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by Christopher Potts

In his article "The Trial," for Grant Magazine, Gordon Burn details and analyzes the media coverage-and captivation-of the Rose West mass murder trial in Britain. Rosemary West ("the most depraved woman on earth") was found guilty on ten counts of murder and sentenced to life in prison after the bodies of ten young women were found buried in the cellar and below the bathroom floor of her house. There were enough sordid details-her husband and accomplice Fred West hung himself in jail, Rose's long and bizarre history of "sadistic-pedophilia"-to make the trial a massive international media event. As Burn describes the coverage on the first day of the trial he says:

Independent Television News chartered a helicopter on the first day, and there was something immediately familiar about the sequence that ran in ITN's bulletins that evening: the white vehicle with the police outriders; the path cleared through the commuter traffic; the implacable helicopter dipping and tracking. It was the visual vocabulary of O.J. and the Bronco, borrowed, presumably, partly in the hope of inheriting some of the same audience. The timing was impeccable: Simpson was acquitted on Rosemary West's first day in the dock. (152-3)

It should be emphasized that West, at the time of this scene, was not fleeing the event in desperation, but already arrested and being brought to trial by the police-there are few inherent, specific similarities to the Simpson images being referenced. But the plain image of a shaky helicopter shot following a white car down an empty highway now exists independent of O.J.'s case itself. It has become a visual cue for media-frenzy, criminal-celebrity, and general depravity in the same way the establishment shot/catchy jingle combination is a visual cue that a sitcom's action has changed places.

Additions to television's "visual vocabulary" are of course not new; even the establishment shot can be traced back to a specific origin. What is new, however, is the speed at which these changes now take place: even before the Simpson case had fully resolved itself, its images had been generalized into visual techniques. As a result, no one-neither producers nor the viewing public-has anything like the total control possible just a decade earlier. In their 1947 article "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" Adorno and Horkheimer propose a theory of the "culture industry" as a dictatorial voice in modern communication, a model that may indeed have been accurate for the time period. But ever since the availability of the first private video camcorders in about 1985, which allow people to film and playback their own lives on television, television production has become an endlessly complicated interplay of viewer and producer contributions, with the end result that no one owns the new O.J.. images with anywhere near the same certainty that producers own the establishment shot.

It is out of this environment that NBC's police drama Homicide: Life on the Street is created every week. Homicide is a particularly interesting show because in addition to being a product of the new viewer-producer dynamic, it remains heavily aware of these origins. It is filmed entirely with hand-held cameras that produce images crude enough to make even the "impromptu" location reporting of the nightly news that follows appear glossy and artificial. And its editing, instead of striving for the traditional "motivated" invisibility that John Fiske defines in his book Television Culture, is littered with jumps cuts and repetitions that reflect a rare "desire to tell the story a particular way" (27). What is remarkable about Homicide is that, by violating these "realistic" codes of television production, it has managed to survive in a major network's prime-time schedule through earning a reputation as being "realistic." This innovation-if it can, indeed, be called innovation at all-is much more than a mere marketing tool; rather, it is the latest product of viewers' decade long reinvention of television realism, motivated primarily by the increasing importance of the video camera in their lives.

The most obviously unusual thing about Homicide is the way the camera approaches its subjects. Instead of keeping a polite and organized distance from the actors, it often swoops down, around, and into the scene's action so dramatically that it is hard not to imagine the cameraman as a factor in the developing action. The intended illusion is that there isn't a lot of high-tech production involved in the show, that the scene is not being filmed on a set crowded with producers and directors and costume designers and make-up artists and the like. We are meant, instead, to envision simply the characters and a single cameraman engaged in a real-life struggle with one another.

Right away there is a fundamental unreality to this situation that should be as strong as it is in the overproduction being avoided: how can the cameraman's presence not only not spoil the realism, but actually help foster it? According to Fiske, past viewers took "the effect of seamlessness, of a continuous flow, with no manufactured joints or edges" as initial proof that what they were watching was unadulterated reality (27). In other words, vast on-set production and precise and intricate post-production made the camera disappear entirely, separating the audience from any knowledge of how programs were produced. In this one-directional environment, it's not hard to imagine the "culture industry" quietly inflicting its ideology on the public.

But the video camcorder's introduction began to undermine this comfortable separation, by, in effect, making viewers into informal producers. Of course, private movie cameras had been sold for a half-century before the camcorder, but always with the same basic difference that separates film from television. The film for these old cameras needed to be sent away for developing, and even then could only be viewed by projection onto a movie screen; like film, these home movies were "a record of what has happened" (Fiske 22)-the past tense being necessary to describe any document that cannot be viewed until well after the fact. But to view the new camcorder movies is as easy, essentially, as turning on the television. For this reason, they harbor all the "nowness" that makes television "a relay of what is happening" (Fiske 22, emphasis added). So, on a small scale, people could now be involved for the first time in the television production of their own lives.

