A History of Violence

A few notes from an upcoming episode on mass shooters

Hi everyone. I have recently been working on finishing up the third and final Epstein episode, but have become temporarily distracted by an episode on mass shootings. I will finish it up this week, and then finish Epstein shortly after. In the meantime, I thought I would just post a few thoughts on one of the sub-topics - namely, the media - of the mass shooter episode. What I’m writing here is obviously only a part of the story (or maybe you don’t think it’s part of the story at all… I want to hear from you as well).

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In 1940, televisions were a rare novelty in American households. In 1950, when there were about 43 million households in the US, TV’s could be found in the living rooms of about 4 million of them (so a little less than 10%). In 1960, there were TVs in 45,750,000 American homes, which was about 87% of the total. By 1970, about 95% of American households had a television, which is 5% higher than the number of American households with telephones at the time, and about the same percentage as Americans who have a cell phone today. That is an extremely rapid adoption of technology that radically reordered the daily routine of the average family.

In 1950, American households that had TVs watched them for an average of about four-and-a-half hours a day. That sounds like a lot, and it is, but remember that only about 10% of homes had TVs at the time. In 1950, most programming was broadcast from New York City, and was heavily influenced by the theatrical traditions of that city. Over the course of the ‘50s decade when TV ownership went from 10% of American households to almost 90%, a growing portion of TV programming was being created in Los Angeles, on the production model pioneered by Hollywood. In place of the Broadway- & off-Broadway-influenced broadcasts popular in 1950, Americans were watching sitcoms, westerns, soap operas, cops and robbers, game shows and other variety shows, and by the end of the decade these dominated the medium.

It’s very difficult to discern the broad effects of a new technology in the early days of its adoption, and most of the attempts consist of a warning that TV (or video games, or the internet) ‘rots your brain’. Even today we don’t understand the true effects of the rise of television, and most people who try end up sounding like Marshall McLuhan or James Poulos, all but indecipherable to people who aren’t immersed in media studies and willing to follow their metaphors to the end. In the early days, TV certainly had its critics and its cassandras, but in general it was successfully marketed as a state-of-the-art technology that would bring people together, and provide regular people access to high culture previously available only to the wealthy.

There weren’t a lot of channels back then, so the prime time shows on the big networks drew enormous audiences - tens of millions of people sitting down at the same time, across the country, and having their moods sync up for a few hours at a time. The programmers could know that on Thursday night between 7:30 and 8:00, tens of millions of people are all going to be laughing at the same thing. But then on Friday, they’re all going to be sad, or afraid, or angry. In the movie Natural Born Killers, Mickey Knox, the mass murderer played by Woody Harrelson, tells a sensationalist TV host that the media is like the weather, except that it’s man-made weather, with transmitters sending out waves of emotion and subconscious messaging that can make it stormy today, and then sunny again tomorrow.

We don’t really have a good grip on what it means for tens of millions of people to sync up their focus and their moods each afternoon and evening. We know that at smaller scales - at sporting events or concerts or political rallies - the effect can be extremely powerful, sometimes dangerously powerful. Great performers and politicians are virtuosos at bringing people to that state, and then playing the crowd like an orchestra to get the precise effect they want. I doubt the television programmers were as competent or conscious as that, but the crowd they were playing to - when you take the major networks together - is comprised of almost the whole society.

In 1959, the TV broadcast industry took two hits that altered its course. One involved the revelation that TV quiz shows were being fixed to create artificially-heightened drama and tension, and to favor certain contestants. That probably seems like a silly scandal today, but at the time quiz shows were close to the most popular form of entertainment around. Networks had something like 16 different ones showing weekly in prime time slots, and tens of millions of people flocked every night to watch them. As rumors spread that the shows were fixed, Congress got involved and held hearings over the issue - which also seems pretty silly - and the whole thing blew wide open. The quiz show scandal made people skeptical of what the networks were really up to right at a time when there were growing protests over the level of violence and portrayal of criminality on display. The first programs to receive criticism were Westerns and cop dramas, but then most famously The Untouchables, which was a series about Eliot Ness and Al Capone and Prohibition-era gangster wars. The level of violence being displayed in these shows would not even receive a PG rating today - and I mean that literally - but people at the time were not desensitized to it, and many didn’t wish to be. The result of these two factors - the quiz show scandal and the protests against TV violence - was that TV lost its tenuous hold on its reputation as a space age communication device for enlightening and uplifting the American people. That reputation was replaced with the one television has more or less maintained to this day, that of a mass producer of cultural junk food at best, and poison at worst.

