Violence in American Popular Culture [2 volumes] 1440832056, 9781440832055

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Violence in American Popular Culture

Violence in American Popular Culture Volume 1: American History and Violent Popular Culture David Schmid, Editor Foreword by Harold Schechter

Copyright © 2016 by ABC-CLIO, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Violence in American popular culture / David Schmid, editor ; foreword by Harold Schechter.   volumes cm   Includes index.   Contents: Volume 1. American History and Violent Popular Culture — Volume 2. Representations of Violence in Popular Cultural Genres.   ISBN 978-1-4408-3205-5 (print : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4408-3206-2 (e-book)  1.  Violence in popular culture—United States.  2.  Violence in mass media.  3.  Violence—United States.  4.  Mass media and culture—United States.  I.  Schmid, David (David Frank), editor.  P96.V52U675 2016  810.9'3552—dc23   2015025368 ISBN: 978-1-4408-3205-5 EISBN: 978-1-4408-3206-2 20 19 18 17 16  1 2 3 4 5 This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. Praeger An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments

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Foreword: American Popular Culture—There Will Be Blood Harold Schechter

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Introduction: Recovering American Violence David Schmid

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Volume 1: American History and Violent Popular Culture Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

The Vanishing Trace of Violence in Native American Literature and Film Tim Bryant The Politics of Pain: Representing the Violence of Slavery in American Popular Culture Erica L. Ball Natural Laws, Unnatural Violence, and the Psychophysical Experience of the Civil War Generation in America Kent A. McConnell World War II in American Popular Culture, 1945–Present Robert K. Chester American Dreams and Nightmares: Remembering the Civil Rights Movement Jennifer Louise Field

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27

45

79

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viContents

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Exploring Popular Cultural Narratives of Gender Violence Susan J. Tyburski Vigilant Citizens and Horrific Heroes: Perpetuating the Positive Portrayal of Vigilantes Erik Mortensen The Violent Gang in American Popular Culture: From Pirates and Cowboys to Bikers and Gangstas Chris Richardson

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Fear and Loathing in Suburbia: School Shootings David McWilliam

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Fatal Attraction: The Serial Killer in American Popular Culture Abby Bentham

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Chapter Eleven

Presidential Violence David Hoogland Noon

Chapter Twelve

September 11 and Beyond: The Influence of 9/11 on American Film and Television Katarina Gregersdotter

Chapter Thirteen

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The War on Terror in American Popular Culture Maryam Khalid

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243

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About the Editor and Contributors

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Index

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Acknowledgments

I have incurred many debts in working on this collection. The most important are as follows: to my wife and children, for their love and support; to the contributors, for their original and thought-provoking work; and to Rebecca Matheson at Praeger, easily the most patient and professional editor with whom I have ever worked.

Foreword: American Popular Culture—There Will Be Blood Harold Schechter

He got hold of my two ears and gave me a butt right in the front part of my head that almost blinded me, for the feller’s skull was as hard as the two sides of an iron pot. . . . So we wrassled and jerked and bit for a long time, till I got a chance at one of his eyes with my thum nail. Then I begun to put on the rail Kentucky twist, he knew it was all day with him, and he fell on his knees and begged for mercy. His eye stood out about half an inch, and I felt the bottom of the socket with the end of my thum. Crockett Almanac, 1839

In post–Civil War Boston, an adolescent sociopath named Jesse Harding Pomeroy—infamous as our country’s youngest serial killer—perpetrated a string of attacks on younger children that began with savage beatings and escalated into mutilation–murder. After his arrest in 1874, outraged observers struggled to account for his fiendish behavior. It didn’t take them long to find an answer. “There is plenty of evidence to show that the reading of dime novels constituted a good share of the boy’s mental nourishment,” declared the Boston Globe. It was Pomeroy’s fondness for such insidious fare as Bald-Eagle Bob, the Boy Buccaneer, Rattlesnake Ned’s Revenge, and Mohawk Nat: A Tale of the Great Northwest—“cheap blood-andthunder stories” replete with graphic depictions of frontier violence—that “first put it in his mind to torture boys.”1 Educators and social reformers were unanimous in their condemnation of these “vile publications.” “The dangers arising from such vicious literature cannot be overestimated by parents,” warned Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, America’s first female physician, while the eminent literature professor Brander Matthews railed against the

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“villainous sheets” that wrought such “dreadful damage” on the minds and morals of “the boys and girls of America.”2 Forty years after his diatribe, Professor Matthews made a startling confession. During his own boyhood, he himself had been an ardent fan of dime novels. Reminiscing about these disreputable diversions from the vantage point of old age, he now praised them for their “thrilling and innocuous record of innocent and imminent danger.”3 By then, of course, the dime novel had long been supplanted by new and presumably more pernicious varieties of pop entertainment that made the earlier, oncedemonized genre seem positively wholesome. One of these was the comic strip. Hard as it is to believe about the medium that produced Krazy Kat, Li’l Abner, and Pogo, the newspaper “funnies” were once widely condemned not just as lowbrow trash, but also as a leading cause of mental and moral degeneracy among the young. As early as 1909, magazines such as The Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping described the Sunday funnies as a “crime against the children of America,” hideously vulgar productions whose “crude art” and “perverted humor” would promote “lawlessness [and] debauched fantasy” in their juvenile readers. By the 1930s, moralists were lashed into even greater frenzies of disapproval by the popularity of action-packed adventure strips such as Flash Gordon and Dick Tracy. “Sadism, cannibalism, bestiality,” one Depression-era critic fulminated. “Torturing, killing, kidnapping. Raw melodrama, tales of crimes and criminals . . . All these, day after day, week after week, have become the mental food of American children. With such things are the comic strips that take up page upon page in the average American newspaper filled.”4 The story was the same with every new medium of popular entertainment. Barely twenty years after it was invented, the motion picture was already being attacked as “a perverter of youth and a breeder of crime.” Asked in 1918 “what proportion of disciplinary cases were attributable to movies,” one child-rearing expert replied without hesitation: “I should say they almost all were.”5 In the 1930s, moral watchdogs proclaimed that the children of America were being “rendered psychopathic” by popular radio programs such as Gang Busters, The Shadow, and Lights Out, which glorified “every form of crime known to man,” from kidnapping and extortion to assault and “sadistic abuse.”6 In 1947, the producer/director/actor John Houseman went after the “funny animal” cartoons that, in those pre-television days, were a vital part of the Saturday matinee movie-going experience for millions of American children: “The fantasies which our children greet with howls of joy run red with horrible savagery. Today the animated cartoon has become a bloody battlefield through which savage

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and remorseless creatures, with single-track minds, pursue one another, then rend, gouge, twist, tear, and mutilate each other with sadistic ferocity.”7 Perhaps the most rabid of all the anti-pop crusaders was Gershon Legman, whose 1949 diatribe Love and Death excoriated everything from Disney cartoons to radio soap operas, though he reserved his most withering scorn for the comic books. “If every American child reads from ten to a dozen comics monthly,” he calculated, “and if there is only one violent picture per page (and usually there are more), this represents a minimum supply, to every child old enough to look at pictures, of three hundred scenes of beating, shooting, strangling, torture and blood per month, or ten a day, if he reads each comic book only once.”8 Clearly there is a highly predictable pattern here. Every time a new type of mass entertainment comes along, high-minded reformers are quick to denounce it as a sign of social decay and a danger to the young. Examples are adduced that purportedly demonstrate a direct correlation between the commission of sensational crimes and the consumption of the latest form of violent make-believe. Eventually, with the advent of a new technology, another, more exciting, fast-paced, and action-packed pastime is created, and the onetime media menace comes to be looked at nostalgically as a harmless, old-fashioned form of play. Can there be any doubt that, say, twenty years from now, critics will be decrying gore-drenched, virtualreality first person shooters—games that allow players to actually feel the blood and brain matter exploding from the skulls of their targets—while pining for the good old days of benign diversions such as Grand Theft Auto and House of the Dead: Overkill? History has proved that for all the hysteria of the finger-wagging moralists, their dire predictions have never come true. The little readers of dime novels didn’t become a generation of outlaws. The boys who thrilled to Little Caesar and Public Enemy didn’t grow up to be tommy-gun–toting gangsters. The teenage fans of Halloween and Friday the 13th didn’t put on hockey masks and run out to dismember coeds with chainsaws. My own generation, raised on a relentless barrage of television gunplay (Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel, The Rifleman, et al.), turned out to be tie-dyed proponents of peace, love, and flower power. Misguided as they are about most things, however, the anti-pop crusaders make one valid point. American popular culture—as the essays in the present collection make abundantly clear—is and has always been rife with what its critics like to call “gratuitous violence.”9 That phrase is, in truth, a serious misnomer, for—far from being uncalled-for—graphic violence is one of the essential features of popular entertainment, whose roots lie in the orally transmitted folklore of pretechnological times. Writing

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about the “folkloristic” background of early cinema, the eminent art critic Erwin Panofsky argues that to evolve from a mere optical novelty into a medium of mass entertainment, the motion picture had to satisfy the public’s perennial taste not only for sentimentality, slapstick, and sex, but also, importantly, for sadistic spectacle—for our “primordial instinct for bloodshed and cruelty.”10 Other cultural critics, Leslie Fiedler prominent among them, have made the same argument: that one of the central functions of art—and especially popular art—is to serve as a safety valve for those “undying primal impulses which, however outmoded by civilization, need to somehow to be expressed,” to offer a socially acceptable way to gratify the “carnivore within” (as William James called the atavistic self that persists beneath the surface of our dutiful daily lives).11 Of all the scenes of violence that Huckleberry Finn witnesses in the narrative of his adventures, the most disturbing to me takes place when Huck, in the company of his new raftmates, the Duke and Dauphin, enters a little one-horse town in Arkansas and comes upon a bunch of young “loafers” mooching chaws of plug tobacco from each other while engaging in casual sadism. “There couldn’t anything . . . make them happy all over like a dog fight,” Huck reports, “unless it might be putting turpentine on a stray dog and setting fire to him, or tying a tin pail to his tail and seeing him run himself to death.”12 When I picture the contemporary counterparts of that shiftless young bunch, I see them not hanging around outdoors, chewing tobacco and torturing animals, but sprawled in someone’s living room, smoking pot while blasting away at aliens, zombies, and terrorists on a PlayStation or Xbox, engaging in precisely the process that pop entertainment exists to effect: the transformation of our innate endowment of aggression and cruelty (“our aboriginal capacity for murderous excitement,” to cite William James again) into play.

Notes 1. Schechter, Fiend, 97. 2.  Blackwell, 90; Michael Denning, 29–30. 3.  Denning, 9. 4.  Ryan, 301. 5. Brownlow. 6.  See Schechter, Savage, 127–130. 7.  Houseman, 120. 8.  Legman, 31–32. 9.  Anyone who believes that American popular culture was less violent in the past is encouraged to consult the 1839 Crockett Almanac, a passage from which forms the epigraph of this essay. See Lofaro.

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10. Panofsky. 11.  See Schechter, Savage, 10. 12.  Twain, 113.

Bibliography Blackwell, Elizabeth. Counsel to Parents on the Moral Education of their Children in Relation to Sex. London, UK: Hatchards, Piccadilly, 1879. Brownlow, Kevin. Behind the Mask of Innocence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Denning, Michael. Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture in America. New York: Verso, 1987. Houseman, John. “What Makes American Movies Tough?” Vogue ( January 15, 1947): 120. Legman, Gershon. Love and Death: A Study in Censorship. New York: Hacker Art Books, 1949. Lofaro, Michael A., ed. The Tall Tales of Davy Crockett: The Second Nashville Series of Crockett Almanacs 1839–1841. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987. Panofsky, Erwin. “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures.” In Awake in the Dark, ed. David Denby, 30–48. New York: Vintage Books, 1977. Ryan, Jack H. “Are the Comics Moral?” Forum 95 (1936): 301–304. Schechter, Harold. Fiend: The Shocking True Story of America’s Youngest Serial Killer. New York: Simon & Schuster/Pocket Books, 2000. Schechter, Harold. Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment. New York: St. Martin’s, 2005. Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: W. W. Norton, 1962.

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Introduction: Recovering American Violence David Schmid

In his 1923 book Studies in Classic American Literature, D. H. Lawrence famously states: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” If these words ever had the power to shock, that time is gone. As long ago as 1957, historian David Brion Davis was arguing in his landmark study, Homicide in American Fiction, 1798–1860, that “a generalized image of America in the eyes of foreign peoples from the eighteenth century to the present . . . would surely include . . . a phantasmagoria of violence, from the original Revolution and Indian wars to the sordid history of lynching; from the casual killings of the cowboy and bandit to the machine-gun murders of racketeers.”1 Today, nothing could be more banal than to assert that violence played a foundational role in American culture and continues to cast a long shadow right up to the present moment. If this was ever denied, now it has become so accepted as to have apparently lost any critical edge it might have once possessed. Related to the banality of its presence for the critic writing on violence in American culture today is its excessive visibility. Like the purloined letter in Edgar Allan Poe’s eponymous story, violence, perhaps especially in the American context, is hiding in plain sight in our popular culture, excessively visible everywhere we look—but, perhaps for that very reason, we are prevented from seeing what is most germane about it. In Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (2008), Slavoj Žižek suggests precisely this possibility when he advises us to resist the temptation to focus exclusively on visible forms of violence: “[W]e should learn to step back, to disentangle ourselves from the fascinating lure of this directly visible ‘subjective’ violence, violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent.”2

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This possibility assumes that we can agree on a definition of what actually constitutes violence, but that assumption proves to be highly questionable. Everyone seems to know what violence is, but when it comes to actually defining it, violence means a multitude of different things to different people. In the words of a recent study of American violence, “While at first glance the concept seems clear enough, the more closely we examine violence the more elusive it becomes.”3 To some, violence should be thought of primarily as a physical phenomenon, something that results in the “injury of other human beings.”4 To others, violence is not only physical but also systemic and should include such phenomena as class, gender, racial, and religious stratification crucial to the smooth running of forms of social organization across the globe. The job of the cultural analyst, according to this argument, is to resist the temptation to concentrate only on the visible forms of violence and instead to draw out and study the normally hidden forms of what Žižek calls “objective” violence.5 As complex and widespread as these understandings of violence are, however, they disclose an understanding of the term that is primarily physical. But there are those who argue that the most fundamental form of violence is much more abstract, a quality of language itself. As Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse put it, “writing is not so much about violence as a form of violence in its own right.”6 Against this tendency to present violence as most fundamentally (although not exclusively) a linguistic phenomenon, still others have insisted upon violence retaining a sense of irreducible materiality, or what the 2009 edition of the Socialist Register describes as “Violence Today: Actually-Existing Barbarism” (see Panitch and Leys). Contrary to those whose focus on the relationship between violence and representation is primarily philosophical or linguistic, those who emphasize the physicality of violence are often oriented toward political or public policy solutions (see, for example, Castelli and Jakobsen). The banality of American violence, its excessive visibility, and problems associated with its definition all constitute impediments to a productive analysis of violence, but these impediments are made worse because the dominant ways of discussing violence in the American public sphere today are themselves banal and in urgent need of reinvention. In this introduction, I will review some of the most common frames currently used to discuss violence and then go on to suggest some ways in which a humanities-centered perspective (a perspective exemplified by this collection of essays) organized around the concept of the American character may represent a productive direction for future analyses of violence.

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At the present time, violence is defined in many different ways in the contemporary American public sphere, but generally not as a humanistic issue. Instead, a number of other discourses currently dominate discussion of the subject. Foremost, violence is defined as a problem of law and order and legality. Whenever events such as school or workplace shootings take place, for example, the primary frame used to make sense of the event is that provided by law enforcement and members of the legal profession. Representatives of law enforcement are the ones to whom the media turn first to understand what is going on, and to the extent that media coverage of these events is interested in examining the larger ramifications of these events, those ramifications are usually constructed in ways heavily influenced by legal discourse, such as debates about gun ownership. In instances in which the perpetrators of violent acts survive the acts themselves, their subsequent passage through the legal system provides an ongoing narrative that helps “make sense” of the violent act to the public at large. Following close behind legal discourses comes the psychological, the other primary way that violence is framed and thus made legible in the contemporary American public sphere. Psychological analyses of those who commit violent acts tend to bear an uncanny similarity to each other, but not just because people who engage in such acts may share a similar psychological profile; rather, these similarities emerge because the events and their perpetrators are interpreted in broadly similar ways. Public debates about violence in the United States, in other words, are characterized most of all by conventions, largely unstated and unacknowledged, that render violent events legible and comprehensible by suturing them into larger narratives that allow certain interpretations of these events while simultaneously disallowing others. The most fundamental, and therefore the most unstated, of these conventions is that the violent subject is an aberrational exception. Despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary, public discourse about violence insists in amnesiac fashion that each new case is an aberration and that these individuals are simply that—individuals, having individualized psychological problems that have no larger social or cultural significance beyond that of these individuals’ immediate personal or familial circumstances. There are, of course, some exceptions to this rule. The actions of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who killed thirteen people before killing themselves at Columbine High School in 1999, were given a broader cultural and social significance (as David McWilliam’s essay demonstrates), but that significance only extended to larger groups that could in turn be rendered abject as aberrational outsiders, such as goth teenagers.

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How hegemonic discourses about violence combine to either deny or limit the extent to which that violence has broader social meanings suggests a possible way forward for a humanistic intervention in this field, but before delineating some of the details of that intervention, I want to explain why I think that intervention should proceed by means of the concept of the American character. It must be said that there can be few more unfashionable ideas within the academy today than the exceptionalism that seems to underpin the notion of the American character, and— surely—any useful discussion of violence must distance itself aggressively from precisely this kind of universalizing concept? Answering this question means acknowledging that academics are just about the only people who have stopped using the concept of the American character. Everyone else has blithely continued to talk about this idea as if it is perfectly acceptable to the vast majority of people, which of course it is. This is precisely why I think the concept of the American character has so much potential utility: Everyone uses it, and both intervening in and resignifying its dominant meanings is a perfectly reasonable and achievable goal. Not surprisingly, the American character was referred to very frequently in the weeks and months following 9/11. In a characteristic response, Michael Ledeen, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Tocqueville on American Character, argued in an essay published in the National Review that the “most amazing thing about America has always been ourselves, as we are rediscovering in our exemplary response to the disaster of September 11th” (Ledeen). After having explained Tocqueville’s continuing relevance for understanding the American character, Ledeen ends his article with the following rallying cry: “We must remember that those who wish for peace must prepare for war, remind ourselves that Americans are great warriors, and get ready to fight again. Because that’s the way it is” (Ledeen). Although I want to use the notion of the American character very differently from Ledeen, the 9/11 context has the virtue of highlighting the complex links between the American character on the one hand and violence and trauma on the other, and it is indeed the complexity of these links that I want to emphasize. For if the conventions that characterize mainstream debates about violence have one thing in common, it is their dedication to producing easy answers to the conundrum of violence. The purpose of these easy answers is to bring about a state of reassurance so beautifully summarized by the late lamented comedian Bill Hicks: “Go back to bed, America. Your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed, America. Your government is in control again.

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Here. Here’s American Gladiators. Watch this. Shut up. Go back to bed, America” (Hicks). That this reassurance may be achieved through popular cultural ritualized spectacles of violence is not the least of Hicks’s insights. What role do the humanities currently play in understanding the relationship between violence and the American character? The ideal of the humanities as an integral part of a healing response to violence is probably the most influential and familiar way in which the humanities currently make themselves visible in their relation to violence in the contemporary American public sphere. I do not want to denigrate this role for the humanities, but it should not be the only role available to the humanities. As important and valuable as healing is, we must consider the possibility that the aim of a humanistic approach to American violence might be to open up wounds as well as help close them. In this spirit, the essays in this collection are designed, among other things, to bring readers face to face with the central role violence has played in American culture, and how that violence has been refracted through our popular culture. Even though outlining the complexity of what Mark Seltzer has called our “wound culture,” which Seltzer describes as “the public fascination with torn and open bodies and torn and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound” can come at a price, I believe it is a price worth paying.7 The common thread in the essays gathered in these two volumes is their shared willingness to resist easy answers about violence, no matter what form those answers take, and instead to muddy the waters, to make things more difficult and unpleasant, to break with, rather than be consistent with, the prevailing wisdom on the relation between violence and Americanness. In doing so, they resist in particular the tendency to describe the violent subject as aberrational and exceptional. Instead, they use the concept of the American character against itself, against its exceptionalist triumphalism, by suggesting instead the profound Americanness of the violent subject. This brings me to D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, a book that contains extraordinary moments of insight that provide effective antidotes to the common idea that violence and the American character exist in a relationship of mutual exclusion. Perhaps the most powerful of those moments comes when Lawrence discusses the famous character invented by James Fenimore Cooper, Natty Bumppo: He says, “Hurt nothing unless you’re forced to.” Yet he gets his deepest thrill of gratification, perhaps, when he puts a bullet through the heart of a beautiful buck, as it stoops to drink from the lake. Or when he brings the

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invisible bird fluttering down in death, out of the high blue. “Hurt nothing unless you’re forced to.” And yet he lives by death, by killing the wild things of the air and earth. It’s not good enough. But you have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.8

It is in this passage that Lawrence reveals his true utility for us today. Against the dominant contention that violence and Americanness are opposites, let us contend instead that, in Lawrence’s words, “America is tense with latent violence and resistance”—and see what happens.9 Perhaps in this way we can produce an analysis of the role violence plays in American popular culture that is fully attentive to the complexity of the concept without getting bogged down in a definitional quagmire. Perhaps this approach will provide us with a convincing explanation of not only how, but also why, we study American violence without lapsing into either simpleminded or instrumental optimism on the one hand or debilitating fatalism on the other. And if you’re not entirely convinced that D. H. Lawrence is the best person to achieve these goals, let me conclude by suggesting noted historian and analyst of American violence Richard Slotkin. Over twenty years, Slotkin published a monumental trilogy of books devoted to the study of American violence. Collectively, Regeneration through Violence (1973), The Fatal Environment (1985), and Gunfighter Nation (1992) attempt to describe what is peculiarly American about the role that violence has played in our culture, and the trilogy does so though the overarching concept of the “myth of the frontier,” which Slotkin describes in Gunfighter Nation as “our oldest and most characteristic myth.”10 According to Slotkin, the frontier myth “relates the achievement of ‘progress’ to a particular form or scenario of violent action . . . the Myth represented the redemption of American spirit or fortune as something to be achieved by playing through a scenario of separation, temporary regression to a more primitive or ‘natural’ state, and regeneration through violence.”11 Slotkin thus enables us to see violence as something other than a negative force in American history; indeed, its “productivity” becomes the key to understanding successive stages of American self-fashioning, from colonial times to the present. Slotkin’s description of how mythological narratives work, and in particular the myth of “regeneration through violence,” is still applicable to a study of the discourses of violence that structure definitions of American community today. Slotkin himself realizes this much when in Gunfighter Nation he describes how George Bush Sr. treated the first war in Iraq as

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a ritual of regeneration through violence and in so doing asked Americans “to conceive our political and moral priorities in exclusively mythic terms—with primary reference to the conflicts, needs, desires, and roleplaying imperatives that are exhibited in mass-culture mythology, and with secondary or negligible reference to the realities of public and political life.”12 Not surprisingly, such an analysis is even more pertinent to a reading of the role that violence plays in a post-9/11 America. In her book Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, philosopher Judith Butler discusses how the attacks that took place on 9/11 brought home to Americans “our exposure to violence and our complicity in it . . . our vulnerability to loss and the task of mourning that follows” and hopes that we might be able to find “a basis for community in these conditions.”13 In practice, as Butler knows all too well, the American response to the knowledge that the national border is permeable and vulnerable was characterized overwhelmingly by anxiety and rage. In this sense, the post-9/11 period did indeed witness a renewal of community, but one motivated by fear and anger rather than vulnerability and openness. What myths influence and define this latest version of American community? This is a question answered persuasively by Susan Faludi in her 2007 book, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, and that the book’s headnote comes from Slotkin suggests her awareness of the relevance of his work.14 According to Faludi, the national response to 9/11 was for Americans to cocoon themselves within a dream world made up of past imaginings of an inviolable America, a dream world above all characterized by the return of the language of the frontier and the myth of the Wild West: “From deep within that dream world, our commander in chief issued remarks like ‘We’ll smoke him out’ and ‘Wanted: dead or alive’ . . . and our pundits proclaimed our nation’s ability to vanquish ‘barbarians’ in a faraway land they dubbed ‘Indian Country.’”15 Faludi’s language echoes in an uncanny way Slotkin’s contention that at the heart of the “regeneration of violence” concept “is the symbol of the ‘savage war,’ which was both a mythic trope and an operative category of military doctrine. The premise of ‘savage war’ is that ineluctable political and social differences—rooted in some combination of ‘blood’ and culture—make coexistence between primitive natives and civilized Europeans impossible on any basis other than that of subjugation.”16 As the essays by Maryam Khalid and Katarina Gregersdotter in this collection demonstrate, careful attention to the precise lineaments of the dream world we have been inhabiting since September 2001 not only demonstrates the continued salience of the work of Richard Slotkin but also, more important, suggests both the ethical imperative informing and the future direction of work on American violence.

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In closing, let me emphasize a point that this collection both demonstrates and asserts forcefully—that future work on American violence should be accompanied by a disciplined attention to and engagement with the popular. In far too many instances, analysts of violence have been unwilling to engage with popular culture other than to criticize or dismiss it. Once again, there are, of course, exceptions to this rule. A great deal of work has been devoted to a discussion of the films of Alfred Hitchcock, a director obviously obsessed with the role of violence in American life. With this said, however, a relatively small percentage of this work has taken seriously the possibility that Hitchcock’s work constitutes a sustained examination of the relation between violence and Americanness. And yet how can one avoid social readings of Hitchcock’s treatment of violence, especially when we consider the concluding scene of Hitchcock’s own personal favorite among his films, 1943’s Shadow of A Doubt? In this scene, we see the town of Santa Rosa honoring the life of Uncle Charlie, who we know to be a serial killer of rich widows but who the town thinks of as a fine, upstanding citizen. What is fascinating about the closing scene of Shadow of a Doubt is that it features an exchange between two characters that contains a radically inadequate explanation of what was wrong with Uncle Charlie. Thus I’d like to think of this scene as a challenge to all of us to develop better explanations of not only popular culture itself, but also the popularity of violent popular culture, and to do so not only for products that can easily be rehabilitated as high culture, such as Hitchcock’s oeuvre, but also for products that one cannot reclaim because they insist on remaining in the gutter, such as the homicidal revenge fantasies of Mickey Spillane, hated by both critics and the other writers of hard-boiled fiction discussed in Rachel Franks’s essay but so popular that at one time seven of the top fifteen best-selling books ever published had been written by Spillane. What this means is that we should not be afraid to get our hands dirty and should be willing to engage with popular culture at the level of the video game entitled “Super Columbine Massacre” or with murderabilia websites such as “Murderauction” and “Supernaught.” The costs of neglecting such cultural products could be high. In overlooking the popular, we risk ceding this ground to the right’s language of moral condemnation. In doing so, we lose the opportunity to, among other things, point out the difference in degree rather than kind between the violent video games the right loves to hate and one of the most popular video games on the planet, “America’s Army,” invented and developed by none other than the U.S. Army. The right clearly realizes that popular culture is, among other things, a terrain upon which political meanings are won or lost. In our continuing efforts to rescue discussions of American violence from banality, we should do no less.

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Notes  1. Davis, vii–viii.  2. Žižek, 1.   3.  Alvarez and Bachman, 6.   4.  Waldrep and Bellesiles, 3.   5.  According to Žižek, the highly visible, or “subjective,” forms of violence are seen as a “perturbation of the ‘normal,’ peaceful state of things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to this ‘normal’ state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent” (2).   6.  Armstrong and Tennenhouse, 2. Some critics have responded to the problems raised by the relation between violence and language by creating new terms reflecting this relation more accurately and vividly. Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero, for example, has claimed that as “violence spreads and assumes unheard-of forms, it becomes difficult to name in contemporary language” (2). With this difficulty in mind, Cavarero suggests the introduction of the neologism “horrorism.” This new term, Cavarero argues, both emphasizes “the peculiarly repugnant character of so many scenes of contemporary violence,” while also helping “us see that a certain model of horror is indispensable for understanding our present” (29).  7. Seltzer, 1.  8. Lawrence, 72–73.  9. Ibid., 60. 10.  Slotkin, 10. 11.  Ibid., 11–12, emphasis in original. 12.  Ibid., 652, emphasis in original. 13.  Butler, 19. 14.  The headnote, taken from Regeneration through Violence, reads as follows: “A people unaware of its myths is likely to continue living by them, though the world around that people may change and demand changes in their psychology, their world view, their ethics, and their institutions.” 15. Faludi, 5–6. 16. Slotkin, 12.

Bibliography Alvarez, Alex, and Ronet Bachman. Violence: The Enduring Problem. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008. Armstrong, Nancy, and Leonard Tennenhouse. “Introduction: Representing Violence, or, ‘How the West was won.’” In The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, 1–26. London, UK/New York: Routledge, 1989. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London, UK/ New York: Verso, 2004.

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Castelli, Elizabeth A., and Janet R. Jakobsen, eds. Interventions: Activists and Academics Respond to Violence. Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Cavarero, Adriana. Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Davis, David Brion. Homicide in American Fiction, 1798–1860. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1957. Faludi, Susan. The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America. New York: Picador, 2007. Hicks, Bill. “Go Back to Bed, America.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR3Kw ODDzeY. Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1951/1923. Ledeen, Michael. “Rediscovering American Character.” www.nationalreview.com/ article/225635/rediscovering-american-character-michael-ledeen. Panitch, Leo, and Colin Leys, eds. Violence Today: Actually-Existing Barbarism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Purloined Letter” (1844). The Murders in the Rue Morgue: The Dupin Tales. Edited and with an introduction by Matthew Pearl, 83–100. New York: The Modern Library, 2006. Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. New York: Routledge, 1998. Slotkin, Richard. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization 1800–1890. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994/1985. Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Harper Perennial, 1992. Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1973. Waldrep, Christopher, and Michael Bellesiles, eds. Documenting American Violence: A Sourcebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Žižek, Slavoj. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London, UK: Profile Books, 2008.

CHAPTER ONE

The Vanishing Trace of Violence in Native American Literature and Film Tim Bryant

Contemporary literature and films about North American Indians bear a trace of violence that is always vanishing. The cause of its vanishing is the rift between Native cultures and the Anglo-American overculture. Violence falls into the cracks between cultures, histories, and social needs to imagine culture and history in diverse ways. It leaves a trace as it falls in the remnants of diversely remembered, diversely imagined histories and futures. That this tendency should occur in Native American literature today should not surprise anyone: it is a cycle initiated during the many moments of “first contact” in the fifteenth century and beyond. Moreover, the ways that American Indian authors imagine violence in their works reflect a troubled relationship between cultures and between historical influence and aesthetic purpose. Between these points lies the question of audience, and the many desires and anxieties attached to an indigenous literature whose primary audience, by the numbers alone, is not indigenous. These factors are all reasons why violence, as one of the most direct expressions of the unequal nature of these relationships, is so often represented in trace—indirectly, even elliptically—in contemporary literature. Violence remains present as a form of truth about these cultural histories, but it appears only in trace forms as a means of accommodating other imaginary relationships among populations and their interrelated histories. The trace is always vanishing because it functions best when doing so: It is a reminder of historical realities, a past of brutalism, but a reminder

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with purposeful omissions that make room for a more accommodating imaginary to take place in cultural exchange—one of its chief functions. Philosopher Jacques Derrida explains the significance of trace in terms of the dualistic nature of language, which signifies the presence of one idea or figure as the absence of another.1 Irresolvable opposites motivate the project of literary deconstruction under the assumption that the subordinate term in each opposition, the one repressed, will always return in some form as an influential absence legible to those who pay attention. This is the sense of trace that I invoke: a sign of violence that is always absented in texts and thus always present as a threatening return of all that has been suppressed, or oppressed, in the awareness granted by history, psychology, and interpretation of forms. This linguistic theory of presence as absence applies to cultural representations as well. A second sense of “vanishing trace” is an intentional pun on the concept of “vanishing race,” a characterization of North American Indians popular in nineteenth-century publications whose authors wished to imagine the essential, and essentially different, attributes of indigenous peoples that was consistent with widespread Anglo-American desires to displace those populations from their lands and from the unfettered expansion of white populations and cultures. The conversion of race to trace is an attempt to invoke this notion of essential identity and at the same time to question its validity by introducing, through the renaming, the possibility for an alternate, resistant meaning. The pairing of “vanishing race” is a contradiction that serves the cultural function of disappearance through representation of a people from without. The “vanishing trace” identifies this function as violence itself: It is a violation of a people by naming them as beyond representation, having attributed an inarticulate quality as an internal attribute of the people themselves, rather than an intentional consequence of historical contact, geographical dislocation, and linguistic erasure. Native American literature and film continues to bear this vanishing trace of violence in representing the operation of violence indirectly in various ways. In the following pages, I examine the work of some of the most popular and bestselling authors—including N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch, Louise Erdrich, Gerald Vizenor, and Sherman Alexie—to explore the dynamics of trace violence in literature and film. The American literary marketplace has afforded a place for literary representations of indigenous peoples dispossessed by institutional, intentional violence— such as preemptive warfare, coercive removal, and broken treaties—but also, supposedly repossessed of self-representation since the “Native American Renaissance” movement inaugurated by N. Scott Momaday’s

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Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for House Made of Dawn in 1969. Select novels from these authors capture moments in which historical violence is referenced within discrete constraints upon what is and is not said about the history, especially the responsible parties and the affected populations. The literary representation grapples with the presence and absence of trace violence, as a product of historical relations and as productive of continuing cultural relationships. Contemporary North American Indian literature represents historical violence indirectly and elliptically for several reasons: (1) not to offend Anglo-American readers, who constitute the majority of the readership and market for these publications; (2) not to restrict indigenous political and aesthetic identities to these materially reductive determinants; (3) to appeal to an Anglo-American constituency including secondary-level and higher education students who may read these texts as cross-cultural instruction; and (4) to appeal to indigenous readers who may read these texts as means of cultural communication. Concrete references to historical violence remain as milestones in the history of Anglo-Indian relations. The Trail of Tears and the Massacre at Wounded Knee are two of the most dramatically remembered moments of the official policy and practice of Indian removal of the nineteenth century. Such events are referenced in the literature but not always revealed fully within the narrative. Instead, references to violence are muted or personalized in ways that may be more acceptable, or less accusatory, to an Anglo-American audience. These two broad tendencies, to avoid offense and appeal to cultural sensibilities, establish the general framework in which historical violence is portrayed in contemporary North American Indian literature. It is a literature preoccupied with the legacies of violence but also intent on negotiating representations of such legacies across two audiences, whose interests and sensitivities influence how the history may be told. Native American literary scholar Alan R. Velie identifies the Christian and native sources of the mythic prototypes that underwrite much contemporary Native American fiction. Most usefully, Velie identifies Abel, the protagonist of Momaday’s foundational work, as the “prototypic victim” made in the mold of his Biblical namesake.2 The narrative tendencies toward framing native status as primarily victimized and toward internalizing Christian worldviews to express that status run the risk, as Velie notes, of oversimplifying native perspectives and potentials. I wish to explore how contemporary Native American literature articulates relationships to violence, including the consequences of narrative conventions, and critical resistance to such violations.

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Imaginary depictions of the indigenous peoples of North America originate from a long history of Anglo-American desires and anxieties about intercultural contact. Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia exemplifies the tendency to frame native populations as, in themselves, trace elements within the landscape. Progressing from measurements of rivers, sea-ports, mountains, and cascades to estimates of population, military force, marine force, and aborigines, his opening “queries” imagine a natural continuum between geographical and cultural landscapes. Within that imagined relationship, Jefferson characterizes indigenous populations as desirably present for the purposes of trade, but inevitably vanishing due in no small part to their own choices. Briefly acknowledging potential obstacles to trade, Jefferson writes, “Add to all this, that in case of a war with our neighbors the Anglo-Americans or the Indians, the route to NewYork becomes a frontier through almost its whole length, and all commerce through it ceases from that moment.”3 War, and those who wage it against the United States, are pragmatically reduced to an effect of trade blockage for Jefferson’s readership. His history thus reduces the violence of war and the presence of Native Americans to their effects upon the ventures of Anglo-American acquisition. Those are the traces by which they are to be known in the Anglo-American worldview promoted here. Evacuating an entire history of forced displacement, Jefferson asserts, “That the lands of this country were taken from them by conquest, is not so general a truth as is supposed. . . . The upper country we know has been acquired altogether by purchases made in the most unexceptional form.”4 After these rationalizations for U.S. expansionism, Jefferson rounds out this reduction of native peoples into a trace presence by bemoaning the diminishment of their populations: “It is to be lamented then, very much to be lamented, that we have suffered so many of the Indian tribes already to extinguish, without our having previously collected and deposited in the records of literature, the general rudiments at least of the languages they spoke.”5 It is the lost knowledge about Native cultures and the violence that loss commits against Anglo-American literature, rather than the loss of the living people and the violence committed against them, that lies at the heart of this lament. Jefferson’s Notes effectively models the operation of intentional erasure that Native American populations would come to suffer from U.S. expansionism and its whitewashed history. Where Jefferson grants the indigenous people trace presence in his record, the violence by which they are removed from their land remains unidentified in origin and portrayed as inevitable in its ends. The tendency to represent native cultures through trace violence permeates contemporary film as well. Film critic Edward Buscombe notes

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in his study Injuns! Native Americans in the Movies that the majority of Hollywood films depict Indians in relationship to whites, rarely granting them independent representation that is not, through plot or context, somehow dependent upon a storyline motivated by Anglo-American characters. For example, Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990) is credited with breaking away from stereotypical conventions of the Hollywood western. Despite the sympathetic view Costner promotes, the film nevertheless retains the perspective of a white man, John Dunbar, making use of Indian culture for his own ends. The film reinforces selective, stereotypical demonizations of indigenous peoples by having “good” Indians and “bad” Indians, which is visible in the framing of the battle scene, in which the Pawnee, who have been characterized as bloodthirsty murderers, make a full-out attack on Dunbar’s group.6 Furthermore, the Sioux help Dunbar recover himself when his own culture fails him. In doing so, Indian culture is put to the service of a narrative common in the AngloAmerican overculture: that of recuperating oneself by being re-created in faraway lands, by traveling to another place before returning to the work within one’s own culture. As the film ends, Dunbar and his wife (like him, an Anglo-American assimilated into the Sioux) separate from the Sioux to forge ahead on their own. Dunbar becomes a witness to the “vanishing race” as he loses sight of the Sioux just as we, the viewers, do. Mainstream American films continue to allay potential anxieties about native presence by making them present onscreen in unthreatening ways, as a presence whose meaning audiences can understand as a part of their own cultural landscape. Among these imagined notions of the people, many stereotypes exist. One of the most prevalent images of Native Americans is that of a transcendent race of spiritual environmentalists, an image popularized and co-opted by the New Age movement. Other popular notions of Indians from history include that of the “noble savage,” a figure credited with an inner nobility of spirit, as well as an essentially uncivilized, or un-civilizable, character; the “peaceful warrior” whose military expertise is translated into spiritually pacifistic contexts; and the “virginal maiden,” an archetype of innocent femininity, very loosely based on the historical figure of Pocahontas, who is imagined, by Disney among others, as eagerly awaiting the arrival of white explorers. My argument addresses the social functions of such stereotypes within the context of personal and structural violence in order to highlight the strategies by which popular Native American authors have attempted to compensate for a history of misrepresentation. Through literary ritualism, minimalism, and ironism, the traces of violence achieve new representation opposed to long histories of erasure and forgetfulness.

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Ritualism Two prime examples of this tendency to reference history elliptically exist in N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977). Both texts feature a protagonist—Abel and Tayo respectively—traumatized by experiences as a U.S. soldier during World War II and unable to reincorporate into his native community. Traumas more exclusively suffered by American Indians haunt these texts, which often serve as lessons in Native American history for student readers, but the most explicit traumas remain U.S.–national in scope. The appropriate response to suffering traumatic violence is framed by these authors as a return to communal traditions, especially spiritual and religious ones. Both novels perform a dual service in communicating several divergent aspects of native spirituality as the means by which to reclaim one’s identity after cross-cultural trauma. The traces of violence, which inform characters’ susceptibilities toward alcoholism, depression, and abuse, may find answer in these texts when characters reconnect to lingering traces of traditional native culture. The promise that these works imply is that tradition persists more strongly than the traumas inflicted by past histories of personal/specific and cultural/broad violence. Momaday’s House Made of Dawn has been credited with inspiring the proliferation of native literature in nonnative communities, as well as the rise of departments of Native American studies at many college campuses. “The Native American Renaissance” movement, which accompanied Momaday’s influence, has been dismissed for its perceived implication that native literature was not vibrantly alive before it achieved popularity in bookstore chains, college campuses, and prize committees. This objection draws attention to the question of audience: For whom is native literature written? The novel tells a multigenerational, pan-Indian saga of native struggle for cultural and spiritual survival against the dispiriting traumas of war, plague, the reservation system, cultural disinheritance, and forced separation from traditional, communal ways of living. The protagonist Abel suffers vague visions of wartime atrocities that also seem to flash back to historical atrocities committed upon the North American Indian peoples by Anglo-European colonizers. When army doctors do nothing to help him, he resorts to alcohol to drown out his troubling visions. Abel’s inebriation thus serves as a metaphorical justification for Momaday to blur perceived lines of historical and contemporary influence. This intentional blurring permits the author to speak across audiences. Momaday’s vision is based in ritualized reintegration of the individual back

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into community and, perhaps, of the nonnative reader to an understanding of a community not necessarily his or her own. It is a vision rooted in a variety of Native American spiritual traditions, but also holding out the possibility of sympathetic understanding to outsiders. Momaday accomplishes this appeal to dual audiences by making Abel feel for a time like an outsider to his own community. The generalization to outsider status shared by both protagonist and reader grants native character and reader, as well as nonnative reader, the ability to seek access to native cultures on equal footing. Momaday’s novel enhances its ability to foster both native and nonnative identification with native cultural practices by embracing a pan-Indian perspective in its plotting and characterization. The work of healing and reintegration operates diversely in the novel through the rituals of four native holy men from different peoples: first, Abel’s grandfather Francisco, The Longhair of the Walatowa/Jemez Pueblo; second, Tosamah, a Kiowa holy man referred to as the “Priest of the Sun,” whose sermons are inspired by peyote-induced visions; third, a Navajo man named Benally, who is Abel’s “Night Chanter,” cleansing him of illness; and fourth, Abel himself, who, once purified, becomes a holy “Dawn Runner” to complete the cycle of healing and integration. The cyclic nature of this process is hinted at in the opening and closing words of the book. The book opens and closes, respectively, with the Jemez words of story-starting and story-ending: “Qtsedaba” and “Dypaloh.” Ritual pervades the entire book, with no clear ending or beginning. As such, the novel perceives violence ritualistically, as something already undergoing transformative healing, rather than a trauma whose history must be isolated for study. Abel’s lack of vision is demonstrated most vividly in his participation in a ritual horse-race during the Feast of Santiago, or St. James. The object of the race is for a rider to gallop full speed before leaning down to grasp up a rooster staked to the earth; the winner is to use the recovered rooster ritualistically to ward off his rivals. According to the original tale, the royal knight Santiago, disguised as a peasant, rides into a Mexican village, where he receives the hospitality of a poor couple, who kill their only rooster to feed him and give him their only bed. Later, upon winning the hand of the king’s daughter in a royal competition, Santiago receives warning of a plot against his life when a live rooster emerges from his mouth. After Santiago uses the rooster’s spur to defeat his enemies, he sacrifices his horse and the rooster, which transform into entire herds of horses and a flourishing of plants and animals. The peasants’ original act of hospitality thus signifies a respect for and continuation of original creation, but this kind of respectful relationship is hidden from Abel. In the race, Abel loses to an albino

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rider, who violently throttles him with the rooster. Abel will later kill this same rider in a drunken rage, mistaking the man’s embrace for an attack. Momaday intentionally leaves the true nature of the albino ambiguous. Thus both the identities of Native character and the identification of their actions as either violent or nonviolent remain as trace for the reader to interpret more fully. This act of violence, ambiguous in its perpetrator’s drunken intent and committed upon an ambiguously threatening target, sends Abel to prison, after which he will resume his journey of healing far from home. The story resumes seven years later in Los Angeles, where Abel meets Rev. J. B. B. Tosamah, “The Priest of the Sun.” Invoking Kiowa rituals of the Sun Dance, Tai-me, and peyote consumption, Tosamah preaches a mixed message of hope and despair, infused with references to not only native religious traditions, but also Christianity and U.S. popular culture. At this point, Abel has become an urban Indian, geographically and culturally cut off from his people by his inability to see the significance of their ways. The mixed content and confusing form of Tosamah’s preaching reflects this in-between state where Abel finds himself a fish out of water, a metaphor Momaday uses throughout the novel.7 Working out of the Los Angeles Holiness Pan-Indian Rescue Mission, Tosamah preaches two sermons: “The Gospel According to John” and “The Way to Rainy Mountain.” In the first sermon, the proud but beaten minister takes up the theme of the divine Word, quoting from the Gospel of John (“In the beginning was the Word”) and from the Hebrew creation story (“And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep”).8 The second sermon recounts the mythic origin of the Kiowa people. These dual origins for his preaching focus on the formlessness of the world at its moment of origin and the potential to find meaningful form in words.9 Tosamah’s tone alternates between cynicism and reverence and from colloquialism to high lyricism as he criticizes Christian evangelists for corrupting language while also warning his congregation not to become victims, but rather to embrace the healing power of the Word. The third holy man Abel encounters is Ben Benally, who befriends Abel in L.A. and performs for him the Night Chant, a sacred rite of the Navajo between one healer and one patient intended to cure spiritual and physical disease. Momaday refers to religious rituals based on song and word as “chantways”: Of these rituals, the Night Chant is considered one of the most sacred. From Benally’s ritual Abel attains the capacity to assume his own role as healer. Upon his return home, Abel performs two important actions: helping his grandfather die and taking up his own position as a holy man in the

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very same room where Abel was born and his mother and brother died. Written in the present tense, like much of Momaday’s novel, this section, upon a second reading, is shown to be running throughout the book. Abel has been healed, and is healing others, before the book started. And, by the same token, he is in need of healing before and after the book has started. Where Momaday’s work promises recuperation from violent acts through the acceptance of cross-cultural identification, making sacred native cultural practices present to other cultures, Leslie Marmon Silko draws out more explicit lines of violence defining the terms of that exchange. As a member of the Laguna Pueblo who also possesses AngloAmerican and Mexican ancestry, Silko grew up at the literal and cultural edges of the reservation, excluded from community in some ways. In an interview with Alan Velie, she claimed, “I am of mixed-breed ancestry, but what I know is Laguna.”10 Silko acknowledges the possibilities of feeling oneself a cultural outsider, even from one’s own people, in the story of Tayo. The violence he suffers is explicitly a product of U.S. warfare not only abroad, but also within its borders via nuclear testing and mining for radioactive materials on native lands. Like Abel before him, Tayo is a native veteran of World War II returned home suffering from shellshock, alcoholism, and a loss of conscious connection to his people. Structurally, Silko’s novel is told in a nonlinear fashion, lacking chapters, to simulate the cyclical nature of ceremony. Interwoven with Tayo’s plot are fragments from Laguna tales about Fly, Corn Woman, and other mythic figures. In its form and structure, the book attempts to resemble the oral nature of ceremonial storytelling. Unlike Momaday, whose use of sacred ceremonies in his fiction received commendation, Silko found herself defending the inclusion of native myth in her work when Paula Gunn Allen criticized her for divulging tribal secrets in Ceremony.11 The nonnative audience of Silko’s and other American Indian authors’ work raises the question again: Who is this written for? In her choice of literary form and content, Silko seems to write for all audiences, because all audiences are, in her view, interconnected. Silko’s Ceremony progresses through Tayo’s encounters with a series of mythical and mundane, holy and unholy, men and women: Corn Woman, Tayo’s auntie, his grandmother, the holy man Ku’oosh, Betonie, Night Swan, Yellow Woman, and the evil witches. Making the perpetrators of evil a generalized force, as opposed to the personal figures of good, Silko obscures the question of responsibility for historical violence. Instead she focuses on the personal effects of trauma on Tayo. The emphasis on personal character may satisfy the expected conventions of the novel as a

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literary genre, but it also permits the novelist to delay her identification of specific causes or agents of violence. Silko maintains a wide audience by intentionally not casting blame upon Anglo-American histories of violence and U.S. governmental policies supporting that violence. Instead, the reader is left to deduce the sources of antagonism through their effects on the native protagonist. In the opening passages of the book, Tayo’s inner monologue shows him to feel like white smoke, invisible, already dead, and without a place in the world.12 Others suffer, too, from the start: His friend Harley is also an alcoholic, with his own illness, and fellow veteran Emo’s sense of frustration fuels a maniacal bloodlust.13 More broadly, the community to which he wishes to return, and that might heal him, no longer exists, because its other members have been just as affected as Tayo. The influence of Christianity on native communities arises subtly in both Momaday and Silko. Where Momaday uses the naive character of Fr. Olguin to make oblique references to the possibility of Christianity disinheriting native populations from traditional religion, Silko is more direct in her characterization of Tayo’s auntie as a hypocritical agent of a Christian faith embraced at the expense of native spirituality. In his youth, Auntie dismissed Tayo as an unworthy half-breed because of his white father. During wartime, she had hoped that the army would withhold Indian medicine from her nephew.14 When he returns, she preaches family reconciliation and Christian forgiveness but continues to distance herself from him.15 These are personalized figures of un-Christian faith, acting both as references to the history of Christian collusion with Indian oppression and as underdeveloped traces of that history. These points of moral and cultural purity are ones both Silko and Momaday complicate. Fr. Olguin may be naive and half-blind, but even Francisco participates in Christian worship with little evidence in the story of any especially ill effects. Silko champions the principle of hybridity over simple binary divisions between cultures and ethnicities. Characters share connections across such conventional divides. In one of his flashbacks to the war, Tayo recalls seeing the face of his Uncle Josiah on the face of a dead Japanese soldier.16 Violence becomes the site of identification, one traumatized soldier with one dead soldier. Hybrid identity, as it is the ability to identify across divisions and cross borders, both real and imagined, is central to Silko’s goal of speaking to multiple audiences. The presence of trace violence, rather than a fuller historical account that may appear oppositional, permits her to address such audiences together. Shared responsibility for cultural disintegration is a topic Silko addresses directly throughout the novel. She gives evidence in the historical practices

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of the U.S. government to promote alcoholism, reeducate native children, deprive populations of native religions, and turn locations of spiritual significance into tourist destinations.17 Despite these injustices, Silko leaves open the possibility of sympathy across populations by asserting that “whites were not always alien” but have become so due to the work of what she calls the witches, evil forces pretending to be human, taking on others’ skins to deceive and lay blame.18 The vague witchery is responsible for the problems of the reservation, as well as new acts of violence, including murder. Murder occurs at an abandoned uranium mine, which refers to one of the most destructive legacies of modern warfare that Silko identifies as an evil threatening all cultures: the nuclear bomb and its fallout. References in the novel to a uranium mine on the reservation allude to four mines operated on American Indian reservations in the twentieth century: (1) mining started during the Gold Rush (1870s) in the Black Hills and on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota; (2) the Midnite Mine (1955–1981) on the Spokane Indian Reservation, Washington; (3) the Cyprus Tohono Mine on Tohono O’odham land near Tucson, Arizona; and (4) mining on the Colorado Plateau/ Navajo Indian Reservation (1947–1959) near Gallup, New Mexico. Silko alludes to Gallup, and to the catastrophic spill of radioactive waste that occurred there in 1979, to link Tayo’s illness with the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.19 This same uranium mine is where Emo murders Harley.20 Like Tayo, who stays his hand from exacting revenge upon Emo, Silko refrains from pursuing these kinds of particular acts of violence and their perpetrators as the cause of violence and, thus, the site of redress. Instead, her narrative evokes a general condition of violence, shared among cultures, due to the category of “witchery” that is both supernatural (witchcraft) and manmade (nuclear technology). This hesitance to identify violence in anything other than generalized, categorical terms introduces an intentional omission of the long, material history of violence between AngloAmerican and Native American populations. The trace of violence that is permitted visibility Silko recuperates by invoking the equally generalized categories of traditional spiritualism and storytelling. The generalized violence of nuclear warfare and its toxic byproducts on reservation lands join together in Silko’s novel to offer a story relatable to both native and nonnative audiences without necessarily rallying readers to action beyond that acknowledgment. The terms of war and land remain too broad in her narrative for adequate response beyond it. The grounds for action seem, also, to vanish. Government coercion, ethnic hybridity, and nuclear radiation appear to form the grounds of meaningful progress in Michael Apted’s Hollywood blockbuster Thunderheart (1992), starring

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Val Kilmer and Graham Greene. Kilmer plays FBI agent Ray Levoi, who is Sioux on his father’s side but whose stereotypical 1980s yuppie lifestyle bears no visible connection to his native heritage. He is so far assimilated into the culture of U.S. nationalism that members of the nation, resentful of federal intrusion, refer to him with derision as “the Washington Redskin.” Like Costner, Apted leaves possibilities for audience sympathy; in the film, Levoi is not just a tool for the FBI to cynically have a so-called insider perspective on the case. On the contrary, Levoi’s initially suspect character is redeemed when Grandpa Sam Reaches, a revered holy man, tells him and the people that Levoi comes from strong blood—that of a man named Thunderheart, who died at the Wounded Knee Massacre. Apted’s film attempts to capture a truer character of American Indians by portraying native characters in less stereotypical and less idealized ways. Apted’s film walks the fine line between stereotype and authentic representation, a goal that may be impossible to achieve but to which the film nevertheless clings. Foreshadowed by the plotline of Maggie, a teacher and activist investigating toxins in the local river, the film’s ending has Kilmer and Greene discover uranium mining on the reservation, conducted illegally and covertly, as the motive for the murder central to the film’s plot. This ending clearly references illegal, governmentally run mining on Indian reservations. But Apted’s film also references his other work released the same year, a documentary narrated by Robert Redford about Leonard Peltier, serving two life sentences in federal prison for the murder of two FBI agents at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The most immediate sources for Apted’s Hollywood blockbuster are the federal murder investigation and his documentary about it, but many of those connections remain as subtext, only traceable by viewers who are already aware of the history.21 Despite the material history of Peltier’s trial and continuing incarceration, as well as the long history of the reservation system, in which Pine Ridge is one of the most impoverished, Apted concludes Thunderheart with an optimistic conclusion. A corrupt FBI agent, his GOON squad cronies, and their native collaborators are defeated by an armed native force who come to Levoi’s aid and confront his pursuers as an armed band in the final chase scene. Levoi departs from the reservation redeemed, having solved the murder and retraced his native roots. Like Momaday and Silko, Apted offers a ritualism of healing and storytelling that displaces historical traces of violence—caused by government corruption, forced assimilation, and destructive warfare, among many other forces—to offer mixed audiences more positive and comforting signs of native cultures’ survival, always in trace form.

The Vanishing Trace of Violence in Native American Literature and Film

Minimalism Other authors like James Welch and Louise Erdrich offer less transcendent outlooks on the possibility of returning to traditional religiosity as a viable means of recovering or withdrawing from cross-cultural contact and its attendant varieties of violence. These authors suppress the violence of history so that, in the style of minimalist writers, it infuses character and story with the effects of understatement, implication, and allusion. By no means lacking depictions of direct and immediate violence of the most visceral kind, Welch and Erdrich’s works nevertheless communicate forms of systemic, historical, and pervasive violence and violation that define the entire world, one in which each individual act of explicitly recognizable violence is only a manifestation of an entire culture, or cross-cultural relation, steeped in wrongful violation. Whereas the ritualistic approach of Momaday and Silko proffers commercial writing as also sacred, including the casual reader in ceremonial storytelling practices, the workings of minimalist native authors deny such aesthetic presumptions. Instead, these works confront the immensity of historical wrongdoings and ongoing inequities with the acknowledgment that literary writing cannot represent all those complexities, nor find remedy for them in traditional religious and narrative practices. Instead, writers like Welch and Erdrich return to moments of mystery, more often mundane than transcendent. These moments, when characters implicitly feel but do not fully comprehend the impact of violence on their lives, define native subjectivity as implicated in structural cycles of violence. The nameless protagonist of Welch’s Winter in the Blood (1974) is obsessed with the loss of his truck and gun, stolen by his Creek girlfriend when she broke up with him and left town. She, too, figures as a sign of loss, one far greater than any of these lost possessions can figure in part or as a whole. The absence of a name for Welch’s protagonist is joined with the absence of a native presence in the land. On the first page, the “Earthboy place” that defines the native population also lacks a name: “[N]o one by that name (or any other) had lived in it for twenty years.”22 Throughout the novel Welch performs a double motion to capture this sense of dislocated, barely traceable native identity. These references link Welch’s protagonist to the author’s own biography and serve to particularize this narrative as one of specific native populations, thus diverging from the pan-Indian ethos of other authors, especially Momaday, who includes fragments of story and ritual from several native populations in House Made of Dawn. The animosity expressed toward the Creek people in Welch’s work also particularizes this story as one in which traces of

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violence persist across native populations based on historical rivalries and competition for resources. When he attempts to recover what he has lost by tracing his girlfriend’s whereabouts to the nearby town Havre, Welch’s protagonist utterly fails. Having discovered her in a bar, he is soon knocked unconscious by his romantic rival and wakes up on the street outside. He is given a second chance at connection by the similarly impoverished and lost Marlene, who wakes him up and accompanies him to a motel. Yet, when they attempt to engage in sex, the romance of the second chance is undercut when he violently strikes her during sex and she eventually accepts it as a part of their lovemaking.23 Bereft of his seemingly heroic quest to recover himself, the protagonist has internalized the structural violence and become its agent. He soon leaves town, returning to the mundane cycle of his life without hopes of escaping his life as a cycle of violence. Culturally and economically bereft, Welch’s protagonist is stuck in present moments of oppression without resort to future-based hopes of redemption or past-based recollections of tradition to rationalize, recuperate, or otherwise reframe the situation of living within a history of violence. Where ritualism may displace violence by offering the ability to trace out other options, past- or future-oriented, the minimalism of Welch’s work offers no such trajectory. The cultural resources displaced include hope in such storytelling devices, whose force is implicitly less powerful than the all-pervasive, material effect of historical deprivations. In her introduction to Welch’s novel, Louise Erdrich credits the author with writing “about Indians without once getting pious, uplifting, or making you feel sorry for The Plight.”24 These are the very same tendencies, as reactions against and solutions for violation of Native peoples, that Momaday and Silko embrace. Welch’s minimalist writing, which rejects such promises of moral uplift, has been far less popular, as Erdrich notes, than the ritualists’ more open sharing of native religious ritualism in mass-market novels. Erdrich, on the other hand, has enjoyed enduring popularity while writing in a similar vein as Welch. Her style, however, retains the appealing possibility of supernatural intervention—not for the purpose of healing past wounds, but for inflicting upon the oppressor unforgiving violence in exchange for violence already suffered by native populations. Remaining true to the ethos of a minimalist literary voice, Erdrich adds to that voice the possibility of vengeful retribution as the trace by which one might know the legacy of violence. Louise Erdrich’s novel Tracks (1988) is characterized by internalized cycles of violence that both define and destroy intermixed communities of Anglo and Native Americans. The protagonist Fleur Pillager is believed by

The Vanishing Trace of Violence in Native American Literature and Film

local communities to possess supernatural powers of destruction by her marriage to a water monster.25 Her destructive threat is also traced to the wrongs her people suffered when Anglo-Americans misappropriated their lands. The action of the novel takes place from 1912 to 1924, and Erdrich alludes to the geographical displacement and dispossession associated with the infamous Trail of Tears in the 1830s, arguing by implication that the cycle of violent displacement and cultural disruption continues. Sexualized violence is central to Erdrich’s storyline, as it is in Welch’s. In one of the book’s most important scenes, Fleur wins money in a poker game with a group of men, her coworkers for the past several months, after which the drunken men ambush and rape her. Soon thereafter, a tornado hits and wipes out the entire town, with the townspeople explaining the storm as a manifestation of Fleur’s malevolent power.26 The townspeople’s process of storytelling is premised on the ability to trace one violent act for another without ever questioning whether they have played a role in fostering such a cycle of violence. Instead, Fleur is invested with the dual roles of victim and avenger by the social illusion of magical powers to make pervasive violence more acceptable. Pauline is the character Erdrich uses to figure a particular variety of bad faith that romanticizes natives as mystically charged others whose inherent capacities for vengeful supernaturalism counterbalance wrongs done by whites. Pauline literally witnesses the men’s ambushing of Fleur and remains silent. She confesses to the reader that as Fleur’s constant shadow, enthralled by the older woman’s beauty and self-possession, she might have been able to prevent the attack.27 This confessional mode is another form of violation, a standpoint at a distance from violence, a privileged perspective whose possessor will never be the target of such violence. Pauline’s apotheosis comes not when she makes amends for her indifferent witness, but when she becomes a nun who aspires to sainthood by self-denial and bodily mortification. Pauline figures the church and its interactions with native populations, historically to their cultural dissolution and conversion to Christianity. She is named well, after St. Paul, the chief evangelist of the early Church. Aligned with the hypocritical Christians found in Momaday and Silko, Pauline embraces religion as a solipsistic form of ritualized self-effacement bordering on narcissism that blinds her to others’ suffering. Pauline figures, as well, as the violation of mundane existence as her constant quest for sanctity only leads her to deprive herself of any ability to help others. When Fleur is suffering a difficult childbirth, Pauline stands helpless even though she is the only person present who could possibly help.28 At the nunnery, her Mother Superior repeatedly corrects Pauline

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for performing mortification rituals upon her body, but she does not cede to that authority. In a sympathetic light, it is clear that Pauline suffers from cycles of violence while at the same time acting as their agent. Erdrich grants Pauline narrative voice second only to Fleur and the trickster figure Nanapush, but the author invests in Pauline’s singular character the wrongdoings of many historical patterns of violation. Pauline is overrepresentative of wrongs inflicted by geographical and cultural dispossession, enacted as land cessations, compulsory Christianization, and the institution of the reservation system. Nanapush characterizes Pauline as “the only trace of those who died and scattered” among a collective of animal skinners; she is to him “an unknown mixture of ingredients” due to her mixed heritage and now absent family.29 Within her self-negating figure rests a massive concentration of violent history for which she cannot rightly be adequately punished without making her a mere scapegoat. Erdrich’s minimalistic technique thus connects traces of violence to one character but refuses to dispel the complex historical causes of that violence by tracing out a clear judgment or resolution. The HBO film Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (2007) adopts a similar tone of minimalism in its depiction of the Sioux’s displacement onto the U.S. reservation system under the authority of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The film’s opening depicts Custer’s defeat at the Battle of Little Bighorn, which motivates a discussion in the next scene during which President Grant plans for the removal of the Sioux from their land. The film adapts this history and minimizes its complexity by focusing on the lives of three historical figures: Senator Henry Dawes, Chief Sitting Bull, and Dr. Charles Eastman (played by, respectively, Aidan Quinn, August Schellenberg, and Adam Beech). Dawes, author of the eponymous act of 1887, was overwhelmingly responsible for the logistics of Indian removal to the reservation system, but the film dramatizes his efforts as well-intentioned and, ultimately, frustrated by Native Americans who fail to understand that his plans are in their best interest. Sitting Bull is dramatized as an overbearing leader who submits, too late, to U.S. authority after his people suffer harsh winters during their Canadian exile, to spend his last days chafing not only at his people’s degradation, but also at his own lost status. Eastman, a Sioux assimilated into Anglo-American culture by his father’s choice, struggles to serve the people, many of whom prefer alcohol over medical care, while also speaking for them among white communities, who almost without exception prefer not to know about their problems. The one exception to Eastman’s frustrated quest to straddle both cultures is his romantic subplot with Elaine Goodale (played by Anna Paquin), whom he eventually marries. Although marginalized as a minor character in the

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film’s plotting, Goodale serves an essential function of minimizing the traces of violence in the film and displacing them with a melodrama of empathy, which she bears for Charles in particular and for his people in general, and of long-suffering as she witnesses the atrocities committed against the Sioux while powerless to help them. Eastman expresses this functional powerlessness, of his status as a functionary working under the BIA system, when he reminds Elaine of her past comment, made in despair, that he and she were on the reservation not to heal and improve lives, but merely to be witnesses. The audience is thus permitted the minimal role of witness as well, watching another iteration of Indians becoming a vanishing race. In the worldview of minimalism, those who possess notions of resistance exist only as the trace of violence upon which the inevitable history writes itself.

Ironism A third option within Native American literature and film is to adopt and adapt native practices of signification ironically to comment on the untenable nature of representing the vanishing trace of violence. Gerald Vizenor and Sherman Alexie are notable for their use of ironic humor, often characterized as postmodern in their use of narrative structure self-consciously to comment on narrative’s political function to represent, or more often misrepresent, native peoples. Whereas ritualists attempt to convert the grounds of story to the sacred and minimalists wish to infuse their fictions with the weight of understated trauma, ironists play with the forms of story to invoke and subvert conventional narratives of American Indian history and culture in contact with Anglo-American encroachment. Irony here serves as a means not primarily of distancing past narratives of victimization, but of re-engaging concepts of Native identity to subvert stereotypes and make room for new representations. In The Trickster of Liberty, Gerald Vizenor adopts a constant stance of ironic engagement in telling various trickster tales of a family of modern-day tricksters, members of the Browne family whose wild exploits resist simplistic notions of native victimization under irresistible cycles of oppression. The patriarch Luster Browne sets the family’s trickster resistance in motion by appointing himself the “Baron of Patronia,” a tract of land that is “a wild crescent on the White Earth Reservation northeast of Bad Medicine Lake” in Minnesota.30 The Baron’s progeny populate picaresque adventures across loosely related exploits in their eponymous chapters, given such provocative, mixed-case titles as “CHINA and the WARRIOR CLOWN” and “The LAST LECTURE at the EDGE.” The novel’s final chapter, in which Vizenor cites various sources in pseudo-academic format, is

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entitled “Epilogue: LOSS LEADERS from the UNIVERSITIES,” a playful jab at the academic study of Native American issues. Vizenor writes that past academic work attempting to “harness the trickster in the best tribal narratives and to discover the code of comic behavior, hindered imagination,” and so repeated acts of cultural misunderstanding and erasure.31 Across these variegated chapters, the Baron’s children succeed at various unusual tasks, including smuggling goods, performing verbal striptease, and solving a case of embezzlement. Perhaps the most successful of all, Ginseng Browne, in the penultimate chapter, manages to negotiate exclusive rights to a lucrative, multinational, multi-organizational commercial exchange of ginseng root with the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong traders, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.32 To consolidate the terms of cultural and commercial exchange, her assistant See See Arachnidan accepts an invitation from the China National Medicines and Health Products Import and Export Corporation to become a Chinese citizen. Vizenor characterizes the tricksters’ bargain as “agreements between traders, spies, agents, shamans, sister, heirs, and a wild genetics engineer” that cause a federal judge to dismiss charges against the Indians, who have thus prospered by their ingenious manipulation of others’ systems of governance.33 Vizenor meticulously and ridiculously evacuates narratives of victimization from the text, instead investing native characters with mischievously unlimited agency in negotiating new terms of relation—cultural, economic, and political—in contradiction to historical violations of cultural and political sovereignty whose losses were facilitated by the U.S. legal system’s disrespect of treaties and other agreements. These intentional acts of effectual deviance align with the concept of “survivance,” a portmanteau of survival and endurance that encapsulates the ability of indigenous peoples to surpass mere survival in the face of such oppression and to achieve intentional self-creation through cultural forms, traditional and revisionary. Gerald Vizenor defines the term as “an active sense of presence, the continuance of Native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name . . . renunciations of dominance, tragedy and victimry.” 34 The members of the Browne family lay claim to land rightfully theirs, after and beyond unethical displacement, and persist not by means of spiritual or subdued resistance but by surprisingly creative, even commercialized adaptations to their new terrain. Though Vizenor’s fiction may be postmodern in its wordplay and world-play, it is also highly effective at dismissing romantic notions of Indians as transcendent and timeless, essentially separated from the rest of the world. Again, the vanishing race appears as subtext. Notions of Native American timelessness may indirectly align with ritualists’ promotion of returning to traditional

The Vanishing Trace of Violence in Native American Literature and Film

ways, but Vizenor introduces the possibility that adaptation to and in the present moment may build the groundwork for traditional endurance in a more material sense. Likewise, ironic engagement offers an alternative to the minimalist internalization of oppressive violence by offering the hope of action that violently breaks from such cyclical oppression through an expansive imagination. Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer (1996) conjures references to multiple acts of historical violence but places the responsibilities of generic and historical violence in the hands of both American Indian and AngloAmerican characters and audiences. Alexie’s novel assumes the murder mystery form, in which procedural investigations concern both criminal and cultural justice, as in Tony Hillerman’s Chee series.35 Alexie’s novel is a postmodern narrative in which criminal guilt exceeds the immediate, generically defined situation of a single death to encompass cultural patterns of violence whose sources are complex and multiple. Alexie’s story is about guilt itself: Indians are both suspect as exotic, inscrutable killers and the victims of killers who continue historical practices leading to cultural deprivation. Situating his story within a white-dominated urban center, Alexie highlights the many contradictions faced by American Indian culture within and against the overculture of the United States. Alexie’s story is not about a warrior returning home from war, but about an urban Indian named John, who may be an innocent victim of ethnic profiling or, in fact, a serial killer operating in downtown Seattle. Alexie is of the Cœur d’Alène people and Spokane tribe, upon whose land the Midnite Mine operated. But Alexie places responsibility for wrongdoing not only with the U.S. government, but also with anyone who seeks justice by conjuring false images of native identity. The main text begins with an origin story. It is the story of John Smith’s birth at a reservation clinic and his adoption by a white couple living in a suburb outside of Seattle. The chapter is written in the style of magical realism or surrealistic fantasy. After John is born, a military helicopter, right out of a Hollywood movie about Viet Nam, dramatically swoops down to the clinic to steal John away from his ailing mother and deliver him directly to the home of his adoptive, white parents. The only trace of his mother that remains to John Smith is a photograph, which he reflects on at the close of the first chapter. He does not even bear her name, but instead a combination of the most generic Anglo first and last names that also mirrors the name of an early European explorer, who was himself responsible for the deaths and eventual displacement of the Powhatan confederation of Virginia. In name and in reality, John Smith is what he has lost.36 Even his memories are inauthentic, borrowing the tropes of a Hollywood war

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movie in place of the true story of his birth. In this way, Alexie critiques the Hollywood glamorization of warfare and of native identity as a means of erasing more authentic identity and memory. Alexie complicates the story further by attributing to John emotional problems that may be due either to an inherited imbalance that is psychological in nature or to a lack of inheritance, that is, his displacement from cultural traditions that could have offered him a stable identity. John never knows what particular tribe he comes from, only that he is American Indian and not white, as he is reminded by his well-meaning but ill-equipped parents, Daniel and Olivia Smith.37 Alexie never resolves the nature of John’s condition because it is such a universal one, caused by a host of historical and social factors responsible for countless displacements and destabilizations of native communities by both well-meaning and notso-well-meaning whites. John is an everyman character caught between both white and native communities, commenting on the nature of both through their uneasy contact. As a consequence of John’s ambiguous condition, the reader is invited to suspect him to be the nameless Indian Killer whose first-person narration runs throughout the novel. After two chapters about John’s birth and his emotional instability, the third chapter brings us the voice of this killer, contemplating what white men to kill next.38 In the same chapter, John suffers several indignities that could fuel such a desire and thus give the reader cause to suspect him of being the killer. Together, the well-meaning and mean-spirited members of the native community and the white community misunderstand John, casting stereotypes upon him that could turn him into a killer. With the provocative title of Indian Killer, Alexie’s novel invites the reader to participate in this generic typecasting. The novel offers another invitation, which is to see John better than his fellow characters do, to see him potentially better than he is able to see himself—that is, to see him not as an Indian who is a sociopathic killer but rather, beyond the murder mystery genre, to look to the factors that cause others, including his own people, to kill him in spirit—to kill the more whole human being that he has the potential to become. In contrast to House Made of Dawn and Ceremony, the primary rituals in Alexie’s novel are, at first glance, the ritualized slayings of a serial killer, who preys equally upon whites, Indians, and the homeless. The book’s opening holds out the promise that John will encounter healing characters, like Marie, who might save him from becoming the fearful killer or from becoming prey to other kinds of stereotyping and cultural death. Alexie uses the cast of characters to comment on a variety of sources that cause such a man as John to exist as trace between communities and unaided by either in

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his desire to create a meaningful life. Alexie’s characters are not traditional healers, but ordinary people living in Seattle from native and nonnative communities: Marie Polatkin, an idealistic college student who feeds the homeless and rails in anger against historical injustices against American Indians; her brother Reggie, a college dropout who wants revenge for his expulsion from school; Dr. Clarence Mather, a naive college professor of American Indian literature whose choice of texts include authors who pretended to be Indians in order to sell books; Jack Wilson, the blond-haired, blue-eyed author of the Aristotle Little Hawk Indian mystery series; and Truck Schultz, a popular talk radio personality who titillates his listeners with images of a savage Indian killer to generate higher ratings. It is through the series of encounters, and missed encounters, with these characters that John’s problems are revealed to be a consequence not only of historical inheritance and disinheritance, but also of ongoing problems in the present day. Alexie makes direct reference to Momaday’s and Silko’s novels by observing that the Indians living in Seattle are familiar with the stories of Abel and Tayo as types of Indians, but no one recognizes John Smith.39 He is a type unacknowledged in a society filled with stereotypes. Deprived of any form of network of healers who could help him reclaim his identity, John Smith defines his struggle, ultimately, as one of self-definition. Alexie refers to traditional rituals sparingly throughout the book, often using elements of traditional rituals at crime scenes to show the killer leaving clues, true or false, of his Indian-ness. The closing chapters of the novel, however, build upon an image of ritualized resistance, first introduced in the prologue. In her final interview with the police, Marie proclaims, “Indians are dancing now, and I don’t think they’re going to stop.” The novel ends with the chapter entitled “A Creation Story,” in which Alexie’s masked killer expresses his intent to dance forever.40 The text’s multiple repetitions of this image of a death dance makes its performance an act of resistance for the community, not just one individual, to take on. The threat of destructive re-creation, without a simple answer about who is responsible, resonates throughout Vizenor’s and Alexie’s ironic texts. The image of the masked dancer originates from the many tools of tradition, storytelling, and self-representation. To wield these tools responsibly is the rightful cultural work of contemporary American Indian literature. Contemporary Native American cinema, by natives and for natives, holds the promise of fulfilling that responsibility of accurate cultural representation. Chris Eyre’s Smoke Signals, based on stories and characters by Alexie, tells the story of two young men struggling with the legacy of reservation living, which has robbed them of their childhoods and, more

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specifically, their fathers. The majority of the film traces the journey of Victor Joseph and Thomas Builds-the-Fire to recover Victor’s father Arnold in both body and spirit, through a road trip filled with flashbacks to their troubled lives on the reservation. As does Alexie’s writing in general, the film uses very self-conscious humor to critique stereotypical portrayals of Native peoples. The film evokes several moments of historical violence obliquely. Arnold Joseph accidentally sets fire to the home of Thomas Builds-the-Fire, killing his parents, while drunkenly staggering with a lit firework during a Fourth of July celebration. One of the film’s final images is of Suzie Song lighting Arnold’s trailer on fire as an exaggerated version of a smudging ritual of purification. Although the film’s ending addresses these recurring acts of violence as a question of forgiveness, of fathers specifically, it only briefly addresses the underlying causes of Arnold’s alcoholism, depression, and violence. The ironic framing of the film suggests, rather, that traces of systematic violence can never be fully resolved, or fully erased, by a society that refuses to address their underlying historical and material causes.

Conclusion The past five decades have exhibited a wider cultural interest in and engagement with Native American culture and literature, but the literary representations that have resulted demonstrate troubling patterns in how historical and contemporary violence are and at the same time are not represented. Some narratives allude to more acceptable, patriotic forms of violence such as warfare, rather than acts specifically against American Indian populations. Some minimize past violence by resolving it in a return to past spiritual practices. Others acknowledge historical violence as a continuing pattern, without the conventional promise of positive closure. Others still offer humor as the only sane response in the face of the insurmountable realities of past, present, and future suffering resulting from inexorable violence that shapes these texts without fully manifesting itself in these works. Whereas the indigenous peoples of North America were once collectively referred to as a “vanishing race” in the country, in the literature, violence leaves a vanishing trace of influence, ever in effect but without a clearly authorized mode of representation. One of the problems with representing indigenous cultures through literary and film narration rests with the form itself. Narrative shows often without telling, without full exposition: Literature imagines states of being and film literally projects external visions that, in turn, create inner visions of our imaginations. But those images and what they suggest may lead

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viewers astray from truthful representation when not tempered by other sources of knowledge. The dominance of mass media today makes this reference to other points of information especially important. A careful regard for history, a healthy skepticism about the pleasures of sympathy, and a good sense of humor are all invaluable tools in taking in what knowledge mass media can give us about Native peoples without being taken in by false images. Those images hold the two-sided power, for good or ill, to determine the people we are willing to recognize and the people we are willing to become.

Notes  1. Derrida, 3.   2.  Velie (2013), 59–60.  3. Jefferson, 16.  4. Ibid., 96.  5. Ibid., 101.  6. During the ensuing battle, Dunbar demonstrates his superior ability, instructing the Indians how to fight effectively and ethically. He corrects one elder not to use his rifle to bludgeon the enemy with its butt, but to shoot it. When his band converges on the last remaining member of the invading force, Dunbar is stunned into silence when the Sioux warriors not only shoot their enemy many times, but also close on the downed man and pummel him. Dunbar may have “gone Native” in establishing sympathetic relations, but he retains a sense of superior Anglo-American civility, even in battle, as well as judgment over those who lack such restraint.  7. Momaday, 79.  8. Ibid.   9.  In his second sermon, “The Way to Rainy Mountain,” Tosamah addresses the very point of suffering “confusion” to the eye, similar to the condition Abel suffers. For the Kiowa, the enormity of Rainy Mountain against a desolate plain represents an ability of “far seeing” ritualistically through mundane distractions to a transcendent, spiritual reality. 10.  Velie (1982), 106. 11.  Allen, 380. 12.  Silko, 13, 14, 25, 30. 13.  Ibid., 18–21, 56–57. 14.  Ibid., 31. 15.  Ibid., 60–64. 16.  Silko, 7. 17.  Ibid., 36, 87, 94, 107. 18.  Ibid., 114–115, 121. 19.  Ibid., 227–228.

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20.  Ibid., 233. 21. The basic elements of Thunderheart, two FBI agents’ investigation of multiple unsolved murders on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, adapt and rearrange the factual evidence reviewed in Incident at Oglala, with many scenes in the film containing visual or verbal cues to the documentary. The film alludes to the American Indian Movement (AIM) in naming the Native resistance group Aboriginal Rights Movement (ARM). Likewise, the GOONS (Guardians of the Oglala Nation), an armed militia led by Jack Milton (played by Fred Ward) to suppress the Sioux who resist federal interference, are a direct reference to the real-life “GOON Squads,” who served a similar purpose for Dick Wilson during his U.S.-supported chairmanship at Pine Ridge from 1972 to 1976. 22.  Welch, 1. 23.  Ibid., 98–99. 24.  Ibid., xiii. 25.  Erdrich, 11. 26.  Ibid., 24–28. 27. Ibid. 28.  Ibid., 60. 29.  Ibid., 38. 30.  Vizenor, 5. 31.  Ibid., xiv. 32.  Ibid., 153. 33.  Ibid., 154. 34. Vizenor, Manifest Manners, vii. 35.  Navajo tribal police officer Jim Chee is the title character in Tony Hillerman’s bestselling murder mystery series, which includes People of Darkness (1980), The Dark Wind (1982), The Ghostway (1984), Skinwalkers (1986), A Thief of Time (1988), Talking God (1989), Coyote Waits (1990), Sacred Clowns (1993), The Fallen Man (1996), The First Eagle (1998), Hunting Badger (1999), The Wailing Wind (2002), The Sinister Pig (2003), Skeleton Man (2004), and The Shape Shifter (2006). 36.  Indian Killer begins with an epigraph from Alexie’s teacher and mentor, Alex Kuo, who writes, “We are what/we have lost.” 37.  Alexie, 31–32. 38.  Ibid., 28. 39.  Ibid., 219. 40.  Ibid., 418.

Bibliography Alexie, Sherman. Indian Killer. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996. Allen, Paula Gunn. “Special Problems in Teaching Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony.” American Indian Quarterly 23, no. 4 (fall 1990): 379–386. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Directed by Yves Simoneau. HBO, 2007. Buscombe, Edward. “Injuns!” Native Americans in the Movies. London, UK: Reaktion Books, 2006.

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Dances with Wolves. Directed by Kevin Costner. Orion Pictures, 1990. Derrida, Jacques. “Différance.” Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982, 3–27. Erdrich, Louise. Tracks. New York: Henry Holt, 1988. Momaday, N. Scott. House Made of Dawn. New York: Harper & Row, 1968. Reel Injun: On the Trail of the Hollywood Indian. Directed by Neil Diamond. Domino Film, 2009. Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Viking Press, 1977. Smoke Signals. Directed by Chris Eyre. Miramax Films, 1998. Thunderheart. Directed by Michael Apted. TriStar Pictures, 1992. Velie, Alan R. Four American Literary Masters. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982. Velie, Alan R. “N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn and Myths of the Victim.” In The Native American Renaissance: Literary Imagination and Achievement, ed. Alan R. Velie and A. Robert Lee, 58–73. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. Vizenor, Gerald. Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1993. Welch, James. Winter in the Blood. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.

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CHAPTER TWO

The Politics of Pain: Representing the Violence of Slavery in American Popular Culture Erica L. Ball

Representations of North American slavery have been essential to the development and expansion of American popular culture. As scholars have long known, it was the figure of the enslaved man (represented by a white actor in blackface) that was both inspiration for and mainstay of the minstrel show—“the first and most popular form of mass culture in the nineteenth-century United States.”1 And from 1915, when director D. W. Griffith made slavery and the Civil War the subject of what some scholars have called “the single most important movie ever made” to 1977, when the television miniseries Roots became the most watched program of its era, representations of relations between white American masters and African American slaves have riveted American audiences and been crucial to key milestones in the history of American mass entertainment.2 These pop culture landmarks have inevitably required representations of violence, for North American slavery and the Civil War that ultimately ended the practice were thoroughly brutal affairs. With this in mind, authors, directors, and artists often dramatized spectacles of violence— especially interracial violence between masters and slaves—in novels, plays, and films set in the antebellum and Civil War–era South, sometimes even making acts of interracial physical or sexual assault essential

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plot devices. As they repackaged the brutality of slavery for American audiences to consume, these writers and directors capitalized on American audiences’ longstanding fascination with violent narratives and imagery.3 And they paved the way for bloody twenty-first-century blockbusters such as Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 film Django Unchained. At the same time, however, embedding depictions of violence in popular tales about slavery did far more than serve as simple entertainment for American audiences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition to reflecting the dominant racial ideologies of the contemporary moment and the personal attitudes of writers and directors, melodramatic portrayals of violence between masters and slaves were also placed in the service of race-related political and social movements.4 From Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the 1850s to The Birth of a Nation (1915) and other early twentieth-century plantation romances such as Gone with the Wind (1936 and 1939) to Mandingo and other sexually explicit “slave fiction” novels in the mid-twentieth century to the Roots phenomenon of the 1970s, popular representations of the violence of slavery have been bound up with everything from the abolitionist movement to the anti-black violence and Jim Crow segregation of the post-Reconstruction New South to the twentieth-century civil rights movement. In the process, they have been instrumental in defining mainstream American ideas about the history of slavery and conceptualizing the possibilities and limits of American freedom.5

The Strange Career of Uncle Tom’s Cabin Antislavery writers, artists, and activists first began representing the violence of slavery in literary and visual culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Abolitionists, increasingly active by the nineteenth century, sought to translate “the pain of slaves . . . into imagery and visual narrative” for a public more accustomed to the popular minstrel show characterizations of singing, dancing slaves, and the proslavery propaganda portraying slavery as a benign, benevolent institution.6 By the mid-nineteenth century, abolitionists had created a set of images that served as metonymic devices, or a sort of visual shorthand dramatizing their arguments about the cruelty of slavery: engravings of human cargo chained and stacked in rows reminiscent of a “tightly packed” slave ship; daguerreotypes of the scarred and disfigured back of an enslaved man, or paintings of an enslaved woman writhing in pain under the lash or shrinking in horror before an impending sexual assault. Abolitionists also represented instruments of torture—such as shackles, collars, chains, or simply the whip itself—as visual symbols of the violence required for the ownership and

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compulsion of chattel slaves. And, as scholars have shown, these images provoked an array of responses in the Victorian viewer, including horror, sympathy, distance, and, for some, even sexual excitement.7 This imagery was disseminated to unprecedented mass audiences through various incarnations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.8 First appearing in serial form in the National Era in summer 1850 through spring 1851, and subsequently published as a two-volume novel in 1852, the story was released to the public at the moment when the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 brought the plight of escaping slaves before the northern public eye. Although Stowe was not a prominent abolitionist, she was intimately familiar with antislavery imagery and rhetoric and sympathetic to the antislavery cause, and she hoped her novel would help persuade “the South to change its mind about slavery.”9 For Stowe, like many abolitionists of the day, the violence experienced by enslaved men and women was an expression of the absolute power given all slaveholders. And though abolitionists conceded that individual slaveholders might vary greatly in terms of their relationship with violence, they insisted that a system that gave some men total power over others bred moral corruption and thus should not be maintained.10 Stowe made her antislavery argument by constructing her novel around two parallel and contrasting plots. After opening on an idyllic Kentucky plantation, the novel narrates the stories of two main characters: that of the devout and devoted family man Tom, sold to a slave trader and transported southward, and of Eliza, who flees northward with her young son Harry (who is about to be sold to the same trader). Relying on the kindness of good-hearted strangers and abolitionists, and encountering many dangers along the way, Eliza and Harry move northward toward freedom. In one especially dramatic scene, Eliza barely escapes the hands of the slave trader by clutching little Harry and scrambling across a churning, icy river, leaving a trail of blood in her wake.11 Tom, meanwhile, moves deeper into the South and is finally purchased by the brutal Simon Legree. Unlike the other—relatively sympathetic—slaveholders portrayed in the novel, the lecherous Legree reigns with terror; sexual, psychological, and physical violence abound on his Louisiana plantation. There two enslaved black drivers named Sambo and Quimbo torture the other bondsmen and women at Legree’s command and seem to delight in lashing Tom with a whip.12 In one especially violent episode, Sambo incapacitates an exhausted field hand named Lucy by “kicking the woman with his heavy cowhide shoe.” Then, to rouse Lucy to consciousness, he removes a “pin from his coatsleeve” and “burie[s] it to the head in her flesh.”13 But it would ultimately be Legree himself, jealous and “foaming with rage” over

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Tom’s refusal to reveal the whereabouts of two enslaved women, who beats Tom so severely that he dies from his wounds.14 Within a year of publication, Uncle Tom’s Cabin had sold more than 300,000 copies, approximately three times as many as the two previous best-selling American novels. One million additional copies of the novel were sold in the United Kingdom, and more than 2 million copies were sold in other parts of Europe and central Asia, where the novel appeared in numerous translations.15 The cultural effects of Uncle Tom’s Cabin were further heightened by the rapid spread of “Uncle Tomitudes.” Representations of popular scenes from the novel, Tomitudes included everything from engravings and paintings to card games, handkerchiefs, ceramic plaques, jigsaw puzzles, mugs, dice games, decorative mantelpiece screens, black woolen stockings, coffee, and licorice, as well as songs and plays based on the novel.16 Additionally, multiple unauthorized versions of the story were staged in the northeast United States and in England within a year of the novel’s publication.17 Watching white actors in blackface portraying key plot points on the stage, audiences outside the American South (where the play was often banned) could gasp at Eliza’s thrilling escape from slavecatchers, laugh at the antics of the mischievous slave girl Topsy, sigh over the short life of little Eva St. Clare (a slave owner’s angelic daughter), and weep during Tom’s savage beating and subsequent death at the hands of Simon Legree. As they did so, they would also imbibe enough of Stowe’s political perspective to make antislavery seem less a fringe political movement and more a mainstream political stance on the eve of the Civil War.18 The immediate and massive success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin can be credited to Stowe’s ability to weave the spectacles of violence she borrowed from antislavery imagery together with Victorian modes of sentimental domestic fiction, religious rhetoric, and even comedic minstrel forms.19 But in the decades after the end of the Civil War and the emancipation of four million enslaved African Americans, Stowe’s antislavery representations of violence were soon repurposed as cruel amusement for a new generation of Americans comfortable with the Jim Crow segregation, disfranchisement, and lynching that terrorized African American communities at the turn of the twentieth century. With an estimated 500 distinct “Tom shows” touring the nation by the end of the nineteenth century, stage adaptations of the novel “drifted away from sentimentalism . . . toward spectacle” and elevated the displays of violence to an epic scale.20 For example, boxers were often hired to play the role of Simon Legree, who was now expected “to beat Uncle Tom at length both with the whip and on the head with its handle.” Tom then smeared himself with red liquid to accentuate his pain for the audience.21 Heavyweight

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champion John L. Corbett (an avowed white supremacist) reportedly “whipped so hard and relentlessly that he actually injured a number of Tom actors” during his stint as Simon Legree in a traveling Tom show in 1901 and 1902. This made him a “sensation” among white audiences, “who could supposedly sympathize with Tom even as they took pleasure in seeing a black man become the victim of the bloody lash.”22 Indeed, turn-of-the-century white audiences and readers could gain enormous pleasure from these depictions of sadistic whipping scenes in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Some late nineteenth-century European psychiatrists reported that some of their patients “found sexual pleasure” in “the scenes of beating in Stowe’s novel meant to dramatize the horrors of slavery.”23 If white audiences derived pleasure from the pain inflicted upon the enslaved characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, white American children were encouraged to access this pleasure through scripted play with their dolls. Unlike expensive white dolls (usually constructed of fragile porcelain), black dolls were manufactured out of sturdy materials such as rubber or cloth, named after the enslaved characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (such as Tom, Dinah, and Topsy), marketed as indestructible, and designed for the rough play and abuse they received at the hands of their young owners. Historian Robin Bernstein has found that white children routinely cast these black dolls as slaves in the second half of the nineteenth century, some even using key chains to fashion manacles to restrain them or hanging them as punishment for some pretended offense. These children also “consciously linked literature and black dolls so as to perform fantasies about brutalized slaves.” 24 After reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1855, Frances Hodgson Burnett acted out favorite scenes from the novel with her dolls. While her black rubber doll was usually pressed into service as Topsy, Burnett also “redesignated the black doll as Uncle Tom and cast herself as Simon Legree.” And after binding her “Uncle Tom,” she “brutally lashed” the doll in a performance of violent rage.25 In another example, a woman recalled that as a child, she liked to imagine that the hole in her black cloth doll might be a “bullet-hole, where the Southerners had shot her when she was running from slavery.” 26 In this way, children acted out the violent master/slave relationship upon their dolls well into the twentieth century. These forms of play worked hand in hand with Tom shows and Tomitudes in helping not only reverse Stowe’s original abolitionist political arguments, but also counteract “one of abolitionism’s most organized, long-standing, and successful arguments: that slaves feel pain, and that this ability to feel pain demonstrates African Americans’ fitness for freedom.”27 Stripped of this progressive political meaning, public and private performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin now allowed participants to take

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pleasure in the violence of slavery while tacitly endorsing the violence enforcing turn-of-the-century Jim Crow law and custom.28

The Eroticization of Interracial Violence Ironically, in the same period when white children were learning to play the part of brutal master and American audiences were enjoying spectacles of violence staged by traveling Tom shows, writers and filmmakers were simultaneously popularizing narratives that represented slavery in a markedly less violent light. In short stories such as the turn-of-the-century “Uncle Remus” tales written by Joel Chandler Harris; novels such as those of Thomas F. Dixon Jr.’s Reconstruction trilogy The Leopard’s Spots (1902), The Clansman (1905), and The Traitor (1907); and cinematic classics such as D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind (1939), writers and directors offered a version of antebellum slavery that appealed to a public hungry for romantic tales of “a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South . . . a Civilization gone with the wind.”29 Drawing heavily upon antebellum proslavery propaganda and anti-Tom fiction, as well as the work of southern historians such as Ulrich B. Phillips, the most popular new literature and film released in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represented slavery as a kind and benevolent institution, defined by harmony and affection between masters and slaves. In these representations, which film scholar Ed Guerrero characterizes as “spectacular, hegemonic masterpieces of antiblack sentiment,” slaves labored happily in the fields without the threat of violence or the presence of a whip-wielding overseer.30 Instead, productions such as these pointedly contrasted their representations of an idyllic and peaceful antebellum South with the deprivation and suffering endured by white southerners in the aftermath of the Civil War. In this nostalgic plantation mythology, emancipation brought not freedom to the slaves, but rather the “enslavement” of peaceful southern whites, forced to contend with African Americans who now sought to vote, hold political office, and define liberty on their own terms. These works were placed in the service of the larger turn-of-the-century project of reconciliation between the North and the South. And in the years surrounding the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil War, “white filmmakers produced a bevy of nostalgic movies set in the slave era.”31 This does not mean that violence was absent from these cultural productions, however. In fact, popular works of fiction and films from this period explicitly linked black male freedom with sexual violence against white southern women and characterized white male quests to avenge

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white southern women for assaults perpetrated by emancipated black men as the height of heroic white masculinity. For example, one of the most pivotal scenes in the legendary silent film The Birth of a Nation centers on a former slave named “Gus, a renegade negro” and his pursuit of the young daughter of the former slaveholding patriarch. After returning from service in the Union army, Gus (played by a white actor in blackface) asks for little Flora Cameron’s hand in marriage. When a horrified Flora refuses, an undeterred Gus stalks the young heroine. In the long, melodramatic chase scene that follows, Flora scrambles up a hillside to escape Gus’s advances. She then leaps from a cliff, ultimately dying in the arms of her older brother Ben, who wipes her bloodstained mouth with the Confederate flag she cherishes. With the deceased Flora now “safe” from any possibility of interracial sexual contact, the white men of the town unite to avenge her honor. Under the auspices of the Ku Klux Klan—which Griffith celebrates in the film’s long, heroic conclusion—they lynch Gus, dump his body on the porch of the home of a prominent mixed-race politician, save Ben Cameron’s love interest from a forced marriage to the same politician, rescue other endangered whites from a phalanx of black Union soldiers, and restore white supremacy and political rule to the town.32 Margaret Mitchell also offers a less openly violent but more sexually titillating variation on this same theme in her best-selling 1936 novel, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Gone with the Wind. In her formulation of white victimhood and heroic vengeance, it is the businesswoman Scarlett O’Hara who is attacked by “a squat black negro with shoulders and chest like a gorilla” who rips her dress “from neck to waist” and then “fumble[s] between her breasts” during an attempted robbery. Although it is her former bondsman “Big Sam” who helps Scarlett escape her black attacker and white accomplice, it is Scarlett’s respected husband, friends, and neighbors in the Klan who are characterized as the true heroes for avenging Scarlett’s honor by raiding the neighborhood and murdering the perpetrators of the attack.33 In these famous melodramatic scenes of sexual violence barely averted and subsequently avenged, the protection of white southern women served as the most significant impetus for white male characters to step into the role of “hero” and participate in a revenge fantasy against their former slaves. In doing so, they allowed white audiences to continue to enjoy the spectacle of anti-black violence long associated with slavery through Tom shows and scripted play with black dolls while simultaneously satisfying widespread demand for nostalgic, peaceful plantation fantasies. Not surprisingly, these depictions of anti-black violence worked seamlessly with the racist discourses of the day. For it was a moment when the lynching

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of black men was commonly justified as necessary for the protection of white southern women and the enforcement of white supremacist laws and customs. Indeed, these scenes had the power to mobilize audiences as well as entertain them. In Atlanta, white men were so inspired by Griffith’s groundbreaking cinematic spectacle of the conquering Klan in The Birth of a Nation that they “marched down Peachtree Avenue in full menacing regalia to celebrate the film’s opening.” And across the country, white Americans obsessed with racial purity rushed to join a revived and reinvigorated (and thoroughly violent) Ku Klux Klan in the wake of Griffith’s film.34 African Americans, meanwhile, appalled both by Griffith’s misrepresentation of history and by its contemporary political implications, launched a campaign to rebut the message of The Birth of a Nation and even ban the film from theaters.35 The 1939 film version of Gone with the Wind would be the last time this particular narrative of interracial sexual violence and revenge was presented in a major Hollywood film about the South before and after the Civil War. Increasingly sensitive to the demands of African American civil rights organizations at a moment when black activism (along with white southern attacks on black civil rights advocates) was gaining mass national and international attention, Hollywood filmmakers were no longer comfortable celebrating slavery and glamorizing the Ku Klux Klan onscreen. At the same time, professional historians were thoroughly discrediting nostalgic plantation mythology by revealing the extent to which slavery had relied upon physical, psychological, and sexual violence against enslaved men and women. In this context, the film industry moved haltingly away from romanticized representations of slavery and the antebellum South toward depictions of African Americans as respectable citizens.36 Thus consumers interested in experiencing the sexual frisson generated by depictions of mid-nineteenth-century interracial sexual violence and revenge would need to look elsewhere to find this sort of entertainment. They would find their expectations met in the “slave fiction” inaugurated by elderly dog breeder turned author Kyle Onstott in his 1957 novel Mandingo.37 In some respects, Mandingo departed in significant ways from the sweeping plantation romances that had dominated the popular market since the late nineteenth century. For Onstott’s novel, unlike these narratives, placed some form of violence in nearly every chapter, describing the events in graphic detail. Set on an Alabama “slave-breeding” plantation, the owners—Warren and Hammond Maxwell (along with Hammond’s young bride, Blanche)—regularly inflicted creative as well as more traditional forms of corporal punishment on the enslaved men, women, and adolescent girls and boys on their “Falconhurst” plantation. For example, in one

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extended punishment scene, Hammond Maxwell ordered an enslaved man called “Memnon” to be stripped, gagged, hoisted upside-down, and paddled on the buttocks until “the bruised flesh spattered through the holes in the paddle with a spurt of blood.”38 Moreover, in Onstott’s lurid imagination, violence also dominated the leisure activities of free and slave alike. Forced to fight for the entertainment and amusement of whites, enslaved men engaged in brutal wrestling matches, biting off toes, squeezing scrotums, and gnawing out the jugular veins of their opponents.39 The novel even concludes with a double murder: Hammond Maxwell poisons his wife Blanche for having an affair and conceiving a child with his champion “Mandingo” fighter Mede; he then forces Mede into a cauldron of boiling water, scalds him to death, and simmers the body into a broth (which he will later order slaves to pour over Blanche’s grave). In this way, Mandingo offered a much more depraved representation of slavery than readers would find in perennial favorites like Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. At the same time, however, Onstott simply made explicit for his readers the eroticism just under the surface of early twentieth-century Tom shows, novels, and films about slavery and the Civil War. In Mandingo’s innumerable scenes of sadomasochistic torture and abuse, characters derive unabashed sexual pleasure from participating in, or viewing the acts of violence. While watching Memnon’s beating, for example, an adolescent slave boy wonders what it would feel like if it were his “own bottom that hung there bruised and raw” and imagines “the exquisite, the ecstatic pain of the impact of the paddle in Hammond’s own hands.”40 Enslaved mothers, meanwhile, relished the nightly spankings they gave their young boys. Young masters gagged and whipped enslaved women as an act of sexual foreplay. And enslaved women, in turn, always “enjoyed [their] subservience to a man who had demonstrated his mastery over her.”41 This mixture of explicit sex and violence made Mandingo seem “morbid, fascinating, revolting,” and very “interesting” to American literary critics and general readers.42 And as the “APPALLING! TERRIFYING! WONDERFUL!” description on the front cover of the first paperback edition suggests, Cold War–era American readers responded enthusiastically to Onstott’s novel. By the middle of the 1970s, more than 5 million copies of Mandingo had been sold, and the novel remained in print until the 1980s.43 In addition to a plethora of knock-off plantation romance novels now categorized as a new genre called “slave fiction,” thirteen official Falconhurst sequels and prequels by other authors followed over the next three decades.44 Hollywood even sought to cash in on Mandingo’s popularity and audience demands for more overt displays of sex and violence on screen by releasing a film version of the novel (as well as its 1962 sequel, Drum)

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in the early 1970s. Keeping the structure of the original plot intact, but giving the film a “blaxploitation”-style makeover, the film cast the male slaves of Falconhurst in the mold of sixties militants waiting for their chance to fight back against the master.45 Now “clearly shot from a point of view sympathetic to the African American perspective,” the film also positioned itself as an antidote to plantation mythologies such as Gone with the Wind.46 Urged by radio advertisements to “Expect the savage . . . Expect the sensual . . . Expect the shocking . . . [and] Expect the truth,” audiences were invited to interpret Mandingo as an accurate representation of the violence of slavery and as “an education to the young and a reminder to the old.”47 Although critics described the movie as “wretched” and “racist trash, obscene in its manipulation of human beings and feelings, and excruciating to sit through,” black audiences still turned out to see the film, reportedly laughing and cheering those moments when slaves got the upper hand or uttered lines like “Kiss my ass!” before being lynched by patrollers.48 Complete with bloody Mandingo fights, murders, floggings perpetrated by jealous white mistresses, and gun battles between brutal masters and tough, rebellious slaves, the film versions of Mandingo and Drum offered an array of intra and interracial brutality for a generation of Americans hungry for explicit depictions of violence. These films also spawned an entire genre of “slavesploitation” films in the 1970s, demonstrating that despite the changes wrought by the civil rights movement and the shifting racial landscape, Americans had not lost their taste for erotically charged depictions of violence and revenge in the context of slavery.

