Abstract
This chapter uses Saussurean semiotics to explore how law is culturally defined through popular visual media and how these media representations contribute to wider understandings of both law’s functioning and its limitations. It profiles four signifiers of law in popular visual media: the father, the lawyer, the policeman and the vigilante and explores the relationship between them, analysing the impact each of these signifiers has on the corresponding signified of law and their connections to justice and the rule of law. The primary texts I will be looking at are the US television series Law & Order (NBC) and Dexter (Showtime) and the UK series Life on Mars (BBC). Following Bennett and Woollacott’s study (1987, Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero. London: Methuen) these examples are supported by a deliberately wide-ranging series of secondary media texts, with some slippage between filmic and televisual texts, as any other approach runs the risk of being too limiting, abstracting texts from the wider culture which both elucidates their meaning and demonstrates how widespread these ideas of law truly are.
Either the world’s right-side up or upside down. Depends on how you look at it. I mean, close the book of rules and there’s just people caught in situations.
Rita Pompano (Ellen DeGeneres), Goodbye Lover, (1999, Warner Brothers) dir. Roland Joffe
Andrea: ‘Unhappy the land that has no heroes!’
Galileo: ‘No, unhappy the land that needs heroes.’
Bertoldt Brecht (The Life of Galileo qtd Life On Mars, Episode Six, emphasis added)
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Notes
- 1.
Interestingly this does not seem to be the case in practice. The adversarial system is, in part, based on the idea that law can be interpreted differently by different people. Similarly the composition of courts acknowledge that judges interpret laws differently; by way of example, some judges believe the American constitution to be a living document while others turn to what the original drafters of the law intended.
- 2.
It is important to note that while I agree with Laster’s proposition that texts form “the main source of common knowledge about the law” I downplay the idea of “influence” with its implications of power over the viewer.
- 3.
408 US 189 (1989).
- 4.
- 5.
Other origin myths for law include Antigone. The Freudian origin myth is selected here because of the connections it makes to modernity and its clear use of a patriarchial/paternal figure as the totem of law, a totemic figure taken up by most popular cultural representations of law.
- 6.
- 7.
American legal historian Jerold Auerback (1983) concurs, stating that: “no longer is it possible to reflect seriously about American culture without accounting for the centrality of law in American history and society” (p. 115) and it is certainly arguable that Auerback’s argument regarding the centrality of law in modern society also applies, at the very least, to England and Australia as well.
- 8.
This chapter is therefore adopting a pragmatic view of justice as the “correct” or “fair” result, predicated on the notion that something is “just” when individuals get what is due to them—a definition which fits both these ideas of justice. In part the chapter plays into the debates around moral relativism in accepting that justice does have a different meaning depending on where it is found—though in this case this is produced more by its relationship with law than its social or cultural context.
- 9.
This is based in part on Lyotard’s (1985) notion of a “multiplicity of justices, each one of them defined in relation to the rules specific to each [language] game” (Lyotard 1985, p. 100, emphasis added). Here I’m suggesting that the intersection of justice and law actually results in a “multiplicity of laws” each based on “the rules specific to each game” i.e. the place of justice in law. We could include postmodern law here as well, but for reasons of space this chapter focuses on pre-modern and modern law.
- 10.
In Series 1, Ep 8, Sam provides a different description of Gene as “an overweight, over the hill, nicotine-stained, borderline alcoholic homophobe with a superiority complex and an unhealthy obsession with male bonding”, to which Gene responds:
You make that sound like a bad thing.
- 11.
The true dangers of this approach are illustrated in Life on Mars, Series 1, Ep 7, when DS Ray Carling (Dean Andrews) and DC Chris Skelton (Marshall Lancaster) force a suspect, Billy Kemble (Kevin Knapman), to ingest cocaine to get him “talky”. Fifty minutes later Kemble dies. Skelton defends his actions as being: “We were just trying to get a result. That’s all. Please the Guv”. Ray similarly defends his actions to Gene as “doing what you taught me. I was trying to get a result for you.” Gene privately admits the problem to Sam: “These lads… they think they’re made in my image. They’ve never learnt where to draw the line. And it scares the shit out of me.”
- 12.
In the spin-off series Law and Order: SVU which, as noted above is closer to having a premodern rather than modern ideal of law at its heart, alternative knowledge structures are introduced and maintained through the permanent cast addition of B.D. Wong’s therapist character.
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Bainbridge, J. (2010). Visual Law: The Changing Signifiers of Law in Popular Visual Culture. In: Wagner, A., Broekman, J. (eds) Prospects of Legal Semiotics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9343-1_7
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