But the change of reputation didn’t affect the dominance of the medium. In 1960, American households were watching over 5 hours of TV per day, compared to four-and-a-half hours a decade earlier, only now we aren’t talking about the rare 10% of homes with televisions in 1950, but nearly 90%. By 1970, the 95% of American households with TVs would be watching them over six hours a day.

The main effect of the industry’s reputational loss was to liberate it from the World War 2-era boundaries that put a bottom limit on the degradation of its content. Throughout the 1960s, programming became more violent, more sexually explicit, and began to glorify crime and criminals much more directly. The seminal 1955 film Rebel Without A Cause actually ends with the rebel himself, played by James Dean, reconciling with his family and pulling back from his lifestyle of nihilistic rebellion, but almost nobody remembers that. Most people didn’t remember it already in the 1960s, because Dean was killed in a car accident shortly after the movie was released, and the only thing that stuck was the image of the cool, sexy, fast-living rebel without a cause. By the mid-60s, mass media and its audience were addicted to the image of the antihero: James Dean’s character in Rebel Without A Cause, with the real-life car crash ending in place of the redemption arc of the original film. There were a string of films starting in 1967 that played on just that theme.

The film industry, which had long kowtowed to the Catholic Legion of Decency, was more conservative and slower to adapt than television, and it tried to maintain the pose of creating art after television producers had accepted their role as purveyors of low culture. But by the late ‘60s, TV was eating the movie industry’s lunch, and Hollywood scrambled to catch up. 1967 saw the release of Cool Hand Luke, where Paul Newman plays a rebel without a cause who is arrested in the movie’s opening scene for cutting the heads off parking meters in the middle of the night. When the police show up, he starts laughing, and, to emphasize the point, the movie freeze-frames on the laugh to post the title ‘Cool Hand Luke’ on the screen. Well, Luke goes to prison, which is run by a stern warden and a walking boss with mirrored sunglasses the other prisoners call “the man with no eyes.” Luke refuses to conform to the existing order of the prison, either with regard to the rules laid down by authorities, or to the established pecking order among the prisoners themselves, and soon starts having problems with both. He’s not a gangster trying to rise to the top of the hierarchy, and he’s not disrespecting the authority of the prison officials out of some criminal minded point d’honneur, he’s just a square peg in a world full of round holes. His attitude brings him into conflict with the prison authorities and the leader of the inmates, and although both are brick walls he runs into, Luke gets up with a smile, dusts himself off, and regroups to have another go. This earns him the respect of the inmates, and he becomes a prison folk hero for his refusal to break and bow. But his confrontations with the prison authorities become more serious over the course of the film. He starts making escape attempts despite not having much time left on his sentence, and the warden warns him repeatedly of where things were headed if he didn’t accept and conform to the established order of the mini-society of the prison. But Luke can’t do that, and after a final escape attempt leads him to a church where he blames God for making him this way, he is shot in the neck by “the man with no eyes” and led away to a prison hospital where it’s implied he’ll be left to die. The movie ends with the inmates continuing to revere his memory.

1969 saw the release of Dennis Hopper’s movie Easy Rider, which expresses a similar theme in a different way. In that one, two easy going motorcyclists smuggle some cocaine from Mexico to LA, sell it off for a chunk of money, and then head east to get to New Orleans in time for Mardi Gras. On their way, a hippie hitchhiker takes them to a commune where they engage in some free love and get some acid for the road. Later during an overnight in jail they meet and befriend an alcoholic lawyer, who gets them out of jail and decides to go to New Orleans with them. The lawyer is a typical square, just an alcoholic square, and when they’re camping out the two bikers break down his resistance and get him to do some other drugs. One of the controversies about the movie was that Hopper had the actors take real drugs during the scenes where it happened. Well, earlier in the day before they stopped to camp, they’d been in a diner getting lunch. All the girls in the diner were giggly over them, but all the men were giving them dirty looks, and so the trio decides to bounce before any trouble starts. That night when they’re camping, a bunch of the men find them and beat them with clubs, killing the lawyer they’d picked up. The original two resolve to continue on to New Orleans and check out a brothel their dead buddy told them about, and they do, and with a couple of prostitutes they have a grand ol’ time on Mardi Gras. The next day, they’re riding their motorcycles out on a country road, and for no reason at all - they just don’t like ‘em - a couple good ol’ boys in a pickup truck decide to terrorize them. The pickup truck comes alongside, and the passenger fires a shotgun to scare them, and one of them wipes out on his motorcycle and is bloody and in bad shape. His friends stops to check him out and says he’ll go get help, but the truck wheels around to finish the job. Another shotgun blast, and this time the other biker’s motorcycle is seen flying off without a rider and bursting into flames. And that’s it.