Reconceptualizing the Violence of Slavery in the Post–Civil Rights Era As the differences between the paperback and film versions of Mandingo suggest, popular representations of slavery began to shift in the 1970s.49 Rather than focusing on justifying Jim Crow practices or scandalizing American audiences, writers and directors now sought to prioritize the experiences of the enslaved and in the process connect their struggle for freedom with the modern civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Taking a cue from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American writers who had earlier published memoirs or translated their personal history and family stories to stage and fiction, late twentiethcentury American writers, both black and white, began producing creative works that granted complexity and interiority to enslaved characters.50 These artistic efforts coincided with the emergence of a new wave of historical scholarship—work that sought to analyze the life experiences of

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enslaved individuals and families—rather than simply focusing on the actions of the planter class.51 The 1977 television miniseries Roots introduced this African American perspective to white American audiences. Rather than defining enslaved men and women primarily in terms of their relationships with white masters, Roots depicted enslaved characters as complex individuals, parents, children, and friends, members of a vibrant and resilient community. Like the 1976 Pulitzer Prize–winning text on which it was based, Roots followed one family’s story over the course of four generations, keeping the themes of community and perseverance at the heart of the narrative. Representing a black family’s quest for freedom and triumphs over adversity, Roots proved enormously appealing to a generation of American viewers coming to terms with the profound gains and disappointments of the civil rights movement. Indeed, Roots became a phenomenal success, far exceeding the expectations of producers. With over 100 million viewers—nearly half the population of the United States at the time—tuning in to watch the finale on January 30, 1977, Roots became the most watched television event of its day, even surpassing televised broadcasts of Gone with the Wind and the Super Bowl. At the conclusion of “Roots Week,” ABC estimated that approximately 85 percent of all televisions in American homes had tuned in to watch at least a portion of the series. And scholars now credit the series with discrediting much of the early twentieth-century plantation mythology, providing African Americans with a renewed sense of pride in their African ancestry and enabling mainstream white Americans to begin seeing African Americans as important contributors to the history and life of the nation.52 Over the course of the series, Roots used carefully selected examples of violence to demonstrate how slave traders, overseers, owners, and patrollers maintained and enforced the system of slavery. Roots also explored the various ways that men and women of African descent negotiated and resisted the violence of slavery. Emphasizing that the whip, the gun, and other instruments of torture were used to kidnap an African teenager named Kunta Kinte, transport him from his West African home, and sell him into slavery in Maryland, Roots insisted that violence was the mechanism that transformed a free man into a slave. Roots also characterized the rape and assault of enslaved African and African American women as painful and traumatic events rather than subjects for the amusement of modern audiences. Additionally, Roots refracted the struggles of Kunta Kinte’s descendants through the lens of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. The patrollers and night riders of Roots are not represented in the heroic terms used by Griffith and Mitchell, but instead are cast as the unmistakable opponents of freedom

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and equality. In two now-iconic scenes of violence—when slave catchers cut off Kunta Kinte’s foot as punishment for an escape attempt and when an overseer whips him into accepting the name “Toby”—Roots emphasized that slavery was the precursor to Jim Crow, characterizing both as systems upheld and enforced solely by violence. Roots marked an essential paradigm shift in the way that North American slavery—as well as its concomitant violence—would be presented in American popular culture. As more television series, novels, and films dramatizing the experiences of enslaved men and women followed, they invariably built on how Roots had represented the violence of slavery. Defining violence as a method of social control, late twentieth-century American popular culture characterized it both as a historic fact of slavery and as something that enslaved African Americans resisted at every turn. In this period, novels such as Kindred (1979) and Beloved (1987) and films such as Daughters of the Dust (1991) explored how acts of violence against enslaved African Americans continued to haunt subsequent generations. Made-for-television films such as A Woman Called Moses (1979) and Solomon Northup’s Odyssey (1984) focused on the varied ways that enslaved men and women resisted violence and created community. And major Hollywood productions such as Glory (1989) and Amistad (1997) positioned rebellious slaves as exemplary heroes, celebrating their shipboard rebellions and service in the Union army as emblematic of the highest ideals of the nation, laudable moments in a long struggle for American freedom.

Conclusion: Representing the Violence of Slavery in the “Post-Racial” Era From the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to the broadcast of Roots, popular representations of the violence of slavery have played a complex role in American culture. In addition to entertaining audiences, scenes of interracial corporal punishment and sexual assault have been shaped by—and have in turn informed—a range of competing political and social agendas. These popular images have had an extraordinary influence on American attitudes toward slavery and ideas about racism. And the response to two films—Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) and Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (2013)—suggests that Americans continue to be interested in the subject of slavery in an age sometimes called a “post-racial” era. Using the lens of the spaghetti western, and drawing heavily upon the “slavesploitation” genre of the 1970s, Django Unchained places violence at the center of the narrative, expanding it to cartoonish proportions. Borrowing tropes from abolitionist imagery and twentieth-century films about

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slavery, including Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Birth of a Nation, Mandingo, Slaves, and The Legend of Nigger Charley, Tarantino pointedly mocks Hollywood’s role in promoting nostalgic representations of antebellum slavery and glamorizing the Ku Klux Klan. Making the former slave turned bounty hunter Django the protagonist, Tarantino allows the young husband to step into the role of avenger as he travels to Mississippi to rescue his wife from a perverse and sadistic owner. When overseers lash an enslaved young woman, Django turns the whip on them before shooting them dead. Django and his German partner gun down or blow up innumerable slaveholders, traders, racists, and their supporters. Indeed, over the course of the film, every iconic racist representation of slavery, from the paternalistic “Big Daddy” modeled after the Cameron patriarch of The Birth of a Nation to the nefarious “Uncle Stephen” taken from the early twentieth-century racist caricatures of Tom shows to a plantation mistress evoking the worst traits of Scarlett O’Hara and Blanche Maxwell, is dispatched in the most outlandish and comedic fashion. If Django Unchained uses displays of extreme violence to explode conventional representations of slavery, Steve McQueen takes a more a restrained approach in 12 Years a Slave. Based on the 1853 memoir of Solomon Northup, a free black New Yorker who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Louisiana, 12 Years a Slave explores how the threat of violence affects all aspects of enslaved lives. We can see this in how McQueen employs acts of violence against Northup to propel the narrative arc of the film (and the story of Northup’s liminality and ultimate fungibility) forward. First, it is through the beating Northup receives in Birch’s jail that Northup is redefined as a runaway slave from Georgia. Then it is with an unexpected slap to the face that Northup is renamed Platt. And it is in a four-minute scene where he is strung up and hung by the neck, suspended between life and death, that Northup’s status as chattel property, totally dependent upon the whims and desires of not just any white man, but his owner, is confirmed. Finally, it is when Northup becomes both witness to and perpetrator of violence against Patsey—a young enslaved woman who endures physical and sexual abuse throughout the film—that he completes his metamorphosis.53 McQueen depicts this violence as sudden, unpredictable, and brutal, and he steadfastly refuses to sensationalize it or package it in the imagery audiences have come to expect since the mid-nineteenth century. In the process, he offers a new interpretation of enslavement as trauma and terror. Though these two films differ markedly from each other—one presents the spectacle of violence as pure entertainment, whereas the other offers a harrowing realism—both characterize the violence of slavery as far more

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than a form of social control. Moreover, the popularity of these two films suggests that twenty-first-century Americans are as fascinated by depictions of the violence of slavery as their nineteenth- and twentieth-century predecessors were. Exactly how these popular representations will affect the political and cultural climate of the twenty-first century remains to be seen. But it is quite likely that depictions of slavery and its attendant forms of violence will continue to reflect and influence the cultural zeitgeist for decades to come.

Notes  1. Rogin, 5.   2.  Rogin, 14; Williams, 5.   3.  As Karen Halttunen has demonstrated in her analysis of Gothic murder tales, Americans have long found depictions of violence to be enormously entertaining, and these depictions, in turn, have performed important cultural work.   4.  Van Deburg, xii.  5. In his analysis of novels about slavery, Tim Ryan argues that any work of literature about slavery always inserts itself into historiographic, literary, and contemporary racial politics. As he sees it, “Any text that addresses the peculiar institution necessarily participates in multiple discourses, which—although inextricably connected—are ultimately quite independent. These include a discourse about the institution of slavery, a discourse about the culture and identities of those who were enslaved, a discourse about their enslavers, and—because the system of bondage that developed in the new World was organized around ethnicity—a discourse about race.” Ryan, 77.   6.  Wood, 216. For more information about the cultural work of blackface minstrelsy in antebellum America, see Roediger, chapters 5 and 6, and Lott.   7.  For more on this, see Wood, Walters, and Hartman.   8.  As Marcus Wood notes, “Abolition thought was constantly absorbed into nineteenth-century English and American culture,” and “Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the key site for the examination of what popular audiences in the mid-nineteenth century wanted to see as, and what publishers wanted to impose upon, the representation of blacks within slave systems.” Wood, 143.   9.  For the sources of Stowe’s antislavery tendencies, see Reynolds, 92–114. 10.  Walters, 83–85. 11.  Stowe, 55. 12.  Stowe, 325–326. 13.  Stowe, 321. 14.  Stowe, 376. 15.  According to David Reynolds, the novel appeared in “French, German, Spanish, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Flemish, Polish, and Magyar,” followed by “Welsh, Russian, Arabic, and other languages.” Reynolds, 126–128.

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16.  Reynolds, 132–136; Bernstein, 94–100. 17.  Williams, 77. 18.  Reynolds, 149–150. 19.  Tompkins, 122–146; Reynolds, 31–42, 77–80. 20.  Bernstein, 128. 21.  Williams, 86. 22.  As David Reynolds notes, this “whipping scene tapped into the cruelest instincts of white audiences” and must be read as “a version of the gloating spectatorship of mobs who regularly gathered to watch blacks being hanged, mutilated, or burned to death in the South during that era of mass lynching.” Reynolds, 200. 23. Williams, 86. Marcus Wood notes that Richard von Krafft-Ebbing and Sigmund Freud both reportedly had patients that shared this fantasy. Wood, 185. 24.  Bernstein, 222–223. 25.  Bernstein, 69–72. 26.  Bernstein, 222–223. 27.  Bernstein, 50. 28.  For more on Jim Crow culture and its effects on African Americans, see Litwack. 29.  Gone with the Wind. 30.  Guerrero, 17. 31.  For more information on this phenomenon, see Van Deburg, 122, and Blight. 32.  The Birth of a Nation; Cripps, 48–51. 33.  Mitchell, 732–733. 34. Guerrero, 14. 35.  Cripps, 57–69. 36.  Rogin, 209–250; Guerrero, 26–29. 37. According to William Van Deburg, “The basic concern” of novels like Mandingo “was to detail the patterns of sadistic sex, nymphomania, incest, and general promiscuity that prevailed on a fictional slave-breeding plantation.” Van Deburg, 148. Literary scholar Timothy Ryan argues, however, that Mandingo must also be understood as a response to changing historiography which now examines “the way in which the oppressive nature of slavery shaped such slave psychologies.” Ryan, 102–103. 38.  Onstott, 124. 39.  Onstott, 249, 413. 40.  Onstott, 125. 41.  Onstott, 50, 151. 42.  Blurb from the Lexington, Kentucky, Herald-Leader, printed on the first pages of the Fawcett paperback edition of Mandingo. 43.  Talbot, 27. 44.  Talbot, xi. 45.  Blaxploitation was the film industry’s attempt to capitalize on the black cultural radicalism of the late 1960s. With this in mind, the early 1970s saw a

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wave of “heady male action fantasies” starring black casts and marketed to urban audiences. Bogle, 241–242; Guerrero, 30–31. 46.  Guerrero, 33. 47.  Talbot, 281–282. 48.  Roger Ebert, July 25, 1975. www.rogerebert.com/reviews/mandingo-1975. For an analysis of the gulf between critical and audience responses, see DeVos, 5–21. 49.  Van Deburg, 104. 50.  These works include Bontemps, Walker, and Styron. 51.  Some of the most groundbreaking texts of this period include Stampp, Gutman, Blassingame, and White. 52. Van DeBurg, 155; Bodroghkozy, 160; Bogle, 239–243; Williams, 238–242. 53.  In these scenes, McQueen economically refutes the cultural work of the moonlight and magnolias myth (antebellum American slavery supported by violence, not paternalism) and carefully skirts the iconic form of abuse (the lash on the bare male back) that audiences both expect and require to make sense of slavery to instead offer a less familiar and less sensationalized representation of violence that unsettles the viewer.

Bibliography Television Programs and Films Amistad. DVD. Directed by Steven Spielberg. 1997; Universal City, CA: Dreamworks Video, 1999. Birth of a Nation, The. DVD. Directed by D. W. Griffith. 1915; New York: Kino International Video, 2011. Daughters of the Dust. DVD. 1991. Directed by Julie Dash. New York: Kino International Video, 2000. Django Unchained. DVD. Directed by Quentin Tarantino. 2012; Beverly Hills, CA: Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2013. Glory. DVD. Directed by Edward Zwick. 1989; Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2001. Gone with the Wind. DVD. Directed by Victor Fleming. 1939; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2009. Mandingo. DVD. Directed by Richard Fleischer. 1975; San Diego, CA: Legend Films, 2008. Roots. DVD. Directed by Marvin Chomsky, John Erman, David Greene, and Gilbert Moses. 1977; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2007. 12 Years a Slave. DVD. Directed by Steve McQueen. 2013; Beverly Hills, CA: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2014. Twelve Years a Slave: Solomon Northup’s Odyssey. DVD. Directed by Gordon Parks. 1984; Thousand Oaks, CA: Monterey Media Video, 2005. Woman Called Moses, A. DVD. Directed by Paul Wendkos. 1979; Hawthorne, CA: Xenon Pictures, 2004.

The Politics of Pain

Novels Bontemps, Arna. Black Thunder, Gabriel’s Revolt: Virginia, 1800. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992 (1936). Butler, Octavia. Kindred. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2003 (1979). Haley, Alex. Roots: The Saga of an American Family. New York: Doubleday and Company, 1976. Mitchell, Margaret. Gone with the Wind. New York: Scribner, 2011 (1936). Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Vintage, 2004 (1987). Onstott, Kyle, and Lance Horner. Drum. New York: Fawcett World Library, 1963. Onstott, Kyle. Mandingo. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Crest, 1958 (1957, authorized uncensored abridgment). Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010 (1852). Styron, William. The Confessions of Nat Turner. New York: Vintage Books, 1993 (1967). Walker, Margaret. Jubilee. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1999 (1966). Secondary Sources Bernstein, Robin. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York: New York University Press, 2011. Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Bodroghkozy, Aniko. “Television and the Civil Rights Era.” In African Americans and Popular Culture, vol. 3, ed. Todd Boyd, 141–163. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008. Bogle, Donald. Primetime Blues: African Americans on Network Television. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, 4th ed. New York: Continuum, 2002. Cripps, Thomas. Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–1942. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993 (1977). DeVos, Andrew. “‘Expect the Truth’: Exploiting History with Mandingo,” American Studies 52, no. 2 (2013): 5–21. Gray, Herman. Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Guerrero, Ed. Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993. Gutman, Herbert G. The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925. New York: Vintage, 1977. Halttunen, Karen. Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

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Litwack, Leon. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. New York: Vintage Books, 1998. Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Reynolds, David S. Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2011. Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, rev. ed. New York: Verso, 1999 (1991). Rogin, Michael. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Ryan, Tim A. Calls and Responses: The American Novel of Slavery since Gone with the Wind. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. Stampp, Kenneth M. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South. New York: Random House, 1989 (1956). Talbot, Paul. Mondo Mandingo: The “Falconhurst” Books and Films. New York: iUniverse, Inc., 2009. Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Van Deburg, William L. Slavery and Race in American Popular Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984. Walters, Ronald G. The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism after 1830. New York: Norton, 1984 (1978). White, Deborah Gray. Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: W. W. Norton, 1985. Williams, Linda. Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Wood, Marcus. Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865. New York: Routledge, 2000.

CHAPTER THREE

Natural Laws, Unnatural Violence, and the Psychophysical Experience of the Civil War Generation in America Kent A. McConnell

“In the South,” observed Mark Twain in 1883 in Life on the Mississippi, “the war is what AD is elsewhere; they date from it.”1 Nearly two decades after the war, no balm soothed the emotional scars the war had left on Southerners. Nostalgia, defiance, and pathos were some of the attributes constituting the memory of former Confederates who measured time from the bygone days of the Old South. From the ashes of war, many former Confederates soulfully longed for the day the South would rise again. But victory did not have a cauterizing effect on the burdened hearts of most Northern families. Like many who had multiple family members serving in the Federal Army, Herman Melville followed the events of the war closely and with a considerable sense of urgency. In spring 1861, for example, he observed the Senate debating secession. Then, three years later, the writer made a trip with his brother to the front lines. There he witnessed the deadly effects of Grant’s Overland Campaign.2 The experience inspired Melville to pen Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, published in 1866. Although largely underappreciated at the time, Melville identified the central element of

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America’s wartime experience, the destruction of human life on a massive scale and its accompanying pathos. “Noble was the gesture which patriotic passion surprised the people in a utilitarian time and country,” Melville wrote months later, “yet the glory of the war fall short of its pathos—a pathos which now at last ought to disarm all animosity.” Even with the war closed, Melville recognized that the sectional “passions” driving the respective sides to war were now seared onto the hearts of the people. For the author, neither God nor progress could be found in war, but only “sacred uncertainty” that “forever impends over men and nations.”3 With little hope for immediate and meaningful political reconciliation, Melville looked to religion and the emotions expressed in mortuary practices to provide a healing balm to the nation. “On such hearts every thing is thrown away,” Melville suggested, “except it be religious commiseration, and the sincerest.”4 For Melville and many others of his generation, the war could be summarized as “the terrible historic tragedy of our time.”5 Although Melville’s instincts were sound when it came to plausible avenues by which reconciliation might occur between North and South, he misjudged the war’s effect on the nation’s spiritual life. From it a deep chasm was born. Mourning rituals, once the property of metaphysical speculation and piety, where empathy and understanding might have once occurred between brethren in the two sections, were now fraught with the politics of “waving the bloody shirt” and “the Redeemed South.” The notion of revenge, whether godly or human, was the subtext in many of these early memorializing efforts.6 “Individual, personalized revenge, is omnipresent in the recollections of participants in civil war,” writes one theorist.7 A brief statistical examination of the deadly result of this conflict give a sense of how widespread ideas of retribution and feelings of hatred were in the postbellum years. Traditionally Civil War historians and their students learned several numbers to convey a sense of the violence experienced by mid-century Americans. These statistics were drawn from some of the earliest statistical measures of Civil War casualty rates.8 Out of the 1860 American population, 2 percent lost their lives in the Civil War.9 One out of every five white males who participated in the war died.10 Whereas roughly 9 percent of northern men of military age were killed or severely wounded, the South experienced nearly 25 percent losses. Considering how military companies were constituted, coupled with traditional methods of fighting, communities seemingly far removed from the action could lose a generation or more of their male population over the course of the war.11 A recent study by demographic historian J. David Hacker cast doubt on the accuracy of these traditional measurements. Using census data

Natural Laws, Unnatural Violence, and the Psychophysical Experience

analysis, Hacker estimates that a more accurate number lies somewhere between 650,000 to 850,000 dead.12 The final number, Hacker tells us, is likely around 750,000, which ultimately places the violence of the war and its devastating effects more at the center of historical analysis than previously appreciated. The war’s unforeseen and eventually unimaginable toll in human flesh left many of the Civil War generation embittered by their sacrifices. 13 Historian James M. McPherson writes, “there was scarcely a family in North or South that did not mourn a relative or friend killed in the war.”14 Given this reality, it is hard to imagine an alternative emotional path for the nation following its fiery trial. In the years that followed, memories of the war evoked an emotional cacophony of bitterness and regret, pride and satisfaction. Violence has been a fundamental force in the shaping of American life and identity.15 Scholars have long recognized the centrality of violence in the nation’s experience but have infrequently used the topic as a central lens for understanding the past. Though sources from the Civil War generation suggest that an indelible mark was placed upon them by the devastating effects of war, explanations for its effects and legacy on the people are limited. An early study on the topic suggests that violence “became the handmaiden of American salvation in the era of Civil War and Reconstruction, for the Civil War was not only a time of pervasive violence in its own right but had an almost incalculable effect in the following decade.”16 The massive scale of destruction in human terms made any systematic study of violence impossible. Moreover, the war emotions ran too high in the postwar decades for any objective treatment of the subject. But from the generation that fought and survived the war, various interpretative threads emerged about the causes and meaning of the war. With the advent of the academic profession of history, scholars began to apply their trade to some of these nascent themes, setting much of the intellectual agenda for the coming generations of scholars. Intellects such as Charles and Mary Beard and W. E. B. Du Bois examined the economic causes that arguably brought on the war. James Ford Rhodes maintained that slavery was the sole cause of the war, whereas his contemporary, Arthur C. Cole, suggested that the North and South were two separate societies with culturally distinct values that ultimately clashed in the war. These were just some of the earliest interpretations offered by trained historians concerning the causes of the war. Ethical considerations about the justifiability of the war, a discussion whose analytical parameters were nonapparent but that was a discourse that nevertheless ran through the “studies” of the Civil War generation, went untouched by the earliest professional historians.

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Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who served as an adviser to President John F. Kennedy, changed all that in 1949 with the publication of “The Causes of the American Civil War: A Note on Historical Sentimentalism” in the Partisan Review. In this essay, Schlesinger took to task the so-called revisionist school of Civil War historians, who argued that the war was the needless and the tragic emotional blunderings of a fanatic generation of politicians who could have solved the problem of slavery without a war. Schlesinger concluded, “To reject the moral actuality of the Civil War is to foreclose the possibility of an adequate account of its causes. . . . Nothing exists in history,” Schlesinger continued, “to assure us that the great moral dilemmas can be resolved without pain.”17 Although many interpreted Schlesinger’s work as a moral invective concerning the state of historical studies in America rather than a serious contribution to the field, his essay nevertheless ushered in a more rigorous examination of issues surrounding ethics and religion.18 A generation later, scholars such as George Fredrickson began to explore the moral mindset that gave rise to and prosecuted the Civil War. Fredrickson was one of a handful of scholars who chose this path of intellectual endeavor. By the close of the twentieth century, prominent social historians such as Phillip Shaw Paludan were raising questions about the measure, meaning, and legacy of the war: “We cannot assess whether this vast expenditure of life and resource was worth it after all,” Paludan writes, “unless we know what kind of society and economy the war created and what kind of lives were led after the killing stopped.”19 A positive affirmation of these criteria is a complicated calculus whose measurable results are tenuous at best. That violence is so intimately linked to self-determination and has been the catalyst for social change in American history is the real tragedy of our past.

Violence in Antebellum America For decades scholars of various disciplines have examined biological death, particularly aging, as an avenue for exploring social continuity rather than change. One of the most inspiring but intellectually frustrating works that helped to found the normative approach of continuity in thanatology is Phillipe Ariès’s The Hour of Our Death.20 Since the publication of Ariès’s heavily relied-upon work, scholars have sought to diversify their approaches to death. This is particularly true in the field of sociology, in which studies of death seek to understand not only social continuity, but also physical death as a substantial causative force of change. “The implications of biological ageing and death,” writes sociologist Jane

Natural Laws, Unnatural Violence, and the Psychophysical Experience

Pilcher, “and the physical replacements of individuals over time as a consequences of these processes, have been more readily evident in theories which seek to explain continuation of the social order than in those which are concerned with social change.”21 Although the deaths produced by the Civil War amplified certain processes of social and intellectual change in America, the violence that engulfed the nation from 1861 to 1865 had its social antecedents. It is important to recognize the conflation of violent acts in American society during the Civil War, but it is also necessary to see this use of violence for social change not as an isolated episode of the nineteenth century, but rather as somewhere in the continuum of a story whose chronology intertwines with the antecedent and subsequent decades of the nineteenth century. To gain some measure of the legacy of the war’s violence, it is necessary to ask what kind of society preceded it. In his exhaustive study American Homicide, author Randolph Roth examines the national homicide rate, demonstrating that it reached its lowest point during the antebellum period between the close of the War of 1812 and the beginning of the Mexican War in 1846.22 Although there were regional variances during this period, overall Americans, particularly whites in the North, enjoyed the blessings that accompanied domestic tranquility. Such peace and prosperity, many thought, could only be the result of humanity’s unique experiment in democracy. In Vermont, the Reverend Samuel Williams praised the government for these fruits stating that it “reverences the people.” Proclaiming America the “best poor man’s country” in the world, the minister was convinced “the highest perfection and felicity, which man is permitted to hope for in the present life, may be rationally expected” in the Republic.23 Data from this period evidences the social stability enjoyed by white Americans that helped to give life to such wild-eyed speculation. Roughly 60 percent of males in the North, for example, owned a business or farm. The percentage jumps to nearly 80 percent when examining only men in their mid-thirties or older.24 Just beneath the demographic markers of stability, however, were troubling signs that would threaten Williams’s nationalist ideal. A southern antislavery movement was quickly on the ebb during the 1830s, when whites feared violent reprisals from their slave populations. Such conclusions were not difficult to reach as antebellum print culture exploded, ushering the issues of slavery, law, and morality onto the front pages of the popular press and into the domestic sphere.25 Newspaper publication exploded onto the scene at the beginning of the nineteenth century as publication rates soared. Between 1790 and 1810, for example, the number of domestic newspapers published around the nation grew from

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ninety to 370. As historian Nathan Hatch points out, the popularization of dailies and weeklies changed the character of the medium. “Responding to a wider democratic public,” Hatch observes, “papers increasingly employed communication strategies that conspired against any form of social distinction: blunt and vulgar language, crude oratory, and sharp ridicule of lawyers, physicians, and clergymen.”26 Leaders within the upper class chafed at such changes. As the popular press loosened cultural restraints, other published materials followed similar patterns. Some of these works deeply penetrated the psyche of white Americans, leading to social unease. In September 1829, David Walker’s seventy-six-page pamphlet “Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular and Very Expressly to Those of the United States of America” put forth an emotional but reasoned invective advocating black insurrection throughout the American South. “The whites have always been an unjust, jealous, unmerciful, avaricious and blood-thirsty set of beings, always seeking after power and authority,” wrote Walker. “Are they not the Lord’s enemies?” the author asked rhetorically. Racializing the cosmic drama between good and evil in Christianity, Walker encouraged his audience to fight the forces of evil, slave-holding whites: “If you can only get courage into the blacks, I do declare it, that one good black man can put to death six white men; and I give it as a fact, let twelve black men get well armed for battle, and they will kill and put to flight fifty whites.” He concluded his logic with a chilling remark that only fueled the racist beliefs of whites: “The reason is, the blacks, once you get them started, they glory in death.”27 Despite Andrew Jackson’s ban on the delivery of abolitionist literature, scattered copies of “Walker’s Appeal” made it into the hands of whites in the South, putting an imprimatur of violent resistance on the question of slavery.28 Less than two years later racial violence exploded in Southampton County, Virginia. Lead by Nat Turner, a literate African American steeped in his own prophetic visions of Christianity, this insurrection by slaves produced the deaths of nearly sixty whites in the area. Although Virginians had uncovered previous plots of slave reprisal in the cases of Gabriel Prosser and Denmark Vesey, they could never fully dismiss the possibility that another plot loomed just beneath the surface.29 As one historian wrote, Turner’s actions “hit an exposed nerve in the southern psyche.”30 Like no other previous event, the actions of Turner and his accomplices challenged not just the system of slavery and the South’s increasingly hegemonic moral authority, but also evoked the deepest psychological fears held by whites toward blacks.31 Reaction was disproportionally violent, with

Natural Laws, Unnatural Violence, and the Psychophysical Experience

episodes of uncontrollable and murderous rage. Although the insurrection was brought to a swift end through the killing or capture of the assailants, armed whites continued to pour into Southampton, waiting to fight what many feared would be a “race war.” Consequently local white reprisals and a swift judiciary process killed hundreds of blacks, both conspirators and nonconspirators. In order to quell any lingering support among African Americans, swift punishment was dealt out to the accomplices. These were not simply acts of retributive justice, but were what theorist Michel Foucault call “physico-penal knowledge”32—that is, symbolic techniques of bodily manipulation meant to convey to the survivors the complete domination of blacks by the white majority. The primary target for such disciplinary power was Turner, whose trial and execution occurred on November 11, 1831. Turner was hanged for his crime, but accounts vary as to what happened to the physical remains, including those by scholars in the twenty-first century. Yet it is apparent, no matter which of these postmortem stories is true, that Turner’s body was “a critical locus through which ideologies of racial and cultural differences were enacted.”33 Several newspapers at the time, however, reported that Turner’s body was “given over” to local surgeons for dissection,34 a practice saturated with religious taboos and reserved for murderers and paupers.35 The Charleston City Gazette posthumously ridiculed Turner, stating, “He met his fate with a stupid sort of indifference— sold his body to the surgeons for dissection, and spent the money in gingercakes!”36 Although a passing critique that employed subtle racist hues, the charge of Turner’s thoughtless indifference towards his bodily remains was a reflection of the deep psychological anxieties held by nineteenth-century Americans over the integrity of the human form as it passed from this world to the next. Incidents of racial violence, magnified in Turner’s Rebellion, were troubling to Southern whites, who dismissed Turner’s call to arms as the fantasies of a religious zealot.37 In reality, Southerners deeply feared black reprisals. In assessing the significance of Turner to the history of the South, Kenneth Stampp concludes, “The psychology and political behavior of antebellum white Southerners is comprehensible only if the persistent dread of slave insurrection is taken into account.”38 As a result, Southerners acted with great paranoia at times, fearing the enemy within. The possibility of slave violence became all the more troubling in the 1840s and 1850s, when the political landscape of the nation shifted under the weight of western expansion and greater resistance to the “peculiar institution” by Northerners.

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After the annexation of Texas in December 1845, President James K. Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor and 3,500 troops south to ensure American territorial claims that stretched to the Rio Grande River. This was a direct act of provocation, as Mexican authorities had openly recognized Texan territorial claims that ended north of the Rio Grande, on the Nueces River. That April, a detachment of Mexican cavalry attacked a small patrol of U.S. soldiers in the disputed strip of territory. In his message to Congress that May, Polk accused Mexicans of invading United States territory to “shed American blood upon American soil.”39 The incident provoked the United States to declare war on Mexico on May 13, 1846. American opinion on the war was mixed. Nearly two months after the start of the war, the young Transcendentalist poet Henry David Thoreau was jailed for his refusal to pay a state poll tax—a tax, Thoreau argued, that contributed to America’s war effort and, ultimately, the expansion of slavery. “There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war,” Thoreau complained, “who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them.” The writer encouraged his audience to see relationships between their everyday lives and larger events with ethical dimensions. “I quarrel not with far-off foes,” he wrote, “but with those, who, near at home, cooperate with, and do the bidding of, those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless.”40 Thoreau’s views of civil disobedience were first published under the title “Resistance to Civil Government” in Aesthetic Papers in 1849. Other contemporaries agreed with the New England sage. Elected to Congress the opening year of the Mexican War, the Whig representative from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, later criticized Polk for springing into action on “wholly unjustifiable pretexts.” In a speech later referred to as the “Spot Resolutions Speech,” Lincoln rhetorically asked the President, “whether the spot on which the blood of our citizens was shed . . . was or was not within the territory of Spain.”41 Assessing what the potential of such land acquisition might mean to the bolstering of southern slavery and the fate of the United States, Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked, “the United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man swallows the arsenic, which brings him down in turn. Mexico,” he concluded, “will poison us.”42 Not so thought most Democrats. Since the days of Thomas Jefferson the party had pushed for expansion across the continent, and many believed a war with Mexico was the next opportunity to fulfill this God-given destiny. The prospect of the geographical spread of American ideals into Mexico (and possibly Quebec during these days of expansionist euphoria) led John L. O’Sullivan, the editor of the Morning News, to remark, “Yes, more, more,

Natural Laws, Unnatural Violence, and the Psychophysical Experience

more!”43 A little more than five years earlier, O’Sullivan, who also edited the nation’s Democratic Review,44 had planted the seeds of the Republic’s so-called “mission,” arguing that the “moral dignity and salvation of man” embodied in the nation was to spread throughout the world.45 The war with Mexico seemed to many to be the fulfillment of this long-discussed vision of the nation’s future and has primarily been treated by scholars in terms of its immediate effects on the issues of slavery, western expansion, and, ultimately, the Civil War. As historians have referenced for years, the junior officers who fought the Mexican War would meet little more than a decade later in the nation’s bloodiest conflict.46 Although much of the focus has been on the biographies of those who fought in the war or changes in military life and tactics, there are other important comparisons as well. As happened in the case of the Civil War, politicians grossly underestimated the financial and human costs of the war. One out of ten American soldiers died in a little less than two years of conflict. In rough terms, the same ratio holds true for those severely wounded by the war. For those in positions of power who provoked the struggle with Mexico, the conflict lasted longer, was harder fought, more expensive, and cost more lives—12,518 total—than anyone ever thought possible.47 Other unintended outcomes were also paralleled in the Civil War. Desertion rates reached the highest percentage of any foreign war fought by the United States. So acute was the problem that in November 1848 the New York Weekly Herald reported that American desertions were so frequent that a circular had been published asking owners of haciendas to “arrest” any deserters and report them to the American authorities.48 Those caught were sometimes executed or received brutal corporal punishments for their crimes, such as flogging. Instituted as a punishment for desertion in the army in 1831, flogging remained the customary form of punishment until 1861.49 One incident making national headlines was the case of Jon Patrick Riley who deserted the army, formed his own brigade,50 and eventually joined the ranks of the Mexican Army. Eventually Riley was captured, along with seventy men during the Battle of Churubusco. He was tried for desertion and convicted. For his crimes, the New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette reported, “Riley is branded with a hot iron on his cheek, scourged and lacerated on his naked flesh, his limbs hoppled with a chain and ball, and his base carcase [sic] confined within view of the American army, doomed to ignominious slavery amid the unceasing contumely of the soldiers who were once his companions.”51 Such forms of violence directed towards the human body to demonstrate ideas of justice were fundamental to the fighting of the American Civil War.

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In many respects scholars have rightly called the Mexican War a dress rehearsal for America’s Civil War. But what is all too often overlooked is the exposure of these regular officers to and participation in a war that at times breached the rules of civilized warfare. By 1847, more than 73,000 volunteers had been mustered into the army. Although most carried out their charges lawfully, notorious companies emerged to prosecute their own brand of warfare and notions of justice. Some infamous companies made up the armies that invaded Mexico. The 1st Pennsylvania, for example, was made up of volunteers from Philadelphia whose members were part of a gang locally known as “the Killers.” This group of men, along with others, started pillaging the land even before crossing into Mexican territory. The Louisville Journal reported in 1847 that Taylor’s march to Monterey “was everywhere marked by deeds of wanton violence and cruelty.” The result of these and other atrocities against civilian populations was enough “to make Heaven weep,” remembered General-in-Chief Winfield Scott later.52 Grant complained that volunteers in the Mexican army were simply used as pawns for a war machine. Poorly clothed and fed often without pay, Grant remarked the men were “turned adrift when no longer wanted.”53 The same might be said, however, of America’s volunteers at the time. In his older but remarkably relevant study Soldiers and Civilians: The Martial Spirit in America 1775–1865, Marcus Cunliffe observes the rank and file in the antebellum period was constituted by both “men of education” and “scoundrels.” This constitution of men in arms led to years of contradictory experiences. “Their existence was at once too military and not military enough,” Cunliffe writes. Their conditions of service varied in extremes that inevitably affected the nation and the home front. “They were alternatively babied and bullied, treated as good Americans and then as bad Americans, as children and as convicts. What saved them from disintegration,” the author remarks, “was the occasional chance to fight—in Florida, in Mexico, against the Indians in the West.”54 By the advent of the American Civil War, memories of the Mexican War cut many ways. Some regular army officers remembered the atrocities committed by volunteers and doubted the disciplinary constitution of such ranks. But others, like Ulysses S. Grant, who served as a second lieutenant during the conflict, saw a distinct advantage to the ferocity displayed by such men. The “rank and file were probably inferior as material out of which to make an army,” Grant speculated, “to the volunteers that participated in all the later battles of the war.” Later in life Grant remembered the war as a “political war” and consequently “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”55 And while he voiced

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no concern at the time of the war, his critique concerned the behavior of nation states and the legalities of territorial acquisition, not the war crimes that American volunteers allegedly carried out against the Mexican people. After the conflict, the same men who perpetrated these acts against civilians came back to a nation less homogeneous, more urban, and far more susceptible to social upheavals than it was in the previous decade. In this new volatile atmosphere, violence by white supremacist groups began to gain strength after the Mexican War, priming for later intensification during the Civil War and Reconstruction.56 Emerson’s prediction about the toxicity of the Mexican War was manifesting itself in several areas of American life in the 1850s as well. Notions of bloodshed and social upheaval were injected into American politics like never before. In the presidential election of 1848, the famed lithographer Nathaniel Currier produced a print entitled “An available candidate—the one qualification for a Whig president.” The image depicted the “candidate” sitting atop a pyramid of skulls, holding a blood-soaked sword wearing formal military attire complete with epaulets and a plumed hat. The officer was said to be either General Zachary Taylor or General Winfield Scott, both of whom were said to embody Whig principles.57 Currier’s depiction tapped into a growing uneasiness felt by Americans that the nation’s thirst for blood to resolve disputes was growing. Unprecedented levels of violence were witnessed in the United States after the Mexican conflict, outstripping all other industrial societies at the time. A new sense of nationalism was emerging at this time, one having clear racial overtones and premised on cultural assumptions. One historical study of homicide in the United States simply put it this way: “The least homicidal places in the Western world suddenly became the most homicidal.”58 Killing came in a variety of forms. Homicides increased in areas of robbery, rape, property disputes, and even card games, among many others. Social instability bred even more killing among Americans, which ironically targeted those at the top of the social order. Although immigration appears to have contributed to the rise in homicides in America, a revealing change was the surge of killings that took place among nativeborn Protestants, which in many areas of the country mirrored the homicide rates of ethnic minorities. Even though racial violence remained omnipresent throughout the early Republic and antebellum period, by the 1840s new forms of prejudice emerged that played on racial stereotypes. Dichotomous forms of thinking formed around anthropological and sociological models that discussed notions of civility, progress, and barbarism. The popularization of these outlooks, in turn, led to a further alienation between the

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sections. “The state of society in the South and their legislation, exhibits a growing tendency to lapse back into barbarism. . . . Men resort to violence and bloodshed,” proclaimed the Milwaukee Sentinel, “rather than to calm discussion and courts of justice to settle their disputes and difficulties.” The article went on to suggest the “Christian world” had risen up through societies like the South to demonstrate a condition that was “mild, moral, peaceable, humane.” In concluding its critique, the newspaper suggested that “the South has already sunk three centuries back toward the age of barbarism.”59 The perception of a violent South was not too far from the truth in the antebellum period. “Southerners did indeed, pass on, consciously and unconsciously, their propensity for violence,” comments one historian of the South, “through the lack of restraint and the encouragement of self-assertion.”60 Viewing self-determination as a self-evident right guaranteed by the law to the point of its violent enforcement, white Americans, with vastly different conceptions of this Godgiven right, marched off to war.

Simply Murder: Unfathomable Killing and the Civil War “For many Americans,” writes historian Maris Vinovskis, “the death of a close friend or relative was the central event of the Civil War.”61 As a sociocultural phenomenon, wartime deaths occurred in a variety of ways, through multiple arenas and evoked a range of responses among citizens and soldiers. As the winds of war changed, so, too, did the ways soldiers, friends, and loved ones interacted with the dead. During the opening years of the war, many families of soldiers having economic means, particularly those of officers, were able to properly mourn and inter the remains of a loved one. Yet as the war grew in ferocity, chaotic scenes in the aftermath of battle, unidentified bodies, and the need to rapidly inter massive numbers of the dead all led to an uncertainty about the meaning of death. The overwhelming task of recording and disposing of the dead, a job designated to the quartermaster general’s office, coupled with problems in communication between the front and hometowns, complicated and in many cases halted traditional burials for families and friends. Even if physical remains were identifiable, they typically remained far from home and thus could hardly afford consolation to families and tight-knit communities making heart-rending sacrifices to the cause. From its inception and with each passing month during the so-called fighting season, the growing ferocity of the fighting made deep impressions upon soldiers and those on the home front. The lives of residents in far-off places such as Shiloh, Tennessee, a town whose name evoked

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biblical allusions of a Messianic promise of hope, were forever changed by the war. In the spring of 1862, residents throughout the South read alarming reports of the first major battle in the west, in which approximately 70,000 men were engaged. One account appeared in southern newspapers after the battle offering bone-chilling words: “[N]early one fourth of the entire number of Confederates engaged were either killed or wounded, a spectacle of heroism and valor presented which would do credit to any age or people.”62 In the north, Congress received word of Shiloh characterizing it as “the hardest battle ever fought on this continent.”63 A captain present at this scene of carnage said, “Whole lines went down like grass before the scythe.” In an agrarian nation this particular metaphor to describe the ferocity of fighting and the efficiency in which men’s lives were cut down became all too common, penetrating deep into the nation’s psyche. Wrote another soldier of the events at Shiloh, “I shall never forget my feelings when I saw the first man killed.”64 Emotions like these were never forgotten, for the violence witnessed by soldiers and at times civilians could prove to be psychologically overwhelming. After Shiloh, the killing intensified and moved to the east. In two battles in the closing months of 1862, the Union Army lost more than 25,000 men. Newspapers carried stories that spoke of treacherous killing, murder, and barbarity, actions not thought possible in the east. That very December, Francis Lieber, working as one of President Lincoln’s military advisers, was busy codifying the rule of war. “Lincoln’s Code,” as scholar John Fabian Witt has termed it, sought to define the rules of war in ways that would allow the Federal government to redouble its efforts and intensify an already bloody war. “The more vigorously wars are pursued,” Lieber concluded, “the better it is for humanity.” Jefferson Davis and Confederate leaders called the code a “license for a man to be either fiend or gentleman.”65 Based on the criterion of vigorous prosecution to maximize efficiency, the employment of Lieber’s code to the Union war effort was quite successful, but it cost countless lives and property. A few months later the Battle of Chancellorsville witnessed the engagement of nearly 100,000 Union forces. Though the Confederates were greatly outnumbered, fielding just more than 57,000, under the cooperative leadership of Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, the Confederates won the battle in stunning fashion. Upon hearing of the loss that cost the Union army more than 18,000 causalities President Lincoln was thunderstruck, his face turning “ashen,” observed Noah Brooks, a newspaper reporter and close confidant of the President. “My God! my God!” uttered Lincoln. “What will the country say?”66

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But the effusion of blood at Chancellorsville was just the beginning. The battles of Chickamauga, Gettysburg, Spotsylvania Court House, and the Wilderness were some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War as a young nation struggled to find meaning in the massive number of dead and wounded. War on this grand a scale was something new for the American psyche, and few were prepared spiritually or otherwise to have a clear sense of its effect on and meaning for society.67 The volume and rapidity of Civil War deaths rained down upon Americans, bringing with it an incoherency about the meaning of these deaths. In the midst of these years, the killing on the battlefield too often seemed pointless. First-hand exposure to war left Sarah Butler, the wife of General Benjamin Butler, to ask, “[W]hat is all this struggling and fighting for? This ruin and death to thousands of families? . . . What advancement of mankind to compensate for the present horrible calamities?”68 Though the notion of “vigorous” prosecution of the war was ultimately a winning strategy for the Federals, it was not achieved without the wasteful loss of human life at times. In May 1864 as Grant pursued Lee down the peninsula, the carnage of the war escalated to unprecedented levels. Grant later wrote in his memoirs, “I have always regretted that the last assault at Cold Harbor was ever made. I might say the same thing of the assault of the 22d of May, 1863, at Vicksburg. At Cold Harbor no advantage whatever was gained to compensate for the heavy loss we sustained.”69 Soldiers on both sides were keenly aware of the changing nature of war and its potential costs. A blood-spattered diary from a Union soldier found after the battle included a final entry: “June 3. Cold Harbor. I was killed.” Mary Chesnut, the Southern diarist, lost her cousin during this time. Recording his death on the pages of her diary, Chesnut simply commented on the larger meaning of death being experienced by Southerners by writing, “The blows now fall so fast on our heads it is bewildering.”70 During the final two years of fighting, as the character of the war took on a modern cast, the violence of the war broadened and deepened. With prisoner exchanges halted and the infrastructure of the South targeted as a wartime measure by the North, an increasing number of deaths occurred from starvation and disease rather than the “glories” of the battlefield. Massive numbers of dead and wounded demanded considerably more support by the War Department and quartermaster office—support that was in short supply as the war continued. The result was increased numbers of missing bodies and trenches of carnage that effectively obliterated the ritualistic aspects of mourning a lost loved one. Because symbols and practices related to death are inextricably linked to some of the deepest-held convictions of human beings, the unexpected and massive carnage produced by

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the war created a series of problems that deeply penetrated the lives of the Civil War generation well into the postbellum period.

Psychophysical Coping with a Bloody Past To appreciate why the violence of the Civil War had such a strong and lingering effect on society, it is important to understand the social register of violence done to bodies within a broader scope of Western history. The war erupted at a key time in American history when a new concern for the sanctity of the human body emerged in the West, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This “almost complete turnabout” in attitudes among citizens, as historian Lynn Hunt describes it in Inventing Human Rights, placed a growing value on individuated bodies outside of religious arenas. Hunt writes, “Bodies gained a more positive value as they became more separate, more self-possessed, and more individualized over the course of the eighteenth century.” She concludes with the insight that “violations of [bodies] increasingly aroused negative reactions.”71 An explosion of language concerning the rights of humans, coupled with this growing social appreciation for individual bodies and their contributions to a civilized society, led to deeply held egalitarian impulses during the prewar era. Another important consideration is the nature of civil wars. According to theorist Stathis N. Kalyvas, the violence in civil war need not always serve an instrumental purpose and has as much to do with social pathologies that generations of Americans, even today, are sometimes reticent to acknowledge.72 Taking seriously Kalyvas’s notion that civil wars are full of pathologies is a call to scholars to begin studying the violence of the Civil War era outside familiar contexts and formulas. The field of scholarship is slowly shifting in this direction, but it will take a tremendous effort by scholars and the general public to set aside their shibboleths and see aspects of the American Civil War as they see those of other nations. As historian Edward Ayers has recently suggested, such adaptations within the field of study are not easy ones. “It may be, rather, that we like the current story too much to challenge it very deeply,” Ayers asserts, “and that we foreclose questions by repeating familiar formulas.”73 The unprecedented amount of violence targeted at civilian populations, left psychophysical scars that penetrated deeply into the psyche of white Americans. One study of this period finds: “The latter part of the nineteenth century was one of the most violent periods in American history . . . and much of that violence is traceable to the Civil War” which served to legitimate the use of violence for social change both good and

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bad.74 Though it is one thing to appreciate the historical significance and changes over time regarding violence as a social phenomenon, it is another to appreciate it on a deeper psychophysical level. To do so is to suggest that scholars have considerable work left to do to understand and measure the true significance and meaning of the war beyond its political outcomes or visible physical scars. “Understanding how the brain and body process, remember, and perpetuate traumatic events,” writes psychotherapist and author Babette Rothschild, “holds many keys to the treatment of the traumatized body and mind.”75 Listening carefully to this dialogue of not only physical pain, but also psychological trauma and lingering emotional scars reveals the oftentimes brutal and inhumane nature of America’s Civil War. Put simply, the violence of the Civil War did not only leave visible wounds, but also punctured the American psyche, leaving emotional and psychological scars not easily healable and never forgotten. “Trauma is a psychophysical experience, even when the traumatic event causes no direct bodily harm,” writes Rothschild. “[That] traumatic events exact a toll on the body as well as the mind is a well-documented and agreed-upon conclusion of the psychiatric community.”76 For people of the postbellum period, the trauma of war waxed and waned. Often remaining buried deep within their psyche, the trauma of the past occasionally found the light of day and was recorded on the pages of diaries and family autobiographies. This Victorian reticence to talk about such matters has led historians to overlook the depth and breadth of this trauma among those whose lives were touched by the fiery trial of war. Examples of this trauma abound in the extant records of the nation if one carefully combs the records of the past. One of the first physicians to understand the relationship between physical and mental wounding was Silas Weir Mitchell, a premiere physician of postwar America who never forgot his experiences of the war. Compared to Benjamin Franklin by contemporaries for his genius, Mitchell served in Turners Lane Hospital in Philadelphia during the Civil War. In charge of nervous injuries and maladies, Mitchell recounted his time in the ward as months being surrounded by “epileptics . . . every kind of nerve wound, palsies, choreas, [and] stump disorders.” Working at one of the largest hospitals in the North to service wounded soldiers, Mitchell and his staff saw countless cases of psychological disorders caused by the war, and he later reflected on the intensity of these years, saying, “I sometimes wonder how we stood it.”77 In 1866 Mitchell penned his experiences in a fictional short story for the Atlantic Monthly that detailed the physiological and psychological problems suffered by soldiers in the war. Entitled “The Case of George Dedlow,” Mitchell’s main protagonist suffered from “phantom pain,” a term

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the physician later coined in 1871. This phenomenon was common in hospitals, according to Mitchell, who witnessed, “thousands of spirit limbs [that] were haunting as many good soldiers, every now and then tormenting them.”78 Having lost all four limbs, Mitchell’s fictionalized character enters the so-called “Stump Hospital” on South Street Philadelphia in 1864 for several months of treatment before he is eventually transferred to the United States Army Hospital for Injuries and Diseases of the Nervous System where he undergoes treatment including injections of morphine to ease his phantom pain. Mitchell’s account of the effects of treatment highlighted the intimate relationship between bodily pain and psychological wellbeing. “I found to my horror that at times I was less conscious of myself, of my own existence, than used to be the case,” states George Dedlow. “This sensation was so novel, that at first it quite bewildered me.” He continues, “At times the conviction of my want of being myself was overwhelming, and most painful. About one half of the sensitive surface of my skin was gone, and thus much of relation to the outer world destroyed.” With this loss of sensation to the outer world, Dedlow considers life as he once knew it to be over. “Thus one half of me was absent or functionally dead.” With the loss of his appendages and normal interaction with his physical surroundings, Dedlow begins to contemplate the ultimate meaning of not just his life, but his humanity. “Would such a being, I asked myself, possess the sense of individuality in its usual completeness, even if his organs of sensation remained, and he were capable of consciousness?” In contemplating this question through the life story of his main character, Mitchell offered his readership keen insights about the everyday experiences and challenges being met by injured Civil War veterans who were returning home. “I thus reached the conclusion that a man is not his brain, or any one part of it,” announced Dedlow, “but all of his economy, and that to lose any part must lessen this sense of his own existence.”79 Mitchell’s essay garnered terrific attention, and the vividness of his descriptions frightened many people into thinking the story was nonfiction. Though Americans were relieved to find out that Dedlow was a fictional character of the recent war, Dedlow was in fact a singular voice speaking for the multiple experiences of severely wounded veterans and their families. And such “fictional” memories of the trauma produced by war never left Mitchell’s mind. On his deathbed in 1913, the physician was heard to whisper medical orders from a bygone era: “That leg must come off—save a leg—lose the life.”80 Similar fictional accounts would appear with varying commercial success in the years following the war. But in the decades after the war, the

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voices of veterans began to be heard in public. While Twain was shaping his manuscript for publication there appeared in the Columbia Tennessee Herald a serialized account of wartime experiences by a former veteran and first-time author, Sam Watkins. Later published as the book Co. Aytch, Watkins’s experience of the war and its postbellum memories painted a first-hand account of the soulful angst that paralleled many of Twain’s fictionalized characters. There is perhaps no more revealing account of how postwar whites in the South understood the meaning of the violence and physical losses they endured than Watkins’s description of his friend, N. B. Shepard, an invalid and bedridden veteran whose service for the Confederacy came to an end in 1864 when he was struck by a ricocheting cannon ball at the Battle of Jonesborough during the Atlanta Campaign. “The ball struck him on the knapsack,” Watkins remembered, “knocking him twenty feet, and breaking one or two ribs and dislocating his shoulder. He was one of God’s noblemen, indeed.” Like so many other Southerners of his generation, however, the vivid tones with which Watkins depicted the righteousness and self-assurance of the Confederate cause were often followed by hues of moral doubt. “God alone controls our destinies, and surely He who watched over us and took care of us in those dark and bloody days, will not forsake us now.”81 The admission is a revealing one, encapsulating some of the primary issues of adjusting to civilian life many Civil War veterans struggled with for years following the war. Though each case for the veteran had its own particularities of readjustment, as a whole, veterans struggled to reassemble their past. For many who were physically or mentally wounded, the normalcy of the life that once was never returned. The scarring effects of the war on the psychophysical world of veterans and their families remained a permanent fixture of life in the decades after the war. In one sense Watkins’s words are an affirmation of his Southern sensibilities and religiosity—that is to say, parsing Watkins’s sentiment, God through an inscrutable wisdom will ultimately not forsake the former Confederacy and the righteousness of its cause. Yet in another sense, the expression is full of doubt. Psychologically suspended in time between the halcyon days of the Confederacy and the publication of his narrative in 1881, Watkins waits for the life-altering phase of the war to be over and for his southern identity to be whole again. The ambiguity of existence felt in these postwar years is what Twain hinted at by referencing the reconfiguration of Southern identity and time. New codes of behavior emerged for Southerners and Northerners alike after the war. The life-altering experience of the Civil War for the South is what Robert Penn Warren described in a different context as its “fear

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of abstraction.” Culturally conditioned to the point of being “instinctive,” according to Penn, Southerners held a fear that “the massiveness of experience, the concreteness of life, will be violated; the fear of abstraction.”82 In a similar way, a fear of violating the concreteness of interpretations involving the war’s meaning was widely experienced by Civil War veterans, both North and South. Even in the midst of the Civil War, the bodies of wounded and dead soldiers were being developed as didactic tools to express particular lessons about the war, its meaning to national providence, and the inevitable sacrifice of its democratic citizenry.83 Many corridors of power spoke of a sanctified suffering experienced by soldiers and families assuring them that the lingering feelings of bitterness were good and that their suffering would simply pass. With the war coming to a close, Reverend Jesse Rankin told his North Carolinian congregation it was “better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting,” for “sorrow is better than laughter.”84 Try as they might, much of the nation would not let soldiers forget the past. The son of one Confederate officer of the war observed that his father returned home “bitter and broken in health and spirit and estate.” Trying to silence the past, “[h]e destroyed all evidence of service, all photographs in uniform and wanted to forget it all.”85 Families and friends of veterans suffered as well. Although Henry James did not serve in the war but experienced it vicariously through the service of his brothers, he suggested later in his life that the war years were “indescribably intensified” as he sought to understand the meaning of the past. Though James referenced the war in many of his writings, on the eve of World War I he endeavored to understand his “generalized pains of participation” in Notes of a Son and Brother. The war, according to one writer, brought with it a “malign invasion of the spirit” from which James never fully recovered.86 The memorializing etiquette developed in the United States at the close of the nineteenth century was spurred by a government that wanted to question neither its reasons for fighting, nor the means by which both sides prosecuted the war. Instead, themes such as manhood, sacrifice, and heroism became the vernacular of these events and were subjects in which both sides could find common ground. This form of consensus, however, was only temporary. As James and Melissa Griffith suggest in their work, The Body Speaks, “Silencing one’s voice in order to protect a vital relationship often makes sense, and is easily accomplished; it is much harder . . . to silence the expression of one’s body.”87 With the posttrauma bodily experience of Civil War veterans’ being caught up in the mechanics of political and social reconciliation of an advancing nation,

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the opportunities for authentic expressions of grief, personal doubts, or regret were rare for individual soldiers. Struggling to make sense of the paradox of war, Watkins, like many other veterans, both North and South, turned to spirituality. Pinning his hopes on a future of final judgment and a resolution of doubt, Watkins recast traditional religious thinking involving a dualist conception of body and soul and put them into one. “The day will come when the good as well as the evil will all meet on one broad platform,” Watkins penned, “to be rewarded for the deeds done in the body . . . with the gates of eternity closed, and the key fastened to the girdle of God forever.”88 In these few lines the writer plainly expressed some of the soulful expressions that so many other fellow countrymen hinted at in their memoirs or scattered across the pages of private letters to family and friends. Suffering, on various levels, had become routine.89 In these words, some of the elusive psychophysical experience of the Civil War is expressed. Memories of violent acts done to the body are juxtaposed with sacrificial acts done by the body. To make sense of these violent experiences, soldiers relied upon sectional prescriptions of just ad bellum that were mutually exclusive.90 After the governments reconciled, an impasse in the healing process was born, as the unequivocal sectional values from which the war was justified were not easily forgotten. Watkins’s writing gave a temporary but meaningful voice to veterans, like Shepard, whose physical and psychological pains were literally housed out of sight of a general public that beneath the gilded patterns of public memorialization struggled to make sense of the war. Furthermore, when the discourse of reconciliation considered the rules of warfare, more obstacles to a psychological reckoning of the past took shape. Jus in bello, justice in war, at times flew in the face of conventional memorial practices, particularly when topics such as prisoner exchanges, guerilla warfare, civilian hardships, and murderous trench warfare challenged the public’s dialogue with the past. All this constituted an irreconcilable past for soldiers that was difficult to convey to nonveterans. It is what Oliver Wendell Holmes famously described as “the incommunicable experience of war” among Civil War veterans. Although writers have made considerable use of these very words, Holmes’s Memorial Day address, “The Soldier’s Faith,” hinted at the continuing struggle of the Civil War generation to make sense of their proclaimed causes and the devastating costs. “Whatever of glory yet remains for us to win must be won in the council or the closet, never again in the field.”91 The biopsychosocial view of illness that is part of the diagnostic tools used by doctors today was not a part of the medical lexicon of late

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nineteenth-century America. But countless numbers of former soldiers and their families suffered from an “irritable heart,” the physiological equivalent of posttraumatic stress disorder, or “nostalgia,” the psychological version of the disorder.92 More often than not, however, the lingering complaints about the Civil War were dismissed or silenced in other ways, sometimes by veterans themselves.93 Vacationing in Saratoga, New York, in 1873, John C. Breckinridge, the fourteenth vice president of the United States, who was serving as the senatorial representative of Kentucky when the war broke out, wrote to Jubal Early refuting his claims that Breckinridge was too devoted to “progressive ideas” concerning national reconciliation and the future of the nation. “You will know better some day,” Breckinridge wrote admonishingly. As the only senator of the United States to be convicted of treason against the nation by the Senate, Breckinridge remained stout in his devotion to his native Kentucky and the former Confederacy. “I seek no man’s society who speaks of us as ‘traitors,’ nor will I associate with our former adversaries upon the basis of mere sufferance.”94 Nearly two decades later such sentiments were still apparent among former veterans. “No God-knows-who-was-right bosh must be tolerated at Gettysburg,” wrote the editor of one veterans’ journal in 1888. “The men who won the victory there were eternally right, and the men who were defeated were eternally wrong.”95 The legacy of violence and the suffering it caused white America seemed to be everywhere in postbellum America, but few wanted to reconcile the past on terms other than their own. But assuredly not all combatants died on the battlefield or were subject to glorious deaths, two points that dominate the rhetoric of memorializing during the Gilded Age. As Drew Gilpin Faust has written, “naming” what the war about—whether accurate or not—was the herculean task of the federal government and other agencies after the war. By the closing of the century the designation “unknown,” remarked Walt Whitman, the nation’s democratic poet, had become significant under the direction of the federal government that encouraged Americans to remember its Civil War past as a Homeric struggle where honorable men sacrificially offered their “last full measure” on the battlefield. 96 This romantic vision of the past developed over several decades, but ultimately served both the individual and collective needs of the nation’s white middle class. Historian David W. Blight writes that the postwar years are “a story of how the forces of reconciliation” between whites in the North and South “overwhelmed the emancipationist vision” of America set out by those who saw racial and social equality as the primary issues upon which the war was predicated.97 So powerful was this narrative that by the closing decade of the nineteenth century, discrete localized memorial efforts to recount the war

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repeated the familiar contours of a national narrative. Affirming a sense of the war’s purposefulness in the larger drama of human history as well as the triumphant march of liberty among nations, these memorial gatherings increasingly centered upon the themes of manly sacrifice and honor, attributes said to be uniquely American. Public recognition of former soldiers and fallen veterans, however, was only one key component of these ceremonies. Memorial exercises were also encouraged by local, state, and federal officials as a ritual process to provide a corporate understanding of the war, one full of noble meaning while displacing memories of its brutality, senseless deaths, and issues of ethical culpability in the prosecution of the war by both sides. Over time the meaning of the war became inseparable from these civic rituals that held sacred meaning for countless Americans. Michael C. Kearl argues that “death’s impact ripples not only across acquaintance networks and space but across time as well.”98 As with the establishment of any dominant narrative, however, alternative stories emerged over the course of the war. But the American Civil War produced massive deaths that challenged and in some cases destroyed the intellectual and social frameworks upon which Americans largely understood death. In so doing, the war helped to change the terms upon which the nation would come to understand death.

Conclusion It took nearly two decades after the war, when state, sectional, and nationalistic memorials to veterans and fallen comrades became a prominent feature of American social life, for ideas about God’s sovereignty and history to be restored in a powerful way. The national discourse that emerged conceived of Providence quite differently from how it had during the antebellum period. From the hallowed ground of Gettysburg and countless other memorial sites of the late nineteenth century, God’s will became a surrogate of national desires. Ironically, for a man who never claimed to know God’s will, Lincoln perhaps gave the most eloquent expression to this burgeoning perspective in the Gettysburg Address, a speech historian Garry Wills appropriately coined “The Transcendental Declaration.”99 But few, if any, other orators matched Lincoln’s eloquence, and if one scratches beneath the surface of these ritualistic gatherings the student of history discovers that an array of the soul-filled troubles of the violent past remained. Although elements of the ideological breach were healed comparatively quickly as a new generation of Americans attempted to put the war behind them, emotional and spiritual wounds from the war remained.

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This was particularly true for religious institutions and their congregants. As President Lincoln reminded his contemporaries in his second inaugural address, those who read the same Bible and prayed to the same God perpetrated the killing on the battlefield.100 Such a paradox was not easily explained and buried itself deep within the psychological makeup of the American people who understood the struggle in more than just national terms, but those of cosmic history. Ultimately these uncertainties became a part of the fabric of American life, unsettling previous worldviews and sparking more uncertainties and violence—particularly racial violence— in the Gilded Age. In his centennial meditations on the Civil War’s meaning in American history, poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren found its ultimate meaning in one word: tragedy. “Here we use it at its deepest significance,” Warren spoke of the term, “the image in action of the deepest questions of man’s fate and man’s attitude toward his fate. For the Civil War is, massively, that. It is the story of a crime of monstrous inhumanity, into which almost innocently men stumbled.”101 In the gilded histories that followed the war, all too often fundamental notions of a sacrificial penance and Christian soldiering replaced the experiences of killing that bespoke of vengeance, inhumanity, lawlessness, and even the desecration of the dead. But these frightful realities of war persisted, raising penetrating questions about the civility and justice executed by the war. For the American people who had endured the fiery trial of war, this “felt history” of the war persisted in the recesses of their souls.

Notes 1.  Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (Boston, MA: James R. Osgood & Company, 1883). 2.  Stanton Garner, The Civil War World of Herman Melville (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1993), 294–344. 3.  Herman Melville, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 272. 4.  Herman Melville, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1866), 265. 5.  Herman Melville, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 272. Some other examples include: Hosea M. Knowtlon, The Tragedy of the Rebellion: An Address Delivered before William Logan Rodman Post, No. 1, Robert G. Shaw Post, No. 146, and R.A. Peirce Post, No. 190, of the Grand Army of the Republic, at Liberty Hall, New Bedford, Mass. May 30, 1890 (Boston, MA: Published by Mercury Pub. Co., Printers, 1890). 6. In her work on notions of sacred versus profane, Lynda Sexson discusses the relationship of the sacred to material culture noting, “The religious

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traditions that have dominated the west have bequeathed to us a rigid distinction between the sacred and the secular. This dichotomy, which protects the authority of institutions, discredits the spontaneous, which has sacred potential. Politically organized religions manipulate sacred symbols in order to enhance and protect their ‘secular’ or community authority.” Lynda Sexson, Ordinarily Sacred (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 1992), 22.  7. Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 60.   8.  Some of the more popular accounts include: William F. Fox, Regimental Losses in the American Civil War, 1861–1865: A Treatise on the Extent and Nature of the Mortuary Losses in the Union Regiments, with Full and Exhaustible Statistics Compiled from the Official Records on File in the State Military Bureaus and at Washington (Albany, NY: Albany Publishing Company, 1889); Thomas L. Livermore, Numbers and Losses in the Civil War in America: 1861–1865 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1900); United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, DC: Government Printing Offices, 1880–1901).   9.  James M. McPherson, Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 56. “The 620,000 Union and Confederate soldiers who lost their lives almost equaled the 680,000 American soldiers who died in all the other wars this country has fought combined. When we add the unknown but probably substantial number of civilian deaths—from disease, malnutrition, exposure, or injury  .  .  . the toll of Civil War dead probably exceeds that of all other American wars put together. Consider two sobering facts about the battle of Antietam, America’s single bloodiest day. The 23,000 casualties there were almost four times the number of American casualties on D-Day, June 6, 1944. The 6,300 men killed and mortally wounded in one day near Sharpsburg were nearly double the number of Americans killed and mortally wounded in combat in all the rest of the country’s nineteenth-century wars combined—the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish–American War, and the Indian wars thrown in for good measure. Finally, mark an even more sobering fact. Two percent of the American population of 1860 were killed in the Civil War; if the United States suffered the same proportion of deaths in a war fought in the 1990s, the number of American war dead would exceed five million” (57). 10. Maris A. Vinovskis, “Have Social Historians Lost the Civil War? Some Preliminary Demographical Speculations,” Journal of American History, 76, no. 1 (June 1989): 40. 11.  Reid Mitchell’s The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), comments on the formation of the federal army. “It is important to realize that this way of recruiting and organizing soldiers was not simply accidental. Instead, this voluntary organization of small communities into a national army, the amalgamation of civic pride and national patriotism serves as an example of how the volunteers imagined the Union should

Natural Laws, Unnatural Violence, and the Psychophysical Experience

function. . . . The local nature of the companies and regiments faithfully mirrored the body politic at large” (22). 12.  J. David Hacker, “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead,” Civil War History 57, no. 4 (December 2011): 307–348. 13.  Anthony Esler, “‘The Truest Community’: Social Generations as Collective Mentalities,” Journal of Political and Military Sociology, 12 (1984): 99–112. 14.  James M. McPherson, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1992), 487. 15. “Violence was interwoven with the creation of the American nation.” Richard Maxwell Brown, Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 7. 16. Brown, Strain of Violence, 7. 17.  Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “The Causes of the American Civil War: A Note on Historical Sentimentalism,” Partisan Review 16, no. 10 (1949): 969–981. 18.  An interesting analysis of Schlesinger’s contribution to Civil War historiography is offered in Michael E. Woods, Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), “Introduction.” 19. Phillip Shaw Paludan, “What Did the Winners Win? The Social and Economic History of the North During the Civil War,” in James M. McPherson and William J. Cooper Jr., eds., Writing the Civil War: The Quest to Understand (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 174–175. 20.  Phillipe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Originally published in 1981, the author writes about his initial preparations for the manuscript. “It forced me to make an attempt at synthesis, to discover the broad lines and major volumes of structure whose slow construction over the years has obscured its unity and coherence.” p.xiii–xiv. 21.  Jane Pilcher, “Mannheim’s Sociology of Generations: An Undervalued Legacy,” British Journal of Sociology 45, no. 3, September (1994): 481–495. 22.  Randolph Roth, American Homicide (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 185. 23.  Williams quoted in Roth, American Homicide, 181. 24. Roth, American Homicide, 186. 25.  See Jeannine Marie DeLombard, Slavery on Trial: Law, Abolitionism, and Print Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 26. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 25. 27.  David Walker, Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular and Very Expressly to Those of the United States of America (Boston, MA: Revised and Published by David Walker, 1830). 28. “A Negro Legislator. The Colored Representative from Boston—His Ancestry—An Interesting Statement,” Chicago Tribune, November 20, 1866, 2. 29.  Recent scholarship by Douglas Egerton has argued Prosser’s rebellion was distinctive in its origins from other slave uprisings in that Prosser’s revolt was

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conceived of as a class revolt of urban artisans against the upper class. Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993). Perhaps the best recent treatment of Prosser is James Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords (Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge, 1997). 30. David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1976), 453. 31.  An older but still highly relevant treatment of this subject is Winthrop D. Jordan’s, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 581–582. 32.  Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Book, 1977), 34. “There is a legal code of pain,” the author writes, “when it involves torture, punishment does not fall upon the body indiscriminately or equally; it is calculated according to detailed rules. . . . All these various elements multiply the punishments and are combined according to the court and the crime.” 33.  Steven Pierce and Anupama Roa, eds., Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporality, Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 5. 34.  Initial reports seem to have been generated by the Petersburgh Intelligencer. For two early reports in the South, see “Nat Turner,” Baltimore Gazette and Daily Advertiser, November 16, 1831, Vol. 76, Issue 12679, 2; “Nat Turner,” Richmond Enquirer, November 18, 1831, Vol. XXVIII, No. 55, 3. 35.  For a brief but insightful treatment of the history of dissection in the West, see Raphael Hulkower, “From Sacrilege to Privilege: The Tale of Body Procurement for Anatomical Dissection in the United States,” The Einstein Journal of Biology and Medicine, 2011. www.einstein.yu.edu/uploadedFiles/ EJBM/27.1%20Hulkower.PDF?n=1250. The Murder Act of 1752 permitted the bodies of executed murderers to be dissected for anatomical “research,” but many of these dissections had a sensational quality, taking place in anatomical theaters were learning was limited due to the spectacular nature of the event. With the growth of medical colleges in the early nineteenth century, the supply of cadavers could not withstand the demand. A black market of body snatchers developed, troubling Americans who sought legislative reforms to curb the practice. The Anatomy Act of 1832 greatly increased the legal supply of cadavers for medical dissection, but most of these physical remains were those of the lowest social strata. 36. “Nat Turner,” Charleston City Gazette & Commercial Daily Advertiser, November 21, 1831, Vol. LIV, No. 272, 2. 37.  A common theme appearing in the newspaper reports concerning the rebellion was that Turner, who was conversant with the literature of the Old Testament prophets, looked at natural phenomena as signs from God to start the rebellion. 38.  Kenneth M. Stampp, America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 35. 39.  Polk’s address was read by the secretary of the Senate and printed “In Senate,” The Congressional Globe, May 11, 1846, 782.

Natural Laws, Unnatural Violence, and the Psychophysical Experience

40.  Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience,” 362. 41. www.archives.gov/education/lessons/lincoln-resolutions/. 42.  Edward W. Emerson and Waldo E. Forbes, eds., Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 10 vols. (Boston, 1909–1914), vol. 7, 206. 43.  Although these words appeared in the lead editorial of the Morning News, it was likely that O’Sullivan penned them. See Robert Sampson, John L. O’Sullivan and His Times (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2003), 201. 44.  In nineteenth-century America, the Democratic Review published political and literary essays that served as an alternative viewpoint to the more conservative and widely popular North American Review. The magazine backed Polk in his 1844 election to the presidency. See Spencer Tucker, ed., The Encyclopedia of the Mexican–American War: A Political, Social, and Military History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2013), 809. 45.  John L. O’Sullivan, “The Great Nation of Futurity,” Democratic Review 6 (November, 1839), 426–430. 46.  Alfred Bill, Rehearsal for Conflict: The War with Mexico, 1846–1848 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947). Among some of the officers were Pierre G. T. Beauregard, Jefferson Davis, Ulysses S. Grant, Joseph Hooker, Thomas J. Jackson, Albert S. Johnston, Joseph E. Johnston, Robert E. Lee, James Longstreet, George B. McClellan, George Gordon Meade, and George H. Thomas. 47. Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 752. 48.  “City of Mexico, Nov. 13, 1848,” New York Weekly Herald, December 2, 1848, Vol. XIV, No. 22, 182. 49. Cunliffe, Soldiers and Civilians, 124. 50.  The St. Patrick’s Battalion was made up recent Irish and German immigrants who joined the army but were said to have suffered from anti-Catholic abuses in the regular army. The battalion was also made up of escaped slaves. 51. “Rewards and Punishments,” New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette, February 3, 1848, Vol. 1, No. 37, 4. 52. Reports from Mexico’s veterans found in Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 119. 53. Grant, Memoirs, 115. 54. Cunliffe, Soldiers and Civilians, 125. 55. Ulysses S. Grant, Memoirs and Selected Letters: Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant Selected Letters 1839–1865 (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1990), 114; 41. 56. Roth, American Homicide, 308. 57. www.loc.gov/pictures/item/90708859/. 58.  Roth writes, “It was at this time that homicide rates in the United States truly diverged from rates elsewhere in the Western world. In the late 1840s and 1850s they exploded across the nation” (American Homicide, 299). 59.  “The Barbarous South,” Milwaukee Sentinel, April 15, 1861. Newspaper article reprinted in Kenneth M. Stampp, ed., The Causes of the Civil War, 3rd rev. ed. (New York: Touchstone Books, 1991), 209.

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60.  Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th-century American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 11. 61.  Vinovskis, “Have Social Historians Lost the Civil War?” 40. 62.  “Confederate Loss at Shiloh,” Macon Daily Telegraph, May 3, 1862, Issue 696, 1. Provider: NewsBank/Readex, Database: America’s Historical Newspapers, SQN: 112CE2722458A448. 63.  Colonel Will De Hass, “The Battle of Shiloh,” Annals of the War Written by Leading Participants North and South (Philadelphia, PA: The Times Publishing Company, 1879), 677–692. 64.  Soldiers’ quotes appear in Henry Woodhead, ed., Voices of the Civil War— Shiloh (Richmond, VA: Time-Life Books, 1996), 110, 121. 65. Lieber quoted in John Fabian Witt, Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History (New York: Free Press, 2012), 4. 66.  Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 520. 67.  Anthropologists assert that “death, which of all human events is the most upsetting and disorganizing of man’s calculations, is perhaps the best source of [measuring] religious belief.” See Bronislaw Malinowski, “The Role of Magic and Religion,” appears in W. A. Lessa and E. Z. Vogt, eds., Reader in Comparative Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 71. 68. Burton, Age of Lincoln; McPherson, Mighty Scourge. 69.  Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007), 344. 70.  Diary entry May 1864 appears in C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 607. 71.  Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007), 82. 72. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 32–51. The author’s assertion concerning the pathological nature of violence persuasively suggests that many disciplines have simply overlooked critical aspects of violence. He writes for example, “This is due to the tendency, among social scientists, to shun and conceal lurid details that so often accompany the descriptions of violence. . . . Where descriptive accounts provide direct, detailed, and highly emotional descriptions of violence, social scientists tend to adopt narrowly instrumentalist accounts with a tautological bent. Mad subjects are replaced by instrumental leaders able to manipulate myopic citizens and implement policies of violence to achieve their goals” (34). 73.  Edward L. Ayers, What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005), 123. 74. Brown, Strain of Violence, 7. 75.  Babette Rothschild, The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000), 5. 76.  Babette Rothschild, The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000), 5.

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77.  Philip Shaw Paludan, “A People’s Contest”: The Union and Civil War 1861– 1865, 2nd ed. (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1996), 327. 78.  Mitchell quoted in R. G. Bittar, S. Otero, H. Carter, and T. Z. Aziz, “Deep Brain Stimulation for Phantom Limb Pain,” Journal of Clinical Neuroscience 12, no. 4 (2005): 399–404. 79. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1866/07/the-case-of-george -dedlow/308771/3/. 80.  Mitchell’s words recorded in Paludan, A People’s Contest, 326. 81.  Sam R. Watkins, Co. Aytch: A Side Show of the Big Show (New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1990), 211. 82.  Warren was describing the world in the South that had evolved since slavery, yet his comments are applicable to the legacy of the war in the South, which to a great extent, violated the massiveness of Southern experience and identity. Warren quoted in the eminent historian of the South, C. Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History, rev. ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1968), 23. 83.  Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Vintage Books, 2008), 100. “Out of the horrors of Civil War burials, there grew . . . a variety of efforts to resist unwanted transformations, to establish different sorts of “lessons” as the product of the nation’s experience of war.” 84.  John C. Inscoe and Gordon B. McKinney, The Heart of Confederate Appalachia: Western North Carolina in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 233. 85.  James Marten, Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 86.  Daniel Aaron, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 107. 87.  James L. Griffith and Melissa Elliott Griffith, The Body Speaks: Therapeutic Dialogues for Mind–Body Problems (New York: Basic Books HarperCollins, Publishers, 1994), 41. 88. Watkins, Co. Aytch, 211. 89. Griffith, The Body Speaks, 47. The authors write, “The silencing of bodily expressions in mind–body problems entail holding one’s body suspended within a particular emotional posture, readied for an action that never arrives.” 90. “Law, and a legalistic morality and politics,” writes John Finnis, “can define peace and war by their mutual opposition. Any two communities are either at peace or at war with one another. If they are at war, each is seeking a relationship to the other (‘victory over,’ ‘prevailing over’) which that other seeks precisely to frustrate or overcome. If they are at peace, each pursues its own concerns in a state of indifference to, noninterference in, or collaboration with the concerns of the other.” See John Finnis, “The Ethics of War and Peace in the Catholic Natural Law Tradition,” in Terry Nardin, ed., The Ethics of War and Peace: Religious and Secular Perspectives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 15. 91. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. “The Soldier’s Faith,” address delivered on Memorial Day, May 30, 1895, Harvard University.

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74

 92. Marten, Sing Not War.  93. Griffith, The Body Speaks, 42. The author writes, “The splitting of language and silencing of the body seem to be the soil in which somatic symptoms grow.”   94.  Breckinridge letter quoted in David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2001), 159.   95.  Journal quoted in Blight, Race and Reunion, 203.   96.  Whitman quote cited in Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Vintage Books, 2008), 103.   97.  David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 2.  98. Michael C. Kearl, Endings: A Sociology of Death and Dying (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 67.  99. Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992). The author discusses the important influences of Transcendentalism on Lincoln as a young man. 100. On the varieties or characteristics of God’s covenant, see Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1997), 229–66. In a section entitled “Nouns: Yahweh as Constant,” Brueggemann discusses the “Metaphors of Governance” applied to God: “The metaphors that appear to dominate Israel’s speech about Yahweh may be termed images of governance, wherein Israel witnesses to Yahweh’s capacity to govern and order in ways that assert sovereign authority and that assure a coherent ordering of the life in the world” (233). He continues: “To be sure, Yahweh’s judgeship has a severe side. The rhetoric of Israel suggests that sometimes Yahweh is deeply affronted by injustice and will strike back at those who affront Yahweh’s passionate commitment to justice. . . . On the whole, however, Yahweh’s fierceness as a judge is not found to be capricious” (235–36). 101. Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), 103.

Bibliography Aaron, Daniel. The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. Ayers, Edward L. Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th-century American South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Ayers, Edward L. What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005. Bill, Alfred. Rehearsal for Conflict: The War with Mexico, 1846–1848. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947. Bittar, R. G., S. Otero, H. Carter, and T. Z. Aziz. “Deep Brain Stimulation for Phantom Limb Pain.” Journal of Clinical Neuroscience 12, no. 4 (2005): 399–404. Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Natural Laws, Unnatural Violence, and the Psychophysical Experience

Brown, Richard Maxwell. Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Chesnut, Mary C. Mary Chesnut’s Civil War. C. Vann Woodward, ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981. “Confederate Loss at Shiloh.” Macon Daily Telegraph, May 3, 1862, Issue 696, 1. Cunliffe, Marcus. Soldiers and Civilians: The Martial Spirit in America, 1775–1865. New York: Little, Brown, 1968. De Hass, Colonel Will. “The Battle of Shiloh.” In Annals of the War Written by Leading Participants North and South, 677–692. Philadelphia, PA: The Times Publishing Company, 1879. DeLombard, Jeannine Marie. Slavery on Trial: Law, Abolitionism, and Print Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Egerton, Douglas R. Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 10 vols. Edward W. Emerson and Waldo E. Forbes, eds. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1909–1914. Esler, Anthony. “The Truest Community”: Social Generations as Collective Mentalities.” Journal of Political and Military Sociology, 12 (1984): 99–112. Faust, Drew Gilpin. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: Vintage Books, 2008. Finnis, John. “The Ethics of War and Peace in the Catholic Natural Law Tradition.” In The Ethics of War and Peace: Religious and Secular Perspectives, ed. Terry Nardin, 15–39. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Garner, Stanton. The Civil War World of Herman Melville. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1993. Goodwin, Doris Kearns. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005. Grant, Ulysses S. Memoirs and Selected Letters: Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant— Selected Letters 1839–1865. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1990. Griffith, James L., and Melissa Elliott Griffith. The Body Speaks: Therapeutic Dialogues for Mind–Body Problems. New York: Basic Books, 1994. Hatch, Nathan O. The Democratization of American Christianity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Holmes, Oliver Wendell. “The Soldier’s Faith.” In Speeches by Oliver Wendell Holmes, 56–66. New York: Little, Brown, 1900. Howe, Daniel Walker. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Hunt, Lynn. Inventing Human Rights: A History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007. Inscoe, John C., and Gordon B. McKinney. The Heart of Confederate Appalachia: Western North Carolina in the Civil War. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000. “In Senate,” The Congressional Globe, May 11, 1846, 782.

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Jordan, Winthrop D. White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1968. Kalyvas, Stathis N. The Logic of Violence in Civil War. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Kearl, Michael C. Endings: A Sociology of Death and Dying. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Malinowski, Bronislaw. “The Role of Magic and Religion.” In Reader in Comparative Religion, ed. W. A. Lessa and E. Z. Vogt, 63–72. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. Marten James. Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. McPherson, James M. Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction, 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1992. Melville, Herman. Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. New York: Da Capo Press, 1995. Mitchell, Silas Weir. “The Case of George Dedlow.” The Atlantic, July 1866. www.theat lantic.com/magazine/archive/1866/07/the-case-of-george-dedlow/308771/3/. Mitchell, Silas Weir. The Medical Department in the Civil War, n.p. American Medical Association, 1914. Mueller, Jean West and Wynell B. Schamel. “Lincoln’s Spot Resolutions.” Social Education 52, no. 6 (October 1988): 455–457, 466. www.archives.gov/ education/lessons/lincoln-resolutions/. O’Sullivan, John L. “The Great Nation of Futurity.” Democratic Review 6 (November 1839): 426–430. Paludan, Phillip Shaw. “A People’s Contest”: The Union and Civil War 1861–1865, 2nd ed.. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1996. Paludan, Phillip Shaw. “What Did the Winners Win? The Social and Economic History of the North During the Civil War.” In Writing the Civil War: The Quest to Understand, ed. James M. McPherson and William J. Cooper Jr., 174–200. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. Potter, David M. The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1976. Roth, Randolph. American Homicide. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009. Rothschild, Babette. The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000. Sampson, Robert. John L. O’Sullivan and His Times. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2003. Schlesinger, Arthur Jr. “The Causes of the American Civil War: A Note on Historical Sentimentalism.” Partisan Review 16, no. 10 (1949): 969–981. Sidbury, James. Ploughshares into Swords. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Stampp, Kenneth M. America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Stampp, Kenneth M., ed., The Causes of the Civil War. 3rd rev. ed. New York: Touchstone Books, 1991.

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Thoreau, Henry David. “Civil Disobedience,” 362. Tucker, Spencer, ed., The Encyclopedia of the Mexican–American War: A Political, Social, and Military History. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2013. Twain, Mark. Life on the Mississippi. Boston, MA: James R. Osgood & Company, 1883. Vinovskis, Maris A. “Have Social Historians Lost the Civil War? Some Preliminary Demographical Speculations.” Journal of American History, 76, no. 1 (June 1989): 34–58. Walker, David. Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular and Very Expressly to Those of the United States of America. Boston, MA: Revised and Published by David Walker, 1830. Warren, Robert Penn. The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial. New York: Vintage Books, 1964. Watkins, Sam R. Co. Aytch: A Side Show of the Big Show. New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1990. Wills, Garry. Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. Witt, John Fabian. Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History. New York: Free Press, 2012. Woodhead, Henry, ed., Voices of the Civil War—Shiloh. Richmond, VA: Time-Life Books, 1996. Woodward, C. Vann. The Burden of Southern History, rev. ed. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968.

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CHAPTER FOUR

World War II in American Popular Culture, 1945–Present Robert K. Chester

Claiming more than 50 million lives, World War II (1939–1945) carried the horror, loss, and carnage of mass violence to farflung reaches of the globe. Alongside immense battlefield casualties on all sides, the war witnessed widespread targeting of civilian populations, as advances in aviation and rocketry allowed for the devastating aerial bombardment of cities such as London, Rotterdam, Dresden, and Tokyo. The war also left behind indelible images of the industrialized slaughter of the Holocaust, while the conflict’s concluding episodes—the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, respectively—confirmed in terrible spectacle the potentially apocalyptic consequences of modern humanity’s capacity to make war. The United States entered World War II as a belligerent power after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 brought an effective end to the “isolationism” prevalent since the end of World War I. Though the fighting did not reach the American mainland, participation in the largest conflict in history radically altered the nation and the lives of millions of its citizens. The United States was thrust into (and embraced) a pivotal international role, emerging from the war as the world’s preeminent military and economic power and becoming swiftly enmeshed in the forty-five-year Cold War with the Soviet Union. The ever-present prospect of more mass death—perhaps even nuclear annihilation—punctuated by “hot” anticommunist wars in Korea (1950–1953) and Vietnam (1962–1975) became one of World War II’s enduring legacies.

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World War II also ushered in sweeping social and cultural changes in American society. Millions of men, either as volunteers or draftees, dropped their civilian occupations to take up military positions. Many did not return, while others came back bearing deep physical and mental scars.1 In the workplace, women replaced these absent men, often enjoying greater independence than prewar society had permitted them.2 The horizons of African Americans and other minorities also altered during the war. Black Americans left the rural south in droves for work in booming war industries; men and women of color hoped their military service would be recognized with greater equality after the war; antiracists across the country sought to use the conflict with Nazism to undermine America’s own systems of racial violence. Yet, as the perseverance of Jim Crow segregation in the nation’s military and the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans on the West Coast suggested, the war also reinforced the entrenched nature of racial inequality in the United States.3 For all the bloodshed, injustice, and upheaval that World War II entailed, historians and popular commentators note that it has become, at least in the nations that emerged victorious, a treasured memory, summoning images of national unity, selfless sacrifice, and righteous violence enacted against brutal aggressors. The war is for many a historical pinnacle: “the best war ever,” in the historian Michael Adams’s (albeit sardonic) phrase.4 In the United States, which remained unbombed during wartime and enjoyed a period of economic recovery and growing affluence, this may be especially true. Across seventy postwar years, a great many representations of the war in American popular culture have imagined it as uncomplicatedly beneficent: altruistic in motivation, noble in conduct, and ultimately triumphant. In his 1991 memoir, Colonel Oliver North called it the war “America won for the world.”5 In the twenty-first century, World War II remained the historical reference of choice as the Bush administration endeavored to legitimize the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Thus it is reasonable to suggest that the presence of World War II in popular and political culture has encouraged a militaristic bent in American society, crafting a rose-tinted image of war, nurturing a sense of national superiority, and encouraging a belligerent approach to foreign policy.6 Celebratory, nationalistic, and bellicose interpretations of the war are perhaps the most commonly and loudly voiced, but it is important to recognize that popular imagery of World War II has always been contested and unstable. In many ways, the extraordinary volume of cultural products engaging with the war ensures that diverse perspectives receive representation. The creators of films, television shows, children’s toys and games, comic books, novels, magazines, advertisements, radio shows,

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theatrical plays, poems, histories, memoirs, video games, and websites have produced an immense catalog of World War II narratives, expressing often competing ideas about the war and its meanings. Moreover, these representations of World War II were inevitably influenced by the postwar contexts in which they were produced, so that interpretations of the war change significantly over time. Taking a highly selective and abridged look at World War II in U.S. popular culture, this chapter shows how elements of the war—including state-sponsored mass violence and individual soldierly courage and sacrifice—were drawn and redrawn according to changing political and ideological expediencies from war’s end in 1945 to the twenty-first-century “War on Terror.” The essay examines film, literature, and television programming, hoping to capture through representative “texts” a sense of the prevailing cultural mood in five different periods. The first section, “Early Postwar” (1945–1948), covers anxieties arising at war’s end over returning soldiers, potential fascist violence at home, racial inequality, and the dawning of the atomic age; the second, “Cold War” (1948–1962), explores shifting postwar international alliances, analyzes the role of World War II popular culture in supporting the United States’ Cold War agenda, and further examines postwar paranoia concerning atomic weaponry; the third, “The Vietnam Era” (1962–1978), considers popular images of World War II as they were filtered through the lens of an unpopular war in Indochina, exploring the decline of militarism in U.S. culture and how Americans drew on the memory of World War II to critique the nation’s postwar global role; the fourth, “Post-Vietnam” (1978–2001) briefly recounts the resuscitation of World War II triumphalism in the Reagan revival of the 1980s and charts the development in the 1990s of patriotic mythologies of “the greatest generation”; finally, “Post-9/11” (2001–) documents how representations of World War II after the September 2001 attacks helped both rejuvenate and challenge American militarism during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and beyond.

Early Postwar, 1945–1948 The war was fought at great geographical distance from the United States: in North Africa, Europe, and across the islands of the Pacific Ocean. Victory was celebrated wildly in the summer of 1945, but war’s end also brought with it concerns over the United States’ future security. The atomic bomb became an instant source of American nightmares. The respected broadcaster H. V. Kaltenborn, speaking on the radio on August 6, cautioned, “For all we know, we have created a Frankenstein! We must assume that

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with the passage of only a little time, an improved form of the new weapon we use today can be turned against us.”7 In November 1945, Life magazine elaborated on this grim prospect in the feature “36-Hour War,” in which much of the United States is destroyed. Accompanying artwork depicted men in radiation suits picking through rubble outside the ruins of New York Public Library.8 Some criticized the extraordinary new weapon deployed against Japan. In March 1946, Lewis Mumford, a prominent intellectual, published a letter in the Saturday Review of Literature in which he called America’s highest political and military officials “madmen.” These madmen, he charged, were “planning the end of the world. What they call continued progress in atomic warfare means universal extermination, and what they call national security is organized suicide.” Anxious to counter such opinions, American officials—notably Secretary of War Henry Stimson in a 1947 Harper’s magazine article—defended the use of the bombs, claiming that they had spared an invasion of the Japanese home islands and thus saved up to 500,000 lives (including those of thousands of American soldiers).9 Irrespective of such debates, a new form of violence loomed large, and the kinds of events depicted in Life in 1945 became a pronounced feature of the American Cold War imaginary, especially after the Soviet Union acquired atomic weaponry in 1949. During this period, Americans also harbored concerns over the nation’s political and social fabric, particularly with regard to race. As the scholar Gunnar Myrdal pointed out in his 1944 study, An American Dilemma, war against the racist ideology of fascism demanded that the United States embrace a more inclusive, multicultural vision of itself.10 This was often expressed in popular culture through representations of the United States and its military as a seamlessly united multiethnic, sometimes multiracial, force.11 Yet the conflict also exposed abundant contradictions on that score, and the wartime home front saw numerous outbreaks of violence sparked by racial or ethnic prejudice. In 1943, anti-Semitic attacks in Boston and New York prompted warnings over “incipient fascism” in U.S. culture, and American liberals in particular worried that peacetime might usher in more of the same. Surveys of GIs overseas revealed some distinctly ethnocentric views, and some feared that demobilizing troops might imperil the democracy they had putatively been defending.12 In his 1944 book, The Veteran Comes Back, Columbia University’s Willard Waller asked, “Will the vets of World War II turn into the Storm Troopers who will destroy democracy?”13 By 1945, with Allied victory increasingly assured, trepidation intensified at the prospect of 12 million uniformed men returning to civilian

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life.14 The sociologist Robert A. Nisbet felt that U.S. society was fractured into civilian and military realms: “two worlds” separated by a “tragic cleavage.” This division, he contended, derived from veterans’ resentment at “the double standard of sacrifice” demanded by the war and “by a developing cynicism” regarding the war’s ideological and political objectives.15 The relationship of racial inequality to democracy was again a principal concern. Alanson H. Edgerton, a scholar of veterans’ affairs and peacetime “readjustment,” noted in 1946 that while the United States “has been called the melting pot of the nationalities of the world,” the existence of “race riots of the past and racial tensions of the present make it clear that much of the melting is still to be done.”16 Veterans—either as perpetrators or victims of violence—were perceived as a potentially volatile ingredient in civilian society, and these concerns found expression in popular culture. Hollywood was awash with political leftists during the war, and these filmmakers began to drop the patriotic triumphalism of early wartime combat movies in favor of more sober considerations of the uncertain future facing the nation and its fighting men.17 Also contributing to these discussions was the Jewish ex-Marine and political leftist Richard Brooks’s 1945 novel The Brick Foxhole. Set in late wartime Washington, DC, The Brick Foxhole focuses not on soldiers deployed to theaters of war, but on those occupying a domestic barracks (the titular “brick foxhole”). Taking the political hub of the nation as his scene, Brooks depicts the military as a breeding ground of bigotries, its members largely disconnected from the antifascist aims of the war. “Many of the men who had fought on [the Pacific islands] Eniewetok and Kwajalein and Guadalcanal,” ponders Pete Keeley, a Pacific combat veteran of progressive inclinations, “had peculiar ideas about liberty and freedom which sounded like white supremacy and Protestant justice.”18 The plot involves the drunken murder of a gay interior decorator by a bigoted Sergeant named Monty Crawford. Suspicion falls on Jeff Mitchell, a sensitive military cartographer who was at the scene just before the killing. Pete Keeley is Mitchell’s friend, and sets out to exonerate Mitchell and take revenge on the reprehensible Crawford. Although the murder victim is gay, it is Crawford’s virulent ethnoracial prejudices that define him. He relishes seeing “Whitey,” an Army boxer, demolish a Jewish Marine in the ring, and claims that incarcerated Japanese Americans are being treated “like guests in a hotel.”19 A sadistic white supremacist with a history of racial violence and a fierce sense of patriotism, Crawford is moved to tears by “God Bless America.” He pontificates loudly on the need to buy war bonds and donate blood, but recounts with pride that during his former career as a Chicago policeman he murdered two black suspects and a

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“Christ-killer.”20 Crawford is the flag-bearer of what Brooks sees as twisted and hypocritical notions of “Americanism,” embodying the United States’ failings and suggesting the potential for fascistic injustice to preside in the postwar nation. In Brooks’s work and that of other contemporaneous liberals, it is notable that violence deployed in defense of progressive ideology is an acceptable solution to the problem of fascism (as it was on a global scale during the war). The armed struggle, these narratives imply, might have to continue in the postwar United States. In The Brick Foxhole, Crawford’s poisonous version of Americanism is curtailed only when Keeley redirects his combat prowess toward the home front. The story concludes amid icons of historical valor in an on-base military museum. In this setting, Keeley’s decision to kill Crawford (an action that also claims Keeley’s life) becomes a heroic deed to match those commemorated in the display cases. For Keeley, fighting Crawford is fighting “the same war” and “the same enemy.” This D.C. museum becomes a stretch of Pacific “jungle,” a “piece of the war” in which antifascism gains another victory.21 The Brick Foxhole is far from optimistic, however, offering no sense of broad societal change accruing from the war, even if Crawford is out of the picture. Instead, the novel poses questions and concerns regarding the war’s yet-unmade legacy. Liberals continued to produce such war stories; a number of films and novels critiquing racial injustice were released between 1945 and 1949.22 In 1947 The Brick Foxhole was adapted for the screen by a group of Hollywood Marxists. Released as Crossfire (with the tagline “Hate is like a loaded gun!”), the screenplay altered the victim’s identity from a gay man to a disabled Jewish combat veteran. This only served to emphasize the “anti-hate” and antifascist messages, as the injustice of violent prejudice was greater when inflicted on an American Jew already wounded in the nation’s service. Problems of “readjustment” were eased by the general prosperity of the postwar years and the provisions of the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act (the GI Bill), which assisted many veterans (particularly whites) in purchasing subsidized housing and gaining a college education.23 In fact, it was not home front fascism that became the nation’s principal postwar concern. Instead, the specter of communism haunted American culture. The liberal vision of the war as a spur to equality was quashed in the late 1940s and early 1950s by the ascendancy of postwar conservatism, which labeled antiracism as communist-inspired “racial agitation” designed to undermine the United States’ global image.24 Many of the artists who associated World War II with the cause of equality attracted the attention of the FBI and the House Committee for the Investigation of Un-American

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Activities (HUAC) and were soon blacklisted (barred from working in the U.S. film industry). Tellingly, the blacklist included the makers of Crossfire and a number of other progressive war narratives. Anticipation of postwar fascist violence gave way to fear of communist infiltration or, worse still, a World War III.

