June 26, 2007
Researcher Looks at the Entertainment Value of Murder in the US
Bloody murder has been a quintessentially American preoccupation since John Newcomen sailed in on the Mayflower and was whacked by a fellow colonist. A news release from The University of Buffalo.
"... Despite our overdeveloped lusts for the 'dark side,'" says cultural analyst and author David F. Schmid, Ph.D, "Americans seem to have no sense at all of how weird our engrossing interest in the macabre appears to those outside this country."
"The thrill and horror evoked by murder narratives bring us close to these 'others,' who hold us in their thrall because on the one hand, they are so like us, and on the other, so different.
Most societies, perhaps all, find murder and murderers of compelling interest," he says, "but Americans have taken this fascination to another level entirely."
Schmid says American crime literature and Americans' thirst for murder narratives harkens back to the mid-17th century, when scaffold sermons by the intellectual stars of Puritan New England began to be preached.
Other scholars agree, suggesting that the appetite for increasingly ghastly information about murder followed the decline of the Puritan ministry and its Calvinist ideals and their replacement by a consumer culture suffused with romantic, literary and legalistic ideals.
Schmid says, "Today's consumer culture offers a murder fix through a variety of media including tabloid newspapers, violent video games that permit us (through virtual technology) to "become" killers and through fictional films about psychopathic cannibals and other vicious murderers.
On television, cable stations such as "Court TV," shows such as "CSI" and "The Sopranos," as well as a seemingly endless stream of news programs and documentaries, all feature coverage of homicide. Like celebrity gossip programming, these shows often include the ever-popular invasion of privacy by camera.
"Our appetite apparently cannot be sated," Schmid says, "which raised the question for me of 'What's really going on here?'
"There are many reasons for this collective obsession today," he says, "but one reason is that -- let's face it, most of us -- in our own culture and others -- lead relatively boring, uneventful lives."
"As bizarre as it sounds, and although we may not want to admit it to ourselves," Schmid says, "many Americans engage routinely with murderous pop culture because it provides them with excitement in the midst of an otherwise mundane existence. Whether it be Hannibal Lector or Tony Soprano, our homicidal heroes are here to stay."
The British-born Schmid is an associate professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Buffalo where he teaches classes in popular culture and cultural studies. He is the author of "Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture" (2005) and has two books in progress: "The Scarlet Thread: A History of Homicide in American Popular Culture" and "Mean Streets and More: Space in Crime Fiction."
The Permanent Link to this page is: http://www.textually.org/tv/archives/2007/06/016413.htm
| Tweet |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
