Visible Stripes: Reenacting Trauma in Hollywood's Carceral Aesthetics

Percey’s concern with the prison film’s counter-reform aesthetics represents in the following analysis the apotheosis of a decades-long development of cinematic approaches to prisons and incarceration in pre-classical and classical American film. Griffiths recounts the use of location-shooting and re-enactment practices in such films as Raoul Walsh’s The Honor System (1917) and Sidney Olcott’s The Right Way (1921), finding their roots in films that Katherine Bleecker produced for the Joint Committee on Prison Reform in 1915.5 Such films reliably traded in re-enactments of prisoner torture, and the trade discourse marketing these films would often appeal to audiences explicitly on the grounds of offering voyeuristic windows into torture.6 Herein lies the contradiction at the heart of the relationship between prison reform and cinema in this period: films advocating for the improvement of prisoners’ conditions relied for affective appeal on re-enacted images of brutalized prisoners, infecting the American carceral imaginary with a normalized image of the traumatized prisoner and influencing American prison film for decades to come. [...]their iconography derived from the use of location photography, staged re-enactments, and actual prisoners filmed as extras. 9 In this sense, the constant repetition of the “stock characters, plots, and themes” that, according to criminologist Nicole Rafter, “turn up again and again in traditional prison films” ought to be read as participating in an ongoing, cyclical, and interminable process in American cultural memory, namely a fantasmatic reconfiguration of the troublingly anti-democratic and sadistic elements of incarceration into a reconcilable and ultimately healthy picture of ever-improving reform.10 In this way, the reformist spirit and anti-death penalty messages consistently endorsed by American prison officials and cinema in the first half of the twentieth century combined with the film industry’s capital-driven need for serialization and reformulation, producing a form of cinema grounded in repetition and a spectator attuned to and expecting this very repetition.