This, naturally, changed their readings of the elaborate but invisible production that dominated television's visuals. The things people taped themselves were quite clearly realistic-this could be "proved," for they were present at the actual event-and yet they bore almost no visual similarity to television reality. The more audiences began to speak this second realistic language, the more the first looked false and out-moded. This development was sufficiently powerful to force a change in television's visual style, so that now, as in Homicide, realism involves the same dynamic that the home viewer/producers create when they put themselves on television: the subjects work to produce real-life, together with the cameraman, who can never be forgotten because he constantly shakes the frame and moves randomly about.

Television's formal producers began earnest imitation of this trend beginning in 1989 with the introduction of cinema verité-style programming likeCops, which involves the same cameraman-subject dynamic as was created through widespread use of the camcorder. But it is a mistake to assume that because television must now play catch-up to its viewers that this situation is a simple, causal one-cultural changes are rarely that easy to trace. At first, since the viewing audience is clearly setting the trend here, it seems we have refuted the claim Adorno and Horkheimer make that, "Immovably, they [here the viewing public] insist on the very ideology which enslaves them" (136). In other words, not only do viewers accept the culture industry's laws, they actually embrace them as the only correct method. But, clearly, this complete overhaul of dramatic realism is the result of audience dissatisfaction with television's language, its rejection of the stylistic ideology-isn't it?

Not exactly: while the culture industry has been forced to compromise itself on this small level, the real catalyst for change here was people's desire for wholesale imitation of what was shown of television. "Even when the public does-exceptionally-rebel against the pleasure industry," Adorno and Horkheimer say, "all it can muster is that feeble resistance which that very industry inculcated in it" (148). It was only through the technical inferiority of the equipment and the inexperience of its users, which combined to make a very rough, sloppy imitation of professional TV, that this new form of realism was born at all.

But even this adjustment suggests too simple a model; the consumers' version of reality was, perhaps, based on an imitation of television, but television producers never fully gained back the control they had lost. By showing interactions between local police and residents, Cops began to reveal a potential social function for the "realism" of the camcorder. This function seemed fully realized in 1991, when the beating of Rodney King was caught by an amateur video "producer" and broadcast thousands of times all around the world.

It's fair to say that no one knew what the reaction would be to the images and, therefore, no one was prepared for what they incited. I suspect television broadcasters thought, at first, that this was a very clear-cut case of police brutality-and that broadcasting it would help further the notion that such incidents are rare and "shocking," to quote one of then-Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates's earliest statements, as Geoffrey Taylor Gibbs reported in the New York Times article "L.A. Cops, Taped in the Act." As Fiske says, negative news like this should have implied "a deviation from the norm, which is therefore construed as 'good'"-an assumption that "is all the more powerful for being unspoken" (285).

But, instead, events swung in exactly the opposite direction. It turned out that eleven other policemen had watched the entire beating without once trying to hold back their fellow officers as they kicked, hit, taser-gunned, and finally hog-tied King on the side of a crowded road. The implications of their inaction were confirmed when it came out that, "complaints of police brutality and racism have continued [in Los Angeles], and verdicts and settlements against the department have risen over the decades, from $553,000 in 1972 to $6.4 million in 1989 to $8 million in 1990" (Gibbs).

Although this news undermined the already fading illusion that the police are solely a force for good, it was easily co-opted. It looked, briefly, as if the video camera's "reality" had managed to begin eliminating the "code of silence" that had kept a great deal of police brutality hidden, with no unforeseen side-effects. The Kansas City Police Department, according to The New York Times, even wrote a "bad boy list" of officers with an inordinate number of citizen complaints and made efforts to retrain them (Terry). Coincidentally, perhaps this name altered the meaning of the Cops theme song, which asks, "Bad boys, bad boys . . . whatcha gonna do when they come for you?" The formerly implied answer was "Call the police," an idea the show worked to instill in its audience; now, viewers heard "bad boys" as a reference to the police, which in turn made them identify with the criminals as victims of unfair police action.

But where this new message would have been radical and un-airable a year ago, it was now merely ironic; television producers handled the shift in public opinion by simply emphasizing the new way of reading. Gibbs's editorial is a fine indication of public opinion at the time, and also acknowledges the source of this new political empowerment:

If there had been no King videotape, there would have been no national attention and perhaps little local attention. If any story had appeared, readers would have been offered dramatic police descriptions of violent attempts by the "perpetrator" to resist arrest after a high-speed chase. . . . But this time the nation saw an independent, irrefutable instance of police officers assaulting a nonresisting citizen.