Cold War, 1948–1962 The onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s reshaped American representations of World War II with regard to international relations. At stake was the credit for winning the war and with it the right to assert hegemony over the postwar world. During wartime, encouraged by the Roosevelt administration’s Office of War Information (OWI), U.S. culture embraced an atmosphere of cooperative internationalism. Tales of the major Allied powers—most notably Britain, France, and the Soviet Union—working and fighting alongside U.S. forces appeared frequently in radio plays and Hollywood films, prompting some to forecast a postwar era of international unity and camaraderie.25 This idealism dissipated as the U.S. and the Soviet Union squared off for postwar influence and strategic advantage.26 In American culture, the Soviets replaced the Nazis and the Japanese as the most dangerous purveyors of global violence, a transition perhaps most evident in cinema. In 1949, the German critic Siegfried Kracauer noted that Russian characters in postwar American films were a far cry from wartime’s “brave Russian women fighters, the happy villagers, and the democratic allures of the rulers.” Instead, Kracauer observed “an atmosphere of oppression” created by communistic “counterparts of the Nazis.”27 Memory of the vast Soviet sacrifice on the Eastern Front impinged in particular upon the United States’ ability to claim jurisdiction over the postwar world and moral supremacy over its Cold War rival, so the Red Army’s effort disappeared entirely from popular retellings of the war. By the early 1950s Russians (or communists) in U.S. culture were far more likely to be instigating World War III than fighting in World War II. RKO Studios’ B-movie The Whip Hand, released in 1951, illustrates this slippage between fascism and communism. The initial story was antifascist in tone, featuring Hitler, alive and vengeful, hiding in (of all places) northern Wisconsin. The fiercely anticommunist tycoon Howard Hughes bought RKO in 1948 and objected to the antifascist theme, ordering the villains changed to communist fifth columnists.28 Hitler does not appear in the final release, but Hughes’s communists employ a Nazi scientist to devise viruses capable of sweeping through urban populations. The gaunt,

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diseased test subjects in the scientist’s laboratory recall images captured at war’s end in Nazi concentration camps, creating perhaps Hollywood’s most flagrant association of communism with the horrors of the Holocaust. 29 In truth, The Whip Hand’s reference to the Holocaust was a rare thing. As the Russians transferred from ally to sworn enemy, so the Germans and Japanese—now being reconstructed under American stewardship—were re-imagined in ways conducive to Cold War alliance. U.S. popular culture largely left behind the copious sins of Nazism and of the Japanese campaigns in China and elsewhere, preferring to find more diplomatic ways of engaging these nations’ part in the war. A number of feature films, including The Desert Fox, Twentieth Century Fox’s 1951 biopic of German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, treated German officers and troops quite sympathetically, taking care to separate the average German from the Nazi zealot.30 Regarding Japan, American filmmakers moved past the enmities of war toward an era of anticommunist cooperation (forgiving and forgetting Pearl Harbor became a common theme). Other symbols of cooperation between Japan and the United States were the Hiroshima maidens, a group of young Japanese women disfigured in the atomic bombings of 1945. Their much-publicized 1955 visit to the United States for surgery became emblematic of the two nations’ revised relationship.31 As Cold War expediencies saw wartime enemies become allies, the wartime Allies found themselves rather overlooked. As a rule, postwar combat cinema eclipsed the international nature of the victorious Western alliance. Emphasizing American sacrifices and successes above those of the other Allies, Hollywood held up the United States as the only meaningful contributor to the righteous violence by which the Axis powers were brought to heel.32 In 1948, as war films—following a brief hiatus— returned to the silver screen, Hollywood laid emphasis overwhelmingly on U.S. troops on D-Day and at the Western Front and on the Marine Corps in the Pacific. In this way, combat cinema reinforced the United States’ claim to leadership of the postwar world. In this scenario, the other Allies, notably Britain and France, were either erased altogether or characterized as militarily helpless (and therefore more deeply indebted to the United States). Based on the stage play by William Wister Haines, 1948’s Command Decision, set in wartime Britain, emphasizes the U.S. innovation of daylight bombing as pivotal to victory in Europe and limits the British to a collection of civilian women variously infatuated with or angry at flyers with whom they have become romantically involved. The Hollywood premiere received the vigorous support of an Air Force band, and information stands trumpeting the assistance of Air Force Materiel Command bedecked the theatre.33

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For the most part, cinematic commemorations of righteous and superior American warmaking were as much concerned with the future as the past. The World War II combat film became a Cold War mainstay, urging readiness (and encouraging recruitment) for another potential war. Frequent references to Pearl Harbor or to prewar European appeasement reminded the nation of the price of a lack of vigilance and preparedness. Often, religious themes were attached to the fighting, implicitly contrasting pious Americanism (and violence in the cause of God) with atheistic communism (and violence in the cause of totalitarianism). Furthermore, the American war effort was, in these pictures, generally uncomplicated by issues such as racial prejudice or emotional trauma, the bloodshed of war underplayed. One of the most successful and iconic of the 1950s combat films was To Hell and Back, Universal’s 1955 biopic of Irish American soldier Audie L. Murphy. The film, like so many others, contains no non-U.S. Allied troops. The story instead centers on an American platoon, on the worthiness of the citizen–soldier’s sacrifice, and on the nation’s need to maintain the capacity to again face down totalitarianism. Death here is clean and quick, and, in the case of the GI, noble and meaningful in its sacrificial nature. The value of a military career is emphasized time and again, as are the admirable ethics and virtues of the American soldiery. War is the “hell” of To Hell and Back, but the film does its best to mask its most devilish aspects. Murphy was the perfect figure through which to craft such a heroic tale. Growing up poor in rural Texas, he became a crack marksman hunting small prey for food. Murphy was desperate to serve in World War II, but his diminutive stature saw him rejected by several branches of the service before he was accepted into the Army. By age 19, Murphy had become the most decorated soldier in U.S. history, earning an unrivaled collection of citations (including a Medal of Honor) and multiple promotions in North Africa, Italy, and France. In 1946, shortly after his return from Europe, Murphy was the cover star of Life magazine. A photo spread featured some of his twenty-eight medals. Injuries sustained in combat prevented Murphy from reenlisting, and in 1948 he began a new career as an actor. By 1953, he had already appeared in around a dozen feature films, mostly Westerns, when he signed with Universal to play himself in To Hell and Back.34 Adapted from Murphy’s 1949 autobiography and made with enthusiastic backing from the Department of Defense (DoD), To Hell and Back encapsulates the ideological tenor of the Cold War World War II film.35 Opening with footage of a formation march and a speech to camera by General Walter Bedell Smith attesting to the truth of what follows, the film

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covers Murphy’s impoverished youth, his rejection as unfit for service by the Marines and the Paratroopers, and then his remarkable combat record with the Army. Much screen time is devoted to Murphy’s friendships with other men in his outfit and to reconstructions of the hero’s propensity for storming German machine guns and securing combat objectives along with battlefield promotions. Around “Murph” orbits an ethnic jumble of supporting soldiers, their names alone—Klasky, Johnson, Brandon, Sanchez, Kovac, “Chief,” and Valentino—confirming the “melting pot” nature of World War II combat. Valentino, an Italian American from Flatbush, New York, eagerly anticipates visiting Naples. “It’ll be real personal for me,” he remarks, “because I’ll be liberating my ancestral home.” Also integral is Kovac, a Polish national whose family has been “liquidated” by the Nazis. For Kovac, too, the war is “real personal,” and he is incensed by the poverty of Italian children, who remind him of the fate of his native Poland. Kovac’s commitment helps his comrades comprehend the noble purpose of the violence they must dispense and suffer—especially after he is killed in action. Johnson, a white Southerner, comments that Kovac “sure was a good soldier” because he “thought he was fighting a holy war.” “Maybe he didn’t mind dying,” adds Brandon. “Maybe that’s what fighting for a cause means.” The film offers little sense of the physical and emotional damage of war, preferring to present violence as clinically dispensed and death as quick and largely bloodless. Comparisons to Murphy’s book reveal how far the cinema went to soften violent images.36 Murphy’s writing regularly describes terrible sights and smells on the battlefield, such as the “seared, torn flesh” that surrounds him after a German artillery barrage, or a “ghastly rain of debris” containing “the limbs and flesh of men.” Also omitted from the screenplay were events such as U.S. soldiers’ being shot by their own countrymen, a GI’s deserting under fire, and the sight of horses killed in battle.37 There is also a sense of bitterness at the conclusion of Murphy’s book that did not make it to the screen. Murphy addresses the ongoing physical and mental wounds suffered by soldiers, contending that “nobody ultimately wins.”38 The film begs to differ, and the on-screen Murphy’s greatest disappointment is that his injuries prevent him from becoming a career soldier. To Hell and Back concludes triumphantly as troops march for Murphy’s Medal of Honor ceremony in April 1945. The scene commemorates World War II heroism and marks the nation’s necessary readiness for any future conflict. “It should do much to enhance the glory of the Army,” wrote a delighted Department of Defense assessor in May 1954.39

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By 1955, though, some degree of popular fatigue with war was setting in. The anticommunist war in Korea (1950–1953) produced stalemate (and almost another use of atomic weaponry), and was not well received by the public. Indeed, the historian Andrew Huebner argues that the Korean War had “a crucial role in generating cynical and critical depictions of the armed forces.”40 The growing number of critical representations of war in American culture took in images of World War II as well as Korea. Critiques of wartime racism, for example, resurfaced in 1955’s Bad Day at Black Rock (about the murder of a Japanese American farmer whose son was a war hero) and 1958’s Kings Go Forth (about the racial prejudices of two GIs in wartime France). By the 1960s a new phase of critical representations of war was gathering speed.

The Vietnam War Era, 1962–1978 Off the blacklist (which ended in the late 1950s) filmmakers began to add force to their critiques of war. In 1963, Carl Foreman, a leftist and former blacklistee, wrote, directed, and produced The Victors, a World War II film ironically titled and bereft of any sense of glory or triumph. Shot in Europe (without assistance from the U.S. military), the film follows a platoon of exhausted GIs through the Italian campaign and beyond, at every turn challenging triumphalist representations of war. Foreman includes a notable vignette in which white servicemen—brethren of Monty Crawford in The Brick Foxhole—assault two black GIs in an Italian bar: “Coon hunting tonight! Any niggers in here?” declares the ringleader. “Two real pretty ones,” replies another white, the line punctuated with a U.S. flag on the wall behind. The white GIs beat their black compatriots while other servicemen look on. Eventually, MPs arrive, dragging away the blacks while the whites escape unmolested. Capturing the narrative’s bitter tone, the hit wartime song, “Remember Pearl Harbor,” plays in the background, doling out hollow pieties of unity and pride. The Victors assails a catalog of World War II mythologies. Moral bankruptcy and cruelty reign. American GIs shoot a helpless puppy for target practice; one soldier establishes himself as a pimp to women in “liberated” areas. Most important, Foreman wants to communicate that war is as destructive to the victors as the vanquished. The film was, he said, “dedicated to the proposition that we lost the war.”41 This he conveys at the conclusion through a knife fight between two soldiers—one American, the other Russian—who wish to pass over the same narrow bridge on the ruined streets of postwar Berlin. Suggesting the collapse of the peace into yet another deleterious conflict over Europe, each soldier stabs his

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adversary to death. In Foreman’s vision, there is no redemptive value in war, and violence is always mutually destructive. After more than a decade of nuclear standoff, Americans were also becoming fatigued with another form of potential mutual destruction. It is difficult to overstate the prominence of nuclear fear in the 1950s. Children in schools drilled for potential atomic attacks; some Americans built elaborate backyard bomb shelters; countless television debates and magazine articles discussed the prospect of survival in an atomic war.42 Atomic fear came to the boiling point in 1962, when the Cuban missile crisis almost brought about nuclear conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. By the 1960s, the idea of (at least partial) U.S. culpability for the seemingly intractable situation created by nuclear armaments and the impasse of mutual assured destruction (MAD) was receiving more widespread expression. In director Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe (1964), the United States (albeit accidentally) assumes the role of Japan at Pearl Harbor and initiates a surprise attack on Russia. In the film’s closing sequence, an air force officer is compelled to obliterate New York City as recompense for the destruction of Moscow by a U.S. bomber that received errant orders from a computer. The sequence is stark and compelling, as everyday scenes from the city are swallowed up in sudden light, white noise, and darkness.43 In the mid-to-late 1960s, growing awareness of the long, contentious, and ultimately unsuccessful American war in Vietnam further debilitated the cultural value of heroic war stories and undermined the stature of military history in general. Despite the efforts of conservatives (including John Wayne in his 1967 film The Green Berets) to insist that the current war was being fought in defense of liberty against totalitarianism, celebratory military narratives dwindled as the United States became increasingly divided over a conflict lacking the clear imperatives of war against fascism. To many Americans (and others around the globe) the war in Vietnam represented unjustified aggression, and reports of American atrocities, notably the slaughter of several hundred Vietnamese women and children at My Lai in 1969, damaged the image of the wholesome citizen-soldier. One GI who had taken part in the massacre later described it as “Just like a Nazi-type thing.” In April 1971, Time magazine published a picture by Bill Mauldin in which the cartoonist depicted his famous World War II GIs, Willie and Joe, looking in shame on the My Lai massacre. Joe asks, “You sure we were fighting for the same country, Willie?”44 The cultural historian Tom Engelhardt labels these years as the “era of reversals” in U.S. society, a time when Americans lost faith in their nation’s virtue and began to see themselves acting with a brutality always previously ascribed to the enemy. In 1965, CBS journalist Morley Safer, after

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accompanying an American platoon as they burned a Vietnamese village, expressed his discomfort at “watching American boys, young and clean, our boys, carrying on like the other side’s soldiers always did, and doing it so casually.”45 In 1969, when Edwin Starr’s hit song asked “War! What is it good for?” and answered “Absolutely Nothin!’” it was expressing sentiments gathering momentum in U.S. culture. So unpopular had the military’s image become that in 1970 toy manufacturer Hasbro altered its range of GI Joe figures from soldiers to civilian adventurers.46 The narrative of righteous violence performed by clean-cut boys against irredeemably evil enemies was no longer sufficient to account for the nation’s experiences with war. In fact, the scholar Barbara Biesecker argues that from 1970 until the late 1990s, World War II “virtually disappeared from U.S. popular culture.”47 Where the war did feature during the 1970s, it was almost always filtered through the war in Vietnam and thus took on darker hues than films like To Hell and Back had ever allowed. Christina Jarvis refers to this as the “Vietnamization” of World War II, and she locates in novels such as Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (1969), which deals with the massive Allied bombing of Dresden, an effort to capsize heroic myths of war and collapse the supposed difference between “their” violence and “ours.”48 The poet McAvoy Layne’s 1973 work, How Audie Murphy Died in Vietnam, encapsulates the unmaking of military mythologies in the Vietnam War years. Layne recounts the inglorious war of a fictional marine named by his patriotic father for the World War II hero.49 Layne’s short, often esoteric poems create a disconnected chain of ill-conceived and inglorious acts of violence, the war’s lack of discernible meaning conveyed by the hazy, incomplete narrative. Layne’s Audie Murphy is surrounded by random, pointless death and incompetence (some of it his own).50 He accidentally shoots at a U.S. position and also avoids combat duty by hiding in a pile of corpses.51 Eventually, Murphy is taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese. For this he gains fame, becoming an accidental hero and the recipient of a Silver Star. In the United States, his parents are summoned to meet the president and receive the medal on live television. A satellite link allows Audie, now freed, to address the nation. At the end of To Hell and Back, Audie Murphy’s Medal of Honor confirms the value of his service. Layne’s Murphy, a fairly worthless soldier, instead becomes admirable by rejecting his Silver Star and asking the president to make the U.S. “the first civilized country/Of the world/To stop the awarding and wearing/Of/Commendation/Medals/For/Killing.”52 As musicians and poets protested the Vietnam War, Hollywood preferred to look away.53 On occasion, World War II stood in as a proxy setting for

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contemporary concerns, as was the case in 1967’s The Dirty Dozen, in which a multiracial group of condemned soldiers is released from the stockade and sent on a suicide mission. It was not until after hostilities concluded in the mid-1970s that the film industry began to make films about Vietnam. One of the earliest is the 1978 independent production Go Tell the Spartans, set in 1964 during the early involvement of U.S. “advisors” in Indochina. At his base of operations in South Vietnam, the aging Major Asa Barker (played by Burt Lancaster) laments that a young draftee, Corporal Stephen Courcey, did not witness World War II. “Too bad we couldn’t have shown you a better war,” the veteran officer says, “like hitting the beach at Anzio, or smashing through to Bastogne with Patton. That was a tour worth the money. This one? This one’s a sucker’s tour, going nowhere, just round and round in circles.” Pointlessly tasked with defending an abandoned, strategically irrelevant fortress, Barker remembers in World War II a contrasting and comforting certitude. It was, quite simply, “a better war.”54 Go Tell the Spartans was adapted from Daniel Ford’s 1967 novel Incident at Muc-Wa, and these additional lines by screenwriter Wendell Hayes place the Vietnam War directly in dialog with World War II. In doing so, Hayes dramatizes the problems confronting narratives of military glory and national infallibility.55 “We won’t lose, cos we’re Americans,” comments Lieutenant Hamilton, but this young officer proves to be as fragile as the exceptionalist ideology to which he clings. In a desolate landscape evocative of defeat and isolation, Hamilton is killed by the North Vietnamese as he attempts to retrieve a fatally wounded comrade from the river. Such bravery (and the patriotic narratives of which it forms a part) cannot be sustained in Vietnam.56 Like Hamilton, Major Barker dies in a manner bespeaking the dissolution of World War II triumphalism into aimlessness and loss. Not only does Barker speak nostalgically of World War II as “a better war,” but he also becomes its embodiment, his antipathy toward the conflict in Vietnam and the new military technologies employed in fighting it earning him the nickname “World War II” from his radio operator. The morning after the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies are routed by the North Vietnamese at Muc-Wa, Courcey finds Barker’s body, broken, naked, and bullet-ridden, laying face down in the mud of a riverbank. Here, in the closing frames of this early Vietnam War film, lies “World War II”—a veteran of Anzio and of Patton’s famous charge to Bastogne—aimlessly wasted in Vietnam.57

Post Vietnam, 1978–2001 The Department of Defense declined to assist Spartans and a number of similarly cynical war films (Apocalypse Now, for one) that requested

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assistance in the late 1970s.58 In popular culture, a plethora of narratives concerning troubled Vietnam veterans bespoke a collapse of faith in the nation, particularly its military and political leadership. Defeat was not something with which the United States was familiar, and it carried cultural repercussions. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter spoke in a televised address of a national “crisis of confidence” and a new era of “limits.”59 Military cinema seemed to reflect this, especially in a swathe of somber Vietnam War films made in the late 1970s and 1980s. Yet even as Burt Lancaster’s “World War II” lay naked and dead, something of a resurrection of the heroic military image in popular culture was also beginning. Scholar Claude Smith commented in 1984 on a recent increase in wholesome military stories featuring “bright boys in clean uniforms.”60 The return of triumphalism in the 1980s owed more than a little to President Ronald Reagan’s rhetoric of rejuvenated national potential. Against the post-Vietnam “crisis of confidence,” Reagan evoked a more limitless, upbeat rendition of the United States and its historical benevolence.61 This included flexing the nation’s muscles against socialism in Grenada in 1983 and rekindling the idea of the United States as a global force for liberty. Visiting Normandy in June 1984 to mark D-Day’s fortieth anniversary, Reagan reasserted the nation’s right and duty to assert itself militarily, creating distance from the inhibitions left over by defeat in Vietnam (sometimes referred to as the “Vietnam Syndrome”). Reagan told the D-Day veterans that, inspired by “faith and belief . . . loyalty and love,” they had “fought for all humanity.” Behind the 1944 landings, Reagan claimed, was “the deep knowledge—and pray God we have not lost it—that there is a profound, moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest.”62 Reagan increased defense spending and reinvigorated the somewhat dormant Cold War by labeling the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” He also promulgated the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, popularly known as “Star Wars”) to defend America against nuclear attacks using space-based weapons systems.63 Initially, Reagan’s bellicosity revived atomic fears. An enormous movement for nuclear disarmament reflected growing public concern, and stories of nuclear apocalypse reappeared in popular culture in great numbers. In 1982, Jonathan Schell’s popular book The Fate of the Earth imagined the aftermath of a modern nuclear war, describing what remains as “a republic of insects and grass.”64 In 1983, ABC’s madefor-TV movie, The Day After, which depicts a surprise Russian attack on Kansas, perturbed many with its graphic depictions of atomic devastation and radiation sickness. Even Reagan’s SDI defense system was considered by some more likely to prompt a Soviet first-strike than prevent one.65

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Reagan’s triumphalist tone eventually won out over the fears he helped engender, especially as improved Cold War relations later in the decade were followed by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Soviet Union’s dissolution shortly after. As the historian George H. Roeder notes, by the 1990s World War II had become in American culture “one of few widely agreed upon moral reference points,” a historical standard against which other endeavors were judged.66 The increased profile of World War II in the 1990s was due in no small part to the coming of many significant fiftieth anniversary dates (Pearl Harbor, D-Day, VE Day, VJ Day, and so on) and to growing awareness that World War II veterans were dying in great numbers. A great outpouring of commemorative activity ensued. Plans to build a World War II memorial at the National Mall were signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1993, the same year the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum opened its doors. In 1995, debates over an exhibition at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum that appeared to question the necessity of the use of atomic bombs against Japan reached fever pitch as veterans and conservative commentators expressed their outrage. In this climate, a great many honorific histories, feature films, and documentaries commemorating the war were produced.67 In recent years, the phrase “greatest generation,” which originated as the title of journalist Tom Brokaw’s bestselling 1998 oral history of World War II, has come to define that era in the popular imaginary. Brokaw is effusive in his praise for the Americans of World War II, arguing that as “[t]hey answered the call to help save the world from the two most powerful and ruthless military machines ever assembled,” they proved themselves “the greatest generation any society has produced.”68 Although Brokaw finds fault in their complicity with racism and McCarthyism, he credits the “greatest generation” with a number of qualities lacking in the contemporary nation: a collective unity and “sense of purpose” as well as modesty and willingness to sacrifice for others. “They will have their World War II memorial and their place in the ledgers of history,” he concludes, “but no block of marble or elaborate edifice can equal their lives of sacrifice and achievement, duty and honor, as monuments to their time.”69 Brokaw’s term caught on, entering the popular lexicon. The Simpsons even poked fun at the phenomenon, featuring an episode in which a sycophantic Brokaw fawns over World War II veterans (including Grandpa Abe Simpson). Alongside a glut of honorific activity, the post–Cold War era also nurtured a new unilateralism born of the United States’ status as the lone superpower—what Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called in 1998 the “indispensible nation”—in international affairs. 70 In Normandy in

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1984, Reagan had remembered all the western Allies, but in the post– Cold War years, American popular culture increasingly slipped into an exceptionalist posture (akin to that of the early Cold War) in which the United States alone was responsible for Nazism’s demise. Director Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), an enormous hit in 1998, fixates on U.S. troops on D-Day and in wartime France, neglecting to include a single non-U.S. Allied soldier. The omission of British troops prompted a satirical response from the Adam and Joe Show, an English TV comedy series. In the 2004 sketch “Saving Private Lion,” a platoon of stuffed animals embarks on a mission to find a lost soldier. After the D-Day landings, one of the Americans asks, “Hey captain, how come we haven’t seen any British soldiers yet?” His captain replies, “Ah, don’t be ignorant. Everyone knows the Second World War was fought entirely by American actors.”71 Exceptionalism also characterizes the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers (2000), another project in which Spielberg was involved (this time as an executive producer alongside Tom Hanks). Based on the work of prolific historian Stephen Ambrose, Band dramatizes the wartime experiences of Easy Company in the 101st Airborne Division, following them from paratrooper training through the D-Day landings and on to Hitler’s Bavarian “Eagle’s Nest.”72 The series’ second episode, “Day of Days,” fails to reflect the international nature of the D-Day invasion force. Indeed, on the rare occasions when British troops appear in the series, they are characterized largely as an incompetent officer class lacking the sense to take on the German army. In “Crossroads,” a brash British tank officer ruins an assault on a German-held building, getting his men killed and halting Easy Company’s advance during Operation Market Garden. Like Saving Private Ryan, which emphasizes the heroism of American soldiers in part by attending closely to the ways in which they die, Band of Brothers creates a more graphic interaction with violence, bloodshed, and the dismemberment of bodies at war than previous decades had generally witnessed. The episode “Bastogne,” for instance, depicts Easy Company’s experiences in Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge, when they held the line against a terrifying and protracted German artillery barrage. The audience suffers along with the troops in their foxholes and witnesses young men whom they have come to admire lose limbs or die slowly from gaping shrapnel wounds. The episode’s particular focus on Doc, the company medic, makes even more pronounced the horrors, the camera taking in piles of bodies in the temporary hospital and dwelling on protruding bones, severed limbs, and torn flesh. As these scenes suggest, in contemporary popular culture there is little attempt to sanitize the image of war, or to make death swift and relatively

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bloodless as it was in films of the Cold War era. Instead, graphic violence becomes testament to the courage of the World War II generation. Band of Brothers’ Captain Dick Winters reminds us that most cannot know the price soldiers pay “in terror, agony, and bloodshed.” Yet the show offers ample solace in the virtuousness of the cause, in the doggedness and will to live of the men—each a citizen-soldier thrust into war. These late twentieth-century war stories create a reassuring sense that Americans are essentially good and that their historical actions have been beneficent. This is confirmed in the series’ penultimate episode, “Why We Fight.” Stationed in surrendered Austria, an Easy Company patrol stumbles upon a concentration camp abandoned by its German guards. The miserable condition of the starving survivors and the piles of rotting corpses remind audiences that, though they did not know it, American troops fought against one of history’s most brutal enterprises. The GIs are appalled and shocked and do all they can to assist. “Why We Fight” seeks to remind us in clear terms of the possibility (and necessity) of virtuous war.

Post-9/11 Just a year after Band of Brothers first aired, the September 11, 2001, attacks ushered in a new era of militarism and warfare in U.S. culture. As the Bush administration embarked first on the “War on Terror” and subsequently on the invasion of Iraq, the nation’s earlier wars—particularly World War II and Vietnam—filtered perceptions of the new conflicts. One way President Bush sought to gain public approval for expansive retaliation was to create moral connections to World War II. Amid the ascendancy of “greatest generation” discourse, it became essential among hawkish voices in politics and popular culture that the public view the post-9/11 conflicts as ideological equivalents to World War II. Even dissenting voices made honorific reference to World War II to question the nation’s contemporary leadership and character relative to that of the “greatest generation.” Initial responses to the 9/11 attacks included comparisons between Japan’s “sneak attack” on Pearl Harbor and al-Qaeda’s actions against U.S. targets. Time magazine, in a special edition of September 12, recalled Franklin Roosevelt’s post–Pearl Harbor declaration of war by headlining an image of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center with a single word in bright red type: “INFAMY.”73 Fox News’s Ann Coulter and other conservatives reinforced the connection to World War II in backing the Bush administration, often by likening Osama Bin Laden (and subsequently Saddam Hussein) to Hitler. At the same time, senior Republican figures such as

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Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld were keen to distance the war from the image of Vietnamese “quagmire.”74 Conservatives also drew on remembrance of American World War II sacrifices to dismiss overseas critiques of post-9/11 U.S. militarism. France, in particular, was assailed for its opposition to the invasion of Iraq. In a 2003 book, Fox News analyst Dick Morris wrote, “Fifty-six thousand six hundred and eighty-one American troops lie buried in military cemeteries in France, many of them at the Normandy beaches, where the long straight symmetrical rows of crosses and Stars of David rise and fall with the terrain before the eye. Yet France is suffering from a national case of amnesia, forgetting the obligations that come with the lives we have lost fighting for French freedom.”75 For Morris and others, memory of World War II was supporting evidence of the United States’ right to instigate war where and when it sees fit (and to brook no critique from any nation it has defended). Others remembered the war to identify a moral decline in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. In the opening episode of Aaron Sorkin’s cable television drama The Newsroom (2012–) the protagonist, respected newscaster Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels), takes part in a public debate. Asked by a college student “what makes America the greatest country in the world?,” he reacts fiercely: [T]here’s absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we’re the greatest country in the world. We’re seventh in literacy, twenty-seventh in math, twenty-second in science, forty-ninth in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, number four in labor force and number four in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the next twenty-six countries combined, twenty-five of whom are allies.76

Young Americans today, he says, mocking conventions of contemporary English usage, are part of “the worst period generation period ever period.” The embittered comparison to the “greatest generation” prefaces McAvoy’s nostalgia for a past in which he believes the United States was the world’s greatest nation. “It sure used to be,” he says. “We stood up for what was right. We fought for moral reasons. We passed laws, struck down laws, for moral reasons. We waged wars on poverty, not poor people. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors, we put our money where our mouths were and we never beat our chest.” Coupled with his implied reference to the “greatest generation,” McAvoy’s claim that the once-great

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United States used to make war for “moral reasons” elevates the World War II era to denounce the present as a time of capitalistic, individualistic, and militaristic excess. Perhaps if there exists a contemporary consensus in World War II remembrance, it pertains to this perception of superior national character and morality, with the war existing in memory as a juncture at which the nation’s power was used for good and the American people pulled together for a splendid purpose. In the twenty-first century, after all, both pro- and anti-war voices agree that World War II was a time of admirable national virtue. The 2003 war in Iraq, for example, was commendable because it was like World War II—or was reprehensible because it was not. In the present day, we are also frequently asked to regard the war as a time of cohesion wherein, regardless of race or religion, the nation’s citizens worked in harmony. Too often the internal divisions and forms of violence—physical and otherwise—inflicted upon nonwhite Americans in wartime and afterwards are buried under this veneer of consensus. In 2007, for example, the eminent documentarist Ken Burns was upset when media activists complained that no Latino veterans were featured in his fourteen-hour World War II documentary series The War. Burns eventually conceded to some of the Latinos’ demands for inclusion, but he complained that in pointing out (and contesting) their omission from his film, Latinos were missing the point that during the war “everybody had their oar in the water, pulling in the same direction.”77 “There’s too much pluribus and not enough unum,” Burns told an interviewer, adding that Latinos “did themselves a disservice, because they further made themselves distinct and isolated themselves. We were all just Americans and that was the point of the film.”78 Burns thus employed the narrative of wartime unity to overlook certain historical inequalities and undermine a contemporary movement for inclusion. Of course, for the Latino protestors, to be left out of a project documenting “the best war ever” would mean unacceptable exclusion from a treasured moment in the nation’s history. World War II remains a contested memory in American popular culture. Between 1945 and the present Americans have expressed a multitude of competing and dynamic ideas about the war, the violence it entailed, and the connotations they felt it should carry in the contemporary nation. Popular culture has not always sanitized the bloodshed of World War II, but it has often bathed it in the redeeming glow of righteous purpose and meaning. It is certain that the copious war crimes of the fascist enemy and the nature of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor lend World War II a moral clarity and virtuousness that should not be disregarded. Later wars have almost utterly failed to recapture it, and it is therefore no wonder

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that World War II—either in antiwar or prowar contexts—has so often been placed on a pedestal in American culture. Yet prevailing narratives of a “greatest generation” and a time of unblemished unity tend to ignore complexity, bolstering a romanticized view of war, fostering a militaristic outlook, and feeding damaging notions of American exceptionalism in the contemporary world. Deconstructing and looking beyond these dominant narratives, however, reveals differing kinds of war stories, exposing what the great novelist of war James Jones called “the darker, nether side of patriotism.”79

Notes   1.  See, for example, Childers.  2. Many American women also served in uniform; see Yellin. On images of women and the re-domesticated role assigned them in postwar culture, see Michel, 260–279.   3.  On the repercussions of World War II for notions of race and national identity, see Gerstle, 187–237.  4. Adams; Wood.   5.  North and Novak, 64.   6.  See Sherry; Wood; Anderson; Bacevich; Torgovnik; and Bodnar.   7.  Of course, he should have said “a Frankenstein’s monster!” Kaltenborn quoted in Boyer, 4–5.   8.  “36-Hour War,” 27–35. See also Fenrich, 122–133.   9.  Mumford; Stimson. Arguments over the bomb’s necessity and morality are many. A good summary can be found in Walker. 10.  Myrdal, 1004. 11.  Slotkin, 469–498; Sklaroff, 945–973. 12.  “I don’t want to see  .  .  . a Fascist movement in this country walk with the isolationists when the war is over,” declared the Methodist Bishop of Boston. “Boston Bishop Asks End of Jew-Baiting.” Early postwar surveys of U.S. GIs in Germany found more than half of those polled in agreement that, despite starting the war, Hitler had done “a lot of good” for his nation (Patterson, 13). 13.  Waller quoted in Gerber, 548. 14.  These 12 million constituted almost two-thirds of U.S. men aged 18–34 (Patterson, 4, 13). 15.  Nisbet, 261–270, quotes on 262, 263, and 267. 16.  Edgerton, 89–90. 17.  Such films include the satire Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) and dramas of war such as Story of GI Joe (1945) A Walk in the Sun (1945), A Medal for Benny (1945), They Were Expendable (1945), Pride of the Marines (1945), and Identity Unknown (1945). 18.  Brooks, 23.

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19.  Ibid., 30, 37–50, 34. 20.  Ibid., 29. 21.  Ibid., 224. 22. These films include Till the End of Time (1946), Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), Lost Boundaries (1949), and Home of the Brave (1949). Novels include Arthur Miller’s Focus (1945), Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948), and Irving Shaw’s The Young Lions (1948). 23.  See Mettler. 24.  See Noakes, 728–749. On the FBI’s obsession with Hollywood antiracism as evidence of communistic sympathies, see Leab. 25.  Glancy, 10–11. Russell Earl Shain finds that in 405 war pictures made between 1939–1947, British characters featured more than three times as often as French and more than eight times as often as Russians. In fact, Germans as allies appear in Shain’s sample more often than either sympathetic French or Russian characters (Shain, 215). On wartime internationalism, see Lorence. On Warner Brothers, the studio that led the anti-Nazi charge, see Birdwell. On the OWI and wartime Hollywood, see Koppes and Black. 26.  See, for example, Leffler, as well as Dunbabin. 27.  Kracauer, 60, 68. 28.  Thomas, 124. 29.  “It was such a good little picture,” lamented Carla Balenda, the female lead, “until Howard got involved.” Humphries, 137. See also Brown and Broeske, 139. 30.  Suid, 161–187. 31.  Chung Simpson. See also Shibusawa. 32.  For a survey of what the Soviet Union, the United States, and Great Britain gave to the war effort, see Overy. 33.  Department of Defense Memo, December 15, 1948. Photographs from the LA premiere are located in the files of the Assistant Secretary of Defense, RG 330 190/28/10/2, Box 702, National Archives II. Also Crowther. 34. “Life Visits Audie Murphy,” 94–97; Pryor. See also Basinger, 156–159. 35. Murphy. For the Department of Defense’s assistance, see DoD Film Collection, Box 11, Folder 19. 36.  The Hollywood Production Code, which governed film content from the early 1930s until the late 1960s, also prohibited what it considered excessive gore. 37.  Murphy, 99, 104, 117–118, 132–133, 187. 38.  Ibid, 269. 39.  The Army provided men, tanks, and other matériel to the film, which was shot in Washington state. See Suid and Haverstick, 248. The quotation comes from Col. Geo. Patrick Walsh to John Horton, May 27, 1954, DoD Film Collection, Box 11, Folder 19. 40.  Huebner, 8–9. 41. Scheuer. 42. For a window into atomic culture, see the excellent documentary The Atomic Café (1982). Also Shapiro.

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43.  The film is based on the 1962 novel of the same title by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. 44.  Huebner, 212, 216. 45.  Safer quoted in Engelhardt, 188. 46.  On Edwin Starr, see Phillips. On GI Joe, see Engelhardt, 175–179. 47.  Biesecker, 405. 48.  Jarvis, 95–117. The debilitation of heroic World War II myths in light of Vietnam by exposing the capacity of Americans to behave brutally is also revealed in numerous World War II memoirs written during the Vietnam era and after. See, for instance, Manchester, and Fussell. 49.  Layne. There are no page numbers in the book. Hereafter, references give the poem’s title and a number to indicate where it appears. There are 229 poems altogether. 50.  Layne, “The Baron,” Ibid. (88). 51.  Layne, “The nickname Night Train” (84); “Among Friends” (170). 52.  Layne, “On ‘Lasting’” (215). 53.  See Smith. 54.  Directed by Ted Post, a veteran of the 1960s World War II television series Combat!, Spartans took some ten years to finance and produce (Suid and Haverstick, 94–95). 55. Ford. 56.  As if to confirm the death of U.S. mythologies of war, a young corporal by the name of Abraham Lincoln is blown up by North Vietnamese shells in the middle of reciting the Gettysburg Address while high on opiates. 57. This observation is indebted to Landon. Both Landon and Jeannine Basinger, in The World War II Combat Film, state that Barker is dubbed “Old World War II.” In fact, it is just “World War II,” although the difference in connotation is negligible. 58.  A script for Apocalypse Now was submitted to the Department of Defense and quickly rejected. DoD Film Collection Part II, Box 1, Folder 6. 59.  Carter, “Crisis of Confidence” speech, July 15, 1979. 60.  Smith Jr., 145–151. 61.  See, for example, Reagan’s second inaugural address, January 21, 1985. 62.  Reagan’s D-Day speech, June 6, 1984. 63. Fitzgerald. 64. Schell. 65.  Linenthal (1989). 66.  Roeder, 3–4. 67. On the Holocaust Museum see Linenthal (1995). On the Smithsonian controversy, see Harwit. 68.  Brokaw, xix, xxx. 69.  Ibid., 11–12, 389–390. 70.  Albright quoted in Johnson, 217. 71.  “Saving Private Lion,” The Adam and Joe Show (2004).

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72. Ambrose. 73.  Time Special Issue, September 12, 2001. 74.  See Coulter; and Kieran, 64–83. 75.  Morris, 170. 76.  “We Just Decided To,” The Newsroom, Season 1, Episode 1, HBO (June 24, 2012). 77.  Burns quoted in Lloyd. 78.  Parts of this interview with Burns on Wisconsin Public Radio were reproduced in an email update from the organization that campaigned for Latinos’ inclusion in the film. See Defend the Honor Update, October 28, 2007. 79.  Jones, 69.

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Jones, James. The Thin Red Line. New York: Delta, 1991/1962. Kieran, David. “‘It’s a Different Time. It’s a Different Era. It’s a Different Place’: the Legacy of Vietnam and Contemporary Memoirs of the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,” War and Society 31, no. 1 (March 2012): 64–83. Koppes, Clayton R., and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits, and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies. New York: The Free Press, 1987. Kracauer, Siegfried. “National Types as Hollywood Presents Them,” Public Opinion Quarterly 13, no. 1 (spring 1949): 53–72. Landon, Philip J. “New Heroes: Postwar Hollywood’s Image of World War II,” in Visions of War: World War II in Popular Literature and Culture, ed. Paul M. Holsinger and Mary Anne Schofield. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 1992, 18–26. Layne, McAvoy. How Audie Murphy Died in Vietnam. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973. Leab, Daniel J., ed., Communist Activity in the Entertainment Industry: FBI Surveillance Files on Hollywood, 1942–1958. Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1991. Leffler, Melvyn P. A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992. “Life Visits Audie Murphy: Most Decorated Soldier Comes Home to Little Town of Farmersville, Texas,” Life, July 16, 1946, 94–97. Linenthal, Edward T. Symbolic Defense: The Cultural Significance of the Strategic Defense Initiative. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989. Linenthal, Edward T. Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum. New York: Viking, 1995. Lloyd, Christopher. “Transcript of Interview with Documentarian Ken Burns,” Indianapolis Star, April 15, 2007. www.indystar.com/article/20070415/ ENTERTAINMENT05/704150466/Transcript-interview-documentarian-Ken -Burns. Lorence, James J. “The ‘Foreign Policy of Hollywood’: Interventionist Sentiment in American Film, 1938–1941,” in Hollywood as Mirror: Changing Views of ‘Outsiders’ and ‘Enemies’ in American Movies, ed. Robert Brent Toplin. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993, 95–115. Manchester, William. Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War. New York: Dell, 1979. Mettler, Suzanne. Soldiers to Citizens: The G.I. Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Michel, Sonya. “Danger on the Home Front: Motherhood, Sexuality, and Disabled Veterans in American Postwar Films,” in Gendering War Talk, ed. Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993, 260–279. Morris, Dick. Off with Their Heads! Traitors, Crooks, and Obstructionists in American Politics, Media, and Business. New York: Regan Books, 2003.

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Mumford, Lewis. “Gentlemen: You Are Mad,” Saturday Review of Literature, March 1946, in Hiroshima’s Shadow, ed. Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz. Stony Creek, CT: Pamphleteer’s Press, 1998, 284–287. Murphy, Audie L. To Hell and Back. New York: Henry Holt, 2002/1949. Myrdal, Gunnar. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944. Nisbet, Robert A. “The Coming Problem of Assimilation,” American Journal of Sociology 50, no. 4 (January 1945). Noakes, John A. “Racializing Subversion: The FBI and the Depiction of Race in Early Cold War Movies,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 26, no. 4 (2003): 728–749. North, Oliver L., and William Novak, Under Fire: An American Story. Buffalo, NY: Twenty First Century Press, 1991. Overy, Richard. Why the Allies Won. New York: Norton, 1995. Patterson, James T. Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Phillips, Kimberley L. War! What Is It Good For? Black Freedom Struggles and the U.S. Military from World War II to Iraq. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Pryor, Thomas M. “Audie Murphy Set to Act Life in Film,” New York Times, June 15, 1953. Reagan, Ronald. Second inaugural address, January 21, 1985, www.reagan.utexas .edu/archives/speeches/1984/12185a.htm. Reagan, Ronald. D-Day speech, June 6, 1984, www.historyplace.com/speeches/ reagan-d-day.htm. Roeder, George H. The Censored War: American Visual Experience during World War Two. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. “Saving Private Lion,” The Adam and Joe Show (2004), https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=wX-wumVSbDQ. Schell, Jonathan. The Fate of the Earth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982. Scheuer, Philip K. “Foreman Will Show Victors Are Losers,” Los Angeles Times, August 7, 1962. Shain, Russell Earl. An Analysis of Motion Pictures about War Released by the American Film Industry. New York: Arno Press, 1976. Shapiro, Jerome F. Atomic Bomb Cinema: The Apocalyptic Imagination on Film. New York: Routledge, 2002. Sherry, Michael. In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Shibusawa, Naoko. America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Sklaroff, Lauren Rebecca. “Variety for the Servicemen: The Jubilee Show and the Paradox of Racializing Radio during World War II,” American Quarterly 56, no. 4 (December 2004): 945–973. Slotkin, Richard. “Unit Pride: Ethnic Platoons and the Myths of American Nationality,” American Literary History 13, no. 3 (2001): 469–498.

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Smith, Claude J. Jr. “Clean Boys in Bright Uniforms: The Rehabilitation of the U.S. Military in Films since 1978,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 11, no. 4 (winter 1984): 145–151. Smith, Julian. Looking Away: Hollywood and Vietnam. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975. Stimson, Henry. “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” Harper’s Magazine, February 1947, in Hiroshima’s Shadow, ed. Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz. Stony Creek, CT: Pamphleteer’s Press, 1998, 197–210. Suid, Lawrence H. Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film, rev. exp. ed. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002. Suid, Lawrence H., and Dolores A. Haverstick, Stars and Stripes on Screen: A Comprehensive Guide to Portrayals of American Military on Film. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005. “The 36-Hour War,” Life, November 19, 1945, 27–35. Thomas, Tony. Howard Hughes in Hollywood. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1985. Time, Special Issue, September 12, 2001. Torgovnik, Marianna. The War Complex: World War II in Our Time. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Walker, J. Samuel. Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs against Japan. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Wood, Edward W. Worshipping the Myths of World War II: Reflections on America’s Dedication to War. Washington, DC: Potomac Press, 2006. Yellin, Emily. Our Mother’s War: American Women at Home and at the Front during World War II. New York: Free Press, 2004.

CHAPTER FIVE

American Dreams and Nightmares: Remembering the Civil Rights Movement Jennifer Louise Field

All eyes were fixed on the television in the 1960s as racial violence exploded across America. From the cold urban streets of the North to the hot dusty back roads of the South, the civil rights movement influenced and continues to influence cultural productions such as television, film and documentary, music, and graphic novels. In this essay, I will demonstrate that how the civil rights era is represented in popular culture at any given time cannot be separated from the context of social, economic, and political issues of the culture from which the representation emerges. How cultural productions approach the civil rights movement underscores the fact that its effects extend far beyond the 1960s. Television in the 1960s was marked by an overabundance of violence on the nightly news that was in stark contrast to the escapism of television sitcoms. Narrative film and documentary of the 1980s and 1990s examined the civil rights movement and its legacy through a dramatic lens that presented the North and South as inherently different. Hip-hop music of the same era started as a resistance subculture touting a mandate to “truth tell,” refuting the stereotypes created by an oppressive white society. Today, graphic novels serve as a way to commemorate many of the fiftieth anniversaries of the civil rights movement that are now upon us. The reoccurrence of racial violence in

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popular culture reflects how American society continues to struggle with examining the roots of racial inequality and oppression in America. Issues of racial tolerance, inclusion, and citizenship in the past have direct consequences on the present and future and force us to examine the tensions between American dreams and American nightmares.

American Dreams As romanticized as the 1960s are in American popular culture today, it was in actuality a decade rife with the violence and anxiety that is a sign of change. America was divided across racial lines in the form of both de jure segregation in the South and de facto segregation in the North. Jim Crow laws in the South not only attempted to keep the races separate, but also enforced a hierarchy of rights while legally protecting racialized violence. The South was the site of unspeakable acts of violence, and though the Northern urban areas were believed to be more liberal, they were also hotbeds of racial antagonism. By the 1960s, owning a television became the norm, and it served as the medium that would bring the events of the civil rights movement, the violence of voting rights abuses, firehoses trained on protesters, and riots into living rooms across the country on the nightly news.1 The birth of the nightly television news program went hand in hand with the growth of the civil rights movement from the 1950s into the 1960s. The civil rights movement and, in particular, the violence that so often defined it was one of the most pressing domestic issues of that time in the United States. The desegregation of public schools in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education proved a particularly poignant television event.2 For example, there was intense coverage of the riots surrounding the enrollment of the Little Rock Nine in 1957 after nine African American students were selected to attend all-white Little Rock Central High.3 An angry mob of white students, parents, and community members hurled insults, held signs that read, “Segregation Forever” and “America for Whites” and chanted, “Two, four, six, eight—we will not integrate.” The mob spat on and assaulted the students as they attempted to enter the school.4 One of the nine students, Elizabeth Eckford, missed the group meetup beforehand and had to enter on her own. Separated from the rest of the group, the Arkansas National Guard prevented her from entering the school. She was verbally and physically assaulted by the white mob until a sympathetic white woman sheltered her and guided her to the bus.5 Television coverage of these events raised important questions about the role the media was playing in the civil rights movement and whether reporters should be participants or observers.6

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It is important to remember that reporters do play an active role in picking the stories, details, and the eyewitness accounts of participants and bystanders in a patterned way that forms a narrative that is also complementary to the agendas of the broadcast networks and sponsors.7 Network news organizations had to design a “narrative frame, recurring themes, familiar characters as well as picture-friendly visuals,” as this new journalistic medium struggled to tell this unprecedented news story of racial unrest and division.8 Participants in the movement would also use media coverage to force the matter into the homes of every American, challenging them to confront their own biases and prejudices. “The movement needed network television as an ally in making its campaigns and demands a national political crisis requiring federal intervention. Attention from television cameras far more than that of even national print media, provided the crucial ingredient for successful campaigns and demonstrations.”9 Television awakened white America to the realities of black oppression, especially in the South.10 “When you see and hear a wildly angry man talking, whether he is segregationist or integrationist, you can understand the man’s anger, you can feel it—the depth of it.”11 Simply reading accounts of such emotions in the newspaper does not allow one to experience the full power of the story. The importance of broadcast journalism to the civil rights movement cannot be overstated. It was essential to initiating a cultural zeitgeist that sympathized with the peaceful protestors who believed so dearly in what they were fighting for that they would repeatedly face the prospect of being arrested and jailed, serious injury, and even death. Witnessing such acts of self-sacrifice was a persuasive impetus for segregated laws to be overturned. It would prove to be shocking to viewers to see the violence that peaceful protesters were met with by police and the military. Eugene “Bull” Connor, commissioner of public safety for Birmingham, Alabama, unabashedly segregationist, oversaw the police and fire departments with an iron fist aimed in the direction of protesters. In 1963, during the Birmingham leg of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s campaign, Connor “ordered his officers to become more physical. Protesters were stunned when the police began using high pressure firehoses that were so powerful that even the strongest of men couldn’t remain standing against them.”12 SCLC Director James Bevel made the decision that the youth should play a more integral role during demonstrations and on May 2, 1963, the first group of children walked from the 16th Street Baptist Church toward Birmingham’s City Hall. By day’s end, 959 children from the ages of six to eighteen were arrested.13 The next day, even more children were out protesting, and Connor ordered fire hoses and attack

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dogs to be used against them. It was one thing to have African American adults being brutalized, but it was quite another to see children being knocked to the ground by water hoses, their clothing and flesh shredded by the teeth of fearsome police dogs on the six o’clock news.14 Television cameras captured the terror, and “that night on their TV screens, the American people witnessed a level of police brutality far beyond anything they’d ever imagined could take place in the United States.”15 Eventually, Connor’s actions backfired, with voters becoming dissatisfied with Birmingham’s worsening reputation and voting Connor out of the position he had held for twenty-two years.16 The overabundance of violent images of social unrest in the country was in stark contrast to the lack of violent racial struggle in American television sitcoms.17 By examining a few sitcoms from the 1960s to the 1970s, we can begin to see which programs were progressively addressing the issues of the day and which refused to admit that there were any racial problems. Looking back at the television of these decades, it is clear that the idea of the “American Dream” dominated popular culture in general and television in particular. On the heels of Leave It to Beaver (1957–1963),18 portrayals of the wholesome white family dominated the airwaves in such programs as The Andy Griffith Show (1960–1968),19 The Brady Bunch (1969–1974),20 Bewitched (1964–1972),21 and Petticoat Junction (1963–1970).22 These shows glorified the normality of whiteness as an imagined American identity. There was very little to no discussion of racial issues in these sitcoms. Lisa Woolfork notes in her study of race and television that “despite the social upheaval of the 1960s, the version of America depicted by television sitcoms and drama was calm.”23 Slapstick comedies such as Bewitched and The Brady Bunch were intended to appease advertisers and also not offend (white) audiences.24 Woolfork further asserts, “This silence about current events resulted in a cognitive gap between nightly news programs (which were riddled with disturbing yet true events) and the easily resolved problems that followed the six o’clock news.”25 By definition, network television during this period was somewhat conservative in terms of what content made it to air, because the job of television was to sell the American Dream to middleclass families. The American Dream is essentially the pursuit and achievement of economic, social, and political success in the United States, a country of supposed liberty comparable to no other. Jim Cullen, author of The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation, writes that the American Dream is essentially based upon universal enfranchisement.26

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It is believed that if one is dedicated enough to commit himself or herself to hard work and perseverance, then anything is possible in America, including freedom, equality, and happiness. In 1965, the spy drama I Spy (1965–1968)27 debuted on NBC starring Bill Cosby as Alexander Scott and Robert Culp as Kelly Robinson. They go undercover as a professional tennis player (Robinson) and tennis coach (Scott) but are actually a duo of secret intelligence officers that travel the world to promote the American way of justice, security, and democracy. I Spy was an attempt to show that a member of any race could achieve the American Dream with hard work. It was a landmark show simply for its integrated starring partnership—one more equitable than most other television shows of the time. I Spy was also meant to boost America’s image on an international stage, especially since the civil rights violence taking place in America at the time made the United States appear hypocritical considering how quick America was to judge the morals of other countries.28 The State Department attempted to change how America was perceived abroad by sending speakers who would attest to the strides being made in American social relations. The “right thing” to say was, “yes, there were racial problems in the United States, but it was through democratic processes (not Communism) that optimal social change for African Americans would occur. It would make things so much easier, however, if the troublemakers stayed home.”29 Josephine Baker posed a special problem for the government. She was an entertainer who did not shy away from the injustices of American society even before the civil rights movement had peaked: Unless there is a halt to the wave of lynchings, electrocutions without proof, collective aggressions and other beauties of the “American way of life,” it means that all the blood spilled in the last war has been in vain. The apparent enemies of Hitler see his triumph multiplied in the Southern United States.30

Such “beauties” solidified the dichotomies of “dreams” and “nightmares” that the American population was experiencing and exposed the hypocrisy of the democracy, equality, and liberty in which Americans took such pride. Slowly, actors and actresses of color were making inroads and changing the image of African Americans on television. In 1968, Julia (1968– 1971),31 starring Diahann Carroll as the first African American female lead of an American television show, began its run. A widowed mother to her son Carl, she is also a professional nurse living in a middle-class world. Although the show was lauded for its progressive and fresh feeling, it has also been criticized for not dealing with the realities of racial issues

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of the time. As Robert Lewis Shayon, a writer for CBS, argued, “television’s fantasy world does more than provide entertainment. It structures a belief in what is possible in the real world.”32 Representation in the media of communities of color has profound effects on allowing one to feel like a valued citizen of American society.33 Toward the late 1960s and into the 1970s, television sitcoms such as All in the Family (1971–1979)34 and its spinoff The Jeffersons (1975–1985)35 would begin to tackle the many issues of the changing American social, economic, and political landscape through comedy. Making its debut in 1971, CBS’s All in the Family ranked first in the Nielsen ratings for five consecutive years (1971–1976).36 With its cantankerous and bigoted lead character, Archie Bunker, discussions of race, class, politics, economics, and much more not only led to heated debates in the Bunker household, but also prompted dialogue in the homes of viewers and cultural critics alike. Notable episodes in the series include “Sammy’s Visit”37 and “Archie’s Operation.”38 In “Sammy’s Visit,” Archie, a cab driver, is thrilled that he picked up Sammy Davis Jr. in his cab. After leaving a bag behind, Davis drops by the Bunker household to pick it up. A comical back-and-forth dialog about race ensues, during which Davis makes backhanded remarks toward Archie to which he is oblivious. As Davis heads out, he poses for one last picture with Archie and surprises him with a kiss on the cheek. The show then heads to commercial with Archie’s stunned expression. The show also spoke to the differences in generations that were in conflict. Many times Archie is at odds over ideological matters with his son-in-law Michael “Meathead” Stivic and his daughter Gloria. The 1960s and 1970s were very much a changing of the guard generationally. The theme song, “Those Were the Days,” was an indication that the Bunkers longed for a simpler albeit mythic time: “Guys like us we had it made . . . Didn’t need no welfare state/everybody pulled his weight . . . Those were the days.” The Bunkers’ neighbors, the Jeffersons, an African American family, were very different from Archie. At times, he was affable to George and Weezy’s son, Lionel, but George is also the mirror of Archie, as much a bigot and prejudiced against whites as Archie is against blacks.39 But not all thought these two shows were a progressive way to discuss race. Bill Cosby has been staunch in his criticism of the show as inherently counterproductive.40 He would take his vision of the black family in his own direction in the 1980s. In 1984, The Cosby Show (1984–1992)41 premiered on NBC, a hit with black and white audiences alike; the Huxtables were a middle-class professional African American couple raising their five children, Sondra,

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Denise, Theo, Vanessa, and Rudy, in Brooklyn, New York. The Cosby Show put its emphasis on the principles of education, hard work, and community participation as a means of achieving the American Dream.42 As television critic David Leonard suggests, “literal pundits and commentators lamented single-parented homes and the inability of single mothers to lift up the generation of African American children.”43 For this reason, The Cosby Show was of great importance in normalizing the depiction of the black family as a functioning nuclear unit. For the most part, the issue of race does not explicitly play a role in the show. The characters do not deal with issues of racism in the workplace or school settings. One of the notable episodes in which the civil rights movement is addressed is “The March,”44 which aired on October 30, 1986. The episode revolves around Theo and his friend Cockroach struggling to write a paper on the 1963 March on Washington. Cliff and Claire, as well as Cliff’s parents, who were there at the march, retell their experiences of that eventful day. This episode was particularly poignant because it served as a way of bridging the gap of understanding in the 1980s that was starting to divide the civil rights and post–civil rights generations, a gap that meant that neither could find common ground on how the baton of the post–civil rights generation should be carried. In many ways, this was the mandate of Cosby’s spinoff sitcom, A Different World (1989–1993),45 intended to follow the Huxtables’ daughter Denise as she attends Hillman College (a fictional African American college based on Spelman College). We see the college experience through African American lenses. The school offered a fresh experience outside the domestic sphere where most black sitcoms tended to take place. “The show utilizes the classroom setting not simply as a vehicle for its seamless integration of historical information and contemporary social debates but to highlight the conflicts, contradictions and diversity . . . that embody the black community.”46 The show focused on a range of issues relevant to the post-civil rights generation, including “sexual harassment, date rape, sexual violence, domestic violence, AIDS, South African Apartheid, race relations, affirmative action and the L.A riots.”47 In the episode “Honeymoon in L.A. Pts I & II,”48 main characters Dwayne Wayne and Whitley Gilbert get married and end up honeymooning in Los Angeles during the 1992 L.A. Riots. These two episodes provide a dialogue regarding the issues surrounding the riots. The riots took place between April 29 and May 4, 1992 and broke out after the acquittal of the police officers who had been videotaped beating Rodney King. The outrage of communities of color exploded, resulting in looting and destruction of local businesses.49 The students of Hillman take the opportunity to discuss

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ideological and tactical points of difference. Dwayne and Whitley get stuck in Los Angeles during the riots and discuss their experience back at Hillman with their friends. Lena, the black power student asserts, “Seriously though, if I were there, I woulda’ gone off.” Dwayne replies, “Seriously though, we got 1 billion dollars in damage ’cause brothers were ripping up their own neighbourhoods. Think for a minute.” Vernon Gaines and Col. Taylor, the two characters of the civil rights generation end the discussion by adding: “We’ll see what effect this has. They said things would change before. Got to work together so your children in the next twenty years won’t feel the need to burn their own communities down.”50 Films that addressed civil rights issues would explore the subject in a much more in-depth way than even the most progressive television sitcoms ever could. Such films took upon themselves the responsibility of correcting myths about the civil rights movement in some cases while also reinforcing other myths. The documentary genre would also take the opportunity to present the voices of the movement in a newly assertive way.

American Nightmares If television had characterized civil rights within a comedic realm, cinema has overwhelmingly focused its lens on the dramatic. American cinema has seen fit to present the civil rights struggle as a dichotomous North versus South issue. David R. Jansson makes an interesting point with his idea of “internal orientalism” in his essay “Hollywood and the Civil Rights Movement.” Cinema often engages in a discourse “that involves the othering of a region within the state and the simultaneous production of an exalted national identity.”51 In turn, negative representations of the South as “racist, backward, intolerant, poor and xenophobic, reproduce a vision of the national identity as tolerant, progressive, enlightened, prosperous and cosmopolitan.”52 Films such as To Kill A Mockingbird (1963), In the Heat of the Night (1967), and Mississippi Burning (1988) situate the South within Jansson’s paradigm of internal orientalism, because the South is perceived in each film as having a vicious kind of racism distinct from the rest of the country. Black filmmakers in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s sought to correct this mythology by presenting the urban ghettos of the North as an essential backdrop of the civil rights narrative. To Kill A Mockingbird,53 directed by Robert Mulligan, is an iconic film based on the novel of the same name written by Harper Lee. The story follows lawyer Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck), who takes on the losing case of a black man accused of raping a local white woman. The ugliest

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sides of racism and hate are laid bare in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, as the story of a black man accused of assaulting a white woman and being presumed guilty is unfortunately not a unique occurrence. In fact, it is eerily similar to the real-life beating and lynching death of teenager Emmett Till in 1955 by three white men for supposedly flirting with a white woman. Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch delivers one of the most lauded and compelling monologues in all of American cinematic history in his closing remarks at the trial, when he speaks of the “victim,” Mayella Ewell: She’s committed no crime—she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society, a code so severe that whoever breaks it is hounded from our midst as unfit to live with. She must destroy the evidence of her offense. But what was the evidence of her offense? Tom Robinson, a human being. She must put Tom Robinson away from her. Tom Robinson was to her a daily reminder of what she did. Now, what did she do? She tempted a Negro. She was white, and she tempted a Negro. She did something that, in our society, is unspeakable. She kissed a black man. Not an old uncle, but a strong, young Negro man. No code mattered to her before she broke it, but it came crashing down on her afterwards.54

This film was a trailblazer in addressing the civil rights movement and racial politics. It would lead the way for such great films as Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967)55 and In the Heat of the Night (1967). In the Heat of the Night56 is significant because it features a strong person of color in a starring role. Sidney Poitier was a central figure of the civil rights movement and had taken on roles that did not shy away from issues of race and racism. When a prominent white businessman, Mr. Colbert, turns up dead in the middle of the street in the fictional town of Sparta, Mississippi, police officers immediately set about to find a suspect. Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier), a black man waiting for the 4:05 a.m. train, is the obvious first suspect to Officer Sam Wood. Local police chief, Gillespie (Rod Steiger) finds out that Tibbs is actually a police officer with the Philadelphia police department, and Tibbs, a homicide expert, is then asked by his chief to stay and help solve the case. Like Mockingbird, In the Heat of the Night is rife with blatant and unapologetically racist attitudes in an otherwise congenial Southern town. Gillespie only keeps Tibbs around out of necessity and makes a point, whenever he feels threatened by Tibbs’s proficiency as a homicide detective, to either try to send him out of town or remind Tibbs of how “uppity” he is. One of the most unforgettable lines from the film comes from Poitier when his character’s patience is being

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tried by the rampant bigotry. It was inconceivable in the South that a black detective could garner any amount of respect: Gillespie [Angrily]: “Virgil, that’s a funny name for a nigger boy who comes from Philadelphia. What do they call ya up there?” Tibbs [defiantly]: “They call me Mr. Tibbs.”57

After a tête-à-tête over racial politics with a white plantation owner, Mr. Endicott, himself a suspect in the case, Virgil ends up taking a slap across the face courtesy of Endicott. Without missing a beat, Virgil slaps him right back. “They called it the “slap heard around the world.”58 This is such a significant scene in the film, to see a black man confidently strike a white man back. It is also a very telling moment for Gillespie, because he does not reprimand Tibbs in front of Endicott, despite Endicott’s insistence that Gillespie step in. After the two leave Endicott’s company, we see the tears running down the plantation owner’s face out of embarrassment and anger. Once outside, Gillespie is furious with Tibbs for hitting Endicott, not out of sympathy for Endicott, but rather out of concern for both Tibbs’s safety and his own because of the power players in the town whom Gillespie must appease. As Mayor Web Shubert insists, the last chief of police would have had Tibbs shot and called the shooting self-defense. It was an affront to the white townspeople of Sparta that a black Northerner would come into their town and show them up. Tibbs does not seem to know his place, which is doubly bad because not only is he a Northerner, but he is also black—“a boy,” they keep reminding him, refusing to acknowledge his adult masculinity. The 1970s Blaxploitation film industry took its cue from films such as Heat by seeking to resist negative stereotypes projected onto black communities. The purpose of Blaxploitation films was to flip the gaze, centering African Americans as the heroes of their own communities. Gordon Parks’s film Shaft (1971),59 for instance, features a black detective who would never have been visible in a mainstream Hollywood film of the time. These films that were black-produced, black-financed, and black-directed were intended for the enjoyment of black audiences. Films of this genre demonstrate that white institutional and social power structures influence black communities to a greater extent than the mainstream media would ever concede.60 This would be especially evident in the blockbuster films that (re)presented the civil rights movement in retrospect. Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning (1988)61 was a major motion picture that sought to portray civil rights violence in the South two decades after the movement. The film centers on two FBI agents from the North, Rupert

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Anderson (Gene Hackman) and Alan Ward (Willem Dafoe), who venture to Mississippi to find out what happened to three civil rights workers who have disappeared. The film is loosely based upon the murder of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney by members of the Ku Klux Klan and the police department of Neshoba County, Mississippi on June 21, 1964.62 The three were arrested for allegedly speeding and were detained for a number of hours before being released in the late hours of the night. As they attempted to leave town, the police deputy followed them, along with members of the Klan. The three civil rights workers were murdered, their car dumped into the Bogue Chitto Swamp, and their bodies buried some distance away.63 The white FBI agents in the film swoop in as the “good guys,” heroes from the North who have the best interests of the southern blacks in mind. However, this is not entirely historically accurate, bearing in mind that this organization more often than not was apathetic and at times even suspicious toward the movement and its leaders. J. Edgar Hoover had many key civil rights leaders and organizations under strict surveillance out of a belief that they were a threat to public security.64 Furthermore, Mississippi Burning frames the black community as being in danger and with little agency of its own, and the film certainly does not acknowledge the civil rights movement that was actually very active in Mississippi. This absence reflects the fact that Mississippi Burning is told through a very white lens. The racial violence is seen as only a part of the backward culture of the South, which in turn accentuates the idea of the North being much more civilized. Not long after Mississippi Burning, Spike Lee’s film, Malcolm X (1992)65 would demonstrate how Malcolm was active in exposing the institutional racism that affected the entire country. Spike Lee’s film was based upon The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965),66 written by Alex Haley and Malcolm X. Malcolm was played by actor Denzel Washington as the film ambitiously follows Malcolm from childhood until his untimely death by assassination at the Audubon Ballroom on February 21, 1965. Until 1989, Martin Luther King Jr. had become mythologized as everyone’s hero, but Malcolm was a leader who was emphatically not a hero to many. Malcolm X once poignantly said, “Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality.”67 The rural symbolized space where lynching was prominent; and the urban was synonymous with guns, water hoses, and attack dogs. There was no space in America where the black community could escape the threat of violence. In Malcolm’s mind, the American Dream was only an American nightmare.

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Cinematic examinations of the movement have certainly supported Malcolm’s position. In Mockingbird, the accused man is found guilty despite Atticus Finch’s best efforts, and in Heat, although police chief Gillespie has warmed to Tibbs by the end of the film, there does not seem to be a wider sense of change in the town of Sparta, and we cannot definitively say that Gillespie’s outlook on race has been altered, even though he has changed his opinion of Tibbs. Mississippi Burning, made twenty years after Heat, follows in the same lineage of staging its black community in the backdrop of a story squarely fixed on the cat and mouse chase between the FBI and the Klan. The FBI is even rewritten in civil rights popular culture memory as being more involved in the civil rights crusade than it actually was.68 In short, for each major motion film examined there is no lasting feeling that any significant cultural shift has been made in quelling long-standing racial tensions. It is the job instead of the viewer to think critically about the issues at hand and come to his or her own conclusions. It was not until black film productions start to approach racial oppression through blaxploitation in the 1970s and black filmmakers of the 1980s and 1990s, such as Spike Lee and John Singleton, that we see more diverse and accurate representations of the civil rights movement and racial oppression in America. Ultimately, violence in cinematic narratives, instead of engaging in a critical dialogue by interacting with the viewers’ experiences, functions primarily as a tool of entertainment. Documentaries have served as a much stronger tool of education when it comes to correcting misrepresentations of the civil rights movement, and they have functioned as a way to heal from the traumatic events of the movement. Documentaries tell stories just as narrative films do. Editors still decide which aspects of a story stay and which are cut.69 Just as with narrative film, editing a documentary is intended to manipulate the audience to feel what the filmmakers want you to feel. However, because television media coverage often showed only the violent aspects of the civil rights movement, without meaningful context or analysis, the documentary fills a cognitive gap wherein actual participants in the struggle for civil rights and their families are afforded the opportunity to tell their own personal stories. Nevertheless, the documentarian must strike a balance between objectivity and subjectivity.70 Eyes on the Prize (1987–1990)71 is a remarkable and unprecedented fourteen-hour documentary series for PBS that debuted in 1987. The first episode, “Awakenings, 1954–1956”72 starts with the individual acts that prompted the civil rights movement, such as the murder of Emmett Till and Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. The exhaustive series looks at such landmark events as the Little Rock High

American Dreams and Nightmares: Remembering the Civil Rights Movement 

School desegregation riot (1957), the March on Washington (1963), and Bloody Sunday (1965). The series is so noteworthy because it offers a variety of perspectives and voices from the grassroots. Using interviews and historical footage, it tells a compelling story of “the people—young and old, male and female, northern and southern—who compelled by a meeting of conscience and circumstance, worked to eradicate a world where whites and blacks could not go to the same school, ride the same bus, vote in the same election or participate equally in society.”73 The series is unparalleled in its exploration of the black freedom struggle in all its facets, too often dichotomized and juxtaposed in popular culture as opposing violent and nonviolent approaches. Eyes allows for the dismantling of these myths and instead focuses on the movement in its entirety, including the victories and the losses. It humanizes the participants by exposing the toll it took on those involved and the level of commitment they went to to see Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream come to fruition. Spike Lee’s Four Little Girls (1997)74 was released almost thirty-five years after the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Mississippi in 1963, perpetrated by members of the Klan. It resulted in the deaths of four young African American girls: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Denise McNair. The documentary focuses on both how the girls’ families keep their memories alive and their own account of the events of that day. Although the film ends with the eventual trial and conviction of Robert Edward Chambliss in 1977, Lee leaves us with images of church bombings as recently as 1993. Blurring the lines of past and present, the viewers must ask themselves how much progress has been made. The PBS documentary Freedom Riders (2010) ponders this question for the anniversary of the 1961 Freedom Rides. Freedom Riders75 focuses on the participants in the Congress of Racial Equality’s (C.O.R.E) campaign to desegregate the interstate bus systems of the south. The determination of the youth to put their lives at risk, to be beat within inches of their lives to achieve equality, spoke volumes to people who watched from their homes. It was becoming clear that these issues were not going to simply go away, nor would the activists back down. The freedom rides in 1961 organized by C.O.R.E were intended to protest Southern states’ organized efforts to resist desegregated bus laws and the federal government’s hesitation to enforce the laws. The tactic of the riders was to “have at least one interracial pair sitting in adjoining seats, and at least one black rider sitting up front, where seats under segregation had been reserved for white customers by local custom throughout the South.” FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe, a member of the Anniston chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, exposed how police commissioner “Bull” Connor had

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given the green light to the Klan that they would have a guaranteed fifteen minutes to initiate attacks upon the riders as they came into Anniston without risk of arrest. Attacks on Greyhound and Trailways buses resulted in fire bombings and bodily attacks by metal pipes, baseball bats, and even bicycle chains. The rides continued throughout the summer despite the brutal violence, demonstrating against segregated restaurants, lunch counters, and hotels. Riders successfully prompted policies, enacted November 1, 1961, removing “white” and “colored” signs from bus terminals and racially segregated water fountains, washrooms, waiting rooms, and lunch counters. Even though the Kennedy administration wanted a quick resolution to the violence, the Freedom riders continued regardless of whether they received federal protection, and the riders inspired many direct action campaigns, such as voter registration campaigns in the Deep South’s Freedom Summer of 1964. From the perspective of popular culture, the other significant feature of the Freedom Riders was their use of music to maintain their focus and give them strength when they were feeling as though they could not go on. The changing tides of the popular music would lend their support to the Freedom Riders in particular and the civil rights movement in general.

A Change Is Gonna Come During the 1950s and 1960s, musical tastes were changing, with the baby boomers becoming more conscious of national and international events. Folk music acts such as Peter, Paul and Mary; Bob Dylan; and Joan Baez broke into popular music with songs that were socially and politically aware. During this time, music played an integral role in the civil rights movement. “We Shall Overcome” gave strength to the weak, the tired, and the scared and would become the anthem of the movement.76 Rhythm and blues and soul music became genres that spoke to the black struggle, just as spirituals, blues, and jazz had before them. There is a long lineage of protest songs tackling racial oppression in the United States. Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” (1939)77 is one such example. Her “personal protest” became famous in 1939 and rose to sixteenth place on the race records Billboard charts despite being banned from airplay.78 The song, written by Jewish schoolteacher Abel Meeropol under the pen name Lewis Allen, was a twelve-line literary response to the fetishization of lynching culture amongst Meeropol’s social and artistic circles as a topic of conversation fueled by the photographs and stories readily on display in New York newspapers.79 The breathy and bluesy sorrowful nature of the song brings life to the painful and sinister subject matter.

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Many artists were affected by Jim Crow laws when touring and often, if not publicly or explicitly, spoke out against segregation; many did so personally.80 Some record labels kept their performers from tackling the issues by having them perform traditional popular music. “Early R&B was rarely political in any direct way and R&B singers seldom expressed themselves on social issues in any direct manner.”81 This was the case for Sam Cooke, James Brown, Marvin Gaye, and Stevie Wonder. Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come (1964),”82 signaled a poignant shift for Sam Cooke before he died. “I go to the movie and I go downtown/Somebody keep telling me, don’t hang around/It’s been a long, a long time coming/but I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will . . . Then I go to my brother/ And I say, Brother, help me please/But he winds up knockin’ me/Back down on my knees.” Although not explicitly referencing the movement, this song became the anthem of hope that the movement desperately needed in 1964, when violence had hit a fever pitch on the road to the Civil Rights Act. After Malcolm X’s assassination in 1965, the black power movement gained momentum and influenced television coverage to change perceptions of blackness in the media. This phase of the movement was focused on black pride and self-sufficiency. They believed in withdrawal from the broken capitalist and racist systems of oppression that were destroying black communities. The Black Panthers, for example, no longer wanted to be framed as victims of the system by the media but instead took the weapons that were being used against blacks to protect communities of color. James Brown’s “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” (1968)83 proved essential to its time because it went hand-in-hand with the black power movement and its shifting feeling that adherence to nonviolence was a show of weakness. It complemented the chanting, militaristic aesthetic of the Panthers.84 Brown’s music was part of “an engaging of tropes and sentiments of black pride (emerging out of Black Power/Black Arts) that were widely circulating among African Americans in the late 1960s.”85 We can see the same convergence of music and civil rights in the rap and hip-hop scene of the 1980s and 1990s. Hip-hop served as a way to give voice to black youth who were frustrated with their circumstances. Central features of hip-hop culture, such as sampling, blurred the civil rights and post–civil rights temporalities and in doing so brought to light the similarities between the two generations.86 For instance, “imagining reproduces or evokes images, events, people, and symbols for the purpose of placing past ideas into closer proximity to the present.”87 A poignant example of imagining can be found in Public Enemy’s music video for “Fight the Power” (1989).88 The video reclaims the black power tradition. The music video opens to newsreel coverage of the March on Washington

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and then cuts to the young inner-city marchers carrying cardboard placards with pictures of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Paul Robeson, and Marcus Garvey, among other important black leaders. This is a symbolic reclaiming of African American heroes, as Chuck D. points out: “Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps.” In tandem with Spike Lee’s film Do The Right Thing (1989),89 the title song was important in making Afrocentrism popular, reclaiming the rhetoric and aesthetic of the Black Power version of the civil rights movement for a new generation.

Marching Forward: Fifty Years Later Some of the most recent reflections on black American identity and the legacies of the civil rights movement can be found in graphic novels.90 Of particular note is how the graphic novel genre has the potential to explore “what-ifs.” For example, Birth of a Nation: A Comic Novel explores the question of what would happen if a black town decided to secede from America because its citizens were barred from voting.91 Today, comics and graphic novels are taking on controversial topics and are starting to incorporate voices from various backgrounds and experiences.92 The Silence of Our Friends,93 a graphic novel written by Mark Long and Jim Demonakos and illustrated by Nate Powell, features the tagline “The Civil Rights Struggle was Never Black and White.” Based on the childhood of Mark Long, the story features two families, one black and one white, who are trying to reach a level of friendship that transcends the racism and bigotry of a South that threatens to rip them apart. As the tension between the communities rises, five students are on trial for the murder of a police officer; the story ends with the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The last pages of the book show whites and blacks coming together and marching. The only text on the last two pages reads: “We will remember not the words of our enemies . . . but the silence of our friends.”94 This quote encourages the reader to reflect not only on the legacy of the civil rights movement, but also on the actions that they themselves have taken, underscoring the bravery of those who speak up and fight for the equality of all people. March Book One95 was released in 2013 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington. Congressman John Lewis’s story is told over the span of a three-book series. (He is the only speaker from the March who is still alive.96) The first book documents Lewis’s youth, his growing desire to be politically active, and his first meeting with Dr. King. A poignant moment of the story comes during Lewis’s first Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-in. His body, in the comic’s representation, is pushed out of the panel, and it is as though the reader could reach out

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and grab his hand.97 In another panel, the comic shows a foot in the act of stepping on a demonstrator’s head as whites look on in the background, pointing and laughing.98 Lewis has noted that it was the Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story (1957) comic book that inspired him as a child, and that he hopes to reach out to a new generation of young readers in the same way.99 We look upon the civil rights movement as a major turning point in American race relations. Five decades later, it is still used as a reference point for judging the current state of racial progress or lack thereof. Graphic novels such as Eric McGruder’s The Boondocks100 examine the figures of the civil rights movement in a new light, extending the scope of memory beyond typical popular culture characterizations of civil rights leaders. In the poignant and controversial episode, “Return of the King,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wakes up from the coma he has been in since the assassination attempt in 1968 and must adjust to a world that he does not recognize in terms of racial relations. Deeply depressed at the state of black affairs and the influence of BET, the episode ends with Dr. King making the following speech: Is this it?! This is what I got all those ass-whuppings for?! I had a dream once. It was a dream that little black boys and little black girls would drink from the river of prosperity, freed from the thirst of oppression. But lo and behold, some four decades later, what have I found but a bunch of trifling, shiftless, good-for-nothing niggers. And I know some of you don’t like to hear me say that word. It’s the ugliest word in the English language, but that’s what I see now, niggers. And you don’t want to be a nigger. Cause niggers are living contradictions! Niggers are full of unfulfilled ambitions! Niggers wax and wane, niggers love to complain, Niggers love to hear themselves talk but hate to explain! Niggers love being another man’s judge and jury! Niggers procrastinate until it’s time to worry! Niggers love to be late! Niggers hate to hurry! Black Entertainment Television is the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life! Usher, Michael Jackson is NOT a genre of music! And now, I’d like to talk about Soul Plane . . . I’ve seen what’s around the corner! I’ve seen what’s over the horizon! And I promise you, you niggers have nothing to celebrate! And, no, I won’t get there with you; I’m going to Canada.101

McGruder defiantly disregards the sacredness of King that surrounds his now seemingly mythic figure today and instead chooses to humanize him in a way reminding us of what he endured and how easily, as time goes on, we fail to realize the depths of his and others’ sacrifice in the name of equality and social justice.

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Final Thoughts America’s civil rights movement forced the country to come to terms with the violence and oppression that divided it at the same time as the golden age of television was beginning. Even though the violence of race riots, bombings, and police brutality dominated television news coverage, the sitcoms of the time were essentially escapist comedies. Shows such as All in the Family and Julia were landmarks in the 1960s and 1970s for progressively addressing racial politics when others refused to do so. Similarly, The Cosby Show was important in the 1980s and 1990s for normalizing representations of African American families on television. Since the 1960s, American films have often focused on dramatic depictions of the civil rights movement and its legacy. Quite often, racial struggle is either depicted in terms of a North/South dichotomy or, as in the documentary genre, in a way seeking to dispel myths about the civil rights movement. African American directors such as Spike Lee, John Singleton, and the Hughes Brothers, as well as artists within the hip-hop community, have been essential to the film canon in (re)presenting the civil rights era from African American points of view. Finally, graphic novels have also engaged with the subject of civil rights. Indeed, each cultural platform can present the civil rights movement as a combination of American dreams and American nightmares.

Notes   1.  “When Television,” 2014.   2.  Streitmatter, 157; “Fighting Back (1957–1962),” 1987.   3.  “The Long March,” 2014.  4. Ibid.   5.  “Fighting Back (1957–1962),” 1987; “The Long March,” 2014.  6. Bodroghkozy, 41.  7. Ibid., 42.  8. Ibid., 44.  9. Ibid., 116. 10.  Streitmatter, 155. 11.  Ibid., 156. 12.  Ibid., 161–162. 13.  “Children’s Crusade,” August 13, 2014. 14.  “Role of Young People,” February 1, 2001. 15.  Streitmatter, 163–164. 16.  Hampton and Fayer, 124. 17.  Breaux, 88. 18.  Leave It to Beaver, 1957–1963.

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19.  The Andy Griffith Show, 1960–1968. 20.  The Brady Bunch, 1969–1974. 21.  Bewitched, 1964–1972. 22.  Petticoat Junction, 1963–1970. 23.  Woolfork, 46. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26.  Cullen, 60. 27.  I Spy, 1965–1968. 28.  Haralovich, 101. 29.  Dudziak, 546. 30.  Ibid., 556. 31.  Julia, 1968–1971. 32.  Harper, 64. 33.  Ibid., 70. 34.  All in the Family, 1971–1979. 35.  The Jeffersons, 1975–1985. 36.  Woolfork, 45. 37.  “Sammy’s Visit,” 1972. 38.  “Archie’s Operation,” 1976. 39.  Woolfork, 45–46. 40.  “Breaking Barriers: A History,” 2014. 41.  The Cosby Show, 1984–1992. 42.  Leonard, 142. 43.  Ibid., 16. 44.  “The March,” 1986. 45.  Leonard, 147–148. 46.  A Different World, 1987–1993. 47.  Ibid., 148. 48.  “Honeymoon in L.A. Pts. I & II,” 1992. 49.  Jansson, 267. 50.  “Honeymoon in L.A. Pts. I & II,” 1992. 51.  Jansson, 267. 52.  Ibid., 268. 53. Peck, 1963. 54. Ibid. 55. Poitier, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, 1967. 56. Poitier, In the Heat of the Night, 1967. 57. Ibid. 58.  Susman, 2012, 59.  Roundtree, 1971. 60.  Baadassss Cinema, 2002. 61.  Hackman, 1988. 62.  Bourgeois, 158–159.

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 63. Ibid., 159.   64.  Gross, 2006; Branch, 413; Germany and Carter, 2011.  65. Washington, 1992.   66.  X and Haley, 1965.   67.  X, 7, 9.  68. Morgan, 139.  69. Oldham, 121.  70. Ibid., 44.  71. Eyes on the Prize, 1987.   72.  “Awakenings 1954–1956,” 1987.  73. “Series Description.”  74. 4 Little Girls, 1997.  75. Freedom Riders, 2010.  76. Reed, 28–29.  77. Holiday, 1939.  78. Turner, 52.  79. Ibid., 51.  80. Smethurst, 109.  81. Ibid., 110.  82. Cooke, 1964.  83. Brown, 1968.   84.  Reed, 52, 60.  85. Smethurst, 108.  86. Aldridge, 228.  87. Ibid., 229.   88.  Public Enemy, 1989.  89. Lee, 1989.  90. Ryan, 922.  91. Fleming, 28.  92. Ibid., 27   93.  Long and Demonakos, 2012.  94. Ibid., 192–193.   95.  Lewis and Aydin, 2013.  96. Dirks, 2013.  97. Lewis, 100.  98. Ibid., 101.  99. Dirks, 2013. 100.  McGruder, 2003. 101.  “Return of the King,” 2006.

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Fleming, Robert. “Beyond Funny: Black Voices in the World of Comics and Graphic Novels.” 4 Little Girls. Documentary. Directed by Spike Lee. 40 Acres & a Mule Filmworks, 1997. Freedom Riders. Directed by Stanley Nelson. American Experience Films, 2010. Germany, Kent, and David Carter. “Mississippi Burning, 1964: Perspectives from the Lyndon Johnson Tapes.” Miller Center, University of Virginia. 2011. http:// whitehousetapes.net/exhibit/mississippi-burning-lbj-tapes. Gross, Terry. “Get on the Bus: The Freedom Riders of 1961.” NPR Books. January 12, 2006. www.npr.org/2006/01/12/5149667/get-on-the-bus-the-freedom -riders-of-1961. Hackman, Gene. Mississippi Burning. Film. Directed by Alan Parker. Orion Pictures Corporation, 1988. Hampton, Henry, and Steve Fayer. Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s–1980s. New York: Bantam Books, 1991. Haralovich, Mary Beth. “I Spy’s ‘Living Postcards’: The Geo-Politics of Civil Rights Television.” In Television, History, and American Culture: Feminist Critical Essays, ed. Mary Beth Haralovich and Lauren Rabinowitz, 98–119. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Harper, Philip Brian. “Televisual Representation and the Claims of the Black Experience.” In Living Color and Television in the United States, ed. Sasha Torres. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Holiday, Billie. “Strange Fruit.” Song. Written by Abel Meeropol. Commodore Records, 1939. “Honeymoon in L.A Pts. I & II.” A Different World. Television Sitcom. Directed by Debbie Allen. National Broadcasting Company, 1992. I Spy. Television Sitcom. National Broadcasting Company, 1965–1968. Jansson, David R. “‘A Geography of Racism’: Internal Orientalism and the Construction of American National Identity in the Film Mississippi Burning.” National Identities 7, no. 3 (2005): 265–285. Jeffersons, The. Television Sitcom. Columbia Broadcasting Company, 1975–1985. Julia. Television Sitcom. National Broadcasting Company, 1968–1971. Leave It to Beaver. Television Sitcom. Comalco Productions. American Broadcasting Company, 1958–1963. Lee, Spike. Do the Right Thing. Film. 40 Acres & a Mule Filmworks, 1989. Leonard, David J. “A Different Sort of Blackness. A Different World in a PostCosby Landscape.” In African Americans on Television: Race-ing for Ratings, ed. David J. Leonard and Lisa A. Guerrero, 141–158. Santa Barbara, CA: ABCCLIO, 2013. Leonard, David J. “Consciousness on Television: Black Power and Mainstream Narratives.” In African Americans on Television: Race-ing for Ratings, ed. David J. Leonard and Lisa A. Guerrero, 16–33. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2013. Lewis, John, and Andrew Aydin. March: Book 1. Illustrated by Nate Powell. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf Productions, 2013.

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Long, Mark, and Jim Demonakos, The Silence of Our Friends: The Civil Rights Struggle Was Never Black and White. Illustrated by Nate Powell. New York: First Second, 2012. Malcolm X, and Alex Haley. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Grove Press, 1965. Malcolm X. Malcolm Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements. Ed. George Breitman. New York: Grove Press, 1965. McGruder, Aaron. A Right to Be Hostile: The Boondocks Treasury. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003. Morgan, Edward. “The Good, the Bad, and the Forgotten: Media Culture and Public Memory of the Civil Rights Movement.” In The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory, ed. Renee C. Romano and Leigh Raiford, 137–166. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2006. Oldham, Gabriella. “Telling Stories.” In First Cut: Conversations with Film Editors. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Peck, Gregory. To Kill a Mockingbird. Film. Directed by Robert Mulligan. Universal International Pictures, 1963. Petticoat Junction. Television Sitcom. Columbia Broadcasting System, 1963–1970. Poitier, Sidney. In the Heat of the Night. Film. Directed by Norman Jewison. Mirisch Corporation, 1967. Poitier, Sidney. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Film. Directed by Stanley Kramer. Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1967. Reed, T. V. The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle. Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 2005. “Return of the King.” The Boondocks. Television Sitcom. Directed by Lee, Calvin. Adult Swim, Teletoon, 2006. “Role of Young People in the Civil Rights Movement.” CNNfyi.com. February 1, 2001. www.cnn.com/fyi/interactive/specials/bhm/backgrounder/youth.html. Roundtree, Richard. Shaft. Film. Directed by Gordon Parks. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1971. Ryan, Jennifer D. “Black Female Authorship and the African Graphic Novel: Historical Responsibility in Icon: A Heroes’ Welcome.” Modern Fiction Studies 52, no. 4 (2006): 918–946. “Sammy’s Visit,” All in the Family. Television Sitcom. Directed by John Rich. Columbia Broadcasting System, 1972. “Series Description.” Eyes on the Prize. American Experience. PBS. www.pbs.org/ wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize/about/fd.html. Smethurst, James. “A Soul Message: R & B, Soul, and the Black Freedom Struggle.” In The Routledge History of Social Protest in Popular Music, ed. Jonathon C. Friedman, 108–120. New York: Routledge, 2013. Streitmatter, Rodger. “Pushing the Movement onto the National Agenda.” In Mightier Than the Sword, 155–170. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2012. Susman, Gary. “‘In the Heat of the Night:’ 25 Things You Didn’t Know about the Sidney Poitier Classic.” Moviefone. August 7, 2012. http://news.moviefone .ca/2012/08/07/in-the-heat-of-the-night-trivia/.

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“The Long March to Freedom.” The Sixties. Documentary. CNN Original Programming, 2014. “The March.” The Cosby Show. Television Sitcom. Directed by Tony Singletary. National Broadcasting System, 1986. Turner, Katherine L. “Sonic Opposition: Protesting Racial Violence before Civil Rights.” In The Routledge History of Social Protest in Popular Music, ed. Jonathon C. Friedman, 44–56. New York: Routledge, 2013. Washington, Denzel. Malcolm X. Directed by Spike Lee. 40 Acres & a Mule Filmworks, 1992. “When Television Comes of Age.” The Sixties. Documentary. CNN Original Programming, 2014. Woolfork, Lisa. “Looking for Lionel: Making Whiteness and Blackness in All in the Family and the Jeffersons.” In Race-ing for Ratings, ed. David J. Leonard and Lisa A. Guerro, 45–68. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2013.

CHAPTER SIX

Exploring Popular Cultural Narratives of Gender Violence Susan J. Tyburski

Gender violence (otherwise known as “gender-based violence”) is violence directed at another person because of his or her sexual identity.1 For a long time, popular culture, along with American society as a whole, was virtually silent on the subject of gender violence. Thanks not only to the work of the second-wave feminist2 and the gay rights3 movements, but also to the creation and dissemination of popular films, television shows, books, and songs exploring this subject, gender violence now has much greater cultural visibility. This chapter will focus on the portrayal of four key categories of gender violence during the last few decades—domestic violence, rape, sexual harassment, and hate crimes—and consider the following questions: How have perpetrators and victims been portrayed? How has popular culture helped to shape gender norms, educate the public about gender violence, and provide space(s) for resistance? What popular culture narratives have been created by, and what legal reforms have resulted from, the portrayal of gender violence in popular media?

Domestic Violence The first film to effectively portray the problem of domestic violence to a wide audience was The Burning Bed (1984), a made-for-television movie directed by Robert Greenwald and starring Farrah Fawcett as the battered wife. This story was originally published as a book by Faith McNulty,4

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chronicling the story of Francine Hughes, who was subjected to years of battering and abuse by her husband, Mickey Hughes. The film primarily focuses on the experiences of Mrs. Hughes, as her innocent hopes for her marriage crumble in the face of her husband’s increasing physical abuse. No attempt is made to explore why Mr. Hughes batters his wife, although his drinking and inability to hold down a job suggest a severe lack of self-esteem, and his parents, who live close by, are portrayed as ineffective enablers of this dysfunctional relationship. Instead, the film portrays the escalating cycle of violence Mrs. Hughes experiences and the manipulation Mr. Hughes employs to keep her connected to him, even after she successfully divorces him. Mr. Hughes persuades his ex-wife to help him with his rehabilitation after a serious automobile accident, and after he recovers, he takes physical custody of the children to continue his control over her. Because the legal system is unable to assist her in recovering the children or protect her from her ex-husband, Mrs. Hughes continues to be vulnerable to repeated beatings. The final straw occurs on March 9, 1977. Mr. Hughes forces his exwife to pour gasoline over, and burn, her books for the college studies she has recently started; he then beats and rapes her. Three hours later, Mrs. Hughes pours the same gasoline around the bed where her ex-husband is sleeping and sets fire to it. She then flees with her children; after turning herself in to the local police station, she is charged with murder. Francine Hughes is subsequently acquitted after a jury finds her not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. Advocates for victims of domestic violence hail The Burning Bed as a crucial catalyst in transforming social attitudes about this crime and achieving legal reforms. As Susan Shoultz explained in a 2009 article in the Lansing State Journal on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the movie’s broadcast, “The images of America’s favorite ‘Charlie’s Angel’—the late Farrah Fawcett— being beaten and bloodied, brought the issue of domestic violence literally into the nation’s living rooms.”5 Because this film portrayed the popular star as the innocent victim of horrendous abuse, the public generally embraced her as a heroine, even though her character engages in a brutal act of mariticide (that is, the murder of one’s husband) by immolation. Reforms in police procedures in responding to domestic violence calls, the proliferation of battered women’s shelters and other services for victims, and the creation of effective treatment for batterers, are some of the productive changes resulting from this landmark film.6 The following year, Steven Spielberg adapted Alice Walker’s 1982 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Color Purple7 into a feature film by the same name. The story of Celie, who is sexually abused by her father and

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then battered by the husband (named “Albert” but known as “Mister”) her father arranges for her, takes place in the 1930s in a poor African American community in rural Georgia. In contrast to the desperate victim played by Farrah Fawcett, Whoopi Goldberg’s portrayal of Celie explores her development from a withdrawn, passive victim to an empowered woman. As the result of the support of her husband’s mistress, Shug, and the discovery of long-withheld letters from her beloved sister Nettie, Celie is ultimately able to stand up to Mister. During a dinner with family and friends, Celie suddenly snaps, grabs a large knife from the table and holds it to Mister’s throat, saying “Until you do right by me, everything you think about is gonna crumble.” In response, Mister taunts Celie: “Who you think you is? You can’t curse nobody. Look at you. You’re black, you’re poor, you’re ugly, you’re a woman, you’re nothing at all!” As Shug convinces Celie to leave, she repeats her curse and triumphantly recites, “Everything you done to me, you already under, you. I’m poor, I’m black, I may even be ugly, but, dear God, I’m here! I’m here!” Discovery of the years of loving letters Nettie wrote to Celie, cruelly withheld from her by Mister, serves as the catalyst for this transformation. After this crucial scene, Celie turns her sewing skills into a successful business, while Mister lapses into alcoholism as his farm deteriorates. Celie’s evolution into a strong woman capable of constructing her own destiny serves as an inspiring contrast to Farrah Fawcett’s character in The Burning Bed, who is driven to the edge of hysteria, commits a horrific crime, and then throws herself on the mercy of the criminal justice system. Spielberg’s 1985 film, like the novel on which it is based, also presents a much more complex view of domestic violence as endemic to a patriarchal system of poverty and oppression in the American south. In contrast, The Burning Bed focuses solely on the relationship of a white working class couple and the desperate struggles of the abused wife to escape this relationship, without exploring a wider social context. A couple of years after these films were produced, a work emerged that portrayed domestic violence as a social problem that reached into the upper echelons of society. In 1987, Charlotte Fedders and Laura Elliott published Shattered Dreams: The Story of Charlotte Fedders, detailing Fedders’s years of abuse at the hands of her husband, John Fedders, who was chief of enforcement for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. This memoir was made into a movie8 in 1990 starring Lindsay Wagner as a D.C. attorney who decides to leave her husband after eighteen years in an abusive marriage, resulting in a high-profile divorce case. This film expanded the view of domestic violence victims to include not only working class and poor women, such as the protagonists in The Burning

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Bed and The Color Purple, but also successful professional women. Similarly, it demonstrated that the perpetrators of domestic violence could include respected officials in the upper ranks of government agencies. This expanding view of domestic violence was crucial to removing the social stigma that battering victims suffered and encouraging such victims to seek help. Subsequent Hollywood films featuring popular stars continued to portray victims of domestic violence as heroines. In Sleeping with the Enemy (1991), Julia Roberts plays a young wife who, after suffering physical abuse at the hands of her controlling husband, fakes her own death and moves to another state. When her husband tracks her down, Roberts’s character shoots him. In What’s Love Got to Do with It? (1993), Angela Bassett plays rock star Tina Turner in a biopic about her life and relationship with her abusive husband, Ike Turner. At the end of the film, Turner finds the strength to leave her husband and embark on a solo career. In both of these films, the battered women are ultimately able to take their lives into their own hands and escape their abusive relationships, providing inspiring examples and crucial role models for abused women seeking productive ways to take control of their lives. Furthermore, the ability of these film projects to attract respected movie stars to play battered women allowed viewers to better understand and empathize with these women, and ultimately altered social attitudes towards, and increased support for, victims of domestic violence. In addition to cinematic portrayals of domestic violence, the music industry has been another source of education about, and support for, victims of domestic violence. In 1993, “Independence Day,” a song by Gretchen Peters, was first performed by country music singer Martina McBride, who has long been an advocate for victims of domestic violence.9 The song tells the story of an abused wife from the perspective of her 8-year-old daughter. The daughter leaves to attend a Fourth of July fair; when she returns to her home, it’s in flames. The lyrics refer to “a day of reckoning” and comment “maybe it’s the only way,” echoing the events in The Burning Bed. In 1994, a music video of McBride singing “Independence Day,”10 and depicting a house in flames as a young girl is led away in a police car, was selected as the Country Music Awards (CMA) Music Video of the Year.11 The following year, Gretchen Peters’s song was selected as the CMA’s Song of the Year.12 Setting this anthem of independence on the Fourth of July associates the murder of a domestic batterer with the patriotic virtues expressed by the Declaration of Independence. Its selection as Music Video and Song of the Year further legitimized the struggles of domestic violence victims in the public eye.

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Through the progression of these works of popular culture, a basic master narrative emerges: a female protagonist, after marrying a man who subjects her to physical and emotional abuse over a long period of time, struggles to extricate herself from their relationship, often resorting to extreme measures in the face of an ineffective legal system. Little, if any, effort is made in these works to explore the character of the male batterer and what psychological and social forces might be prompting his violent behavior. Nevertheless, the development of this popular culture narrative through the 1980s and 1990s increased public awareness of this serious social issue. In 1994, Congress passed, and President Bill Clinton signed, the Violence Against Women Act, authorizing, among other things, the creation of the Office on Violence Against Women13 and the National Domestic Violence Hotline, linking victims of domestic violence with local resources through a simple phone call. This hotline has developed into an online clearinghouse of information about domestic violence and offers victims the ability to instantly chat online about their domestic situations.14 Unlike the popular culture narrative that has developed concerning heterosexual couples, the problem of domestic violence between same-sex couples is generally absent from the stories portrayed by popular media, reflecting the invisibility of same-sex couples in American society for many decades.15 Organizations such as Community United Against Violence (CUAV) are working to remedy this gap in public consciousness.16 In addition, the 2013 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act includes specific protections for LGBT community members, as well as Native American women.17

Rape Just as the prime-time broadcast of The Burning Bed brought the hitherto hidden problem of domestic violence into America’s living rooms in the 1980s, the film The Accused introduced the violent experience of rape from a woman’s perspective into mainstream consciousness. The Accused was the first film to portray the direct experience of a rape victim in suffering a humiliating, violent attack and then undergoing brutal cross-examination in a subsequent criminal trial. The film stars Jodie Foster as a young waitress, Sara Tobias, who is gang-raped in a bar while a group of men watch and cheer. Kelly McGillis plays an assistant district attorney, Kathryn Murphy, who agrees to a plea bargain for the rapists without consulting Tobias, then decides to prosecute the male observers after learning that Tobias continues to suffer harassment as a result of her rape. Unlike the New

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Bedford trial televised by CNN, in which the rape narrative necessarily unfolded through the testimony of witnesses, the movie includes a graphic flashback of the gang rape and the cheering onlookers, allowing audience members to imagine themselves in the victim’s place. Interestingly, this graphic flashback does not occur during the victim’s testimony, but during the testimony of a witness to the rape, Kenneth Joyce, who ultimately decides to come forward and participate in the trial. Like Joyce, the audience is placed in the disturbing position of watching the rape unfold on screen and is challenged to judge not only the behavior of the cheering onlookers, but also of themselves as voyeurs.18 The Accused was loosely based on the 1983 gang rape of Cheryl Araujo in a bar in New Bedford, Massachusetts,19 which resulted in the first nationally televised rape trial on CNN.20 In addition to the local media, The New York Times, Time, and Newsweek,21 as well as People magazine all covered the trial in detail.22 Despite initial efforts to protect her identity, the public broadcast of the victim’s name during the trial, as well as the traumatizing cross examination she endured concerning her sexual history and character, caused her to change her name and move to another state after her assailants’ convictions.23 The national broadcast of this rape trial opened a national debate on the rights of rape victims, leading to a Senate hearing on whether federal guidelines needed to be established for the televising of rape trials.24 The Accused reportedly “contains one of the most watched rape scenes in cinematic history.”25 Feminist author and activist Andrea Dworkin compares the effects on public consciousness of viewing the televised New Bedford rape trial and the subsequent film starring Jodie Foster.26 According to Dworkin, “the [audience] ratings [for the televised trial] beat out the soap operas,” and “people watched it as entertainment every day.”27 The formal process of the trial allowed viewers to maintain some critical distance from the brutal events described by the witnesses. In contrast, the fictionalized film The Accused forces us to confront the rape victim, not as the object of a crime, but as a human being who has suffered: Jodie Foster, through her artistry and creativity, shows us that a woman is a human being. And it takes two hours to establish for a mainstream audience that in fact, that’s true, so that at the point when we reach the gang rape, we understand that someone, someone, someone has been hurt in a way that goes beyond the sum of the physical brutalities that were done to her.28

Although critics have pointed out the problems of condemning passive spectators to a rape while transforming the rape into a cinematic

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spectacle,29 this “spectacle” allows audience members of both sexes to better understand the horrific experience of a rape victim. Twelve years after the release of The Accused, the novelist Alice Sebold shared her personal experience as a victim of rape in her best-selling memoir Lucky. This memoir takes the reader through her rape and the aftermath, including her experiences with all aspects of the legal system, the resulting trial of her rapist, and her struggles to resume some semblance of a normal life. Unlike The Accused, which saves the depiction of Tobias’s brutal gang rape until the end of the film, Sebold’s memoir opens with a vivid description of her rape.30 A college freshman, she was walking across campus at night when she was attacked and dragged into a deserted covered walkway, where she was sexually assaulted. Sebold does not spare the reader any of the gruesome details, including her humiliation and embarrassment after returning to her dorm room and reporting the rape to the local police. She is able to persuade the police to pursue her rapist, and is ultimately successful in obtaining his conviction, because The cosmetics of rape are central to proving any case. So far, in appearance, I was two for two: I wore loose, unenticing clothes; I had clearly been beaten. Add this to my virginity, and you will begin to understand much of what matters inside the courtroom.31

Like the works portraying victims of domestic violence, films and books exploring rape victims’ experiences have served to educate the public and garner support for legislation strengthening victims’ rights, including the federal rape shield provisions of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, preventing accused rapists from inquiring into the past sexual conduct of their victims in an attempt to use such sexual histories against them.32 They have also broadened public awareness of the insidious effects of non-physical violence against women, as demonstrated by Roger Ebert’s observation in a 1988 review of The Accused originally published in The Chicago Sun-Times: [V]erbal sexual harassment, whether crudely in a saloon back room or subtly in an everyday situation, is a form of violence—one that leaves no visible marks but can make its victims feel unable to move freely and casually in society. It is a form of imprisonment.33

These remarks by Ebert linking rape and verbal sexual harassment were amazingly prescient. A few years after these observations were published, a young lawyer named Anita Hill made sexual harassment a national topic of debate.

