Representation and reality

In Chapter Two, I delineated criminological criticism as a method for critical criminology. I applied this method to three examples of allegory – a film, a television series, and a novel – in Chapters Three, Four, and Five in order to disclose their respective insights into the harms of sexism, racism, and elitism. In Chapter Three, I argued that Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) frames resistance to hegemonic masculinity, gender cooperation, and the possibility of feminist statehood as a demand for radical feminist governance. But how does one get from the urgency of radical feminism in Mad Max to the urgency of radical feminism in reality? The film may be set in Australia, but it is a post-apocalyptic Australia and Immortan Joe's Citadel bears little resemblance to any existing society. The problem seems to be aggravated in Chapter Four, where I claimed that Carnival Row (2019) demonstrates the contribution of racism, alienation, and decivilisation to urban revanchism. The series is set in a fantastic world of myth and magic that, if it resembles life on Earth at all, is more representative of the early 20th than the early 21st century. With this in mind, The Cuckoo's Calling (Rowling 2013) initially seems less problematic. I maintained that the novel makes a case for celebrity as exacerbating rather than alleviating elitism courtesy of media capital and mediated culture. Unlike the other two allegories, The Cuckoo's Calling is set in a real place, which is represented accurately and authentically. The problem nonetheless remains, because however realistic Rowling's London is, the moment she describes Lula, Robin, and Strike as inhabiting it, it ceases to be the actual, historical London of 2010. One can visit Denmark Street and perhaps even find the exact building in which Strike lives and works, but one will not find ‘C.B. Strike, and, underneath it, the words Private Detective’ on any of the doors inside it (Rowling 2013: 14).

Whether set in the Burgue, a not-too-distant future Australia, or a not-quite-contemporary London, all of the allegories are fictional narratives. In A Criminology of Narrative Fiction (McGregor 2021a), I argued that none of the three standard distinctions between nonfiction and fiction – true versus false, belief versus imagination, and existence versus invention – described the sophistication of the difference in sufficient detail.