What Gibbs does not consider in his March, 1991 article (relatively early in the course of these events) is where this newfound citizen-owned power source would lead. As the Rosemary West coverage quickly appropriated images from the Simpson case, so the seemingly straight-forward "revelations" of the King tape were used to frame interpretations in a New York case. On April 27, 1991, a New York Times headline read "Jury Quickly Acquits Man Charged in Brush With An Officer" (Sullivan). The case involved a New York University student, Stephen Grant, charged with attempting to incite a riot in Washington Square Park after arguing with police about his playing a radio too loud. "The police said that they had charged him with riot," the article reads, "because he was yelling 'police brutality!' when he was being subdued and that his cries prompted people in a crowd that had gathered to throw bottles and rocks at them." In other words, at least as I read it, Grant attempted to recall the Rodney King events almost as a reflex, and the crowd followed his lead with equal fervor. It was the policemen's attempt simply to make an arrest that led to an exploitation of Rodney King's celebrity-excessive force was never actually the issue.

The jury's verdict was similarly motivated: they took "only minutes" to award Grant two million dollars in civil damages. Even Grant's lawyer, William Kunstler, "said he believed the jurors had responded indirectly to the televised videotape last month of Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King" (Sullivan). If he's correct, the time span alone is incredible: in just one month, the Rodney King beating had been broadcast enough times to become a part of television's language in the same way O.J. Simpson's taped-flight did. But where the West-Simpson equation is at least nominally justified-they both involve gruesome murders-that Grant was able to recall Rodney King for his case so easily, which is similar only in that it involves a white officer and a black suspect, underlines the images' extreme mutability, and the lack of control anyone has over them. In this new environment, even the more basic and necessary police action was seen as a manifestation of the King images, and therefore either excessive, racially biased, or both.

All this had a peculiar and unfortunate effect of the Rodney King trial itself. While the images were being used by people everywhere to fight police brutality (and, as we've seen, sometimes fight even simple police action), they were necessarily being robbed of their specific meaning to Rodney King and the police officers involved. Everyone could see the amateur video was representative of a larger social problem, but for it to become ingrained enough in the American psyche to gain this symbolic power it had to be shown hundreds and hundreds of times. As a result, we-including, especially, the jury-became desensitized to its actual violence. It was possible, after a month of replays, to watch the beatings without even imagining Rodney King himself, or caring which officers were involved.

There is something fundamentally unrealistic about this situation: the Rodney King images were powerful enough to forever change the tone and structure of American society, but they couldn't even indict the officers that appeared in them. The Los Angeles riots that occurred after the verdict was announced, then, were not a direct result of the injustice done to Rodney King, but of the incredible and violent disbelief people had that, though it appeared they had finally gained social power over the brutality of the police through their camcorders, the images they produced had been manipulated to work against them. Gibbs's assertion that the country had seen "an independent, irrefutable instance of police officers assaulting a nonresisting citizen" still dominated, which made the acquittal not only wrong but impossible: how could they possibly not have done it, when the camera tells us so explicitly, through its un-matched realism, that they did?

The logic behind claiming that any video taped evidence is an "irrefutable instance" of anything is actually very shaky. It implies that the camera is powerful enough to record everything that happens at a given time, including the subtleties of human interaction. This assumption makes it possible for a viewer to contribute his own emotions to a videotape and then mistake them for an inherent set of meanings. As this applies to Rodney King, in the hands of the defense, the tape was used in combination with a high-speed chase, King's arrest record, and his drug use to make the beating look necessary for apprehending the particular suspect. And this new approach magically changed the tape itself: what were once King's attempts to protect himself became his attempts to escape; what were originally pleas for mercy became a verbal assault on the police. The tape was deconstructed and then reconstructed again so many times, and with such varied results, that the actual event it supposedly captured became unreal. History was, in essence, changed by its record.

One of the most interesting things about Homicide as a program is the way it manages, simultaneously, to raise the question of television's role in creating reality, and still exploit its techniques for doing so. The episode that first aired on the April 26, 1996, for example, concerns a murder mystery centered on a video will left by a suspect's (Richard Lomer's) foster father, Walter Lomer. On this video tape, which the detectives study for clues, Walter wills his entire fortune to the Richard's biological father, Edward Clifford. The premise is sufficiently mysterious, and leads the detectives to learn that, though the two never met, Clifford had stolen Walter's wife many years earlier out of spite for Walter's adoption of his son, Richard. This leads the detectives to a very interesting, impossible question: though Clifford knew Walter specifically, Walter never had even basic contact with Clifford-in fact, didn't even know he existed as an individual. So how can Walter possibly leave Clifford his entire fortune? For that matter, how can he even speak Clifford's name on the tape, a name it has been made very clear he has never heard before?

