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“Law & Order,” Stanley Fish doesn’t like you !

Another one of Stanley Fish's superior sounding fatuous essays appeared in the NYT's Opinionator blog. It is Law & Order he is criticizing this time. And why?  For having a "law and order" agenda and for being unkind to the rich and the exceptional. Heck, the characters that Jack McCoy and his band of justice seekers go after are scoff-laws. Whether rich or poor, smart or dim, brilliantly succesful or abject failures, they are in the show because they broke the law. So, naturally Law & Order doesn't like them. Duh. For Stanley Fish to make the show into a leftist commentary against successful, brilliant people reflects Fish's own snit against the "heartless, by-the-law" liberal society. Amidst the smog of his own superiority, Fish fails to appreciate that the wonderful TV crime series was often against the unjust sense of entitlement of many wealthy  and successful criminals and not against wealth and success per se. And unlike many other shows, and as in real life, justice was not always served.

Jack-mccoy

‘Law & Order’ Probably Doesn’t Like You

By STANLEY FISH

Nothing personal. But now that Dick Wolf’s “Law & Order” has called it a day — or rather a 20-year run — it is time to notice what may be its most remarkable feature; not the brilliant formula that offers both the comfort of predictability and the promise of constant surprise (an episode almost never ends up where it seems to be going at the beginning), not the ability of the show to survive major cast changes without missing a beat, not the considerable accomplishment of making the arcane vocabulary of the law ( “fruit of the poisoned tree,” “asked and answered,” “prejudicial,” “allocute,” “goes to relevance”) as familiar to TV viewers as the jargon of sports, but the extraordinarily long list of professions, classes and category of persons it doesn’t like.

Begin with rich people. “Law & Order” hates rich people; they are arrogant, they are condescending, they consume conspicuously, and, worst of all, they believe they are above the law. In one episode, the head of a foundation is informed of a $400,000 problem. She retorts, “$400, 000 is less than I spend on sweatpants.” In another episode (“Venom”), a 64-year old woman who is bent on protecting her 27-year old husband says to one of the district attorneys: “You have no idea of what a woman in my position can do.” Actually they have a very good idea. Time and again wealthy people manipulate the system by getting well connected friends to intervene in cases or by hiring high-priced lawyers who know how to put up procedural roadblocks forever. … (blah, blah and more blah!)

…..From episode to episode “Law & Order” is engaged in a staying action against the forces that threaten its ideals, forces that live and have their being in the walks of life that afford the time and the resources to pursue nefarious, self-serving, agendas. The only way to be O.K. in Dick Wolf’s world is to have a job that is steady but doesn’t pay very much, to drive a five year old car you’re still paying off, to live in a small house with a large mortgage, to have an education that helps you get by but doesn’t give you any fancy ideas, to attend a house of worship that is the center of your social life, and to have almost no leisure time. Unless you fit that profile, “Law & Order” probably doesn’t like you.

Oh dear! Fish managed to be passive-aggressive and a noodge in the same breath!

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3 responses to ““Law & Order,” Stanley Fish doesn’t like you !”

  1. Joe

    I saw this earlier and was probably going to write the exact same post! Minus the cool new vocab. I’m sure Fish is probably a bright guy, but how he missed the fact that the characters on the show are on the show because they’re criminals (other than the cops and prosecutors) is beyond me.

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  2. Dean C. Rowan

    I’m always embarrassed when Fish takes sports or film (or TV) for his topic, as he often does. Same goes for Stanley Cavell on film. I get so much pleasure from Fish’s work–not quite so much, but some from Cavell’s–and then he tries to lighten things up by writing about some baseball player named Dennis Martinez. Boring. Same here, I’m afraid. I don’t think I’ve ever seen L&O, but I have seen a couple of the variants of CSI, and I gather their similar, kind of?
    In his defense, however, I’m not sure your insights, Joe and Ruchira, do much to clarify the point you view Fish as missing. The depiction of wealthy people as criminals doesn’t work to offset or explain their personal vileness. It compounds it. If Fish is right–and for one reason, I think he may not be–then Wolf’s crafting of stories about obnoxious wealthy crooks simply means Wolf want viewers to sympathize with him about the obnoxious crookedness of wealthy people. Furthermore, at least one of the characters Fish highlights doesn’t appear to be a criminal. The “Britney-Spears-type starlet” seems to be the victim. I can’t say for sure, because I don’t know how the episode turns.
    But here’s where I think Fish may be mistaken: for Fish, the search for meaning is always a search for intention. Thus, to find the meaning of L&O, either an individual episode or its lengthy run, one must discern somebody’s intention (even that of a corps of writers). A resort to a semiotic reading of the series, or to an interpretation based on discourse analysis, say, can produce a meaning, but it won’t be the meaning Fish seeks, which requires an author or authorial proxy whose intention in creating the work are the paramount guide to its meaning. (Think about the Constitution and its “authors.”) Fish picks Wolf. Since Wolf, according to Fish, chose to depict rich people as condescending, crude cheaters, then one of the meanings of L&O is that rich people are condescending, crude cheaters. Hence, what bothers Fish is the prescription for parsimony “to be O.K. in Dick Wolf’s world.” But why should the significance of L&O be tied so absolutely to terms for favorable inclusion in the producer’s “world”? Are television shows, movies, and plays to be judged by the degrees to which audience members empathize with the characters and, more so, feel a sense of belonging among them, simply because that’s what one of the authorial figures intended?

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  3. Joe

    For what it’s worth, I think Fish’s description of the criminals on L&O is inaccurate. I agree that most wealthy people appear as criminals and bad people, but that’s not the same thing as saying that most criminals on the show are wealthy. There are plenty of middle class and poor criminals depicted, too. I would say that all groups — again, excepting prosecutors and cops (for the most part) — are depicted badly and as criminals. Good wealthy people don’t get to appear on the show because they’re not criminals, and generally, good people don’t appear on the show for the same reason. (If he answered that, I’m just not remembering that part of the article, which I read a while ago.)

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