Women in Crime Drama - Research

The representation of women in television crime dramas; focusing on The Killing and Orange is the New Black. 

Representation is the description or portrayal of someone or something in a particular way. An institution cannot portray every aspect of a person so certain features of an individual’s personality and appearance will be enhanced. This is often their age and gender. Media texts are a construction, meaning that representations within them are the institution’s point of view. Representation in television is constructed through symbolic codes, dialogue and iconography such as clothing and actions which can then be read by an audience. Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding theory suggests that encoding is the means behind something given by the institution and decoding is an audience’s interpretation, which can differ from what the institution wanted.

Television is considered a major contributor in generating meaning of femininity and masculinity. It is important to study representation because it can be used to influence an audience’s opinion of a character. If the audience identify with someone in the media who is represented positively then “it can offer a sense of belonging and opportunity, but the opposite is also true” (Ryland, 2013).

My focus is to analyse and explore the different representations of women in crime dramas. How cultural changes such as feminism may have influenced them over time and how the changes in sociological points of view are reflected in the genre; yet how the female stereotype can still be identified in today’s media.

Stereotypes are socially constructed and a reflection of dominant ideologies portrayed through representation. They do not remain static but change over time. Traditional stereotypes of women are of homemakers without jobs whose responsibility ends once their children are asleep, “Hegemonic Masculinity practices the dominant social position of men and the subordinate social position of women” (Connell, 2005). Conventional representations of women in crime began to change slightly in 1939 where before, women would not appear on radio at all, to when the first ever female detective, Phyl Coe featured in 15 minute episodes of an old time radio show. The murder in one episode would be revealed in the next, allowing for an open narrative to keep the audience interested. Drama is a product of its time, the dominant theme in drama pre-1990 is the role of women in the work place. Programmes such as Prime Suspect and The Fall focus on this by looking at how the female lead survives in a male-dominated profession. The occupation of “doctor, lawyer, engineer, architect and political leader are jobs that in the thirties and forties would have been called men’s work” (Basinger, 1993). 

 
During the 1970’s and the 1980’s two American television crime dramas, Police Woman, which began as a radio show in 1937 and Cagney and Lacey which aired in 1982 were successful because of their strong female leads. Cagney and Lacey won the Emmy Award for ‘Best lead actress in drama’ for 6 consecutive years. In Police Woman, the audience know that Sergeant Pepper is the prevailing character, point of view shots looking down on the antagonists portray her as superior. This explores a matriarchal ideology and challenges the stereotypical sociological hierarchy by putting women at the top. Cagney and Lacey were in sharp contrast to conventional representations of women, they were in-control, working women who solved their own cases and were rarely presented as women in distress. The 30-year-old middle class characters were realistic and relatable for the target audience of women the same age. Viewers from the time of its initial release sent letters to the producers writing “It’s the only show on television I feel I can relate to” and “Cagney and Lacey holds an especially important message for our youth on the changing role of women in our society.” (D'Acci, 1994).

The BBC is a public service broadcaster, along with other channels it is required to provide a range of programmes to satisfy a wide audience. Impartial programming offers a balanced viewpoint that does not pander to the interests of a particular group meaning audiences are more likely to trust the BBC and their representations because they know that they must be fair and equal. “The BBC’s key core values are impartiality, accuracy, fairness and editorial integrity.” (BBC, 2015). Netflix can be more challenging with their representations because an audience does not have the same expectations, such as with House of Cards which portrays manipulative, controlling female characters. House of Cards is a Netflix original series that contains popular challenging representations; the show won the Golden Globe Award for Best performance by an actress in television in 2014. 

 
The nearly all female cast American crime drama Orange is the New Black (OITNB) is a Netflix original series released in July 2013. The programme is based on Piper Kerman’s memoir: Orange is the New Black, My Year in a Women’s Prison, who is a feminist herself. The story focuses on Piper Chapman, a woman in her thirties who is sentenced to fifteen months in prison. The programme is made up of many stereotyped characters which has proved highly popular with its audience so much so, that the series has been nominated for several Emmy Awards and Golden Globes. A blog post discussing the representations within OITNB says that “because female relationships are rarely depicted well on television, OITNB stands out from the norm” (Suarez, 2014). The representations are more realistic because the characters are based on real life people who were inmates at the same time as Kerman. OITNB was scripted by female writer Jenji Kohan who also created Weeds, another female inspired series. There is at least one stereotype that an audience member can relate to, explained by the personal identity strand of Katz and Blumler’s Uses and Gratifications theory. For example a young and innocent girl and a mother. The show was given a 79% rating from Metacritic, evidencing that the challenging representations are considered positive by the dominant audience. 

Netflix exploits a new way of consuming television on demand, which is particularly popular amongst younger audiences. Voxburner, a company that dedicates itself to researching and reporting on the mind set of young people shows that “75% of 18- to 24-year-olds use their laptops as televisions” (Ward, 2013). Since OITNB is only available through Netflix, the assumption can be made that it targets a younger, post-modern audience. This gives the programme the opportunity to explore more challenging representations without encouraging oppositional responses for older audiences. Its distribution suggests that the show’s predominant audience is one that is technologically advanced.

