve said so far:
- It’s hard to imagine that SVU is an excuse to watch rape, because it doesn’t even give you an opportunity to watch rape
- The police-procedural aspects are too consistently observed, and too successful with the public, to be “only” a pretext.
- This “sublimated-sex” explanation doesn’t explain the scenes of traumatic narration which seems to be so structurally important to the show.
Doink Doink.
So let’s talk about Hegel for a hot second. (Most of what follows is drawn from Lewis Hinchman’s survey article, “Hegel’s Theory of Crime and Punishment.” I had a half-assed idea of how Hegel’s theory worked, but I needed some help to full-ass it.) Pretty much universally, theories about the state’s right/ability to inflict punishment are either utilitarian, meaning that punishment is acceptable because it prevents further crime, causing a net increase in happiness, or retributionist, meaning that the nature of crime requires the guilty to be punished regardless of the long term results. Hegel falls into the second camp. But what sets him apart is the way in which he theorizes the perennial problem of the relationship of the criminal to the punishing society.
Utilitarians can handwave this: if ninety-nine people who aren’t being punished are happy, one poor bastard stuck in the iron maiden doesn’t really matter. But if you take utility out of the equation, suddenly it matters a whole heck of a lot, because the sticking of poor bastards in iron maidens is the sort of extravagance that laws are meant to curtail in the first place. So for retributionists like Hegel, some kind of explanation is required. A few different attempts have been made over the years. Hobbes gives kind of a non-answer, simply acknowledging that a person who is being punished will never recognize the right of the state to punish him/her. Rousseau, later, would theorize a each person has both a public citizen-self and a private psychological-self (although of course he would not have used the term “psychological”), and that we all recognize, as citizens, the state’s authority to punish, even as we object, as psychological entities, to applying that law to ourselves. Kant then picks up on this as a special case of the categorical imperative: to recognize the state’s authority to punish everyone except yourself is exactly the kind of non-universalized maxim that characterizes immorality under his ethical system. So while a distinction between the citizen-self and the psychological-self could still exist in some cases, it would never exist for a truly moral individual.
Hegel takes this a step further. Rousseau’s citizen-self and psychological-self are unified: one of Hegel’s crucial innovations is the idea that people are socially constituted. But unlike our modern notions of social-constitutedness, which tend to be rather grim, Hegel’s isn’t to be seen as a limit on free will. Rather, it is only through society that we can be fully ourselves. Furthermore, a good, “whole” society would not even require laws because everyone would do what is right instinctively. Existence in society, for Hegel, is about “the affirmative knowledge of oneself in the other self,” i.e. the recognition that my experience as a thinking human being in society is not different in any meaningful way from your experience as a thinking human being in society, etc. etc. etc. Willfully committing violence or theft requires us first to destroy this recognition. Therefore, when a criminal commits a violent act, he damages both society and himself by destroying his status as a fully socialized individual. The Law, then, exists to serve as a boundary—to tell us, as society, when someone has destroyed their relationship to the community.
This is really only half of Hegel’s theory. His justification of punishment, in the end, turns on the idea that it is only through punishment that the wholeness of society—and, peculiarly enough, the wholeness of the criminal—can be reconstituted. Considering that theories of punishment usually focus on society’s ability to do things (imprison, fine, execute), the process for Hegel is strangely fixated on information. The crucial idea is that behind any crime lies an essential act of self-delusion: the criminals have tricked themselves into believing that they are not socially constituted members of society. Whether they really are members of society or not may be an arguable point for most of us, but for Hegel the criminal is simply wrong, and needs to be corrected. Trial and punishment serve as a kind of public refutation: “You say that you are not a part of our culture, and therefore, not a whole person,” says the Law, “but we are here to prove you wrong.” This reconstitution process always struck me as the most idiosyncratic aspect of Hegel’s theory, and I’m not quite sure how it’s supposed to work. (For an example of how weird it starts to get, Hegel has no room for the concept of an ex-con. In a perfect world—although I think he acknowledged that this was never really achievable—a murderer who had served his time would no longer be a murderer.) Luckily, it’s not something that we need to consider too much when we’re looking at Law & Order. The point to remember is that both society itself and the individual’s relationship to society are conceived of as a kind of “completeness.” Crime damages this, making both the criminal and the society incomplete. Punishment fixes the damage, making criminal and society complete again.
[Cue electric violin drone.]
So that’s Hegel’s theory of justice and punishment. How about Dick Wolf’s theory of justice and punishment? To the extent that the Law & Order franchise is about anything, it’s about society’s proper reaction to crime, and while I don’t think for a second that Dick Wolf (or any other individual) was trying to come up with a coherent theory of justice as they wrote it, there is a sort of ad-hoc theory that has developed over the course of the show’s multi-decade run. Like Hegel’s theory, it is retributionist: the utilitarian justification that McCoy et al. are somehow making New York a safer place is given lip-service every now and then, but no more than that. The demands of serial drama dictate that another murderer or rapist will pop up next week anyway. What remains is retribution. Even for a perp that poses no further danger to the community, the fact that crimes have been committed demands a certain response.
