High-rise Anxiety and the Failure of Community
Just months after the Genovese murder, the local ABC affiliate in Philadelphia, PA aired the program The Detached Americans to identify the problem of urban apathy using the Genovese case as its kernel event. The TV documentary explains the act of bystanding as an effect of converging social conditions that create massified, consumerist, and capitalist urban and suburban subjects. It connects rather than interprets the model of urban and suburban personhood in the mid-1960s, drawing links between education, suburbanization, authoritarian military culture, deadening office work, and rule and role-bound relations of the nuclear family as the source-field of social detachments, self-interest and self-protectionism. In its view, the problem of bystander non-intervention the Genovese case revealed represents a common denominator of city life rather than an exceptional urban experience based in the thin networks of social affiliation. It psychologizes the urban apartment dweller using a critique of suburbanization as conformist, authoritarian, and psychologically-deadening.
The 1964 documentary is crafted in the style of a civics lesson on public apathy and the problems of suburbanization, which were offered as explanations for the conditions that led to the failures of Genovese’s urban neighbors to intervene. The film locates the source of their urbanized failures in the collapse of rural community and the expansion of the suburban residential areas. Rather than urbanization, the film argues that suburban production of social homogenization and the standardization of public education and middle class employment breed white crime fear and detachment, foster people’s willingness to follow rules, and promote obedience and conformity. Through its documentary aesthetic, The Detached Americans eschews a rush to judgment on the individuals who fail to help others in favor of fuller consideration of the conditions that make intervention in the city more difficult, even if the answers the film provides---to communicate with less role-bound expectations of others within suburbanized families---fail to adequately address the problem.
The Detached Americans functions as a diagnostic text, naming and describing the problem of social detachment in the city, and the country more broadly, and offering advice to viewers on how to develop communicative competencies that can thwart social barriers to involvement in others’ lives. The Genovese case bookends the TV program, which begins by describing the non-intervention of the witnesses to the Genovese murder, then proceeds by way of mid-century critiques of American conformity, bureaucracy and social typing to examine how urban society and its physical and social structures of governing typecast people into inflexible roles that create barriers to communication and social affiliation---echoing William Whyte’s (1956) The Organization Man, David Riesman’s (1950) The Lonely Crowd and C. Wright Mills’ book (1951) White Collar. According to the film, to interpret the city and the specific crime of urban indifference requires that viewers learn to read others as social types, or kinds of generalized others. With the help of expert narrators, spectators can learn to read for social types in order to develop skills that, rather paradoxically, will supposedly break down the problem of social typecasting.
In one of the film’s opening scenes, a detective speaks directly to the audience about how the Genovese murder was perpetrated as much by the bystanders to the assault as the assailant. Bystanders here are coded as accomplices to the crime, complicit in Genovese’s killer, Winston Moseley’s, perpetration. Blame for the crime rests with those who failed to intervene, ‘a curious shift,’ Stanley Milgram criticized in 1964 as ‘reminiscent of recent trends in moralizing about the Nazi era.’ While ‘writers once focused on the sins of the Nazis; it is now more fashionable,’ he argued, ‘to discuss the complicity of their victims’ (1964, 602), a reference to Hannah Arendt’s controversial thesis on the banality of evil from her coverage of the Adolf Eichmann trial.
At minimum, the solution The Detached Americans offers to the problem of non-responsive citizens is calling the police; the larger solution is to learn to become better citizens through expert training in group and interpersonal relations as a way of rebuilding a sense of community in the context of atomized, anonymous, suburban living. The film dramatically depicts the source of the problem of bystander non-intervention in a scene in which a bulldozer demolishes a rural barn. The film then cuts to aerial footage of the orderly streets and homogenous homes of the suburbs. The film locates the urban problem of bystander non-intervention around the Kitty Genovese case in the physical and social transformation of suburbanization. These transformations, the film implies, shape the psychological character of the city dweller, proposing a psychological character profile that connects the inner city resident with the middle class suburbanite. In the film, changes along the rural/suburban interface at the edges of the metropolis represent the problems of non-involvement for the high-rise apartment dweller living in the dense inner city.
