An essential guide to understanding classic and contemporary crime films Under the Gun provides a systematic and sophisticated criminological perspective to bear on crime films. The book provides a fresh way of looking at cinema, using the concepts and analytical tools of criminology to uncover previously unnoticed meanings in film, ultimately making the study of criminological theory more engaging and effective for students while simultaneously demonstrating how theories of crime circulate in our mass-mediated worlds. The result is an illuminating new way of seeing movies and a compelling way of learning about criminology. Stepping into the fray between the gritty realities of crime and punishment and their mediated forms, Under the Gun also brings into relief the ways that crime theory might birth the seeds of its own undoing. From those primordial and revenant crime theories—the elemental evil driving films like The Conjuring, the brute biological determinism of There’s Something About Kevin, and the banal carceral feminism of The Silence of the Lambs—to the countervisual work of reckoning: the prescient intersectionality of Set It Off, the queer and green criminologies of Moonlight and Dark Water, and the anti-colonial indictment of Saint Omer, Under the Gun asks would-be criminologists to a take up the cultural work that is truly foundational to the study of harm, violence, and justice.

本作は、単なる映画ガイドの枠を超え、犯罪学という峻厳なレンズでスクリーンの深淵を暴き出す、知的興奮に満ちた一冊です。著者らは、私たちが消費する物語がいかに社会的な犯罪観を形作り、時には歪めているかを鋭く指摘します。名作映画を学術的なツールで解体するその筆致は、批評の域を超え、現代社会の闇を照射する深遠な文学的魅力に溢れています。 映像文化の多層的な意味を掘り起こす圧倒的な洞察は、読者に正義や暴力の本質を問い直す衝撃を与えます。慣れ親しんだ作品を交差性や反植民地主義の視点で鮮やかに再定義するプロセスは、真の知的冒険と言えるでしょう。虚構と現実の境界に立ち、世界の構造を揺さぶる至高の学術的探求をぜひ体感してください。