Abstract
As Ruth Penfold-Mounce notes at the start of her book, Celebrity Culture and Crime: The Joy of Transgression, we are living in an historical moment in which celebrity culture seems to have reached a level of unprecedented visibility. Much disdain has met this cultural turn, which has been accused of everything from encapsulating the general ‘dumbing down’ of the contemporary media, to the transformation of a generation of young people into uniform ‘wannabes’. If our preoccupation with celebrity is matched by anything, however, it is our equally vigorous fascination for all things criminal; from the explosion of multiple real-crime television formats since the 1990s (which I, among others, examined in 2006 in Crime Watching: Investigating Real Crime TV), to the seemingly endless proliferation of differently accented crime drama series, our appetite for crime stories seems rapacious. Despite this apparently recent degree of unsurpassed vitality in both arenas, however, neither of these phenomena is ‘new’, of course. Our absorption in both celebrity and criminality evidently have long histories, histories that have also long been entwined; consider the manner in which popular folk songs once charted the acts of notorious highway robbers, for example. Furthermore, ‘celebrity studies’ has become a massive growth area of scholarship in recent years with collections such as Su Holmes and Sean Redmond’s Framing Celebrity (2006) leading the way in the revival of academic interest in this field. Yet relatively little critical work to date has examined the intersections between criminality and celebrity. It is for this reason that Penfold-Mounce’s book is a welcome addition to the scholarship in both arenas, in a study which examines ‘the evidence of a relationship between celebrity and criminality…in order to establish the circumstances and reasons for this connection existing as a united phenomenon referred to as “celebrated criminality”’ (p. 1).
Penfold-Mounce’s book charts the case for this ‘celebrated criminality’ by returning first to Horkheimer and Adorno’s theory of the culture industry and updating it for the 21st century by repositioning it in relation to Foucauldian governmentality. Her argument here, briefly, is that:
governance by the culture industry as government takes place through the provision of exciting, pleasurable entertainment, which is often focussed upon… [celebrity]. Consequently, celebrity is a central governance from within the culture industry and illustrates the increasingly subtle and pervasive control measures characteristic of Foucauldian governmentality. (p. 51)
The author identifies two strands of celebrated criminality; that of ‘criminal celebrity’, where criminals become celebrities, and ‘rogue celebrities’, in which celebrities become associated with crime or deviance (p. 63). The different classifications of ‘criminal celebrities’ that Penfold-Mounce constructs, and the discussions of specific criminals she undertakes, provide some of the most interesting material in the book; for example, the East End’s Kray twins, gangsters and ‘underworld exhibitionists’ who remain fascinating figures of both notoriety and nostalgia in British popular culture some 50 years after they were first in the news.
Penfold-Mounce’s style is generally readable and accessible. The major challenge of any interdisciplinary study such as this, of course, is to do justice to all the arenas under analysis, grasping and communicating the intricacies of each field while forging a sense of the connections between them. Readers new to celebrity studies or cultural criminology will find this book a comprehensible way into important debates in both fields. That said, when laying down the critical foundations of the conceptual terrain that informs its approach, the early part of the volume sometimes seemed to labour over its theoretical exposition. A good way into proceedings, I felt as if I were still waiting for the nub of the book, and Penfold-Mounce’s own interventions, to open up. This is a shame, since if the book had condensed some of the explication of extant work, more space could have been afforded to the author’s own formulations and case studies as outlined above.
For example, one of the issues that most intrigued me while reading the book was that of when or why some well-publicised criminals don’t quite fit the ‘criminal celebrity’ moniker. Penfold-Mounce notes that this can happen when victims instead take centre stage to become celebrity figures, while she also devises the category of ‘iniquitous criminals’ to signal the particular outsider status of these individuals, i.e. those who ‘cross a cultural line that alienates them from the public’ by committing horror crimes (p. 90), a group which includes figures such as Ted Bundy and Myra Hindley among its number. In such cases, the perceived flippancy of the term ‘celebrity’ surely militates against its use in reference to these criminals, as if adopting it would be to belittle the gravity of their crimes and the fates of their victims. The author notes in passing that these criminals can in fact be regarded as ‘anti-celebrities’ (p. 90). This is a concept that would have been very usefully explored further, since it seemingly promises to crystallize many of the conflictual tensions at work in the operation of celebrity, and indeed in our cultural preoccupation with criminality. In respect of the author’s initial summarizing of contemporary celebrity culture, there is sometimes a tendency to simplify its mechanics and to reiterate familiar critiques of it. ‘Heroic figures distinguished by their greatness due to accomplishments and achievements are increasingly not being differentiated from celebrities whose well-knownness is centred upon marginally different mediated personalities’ (p. 14), we are told, for example. But where precisely is the evidence for such a perceived decline? It seems too easy to point to a lack of discernment among contemporary audiences in their engagement with celebrity culture when very little empirical work with these audiences on their actual relationships with this movement has been undertaken. Hence I would have liked to see some of this early section of the book do a little more to ‘step up’ to intervene in or challenge some of the received wisdom on celebrity culture.
However, as the book gathers momentum it begins to formulate an increasingly meditative account of the diversity of audience relationships with celebrity. This is done in part through its exploration of ‘resonance’, in which audiences go beyond merely ‘identifying’ with or ‘relating’ to a celebrity to instead ‘interact and respond’ (p. 64). Resonance also illuminates how it is that the public become attracted to crime and criminality, since it can encompass ‘a multiplicity of sources that do not exclude unpleasant and disturbing occurrences’ and ‘feelings of rebellion, disgust, horror, loathing or fear’ (p. 69). By bringing the study of celebrity and criminality together and highlighting the many forms of interconnections between them, the book elucidates our often fractious engagement and fascination with both arenas. Both constitute frameworks which trouble and appal us as much as they evidently entertain and intrigue and, given their centrality to the contemporary public world and its media landscape, one can only hope that Penfold-Mounce’s book will serve as a valuable prompt for further scholarship on this enormously rich topic.