But what response? Rehabilitation—perhaps in a sense the reconstitution that Hegel is hoping for—is completely absent here. None of the criminals processed by McCoy et al. show up in a later episode on a work-release program. Punishment, then? Not really. We never see punishment on Law & Order. Trials, sure, and even convictions. But could we imagine an episode that focused on documenting punishment itself, following the prisoners around their daily lives in jail? Even Oz, which was set in a jail, was never really about this. No, when criminals have had their day on Law & Order, they are… simply… gone. All sentences are effectively death sentences: whatever happens to them afterwards, we don’t get to see it. What we do see, remember, are those constant melodramatic recitations of the crime. Occam’s Razor again suggests that these scenes are there for a reason. If the series is about the proper reaction to crime, and [X] happens in every single episode, then [X] is probably the reaction in question.
Law & Order‘s theory of justice then, like Hegel’s, is essentially an informational transaction. The traumatic events that have been concealed must now be brought to light. This means that the confession scenes are a return-of-the-repressed, however, what is repressed is not the crime’s thrill, but the trauma itself. Furthermore, like Hegel’s theory, Law & Order involves a crucial moment of recognition between the criminal and the society that punishes. It would never be enough, on Law & Order, for the criminal to decide that he needs to pay for what he’s done, and do the time. He needs to explain himself to the state, represented both by the characters, who are instruments of the state, and by the audience, who are the body politic itself. Similarly, it’s not enough for the victim of the crime to deal with their PTSD in therapy. They need to get up in front of the court and tell the whole world. (Usually we’re told that this is the only way to start the healing process—but note that we never see the actual healing process, any more than we see the actual punishment.)
Notice that we are not in Hegel territory any more. The crucial recognition for him is that the criminal is not different from the rest of society. In Law & Order, it is just the opposite. The prosecutors force the criminal to confess because he/she has been masquerading as a normal member of society—and in that all crimes on Law & Order are presented as equally depraved, this masquerade is probably what the court system on Law & Order is really meant to prevent. As with Hegel, what damages one member of society damages all of society, because society cannot be whole unless all of its members are whole. But the way around this is not to repair the damage. Rather, it is to cast the compromised members out of society.
The theoretical touchstone here is Julia Kristeva’s theory of “abjection.” Kristeva argues that we define ourselves as human beings by rigorously policing the boundaries of our bodies and our psyches. Each of us makes a rigid distinction between what is “me” and what is “not me,” and maintaining this distinction requires a constant process of physical and psychological casting-off. Look at your hands. Think about how disgusting you consider them (I’m guessing not very). Now imagine all of the fingernails that you have cut off over the past five years, piled up next to your computer. Gross? Yeah, it’s pretty gross. But there’s no real reason for this! Those fingernails haven’t been anywhere that your hands haven’t been first. They are, rather, disgusting precisely because they define the boundary between the “me” and the “not me.” Now replace your own body with the body politic: what must be cast off so that this body can remain whole? Criminals. Or more precisely, the trauma of crime.
And this is where it honestly gets a liiiitle bit completely appalling. The healthy body of society in these shows is represented by the cops and the lawyers. Unlike the criminals (and the victims!), they persist from episode to episode. And while the criminals (or the victims!) deliver these intense, melodramatic narrations of the criminal act, the cops and lawyers spend most of their time being competent and cracking wise. In terms of being cast out of society as an abject thing, Law & Order makes precious little distinction between the criminal and the victim of the crime.
Now, there’s still something wrong with this picture, which is that I haven’t explained why SVU in particular draws an audience. Basically all I’ve pointed out are the ways that it’s similar to Law and Order Regular Victim’s Unit. But I think it’s really just a question of what kind of crime you find most threatening to your idea of a well-ordered society.
TV crime shows are almost overwhelmingly pegged to two kinds of criminal: murderers, and (a distant second) rapists. These, then, are the criminals we are most anxious to cast out of our society—those which, in fact, we are least likely to identify with. There is no analogue to Ocean’s Eleven where a raffishly handsome ex-con pulls together a dream team to pull off the perfect sexual assault. (At least I hope there isn’t.) So yes, watching SVU implies a that you are comfortable, on a certain level, with seeing sex crimes and crimes against children. It means you’re comfortable with seeing them abjected. It does not mean that you are necessarily comfortable with them on any other level at all. The show is still pretty ideologically suspect… but reducing it to subconscious erotica does a disservice to the text and to its fanbase.