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Sexual Harassment The explosive testimony of Anita Hill during the televised Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in October 1991 brought national attention to the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace. Prior to Hill’s televised testimony, sexual harassment was portrayed in a humorous fashion, as in the hit comedy 9 to 5. The television broadcast of Anita Hill’s testimony, with graphic descriptions of Clarence Thomas’s alleged sexual overtures to Anita Hill during his tenure at the EEOC, once again brought a previously hidden issue into America’s living rooms. Instead of a fictionalized story, however, this television drama unfolded in front of Americans in the form of sworn testimony before U.S. Senators. The majority of the white male Senators conducting the hearing treated Hill’s allegations with skepticism and subjected her to aggressive cross-examination; Senator Arlen Specter accused her of perjury.34 Thomas then responded passionately, accusing the Senate of conducting “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks.”35 These hearings dramatized the difficulties in resolving the credibility of “he said/she said” allegations of sexual harassment under legal evidentiary standards, further complicated by the issue of race, with white men interrogating a black woman and a black man. Even though Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court was ultimately confirmed, the allegations of sexual harassment that arose during the confirmation hearings had an immediate and lasting effect on American popular culture and society. As a result of Anita Hill’s testimony, federal discrimination laws were amended to make it easier to sue for money damages, and there was a sharp increase in sexual harassment suits.36 In addition, men and women began discussing an issue that had generally remained unacknowledged. Julianne Malveaux describes the scope of the resulting social and political transformations: Anita Hill’s action has had an impact on both popular culture and public policy in the last decade of the twentieth century. . . . The Civil Rights Act of 1991 was passed weeks after the Thomas confirmation. The following year was described by many as “the year of the woman,” with Hill’s name invoked as a reason to do everything from elect candidates to form political action committees. In 1992 . . . four women senators were elected because of “the Anita Hill effect.”37

A couple of mainstream fictional works attempted to make sense of the divisive gender issues arising from the Clarence Thomas hearings. Oleanna (1992), a controversial play by David Mamet about alleged sexual

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harassment in academia, was described by New York Times theater critic Frank Rich as “an impassioned response to the Thomas hearings.”38 It emphasized the “he said/she said” problem presented by those hearings, and illustrated how specific statements and physical gestures might be interpreted radically differently by a man and a woman, with potentially devastating consequences. The conflict between the two characters— John, a middle-aged professor, and Carol, his young student—serves as a metaphor for the conflict or “sexual battleground”39 revealed in society by the national broadcast of Anita Hill’s accusations. In another twist, the film Disclosure examines the question of sexual harassment from a male victim’s perspective. Based on the novel by Michael Crichton,40 this film involves the false accusations of sexual harassment by a woman (played by Demi Moore) against her employee (Michael Douglas) after he rejects her sexual overtures. The woman then brings a sexual harassment suit against the man, threatening his career and his family. Though the book was based on a true story relayed to the author by a lawyer,41 many scholars and activists criticized this narrative as antifeminist and misogynistic42—revealing, again, how divisive the issue of sexual harassment can be. The post–Thomas hearing increase in sexual harassment claims resulted in a number of important legal precedents. Two films emerged in the following decades that shared the stories of these important precedents with the general public. The 1996 film Hostile Advances: The Kerry Ellison Story is a made-for-television movie about the landmark federal court case, Ellison v. Brady. Ellison set the “reasonable woman” standard (subsequently called the “reasonable worker” standard43) in sexual harassment cases, allowing the evaluation of the facts from the perspective of the victim rather than the perpetrator. Similarly, North Country (2005), starring Charlize Theron, was based on Class Action,44 the non-fiction account of the landmark 1984 case Jenson v. Eveleth Taconite Co.45 In Jenson, a female miner successfully sued for abusive treatment suffered on the job as a result of her sex; it was the first case that successfully established a class action lawsuit for sexual harassment over a pervasive atmosphere of harassment towards women in a traditionally male work site. These two films brought these legal narratives to a much wider audience. The interplay of cultural and legal narratives in the films and books portraying sexual harassment in the workplace demonstrates how these narratives are, to a great extent, interdependent, working in tandem to explore and clarify our roles, rights, and responsibilities in society. Similar interdependent narratives have developed concerning hate crimes perpetrated against members of nonheterosexual communities.

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Hate Crimes During the last decade, American society has undergone a seismic shift in its attitudes towards the LGBTQ46 community. (The acronym “LGBTQ” is used to reflect the diversity of the non-heterosexual community; it generally stands for “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered and Queer/Questioning.”) Unfortunately, there has also been a rise in hate crimes targeting this community. Hate crimes are threats or acts of violence motivated by animus against a specific social group, targeting members of that group.47 Laws addressing hate crimes do not create new crimes; rather, they provide enhanced penalties for perpetrators of traditional crimes against persons and property whose motivation includes enmity or bias against a group of individuals determined to be in need of additional protection, such as members of the LGBTQ community.48 In October 1998, Matthew Shepard, a gay college student, was brutally beaten, tied to a fence outside Laramie, Wyoming, and left to die by two young men who later expressed homophobic attitudes and used a “gay panic” defense in the subsequent criminal trial.49 The extreme brutality of this terrible murder sparked a national outcry for federal hate crimes legislation.50 Matthew Shepard’s mother, Judy Shepard, became a tireless advocate for the LGBTQ communities, creating the Matthew Shepard Foundation51 and lobbying Congress for passage of federal hate crimes legislation.52 In October 2009, the Matthew Shepard/James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act was passed, expanding the federal government’s authority to prosecute hate crimes motivated by an individual’s actual or perceived race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability.53 One month after Matthew Shepard was killed, the Tectonic Theater Project, an innovative theater company from New York City led by Moisés Kaufman, visited Laramie, interviewed more than 200 community members, and wove these interviews into a play called The Laramie Project. These interviews revealed a wide range of views of the LGBTQ communities in the town of Laramie. As Kaufman explains in the introduction to the published play: There are moments in history when a particular event brings the various ideologies and beliefs prevailing in a culture into sharp focus. At these junctures the event becomes a lightning rod of sorts, attracting and distilling the essence of these philosophies and convictions. By paying careful attention in moments like this to people’s words, one is able to hear the way these prevailing ideas affect not only individual lives but the culture at large.54

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The Laramie Project is constructed as a series of interview excerpts, allowing the audience to construct a vision of the Laramie society using these juxtaposed excerpts as building blocks. The perspectives expressed by various residents run the gamut from a common “live and let live” attitude towards gays and lesbians55 to a gay rancher who equates the professed “live and let live” philosophy to an intimidating “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach56 to religious leaders who condemn the “gay lifestyle” as morally “out of bounds”57 to a priest who is full of compassion for both the victim and the murderers.58 The play culminates in trial scenes crafted from actual court transcripts, during which the anti-gay animus provoking the murder of Matthew Shepard is exposed for the entire town to confront.59 During the last decade, this documentary theater piece has been performed more than any other play in America.60 In 2002, The Laramie Project was made into an HBO film61 and has been performed around the world. Follow-up interviews conducted by the Tectonic Theater Company to find out how community attitudes may have changed over the last decade resulted in a second theater piece: The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later. A social network site with discussion forums and educational resources called The Laramie Project Online Community was available for about ten years after this play was first produced, and the Matthew Shepard Foundation employs a “Laramie Project Specialist” to work with groups that wish to produce one or both plays, lead post-show discussions, and do other educational and political outreach.62 A few years after the horrific murder of Matthew Shepard, a 16-year-old boy was killed in another hate-motivated crime. In June 2001, Fred Martinez, a Native American transgender youth from Cortez, Colorado, was bludgeoned to death by a young man who subsequently bragged that he “beat up a fag.”63 The public outcry over this brutal murder of a high school boy strengthened public support for hate crimes legislation. It also sparked the creation of new LGBTQ support groups, including local Two Spirits societies, whose mission is to provide a supportive space for, and educate others about the nature of, “two spirit” individuals.64 In many indigenous societies, persons who embody both male and female “spirits” are recognized having a special gift and honored as spiritual leaders; Martinez was a nádleehí, a “two spirit” person, in his Navajo culture.65 A 2010 documentary film by Lydia Nibley, Two Spirits, explores Fred Martinez’s death and the indigenous “two spirit” culture; it has been broadcast as part of the PBS series Independent Lens and shown around the country.66 Recently, the publicly accepted narrative of Matthew Shepard’s murder has come into question thanks to in-depth reporting conducted by Stephen Jimenez.67 In 2013, Jimenez published The Book of Matt, which

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describes evidence of Shepard’s use of methamphetamine and suggests that his murder may have been caused by his involvement in a drug culture rather than by anti-gay animus. In a Wall Street Journal book review, James Kirchick comments that, while “we will likely never know what truly transpired on that evil Wyoming night,” Jimenez’s book illustrates the power of the media to shape the popular conception of an event. It shows how a desire for Manichean morality tales can lead us to oversimplify the human experience.68

Kirchick’s comments could easily apply to many of the popular culture works discussed in this chapter. Like the horrific murder of Matthew Shepard, true stories of victims of gender violence have been repeatedly transformed into mythic narratives that often serve political ends, such as the use of The Laramie Project to garner support for hate crimes legislation. More importantly, these transformed narratives provide ways for us to make sense of profoundly disturbing events, creating meaning and allowing us to move forward as a society.

Conclusion Law and Humanities Professor David Papke defines “narrative” as “the transformation of events and sentiments into stories which impart meaning.”69 As the law develops, “master narratives” are created, which are “descriptions in the law that characterize people whom the law affects and describe the options that the law should allow those people.”70 Similarly, the generation of widely disseminated popular cultural artifacts, such as films, television broadcasts, books, and songs create narratives that assist us in making sense of our lives. Margaret Somers has identified several dimensions of narratives, including public narratives, which are “the institutional and political stories that form the context for our personal stories,” and “master narratives,” which are “the overarching mythic structures of a society that feed both the public and the personal narratives and for which they serve as explanatory frameworks.”71 Popular cultural artifacts contribute to the creation of both public and master narratives. The narratives created through products of our popular culture influence the legal “master narratives” that result in the generation of laws and legal precedents affecting our rights and relationships in society. Conversely, many of these legal precedents are shared through stories disseminated through popular cultural products, which create master narratives about our rights and responsibilities in society.

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Papke recognizes the “cultivation effect” that regular television viewing has on viewers’ perceptions of violence in society.72 Though their depictions of social issues are often simplistic and do not delve into the nuances of the various complex forces shaping these issues, mainstream films, television broadcasts and books have, to a great extent, shaped both public perceptions of gender violence and the victims of such violence. These shifts in public attitudes have resulted in a number of social and legal reforms, such as the proliferation of organizations and resources to address, and assist victims of, gender violence, as well as the enactment of legislation such as the federal Violence Against Women Act and the Matthew Shepard/James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. These constructive examples demonstrate the power of popular culture to create master narratives that shape social attitudes and spur practical action addressing gender violence.

Notes   1.  European Institute for Gender Equality.   2.  The second wave of feminism grew out of the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s and focused on women’s social equality. See Rampton.   3.  The modern gay rights movement, working for equal rights for LGBTQ individuals, grew out of the 1969 Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village. See Eaklor.  4. McNulty.   5.  Quote by Susan Shoultz, executive director of EVE Inc., in Ahern.  6. Ahern.  7. Walker.  8. Shattered Dreams.  9. Thompson. 10.  “Independence Day,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VPpAZ9_qAw&f eature=youtu.be. 11.  CMA Archive 1994. Country Music Awards. 12.  CMA Archive 1995. Country Music Awards. 13.  Office on Violence Against Women. 14.  The National Domestic Violence Hotline. 15. Shwayder. 16.  Community United Against Violence. 17.  The National Domestic Violence Hotline. 18.  Horeck, 92–93. 19.  Ibid., 70–71. 20.  Ibid., 84–90. 21.  Cuklanz, 10. 22. Vespa. 23. Pateakos.

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24.  U.S. Senate Hearing (April 24, 1984). Cited in Horeck, ibid., 85–90. 25.  Horeck, 115. 26.  Dworkin, 37–42. 27. Ibid., 38. 28. Ibid. 29.  Horeck, 91–102. 30.  Ibid., 5–27. 31.  Ibid., 23. 32.  “Factsheet: The Violence Against Women Act.” 33. Ebert. 34.  U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on the Nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court of the United States, 49–135, 231. 35. Ibid.,157. 36. Stark. 37.  Malveaux, xii. For a more in-depth discussion of the legal reforms prompted by Hill’s testimony, see Ross. 38. Rich. 39. Ibid. 40. Crichton, Disclosure. 41.  Crichton, “Disclosure: Note from Michael.” 42.  See, e.g., Terry and Schiappo, and Lilyana. 43.  Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway Co. v. White. 44. Bingham. 45.  Jenson v. Eveleth Taconite Co. 46.  For a complete list of acronyms and definitions concerning sexual identity, see “LGBT Terms and Definitions” at the University of Michigan’s student life resources website (http://internationalspectrum.umich.edu/life/definitions). 47.  Federal Bureau of Investigation. 48. Ibid. 49.  Brooke. See also “The Laramie Project Archives.” 50. Lyman. 51.  “The Foundation’s Story.” 52. Cart. 53. Jackson. 54.  Kaufman, v. 55.  Ibid., 45. 56.  Ibid., 59. 57.  Ibid., 24–25. 58.  Ibid., 65–66. 59.  Ibid., 80–97. 60.  “The Laramie Project.” Tectonic Theater. 61.  The Laramie Project (2002). 62.  “Laramie Project Support.” Matthew Shepard Foundation. 63. Cowan.

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64.  Ibid. See also Two Spirit National Cultural Exchange, Inc. 65.  Two Spirits. “People in the Film.” 66.  Independent Lens. “Two Spirits.” 67. Hicklin. 68. Kirchick. 69.  Rand, 69–70, citing Papke, 149. 70. Ibid. 71.  Japp, 55, citing Somers, 619–620. 72.  Papke, “Impact,” 1228, citing Sarah Eschholz.

Bibliography Accused, The. DVD. Directed by Jonathan Kaplan. 1988. Ahern, Louise Knott. “‘The Burning Bed’: A Turning Point in Fight against Domestic Violence,” Lansing State Journal, September 27, 2009. Bingham, Clara. Class Action: The Landmark Case that Changed Sexual Harassment Law. New York: Doubleday, 2002. Brooke, James. “Witnesses Trace Brutal Killing of Gay Student.” The New York Times. November 21, 1998. Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway Co. v. White, 548 U.S. 53 (2006). Burning Bed, The. DVD. Directed by Robert Greenwald. 1984. Cart, Julie. “Matthew Shepard’s Mother Aims to Speak With His Voice.” Los Angeles Times. September 14, 1999. CMA Archive. Country Music Awards. Color Purple, The. DVD. Directed by Steven Spielberg. 1985. Community United Against Violence. www.cuav.org. Cowan, Emery. “A Boy Remembered.” The Durango Herald, June 11, 2011. Crichton, Michael. Disclosure. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. Crichton, Michael. “Disclosure: Note from Michael.” Michael Crichton: The Official Site. http://www.michaelcrichton.net/books-disclosure-movie.html Cuklanz, Lisa M. Rape on Trial: How the Mass Media Construct Legal Reform and Social Change. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Disclosure. DVD. Directed by Barry Levinson. 1994. Dworkin, Andrea. “Terror, Torture and Resistance.” Keynote speech at the Canadian Mental Health Association’s Women and Mental Health Conference— Women in a Violent Society. Banff, Alberta. May 1991. Subsequently published in Canadian Woman Studies/Les Cahiers de la Femme 12, no. 1: 37–42. Eaklor, Vicki L. “Gay Rights Movement, U.S.” glbtq: an encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, & queer culture. http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/ gay_rights_movement.html Ebert, Roger. “The Accused.” RogerEbert.com. October 14, 1988. Ellison v. Brady, 924 F.2d 872 (1991). Eschholz, Sarah, The Media and the Fear of Crime: A Survey of the Research. 9 U. Fla. J. L. & Pub. Pol’y 37 (1997).

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European Institute for Gender Equality. “What Is Gender-Based Violence?” European Institute for Gender Equality. http://eige.europa.eu/content/activities/gender -based-violence “Factsheet: The Violence Against Women Act.” The White House. https://www .whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/vawa_factsheet.pdf Fedders, Charlotte, and Laura Elliott. Shattered Dreams: The Story of Charlotte Fedders. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. Federal Bureau of Investigation. “Defining a Hate Crime.” The FBI. http://www.fbi .gov/about-us/investigate/civilrights/hate_crimes/overview Hicklin, Aaron. “Have We Got Matthew Shepard All Wrong?” The Advocate, September 13, 2013. Horeck, Tanya. “‘Rape Is Not A Spectator Sport’: The New Bedford ‘Big Dan’s’ Gang Rape” and “‘They Did Worse Than Nothing:’ Rape and Spectatorship in The Accused.” Public Rape: Representing Violation in Fiction and Film. London, UK: Routledge, 2004. Hostile Advances: The Kerry Ellison Story. DVD. Directed by Allan Kroeker. 1996. Independence Day. BMG Entertainment. Directed by Deaton Flanigen. 1993. Independent Lens. “Two Spirits.” PBS. May 20, 2011. Jackson, David. “Obama Signs Hate Crimes Law Rooted in Crimes of 1998.” USA Today, October 28, 2009. Japp, Phyllis M. “Representation as Ethical Discourse: Communicating with and about Mediated Popular Culture.” In Communication, Ethics, Media and Popular Culture, ed. Phyllis M. Japp, Mark Meister, Debra K. Japp, 41–64. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2005/2007. Jenson v. Eveleth Taconite Co., 130 F.3d 1287 (1997). Jimenez, Stephen. The Book of Matt. Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 2013. Kaufman, Moisés. The Laramie Project. (2002). Kaufman, Moisés, Leigh Fondakowski, Greg Pierotti, Andy Paris, and Stephen Belber. The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later. New York: Dramatist’s Play Service, 2012. Kirchick, Stephen. “Book Review: ‘The Book of Matt,’ by Stephen Jimenez.” Wall Street Journal, October 22, 2013. “Laramie Project, The.” Tectonic Theater. http://www.tectonictheaterproject.org/ The_Laramie_Project.html Laramie Project, The. DVD. Directed by Moisés Kaufman. 2002. “Laramie Project Archives, The.” New York Times on the Web. HBO Films, 2002. “Laramie Project Support.” Matthew Shepard Foundation. http://www.matthews hepard.org/our-works/lp-support Lilyana, Sandra. “A Feminist Analysis of the Female Antagonist in Michael Crichton’s Disclosure.” Jurnal Sastra Inggris 8, no. 1 (February 2008): 51–60. Lyman, Rick. “Hate Laws Don’t Matter, Except When They Do.” The New York Times, October 19, 1998. Malveaux, Julianne. “Foreword.” In Race, Gender and Power in America: The Legacy of the Hill-Thomas Hearings, ed. Anita Faye Hill and Emma Coleman Jordan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

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Mamet, David. Oleanna. New York: Dramatist’s Play Service, 1998. Matthew Shepard Foundation. “The Foundation’s Story.” Matthew Shepard Foundation. http://www.matthewshepard.org/our-story McBride, Martina. “Independence Day.” The Way That I Am. RCA Records, 1994. McNulty, Faith. The Burning Bed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980. National Domestic Violence Hotline. http://www.thehotline.org/ 9 to 5. DVD. Directed by Colin Higgins. 1980. North Country. Directed by Niki Caro. 2005. Office on Violence Against Women, U.S. Department of Justice. http://www.justice .gov/ovw Papke, David Ray. “Discharge as Dénouement: Appreciating the Storytelling of Appellate Opinions.” 40 J. Legal Educ. 145 (1990). Papke, David Ray. “The Impact of Popular Culture on American Perceptions of the Courts.” Indiana Law Journal 82 (2007): 1225–1234. Pateakos, Jay. “Brothers Break Silence in Big Dan’s Rape Case.” The Herald News, October 26, 2009. Rampton, Martha. “The Three Waves of Feminism,” Pacific, 41, no. 2 (fall 2008). Rand, Spencer. “Creating My Client’s Image.” Journal of Law and Policy 28, no. 69 (2008). Rich, Frank. “Oleanna: Mamet’s New Play Detonates the Fury of Sexual Harassment.” The New York Times, October 26, 1992. Sebold, Alice. Lucky. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., 1999. Shattered Dreams. DVD. Directed by Robert Iscove. 1990. Shwayder. Maya. “A Same-Sex Domestic Violence Epidemic Is Silent.” The Atlantic. November 5, 2013. Sleeping with the Enemy. DVD. Directed by Joseph Ruben. 1991. Somers, Margaret R. “The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Network Approach.” Theory and Society 23 (1994): 605–649. Stark, Betsy. “Anita Hill Lifted the Veil.” ABC News. October 2, 2007. Terry, Valerie S. and Edward Schiappo. “Disclosing Antifeminism in Michael Crichton’s Postfeminist Disclosure.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 23, no. 1 (January 1999): 68–89. Thompson, Gayle. “Martina McBride Takes a Stand against Domestic Violence.” The Boot, October 28, 2010. Two Spirit National Cultural Exchange, Inc. http://pflagboulder.org/wp-content/ uploads/2014/03/Crisosto-ApacheExtended-Bio.pdf Two Spirits. “People in the Film.” Two Spirits. http://twospirits.org/people-in -the-film/ Two Spirits. DVD. Directed by Lydia Nibley. 2009. U.S. Senate Hearing, April 24, 1984. United States Ninety-Eighth Congress hearing before the Sub-committee on Criminal Law of the Committee on the Judiciary. “Impact of Media Coverage of Rape Trials. Second session on Oversight on the Effect of Publicity On the Victims in Rape Cases, and the Right of the Press to Have Access to Such Proceedings.” Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

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U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on the Nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court of the United States. J-102-40. October 11, 12, and 13, 1991. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993. Vespa, Mary. “No Town without Pity, a Divided New Bedford Seeks Justice in a Brutal Gang Rape Case.” People 21, no. 10 (March 12, 1984). Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. Mariner Books, rpr. 2006. What’s Love Got to Do With It. DVD. Directed by Brian Gibson. 1993.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Vigilant Citizens and Horrific Heroes: Perpetuating the Positive Portrayal of Vigilantes Erik Mortensen

This chapter will explore the figure of the vigilante within American popular culture, and will argue that within the culture it holds a positive status. Vigilantism is a very large topic to cover in a single chapter; many books have been devoted to the subject. Thus this chapter will confine itself to exploring how the vigilante is continually presented as a positive figure within American popular culture. For the purposes of this chapter, the vigilante is defined as an individual (or a group of individuals) who takes “the law” into his or her own hands but often vigilantes are not concerned only about pursuing what is or is perceived to be legally right, but are ultimately more concerned with pursuing what is just from their own perspective. Often this pursuit of justice is accomplished through the use of violence, but the violence can be perceived as justified and therefore condoned. This is often linked to the narrative that is told about vigilante figures by themselves or others, whether through media (mainstream and independent), through fictional representations (film, literature, graphic novels, and comics) or through history. In fact, the narrative of American history is something that many vigilantes draw upon to inform their ideologies of justice, and this subject will be explored later in the chapter with

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a close reading of some particular vigilante texts. American history links the founding of the nation to acts of violence in resistance against injustice through the revolutionary war. In the way that American historical narratives are constructed, one can read the revolutionary war as a vigilante act, and the events leading up to it—such as the Boston Tea Party—as examples of vigilante activity. This connection between American history and vigilantism is one that many right-wing extremist militia groups make in both explaining and justifying their vigilante activity. As D. J. Mulloy has argued in American Extremism, members of these groups use their perceptions and understandings of history to construct a narrative that legitimizes their actions and allows them to perceive themselves as patriots and then project this image to the American public at large. To some extent, the American public also believes in the ideals of justified violence and resistance to injustice (whether real or perceived). Though the actions of militia groups may be viewed as extreme, the ideologies that guide them are not so different from the ones held by the mainstream and the mainstream’s perception of American history. This accounts for how populist political movements such as the Tea Party have come into existence. The modern-day Tea Party, with its often violent imagery and rhetoric, can be read as invoking the same historical notion of the Boston Tea Party as a patriotic and vigilante action. The ties became even closer when one of the main Tea Party movement figures, Sarah Palin, titled her autobiography Going Rogue. The Revolutionary War period is not the only period of interest to these militia groups. One of the other primary periods of interest is that of the Old West. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner outlined the importance that the western frontier had in the shaping of American culture, and Richard Slotkin has done much work on the importance of this period in establishing the links between violence, guns, independence, self-fashioning, freedom, and masculinity to the mythic identity of America. Turner outlines the importance of the frontier experience in American history, stating that “each frontier did furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of the older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier.”1 Turner’s argument helped build the mythic elements of American history and culture that Slotkin critiques and exposes. He explores how the American myths are central to American identity and ideals, but also argues that the myths “retain their mythic powers only so long as they continue to evoke in the minds of succeeding generations a vision analogous in its compelling power to that of the original mythopoetic.”2 These mythic views are central to American

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identity for both the mainstream and extremist groups such as the Minute Men, a group of citizens who have taken it upon themselves to guard the U.S. border with Mexico because they perceive the government to be failing in its duty to control the movement of illegal immigrants into the United States. The American media portrays the Minute Men either as dangerous criminals or as heroic patriots. Of course, neither of these representations really explains who the individuals are or why they do what they do, because this is connected to each member’s past life experiences, and it goes beyond just the particular ideology that inspires the group. Harel Shapira makes a similar point in Waiting for José, his study of the Minute Men. Shapira argues that the Minute Men find their lives when not engaged with the group having “a lost sense of place and purpose” and involvement in the group allows them to “reclaim their place in America.”3 The important point in exploring narratives about American history and the use that these groups make of them is to recognize how the mainstream ideology and understanding of these historical narratives is not so different from the extremist position. But when these narratives inspire direct action, then the mainstream becomes uncomfortable. But it is not just right-wing extremist groups that may be perceived as vigilantes engaged in honorable conduct. Many Americans may view organizations such as the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense or the American Indian Movement (AIM) as vigilante heroes in particular historical moments. Ray Abrahams states that vigilantism is “a frontier phenomenon,”4 but in this case the frontier is not a physical border or boundary, but instead a geography of social and cultural norms and boundaries that are being resisted. In the construction of this narrative, these groups may be seen as pursuing social justice through force, along with legal justice for the respective communities they represent—African Americans and Native Americans. In both cases, the valorizing of vigilantes, whether to the left or right according to political preferences, is rooted in the same core interpretations of justifiable and heroic violence in the mythic historical narratives of the nation for its citizens. This shared interpretation of lessons from mythic historical narratives of American identity will be explored further in relation to American popular culture, but first it may be useful to say more about why the positive portrayal of vigilantes is worth considering. The theory that this chapter proposes is that our positive attitude toward vigilantism could be responsible for making America a more violent culture. Steven Pinker has argued in The Better Angels of Our Nature that violence is declining globally. Though his argument is controversial and presents numbers and statistics of a questionable nature, he does admit that the United States presents an

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anomaly in his theory and also notes that the concept of “self-help” justice in the South may be a factor in creating this anomaly. Although the South does indeed have a historical tradition of vigilante activity in relation to the Old West ideologies in Texas, New Mexico, California, Oklahoma, and other states—and also has the bloody history of lynching and the Ku Klux Klan—the mistake is to assume that only the South has this notion of self-help justice and that these ideologies cannot be found in the popular culture of other parts of America as well. A foundational vigilante film is Death Wish (1974), starring Charles Bronson and directed by Michael Winner, which illustrates the influence and popularity of vigilante narratives in American popular culture. Bronson plays Paul Kersey, a liberal New York City architect, whose family is attacked by crooks, leading to his wife’s death and his daughter’s rape and subsequent catatonia. Kersey is sent by his employer to the U.S. Southwest after this tragedy to work on a development project but while there is introduced by a friend to the gun culture and the mythic codes of the Old West. After this trip, Kersey returns to New York and begins a spree of vigilante murders. He purposely puts himself in harm’s way to encounter criminals and then kill them. In this film the vigilante character embraces the mythic historical narrative of the frontier West by belatedly defending his homestead—his family and New York City—that he previously failed to defend because, the film implies, he was too liberal. At the end of the film, Kersey is discovered to be a vigilante, but rather than arresting him, a police detective allows him to escape to another city where Paul can continue his vigilante activity in the four other films that constitute the Death Wish franchise. Ultimately the vigilante is presented as a hero, his actions apparently helping reduce crime; although law enforcement cannot publicly condone his actions, they will not arrest him for them. Ten years after the release of Death Wish, New York City would experience the trial of Bernhard Goetz, a trial that focused on a vigilante action practically pulled from the film. In Death Wish, Kersey rides a subway train waiting for some men to try to rob him and then he shoots and kills them. In 1984 Goetz entered a subway car and was approached and surrounded by four black males looking for money, after which he shot them all in self-defense. None of them died, but one of them did receive permanent brain damage. The lengthy court case that ensued was watched by much of America. In the end Goetz was acquitted on all counts except a weapon possession charge. One of the jurors, Mark Lesly, went on to publish Subway Gunman, his account of the trial, in which he argues that “Bernhard Goetz did what the law allows. I agree with that statement, and I think the law is flawed.”5 The law validated Goetz’s act of vigilante violence, and

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to some of the population of New York City, Goetz was a folk hero. This is not to say that there were not critics of Goetz and the jury, but there was as much admiration as condemnation. In the real world, vigilantes can be romanticized, but the consequences of such romanticization are more complicated than in fictional or artistic representations of vigilantes because they are not contained narratives. In fiction, the narrative of a vigilante can be constructed by the author to influence a reader to view them in a particular light by the way the narrative presents the vigilante. In reality there are often competing narratives from media, culture, the legal system, and the vigilante himself or herself trying to influence how the public perceives and understands vigilante activity. The contained narratives also work more effectively to help form the mythic status of the vigilante which will impact the public perception of vigilante action in reality. The effects of contained narratives will be explored further in close readings of Falling Down and The Brave One, two other vigilante films set in an urban environment, and how these narratives construct the vigilante as a positive figure. In many ways the urban space of the American city is a space that is filled with unseen borders and frontiers. There are spaces that exist along racial divides, economic divides, lifestyle divides, and religious divides, not to mention all the interactions between these various spaces. The city is a large and diverse space with different languages and cultures crammed together, and varying social norms from region to region. Each region within the city space has its written and unwritten rules, and in any space there can be punishments for transgressing them. It is no shock that the two main characters of each film, William Foster from Falling Down (played by Michael Douglas) and Erica Bain from The Brave One (played by Jodie Foster), transgress these boundaries repeatedly as they walk the city. As they move through the city spaces, Foster on the West Coast in Los Angeles, and Bain on the East Coast in New York, they cross over boundaries and push to make a new frontier that they feel they must defend using the universal language of the city: violence. Violence is the one tactic that is used in every space of the city, and it is a language that everyone can understand. It is also what leads to the creation of the vigilante figures in both of these films, linking these films with the creation of Kersey as a vigilante in Death Wish. The formation of the vigilante in these films can be understood by examining the ways that they relate to the city when they decide to turn rogue within its space. In Foster’s case, the film begins with him stuck in traffic in the stifling heat. He sees crowded cars and angry people. There is a shot of a school bus filled with ethnically diverse children that has a large American flag on the side. Foster’s air conditioner is broken, as is the crank

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to open his window. His situation in the car can be read as symptomatic of the position of the average white, middle-aged, American male in the contemporary city. He feels his space is confined, and the city is flawed and broken like the air conditioner and window crank in his car. It is a space where he has become confined and from which he needs to break. He leaves his car in the road, and as angry drivers ask what he is doing, he responds, “I’m going home.” For Foster, home is an idealized space in a city and time when he knew where he belonged and felt he had purpose and power. In The Brave One, Bain works for a radio station and runs a show for which she walks New York City and collects the sounds from its streets, then builds narratives from the sounds and plays them on the air. She starts all of her shows “I’m Erica Bain, and as you know, I walk the streets.” For her the streets are a place of comfort and freedom, and she refers to New York as “our safest big city in America.” Her attitude changes however, when she and her fiancé are attacked at night in a park by a gang of young men from Spanish Harlem. They are both severely beaten. Her fiancé dies, and she is comatose for three weeks before she awakens and finds herself touched by fear, afraid of the city space in which she once found comfort and freedom. She decides to walk the city again, but only feels comfortable doing so if she has a gun, as if she were a female Bernhard Goetz. Foster, after leaving his car, goes to a corner store run by a Korean shop manager. Foster wants change, but the owner refuses to give him any unless he purchases something. A fight ensues and Foster grabs a baseball bat from the store manager and starts to demolish his store as punishment for his unfair prices. As Foster does this he states, “I’m just standing up for my rights as a consumer.” He then pays 50 cents for a can of Coke and leaves with the bat. This is the moment where Foster becomes a vigilante and in both films it is acts of violence that lead the vigilantes to begin their work. In The Brave One, when Bain goes to purchase a gun legally, she discovers she will have to wait thirty days. This is unacceptable to her, and a man in the gun shop hears her say so. He offers her a gun then and there, instructions on how to use it, and bullets, all for $1,000. She accepts his proposal and gets her gun. Later that night Bain is at a corner store when the store owner’s ex-husband comes in and guns the owner down. He becomes aware of Erica’s presence through her ringing cell phone, but she shoots and kills him, and then leaves the scene after taking the store’s security tape. In this case, it is the urban space itself that offers Bain the tools she needs to engage in vigilante activity. The same is true for Foster in Falling Down; as he continues to wander through the city he ends up

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collecting various new weapons from the different criminals he encounters and kills or beats them after they use violence against him. The accumulation of tools to engage in vigilante activity is a way of demonstrating the American urban space as a new frontier needing to be tamed by the vigilante and to justify the use of violence to create or protect an individual’s space and place within America. As the urban space creates the opportunity for the vigilantes to engage in violent activity, the space is also framed as one in which the primary language used between ethnically and economically diverse groups is violence. As Foster moves through the city, he has a Korean shop keeper try to hit him with a bat and Latino gang members threaten him with a knife and then later attempt to shoot him. He even has a white senior citizen launch a golf ball at his head as he is crossing a golf course. At one point in the film, Foster holds up a fast food burger conglomerate in an apparent act of protest against the corporate abuse and manipulation of the consumer. After this event he encounters a white supremacist, who mistakes Foster for a racist vigilante and a bigot, but Foster replies “I’m an American, but you are a sick asshole.” After Foster dismisses the white racist, he goes on to attack Foster, but Foster kills him with excessive violence by stabbing him and shooting him repeatedly. Foster sees himself as a patriot defending traditional conservative American family values that even in his own life are a fiction that never really existed. Everywhere he goes he encounters the ways that violence intersects with race and capitalism in urban space, and he feels that the only language with which he can respond and in which he can be understood is violence. Bain’s position in The Brave One is a little different because of her gender. She also finds herself encountering violence and threats of violence from various races and economic classes, but she purposely places herself in situations to have these encounters and to punish those who would do violence against her. Bain seeks them out to use violence as a therapeutic tool, and, interestingly, her actions are legitimized when police detective Mercer, who is a figure of authority and good, as well as black, helps her commit a murder and escape without penalty for the past killings she has committed. Bain’s violence can be seen as an extension of her acting as the voice of the city, as she does in her radio show. The common point of both these films is that the vigilante is white, able to walk the city and commit violent acts. The difference in how their actions are received and their ultimate fate in the narrative both seem to lie in their gender. Foster is constructed as a sympathetic character who is somewhat romanticized in the film until his violent actions move from vigilantism to the terrorizing of his wife and child. At this point, a detective who has

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been tracking Foster has him at gunpoint to take him under arrest. Foster has a moment of realization and asks, “I’m the bad guy?” Then he threatens to shoot the detective if he doesn’t shoot him first. Foster states “You have two options. I can shoot and kill you, or you can shoot and kill me and my little girl can get the insurance money.” Foster pulls his gun and the detective shoots him, but Foster turns out only to have a blue plastic water pistol. Ultimately, he is seen as self-sacrificing and idealized. His masculine act of violence is offered as redemption, and though his vigilante activity and murders are never viewed as strictly wrong, when he starts to terrorize his family the narrative urges that he must die. If the character of Foster was played by a black actor it is interesting to speculate whether the film would still encourage support for vigilante action or conclude with an act of apparently redemptive violence in American urban space. In contrast to Foster, Bain is portrayed as conflicted about her actions, but also as heroic. She engages in violent acts outside the law to restore order and decency. She pushes past the civilized to help open the path to civilization. This is mirrored by how the film’s violence allows personal healing for Bain. She is further legitimized and brought back into society by the endorsement and help of a police officer. Detective Mercer may be more inclined to assist Bain as he has seen the ineffectual and corrupt aspects of the legal system as a black officer of the law. But, again, the reception of Bain’s actions might have been different if a black actor portrayed this character. Ultimately, it is the urban space that creates the vigilantes in these films, and this space is constructed in such a way that violence is its universal language, but whether the violence is condemned or condoned is definitely linked to one’s race and gender. The whiteness of the vigilantes in these narratives is one factor that leads to the portrayal of the vigilante as a positive figure. Falling Down was made in 1994, while Bill Clinton was president, and The Brave One was made in 2005 while George W. Bush was president. This is an important detail, because The Brave One was made in post9/11 America, which could be another reason for the positive portrayal of violence from a vigilante against perceived threats, as well as how the narrative treats violence as a therapeutic device. Within American culture after 9/11, violence was seen as a necessary tool to respond to terrorist attacks, and the nation cheered in the midst of its mourning when bombs were dropped in response. Part of the reason why 9/11 seemed to demand a violent response is the historical lessons of justified violence taken from the mainstream narrative of American history dating back to the American Revolution and the nation’s founding. With this in mind, it is no surprise that Foster in Falling Down is trying to protect a conservative right-wing

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America that felt it was losing ground and under attack during Clinton’s two terms as president. In this film there is also a call back to the frontier ideology of defending the homestead. In the past decade there has been a proliferation of vigilante texts and images in the culture in the form of books, graphic novels, films, and television shows. 9/11 not only helped to create both a new climate of fear and a new found desire for defense at a national level, but it also eventually eroded trust in both big government and one’s neighbors and fellow citizens. The War on Terror, in other words, raised the possibility that the enemy could be anyone. As a result, the mythic individuality of America is being both called upon and resisted in the form of more government regulation and control for security purposes. Increased government control and surveillance has been one factor encouraging both the growth of militia groups and vigilante texts such as V for Vendetta, Watchmen, The Dark Knight trilogy, the growing popularity of superhero films, Westerns such as 3:10 to Yuma, Open Range, and True Grit, as well as television shows dedicated to rogue vigilante agents and law enforcement agents, such as 24, Arrow, and Dexter. There is not enough space to discuss all of these texts in this chapter, but it is worth focusing some attention on the narrative of True Grit in both its novel and film forms. This narrative tells the story of a young girl named Mattie who pursues her father’s murderer (Tom Chaney) into the frontier of Indian country with the help of a U.S. Marshal (Rooster Cogburn) and a Texas Ranger (LaBoeuf) for the promise of a cash reward from Mattie and other parties whom Chaney has wronged. The narrative is a Western written in the twentieth century, helping keep the myth of the frontier alive, and the more recent film adaptation of the Coen brothers was made in 2010. Mattie originally strikes a deal with Rooster to pursue Chaney, and she will accompany him to ensure that he does what he is paid to do. When LaBoeuf arrives in pursuit of Chaney as well, he informs Rooster that there is a much larger reward for him in Texas than the $100 that Mattie is offering. The two lawmen try to hatch a deal together and leave Mattie behind, but she displays her grit and determination by catching up with them and proving her equal ability to make her way in the wilderness despite her age and gender. Near the end of the narrative, Mattie is captured and left alone with Chaney, and he is instructed not to harm her. This instruction seems almost ironic, for it is Mattie who kills Chaney: “The charge exploded and sent a lead ball of justice, too long delayed, into the criminal head of Tom Chaney.”6 It is troubling that it is only a bullet and Chaney’s resulting death

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that gives Mattie a sense of justice, and because it is at her hand, she does not begrudge LaBoeuf’s taking the body with him to collect the reward for it. This shows Mattie achieving a new level of power in society. It is also the point in the narrative at which Mattie becomes a vigilante. The new power she achieves is the power to dispense justice, which also comes with the power of determining if a man should live or die. All it cost was $100, a cheap fee for the power over a man’s life and death. This action also works to remove Mattie from being the damsel in distress and continues to allow for a heroic and progressive feminist perspective on her position. The reader of the novel is meant to perceive Chaney’s death as an act of justice because Chaney confessed to killing Mattie’s father, so they can feel assured that the death is justified without a trial. In the film, the scene in which Mattie shoots Chaney is also where she becomes a vigilante, ordering him to stand in front of her and then shooting him with a smile on her face. Again, the viewer feels that it is a justified death, because Chaney has admitted to the killing of Mattie’s father before this event. This allows the reader to forget the connection between money and justice in the text. Mattie gets justice, unmotivated by money as Rooster and LaBoeuf are. Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s 2010 film Kick-Ass is another good text to focus on in discussing the contemporary proliferation of vigilante texts. The film is Millar and Romita’s adaptation of their graphic novel of the same name, and both forms have had a sequel, with a third installment of the graphic novel forthcoming. Both the graphic novel and the film tell the story of an average high school kid, Dave, who decides he wants to become a superhero. He recognizes he has no powers, but he wants to dress up and fight crime, so he does so and seriously injures himself on his first attempt. After he gets surgery and ends up getting some metal grafted to his skeleton, he resumes his crime fighting under the name of “Kick-Ass.” This time he is much more successful and attracts the attention of two other costumed fighters: “Big-Daddy” and “Hit-Girl,” a father and daughter team who, like Kick-Ass, have no superpowers, but instead have spent years training to be expert fighters with all manner of weapons and guns. The main difference in tactics between Kick-Ass and the other two is that Kick-Ass has never killed anyone, whereas Hit-Girl and Big Daddy kill everyone they fight in excessive and ultraviolent ways. Despite their differences, the vigilantes team up to fight the mob that dominates their city. Both the graphic novel and film versions of Kick-Ass present vigilantes as positive figures who are hailed by the public as heroes. There are other contemporary vigilante texts that at first glance might seem to complicate the positive portrayal of the vigilante but that ultimately also fall into the trap of presenting them as heroes. Two of the most

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widely viewed vigilante texts of recent years in this category are Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy (2005–2012), and the Showtime TV series Dexter (2006–2013) based on the novels by Jeff Lindsay. There have been an astounding number of superhero films in the last ten years, and this is likely a result of growing unrest within the American population about the state of their lived reality and their feeling of powerlessness to do anything to alter it. The population is looking to be saved from terrorist threat and economic destabilization but feel that only a Superman can save them. This is what makes the recent vigilante Batman portrayal interesting to focus on, for he has no superpowers. He is just an ordinary mortal who nevertheless manages to save the community. Nolan’s take on the legendary figure of Batman kept the darker and edgier tradition that this figure has generally held, but he also worked to present a Batman that seemed plausible, less torn from the pages of comics. This is accomplished by having him use science and corporate resources to outmaneuver his enemies. He uses psychology and theatricality to create fear in his enemies and develop a mythic status for himself. He uses tools, tactics, and ideas that any individual could use. Batman’s methods of obtaining power are not supernatural but instead are the result of shrewd planning and self construction. It offers a narrative that allows anyone to fantasize about becoming Batman, an example of the American ideal of a self-made man. Batman is also another vigilante, such as Goetz, Bain, and Mattie, who finds his call to action in a violent act—the murder of his parents—and then uses violence to enforce his perception of justice. Though numerous comics have presented a Batman who is willing to kill, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns being one of the most famous, the new films demonstrate a Batman in control of his emotional and violent impulses. He makes decisions that serve both his city (community) and his principles (the greater good). We get a sense of Batman’s being a hero of the people, particularly in the second film of the trilogy The Dark Knight, which presents arguments about what it means to have justice and order in society. Batman is aware that the lawyer Harvey Dent is the kind of hero the city needs, one who does not have to hide behind a mask and who can prosecute criminals and clean up the streets. At the same time, Batman also has to decide how to deal with The Joker. He is another vigilante, but his goal is to reveal Batman’s identity, so in a sense he wishes to police Batman in a way he finds law enforcement unable to do—partly because the law is working with Batman through Commissioner Gordon. Ultimately, at the end of the film, it can be seen that the Joker wins. He makes Batman take the fall for murders committed by Harvey Dent to keep Dent’s name clean and allow him to be a symbol of hope for the city.

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Batman is vilified as a murderer and will have to be hunted. Batman’s sacrifice is viewed by the audience as a heroic act, just as the lie about Dent is seen as both necessary and positive. The audience is made to accept these problematic positions and still see Batman as a hero, because, as Gordon says at the end of the film, “he can take it. Because he is this city’s hero. Not the one it needs, but the one it deserves.” Here there is seeming critique by saying that a vigilante is not the needed hero because the vigilante is a criminal, but then Batman is seen as what is deserved because the city deserves a savior—and that is the operation that the mythic figure of the vigilante performs. Dexter presents an even more problematic text and figure in relation to vigilantism, a phenomenon that it manages to romanticize. Dexter Morgan works for the Miami Police Department as a blood splatter analyst. He is also a serial killer who was adopted and raised by a police officer. His adoptive father taught him how to “manage” his impulse to kill by encouraging—and training—him to hunt criminals and follow a code according to which he murders only people who have killed and remain unpunished, and only after he amasses positive proof of their guilt. In Dexter, the viewer roots for and cheers on the serial killer, because the audience is encouraged to enjoy the thrill of the hunt for criminals and their bloody deaths. An example of this from the first season is when Dexter offers an interpretation of crime scene evidence that leads the police away from the real murderer to focus on an innocent man so that Dexter can have a chance to kill the murderer himself. The audience is meant to be excited by Dexter’s manipulation of the police and his own breaking into the suspect’s property to collect evidence and proof of the suspect’s guilt before he kills them. One of the pivotal questions that Dexter asks the audience in ads for the show is: “Am I a good man doing bad things, or a bad man doing good things?” The interesting point is that no matter how that question is answered, it leads to complicated and troubling issues. If Dexter is a good man doing bad things, then he is a good man because he has an impulse to punish and seek justice on his own. If he is a bad man doing good things, it is his murders that are good—but also bad because the impulse to commit them comes from his serious psychological issues. To put it another way, in Dexter, being a vigilante is not wrong, but the need to kill serially is still condemned. If one applies this same logic to Death Wish, it leads one to ask whether Kersey is a vigilante or a serial killer, because he seems compelled to go hunting for criminals to kill. The possible consequences of the popularity of Dexter come into focus when one considers the existence of an online group called Dexter’s Disciples where fans can answer trivia questions and are ranked based on how

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much they know about the Dexter narratives. The name of the group is a little troubling, the term “disciple” suggesting the concept of a religious follower of a doctrine or code. In this case it would be Dexter’s code, which further demonstrates mainstream American culture’s acceptance of a problematic figure. The online group Anonymous also raises the possibility of vigilante activity through social media and the Internet. The members of this group of “hacktivists” can be viewed as vigilantes in the sense that they break the law and use digital and social force to pursue their take on justice. It is clear that the group seeks to have an identity linked to vigilante activity by the fact that members of the group wear the Guy Fawkes masks popularized by V for Vendetta. This is worth drawing attention to because the Internet and social media are another new frontier in American culture offering the potential for more individuals to fantasize or act on the impulse to embody the mythic figure of the vigilante. The vigilante is a mythic figure within American culture. It has appeared in a dizzying array of texts in contemporary times, but it is also part of a much longer tradition in American culture that goes back to the founding of America and the revolutionary war, as well as the Old West and the frontier period of American history. The vigilante personifies core principles of American mythology: justified violence, defense of the homestead, resistance to tyranny through force, independence and individualism, and self-made identity. The connections between vigilantes and these principles have led to the perpetual positive portrayal of these figures in American popular culture, which, in turn, has helped shape a more violent culture. If American identity is strengthened by embracing, embodying, and perpetuating its myths, then the mythic vigilante hero will keep being recycled as a savior for American society through the use of violence.

Notes 1.  Turner, 38. 2. Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, 8. 3.  Shapira, xxiii. 4.  Abrahams, 3. 5.  Lesly, 316. 6.  Portis, 195.

Bibliography Abrahams, Ray. Vigilant Citizens: Vigilantism and the State. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1998. Andreyko, Marc. Manhunter: Street Justice. New York: DC Comics, 2005.

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Azzarello, Brian. Joker. New York: DC Comics, 2008. Bad Day At Black Rock. DVD. Directed by John Sturges. 1955. Warner Bros. Barr, Mike W. Batman Year 2: Fear the Reaper. New York: DC Comics, 2002. Batman Begins. DVD. Directed by Christopher Nolan. 2005. Warner Bros. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulation and Simulacra. Trans. Shelia Glaser. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Boondock Saints, The. DVD. Directed by Troy Duffy. 1999. 20th Century Fox. Brave One, The. DVD. Directed by Neil Jordan. 2007. Warner Bros. Brooker, Will. Batman Unmasked. New York: Continuum, 2000. Dark Knight, The. DVD. Directed by Christopher Nolan. 2008. Warner Bros. Dark Knight Rises, The. DVD. Directed by Christopher Nolan. 2011. Warner Bros. Death Wish. DVD. Directed by Michael Winner. 1974. Dino Di Laurentiis Company. Dexter. DVD. Created for television by James Manos Jr. 2006–2013. Showtime Entertainment Companies. Dyer, Richard. White: Essays on Race. New York: Routledge, 1997. Falling Down. DVD. Directed by Joel Schumacher. 1993. Alcor Films. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 2008. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1988. Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Vintage, 1988. Kane, Bob. Showcase Batman, vol 1. New York: DC Comics, 2006. Law Abiding Citizen. DVD. Directed by Gary F. Gray. 2009. Overture Films. Lesly, Mark. Subway Gunman. New York: British American Publishing, 1988. Lindsay, Jeff. Darkly Dreaming Dexter. New York: Vintage, 2006. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: Paradox Press, 1993. Millar, Mark, and John Romita Jr. Kick-Ass. New York: Marvel World Wide, 2011. Millar, Mark, and John Romita Jr. Kick-Ass 2 Prelude: Hit-Girl. New York: Marvel World Wide, 2013. Millar, Mark, and John Romita Jr. Kick-Ass 2. New York: Marvel World Wide, 2013. Miller, Frank. Batman Year 1. New York: DC Comics, 2005. Miller, Frank. The Dark Knight Returns. New York: DC Comics, 1986. Moore, Alan. Watchmen. New York: DC Comics, 1987. Mulloy, D. J. American Extremism: History, Politics and the Militia Movement. New York: Routledge, 2008. Palin, Sarah. Going Rogue. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009. Pinker, Steven. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Viking, 2011. Rasmussen, Scott, and Douglas Schoen. Mad As Hell. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2010. Roley, Brian Ascalon. American Son. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. Roosevelt, Theodore. Theodore Roosevelt. New York: Da Capo Press, Inc., 1985. Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. New York: Routledge, 1998.

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Shapira, Harel. Waiting for José: The Minutemen’s Pursuit of America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-century America. New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1992. Slotkin, Richard. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American frontier, 1600–1860. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973. Star Chamber, The. DVD. Directed by Peter Hyams. 1983. 20th Century Fox. True Grit. DVD. Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. 2010. Paramount Pictures. Tucker, William. Vigilante: The Backlash against Crime in America. New York: Stein and Day, 1985. Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. New York: Dover Publications, 2010. Valentine, Alan Chester. Vigilante Justice. New York: Reynal, 1956. Waldrep, Christopher. Lynching in America: A History in Documents. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Wister, Owen. The Virginian. New York: Penguin Books, 1988. Youngquist, Jeff. Essential Punisher. New York: Marvel Publishing, 2006.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

The Violent Gang in American Popular Culture: From Pirates and Cowboys to Bikers and Gangstas Chris Richardson

The word “gang” may evoke very different images depending on your generation and where you grew up. Some people envision prohibition bootleggers in pinstripe suits, others burly bikers rumbling down highways on their hogs. Film fans often think of Al Pacino in the 1983 classic Scarface or of Denzel Washington in American Gangster (2007). Others still may have hip-hop stars such as 2Pac or 50 Cent in mind. There is no shortage of iconography when it comes to gangs and gangsters in American popular culture. The vast array of “gangs,” comprising both heroes and villains and oscillating between fact and fiction, reveal much about the beliefs and attitudes of their times. I begin with the term itself, exploring its etymology, then elaborate the history of gangs in America while examining the major shifts in cinema, music, and popular culture that have shaped how we understand the violent gang today. It seems as if youths have always upset older citizens wherever they have appeared. In the eighth century B.C., Hesiod bemoaned the “frivolous” young people who were “reckless beyond words.”1 Socrates hated the young Greeks, whom he argued “now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority.”2 The term “gang,” from Old Norse “gangr” and Old English “gangan,” entered English around the sixteenth century

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and originally meant “to go,” as in “gang to your room.”3 Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote, for example, that “freedom and Whisky gang thegither!”4 By the early seventeenth century, the word began to denote a set of things that go together. English speakers referred to groups, primarily sailors or workmen, as gangs. Soon after, the word acquired negative connotations as these groups became known for engaging in illicit activities, drinking, philandering, and fighting wherever they went. There are a variety of scholarly theories about the origins of gangs, with one popular timeframe being Europe’s early modern period (c. 1400–1700 AD). Pearson gives an account of “organised gangs” in the seventeenth century who amused themselves by “breaking windows, demolishing taverns, assaulting the Watch, attacking wayfarers and slitting the noses of their victims with swords, rolling old ladies in barrels, and other violent frolics.”5 Elsewhere in history, related groups called “thugs,” “hooligans,” and “hoodlums” have occupied the minds of concerned citizens, each with their own unique genealogies.6 Today, we have an assortment of popular terms associated with gangs, which reflect the range of cultural associations they carry. A gangplank is a movable board or ramp used to get on and off ships, which pirates might also use to force victims to walk into the middle of the ocean as punishment. Press ganging, used by both criminals and governments, refers to the seizure of men who possess sailing skills. Most notably, the British navy deployed this technique in the eighteenth century, forcing many citizens of the Commonwealth to work its ships while providing little more than food, shelter, and a respite from beatings in return.7 A chain gang refers to a number of convicts chained together and forced to perform labor outside the prison. Paul Newman famously portrayed the Southern chain gang experience in Cool Hand Luke (1967). Though the use of chain gangs in America disappeared by the 1950s, modern iterations of the chain gang (often voluntary and without actual chains) have once again become common sights on the sides of many highways in the south.8 The term “gangster” is a distinctly American word that, rather than emphasizing a group, focuses on the solitary gangland leader (such as Al “Scarface” Capone or George “Machine Gun” Kelly). Other modern American terms include “gangbanger” and “gangsta,” both associated with African American inner-city gangs of the 1980s. The earliest “gangs” to enter North America would likely be the Vikings, who established trading routes in the ninth and tenth centuries.9 These roving bands of men formed a sort of proto-gang, providing protection and selling their wares to those who could afford them while also instilling fear throughout communities by their use of violence and their warrior

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mentality. It is also worth noting that aboriginal “gangs” could be said to exist in North America long before European contact. The Comanche and Apache have been known to comprise extremely deadly groups of warriors, and others, like the Yurok in California, were status-obsessed schemers who constantly sought to display their wealth and power, according to some descriptions.10 In the seventeenth century, European gangs entered North America in the guise of pirates and privateers who operated across the eastern seaboard. With settlements quickly being established in the new world, pirates ran illegal ships, stole from colonies, and raided trading ships using pistols, swords, and cannon fire. Such events produced many legends that survive to this day. Blackbeard, for example, is said to have led an army of 300 pirates and bounded into battles with swords drawn and a dozen knives and pistols ready at his side. Though piracy continues to occur, the peak of American pirate gangs lasted from roughly 1500 to 1800, when relatively small ships were the main transporters of goods and law enforcement was virtually non-existent.11 As Tom Hanks notably portrayed in Captain Phillips (2013), however, ships such as the MV Maersk Alabama have been hijacked as recently as 2009—though it was the first American ship to experience such an event in 200 years. In the mid-nineteenth century, long before Los Angeles gangstas became infamous in California for sporting bandanas and carrying out drive-by shootings, journalists and other writers began to glamorize bands of young men who terrorized the West. Some of these groups were known for riding into towns on their horses, hiding their faces behind bandanas, and unloading their six-shooters into crowds.12 Legends about Butch Cassidy and the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, the James–Younger Gang, the Wild Bunch, and similar groups quickly spread as books such as Augustus Appler’s The Guerrillas of the West (1876) and James Buel’s The Border Outlaws (1882) became immensely popular among the growing literate population.13 Eastern cities such as New York and Chicago also held many urban gangs, as Martin Scorsese showed in Gangs of New York (2002), which he based on Herbert Asbury’s 1927 book.14 Gangs of this period looked very different from East to West. Whereas cities such as New York were highly populated and urbanized, many western towns had little in the way of law enforcement. The Hole-in-the-Wall gang, for example, took its name from a pass in Johnson County, Wyoming, which several gangs used as their base of operations. No lawmen were able to infiltrate its desolate landscape and heavy fortification. It remained in use from the mid-nineteenth century to about 1910. Today, the cabin used by Butch Cassidy remains open to the public in Cody, Wyoming, where it has been relocated and put on display to tourists.

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Though fascination with cowboy gangs remains strong, its most notable era in American popular culture was arguably the mid-twentieth century, when actor John Wayne and director John Ford produced such hits as Stagecoach (1939), The Searchers (1956), Rio Bravo (1959), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). Notably, the heroes of these films often rescued small towns by fighting off gangs of outlaws. Later hits such as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1967) and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) were more sympathetic to the gang members themselves, modeling a trend that appears in urban gangster films as well. During the 1920s, many soldiers returned home from the war and, unable to find legitimate jobs, joined the underground economy, transporting alcohol during prohibition and enforcing territory for competing gangsters. America’s most famous gangs appeared during this era. The Dillinger Gang, for example, robbed banks under the direction of John Dillinger, who twice escaped from jail. Ironically, he was killed outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago after seeing Manhattan Melodrama, a film in which Clark Gable plays a gangster who is sentenced to death for his crimes. The death of “America’s first celebrity criminal,” as Matera refers to Dillinger in his biography, “served as a warning to young men that he wasn’t someone to be idolized.”15 He notes that hours later, a young man shouting “I’m the new Dillinger!” was killed by police in Los Angeles. Despite Dillinger’s cautionary tale, he has been glamorized on screen dozens of times since his death, most famously by Lawrence Tierney in Dillinger (1945), Martin Sheen in Dillinger and Capone (1995), and Johnny Depp in Public Enemies (2009). Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd was another famous bank robber of the time. He was celebrated as a tragic figure of the Great Depression in Woody Guthrie’s “The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd” and is also mentioned in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath as the victim of police corruption.16 Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, who led the Barrow gang in the early 1930s, exploded into the mainstream press after a series of bank robberies, gaining much of the public’s attention for their youthful good looks and criminal escapades, allegedly killing as many as nine police officers during their spree. Reflecting on a photo of the two found in a hideout in Joplin, Missouri, Jeff Guinn writes, “Few real-life villains had the same roguish charisma that Jimmy Cagney and Edward G. Robinson brought to movie screens. Al Capone was clearly a barbaric thug. Ma Barker was a dumpy middle-aged woman. John Dillinger had matinee-idol good looks and Pretty Boy Floyd had the best possible nickname, but the Joplin photos introduced new criminal superstars with the most titillating trademark of all—illicit sex. . . . That made it easy, when writers exaggerated Clyde’s and

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Bonnie’s exploits, for readers to buy into far-fetched stories about these young criminal lovers.”17 This forbidden behavior made the two regulars in newspapers, newsreels, and popular magazines of the time, inspiring many pulp fictions and detective stories, as well as homages within comics, novels, and films. Bonnie even sent a poem to a Dallas newspaper to be published after her death, further cementing the couple’s legendary lives within popular culture. Through rhyming verses, she evokes their bleak future and the final shootout to come, promising that “[s]ome day they will go down together . . . death to Bonnie and Clyde.”18 Bonnie and Clyde remain the most popular of all criminal couples in American popular culture, inspiring films such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, the 2013 miniseries Bonnie & Clyde, and songs such as Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot’s 1967 hit “Bonnie and Clyde” and, more recently, Jay Z and Beyoncé’s “’03 Bonnie and Clyde.” In 1923, Barrow and Parker were killed on a rural road in Louisiana by a posse of officers who had tracked them to a remote location. The police left dozens of bullet holes in the couple’s getaway car as they tried to escape, killing them both on the stretch of highway off Interstate 20, where the Bonnie and Clyde Festival now takes place to commemorate the shootout each year. During prohibition, popular media discourses blurred the distinction between criminal gangs and venerable business associations. Eminent families linked to bootlegging, such as the Bronfmans, the Kennedys, and the Seagrams, were also respected citizens and prominent figures in political circles. “The forerunners of today’s drug barons and money launderers were not underworld figures but respectable merchant banks and brokerage houses,” writes Behr in Prohibition: Thirteen Years that Changed America.19 In the early nineteenth century, the image of the gangster changed considerably, transforming from a shadowy figure lurking in a city alleyway or riding into town on a muddy horse to the tailored-suit–wearing businessman crunching numbers in the financial district. Though Bonnie and Clyde may have been the most alluring criminals of this period, the most famous gangster was undoubtedly Al “Scarface” Capone, whose legend as a Chicago crime kingpin continues to grow to this day. Capone is believed to have been one of the most violent bootleggers and racketeers of his time, controlling a multi-million-dollar gangland empire, but he was charged with relatively minor offenses, such as tax evasion, and sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison, which he spent first in Atlanta and then in Alcatraz in California. By the time of his death in 1947, Capone was a household name, providing the quintessential image of the American gangster in popular culture. He was the basis for Howard Hughes’s

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famous gangster film Scarface (1932) and has since been played by Robert De Niro in The Untouchables (1987) and Stephen Graham in the hit HBO series Boardwalk Empire. The first influential research on gangs, The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago (1927) by Frederick Thrasher was published during this period.20 Whereas previous researchers sought biological and psychological explanations of young delinquent groups, the University of Chicago professor spent seven years getting to know the young men who gathered on street corners, engaging in acts of petty larceny and violence and finding identity in an environment that generally ignored their thoughts and desires.21 Thrasher posited that gangs emerge spontaneously as play groups that become solidified through conflict. “Not only does the gang boy transform his sordid environment through his imagination, but he lives among soldiers and knights, pirates and banditti.”22 These fairly innocent exploits, however, escalate to violent crime when assemblages of young men seek more excitement. “Junking leads to petty stealing. ‘Going robbing’ is a common diversion in the gang and this often develops into more serious types of burglary and robbery with a gun.”23 Thrasher refused to acknowledge a “gang instinct” per se, but he asserted that gangs will continue to thrive where social organizations and community supports lag behind the growth of a city. Alongside Thrasher, researchers associated with the Chicago School engaged in myriad studies of marginalized groups during this period. Robert Park led the group after working for more than a decade as a journalist. He argued that “we need such studies, if for no other reason than to enable us to read the newspapers intelligently.”24 Like Thrasher, Park and his associates conceived of gangs as fulfilling a socializing function where other institutions like schools, churches, and the family did not. In 1925, Park and Burgess published The City, a series of influential essays that argued, among other things, that the closer one ventured into the inner city, the more precarious the area’s cultural, economic, and social dynamic would appear. The smorgasbord of groups operating in the center of the city, primarily recently immigrated, working-class families, formed an interstitial space with less solidified social norms and expectations. This geographical arrangement, in turn, led gangs to form as organic social institutions. In the middle-class suburbs, where organizations such as the school, the church, and the family were well defined, fewer gangs were active. As many scholars have subsequently pointed out, the arguments of the Chicago School presuppose a set of normalizing assumptions about the superiority of white, middle-class values and posit geographical separations that are no longer accurate. Nevertheless, research continues to support the assertion that social disorganization, poverty, and neglected

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youth often lead to deviance and gang formation and the Chicago School’s legacy inaugurated contemporary gang research as we know it today. After World War II, returning soldiers sought outlets to replace the camaraderie, the mechanical workmanship, and, sometimes, the violence to which they had become accustomed. Although motorcycles have existed in various forms since the late-nineteenth century, a recognizable motorcycle subculture developed in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, during which time clubs such as the Hells Angels (1948) and the Pagans (1959) formed in California and Maryland respectively. These workingclass men exhibited many of the traits found in popular depictions of outlaw bikers—aggressive behavior, a penchant for drinking and/or recreational drug use, and a desire for power and respect. Most of these men rode large V-Twin Harley-Davidson motorcycles and congregated in bars and pool halls where they formed club rules and regulations. In 1947, motorcyclists from the Booze Fighters and the Pissed Off Bastards of Bloomington disrupted an event in Hollister, California, sponsored by the American Motorcycle Association (AMA). Known as the Hollister Riots, the violent incident led the AMA to publicly state that the deviant bikers who took over Hollister’s main drag were not representative of 99 percent of motorcyclists. This declaration led the outlaws to adopt the title of “1 percenter,” a moniker that many continue to use with pride. As news spread of this event, which left fifty people injured and landed nearly 100 bikers in jail, popular depictions of motorcyclists began to focus on the criminal element with films such as The Wild One (1953), starring Marlon Brando, and Easy Rider (1969), starring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, and books such as Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (1966) and Danny Lyon’s The Bikeriders (1968), as well as the 1970s Ghost Rider comics series. As Hunter S. Thompson wrote in Hell’s Angels: The concept of the “motorcycle outlaw” was as uniquely American as Jazz. Nothing like them had ever existed. In some ways, they appeared to be a kind of half-breed anachronism, a human hangover from the era of the Wild West. Yet in other ways they were as new as television. There was absolutely no precedent, in the years after World War II, for large gangs of hoodlums on motorcycles, reveling in violence, worshiping mobility and thinking nothing of riding five hundred miles on a weekend . . . to whoop it up with other gangs of cyclists in some country hamlet entirely unprepared to handle even a dozen peaceful tourists.25

In the last few decades, this image of the fearsome biker gang has largely waned, though some remnants remain in popular culture, notably with the

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hit FX series Sons of Anarchy, which follows bikers in small-town California as second-generation members struggle with the legacy of their motorcycle club. For the most part, however, fears of bikers have diminished in recent years. In the last few decades, groups such as the Hells Angels have become increasingly corporate and litigious, suing Toys ‘R’ Us, Alexander McQueen, Amazon, Saks, Zappos, Walt Disney, and Marvel Comics. They even sued a young woman who sold embroidered patches that allegedly resembled the group’s logo.26 The last transformation of the violent gang in recent history has stemmed from the inner-city drug battles of the 1980s and 1990s, during which time crack sales skyrocketed, rap music flourished, and the “hood film cycle” showed cinemagoers a new, dramatic world of gangstas and racial tensions. In the 1980s, former model Léon Bing became one of the first journalists to gain access to hardcore gang members in Los Angeles, bringing their stories of guts, gats, and graves to an eager public.27 As a moderator on a gang forum in 1989, she asserted that “it would be hard to write a morality play more likely to strike terror into the hearts of the middle class.”28 While street gangs such as the Bloods and the Crips had existed since the early 1970s, hip-hop groups such as N.W.A. brought such realities out of their locales and into mainstream culture. In the late 1980s, U.S. organizations began performing gang surveys painting alarming portraits of a nation under siege by violent predators. Although more recent statistics demonstrate a decline in gangs since 1996, twentieth-century surveys indicated a meteoric rise in gang-infested cities from six American municipalities in 1975 to 1,492 in 1996.29 Furthermore, an assessment in the mid-1990s reported 23,388 youth gangs and 664,906 members across the country. Although some authors warned citizens of the dangerous criminals lurking in the nation’s seemingly pristine suburbs,30 others have more recently cautioned readers about “a world of gangs,” taking the focus international.31 The United States soon coordinated dozens of organizations, including 160 Violent Gang Safe Street Task Forces working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the National Youth Gang Center (NYGC),32 the National Gang Intelligence Center (NGIC), the National Alliance of Gang Investigators Associations (NAGIA), the National Gang Targeting, Enforcement & Coordination Center (GangTECC), and the Organized Crime and Gang Section (OCGS) within the Department of Justice.33 In the late 1980s and early 1990s, more than thirty U.S. states passed legislation allowing juveniles to be tried in adult courts and many enacted statutes that specifically targeted gangs.34 The most wide-ranging legal changes designed to battle gangs stemmed from President Clinton’s Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act

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of 1994, which allocated more than $30 billion for policing, imprisonment, and crime prevention.35 With the swaths of blacks and Latinos entering American prisons following the implementation of Reagan-era War on Drugs policy and Clinton’s Violent Crime Act, prison gangs became a growing concern. Some gangs even formed in prison and spread out, as in the case of MS-13, La Nuestra Familia, and the Aryan Brotherhood, all of which grew out of California prisons between the 1960s and 1980s. By 1996, some authors were claiming that “America is now home to thickening ranks of juvenile ‘super-predators’—radically impulsive, brutally remorseless youngsters, including ever more pre-teenage boys, who murder, assault, rape, rob, burglarize, deal deadly drugs, join gun-toting gangs and create serious communal disorders.”36 This concept of the “super-predator,” now debunked, created a moral panic about violent, inner-city gangs, whose legal and political repercussions Americans continue to see today. Along with such fears, and perhaps spurred on by them, the central cultural phenomenon to emerge from this period was hip-hop. Growing out of the Bronx in the 1970s, hip-hop hit the mainstream when the top-selling album in 1991 became N.W.A.’s Niggaz4Life, featuring L.A. gangstas Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, and Eazy-E.37 Youth in the suburbs of North America began devouring these violent, profanity-laced tracks, which told stories of African American criminal groups and their street cultures. By the 1990s, gangsta rap and terms such as gang bangin’ and O.G. (Original Gangsta) entered common parlance among many youths, giving the concept of gangs particular racial connotations. Since then, hiphop themes of underclass resistance and subcultural pride have spread to Montreal,38 France,39 and eastern Europe,40 among other places, producing, at best, an inspirational message of hope for marginalized communities, and, at worst, a glamorization of violence, misogyny, and material consumption associated with the modern gangsta. Panics over gangsta rap exemplify the difficulties audiences and critics alike have separating real-life violence from their representations in popular culture. As Rodman points out, “the possibility that these musicians are invoking the fictional ‘I’ is one that the dominant public discourse largely refuses to recognize or accept. ‘Common sense,’ it seems, tells us that John Lennon didn’t really want to kill his first wife when he wrote ‘Run For Your Life,’ but that ‘Cop Killer’ must be taken as a literal expression of the truth about Ice-T’s felonious desires.”41 During this period, many rappers earned more notoriety for their arrest records than their albums. As Tricia Rose argues, “The concern over hip hop and violence peaked in the early to mid-1990s when groups like N.W.A. from Los Angeles found significant

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commercial success through a gang-oriented repertoire of stories related especially to anti-police sentiment.”42 Their success with songs like “Fuck the Police,” as well as that of other groups on labels like Death Row Records prompted fears, particularly from politicians and concerned parents, that such violent acts would be mimicked by young listeners. As Rose and others have pointed out, George W. Bush claimed that it was “sick” to glamorize the killing of police officers on a rap album, but then happily accepted support from Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had pretended to kill hundreds of people on screen, including police officers. As gangsta rap became more commercially successful, welcoming many acts with actual criminal histories of selling drugs, participating in gangs, and, in the cases of Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls, and 50 Cent, having experienced brutal drive-by shootings, the image of gangs took on strong connotations of race, gender, and geographical location. No longer would gangs be associated with pirates, cowboys, or bikers, all predominantly older white men; they were now young, black, and located almost completely in inner-city ghettos, according to the popular imagination of the time. Despite these representations, it is important to note that women have always played an integral role in gang culture. Legends circulate of HellCat Maggie, who fought with her filed teeth and brass fingernails alongside the Dead Rabbits in nineteenth-century New York.43 Thrasher mentions female gang members who were granted entrée for their sexual favors in Chicago during the 1920s. And Whyte details the Aphrodite Club, which caused trouble in the 1930s.44 Only in the late-twentieth century, however, has the theme of gangs and gender led to sustained research efforts such as Campbell’s (1984) The Girls in the Gang, Moore’s (1991) Going Down to the Barrio: Homeboys and Homegirls in Change, and Chesney-Lind and Hagedorn’s Female Gangs in America: Essays on Girls, Gangs, and Gender (1999).45 By 2002, Miller argued that “it is no longer accurate to say that female involvement in youth gangs is an understudied phenomenon.”46 Scholars have found that women join gangs for myriad reasons, some entering as mere hangers-on, others taking active roles in the criminal exploits of the groups. Frequently, however, the risk of victimization increases for female gang members from both within the gang and outside it.47 This acknowledgement has also translated to cinema, with females forming gangs, robbing banks, and taking over territory in films such as Set It Off (1996), Sket (2011) and Spring Breakers (2013), all of which invert dominant stereotypes about women’s subservient roles in gangs. Today, the National Gang Center reports that gangs emerged in most large cities before the 1990s and have progressed more recently to suburban

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counties and smaller cities and towns in the last few decades.48 The estimated number of gangs across the United States remains similar to that of the 1990s, at 30,000, comprising approximately 780,000 individual members. More than half of all law enforcement respondents in 1996 argued that gang problems were “getting worse,” while more recently about 30 percent of respondents would agree with that statement. Unfortunately, the survey does not provide a definition of “gang,” relying instead on participants to designate members of their communities as gang members. The survey suggests, however, that characteristics of gangs may include (1) committing crimes together, (2) a gang name, (3) the use of colors or symbols, (4) hanging out together, (5) claiming territory, and (6) having a leader. Many of these characteristics, however, could be attributed to high school football teams, college fraternities, office coworkers, and even the Muppets of Sesame Street, as Michael Davis humorously demonstrated by titling his book Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street.49 Gangs continue to provide compelling subjects for books, films, and newspapers. Because most people are not exposed to gangs in their own lives, the representations of these groups are particularly important for understanding contemporary legal, political, and social discourses and fictional depictions of gangs are crucial to understanding how Americans perceive and address such groups. Gangs have been particularly influential in music and film. As discussed above, gangsta rap has been enormously successful since the 1980s, starting with groups such as Grandmaster Flash and Slick Rick and continuing with artists such as Rick Ross (who took his name from a legendary crack kingpin in Los Angeles) and 50 Cent (whose claim to fame is having survived seven gunshot wounds). And though gangsta rap’s influence on popular music has been of relatively short duration, representations of gangs in film and other forms of popular culture have been around since early film serials such as The Perils of Pauline (1914), featuring menacing gangs of pirates, and Barney Oldfield’s Race for a Life (1913), featuring a gang tying a woman to the tracks in front of an oncoming train. The gangster film became popular as a genre in the 1930s alongside the introduction of speaking movies and prohibition accounts of reallife gangsters such as Al “Scarface” Capone. The genre grew quickly in popularity with films such as Scarface (1932) and Angels with Dirty Faces (1938). Despite the warnings that tended to precede the films, the genre, along with its literary and comics counterparts, began to face strong criticism and imposed heavy (self)censorship. With the emergence of psychedelic films about biker gangs and drug users in the 1960s, the idea of “gangs” took on new meaning in film just as it did in the real world. The

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remake of Scarface in 1983, for example, transplanted the Chicago prohibition story to Miami and switched the ambitious Italian immigrant Tony Camonte (Paul Muni) with Cuban refugee Tony Montana (Al Pacino). The film quickly earned cult status and propelled the modern gangster film into the mainstream.50 With the concern over crack cocaine and violent African American gangs by the late 1980s, the image of the violent gang took on strong racial connotations and the “hood film cycle” emerged, beginning with Colors (1988) and ending with Clockers (1995). The genre has since become much more self-reflexive, with Tarantino’s postmodern Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), then Michael Mann’s Heat (1995) and Public Enemies (2009), all of which playfully allude to previous generations of gangster films while adding to the canon. Although the transformation of gang imagery in American popular culture has been swift, many common elements persist. Young men, often from minority groups, remain much more frequently identified as “gang” members and are also more likely to identify themselves as such.51 As Katz remarks: an inside joke that has been shared by field investigators over several decades is that subjects freely refer to their enemies as members of gangs but instruct an observing sociologist that their collective commitment is to a “club,” an “organization,” a “clique,” a “barrio,” a “mob,” a “brotherhood,” a “family,” an ethnic “nation,” a “team,” or a “crew.”52

Although the word gang can simply mean a group, it more frequently connotes the menace of violence and criminality, which threatens the mainstream culture from the outside in. The prominence of gangs in popular fiction has both perpetuated the mythology of youth and crime and reflected real-life concerns, ranging from outlaws and hippies to inner-city gangs and deviant subcultures. Today, digital technology is playing a more central role in popular conceptions of gangs. Studies are focusing on traditional gangs going online as well as new gangs springing up from the deep web, such as the hacker group Anonymous.53 The FBI’s 2011 National Gang Threat Assessment warns, “The proliferation of social networking websites has made gang activity more prevalent and lethal—moving gangs from the streets into cyber space.”54 Interestingly, many postapocalyptic narratives, from A Clockwork Orange (1971) to The Road (2009)—as well as many zombie and outbreak plots—envision a world in which gangs imperil survivors and fight for resources. Though it is impossible to foresee how accurate these visions of the future may become, it is likely

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that gangs will continue to hold a prominent position within American popular culture, retaining many of the same underlying characteristics they’ve shared for centuries: male-centric, working-class, ethnically, or culturally outside dominant cultures, always accompanied by the threat of violence.

Notes  1. Levine, xiii.  2. Tapscott, 305.   3.  Oxford Dictionaries. “gang,” https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ english/gang.  4. Burns, 27.  5. Pearson,188.   6.  Dash, Pearson, and Van Deburg.   7.  Ennis and Land.  8. Colvin.   9.  Williams et al. 10.  Hamalainen, Haley, and Kroeber. 11. Thompson. 12.  Titles like Wild Cowboys: Urban Marauders and the Forces of Order make the link between cowboys of the nineteenth century and contemporary urban gangs explicit. See Jackall. 13.  Appler and Buel. 14.  Journalist Herbert Asbury’s The Gangs of New York details notorious gangs such as The Dead Rabbits, The Plug Uglies, and the Bowery Boys at the turn of the century. 15.  Matera, 362. 16.  “I knowed Purty Boy Floyd’s man. He wasn’t a bad boy. Jus’ got drove in a corner,” the character Ma tells another character. Editor Robert Demott also notes that “though eventually labeled Public Enemy Number 1, [he] came to be considered the last social bandit in America, comparable to Robin Hood or Billy the Kid, whom he idolized” (Steinbeck). 17.  Guinn, 480. 18.  Toland, 298–299. 19.  Behr, 130. 20. Thrasher. 21.  While earlier works that use the term “gang” exist, such as The Boy and His Gang, the majority of scholars cite Thrasher as the founder of contemporary gang research. See Puffer. 22.  Thrasher, 85. 23.  Ibid., 269. 24.  Park and Burgess, 3. 25.  Thompson, 66–67.

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26. Kovaleski. 27. Bing, Do or Die. 28.  Bing, “When You’re a Crip,” 51. 29.  Curry and Decker, Klein and Maxson. 30.  Meuhlbauer and Dodder, Richards et al. For more recent reiterations, see Garland, Korem, and Monti. 31. Hagedorn, Gangs in the Global City, Hagedorn. A World of Gangs, Klein et al. 32.  In 2009, the National Youth Gang Center merged with the National Gang Center. 33. If these acronyms seem convoluted, they likely are; even the various departments that employ them seem to be confused (or simply unable to update their web sites quickly enough). The FBI, for instance, listed National Gang Targeting, Enforcement & Coordination Center (GangTECC) as a gang taskforce in 2011; however this group merged into The Organized Crime and Gang Section (OCGS) in 2010 along with the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section (OCRS) and the Gang Unit. 34.  McCorkle and Miethe. 35. Richardson. 36.  Bennett et al., 27. 37. David. 38.  Low et al., 59–82. 39. Orlando. 40.  Dyson, Richardson, and Skott-Myhre. 41. Rodman. 42.  Rose, 34. 43. Asbury writes, “When Hell-Cat Maggie screeched her battle cry and rushed biting and clawing into the midst of a mass of opposing gangsters, even the most stout-hearted blanched and fled” (27–28). 44. Whyte. 45.  Campbell, Moore, Chesney-Lind, and Hagedorn. See also Chesney-Lind and Pasko. 46.  Miller, 175. 47.  Dorais and Corriveu, Nimmo, and Nurge. 48.  National Gang Center. 49. Davis. 50. Tucker. 51.  Esbensen et al. found that only a small percentage of white youths (15 percent in their sample) identify themselves as gang members today. By contrast, 67 percent of African American and 43 percent of Hispanic youths claimed their groups were “gangs.” 52.  Katz, 115. 53.  Lynn, Hanser, Sela-Shayovitz. 54.  Federal Bureau of Investigation, 41.

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Bibliography Appler, Augustus C. The Guerrillas of the West: Or, The Life, Character and Daring Exploits of the Younger Brothers. Saint Louis: Eureka, 1876. Asbury, Herbert. The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld. New York: Random House, 2008. Behr, Edward. Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1996. Bennett, William J., John J. Dilulio Jr., and John P Walters. Body Count: Moral Poverty . . . and How to Win America’s War against Crime and Drugs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Bing, Léon. “When You’re a Crip (or a Blood).” Harper’s Magazine, fall 1989. Bing, Léon. Do or Die. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991. Buel, James W. The Border Outlaws: An Authentic and Thrilling History of the Most Noted Bandits of Ancient or Modern Times, the Younger Brothers, Jesse and Frank James, and Their Comrades in Crime. St. Louis: Historical Pub. Co., 1882. Burns, Robert. The Works of Robert Burns: With an Account of His Life, and a Criticism on His Writings, To Which Are Prefixed Some Observations on the Character and Condition of the Scottish Peasantry. Vol. 3. London, 1820. Campbell, Anne. The Girls in the Gang. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1984. Chesney-Lind, Meda and John M. Hagedorn. Female Gangs in America: Essays on Girls, Gangs, and Gender. Chicago, IL: Lake View Press, 1999. Chesney-Lind, Meda, and Lisa Pasko. Girls, Women, and Crime: Selected Readings. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004. Colvin, Mark. Penitentiaries, Reformatories, and Chain Gangs: Social Theory and the History of Punishment in Nineteenth Century America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997. Curry, G. David and Scott H. Decker. Confronting Gangs: Crime and Community. Los Angeles, CA: Roxbury Publishing Company, 1998. Dash, Mike. Thug: The True Story of India’s Murderous Cult. London, UK: Granta, 2006. Davis, Michael. Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street. New York: Penguin, 2009. Dorais, Michel, and Patrice Corriveu. Gangs and Girls: Understanding Juvenile Prostitution. Translated by Peter Feldstein. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009. Dyson, Michael Eric. Know What I Mean? Reflections on Hip Hop. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2007. Ennis, Daniel James. Enter the Press-Gang: Naval Impressment in Eighteenth-Century British Literature. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002. Esbensen, Finn-Aage, Bradley T. Brick, Chris Melde, Karin Tusinski, and Terrence J. Taylor. “The Role of Race and Ethnicity in Gang Membership.” In Street Gangs, Migration, and Ethnicity, ed. Frank van Gemert, Dana Peterson, and Inger-Lise Lien, 117–139. Portland, OR: Willan Publishing, 2008.

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Federal Bureau of Investigation. 2011 National Gang Threat Assessment: Emerging Trends. New York: Morgan James Publishing, 2012. Garland, Sarah. Gangs in Garden City: How Immigration, Segregation, and Youth Violence Are Changing America’s Suburbs. New York: Nation Books, 2009. Guinn, Jeff. Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012. Hagedorn, John M. A World of Gangs: Armed Young Men and Gangsta Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Hagedorn, John M., ed. Gangs in the Global City: Alternatives to Traditional Criminology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Haley, James L. Apaches: A History and Culture Portrait. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981. Hamalainen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Hanser, Robert D. “Gang-Related Cyber and Computer Crimes: Legal Aspects and Practical Points of Consideration in Investigations.” International Review of Law, Computers and Technology 25, nos. 1/2 (March 2011): 47–55. Jackall, Robert. Wild Cowboys: Urban Marauders and the Forces of Order. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Katz, Jack. Seductions of Crime: A Chilling Exploration of the Criminal Mind—from Juvenile Delinquency to Cold-Blooded Murder. New York: Basic Books, 1988. Klein, Malcolm W., and Cheryl L. Maxson. Street Gang Patterns and Policies. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 2010. Klein, Malcolm, Hans-Jürgen Kerner, Cheryl Maxson, and E. Weitekamp. The Eurogang Paradox: Street Gangs and Youth Groups in the U.S. and Europe. New York: Springer, 2000. Korem, Dan. Suburban Gangs: The Affluent Rebels. Richardson, TX: International Focus Press, 1994. Kovaleski, Serge F. “Despite Outlaw Image, Hells Angels Sue Often.” The New York Times, November 29, 2013. Kroeber, Arthur. Handbook of the Indians of California. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1925. Land, Isaac. War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor, 1750–1950. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Levine, Peter. The Future of Democracy: Developing the Next Generation of American Citizens. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2007. Low, Bronwen, Mela Sarkar, and Lise Winer. “‘Ch’us Mon Propre Bescherelle’: Challenges from the Hip-Hop Nation to the Quebec Nation.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 13, no. 1 (February 2009): 59–82. Lynn, Judge B. Winmill, David L. Metcalf, and Michael E. Band. “Cybercrime: Issues and Challenges in The United States.” Digital Evidence and Electronic Signature Law Review 7 (December 2010): 19–34. Matera, Dary. The Life and Death of America’s First Celebrity Criminal John Dillinger. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2007.

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McCorkle, Richard C., and Terance D. Miethe. Panic: The Social Construction of the Street Gang Problem. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990. Meuhlbauer, Gene, and Laura Dodder. The Losers: Gang Delinquency in an American Suburb. New York: Praeger, 1983. Miller, Jody. “The Girls in the Gang: What We’ve Learned from Two Decades of Research.” In Gangs in America III, ed. C. Ronald Huff. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2002. Monti, Daniel. Wannabe: Gangs in Suburbs and Schools. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1994. Moore, Joan W. Going Down to the Barrio: Homeboys and Homegirls in Change. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1991. National Gang Center. 2011 National Youth Gang Survey. U.S. Department of Justice. Nimmo, Melanie. The “Invisible” Gang Members: A Report on Female Gang Association in Winnipeg. Winnipeg, MB: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2001. Nurge, Dana. “Liberating yet Limiting: the Paradox of Female Gang Membership.” In Gangs and Society: Alternative Perspectives, ed. Louis Kontos, David Brotherton, and Luis Barrios. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Orlando, Valerie. “From Rap to Raï in the Mixing Bowl: Beur Hip-Hop Culture and Banlieue Cinema in Urban France.” Journal of Popular Culture 36, no. 3 (winter 2003): 395–415. Oxford Dictionaries. “gang.” https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ english/gang. Park, Robert E., and Ernest Watson Burgess. The City. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Pearson, Geoffrey. Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears. London, UK: Macmillan Press, 1983. Puffer, Joseph A. The Boy and His Gang. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1912. Richards, Pamela, Richard A Berk, and Brenda Forster. Crime as Play: Delinquency in a Middle Class Suburb. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Publishing Co, 1979. Richardson, Chris. The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. In Anti-Immigration in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia, ed. Karen Arnold. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 2011. Richardson, Chris, and Hans A. Skott-Myhre, eds. Habitus of the Hood. Chicago, IL: Intellect Press, 2012. Rodman, Gilbert B. “Race  .  .  . and Other Four Letter Words: Eminem and the Cultural Politics of Authenticity.” Popular Communication 4, no. 2 (June 2006): 95–121. Rose, Tricia. The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk about When We Talk about Hip Hop— and Why It Matters. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2008. Samuels, David. “The Rap on Rap.” In Popular Culture: An Introductory Text, ed. Jack Nachbar and Kevin Lause. Bowling Green, KY: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1992.

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Sela-Shayovitz Revital. “Gangs and the Web: Gang Members’ Online Behavior.” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 28, no. 4 (November 2012): 389–405. Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin, 2006. Tapscott, Don. Growing Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009. Thompson, Hunter S. Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga. New York: Ballantine Books, 1966. Thompson, Janice E. Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Thrasher, Frederic M. The Gang: A Study of 1, 313 Gangs in Chicago. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Toland, John. The Dillinger Days. New York: Da Capo Press, 1995. Tucker, Ken. Scarface Nation: The Ultimate Gangster Movie and How It Changed America. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2008. Van Deburg, William L. Hoodlums: Black Villains and Social Bandits in American Life. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Whyte, William Foote. Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1943. Williams, Gareth, Peter Pentz, and Matthias Wemhoff, eds. Vikings: Life and Legend. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014.

CHAPTER NINE

Fear and Loathing in Suburbia: School Shootings David McWilliam

Defining School Shootings When Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed twelve students and a teacher and injured a further twenty-four at Columbine High School, Littleton, Colorado, on April 20, 1999, school shooters became the popular image of seemingly random, chaotic violence in American suburbia. Within American popular culture, this posed an apparently irresolvable problem. Being teenagers, the school shooters’ culpability is hard to determine. Debates about the widespread availability of firearms in the United States and the role of violent media as possible inspiration for nihilistic rage are entangled in scapegoating narratives that seek to find individuals or groups whose blame can absolve society of collective responsibility. Although school shooters have been read as monstrous psychopaths in true crime, fictional texts have explored them as flawed, yet sympathetic, troubled characters and dangerously introverted loners. Intense media scrutiny and promises from politicians to take steps to prevent further tragedies only seem to heighten the sense of impasse that dogs their representation across media. This impasse reflects a deep rift in contemporary American politics, in which school shooters have become a kind of test case enabling irreconcilable political views to be played out. Glenn W. Muschert offers the following typology of school shootings: “rampage shootings,” “mass murders,” “terrorist attacks,” “targeted

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shootings,” and “government shootings.”1 Muschert classifies Columbine as a rampage shooting, the kind most frequently brought to national attention and around which a moral panic formed. Rampage shootings have occurred in both schools and universities and are defined as being committed by a perpetrator who is a “member or former member [of the institution], such as a student, former student, employee, or former employee,” selecting the “school or group of students  .  .  . for symbolic significance, often to exact revenge on a community or to gain power.”2 Michael Rocque highlights how individuals are not targeted once a rampage shooting begins: “What matters in these instances is not exacting revenge on particular people, but to make a statement with violence—it may not matter who the ultimate victims are.”3 Columbine took place amid a cluster of such rampage massacres in the late 1990s, which have continued in the years since. Despite school shootings predating Columbine, Muschert notes that the intense media scrutiny created a widespread “public perception of school shootings as an emergent and increasing social problem.”4 Even though Columbine is not the most deadly (rather, Seung-Hui Cho’s shooting spree at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, on April 16, 2007, in which he killed thirty-two people in two locations before committing suicide), it has come to stand for a category of offence, the school shooting, and Harris and Klebold for a type of criminal, the school shooter, in American popular culture. Muschert notes that school shooters had a very brief period of prominence as a national crisis from 1997 to 2001 before reporters largely returned to covering their crimes as local issues.5 The moral panic that developed as a response to them was situated between panics about serial killers, which emerged in the 1980s, and terrorism in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Why was the panic not sustained, when school shootings continue to happen across the United States? Whereas serial killers fascinate due to their ability to avoid detection as they murder over a prolonged period of time, school shooters often commit a single act of mass violence followed either by death or capture shortly afterward. Terrorists often have manifestos or goals that link them to wider political issues, prompting debates about U.S. foreign and domestic policies. Despite various documents outlining school shooters’ motives, school shootings have been presented as “acts of terrorism without an ideological core,” very difficult to predict or understand.6 This has led commentators such as Jonathan Fast to concentrate on the psychological state of those who commit school shootings, arguing that a shooter is often “a narcissist, or in common parlance, a Drama Queen, a person who craves attention and lacks empathy, two factors which unfortunately operate synergistically

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in turning a suicide, a private event, into a mass murder, a public event.”7 Peter Langman offers a more systematic typology of school shooters based on their psychological disposition/condition: “psychopathic, psychotic, and traumatized.”8 Unlike serial killers and terrorists, school shooters have been much harder to depict as wholly responsible for their crimes. One possible reason for this is the young age of both the killers and their victims, who are very often teenagers. As Thomas Hine notes, the ambiguous position of the teenager in American culture, situated between the innocence of childhood and the autonomy of adulthood, creates a sense of confusion as regards their agency: Teenagers are often expected to be transgressors, and when they do fail to conform to the frequently ambiguous rules within which they are expected to live, they can be punished very severely. Institutionally, teenagers are treated as something less than real people—sometimes resembling children, sometimes adults. And during the 1990s, it has become politically popular to punish them as both.9

In addition to their young age, the class and ethnicity of most school shooters has also generated significant debate. As Rocque notes, while “[s]tudies show that violence is disproportionately concentrated in minority and lower class populations”, rampage school shooters are nearly all “middle to lower middle class white males.”10 Rocque claims that this has political significance: “The involvement of middle class shooters in middle class areas rather than inner city populations may explain the media saturation that makes the incidence of such events appear more prevalent than they are.”11 Therefore, the cultural effects of the school shooting panic were perhaps influenced by what Sara Ahmed identifies as “an unequal relation to entitlement,” in which “more privileged subjects will have a greater recourse to narratives of injury. That is, the more access subjects have to public resources, the more access they may have to the capacity to mobilise narratives of injury within the public domain.”12 Such “narratives of injury” allowed the communities in which these crimes took place to demand sympathy, rather than the condemnation that others are often subjected to. However, the typical race and class of school shooters means that their crimes create divisions within suburbia, provoking competing groups to blame one another and search for scapegoats. Media commentators have speculated whether school shooters were themselves victims of bullying and, if so, whether this challenges their construction as monstrous offenders. Slavoj Žižek offers a useful formulation

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for thinking about how the focus on acts of violence often obscures the underlying causes: At the forefront of our minds, the obvious signals of violence are acts of crime and terror, civil unrest, international conflict. But we should learn to step back, to disentangle ourselves from the fascinating lure of this directly visible “subjective” violence, violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent. We need to perceive the contours of the background which generates such outbursts . . . [S]ubjective violence is just the most visible portion of a triumvirate that also includes two objective kinds of violence[:] “symbolic” violence embodied in language and its forms [and] “systemic” violence, or the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems.13

Presenting school shooters as solely responsible for their “subjective” violence is rather seductive for some writers who deal with the phenomenon. They privilege the question of motivation, attempting to explore the mindset of school shooters while ultimately leaving them as enigmatic figures, even to themselves. Others seek to consider how school shootings can be linked to “systemic” violence in the United States, making them symptomatic of a wider cultural malaise. This makes their denunciation far more complex than that of adult criminals with similarly high body counts.

Apportioning Blame in the Aftermath In addition to grief and outrage, Columbine provoked introspection and recriminations within the local and national communities because the killers were teenage students at the school. Thus accusations were made by both conservatives and liberals that implicated the wider U.S. society. Broadly speaking, the former blamed violent popular culture, especially video games and nihilistic music (identified as synonymous with the school clique the Trench Coat Mafia the killers were alleged to have belonged to) for the massacre, whereas the latter targeted American gun culture and the widespread availability of firearms. Taking Columbine as a case study for the school shooting phenomenon, it is instructive to look at how different groups in a diverse range of media sought to narrativize the crisis to apportion blame or reach an understanding of the killers’ motives. One of the first popular theories was that the killers were part of a violent goth subculture despite, as Catherine Spooner notes, neither shooter’s being a goth “in the sense that most members of the subculture understood it.”14 After Columbine, goths were condemned in mainstream U.S. news media

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by those outside the subculture who viewed it through the prism of fear and misunderstanding. The Trench Coat Mafia was a name that suggested organized criminal resistance, subsequently dismissed as groundless, which fed into rumors that Columbine was a retaliatory attack for bullying and social exclusion. Seemingly, Harris and Klebold’s taste for such garments was enough to mark them as goths in the reports that appeared in the wake of the massacre. Indeed, Richard Griffiths notes how much of the moral panic linking Goths to school shootings stemmed from a segment in an episode of ABC’s 20/20 current affairs program called “The Goth Phenomenon,” which aired April 21, 1999: Apart from reinforcing the claim that Harris and Klebold might have been involved with what they called the “gothic movement,” the feature suggested that some goths had engaged in homicidal activity before the Columbine disaster and that goths were a new type of white suburban teenage gang that participated in self-mutilation. The belief that goths posed a potential threat to “normal” Americans was reinforced in the report by Steve Rickard, a member of the Denver Police Department gang unit, who argued that most suburban areas in the USA were potentially affected by “suburban groups like the gothic movement.”15

By naming a visible group as responsible for the massacre, the early accounts were quickly repeated by news organizations around the world, enabling public anger to drown out the searching analysis required by such a significant crime. The moral panic that accompanied it cast goths as a suburban, violent gang, and an individual was required as the figurehead for the threat they were alleged to pose to Middle America. After rising to prominence in the preceding three years as the self-styled Antichrist Superstar, alternative rock star Marilyn Manson was identified as the preeminent corrupting influence over America’s ghoulish teenagers. In his ethnographic study of the subculture, Paul Hodkinson challenges the notion that goths form an overtly oppositional group at odds with the mainstream, such as the mods and rockers studied by Stanley Cohen. Instead, Hodkinson notes that goths emerged as a subculture in the 1980s alongside bands such as The Cure and The Sisters of Mercy, defined by four areas of subcultural substance: a shared set of values and tastes, a “translocal sense of affiliation and collective distinction,” a commitment to spend significant amounts of time and energy engaging with others in the subculture, and, based on his ethnographic study of the British goth scene in the 1990s, the ability to operate “relatively autonomously.”16 In contrast, Manson draws on goth imagery as part of a performance art, which in

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turn is in the service of a countercultural critique of American hypocrisy. As Charles Conaway argues, “Manson adopts a seemingly monstrous persona in order to suggest that his monstrosity is a product of mainstream culture.”17 The conflation of the two allowed goths to be misrepresented as politically aggressive and made Manson the de facto spokesperson for a subculture he only partially inhabited. Indeed, as Hodkinson notes, Manson is not always accepted as a goth within the subculture because of his metal-oriented music, as well as the mainstream, commercial success and notoriety he courted in the 1990s.18 It is through this process that subculture and counterculture were confused, as goths’ self-identification as a separate group to mainstream society was interpreted as a deliberate opposition that fostered fantasies of violent retribution for bullying, harassment, and intimidation. Whereas Cohen notes that a successful moral panic requires “a soft target, easily denounced, with little power and preferably without even access to the battlefields of cultural politics,” Manson had ready access to those battlefields and was steeped in the rhetoric of cultural criticism.19 Indeed, he had sought out the role of adversary earlier in the decade by adopting the persona of the Antichrist from the Book of Revelation, which, as Robert Fuller argues, has been identified with different anti-authoritarian figures throughout American history: “The Antichrist is most vividly present in those moments when otherwise faithful persons are attracted to ideas that would gradually lead them to abandon unquestioning commitment to group orthodoxy. The efforts of various persons to name the Antichrist thus tend to mirror the internal struggles of individuals and communities to ward off doubt or ambiguity.”20 As a popular rock star and former journalist with a sharp eye for social commentary, Manson was able to offer his own interpretation of the tragedy in Rolling Stone magazine, subverting the role of scapegoat by making it a platform from which to spread his countercultural message further than ever before. In the article “Columbine: Whose Fault is It?” Manson challenges the scapegoating process, in which one person is blamed for a crisis, by attributing responsibility for the massacre to the whole of American society: “When it comes down to who’s to blame for the high school murders in Littleton, Colorado, throw a rock and you’ll hit someone who’s guilty.”21 This is an obvious allusion to the passage in The New Testament in which Jesus responds to a mob calling for a woman to be stoned for adultery by saying, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”22 This slippage from an unholy to a holy perspective was influenced by the massacre occurring during Manson’s Mechanical Animals (1998) era, in which he combined the role of Christ and alien visitor to Earth, outsider figures who are puzzled

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by humanity’s capacity for violence and betrayal before being destroyed by it. Manson presents himself as the product of a dysfunctional culture, critiquing a parasitic commercial relationship between tragedy and media coverage in much of his work, a point he highlights in the article: The name Marilyn Manson has never celebrated the sad fact that America puts killers on the front of Time magazine, giving them as much notoriety as our favorite movie stars. From Jesse James to Charles Manson, the media, since their inception, have turned criminals into folk heroes. They just created two new ones when they plastered those dip-shits Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris’ pictures on the front of every newspaper. Don’t be surprised if every kid who gets pushed around has two new idols.23

Here Manson makes counteraccusations against the people who are attempting to turn him into a scapegoat, suggesting that the sensationalist coverage of high-profile murder cases may encourage future copycat killings as downtrodden outsiders see murder as a vehicle for fame and notoriety. At the same time, he is positioning himself alongside those heaping invective on the dead killers, something he would later distance himself from. In the final album of the triptych begun with Antichrist Superstar (1996), Holy Wood (in the Shadow of the Valley of Death) (2000), Manson plays the character of Adam Kadmon, a figure who mirrors his own attempt to foster revolution only to see it co-opted by corporations and distorted in the news media, ultimately committing suicide in disgust and thus making himself a martyr to his own cause.24 Analyzing the cover image of Manson crucified with his lower jaw having been torn off, Conaway argues that instead of deconstructing the process of scapegoating, Manson turns the media itself into a scapegoat: “Ultimately, then, through the image of the crucifixion, Manson aligns himself with Christ, seizing the moral authority that had been used against him in the moral panics that signified his supposed depravity. In fact, he not only turns the arguments of the moralists on their heads, claiming moral superiority for himself, but he also more or less accuses the moralists of perpetrating exactly the kind of brutality that they claim he incited.”25 However, this tells a rather incomplete picture of Manson’s complex response to Columbine through Holy Wood. For instance, the single “The Nobodies” sees the singer write from the perspective of a school shooter, offering a semi-empathetic representation of their desire to be acknowledged through an act so extreme that they can no longer be marginalized and ignored. Rather than justifying their crimes or celebrating their infamy, this nihilistic track sees Manson identify with the killers as a figure who has been made into a monster by a society that rejects him.