My attempt here is not to point out a weakness in the writing; on the contrary, I think the show's producers have intentionally left the plot open to deconstruction to cast doubt on the validity of even the most straight-forward video evidence. Lomer is shown on videotape saying things he cannot possibly say, yet there is never any explicit doubt that he is saying them.

The un-reality of this episode, and in turn of video taping in general, is not confined to the basic plotline of the story either. It turns out the suspect is a member of the National Security Agency-he is a secret agent, and his job is to make maps of the future, of places that do not exist yet. Additionally, there is a subplot involving the unexplainable disappearance of a VCR one of the detective's stole from the evidence room. When he hears rumors it has been confiscated by two mysterious men from higher up in the department, he becomes paranoid. Any conversation about the situation is then obscured by his insistence, obliquely, that, "this conversation never happened. I'm not here. You're not talking to me. Right?"

Because the conversation he is claiming doesn't exist is being filmed (and millions of viewers can watch it), the ironic message is very clear: just because there is video evidence of an event doesn't automatically mean it happened, or that it happened the way you think it did. This claim is made doubly powerful by the fact that the show is filmed by video cameras that produce images very similar in quality and positioning to amateur home videos.

Though the content of Homicide rarely emphasizes un-reality this explicitly, the visual form of the show consistently reminds viewers that video documentation is not infallible. The continuity between edits, for example is often completely ignored, so that there appear to be gaps in the film, things we are not privileged to see. Extras appear and disappear between cuts, the principal actors might suddenly be sitting around a desk when just one frame earlier they were across the room, and, conversely, sometimes important lines are repeated, in succession, from each of the different takes the actor did, which subtly calls attention to the production process. So, on one hand, the producers are attempting to infuse as much realism into the show as possible by copying the hand-held camera style. But they undermine the validity of this technique through a highly-stylized approach to editing and continuity, calling into question whether the camcorder's images should be considered real at all.

In confusing the issue this way, Homicide places itself right in the middle of the question people have over what is and isn't to be taken as reality. In recent months the most politically charged character on the show has become the unassuming, boyish detective Brody, whose only job is to follow the homicide detectives with a portable video camera while they make arrests, to provide video documentation of their side of things. There is an awareness here that the video camera can be used to create multiple versions of a real-life incident, and it makes for some of the most interesting scenes in the series. In the episode that aired on the April 12, for example, the detectives suspected a Moslem security guard of a murder that took place at the housing project he policed. When they took him into the interrogation room he immediately attempted to force a conflict among the racially diverse officers present. The police eventually won out and the guard agreed to continue the interview even with the white policeman still present. But when Brody and his camera entered the room, the guard became more enraged than before.

To him (and most Americans) there were now three separate political elements at work in the room, the third and most enraging being the camera itself, abstracted from its human carrier. The guard was angry, at least partially, because recent social events have shown that when reality is put on tape, it becomes uncontrollable-and subject to manipulation. Until it is understood that no camera, regardless of the circumstances, can capture an unbiased reality, new video images will continue to incite dramatic social conflict as fast as they are produced. The camcorder, then, which began life as an "innocent" imitation of television, became, briefly, an instrument for positive social reform-and then turned suddenly on its makers to become a feared, misunderstood mechanism for social debate and unrest. In the end, this amounts to the same helplessness created by Adorno and Horkheimer's "culture industry," but without the reassuring notion that at least the producers might be in control.

Works Cited

Burn, Gordon. "The Trial." Grant Magazine, Spring 1996, Issue 53.

Fiske, John. Television Culture. New York: Routledge, 1987

Gibbs, Geoffrey Taylor. "L.A. Cops, Taped in the Act." The New York Times, Tuesday Mar 12, 1991, Sec A, p23.

Horkheimer, Max and Theodore W. Adorno. "The Culture Industry: Englightenment as Mass Deception." Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cummings. New York: Continuum, 1993.

Sullivan, Ronald. "Jury Quickly Acquits Man Charged in Brush With Officer." The New York Times, Saturday Apr 27, 1991, Sec 1, p: 28.

Terry, Don "Kansas City Police Go After Own Bad Boys." The New York Times, Tuesday Sep 10, 1991, Sec A, p1.

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