A milestone in this development was the 1967 Bonnie & Clyde movie with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. The advertising tagline for the film was “They’re young… they’re in love… they kill people!” In the climactic ambush at the end, the director shot the scene where part of Clyde’s head gets blown off to call up the image of JFK’s murder captured in the Zapruder film. The problem people had with the film at the time was only partly to do with the new realism with which the violence was depicted. A lot of the criticism that came from the Legion of Decency and other groups focused more on the glorification of criminality and the glamorization of violence. One of the themes of the film was that violence was a legitimate means of becoming famous. And who can deny it? I don’t even have to tell you who Bonnie & Clyde are, because chances are most of you have some idea. Bonnie & Clyde, both in the film and, apparently, in real life, were very aware of, and quite obsessed with, their media image, and as the film goes on their continued crime spree seems to be driven by the need to provide more content to feed those images. Bonnie & Clyde aren’t exactly the good guys, but they are portrayed as rebels against a stodgy and inflexible system of which the cops are mere henchmen, rather than as the empty-headed nihilistic killers Bonnie & Clyde actually were.

In Cool Hand Luke and Easy Rider, the protagonists are less violent rebels than Bonnie & Clyde, but in a way they take the narrative one step further insofar as they’re explicitly treated as the good guys in the story, while the normie men policing the boundaries of acceptable behavior are explicitly treated as the brutal nihilists. A Clockwork Orange, which came out in 1971, is a little more complicated. The brutal violence of Alex and his friends is certainly glamorized, if not exactly glorified - it’s a little like the Oliver Stone film Natural Born Killers in that sense - but then when he’s captured and put through his MK Ultra-style aversion therapy, he is portrayed with some pathos as the victim of a machine-like system.

This emerging theme was also expressed well in the 1973 Terence Malick movie Badlands, which is loosely based on the 1958 Starkweather murder spree, and then fully captured in Natural Born Killers (also very loosely based on the Starkweather rampage), and the recent Jaoquin Phoenix film Joker - a theme of mindless violence as a form of genuine rebellion against unacceptable social conditions, of violence as a means of identity formation and of gaining social recognition that would otherwise be lacking.

Now I can hear a lot of people out there already. Cool Hand Luke? Easy Rider? A Clockwork Orange? Badlands? Those are great movies… and that’s what you’re calling shocking? And I agree, none of those movies shock me either, and I like them as much as the next child of my generation. But consider the widespread reports in 1973, when The Exorcist came out, of audience members fainting, vomiting, and having hysterical or nervous breakdowns right there in the theater, or in subsequent days. There were reports of heart attacks and miscarriages at movie theaters. A New York Times reporter wrote: “Filmgoers get not only the events on the screen, but also the spectacle of the less hardy among them succumbing to fainting spells and bouts of vomiting.” This was a common response adults who knew what they were getting into were having across the country.

The Exorcist is an interesting film. Awful, but interesting. I don’t think people watch it that much anymore, so for those who don’t know it’s about a little girl named Regan who gets possessed by a demon. The girl has recently moved to Washington, DC with her mother, who is a movie actress, and her dad is out of the picture - a point the film dramatizes by his failure to call her on her birthday. As the demon begins to afflict her, experts are brought in and one of the first things they do is prescribe her Ritalin. Of course amphetamines aren’t a known cure for demonic possession, so the situation escalates until this little girl turns into a disgusting monster, with her head spinning 360 degrees, projectile vomiting gore all over people, and at one point masturbating by jabbing a crucifix into herself. Which all sounds pretty horrific, except that today you could show The Exorcist to any 12-year-old who’s played the Silent Hill or Resident Evil video games, and they’d probably bored to tears.

Now maybe I’m just getting old, but I can’t help but think that there might be some consequences at the margins when you go from a population of adults who fled the theater in terror and disgust over The Exorcist, to a population where kids can watch it and be bored to sleep. Or of being raised by parents who think there’s nothing wrong with that. Of course, I’m not saying that every kid who watches The Hills Have Eyes or plays Grand Theft Auto is going to become violent or mentally ill, that’s not my point. 99.9% of people who take an SSRI drug aren’t going to become suicidal or homicidal, but there is a warning about those things on the side of the bottle because when you feed it to tens of millions of people that 0.1% starts to add up. And so you and I might have those experiences and take it in stride, but when the whole culture shifts in that direction… what then?