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From a liberal perspective, Michael Moore’s documentary Bowling for Columbine (2002) attempts to move beyond the scapegoating process by looking at wider factors that made the massacre possible, considering a sense of violent alienation in high schools, but reserving most criticism for the widespread availability of firearms in the United States. Moore channels the viewer outrage at the carnage against those who remained firmly in support of gun ownership in the wake of Columbine: the National Rifle Association. However, this campaign becomes haunted by the same sort of rhetoric used when Manson was selected as scapegoat, holding Charlton Heston, then president of the NRA, individually accountable for the vastly powerful gun lobby he was but a part of. Interestingly, Moore’s interview with Manson for the documentary presents the Antichrist Superstar in a very different light to the position he adopted in the months following Columbine, as he suggests that such troubled teenagers as Harris and Klebold be given a sympathetic hearing.

True Crime Treatments Mark Seltzer defines true crime as follows: [O]ne of the popular genres of the pathological public sphere. It posits stranger-intimacy and vicarious violation as models of sociality. This might be described as a social tie on the model of referred pain. And in that true crime is crime fact that looks like crime fiction, it marks or irritates the distinction between real and fictional reality, holding steadily visible that vague and shifting region between truth and falsity where belief resides: what we can call, on the model of referred pain, referred belief [emphasis in original text].26

The tenth anniversary of Columbine saw the publication of two true crime books on the massacre: Jeff Kass’s Columbine: A True Crime Story (2009), which claims to “tell the complete story of that day,” and Dave Cullen’s Columbine (2009), presented as “the definitive account of those terrible events.” Whereas Kass’s book offers a rather exhaustive overview of the documented evidence and is heavily critical of the police investigation, Cullen focuses on interpreting Harris as a monstrous psychopath, allowing him to reframe the case as a story about inhuman evil. In addition to incorporating elements of crime fiction into his narrative, early in Columbine, Cullen draws on another fictional tradition, the gothic, to remind the reader of the traumatic wounds caused by school shootings: A terrifying affliction had infested America’s small towns and suburbs: the school shooter. We knew it because we had seen it on TV. We had

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read about it in the newspapers. It had materialized inexplicably two years before [Columbine]. The perpetrator was always a white boy, always a teenager, in a placid town few had ever heard of. Most of the shooters acted alone. Each attack erupted unexpectedly and ended quickly, so TV never caught the turmoil. The nation watched the aftermaths: endless scenes of schools surrounded by ambulances, overrun by cops, hemorrhaging terrified children.27

Here, Cullen creates a sense of shared identity between reader and author as the “we” who watch the horror of successive school shootings in the media, drawn together to form what Seltzer terms a “wound culture” that commiserates with the victims. That these attacks are “inexplicable” and “unexpected” is suggestive of motiveless crime, recalling the slaughter of strangers by serial killers. The scenes are “endless” because of their repetition in the media; like the looped footage of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, viewers are encouraged to relive the trauma vicariously over and over. School shootings, though extremely serious, are relatively rare when compared to the overall homicide figures in the United States; it is their circulation and prominence in the media that creates the impression of an infestation. The schools are anthropomorphized to become wounded figures that are metonymic representatives of the wider nation, “infested” by parasitical entities that attack the lifeblood of the community; the children who represent its future. Whereas the victims are associated with innocence by being referred to as “children,” the killers are marked as having compromised their childhood through their crimes and are differentiated with the term “teenagers,” a more troubling, liminal figure in American culture. The school shooter is thus presented as an “affliction,” an inhuman “it,” creating a state of pain vicariously experienced by Cullen’s audience and fellow citizens. A similar conflation of the physical wounds of the victims and the trauma in the wider community can be found in the words of then President Bill Clinton, whom Cullen quotes as stating that “the community is an open wound” in the aftermath of the attack.28 Cullen uses graphic depictions of the wounds inflicted on Harris and Klebold’s victims, particularly Patrick Ireland, to generate empathy with them, in a process Seltzer describes as “stranger-intimacy and vicarious violation.” The level of detail provided draws on the techniques of body horror to appropriate Ireland’s wounds for a law-and-order agenda that uses empathy to foster hatred of the shooters: Patrick’s skull had stopped several buckshot fragments. Other debris lodged in his scalp as well—probably wood splinters torn from the tabletop in the

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blast. One pellet got through. It burrowed six inches through spongy brain matter, entering through the scalp just above his hairline on the left, and lodging near the middle rear. Bits of his optical centre were missing; most of his language capacity was wiped out. He regained consciousness, but words were hard to form and difficult to interpret as well. Pathways for all sorts of functions had been severed.29

Here Cullen is inviting his audience to gather around this trauma and feel a shared sense of horror at the consequences of Harris and Klebold’s actions, with the pellet transformed into a maggot-like alien intrusion that has devoured important sections of Ireland’s brain when “burrowing” into it, leaving him in a critical condition that would take years to recover from and that would mark his body for the rest of his life. This demarcates a division between the reader and the killers, who demonstrated a lack of affect in the presence of the wounded and dead, failing the test of empathy that has come to signify evil in the generic conventions of true crime as set out by Jean Murley: “Conscience—its presence and absence—has become an ordering principle, a way of separating the good from the bad, the benignly mad from the dangerously so. Through its use in true crime, the notion of the psychopath/sociopath has become a metaphorical tool, a way of first making known and then separating the strange, the frightening, disturbing, and finally, the monstrous.”30 Endorsing FBI Special Agent Dwayne Fuselier’s posthumous profiling of Harris, Cullen identifies him as a psychopath, neither sane nor insane, who had no motive, felt no remorse and drew the weaker-willed Klebold into his deadly plans. One of the key elements of the psychopath’s lack of empathy is the refusal to see other human beings as capable of feeling. It is therefore interesting to note that, in explaining just how abnormal Harris’s mind was, Cullen states that although he could feel more empathy than a rogue AI such as HAL from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Harris fell “far short of the average golden retriever”;31 “[h]is brain was never scanned, but it probably would have shown activity unrecognizable as human to most neurologists.”32 Not only does the author dehumanize his subject by locating him somewhere between machine intelligences and domestic pets on a spectrum of empathy, but he does so by surmising the results of medical examinations not carried out. Reducing the causal factors behind the massacre to the malign influence of an individual obfuscates the network of ideologies and vested interests that shape responses such as the call for greater gun ownership to guard against future atrocities. The overall effect is not dissimilar to the scapegoating process, in that the impulse to absolve wider society can be seen at work as Cullen links

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school shooters to serial killers and terrorists as manifestations of evil. Furthermore, in light of the status of terrorism as the pre-eminent threat facing American society in the twenty-first century, reframing Harris as a failed domestic terrorist can be read as an attempt to emphasize the book’s relevance to a contemporary audience.

Fictional Responses School shootings were the subject of limited fictional treatment prior to Columbine. Stephen King’s novella Rage (1977), published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, offers close identification with a school shooter through the first-person narration of Charlie Decker. After learning of his expulsion from school for hospitalizing a member of staff, Charlie “goes berserk,” murdering two teachers and then holding his classmates captive in a process he refers to as “getting it on.” Together, they explore his motivations through talking about traumatic moments in his past. Although it appears that Charlie’s rampage is fueled by a wide range of factors, from bullying to embarrassment by peers and teachers, an oedipal struggle with his father is offered as the ultimate explanation. Reflecting on the aftermath of a bloody fight between the two while sitting above the cooling corpse of his teacher, Charlie confesses: “Now I wish it was him I’d killed, if I had to kill anyone. This thing on the floor between my feet is a classic case of misplaced aggression.”33 During their discussion, Charlie’s captive classmates increasingly come to sympathize and empathize with him, revealing their own anger, hatred and rebelliousness. They begin by telling him stories about the humiliations they have suffered, culminating with them torturing the only student who clings to orthodox morality in his response to the situation. Rather than pass judgment on Charlie, King presents him as the catalyst for the expression of his peers’ own inner rage. After allegations that Rage might have inspired a series of school shootings in the 1990s, King withdrew it from circulation, a move that seemed to endorse the link between school shootings and violent popular culture. Indeed, Joseph Grenny has called for either a law restricting the glorification and promotion of school shootings in the media or other actions that will “make Stephen King’s response the norm rather than the exception.”34 A more extreme exploration of school shootings as the explosive results of repressed anger and anxiety can be found in Dennis Cooper’s My Loose Thread (2002). The novel possesses some of the key characteristics that James Annesley associates with blank fiction, which emerged as part of a wider American cultural shift in the late twentieth century typified by its “preoccupation with violence, indulgence, sexual excess,

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decadence, consumerism and commerce,” stylistically defined by “blank, atonal perspectives and fragile, glassy visions.”35 My Loose Thread follows the introverted torment of a teenager, Larry, who struggles to confront his feelings about the incestuous relationship he has with his younger brother, killing his parents and encouraging a fellow student to carry out a school shooting as inadequate responses to his inarticulacy. Here, the school shooter is a secondary character Larry does not think too deeply about, a Nazi in American suburbia who becomes enraged at manifestations of his own homosexuality, opting to emulate Harris and Klebold rather than face charges for raping a male student. Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003) is an even blanker representation of a school shooting, opting for minimal narrative so as to lend a documentary quality to the film, reinforced through long tracking shots that capture the experience of a massacre from numerous perspectives. Although Elephant seems to identify bullying as a possible cause for the school shooting and an intimate shower scene between the two male shooters once again suggests that repressed sexuality contributes to their rampage, the killers’ characters are not fleshed out enough for the viewer to understand their motivations. They stalk the school corridors armed to the teeth, wearing blank expressions that conceal whatever emotions they may be feeling. Elephant leaves the viewer without any sense of closure or resolution, ending with one of the shooters killing his accomplice and slowly hunting two other students. The effect is to create a sense of meaninglessness and hopelessness while a school shooting is in progress. In contrast, Warren Ellis’s “Shoot,” a comic strip for the Hellblazer series, pushes beyond the seeming irrationality of the shootings found in Rage, My Loose Thread, and Elephant, suggesting that they are a nihilistic response to societal failings. Written before Columbine but withheld from publication out of heightened sensitivity about the subject, “Shoot” was finally published by Vertigo in 2010. In it, occult detective John Constantine investigates a series of school shootings across America to understand the phenomenon. Constantine’s disturbing conclusion is that the massacres are the result of economic and political stagnation that has led to a nihilism shared by the killers and their victims: “They’re only kids, for Christ’s sake. This is the best response they can manage to the insane fucking world they’re in. They stand there and wait for the bullet.”36 The reader is then guided through to the final panel, in which Constantine notes how one of the victims is quietly telling his attacker to shoot. As such, Ellis’s story firmly roots the blame for school shootings in what Žižek would term the “systemic” failings within U.S. culture to provide young people with hope or a sense that their lives have real meaning.

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Rather than focus on the school shooter or victims, Lionel Shriver’s novel We Need to Talk about Kevin (2003) explores the moral panic generated in the wake of a school shooting from the perspective of the eponymous Kevin’s mother. Eva Khatchadourian’s success in business situates her as an example of the American Dream fulfilled until her son Kevin massacres his fellow students and she becomes vilified for his crimes. Suffering from postnatal depression and emotionally unsupported by her husband, Eva comes to believe that Kevin was born a malevolent presence in her life, linking to the bad-seed horror tradition of Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976). On rising to notoriety after his conviction, Kevin offers a form of social criticism that supports Manson’s views about celebrity murderers when interviewed for television: “Okay, it’s like this. You wake up, you watch TV, and you get in the car and you listen to the radio. You go to your little job or your little school, but you’re not going to hear about that on the 6:00 news, since guess what. Nothing is really happening. . . . And you know, it’s got so bad that I’ve started to notice, the people on TV? Inside the TV? Half the time they’re watching TV. . . . All these people, . . . [w]hat are they watching? . . . People like me” [emphasis in original text].37

In a move that echoes Mickey Knox’s (Woody Harrelson) media-conscious confession to being a “natural born killer” in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994), Kevin is seemingly challenging others in his society to join him in violent anarchy. This apocalyptic vision invokes the Antichrist, which, as Fuller characterizes it, “embodies those alluring traits and qualities that at a deeper level threaten to seduce even the ‘true believer’ into apostasy.”38 When asked whether her son feels any remorse for his actions, Eva’s own reading of Kevin’s crimes echoes Manson’s attempt to paint school shootings as symptomatic of a culture in which becoming a mass murderer offers the possibility of fame and notoriety: “What could he conceivably regret? Now he’s somebody, isn’t he? And he’s found himself, as they said in my day . . . He’s a murderer. It’s marvelously unambiguous” [emphasis in original text].39 However, Eva’s scathing self-analysis and the demonization she suffers at the instigation of the victims’ families force a re-evaluation of her son as they both become monstrous in the eyes of the local community. Kevin’s crimes were committed as a minor, and so his sentence is shorter than it would have been if he had waited for his next birthday, reinforcing the troublingly liminal status of the teenage school shooter. During this time,

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Eva’s position as an outsider helps her to understand Kevin and, as the persona of anarchic Antichrist crumbles, she recognizes a fellow frightened, alienated, and flawed human being. The final paragraph ends the novel on a note of hope mingled with despair: [A]fter three days short of eighteen years, I can finally announce that I am too exhausted and too confused and too lonely to keep fighting, and if only out of desperation or even laziness I love my son. He has five grim years left to serve in an adult penitentiary, and I cannot vouch for what will walk out the other side. But in the meantime, there is a second bedroom in my serviceable apartment.40

As such, Kevin ends with the prospect of cohabitation and the possibility of building a relationship when he is released. Eva’s shifting perception of her son reverses the process of alienation identified in the lyrics of the final track on Antichrist Superstar, “Man That You Fear,” in which Manson reflects on shedding his old skin to become a countercultural monster, as her malevolent child has become humanized through their mutual suffering. DBC Pierre’s satirical novel Vernon God Little (2003) offers a very different approach to the moral panic about school shooters and can be read in light of a history of witch-hunts dating back to the Salem witch trials of 1692, which Bernard Rosenthal argues have been “the vehicle for countless metaphors of oppression and persecution” and have “had a powerful hold on American imagination.”41 Pierre explores the ways in which the tragedy of a school shooting in the Texan town of Martirio is exploited by a moral entrepreneur, Eulalio (Lally) Ledesma, who harnesses what Cohen calls the “agents of moral indignation,” from police officers hoping to raise their profile to mass media outlets looking for a ratings-winning story, to build a commercial and political empire.42 No hard proof is presented for Vernon Gregory Little’s culpability, but the taint of friendship with the shooter is sufficient for his conviction in the court of public opinion. Initially, Lally offers to assist Vernon, telling him that he needs to find a way of controlling the narrative about his relationship to the massacre: “People decide with or without the facts—if you don’t get out there and paint your paradigm, someone’ll paint it for you.  .  .  . You need positioning, like a product in the market—the jails are full of people who didn’t manage their positions.”43 When Vernon refuses to give Lally an exclusive on his story, he switches from would-be protector to lead witch-hunter, not because of any fresh evidence, but due to spite and the potential for personal advancement. By being privy to the disconnect between Lally’s public image and

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private machinations, the reader is presented with a satire of the sort of cynical self-interest that may be at play with the “right-thinking people” who instigate moral panics. Considering that many school shooters die before they can be arrested and are thus not able to reflect on the consequences of their crimes, gothic fiction offers the possibility of imagining their perspectives from beyond the grave. Danny Ledonne’s Super Columbine Massacre RPG! (2005) is a computer game in which the player takes on the role of Harris/Klebold. Ledonne claims that the Columbine shooters can be understood as the “canaries in the mine—foretelling of an ‘apocalypse soon’ for those remaining to ponder their deeds. . . . I present to you one of the darkest days in modern history and ask, ‘Are we willing to look in the mirror?’” [emphasis in original text].44 The implication is that Super Columbine Massacre RPG! is a critique of American society, in which so many school shootings have taken place. However, any satirical intent is hopelessly confused through the close identification of the game’s creator with Harris and Klebold. Players must follow in their footsteps in order to trigger select quotations from material by the killers found after the massacre, in an attempt to explore their mindsets. The game has a metafictional quality because of its numerous references to Doom (1993), a violent first-person shooter Harris supposedly loved, such as the switch to a first-person perspective whenever the player fights someone and the introduction of the game’s demonic enemies. The notion that this is a role-playing game seemingly arises from the rewards of experience points and the repeated message “Another victory for the Trench Coat Mafia!” every time they kill those in their path. This is never really developed outside of in-game bonuses and remains rather superficial. The violence at the school is interspersed with flashbacks to when the killers felt powerless and humiliated, generating a sense of sympathy that jars with the glib treatment of the murders committed while playing as them. More problematic is their celebration in Hell, as the shooters fight their way to Satan, who compliments them after they defeat him in combat: “You boys have been kicking ass and taking names all the way to Hell and back,” making them into anti-heroes. Ledonne’s attempt to emphasize the significance of Columbine leads him to end the game with the proclamation “The Final Epoch Has Begun: Mission Accomplished!” As such, the Columbine massacre becomes overdetermined as ushering in the final stage of human existence and beginning the End of Days foretold in the Bible’s Book of Revelation. The first season of Brad Falchuk and Ryan Murphy’s television series American Horror Story (2011) explores the psychology of a spectral school shooter forever frozen in time. The ghost, Tate Langdon (Evan Peters), is

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seeing one of the new owners of the house he haunts, Ben Harmon (Dylan McDermott), for therapy sessions. Although Tate presents details of his involvement in a school shooting as fantasies that he has not acted upon, it is later revealed that he massacred his fellow students and was killed by armed police when resisting arrest in his home. Tate gives reasons for killing his peers that are superficially altruistic: “It’s a filthy goddamn world and, honestly, I feel like I am helping to take them away from the shit and the piss that runs through the streets. I’m helping to take them somewhere clean and kind”. What is missing from these reflections is any sense of his victims’ agency: It is Tate’s judgment that their lives are disgusting and miserable; it is Tate’s decision to end them. The viewer is thus prompted to question whether he sees his victims as subjects or simply objects on which to carry out his will. Tate’s motivations are questioned when the spirits of the students he murdered walk the earth on Halloween in order to demand answers from him. Tate refuses to acknowledge that he knows them, treating his victims as figments of his imagination, and they leave frustrated and disappointed. One of the most poignant moments of the series occurs when Tate warns Ben’s teenage daughter, Violet (Taissa Farmiga), “Screw high school. That’s . . . It’s just a blip in your timeline. Don’t get stuck there.” This exchange highlights the horror of being trapped in the teenage angst of the high school dynamic, in which bullying can be perceived as all-encompassing and extreme solutions may seem attractive but then lead to far greater suffering. Although Tate is dead and thus beyond reprisals, he is tormented not only by what he done, but also what he feels it has made him become. Though it seems as if Tate may find a form of redemption through his relationship with Violet, it becomes apparent that his violent impulses have not been quelled when he is exposed as having raped her mother. As a ghost who impregnates a living woman, Tate fathers the Antichrist, reinforcing the connection between this figure and school shooters in American popular culture. Even so, Tate still seeks forgiveness from the restless spirits of the Harmon family, suggesting that he does not glory in his crimes but also that he privileges his own emotional suffering above those of his victims. The show heavily implies that the house itself is a malevolent force possessing the power to influence the behavior of the ghosts that haunt it, blurring the line between human agency and an inhuman source of pure evil. Violet rejects Tate on the grounds that he is intrinsically linked to its evil: “I used to think that you were like me; you were attracted to the darkness. But, Tate, you are the darkness.” Ben is much more clinical in his appraisal of the school shooter’s damned condition, echoing Cullen’s reading of Harris: “You’re a psychopath, Tate. It’s a mental

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disorder and therapy can’t cure it.” Ben goes on to claim that his former patient is “the worst kind” of psychopath, “charismatic,” “compelling,” and “a pathological liar.” Nevertheless, Tate is not fully banished from their lives and continues to exist as a presence on the margins within the house, standing in the shadows and holding onto hope of returning to the light. As such, Tate embodies the spectral figure of the school shooter that continues to haunt post-Columbine American popular culture.

Conclusion Despite persistent advocacy of sympathy and empathy for school shooters across a range of fictional and journalistic narratives, an even stronger lobby depicts them either as the deadly offspring of a sick society or as inherently evil psychopaths. These competing frameworks for understanding school shooters are the result of the liminal status of this category of criminal between childhood and adulthood, murderer and monster. This can perhaps be explained on the grounds that school shootings are an expression of teenage rage, predicated on reasons that may not even make sense to the killer later in life. From Kevin’s move to an adult penitentiary to Tate’s immortality, the passage of years clarifies the gravity of their actions and the devastating consequences for themselves, their families, and their victims. Although fictional school shooters may become repentant, it is questionable whether they will find forgiveness. Furthermore, if American society is in some sense to blame for this phenomenon, it is incredibly difficult to isolate the causal factors and even harder to reach the consensus necessary to take meaningful action. This can be seen in the raging conflict between those who believe that gun laws are too weak, granting dangerous individuals access to deadly weaponry, and those who advocate more widespread gun ownership so that communities can defend themselves from attack. These impulses find expression in the song “Take Out the Gunman” (2014) by alt-metal band Chevelle. The lyrics tell the story of an attempt to overpower or kill the perpetrator of a mass shooting, suggestive of vigilante power fantasies. However, the singer’s descent into disturbed screams towards the end of the song suggests that this is more a howl of frustration about a society in which rampage shootings have been normalized while the U.S. government refuses to take action to prevent them.

Notes 1.  Muschert, 62. 2. Ibid.

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3.  Rocque, 306. 4.  Muschert, 65. 5.  Ibid., 60. 6.  Fast, 9. 7.  Ibid., 18. 8.  Langman, 18. 9.  Hine, 17. 10.  Rocque, 306. 11. Ibid. 12.  Ahmed, 33. 13.  Žižek, 1. 14.  Spooner, 160. 15.  Griffiths, 407. 16.  Hodkinson, 195. 17.  Conaway, 132. 18. Hodkinson, 79. 19.  Cohen, xi. 20.  Fuller, 6. 21. Manson. 22.  The Bible, John 8:7. 23. Manson. 24.  For an in-depth analysis of the album, see the entry for Holy Wood (in the Shadow of the Valley of Death) on mansonwiki.com. 25.  Conaway, 126–127. 26.  Seltzer, 2. 27.  Cullen, 14–15. 28. Ibid., 93. 29.  Ibid., 77. 30.  Murley, 154. 31.  Cullen, 243. 32.  Ibid., 242. 33.  King, 136. 34. Grenny. 35.  Annesley, 1–2. 36.  Ellis, 27. 37.  Shriver, 414–415. 38.  Fuller, 9. 39.  Shriver, 194. 40.  Ibid., 468. 41.  Rosenthal, 1. 42.  Cohen, 7. 43.  Pierre, 33–34. 44. Ledonne.

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Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Annesley, James. Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel. London, UK: Pluto, 1998. The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha. 1997; repr. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008. Cohen, Stanley. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers, 3rd ed. 2002; repr. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. Conaway, Charles. “Manson’s R+J: Shakespeare, Marilyn Manson, and the Fine Art of Scapegoating.” In Rock Brands: Selling Sound in a Media Saturated Culture, ed. Elizabeth Barfoot Christian, 119–137. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2011. Cullen, Dave. Columbine. Tiverton: Old Street, 2009. Ellis, Warren et al. “Shoot.” In John Constantine, Hellblazer: Shoot, 6–28. New York: DC Comics, 2014. Fast, Jonathan. Ceremonial Violence: Understanding Columbine and Other School Rampage Shootings. New York: Overlook, 2009. Fuller, Robert. Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Grenny, Joseph. “The Media is an Accomplice in Public Shootings: A Call for a ‘Stephen King’ Law.” Forbes. 13 December 13, 2012. www.forbes.com/sites/ josephgrenny/2012/12/13/the-media-is-an-accomplice-in-public-shootings-acall-for-a-stephen-king-law/. Griffiths, Richard. “The Gothic Folk Devils Strike Back! Theorizing Folk Devil Reaction in the Post-Columbine Era.” Journal of Youth Studies 13, no. 3 (2010): 403–422. doi.org/10.1080/13676260903448021. Hine, Thomas. The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager. New York: Perennial, 2000. Hodkinson, Paul. Goth: Identity, Style and Subculture. Oxford, UK: Berg, 2002. King, Stephen, Rage. In The Bachman Books. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1987. Langman, Peter. Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009 Ledonne, Danny. “Artist’s Statement.” www.columbinegame.com/statement.htm. Manson, Marilyn. “Columbine: Whose Fault is It?” Rolling Stone. June 24, 1999. www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/columbine-whose-fault-is-it-19990624. Murley, Jean. The Rise of True Crime: 20th-century Murder and American Popular Culture. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008. Muschert, Glenn W. “Research in School Shootings.” Sociology Compass 1, no. 1 (2007): 60–80. doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00008.x. Pierre, DBC. Vernon God Little. London, UK: Faber and Faber, 2003. Rocque, Michael. “Exploring School Rampage Shootings: Research, Theory, and Policy.” The Social Science Journal 49, no. 3 (September 2012): 304–315. doi. org/10.1016/j.soscij.2011.11.001.

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Rosenthal, Bernard. Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Seltzer, Mark. True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity. New York: Routledge, 2007. Shriver, Lionel. We Need to Talk about Kevin. London, UK: Serpent’s Tail, 2006. Spooner, Catherine. Fashioning Gothic Bodies. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2004. Žižek, Slavoj. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London, UK: Profile, 2009.

CHAPTER TEN

Fatal Attraction: The Serial Killer in American Popular Culture Abby Bentham

If a single figure can be said to exemplify American popular culture’s apparent fascination with violence, it is the enigmatic serial murderer. The mythos that has sprung up around the serial killer is both potent and ubiquitous; representations occur in various forms of media, including fiction, true crime, film and television, music, and graphic novels. So iconic is this figure that one can even purchase serial killer action figures, trading cards, and murderabilia.1 Notably, this is not an entirely niche market; CDs of Charles Manson’s music can be purchased from Barnes and Noble, and in 2010, Dexter action figures were available to purchase in Toys ‘R’ Us. Indeed, the polysemic serial killer holds such a unique place in the cultural imaginary that he or she has in some ways come to be seen as emblematic of America itself. David Schmid argues that “the serial killer is as quintessentially American a figure as the cowboy”2—and the comparison with this feted, roaming outlaw is a just one. Both figures capture the spirit of American individualism and the pushing of boundaries; both have transcended their lived reality to achieve near-mythical status. Yet when one considers the actuality of serial murder—the suffering and degradation of victims, the devastated families left behind, the assault on law and order—the allure of the serial killer is hard to understand. The serial killer is not a noble renegade fighting back against a corrupt administration, but a disturbed and dangerous individual preying on society’s most vulnerable members. So how do we account for the serial killer’s enduring appeal? And how has this figure become so central to American popular culture?

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Exemplar of Modernity Serial murder, which the FBI defines as the “unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s), in separate events,”3 is generally considered to be a modern phenomenon. The term “serial murder” has its origins in the mid-1960s, although it did not come into general usage until the 1980s; however, the concept has existed since at least 1888, when Jack the Ripper slaughtered five prostitutes in the Whitechapel area of London. Media coverage of the case was frenzied, in Europe and America as well as in the UK, and reporters on both sides of the Atlantic were united in their disapprobation of the unknown perpetrator, who was often described as “inhuman” and a “monster.” Theories about “Jack’s” identity abounded, but the popular conception of him as a middle-class white male preying on socially marginal women conforms with the profile of the prototypical serial killer that would be established a century later. It’s interesting to note that a popular British rumor that suggested that the Ripper may have been American was accepted by many American commentators, who “took a perverse pride in the idea  .  .  . perhaps feeling that the United States should lead the world in all things, including crime.”4 Regardless of national identity, the Whitechapel murderer came to exemplify modernity itself; the anonymity of the teeming, industrialized city enabled the killer to evade capture even as the growth in mass media allowed news of his exploits to be transmitted around the world. Representations abounded (and continue unabated today) across a variety of media, including newspapers, periodicals, broadsides, ballads, and the stage and, as the Ripper reached mythical proportions, “[h]e set the stage for crime literature where the serial killer takes the leading role in an almost heroic capacity.”5 Fascination with notorious criminals was not created by the Ripper case, however. In his study of the antiheroes of the penny dreadfuls and the later boys’ adventure comics, E. S. Turner notes that “[w]age slaves . . . wanted to read about fiery individualists, men of spirit who defied harsh laws and oppressive officialdom, even though they finished at the end of a hempen rope.”6 The eighteenth-century English thief Jack Sheppard (1702–1724) became a folk hero after his four daring escapes from prison and was immortalized via various narratives and dramatic treatments of his story by such luminaries as Daniel Defoe, John Gay, and William Ainsworth. Similarly, the French double murderer Pierre François Lacenaire (1803–1836), who had the added distinction of being a poet, achieved celebrity status thanks to his melodramatic performances in court. Lacenaire’s virtues were still being extolled twenty-five years after his death, demonstrating not only his lasting effect on popular culture, but also how he was romanticized and

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rendered attractive to generations of readers.7 (It’s interesting to note the similarities between the courtroom exploits and escapes from custody of Sheppard and Lacenaire and the poster boy for modern “celebrity” serial killing, Ted Bundy—clearly the points of appeal are universal and not timebound.) The first known American serial killer was H. H. Holmes, who in the 1880s killed an undetermined number of victims (estimates range from 20 to 200) in a horrifying gothic hotel that he built and operated himself and that would later be known as the “Murder Castle.” His arrest in 1894 and the details of his crimes, which emerged throughout 1895, were widely publicized, as was his confession, for which Hearst newspapers paid Holmes $10,0008 (the National Bureau of Economic Research puts the annual average salary in 1890 at $485, so this was a significant sum). 9 Each of these cases lays bare the interplay between fact and fiction, myth-making and media, which secures the legacies of celebrated criminals and feeds the public appetite for thrilling stories of transgression.

Narrative M.O. Narrative treatments of such tales, both in the nineteenth century and today, demonstrate the multiplicity of tropes at play within serial killer culture, including folklore, horror, carnivalesque, and the gothic. Each of these genres is concerned with boundary-breaking and taboo; perhaps most significant, they also offer audiences a titillating glimpse of the mysterious malefactor. Responses range from a thrill of terror to a brief and joyous vicarious contravention of societal norms, yet in exposing the threats to society such narratives ultimately serve to reinforce the very boundaries that are being transgressed. As Joseph Grixti explains, popular cultural representations of serial murder reassure audiences “about the rightness of the current state of civilized society, since the monsters repeatedly emerge as the exceptions that make the rule, the chinks and cracks in the social fabric that (though they may cause momentary concern and discomfort) are actually made to remind us of the structural soundness of the fabric itself.”10 Furthermore, the mythologization of killers such as Jack the Ripper offers a means of reducing the figure’s threat, as the focus shifts from the heinous reality of the crime to the carnivalesque nature of the crime narrative—from atrocity to attraction. We see this process at play in the recontextualization of figures such as Vlad the Impaler, whose story formed the basis of the enduring Dracula myth, Gilles de Rais, who inspired the Bluebeard legend, and Elizabeth Bathory, who Hammer Films reimagined as “Countess Dracula”; 11 the reality of their many hundreds of collective victims gets lost in the process of fictionalization.

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As Schmid observes, journalistic coverage of crime came relatively late to America, as newspapers had tended to eschew crime reporting on the grounds of taste and decency.12 This changed in the 1830s with the rise of the penny press, which favored a more relaxed reporting style, and over the course of the nineteenth century crime reporting rapidly became more salacious. Attempts to reintroduce a degree of respectability to murder narration would not be felt until the 1920s, when Edmund Pearson published a series of successful true crime books and articles in quality magazines such as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. Pearson’s strict selection criteria, aestheticism, and restrained poetics opened true crime to a more educated and reputable audience; conservative politics and a moralizing tone were also introduced.13 However, as the true crime genre gained in popularity, the veneer of respectability fell away and gory, sensationalistic narratives once more became the norm. Publications such as True Detective, which during the 1930s and 1940s “was reportedly selling two million copies per month,”14 established the lightly fictionalized, journalistic style of true crime narration that persists today and the genre dropped the pretense of offering moral instruction to its readers.

Fictional Representations As the twentieth century progressed, depictions of crime and criminality moved away from the cultural borders and became progressively central to the popular imaginary. Against a backdrop of two World Wars, economic crisis, gangsterism, and the rise of the political far right, narratives depicting humankind’s base nature were increasingly in demand. Depictions of serial killers and psychopaths abounded in fiction and film, particularly following the introduction of the paperback format. America’s Pocket Book imprint, which launched in 1939, was modeled on the success of England’s Penguin Books and quickly established itself as the leading provider of hardboiled and noir fiction. Other publishers, including Lion and Gold Medal, followed, providing what Geoffrey O’Brien has termed “a microcosm of American fantasies about the real world”15 and a “vision of the lurid underside of life.”16 Perhaps the most famous of the pulp writers, and the one most heavily invested in representations of serial killers, is Jim Thompson. His 1952 masterpiece, The Killer Inside Me, which Mark Seltzer has described as a “remarkable prototype novel of compulsive killing”17 offers one of popular culture’s most enduring—and engaging—fictional serial killers. Lou Ford is a “hyper-typical deputy sheriff living in the hypertypical American place, Central City”;18 his very ordinariness makes his aberrance all the more terrifying. The novel is narrated by Ford himself, a

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narrative technique that gives the reader unparalleled access to the killer’s interior and encourages an empathetic response to Thompson’s protagonist. The novel represents a high-water mark in the representation of serial killing in popular fiction and in the years since its release has lost none of its allure or intensity. 19 Indeed, first-person empathetic depictions of the serial killer would become a feature of the twentieth century, a phenomenon that contributed greatly to the valorization and ultimate celebrification20 of this figure. Characters such as Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley21 enjoyed similar support; like Lou Ford, he has remained central to the cultural imaginary thanks both to the power of the original novel and its 1999 film adaptation.22 Audience acceptance of such characters was relatively untroubled due to their fictional status; however, Truman Capote’s sympathetic rendering of killers Perry Smith and Dick Hickock in his 1965 “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood was met with a storm of criticism. In 1959, Smith and Hickock slaughtered four members of the Clutter family in Kansas; the crime and the killers’ subsequent apprehension, trial, and execution are unflinchingly depicted in the book. The brutality of the killers is explored in detail but so, too, is their humanity, a surprising narrative development that forces the reader to address his or her own moral equivalency. Furthermore, in its depiction of senseless viciousness, the book also spoke to contemporary cultural concerns about the breakdown of society, as Hollowell explains: “In Cold Blood exemplifies the seemingly random, meaningless crime that became symptomatic of America in the sixties. For implicit in the story of the Kansas killings are larger questions about the social dislocations of the sixties and the failure of conventional morality to explain away the senseless violence we read about daily in the newspaper.”23

Moral Panic and Political Rhetoric These fears moved to the cultural foreground in the latter part of the twentieth century, thanks to a significant increase in the incidence of serial murder in America. According to Peter Vronsky, “[b]etween 1960 and 1990, confirmed serial homicides increased by 940 percent. By early 1980, the rapid rise in serial murder was causing a panic that seized the nation.”24 The 1970s saw an extraordinary concentration of extreme serial murder cases25 and a concomitant increase not only in the news reporting of these crimes, but also in true crime treatments and fictional representations of serial murder. The rising tide of serial murder can be attributed to events such as population increase, technological advances in the mass media, and an increasing “tabloidization” of news reporting; it also reflects what Philip Jenkins calls “prevailing social and

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political currents, which in the United States at that time tended to be strongly conservative.”26 Following a number of high profile cases in the late 1970s— including the “Vampire of Sacramento,” Richard Chase, who was arrested in 1978 after claiming six victims; John Wayne Gacy, the “Killer Clown,”27 who was also apprehended in 1978 (thirty-three known victims); and Ted Bundy, who was initially incarcerated in 1975 but escaped twice in 1977 and 1978 before being recaptured (Bundy eventually admitted to thirty killings but was suspected of up to 100), serial murder was seized upon and used for rhetorical purposes by the New Right movement. As the capitalistic excesses of the late twentieth century accelerated, American society placed increasing importance on individualism, and there developed a set of social circumstances that Kevin Haggerty has implicated in the rise of serial murder as a modern phenomenon: 1. The mass media and the attendant rise of a celebrity culture 2. A society of strangers 3. A means/ends rationality largely divorced from value considerations 4. Cultural frameworks of denigration that tend to implicitly single out some groups for greater predation 5. Particular opportunity structures for victimization 6. The notion that society can be engineered28

The effect of urbanism on community values and personal identity challenged earlier conceptions of safety as a seemingly chaotic, uncaring modernity fostered a sense of vulnerability heightened by media coverage of the growing problem of serial murder. Anxieties about the roaming serial killer and “murder without apparent motive” (as introduced by Capote’s use of Joseph Satten and Karl Menninger’s influential 1960 article29 in In Cold Blood) captured the public imagination, and news of the dramatic spike in violence in cities such as New York made global headlines. The neoliberal Reagan administration, along with moral conservatives, interpreted the increase in serial murder as the inevitable consequence of the social changes of the 1960s, and as a potent domestic threat, the serial killer offered a neat counterpoint to the dangers posed by international enemies such as Middle Eastern terrorists and the Soviet Union. Significantly, the increased focus on serial killers during this period can also be linked to the FBI, as Murley observes: As the Communist threat eased and the most heated part of the Cold War drew to a close during the 1970s and into the 1980s, the FBI began an era of belt tightening and penuriousness that coincided with a drop in public

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confidence in government institutions and a decline in the FBI’s reputation and popularity. The threat posed by serial killers was used by the agency to resuscitate its creaky and ailing image and restore its federal funding, as the term “serial killer” and all it implied leaked into public consciousness.30

Many of the (at times wildly inaccurate)31 crime statistics that were in circulation at this time originated from the Behavioral Sciences Unit (BSU) of the Justice Department, headquartered at the FBI National Academy in Quantico and later immortalized by Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs (1988). As the unit lobbied for federal funding for programs that would address the “linkage blindness” that had prevented the early apprehension of Ted Bundy, the “serial killer panic” so prevalent in this era was exacerbated. The BSU, established in the early 1970s specifically to address the growing problem of serial murder, developed “profiling” techniques that agents claimed helped them better understand and therefore apprehend violent offenders. So-called “mindhunters” such as John Douglas and Robert Ressler (both of whom provided the inspiration for Thomas Harris’s Special Agent Jack Crawford) became celebrities in their own right, and there began a curiously symbiotic relationship between “three apparently independent forces: the law enforcement bureaucracy, the news media, and popular culture.”32

Thomas Harris and the Rise of Serial Killer Culture The American author and screenwriter, Thomas Harris, cemented the relationship between serial killing, law enforcement, and popular culture. Harris, who Leonard Cassuto has described as “perhaps the most influential American crime writer since Dashiell Hammett,”33 established the template for serial killer fiction and brought serial killers, and the profilers who sought them, into the mainstream. His enigmatic and enduring character, Hannibal Lecter, would transcend his literary base to occupy a unique place in American popular culture, and Harris himself would be credited as “perhaps the man most directly responsible for the 1980s and 1990s explosion of interest in serial killers, the current cycle of fictional narratives of serial murder, and the future shape of the mythos itself.”34 Harris’s commitment to research is legendary, and his portrayal of the mindhunters in his first two Lecter novels (Red Dragon, 1981, and The Silence of the Lambs, 1989) was so successful that “at the FBI training academy in Quantico—which Harris, researching his novel, briefly attended—the case of Ed Gein, on whom Buffalo Bill is based, is taught alongside Harris’s book.”35

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Harris’s work spawned a raft of imitators within popular fiction, and his influence could also be felt on true crime literature, with offenders such as Randy Kraft and Charlie Hatcher described as “real-life” Hannibal Lecters.36 The news reporting of serial murder was similarly affected, with sensationalistic coverage of sequential killings, always a guarantee of large sales or viewing figures, increasingly focusing on “crimes that most resembled available public stereotypes: sex killers like Bundy, cannibals like Hannibal. In turn, reporting of those specific cases reinforced awareness of these stereotypes.”37 Furthermore, Harris’s flattering depiction of the mindhunters Will Graham in Red Dragon and Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs bolstered the discourses placed into the media by the Justice Department and cemented public conceptions of the FBI and the BSU as society’s only defense against the terrifying serial killer. However, it is interesting to note that the symbiotic relationship between fact and fiction relates not only to representations of serial murder, but also to modern detection techniques. In his 1995 book, Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Serial Crime Unit, John Douglas asserts that modern detection techniques actually have a basis in literature: “[T]hough most of the books that dramatize and glorify what we do, such as Tom Harris’s memorable The Silence of the Lambs, are somewhat fanciful and prone to dramatic license, our antecedents actually do go back to crime fiction more than crime fact. C. August [sic] Dupin, the amateur detective hero of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1841 classic “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” may have been history’s first behavioral profiler.”38 Douglas’s description of The Silence of the Lambs as “memorable” ratified Harris’s depiction of the BSU, and the endorsement assured the popularity of Harris’s novels with a public keen to glimpse the inner workings of the FBI.39 Harris’s earliest Lecter novels are police procedurals, a type of crime thriller that offers reassuring closure to the reader as justice prevails and law and order are restored by the narrative’s end. The locus of empathy in such novels is typically the detective, yet—for all of the popularity of characters such as Graham and Starling—in Harris’s novels it was the cannibalistic serial killer, Hannibal Lecter, who really captured the public’s imagination. Within Harris’s narrative worlds, Lecter enjoys a unique celebrity; consulted by the Justice Department and feted by the press and academics alike, his remarkable intellect and beguiling, if chilling, charisma foregrounded over his gruesome murders. Lecter’s choice of victims and his particular way of making their deaths fit their “crimes” foreshadows Jeff Lindsay/Showtime’s Dexter and, in reducing cognitive dissonance, creates further points of identification for audiences. This effect was heightened by Harris’s decision to depict Lecter as a “‘good’

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serial killer”40 in the novels “by contrasting him with a ‘bad’ serial killer”41 such as Francis Dolarhyde or Buffalo Bill. The extraordinary popularity of Jonathan Demme’s 1991 film adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs launched Lecter into the cultural stratosphere, leading Linda Mizejewski to describe him as “the most prominent celebrity serial killer of the twentieth century.”42 Lecter’s fame was both a catalyst for and expression of the bizarre celebrification of serial killers that became increasingly prominent during this period, and it is interesting to note that the valorization of the serial killer was not confined to fiction, but extended also to actual serial killers such as Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy.

The “Celebrity” Serial Killer Bundy occupies a unique place in the cultural imaginary as perhaps the most celebrated real-life serial killer of all time. His abject crimes, which took place between 1974 and 1979 and included murder, rape, and necrophilia, are overshadowed by his handsome, articulate, and charming media image that contradicts the gothic monstrosity that attended earlier representations of prolific murderers. Indeed, this witty, likeable psychopath has more in common with the charismatic fictional creations of Thompson and Highsmith than the slavering beasts depicted in Ripper-era coverage of sequential murder. Bundy’s two daring escapes from custody recall that other feted jail-breaker and folk hero Jack Sheppard, and even though Bundy’s final escape culminated in an horrific explosion of violence that claimed the lives of three more victims (one a 12-year-old girl) one cannot help but marvel at the fortitude and ingenuity that facilitated his escape and kept him one step ahead of the authorities during his time on the run.43 Bundy’s flamboyant court appearances, which saw him acting as his own counsel and even, incredibly, getting married in court during his trial, captivated contemporary audiences, and the courtroom was consistently packed with young and attractive “Ted groupies.” Even the judge who presided over Bundy’s 1979 trial, which a contemporary report described as having “the makings of a Perry Mason trial,”44 appeared to have been won over when he told the killer, “I want you to know I have no animosity for you.”45 The carnivalesque tale did not end with Ted’s incarceration; he reputedly fathered a daughter while on Death Row, despite a ban on conjugal visits. In later years, Bundy gave media interviews on the pernicious effects of violent pornography and helped the FBI profile the Green River Killer in much the same way that the fictional Lecter would later be consulted during the search for Buffalo Bill. The carnival atmosphere that surrounded Bundy’s 1989 execution was reminiscent of the public executions

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that took place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at England’s famous Newgate Prison, with a crowd of 500 people gathering outside the prison to chant “Fry, Bundy, fry!”46 while others staged celebratory barbeques or sold branded T-shirts at various locations throughout Florida. Mark Seltzer tells us that “[t]he serial killer . . . aspires—like everyone else?—to celebrity under the conditions of an anonymous mass society,”47 and this phenomenon, fueled by media interest in serial murder, was particularly prevalent in the late 1970s. Ted Bundy courted attention from the press and on one occasion even went so far as to perform a backward somersault for cameramen waiting outside an Orlando courthouse.48 Yet he also attacked the media, castigating them for “metamorphosing him into a ‘symbol’”49 for their interest in serial murder: “It is sad but true that the media thrives on sensation and they thrive on evil.”50 Despite his protestations about the media, Bundy was reportedly envious of the coverage given to Gary Gilmore, a double murderer who was held at Utah State Prison at the same time that Bundy was there in 1976. Having been sentenced to death for the murders of Max Jensen and Bennie Bushnell, Gilmore demanded that the execution be carried out quickly so that he could avoid the prolonged limbo of life on Death Row. The ensuing legal battle, played out under the gaze of the media, saw Gilmore transformed into a reluctant celebrity who even graced the cover of Newsweek, with the words “DEATH WISH” printed on his chest.51 Although Gilmore claimed that “he didn’t want news coverage, TV, radio interviews, nothing,”52 he couldn’t deny his growing fame—particularly when he began to receive thirty to forty pieces of fan mail per day53 and prison guards were asking for his autograph.54 His story was told by Norman Mailer in The Executioner’s Song (1979), a book that would earn Mailer the 1980 Pulitzer Prize and that Murley has described as being “as much an exploration of the marketing of murder as it is of murder itself.”55 The Executioner’s Song also foregrounds the nascent murder merchandising industry;56 everyone involved in Gilmore’s story seemed set to gain financially from his death, and there was even talk of him wearing a branded “GILMORE—DEATH WISH” T-shirt for the execution “so they could auction it off, bullet holes and all.”57 The rise of celebrity culture and the commodification of murder continued unabated in the latter years of the twentieth century, and matters of taste and decency increasingly took second place to sensationalism. Mass media obsession with serial murder during this period is starkly rendered by Robert Conrath’s observation that “when Jeffrey Dahmer’s house of carnage was discovered in Milwaukee in 1991, television rights to his story were being negotiated within the hour.”58 Furthermore, the shaky public personas of notorious serial killers were increasingly replaced with gothic

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media images.59 When asked to explain his crimes in a telephone interview with the Knight-Tribune shortly before his execution in 1994, John Wayne Gacy replied: “There’s been 11 hardback books on me, 31 paperbacks, two screenplays, one movie, one off-Broadway play, five songs, and over 5,000 articles. What can I say about it?”60 Killers became increasingly aware of the power of their brands, as demonstrated by the fact that, at the height of his “fame,” Ramirez signed his artworks “Richard Ramirez Night Stalker.” Tellingly, his pieces were in such high demand within the murderabilia market that he even had his own art dealer.61

Reorientation and Rationalization The first wave of panic about serial murder that typified 1983–1985 was diluted as the decade progressed, in part thanks to the impact of mass media representations of serial murder. True crime, popular fiction, splatter films, television treatments, and graphic novels helped to reduce the serial killer to a selection of manageable tropes that separated public perception of the figure from lived reality. However, fears were reignited in the period 1990–1992 after a burst of fictional and actual serial murder events. These included the 1990 campus murders of five students in one weekend by “Gainesville Ripper” Danny Rolling; the troubled publication of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho in 1991;62 the release of Jonathan Demme’s adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs (1991); the apprehension of the cannibalistic Jeffrey Dahmer; and the arrest of Aileen Wuornos, often described as America’s first female serial killer. The crimes of both Dahmer and Wuornos came to light in 1991 and acted as an interesting factual counterpoint to the fictional offerings of Demme/Harris and Ellis. The extraordinary concentration of factional and fictional serial murder narratives during this period meant that sequential killing was almost constantly in the news and anxieties about personal safety and moral collapse heightened significantly. Brian Jarvis has linked the commercialization of violence to “consumer pathology,”63 and these issues are memorably explored by Bret Easton Ellis in American Psycho (1991). This controversial text constitutes a pivotal moment in American pop culture’s representation of the serial killer, and its effect was compounded by Mary Harron’s 2000 film of the same title. American Psycho combines virtuosic poetics with a wide variety of cultural influences—including the slasher film/gross-out movie, the celebrification of the serial killer, consumer culture and Reaganite politics, and the witty, likeable psychopaths in the work of Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith, and Thomas Harris—to create a paradigm-changing, landmark

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exploration of what Haggerty describes as “the elective affinities between serial murder and contemporary civilization.”64 The novel’s unflinching focus on the brutal and gratuitous murders (possibly) committed by its antagonist, Patrick Bateman, would change forever the treatment of violence and the serial killer in American pop culture. Thanks to its likeable antagonist and casual attitude to representations of extreme violence, American Psycho is perhaps the key text responsible for the normalization of serial murder that took place in the late twentieth century. Bateman made possible characters such as Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter and also led to an increased focus on the aestheticization of violence that can be felt in contemporary cultural output. Media representations of serial murder have traditionally tended to focus on the killer’s monstrosity and how his acceptable public facade hides unimaginable horrors.65 However, as the twentieth century drew to a close, the idea that the serial killer might look like “one of us” expanded to include the suggestion that there is a little bit of the serial killer or psychopath in everyone. For instance, the 1997 graphic novel JTHM: Director’s Cut, by Jhonen Vasquez,66 details the exploits of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac (the JTHM of the title). The work includes a preface by Rob Schrab who explains that “[t]here’s a little monster inside all of us, a little wolf-faced monkey that needs to be satiated. As people, we mustn’t ignore that monster. If we do, we cheat ourselves. We deny an emotion, a feeling.”67 Schrab argues that engagement with characters such as Johnny the Homicidal Maniac allows readers to “commit murder in [the] dream world,”68 thereby engaging in wish-fulfillment and releasing psychic tension in a safe and risk-free manner. Vasquez himself prefaces the book with a cartoon character who advises readers to “[r]emember, it’s all just questionably tasteful fun.”69 Derf Backderf is similarly compelled to add disclaimers to his graphic novel, My Friend Dahmer (2012).70 Backderf’s treatment of the Dahmer story, and the reader’s consumption of it as entertainment, should be troubling; instead the graphic novel sensitively renders the “tragic tale”71 of the young “Jeff’s” troubled upbringing and passes judgment on those adults who failed to nurture and support him and thereby prevent his murderous expressions of loneliness and despair. Backderf’s sympathetic treatment of the killer reflects not just his personal history with Dahmer but also changing public attitudes to serial killers in the twenty-first century. However, Backderf is at pains to distance himself from Dahmer’s crimes: “Once Dahmer kills . . . —and I can’t stress this enough—my sympathy for him ends . . . Dahmer was a twisted wretch whose depravity was almost beyond comprehension. Pity him, but don’t empathize with him.”72 Significantly, Backderf’s narrative does not

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focus on Dahmer’s crimes. There is a disconnect between the struggling youth of Backderf’s graphic novel and the demonic murderer depicted elsewhere. In part, this reflects the inability of “normal” citizens such as Backderf to understand how a classmate and friend could become a cannibalistic serial murderer. It could also be seen as the compound effect of the myriad retellings of the story; the overlay of fictional representations and news reporting of real-life cases sees the horror of the crimes mitigated by the popular conception and media image of the serial killer. In a sense, the process allows pop culture serial killers to be “declawed”; reduced to gothic spectacle, they become acceptable subjects for cultural scrutiny, and the process allows the reader to disavow any troubling feelings of moral complicity.

Disavowal and Dexter : The Heroic Serial Killer As we have seen, in the twentieth century it became increasingly acceptable for writers, filmmakers, and graphic novelists (among others) to offer engaging portraits of serial killers to a public eager for exciting and challenging tales of transgression. Although still subject to gothic narrative devices, the serial killer was increasingly humanized, and an empathetic response to the figure was often encouraged. However, although moral dubiousness increased during this period thanks to the narrative reorientation of the serial killer, the boundaries between acceptable (law-abiding) and unacceptable (murderous) behaviors remained clearly delineated. The relentless collapsing of categories such as good and evil in popular culture led to a renegotiation of fictional morality that is best expressed by Dexter, the “heroic” serial killer. Dexter Morgan, blood spatter analyst by day and vigilante serial killer by night, is the hero of a series of seven novels by Jeff Lindsay (2004–2013) and eight seasons of an award-winning television series (2006–2013) by U.S. premium cable channel Showtime. Dexter draws on the revenge narratives that have been a mainstay of American popular culture in genres as disparate as the classic Western, the 1970s cycle of vigilante films, and graphic novels such as Punisher (1986).73 The character’s reorientation from evil to righteousness is achieved by his commitment to only killing other killers and, as the embodiment of Julia Kristeva’s notion of the “criminal with good conscience . . . the killer who claims he’s a saviour,”74 his characterization marks a further milestone in serial killer culture. Dexter offers a potent and satisfying antidote to the fears about rising violence and the breakdown of society that typified the second wave of

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serial killer panic in the 1990s. In Dearly Devoted Dexter (2005), the second novel in Lindsay’s series, Dexter muses that I could have been much worse. I could have been a vicious raving monster who killed and killed and left towers of rotting flesh in my wake. Instead, here I was on the side of truth, justice, and the American way. Still a monster, of course, but I cleaned up nicely afterward, and I was OUR monster, dressed in red, white, and blue 100 percent synthetic virtue.75

The juxtaposition of Dexter and his victims is an important identificatory tool for an American public inundated with around thirty years’ worth of stories about the untrammeled murderous appetites of killers such as Bundy, Gacy, and Dahmer. Dexter stands for reason, order, and decency. He steps in to protect society when traditional structures of law, order, and justice fail. His kills are not fueled by a pathological urge to destroy or possess; they are governed by a strict moral code and ultimately benefit society. This code is the key to audience acceptance of Dexter and what Schmid has described as “the willingness of Americans to embrace the serial killer as one of their own, as the personification of essentially American values.”76 Lindsay’s novels and the Showtime series dedicate a significant amount of narrative space to the code, which was devised by Dexter’s late stepfather, Harry Morgan. Harry was a highly respected detective with the Miami–Dade Police Department who became increasingly frustrated with the inability of conventional justice to deal adequately with extreme offenders. Upon realizing that his son’s murderous urges could not be eradicated, Harry trained Dexter to channel his impulses into only killing those deserving of their fate. Cognitive dissonance is reduced when the reader or viewer accepts that leaving Code-less killers and predatory pedophiles free to prey on the vulnerable is far worse than condoning their dispatch by Dexter. Acceptance of Dexter’s actions is also facilitated by the bifurcation between his “[q]uirky, funny, happy-go-lucky”77 persona and his Dark Passenger. The separation of these two aspects of his personality facilitates an empathetic response to Dexter by reducing the culpability of his most appealing and socially acceptable “self” and attributing his crimes to a shadowy, almost supernatural other.78 Lindsay’s sardonic narrative style and Showtime’s casting of Michael C. Hall in the title role also help; the use of a handsome, charming, and famous actor taps into the Hollywood star system, which Schmid imbricates in the rise of the celebrity serial killer.79 Despite the multiple disavowal techniques embedded in the narratives, audiences embrace Dexter not in spite of but because

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of his nefarious deeds. He answers a common need to fight back against social threats whilst also supplying the opportunity for thrilling, vicarious transgression. The empathetic reorientation of the serial killer, which grew steadily throughout the twentieth century, finds its fullest expression in Dexter. Martin McDonagh’s film Seven Psychopaths (2012), suggests that the trope of the “killer who only kills other killers” is becoming hackneyed and boring, yet it shows no sign of abating. Ambiguous figures of identification have become a mainstay of contemporary television series such as Hannibal80 and Bates Motel,81 both of which reimagine and develop foundational characters from the serial killer mythos. The serial killer has been transformed from a liminal, unknowable fiend into a locus of empathy and exemplar of modernity, and violent spectacle is now an acceptable form of entertainment. Regardless of narrative orientation, the serial killer offers great dramatic potential and invites a plurality of intriguing responses. The extraordinarily diverse and numerous representations of this figure both reflect his or her cultural resonance and ensure the serial killer’s iconic status within American popular culture.

Notes   1.  Worryingly, at www.serialkillers.com one can even buy stun guns, pepper spray, and voice changers—everything the fledgling serial killer might need! This suggests an aspirational level to the mythos and posits serial killing as a vocation rather than as a compulsive manifestation of mental illness or personality disorder.  2. Schmid, Natural 24.  3. Morton, n.p.  4. Schmid, Natural 32.  5. Vronsky, 62.  6. Turner, 52.  7. “Lacenaire,” 417.  8. Schmid, Natural 55.  9. Long, 40. 10.  Grixti, 95. 11.  Ibid., 88. 12. Schmid, Natural 182. 13.  For more on Pearson, see Schmid, Natural Born Celebrities, 184–190. 14.  Murley, 13. 15.  O’Brien, 2. 16.  Ibid., 11. 17.  Seltzer, 159. 18.  Ibid., 160.

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19.  Film versions of the novel appeared in 1976 (Devi, dir. Burt Kennedy) and 2010 (Hero Entertainment, dir. Michael Winterbottom), providing further evidence of Lou Ford’s enduring appeal. 20.  For more on the celebrification of the serial killer, see Schmid’s definitive book on the subject, Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture (Chicago, IL/London, UK: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 21.  The Talented Mr Ripley, London, UK: Vintage, 1999/1955. 22.  Miramax, dir. Anthony Minghella. 23.  Vronsky, 19. 24. Ibid. 25.  These include, but are not restricted to, Juan Corona, active 1960s–1971; Herbert Mullin, active 1972–1973; Edmund Kemper, active 1964 and 1972– 1973; Dean Corll, active 1970–1973; John Wayne Gacy, active 1972–1978; Ted Bundy, active 1974–1979; David Berkowitz, active 1976–1977; Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, active 1977–1978; William Bonin, active 1979–1980; Wayne Williams, active 1979–1981. 26.  Jenkins, 8. 27.  Note the gothic nicknames given to these and other serial killers. 28.  Haggerty, 173. 29.  Satten, Joseph, Karl Menninger, Irwin Rosen, and Martin Mayman, “Murder without apparent motive: A study in personality disorganization,” American Journal of Psychiatry 117, no. 1 (1960): 48–53. 30.  Murley, 156. 31.  Jenkins challenges the widely quoted figures of 4,000–5,000 annual serial murder victims, arguing that discrepancies in the reporting of crime distorted the data. For more information, see Jenkins pp. 49–80. 32.  Jenkins, 223. 33.  Cassuto, 242. 34.  Simpson, 83. 35.  Haut, 215. 36.  Jenkins, 89–90. 37.  Ibid., 98. 38.  Douglas and Olshaker, 32. 39.  However, the accuracy of Harris’s depiction of the FBI has also been challenged, as Jenkins observes. See Using Murder, p. 74. 40.  Schmid, “Devil” 140. 41. Ibid. 42.  Mizejewski, 159. 43.  Given the ferocity of Bundy’s final attacks, it is extraordinary that one is still able to admire aspects of his escape. The feat is achieved via a complex process of disavowal that can also help to explain audience engagement with serial killers more generally. Readers of narrative descriptions of Bundy’s exploits, such as Ann Rule’s The Stranger beside Me (New York: Norton, 2000/1980), are able to reconcile the dissonance between their enjoyment of the text and the bloody reality of the

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crimes being depicted by focusing instead on less troubling facets of the tale. Rule foregrounds the carnivalesque elements of the Bundy story, thereby shifting attention away from the crimes and the victims and allowing the reader to gloss over the more disturbing material and his or her consumption of it as entertainment. 44.  Smith, n.p. 45. Ibid. 46.  Bearak, n.p. 47.  Seltzer, 135. 48.  Rule, 423. 49. Ibid. 50.  Ibid., 356. 51.  Mailer, 657. 52.  Ibid., 490. 53.  Ibid., 661. 54.  Ibid., 921. 55.  Murley, 70. 56.  When asked for his last words before the execution was carried out, Gilmore simply said “Let’s do it.” These words were immortalized on T-shirts that appeared soon after his death (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/janu ary/17/newsid_2530000/2530413.stm accessed 30/06/14 22.53h) and, incredibly, were also the inspiration for Nike’s enduring “Just Do It” slogan (see www.nytimes .com/2009/08/20/business/media/20adco.html). 57. Mailer, 851. There is some suggestion in the text that the comments regarding the sale of the T-shirt were made in jest; either way, it highlights the ruthlessness of the murder industry. 58.  Conrath, 156. 59.  Jean Murley describes Charles Manson’s transformation into a “cultural signifier of mayhem and subversion” (93). Murley argues convincingly that “[t]he Manson phenomenon has truly been one of the most bizarre collisions of media and murder in American history, and the cultural products that have resulted from that collision magnify issues of celebrity and crime, of violence and entertainment, and misapprehension of the line separating the two” (ibid., 91). 60.  Berry-Dee, 70. 61.  See http://serialkillersink.net/skistore/index.php?_a=viewProd& productId= 2686. 62. Ellis’s novel was dropped by its original publisher, Simon & Schuster, days before its scheduled release in 1990, after leaked excerpts from galley proofs printed in Time and Spy magazines were uniformly condemned. Just two days later, Ellis signed a new contract with Random House, a more prestigious publisher, who released the book under its Vintage imprint the following year. Early criticism of American Psycho was almost exclusively negative, with Tammy Bruce, President of the Los Angeles Chapter of the National Organization of Women, describing it as “a how-to novel on the torture and dismemberment of women” (New York Times, December 6, 1990).

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63.  Jarvis, 326–344. 64.  Haggerty, 184. 65.  This discourse does seem to be specific to male killers. Female serial killers such as Wuornos tend to be depicted as more outwardly “other” and liminal; in Wuornos’s case, this was heightened by her status as a sex worker, which instantly set her beyond “respectable” society. 66.  San Jose: Slave Labor Graphics, 1997. 67.  Ibid., n.p. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid. 70.  New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2012. 71.  Backderf, 11. 72.  Ibid., 11. 73.  Garth Ennis and Lewis La Rosa, The Punisher: In the Beginning (New York: Marvel, 2006). 74.  Kristeva, 4. 75.  Lindsay, 4. 76.  Schmid, “Devil” 132–133. 77.  Lindsay, 130. 78.  However, it’s not all about disavowal. According to Jung, the shadow is one of the universal archetypes that make up human consciousness. Acceptance of Dexter may therefore also be based on the reader or viewer’s acknowledgement of his or her own shadow. 79. Schmid, Natural 105–137. 80.  Dino De Laurentiis, 2013–present. 81.  American Genre Film Archive, 2013–present.

Bibliography Backderf, Derf. My Friend Dahmer. New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2012. Bates Motel. American Genre Film Archive, 2013–present. Bearak, Barry. “Bundy electrocuted after night of weeping, praying: 500 cheer death of murderer.” Los Angeles Times, January 24, 1989. http://articles.latimes .com/1989-01-24/news/mn-1075_1_ted-bundy. Berry-Dee, Christopher. Talking with Serial Killers 2: The World’s Most Evil Killers Tell Their Stories. London, UK: John Blake Publishing, 2005. Cassuto, Leonard. Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories. New York: Columbia UP, 2009. Conrath, Robert. “Serial Heroes: A Sociocultural Probing into Excessive Consumerism.” In European Readings of American Popular Culture (147–158), ed. John Dean and Jean-Paul Gabilliet. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. Dean, John, and Jean-Paul Gabilliet, eds. European Readings of American Popular Culture. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. Dexter. Showtime, 2006–2013.

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Douglas, John and Mark Olshaker. Mindhunter: Inside the FBI Elite Serial Crime Unit. London: Arrow, 1997/1966. Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. London: Picador, 2000/1991. Ennis, Garth, and Lewis La Rosa. The Punisher: In the Beginning. New York: Marvel, 2006. Grixti, J. “Consuming cannibals: Psychopathic killers as archetypes and cultural icons,” Journal of American Culture 18, no. 1, 87–96. Haggerty, Kevin D. “Modern serial killers,” Crime, Media, Culture 5, no. 2 (2009): 168–187. Hannibal. Dino De Laurentiis, 2013–present. Harris, Thomas. Red Dragon. London, UK: Arrow Books, 2009/1981. Harris, Thomas. The Silence of the Lambs. London, UK: Mandarin, 1991/1989. Haut, Woody. Neon Noir. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1999. Highsmith, Patricia. The Talented Mr Ripley. London: Vintage, 1999/1955. Howard, Douglas L., ed. Dexter: Investigating Cutting Edge Television. London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2010. Jarvis, Brian. “Monsters Inc.: Serial killers and consumer culture,” Crime Media Culture 3, no. 3 (2007), 326–344. Jenkins, Philip. Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1994. The Killer Inside Me. Dir. Burt Kennedy. Devi, 1976. The Killer Inside Me. Dir. Michael Winterbottom. Hero Entertainment, 2010. Kooistra, Paul. Criminals as Heroes: Structure, Power and Identity. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989. Kristeva, Julia. The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. “Lacenaire.” All the Year Round. July 27, 1861. Lindsay, Jeff. Darkly Dreaming Dexter. London, UK: Orion, 2004. Lindsay, Jeff. Dearly Devoted Dexter. London, UK: Orion, 2006. Lindsay, Jeff. Dexter in the Dark. London, UK: Orion, 2008. Lindsay, Jeff. Dexter by Design. London, UK: Orion, 2009. Lindsay, Jeff. Dexter Is Delicious. London, UK: Orion, 2010. Lindsay, Jeff. Double Dexter. London, UK: Orion, 2011. Lindsay, Jeff. Dexter’s Final Cut. London, UK: Orion, 2013. Long, Clarence D. Wages and Earnings in the United States, 1860–1890. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960. www.nber.org/chapters/c2497.pdf. McDowell, Edwin. “NOW Chapter Seeks Boycott of ‘Psycho’ Novel.” New York Times. December 6, 1990. www.nytimes.com/1990/12/06/books/ now-chapter -seeks-boycott-of-psycho-novel.html. Mailer, Norman. The Executioner’s Song. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2012/1979. Mizejewski, Linda. “Stardom and Serial Fantasies: Thomas Harris’s Hannibal.” In Keyframes: Popular Cinema and Cultural Studies (159–170), ed. Matthew Tinkcom and Amy Villarejo. London, UK: Routledge, 2001.

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Morton, Robert J., ed. “Serial Murder: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives for Investigators.” FBI.gov 2008. www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/serial-murder. Murley, Jean. The Rise of True Crime: 20th-century Murder and American Popular Culture. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008. O’Brien, Geoffrey. Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir. New York: Da Capo Press, 1997. Rule, Ann. The Stranger beside Me. New York: Norton, 2000/1980. Satten, Joseph, Karl Menninger, Irwin Rosen, and Martin Mayman. “Murder without apparent motive: A study in personality disorganization.” American Journal of Psychiatry 117, no. 1 (1960): 48–53. Schmid, David. Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture. Chicago, IL/London, UK: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Schmid, David. “The devil you know: Dexter and the “goodness” of American serial killing.” In Howard, Douglas L., ed. Dexter: Investigating Cutting Edge Television. London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2010. 132–142. Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. New York: Routledge, 1998. Seven Psychopaths. Dir. Martin McDonagh. CBS, 2012. The Silence of the Lambs. Dir. Jonathan Demme. Orion, 1991. Simpson, Philip L. Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer through Contemporary American Film and Fiction. Carbondale/Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. Smith, Derelle III. “Folksy-but-tough judge was star of Bundy trial.” Sarasota Herald Tribune, Sunday August 12, 1979. http://news.google.com/newspapers? nid=1755&dat=9790812&id=WZ8cAAAAIBAJ&sjid=o2cEAAAAIBAJ& pg=6790,4889094. The Talented Mr Ripley. Dir. Anthony Minghella. Miramax, 1999. Tinkcom, Matthew, and Amy Villarejo, eds. Keyframes: Popular Cinema and Cultural Studies. London, UK: Routledge, 2001. Turner, E. S. Boys Will Be Boys: The Story of Sweeney Todd, Deadwood Dick, Sexton Blake, Billy Bunter, Dick Barton, et al. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1976. Vasquez, Jhonen. JTHM: Director’s Cut. San Jose, CA: Slave Labor Graphics, 1997. Vronsky, Peter. Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters. New York: Penguin, 2004.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Presidential Violence David Hoogland Noon

From the beginning, Americans have viewed the presidency with both adulation and fear. During the ratification debates, the Constitution’s advocates insisted that their system would produce virtuous, wise executives to defend the nation against danger. They pointed to George Washington as the template for those best suited for the office. Others, however, suspected sinister designs, and they warned that men who aspired to the presidency would abuse its powers, turn upon the people, and devour their liberties. The Constitution’s detractors feared the birth of a new Caesar—or worse. One critic warned that the proposed “President-general” had been “vested with powers exceeding the most despotic monarch we know of in modern times.” He compared the office to a “hydra” menacing the republic.1 Everyone agreed, at least, that the chief executive would possess great power. Scholars have scrutinized and debated the scope and expression of those powers for well over two centuries. Yet presidential power has also been questioned, celebrated, and condemned in novels, films, comic books, visual art, music, and legends. Among other things, Americans rely on culture as a vehicle for reflecting on the responsibilities and dangers of presidential power, including its capacity to unleash violence—violence committed in defense of the nation and on behalf of its citizens, or violence that endangers liberty and even threatens the extinction of life itself. This chapter takes a broad look at the mingling of political and popular culture by examining a selection of episodes in the history of presidential violence. My argument will be straightforward. In their pursuit of the office,

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presidents are expected to display traits including “toughness,” “strength,” and the “will” to overcome adversaries. To give substance to these traits, presidents and their supporters often invoke their experience with organized violence— especially military experience—as having forged their political character. Along these lines, I will examine two presidential characters—Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt—in some detail, to see how violence shaped their lives and popular images. To the degree that violent experience was useful to the construction of their personas, however, it also provoked anxieties about the manner in which they might use the instruments of national power. Would they slay the hydra or become the hydra? These concerns became even more profound during the nuclear age, when presidents acquired the tools of mass destruction. Americans wondered if presidents could contain the dangers of nuclear weapons, or if they would be rendered helpless by circumstances beyond their control? Finally, in more recent cultural imagery of presidential violence, we see more playful and ironic combinations as presidents have appeared in horror, action and superhero roles, battling an array of monsters and villains and saving the nation from catastrophe.

Andrew Jackson: The Personal Is the Political Any discussion of “presidential violence” must begin with Andrew Jackson, whose political career coincided with the birth of popular politics. Jackson’s biography was rough-hewn and staggeringly violent. He brawled with personal and political enemies, led armies against Britain and Spain, and dislodged Indian people from their homelands. He also imposed martial law in New Orleans, executed soldiers for mutiny and desertion, and ordered the killing of two British citizens during his controversial invasion of Florida. Supporters hailed his past as proof of his willingness to fight on behalf of national (white) interests. Opponents warned that Jackson was an American Napoleon. Raised in a Southern culture that celebrated interpersonal violence, Jackson participated in his first duel at age 21. After moving to Kentucky, he killed a rival planter and horse breeder in a duel and years later engaged in a public shootout with two brothers in Nashville. Jackson’s fury, though, was reserved not merely for individuals who crossed him. Indeed, his military career might be understood as one long campaign against European and Native American adversaries whom Jackson viewed as intruders on American soil. England was Jackson’s greatest foe. His mother and two older brothers had died during the Revolutionary War, and young Jackson was himself badly wounded by a British officer who slashed his hand and face when the boy refused to clean his boots. Jackson never forgave the

Presidential Violence

British, and he later described a “debt of retaliatory vengeance” that he aimed one day to repay.2 Jackson repaid that debt in part at the close of the War of 1812, when he led a combination of American forces in defense of New Orleans against a much larger British force. The Battle of New Orleans (January 8, 1815) was celebrated in popular culture as a moment of triumph and redemption, with Jackson himself portrayed as the greatest national hero since George Washington. Audiences toasted and cheered him wherever he traveled in subsequent years, and Americans commemorated New Orleans in popular music, verse, and prose. Noah Ludlow’s song “The Hunters of Kentucky” (1822) was the best-known tribute; in 1824 and 1828, it served as an anthem for Jackson supporters as they rallied behind his bid for higher office.3 Others joined Ludlow in celebrating Jackson at New Orleans. In 1827, for example, an anonymous author published An Epick Poem in Commemoration of Gen. Andrew Jackson’s Victory on the 8th of January, 1815. This thirty-page hyperbolic account of a battle ended with visions of the “Mississippi swell’d with curdling blood,” “burst[ing] its banks” with human gore as the sky shattered with “mad lightnings,” “red thunders,” and a “whirlwind tempest” that cast the British forever from American shores.”4 Jackson’s defeat of the British was central to his case for the presidency. Yet Jackson’s feats were not celebrated without reservation as qualities suitable for high office. Though Jackson believed that only a man who could “dwell on blood & carnage with any composure” would be suited to the “stormy sea” of the presidency, his detractors warned of dangerous tendencies.5 They pointed to his imposition of military rule over New Orleans before and after the battle, and they reminded Americans that Jackson’s invasion of Spanish Florida had contradicted his orders, which were to stop cross-border Seminole raids and not to seize additional territory from Spain. Jackson’s adversary Henry Clay condemned him on the floor of the House of Representatives, warning that Jackson was an aspiring “military chieftain” who might take his place in a line of tyrants from Alexander the Great to Napoleon Bonaparte.6 During his presidential campaigns of 1824 and 1828, the anti-Jacksonian press dredged his biography to accentuate his cruelty and insubordination, his “intemperate life and character.” One pamphleteer claimed to have a list of “nearly ONE HUNDRED FIGHTS or violent or abusive quarrels” instigated by Jackson.7 Others accused him of inhumanity toward ordinary soldiers. During the 1828 election contest, supporters of the incumbent, John Quincy Adams, distributed a variety of so-called “Coffin handbills,” detailing (as one put it) “the Bloody Deeds of GENERAL

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JACKSON.” This particular sheet featured six black coffins representing the half dozen men that Jackson had “murdered”—that is, executed for mutiny and desertion—during the Creek War (1813–1814). It included stories and poems about the executions as well as Jackson’s various feuds. The handbill’s author warned that readers would have to decide for themselves whether Jackson “has not done enough to disqualify him” for the presidency.8 Numerous other “coffin handbills” circulated during these years, adding to a swell of anti-Jackson popular literature that sought to undermine his status as a war hero. The most prolific anti-Jacksonian was a Cincinnati newspaper editor named Charles Hammond. His Monthly anti-Jackson Expositor ran from January to October 1828 and issued a relentless stream of bile aimed at the Democratic candidate. Hammond’s Cincinnati Gazette also supplied the lyrics to what would become the de facto campaign song for John Quincy Adams’s re-election bid in 1828. Playing on a traditional Scottish muster tune, “Little wat ye wha’s a-comin’” (roughly translated as “little know ye what’s coming”), Adams’s supporters detailed the awaiting horror if Jackson were victorious. Murder wi’ gory han’s a-comin’ Fire’s a-comin’, swords a-comin’ Pistols, guns an knives are comin’ . . . Martial an’ Lynch’s Law are comin’, Slavery’s comin’, Blunder’s comin’, Robbing’s comin’, Jobbing’s comin’, An’ a’ the plague o’ War’s a-comin’ . . .9

This was not the last presidential campaign to suggest that world-ending violence might ensue if the wrong candidate were elected. Of course Andrew Jackson prevailed in the 1828 election, and although the nation did not collapse into a “plague o’ War,” the polarized image of Jackson continued to shape popular views of his presidential character. More broadly, such views helped establish a rhetorical framework through which many subsequent presidential contests would be viewed. Jackson believed himself an agent of the people against demonic, aristocratic predators, and he acted on that sensibility when striking out against entities such as the National Bank, which his Democratic partisans frequently depicted as a “monster” in word and print. Vetoing the bank’s renewal in 1832, Jackson was hailed by supporters for “slaying” the beast. His opponents, by contrast, howled against his bold use of presidential power, raising the specter of “King Andrew” and suggesting that Jackson himself

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was the true monster. Both views, however, conceived of Jackson as an agent of violence, either on behalf of or against the republic itself. Other episodes in Jackson’s presidency, including the Indian removal campaign as well as his dispute with South Carolina over tariff enforcement and “nullification,” were likewise set within metaphorically violent frames by the popular press, in political campaigns, as well as in anti-removal and abolitionist protest literature. Hero or menace to the people and their liberties, Jackson’s popular reputation has always hinged on themes of violence. Even today, Jackson continues to spark debate, with critics arguing that an architect of Indian genocide ought not to appear on the $20 bill.10

Theodore Roosevelt: Violence and Masculine Self-Transformation Though Theodore Roosevelt could not compete with the violence that defined Jackson’s world, he nevertheless tapped into the mythology of the frontier, crafting himself as a “western” man, an aggressive nationalist, and an apologist for Indian removal. And though his military background was far less extensive than Jackson’s, Roosevelt also used war to enhance his political fortunes. Like Jackson, Roosevelt’s popular image cut in several directions. His violent pastimes, his defense of imperialism, and his brief career as a military officer helped cast him as a tough-minded leader who would fight on behalf of the people; these same features, however, supplied his critics with the tools to criticize him as a potential menace to the nation. Born to an upper-class New York family, Theodore Roosevelt was a sickly child, plagued by asthma and chronic diarrhea, who turned repeatedly to violent pastimes to fashion himself into a more robust young man. He read the works of popular juvenile authors such as Mayne Reid, whose books celebrated young hunter–naturalists who stalked buffalo, shot antelope, and wrestled cougars and bears. Acquiring his first gun at age 14, he embarked on a lifelong enthusiasm for hunting that remains one of Roosevelt’s defining character traits. In his early teens, Roosevelt pursued a regimen of physical training to remake his body into a “tough nut.” He boxed and lifted weights, training himself to be like the men he admired in his reading—war heroes and frontier explorers who inspired daydreams of glory.11 He credited boxing for his transformation into a virile young man, “as stout and able a fighting man as my Norse ancestors.”12 Roosevelt brought his fighting instincts into politics. Elected to the New York State Assembly in 1882, Roosevelt quickly established a reputation as an aggressive legislator with tornado-like energy. Isaac Hunt, a fellow legislator, described his friend years later as “just like a Jack coming out of

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the box; there wasn’t anything cool about him. He yelled and pounded his desk, and when they attacked him, he would fire back with all the venom imaginary.”13 Political men, Roosevelt argued, should be “vigorous in mind and body, able to hold our own in rough conflict with our fellows, able to suffer punishment without flinching, and, at need, to repay it in kind with full interest.”14 To further cultivate those virtues, Roosevelt abandoned politics temporarily and set out in 1884 for the Dakota Territory, where he transformed himself into an emblem of frontier manhood. He published several books based on his western experience, and he wrote a four-volume history titled The Winning of the West, which openly celebrated the ruthless subjugation of Indian people, whom he described as a “weaker and wholly alien race.” Though he lamented the “sad and dreadful” violence that accompanied white settler expansion, he also believed that such violence represented the “birthpangs of a new and vigorous people.”15 The seizure of the continent fulfilled a national duty, a view reflected nearly everywhere in the culture of his era. Indeed, two of Roosevelt’s best friends from his Dakota interlude—the artist Frederick Remington and the novelist Owen Wister—were central to the construction of a romantic and violent Western-themed culture that took shape amid the ghastly campaigns against Native people that culminated with the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. Roosevelt updated this vision of racial conquest, joining other nationalists in promoting the cause of empire in the Caribbean and the Pacific. For Roosevelt, America stood on the leading edge of a global transformation that would propel a manly race to supremacy. With war against Spain looming in 1898, Roosevelt once again transformed himself. Resigning his position as assistant secretary of the Navy, he secured an appointment as lieutenant colonel in a volunteer cavalry unit. The press was entranced by Roosevelt’s efforts to train his men, and the unit was quickly dubbed the “Rough Riders.” Roosevelt put together an eclectic group of young white men drawn from the Southwest along with a scattering of Ivy League students from the East. When Roosevelt and his cavalry embarked for Cuba, they brought journalists, photographers, and a motion picture crew to publicize the Rough Riders’ efforts. By the time Roosevelt returned in triumph, he was arguably the most famous man in the nation—fame that he and his supporters parlayed into a successful campaign for the governor’s office in New York, followed two years later by his election to the vice presidency, and (after the assassination of William McKinley) his move into the White House itself. Roosevelt used his conspicuous position to urge American men to pursue what he often called “the strenuous life.” He celebrated “the man who

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does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.”16 In foreign affairs, he warned that if the United States refused to bring order in chaotic environments such as the Philippines, some “stronger, manlier power” would complete the work instead.17 He lamented the fact that “a certain softness of fibre” had weakened Americans in general and American men in particular. So far as he could tell, there was no contemporary equivalent to the courageous backwoodsmen who forged the nation a century before. For Roosevelt, the solution to “softness” and weakness was to promote “vigorous, manly out-of-door sports” including hunting, rowing, mountain climbing, football and boxing among others.18 Roosevelt practiced as he preached. As governor, he sparred, wrestled, skipped rope and punched sandbags in his spare hours. During his presidency, he invited former professional boxers and trainers to work with him at the White House. When he permanently injured his left eye in a sparring match, Roosevelt took up ju-jitsu.19 Roosevelt’s enthusiasm for violence struck many cultural chords. As one historian has described it, Roosevelt was “a cartoonist’s dream come true; drawing the president became a national pastime.”20 The energy that Roosevelt brought to political life—particularly his much-celebrated efforts to disrupt monopolies, or his epic intraparty feuds that played out before national audiences—were frequently portrayed in the language and visual rhetoric of boxing, martial arts, cowboy lore, hunting, and so on. Roosevelt’s attacks on railroad combinations, for example, might be represented as a contest between the president—clad in his colonel’s hat and brandishing six-shooters—and a suit-wearing executive.21 When Roosevelt successfully intervened to help resolve a coal strike in 1902, the New York Herald declared it “Roosevelt’s biggest game” and portrayed him beside the carcass of an enormous wolf.22 Drawing on Roosevelt’s zeal for wrestling, the New York Herald published a cartoon in 1905 showing Roosevelt engaged in a wrestling bout with an anthropomorphized railroad engine.23 When Roosevelt announced that he would challenge William Taft for the Republican party nomination in 1912, he boasted dramatically that “my hat is in the ring, the fight is on, and I am stripped to the buff”—a declaration that could not have disappointed cartoonists, who rushed to depict the rivals in fisticuffs. However—as with Jackson—Roosevelt’s aggressive persona inspired concern as well as admiration. Mark Twain found him “clearly insane in several ways” and “insanest upon war and its supreme glories.”24 Political cartoons frequently evoked Roosevelt’s cowboy/military persona to suggest that he was erratic, unpredictable, or dangerous to the republic. L. C.

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Gregg of the Atlanta Constitution drew Roosevelt in 1904 as a face assembled from weapons—bullets for teeth, bayonets for whiskers, cannon for eyeglasses—and wearing a hat inscribed with the word “militarism,” and a scarf made from a torn copy of the Constitution.25 The satirical magazine Puck featured Roosevelt in more than 250 cartoons between the 1880s and World War I. Though Roosevelt’s crusades against corruption and the machinations of city bosses earned him favorable representations in Puck early in his career, the magazine turned to increasingly sharp-toned parody as Roosevelt’s political power evolved. Its illustrators frequently depicted Roosevelt in cowboy garb, in various military uniforms, or as a hulking, club-wielding giant. In an illustration that appeared several weeks before the 1904 election, Keppler drew a contrast between Roosevelt and his Democratic opponent, Alton Parker. Roosevelt, depicted in his Rough Riders uniform with imperial robes draped over his left arm, stands with one foot trampling the Constitution and his right hand bearing a sword inscribed with “Militarism.” Parker, by contrast, wears judicial robes and stands with a sword beneath his left foot and the Constitution triumphantly lifted with both hands overhead. Urging his audience to “Take your choice,” Keppler evoked the image of Roosevelt as a military chieftain—one that would have been quite familiar to the anti-Jacksonian faction seven decades earlier.

Presidential Violence in the Age of Mass Destruction The Cold War reshaped the relationship between presidents and violence in popular culture. What seemed to be a binary struggle between good and evil became more ambiguous as the years passed. In the name of containing communism, the United States rebuilt Western Europe and Japan after the devastation of World War II, and it played a central role in creating the United Nations, whose chief aim was to prevent the recurrence of global violence. It also, however, waged a catastrophic war in Vietnam; orchestrated the collapse of democratic governments in Iran and Guatemala; attempted (and failed) to dispose of Fidel Castro in Cuba; supported murderous right-wing dictatorships in Latin America; and developed an arsenal of weapons that could incinerate the planet within minutes. The tensions surrounding the nuclear arms race were particularly acute. From the Truman presidency through the Reagan years, the popular and political culture of the Cold War reflected heightened concern that American presidents—even those with distinguished military backgrounds—might not be able to protect the nation from the unthinkable horror of atomic war.

Presidential Violence

Dwight Eisenhower, for example, took office in 1953 less than a decade after successfully leading the allied liberation of France and helping end World War II in Europe. At the time of his election, the United States was mired in the Korean War, which had turned into a harsh and increasingly unpopular stalemate. Vowing to restore peace in Korea, Eisenhower also committed the United States to challenging the Soviet Union and defending its interests at the “far corners of the earth.” Though Eisenhower worried about the rise of a “garrison state,” and though he attempted to restrain the growth of defense spending during his presidency, he also presided over the expansion of the nuclear arsenal and relied on a strategy of deterring Soviet or Chinese aggression by threatening them with “massive retaliation” and by engaging in a nuclear brinksmanship. His administration made it clear that the United States would not hesitate to use atomic weapons under certain conditions. Though critics of the policy worried that Eisenhower’s policy virtually ensured that any conflict, however remote, could spark nuclear holocaust, the president and his cabinet believed their approach would keep the nation’s adversaries in check. Though Americans in the early years of the Cold War often seemed complacent about the nuclear peril, and though public opinion surveys revealed widespread belief that the arms race was somehow necessary, popular culture by the late 1950s and early 1960s reflected pervasive dread. Novels such as Helen McCloy’s The Last Day (1959), Walter M. Miller Jr.’s Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), and Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (1963) addressed nuclear war and the challenges of post-apocalyptic survival. B-grade horror films such as Them! (1954), Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), and The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) among others explored themes of atomic mutation, as humans, animals, or insects transformed into irradiated terrors. As the United States and the Soviet Union developed new weapons in the early 1960s, the 1962 confrontation over Soviet missiles in Cuba seemed to affirm popular apprehension that nuclear war was imminent and that American presidents were unable to contain the danger. Two 1964 films—Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe—dwelled on the flawed logic of the Cold War. In both, the United States launches a nuclear strike against the Soviets, either accidentally or through the orders of a deranged general. In each film, the president is unable to recall the bombers carrying out their apocalyptic missions. Neither film is terribly subtle about suggesting that the strategic logic of the Cold War—specifically, a reliance on the threat of “mutually assured destruction” to forestall war—was flawed. Dr. Strangelove concludes with a single American bomb igniting a

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Soviet “Doomsday Machine” that promises to end all terrestrial existence. Fail-Safe ends with the destruction of Moscow and New York. These films revealed in different ways the degree to which Americans were aware and concerned that presidential authority might not be sufficient to protect the nation. Neither of these films, however—nor any others in their cultural vicinity—portrayed their presidents as lunatics who might launch a war out of recklessness or malevolence. Nevertheless, these films helped establish the background for the 1964 election, which turned on themes of nuclear annihilation. Set in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, the nation’s deepening military involvement in southeast Asia, and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the contest between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater would stand out as one of the most intense in the nation’s history. The Johnson campaign portrayed Goldwater as an extremist who opposed civil rights, the United Nations, and new arms control measures such as the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Moreover, Goldwater had advocated the use of atomic bombs in southeast Asia and joked about lobbing missiles into the Kremlin. For these and other reasons, Goldwater’s opponents described him as “trigger-happy,” a reputation the Johnson campaign exploited. In radio and television advertisements especially, Johnson’s team raised concerns that Goldwater might preside over nuclear war. Vague campaign slogans urged voters to realize that “the stakes are too high for you to stay home.” One television ad featured stock footage of dozens of U.S. and Soviet nuclear tests. A radio ad speculated that perhaps Goldwater was “bored with peace.” Another television spot featured a buzzing White House phone, with a voiceover reminding viewers that “This particular phone only rings in a serious crisis” and that voters should “keep it in the hands of a man who has proven himself responsible.” Most famously, the Johnson campaign produced the “Daisy Ad.” Featuring a young girl counting and plucking the petals from a flower, the ad ominously shifts to countdown followed by stock footage of a nuclear explosion and a billowing mushroom cloud. Without mentioning Goldwater’s name, President Johnson intones, “These are the stakes: to make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.”26 By election day, public opinion polls revealed that 64 percent of women and 45 percent of men feared nuclear war if Goldwater were elected.27 Johnson, of course, won in a landslide, but Goldwater’s defeat spurred the rise of a conservative movement that insisted on a more aggressive foreign policy. By the early 1970s, California governor Ronald Reagan— a former actor whose launched his political career by campaigning for

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Goldwater—had emerged as the standard-bearer for the New Right. Like Goldwater, Reagan criticized arms control as appeasement and warned that the United States was falling behind the Soviet Union in the production of weapons needed to secure peace. To conservatives, Ronald Reagan was an agent of salvation, rescuing the nation from the treachery of the “welfare state,” offering vindication after a succession of humiliations (especially the loss in Vietnam), and promising to defeat communism rather than merely to contain it. After defeating Jimmy Carter in 1980, Reagan quickly proposed a weapons modernization effort that would add thousands of new warheads and delivery systems to the American arsenal. Overall, the Reagan administration presided over a 40 percent increase in spending on weapons research, development, testing, and production, all this rooted in his conviction that the United States must prove to the Soviet Union that a nuclear war would be unwinnable. In 1982, Reagan proposed arms reductions on terms more favorable to American interests; the following year, Reagan further destabilized U.S.–Soviet relations by proposing a space-based nuclear defense system (“Star Wars”) that would have undermined several arms control treaties from the 1960s and 1970s. By 1984, the famous Doomsday Clock—featured on the cover of every issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists since its inception—moved to three minutes to midnight, its closest approach to the fateful hour since 1960. Public concern over nuclear weapons grew during the early years of Reagan’s first term. In December 1981, an NBC/Associated Press survey found that 76 percent of Americans believed nuclear war was “likely” at some point in the near future. Broad popular concern helped reinvigorate grassroots campaigns against nuclear weapons. More than 200 city councils and nine state legislatures passed resolutions urging a freeze on weapons production and deployment.28 Reagan did little to help matters in August 1984, when he joked during a radio sound check that he had signed a new law “that will outlaw Russia forever,” adding that “We begin bombing in five minutes.” Though Reagan’s words were not actually broadcast, audio clips leaked to the press later, much to the administration’s embarrassment. The grim joke made its way into popular culture. Several musicians, including Bootsy Collins (of Parliament-Funkadelic) and Jerry Harrison (of Talking Heads), produced songs using the audio of Reagan’s gaffe.29 In the midst of all this, more intense fears of nuclear holocaust returned to the surface of American popular culture. In 1982, journalist Jonathan Schell published The Fate of the Earth, a bestseller that provided a horrifying overview of the ecological consequences of nuclear war. Apocalyptic

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films like The Day After—which aired in November 1983 to a television viewership of 100 million—or the British film Threads—which aired in the United States in January 1985—likewise heightened the presence of nuclear war in the media and everyday life. Popular films such as Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981), Testament (1983), Red Dawn (1984), and Terminator (1984), all dealt in various ways with the aftermath of nuclear attack. These films did not make any effort to represent presidential characters, however, as Dr. Strangelove or Fail-Safe had. Aside from a radio address by a fictional president in The Day After, political leaders were marginal. This was perhaps indicative of the degree to which Americans understood that nuclear weapons—the most violent expression of human ingenuity in the history of the species—had slipped beyond the power of world leaders to control them.

Postmodern Presidential Violence: Zombies, Vampires, and Werewolves With the collapse of the communist bloc in eastern Europe and the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself, the Cold War ended without the thermonuclear catastrophe whose threat had so haunted American culture. New threats, however, filled the void. “Rogue nations” such as North Korea and Iraq posed challenges to a succession of presidents, as did war and genocide in the former Yugoslavia, and the dangers posed by terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda were underscored by a series of attacks that culminated on September 11, 2001. Meantime, the specters of climate change, economic collapse, war, and epidemic disease loomed in the background as a new generation of apocalyptic narratives circulated in American culture. Today, zombies, vampires, and an array of other beasts roam through American film, television, fiction, and graphic novels. Meantime, some of our presidents have appeared as slayers of monsters (or even as monsters themselves), possessed with the tools to carry out spectacular acts of violence. In recent decades, the fantasy of a monster-subduing president has been articulated in a variety of ways. During the Cold War, several fictional presidents appeared in comic books or on television as superheroes. In 1967–1968, an animated series called Super President aired briefly, featuring President James Norcross, a shape-shifting hero who vanquished aliens and mutants among other villains. In 1973–1974, Prez, a similarly short-lived offering from DC Comics, followed the exploits of Prez Rickard, the nation’s first teenage president, who spent four issues battling right-wing militia leaders, political bosses, and a plot hatched by Transylvanian vampires to scatter rabid bats across the nation.30

Presidential Violence

Eventually, real presidents took their turn. During the 1980s, hyperviolent films such as the Rambo franchise inspired Ronald Reagan—himself a former actor—to jokingly compare himself to an action hero. The Rambo films starred Sylvester Stallone as a psychologically traumatized Vietnam veteran recruited by the U.S. Army for special missions in Vietnam and Afghanistan, and on several occasions, Reagan quipped to the press that Stallone’s character had supplied him with good ideas about how to rescue American hostages.31 The joke took on a life of its own. “Ronbo” posters, t-shirts, and political cartoons appeared with Reagan’s smiling face grafted onto Stallone’s steroid-inflated physique. In 1986, the comic book publisher Solson capitalized on the gimmick by producing three issues of Reagan’s Raiders, which featured a machine-gunning Reagan dressed in a spandex suit, suppressing international cocaine traffic and rescuing imprisoned soldiers on foreign soil. Obviously, Reagan’s Raiders or “Ronbo” played on the conservative political belief that the United States—and presidents like Jimmy Carter—had exhibited weakness during the 1970s by losing the war in Vietnam, failing to liberate American hostages in Iran, and dealing ineffectively with terrorism; Reagan, presumably, would single-handedly restore the nation’s dignity and pride. As it happened, of course, Reagan was incapable of bringing order to chaos. Indeed, his presidency was nearly undone by the Iran–Contra scandal, which centered on illegal arms sales to Iran, failed efforts to leverage those sales to free American hostages in Beirut, and the illegal funding of anti-government rebels in Nicaragua. In hindsight, the “Ronbo” motif seems more satirical than it was originally intended to be, exposing the gap between public expectations and the more complex realities of the presidency. One president who rarely disappoints—Abraham Lincoln—has unquestionably (and improbably) become the most violent president in contemporary popular culture. Unlike other early figures like Jackson or Roosevelt, Lincoln was not an advocate of violence, and though he was a renowned wrestler as a young man, violence was remote to his nature. Though Lincoln served as an Illinois militia captain during the Black Hawk War, his action was limited to “charges upon the wild onions” and a “good many bloody struggles with the mosquitoes,” as he often joked during his political career.32 Of course, the cerebral, lawyerly, and gentle Lincoln would eventually preside over the bloodiest war in the nation’s history, for which Confederates and their northern sympathizers regarded him as a monster. Southern images of Lincoln were grotesque. In newspaper editorials, political cartoons, poetry and theater, the Confederates portrayed Lincoln as a drunken ape, a miscegenationist, or an ignorant frontier hick.

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More ominously, Southerners understood the new president as a tyrant who ravaged and humiliated the South, inspiring slave insurrection and destroying civilization. Although a strain of Lincoln hatred has always existed, popular memory of Lincoln has predominantly emphasized his gentleness and humanity, his humble social origins, and his role in preserving the Union and extending liberty to 4 million enslaved Americans. In the 1990s and early 2000s, however, a “new Lincoln” emerged. This new character was ferocious, violent, and perpetually engaged in remorseless struggle against a horde of beasts and monsters. Scott McCloud’s 1997 graphic novel The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln offered perhaps the first vision of this new Lincoln. In McCloud’s tale, Lincoln returns to vanquish a charismatic, jingoistic imposter who turns out to be Benedict Arnold—and who is an agent for a force of aliens plotting to conquer the United States. At the novel’s climax, Lincoln inhabits his own memorial statue, and—putting his titanic size and strength to good use—unmasks his imposter, banishes the alien menace, and delivers a brief speech condemning shallow patriotism before returning to his marble pedestal.33 Lincoln’s adventures grew considerably rougher in the coming years. In 2009–2010, comic book author Stephen Lindsay published Jesus Hates Zombies Featuring Lincoln Hates Werewolves. This four-volume tale transports Lincoln to the post-apocalyptic present, where he accompanies Jesus, Mother Theresa, Frederick Douglass, and Elvis in their effort to stifle a zombie outbreak.34 In Seth Grahame-Smith’s Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter (2010), Lincoln destroys a subnation of slaveholding vampires.35 With great zeal, Lincoln kills and kills again, decapitating, impaling, and eventually driving all but the most recalcitrant vampires from the land. Turned into a feature film in 2012, Vampire Hunter inspired a host of imitators, including other films such as Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies (2012) and spoofs such as FDR: American Badass (2012), in which Franklin Roosevelt battles werewolves who spread polio and form the core of the Nazi Party. It is not difficult to imagine why these sorts of representations might appeal to contemporary audiences. For starters, there is an ironic, postmodern playfulness to blending action/horror genres with the dignified realm of the presidency. Imagining Lincoln as an axe-wielding liberator is—put simply—fun. But these representations would also be unthinkable without a supporting ideological framework, including a broad set of assumptions that Americans hold about the power and authority of the presidency. Our political culture reinforces the belief that presidents are more powerful than they actually are; in a sense, we have always expected them to wield extraordinary abilities that are not actually available to them. Or, with someone like Abraham Lincoln, we oversimplify the role they

Presidential Violence

may have played in shaping historical events. Stories about Lincoln saving the nation from werewolves, zombies, or vampires would make no sense if audiences did not already view him as the central actor in a historical drama that ended with the preservation of the union and the destruction of slavery. In times of political and social crisis, Americans look to presidents to resolve, perhaps single-handedly, any problem bedeviling the nation. Whimsical cultural texts offer a window into these expectations. Those expectations were most recently on display during the 2008 election. The particular circumstances of Barack Obama’s candidacy—an African American running in a time of war and in the midst of global financial catastrophe—intensified the sense that this was a transformative historical moment. Obama’s supporters hoped his election would resolve problems ranging from the war on terror to the economy to health care and gay rights. Appropriately enough, artists and ordinary fans often re-imagined Obama as a superhero, including Batman, Spider-Man, Superman, the Green Hornet, or “Neo” from The Matrix (Gopalan). The renowned comic book artist Alex Ross, for example, produced one of the most recognizable images of Obama with a work titled “It’s Time For A Change” in July 2008. The painting featured Obama staring boldly to his left while parting his shirt to reveal a large red “O” on blue spandex. Obama even quipped three weeks prior to the election that he had been “sent here [from Krypton] by my father, Jor-el, to save the planet Earth.”36 After his inauguration, Obama appeared in numerous comic book series, including an issue of The Amazing Spider-Man as well as (referentially, at least) in Action Comics and Final Crisis, both of which featured a black Superman/president. Obama also appeared in a four-issue series of Army of Darkness, a one-shot issue of Drafted, as well as a four-issue satire called President Evil—a play on the popular Resident Evil video game. In each of these, Obama struggles against violent hordes of aliens, zombies, and other assorted monsters. In President Evil: I Have a Scream, “Barot” Obama helps suppress a zombie infestation. Even more absurdly, a fourissue comic called Barack the Barbarian appeared in 2009, detailing the heroic exploits of “Barack of Shikhago” as he teams up with “Valkyrie Hilaria” (Hillary Clinton) to liberate “Warshingtun” (and Liberty herself) from the “Despot Boosh” and “Harry Burden” (Dick Cheney). A follow up issue, The Fall of Red Sarah, gave allegorical treatment to the passage of health care reform. Although these texts are offered to readers with a wink and a tongue in cheek, they nevertheless offer a vision of Obama that blended well with the views of his most committed supporters. For many American conservatives, however, Barack Obama possessed super-villainous qualities that could also be expressed using the visual

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rhetoric of popular comics. Reversing the Obama-as-superhero meme, for example, activists in Southern California began distributing posters featuring the president as the Joker from the Batman series, with the Obama’s menacing face leering over the single word “socialism” or over one of several other captions (e.g., “Why so socialist?” or “Some people just like to watch capitalism burn”).37 The Obama-as-Joker meme received gleeful attention from conservative radio and television hosts such as Glenn Beck, Tammy Bruce, and Rush Limbaugh and on conservative blogs such as Right Wing News and Atlas Shrugs, as well as coverage on mainstream cable news networks. For conservatives, the vision of Obama as a violent criminal such as the Joker tied in to their suspicions that he was not who he claimed to be—that he was, in a sense, a masked villain. Thus, during and after the election, popular rumors circulated that Obama was not actually an American citizen, that he was a “secret Muslim” (or even the Antichrist), that he was actually a socialist, or that he had clandestine ties to domestic or international terrorist groups. Most of Obama’s opponents used the image of a violent terrorist such as the Joker to express their displeasure with his administration’s economic policies or to accentuate their suspicion of health care reform. Obama’s violence, in this sense, was directed against individual liberties (and especially economic liberties). On the extreme right, however, it also became conventional wisdom that Obama was planning to forcefully confiscate the weapons of law-abiding citizens or that his administration had ordered a million coffins for use in future concentration camps (where anti-administration rebels would be liquidated), or even that Obama himself had been personally responsible for scores of suspicious deaths and mass “lone gunman” shooting sprees. The Internet—perhaps the main locus of contemporary popular culture— seethes with these conspiracy theories and more.38 Although conservatives have imagined someone such as Obama as a grave threat to their liberty and property, presidential action has come under great scrutiny from liberals and progressives as well. Under the premise of protecting Americans from terrorism, George W. Bush claimed the prerogative to detain “unlawful combatants” indefinitely at sites such as Guantanamo Bay, lifted restrictions that prohibited the CIA from carrying out political assassinations, permitted military and intelligence personnel to carry out “enhanced interrogation” techniques that blurred the boundary between interrogation and torture, froze bank assets held by organizations listed as terrorist networks by the State Department, and authorized warrantless domestic surveillance programs. For these actions, liberals condemned the Bush administration as lawless, dangerous, and even monstrous. (Alex Ross, for example—creator of the Obama/

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Superman image—depicted Bush as a vampire, feasting on the neck of the Statue of Liberty, on the October 26, 2004 cover of the Village Voice.) After his inauguration, Obama reversed some of these Bush-era policies but maintained or expanded others, including dramatically increasing the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or “drones”) to target suspected terrorists (including American citizens) on foreign soil. Defenders of these and other presidential prerogatives have argued, in a manner that would have been familiar to readers of The Federalist essays, that the interests of national security—of shielding the public from great harm—more than justify their use. Yet from the standpoint of civil liberties, human rights, and international law, many of these powers seem to exceed the moral and constitutional limits that presumably apply to those serving as president; if they do not contain the “foetus of monarchy,” these powers certainly raise long-standing anxieties about unchecked executive authority. The rights of vampires and zombies might not provoke much concern, but the rights of actually existing humans do.

