Representing the killing state: the death penalty in nineties Hollywood cinema SEAN OSULLIVAN CENTRE

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Representing the killing state the death
penalty in nineties Hollywood cinemaSEAN
OSULLIVANCENTRE FOR CRIMINAL JUSTICE POLICY AND
RESEARCH
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• Dead Man Walking (1995)Last Dance (1996)The
  Chamber (1996)
• True Crime (1999)
• The Green Mile (1999)
• others
• A conscious intervention into the cultural
  politics of capital punishment?

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The Killing State (Sarat)

• routinised state killing (requires legitimation)
• due process
• bureaucratic, non-sadistic death using
  technology to kill softly
• Myths life doesnt mean life
• death doesnt mean death
• dangerousness
• the criminal the crime

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Countered by death-row advocacy

• narration
• witnessing
• benchmarking

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Sarat on the films

• Focus on individual cases and reproduced
  individualised narratives of responsibility
  and dessert
• Fetishise the machinery of death and delude
  us into thinking that we can know death
• Failed intentions, reproducing a conservative
  cultural politics.

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• Dead Man Walking The spiritual confident duped
  by the manipulative death-row inmate?

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• Rick and Cindy in Last Dance (1996)

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• The Chamber does racist bigot Sam Cayhall
  deserve to die?

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• Can the washed-up investigative-journalist save
  the innocent man?

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• The Green Mile the inmate on death-row has
  magical powers!

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• The films narrated, witnessed, benchmarked, and
  produced humanisation and empathy
• Stars act as informal endorsers
• New abolitionism (Sarat) is expert-led whilst
  Hollywood cinema is popular
• Anti-death rational or intuitive?
• The Down-turn in Support
• Isolating Texas.

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• Winslet and Spacey in The Life of David Gale
  (2003) isolating Texas.