Under the Gun: Criminology Goes Back to the Movies

An essential guide to understanding classic and contemporary crime films

Under the Gun provides a systematic and sophisticated criminological perspective to bear on crime films. The book provides a fresh way of looking at cinema, using the concepts and analytical tools of criminology to uncover previously unnoticed meanings in film, ultimately making the study of criminological theory more engaging and effective for students while simultaneously demonstrating how theories of crime circulate in our mass-mediated worlds. The result is an illuminating new way of seeing movies and a compelling way of learning about criminology.

Stepping into the fray between the gritty realities of crime and punishment and their mediated forms, Under the Gun also brings into relief the ways that crime theory might birth the seeds of its own undoing. From those primordial and revenant crime theories—the elemental evil driving films like The Conjuring, the brute biological determinism of There’s Something About Kevin, and the banal carceral feminism of The Silence of the Lambs—to the countervisual work of reckoning: the prescient intersectionality of Set It Off, the queer and green criminologies of Moonlight and Dark Water, and the anti-colonial indictment of Saint Omer, Under the Gun asks would-be criminologists to a take up the cultural work that is truly foundational to the study of harm, violence, and justice.