Conclusion Though they might not share our cultural fascination with vampire hunters or supervillains like the Joker, Americans living in the era of Andrew Jackson would find much about our contemporary political world strangely familiar. Cultural fantasies about—and fears of—presidential violence are, as we have seen, as old as the republic itself. Over time, as Dana Nelson argues, we have come to imagine the presidency as “democracy’s heart” as well as its “avenging sword,” an (apparently) heroic and magical office that endows its possessors with the title of “most powerful man in the world.”39 Not every president has fit the bill, of course—it would be difficult to describe Calvin Coolidge or Jimmy Carter brandishing a sword of any kind, vengeful or otherwise—but many other presidents have been looked upon as instruments for great national salvation. For their supporters, at least, presidents such as Jackson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, or Reagan rescued Americans from terrible dangers (e.g., aristocracy, secessionism, corruption, or communism). Americans continue to dream of a mighty executive who liberates them from captivity and triumphantly defeats their enemies. They also, however, continue to fear that their most powerful leaders might overstep their authority and trample their liberties—or do much worse—or that their leaders will be insufficiently capable of protecting them from the worst forms of violence imaginable. Contemporary meditations on the scope and use of presidential power, then, often replicate some of the original points of contention surrounding the office itself. At

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the heart of these debates, Americans acknowledge that presidents possess an assembly of instruments that are capable of generating staggering amounts of violence. Because the presidency is itself a “popular” institution, and because presidents are unquestionably creatures of popular fantasy and are mediated by novels, films, comic books, visual art, and music, as well as in folklore, material, and mass mediated cultures, we can learn much from examining how presidents—and the powers at their disposal— have been represented in the realm of popular culture.

Notes   1.  Storing, ed., 131, 137.  2. Patterson, 163.  3. Ward, 14.  4. An Epick Poem, 32.  5. Jackson, 82.   6.  Quoted in Ward, 187.  7. Hughes, 32–33.  8. Binns, n.p.   9.  Schoening and Kasper, 43. 10.  Keenan, n.p. 11. Roosevelt, Autobiography, 28. 12.  Riordan, 37–42 13.  Morris, 153. 14.  Roosevelt, “The Manly Virtues,” 58–59. 15. Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, 156. 16. Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life, 3. 17.  Ibid., 21–22. 18.  Bederman, 186. 19. Roosevelt, Autobiography, 41. 20.  Albala, 551. 21.  Donahey, n.p. 22.  Shaw, 78. 23.  Rogers, n.p. 24.  Twain, 232. 25.  Hess and Northrop, 79. 26.  Jamieson, 197–198. 27.  Perlstein, 424. 28.  Kimball, n.p. 29.  Bonzo Goes to Washington. 30.  Smith, 192–193. 31.  Chapman 171–184; Jeffords 24–63. 32.  Current, 132. 33.  McCloud, n.p.

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34.  Lindsay, n.p. 35.  Grahame-Smith, 14. 36.  “US Elections,” n.p. 37.  Borelli, n.p. 38.  Suebsaeng and Gibson, n.p. 39.  Nelson, 1.

Bibliography Albala, Monica T. “Theodore Roosevelt: The Man and the Image in Popular Culture.” In Theodore Roosevelt: Many-Sided American, ed. Natalie A. Naylor, Douglas Brinkley, and John Allen Gable, 547–558. Interlaken, NY: Heart of the Lakes Publishing, 1992. An Epick Poem in Commemoration of Gen. Andrew Jackson’s Victory on the 8th of January, 1815. Boston, MA: William Eamons, 1827. Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1890–1917. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1995. Binns, John. Some Account of some of the Bloody Deeds of GENERAL JACKSON. Library of Congress. www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2008661734. Bonzo Goes to Washington. “Five Minutes.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=0k4TNtUZnM4. Borelli, Christopher. “Talking to the Chicago College Student Who May Be behind the Obama-as-Joker Poster.” Chicago Tribune. August 19, 2009. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2009-08-19/entertainment/09081 80509_1_posters-joker-adobe-photoshop. Chapman, James. War and Film. London, UK: Reaktion Books, 2008. Current, Richard. “Master Politician.” In The Best American History Essays on Lincoln, ed. Sean Wilentz, 129–148. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009. Donahey, J. H. “Hold on, Teddy, Let’s Talk It Over!” Library of Congress, www.loc .gov/pictures/item/2013651593/. Grahame-Smith, Seth. Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2010. Hess, Stephen, and Sandy Northrop. American Political Cartoons: The Evolution of a National Identity, 1754–2010. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2011. Hughes, William W. Archibald Yell. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1988. Jackson, Andrew. “[Andrew Jackson] To James Monroe.” In The Papers of Andrew Jackson, vol. 4: 1816–1820, ed. Harold D. Moser, David R. Hoth, and George H. Hoemann, 80–82. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994. Jameison, Kathleen Hall. Packaging the Presidency—A History and Criticism of Presidential Campaign Advertising. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Jeffords, Susan. Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994. Keenan, Jillian. “Kick Andrew Jackson Off the $20 Bill!” Slate. March 3, 2014. www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/03/andrew_jackson_ should_be_kicked_off_the_20_bill_he_ordered_a_genocide.html.

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Kimball, Daryl G. “Looking Back: The Nuclear Arms Control Legacy of Ronald Reagan.” Arms Control Today ( July/August 2004). www.armscontrol.org/ act/2004_07-08/Reagan. Lindsay, Stephen. Jesus Hates Zombies Featuring Lincoln Hates Werewolves, vols. 1–4. Levittown, NY: Alterna Comics, 2009–2010. McCloud, Scott. The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln. La Jolla, CA: Homage Comics, 1998. Morris, Edmund. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. New York: Random House, 1979. Nelson, Dana. Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Patterson, Benton Rain. The Generals: Andrew Jackson, Sir Edward Pakenham, and the Road to the Battle of New Orleans. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Perlstein, Rick. Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. New York: Nation Books, 2009. Riordan, Clarence. “Like Father Like Son.” In The Greatest Boxing Stories Ever Told: Thirty-Six Incredible Tales from the Ring, Jeff Silverman, 37–42. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2004. Rogers, W. A. “Who is Master?” Library of Congress. www.loc.gov/pictures/ item/2010717664/. Roosevelt, Theodore. The Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913. Roosevelt, Theodore. “The Manly Virtues and Practical Politics.” In The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 1, 51–62. New York: P.F. Collier, 1897. Roosevelt, Theodore. The Strenuous Life. New York: The Review of Reviews Company, 1910. Roosevelt, Theodore. The Winning of the West, vol. 2. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1917. Schoening, Benjamin, and Eric Kasper. Don’t Stop Thinking about the Music: The Politics of Songs and Musicians in Presidential Campaigns. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011. Shaw, Albert. A Cartoon History of Roosevelt’s Career. New York: The Review of Reviews Company, 1910. Smith, Jeff. The Presidents We Imagine: Two Centuries of White House Fictions on the Page, on the Stage, Onscreen, and Online. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009. Storing, Herbert J., ed. The Complete Anti-Federalist, vol. I. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Suebsaeng, Asawin, and Dave Gibson, “Chart: Almost Every Obama Conspiracy Ever,” Mother Jones. October 2012. www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/ chart-obama-conspiracy-theories. Twain, Mark. “The President Hunts a Cow.” In Mark Twain’s Book of Animals, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, 231–234. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. “US Elections: Barack Obama Jokes He is Superman.” The Telegraph, October 18, 2008. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/3213768/US -elections-Barack-Obama-jokes-he-is-Superman.html. Ward, John William. Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age. New York: Oxford University Press, 1955.

CHAPTER TWELVE

September 11 and Beyond: The Influence of 9/11 on American Film and Television Katarina Gregersdotter

The planes crashing into the twin towers on September 11, 2001, the towers’ subsequent and violent collapse, the smoke, fire, screams, and pain, the falling and dying people—all are images that have significantly affected not only the United States but the entire globe. Author Don DeLillo (2007) writes in his novel Falling Man: “These are the days after. Everything now is measured by after.”1 Many people would agree with this; there is a “before” and “after” these events. These images mean different things to different people; while some may see the attack as an attack on the western world per se, others may see it as part of a war that had already started long before this date. For example, DeLillo (2007) writes: “But that’s why you built the towers, isn’t it? Weren’t the towers built as fantasies of wealth and power that would one day become fantasies of destruction? You build a thing like that so you can see it come down. The provocation is clear. What other reason would there be to go so high and then to double it, do it twice? It’s a fantasy, so why not do it twice? You are saying, Here it is, bring it down.”2 It was soon made clear that what took place on September 11 undoubtedly was a politically motivated act, and it changed U.S. foreign policy as well as the foreign policy of its allies.

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I have here consciously used the term images not to diminish the violence, destruction, and deaths of thousands of people, but because, as Walter Benjamin has remarked, “[h]istory decays into images, not stories.”3 When the news of the attack started spreading, what we saw seemed so familiar. This had been visualized and witnessed before, especially on the big screen. Hollywood had for a very long time done the same to New York; most of its landmarks have been destroyed in one movie or another. Stephen Prince (2009) points out that in movies such as Independence Day (1996), Godzilla (1998), and The Day after Tomorrow (2004) “beloved landmarks such as the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center, and the Statue of Liberty”4 have been demolished in explosions, fires, and more—both before and after September 11. This is especially so with the multitude of social fora on the Internet that exist today and the personal photos and movies that spread through them. The initial response to September 11 from filmmakers and television production companies was to make changes to movies that were in the making; themes that dealt with death, terrorism, or even just New York were avoided. In the comedy Zoolander, for example, the Twin Towers were edited out, as Sara E. Quay and Amy M. Damico (2010) mention.5 Premieres of some movies were postponed for the same reason. Quay and Damico (2010) write that “[i]mages of the Twin Towers or scenes of death and destruction were eliminated to respect the nation’s understandable sensitivity to such imagery.”6 These events have unsurprisingly given rise to many cultural interpretations and responses, even though it took a few years before the events were explicitly addressed. The focus of this essay is to provide an overview and discussion of the images of violence in some of the filmic and televised responses to September 11, and especially the many narrations concerning what happened after September 11, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and also in the United States. The subsequent wars have many names—the (global) War on Terror, Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom—and so on, but what unites them all is, of course, violence. This essay will discuss various types of violence that are depicted in these movies and television series, and it is divided into four sections. The first discusses two movies that narrate the events of September 11. The second discusses movies and one TV series that are set in Iraq. The third discusses what I term mission films—films that are related to real events and real missions, such as that to find Osama Bin Laden. The final section discusses movies that partly deal with coming back from war, where violence is depicted as coming home with the returning soldier. The violence concerns perhaps an individual, a civilian, or more people—a military

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unit or a village, for example, or even a nation. There are also variations in the descriptions of the person or people who perform the violence. They can be seen as thriving on violence, such as in Redacted, or suffering immensely from it, as in Stop-Loss. Finally, these descriptions of violence range from those portrayed as meaningless and seemingly random to those that portray violence either as self-defense or as the only means to achieve a goal. This type of violence can include torture, which may be physical and very graphically detailed, as in Zero Dark Thirty, and it may also contain a psychological dimension, as in Brothers and Homeland.

September 11, 2001 Two movies were released in 2006 that cover the events of September 11 from different perspectives. They are Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center and British filmmaker Paul Greengrass’s United 93. Stone had promised the industry not to make a “political” film,7 and the result is an intimate portrait of two critically wounded Port Authority Officers who are trapped under the debris of the South Tower. Though dealing with a very violent event, the film is not violent in the standard sense—for example, the viewer is not even shown the towers collapsing—rather, the focus is on the Port Authority officers’ physical, emotional, and psychological pain. To a certain extent, the movie successfully shows a country under attack, as represented by the two officers and their worried families. World Trade Center, of course, shares some of the same themes as United 93, such as terrorism and heroism, but ends up as more of a standard Hollywood production that promotes a belief in the nation as much as belief in the individual’s endurance and will to survive. Stephen Prince (2009) points out: “By telling a story about life, it fails to tell one about death. The scale of life lost at the World Trade Center gives that day one of its indelible meanings. Take that away, and one risks reducing the magnitude of the event.”8 The movie very symbolically ends with the image of the birth of a child. In comparison to World Trade Center, United 93 does not “reduce the magnitude” of the event: It tries to realistically portray what (possibly) happened on United Airlines flight 93 to San Francisco. Along with three other aircraft, United 93 was hijacked. United 93, however, was the only plane that never reached its destination (which may have been the White House); instead, it crashed into a field in Pennsylvania because of the interference of some of the passengers. Because there were no survivors, it will never be completely clear what happened on that plane, but with his film, Greengrass nevertheless attempted to create a documentary feeling

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by describing a possible scenario. Greengrass used many amateur actors, and there is no real main character the viewer learns more about; this enhances the impression of authenticity. In comparison to World Trade Center, which has celebrity actors (Nicolas Cage and Maggie Gyllenhaal, for example) in the lead roles, “Greengrass wanted to emphasize that those who were caught up in the attacks were ordinary people,”9 and this is also why the magnitude of the event is not diminished. We immediately learn who the terrorists are, because the first scene shows the three terrorists in a motel room. Two of them are praying, one of them with the Qur’an in his hands. The words “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) are heard, words that have become a common device used by movie or television show producers to signal fundamentalism and danger. The pace of the film is, however, initially quite slow; we see passengers boarding the plane and the flight attendants greeting them. We see people in the control tower. Despite the slow pace, it is quite painful to watch, because we know how it will end—partly because of the scene in the motel room. In his review of the film, Peter Bradshaw (2006) writes: “But we all know, or think we know, how the story of United 93 comes out, and this is what makes the film such a gut-wrenching example of ordeal cinema.”10 We know that the passengers fought back and tried to stop the terrorists, but we also know that the plane ultimately crashed, and that there were no survivors. Bradshaw continues: “And all these people are ghosts, all of them dead men and dead women walking. When they are politely asked to pay attention to the ‘safety’ procedures, ordinary pre-9/11 reality all but snaps in two under the weight of historical irony.”11 Why the terrorists took so long to overtake the plane remains unknown; Greengrass’s version is that they were too nervous, perhaps even frightened. They are shown hesitating; we see beads of sweat on their foreheads. Greengrass shows with this movie that to portray violence and its effects, graphic details are not necessary, and in a way this makes the audience question the necessity of the sometimes extreme levels of violence in other movies. When the terrorists do start their hijacking, after almost an hour of screen time, the camera moves in a jittery way, we see glimpses of knives, and we also see a bomb vest (which later is revealed to be a mock-up). When the film was released the general public had become familiar with the phenomenon of the suicide bomber, so the mere image of a vest is enough to instill fear. Prince asserts that “[t]he killing of the pilots and stewardess is shown very obliquely. While there is no ambiguity about what is happening, the camera setups tend to be off-angle, with unclear and often blocked sight-lines on the violence, and editing imposes

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a choppy, staccato rhythm that serves to occlude details about the killings as they are happening.”12 As in World Trade Center, United 93 focuses on the psychology of both the passengers and the terrorists. The passengers are seen praying, crying, and calling their families, and when they decide to fight back it is shown in a very realistic manner. Violence, of course, increases in this moment, but as these are obviously ordinary people, not evident heroes in the Hollywood sense, who are not used to violence and are therefore easy to identify with, the narration remains realistic. Prince (2009) poignantly comments on the ending: “By ending the film with the crash of United 93, and presenting it from a visual perspective inside the plane, Greengrass renders the process of dying on that plane into a subjective experience for the viewer.”13 Despite, or because of, the anonymity of the characters, they remain sources of identification for the audience until the end. Heroism can be a difficult topic in any film; it can easily slide into sentimentality or exaggerated patriotism. Because Greengrass has chosen this topic, and this event, this theme cannot be circumvented. However, as stated above, through his narration, there is a lack of overt heroism. Yet, what the passengers on this flight did, by sacrificing themselves, most likely saved many more lives. But as Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers (2006) explains: “We will never know whether the passengers actually breached the cockpit. What matters to Greengrass is their collective intent. At the end, he imagines a sea of arms reaching into that cockpit in a way that redefines heroism. Far from being exploitive, the effect is inspiring: This is the best of us.”14 The film also demonstrates, unlike most Hollywood action movies, or a television show such as 24, “the confusion, paralysis, and incomprehension that gripped the air control and defense systems,”15 and the result is an account of what it seems reasonable to assume happened on flight United 93 that is both gripping and realistic.

Iraq Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008) opens with a quotation from the book War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by war correspondent Chris Hedges (2002): “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” The film focuses on one character, Sergeant First Class William James (Jeremy Renner), who is the team leader of a unit in Iraq that dismantles explosives. He is depicted as reckless and egocentric, and the other members of his team tend to question him, often feeling that he endangers their safety. After his return to his wife and son in the United

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States, he realizes that he cannot go back to family life, so he returns to Iraq to start another tour of duty, choosing death over life. Der Derian (2010) comments: “James returns to the war, still trying to make the best of a lost cause, no wiser or better for all he has suffered, and[,] worse, unable to love.”16 Kathryn Bigelow knows how to build up tension. The Hurt Locker starts in medias res; the well-known actor Guy Pearce is Staff Sergeant Matt Thompson, who is, after a few minutes, killed by a radio controlled explosive device, after which he is replaced by James. By starting the film by killing off one famous actor, the audience is on its toes: There are no rules here; the heroes may not survive. Yet the film soon proves to be far from a narration of heroism, and the quote the movie starts with is what symbolizes James as a character. He is unable to function in a society that is not at war; he cannot find purpose or meaning unless he can live on the edge, and be and act in a violent environment. From one perspective, the movie can be seen as a critique of war, or even this particular war. Individuals are transformed from fathers or sons (there are no female combatants in the film) to killers. From another perspective, the movie in fact fails to criticize or question the terms of war and invasions, its focus placed on only one man. Bigelow shows the psychological effects of violence on one individual, and this must been seen as a failure, for the setting is the occupation of Iraq. As in many other visual narrations, such as Brothers, Generation Kill, and Lone Survivor, the landscape is portrayed as the enemy, and in this case, it can be seen to influence James: It helps provoke the violence he harbors inside. Omar Assem El-Khairy (2010) writes that “The Hurt Locker presents Iraq as a barren uninhabitable land, thus mystifying its inhabitants and raising US soldiers to almost superhero status. As one soldier puts it, ‘the bottom line is if you’re in Iraq you’re dead.’”17 The colors are grayish, yellow, orange, and brown; the lack of water and therefore a civilized way of life is made obvious through the colors alone. Yet the landscape is used here to emphasize the plight of James more than the inhabitants of the nation. There is dust in the air when he walks down the street, geared up with helmet, mask and weaponry. One scene in particular highlights James’s personality. He has a box of memorabilia under his bed, which the other men in the unit are looking through. One item after the other is picked up from the box, and James comments that it is “a box full of stuff that almost killed me.” He continues: “You know, I just think it’s really interesting to hold something in your hand that could have killed anyone.” He seems to cherish the moments he has managed to escape death, but simultaneously he seems to suggest that he is unique; the “stuff” could

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have killed others, and he is in charge of them. They are his. After this he and Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), one of the characters who oppose his attitude, have a boxing match, a way for Bigelow to show the normalization of violence by emphasizing the fact that they engage in violence in their spare time as well. One Iraqi character, a young boy called Beckham (Christopher Sayegh), acts as a means to show the audience a more humane side of James, a part of his personality that does not thrive on danger and violence. They have a playful father–son relationship, and their conversations become pauses from a life where death is always present. However, when James believes that Beckham has been killed, he turns into a killing machine, out for vengeance. Joshua Clover (2009) remarks: “The seeming murder and misuse of the boy provokes James, supported by his increasingly unwilling team, into an adrenalin soaked commando raid on a local family, which ends disastrously. But this is enough for James; when he later encounters Beckham alive and well, he registers nothing. The boy has served his purpose, a mute justification for another visit to the firefight.”18 His actions can easily be interpreted as a response to a violent act over which he had no control. Therefore, these scenes make us ask whether James ever had the ability to love, as Der Derian proposes. Perhaps his personality is not shaped by the environment of war; instead, perhaps Bigelow suggests, every war needs such a man, a man already devoid of empathy and the ability to feel grief. If The Hurt Locker deals with violence organized around a single individual, the seven-episode miniseries Generation Kill (2008) covers more perspectives. The series is about the invasion of Iraq and is based on a nonfiction account written by Rolling Stone journalist Evan Wright (also titled Generation Kill, 2004). Wright follows a group of U.S. Marines stationed in Kuwait until they invade Iraq. The series encompasses forty days and is filled with violence contrasted with mundane and trivial and even ridiculous matters. The plot is to a great extent dialogue-driven, and in between actual scenes where shots are fired and violence is present, the Marines are preoccupied with the importance (and rules and regulations) of grooming, the possible death of J.Lo (Jennifer Lopez), and other conversations that seem to be far away from the near future occupation of Iraq. They are simply passing time during the long hours of waiting for orders. Evan Wright’s (Lee Tergesen) presence is ridiculed until they find out he has also worked for the magazine Hustler. This is in line with the general topics of conversation—jokes and rants about sex and women (and the subsequent homophobic comments)—and can be seen as a way to normalize an extreme situation; the invasion of another country, far away from

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home. These types of comments are not unique to Generation Kill; rather, they are part of the war genre. The series is multilayered in a number of different ways. Even though the focus is on the Americans, and so the military occupation is seen and narrated from their perspective, there is still an attempt to discuss the invasion from the Iraqi point of view, and this problematizes both the invasion and the reasons behind it. We know now that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but at the time, this was still considered a valid reason for invading the country. The unit is made up of men who have very different personalities, even though they may also be seen as stereotypes. There are racists, and there are idealists. There are the immature young men, and there are more experienced Marines. One of these inexperienced soldiers, Lance Cpl Harold James Trombley (Billy Lush) explains to Wright why he feels disappointed: “You know what sucks? All those dead bodies we saw today. I didn’t get to shoot any of them.” This man represents one type of soldier we are familiar with in the genre; the one who longs to make his first kill. As John Leonard (2008) states in his review: “[At] Camp Mathilda in Kuwait, they had rehearsed violent death. Recon marines endure the same training as Navy Seals and Army Special Forces. They look forward to stealth and killing; that’s what they signed up for.”19 Corporal Josh Ray Person (James Ranson) says to Evan Wright: “The Marine Corps is like America’s pit bull. They beat us, mistreat us, and every once in a while, they let us out to attack someone.” Generation Kill does not so much criticize the underlying reasons for invading Iraq but instead questions the way it was carried out. We understand, for example, that this unit of soldiers only had one translator, and Evan Wright is obviously perplexed when he learns about this. One even more important point of criticism is shown through the emphasis on what seems to be the impossibility of not killing civilians, even though they try hard to avoid doing so. For example, they start shooting at a hamlet, despite there being only women and children there. Even though some of them notice the mistake and yell “Cease fire,” the orders are either ignored or not heard. Mistakes are shown to be far too easy to make, and they are always fatal. That civilians are killed is depicted as being an inevitable part of war, but Generation Kill also suggests that civilian deaths happen because of the Iraqi people and the landscape of Iraq who, just as in The Hurt Locker, are often depicted as being very different from the Americans. Brian Lowry (2008) notes: “Once the shooting starts, a chaotic, claustrophobic vision of war ensues (much of it from the inside of a Humvee) displaying the ease with which soldiers can come to view the enemy and even the civilian

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population of ‘Hajis’ as something less than human.”20 Sergeant Antonio Espera (Jon Huertas) half-jokingly asserts: “It’s destiny, dawg, The white man’s gotta rule the world.” There are, however, several moments when some of the Marines remind the others that the Iraqis in fact are human. Someone poses the question that perhaps Americans would not feel comfortable having invading armed forces answering the call of nature in their front yards? When a young boy is shot in the stomach, the Marines are faced with the grief of the mother and thus that the Iraqi people are not essentially different from Americans. The mother is desperately holding him in her arms, crying and wailing. This is the first scene where most of the Marines are affected by this side of the war and realize that to kill a child can never be justified. They also try to get him evacuated by helicopter to save his life, but their commander Lieutenant Colonel Stephen “Godfather” Ferrando (Chance Kelly) explains that it cannot be done. Under the rules, the Marines say, they have to provide him with care until he dies, and it seems as if the Marines stand united in this question; they want to do the “right” thing but are in opposition to their superiors and cannot do anything about it. Watching them waiting for a child to die is unnerving for the viewer, and the results of the cruelty of war are seen in the faces of the marines, in the grieving mother’s, and naturally in the unconscious, dying boy. When they eventually reach Baghdad, the situation is presented as chaotic, and it is again stressed that the Americans are far from home, that Iraq represents another culture to them. Some of them also realize that they have been part of creating this chaos. Alessandra Stanley (2008) writes: “Marines look on helplessly as Baghdad is looted and children succumb to disease and chaos. The men find a wallet on an enemy fighter that identifies the man as a young Syrian who wrote the word ‘jihad’ on his entry papers. ‘This is the opposite of what we want,’ Lieutenant Fick tells the reporter. ‘Two weeks ago he was still a student in Syria. He wasn’t a jihadist until we came to Iraq.’”21 This raises the question of whether violence can ever be constructive, even in war. Will violence always give birth to violence? One of the marines even observes that much of what they do in Iraq they would go to prison for at home. There are rules to follow in a war as well, but extreme circumstances perhaps create (or invite) extreme individuals and actions. This is the case in Brian De Palma’s Redacted (2007). It won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and is an aggressive and brutal account of what took place in 2006 when American soldiers raped a young Iraqi girl and then killed her family. Redacted resembles De Palma’s Vietnam movie Causalities of War (1989), which also dealt with the rape of a local

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girl by an American soldier. Redacted tries to create an authentic atmosphere and it achieves this mainly because one character, Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz), films everything with his digital video camera. He records day-to-day activities, making a war diary with the hopes of one day being accepted into film school. Despite the aim to make a truthful account of what happened, the political agenda is what guides the narration. Apart from Salazar, there are hardly any sympathetic characters, and very soon the viewer realizes that many of them are potential rapists and sadists. Roger Ebert (2007) states that after the rape of the girl and the multiple murders, “[c]ompany members are informed . . . that if they don’t keep quiet, they will die. There is no reason to doubt this.”22 They are shown molesting a woman sexually at a checkpoint; they play cards with pornographic images, and they open fire on a car and kill a pregnant woman. They frequently refer to the Iraqi people as “sand niggers” or “ragheads.” De Palma’s message is clear: these men live and breathe violence. After getting drunk one night, they decide to rape the 15-year-old girl, and, ironically enough, Salazar is still filming. He does not take part in the crime, but he does not interfere, either. Even though De Palma has used the documentary style throughout the movie, it is not until now that it adds to the description of the violence, and its consequences. To be a witness is, in De Palma’s movie, also a criminal act, as Mark Straw maintains (2010). This is a very painful scene to watch: Not many details are shown, but the violence is almost palpable. The final part of the movie is called “Collateral Damage” and shows stills of dead Iraqi civilians, many of whom are children. Mark Straw comments: “[T]he photographs themselves are horrific, featuring images of bodies severely wounded by bullets or bombs, numerous corpses, and the remains of Abeer qasim Hamza al-Janabi.”23 Stephen Prince maintains that the film takes “an extremely hard-edged view of the war.”24 That these photographs are included is a way for the director to stress the main point of the film. He has told the story of one crime committed by the invading forces, but there are many more to mention. Those are the crimes of which no soldier will be found guilty, and thus the rape and murders committed by these men can then be seen as a metaphor for the invasion per se. Finally there are movies that are set in Iraq and deal with the theme of war, but are more concerned with creating suspense and therefore the theme and use of violence is used strictly for entertainment. Green Zone (Greengrass 2010) is such a movie. It is also set in Baghdad and, like Generation Kill, stresses the general chaos that the invasion and search for the weapons of mass destruction has generated. U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon) starts to question the intelligence

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given about where to search for such weapons. Many critics have also commented on the team of Greengrass and Damon, who worked together in the Bourne movies. Todd McCarthy (2010) comments: “The interlocking of form and content remains intact for at least the first half of the picture, but once Damon’s one-man truth squad goes off the reservation and starts behaving too much like Jason Bourne for comfort, the film begins not only spilling more blood but also leaking crucial credibility.”25 The movie is, as stated, clearly set in a war zone and with a war theme, but the general dramaturgy and focus on conspiracy places the film in the action genre and this also effects the descriptions of violence; they are only there to build up tension.

Missions Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow 2012) and Lone Survivor (Peter Berger 2013) both deal with specific missions; consequently, their plots are driven by a specific goal, and loosely based on real events. The former recounts the ten-year hunt for the world’s most wanted man, Osama bin Laden, and ends with his death in Pakistan. The title refers to the time of his death, half past midnight. The latter is based on a nonfiction book with the same name (2013) written by the lone survivor Marcus Luttrell, together with Patrick Robinson. The movie narrates the Navy SEAL mission Operation Redwings, to track down Taliban leader Ahmad Shah. These two films stand out as being by far the most violent ones discussed in this chapter. They are, however, violent in different ways, and for different reasons, a point to which I return. Zero Dark Thirty is fiction but poses as a fact-based narrative. Bin Laden is referred to as the most dangerous man in the world, and the film thus contains violence of many forms that can be seen as a consequence of Bin Laden’s own reputation. Marouf A. Hasian Jr. (2014) explains that the “movie starts and ends with what many regard as two of the most iconic image events in American memory, the attack on the Twin Towers and the attack on the Abbottabad compound.”26 The film starts with a black screen and sounds from recordings from September 11 (“It’s so hot, I’m burning up,” “I’m gonna die, aren’t I?” are heard). There are various voices pleading for help, and emergency operators trying to calm them. We then learn that two years have passed, and we are introduced to the main character, Maya (Jessica Chastain), a CIA analyst officer who has just been transferred to the U.S. embassy in Pakistan. She is working closely with Dan (Jason Clarke) to find leads into Bin Laden’s location. Only a few minutes into the film, Dan is seen torturing a prisoner, Ammar (Reda

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Kateb), and when he is not torturing him, he is threatening him verbally. “I own you, Ammar. You belong to me.” Dan sometimes takes breaks, having coffee and smoking cigarettes, but then continues torturing him, using waterboarding, for example. Maya’s facial expression shows unease; she perhaps realizes the cruelty of the situation, or she is not used to seeing this. As the years go by, however, she becomes accustomed to the use of torture, maybe adopting Dan’s view of it: “He [the detainee] has to learn how helpless he is.” It seems as if torture is regarded as a necessity in the hunt for Bin Laden. When Dan eventually decides to leave he says to Maya: “I’ve seen too many guys naked, it’s gotta be over a hundred at this point.” But he also warns Maya to “be careful with the detainees now. Politics are changing. You don’t wanna be the last person holding a dog collar when the oversight committee comes,” referring to the various scandals revealed in the media about how prisoners have been mistreated in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. The torture of Ammar goes on for nearly twenty minutes in the film. Ammar grows weaker and weaker; at one point, he is kept awake for ninety-six hours. Steve Coll (2013) asserts: “There can be no mistaking what Zero Dark Thirty shows: torture plays an outsized part in Maya’s success. [Ammar] is tortured extensively in the film’s opening sequence. . . . Ammar’s face is swollen, we see him strung up by ropes, water boarded, sexually humiliated, deprived of sleep through the blasting of music, and stuffed into a small wooden box.”27 Maya is portrayed as a modern CIA version of Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab, on a tireless and obsessive hunt for Moby Dick, the great white whale. It is because of her stubbornness and dedication to the task of finding Bin Laden, director Bigelow suggests, that Bin Laden eventually could be found. Nevertheless, the film also suggests that so-called enhanced interrogation, a euphemism for torture, was also necessary. Attacks carried out by terrorists in London and Saudi Arabia, as well as the bombing of the Islamabad Marriott Hotel in 2008, all give further evidence of the necessity of torture. As mentioned before, Maya becomes less and less bothered by torture. When she is not in the room with the detainee, directing torture, she is seen watching tape after tape of interrogations of detainees. Through Maya’s eyes and her determination to find Bin Laden, torture itself becomes normalized for both the audience and the characters. The final attack, the final acts of violence, occur when a team of Navy SEALs enters the compound in Abbottabad. They kill several people, but the vision is now blurred, as if seen through night-vision goggles. We hear and see women and children screaming, shots are fired, and bodies hit the floor with muted thumps. Maya is later shown Bin Laden’s dead body. Her goal has thus been achieved, and in the aircraft going to the United States,

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she cries. It is not clear whether she is mourning all the deaths, including her colleague and probably her only friend Jessica (Jennifer Ehle) or that her life no longer has a purpose. Lone Survivor does not deal with torture, but violence is as frequent and as graphically portrayed as in Zero Dark Thirty. Critic Justin Chang (2013) describes it as an “often unbearably brutal account of a doomed 2005 military mission in Afghanistan [and] is perhaps the most grueling and sustained American combat picture since Black Hawk Down.”28 One major difference is that the violence is inflicted on the Navy SEAL members, rather than on “the enemy.” However, one similarity is that if seen as part of a genre that focuses on the War on Terror, any violence performed by an American combatant is explained and justified by the cruel actions performed by, in this case, the Taliban. As in many of the war narratives discussed here, the division between “us” and “them” creates a dividing line, accentuating many cultural differences. When we meet the Navy SEAL unit for the first time, they are training hard but also shown joking, singing and dancing. It is clear that they are united by not only the cause, but also by friendship and brotherhood. When we see the Taliban for the first time, they are shown hacking a man to death, and there is no sense of brotherhood among the Taliban, or of any feelings other than hate and probable fanaticism. This suggests that the violence the Taliban use is based on impulse and is thus seemingly random, whereas the Navy SEALs in training show not only muscle and the ability to endure, but also a sense of rationality. From this perspective, Lone Survivor can be seen as a very problematic film. The title of the movie reveals the end, so the viewer is not surprised to see Marcus Luttrell (Mark Wahlberg) on a gurney, severely wounded and about to be evacuated by helicopter at the beginning of the film. His voiceover says: “There is a storm inside of us. I’ve heard many team guys speak of this. A burning. A river. A drive. An unrelenting desire to push yourself harder and further than anyone could think possible. Pushing ourselves into those cold, dark corners. Where the bad things live. Where the bad things fight.” The “we” he describes are the Navy SEALs and their brotherhood. But the “we” might also be seen as a metaphor for the American people. The “bad things” in this context are the Taliban, reduced from humans to inanimate objects. This can be seen as a comment on the notion that there exists a kind of violence that is both warranted and “better,” and thus rational, than another type of violence that apparently prospers in “cold, dark corners” that are presented as uncivilized. In Lone Survivor, the landscape that represents Afghanistan, the mountains of Kunar, is constructed as the enemy to the Americans more than

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in any other narrative discussed in this chapter. It is “those cold dark corners” mentioned above. It is more than “different” from home; it is actively hostile, since it physically hurts the unit that is sent out to find Ahmad Shah. At first, the mountain and the trees are shown as helping the four Navy SEAL members hide as they stake out the Taliban camp. They are of course professionals, and know how to stay hidden, but as soon as they are discovered the landscape only works to their disadvantage. After the Navy SEALs encounter three goat herders, they decide, after debating the subject among themselves, to let them live, even though their operation might be compromised. This act of mercy, though it would have been against the Geneva Convention to kill them, is what eventually seals their fate. After this, nearly 40 minutes of ruthless firefights begin. Background music is limited in order to instead audibly highlight the sounds of shots, the sounds of bullets hitting human bodies, and the sound of human bodies falling down the mountain, hitting rock after rock. Chang (2013) comments: “[T]he cruelest moments are those in which the SEALs seek cover by hurling themselves downhill, the rocks and branches becoming lethally sharp obstacles beneath their feet.”29 Despite the length of the scene, it is the natural climax of the movie. Yet the almost wordless scene stresses not only the extreme levels of graphic violence, but also the suffering and pain of the four Americans. One critic mentions that a Taliban can be killed with one single shot, while it takes as many as a dozen shots to kill an American.30 Justin Chang also states that “every fall, scrape and curse registers with tremendous impact.”31 One death scene in particular, that of Matt “Axe” Axelson (Ben Foster), almost resembles torture, because it takes so many shots to kill him. He had earlier shouted to the Taliban: “You can die for your country—I’m going to live for mine!” This becomes an ironic comment since the viewer knows that only Luttrell will survive, but it also illustrates his personality and, perhaps, nationality; it will be difficult to kill him. Axelson crawls on all fours until he finds a place to sit and wait for death. He is bloody, dirty, with one eye wounded, and the breathing is very slow, heavy and strained. We can hear that his lungs are hurt. He is eventually hit straight in the head, and the camera shows his remaining eye staring emptily. The film has received praise as well as criticism; some critics have described it as a patriotic film whereas others have dismissed it as racist, but many critics agree that the scene on the mountain is very effective. There is, however, no clear conclusion in the film; it depicts a failed mission, as opposed to Zero Dark Thirty. One short dialogue lingers however, and it is one that promises more violence. Luttrell says: “I’m sorry that we didn’t kill more of these motherfuckers” and receives the reply from a

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brother in arms: “Oh, don’t be fucking sorry. We’re going to kill way more of them.”

Homecoming Brothers (Jim Sheridan 2009) is a remake of the Danish film of the same title by Susanne Bier (Brødre 2004). It tells the story of two brothers: Sam (Tobey Maguire), a Marine captain, and Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal), recently released from prison where he has served time for armed robbery. Sam is portrayed as a successful man; he is happily married to Grace (Natalie Portman) and they have two children. He is also a patriot. Tommy, on the other hand, is a constant disappointment to their father Hank (Sam Shepard), who is ex-military and an archetypal patriarch. When Sam is called to duty in Afghanistan, they all meet for a family dinner and Tommy asks Sam: “You love it over there, huh?” Sam replies simply that it is his job. One of his daughters then says that they only shoot the bad guys, “The ones with beards.” This short dialogue effectively shows the cliché that surrounds the “bad guys”—they are bearded Taliban—but it also demonstrates a belief in the war: that it is necessary and justified because of the “badness,” or evil, embodied by the enemy. To emphasize this point even more clearly, Hank states that Sam is a hero because he is serving his country. Sam’s plane is later shot down over Afghanistan, and he and Private Joe Willis (Patrick John Flueger) are captured by the Taliban. In the United States, his family receives the news of his death. The film hereafter moves between scenes in the Taliban camp and the hometown in the United States where everybody else tries to move on with their lives and live with their grief. The scenes construct a sharp and important contrast between two realities. The mundane features of everyday life in Grace’s family emphasize the cruelty that Sam is exposed to. Grace tries to rebuild her life and she receives practical and emotional support from the remaining brother, Tommy, who in the absence of Sam, has matured and acts responsibly. Among other things, he helps her to renovate the kitchen, an effective and unambiguous symbol for family and safety. For Sam, on the other hand, psychological and physical violence is part of his everyday existence. He is held prisoner in a cave along with Joe Willis. Outside the Taliban are looking through their prisoners’ private family photos. They are laughing and pointing, and the prisoners’ sense of helplessness is stressed by this act of humiliation. This can be compared to the torture scenes in Zero Dark Thirty, where the helplessness of the detainees is also highlighted, but the CIA agents performing it are never amused; they are simply doing their job. In another scene in Brothers, the Taliban executes Afghan civilians

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who are begging for their lives. While Grace and Tommy are painting the kitchen, Joe Willis is tortured and burned and forced to make a taped “confession.” Tommy, in the United States, also makes personal progress when he makes amends for his past acts of violence, asking the victim of the robbery for forgiveness. In one of the film’s two climaxes, Grace and Tommy are shown sharing a kiss while Sam in Afghanistan is forced to beat Joe to death. This scene is hard to watch for two reasons. Sam, this calm, mature, and conscientious man, completely loses control. To save his own life, he is forced to take another, and when he beats Joe, his face is distorted with hatred and desperation. Second, the violent rage the Taliban display is as painful. One man keeps screaming: “Kill him or I will kill you! Kill him or I will cut his head off!” The screaming is loud, stressful, and appears to completely surround Sam; it seems as if he finally gives in to stop the screaming as much as to save his own life. Sam screams back: “There!” This is crucial to the theme of the film, and to the characterization of Sam; in those brief and violent moments he, too, loses his humanity, and afterwards the camera shows him in the cave again, this time alone, sitting as if frozen, and staring in front of him, obviously in shock. The violence he has been subjected to, and forced to commit, is different from his previous experiences, even though he is a trained soldier. When Sam is later rescued and reunited with his family, his reintegration into family life becomes impossible because of what happened. He cannot tell anyone about what he has done, because of the shame and guilt. The homecoming thus never truly becomes a real homecoming, due to the violence. He has become a very different man and a very lonely one since he feels that no one can understand what he has experienced. In one scene, Sam’s wife Grace sees the scars on his body, the physical evidence of torture, but he cannot share the psychological scars. The first season of Homeland (Showtime 2011–) shares many of the themes displayed in Brothers, especially in the characterization of one the protagonists, Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis). He is a U.S. Marine who returns home after several years of captivity in Iraq. The series is of course constructed according to a completely different dramaturgy, where every episode ends with a type of cliffhanger, and clues to the truth about this character are slowly revealed, and sometimes contradicted. But it is clear that Brody is a deeply traumatized individual who cannot tell his wife or children about his experiences. She sees his scarred and broken body, and in flashbacks it is revealed that he was forced to beat his cocaptive Tom Walker (Chris Chalk), to what Brody thought was his death. Despite the many twists and turns in the series, and the question that

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keeps surfacing–—has Nicholas Brody been turned by Al-Qaeda?—Brody is clearly tormented; he is either emotionally and psychologically distant or overtly aggressive to the people around him. In Brothers, Sam eventually asks to be sent back to Afghanistan, because he cannot be with his family. “They don’t understand,” he confesses. In the second and last climax of the film, in an outburst of rage, Sam demolishes the new kitchen. It has come to symbolize his failures as a father, as a husband, as a brother, and as a soldier. He screams at a terrified Grace, holding his hands in front of him: “You know what I can do with these hands, Grace? Fuck!” When the police arrive he points his gun to his own head. The movie ends with a question to the audience; it is of course rhetorical, but nevertheless conveys a message of what war can do to the individual, and as a consequence to his or her immediate family. “I don’t know who said only the dead have seen the end of the war. I’ve seen the end of war. The question is: Can I live again?” The movie has its obvious limitations, focusing on the perspective of one American soldier, yet it aspires to ask larger questions about the nature of war, and what violence can do to a person, even if that person is a trained soldier: Sam clearly suffers from posttraumatic stress disorder. This theme links Brothers to antiwar movies such as The Deer Hunter (Cimino 1978), another movie that emphasizes the extreme circumstances of being kept prisoner, how violence affects a person, and also the problematic view of how violence can be linked to the enemy—those who are not white, those who are not Americans. The theme of homecoming is also explored in, among others, Stop-Loss (Kimberly Peirce 2008) and The Messenger (Oren Moverman 2009). The title of the film Stop-Loss refers to the involuntary extension of a soldier’s enlistment contract, and this is what happens to U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Brandon King (Ryan Philippe) who has just returned home from Iraq, where the final, very violent events, which are also shown in the film, have left him both traumatized and disillusioned. When he is ordered back to Iraq, he goes AWOL. The film aims to illustrate what can happen to a soldier who is subjected to, and who becomes a perpetrator and target of, violence. The acts of violence are internalized and become part of the individual, both psychologically and emotionally: One critic claims the film depicts “an emotional battlefield.”32 When King and his comrades in arms are celebrated in their hometown in Texas, it becomes clear to the viewer that they have left nothing behind: The violence has been brought home with them, and it has left such scars that they keep on using violence at home. When King learns that he has been stop-lossed, he cannot accept another tour of duty, and he instead escapes, even though he is breaking the law. The question of who is really breaking the law is what Peirce

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emphasizes here. When and why can a person be forced to be a soldier? On his journey, King still has to deal with the fact of the war; he is beaten, he beats others, and the movie ends with King returning to another tour of duty, as does James in The Hurt Locker, with the difference that James is eager to get back. The Messenger is different from the other movies and TV series discussed in this chapter, though I maintain that it also deals with homecoming and violence. The Messenger narrates only the end result of violence; it tells the story of two men from the U.S. Army whose job is to notify families of dead soldiers. The violence is here thus only seen as grief and loss. The violence has already occurred, “outside” the movie; yet the film manages to convey how violence, in the long run, and after the fact, affects older and not yet born generations. Captain Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson), one of the “messengers,” quite sarcastically remarks: “There’s no such thing as a satisfied customer.” The violence revealed in this movie is thus on a psychological level more than anything else, but it is still an important contribution to this genre, since it shows the effects of violence on those who are left behind, on those who are not personally involved in military operations.

Conclusion: Violence Coming Home The many examples of violence that have been discussed here are embedded in certain contexts, and are furthermore connected to certain characters that influence both the meaning and purpose of these violent images. What can be said about all of them however is that they seek to explore the ethics of violence in a post–September 11 reality. They use descriptions of violence to discuss the global war on terror, but by doing so they must also, in a way, objectify violence. Therefore, the issue of the ethics of violence becomes an issue of aesthetics in these visual responses. Just like the characters in The Messenger, these films and television shows are also messengers in a way. They bring back the consequences of war and conflict to the audience and in doing so partake in a metaphorical homecoming. In this sense, all of the images discussed in this chapter can in fact be included in the section Homecoming. The two movies that specifically narrate the events of September 11 can be said to communicate a sense of hopefulness. World Trade Center focuses more on life than on death. United 93 proves that to narrate extreme violence, graphic details are not necessary, and to narrate hope, formulaic heroes are not needed; Greengrass focuses on the collective efforts, rather than on the individual. Yet, because what actually happened can never be

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known, it is only one possible interpretation, no matter how plausible it might seem. The televised and filmed interpretations of the invasion of Iraq also participate in discussions concerning the individual and the collective and engage in a critical discussion about the nature and consequences of war. Green Zone, also directed by Paul Greengrass, but very different from United 93, criticizes the reasons for the invasion, and the tales told of weapons of mass destruction. That violence is a daily fact for both civilians and soldiers cannot be doubted, but the film has a hero, as in a regular action film, and therefore the violence lacks depth and remains on the level of entertainment and excitement. By comparison, Generation Kill, The Hurt Locker, and Redacted all aim to represent the war in Iraq and the effects of violence more realistically. The Hurt Locker focuses on the individual man and how violence affects him. In comparison to, for example, Green Zone or Lone Survivor, the main character James can be seen to complicate, or even criticize, the use of heroes in war movies, and it also poses the question, much as Generation Kill does, of whether violence can ever lead to anything else than more violence. Generation Kill depicts a dual process; the first one is the process that is the invasion of Iraq; day by day they come closer to Baghdad. The second process takes place on an emotional and psychological level; many of the members of the Marine unit mature over the course of this process and, because of the many civilian casualties they both witness and cause themselves, they gain knowledge of the destructive and often unfair side of an invasion. Like Generation Kill, Redacted shows how a unit, not an individual, can trigger each other to commit war crimes. Through threats and bullying, the characters that object to the rape and murders are silenced. If The Hurt Locker shows the normalization of violence via the main character, Redacted takes the theme of normalization one step further; from the start the soldiers are shown to harass civilians and to be both racist and sexist, with no redeeming qualities. Violence is more than normalized, it is what motivates most of them, and De Palma’s verdict is that everybody shares the blame, even those soldiers who do not actively take part in the crimes. The section of this chapter called Missions includes two movies, and they are more graphically detailed in their descriptions of violence than the other films I discuss. They also both seem to differentiate between types of violence—the sort that is essential and based on rationality and the sort that is random and based on impulse. Zero Dark Thirty shows lengthy scenes where detainees are tortured, and Lone Survivor depicts how the Taliban shoots to pieces a small unit of Navy SEALs, in another

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lengthy scene. The torture is described as essential, and therefore rational, in finding Bin Laden. Lone Survivor, even though it describes a failed mission, emphasizes the justified reasons behind the mission, by showing the (random) cruelty of the Taliban. If we leave these visual examples and look at the rest of the movie and television industry we can see that many of these themes are recycled. One obvious example is, of course, the television series 24, which often depicts torture as a necessary means to stop terrorism. However, terms that before September 11 were not public knowledge, such as suicide bombers and drones, are now found in narratives that do not specifically deal with the war on terror. For example, two recent science-fiction movies, Oblivion (Joseph Kosinsky, 2013) and Elysium (Neill Blomkamp, 2013), both include suicide bombers and drones, and they are crucial elements in both films. The plot in Out of the Furnace (Scott Cooper 2013) circles around a family tragedy but has one character who is a veteran who was stationed in Iraq. This man cannot have a regular job but is instead making money from fighting; thus this movie can also be seen as recycling the theme of homecoming. It is fair to assume that these themes and plot devices have grown out of the events of September 11 and its aftermath. This also suggests, because the conflict has no immediate and visible end, that these themes will probably continue to influence American film and television productions for a long time. Because the boundaries of the war are blurred, and new conflicts keep rising to the surface, the many visual responses and interpretations can be seen as a way of helping the American audience grasp the meanings and implications of the violent events, though perhaps for diverse purposes. They range from wanting to promote a sense of unity and belief in the cause and the nation to asking difficult and critical questions about what violence in modern wartime does to individuals, peoples, and a nation.

Notes  1. DeLillo, 138.  2. DeLillo, 116.   3.  Quoted in Der Derian, 183.  4. Prince, 18.   5.  Quay and Damico, 174.   6.  Quay and Damico, 173.  7. Prince, 100.  8. Prince, 106.  9. Prince, 107. 10.  Bradshaw, n.p.

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11.  Bradshaw, n.p. 12.  Prince, 113. 13.  Prince, 114. 14.  Travers, n.p. 15.  Prince, 109. 16.  Der Derian, 183. 17.  El-Khairy, 190. 18.  Clover, 9. 19.  Leonard, n.p. 20.  Lowry, n.p. 21.  Stanley, n.p. 22.  Ebert, n.p. 23.  Straw, 101. 24.  Prince, 302. 25.  McCarthy, n.p. 26.  Hasian Jr., n.p. 27.  Coll, n.p. 28.  Chang, n.p. 29.  Chang, n.p. 30.  O’Hehir n.p. 31.  Chang, n.p. 32.  Travers, n.p.

Bibliography Bradshaw, Peter. Review of United 93. The Guardian, June 2, 2006. www.theguardian .com/culture/2006/jun/02/1. Chang, Justin. Review of Lone Survivor. Variety, November 11, 2013. http://variety .com/2013/film/reviews/lone-survivor-review-1200820276/#. Clover, Joshua. “Allegory Bomb.” Film Quarterly 63, no. 2 (winter 2009), 8–9. Coll, Steve. “‘Disturbing’ & ‘Misleading.’” The New York Review of Books, February 7, 2013. www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/feb/07/disturbing-misleading -zero-dark-thirty/. DeLillo, Don. Falling Man. New York: Picador, 2007. Der Derian, James. “Now We Are All Avatars.” Millennium—Journal of International Studies 39 (2010): 181–186. Ebert, Roger. Review of Redacted. www.rogerebert.com/reviews/redacted-2007. El-Khairy, Omar Assam. “Snowflakes on a Scarred Knuckle: The Biopolitics of the ‘War on Terror’ through Steve McQueens’s Hunger and Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker.” Millennium—Journal of International Studies 39, no. 1 (August 2010): 187–191. Hasian, Marouf A. Jr. “Military Orientalism at the Cineplex: A Postcolonial Reading of Zero Dark Thirty.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 2014. doi: 10.1080/15295036.2014.906745.

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Leonard, John. “HBO’s Terrific Summer Buzz Kill.” New York Magazine TV Reviews. July 6, 2008. http://nymag.com/arts/tv/reviews/48312/. Lowry, Brian. Review of Generation Kill. Variety, July 9, 2008. http://variety .com/2008/scene/reviews/generation-kill-1200508469/#. McCarthy, Todd. Review of Green Zone. Variety, March 4, 2010. http://variety .com/2010/film/reviews/green-zone-1117942351/#. O’Hehir, Andrew. “Lone Survivor: A Pro-War Propaganda Surprise Hit.” Salon, January 18 2014. www.salon.com/2014/01/15/lone_survivor_a_pro_war _propaganda_surprise_hit/. Prince, Stephen. Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism. New York/ Chichester, UK: Columbia University Press, 2009. Quay, Sara E., and Amy M. Damico, eds. September 11 in Popular Culture: A Guide. Santa Barbara, CA/Denver, CO/Oxford, UK: Greenwood, 2010. Stanley, Alessandra. “Comrades in Chaos, Invading Iraq.” The New York Times, July 11, 2008. www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/arts/television/11kill.html? page wanted=all&_r=0. Straw, Mark. “The Guilt Zone: Trauma, Masochism and the Ethics of Spectatorship in Brian De Palma’s Redacted (2007).” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 24, no. 1 (2010): 91–105. Travers, Peter. Review of United 93. Rolling Stone, April 28, 2006. www .rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/united-93–20060428. Travers, Peter. Review of Stop-Loss. Rolling Stone, March 28, 2008. www .rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/stop-loss-20080328.

Film and Television Brothers. Directed by Jim Sheridan. 2009. Lionsgate. 2010. DVD. Elysium. Directed by Neill Blomkamp. 2013. Universal, 2013. DVD. Generation Kill. Directed by Susanna White and Simon Cellan Jones. 2008. HBO, 2009. DVD. Green Zone. Directed by Paul Greengrass. 2009. Universal Studios, 2011. DVD. Homeland. Directed by Michael Cuesta and Lesli Linka Glatter et al. 2011—. Showtime. 2012. DVD. Lone Survivor. Directed by Peter Berger. 2013. Universal Studios. 2014. DVD. Oblivion. Directed by Joseph Kosinsky. 2013. Universal Studios. 2013. DVD. Out of the Furnace. Directed by Scott Cooper. 2013. Relativity Media, Lionsgate. 2014. DVD. Redacted. Directed by Brian De Palma. 2007. The Film Farm. 2009. DVD. Stop-Loss. Directed by Kimberly Peirce. 2008. Paramount Pictures. 2008. DVD. The Hurt Locker. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. 2008. Lionsgate. 2008. DVD. The Messenger. Directed by Oren Moverman. 2009. Oscilloscope Laboratories. 2011. DVD. World Trade Center. Directed by Oliver Stone. 2006. Paramount Pictures, 2013. DVD. United 93. Directed by Paul Greengrass. 2006. Universal Studios, 2011. DVD. Zero Dark Thirty. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. 2012. Universal Pictures, 2013. DVD.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The War on Terror in American Popular Culture Maryam Khalid

This chapter explores representations of violence in American popular culture texts produced in the aftermath of 9/11. In doing so, it argues that violence as represented in these texts is part of a wider discourse of violence that is shaped by gendered and racialized knowledge of the world and its people. That is, violence in popular culture is reflective of, and contributes to, how violence is understood in a range of mediums and discourses (for example, in policy texts and in elite politics). To illustrate this claim, this chapter explores how violence has been represented in post-9/11 popular culture, as well as how these representations relate to broader discourses of violence, including the discourses of post-9/11 U.S. administrations and mainstream media. In the immediate aftermath of the al-Qaeda–led attacks on U.S. soil on September 11, 2001, popular media and official Bush administration responses to the attacks centered on a narrative of civilizational conflict (“us” vs. “them”) that would come to shape mainstream understandings of both 9/11 and the “War on Terror” that emerged soon after. This chapter is concerned with how violence and the related concepts of threat, security, and peace are constructed. By examining what constitutes “inside” and “outside,” “us” and “them,” “self” and “other” by referring to ethnicity, culture, gender, and sexuality, we can understand how violence was conceptualized in the context of the War on Terror. The chapter focuses primarily on how this dynamic between violence and the War on Terror plays out in American popular culture but also considers Bush

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administration discourse with a view to interrogating how the “official” may have created the conditions for what is “appropriate” in representations of the War on Terror more broadly. To this end, this chapter addresses two key questions that underpin many of the essays in this collection. First, it asks what factors influence how violence is presented to the American public in popular culture and looks to dominant U.S. foreign policy discourse in doing so in the 9/11 and War on Terror contexts. Second, the chapter draws some conclusions on what political violence (enacted by both state and nonstate actors) tells us about violence in American culture as a whole. In particular, the notion that “everything changed” after 9/11 is one that deserves some interrogation; to this end, the chapter also seeks to identify how understandings of violence change and how continuities remained between the pre- and post-9/11 contexts (for example, the “national myths” of American exceptionalism and manifest destiny shape post-9/11 understandings of the United States as the embodiment of freedom). In mainstream U.S. discourses around 9/11 and the War on Terror, violence (of the attacks and subsequent military actions) was understood through a series of binaries, made justifiable depending on who was employing violence and for what purposes. According to these discourses, violence was necessary and targeted, unwarranted and indiscriminate, legitimate and unsanctioned. Violence in the aftermath of 9/11, as at many other moments of national importance, served to (re)construct the “U.S. self,” its role in the world, and its enemies. Violence served to delineate and justify the national purpose in both official government discourse and in popular culture. However, responses to 9/11 within U.S. popular culture were not homogeneous by any means; there emerged, in the years after 9/11, attempts to challenge some of the representations put forward by the Bush administration and popular news media, with a view to challenging what was perceived to be deployment of the trauma of 9/11 to justify an imperialist foreign policy toward the Middle East. This chapter will trace the development of mainstream responses to 9/11 and the War on Terror; interrogate how violence was constructed in popular culture vis-à-vis 9/11 and the War on Terror; uncover the role of gendered and orientalist logics in mediating mainstream understandings of violence, and relatedly, “self” and “other” in this context; and explore how alternative readings of 9/11 and the “War on Terror” in popular culture undermine the logics and assumptions on which mainstream understandings rely. Drawing on and examining a range of scholarship and popular culture texts (including television shows, films, written works of fiction and nonfiction, news media, comic books, video games, and music), the

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chapter will provide an examination of how the War on Terror was represented (defined, understood, justified) and deployed in popular culture, as well as to what effect.

Violence and War: Constructing ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ The Bush administration presented al-Qaeda’s attacks of September 11, 2001, as provoking “a war to save civilization itself” that, in President Bush’s words, “[w]e did not seek  .  .  . but we must fight.”1 Much mainstream discussion of the War on Terror that was waged after these attacks has revealed an uncritical acceptance of the assumptions of the War on Terror (including its very necessity). But these approaches take as given a particular set of (highly contested and complex) logics upon which understandings of 9/11 and the War on Terror rest. These logics are shaped by, and in turn shape, particular understandings of violence—when it is appropriate, when it is mandated, who may enact it, and who its legitimate targets are. Making sense of the violence of 9/11 has been central to shaping the U.S. response to these attacks and to the nation’s construction of its identity in the aftermath of the attacks. Indeed, violence has been central to constructs of “the nation” in many contexts. In the American context in particular, this is evident in the process of militarism. Militarism is central to understanding War on Terror discourses (whether official, news media, and popular cultural), as I will show, but it also predates the events of September 11, 2001. As a range of scholars have argued, even though the events of September 11, 2001 constituted the most deadly terrorist attack on U.S. soil to date, the U.S. post-9/11 was not necessarily entirely “changed,” nor has the world changed as significantly as was first suggested in popular discourse.2 Militarism has long shaped how U.S. publics, and, indeed, many people around the world (especially those involved in elite politics), understand, engage with, and respond to events, actions, and peoples. Militarism is an ideology that organizes political/economic/social relationships, processes, and practices around (and in support of) “military values.”3 A key assumption in this ideology is that war is inevitable, that “military values and policies [are] conducive to a secure and orderly society,” with the belief that organized violence is the best way to protect and advance the national interest.4 Indeed, the policies of militarism themselves can lead to situations and behaviors that then justify the need for militarism.5 In this way, militarism both shapes how violence is understood—its purpose, when and why it should be used, and by whom it should be used—and is itself based on understandings of the purpose(s) of violence.

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Militarism is not limited to elite politics—war, aggression, and violence are lauded and considered to be central to expressions of masculinity in popular culture also.6 Cynthia Enloe has illustrated the reach of militarism, citing the example of the decision to add satellite-shaped pasta to a popular brand of canned soup as indicative of the acceptance of militarized imagery in the “everyday.” As Enloe explains, militarism “affects not just the executives and factory floor workers who make fighter planes, landmines and intercontinental missiles, but also the employees of food companies, toy companies, clothing companies, film studios, stock brokerages and advertising agencies.”7 Militarism extends into what James Der Derian refers to as the military–industrial–media–entertainment network.8 For example, Hollywood’s incorporation into 9/11 militarist discourse is well illustrated by the first Emmy Awards show post–September 11, 2001. Postponed twice after the events of 9/11, the 2001 Emmys featured a patriotic montage of “national unity.” Although the show’s voiceover introduced the montage as being aimed at a “global audience,” it went on to describe it as “honor[ing] those cherished freedoms that set us apart as a nation and a people.”9 Largely decontextualized footage of Hollywood’s involvement in wartime efforts followed, spanning a range of wars (WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and the first Gulf War). The militarization of popular culture here is clear as images that juxtaposed the Emmy audience and Gulf War I GIs applauding Bob Hope “establish a visual rhetoric that asks viewers to imagine that soldiers and celebrities are contiguous publics.”10 The discourse constructed by senior members of the Bush administration early in the War on Terror also used images of militarism to construct a motif of violence through repeated references to battles and wars. This operated according to a gendered logic valuing masculinityexpressed-through-violence as capable of delivering security above all else. As early as his first short statement after the 9/11 attacks, Bush vowed to “hunt down” those who were responsible for the attacks, a phrase that he would repeat through the course of his administration.11 This was characteristic of the tendency to draw on typically “masculine” traits and acts to define the “U.S. self” after the attacks. Meghana Nayak argues that the “militaristic solutions” to insecurity after 9/11 put forward by the Bush administration were the result of a “masculinist anxiety.”12 This anxiety was reflected in wider public discourse, including popular culture. Julie Drew, analyzing a range of texts produced immediately after September 11, illustrates that much of this public discourse was centered on a feminized notion of fear. Describing feelings of “violation,” “panic,” and being “paralyzed,” as well as images of “running” (away) and “men

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screaming,” Drew’s research shows that the vulnerability of highly visible symbols of U.S. economic and military strength eroded, to some degree, a sense of masculinity that has been central to dominant (and especially official) constructions of U.S. “self”/“national identity.”13 Defense officials had expressed concern about feminization before 9/11; the centrality of masculinity vis-à-vis national identity is clear in discourse that values rationality, power, competition, aggression, and activeness over “feminine” traits such as impulsiveness, lack of control, and emotion.14 In this context, it is not surprising that official and unofficial responses to 9/11 were overwhelmingly hypermasculine. The attacks on symbols of U.S. power (economic, cultural, military), both in and of themselves and also in terms of public reactions, demanded the assertion of masculine behaviors to regain a “lost” masculinity. War on Terror discourse has been constructed around a dichotomy between the civilized, moral, and benevolent masculinity of the “West” and the barbaric, backward, oppressive, and deviant masculinity of the “brown man,” as well as the “free” “Western” woman and the oppressed, subjugated “brown woman.”15 These hierarchical categorizations reflect a militarist concern with competing masculinities. A rational, assertive masculinity was harnessed in official U.S. and mainstream popular texts to construct the authority of the George W. Bush administration, with concern for “security” in the “War on Terror” discourse, centered around competing masculinities embodied in and performed by “us” and “them.”16 As Stuart Croft argues, this formed a “meta-narrative” that became hegemonic in that it guided responses to 9/11 and legitimized the War on Terror as a response to the violence of 9/11. That is, popular culture “co-produced” this narrative through reproducing its key assumptions, values, and representations. In this way, representations of violence in official (Bush administration) discourse shaped the boundaries of what was considered appropriate in 9/11 and War on Terror discourse more broadly. That is, the construction of threat and the characteristics of “self” and “other” in the Bush administration’s response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, drew on preexisting understandings to process and understand these events. The Bush administration’s discourse on 9/11 drew on already existing (mainstream) understandings of “us” (America, Americans, and “the West”) and “them” (“the East), of masculinity and femininity, of men and women. In setting out these categories, mainstream discourse also determined what people in each of these categories could be and do, and did so often by reference to their relationship to violence. This included how various “types” of peoples understood and employed violence. Each of these, however, assumes the

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necessity of violence, rather than questioning its usefulness in addressing problems. In the masculinized approach to the world employed by the Bush administration (among others), violence is inevitable and necessary.17

Early Responses to 9/11 in American Popular Culture It is in the above context that the treatment of 9/11 in texts of American popular culture must be understood. Popular understandings of 9/11 often worked within the discursive boundaries set out in official and mainstream media discourse on 9/11 and the War on Terror. The Bush administration’s “with us or against us” rhetoric cast critique or open interrogation of the assumptions of the administration’s discourse as anti-patriotic at best and as assisting the perpetrators of 9/11 at worst. The combined effect of political discourse, media representations, and legislative actions was to create a “moral panic” that profoundly affected American culture.18 In light of this, Lynn Spigel explains, a desire to engage in “tasteful” programming shaped the entertainment industry in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks. Films that reflected elements of the events of 9/11, such as Collateral Damage, were pulled, and movies and television shows that dealt with violent events were removed from the broadcasting schedule. A notable example is the show The Siege, which focused on an Arab terrorist plot against New York. As I will explain shortly, this is not to say that racialized portrayals of violence and racialized understandings of 9/11 were not represented in popular cultural texts. Rather, their appearance was delayed. In the first few days and weeks after 9/11, the focus of the entertainment industry centered on two key types of broadcast. Initially, major television networks replaced regular broadcasts with commercial-free nonstop coverage of the 9/11 attacks and their immediate aftermath for up to a week. As the Bush administration explicitly called for Americans to “go back to [their] lives and routines” this coverage of the attacks and their aftermath was reduced.19 This saw a return to “normal” programming, which was marked by a concern with broadcasting family-friendly films and shows such as Look Who’s Talking and Grease.20 Although popular cultural texts (films, scripted television) broadcast in this initial period after the 9/11 attacks were specifically selected for their lack of violence, violence as a concept remained central in shaping responses to 9/11 through the anxiety around representing it. In the weeks after this initial period, television began to engage with the concept of violence, although not yet with the violence of 9/11 itself, through popular movies and television shows. For example, schedules included disaster and war films and programs on the assassination of JFK.21

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This use of motifs of non-9/11 violence speaks to the broader cultural relevance of violence in understanding and reproducing “the nation.” That is, as the Bush administration set out to construct the U.S. “self” through reference to “acceptable” and “barbaric” acts of violence, mainstream television drew upon previous popular cultural artifacts in which violence served as way to both distinguish between “good” and “bad” and reassert the national narrative that had been disrupted by 9/11. Reconstructions of 9/11 were rare even years after the events—Antonio Sánchez-Escalonilla writes that between 2001 and 2009 there were only two major films reenacting the attacks.22 There was a clear reluctance to directly address the events themselves, though fictional works did engage with the political debate around the attacks and the insecurities that emerged afterwards. Major films such as Minority Report, The Terminal, War of the Worlds, and Munich, though avoiding the attacks and their geographic locations (such as Ground Zero), addressed issues of insecurity and surveillance that were central to political debates about how to best deal with the aftermath of the attacks and the “changed world” post-9/11. For example, Minority Report can be read as addressing increased surveillance after the passing of the Patriot Act in 2001, as well as the implications of this increased securitization on the liberty that was threatened by terrorists and protected through the War on Terror.23 Television shows dealt more explicitly with the political context of the 9/11 attacks, at times actively blurring the boundaries between reality and entertainment. “Soft-news” programs such as  America’s Most Wanted, for example, invited the audience into the hunt for the perpetrators of 9/11.24 The White House and the FBI approached the creators of the show, at the request of President George W. Bush, to produce a special episode titled “America’s Most Wanted: A Special Edition: Terrorists,” featuring the twenty-two most wanted terrorists listed by the Bush administration.25 In doing so, the program reproduced the discursive boundaries of “terrorism” and “threat” constructed by the Bush administration. That is, the administration’s focus on specific types of terrorism in the ostensibly global War on Terror was reflected in the choice to concentrate on (identifiably) “Eastern” terrorist organizations. While Bush admitted that “[t]hese 22 individuals do not account for all the terrorist activity in the world,” he called the twenty-two selected “among the most dangerous, the leaders and key supporters, the planners and strategists.”26 In choosing to select primarily Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim individuals and groups as the key focus of the War on Terror, the mission to show that “terrorism has a face” and “expose it for the world to see” was very much racialized.27 The coopting of popular television amplified the pervasiveness of the discourse

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and racialized logics at play that were central to the popular and official legitimization of state-sanctioned violence in Afghanistan and Iraq. Takacs corroborates the idea that popular television shows “resonated with and exacerbated the public mood in ways that proved conducive to the conduct of the War on Terrorism.”28 By linking “fear to vigilance and violence to emotional release,” popular television shows dealing with 9/11 and counter-terrorism reinforced “popular feelings of vulnerability” which were central to the justification of “proactive defence” in official discourse. That is, as official War on Terror discourse cultivated a perpetual state of insecurity, popular television shows, as dominant cultural artifacts, reproduced this insecurity.29 Scripted television shows became central to this reproduction, as they began to tackle the attacks of 9/11 and the state of (in)security that emerged afterwards. The West Wing, for example, deviated from its schedule in a special episode titled “Isaac and Ishmael,” which was produced and broadcast after the events of 9/11. The episode began with cast members breaking the fourth wall and addressing audience members directly, then moved onto a scenario in which a group of students taking a tour of the White House are trapped after a bomb threat. The episode engages with the post-9/11 world through the ad-hoc “history lesson” given to these students as they await a resolution to the bomb threat and the broader terrorism/rescue plot. To some extent, the episode reflected a willingness to interrogate the accepted logics of violence in dominant American 9/11 discourse, as the students were exposed to alternative narratives of the political context of the 9/11 attacks, including the impact of Western and specifically U.S. intervention in the Middle East. In this way, the writers represented violence in a relatively contextualized manner, drawing on global politics and foreign policies as a frame through which to understand the violence of 9/11.30 However, as Laura Shepherd argues, ultimately the audience is indeed “expected to ally with the “us” and the “we”” constructed in the show’s explanation of legitimate and illegitimate violence in global politics.31 One of the main characters in The West Wing, Toby, expresses how violence enacted by specific states is justifiable and in doing so links the violence of 9/11 to previous political events in which the United States took a less unilateral, aggressive, and therefore less masculine stance against the “Eastern Other”: TOBY: Be nice [to the Arab world]?  .  .  . Well  .  .  . How about when we, instead of blowing Iraq back to the seventh century for harbouring terrorists and trying to develop nuclear weapons, we just imposed economic

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sanctions and were reviled by the Arab world for not giving them a global charge card and a free trade treaty? How about when we pushed Israel to give up land for peace? How about when we sent American soldiers to protect Saudi Arabia, and the Arab world told us we were desecrating their holy land? We’ll ignore the fact that we were invited. How about two weeks ago, in the State of the Union when the President praised the Islamic people as faithful and hardworking only to be denounced in the Arab press as knowing nothing about Islam? But none of that is the point.

In response to this, another character, Andy, asks “what’s the point?” Toby responds: “Why does the U.S. have to take every Arab country out for an ice cream cone? They’ll like us when we win!”32 The dialogue spoken by Toby and Andy, Shepherd argues, represents masculine reasoning against a feminine lack of political understanding and power. The violent response to 9/11 (in the form of the impending bombings of Afghanistan and later Iraq) is legitimized through reference to dominant understandings of gender as well as of race. Ultimately, the episode reflects a commitment to the global institutionalization of liberal democracy and “represents a vision of political strategy that legitimates the use of violence in pursuit of these ends.”33 That is, violence is constructed here as a means to an end, and as such not only legitimizes by its goal but also reproduces the masculine logic in which violence perpetrates violence, as only the deployment of violence can effectively deal with violence directed against the “self.”

Reproducing Gendered and Racialized Discourses Post-9/11 The ways in which 9/11 was represented illustrates what Spigel suggests in her analysis of television programming post-9/11: that the boundaries of official War on Terror discourse limited how 9/11 could be discussed in dominant modes of popular representation. The trauma of 9/11 resulted in a state of insecurity in which both physical violence and ideology presented a threat to the United States and its allies. Popular television shows including 24, JAG, Threat Matrix, Sleeper Cell, and The Agency were marked by strong military content, which exemplifies what Stacy Takacs calls “militainment.” These television shows thus reproduced the gendered and racialized logics that underscored the Bush administration’s post-9/11 legitimation of military values.34 Similarly, the first two film reconstructions of the 9/11 attacks, United 93 and World Trade Center, did not interrogate the gendered and racialized logics that characterized official narratives of 9/11 and the War on Terror. These films reproduced representations of the Muslim “other,” a group in which the

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boundaries of acceptable/unacceptable were marked by reference to not only the perpetration of violence, but also cultural practices. The link between violence and cultural practices has been denounced by the Bush administration: Bush explained that “this is a war against terrorism and evil, not against Islam.”35 He also assured Muslims that “[w]e respect your faith.”36 However, in both official and popular discourses on 9/11 and the War on Terror, this distinction quickly became blurred. For example, in United 93, Islamic prayer rituals were associated with violence (specifically the attacks of 9/11) whereas Christian prayers were used to create intimacy and affinity with the film’s audience, and the use of “Middle Eastern” voices and language signified threat.37 Along with television and film, video games are another significant medium of popular culture that has reproduced the logics of masculinity that justify violence as a political choice. Video games are consumed by around 75 percent of all U.S. households and thus are a significant medium of visual culture.38 As Marcus Power explains, “digital war games have increasingly come to provide a space of cyber-deterrence where Americans are able to “play through” the anxieties that attend uncertain times and new configurations of power” since the events of 9/11.39 Power acknowledges the links between the gaming industry and the U.S. military and argues that these links illustrate the central role violence plays in the popular imagination. In the post-9/11 context, video games portraying the conflicts of the War on Terror reflected the gendered and racialized logics that shaped dominant media, government, and pop culture discourses. Although video games function as a way to “elicit consent for the US military” by normalizing and legitimizing particular kinds of violence, they also allow us to see the effects of militarism and military activities on the “everyday.”40 The political economy of fear and violence (both before and after 9/11) is central to understanding this effect, which combines both fear of and desire for violence.41 That is, the fear of violence elicits and justifies the desire to enact violence against a racially identifiable enemy as an expression of masculinity. Mirroring the conflicts of the “real” world, video game developers have often drawn on “the national enemy du jour” to populate the digital worlds they create. Games such as 24: The Game, Command and Conquer, Kuma: War, Conflict Desert Storm, Operations, and Splinter Cell situate game play within post-9/11 conflicts that draw on the War on Terror, particularly in terms of constructing the game’s conflict around a racialized enemy that is identifiable as “Arab/Muslim/terrorist.”42 Although some of this is implicit (Command and Conquer alludes to the war in Iraq), some games explicitly situate in-game conflict within specific locations in Iraq (notably Fallujah) and against key figures in the “War on Terror” (such as Saddam Hussein’s

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sons Uday and Qusay Hussein) and some games (such as America’s Army and Spectrum Warrior) have been produced with the assistance of the U.S. armed forces.43 Video games play an important role in legitimizing and justifying U.S. interventions under the banner of the War on Terror in the post9/11 era. As Power explains, the “cinematic” and “theatrical experience[s] of war” presented in these games are “implicated in the production of geopolitical discourses of war and security” through their (re)production of longstanding popular understandings of race, gender, and militarism.44

Expanding the Discourse: Alternative Representations of Violence Although popular culture produced in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 tended to reproduce the logics, motifs, and representations of official discourses on the War on Terror, it also provided an avenue through which to explore alternative ways of understanding these events. Cultural texts provided a space in which the narrow discursive limits of official and mainstream media representations of the violence of 9/11 and military responses to it could be both contested and expanded. For example, War of the Worlds, released four years after the 9/11 attacks, addressed the threat of violence inflicted by “others” in the context of “preventative war.” War of the Worlds addressed issues of social panic through a sci-fi catastrophe scenario set in New Jersey, close to New York City, where the 9/11 attacks took place. However, the film can be read as a critique of “preventative war” through its willingness to question the effectiveness of violence in securing peace, specifically whether retaliatory and preventative military action might perpetuate a cycle of violence.45 Popular television also displayed some variety in terms of the questions it posed about the Bush administration’s responses to the events of 9/11. It was generally satirical and supernatural/science fiction shows that opened a space for dissent. Takacs writes that “The Daily Show and Whoopi . . ., Lost, Invasion, and Battle Star Galactica opened a space in the cultural terrain for dissent to be elaborated, explored and consolidated.”46 In satirical shows, humor was used to incorporate voices excluded from dominant popular and official discourses on the War on Terror. The fictional settings of Battle Star Galactica, Invasion, and Lost employed “political allegory to interrogate the post-9/11 politics of fear and the security policies that followed from it,” including the deployment of violence as a result of militarist values.47 Comic books also served as a medium through which dominant discourses about 9/11 and the War on Terror could be interrogated. Superheroes had been central to popular reactions to 9/11. Some, such as the

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Captain America series, reproduced some of the basic assumptions around violence that marked dominant responses to 9/11 in the United States. The first Captain America released after 9/11, Jason Dittmer notes, characterized war as a circumstance imposed on the United States rather than a choice.48 In this case, violence is viewed through a masculinist frame, as it is assumed that it is only the violence of war that constitutes a legitimate challenge to the violence of terrorism. As Dittmer explains, Captain America’s monologue in this publication reflects the linguistic choices of the Bush administration (referring to hunting them down, using violent imagery to illustrate strength); this serves as “a proscription for American behavior and a statement of American military power, but also simultaneously constructs both the meaning of America and the terrorists’ identity as parts of a freedom-loving/freedom-hating dichotomy that forecloses other possibilities.”49 However, there are also significant examples of an ambiguous response to (if not outright rejection of) dominant War on Terror narratives. In order to generate income for the Twin Towers Fund, Marvel Comics released a commemorative publication titled Heroes: The World’s Greatest Superhero Creators Honor the World’s Greatest Heroes. 9.11.2001. Although some images featured stereotypical acts of heroism situated around “masculine” power using force and violence, others were more nurturing. “Masculine” traits of aggression were linked to the use of violence as an appropriate response to 9/11; Captain America, for example, was depicted alongside an inscription that drew on vivid imagery structured around binaries of “good” and “evil,” mirroring the Bush administration’s rhetoric. However, superheroes and firefighters were also depicted working together to provide assistance and support to those in the World Trade Center. Women were shown as experiencing loss, but men were too, and were depicted engaging in collaborative work to assist the communities most directly affected by the attacks. These images drew on and juxtaposed traditionally “feminine” and “masculine” behaviors (a woman waiting by the phone for news about her pilot husband / men engaged in rescue missions) and explicitly incorporated those who might be “othered,” such as a character with an identifiably Arab name.50 In doing so, such images destabilized and delegitimized the masculinist and racialized logics upon which violent militarist responses to 9/11 are predicated.

Conclusion Understandings of political violence (enacted by both state and non-state actors) in U.S. popular culture in the post-9/11 world contain some clear similarities to pre-9/11 contexts. They reflect and reinforce the intertwined processes of masculinization and militarism that were a central feature of the

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culture before, during, and after 9/11. Challenging the notion that “everything changed” after 9/11, understandings of violence have maintained significant continuity before and after 9/11 in terms of the gendered and racialized logics that shape how violence is understood—when it is appropriate, when it is mandated, who may enact it, and who/what the legitimate targets of violence are. Popular culture served as a discursive site through which understandings of both 9/11 and the violence of the War on Terror that followed were reproduced and at times contested. Representations of “us” and “them” reflected, in many cases, the boundaries of identity created by the Bush administration (which itself drew on pre-existing understandings of identity, violence, and appropriate performances of these concepts). That is, they often reproduced the logics of masculinist militarism that justify violence as both a political choice and a necessity. However, popular culture also offered scope for deviation from the prescribed approach to understanding the violence of 9/11 and the War on Terror. Popular culture offered a medium through which these ideas could be challenged, often by fictionalizing the reality of the post-9/11 world. Popular culture reflects the wide variety of ways in which the violence of 9/11 and the resulting War on Terror has been understood. It illustrates how discourses of elite politics, the news media, and popular expression intersect, but also the opportunities for challenging dominant discourses that have shaped our understandings of violence in global politics.

Notes  1. Bush, 2001e.   2.  This perspective, in terms of analyses of official U.S. administration policies, is reflected in the work of, inter alia, Noam Chomsky (2003), James Der Derian (2002), and Caroline Kennedy-Pipe and Nicholas Reggner (2006), but also in scholarship on popular culture; see, for example, David Schmid (2005).   3.  See Khalid, 2015.  4. Reardon, 14.  5. Horn, 59.   6.  See Khalid, 2015.  7. Enloe, 2   8.  See Der Derian 2009.   9.  Spigel, 252, my emphasis. 10.  Spigel, 252, 254. 11.  Bush, 2001a. 12.  Nayak, 49–50. 13.  Drew, 71–73. 14.  Cohn, 229–236. 15.  See Nayak; Khalid, 2011. 16.  See Tickner; Ferguson; Shepherd.

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17.  See Khalid, 2011. 18.  See Rothe and Muzzatti. 19.  Bush, 2001b. 20.  Spigel, 235–237. 21.  Ibid., 240. 22.  Sánchez-Escalonilla, 11. 23.  Ibid., 11–13. 24.  Takacs, 31. 25.  See Schneider for more details. 26.  Bush, 2001c. 27. Ibid. 28.  Takacs, 57. 29.  Ibid., 95–96. 30.  Shepherd, 61; Spigel 243. 31.  Shepherd, 62. 32.  Ibid., 62. 33.  Ibid., 62. 34.  Takacs, 26–28, 100. 35.  Bush, 2001d. 36.  Bush, 2001b. 37.  See Creekmur, 87–88. 38.  Power, 273. 39.  Ibid., 273. 40.  Ibid., 273. 41.  Crandall, 20. 42.  See King and Krzywinska, 60–61; Power, 273, 281; Sample. I use “Arab/ Muslim” purposefully, to signify that “Arabs” and “Muslims” are conflated in War on Terror (and other orientalist) discourse despite the differences between these groups as well as the differences among them (Nayak, 58). 43.  Power, 272; Annandale, 98. 44.  Power, 274, 285. 45.  See Gordon, 260–264; Sánchez-Escalonilla, 16. 46.  Takacs, 27. 47.  Ibid., 27. 48.  Dittmer, 638. 49.  Ibid., 638. 50.  Evans, 120–121.

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Bush, George W. September 11, 2001a. “Remarks by the President after Two Planes Crash into World Trade Center.” http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/ news/ releases/2001/09/20010911.html. Bush, George W. September 20, 2001b. “President Declares ‘Freedom at War with Fear’: Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People.” http:// georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html. Bush, George W. 2001c. “President Unveils “Most Wanted” Terrorists.” 10 October. http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/ 2001/ 10/20011010-3.html. Bush, George W. October 12, 2001d. “President Asks American Children to Help Afghan Children.” http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/ releases/2001/ 10/20011012-4.html. Bush, George W. November 8, 2001e. “President Discusses War on Terrorism in Address to the Nation.” http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/ releases/2001/11 /20011108-13.html. Chomsky, Noam. “Wars of Terror.” New Political Science 25, no. 1 (2003): 113–127. Cohn, Carol. “War, Wimps and Women: Talking Gender and Thinking War.” In Gendering War Talk, ed. Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott, 225–246. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Crandall, Jordan. “Envisioning the Home Front: Militarization, Tracking and Security Culture.” Journal of Visual Culture 4, no. 1 (2005): 17–38. Creekmur, Corey. “The Sound of the “War on Terror”.” In Reframing 9/11: Film, Popular Culture, and the “War on Terror,” ed. Jeff Birkenstein, Anna Froula, and Karen Randell, 83–96. London, UK/New York: Continuum, 2010. Croft, Stuart. Culture, Crisis and America’s War on Terror. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Der Derian, James. “9.11: Before, after, and in Between.” Social Science Research Council, 2002. http://essays.ssrc.org/sept11/essays/der_derian.htm. Der Derian, James. Virtuous War: Mapping the Military–Industrial–Media–Entertainment Network. London, UK: Routledge, 2009. Dittmer, Jason. “Captain America’s Empire: Reflections on Identity, Popular Culture, and Post-9/11 Geopolitics.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95, no. 3 (2005): 626–643. Drew, Julie. “Identity Crisis: Gender, Public Discourse, and 9/11.” Women and Language 27, no. 2 (2004): 71–73. Enloe, Cynthia. Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives. Berkley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000. Evans, Alex. “Superman Is the Faultine: Fissures in the Monomythic Man of Steel.” In Reframing 9/11: Film, Popular Culture, and the “War on Terror,” ed. Jeff Birkenstein, Anna Froula, and Karen Randell, 117–126. London, UK/New York: Continuum, 2010. Ferguson, Michaele L. ““W” Stands for Women: Feminism and Security Rhetoric in the Post-9/11 Bush Administration.” Politics and Gender 1 (2005): 9–38. Gordon, Andrew. Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.

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Horn, Denise M. “Boots and Bedsheets: Constructing the Military Support System in a Time of War.” In Gender, War, and Militarism: Feminist Perspectives, ed. L. Sjoberg and S. Via, 57–68. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010. Kennedy-Pipe, Caroline, and Nicholas Reggner. “Apocalypse Now? Continuities or Disjunctions in World Politics after 9/11.” International Affairs 82, no. 3 (2006): 539–552. Khalid, Maryam. “Feminist Perspectives on Militarism and War: Critiques, Contradictions, and Collusions.” In The Oxford Handbook of Transnational Feminist Movements, ed. Rawwida Baksh and Wendy Harcourt. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2015. Khalid, Maryam. “Gender, Orientalism and Representations of the ‘Other’ in the War on Terror.” Global Change, Peace and Security 23 (2011): 15–29. King, Geoff, and Tanya Krzywinska. Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders: Videogame Forms and Contexts. London, UK/New York: I.B. Tauris, 2005. Nayak, Meghana. “Orientalism and ‘Saving’ U.S. State Identity after 9/11.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 8, no. 1 (2006): 42–61. Power, Marcus. “Digitized Virtuosity: Video War Games and Post-9/11 CyberDeterrence.” Security Dialogue 38, no. 2 (2007): 271–288. Reardon, Betty. Sexism and the War System. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996. Rothe, Dawn, and Stephen L. Muzzatti. “Enemies Everywhere: Terrorism, Moral Panic, and U.S. Civil Society.” Critical Criminology 12, no. 3 (2004): 327–350. Sample, Mark. “Virtual Torture: Videogames and the War on Terror.” Game Studies 8, no. 2 (2008). www.gamestudies.org/0802/articles/sample. Sanchez-Escalonilla, Antonio. “Hollywood and the Rhetoric of Panic: The Popular Genres of Action and Fantasy in the Wake of the 9/11 Attacks.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 38, no. 1 (2010): 10–20. Schmid, David. “Serial Killing in America after 9/11.” The Journal of American Culture 28, no. 1 (2005): 61–69. Schneider, Michael. “Fox Salutes Request by Bush for “Wanted” Spec.” Variety, October 10, 2001. http://variety.com/2001/tv/news/fox-salutes-request -by-bush-for-wanted-spec-1117854100/. Shepherd, Laura. Gender, Violence and Popular Culture: Telling Stories. London, UK/ New York: Routledge, 2013. Spigel, Lynn. “Entertainment Wars: Television Culture after 9/11.” American Quarterly 56, no. 2 (2004): 235–270. Takacs, Stacy. Terrorism TV: Popular Entertainment in Post-9/11 America. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012. Tickner, J. Ann. “Feminist Perspectives on 9/11.” International Studies Perspectives 3 (2002): 333–350.

About the Editor and Contributors

The Editor David Schmid is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University at Buffalo, where he teaches courses in British and American fiction, cultural studies, and popular culture. He has published on a variety of subjects, including the nonfiction novel, celebrity, film adaptation, Dracula, and crime fiction, and he is the author of Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2005. He is currently co-editing a forthcoming collection of essays, Globalization and the State in Contemporary Crime Fiction: A World of Crime, and completing a book manuscript entitled From the Locked Room to the Globe: Space in Crime Fiction.

The Contributors Erica L. Ball  is professor of American studies and chair of African ­American studies at California State University, Fullerton. Her first book, To Live an Antislavery Life: Personal Politics and the Antebellum Black Middle Class (University of Georgia Press, 2012), explored the intersections between antislavery consciousness and black middle-class self-fashioning in early African American advice literature. She is currently writing a book on popular representations of slavery and freedom in the post–World War II era entitled Slavery in the American Imagination  and co-editing, with Kellie Carter-Jackson, a collection of essays entitled Reconsidering Roots: ­Reflections on the Fortieth Anniversary of the Television Mini-Series That Changed the Way We Understood American Slavery. Abby Bentham  teaches at the University of Salford, where she was recently awarded a PhD for her thesis “Empathy for the Devil: The Poetics

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of Identification in Psychopath Fiction.” Her broader research interests include film and television studies, psychoanalysis, transgression, gender, and popular culture. She has published on subjects as diverse as Dickens and Dexter and is currently working on a piece about the unique grip that the Moors Murders case has on the British cultural imaginary. Tim Bryant  is an assistant professor of English at SUNY Buffalo State, where he teaches American and American Indian literature and film. He has published articles on Melissa Scott’s Burning Bright, Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories, Alan Moore’s Watchmen, Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series, and the Cold War roots of interactive fiction and roleplaying games. Tim is currently completing a book project on representations of spiritual authority in American popular culture since the Civil War. Robert K. Chester  completed his undergraduate studies in his native England before moving to the United States in 2001. He currently teaches in the American Studies Department at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he obtained his PhD in 2011. His research focuses on war and the remembrance of war in U.S. culture, with particular attention to representations of World War II, race, and national identity in Hollywood cinema. His work has recently appeared in American Quarterly and War and Society. Jennifer Louise Field  is currently a PhD student in the Department of Humanities at York University. She completed her master’s degree in sociology at Guelph University in 2013, for which she wrote a major research paper, “Malcolm X: A Critical Examination of the ‘American Dream’ in the Era of ‘Reaganomics’” under the supervision of Dr. Cecil Foster. Her current research involves critical examination of the depictions of interracial couples in television and cinema. Katarina Gregersdotter is an associate professor of English literature at Umeå University, Sweden. She has published a variety of academic and popular articles on Anglo-American and Scandinavian crime fiction and has edited anthologies about sexual violence in contemporary crime fiction, and gender studies. She is currently editing an anthology about animal horror cinema. Maryam Khalid has degrees in law and politics from Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and holds a PhD in international relations from the University of New South Wales. She currently teaches in law, politics, and international relations at Macquarie University, and her most recent publications focus on gender, sexuality, race, and global politics.

About the Editor and Contributors

Kent A. McConnell is a member of the History Department at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Before teaching at Exeter, Dr. McConnell served four years as a visiting professor in the Department of History at Wake Forest University. He also served as a visiting professor in the Department of Religion at Dartmouth College and Colby College. He co-edited the publication Conflicts in American History—A Documentary Encyclopedia: The Gilded Age, Progressive Era, and World War I: 1877–1920 and is completing his monograph A Time-Stained God: Spiritual Lives, Civil War Deaths and the Violent Remaking of Religion in America (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press). Some of his other publications include “Exploring the Democratic Narratives of Free Black Women in America’s Past” in Rethinking Emilie Francis Davis: Lesson Plans for Teaching Her Civil War Pocket Diaries and “‘Betwixt and Between’: Topographies of Memory and Identity in American Catholicism” in Vale of Tears: New Essays on Religion and Reconstruction. He has also authored articles in such publications as the Journal of Religion and Society, Oxford University’s Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896–Present, and the multi-volume Dictionary of American History by Charles Scribner’s Sons publishers, as well as reviews for the Journal of American History. Dr. McConnell has held several regional research fellowships and national fellowships, including ones with the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Pew Charitable Trust. David McWilliam  is an associate lecturer at Lancaster University and Manchester Metropolitan University. His doctoral thesis, American Monsters: Identification with Criminals in Twenty-First-Century Culture, analyzed how contemporary fiction can challenge dominant American political narratives about the monstrosity of serial killers, school shooters, and pedophiles by fostering emotional identification between the audience/ reader and suffering, repentant individuals who wish to find some form of redemption. He has published on Gothic crime, iconic monsters, and neoconservativism across a range of different media and has forthcoming publications on posthuman creationism in science fiction, the neoVictorian rhetoric of neoliberal austerity politics, and conspiracy theories about disaster capitalism. Erik Mortensen is currently a contract professor in the General Arts and Science University and College Transfer program at Humber College; he is also a PhD candidate in the Department of Humanities at York University. He holds an M.A. in English and film studies from Wilfrid Laurier University and a B.A.H. with a double major from the departments of history and English and theater studies. He has published novellas that include Avenging Abe and Sir Cook, the Knight? He has also won creative writing

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competitions and has had his original plays produced on stage at various locations in Ontario, Canada. David Hoogland Noon holds a PhD in American studies from the University of Minnesota and is an associate professor of U.S. history at the University of Alaska Southeast. He has published a variety of articles on the history of developmental psychology, historical memory in the war on terror, and presidents in popular culture. He is currently working on a manuscript that expands on his contribution to this volume, surveying the representations of presidential violence from the early nineteenth century to the present. Chris Richardson is an assistant professor of communication studies at Young Harris College. His research explores representations of crime in contemporary popular culture. He is an executive member of the Popular Culture Association of Canada; a faculty advisor for Lambda Pi Eta, the National Communication Association’s undergraduate honors society; and the founder and supervisor of the YHC Media Studies Research Collective. His research has appeared in journals such as Popular Music and Society, the Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice, and the British Journal of Canadian Studies. In 2012, he published Habitus of the Hood with Dr. Hans Skott-Myhre, interrogating intersections of street culture and popular media. His next book, with Romayne Smith Fullerton, focuses on crime coverage in Canada news media. Harold Schechter is a professor of American literature at Queens College, the City University of New York. His essays on crime, psychopathology, and media violence have appeared in many newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and International Herald Tribune. Among his more than thirty published books are a series of historical true-crime narratives about America’s most infamous serial killers, several encyclopedic works (The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers, The Serial Killers Files, Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of ), and an anthology of American true-crime writing published by the Library of America. Susan J. Tyburski practiced law for twenty years and currently works as an administrative law judge for the State of Colorado. She teaches courses exploring the intersections of law, literature and society for the University of Denver, as well as literature and writing courses for Red Rocks Community College. Her recent publications include essays in The American Thriller (Salem Press, 2014), EcoGothic (Manchester University Press, 2013) and The Social History of Crime and Punishment in America (Sage Publications, 2012).