The protagonist in OITNB is represented as a typical female character, described in an article as “young, white and privileged” (SWSG, 2013), similar to the main character in Veronica Mars; this type of representation is a recurring genre convention of modern crime dramas. However the diversity in OITNB shows a step towards a more inclusive media. The characters offer some amount of femininity in their characteristics, “traditional feminine traits – compassion and sensitivity” (Thomas, 2000), some of the characters are mothers. Galina “Red” Reznikov is the show’s stereotypical Russian woman and their femme fatale character, similar to that of clichéd feminists such as Xenia Onatopp in Goldeneye, she is in a position of power. Red uses her feelings of vulnerability as inspiration to become the leader amongst the inmates. In the first episode, she establishes herself as the authoritative figure by starving the protagonist Piper after being insulted by her. Her aggressive tone and commanding dialogue directed at Piper also lets the dominant audience know she’s in charge.

Danish crime drama The Killing is set in the Copenhagen Police Department and revolves around the lead female Detective Chief Inspector Sarah Lund whose representation makes her gender neutral; her character can be considered somewhat androgynous. According to the gender stereotypes, she is neither feminine nor masculine. “She's so good at what she does that it kind of removes all gender” says actress Mireille Enos who plays the character in the American remake (Rosenberg, 2011). This also supports the ideologies within the queer theory, which is similar to feminism in that they both explore unconventional gender characteristics. The Queer theory rejects the concept of essentialism, which is the view that categories of people, such as women and men have specific characteristics that are necessary to their identity. Unlike BBC’S Silk, where Costello’s gender is constantly referred to, calling her the ‘female silk’, Lund’s gender is never mentioned throughout all three series, leaving it to the audience to define her identity as they wish, this avoids alienating either gender of audience.

Lund’s representation does not express many obvious male characteristics known to an audience through a stereotypical male character, however she is seen to “contain emotion” (Children Now, 1999) through difficult situations and in relationships. Her relationship with her son and boyfriend is challenged because of how she prioritises her career over everything else in her life. This is common to the genre and can be found in Scott and Bailey and The Wire. When comparing Lund to the other main female character in the programme, the mother of the murder victim Pernille, Lund is emotionless. Stella Gibson from The Fall could have been inspired by Lund as her character is similarly cold and distant. Pernille expresses great emotion and the high angle shot of her crying on the floor exposes her to the audience and plays on her vulnerability as the camera circles her from above. This shot is similar to one from series 1 of Broadchurch where a slow motion tracking shot is used, focusing on the mother’s face, intensifying her feelings of fear for the audience.

“Realistic, simple and precise…” is how Lund’s representation is described by a writer for The Economist. (The Economist , 2010). Throughout all three series, Lund is rarely seen wearing anything other than jeans, a knitted jumper and no makeup, making her character realistic and one that the female audience can personally identify with. Considering Mulvey’s Male Gaze theory and how the sexualisation of women in cinema is typical, these texts are post-modern in that they reject this convention. Looking at Propp’s character types, Lund is considered the hero character, however it is more accurate to describe her as a ‘flawed hero’ (MediaMagazine, 2012), much like the character of Horatio Caine in CSI: Miami as he makes mistakes like people in real life. Her character is unconventional because she is not defined by her gender and challenges the divide between masculinity and femininity. Judith Butler, a gender theorist said that “gender is not the result of nature but is socially constructed” (Butler, 1990) meaning that the stereotypical differences between genders are fabricated to separate men and women.

“Today, the genre has never been more popular, but it owes much of its winning formula to industry innovations developed in the 1950s and 1960s” (Pioneers of Television, 2014). The target audience of crime dramas has changed, OITNB targets a young audience which has encouraged the development of the genre. “Several ground-breaking crime dramas also challenged stereotypes of the day, casting women and minorities in key roles.” (Pioneers of Television, 2014). The Killing expresses these challenging representations.

For my production, I will create a female lead with a similar representation to Lund from The Killing because this type of representations is most popular with a dominant audience, she will be portrayed as strong and powerful to conform to post-feminist ideologies. The programmes with the most challenging characters appear to be well-received with their audience. The Killing generated a popular American remake and a novelisation of the first series in 2012 and OITNB was renewed for a second season before the first was released.

I will also provide the audience with a contrasting representation by using another female more like Piper from Orange is the New Black. To achieve this I want to use similar camera angles and shots to the ones seen in The Killing, so that the audience can identify her as the superior, for example using a low angle shot while she is talking to other characters. By using dialogue similar to that in OITNB, the character will still seem stern and defensive. The use of genre conventions is also important so that the dominant audience can identify the programme as crime; this will make my production look like a realistic modern crime drama. 

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