Rentschler - Filmic Witness to the 1964 Kitty Genovese Murder
Overview
The 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese is one of the most well known U.S. crime stories of the 20th century. At 3:20 am on March 13, 1964 in the Kew Gardens neighborhood of Queens, NY, Catherine “Kitty” Genovese, a 28-year old Italian-American and lesbian woman was assaulted by knife on two separate occasions, raped and then killed by Winston Moseley, a 29-year old African-American homeowner and family man, who is currently serving out a life sentence at Clinton Correctional facility in New York. The story of the murder is famous as a case in which 37 out of 38 neighbours were said to have witnessed the assault, like spectators at the theater or TV audiences glued to their TV sets, and did not call the police (Gansberg, 27 March 1964, Rosenthal 1964/1994). Martin Gansberg's New York Times story '37 Witnesses to Murder Do Not Call Police' set the dominant narrative of the murder as one of failed witnesses to the killing, framing the crime’s bystanders as accomplices to Moseley’s violence. In the process, his story also exscripted the sexual violence Moseley committed against Genovese, and focused instead on the murder. This and subsequent accounts of the Genovese murder shifted the focus on the crime from the perpetrator and victim to those spectral subjects—urban apartment dwellers—who were asked to bear partial responsibility for the crime as witnesses to it. To New York Times metropolitan editor Abe Rosenthal (1964), 'Very few stories transfer immediately their essential meaning from the victim or participant to the reader; this one did.' For him, the story of the witnesses to the Genovese murder signaled a growing 'sickness of public apathy' specific to the conditions of mid-1960s urban America. 'Social change,' as Ian Hacking argues, 'creates new kinds of people' (1986, 161).
To Raymond Williams, the key to any good description is its starting point, 'the particular experience that is seized as determining' (1961, 121). In the U.S. context of 1964, the Kitty Genovese murder case provided a politically expedient and compelling allegory about social apathy, white crime fear and what social psychologists would come to term the diffusion of responsibility in the midst of growing federal panic about black civil dissidence and urban rebellion. From the perspective of criminology, the Genovese murder represents a signal crime, a story that 'index[es]…the state of society and social order' (Inness 2004). To this day, the case is a curricular staple in psychology classrooms across the English-speaking world, and circulates in such popular texts as Malcolm Gladwell’s 2000 bestseller The Tipping Point and the 1986 graphic novel Watchmen.
Social psychologists Stanley Milgram and Paul Hollander declared in a Nation article that 'the Kew Gardens incident' had 'become the occasion for a general attack on the city' (1964, p. 602). Talk of the failed witnesses challenged Jane Jacobs’ visionary 1961 thesis on the street level encounters that socially bind neighborhood residents to each other; though it also confirmed, in turn, one of Jacobs’s exceptions to her thesis on community surveillance: early morning conditions (Genovese was assaulted in the early morning hours of March 13, 1964; see Jacobs, 41). Public peace in the city, Jacobs suggested, rested not on the police but on the 'intricate, almost unconscious network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves' (32). 'To keep the city safe,' she argued, was 'the fundamental task of a city’s streets and its sidewalks,' and the 'lowly, unpurposeful and random…contacts' fostered between strangers there (30, 72). A safe street was one in which neighbourhood residents could lay 'eyes on the street' (35) as a routine practice of surveillance.
While the subject position of bystander existed before the Genovese murder in U.S. public discourse on bystanders to the Nazi Holocaust at the end of WWII, the Genovese murder crystallized an understanding of bystanding as a problem of civic indifference that was specific to urban spaces and a racialized U.S. construction of the crime problem. The meaning of the Genovese murder story as a problem of bystander non-intervention helped identify a type of person and practice on which the turmoil of social change in the 1960s could be focused: the bystander who bystands. The construction of the bystander problem around the case rests on a powerful fiction of the 38 witnesses to the murder that has not yet been adequately addressed. Only nine of the witnesses have been fully identified: the seven who testified at Winston Moseley’s murder trial and another two people from the neighborhood. Additionally, two residents did call the police, and one elderly female neighbor, Sophie Farrar, offered Genovese aid as she lay dying. The number of witnesses resulted from a police canvas of 38 residents after the Genovese murder, where the police learned that several neighbors heard or saw parts of the assault (see Rosenthal 1964/1998). The 38 witnesses, then, are something of a spectral subject; in Ian Hacking’s (1986) terms, they have been 'made-up' by newsmen, psychological researchers, filmmakers, TV producers and other cultural intermediaries that cast actors into character roles that came to stand in for the 38 witnesses in the city.