Index

ABC: The Day After, 93, 234; “The Goth Phenomenon,” 187; Roots week, 37; 20/20, 187 Aboriginal Rights Movement, 24n21 Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies, 236 The Accused, 135–37 Action Comics, 237 Adams, John Quincy, 225–26 Adams, Michael, 80 The Agency, 273 age of mass destruction, 230–34 Ainsworth, William, 204 Albright, Madeleine, 94 Alexie, Sherman, 2, 17; Indian Killer, 19–22, 24n36 Allen, Lewis (Abel Meeropol): “Strange Fruit,” 120 Allen, Paula Gunn, 9 Allied troops, 82, 85, 86, 87, 91, 95 All in the Family, 112, 124 al-Qaeda, 265, 267 The Amazing Colossal Man, 231 The Amazing Spider-Man, 237 American Indian Movement, 24, 151 “America’s Army,” xxii, 275 The Andy Griffith Show, 110 Angels with Dirty Faces, 175 Annesley, James, 193–94 Anonymous, 161, 176 Appler, Augustus: The Guerillas of the West, 167 Apted, Michael: Thunderheart, 11–12, 24n21

Araujo, Cheryl, 136 Ariès, Phillipe: The Hour of Our Death, 48, 69n20 Armstrong, Nancy, xvi Army of Darkness, 237 Arrow, 157 Aryan Brotherhood, 173 Asbury, Herbert: Gangs of New York, 167, 177n14, 167n43 Atlas Shrugs, 238 atomic bombs, 79, 81–82, 86, 89, 90, 93, 94, 100n42, 230, 231, 232 Attack of the Crab Monsters, 231 Backderf, Derf: My Friend Dahmer, 214–15 Bad Day at Black Rock, 89 Baez, Joan, 120 Baker, Josephine, 111 Bald-Eagle Bob, the Boy Buccaneer, ix Balenda, Carla, 100n29 Band of Brothers, 95, 96 Bardot, Brigitte: “Bonnie and Clyde,” 169 Barker, Ma, 168 Barney Oldfield’s Race for a Life, 175 Barrow, Clyde, 168–69 Bassett, Anglea: What’s Love Got to Do with It? 134 Bateman, Patrick, 214 Bates Motel, 217 Battle of Jonesborough, 62 Battle Star Galactica, 275 Beard, Charles, 47 Beard, Mary, 47

286Index Beatty, Warren: Bonnie & Clyde, 169 Beech, Adam: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, 16 Behr, Edward: Prohibition, 169 Bevel, James, 109 Bewitched, 110 Beyoncé: “03 Bonnie and Clyde,” 169 Bier, Susanne: Brothers, 257 Biesecker, Barbara, 91 Bigelow, Kathryn: The Hurt Locker, 247–48, 249, 250, 260, 261; Zero Dark Thirty, 245, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 261 Biggie Smalls, 174 Bing, Léon, 172 Bingham, Clara: Class Action, 145 Bin Laden, Osama, 96, 244, 253–54, 262 blackface, 27, 30, 33, 40n6 Black Panthers, 121, 151 black power, 121–22 Blackwell, Elizabeth, ix blaxploitation, 36, 41n45, 116, 118 Blight, David W., 65 Blomkamp, Neill: Elysium, 262 Bloody Sunday, 119 Booze Fighters, 171 Boston Globe, ix Boston Tea Party, 150 Bowery Boys, 177n14 The Brady Bunch, 110 Bradshaw, Peter, 246 Brando, Marlon: The Wild One, 171 The Brave One, 153, 154, 155, 156 Breckinridge, John C., 65 Brooks, Noah, 57 Brooks, Richard: The Brick Foxhole, 83–84 Brothers, Hughes, 124 Brokaw, Tom, 94 Brown, James: “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud),” 121 Brown v. Board of Education, 108 Bruce, Tammy, 238 Brueggemann, “Metaphors of Governance,” 74n100 Buel, James: The Border Outlaws, 167 Bundy, Ted, 205, 208, 209, 210, 211–12, 216, 218n25, 218n43

Burgess, Ernest Watson: “03 Bonnie and Clyde,” 169 Burns, Ken: The War, 98, 102n78 Burns, Robert, 166 Buscombe, Edward: Injuns!, 4–5 Bush, George H. W., xx–xxi Bush, George W., invasion of Iraq, 80; rap albums, 174; War on Terror, 96, 156, 238–39, 265–68, 269, 270, 271, 273–74, 275, 276, 277 Bushnell, Bennie, 212 Butch Cassidy and the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, 167 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 168 Butler, Judith: Precarious Life, xxi Butler, Benjamin, 58 Butler, Octavia: Kindred, 38 Butler, Sarah, 58 Byrd, James, Jr., 140, 143 Campbell, Anne: The Girls in the Gang, 174 Capone, Al “Scarface,” 166, 168, 169, 175 Capote, Truman: In Cold Blood, 207, 208 Captain America, 276 Carroll, Diahann: Julia, 111–12 Carter, Jimmy, 93, 233, 235, 239 Cassidy, Butch, 167–68 Cassuto, Leonard, 209 Castro, Fidel, 230 Cavarero, Adriana, xxiiin6 celebrity serial killers, 211–13 Chambliss, Robert Edward, 119 Chaney, James, 117 Chang, Justin, 255, 256 Chase, Richard: “Vampire of Sacramento,” 208 Chastain, Jessica: Zero Dark Thirty, 253 Chesney-Lind, Meda: Female Gangs in America, 174 Chicago School, 170–71 Cho, Seung-Hui, 184 Chomsky, Noam, 277n2 Christianity, 8, 10, 15, 50 Chuck D., 122 civil rights movement, 28, 36, 37, 107–30; American dreams, 108–14; American nightmares, 114–20; change is gonna come, 120–22; fifty years later, 122–23

Index Civil War generation in America, 27, 30, 32, 34, 35, 45–77; antebellum America, 48–56; psychophysical coping with a bloody past, 59–66; unfathomable killing, 56–59 Clarke, Jason: Zero Dark Thirty, 253 Clay, Henry, 225 Clinton, Bill, 94, 135, 156, 157, 191; Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, 172–73 Clockers, 176 A Clockwork Orange, 176 Clover, Joshua, 249 CNN, 136 Coen brothers, 157 Cold War, 35, 79, 81, 82, 85–89, 93, 94, 95, 96, 28, 230, 231, 234 Cole, Arthur C., 47 Coll, Steve, 254 Collateral Damage, 270 Collins, Addie Mae, 119 Collins, Bootsy, 233 Colors, 176 Columbine High School, xvii, 183, 184, 186–87, 189, 190–91, 193, 194, 197, 199 Command and Conquer, 274 Community United Against Violence, 135 Conaway, Charles, 188, 189 Confederacy, 33, 45, 57, 62, 63, 65, 68, 235–36 Conflict Desert Storm, 274 Congress of Racial Equality, 119 Connor, Eugene “Bull,” 109–19, 119–20 Conrath, Robert, 212 Cooke, Sam: “A Change Is Gonna Come,” 121 Cool Hand Luke, 166 Coolidge, Calvin, 239 Cooper, Dennis: My Loose Thread, 193 Cooper, James Fenimore, xix–xx Cooper, Scott: Out of the Furnace, 262 Corbett, John L., 31 C.O.R.E., 119 Cosby, Bill: The Cosby Show, 112–13, 124; A Different World, 113; I Spy, 111 Costner, Kevin: Dances with Wolves, 5, 12 Coulter, Ann, 96

287 Crichton, Michael: Disclosure, 139 Crockett Almanac, ix, xiin9 Crossfire, 84, 85 Cullen, Dave: Columbine, 190–93, 198–99 Cullen, Jim: The American Dream, 110 Culp, Robert: I Spy, 111 Cunliffe, Marcus: Soldiers and Civilians, 54 The Cure, 187 Currier, Nathaniel, 55 Dafoe, Willem: Mississippi Burning, 116–17 Dahmer, Jeffrey, 212, 213, 214–15 Damico, Amy M., 244 Daniels, Jeff: The Newsroom, 97 The Dark Knight, 157 Davis, David Brion: Homicide in American Fiction, 1798–1860, xv Davis, Jefferson, 57 Davis, Michael: Street Gang, 175 Davis, Sammy, Jr., 112 Dawes, Henry, 16 D-Day, 68, 86, 93, 94, 95 Dead Rabbits, 174, 177n14 Dedlow, George, 61 The Deer Hunter, 259 Defoe, Daniel, 204 DeLillo, Don: Falling Man, 243 Demme, Jonathan: The Silence of the Lambs, 211, 213 Democratic Review, 53, 71n44 Demonakos, Jim: The Silence of Our Friends, 122 De Niro, Robert: The Untouchables, 170 De Palma, Brian: Causalities of War, 251; Redacted, 251 Depp, Johnny: Public Enemies, 168 Der Derian, James, 248, 249, 268, 277n2 Derrida, Jacques, 2 Dexter, 157, 159, 160–61, 203, 210, 214, 215–17, 220n77 Dick Tracy, x Dillinger, John, 168 Dillinger Gang, 168 The Dirty Dozen, 92 Disney, xi, 5 Disney, Walt, 172 Dittmer, Jason, 276

288Index Dixon, Thomas F., Jr.: The Clansman, 32; The Leopard’s Spots, 32; The Traitor, 32 Dolarhyde, Francis, 211 domestic violence, 131–35, 137 Donner, Richard: The Omen, 195 Doom, 197 Douglas, John, 209; Mindhunter, 210 Douglas, Michael: Disclosure, 139; Falling Down, 153 Douglass, Frederick, 122, 236 Drafted, 237 Dr. Dre, 173 Drew, Julie, 268–69 Du Bois, W. E. B., 47 Dunaway, Faye: Bonnie & Clyde, 169 Dylan, Bob, 120 Eastman, Charles, 16–17 Eazy-E, 173 Ebert, Roger, 137, 252 Eckford, Elizabeth, 108 Eisenhower, Dwight, 231 Esbensen, Finn-Aage, 178n51 Edgerton, Alanson H., 83 Egerton, Douglas, 69n29 El-Khairy, Omar Assem, 248 Elliott, Laura: Shattered Dreams, 133 Ellis, Bret Easton: American Psycho, 213, 219n62 Ellis, Warren: “Shoot,” 194 Ellison v. Brady, 139 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 52, 55 Engelhardt, Tom, 90 Enloe, Cynthia, 268 Ennis, Garth: The Punisher, 215 An Epic Poem in Commemoration of Gen. Andrew Jackson’s Victory on the 8th of January, 1815, 225 Erdrich, Louise, 2, 13, 14; Tracks, 14–16 Eyre, Chris: Smoke Signals, 212 Falchuk, Brad: American Horror Story, 197 Falling Down, 153, 154, 156 The Fall of Red Sarah, 237 Faludi, Susan: The Terror Dream, xxi Farmiga, Taissa: American Horror Story, 198 Fast, Jonathan, 184

Faust, Drew Gilpin, 65 Fawcett, Farrah: The Burning Bed, 131–33 FBI, 12, 24n21, 84, 100n24, 116–17, 118, 172, 176, 178n33, 204, 208–9, 210, 211, 218n39, 271 FDR: American Badass, 236 Fedders, Charlotte: Shattered Dreams, 133 Fedders, John, 133 The Federalist, 239 Fiedler, Leslie, xii 50 Cent, 165, 175 Final Crisis, 237 Finnis, John, 73n90 Flash Gordon, x Fleming, Victor: Gone with the Wind, 32, 34 Floyd, Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy,” 168, 177n16 Flueger, Patrick John: Brothers, 257 Fonda, Peter: Easy Rider, 171 Ford, Daniel: Incident at Muc-Wa, 92 Ford, John: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 168; Rio Bravo, 168; The Searchers, 168; Stagecoach, 168 Foreman, Carl: The Victors, 89–90 Foster, Ben: Lone Survivor, 256 Foster, Jodie: The Accused, 135–37; The Brave One, 153 Fox News, 96, 97 Franklin, Benjamin, 60 Fredrickson, George, 48 freedom riders, 119–20 Freud, Sigmund, 41n23 Friday the 13th, xi Fugitive Slave Law, 29 Fuller, Robert, 188, 195 FX: Sons of Anarchy, 172 Gacy, John Wayne, 208, 211, 213, 218n25 Gainsbourg, Serge: “Bonnie and Clyde,” 169 Gang Busters, x gang rape, 135–37 gangs, 54, 154, 155, 165–82, 187 Garvey, Marcus, 122 Gay, John, 204 Gaye, Marvin, 121

Index gay rights, 131, 143n3, 237 Gein, Ed, 209 gender violence, 131–48; domestic violence, 131–35, 137; hate crimes, 139, 140–42; rape, 15, 37, 132, 135–37, 152, 198, 251–52, 261; sexual harassment, 137, 138–39 Gettysburg, 65, 66 Gettysburg Address, 66, 101n56 God’s covenant, 74n100 Godzilla, 244 Goetz, Bernhard, 152–53, 154, 159 Goldberg, Whoopi: The Color Purple, 133 Goldwater, Barry, 232–33 Goodman, Andrew, 117 GOONS (Guardian of the Oglala Nation), 12, 24n21 Good Housekeeping, x Go Tell the Spartans, 92 Gothic murder tales, 40n3 Goths, 187 Grand Theft Auto, xi Graham, Stephen: Boardwalk Empire, 170 Graham, Will: Red Dragon, 210 Grahame-Smith, Seth: Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, 236 Grant, Ulysses S., 16, 54, 58; Overland Campaign, 45 Grease, 270 Greene, Graham: Thunderheart, 12 Greengrass, Paul: United 93, 245, 246, 247, 260–61, 273–74 Greenwald, Robert: The Burning Bed, 131–32 Green Zone, 252, 261 Grenny, Joseph, 193 Griffith, D. W.: The Birth of a Nation, 32, 33, 34 Griffith, James: The Body Speaks, 63, 73n89, 74n93 Griffith, Melanie: The Body Speaks, 63, 73n89, 74n39 Griffiths, Richard, 187 Grixti, Joseph, 205 Guantanamo, 238, 254 Guerrero, Ed, 32 Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, 115 Gulf War, 268

289 Gunsmoke, xi Guthrie, Woody: “The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd,” 168 Hacker, J. David, 46–47 Hackman, Gene: Mississippi Burning, 116–17 Hagedorn, John M.: Female Gangs in America, 174 Haines, William Wister: Command Decision, 86 Haley, Alex: The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 117; Roots, 27, 28, 37–38 Halloween, xi Halttunen, Karen, 40n3 Hammond, Charles: Cincinnati Gazette, 226 Hanks, Tom: Band of Brothers, 95; Captain Phillips, 167 Hannibal, 217 Harrelson, Woody: The Messenger, 260; Natural Born Killers, 195 Harris, Eric, xvii, 183, 184, 187, 189, 190, 191–93, 194, 197, 198 Harris, Joel Chandler: “Uncle Remus” tales, 32 Harris, Thomas: The Silence of the Lambs, 209–11, 213, 218n39 Harrison, Jerry: Talking Heads, 233 Harron, Mary, 213 Hasbro: GI Joe, 91 Hasian, Marouf A., Jr., 253 Hatch, Nathan, 50 Hatcher, Charlie, 210 hate crimes, 139, 140–42 Hate Crimes Prevention Act, 143 Have Gun Will Travel, xi HBO: Band of Brothers, 95; Boardwalk Empire, 170; Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, 16–17; The Laramie Project, 141 Hedges, Chris: War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, 247 Hell-Cat Maggie, 174, 178n43 Hells Angels, 171, 172 Heston, Charlton, 190 Hicks, Bill, xviii–xix Highsmith, Patricia, 207, 211, 213 Hill, Anita, 137–39, 144n37 Hillerman, Tony: Chee series, 19, 24n35 Hine, Thomas, 185

290Index hip hop, 107, 121, 124, 165, 172, 173 Hiroshima, 11, 79, 86 Hitchcock, Alfred: Shadow of A Doubt?, xxii Hodkinson, Paul, 187, 188 Holiday, Billie: “Strange Fruit,” 120 Hollister Riots, 171 Holmes, H. H., 205 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 64 Holocaust Museum, 101n67 Homeland, 245, 258 Hoover, J. Edgar, 117 Hopper, Dennis: Easy Rider, 171 Horner, Lance: Drum, 35, 36 horrorism, xxiiin6 Hostile Advances, 139 Houseman, John, x Huebner, Andrew, 89 Hughes, Francine, 132 Hughes, Mickey, 132 Hughes, Howard: Scarface, 169–70; The Whip Hand, 85 Hughes Brothers, 124 Hussein, Qusay, 275 Hussein, Saddam, 96, 274–75 Hussein, Uday, 275 Ice Cube, 173 Ice-T, 173 Incident at Oglala, 24n21 In the Heat of the Night, 114, 115 Invasion, 275 Ireland, Patrick, 191–92 ironism, 17–22 Jackson, Andrew, 50, 224–27, 229, 230, 235, 239 Jackson, Michael, 123 Jackson, Thomas “Stonewall,” 57 Jack the Ripper, 204, 205 JAG, 273 James, Henry: Notes of a Son and Brother, 63 James, Jesse, 189 James, William, xii James–Younger Gang, 167 Jansson, David R., 114 Japan, 81, 81, 85, 86, 90, 94, 96, 98, 230. See also Hiroshima; Nagasaki; Pearl Harbor

Japanese Americans, 80, 83 Jarvis, Brian, 213 Jarvis, Christina, 91 Jay Z: “03 Bonnie and Clyde,” 169 Jefferson, Thomas: Notes on the State of Virginia, 4 Jenkins, Philip, 207–8 Jensen, Max, 212 Jenson v. Eveleth Taconite Co., 139 Jim Crow, 28, 30, 32, 36, 38, 41n28, 80, 108, 121 Jimenez, Stephen: The Book of Matt, 141–42 Johnson, Chalmers, 88 Johnson, Lyndon, 232 Jones, James, 99 Jordan, Winthrop D.: White over Black, 70n31 Kaltenborn, H. V., 81–82, 99n7 Kalyvas, Stathis N., 59, 72n72 Kass, Jeff: Columbine, 190 Kateb, Reda: Zero Dark Thirty, 253–54 Kaufman, Moisés, 140 Kearl, Michael C., 66 Kelly, Chance, 251 Kelly, George “Machine Gun,” 166 Kennedy, John F., 48, 120, 232, 270 Kennedy-Pipe, Caroline, 277n2 Kilmer, Val: Thunderheart, 12 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 117, 119, 122, 123 King, Rodney, 113 King, Stephen: Rage, 193 Kings Go Forth, 89 Kirchick, James, 142 Klebold, Dylan, xvii, 183, 184, 187, 189, 190, 191, 192, 194, 197 Korea, 89, 231, 234, 268 Korean War, 79, 231 Kosinsky, Joseph: Oblivion, 262 Kracauer, Siegfried, 85 Kraft, Randy, 210 Krazy Kat, x Kubrick, Stanley: Dr. Strangelove, 231–32, 234; 2001, 192 Ku Klux Klan, 33, 34, 39, 117, 119, 152 Kuma, 274 Kuo, Alex, 24n36

Index Lacenaire, Pierre François, 204–5 The Ladies Home Journal, x Langman, Peter, 185 La Nuestra Familia, 173 The Laramie Project, 140, 141–42 La Rosa, Lewis: The Punisher, 215 Lawrence, D. H: Studies in Classic American Literature, xv, xix–xx Layne, McAvoy: How Audie Murphy Died in Vietnam, 91 Leave It to Beaver, 110 Ledeen, Michael: Tocqueville on American Character, xviii Ledonne, Danny: Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, 197 Lee, Harper: To Kill a Mockingbird, 114 Lee, Robert E., 57, 58 Lee, Spike, 118, 124; Do The Right Thing, 122; Four Little Girls, 119; Malcolm X, 117 The Legend of Nigger Charley, 39 Legman, Gershon: Love and Death, xi Leonard, David, 113 Leonard, John, 250 Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered and Queer/Questioning. See LGBTQ Lesly, Mark: Subway Gunman, 152 Leys, Colin: “Violence Today,” xvi LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered and Queer/Questioning), 140, 141, 143n3 Lieber, Francis, 57 Lights Out, x Li’l Abner, x Limbaugh, Rush, 238 Lincoln, Abraham, 57, 66–67, 74n99, 235–37, 239; “Spot Resolutions Speech,” 52 Lindsay, Jeff: Dearly Devoted Dexter, 216; Dexter, 157, 159, 160–61, 203, 210, 214, 215–17, 220n77 Lindsay, Stephen: Jesus Hates Zombies Featuring Lincoln Hates Werewolves, 236 Lion and Gold Medal, 206 Little Caesar, xi Little Rock Nine, 108, 118–19 Long, Mark: The Silence of Our Friends, 122 Look Who’s Talking, 270

291 Lost, 275 Lowry, Brian, 250 Ludlow, Noah: “The Hunters of Kentucky,” 225 Lumet, Sidney: Fail Safe, 90, 231 Lyon, Danny: The Bikeriders, 171 Mackie, Anthony: The Hurt Locker, 249 Mad Max 2, 234 Mailer, Norman: The Executioner’s Song, 212; The Naked and the Dead, 100n22 Malcolm X, 117, 121 Mamet, David: Oleanna, 138–39 Mann, Michael: Heat, 176; Public Enemies, 176 Manson, Charles, 187–90, 203, 219n59; Antichrist Superstar, 189, 196; “Columbine,” 188; Holy Wood, 189; “Man That You Fear,” 196; Mechanical Animals, 188; “The Nobodies,” 189 Manson, Marilyn, 187–90, 195, 196 March Book One, 122 March on Washington, 113, 119, 121–22 Martinez, Fred, 141 Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, 123 Marvel Comics, 172; Heroes, 276 Massacre at Wounded Knee, 3, 228 Matthews, Brander, ix–x Mauldin, Bill, 90 McBride, Martina: “Independence Day,” 134 McCarthy, Todd, 253 McCloud, Scott: The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln, 236 McCloy, Helen: The Last Day, 231 McDermott, Dylan: American Horror Story, 198 McDonagh, Martin: Seven Psychopaths, 217 McGruder, Eric: The Boondocks, 123 McNair, Denise, 119 McNulty, Faith: The Burning Bed, 131 McPherson, James M., 47; Drawn with the Sword, 68n9 McQueen, Alexander, 172 McQueen, Steve: 12 Years a Slave, 38, 39, 42n53 Meeropol, Abel: “Strange Fruit,” 120

292Index Melville, Herman: Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, 45–46; Moby Dick, 254 Menninger, Karl, 208 The Messenger, 259, 260 Mexican War, 53, 54, 55, 68n9 Millar, Mark: Kick-Ass, 158 Miller, Arthur: Focus, 100n22 Miller, Frank: The Dark Knight Returns, 159 Miller, Jody, 174 Miller, Walter M., Jr.: Canticle for Leibowitz, 231 minimalism 13–15, 16, 17 Minority Report, 271 Mississippi Burning, 114, 116–17, 118 Mitchell, Jeff, 83 Mitchell, Margaret: Gone with the Wind, 28, 33–34, 35, 36, 37 Mitchell, Reid: The Vacant Chair, 68n11 Mitchell, Silas Weir: “The Case of George Dedlow,” 60–61 Mohawk Nat, ix Momaday, N. Scott, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 21; House Made of Dawn, 1, 2–3, 6–9, 13, 20 Moore, Demi: Disclosure, 139 Moore, Joan W.: Going Down to the Barrio, 174 Moore, Michael: Bowling for Columbine, 190 Morning News, 52, 71n43 Morris, Dick, 97 Morrison, Toni: Beloved, 38 MS-13, 173 Mulligan, Robert: To Kill A Mockingbird, 114–15 Mulloy, D. J., 150 Mumford, Lewis, 82 Muni, Paul: Scarface, 176 Munich, 271 Murder Act of 1752, 70n35 “Murderauction,” xxii Murley, Jean, 192, 208–9, 212, 219n59 Murphy, Audie L.: To Hell and Back, 87–88, 91 Murphy, Kathryn, 135 Murphy, Ryan: American Horror Story, 197–98 Muschert, Glenn W., 183–84 Muslims, 271, 273–74, 278n42

MV: Maersk Alabama, 167 Myrdal, Gunnar: An American Dilemma, 82 Nagasaki, 11, 79 National Era, 29 National Gang Center, 174–75, 178n32 National Gang Targeting, Enforcement & Coordination Center, 172, 178n33 National Youth Gang Center, 172, 178n32 Native American Literature and Film, 1–25; ironism, 17–22; minimalism 13–15; ritualism 6–12 Nayak, Meghana, 268 New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette, 53 Newman, Paul: Cool Hand Luke, 166 New York Weekly Herald, 53 Nibley, Lydia: Two Spirits, 141 9/11. See September 11 Nisbet, Robert A., 83 Nolan, Christopher: The Dark Knight trilogy, 159 Norcross, James, 234 North, Oliver, 80 North Country, 139 Northup, Solomon, 39. See also Solomon Northup’s Odyssey; 12 Years a Slave N.W.A., 172, 174; Niggaz4Life, 173 Oblivion, 262 Onstott, Kyle: Drum, 35, 36; Mandingo, 28, 34–36, 39, 41n37, 41n42 Open Range, 157 Operations, 274 O’Sullivan, John L., 52–53, 71n43 Pacino, Al: Scarface, 165, 176 Pagans, 171 Palin, Sarah: Going Rogue, 150 Paludan, Phillip Shaw, 48 Panitch, Leo: “Violence Today,” xvi Panofsky, Erwin, xii Papke, David, 142, 143 Paquin, Anna: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, 16–17 Park, Robert E.: The City, 170 Parker, Alan: Mississippi Burning, 116–17 Parker, Alton, 230

Index Parker, Bonnie, 168–69 Parks, Gordon: Shaft, 116 Parks, Rosa, 118–19 PBS: Eyes on the Prize, 118; Freedom Riders, 119–20; Independent Lens, 141 Pearl Harbor, 79, 86, 87, 90, 94, 96, 98 Pearson, Edmund, 206 Pearson, Geoffrey, 166 Peck, Gregory: To Kill a Mockingbird, 114–15 Peltier, Leonard, 12 Perils of Pauline, 175 Peter, Paul and Mary, 120 Peters, Evan: American Horror Story, 197–98 Peters, Gretchen: “Independence Day,” 134 Petticoat Junction, 110 Philippe, Ryan: Stop-Loss, 259 Phillips, Ulrich B., 32 Pierre, DBC: Vernon God Little, 196 Pilcher, Joan, 48–49 Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, 11, 12, 24n21 Pinker, Steven: The Better Angels of Our Nature, 151–52 Pissed Off Bastards of Bloomington, 171 Plug Uglies, 177n14 Pocket Book, 206 Poe, Edgar Allan: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” 210; “The Purloined Letter,” xv Pogo, x Poitier, Sidney: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, 115; In the Heat of the Night, 115 Polanski, Roman: Rosemary’s Baby, 195 Polk, James K., 52, 71n44 Pomeroy, Jesse Harding, ix Powell, Nate: The Silence of Our Friends, 122 Power, Marcus, 274, 275 President Evil, 237 presidential violence, 223–42; age of mass destruction, 230–34; Andrew Jackson, 224–27; postmodern, 234–39; Theodore Roosevelt, 227–30 Prez, 234 Prince, Stephen, 244 Prosser, Gabriel, 50, 69n29 Public Enemy, xi

293 Public Enemy: “Fight the Power,” 121–22 Puffer, Joseph A.: The Boy and His Gang, 177n21 Pulp Fiction, 176 Quay, Sara E., 244 Quinn, Aidan: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, 16 Ramirez, Richard, 213 Rankin, Jesse, 63 Ranson, James: Generation Kill, 250 rape, 15, 37, 132, 135–37, 152, 198, 251–52, 261 Rattlesnake Ned’s Revenge, ix Reagan, Ronald, 81, 93–94, 173, 208, 213, 230, 232–33, 235, 239 Reagan’s Raiders, 235 Reconstruction, 28, 32, 47, 55 Red Dawn, 234 Redford, Robert, 12 Remington, Frederick, 228 Renner, Jeremy: The Hurt Locker, 247 Reservoir Dogs, 176 Resident Evil, 237 Ressler, Robert, 209 Revolutionary War, 150, 161, 224 Reynolds, David, 40n15, 41n22 Rhodes, James Ford, 47 Rich, Frank, 139 The Rifleman, xi Right Wing News, 238 Riley, Jon Patrick, 53 ritualism 6–12 RKO: The Whip Hand, 85 The Road, 176 Roberts, Julia: Sleeping with the Enemy, 134 Robertson, Carole, 119 Robeson, Paul, 122 Robinson, Patrick: Lone Survivor, 253 Roeder, George H., 94 Rolling Stone, 188, 247, 249 Romita, John, Jr.: Kick-Ass, 158 Rommel, Erwin, 86 Roosevelt, Franklin, 96, 236 Roosevelt, Theodore, 85, 224, 227–30, 235, 239 Rosenthal, Bernard, 196

294Index Ross, Alex, 237, 238 Ross, Rick, 175 Roth, Randolph: American Homicide, 49, 71n58 Rothschild, Babette, 60 Rowe, Gary Thomas, 119–20 Rule, Ann: The Stranger beside Me, 218n43 Rumsfeld, Donald, 97 Ryan, Tim, 40n5, 41n37 Safer, Morley, 90–91 Satten, Joseph, 208 Schell, Jonathan: The Fate of the Earth, 93, 233–34 Schellenberg, August: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, 16 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 69n18; “The Causes of the American Civil War,” 48 Schmid, David, 203, 206 school shootings, 183–202; apportioning blame in the aftermath, 186–90; definition 183–86; fictional responses, 193–99; true crime treatments, 190–93 Schrab, Rob, 214 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 174 Schwerner, Michael, 117 Scorsese, Martin: Gangs of New York, 167 Scott, Winfield, 54, 55 Seltzer, Mark, xix, 190, 121, 191; The Killer Inside Me, 206, 212 September 11, xviii, xxi, 157, 184, 234, 245–47, 265, 267, 268, 269; and beyond, 243–64; early responses to, 270–73; homecoming 257–60; Iraq, 247–53; missions, 253–57; post- xxi, 96–99, 156, 265, 266, 268, 274, 275–77. See also War on Terror serial killers, ix, xxii, 19, 20, 160, 184, 185, 191, 203–22; celebrity, 211–13; disavowal and Dexter, 215–17; exemplar of modernity, 204–5; fictional representations, 206–7; heroic, 215–17; moral panic and political rhetoric, 207–9; narrative M.O., 205–6; reorientation and rationalization, 213–15; Thomas Harris and the rise of serial killer culture, 209–11 Set It Off, 174

Sexson, Lynda, 67n6 sexual harassment, 137, 138–39 The Shadow, x Shain, Russell Earl, 100n25 Shakur, Tupac, 165, 174 Shapira, Harel: Waiting for José, 151 Shaw, Irving: The Young Lions, 100n22 Shayon, Robert Lewis, 112 Sheen, Martin: Dillinger and Capone, 168 Shepard, Judy, 140 Shepard, Matthew, 140–42, 143 Shepard, N. B., 62, 64 Sheridan, Jim: Brothers, 245, 248, 257–59 Shiloh, TN, 56–57 Shoultz, Susan: “The images of America’s favorite ‘Charlie’s Angel’,” 132 Showtime: Dexter, 157, 159, 160–61, 203, 210, 214, 215–17, 220n77; Homeland, 258 Shriver, Lionel: We Need to Talk about Kevin, 195 Sidbury, James: Ploughshares into Swords, 69n29 Sket, 174 The Siege, 270 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 2, 12, 13, 14, 15, 21; Ceremony, 6, 9–11 The Simpsons, 94 The Sisters of Mercy, 187 Sitting Bull, 16 slavery, 1–25; eroticization of interracial violence, 32–36; post–civil rights era 36–38; post–racial era 38–40; Uncle Tom’s Cabin 28–32, 38, 39, 40n8 Slaves, 39 Sleeper Cell, 273 Slotkin, Richard: The Fatal Environment, xx; Gunfighter Nation, xx–xxi; Regeneration through Violence, xx Smith, Claude, 93 Smith, Perry, 207 Smith, Walter Bedell, 87–88 Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, 94, 101n67 Socialist Register, xvi Solomon Northup’s Odyssey, 38 Sorkin, Aaron: The Newsroom, 97

Index Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 109 Soviet Union, 79, 82, 85, 90, 93, 94, 100n32, 208, 231, 233, 234 Spielberg, Steven: Amistad, 38; Band of Brothers, 95; The Burning Bed, 133; The Color Purple, 132–33; Saving Private Ryan, 95 Spigel, Lynn, 270, 273 Splinter Cell, 274 Spring Breakers, 174 Starr, Edwin: “War! What is it good for?” 91 State Department, 111, 238 Steinbeck, John: The Grapes of Wrath, 168 Stone, Oliver: Natural Born Killers, 195; World Trade Center, 245, 246, 247, 260, 273 Stonewall riots, 143n3 Stop-Loss, 245 Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Uncle Tom’s Cabin 28–32, 38, 39, 40n8 St. Patrick’s Battalion, 71n50 Strategic Defense Initiative, 93 Straw, Mark, 252 “Super Columbine Massacre,” xxii Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, 197 “Supernaught,” xxii Taft, William, 229 Takacs, Stacy, 272, 273, 275 “Take Out the Gunman,” 199 Tarantino, Quentin: Django Unchained, 28, 38–39; Pulp Fiction, 176; Reservoir Dogs, 176 Taylor, Zachary, 52, 54, 55, 114 Tectonic Theater Project, 140, 141 Tennenhouse, Leonard, xvi Tergesen, Lee, 249 The Terminal, 271 Testament, 234 Them!, 231 Theron, Charlize: North Country, 139 Thomas, Clarence, 138–39 Thompson, Hunter S.: Hell’s Angels, 171 Thompson, Jim: The Killer Inside Me, 206–7, 211, 213 Thompson, Matt, 248

295 Thoreau, Henry David: “Resistance to Civil Government,” 52 “Those Were the Days,” 112 Thrasher, Frederick: The Gang, 170, 174, 177n21 Threads, 234 Threat Matrix, 273 3:10 to Yuma, 157 Tierney, Lawrence: Dillinger, 168 Trail of Tears, 3, 15 Travers, Peter, 247 Trench Coat Mafia, 186, 187, 197 True Detective, 206 True Grit, 157 Tubman, Harriet, 122 Turner, E. S., 204 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 150 Turner, Ike: What’s Love Got to Do with It?, 134 Turner, Nat, 50–51, 70n37 Turner, Tina: What’s Love Got to Do with It?, 134 Turners Lane Hospital, 60 Turner’s Rebellion, 51, 70n37 Twain, Mark, 229; Life on the Mississippi, 45, 62 Twentieth Century Fox: The Desert Fox, 86 24, 157, 273 24: The Game, 274 2Pac. See Shakur, Tupac Union Army, 33, 38, 57, 68n9, 68n11 Universal: To Hell and Back, 87–88, 91 Vampire Hunter, 236 Van Deburg, William, 41n37 Van Sant, Gus: Elephant, 194 Vasquez, Jhonen: JTHM, 214 Velie, Alan R., 3, 9 Vesey, Denmark, 50 V for Vendetta, 157, 161 Vietnam era: 1962–1978, 89–92; post, 1978–2001, 92–96 Vietnam War, 79, 97, 101n48, 230, 233, 235, 268 vigilantes, 149–63, 199, 215 Vinovskis, Maris, 56 Violence Against Women Act, 135, 137, 143

296Index Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, 172–73 Violent Gang Safe Street Task forces, 172 Virginia Tech, 184 Vizenor, Gerald, 2; The Trickster of Liberty, 17–19, 21 von Krafft-Ebbing, Richard, 41n23 Vonnegut, Kurt: Cat’s Cradle, 231 Slaughterhouse Five, 91 Vronsky, Peter, 207 Wagner, Lindsay: Shattered Dreams, 133 Wahlberg, Mark: Lone Survivor, 255, 256–57 Walker, Alice: The Color Purple, 132–33, 134 Walker, David: “Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles,” 50 Waller, Willard: The Veteran Comes Back, 82 Warner Brothers, 100n25 War of the Worlds, 271, 275 War on Drugs, 173 War on Terror, 81, 96, 157, 237, 244, 255, 260, 262, 265–81, 282; alternative representations of violence, 275–76; constructing ‘self’ and ‘other,’ 267–70; early responses to 9/11, 270–73; gendered and racialized discourses post9/11, 273–75; violence and war, 267–70 Warren, Robert Penn, 62–63, 67, 73n82 Washington, Denzel: American Gangster, 165; The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 117 Washington, George, 223, 225 Watchmen, 157 Watkins, Sam: Co. Aytch, 62, 64 Wayne, John: The Green Berets, 90; The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 168;

Rio Bravo, 168; The Searchers, 168; Stagecoach, 168 Welch, James, 2, 15; Winter in the Blood, 13–14 “We Shall Overcome,” 120 Wesley, Cynthia, 119 The West Wing, 272 Whitman, Walt, 65 Whyte, William Foote, 174 Wild Bunch, 167 Williams, Samuel, 49 Williams, Wayne, 218n25 Wills, Garry: “The Transcendental Declaration,” 66 Wilson, Dick, 24n21 Wilson, Jack: Aristotle Little Hawk series, 21 Winner, Michael: Death Wish, 152 Wister, Owen, 228 A Woman Called Moses, 38 Wonder, Stevie, 121 Wood, Marcus, 40n8, 41n23 World Trade Center, 96, 184, 191, 244, 245, 276 World War II in American Popular Culture, 1945–Present, 79–106; Cold War, 1948–1962, 85–89; early postwar, 1945–1948, 81–85; post-9/11, 96–99; post Vietnam, 1978–2001, 92–96; Vietnam War era, 1962–1978, 89–92 Wuornos, Aileen, 213, 220n64 Wright, Evan, 249, 250 Zero Dark Thirty, 245 Žižek, Slavoj: Violence, xv, xvi, xxiiin5, 185–86, 194 Zoolander, 244

Violence in American Popular Culture

Violence in American Popular Culture Volume 2: Representations of Violence in Popular Cultural Genres David Schmid, Editor Foreword by Harold Schechter

Copyright © 2016 by ABC-CLIO, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Violence in American popular culture / David Schmid, editor ; foreword by Harold Schechter.   volumes cm   Includes index.   Contents: Volume 1. American History and Violent Popular Culture — Volume 2. Representations of Violence in Popular Cultural Genres.   ISBN 978-1-4408-3205-5 (print : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4408-3206-2 (e-book)  1.  Violence in popular culture—United States.  2.  Violence in mass media.  3.  Violence—United States.  4.  Mass media and culture—United States.  I.  Schmid, David (David Frank), editor.  P96.V52U675 2016  810.9'3552—dc23   2015025368 ISBN: 978-1-4408-3205-5 EISBN: 978-1-4408-3206-2 20 19 18 17 16  1 2 3 4 5 This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. Praeger An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments

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Foreword: American Popular Culture—There Will Be Blood Harold Schechter

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Introduction: Recovering American Violence David Schmid

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Volume 2: Representations of Violence in Popular Cultural Genres Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Traversing the Boundaries of Moral Deviance: New England Execution Sermons, 1674–1825 Daniel Belczak Reading between the Lines: The Penny Press and the Purpose of Making Violence News Mark Bernhardt The Coy, the Graphic, and the Ugly: Violence in Dime Novels Pamela Bedore “She Decided to Kill Her Husband”: Housewives in Contemporary American Fictions of Crime Charlotte Beyer Hard-Boiled Detectives and the Roman Noir Tradition Rachel Franks

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49

71

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Chapter Six

Violence, the Production Code, and Film Noir119 Homer B. Pettey

Chapter Seven

From Knights to Knights-Errant: The Evolution of Westerns through Portrayals of Violence Nathan Wuertenberg

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Modus Operandi: Continuity and Change in Television Crime Drama at the Forensic Turn Jules Odendahl-James Documenting Murder before In Cold Blood: The 1950s Origins of True-Crime Jean Murley Capote’s Children: Patterns of Violence in Contemporary American True-Crime Narratives David Schmid

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“I’m Not Prepared to Die”: Murdered-Girl Tunes in Appalachia Courtney Brooks

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AmeriKKKa’s Human Sacrifice: Blackness, Gangsta Rap, and Authentic Villainy Seth Cosimini

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“Violent Lives”: The Representation of Violence in American Comics Jesús Jiménez-Varea and Antonio Pineda

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Chapter Fourteen “Command and Conquer”: Video Games and Violence Jennifer Jenson, Milena Droumeva, and Suzanne de Castell

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About the Editor and Contributors

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Index

317

Acknowledgments

I have incurred many debts in working on this collection. The most important are as follows: to my wife and children, for their love and support; to the contributors, for their original and thought-provoking work; and to Rebecca Matheson at Praeger, easily the most patient and professional editor with whom I have ever worked.

Foreword: American Popular Culture—There Will Be Blood Harold Schechter

He got hold of my two ears and gave me a butt right in the front part of my head that almost blinded me, for the feller’s skull was as hard as the two sides of an iron pot. . . . So we wrassled and jerked and bit for a long time, till I got a chance at one of his eyes with my thum nail. Then I begun to put on the rail Kentucky twist, he knew it was all day with him, and he fell on his knees and begged for mercy. His eye stood out about half an inch, and I felt the bottom of the socket with the end of my thum. Crockett Almanac, 1839

In post–Civil War Boston, an adolescent sociopath named Jesse Harding Pomeroy—infamous as our country’s youngest serial killer—perpetrated a string of attacks on younger children that began with savage beatings and escalated into mutilation–murder. After his arrest in 1874, outraged observers struggled to account for his fiendish behavior. It didn’t take them long to find an answer. “There is plenty of evidence to show that the reading of dime novels constituted a good share of the boy’s mental nourishment,” declared the Boston Globe. It was Pomeroy’s fondness for such insidious fare as Bald-Eagle Bob, the Boy Buccaneer, Rattlesnake Ned’s Revenge, and Mohawk Nat: A Tale of the Great Northwest—“cheap blood-andthunder stories” replete with graphic depictions of frontier violence—that “first put it in his mind to torture boys.”1 Educators and social reformers were unanimous in their condemnation of these “vile publications.” “The dangers arising from such vicious literature cannot be overestimated by parents,” warned Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, America’s first female physician, while the eminent literature professor Brander Matthews railed against the

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“villainous sheets” that wrought such “dreadful damage” on the minds and morals of “the boys and girls of America.”2 Forty years after his diatribe, Professor Matthews made a startling confession. During his own boyhood, he himself had been an ardent fan of dime novels. Reminiscing about these disreputable diversions from the vantage point of old age, he now praised them for their “thrilling and innocuous record of innocent and imminent danger.”3 By then, of course, the dime novel had long been supplanted by new and presumably more pernicious varieties of pop entertainment that made the earlier, oncedemonized genre seem positively wholesome. One of these was the comic strip. Hard as it is to believe about the medium that produced Krazy Kat, Li’l Abner, and Pogo, the newspaper “funnies” were once widely condemned not just as lowbrow trash, but also as a leading cause of mental and moral degeneracy among the young. As early as 1909, magazines such as The Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping described the Sunday funnies as a “crime against the children of America,” hideously vulgar productions whose “crude art” and “perverted humor” would promote “lawlessness [and] debauched fantasy” in their juvenile readers. By the 1930s, moralists were lashed into even greater frenzies of disapproval by the popularity of action-packed adventure strips such as Flash Gordon and Dick Tracy. “Sadism, cannibalism, bestiality,” one Depression-era critic fulminated. “Torturing, killing, kidnapping. Raw melodrama, tales of crimes and criminals . . . All these, day after day, week after week, have become the mental food of American children. With such things are the comic strips that take up page upon page in the average American newspaper filled.”4 The story was the same with every new medium of popular entertainment. Barely twenty years after it was invented, the motion picture was already being attacked as “a perverter of youth and a breeder of crime.” Asked in 1918 “what proportion of disciplinary cases were attributable to movies,” one child-rearing expert replied without hesitation: “I should say they almost all were.”5 In the 1930s, moral watchdogs proclaimed that the children of America were being “rendered psychopathic” by popular radio programs such as Gang Busters, The Shadow, and Lights Out, which glorified “every form of crime known to man,” from kidnapping and extortion to assault and “sadistic abuse.”6 In 1947, the producer/director/actor John Houseman went after the “funny animal” cartoons that, in those pre-television days, were a vital part of the Saturday matinee movie-going experience for millions of American children: “The fantasies which our children greet with howls of joy run red with horrible savagery. Today the animated cartoon has become a bloody battlefield through which savage

Foreword: American Popular Culture—There Will Be Blood 

and remorseless creatures, with single-track minds, pursue one another, then rend, gouge, twist, tear, and mutilate each other with sadistic ferocity.”7 Perhaps the most rabid of all the anti-pop crusaders was Gershon Legman, whose 1949 diatribe Love and Death excoriated everything from Disney cartoons to radio soap operas, though he reserved his most withering scorn for the comic books. “If every American child reads from ten to a dozen comics monthly,” he calculated, “and if there is only one violent picture per page (and usually there are more), this represents a minimum supply, to every child old enough to look at pictures, of three hundred scenes of beating, shooting, strangling, torture and blood per month, or ten a day, if he reads each comic book only once.”8 Clearly there is a highly predictable pattern here. Every time a new type of mass entertainment comes along, high-minded reformers are quick to denounce it as a sign of social decay and a danger to the young. Examples are adduced that purportedly demonstrate a direct correlation between the commission of sensational crimes and the consumption of the latest form of violent make-believe. Eventually, with the advent of a new technology, another, more exciting, fast-paced, and action-packed pastime is created, and the onetime media menace comes to be looked at nostalgically as a harmless, old-fashioned form of play. Can there be any doubt that, say, twenty years from now, critics will be decrying gore-drenched, virtualreality first person shooters—games that allow players to actually feel the blood and brain matter exploding from the skulls of their targets—while pining for the good old days of benign diversions such as Grand Theft Auto and House of the Dead: Overkill? History has proved that for all the hysteria of the finger-wagging moralists, their dire predictions have never come true. The little readers of dime novels didn’t become a generation of outlaws. The boys who thrilled to Little Caesar and Public Enemy didn’t grow up to be tommy-gun–toting gangsters. The teenage fans of Halloween and Friday the 13th didn’t put on hockey masks and run out to dismember coeds with chainsaws. My own generation, raised on a relentless barrage of television gunplay (Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel, The Rifleman, et al.), turned out to be tie-dyed proponents of peace, love, and flower power. Misguided as they are about most things, however, the anti-pop crusaders make one valid point. American popular culture—as the essays in the present collection make abundantly clear—is and has always been rife with what its critics like to call “gratuitous violence.”9 That phrase is, in truth, a serious misnomer, for—far from being uncalled-for—graphic violence is one of the essential features of popular entertainment, whose roots lie in the orally transmitted folklore of pretechnological times. Writing

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xii

about the “folkloristic” background of early cinema, the eminent art critic Erwin Panofsky argues that to evolve from a mere optical novelty into a medium of mass entertainment, the motion picture had to satisfy the public’s perennial taste not only for sentimentality, slapstick, and sex, but also, importantly, for sadistic spectacle—for our “primordial instinct for bloodshed and cruelty.”10 Other cultural critics, Leslie Fiedler prominent among them, have made the same argument: that one of the central functions of art—and especially popular art—is to serve as a safety valve for those “undying primal impulses which, however outmoded by civilization, need to somehow to be expressed,” to offer a socially acceptable way to gratify the “carnivore within” (as William James called the atavistic self that persists beneath the surface of our dutiful daily lives).11 Of all the scenes of violence that Huckleberry Finn witnesses in the narrative of his adventures, the most disturbing to me takes place when Huck, in the company of his new raftmates, the Duke and Dauphin, enters a little one-horse town in Arkansas and comes upon a bunch of young “loafers” mooching chaws of plug tobacco from each other while engaging in casual sadism. “There couldn’t anything . . . make them happy all over like a dog fight,” Huck reports, “unless it might be putting turpentine on a stray dog and setting fire to him, or tying a tin pail to his tail and seeing him run himself to death.”12 When I picture the contemporary counterparts of that shiftless young bunch, I see them not hanging around outdoors, chewing tobacco and torturing animals, but sprawled in someone’s living room, smoking pot while blasting away at aliens, zombies, and terrorists on a PlayStation or Xbox, engaging in precisely the process that pop entertainment exists to effect: the transformation of our innate endowment of aggression and cruelty (“our aboriginal capacity for murderous excitement,” to cite William James again) into play.

Notes 1. Schechter, Fiend, 97. 2.  Blackwell, 90; Michael Denning, 29–30. 3.  Denning, 9. 4.  Ryan, 301. 5. Brownlow. 6.  See Schechter, Savage, 127–130. 7.  Houseman, 120. 8.  Legman, 31–32. 9.  Anyone who believes that American popular culture was less violent in the past is encouraged to consult the 1839 Crockett Almanac, a passage from which forms the epigraph of this essay. See Lofaro.

Foreword: American Popular Culture—There Will Be Blood 

10. Panofsky. 11.  See Schechter, Savage, 10. 12.  Twain, 113.

Bibliography Blackwell, Elizabeth. Counsel to Parents on the Moral Education of their Children in Relation to Sex. London, UK: Hatchards, Piccadilly, 1879. Brownlow, Kevin. Behind the Mask of Innocence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Denning, Michael. Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture in America. New York: Verso, 1987. Houseman, John. “What Makes American Movies Tough?” Vogue ( January 15, 1947): 120. Legman, Gershon. Love and Death: A Study in Censorship. New York: Hacker Art Books, 1949. Lofaro, Michael A., ed. The Tall Tales of Davy Crockett: The Second Nashville Series of Crockett Almanacs 1839–1841. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987. Panofsky, Erwin. “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures.” In Awake in the Dark, ed. David Denby, 30–48. New York: Vintage Books, 1977. Ryan, Jack H. “Are the Comics Moral?” Forum 95 (1936): 301–304. Schechter, Harold. Fiend: The Shocking True Story of America’s Youngest Serial Killer. New York: Simon & Schuster/Pocket Books, 2000. Schechter, Harold. Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment. New York: St. Martin’s, 2005. Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: W. W. Norton, 1962.

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Introduction: Recovering American Violence David Schmid

In his 1923 book Studies in Classic American Literature, D. H. Lawrence famously states: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” If these words ever had the power to shock, that time is gone. As long ago as 1957, historian David Brion Davis was arguing in his landmark study, Homicide in American Fiction, 1798–1860, that “a generalized image of America in the eyes of foreign peoples from the eighteenth century to the present . . . would surely include . . . a phantasmagoria of violence, from the original Revolution and Indian wars to the sordid history of lynching; from the casual killings of the cowboy and bandit to the machine-gun murders of racketeers.”1 Today, nothing could be more banal than to assert that violence played a foundational role in American culture and continues to cast a long shadow right up to the present moment. If this was ever denied, now it has become so accepted as to have apparently lost any critical edge it might have once possessed. Related to the banality of its presence for the critic writing on violence in American culture today is its excessive visibility. Like the purloined letter in Edgar Allan Poe’s eponymous story, violence, perhaps especially in the American context, is hiding in plain sight in our popular culture, excessively visible everywhere we look—but, perhaps for that very reason, we are prevented from seeing what is most germane about it. In Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (2008), Slavoj Žižek suggests precisely this possibility when he advises us to resist the temptation to focus exclusively on visible forms of violence: “[W]e should learn to step back, to disentangle ourselves from the fascinating lure of this directly visible ‘subjective’ violence, violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent.”2

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This possibility assumes that we can agree on a definition of what actually constitutes violence, but that assumption proves to be highly questionable. Everyone seems to know what violence is, but when it comes to actually defining it, violence means a multitude of different things to different people. In the words of a recent study of American violence, “While at first glance the concept seems clear enough, the more closely we examine violence the more elusive it becomes.”3 To some, violence should be thought of primarily as a physical phenomenon, something that results in the “injury of other human beings.”4 To others, violence is not only physical but also systemic and should include such phenomena as class, gender, racial, and religious stratification crucial to the smooth running of forms of social organization across the globe. The job of the cultural analyst, according to this argument, is to resist the temptation to concentrate only on the visible forms of violence and instead to draw out and study the normally hidden forms of what Žižek calls “objective” violence.5 As complex and widespread as these understandings of violence are, however, they disclose an understanding of the term that is primarily physical. But there are those who argue that the most fundamental form of violence is much more abstract, a quality of language itself. As Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse put it, “writing is not so much about violence as a form of violence in its own right.”6 Against this tendency to present violence as most fundamentally (although not exclusively) a linguistic phenomenon, still others have insisted upon violence retaining a sense of irreducible materiality, or what the 2009 edition of the Socialist Register describes as “Violence Today: Actually-Existing Barbarism” (see Panitch and Leys). Contrary to those whose focus on the relationship between violence and representation is primarily philosophical or linguistic, those who emphasize the physicality of violence are often oriented toward political or public policy solutions (see, for example, Castelli and Jakobsen). The banality of American violence, its excessive visibility, and problems associated with its definition all constitute impediments to a productive analysis of violence, but these impediments are made worse because the dominant ways of discussing violence in the American public sphere today are themselves banal and in urgent need of reinvention. In this introduction, I will review some of the most common frames currently used to discuss violence and then go on to suggest some ways in which a humanities-centered perspective (a perspective exemplified by this collection of essays) organized around the concept of the American character may represent a productive direction for future analyses of violence.

Introduction: Recovering American Violence 

At the present time, violence is defined in many different ways in the contemporary American public sphere, but generally not as a humanistic issue. Instead, a number of other discourses currently dominate discussion of the subject. Foremost, violence is defined as a problem of law and order and legality. Whenever events such as school or workplace shootings take place, for example, the primary frame used to make sense of the event is that provided by law enforcement and members of the legal profession. Representatives of law enforcement are the ones to whom the media turn first to understand what is going on, and to the extent that media coverage of these events is interested in examining the larger ramifications of these events, those ramifications are usually constructed in ways heavily influenced by legal discourse, such as debates about gun ownership. In instances in which the perpetrators of violent acts survive the acts themselves, their subsequent passage through the legal system provides an ongoing narrative that helps “make sense” of the violent act to the public at large. Following close behind legal discourses comes the psychological, the other primary way that violence is framed and thus made legible in the contemporary American public sphere. Psychological analyses of those who commit violent acts tend to bear an uncanny similarity to each other, but not just because people who engage in such acts may share a similar psychological profile; rather, these similarities emerge because the events and their perpetrators are interpreted in broadly similar ways. Public debates about violence in the United States, in other words, are characterized most of all by conventions, largely unstated and unacknowledged, that render violent events legible and comprehensible by suturing them into larger narratives that allow certain interpretations of these events while simultaneously disallowing others. The most fundamental, and therefore the most unstated, of these conventions is that the violent subject is an aberrational exception. Despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary, public discourse about violence insists in amnesiac fashion that each new case is an aberration and that these individuals are simply that—individuals, having individualized psychological problems that have no larger social or cultural significance beyond that of these individuals’ immediate personal or familial circumstances. There are, of course, some exceptions to this rule. The actions of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who killed thirteen people before killing themselves at Columbine High School in 1999, were given a broader cultural and social significance (as David McWilliam’s essay demonstrates), but that significance only extended to larger groups that could in turn be rendered abject as aberrational outsiders, such as goth teenagers.

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How hegemonic discourses about violence combine to either deny or limit the extent to which that violence has broader social meanings suggests a possible way forward for a humanistic intervention in this field, but before delineating some of the details of that intervention, I want to explain why I think that intervention should proceed by means of the concept of the American character. It must be said that there can be few more unfashionable ideas within the academy today than the exceptionalism that seems to underpin the notion of the American character, and— surely—any useful discussion of violence must distance itself aggressively from precisely this kind of universalizing concept? Answering this question means acknowledging that academics are just about the only people who have stopped using the concept of the American character. Everyone else has blithely continued to talk about this idea as if it is perfectly acceptable to the vast majority of people, which of course it is. This is precisely why I think the concept of the American character has so much potential utility: Everyone uses it, and both intervening in and resignifying its dominant meanings is a perfectly reasonable and achievable goal. Not surprisingly, the American character was referred to very frequently in the weeks and months following 9/11. In a characteristic response, Michael Ledeen, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Tocqueville on American Character, argued in an essay published in the National Review that the “most amazing thing about America has always been ourselves, as we are rediscovering in our exemplary response to the disaster of September 11th” (Ledeen). After having explained Tocqueville’s continuing relevance for understanding the American character, Ledeen ends his article with the following rallying cry: “We must remember that those who wish for peace must prepare for war, remind ourselves that Americans are great warriors, and get ready to fight again. Because that’s the way it is” (Ledeen). Although I want to use the notion of the American character very differently from Ledeen, the 9/11 context has the virtue of highlighting the complex links between the American character on the one hand and violence and trauma on the other, and it is indeed the complexity of these links that I want to emphasize. For if the conventions that characterize mainstream debates about violence have one thing in common, it is their dedication to producing easy answers to the conundrum of violence. The purpose of these easy answers is to bring about a state of reassurance so beautifully summarized by the late lamented comedian Bill Hicks: “Go back to bed, America. Your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed, America. Your government is in control again.

Introduction: Recovering American Violence 

Here. Here’s American Gladiators. Watch this. Shut up. Go back to bed, America” (Hicks). That this reassurance may be achieved through popular cultural ritualized spectacles of violence is not the least of Hicks’s insights. What role do the humanities currently play in understanding the relationship between violence and the American character? The ideal of the humanities as an integral part of a healing response to violence is probably the most influential and familiar way in which the humanities currently make themselves visible in their relation to violence in the contemporary American public sphere. I do not want to denigrate this role for the humanities, but it should not be the only role available to the humanities. As important and valuable as healing is, we must consider the possibility that the aim of a humanistic approach to American violence might be to open up wounds as well as help close them. In this spirit, the essays in this collection are designed, among other things, to bring readers face to face with the central role violence has played in American culture, and how that violence has been refracted through our popular culture. Even though outlining the complexity of what Mark Seltzer has called our “wound culture,” which Seltzer describes as “the public fascination with torn and open bodies and torn and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound” can come at a price, I believe it is a price worth paying.7 The common thread in the essays gathered in these two volumes is their shared willingness to resist easy answers about violence, no matter what form those answers take, and instead to muddy the waters, to make things more difficult and unpleasant, to break with, rather than be consistent with, the prevailing wisdom on the relation between violence and Americanness. In doing so, they resist in particular the tendency to describe the violent subject as aberrational and exceptional. Instead, they use the concept of the American character against itself, against its exceptionalist triumphalism, by suggesting instead the profound Americanness of the violent subject. This brings me to D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, a book that contains extraordinary moments of insight that provide effective antidotes to the common idea that violence and the American character exist in a relationship of mutual exclusion. Perhaps the most powerful of those moments comes when Lawrence discusses the famous character invented by James Fenimore Cooper, Natty Bumppo: He says, “Hurt nothing unless you’re forced to.” Yet he gets his deepest thrill of gratification, perhaps, when he puts a bullet through the heart of a beautiful buck, as it stoops to drink from the lake. Or when he brings the

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invisible bird fluttering down in death, out of the high blue. “Hurt nothing unless you’re forced to.” And yet he lives by death, by killing the wild things of the air and earth. It’s not good enough. But you have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.8

It is in this passage that Lawrence reveals his true utility for us today. Against the dominant contention that violence and Americanness are opposites, let us contend instead that, in Lawrence’s words, “America is tense with latent violence and resistance”—and see what happens.9 Perhaps in this way we can produce an analysis of the role violence plays in American popular culture that is fully attentive to the complexity of the concept without getting bogged down in a definitional quagmire. Perhaps this approach will provide us with a convincing explanation of not only how, but also why, we study American violence without lapsing into either simpleminded or instrumental optimism on the one hand or debilitating fatalism on the other. And if you’re not entirely convinced that D. H. Lawrence is the best person to achieve these goals, let me conclude by suggesting noted historian and analyst of American violence Richard Slotkin. Over twenty years, Slotkin published a monumental trilogy of books devoted to the study of American violence. Collectively, Regeneration through Violence (1973), The Fatal Environment (1985), and Gunfighter Nation (1992) attempt to describe what is peculiarly American about the role that violence has played in our culture, and the trilogy does so though the overarching concept of the “myth of the frontier,” which Slotkin describes in Gunfighter Nation as “our oldest and most characteristic myth.”10 According to Slotkin, the frontier myth “relates the achievement of ‘progress’ to a particular form or scenario of violent action . . . the Myth represented the redemption of American spirit or fortune as something to be achieved by playing through a scenario of separation, temporary regression to a more primitive or ‘natural’ state, and regeneration through violence.”11 Slotkin thus enables us to see violence as something other than a negative force in American history; indeed, its “productivity” becomes the key to understanding successive stages of American self-fashioning, from colonial times to the present. Slotkin’s description of how mythological narratives work, and in particular the myth of “regeneration through violence,” is still applicable to a study of the discourses of violence that structure definitions of American community today. Slotkin himself realizes this much when in Gunfighter Nation he describes how George Bush Sr. treated the first war in Iraq as

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a ritual of regeneration through violence and in so doing asked Americans “to conceive our political and moral priorities in exclusively mythic terms—with primary reference to the conflicts, needs, desires, and roleplaying imperatives that are exhibited in mass-culture mythology, and with secondary or negligible reference to the realities of public and political life.”12 Not surprisingly, such an analysis is even more pertinent to a reading of the role that violence plays in a post-9/11 America. In her book Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, philosopher Judith Butler discusses how the attacks that took place on 9/11 brought home to Americans “our exposure to violence and our complicity in it . . . our vulnerability to loss and the task of mourning that follows” and hopes that we might be able to find “a basis for community in these conditions.”13 In practice, as Butler knows all too well, the American response to the knowledge that the national border is permeable and vulnerable was characterized overwhelmingly by anxiety and rage. In this sense, the post-9/11 period did indeed witness a renewal of community, but one motivated by fear and anger rather than vulnerability and openness. What myths influence and define this latest version of American community? This is a question answered persuasively by Susan Faludi in her 2007 book, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, and that the book’s headnote comes from Slotkin suggests her awareness of the relevance of his work.14 According to Faludi, the national response to 9/11 was for Americans to cocoon themselves within a dream world made up of past imaginings of an inviolable America, a dream world above all characterized by the return of the language of the frontier and the myth of the Wild West: “From deep within that dream world, our commander in chief issued remarks like ‘We’ll smoke him out’ and ‘Wanted: dead or alive’ . . . and our pundits proclaimed our nation’s ability to vanquish ‘barbarians’ in a faraway land they dubbed ‘Indian Country.’”15 Faludi’s language echoes in an uncanny way Slotkin’s contention that at the heart of the “regeneration of violence” concept “is the symbol of the ‘savage war,’ which was both a mythic trope and an operative category of military doctrine. The premise of ‘savage war’ is that ineluctable political and social differences—rooted in some combination of ‘blood’ and culture—make coexistence between primitive natives and civilized Europeans impossible on any basis other than that of subjugation.”16 As the essays by Maryam Khalid and Katarina Gregersdotter in this collection demonstrate, careful attention to the precise lineaments of the dream world we have been inhabiting since September 2001 not only demonstrates the continued salience of the work of Richard Slotkin but also, more important, suggests both the ethical imperative informing and the future direction of work on American violence.

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In closing, let me emphasize a point that this collection both demonstrates and asserts forcefully—that future work on American violence should be accompanied by a disciplined attention to and engagement with the popular. In far too many instances, analysts of violence have been unwilling to engage with popular culture other than to criticize or dismiss it. Once again, there are, of course, exceptions to this rule. A great deal of work has been devoted to a discussion of the films of Alfred Hitchcock, a director obviously obsessed with the role of violence in American life. With this said, however, a relatively small percentage of this work has taken seriously the possibility that Hitchcock’s work constitutes a sustained examination of the relation between violence and Americanness. And yet how can one avoid social readings of Hitchcock’s treatment of violence, especially when we consider the concluding scene of Hitchcock’s own personal favorite among his films, 1943’s Shadow of A Doubt? In this scene, we see the town of Santa Rosa honoring the life of Uncle Charlie, who we know to be a serial killer of rich widows but who the town thinks of as a fine, upstanding citizen. What is fascinating about the closing scene of Shadow of a Doubt is that it features an exchange between two characters that contains a radically inadequate explanation of what was wrong with Uncle Charlie. Thus I’d like to think of this scene as a challenge to all of us to develop better explanations of not only popular culture itself, but also the popularity of violent popular culture, and to do so not only for products that can easily be rehabilitated as high culture, such as Hitchcock’s oeuvre, but also for products that one cannot reclaim because they insist on remaining in the gutter, such as the homicidal revenge fantasies of Mickey Spillane, hated by both critics and the other writers of hard-boiled fiction discussed in Rachel Franks’s essay but so popular that at one time seven of the top fifteen best-selling books ever published had been written by Spillane. What this means is that we should not be afraid to get our hands dirty and should be willing to engage with popular culture at the level of the video game entitled “Super Columbine Massacre” or with murderabilia websites such as “Murderauction” and “Supernaught.” The costs of neglecting such cultural products could be high. In overlooking the popular, we risk ceding this ground to the right’s language of moral condemnation. In doing so, we lose the opportunity to, among other things, point out the difference in degree rather than kind between the violent video games the right loves to hate and one of the most popular video games on the planet, “America’s Army,” invented and developed by none other than the U.S. Army. The right clearly realizes that popular culture is, among other things, a terrain upon which political meanings are won or lost. In our continuing efforts to rescue discussions of American violence from banality, we should do no less.

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Notes  1. Davis, vii–viii.  2. Žižek, 1.   3.  Alvarez and Bachman, 6.   4.  Waldrep and Bellesiles, 3.   5.  According to Žižek, the highly visible, or “subjective,” forms of violence are seen as a “perturbation of the ‘normal,’ peaceful state of things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to this ‘normal’ state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent” (2).   6.  Armstrong and Tennenhouse, 2. Some critics have responded to the problems raised by the relation between violence and language by creating new terms reflecting this relation more accurately and vividly. Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero, for example, has claimed that as “violence spreads and assumes unheard-of forms, it becomes difficult to name in contemporary language” (2). With this difficulty in mind, Cavarero suggests the introduction of the neologism “horrorism.” This new term, Cavarero argues, both emphasizes “the peculiarly repugnant character of so many scenes of contemporary violence,” while also helping “us see that a certain model of horror is indispensable for understanding our present” (29).  7. Seltzer, 1.  8. Lawrence, 72–73.  9. Ibid., 60. 10.  Slotkin, 10. 11.  Ibid., 11–12, emphasis in original. 12.  Ibid., 652, emphasis in original. 13.  Butler, 19. 14.  The headnote, taken from Regeneration through Violence, reads as follows: “A people unaware of its myths is likely to continue living by them, though the world around that people may change and demand changes in their psychology, their world view, their ethics, and their institutions.” 15. Faludi, 5–6. 16. Slotkin, 12.

Bibliography Alvarez, Alex, and Ronet Bachman. Violence: The Enduring Problem. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008. Armstrong, Nancy, and Leonard Tennenhouse. “Introduction: Representing Violence, or, ‘How the West was won.’” In The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, 1–26. London, UK/New York: Routledge, 1989. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London, UK/ New York: Verso, 2004.

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Castelli, Elizabeth A., and Janet R. Jakobsen, eds. Interventions: Activists and Academics Respond to Violence. Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Cavarero, Adriana. Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Davis, David Brion. Homicide in American Fiction, 1798–1860. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1957. Faludi, Susan. The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America. New York: Picador, 2007. Hicks, Bill. “Go Back to Bed, America.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR3Kw ODDzeY. Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1951/1923. Ledeen, Michael. “Rediscovering American Character.” www.nationalreview.com/ article/225635/rediscovering-american-character-michael-ledeen. Panitch, Leo, and Colin Leys, eds. Violence Today: Actually-Existing Barbarism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Purloined Letter” (1844). The Murders in the Rue Morgue: The Dupin Tales. Edited and with an introduction by Matthew Pearl, 83–100. New York: The Modern Library, 2006. Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. New York: Routledge, 1998. Slotkin, Richard. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization 1800–1890. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994/1985. Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Harper Perennial, 1992. Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1973. Waldrep, Christopher, and Michael Bellesiles, eds. Documenting American Violence: A Sourcebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Žižek, Slavoj. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London, UK: Profile Books, 2008.

CHAPTER ONE

Traversing the Boundaries of Moral Deviance: New England Execution Sermons, 1674–1825 Daniel Belczak

One sayes [sic] well, That Sermons Preached, are like Showers of Rain, that Water for the Instant; But Sermons Printed, are like Snow that lies longer on the Earth. God grant that the Truths falling from Heaven, in this Form, this Winter upon our Neighbours, may Soak into their Hearts, with a Sensible and a Durable Efficacy.1 Cotton Mather, Pillars of Salt, 1699

On April 2, 1674, seventeen-year-old Benjamin Goad stood on the Boston gallows waiting to be launched into eternity. Goad’s execution was in many ways emblematic of hundreds of others during the colonial and early national periods in New England. After committing his crime, Goad was tried, sentenced, and executed at a pace that compared to modern day executions could only be described as occurring at breakneck speed. His execution was also noteworthy for two reasons. First, Goad was the last of only a handful of men to be executed for bestiality in New England. As Goad stood on the gallows awaiting his fate, he and the gathered crowd watched as the mare with which he had committed his unnatural act was killed by the executioner. Second, Samuel Danforth delivered New England’s first published execution sermon in response to Goad’s

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criminal act and pending execution. Danforth’s sermon, The Cry of Sodom Enquired Into, used the story of the destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah as the Biblical text upon which to address the audience and the condemned prisoner. But just as Goad’s crime was anomalous, so, too, was Danforth’s sermon. Danforth spoke little of salvation, for either Goad or for his congregation, and instead focused on the wickedness and uncleanness that he saw pervading New England. Society was becoming polluted, and only through the amputation of this gangrenous member could God’s wrath be avoided.2 Less than a year after Benjamin Goad’s execution, two more men waited for their moment of execution on the Boston gallows, Robert Driver and Nicholas Feavour. After a reprimand for being slothful by their master and a release from his service, these two men killed their now former master as he sat in his parlor. For this execution, Increase Mather preached a sermon, The Wicked Mans Portion. Similar to Danforth’s earlier sermon, Mather also focused on avoiding lesser sins such as idleness, disobedience to parents, and drunkenness, as well as the importance of cutting off corrupted members of the community in order to avoid further social pollution. But unlike Danforth, Mather dedicated a significant portion of his sermon to the very real possibility of avoiding a second death. The first death of Driver and Feavour was already sealed. In execution, their bodies would die. Their souls, however, could still find life and ultimate salvation through true repentance. Although addressed specifically to the malefactors soon facing their own mortality, the message was clear for the community as well: Death will eventually claim all bodies, but the soul can still be saved.3 With some variation, this pattern of execution preaching would be followed by scores of ministers over the next 150 years. After a preface addressed to the readers, the sermon began with a Biblical passage and theological explanation. The doctrinal basis of the sermon was then given and explored with several propositions or questions. This doctrine was then applied as a warning to the audience as part of a call for repentance from the community. Next, the minister turned his attention to the condemned prisoner awaiting execution, urging true repentance before death, lest he or she face final damnation. Finally, the prisoner was often given a chance to make a dying address to the audience, which was either included as part of the sermon or sold as a separate broadside. By focusing on the offenses of men and women who were frequently community outsiders or marginal figures, the moral boundaries of the community were drawn. Often after a life of transgression, these outsiders finally faced their earthly fate. Yet still their ultimate salvation was

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possible. Thus, for community members, avoiding a similar path, given their religious education and social standing, should be achievable. All could avoid a second death. The difficulty in finding true repentance for these reprobates awaiting execution, however, would be far greater. Their lives of crime had hardened their hearts and turned them away from Jesus Christ. All sinners, therefore, must embrace a life of righteousness and Christ’s saving grace. This message was continued in execution preaching, but to retain their place of prominence in the execution ritual and deter their audience from a life of sin, ministers increasingly incorporated pluralistic theologies and secularized rhetoric into their sermons during the eighteenth century. This adaptation of sermons to their intended audience also demonstrates the largely consensus nature of these publications, being shaped by both minister and audience, and their important role in the production, distribution, and consumption of popular culture.4 Although the longstanding preaching of execution sermons lends credence to the notion that these documents were important forms of popular culture, this fact alone only touches on the production of these sermons. To more fully assess the popular nature of execution sermons, the distribution and consumption of this form of crime literature must also be examined. Fundamentally, there must be a literate populace able to read these sermons. Colonial and early national New England provided such a population. Upon the publication of the first execution sermons, the male literacy rate approached 70 percent, and by the close of the eighteenth century, near universal male literacy had been achieved.5 Female literacy may have reached similar near universal levels by the end of the eighteenth century as well.6 Rising literacy may have been aided by the increasing availability of texts designed for children and the growing appeal of spelling books for instruction. Additionally, around the mid-eighteenth century, the doctrine of original sin came under sustained attack. This theological debate may seem unrelated to literacy, but the view of children as trainable rather than innately sinful may have also inspired further instruction to children in order to set them on the path toward righteousness.7 With a highly literate populace, therefore, the sermons had a potential market, but were the men and women of New England willing to spend their hard-earned wages on these execution sermons? Exact sales figures cannot be determined with any level of certainty, but evidence from ministers, printers, and the sermons themselves lend credibility to the notion that these sermons were truly a form of popular culture.8 Cotton Mather, son of the aforementioned Increase Mather, was the most prolific preacher of execution sermons, delivering at least ten such sermons between 1687

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and 1726. Mather also wrote in his diary of the large crowds and ready audience for execution sermons. In 1693, Mather preached a sermon for two women, Elizabeth Emerson and Negress Grace, under sentences of death for infanticide. Mather noted in his diary that the crowd gathered to hear his sermon was “one of the greatest Assemblies, ever known in these parts of the World.” He went on to write that “the Sermon was immediately printed; with another, which I had had formerly uttered on the like Occasion; (entitled, Warnings from the Dead.) and it was greedily bought up; I hope, to the Attainment of the Ends, which I had so long desired. T’was afterwards reprinted at London.”9 Five years later Mather delivered another sermon, this time for the execution of Sarah Threeneedles for infanticide, where again “the greatest Assembly, ever in this Countrey [sic] preach’d unto, was now come together; It may bee [sic] four or five thousand Souls.”10 Even allowing for a moderate level of exaggeration, at least for a famous minister such as Cotton Mather, there was no shortage of New Englanders willing to attend the preaching of and subsequently purchase a copy of an execution sermon. The willingness of printers such as Bartholomew Green, John Allen, Timothy Fleet, and Samuel Kneeland to publish multiple execution sermons also suggests a ready customer base for these publications. The numerous editions of many sermons further indicate strong sales as well. Although multiple editions seem to have become more common in the second half of the eighteenth century, early sermons were not exempt from prolific publishing. The execution of James Morgan in 1686 was especially fruitful for execution sermons. Three sermons were preached for the occasion, one each by Increase Mather, Cotton Mather, and Joshua Moody, and all went into a second edition after the first was rapidly bought up.11 Nearly a century later, in 1772, Mohegan minister Samson Occom preached a sermon for the execution of Moses Paul, also a Native American, which would become the most reprinted execution sermon. A Sermon, Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian went through nineteen editions and was advertised in New England newspapers for more than a year after the initial publication in November 1772.12 Occom’s sermon, however, was not unique in appearing in newspaper advertising. Most sermons were featured in at least one newspaper advertisement and many were advertised multiple times or in multiple newspapers. If the thirteen sermons delivered before 1704 (the year that John Campbell established the first colonial newspaper, the Boston News-Letter) are discounted, the percentage of advertised sermons rises to nearly two-thirds.13 Newspaper advertising again contributes to the notion that these sermons were directed toward a popular audience. The

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advertisements often included a layout similar to that of the title page of the sermon, prominently presenting the name of the offender, the crime committed, and the name of the victim. Additionally, the advertisement almost always provided the location and name of the seller of the sermon, who often also published the newspaper being read. For example, Thomas and Samuel Fleet published the first edition, and several of the later editions, of Occom’s sermon for Moses Paul. The Fleets also printed the Connecticut Journal, the newspaper featuring much of the early advertising for this sermon.14 Even with a literate public, willing printers, and considerable advertising, however, the price of sermons needed to be low if they were to reach a popular audience. Although the sale price was seldom included in the newspaper advertisements, it was given frequently enough to allow for the sermons to be assigned a generalized price. The median sale price of an execution sermon was around nine pence. Although colonial currency values and wage rates fluctuated greatly over the course of the eighteenth century, the period from 1785 to 1793 provides a useful sample range. During this period four sermons were assigned a price in their advertisements, three at nine pence and one at eight pence. Wages during this period for an average male laborer, blacksmith, or carpenter in Massachusetts were between three schillings (thirty-six pence) and five schillings (sixty pence) a day.15 This wage would place the cost of an execution sermon at between a quarter and about a seventh of a daily wage. While this is not an insignificant cost for an average worker, it also would not have been a hindrance to the purchase of such a sermon. In fact, in at least one instance, an execution sermon was the least expensive option for an individual wanting to purchase a religiously themed publication. An advertisement for Timothy Hilliard’s sermon for the execution of Richard Barrick, John Sullivan, and Alexander White listed its sale price at nine pence. On the same page of the Essex Journal, a sermon by Rev. John Murray entitled The Origin of Evil was priced at two schillings (twenty-four pence) or four schillings when printed on fine paper (forty-eight pence). A discourse delivered by Samuel Spring on Christian knowledge would cost the interested buyer only one schilling (twelve pence), but this price was still higher than for Hilliard’s execution sermon.16 Whether an execution sermon would have always been the least expensive option cannot be definitively determined, but what is clear is that cost would not have prohibited most New Englanders from purchasing execution sermons. Ministers produced, printers distributed, and New Englanders consumed execution sermons for 150 years. But what exactly were these sermons that were being produced, distributed, and consumed? Although sermons

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ranging from Samuel Danforth’s The Cry of Sodom Enquired Into (1674) to Jonathan Going’s A Discourse, Delivered at Worcester, Dec. 11, 1825, The Sabbath after the Execution of Horace Carter (1825) are all placed in the same crime literature genre, these publications underwent numerous changes over this period. Beginning as thoroughly religious expressions of the dominant Puritanism of seventeenth-century New England, these sermons focused on preserving the morality of the community being addressed. By the early decades of the eighteenth century, the rhetoric of execution sermons began to incorporate aspects of both growing religious pluralism and secular ideas of the Enlightenment in explaining the root causes and justifying the punishment of crime. Finally, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most, but not all, sermons attempted to frame the execution ritual as serving the common good of society.17 In traversing the moral boundaries of society, ministers consistently used the reprobates awaiting their sentences of death as an example for their audience. After a life of sin, these individuals were unlikely to be saved. Their hearts had become hardened, and their ability for genuine repentance and thus salvation was unlikely. Theologically, this position was a difficult one to square with the doctrine of predestination. If God had already predetermined those who would be saved and those who would be damned, would not the actions of the individual be immaterial and unable to change the will of God? Not only would such a view be impractical, as it would absolve anyone from repercussions for their actions. However, the Puritans in New England allowed for both predestination and free will. They argued that through God’s covenants with man, His intentions could be rationalized, and those who unreasonably and obstinately refused to accept His covenant could not be one of the elect.18 In using the condemned prisoner as an example, the ideal narrative began with a reprobate who realized that he or she had lived a wicked and sinful life, followed by full and genuine repentance, and finally a speech addressed to the crowd stating that even the worst sinner could still embrace the saving power of Christ. Esther Rodgers provided such an example. At age 13, Rodgers moved from Kittery, Maine to Newbury, Massachusetts to live in the house of Joseph Woodbridge as a servant. The household also included black slaves who mixed freely with the white servants. Around age 17, Rodgers began a romantic relationship with one of the slaves and gave birth to a child whom she concealed and smothered to death. This crime went undetected, but three years later Rodgers again gave birth to a child fathered by one of the slaves of the household. This second child was found, and Rodgers was convicted of infanticide and hanged on July 31, 1701.19

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John Rogers, pastor of the church in Ipswich, delivered three sermons in response to Rodgers’s crime and sentence of death. The sermons were published together, along with Rodgers’s last speech as she stood on the gallows, as Death, The Certain Wages of Sin to the Impenitent: Life, The Sure Reward of Grace to the Penitent. In the preface to the sermons, William Hubbard explained that the purpose of publishing these sermons was not simply to provide the text for those fortunate enough to hear the sermons delivered in person, but for all others who “may be stirred up to praise the Lord for his wonderful goodness, in making such an heinous Sinner such an Instance of Converting Grace and Mercy.”20 The stain of original sin spared no one. All are sinners. Esther Rodgers was only separated from those watching her execution, man or woman, by the grave nature of her sin, not in being a sinner. Her genuine and full repentance thus stood as a perfect example of how even those guilty of a crime such as murder could still genuinely repent. After Rodgers’s last dying declaration, John Rogers recounted the reaction of the crowd, estimated at between four and five thousand, gathered to witness the execution: Rodgers “melted the hearts of all that were within feeling or hearing, into Tears of affection, with greatest wonder and admiration. Her undaunted Courage and unshaken Confidence she modestly enough expressed, yet steadfastly held to the end.”21 But not all prisoners were as interested in providing as good of an example as Esther Rodgers. Three years earlier, both Sarah Smith and Sarah Threeneedles were also convicted of infanticide. Sarah Smith’s husband had been taken into captivity and likely killed, but no annulment of marriage was procured, and thus her romantic relationship with Joseph Colson was deemed adultery and her child of this relationship a bastard. Sarah Threeneedles, a decade Sarah Smith’s junior, had in her young life garnered a reputation for promiscuity. Before leaving her newborn boy to die from exposure, Threeneedles had already given birth to another child out of wedlock and faced punishment by her family for the shame she brought upon them.22 Although the details of these latter two cases are not identical to that of Esther Rodgers, nothing would suggest that these two women would refuse to fulfill their proscribed role as the penitent thief upon the cross. John Williams, pastor of the church at Deerfield, delivered a sermon for Sarah Smith on the day of her execution. Given the sexual nature of Smith’s transgressions, Williams focused on warning his audience away from being unclean (an oft-used term in early sermons to refer to sins such as fornication, adultery, and sodomy).23 Simply reading the sermon would provide no indication that Smith was unrepentant. The sermon did not provide a dying declaration by Smith, which would indicate her impenitence, but early

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sermons did not always include this type of supplementary attachment. Instead, Cotton Mather described Smith’s conduct in his publication, Pillars of Salt, a sermon for Sarah Threeneedles and a compendium of crime history in Massachusetts.24 Mather complimented Reverend Williams for his attempts at directing Smith toward repentance as she sat in prison awaiting her impending execution, but his efforts nonetheless failed. Smith repeatedly lied to Williams during his counsel and “she slept both at the Prayer and the Sermon; in the publick [sic] Assembly on the day of her Execution; and seemed, the most unconcern’d of any in the Assembly.”25 In addition to the sermon delivered by Cotton Mather, Sarah Threeneedles also received spiritual guidance from Increase Mather, president of Harvard College, and Samuel Willard, a minister and teacher in Boston. The titles of their sermons implied a lack of repentance from Threeneedles: The Folly of Sinning and Impenitent Sinners Warned. Increase Mather’s sermon provided little detail about Threeneedles’s continuing transgressions after her conviction for infanticide, and instead focused on the folly of the sinner who remains impenitent. Impenitence could only lead to damnation. But Mather held out hope: “If you cannot go to him [Jesus Christ] with a penitent heart, go to him for one . . . If that precious blood be sprinkled on you, then not withstanding your sins have been as Scarlet and red like Crimson they shall be as white as Snow.”26 Samuel Willard was not so optimistic, having abandoned all hope. During her incarceration, Threeneedles engaged in sexual relations with a fellow prisoner. Willard saw this action, the continuation of “abominable Whoredom,” as a clear indication that Threeneedles had no desire to turn away from sin and embrace the saving grace of Christ. But Willard was not content to simply point out the folly of sinning as Increase Mather had done. Mather had struggled to use Threeneedles as a useful example for his audience. He hoped she would repent and thus show that even the worst sinner could be saved through genuine reformation, but ultimately this message was limited by Threeneedles’s continued sexual transgressions. She seemed unwilling to repent. Samuel Willard thus used a different tactic than Mather. Although Sarah Threeneedles would not provide a narrative of the penitent thief upon the cross, as Esther Rodgers would only three years later, she did provide an example of the fate awaiting those who refused to repent. In closing his sermon, Willard gave his audience one of the clearest explanations of the repercussions for rejecting the saving power of Christ: Let all that hear me this day take notice and tremble, and learn by this amazing instance, what sin persisted in, under calls, and counsels, & warnings will expose them to, & how righteous a thing it is with God, to leave them

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up to a feared conscience, Who would not be instructed . . . know it, that if you appear before your Judge under the guilt of these Crimson and Scarlet Sins, a few days more will fix you in Eternal Miseries, and because you have despised mercy in the day of it, you shall have Judgment without mercy.27

In fulfilling their role in the execution ritual, a true penitent such as Esther Rodgers provided the audience a living, and soon to be dead, example that even the worst crimson and scarlet sinner could still find salvation. But the impenitent sinner, man or woman, provided a useful example as well. Their unwillingness to accept God’s covenant and the saving power of Christ sentenced them not just to a first death—that of the physical body—but a second death, damnation in hell. This pattern of praising the penitence and decrying the impenitence of malefactors as they stood on the gallows would be followed for more than a century.28 Although attempts at communal deterrence never ceased in execution preaching, beginning in the early decades of the eighteenth century, rising religious pluralism spurred a new focus on the salvation of the individual. In particular, attacks on the doctrine of original sin fundamentally altered the relationship between human action and human salvation. Natural depravity necessitated divine intervention in order to achieve salvation. But without the stain of original sin, the difficulty in the transformation from sinner to saint was significantly eased. Original sin maintained its defenders, most notably Jonathan Edwards, but even though this theological debate remained unsettled throughout the eighteenth century, the introduction of dissenting opinions and religious pluralism directed ministers to broaden the rhetoric of their sermons and focus on both communal deterrence and the very real possibility of salvation for the penitent malefactor.29 Religious pluralism, including increasing numbers of ministers challenging traditional Puritan rhetoric, manifested most clearly by the 1730s, but even in the first decades of the eighteenth century, hints of dissent in execution sermons began to appear. Benjamin Colman, pastor of the Brattle Street Church in Boston, preached three execution sermons during the 1710s and 1720s. Colman continued to preach for repentance from sin. But although earlier ministers, such as Increase Mather and John Rogers, called for penitence because it was the only path to potential salvation, Colman called for penitence because it pleased God. In his sermon, The Divine Compassions Declar’d and Magnified, Colman preached to Margaret Callogharne that God has “no pleasure in the Fall of Angels, nor of Man; He made them both Happy; He has pleasure in the Angels that stand, and in the Sinners whom His Grace recovers. He chose not their Sin and Ruin,

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tho’ He permitted their own profane Choice; and for it He curs’d them in His Wrath and sore Displeasure.”30 Although subtle, Colman shifted the purpose of repentance from simply avoiding damnation to pleasing God while allowing for the possibility, if not probability, of salvation. Colman may not have gone as far as universal salvation in his preaching, but he made another subtle change in his rhetoric. Seventeenth-century sermons, most notably Samuel Danforth’s Cry of Sodom Enquired Into, used rhetoric describing the sinner as a disease that must be amputated in order to prevent the spread of infection to the rest of the community. Colman continued the metaphor of disease and amputation, but instead of the sinner being gangrenous, it was the sin that was the disease. After explaining to his audience the necessity of executing Margaret Callogharne for her crime of infanticide, and that neither God nor civil authorities took pleasure in her sentence of death, Colman returned to repentance. Only through repentance could salvation be attained, but “if your Wounds be not Open’d they will never be Cleans’d, and if they be not cleans’d they can never heal, but will Gangreen and Rot.”31 Through repentance wounds could be healed, and although the malefactor must be put to death, ultimate salvation may still be attained. Eighteenth-century sermons, influenced by growing religious pluralism, therefore emphasized God’s benevolence over His vengeance and expanded the possibility of salvation for penitent reprobates. Religious pluralism, however, also worried some ministers. On May 8, 1733, Rebeckah Chamblitt, a 27-year-old servant in Boston, concealed the birth of her child and left it to die. She was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death by September of the same year.32 On the Sunday before her scheduled execution, Thomas Foxcroft, pastor of the Old Church in Boston, preached a sermon, Lessons of Caution to Young Sinners. As the title of his sermon would suggest, Foxcroft spent much of his exhortation on the danger of dying in youth after a life of sin. But Foxcroft also cautioned his audience from being caught in the winds of new doctrines: “Be not Children, tossed to and fro, and carry’d about with every Wind of Doctrine, by the flight of Men, and cunning Strategems, whereby they lie in wait to deceive. . . . Beware of grieving the Holy Spirit by practically denying the Faith, lest He be provoked to give you up to a Spirit of Error.”33 The religious landscape of New England had undergone significant change, even since 1674 and the first published execution sermon. Foxcroft warned that neither following a path of errors, erroneous religious doctrines, nor ignorance, a lack of religious education, was an excuse that could prevent damnation.34 Religious pluralism, therefore, may have either saved souls or guided them on a path to hell, but it also led to a secularization of execution

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sermons. In the decades before the American Revolution, secular ideas were introduced to execution preaching in response to changing religious doctrine. Without natural depravity, what could be the cause of malefactors’ transgressions? Increasingly over the eighteenth century, drunkenness, idleness, and poor education, began to take precedence in explicating the root causes of a life of sin. But even in the seventeenth century, natural depravity had never served as a fully adequate explanation. If all were depraved, why did some individuals live a life of righteousness while others fell into a life of sin? Secularization, however, was not confined to explanations of crime; it also manifested in justifying the punishment of offenders through public execution. During the seventeenth century, capital statutes in New England were primarily derived from the Bible. For the covenanted society of New England, the Bible was the ultimate source of justification. By the eighteenth century, property offenses, such as burglary, robbery, and piracy had also been added to the capital statutes of New England. These secular crimes found no Biblical support. As a result, the frequency of sermons referencing civil authorities and their necessity in punishing these crimes with death increased significantly, especially beginning in cases of piracy and burglary during the 1720s and 1730s.35 To return briefly to Thomas Foxcroft’s sermon. As part of the preface, Foxcroft included a short description of Rebeckah Chamblitt’s crime and execution. Additionally, he provided the text of the 1624 English statute: “An Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murdering of Bastard Children.”36 This act declared that whether stillborn or killed by its mother’s hands, the concealment of the death of a bastard child was a capital crime. The inclusion of this act, however, appears unnecessary. Beginning with the first law codes of Massachusetts, passed in the 1640s, murder was recognized as a capital crime because it was Biblically sanctioned.37 Although often studied as a separate category of gendered crime, infanticide is most basically a type of murder. It would thus seem redundant to include an act passed in England more than a century earlier. It may in fact be unnecessary, but the addition of this law demonstrates the growing incorporation of secular elements into execution preaching. Not only were magistrates empowered by God to execute criminals who had debased divine law, but they were also so empowered by civil authorities for violations of secular statutes. Beware of profanity, irreligion, disobedience to parents, lying, anger, and uncleanness: These were some of the transgressions Foxcroft outlined in his sermon. Wedged within these common warnings, however, was the love of money. Foxcroft preached, “Beware of Covetousness, and a worldly Mind, The Love of Money is the Root of all Evil: ’tis an evil Disease, that has slain its Thousands. They that will be rich, fall into Temptation

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and a Snare, and into many foolish and hurtful Lusts, which often end in Destruction.”38 If Foxcroft had delivered his sermon for a malefactor guilty of a crime such as robbery or piracy, two crimes specifically mentioned in this section on the evils of money, this exhortation would appear relatively unremarkable. He would simply be addressing the secular nature of the crime committed and the root cause of its undertaking. But Rebeckah Chamblitt’s crime was infanticide. Even accounting for the bombastic language of Foxcroft’s sermon, money as the root of all evil seems quite a shift from earlier sermons. This rhetoric, however, does reflect the hybridization of secular and religious understandings of crime and justifications of punishment during the mid-eighteenth century.39 Separated by nearly seventy years, Increase Mather and Charles Chauncy delivered two similar, yet remarkably different execution sermons. In December 1685, James Morgan drunkenly murdered Joseph Johnson, a fellow customer in a drinking establishment owned by Constante Worcester.40 Increase Mather, along with his son Cotton and Joshua Moody, preached sermons to Morgan in the days leading up to his March 1686 execution. After opening with a reflection on a verse from the book of Numbers, Mather provided the doctrine upon which the sermon would be based: “That Murder is a Sin so great & heinous, as that whoever shall be found Guilty of it, must be put to death by the hand of publick [sic] Justice.”41 Mather went on to explain the difference between willful murder and what he called casual homicide or accidental manslaughter, only the former of which mandated death as a punishment. Killing in self-defense and during acts of war were also exempt from capital punishment. Furthermore, he defended the role of civil magistrates in holding the sword of God and striking down those who would violate his divine law, arguing that “Private Reveng [sic] is evil, but publick [sic] Revenge on those that violate the Laws of God, is good . . . For Murder is such a sin as does pollute the very Land where it is done; not only the person that has shed blood is polluted thereby, but the whole Land lies under Pollution until such time as Justice is done upon the Murderer.”42 Taking life is a right that only God, and the civil magistrates acting on His behalf, possess, and thus Morgan deserved death for his usurpation of this divine right. On April 6, 1754, William Wieer struck fellow dockworker William Chisholm in the head with a piece of firewood, mortally wounding him. Wieer was executed in November after a failed clemency plea to the governor, likely thanks to his attempted escape from his prison cell.43 Charles Chauncy, pastor of the First Church in Boston, delivered a sermon on the Thursday before Wieer’s execution. An opponent of the Great Awakening, Chauncy disparaged the revivalist rhetoric that mediated the relationship

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between God and the individual through fear. Instead, Chauncy focused his theology on moral actions leading toward salvation as well as incorporating ideas from Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke on the social contract and natural rights. All of these beliefs manifested in his sermon focused on, “The Scripture-Law against Murder explained and enforced.”44 Similar to Mather, Chauncy dismissed certain forms of killing including accidents, self-defense, and slaying of enemies during war, as permissible, but crucially he altered the purpose of the “publick Revenge” against the willful murderer. Whereas Mather had firmly placed capital punishment as a necessary amputation of a diseased social member for his or her transgression against divine law, Chauncy outlined a more secular theory on the role of the civil magistrate. Authority to punish with death was still ultimately derived from God, but capital punishment is “an act of publick [sic] Service, necessary for the well-being of Society; which could not subsist, if wicked and violent Men should be suffered, with Impunity, to invade the Rights of others, as their ungoverned Lusts might prompt them thereto.”45 According to Mather, the execution of James Morgan served the common good because God would not stand for leniency against a violator of His divine law. Thus God’s wrath could be brought down upon the whole community if this malefactor were not put to death. Chauncy, however, did not see the execution of William Wieer as serving the common good by simply placating an angry and vengeful God. Instead, Chauncy sought the punishment of murder, “for [murder] carries in it, in an high Degree, Uncharitableness, Injustice, and Impiety; each of which are in themselves great Breaches upon the Law of Nature and Religion.”46 This incorporation of secular logic intensified during and after the Revolutionary period and the religious rhetoric of execution sermons was successfully overtaken. The focus of these sermons became neither the moral foundation of the community nor the individual’s conversion upon the gallows, but instead upholding the legitimacy of governmental authority. No longer were sermons delivered to small, religiously homogenous communities as part of a sacred ritual. By the time of the Revolution, ministers influenced by new religious doctrines and Enlightenment philosophies adapted execution preaching into a secular genre often espousing the tenets of republicanism and the importance of respecting the laws of the new nation. Nathan Strong, New Light pastor of the First Church in Hartford, delivered such a sermon to “vast concourse of people” gathered to witness the execution of Moses Dunbar for his crime of high treason. Dunbar’s crime was not unique during the American Revolution, as many individuals were executed in New England for treason, espionage, and

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sedition, but he was the only offender to have been the subject of an execution sermon.47 Strong’s sermon, The Reasons and Design of Public Punishments, began not unlike dozens of earlier sermons, with a Biblical text. He chose a passage from the book of Timothy: “Them that sin rebuke before all, that others also may fear.”48 But unlike earlier sermons, which either found public executions necessary due to violations of the law of God or the law of God and man, Strong employed a different understanding of Dunbar’s criminal act. Strong began, “Our country, its privileges and laws are sacred—they guard our peace, our interest and lives—being enacted in a public manner, with the free consent of the people, they become ordinances of God; and the transgressor offends against Heaven and earth.”49 The republican influence of this statement could not have been lost on the audience. The laws of the United States, being enacted by the free consent of the governed, became sacred laws of God, and thus Dunbar violated not only the law of man, but also the law of God, through his treasonous acts. In the post-Revolution period, sermons again redefined the relationship between capital punishment and the common good. In October 1790, James Dana, pastor of the First Church in New Haven, delivered a sermon for the execution of Joseph Mountain. The son of two emancipated black slaves, Mountain went to sea as a teenager and lived in London for more than a decade. After returning to the United States in 1790, Mountain sexually propositioned two white girls while walking on the Boston Post Road. After their ardent refusal, he assaulted one of the girls, who was only 14 years old.50 Dana’s sermon, The Intent of Capital Punishment, stressed a combination of legal rigidity in the enforcement of capital laws and leniency in what crimes should be punished with death. Dana argued that the purpose of capital punishment was deterrence, and went on to criticize England’s law codes for its more than 160 capital crimes. “Shall crimes so different in their natures as murder and a trifling theft be subjected to the same penalty?” he asked.51 Juries would acquit the guilty or mitigate the offense in order to avoid sending an offender to the gallows for a relatively minor crime. According to Dana, such a system was unworkable. What was necessary was few capital crimes (murder, treason, and rape) and definitive punishment.52 Although Dana frequently departed from the patterns of earlier sermons in his examination of intent of capital punishment, he did not completely abandon the rhetoric of the past. Beginning with the first published execution sermon in 1674, amputation of a diseased member served as an important trope, and Dana chose to include this justification for capital punishment. Much like Strong, however, he placed amputation in terms of

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defense of secular society: “Should his conduct as a citizen be . . . vicious and dangerous, the . . . power in civil government must be exercised in sentencing him to death . . . as such [a] member must be amputated for the preservation of the body, so persons of such depravity must be cut off for the preservation of the state.”53 No longer was God’s wrath set to destroy society if sinful members were allowed to escape earthly punishment. Instead, the state would be undermined if its laws were not enforced with certainty and to the fullest extent possible. Thus it was not Mountain’s race that made him a threat to society, and thus deserving of death, but his violation of the sacred laws of the United States. But what if public executions and their accompanying sermons no longer served the common good? Although only two execution sermons openly challenged the use of public execution, Thomas Thatcher’s sermon delivered for the execution of Jason Fairbanks was emblematic of changes both in execution preaching and crime literature in general.54 Thatcher, pastor of the Third Parish in Dedham, delivered his sermon three days after the execution of Jason Fairbanks on September 10, 1801. But unlike many earlier sermons, Thatcher’s exhortation was only one of many popular publications able to be consumed by the public. Trial reports, criminal biographies, broadsides, expanded newspaper coverage, and sentimental fiction all competed with the sermons delivered in response to Fairbanks’s execution. Although the execution sermon as a genre would persist for more than two decades, there had been a definitive shift from the colonial era of information scarcity and elite control to the nineteenth century system of profound abundance and pluralism.55 Thatcher spent much of his sermon commenting on Fairbanks’s conduct and the proper message for the audience to take away from this infamous case, but he also reflected on the pernicious nature of public executions. Such spectacles “naturally harden the heart, and render it callous to those mild and delicate sensations which are the out guards of virtue.”56 Thatcher argued that that procession and execution ritual were unnecessarily severe on the condemned criminal, a savage instance of cannibalism for the family and friends in attendance, and a detriment to the morals of all others. The condemnation of the public execution thus represented a final shift in the metaphor of social pollution. Samuel Danforth saw the individual sinner as a gangrenous member that needed to be amputated to avoid the corruption of all others. Benjamin Colman instead saw the individual’s sin as a disease that threatened to infect society. Finally, Thatcher identified the public execution ritual as a source of pollution for the audience. Drawing a parallel from the recent French Revolution, Thatcher found that it

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was the frequent and “sanguinary exhibitions, [that] corrupted the hearts and polluted the senses” of those in attendance. The small communities and pious rituals of the late seventeenth century were gone. In their place was a crowd of an estimated 10,000 spectators cramming themselves into the city of Dedham (population 2,000) to witness a “senseless parade.”57 For more than 150 years, ministers, publishers, and audiences attempted to traverse the moral boundaries of an ever-changing society through the production, distribution, and consumption of execution sermons. Both the longstanding preaching of execution sermons and the persistent adaptation of rhetoric implies that these exhortations were not an example of ministers imposing their theological views upon their audience, but rather a reflection of the consensus nature of these documents. Although in reference to a different form of popular culture, Michel Foucault’s statement is apt: “[P]erhaps we should see this literature of crime, which proliferated around a few exemplary figures, neither as a spontaneous form of ‘popular expression,’ nor as a concerted programme of propaganda and moralization from above.”58 In order to maintain their influential status as part of the popular culture of early New England, ministers needed to adapt their execution sermons and incorporate the religious and secular changes ongoing in the long eighteenth century. For decades these adaptations were successful. Ministers drew large crowds to hear their orations, thousands of copies of published sermons were sold, and execution sermons held a virtual monopoly in crime literature. By 1825, however, other forms of popular culture, including expanding newspaper coverage and detailed trial reports, had overtaken the market. Jonathan Going, a Baptist minister in Worcester, delivered the final published sermon after the execution of Horace Carter. His concluding words effectively encapsulate the history of execution preaching: “[T]he story of Carter is deeply interesting to us all.—It is the history of a vicious life terminating in a disgraceful death. It stands as a beacon, with the admonitory inscription, Beware! It impressively teaches us that the way of the transgressor is hard. May we wisely foresee the evil, and hide ourselves. May we be excited to live soberly, righteously and godly, as the only means of obtaining self-approbation, and the favour of God.”59

Notes 1.  Cotton Mather, Pillars of Salt, 2. 2.  For a brief description of Benjamin Goad’s crime and execution, see Hearn, 47. On Puritan attitudes toward sexual offenses specifically in reference to Goad, see Canup, 123–134; Warner, 22–25; Godbeer, 263–271. 3. For the portion of Mather’s sermon on escaping a second death, see Increase Mather, The Wicked Mans Portion, 21–25. Although not noted by Hearn in his

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description of the crime committed by Driver and Feavour, Mather identified both men as foreign-born. For his marginal comment, see The Wicked Mans Portion, 21. For Hearn’s description of the case, see Hearn, 48. 4.  On the important role of deviant individuals in Puritan society in constructing community identity, see Erikson, 195–199. Puritan sermons and popular religious practice have received substantial scholarly attention; see Bercovitch, 3–31; Stout, 3–12; Toulouse, 46–74; Hall, 166–212; Neuman, 1–34. On execution sermons in particular, see Minnick, 77–89; Faber, 1–41, 217–256; Bosco, 156–176; Daniel A. Cohen, 83–116; Halttunen, 1–59; Seay, 3–16. 5.  Lockridge, 13–27. Lockridge studied signatures on wills to estimate literacy rates but posited that the rise in signatures was also accompanied by general increases in both reading and writing. See Lockridge, 16. 6.  Perlmann and Shirley, 63–66. Lockridge had placed the rate of female literacy much lower, around 50 percent by the end of the eighteenth century, see Lockridge, 38–39. Perlmann and Shirley, however, used other data not examined by Lockridge, including censuses and evidence from other New England counties, as well as studies subsequent to the publication of Lockridge’s study, to place the rate of female literacy at near universal by 1800. 7.  Monaghan, 3–5. 8.  In 1717, Cotton Mather preached two sermons for the execution of Jeremiah Phoenix for the murder of his wife. In his diary, Mather noted how almost 1,000 copies of the sermon, The Valley of Hinnom, had been sold in a week. See Mather, Diary of Cotton Mather, 1709–1724, 460–462. For a brief study of Cotton Mather’s execution sermons, see Lazenby, 50–56. 9. Mather, Diary of Cotton Mather, 1681–1708, 165. Mather, Warnings from the Dead, 1–76. Mather also frequently gave away free copies of his sermons to interested readers. See Cotton Mather, Diary of Cotton Mather, 1681–1708, 518. 10. Mather, Diary of Cotton Mather, 1681–1708, 279. 11.  Ibid., 122–123. The sermons delivered were Increase Mather, A Sermon, 1–36; Cotton Mather, The Call of the Gospel, 38–82; Moody, 84–124. The title page of Increase Mather’s sermon also indicated that the sermon would be sold at the book shop of John Brunning at the Corner of Prison Lane next to the Exchange. 12.  Minnick placed the number of editions of Occom’s sermon at nineteen. See Minnick, 80. Occom and his sermon published for the execution of Moses Paul have received considerable scholarly attention; see Elliott, 233–253; Chamberlain, “The Execution of Moses Paul,” 414–450; Chiles, 1398–1417; Slayer, 77–105; Leblanc, 26–52; Weyler, 114–144. 13.  On the establishment of the first successful newspaper in the colonies, see Clark, 347–366. For a study of the role of religion and early coverage of news, see Nord, 9–38. Newspapers were not the only avenue through which execution sermons could be advertised. For an advertisement of Increase Mather’s sermon, The Folly of Sinning, delivered for the execution of Sarah Threeneedles, see Cotton Mather, Pillars of Salt, 112. 14.  For two early advertisements of Occom’s sermon, see Connecticut Journal, October 30, 1772, 3; New London Gazette, November 6, 1772, 3. Although

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the Boston News-Letter began publication in 1704, the first execution sermon advertisement was not featured until 1713. The advertisement was for Benjamin Colman’s sermon delivered for the execution of David Wallis; Boston News-Letter Sept. 28, 1713, 2. 15.  Wright, 53–57. See also Stewart and Bowen, 51–56. 16.  Essex Journal, June 15, 1785, 3. The price disparity may have been in part due to the difference in length of each publication. Murray’s sermon The Origin of Evil Traced in a Sermon was 100 pages long. Samuel Spring’s discourse Christian Knowledge, and Christian Confidence Inseparable was forty-six pages long. Hilliard’s sermon Paradise Promised, By a Dying Saviour, to the Penitent Thief on the Cross was thirty-two pages long, including appended back matter. 17. Cohen, Pillars of Salt, 41–114; Halttunen, 7–32; Seay, 3–16. 18.  Miller, 402–403. On the importance of covenant theology in seventeenthcentury Puritan New England, see Witte Jr., 277–319. 19.  Hearn, 107. On the Esther Rodgers case and the sermons delivered by John Rogers, see Henigman, 17–24. 20. Rogers, 2. In the preface, Hubbard went on to compare Rodgers to a Christian martyr in her embrace of prison as a paradise in which she was able to once again find the saving grace of Christ (Rogers, 3). 21.  Ibid., 153. 22.  Hearn, 105–106. 23.  Williams, 9–64. 24. Cohen, Pillars of Salt, 54–57. 25.  Cotton Mather, Pillars of Salt, 104–105. 26.  Increase Mather, The Folly of Sinning, 48. 27.  Willard, 56. On Sarah Threeneedles’s continued sexual transgressions while in prison and her last statements, see Cotton Mather, Pillars of Salt, 105–111. In an examination of execution sermons for women convicted of infanticide, Henigman accurately found the ministers’ rhetoric remarkably gender-neutral. See Henigman, 24. For an analysis of the role of women’s bodies in execution preaching, see Schorb, “Uncleanliness Is Next to Godliness,” 72–92; Schorb, “Hard-Hearted Women,” 290–311. On the use of the language of uncleanness, especially in cases of infanticide, see Kathleen M. Brown, 76–94. In a study of women and race in early American narratives, Sharon M. Harris found that infanticide prosecutions were shaped not only by gender, but also race, with African women receiving harsher treatment than white or Native American women. Some, but not all, of the cases Harris examined featured execution sermons. Given that there was only one African and one Native American woman subject to an execution sermon for the crime of infanticide, it is difficult to sustain her comparative argument on these grounds alone. See Harris, 25–68. 28. Other execution sermons focused on women convicted of infanticide include Cotton Mather, Warnings from the Dead (Elizabeth Emerson and Negress Grace); Cotton Mather, A Sorrowful Spectacle (Margaret Callogharne); Colman, The Divine Compassions Declar’d and Magnified (Margaret Callogharne); Foxcroft, Lessons

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of Caution to Young Sinners (Rebeckah Chamblitt); Adams, A Sermon Preached on the Occasion of the Execution of Katherine Garrett (Katherine Garrett); Browne, Religious Education of Children Recommended (Penelope Kenny); Shurtleff, The Faith and Prayer of a Dying Malefactor (Penelope Kenny, Sarah Simpson); Bascom, A Sermon, Preached at the Execution of Abiel Converse (Abiel Converse). 29.  Chamberlain, “The Theology of Cruelty,” 349–356; Gaustad, 693–695; Scott, 1–17. Although not the direct focus here, on the effects of the Great Awakening and whether such a concept is even a useful construct, see Butler, 98–128; Lambert, 3–16; Kidd, xiii–54, 83–188. On the religious revival of the eighteenth century in a comparative context, see Crawford, 361–397. 30. Colman, The Divine Compassions Declar’d and Magnified, 22–23. Colman’s sermon, along with that of Cotton Mather for the execution of Margaret Callogharne, was advertised in Boston News-Letter, July 11, 1715, 2. For changes Colman brought forth as pastor of the Brattle Street Church, including abandoning tests for saving grace and opening communion to all, see Stout, 131; Holifield, 80–81; Turell, 50–112. 31. Colman, The Divine Compassions Declar’d and Magnified, 46. For Colman’s other two sermons, see Colman, The Hainous Nature of the Sin of Murder, 3–34; Colman, It is a fearful thing to fall into the Hands of the Living God, 1–39. For two advertisements of It is a fearful thing to fall into the Hands of the Living God see, Boston News-Letter, July 14, 1726, 2; Boston News-Letter, July 21, 1726, 2. Cotton Mather also preached a sermon for each of the executions attended by Colman, see Mather, The Sad Effects of Sin, 1–64; Mather, A Sorrowful Spectacle, 3–92; Mather, The Vial Poured out upon the Sea, 1–51. For two advertisements of The Vial Poured out upon the Sea, see Boston News-Letter, July 28, 1726, 2; Boston News-Letter, August 4, 1726, 2. 32.  Hearn, 124–125. 33.  Foxcroft, 30–31. Corrigan described Foxcroft, along with Benjamin Colman, as liberal clergymen, opposed to Cotton Mather and his followers. One of the important messages of Foxcroft’s preaching was portraying God as compassionate and as a father to humanity. See Corrigan, “Catholick Congregational Clergy and Public Piety,” 210–222. For two advertisements of Foxcroft’s sermon, see New England Weekly Journal, October 29, 1733, 2; New England Weekly Journal, November 5, 1733, 2. 34.  Religious pluralism in execution sermons was stymied in the early decades of the eighteenth century largely by Cotton Mather’s monopoly on execution preaching for nearly a decade. From 1715, the year of Colman’s sermon for Margaret Callogharne, until 1726, when Colman again delivered a sermon, Cotton Mather, an opponent to the emerging liberal clergymen, delivered five execution sermons: two in 1717 for the execution of Jeremiah Phoenix (Mather, The Valley of Hinnom; Mather, Febrifugium: An Essay for the Cure of Ungoverned Anger), one in 1721 for the execution of Joseph Hanno (Mather, Tremenda: The Dreadful Sound with which the Wicked are to be Thunderstruck), one in 1724 for the execution of John Archer and William White (Mather, The Converted Sinner), and one in 1726 for the execution of Samuel Cole, William Fly, and Henry Greenville (Mather, The Vial Poured Out Upon the Sea).

