Bethany Ogdon mentioned an unpublished essay by an "O'Neill"

on police 'reality' television.  If this O'Neill is the same

one, then it was indeed published, and the reference is as

follows:



Edward R. O'Neill.  "The Seen of the Crime:  Violence,

Anxiety and the Domestic in Police Reality Programming."

_Cineaction:  Radical Film Criticism and Theory_.  Special

issue, "Murder in America," No. 38 (September 1995).



The author argues:



(1) that the ostentatiously self-reflexive visual style of

programs such as _Cops_ and _America's Most Wanted_ does not

produce the 'Brechtian' distanciation that film scholars

associate with such devices but rather hyperbolically

increases the ideological authority of the works;



(2) that such programs imply a complication of the

historical shift identified by Foucault from a spectacularly

visible punishment to a less visible discipline:  namely,

the crime and the criminal's apprehension are made

spectacularly legible, but the spectator is put in the

position of the panoptic disciplinary authority;



(3) that these programs can be interpreted as a continuation

of the construction of the domestic sphere also operative in

the genre of melodrama insofar as in that genre the domestic

sphere is made transparent to the spectator's gaze, and in

police 'reality' programming a similar transparency is also

operative.



Whether these claims can ultimately be supported, however,

is a matter open to doubt.



Sincerely,

Edward R. O'Neill

UCLA

Dept. of Sociology/General Education Program



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