This article examines a group of films and videos that constitute a moving image archive of the 1964 Kitty Genovese rape and murder and its purported 38 witnesses in New York City. Across a range of genres that center on the crime’s location on a city sidewalk just outside of a multi-storey apartment building in the Kew Gardens neighborhood of Queens, NY, films gave audio-visual form to the apartment interiors and urban street exteriors of bystander-based witnessing that constitute the meaning, and look, of this historical case, the work of case-making that surrounds it and the imagination of the city produced in its wake. Like other films that dramatize social relations through the lens of apartment living, films on the bystanders to Genovese’s rape and murder dramatize a mid-century investment in the behavioral sciences as a potentially democratizing force for returning the power of reasoned selfhood to the largely anonymous mass subjects of urban living. Filmic depictions of apartment dwellers’ atomized experiences of city living focused on the high-rise apartment as a particular space of urban anxiety and collective apathy.
In Jane Jacobs’ vision of the collectively surveilled city street, the upper floor high-rise apartment dweller could not adequately watch the street on which he lived; he was separated him from the regular stranger sociability that closer proximity to the street enabled. 'Looking down from our windows,' Milgram warned, we see people as little more than 'abstracted points in motion.' Such 'verticality,' he argued, 'visually segments our experience into noncommunicating strata of urban life' (1984, 11, 10). Drawing on Erving Goffman’s interactionist sociology, anthropologist Edward Hall’s (1963) study of proxemics also focused on 'the distance between men in the conduct of daily transactions, the organization of space…and the layout of his towns' to examine the forms of alienation and lack of involvement American urban dwellers communicated in their behavior to strangers in proximity.
Alongside these social scientific diagnoses of proximate social indifference in the city, films portrayed the city as an elusive psychological phenomenon that could be audio-visually witnessed on screen. Filmic reproductions of the 1964 Genovese case challenged the idea that the city could be easily interpreted for potential risks by locating a site of unacknowledged danger—complicit neighbours---in urban high-rise apartments. Films such as the 1964 TV documentary The Detached Americans, the 1975 ABC network made-for-television film Death Scream, Alex Proyas and Salik Silverstein’s 1980 student film Groping shot in Sydney, Australia and Lucas Belvaux’s 2012 French film 38 Témoins (38 Witnesses) remake, re-enact and re-present the Genovese murder by casting not only apartment dwellers but the cities and urban residences in which they live into key character roles. If, as Pamela Wojcik argues, 'the apartment functions like a microcosm of the city' (2010, 38), films that represent the Genovese murder depict apartment dwellers as subjects who repeatedly fail to act collectively on behalf of their neighbors. The apartment and city street 'function less as the setting and more as a narrative device' for the crime’s representation and re-enactment in films that represent the Genovese murder (see Wojcik, 2010, 6). While films place the crime of Genovese’s sexual assault and murder in the city street, they locate apartment-dwelling urban bystanders as accomplices to the perpetrator, portraying the high-rise apartment building as a psychologized space of urban fear and apathy. In this way, 'the apartment not only hosts but motivates action; it entails certain sets of relationships; it involves formal and thematic elements; it conveys ideologies of urbanism' (Wojcik, 2010, 7).
This article interrogates how films around the Genovese case define bystander non-intervention as a problem exacerbated by urban living conditions. My interest lies in the role film making plays in how the crime was constructed as a case that could represent a broader set of issues about urban living and the fear-based social relations it is said to constitute. Film stood in as witness to the murder after-the-fact and for the unknown bystanders to the assault, mobilizing an imperative to both depict the bystanders and who they could have been, and to explain why and how witnesses to the assault---and other 'like' assaults---could experience the crime first-hand and fail to call for help from within their apartments. In particular, filmic re-enactments of the murder turned bystanders into a recognizable kind of urban subject who could be located in the spaces of urban high-rise apartment living.
Through these filmic witnessing characters and stand-ins, film did more than transmit or transfer meaning. It imagined, projected, modeled and explained the conditions and reasons for bystander inaction, focusing on the high-rise apartment as the physical embodiment, and dis-memberment, of collective non-response. In this way, films acted as a public and popular corollary to social scientific theories of alienated and seemingly uninvolved residents of the city. In compiling and analyzing a filmic archive on the Kitty Genovese murder, I ask how the visual culture around the Genovese case fills in the holes, absences and missing subjects at the heart of the Genovese murder bystander story by directing spectators’ attention onto the physical spaces of urban living in the city.