To be a good witness, a responsive witness, the film directs viewers to look at and understand the placeholder for the crime: a chalk outline of a body lying in the street. The sexual violence and murder committed against Genovese is placed in the street, where violent death is projected as public and staged, and at the same time spectral. Viewers never see or hear the crime being committed; they instead see the outline of the victim’s corpse, and then later hear the testimony of a single fictional male witness as he describes what he saw of the assault and why he did not intervene. Just as the witnesses cast a ghostly presence, the murder also haunts the scene: it has no bodies. The program describes how the un-named victim, clearly modeled on Genovese, led an urban life, signified by the high-rise apartment building that stands behind the detective. Genovese actually lived on the second storey of a Tudor building above a shop across the street from a 10-storey apartment building. ‘This is where she lived,’ the detective declares as he points to the high-rise, placing the witnesses and Genovese into physical proximity that is also meant to signify, in its ideal form, a context of neighbourliness. While the film depicts the murders’ witnesses as all living in the same building, the 7 witnesses who testified at Moseley’s murder trial lived in three different buildings, distributed at different vantage points on the scene of the crime. The Detached Americans may suggest the witnesses all lived in one building to emphasize more dramatically the failures of the model of community based in multi-storey apartment buildings. The film’s detective character tells us the witnesses ‘were on four different floors, looking down at the thing,’ portraying the witnesses as an aggregated collective in which the physical proximity enabled by the high-rise apartment fails to produce collective action.
At the end of the film, a fictional witness to the Genovese murder describes the scene he saw on the street as he fumbles and hesitates to explain why he did not call the police. The scene is shot from inside his upper floor apartment, where the camera pays witness to his testimony after-the-fact. Looking at him gazing upon the street below, the camera also pays witness to his act of spectatorship after-the fact, as if the truth of his inaction on the night of the murder can be located in his act of looking at the scene months later. When viewers are introduced to him as a witness to the murder, he has just walked from the conflict-ridden and socially deadening suburban home that centers the film’s location of the problem of bystander non-intervention in the suburbanized nuclear family form and then appears in the apartment building. The detachments of suburbia are here juxtaposed with high-rise indifference in the city.
Like 1950s educational television programs, The Detached Americans ‘stages a sense of proxy contact between everyday citizens and experts charged with the administration of their conduct’ (McCarthy 2010, 90). Similar to the role-play scenarios in the TV programs Anna McCarthy analyzes in her book The Citizen Machine, The Detached Americans uses techniques of what McCarthy calls ‘wooden acting’ to encourage viewers to learn the difference between who individuals are and the social roles they play (98). While the programs McCarthy analyzes draw from inter-group relations theory and mid-century scholarship on the problem of communication across group differences to offer training to its program’s viewers, The Detached Americans seems to draw from the subfields of interpersonal communication, social interactionism and social role theory for its conceptualization of the problem the Genovese murder identified, and the solution on offer. In the program, group differences are subsumed within the dyad of the married couple and the suburban family as key sites of social management and behavioral engineering. The Detached Americans is explicit in this lesson, and quite literally uses wooden acting in scenes dramatized with mannequins and Barbie and Ken dolls.
The Detached Americans is an example of civic television, a form of media production aimed at training and producing better citizens. Harry Reasoner represents the moral pedagogue, a role he earned through his job anchoring for CBS news at the time, where he covered the JFK assassination in November 1963 and Lee Harvey Oswald’s killing live on-air. Later, in 1968, he co-created the program 60 Minutes with Mike Wallace. In the film, real-life news anchor Harry Reasoner teaches by demonstration. In an act of re-mediation, he points to a TV screen used on set to play recorded examples of bystander inaction. As an agent of civic-minded demonstration, the film positions ‘the spectator to look at the [film’s] situations from such an angle that they necessarily become subject to [its] criticisms’ (Brecht 1938, 1): the critique of mass society, of social typecasting, and the industrial and governmental infrastructures of social atomization.
Anna McCarthy describes demonstration-based civic pedagogy as a ‘postwar art of government,’ where television documentary becomes an ‘experiment in governing by television,’ addressing the failures of citizens to act responsibility toward other citizens in need. The good citizen must not only be taught, he or she must have ethical citizenship demonstrated to him or her. The Detached Americans might offer an alternative ethics of witnessing within the context of divided city life. Its thin description of the multiple factors that condition bystander intervention in the context of changing urban social relations function like Erving Goffman’s ‘eye behavior on the street’: a means of glancing at the whole picture, of going what Heather Love calls ‘close, but not deep’ in one’s interpretation of urban social relations (Love 2010, 380). In the case of the Genovese murder, where bystanders were said to have failed to act on their ear and eyewitnessing of the street, television documentary comes to both fill in for their absence and help train other citizens in how not to be a bystander by portraying a series of structural factors that impinge on people’s ability to, and willingness, to intervene on behalf of others in the context of urban life.