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35. Cohen, Pillars of Salt, 83–114; Seay, 106–136. Execution sermons for men convicted of piracy include Cotton Mather, Faithful Warnings to prevent Fearful Judgments ( John Quelch, John Lambert, John Miller, Erasmus Peterson, Peter Roach, Christopher Scudamore); Cotton Mather, The Converted Sinner ( John Archer, William White); Cotton Mather, The Vial Poured Out upon the Sea (Samuel Cole, William Fly, Henry Greenville); Colman, It is a fearful Thing to fall into the Hands of the Living God (Samuel Cole, William Fly, Henry Greenville); Baldwin, The Danger of Living without the fear of God (Francis Frederick, John Rogg, Peter Peterson, John Williams). For secondary works on the execution sermons delivered to men convicted of piracy, see Daniel E. Williams, “Puritans and Pirates,” 233–251; Daniel E. Williams, “Of Providence and Pirates,” 169–195; Burleigh, 151–173; Pitt, 222–252. 36.  On the treatment of women in England tried over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Clayton, 337–359. For a comparative view of infanticide in England and New England, see Hoffer and Hull, 65–91. 37.  The Body of Liberties of 1641, 533–548; Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts, 4–6, 26. Other religiously justified capital crimes included idolatry, witchcraft, blasphemy, manslaughter, poisoning (killing through guile), bestiality, sodomy, adultery, man-stealing, false witness (in a capital case), conspiracy, a child cursing or smiting a parent, and rebellion of a son against a parent. Non-biblically justified capital crimes included rape, burglary (on a third offense), robbery (on a third offense), and the return of a Jesuit after banishment from the colony. Other capital offenses added over the seventeenth century that lacked specific Biblical justification were heresy (for a second offense), arson, return of a Quaker after banishment from the colony, piracy and mutiny, treason against the king, and military service with certain foreign states (Powers, 270–273). 38.  Foxcroft, 41. 39.  Two sermons of the 1730s that did address property crimes were Campbell, 1–36; William Williams, 5–23. Both cases involved men convicted of burglary. Williams did not include the specific law against burglary in his sermon but did find it suitable to recount the numerous crimes punishable by death: murder, infanticide, arson, buggery (including bestiality and sodomy), rape, polygamy, treason, assault and robbery (second conviction), and burglary. Only murder and buggery would have Biblical sanction as capital crimes from this list. See Williams, 10. For an advertisement of Campbell’s sermon, see Boston News-Letter, February 9, 1738, 2. For two advertisements of Williams’s sermons, see Boston Evening Post, October 23, 1738, 2; New England Weekly Journal, October 24, 1738, 2. 40.  Hearn, 56. 41.  Increase Mather, A Sermon, 3. 42.  Ibid., 6, 12. Cohen, Pillars of Salt, 50–54. 43.  Hearn, 141. 44.  Chauncy, 5; Chamberlain, “The Theology of Cruelty,” 347; John Corrigan, The Hidden Balance, 1–8; Cohen, Pillars of Salt, 104–106. On the importance of Locke’s treatises on civil government for New England ministers, see Seay, 119–122.

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45.  Chauncy, 8. 46.  Ibid., 13. 47. Strong, 17. On Strong’s role as part of the Second Great Awakening, see Shiels, 404–408. For two advertisements of Strong’s sermon, see Connecticut Courant, May 5, 1777, 3; Connecticut Courant, May 12, 1777, 1. Strong’s sermon was priced slightly higher than average, at one schilling. 48.  Strong, 5. 49.  Ibid., 15. 50.  Hearn, 178–179. In an examination of the Joseph Mountain case, including the Sketches of the Life of Joseph Mountain, Goodheart and Hinks argued that the rape almost certainly did not occur. See Goodheart and Hinks, 497–527. Only three other cases featuring a black man accused of rape were the subject of an execution sermon: MacCarty, The Power and Grace of Christ Display’d to a Dying Malefactor (Arthur); Hutchinson, Iniquity Purged by Mercy and Truth (Arthur); Worcester, A Sermon Delivered at Haverhill (Thomas Powers); Langdon, A Sermon, Preached at Danbury (Anthony). Three other sermons featured a white man convicted of rape: Diman, A Sermon, Preached at Salem (Bryan Sheehan); Shepard, A Sermon, Delivered at Lenox (Ephraim Wheeler); Going, A Discourse, Delivered at Worcester (Horace Carter). For a case study of the Ephraim Wheeler case, see Brown and Brown. 51. Dana, 7. Advertisements for this sermon included Connecticut Gazette, November 12, 1790, 4; Connecticut Gazette, November 19, 1790, 1. The November 12 paper also included an advertisement for Sketches of the Life of Joseph Mountain, priced at seven pence. Dana’s sermon was priced at nine pence. Also see Connecticut Courant, November 22, 1790, 4. 52.  Dana justified murder as a capital crime because God ordained it so, and treason as being murder extended to the whole community. His argument for rape, which is not a Biblically sanctioned capital crime, is less clear. He simply found the crime to be too dangerous to society and a vicious attack on female honor. See Dana, 8–9. Three years earlier Stephen West, preaching for the execution of John Bly and Charles Rose, separated murder from its religious context, stating “there is great reason to suppose that none of these crimes [those made capital in the Mosaic Code], not even murder itself, were made capital, by the Jewish law, because they were sins against God; but because they were sins against society” (West, 4). 53.  Dana, 10, 11. The scholarship on execution sermons and the presence or absence of racial explanations for crime, particularly for cases of rape is quite extensive. Richard Slotkin, Daniel E. Williams, and Donna Denise Hunter have all argued that racially based rhetoric was included in execution sermons. Slotkin argued that the language of sermons featuring black reprobates, and especially black rapists, to have been exaggerated, even to the point of caricature, and intensified in its condemnation and linkage of sexuality with evil (Slotkin, 3–31). Similarly, Williams found the stereotype of the hypersexual black beast to have been set by the sermons for the execution of Arthur in 1768, which contributed to the conceptualizing of

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all blacks as potential criminals (Williams, “The Gratification,” 194–221). Hunter claimed that the identification between the criminal and the congregation was less pronounced when the offender was black and also that after the Revolution the immorality of black reprobates was stressed to a much higher degree than for whites. Hunter, 32–126. Daniel A. Cohen convincingly refuted the conclusions of Slotkin and Williams, finding instead that racial interpretations of crime and punishment were rarely emphasized, and often ignored in execution sermons (Cohen, “Social Injustice,” 481–526). Similarly, Tayna M. Mears contended that the arguments of Slotkin, Williams, and Hunter were limited by their attempt to find instances of racial rhetoric in execution literature (Mears, 117–172). 54.  The second sermon to challenge the use of public executions was the last delivered in New England (Going, 11). In 1832, Orestes A. Brownson delivered an address for the execution of Guy C. Clark in Ithaca, New York. Brownson, who at the time was a Unitarian, rejected not only public executions, but also the use of capital punishment entirely. See Brownson, 174–182. 55. Cohen, Pillars of Salt, 167–194; Richard D. Brown, 270–271; Gilmore, 5. 56.  Thatcher, 24. Even as early as 1754, Charles Chauncy warned his audience not to attend public executions out of vain curiosity or as sport and merriment. See Chauncy, 22. On the Fairbanks case, see Freeman, 1–26; Seay, 3–14; Hearn, 187–188. A second sermon was preached on the same day after Fairbanks’s execution: Thaddeus Mason Harris, 1–25. I was unable to find any advertisements for Thatcher’s sermon, but many appeared for Harris’s sermon. See Boston Gazette, October 29, 1801, 4; Columbian Minerva, October 6, 1801, 3; Salem Gazette, October 27, 1801, 1; Western Star, October 31, 1801, 4; Hudson Gazette, November 10, 1801, 3. When listed, the price of Harris’s sermon was nine pence. 57.  Thatcher, 26. 58.  Foucault, 67. 59.  Going, 22.

Bibliography Adams, Eliphalet. A Sermon Preached on the Occasion of the Execution of Katherine Garrett. New London CT: T. Green, 1738. Baldwin, Thomas. The Danger of Living without the fear of God. Boston, MA: James Loring, 1819. Bascom, Aaron. A Sermon, Preached at the Execution of Abiel Converse. Northampton, MA: William Butler, 1788. Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978. Bosco, Ronald A. “Lectures at the Pillory: The Early American Execution Sermon.” American Quarterly 30, no. 2 (summer 1978): 156–176. Brewin, Mark Winston. “The New England Execution Sermon: Texts, Rituals, and Power.” Observatorio 5, no. 2 (2011): 135–160.

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Brown, Irene Quenzler, and Richard D. Brown. The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler: A Story of Rape, Incest, and Justice in Early America. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003. Brown, Kathleen M. “Murderous Uncleanness: The Body of the Female Infanticide in Puritan New England.” In A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America, ed. Janet Moore Lendman and Michele Lise Tartar, 77–94. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Brown, Richard D. Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Browne, Arthur. Religious Education of Children Recommended. Boston, MA: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1739. Brownson, Orestes A. An Address Prepared at the Request of Guy C. Clark. Ithaca, NY: S.S. Chatterton, 1832. In The Early Works of Orestes A. Brownson, vol. 2: The Free Thought and Unitarian Years, 1830–35, ed. Patrick W. Carey, 174–182. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2000. Burleigh, Erica. “Coercion, Conviction, Conversion: Sovereign Selves and Interior States in Colonial Piracy Trials and Narratives.” Law and Literature 24, no. 2 (summer 2012): 151–173. Butler, Jon. Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Campbell, John. After Souls by Death are Separated from their Bodies, they come to Judgment. Boston, MA: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1738. Canup, John. “‘The Cry of Sodom Enquired Into’: Bestiality and the Wilderness of Human Nature in Seventeenth-Century New England.” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 98 (1988): 113–134. Chamberlain, Ava. “The Theology of Cruelty: A New Look at the Rise of Arminianism in Eighteenth-Century New England.” The Harvard Theological Review 85, no. 3 ( July 1992): 335–356. Chamberlain, Ava. “The Execution of Moses Paul: A Story of Crime and Contact in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut.” The New England Quarterly 77, no. 3 (September 2004): 414–450. Chauncy, Charles. The Horrid Nature, and Enormous Guilt of Murder. Boston, MA: Thomas Fleet, 1754. Chiles, Katy L. “Becoming Colored in Occom and Wheatley’s Early America.” PMLA 123, no. 5 (October 2008): 1398–1417. Clark, Charles E. “Early American Journalism: News and Opinion in the Popular Press.” In A History of the Book in America, vol. 1: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, 347–366. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Clayton, Mary. “Changes in Old Bailey Trials for the Murder of Newborn Babies, 1674–1803.” Continuity and Change 24, no. 2 (2009): 337–359. Cohen, Daniel A. Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

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Cohen, Daniel A. “Social Injustice, Sexual Violence, Spiritual Transcendence: Constructions of Interracial Rape in Early American Crime Literature, 1767–1817.” The William and Mary Quarterly 56, no. 3 ( July 1999): 481–526. Colman, Benjamin. The Hainous Nature of the Sin of Murder and the Great Happiness of Deliverance from it. Boston, MA: John Allen, 1713. Colman, Benjamin. The Divine Compassions Declar’d and Magnified. Boston, MA: T. Fleet and T. Crump, 1715. Colman, Benjamin. It is a fearful thing to fall into the Hands of the Living God. Boston, MA: John Phillips and Thomas Hancock, 1726. Corrigan, John. The Hidden Balance: Religion and Social Theories: Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Mayhew. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Corrigan, John. “Catholick Congregational Clergy and Public Piety.” Church History 60, no. 2 ( June 1991): 210–222. Crawford, Michael J. “Origins of the Eighteenth-Century Evangelical Revival: England and New England Compared.” Journal of British Studies 26, no. 4 (October 1987): 361–397. Dana, James. The Intent of Capital Punishment. New Haven, CT: T. and S. Green, 1790. Diman, James. A Sermon, Preached at Salem. Salem, MA: Samuel and Ebenezer Hall, 1772. Elliot, Michael. “‘This Indian Bait’: Samson Occom and the Voice of Liminality.” Early American Literature 29, no. 3 (1994): 233–253. Erikson, Kai T. Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1966. Faber, Eli. “The Evil That Men Do: Crime and Transgression in Colonial Massachusetts.” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1974. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. Foxcroft, Thomas. Lessons of Caution to Young Sinners. Boston, MA: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1733. Freeman, Dale H. “‘Melancholy Catastrophe!’: The Story of Jason Fairbanks and Elizabeth Fales.” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 26, no. 1 (winter 1998): 1–26. Gaustad, Edwin S. “The Theological Effects of the Great Awakening in New England.” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 40, no. 4 (Mar. 1954): 681–706. Gilmore, William J. Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780–1835. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989. Godbeer, Richard. “‘The Cry of Sodom’: Discourse, Intercourse, and Desire in Colonial New England.” The William and Mary Quarterly 52, no. 2 (April 1995): 259–286. Going, Jonathan. A Discourse, Delivered at Worcester. Worcester, MA: William Manning, 1825. Goodheart, Lawrence B. and Peter Hinks. “‘See the Jails Open and the Thieves Arise’: Joseph Mountain’s Revolutionary Atlantic and Consolidating Early National Connecticut.” Atlantic Studies 10, no. 4 (2013): 497–527.

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Hall, David D. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989. Halttunen, Karen. Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Harris, Sharon M. Executing Race: Early American Women’s Narratives of Race, Society, and the Law. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2005. Harris, Thaddeus Mason. A Sermon Preached in the First Parish in Dedham. Dedham, MA: Herman Mann, 1801. Hearn, Daniel Allen. Legal Executions in New England: A Comprehensive Reference, 1623–1960. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., Inc., 1999. Henigman, Laura. Coming into Communion: Pastoral Dialogues in Colonial New England. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Hilliard, Timothy. Paradise Promised, By a Dying Saviour, to the Penitent Thief on the Cross. Newbury-Port, MA: John Mycall, 1785. Hoffer, Peter Charles, and N. E. H. Hull. Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and New England, 1558–1803. New York: New York University Press, 1984. Holifield, E. Brooks. Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Hunter, Donna Denise. “Dead Men Talking: Africans and the Law in New England’s Eighteenth-Century Execution Sermons and Crime Narratives.” Ph.D. diss., University of California–Berkeley, 2000. Hutchinson, Aaron. Iniquity Purged by Mercy and Truth. Boston, MA: Thomas and John Fleet, 1769. Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Lambert, Frank. Inventing the “Great Awakening”. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Langdon, Timothy. A Sermon, Preached at Danbury. Danbury, CT: Douglas and Nichols, 1798. Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts. Cambridge, MA: General Court of Massachusetts, 1648. Lazenby, Walter. “Exhortation as Exorcism: Cotton Mather’s Sermons to Murderers.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 57 (1971): 50–56. LeBlanc, Michael. “Putting on ‘the Helmet of Salvation’ and Wielding ‘the Sword of the Spirit’: Joseph Johnson, Moses Paul, and the Word of God.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 24, no. 3 (fall 2012): 26–52. Lockridge, Kenneth. Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1974. MacCarty, Thaddeus. The Power and Grace of Christ Display’d to a Dying Malefactor. Boston, MA: Kneeland and Adams, 1768. Mather, Cotton. The Call of the Gospel. Boston, MA: Richard Pierce, 1687. Mather, Cotton. Warnings from the Dead. Boston, MA: Bartholomew Green, 1693. Mather, Cotton. Pillars of Salt. Boston, MA: Bartholomew Green and John Allen, 1699.

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Mather, Cotton. Faithful Warnings to prevent Fearful Judgments. Boston, MA: Timothy Green, 1704. Mather, Cotton. The Sad Effects of Sin. Boston, MA: John Allen, 1713. Mather, Cotton. A Sorrowful Spectacle. Boston, MA: T. Fleet and T. Crump, 1715. Mather, Cotton. The Valley of Hinnom. Boston, MA: John Allen, 1717. Mather, Cotton. Febrifugium; An Essay for the Cure of Ungoverned Anger. Boston, MA: John Allen, 1717. Mather, Cotton. Tremenda: The Dreadful Sound with which the Wicked are to be Thunderstruck. Boston, MA: B. Green, 1721. Mather, Cotton. The Converted Sinner. Boston, MA: Nathaniel Belknap, 1724. Mather, Cotton. The Vial Poured Out upon the Sea. Boston, MA: T. Fleet, 1726. Mather, Cotton. Diary of Cotton Mather, 1681–1708. Boston, MA: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1911. Mather, Cotton. Diary of Cotton Mather, 1709–1724. Boston, MA: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1911. Mather, Increase. The Wicked Mans Portion. Boston, MA: John Foster, 1675. Mather, Increase. A Sermon Occasioned by the Execution of a Man Found Guilty of Murder. Boston, MA: Richard Pierce, 1687. Mather, Increase. The Folly of Sinning, Opened & Applyed in Two Sermons. Boston, MA: B. Green and J. Allen, 1699. Mears, Tayna M. “‘To Lawless Rapine Bred’: A Study of Early Northeastern Literature Featuring People of African Descent.” Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2005. Miller, Perry. The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. New York: Macmillan, 1939. Minnick, Wayne C. “The New England Execution Sermon, 1639–1800.” Speech Monographs 35 (1968): 77–89. Monaghan, E. Jennifer. Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005. Moody, Joshua. An Exhortation to a Condemned Malefactor. Boston, MA: Richard Pierce, 1687. Murray, John. The Origin of Evil Traced in a Sermon. Newbury-Port, MA: John Mycall, 1785. Neuman, Meredith Marie. Jeremiah’s Scribes: Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Nord, David Paul. “Teleology and News: The Religious Roots of American Journalism, 1630-1730.” The Journal of American History 77, no. 1 ( June 1990): 9–38. Perlmann, Joel, and Dennis Shirley. “When Did New England Women Acquire Literacy?” The William and Mary Quarterly 48 no. 1 ( January 1991): 50–67. Pitt, Steven J. J. “Cotton Mather and Boston’s ‘Seafaring Tribe.’” The New England Quarterly 85, no. 2 ( June 2012): 222–252. Rogers, John. Death, The Certain Wages of Sin to the Impenitent: Life, The Sure Reward to Grace to the Penitent. Boston, MA: B. Green and J. Allen, 1701. Schorb, Jodi. “Uncleanliness Is Next to Godliness: Sexuality, Salvation, and the American Women’s Execution Narrative.” In The Puritan Origins of American

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Sex: Religion, Sexuality, and National Identity in American Literature, ed. Tracy Fessenden, Nicholas F. Radel, and Magdalena J. Zaborowsa, 72–92. New York: Routledge, 2001. Schorb, Jodi. “Hard Hearted Women: Sentiment and the Scaffold.” Legacy 28, no. 2 (2011): 290–311. Scott, Donald M. From Office to Profession: The New England Ministry, 1750–1850 Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978. Seay, Scott D. Hanging between Heaven and Earth: Capital Crime, Execution Preaching, and Theology in Early New England. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009. Shepard, Samuel. A Sermon, Delivered at Lenox. Stockbridge, MA: H. Willard, 1806. Shiels, Richard D. “The Second Great Awakening in Connecticut: Critique of the Traditional Interpretation.” Church History 49, no. 4 (December 1980): 401–415. Shurtleff, William. The Faith and Prayer of a Dying Malefactor. Boston, MA: J. Draper, 1740. Slayer, Matt. “‘Between the Heavens and the Earth’: Narrating the Execution of Moses Paul.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 36, no. 4 (2012): 77–105. Slotkin, Richard. “Narratives of Negro Crime in New England, 1675–1800.” American Quarterly 25, no. 1 (March 1973): 3–31. Spring, Samuel. Christian Knowledge, and Christian Confidence Inseparable. Newbury-Port, MA: John Mycall, 1785. Stewart, Estelle M. and J.C. Bowen. History of Wages in the United States from Colonial Times to 1928. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1934. Stout, Harry S. The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Strong, Nathan. The Reasons and Design of Public Punishments. Hartford, CT: Ebenezer Watson, 1777. Thatcher, Thomas. The Danger of Despising Divine Counsel. Dedham, MA: Herman Mann, 1802. The Body of Liberties of 1641. In Crime and Punishment in Early Massachusetts, 1620– 1692: A Documentary History, Edwin Powers. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1966. Toulouse, Teresa. The Art of Prophesying: New England Sermons and the Shaping of Belief. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987. Turell, Ebenezer. The Life and Character of the Reverend Benjamin Colman, D.D. Boston, MA: Rogers and Fowle, 1749. Warner, Michael. “New English Sodom.” American Literature 64, no. 1 (March 1992): 19–47. West, Stephen. A Sermon, Preached in Lenox. Pittsfield, MA: Elijah Russell, 1787. Weyler, Karen A. Empowering Words: Outsiders and Authorship in Early America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013. Willard, Samuel. Impenitent Sinners Warned. Boston, MA: B. Green and J. Allen, 1698.

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Williams, Daniel E. “Puritans and Pirates: A Confrontation between Cotton Mather and William Fly in 1726.” Early American Literature 22, no. 3 (1987): 233–251. Williams, Daniel E. “Of Providence and Pirates: Philip Aston’s Narrative Struggle for Salvation.” Early American Literature 24, no. 3 (1989): 169–195. Williams, Daniel E. “The Gratification of That Corrupt and Lawless Passion: Character Types and Themes in Early New England Rape Narratives.” In A Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America, ed. Frank Shuffelton, 194–221. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Williams, John. Warnings to the Unclean. Boston, MA: B. Green and J. Allen, 1699. Williams, William. The Serious Consideration, that God will Visit and Judge Men for Sin. Boston, MA: Thomas Fleet, 1738. Witte, John Jr. The Reformation of Rights: Law, Religion, and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Worcester, Noah. A Sermon Delivered at Haverhill. Haverhill, NH: N. Coverly, 1796. Wright, Carroll D. History of Wages and Prices in Massachusetts: 1752–1883. Boston, MA: Wright & Potter Printing Co., 1885.

CHAPTER TWO

Reading between the Lines: The Penny Press and the Purpose of Making Violence News Mark Bernhardt

The newspaper industry continually evolves as publishers offer new types of content and pursue different target audiences in response to the changing times. In the 1820s, publishers primarily provided economic and political news, catering to upper-class readers and aligning themselves with a political party, with most revenue coming from expensive subscriptions and political-party contributions. However, in the 1830s, a new business model emerged, with a group of New York City publishers designing newspapers to exploit untapped markets and revenue sources, taking advantage of social and economic changes sweeping the nation. The “Penny Press,” as it was called, targeted a mass audience and relied more on advertising for revenue rather than contributions from political parties. In targeting a mass audience, the Penny Press published news that interested working- and middle-class readers, providing more lively content. One way in which publishers did this was by devoting attention to violent events. In analyzing the place of violent content in the Penny Press, I focus on three types of events—crime, civil unrest, and war—discussing an example of each in detail. Stories about violent crime appeared regularly in the Penny Press, and sometimes publishers turned them into melodramas that

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mimicked the era’s gothic literary style. Such was the case with the 1836 Helen Jewett murder. Labor strikes and riots could also become sensations, such as the 1842 Croton aqueduct strike and riots, which lasted several weeks and involved violent clashes between Irish strikers and strikebreakers before the local militia intervened. Finally, war, by nature, is violent, and the Penny Press extensively covered the Mexican–American War (1846–1848), which resulted in the United States’ conquering a large part of Mexico to expand across North America to the Pacific Ocean. Although content about violence attracted readers, coverage of violent events did more than sell newspapers. The stories and pictures published in the papers also spoke to societal concerns regarding such issues as the dangers of city life, class conflict and immigration, and the drawbacks of U.S. expansionism. In exploring these issues, I will draw from the content in the two main Penny Press papers in New York City, the New York Sun and New York Herald, with some discussion of a third important Penny Press paper, the New York Tribune. The 1830s and 1840s were decades marked by monumental change in U.S. society. A regional market economy emerged in place of the self-sufficient farms on which most people in the colonial period made their livings.1 One result of this shift in the nation’s economic system was the rapid growth of cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore, as new commercial and industrial opportunities drew a flood of young men and women from the countryside and immigrants from England, Ireland, and Germany. Of these rising urban centers, New York City solidified itself as the leading mercantile city in the nation with the building of the Erie Canal in 1825, putting New York at the center of all the economic growth happening in the North and West.2 The changes taking place in the nation’s cities triggered changes in the nation’s press, with New York City as the epicenter of this development. The number of newspapers exploded during the period between 1830 and the Civil War. In 1830, there were 1,300 newspapers published, of which only twenty-five were daily papers. By 1860, the number of newspapers increased to 4,051, with 387 dailies.3 New York newspapers were widely circulated throughout the country, with nearly 1 million papers per month sent to subscribers around the United States through the 1830s. And even if people did not receive a New York subscription, local papers reprinted stories from the New York press. The trade networks that made New York City the economic center of the United States also made it the media center of the country.4 From New York there came a new type of journalism that targeted a new audience: the working and middle classes that were swelling the city’s

Reading between the Lines

population. Called the Penny Press (because the papers sold for a penny on the street rather than by annual subscription), this style of journalism emphasized local news, human interest stories, and entertainment.5 It used a writing style of shorter sentences, shorter paragraphs, and basic vocabulary. The use of pictures also helped the Penny Press become the earliest form of journalistic mass media, for it required only rudimentary reading skills.6 The founding of the New York Sun in 1833 by Benjamin Day, the initiator of the Penny Press revolution, and the host of imitators he inspired, marked a shift away from the mercantile and partisan journalism that existed before toward an independent commercial press. The Sun and its main rival, James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald, which became the biggest “penny papers,” did not take funds from political parties, rather relying more on advertising than other papers, linking themselves to commerce within the new economy. Ad rates were directly connected to circulation, so these papers published stories that would attract a mass audience, and the largest audience was to be found in the diverse working and middle classes.7 In the middle decades of the nineteenth century Penny Press papers came to dominate the urban centers of the northern United States where its target audience congregated. Though the Penny Press remained confined to urban centers because the papers needed access to a large audience and business community to generate advertising revenue in order to succeed financially, it did have a wider effect on news content in small towns because of the practice of reprinting articles from the newspapers in the large urban centers.8 Because of its independence from political parties, media commentator Andie Tucher says that “[c]ommon wisdom has held ever since that the great achievement of the penny press was its development of the ideal of objectivity: the premise that the duty of a reporter—operating free of bias, preconception, outside pressure, or personal agenda—is to marshal the facts that will reproduce as far as possible the world as it really is.” But she argues that just because the Penny Press was not taking money from political parties, we should not credit these papers with objectivity. Although the Penny Press did not follow a straight party line in editorializing, publishers supported the candidates and politics of specific parties, though by choice rather than necessity.9 The Penny Press coverage of nonpolitical stories was not objective either. Publishers allowed their personal feelings about news events to shade their reporting to promote an agenda or comment on social or political issues of the day, as seen in the reports of the Helen Jewett murder, Croton Aqueduct strike, and Mexican–American War. The melodramatic and sensational reporting of crime was an important component of what the Penny Press published, and the Sun and Herald

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became particularly successful publishing crime stories. Before the 1830s the press rarely covered crime. Newspapers, which were typically weekly, did not devote their limited space to stories publishers felt most people had heard already. This changed with the Penny Press and the development of a new reporting method: investigative reporting.10 By sending reporters to slums, prisons, and brothels, the Penny Press made the effort to gather the stories that interested people.11 Day and Bennett generally left political and business news to the traditional, party-oriented “six-cent papers” and focused on news with broader interest, though the Penny Press was not devoid of more traditional news. One advantage of local news was that it was cheaper to get. It hardly cost the Sun or Herald anything to send reporters to the police court for stories or to print lively accounts of sensational happenings that the publishers themselves picked up around town.12 Although crime took place every day in New York, only certain crime stories generated intense public interest—the story had to have the right kind of crime and characters to strike a chord with the masses.13 Such a case came to the public’s attention in 1836 when a prostitute named Helen Jewett was found murdered in her bed. The Herald’s coverage of the Jewett case was so successful, in fact, that it made the paper the most widely circulated in the country.14 In capitalizing on the violence and mystery of murders such as Jewett’s, the Penny Press drew upon the popular gothic literary style for inspiration.15 Gothic literature highlighted bloody, sexual murders, and the stories explored the motives of the criminals and gory details, graphically describing the pain endured and the state of corpses. Authors of these narratives sought to bring the reader into an emotional state of fear, hatred, and disgust.16 Historian Karen Halttunen says that, “The primary technique of sensationalism was body-horror, the effort to arouse the reader’s repugnance (and excitement) in the face of the physiological realities of violent death. After 1800, popular murder literature practiced new and increasingly extreme strategies to evoke readers’ fascinated revulsion and disgust in the face of murderous violence.”17 These techniques are exemplified in the coverage of the Jewett case. The mystery of Jewett’s murder began in the early hours of April 10, 1836. Rosina Townsend, the brothel’s proprietor, was awakened by a knock at her bedroom door and a man asking to be let out of the house. Rosina told him, “Get your woman to let you out.” Rosina claimed she went back to sleep until roused again by a knock at the front door by a regular customer who had made arrangements for a late arrival. When Rosina let him in she noticed a lighted lamp on a table in the parlor that

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should have been upstairs and saw that the back door was ajar. Curious, she investigated the backyard and then went upstairs. She first checked the door of Maria Stevens and found it locked. Next she tried Helen Jewett’s room. When she opened the door, smoke billowed out. She screamed, “Fire!” and people fled the house. Rosina and another prostitute tried to rescue Jewett but discovered she was in bed, engulfed by the flames. Her companion of that evening was nowhere to be found.18 After the fire was put out, two doctors arrived to conduct an autopsy. They determined Jewett had been killed in her sleep from one of several blows to the head by a sharp object before the fire was set.19 Richard Robinson, who went by the alias Frank Rivers when visiting the brothel, was identified as the client Helen had been with that night.20 Later that day, Robinson was arrested and charged with Jewett’s murder. The gothic literary influence is clear in how Bennett and Day report the events that so captivated their audiences. The newspaper accounts of Jewett’s murder focused on the violence of the act. The press provided graphic descriptions of the murder scene. The New York Sun’s description is straight forward in capturing the gruesomeness of the discovery. On proceeding to [Helen’s] room . . . the bed and bedding was found almost wholly consumed and [Helen] lying as if perfectly dead, her left side burned, from head to foot, almost black. . . . [T]here was, on the right side of her head, a little above the temple, a large and deep cut, about three inches in length, which on inspection was found to have been made with some sharp instrument in the shape of an axe or hatchet, which had penetrated her skull and entered the brain; and which undoubtedly instantly deprived her of life, almost without her being aware that she had been struck.21

The Herald also reported the gore, but Bennett did so in a way that suggests an eroticism exuded by the corpse, sexual and almost pornographic in nature: “He half uncovered the ghastly corpse. I could scarcely look at her for a second or two. Slowly I began to discover the lineaments of that corpse as one would the beauties of a statue of marble. It was the most remarkable sight I ever beheld—. . . .” He goes on to say that the body looked as white and polished as marble. “One arm lay over her bosom—the other was inverted and hanging over her head. The left side, down to the waist, where the fire had touched was bronzed like an antique statue. . . .” Here, he compared the corpse to the statue Venus de’ Medici. “For a few moments I was lost in admiration at the extraordinary sight—a beautiful female corpse— that surpassed the finest statue of antiquity.” Finally, he noted the gashes to her right temple, “inflicted upon her head three blows, either of which

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must have proved fatal, as the bone was cleft to the extent of three inches in each place.”22 There are many parallels between the Penny Press reports and murders described in Gothic tales. Comparing the newspaper accounts to a story by one of the era’s most well-known Gothic writers, Edgar Allan Poe, one can see that there is little difference between novel and newspaper. In The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Poe writes: On a chair lay a razor, besmeared with blood. On the hearth were two or three long and thick tresses of grey human hair, also dabbled in blood, and seeming to have been pulled out by the roots. . . . Of Madame L’Espanaye no traces were here seen; but an unusual quantity of soot being observed in the fireplace, a search was made in the chimney, and (horrible to relate!) the corpse of the daughter, head downwards, was dragged therefrom; it having been thus forced up the narrow aperture for a considerable distance. The body was quite warm. Upon examining it, many excoriations were perceived, no doubt occasioned by the violence with which it had been thrust up and disengaged. Upon the face were many severe scratches, and, upon the throat, dark bruises, and deep indentations of finger-nails, as if the deceased had been throttled to death. After a thorough investigation of every portion of the house, without further discovery, the party made its way into a small paved yard in the rear of the building, where lay the corpse of the old lady, with her throat so entirely cut that, upon an attempt to raise her, the head fell off. The body, as well as the head, was fearfully mutilated—the former so much so as scarcely to retain any semblance of humanity.23

Neither Poe nor Bennett and Day hold much back in the way of blood and gore. Even when compared to one of the masters of the Gothic style, Bennett and Day seem perfectly competent in the art of evoking readers’ “fascinated revulsion and disgust in the face of murderous violence.” In the newspaper reports and Poe’s story, the bodies’ discoloration is noted— Jewett’s blackened (or bronzed) from the fire, L’Espanaye’s marked with bruises. In both cases the bodies are reported to be mutilated—Jewett from the hatchet blows to her head, Madame L’Espanaye from a beating and her mother nearly decapitated. The bodies are portrayed as having a “ghastly” appearance—Bennett could hardly look at Jewett’s body at first, Poe describing L’Espanaye’s mother “as scarcely [retaining] any semblance of humanity.” Although gothic novels often included illustrations (the only publishable picture form at the time), the Penny Press papers did not always do the same with their murder reports, primarily because of the time consuming

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nature and expense of making woodcuts.24 None of the papers published pictures with the coverage of Jewett’s murder. And when illustrations were published, they did not always include scenes of violence. For example, in 1840, the Herald printed an illustration with an article about the trial of James Wood. Wood was accused of shooting and killing his daughter. The picture shows a room in which the body of Wood’s daughter is lying on the floor by a window. Two men, one white and the other black, are seen standing in the doorway and appear surprised by the discovery they have apparently just made. The gun used to shoot the woman is visible on the floor.25 An illustration from the Herald that did match the gothic style was published in January 1842 with coverage of the trial of John Colt. Colt was accused of killing a printer, Samuel Adams, to whom he owed money. In an argument between the two men, Colt claims he struck Adams with a hatchet in self-defense. Then, fearing that no one would believe his story, he stuffed the body in a crate and mailed it to New Orleans. The crate was intercepted before leaving port. The picture shows the body of Samuel Adams lying on a table, partially propped up against a wall. Blood is coming out of his mouth, and one side of his face appears battered. The caption above reads, “SAMUEL ADAMS, THE PRINTER, BEFORE HE WAS CUT UP AND SALTED.”26 This was an exaggeration on Bennett’s part— Adams was never dismembered or preserved. Murder stories made for popular reading but could also serve other purposes, such as drawing attention to the problems of urban growth and the trouble in which unsupervised young men and women who had recently migrated to the city could find themselves. The increased movement of people from one place to another, combined with growing immigrant populations, made it less likely that everyone in an area knew and socialized with each other, which was the basis for social discipline and surveillance. The changing economy also took young people away from their families, leaving them unsupervised in a world where they could anonymously engage in illicit activities with little fear of consequences. Jewett had come from Maine and entered the city’s growing sex trade, which boomed in the 1830s because of the demand generated by the city’s growing single-male population. Richard Robinson was a young clerk who had come from Connecticut and lived in a boarding house, roaming the city as he pleased with other young men.27 James Gordon Bennett spoke directly about the problems arising in the city from delinquent young people: “There exists no parental authority over young men. . . . The halls, gaming houses, houses of ill name, are permitted to exist unmolested by the judicial authorities, and to corrupt and demoralize all the youthful population of the city.”28 While the Penny Press profited from such events

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as the Jewett murder, the publishers also used them to critique social problems. Murder cases provided the press with an opportunity to comment on the nature of violence between individuals and the motives they had for killing each other. Sometimes groups of people found a common motive that inspired them to engage in violence. Like murder cases, collective violence, which included riots stemming from ethnic, racial, religious, political, or class unrest, lent itself to sensationalized reporting and social commentary. Historian Michael Feldberg describes collective violence during this era as “one means by which various groups attempted to control competition among themselves, or by which they responded to changes in their relative status, power, wealth, or political influence.”29 David Walker Howe notes that the growing cities seemed vulnerable to anyone exploiting group resentments among the increasingly diverse urban communities.30 Historian John C. Schneider’s research reveals that at least 70 percent of American cities having a population of twenty thousand or more experienced some degree of major disorder between 1830 and 1865.31 One source of this disorder was a growing disparity in wealth between workers and employers created by the evolving market economy, which sparked labor conflict.32 In 1840, workers on the Croton aqueduct project, many of them recent Irish immigrants, went on strike, demanding higher wages. The economic downturn that began with the Panic of 1837 had suppressed wages for some time, as contractors were able to hire from a large pool of unemployed skilled and unskilled laborers, both native-born and immigrant.33 Worker frustration was compounded by the requirement that employees buy groceries from company stores at marked-up prices.34 Furthermore, Irish workers found themselves worse off than most, because American citizens of other ethnicities discriminated against them, leaving them with fewer economic opportunities.35 Typically, disgruntled workers quit, though this might lead to financial losses as employers could refuse to pay employees who had not fulfilled their entire labor contract. During economic downturns, such as the one gripping the nation in 1840, workers tolerated lower wages and poor working conditions because they knew they had few alternatives.36 Many working on the Croton aqueduct, however, chose to unionize and initiate a strike, determined to end the exploitation. Unions were not common or legally protected at this time. Under common law, strikes constituted illegal conspiracies for which participants could be prosecuted. Local authorities sometimes called out the militia to break up strikes.37 This was the case with the Croton strike.

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The striking workers attempted to pressure others to join the strike by using violence.38 According to Michael Feldberg, “Such violence was overtly intended to force employers to give in to the strikers’ demands. Just as important, it served to boost the strikers’ solidarity and morale at a time when they were not working, not earning money, and rapidly consuming the meager savings they had accumulated in the months or years before the strike.”39 Initially, the New York Sun and New York Herald supported the strikers, though both used racial slurs and stereotypes, at times referring to the Irish as “Paddies” and claiming they were violent by nature. The Sun blasted the “almost animal wages” the workers received as a “degree above starvation” and criticized the contractors for forcing workers to shop at company stores that marked up prices by a third.40 The Herald reported that contractors had been paying workers one dollar per day, which the paper stated was “little enough,” but reduced wages over the winter when the number of laborers was cut from 3,600 to 1,000.41 “As the wants of these poor fellows were very great, and many had wives and little ones dependent on their exertions for daily bread, they petitioned the contractors for work on almost any terms. The contractors  .  .  . made this an excuse for grading down the wages . . . to six shillings [fifty cents] a day, which the poor fellows were compelled to submit to, and besides this, to take half their earnings out in slops, food, etc., from stores kept by the contractors or their agents.”42 As the workers reportedly told the Herald, “We want jist the dollar a day, and liberty to spend it where we please.”43 The Sun stated, “Against such treatment they are not only justifiable in ‘standing out,’ but in warning and in protecting others and each other; and if the consequence to the contractors should happen to be forfeiture and loss, they will have nothing but their own . . . injustice to blame for it.”44 In its early reports the Sun claimed that the workers “evince no disposition whatever to commit violence or create disturbance of any kind.”45 The contractors refuted this report, telling the Sun that the workers had committed numerous violent acts, such as assaulting one of the contractors and casting “adrift a sloop engaged in bringing sand for the construction of the reservoirs, which had only a lad on board, and he was asleep. It was flood tide, and the sloop was driven through Hell Gate, to the imminent danger of the sloop, and of the boy’s life.”46 The Herald, comparatively, acknowledged that the strikers engaged in violence, attempting to drive off all those who were unwilling to join the strike by beating them and breaking equipment, even threatening to murder the contractors. These threats and acts of violence did lead some to join the strike. Others, however, still refused.47

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The contractors appealed to the city commissioners and mayor to do something to stop the strike. Eventually the mayor called on the local militia to end it. Defending the contractors, the mayor stated, “we mean to protect our property even if we might be obliged to use violent means to do it.”48 The militia did manage to restore order temporarily by threatening to arrest and use violence against the strikers.49 The Herald reported that several city officials, however, requested that the militia use restraint as they did not want any of the Irish workers killed on the eve of city elections. Fortunately, no one died, though many were injured, in what the Herald dubbed the “bloodless Croton war.” 50 As the strike wound down, the papers criticized those attempting to keep the strike going with “violent interference.” The Herald reported that “Since Sunday they have created two riots, destroyed some property, threatened the lives of twenty or thirty persons, and nearly beat to death six or seven others.” The papers noted that the local militia had stationed troops along the course of the aqueduct to protect those who chose to work.51 While the Penny Press did take the side of the working class, a key component of its audience, on such issues as higher wages and the right to strike, that support had limits. The characterization of Irish immigrants also reveals that Day and Bennett (of English and Scottish descent respectively) had many of the same prejudices as other Americans toward the Irish, even though Irish immigrants were often Penny Press customers. Class conflict and immigration were issues the Penny Press dealt with carefully in the context of the era’s social changes. Publishers sought to find a middle ground in strike coverage for the native-born working class who felt exploited by employers but also saw immigrants as the enemy because employers used them to keep wages low, the immigrants who were desperate for work and expanding the Penny Press customer base, and advertisers who opposed unions and potentially violent labor strikes. Not only could individuals and groups find motivation to commit violence, states could be motivated to engage in violent acts as well, such as war. As with crime and social disorder, the Penny Press presented the violence of war in ways that addressed social and political issues. On May 13, 1846, the United States declared war on Mexico because of a dispute over the Texas border. The war ended February 2, 1848, with the United States acquiring 500,000 square miles of Mexican territory. The war and subsequent territorial acquisition were highly controversial. Democrats supported the war as a means for furthering their agenda of rapid territorial expansion across the continent. However, the northern and southern party factions disagreed on how much land to take because southern Mexico would be open to slavery and come with a large Mexican population. Whigs opposed the war and

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quest for more land, preferring slow national growth, limits on slavery’s expansion, and the exclusion of Mexicans from the United States.52 The Penny Press engaged in these debates over westward expansion and the potential incorporation of Mexicans into the nation. Though the war was a major news event, few U.S. newspapers had the financial resources to send reporters directly to Mexico, so many papers around the country reprinted reports from New Orleans newspapers.53 Unlike murder reports, the war reports were not typically sensationalized. This may be because the news was reprinted from New Orleans papers, which did not practice the same journalistic style—the Penny Press did not take root in the South, because the demographic and economic conditions were not right for such papers to be successful.54 The reports did at times describe battles in dramatic fashion, but generally they just reported the details and provided information about the number of casualties. For example, the Herald included a report that U.S. forces defeated a Mexican army of 5,000, killing 700 while losing only 6.55 One of the most graphic accounts Bennett provided was a description of U.S. casualties after a June 1846 battle: Capt. Page, whose under jaw has been shot way, is in a fair way of recovery. Capt. Hood was walking about with the stump of his right arm dangling by his side, and appeared in good humor. Col. McIntosh who was badly wounded, was stretched out yesterday morning in a Mexican wagon, trying to read. He was stabbed in the throat, or rather down the throat in the neck, and other parts of his body and was repeatedly knocked down in the fight. Capt. McClay, who was wounded in the action of the 9th, is here, with an awfully bad chin which a Mexican grape shot passed, shaving a little closer than was safe, as if it carried with it some of the bones and sinews.56

Because most reports were not written by the New York papers, the component of the war coverage through which publishers expressed their views, besides editorials, was illustrations in which publishers depicted the war’s events and participants. Some pictures did not make any specific social or political statements. The first picture relating to the war published in the Sun, now owned by Moses Yale Beach, titled “Glorious Victory. ROUT OF THE MEXICANS,” depicts soldiers in silhouette, engulfed in dust.57 The headlines report Matamoras was reduced to ashes and 700 Mexicans were killed in the battle of Point Isabel. The number of U.S. dead is not revealed. The viewer can see violence (through a cloud of dust, at least), though the violence is neither graphic nor realistic, there being no signs of injury or death to

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convey the suffering of warfare in this picture, which looks like something out of a comic book. Similar in style, the one battle scene the Herald published during the war is of General La Vega, standing firm behind his falling men in the face of an American onslaught that ultimately led to his capture. The charging Americans are seen on the right side of the picture with the Mexican line on the left and dead Mexican soldiers lying in the foreground. Like the picture from the Sun, this illustration does not make any particular social or political statements or provide any graphic depictions of violence, even while revealing the bodies of dead Mexican soldiers, as their mortal wounds are not apparent.58 Through other battle scenes, publishers revealed their views on westward expansion and territory acquisition. For example, Beach wanted the United States to limit its conquest of Mexican territory so that few Mexicans would be brought within U.S. borders, a position held by many Americans. To make acquiring Mexican land and the 7 million Mexicans who would come with it seem undesirable, he published illustrations in which he portrayed Mexicans as either Native Americans or Africans, emphasizing Mexican inferiority and the perceived threat they posed to white Americans. “The Siege of Monterey” depicts a barefoot Mexican soldier charging and pointing his pistol at a U.S. cavalry soldier, with a tomahawk swung above his head like a Native American warrior.59 A similar illustration shows U.S. soldiers on horseback charging into a line of Mexican soldiers. Two of the Mexican soldiers have been drawn with black skin, implying that they are of African descent.60 The Europeans who encountered Native Americans upon arrival in the Americas thought of them as primitive savages.61 Early European settlers tried to convert Native Americans to Christianity.62 However, because Native Americans did not respond as readily as hoped, the Europeans began repelling the native people, feeling justified in taking land from “heathens,” a mentality later adopted by Americans.63 Furthermore, Europeans and Americans depicted Native Americans as bloodthirsty killers who victimized women and children to provide further justification for conquest, feigning innocence of the violence they committed against Native Americans.64 Whites also deemed Africans primitive savages, though rather than repelling them, whites used Africans’ perceived need for civilizing as justification for enslaving them.65 Yet though whites saw themselves as superior to Africans and believed they could keep their slaves under control, there was a constant fear of slave rebellion in slave-owning regions, inspired by the hundreds of plots and uprisings by slaves seeking freedom from bondage.66 There were more than 250 rebellions or alleged plots

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from the colonial era through the antebellum period.67 Whites responded fiercely to any rumor of rebellion, such as in the case of Denmark Vesey’s plot in South Carolina in the early 1820s, which resulted in the execution of thirty-five blacks and the exile of forty others.68 These responses to Native Americans and Africans, developed in the original thirteen British colonies and United States over a period of more than 200 years, influenced in various ways the representations of the Mexicans seen in the Sun’s illustrations. Beach’s illustrations imply that Mexicans should be kept out of the United States. 69 Taking land from inferior people, whether through treaties or by force, became part of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny that was used to justify war with Mexico.70 And the articles accompanying Beach’s illustrations reveal that the Mexicans typically lose their battles with American soldiers, such as the Battle of Point Isabel in which Beach notes the large number of Mexicans killed and that the town of Matamoras was reduced to ashes, thus making conquest seem relatively easy.71 But Mexicans could not be relocated as easily as Native Americans had been up to this point if the United States took over all of Mexico. Nor could they be controlled in the manner whites controlled blacks. Such issues caused some to worry that bringing Mexicans into the nation would harm the United States by flooding the country with people who could never truly be assimilated because of their racial inferiority.72 Furthermore, the tomahawk-wielding soldier plays on the fear of Native American raids, with men, women, and children being scalped in savage attacks. Likewise, the armed black-skinned Mexicans raise the specter of slave revolts. Though whites had superior weapons and numbers to suppress Native Americans and Africans, the thought of Native Americans and Africans putting American lives at risk was a frightening one. In these ways, the imagery Beach used helped support his argument that it was best to bring as few Mexicans into the United States through conquest as possible.73 In contrast to Beach’s negative portrayal of Mexicans, Horace Greeley, publisher of another penny paper, the New York Tribune, characterized Mexicans positively. Rather than portraying the United States as justified in taking Mexican land by disparaging Mexicans, Greeley expressed the opinion that Mexicans were the innocent victims of unwarranted U.S. aggression. In an editorial, he wrote of U.S. actions, “The laws of Heaven are suspended and those of Hell established in their stead. It means that the Commandments are to be read and obeyed by our people thus— Thou shalt kill Mexicans; Thou shalt steal from them, hate them, burn their houses, ravage their fields, and fire red-hot cannon balls into towns swarming with their wives and children.”74 To Greeley, Americans were

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acting like savages, and he exposed the violence committed by Americans against Mexicans to shame Americans into leaving Mexico alone. Few seemed to pay attention to Greeley, however, as many Americans accepted that Mexicans were an inferior people such as Native Americans were considered to be and that their loss was insignificant or, for expansionists, even necessary. The Penny Press remained dominant in the nation’s major northern cities through the Civil War, but the retirement of its original publishers left a vacuum that came to be filled in the 1870s by new publishers and an engaging new style of journalism that built on elements of the earlier Penny Press. Called “New Journalism,” it proved highly marketable and spread around the country. Three primary characteristics defined New Journalism. First, New Journalism publishers redesigned the paper format and changed the presentation style to make it more accessible, furthering developments the Penny Press initiated. Second, they made use of sensationalized news and editorial content popularized by the Penny Press, though to a greater extent. Third, they promoted social and political causes popular with the urban working and middle classes, the largest demographics in the publishers’ markets, and the same audience targeted by the Penny Press. By the end of the nineteenth century, the rivalry between New Journalism’s two most influential publishers, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, led to a New York newspaper war in which both took sensationalism to new levels. Similar to the Penny Press publishers, Pulitzer and Hearst (as well as other New Journalism publishers), devoted extensive coverage to murders, civil unrest, and war. For example, a study of one Hearst publication, the San Francisco Examiner, found that during the 1890s the paper included more articles about crime than any other news topic. Comparatively, in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Examiner’s main rival, crime ranked as the third most common news topic after business and natural disasters.75 Pulitzer and Hearst also led the way in advocating for the United States to provide Cuban rebels with aid during the 1895 Cuban Revolution and in covering the Spanish-American War that resulted from the deterioration in diplomatic relations between Spain and the United States because of Cuba.76 Critics of Pulitzer’s and Hearst’s sensationalistic methods dubbed their news style “Yellow Journalism,” a name that came to be associated with New Journalism in general. New Journalism proved very influential, and journalism historians credit New Journalism with initiating many components of modern journalism, as journalism continued to evolve and build on what came before. The Penny Press was a revolutionary style of journalism created in response to the social and economic changes taking place in the United

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States and had a lasting effect in that it initiated journalistic trends that continued into the last decades of the nineteenth century. It offered a journalism free from direct political influence and a news forum more readily available to the masses than earlier journalistic business models. Perhaps most important to its success, it offered interesting reading material that appealed to a large audience—news about violence helped attract readers. This approach to the news set journalism on a new course.

Notes  1. Sellers, 20–21.   2.  Ryan, 63–64; Stansell, 84; Sellers, 23–28; Burrows and Wallace, 429–431, 478, 514.  3. Kobre, 222.   4.  Burrows and Wallace, 441; Tucher, 88. In a survey of stories between 1820 and 1860 from papers around the country, Donald Shaw found that 6 percent of news was about events in New York City, and 7 percent of all news stories originated in New York City newspapers (Shaw, 39, 43).   5.  Stevens, 20; Huntziker, 32; Tucher, 9.   6.  Shaw and Slater, 87, 89; Anderson, 3. It is estimated that 89 percent of northern artisans and 76 percent of northern farmers and laborers were literate in period of 1830 to 1895, so there was a large market for this product. Denning, 31.   7.  Huntziker, 1, 12. A total of thirty-five penny newspapers started in New York in the 1830s, but Day’s Sun and Bennett’s Herald were the only survivors of the first decade.   8.  Shaw, 39, 43.   9.  Tucher, 1–2, 12. 10.  Ibid. 7, 9–11. In 1836 the Sun reportedly had a circulation of at least 22,000, and Day was making a profit of more than $20,000 a year. The “Penny Press” is usually credited with the advent of sensationalism in U.S. newspapers, but the “Penny Press” was not nearly as sensational as the “New Journalism” of the 1880s and 1890s. In a sampling of stories from “penny papers,” Donald Shaw and John Slater found that 25–50 percent of stories were of a sensationalistic nature, depending on how liberal a definition of sensationalism was used to interpret them. This was a very high percentage for the time, and the “six-cent” papers accused Bennett of replacing substance with sensationalism. Bennett, in reply, only expressed his determination to provide a paper for the masses. “We newspaper people thrive best on the calamities of others. Give us one of your real Moscow fires, or your Waterloo battlefields; let a Napoleon be dashing with his legions throughout the world, overturning the thrones of a thousand years and deluging the world with blood and tears; and then we of the types are in our glory.” In so covering the news, the “Penny Press” was symbolic of the political and economic upheaval of the Jacksonian Era and exposed class differences and interests in New

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York City. Dedicating itself to the working class, which had never been targeted as a newspaper audience before, it recorded the struggles of both laborers and gentry to define their place within this new society, and, more specifically, to exist side-by-side in the increasingly stratified city of New York (Shaw and Slater, 88; Crouthamel, 25; Huntziker, 20; Tucher, 16). 11.  Francke, 84. Initially the journalist interview used the interrogation model from the courtroom and police practice. The interview became intertwined with sensational news stories because only people of lower status in society could be subjected to such questioning; politicians, businessmen, and other societal elites would never consent to voluntary interrogation. The style evolved through time to become more respectable and a major component of news gathering from all types of sources. Francke, 82. 12.  Tucher, 9. In contrast to the “Penny Press” there were nine “six-cent” papers in the city. These papers operated in the traditional manner, maintaining ties to political parties and selling annual subscriptions. They were read primarily by a wealthier clientele than the “Penny Press.” None of the “six-cent” papers reported crime stories, rather focusing on shipping information, political speeches, news from Albany and Washington, D.C., and business news. The most sensational stories in these papers were of transportation disasters, because of their impact on business. The “six-cent” papers published stories about exploding boilers on trains and steamships, sometimes including pictures of the dead laid out at the scene of such accidents. Eventually, however, these papers began giving passing coverage to the Helen Jewett murder because it was such a popular topic in the city. The “six-cent” papers were the Evening Post, Commercial Advertiser, Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, Evening Star, New York Times, Journal of Commerce, Mercantile Advertiser, New York Gazette, and the Daily Advertiser (Cohen, 25–26; Wosk, 32–33, 52–53). 13.  New York averaged about three homicides per year per 100,000 people in this period. The New York newspapers only reported about three or four murders a month on average, including those from other parts of the country (Monkkonen, 20, 58, 62; Stevens, 43). 14.  Circulation reached such a high after Richard Robinson’s trial that Bennett raised the price of the Herald to two cents in August 1836 (Stevens, 42, 37). 15.  Halttunen, 2. 16.  Ibid., 2, 3, 5, 74. 17.  Ibid., 73. 18.  Cohen, 3–7. 19.  Ibid., 13–14. 20.  Ibid., 10, 13. 21.  New York Sun, April 11, 1836, 2. 22.  New York Herald, April 12, 1836, 3; April 13, 1836, 4. 23.  Poe, 185. 24.  Huntziger, 54–56; Lee, 129; Crouthamel, 27, 34. 25.  New York Herald, April 1, 1840, 6.

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26.  Ibid., 20 January, 1842, 2. 27.  D’Emilio and Freedman, 56; Weeks, 32; Burrows and Wallace, 475, 533; Cohen, 11, 34, 42, 112. 28.  New York Herald, August 18, 1841, 2. 29.  Feldberg, 6. 30.  Howe, 431–432. 31.  Schneider, “Mob Violence and Public Order in the American City” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1971). Quoted in Brown, 3. 32.  Gilje, 176. 33.  Burrows and Wallace, 625. 34.  New York Sun, April 9, 1840. 35.  Gilje, 127. 36.  Ibid., 549. 37.  Howe, 548–549. 38.  Gilje, 178. 39.  Feldberg, 62. 40.  New York Sun, April 9, 1840. 41.  New York Herald, April 13, 1840. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44.  New York Sun, April 9, 1840. 45. Ibid. 46.  Ibid., April 17, 1840. 47.  New York Herald, April 7, 1840. 48.  Ibid., April 13, 1840. 49.  Ibid., April 7, 1840. 50.  Ibid., April 13, 1840. 51.  New York Sun, April 21, 1840; New York Herald, April 21, 1840. 52. Smith, 10–11; Onuf and Sadosky, 43, 81; Leckie, 507; McPherson, 4, 48–49; Rathbun, 464; Morrison, 32, 37; Bernhardt, “Conquering Eden,” 12. 53.  Cress, 8. 54.  Tripp, 154–155. 55.  New York Herald, May 19, 1846, 1. 56.  Ibid., June 8, 1846, 1. 57.  New York Sun, May 19, 1846, Second Edition, 1. 58.  New York Herald, June 28, 1846, 1. 59.  New York Sun, April 3, 1847, Weekly Edition, 1. 60.  Ibid., January 16, 1847, Weekly Edition, 1. 61.  Berkhoffer, 40–41. 62.  Colin G. Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 68–69. 63.  Banner, 16. 64.  Drinnon, 35–45; Black, 49–58. 65.  Genovese, 4–5; Dusinberre, 248, 265.

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66.  Worgs, 22, 25; Kyles, 501–502; Crockett, 309–312. 67.  Tang, 598. 68.  Davis, 167; Morgan, 160; Johnson, 915–916. 69.  Bernhardt, “Red, White, and Black,” 22. 70.  Banner, 121–140, 191–227; Black, 121–122, 196–199. 71.  New York Sun, May 19, 1846, Special Edition, 1. 72.  Horsman, 242–244; Black, 260. 73.  Bernhardt, “Red, White, and Black,” 22. 74.  New York Tribune, May 13, 1846, 1. 75.  Writer’s Program of California, 29. 76.  Campbell, 97–123.

Bibliography Anderson, Patricia. The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture, 1790–1860. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1991. Banner, Stuart. How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005. Berkhoffer, Robert F. Jr. The White Man’s Indian: Image of the American Indian From Columbus to the Present. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978. Bernhardt, Mark. “Conquering Eden: The Debate over Territory Acquisition in the New York Press Coverage of the Mexican War.” Journal of the West 50, no. 2 (spring 2011): 12–20. Bernhardt, Mark. “Red, White, and Black: Opposing Arguments on Territorial Expansion and Differing Portrayals of Mexicans in the New York Sun’s and New York Herald’s Coverage of the Mexican War,” Journalism History 40, no. 1 (spring 2014): 15–27. Black, Jeremy. Fighting for America: The Struggle for Mastery in North America, 1519–1871. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Brown, Richard Maxwell. Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Calloway, Colin G. New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Campbell, W. Joseph. Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001. Cohen, Patricia Cline. The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in New York. New York: Vintage Books, 1999. Cress, Lawrence Delbert, ed. Dispatches From the Mexican War: By George Wilkens Kendall. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. Crockett, Hasan. “The Incendiary Pamphlet: David Walker’s Appeal in Georgia.” Journal of Negro History 86, no. 3 (summer 2001): 305–318. Crouthamel, James L. Bennett’s New York Herald and the Rise of the Popular Press. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1989.

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Davis, Thomas J. “Conspiracy and Credibility: Look Who’s Talking, about What— Law Talk, Loose Talk.” The William and Mary Quarterly 59, no. 1 ( January 2002): 167–174. D’Emilio, John, and Estelle B. Freedman. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 2nd ed. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1997. Denning, Michael. Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America. London, UK: Verso, 1987. Drinnon, Richard. Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980. Dusinberre, William. Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Swamps. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000. Feldberg, Michael. The Turbulent Era: Riot and Disorder in Jacksonian America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. Francke, Warren. “Sensationalism and the Development of 19th-Century Reporting: The Broom Sweeps Sensory Details.” Journalism History 12, nos. 3–4 (winter–autumn 1985): 80–85. Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon Books, 1974. Gilje, Paul A. The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. Halttunen, Karen. Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. Howe, Daniel Walker. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Huntziker, William E. The Popular Press, 1833–1865. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. Johnson, Michael. “Denmark Vesey and his Co-Conspirators.” The William and Mary Quarterly 58, no. 4 (October 2001): 915–976. Kobre, Sidney. Foundations of American Journalism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press Publishers, 1958. Kyles, Perry L. “Resistance and Collaboration: Political Strategies within the AfroCarolinian Slave Community, 1700–1750.” Journal of African American History 93, no. 4 (fall 2008): 497–508. Leckie, Robert. From Sea to Shining Sea: From the War of 1812 to the Mexican War, the Saga of America’s Expansion. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993. Lee, Alfred. The Daily Newspaper in America. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1937. McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Monkkonen, Eric H. Murder in New York City. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Morgan, Philip D. “Conspiracy Scares.” The William and Mary Quarterly 59, no. 1 ( January 2002): 159–166.

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Morrison, Michael A. “‘New Territory versus No Territory’: The Whig Party and the Politics of Western Expansion, 1846–1848.” The Western Historical Quarterly 23, no. 1 (February 1992): 25–51. Onuf, Peter S., and Leonard J. Sadosky. Jeffersonian America. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2002. Poe, Edgar Allan. Tales of Mystery and Imagination, ed. Brentano’s Publishers. New York: J.J. Little and Ives Company, 1928. Rathbun, Lyon. “The Debate over Annexing Texas and the Emergence of Manifest Destiny.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 4, no. 3 (2001): 459–493. Ryan, Mary P. Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Sellers, Charles. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Shaw, Donald Lewis. “At the Crossroads: Change and Continuity in American Press News, 1820–1860.” Journalism History 8, no. 2 (summer 1981): 38–50. Shaw, Donald L., and John W. Slater. “In the Eye of the Beholder? Sensationalism in American Press News, 1820–1860.” Journalism History 12, nos. 3–4 (autumn 1985): 86–91. Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970/1950. Stansell, Christine. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Stevens, John D. Sensationalism and the New York Press. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Tang, Joyce. “Enslaved African Rebellions in Virginia.” Journal of Black Studies 27, no. 5 (May 1997): 598–614. Tripp, Bernell Elizabeth. “The Antebellum Press, 1820–1861.” In The Media in America: A History, ed. Wm. David Sloan. Northport, AL: Vision Press, 2008. Tucher, Andie. Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America’s First Mass Medium. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Weeks, Jeffrey. Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800, 2nd ed. London, UK: Longman Group UK Limited, 1981. Worgs, Donn C. “Beware the Frustrated: The Fantasy and Reality of African American Violent Revolt.” Journal of Black Studies 37, no. 1 (spring 2006): 20–45. Wosk, Julie. Breaking Frame: Technology and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992. Writer’s Program of California. History of San Francisco Journalism: Trends in Size, Circulation, News and Advertising in San Francisco Journalism, 1870–1938. San Francisco, CA: Works Progress Administration, 1940.

CHAPTER THREE

The Coy, the Graphic, and the Ugly: Violence in Dime Novels Pamela Bedore

A beautiful young woman shackled to a bed and graphically tortured by a hideous hag. A private detective mounted on a spit and slowly roasted over an open fire by a group of outlaws. A member of a criminal gang publicly tortured by the gang leader in an act of ritualized violence meant to keep control of other gang members. Rape referred to by rough criminals—usually two or three men and one woman—as “forced marriage.”1 American dime novels did not shy away from sensational depictions of violence within the narratives of crime and detection that formed the industry’s most profitable—and most controversial—genre. Dime novels were frequently criticized for not only portraying extreme violence, but also promoting it among the youth who were considered the main readers of these cheap books of fiction. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the censorship of these texts only made them more popular, and dime novel publishers had to deal with the rhetorical challenge of depicting the highly saleable commodity of representations of violence without raising the ire of their politically powerful censors. The result of this complex rhetorical context is a diverse set of narrative and marketing strategies that underscore tensions between convention and innovation, with some dime novels focusing on the sensational potential of violence, and especially of torture, and others depicting violence in concert with their development of the genres codified within America’s first burst of mass literature. The resulting palimpsest of representations of violence includes some gruesome murders

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that are almost entirely sanitized alongside others that are sensationalized in remarkably lurid fashion. Sexual violence is often present but tends to be relegated to offstage scenes described euphemistically, whereas other kinds of violence—including torture—are graphically presented through a variety of points of view that ask readers to identify, in different contexts, with the torturer, the spectator to torture, and the torture victim. This chapter is organized around the tensions between violence as sensation and violence as generic development. It provides information on the dime novel industry and its censorship battles in order to underpin detailed examinations of specific texts that use violence to evoke sensational responses and others that are involved in creating generic codes for three subgenres of crime fiction: the classical mystery, the hardboiled, and the police procedural.

Violence and Censorship: The Dime Novel as Contested Ideological Territory The latter half of the nineteenth century saw a new fiction industry flourish as the main genres were developed and codified within American popular fiction. The dime novel industry, dominated by four major publishing houses in New York City,2 produced about 50,000 titles in its years of prominence, 1860–1917, only to be replaced by the pulps and early film in 1917 when a change in postal rates cut into the profit margin and tolled the death knell for this medium. Dime novels, which sold for anywhere from five to twenty-five cents, were immensely popular and were contemporaneous with a major upswing in literacy for the American public.3 Culturally, the dime novels denoted and perhaps even created a shift towards the commodification of narrative as readers avidly demanded and consumed fictional works that were marked as interchangeable products through new marketing and branding practices. Critically, the dime novels were the first space to develop hundreds of examples of the conventions of major popular genres such as crime fiction, western, science fiction, adventure, and romance. Thus they contain a remarkable diversity in their depiction of almost all sociocultural concerns, including violence. Who read the dime novels? They were often sold for cash at newsstands and in railway stations, so we can’t be sure who actually consumed them. Because dime novels within a series are all the same number of pages, shorter books often include extensive advertising, and these paratextual materials suggest a fairly young target audience. Novels from The New York Detective Library, for example, are printed on newsprint and are thirty-two pages each, in double or triple columns depending on word count. Unused space is filled with advertisements for a series of “Useful and Instructive Books” that claim to be cross-generational even as they target a fairly young demographic. These focus on courtship, camaraderie,

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and career, featuring such titles as How to Become a Scientist, How to Become an Inventor, How to Dance, How to Write Love Letters, and How to Flirt (“Just out. The arts and wiles of flirtation are fully explained by this little book. Besides the various methods of handkerchief, fan, glove, parasol, window, and hat flirtations, it contains a full list of the language and sentiment of flowers, which is interesting to everybody, both young and old.”). The narratives themselves also show a tendency toward attracting young readers, with youthful characters such as boy detectives, student athletes, and teens on adventures of various kinds. And yet, as Michael Denning has shown, dime novels are in no way merely an early version of children’s or young adult literature. They were broadly read across generations and genders, and the crime narratives, like other nascent genres, feature detectives ranging in age, including Young Sleuth, the most promising youth on the police force; Nick Carter, whose 1,400+ novels show him as being anywhere from his mid-twenties to his forties; and Old King Brady, a representative of the older, wiser detective. Who wrote the dime novels? According to an account by Edward Bok in 1892, some dime novels were produced as if on an assembly line, with young women combing through the newspapers to seek interesting happenings that would form a good basis for a sensational story, more experienced readers winnowing down the stacks of ideas, female writers producing skeletons for novels, and a male editor identifying an appropriate series and assigning each story idea to an appropriate writer, at which point the (usually male) writer would produce the commodity that would be published as a dime novel. These fictional works, then, were the original “ripped from the headlines” aesthetic products. This is no surprise, as they belong to an era in which popular literature and newspapers were often equally sensational, both blurring the lines between fiction and nonfiction. Indeed, many newspaper and magazine writers also wrote for the dime novels, although most such writers were not well known in their day, in part because they often published under house names owned by publishers.4 A few dime novel writers are familiar to scholars of the period, though. Theodore Dreiser was an editor for Street & Smith, and Lydia Schurman has shown that his work on dime novels substantially influenced his writing. Such literary luminaries as Louisa May Alcott, Bret Harte, and Upton Sinclair wrote dime novels under house names. Sinclair, in fact, defended the dime novels in answering a reporter’s question when he was running for governor of California: “‘Yes, I wrote many of the Hal Maynard stories,’ he said. ‘And I wrote a lot of other stories for Street & Smith. You want to know something? I’m not ashamed of one of them. I was very young, but they were pretty good stories and they never did the boys who read them any harm’” (quoted in Reynolds 104).

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The dime novels needed defending. They were much reviled in some circles, with active campaigns condemning them based in part on their depictions of violence. The most prominent of the anti–dime-novel groups was the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, headed by Anthony Comstock (1844–1915), whose 1883 book Traps for the Young carefully lays out numerous examples of how violence within dime novels can translate into real-life criminal activity on the part of the novels’ young readers. Comstock’s argument for a direct causation between reading dime novels and committing crimes raises some of the issues that have surrounded detective fiction since its origins: The youth who reads the loathsome details as above described might almost as well pass his time in the society of criminals. He could scarcely learn more of vice if he associated with thieves, murderers, libertines, and harlots. The presence of the criminal would inspire a fear, and their coarse loud talk ungarnished by an editor’s pen would disgust and in part counteract the force of an evil example. (15)

According to this rhetoric, a young reader might be better off physically spending time in the criminal underworld than reading about it, often through a sanitizing lens. A defender of dime novels—and of detective fiction more generally— might argue that although the fictional space of this genre is peopled by Comstock’s “thieves, murderers, libertines, and harlots,” the reader is in fact spending time not with these shady characters, but with the detective who opposes them. However, the detective’s point of view did not always provide a clear moral space within dime novels, any more than it does today. As newspaper stories from the period reveal, the detective was often viewed with suspicion by a public that feared that contact with the criminal underworld could corrupt detectives.5 The blurring between criminal and detective is also evident in dime detective novels that include well-known outlaw characters not merely as powerful antagonists to the detectives, but as heroes in their own right. In fact, the New York Detective Library series was long subtitled “The Only Library Containing True Stories of the James Boys.” To show detection, then, was to show crime, and for the powerful Comstock and his army of censors, the dime novels, whether they were sanitizing or glorifying violence, were among the worst traps for the youth, whose moral fiber required constant protection. Although roundly mocked in several mid-brow magazines of the day, Comstock remained a powerful public figure for years, and under his

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watch, numerous arrests of dime novel writers and publishers were made, and publication of many dime novels was repressed.6 And Comstock, by no means a sophisticated literary critic, is quite right in noting that dime novels often exploit the narrative interest of the intersection of sexuality and crime. In showing that cheap fiction “link[s] the pure maiden with the most foul and loathsome criminal,” for example, Comstock lists twenty reprehensible storylines, including: A woman murdered by masked burglars. An attempt to force a beautiful girl to marry a scoundrel to save her benefactor. Two attempts to coerce a girl to marry against her wishes. One woman who died in New York comes to life in Italy. Two attempted assassinations. One confidence operator at work to swindle a stranger. (22–23)

A reader of dime novels might think “Hey, I read that one!” about any of these plot points. Taken together, these examples underline a key fact of the dime novels: Elements of violence against men, including male detectives, regularly reside alongside often more complex narratives of the sexual violation of women. The dime novels, then, provided a complex space for “hack” writers to explore any number of pressing social and cultural concerns of their day, including deep-seated anxieties about violence—who practiced it and how, whether and when it was justified, how it intersected with questions of gender roles, and how the newly literate population should process it narratively. By definition, dime novels were always produced and consumed as part of a series, and publishers devoted a great deal of energy to making each book in a series look the same, with recognizable format, cover art, author name, and so forth. And yet, despite the appearance of uniformity within dime novel series, the narratives inside the paper covers show tremendous diversity in how they depict and comment upon issues of violence. As we turn to an analysis of violence within specific texts, I delve into two dime novels with particularly interesting depictions of torture that demonstrate sensational writing techniques; these are, in my own reading experience, rather more graphic in their depictions of violence than most. I then turn to three dime novels that show trends in the development of crime fiction subgenres. These latter examples, all taken from the long-running New York Detective Library, are more typical of how violence is represented within this enormous textual corpus.

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Violence and Sensation: Shifting Reader Identification in Dime Novel Torture Scenes I begin my textual analysis with torture not because it is common in the dime novels, but because its presence almost always points to texts of special literary interest. Torture, of course, is the subject of much literary criticism, creating imbrications between power, identity, and epistemology. Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, sees the momentum of torture as centering on masculinity, as he suggests that “the torturer pits himself against the tortured for his ‘manhood’” (30). Frantz Fanon, equally interested in the intersections of torture and identity, explores the colonial implications of acts of torture on both torturers and witnesses to torture. Elaine Scarry, in her book-length study of the subject, characterizes torture as erasing the gap between body and language, suggesting that “[i]ntense pain is also language-destroying: as the content of one’s world disintegrates, so the content of one’s language disintegrates; as the self disintegrates, so that which would express and project the self is robbed of its source and its subject” (35). For Scarry, then, the effect of torture is to efface not only the self, but also the distinction between self and body (48–49), and, furthermore, to dissolve “the boundary between inside and outside [and] give rise to a fourth aspect of the felt experience of physical pain, an almost obscene conflation of private and public” (53). It is no surprise, considering what complex critical conversations exist around torture and its representations, that dime novels that explicitly portray torture tend to be among those most responsive to literary analysis. Let us turn to William Ward’s Jesse James’ Nemesis; or, The Pinkerton Oath (1908), which highlights the sensational nature of some dime novels. A fuller analysis of the entire novel can be found elsewhere,7 so we will focus here on the techniques it uses to create visceral sensations in readers. Jesse James’ Nemesis includes twinned torture scenes, one of an outlaw and one of a detective, both perpetrated by the most recognizable dark double available to dime novel detectives: the infamous Jesse James. The first torture scene features Doughnut Jack, a member of an outlaw gang led by Dick the Rat, who reports directly to Jesse James. Revealed to be a traitor, Jack is graphically and brutally tortured by Dick under the spectatorship of the infamous outlaw. The descriptions are remarkably lurid, and the acts of violence would presumably be shocking to most readers. Doughnut Jack is summoned to an eerily lit cave filled with eighteen other gang members holding various weapons, all caped and masked. He is ordered to undress, and when he refuses, Dick the Rat strips him naked with a knife. In a sadomasochistic display, Doughnut Jack undergoes a series of horrifying trials that include dancing on sharp knives and

The Coy, the Graphic, and the Ugly: Violence in Dime Novels 

having one piece of his flesh filleted off by each of the eighteen other men in the room. After excruciating torture that ends in death, Jack’s body is unceremoniously dumped in the river in a gunny sack. The gruesome nature of the depictions becomes particularly interesting when we consider that in this chapter the reader is positioned neither with the torturer nor the tortured, but with Jesse James, who is viewing the scene with intense glee: “The prospect of witnessing the punishment administered to his [Jesse’s] betrayer delighted the desperado whose blood-lust had been awakened by the encounter with the detectives and men of the plains” (53). Jesse has recently been so frustrated by the Pinkerton detectives who are on his trail that the torture of Doughnut Jack becomes a sort of relief to his exasperation and his “blood-lust” becomes aroused—and certainly sated—throughout the lengthy descriptions of Jesse’s consumption of the naked traitor’s pain and suffering. This scene is a clear demonstration of one of the narrative powers of detective fiction I examine elsewhere: the continual pendulum between reader contamination and containment in crime novels.8 The reader here is positioned in the extremely contaminating perspective of Jesse James, being asked to share his enjoyment of the brutal torture of a traitor who assists the detectives in their never-ending fight against crime. The contaminating potential of the scene is perhaps heightened by the sensational focus of the language, which highlights Jesse’s visceral responses as a spectator: “Accustomed to witnessing and participating in deeds of fiendish brutality as Jesse was, the sight of the awful punishment inflicted upon the traitor cooled the marrow in his bones” (61). The shiver of cold marrow is followed by Jesse’s more intellectual reaction, “Yet despite his feeling of horror, he could not but admire the cunning of the man who maintained his supremacy over his gang by acts so barbarous” (61). From “horror” to “cunning,” Jesse is revealing, with the reader sharing his point of view, the dissolution between body and intellect that Scarry identifies as the unmaking power of torture. The novel’s second scene of torture is a clear echo, even including the detail of the torturer commanding the torture victim to remove his clothing and then, upon refusal, removing it by force, with Jesse performing the unlikely feat of shooting the victim’s clothing from his body, including his underclothes. In this case, the victim is the Pinkerton detective, the main point-of-view character for the detective chapters of the novel. John Whichler is captured by the outlaws and, when he realizes that his torture and death are certain, he tries to shoot himself. He is prevented by the fastmoving Jesse James, who instead orchestrates his graphic torture for the pleasure of an onlooking crowd of outlaws. The scene is less spectacular

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than, but just as sensational as, the earlier depiction of Doughnut Jack’s trials. The reader here shares Whichler’s point of view, complete with his brief hope of escape when he hears a horse coming (the horse turns away, never seen), his desperate thoughts of leaving his wife and children without support, and his eventual hopeless understanding that “death would be reserved till the blood-crazed brutes had surfeited themselves upon his suffering” (143). Through Whichler’s eyes, the reader looks upon Jesse James, “who had become more fiend than human” (152), until he finally releases the detective into welcome death. The blurring of sensation and intellect occurs again here as the Pinkerton detectives publish the full account of Whichler’s torture and death in the newspapers so that locals, who generally support the outlaws, will help in their search for the James brothers (163). Ward’s novel is the most grisly dime novel I’ve ever read. It is not alone, though, in killing off a main detective character,9 and it acts as an extreme version of a trend seen in many dime novels: torture is used to evoke specific bodily responses in readers. This sensational technique is equally present in Shadow; or, The Mysterious Detective (1883), in which we find the less common scenario of a woman being tortured. This novel makes explicit a dynamic present in many dime novels: A “forced marriage,” the dime novel euphemism for rape, is facilitated by a female character. The use of a female torturer has the obvious benefit for publishers of appeasing censors, as it avoids an explicit rape scene, taking advantage of the Victorian notion that physical contact between women is by nature nonsexual. Shadow, in fact, uses the torture motif to create a formidable female antagonist, which means that the novel fully explores the potentials of strong female characters in all three of the main character positions of detective fiction: detective, criminal, and victim. The power of Shadow, the eponymous female detective, is fully discussed elsewhere,10 so we shall focus here on the sensational use of torture in developing the characters of Tige and Helen. Helen Dilts is a recognizable female character of the dime novel tradition: she is an unsuspecting heiress who lives as a poor but respectable young woman, engaged to be married to an upstanding young man of modest means. She is kidnapped and threatened with marriage to a detestable man; upon refusing, she is turned over to a horrid woman charged with forcing her compliance. In Shadow, the female would-be facilitator of the rape is Tige, who runs an insane asylum that houses many inmates who have gone mad only after entering the facility (“And once the person is declared insane, into a private madhouse he is inveigled, never again to see the light of day. And there he is kept until he is actually driven mad,

The Coy, the Graphic, and the Ugly: Violence in Dime Novels 

or until death steps in and releases him,” the narrator explains [17]). The depth of Tige’s villainy is introduced using all the melodramatic language of the sensation fiction of the day: Tige was a fiend. A fiend! The word has not sufficient meaning to describe what she really was. If Satan ever quits his sulphurous house to take up his residence in a particular human being, he certainly was residing then in the earthly form of the terrible woman who presided over that private mad-house, and was the arbiter of the fates of so many beings who were helpless in her vile clutches. And torture! And the sight of human agony! She loved them. (19)

The narrator seems to luxuriate in Tige’s demonic love of torture, alternating between chapters devoted to Police Captain Howard’s search for the missing girl and chapters narrating Helen’s increasingly horrific violations at Tige’s hands. Interestingly, the novel is narrated in the first person, with a preface from Police Captain Howard explaining that all he is about to recount is absolutely true and that he hopes his readers will enjoy yet another story of his life as a detective. Considering this introduction, the near glee of the narrator in describing the villainous Tige participates in the complex dual voice of the dime novel detective character, at once a protector of the populace and an ethically problematic figure. One could argue that the narrator of the Helen Dilts scenes cannot be Captain Howard, since he is not present during these episodes. However, the preface emphasizes that although an author should not usually include himself in the story he is recounting, Howard is forced to do so because of his prominent role in this and other tales. It is not uncommon for a dime novel detective hero to be depicted in a morally ambiguous way, and the narrator of Shadow’s torture chapters addresses the reader in exactly the same sensational way that Howard does in his introduction. The torture chapters briefly explore the torturer’s mind in addition to their visceral exploration of the torture victim’s body. In Helen’s first encounter with Tige, she is repeatedly jabbed with a big pin that quickly becomes covered in her blood. She shrieks that she will be quiet and docile. After Tige threatens her with further unnamed punishments if she disobeys, Helen is tied, spread-eagled, to her asylum bed. The reader is

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then addressed directly and given instructions for how to duplicate the sensations of torture : Place a pound weight on the palm of your hand, and endeavor to keep that hand extended, for, say five minutes. Can you do it? You think you can, that is if you have never tried it. Try it now. You will not be able to do it. Long before the five minutes have expired your arm will be a pathway for a succession of spasms of pain such as you have never felt before. All that you can voluntarily endure, quadrupled and more, Helen was forced to pass through because of the strained position of her arms. (64)

The reader, then, is forced into an uncomfortable identification—and one quite unfamiliar to modern readers of detective fiction, who are used to sharing the detective’s perspective—with the victim. Because the narrator sets up the reader to fail in the competition with this victim, the raising of visceral sensation renders Helen Dilts a more heroic character who can withstand an impressive amount of torture. And she does. Within the thirty-two double-spaced pages of this novel, Helen is nearly drowned in the cellar of a house, is poked with a pin, is repeatedly bound in painful positions for several hours, has all the toenails of one foot pulled out with pincers, is choked by a male attendant of the asylum, and has feathers drawn slowly over the soles of her bare feet while Tige laughs like a hyena (again with a direction to the reader to attempt to recreate Helen’s sensory experience at home—“It was agony to endure. Don’t you think so? Well, try it” [93]—followed by explicit instructions). Helen also undergoes psychological torture, being fed by a male attendant who explains that she must eat the excellent food and wine so that she will be strong enough for her torture—and that her torture will be worse if she doesn’t eat. In classical torture style, Tige combines physical violence with verbal threats to eventually send Helen into hysterics, a state completely new to this healthy young woman. Tige then removes herself, returning only when Helen is calm enough to withstand her presence. The torture itself is eventually no longer necessary: Several times each day Tige would pass suddenly into the poor girl’s presence, and no matter how composed Helen might have been a minute before, the sight of her torturer at once threw her into an excited state, at the same time inducing a fear that caused her to retreat into a corner, quivering and gasping for breath, while a cold dew that sprang from every pore would bathe her entire body. (103)

The Coy, the Graphic, and the Ugly: Violence in Dime Novels 

Helen, then, is traumatized, physically and mentally, by the time she is rescued. And yet, she does not break. In the end, she is rewarded for her bravery and mental fortitude, as she is reunited with her worthy fiancé and his kind mother, and her inheritance pulls the three of them out of poverty. She eventually has several children, one of whom is named after Police Captain Howard. Jesse James’ Nemesis and Shadow, The Mysterious Detective both deploy graphic depictions of torture in order to arouse specific physical reactions in their readers. In the former novel, the reader takes on the perspectives of the gleeful spectator to Doughnut Jack’s torture and of the torture victim who is also the main detective. In the latter, the reader experiences the torture viscerally from the victim’s position but also occasionally gets glimpses into Tige’s thought processes as she determines her best strategies in driving Helen mad. The influence of the gothic is clear here, especially in the figure of the sane young heiress’s lengthy imprisonment at the hands of a sinister asylum director. These dime novel representations of torture owe much to the sensation tradition, although they go even further in their graphic visual depictions of torture and their almost gleeful use of torture in evoking complex sensational and emotional responses in readers. These are, in my reading experience, extreme examples of sensational violence in dime novels whose presence delineates the parameters within which violence was represented within this mass of cheap fiction.

Violence and Genre: Situating Dime Novels with the Conventions of Crime Fiction In The Storytelling Animal, Jonathan Gottschall argues that fictional violence is usually presented within a clear moral framework: “Fiction almost never gives us morally neutral presentations of violence. When the villain kills, his or her violence is condemned. When the hero kills, he or she does so righteously. Fiction drives home the message that violence is acceptable only under clearly defined circumstances—to protect the good and the weak from the bad and the strong” (132). Within modern detective fiction, this is generally true, although crime fiction more generally—especially noir and hardboiled—often explicitly worries the edges of the clear moral framework. When we examine early developments of crime and detective fiction in the dime novels—the first major playground for these genres to develop recurring features—we find that the place of violence within each of the major crime fiction subgenres is already quite clear. Let us turn now to three dime novels that typify the early subgenres of detective fiction that would eventually be codified as the drawing-room mystery, sometimes known as classical or golden-age detective fiction; the hardboiled, which draws together conventions from western and adventure

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tales; and the police procedural, although police procedural dime novels are far less forensically oriented than those we see today. These subgenres are still in their infancy in the nineteenth-century dime novels, so generic categories are often blurred. For example, a novel that begins with the hallmarks of a police procedural may veer into the realm of the drawingroom mystery when a police officer goes to a country manor to find a body in a locked room and a number of likely suspects waiting to be interrogated in classical mystery style. We will look closely at three examples that demonstrate common ways that dime novels addressed issues of violence in each of the subgenres. The examples are taken from the New York Detective Library, a long-running multiple-author series. The three “authors” here discussed are popular house names that appear in numerous dime novels, including numerous issues of this series.

Drawing-Room Mystery: Secrets, Ghosts, and Offstage Violence Old King Brady’s Great Reward; or, The Haselhurst Secret (by A New York Detective, 1886) is a fairly conventional example of the drawing-room mystery that predates Sherlock Holmes’s enormous influence on the genre by almost two years (A Study in Scarlet appeared in December 1887). The Old King Brady novel includes many of the elements associated with classical detective fiction in general and Holmes in particular. Indeed, Old King Brady, like Sherlock Holmes would be, is a tall, thin detective as skilled in reading forensic evidence as he is in the art of disguise. This novel, additionally, includes many familiar elements: the locked-room murder of a wealthy middle-aged man with competing heirs; planted evidence, including a bloody dagger, a forged letter, and a distinctive button; and a supernatural element—a house ghost, in this instance—that is rationally explained in the end. The third-person narrator employs only the detective’s point of view, and questions of justice are relatively clear-cut throughout. Although the novel’s engagement with violence seems minimal, it may have been the kind of narrative Anthony Comstock and his confreres imagined corrupting the youth of America. The violence in this novel is very much in keeping with the classical mystery genre. The murder is described in terms that may attempt to sensationalize but that are actually quite sedate, as a witness says: “He had been murdered—foully murdered, stabbed through the left side in the immediate region of the heart” (3). Old King Brady’s viewing of the scene includes a description of the violated body that sanitizes the murder even further:

The Coy, the Graphic, and the Ugly: Violence in Dime Novels 

Upon the bed lay the outline figure of a large and powerful man beneath a sheet of snowy whiteness covering it from head to foot. Old King Brady turned down the sheet reverently. The well-known features of the Wall Street money king lay revealed. The body was faultlessly dressed, the hair and beard neatly arranged. (3)

The victim has been “foully” murdered only in the sense that all murder is foul. There are no graphic details of the violence necessarily connected to murder, which places the narrative momentum of the story more in its epistemological complexity (whodunit) than in any kind of sensationalized attention to gore or conflict. This may serve as an example of Comstock’s concern that the natural fear and loathing a young reader should feel toward the criminal is effaced by the sanitized corpse. The reader’s fear, instead, is directed towards two features of the Victorian sensation: the supernatural and the madwoman. Old King Brady, first as himself and later in his disguise as a very tall masculine-looking female housekeeper, stays in the red room, which the murdered man’s niece tells him is haunted. The detective’s response: “you could not have told me anything that would please me more. To sleep in a genuine haunted house has been my desire for years” (8). In classic gothic style, Brady, like the reader, is drawn from a position of rationality (“He was no believer in the supernatural” [9]) to one of doubt: “And now, for the first time in his official career, there fell upon the detective those strange creeping sensations of horror that possess most men when the dread of the supernatural is awakened within their souls” (9). Is this a detective novel or a horror novel? The gothic is further cemented as the main mode of this novel in the conclusion, which appears to draw heavily upon Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) when Old King Brady realizes that a French housemaid is acting most mysteriously. She is, it turns out, the legal wife of Hubert Hall, the dead man’s murderous nephew who has used a number of tools in making the house appear haunted. Angered by her secret husband’s flirtations with his cousin, Marie Picard attempts to stab Hubert and eventually goes mad, setting the house on fire and killing herself with poison. The most immediate violence, then, is associated not with the murder, but with the madwoman’s arson, since Old King Brady, tied to a chair, very nearly perishes in the flames, saved only by the housemaid’s severing of his bonds in time for him to make a brave and unlikely leap to a ladder that is ten feet short of the attic from which he emerges. The sanitized murder is, one could argue, depicted as a rational attempt by a greedy man to steal from his uncle, and the murderer is punished, spending the remainder of his life in prison. The more vividly depicted crime against property (arson), with

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its consequent danger to the main detective, is an irrational act associated with the death of the perpetrator. In both cases, violence is an obligatory part of the plot, providing momentum to the novel’s epistemological and gothic elements, but it is presented in exactly the understated way we often see in the drawing-room mysteries with which this dime novel shares many conventions.

The Hardboiled: Detectives, Outlaws, and a Damsel in Distress Jerry Owens among the Moonshiners; or Pinkerton’s Little Detective in Tennessee (by Robert Maynard, 1892) showcases many of the early elements of the hardboiled that were to become popular in 1920s and 1930s West Coast crime fiction. Jerry Owens is a recurring dime novel detective presumably intended to appeal to a younger demographic. As a Pinkerton operative, he would be ethically complex to a nineteenth-century audience that had suspicions about Allan Pinkerton and his army of private detectives, who routinely performed surveillance of employees, strike-breaking, and bounty hunting, as well as more traditional detective work. In this novel, Jerry is in Tennessee, trying to break up a major moonshining operation. The moonshiner acts as an ambiguous antagonist for a dime novel detective like Jerry, since the practice of making and selling alcohol without government permission was not universally considered a serious crime in the 1880s, nor in the Prohibition Era (1920–1933) when the hardboiled rose to prominence.11 The reader of this novel is thus placed in the same kind of complex ethical position as the reader of the hardboiled, at once invested in the protagonist’s success and questioning to some degree the moral framework within which he operates. Jerry Owens among the Moonshiners is structured as an episodic tale in which Jerry moves from one perilous position to another with little investigation or deduction in between. The leader of the moonshiners is Bill Tredegar, whose criminality needs to be spelled out from the start, when he is characterized as “‘not only a moonshiner, but an outlaw—a robber’” (3), the implication being that a moonshiner is not inherently a criminal. Bill, it turns out, is more than an outlaw or a robber; he is also a potential murderer, although he never actually succeeds in killing anyone in the novel. The basic plot is simple. Jerry has been tasked with breaking up a moonshiner ring and capturing Bill, its leader. In the course of his pursuits, Jerry is himself captured multiple times. Bill’s beautiful daughter, May, helps Jerry escape an early capture, raising such ire in her father that he orders her execution. Assisted by Jerry and the

The Coy, the Graphic, and the Ugly: Violence in Dime Novels 

reformed moonshiner, Bob Warner, May eventually escapes the mountain. In the end, she learns that Bill is not her biological father, and she is reunited with her long-lost mother, who helps her celebrate her marriage to Bob. Bill dies after confessing all, and Jerry Owens enjoys a typical dime novel detective ending: “Jerry Owens is still living, still on the force, and still known as Pinkerton’s Little Detective who broke up the moonshiners on Old Baldy” (31). To find instances of violence in this dime novel, the reader need only flip to the end of each chapter, as most end on perilous cliffhangers. For example, Jerry hears an intruder breaking into his room at the inn at the end of chapter 1; ends chapter 2 tied to a chair, awaiting execution by the moonshiners; and enters a seemingly deserted whiskey still in chapter 3 only to find a half-dozen desperate criminals awaiting him with revolvers cocked—and so on. In keeping with the adventure genre, Jerry Owens among the Moonshiners includes eleven gun battles, mostly between Jerry and the moonshiners, but some only overheard as the moonshiners also battle each other and a deputy marshal with whom Jerry has an uneasy alliance. Furthermore, Jerry undergoes a number of often absurd trials: He is attacked by a powerful bloodhound; he tumbles over a precipice; a moonshiner falls into the crevice where he is hiding; he narrowly escapes an avalanche; he falls through the floor while eavesdropping, landing directly in front of Bill Tredegar; and he is nearly consumed by a forest fire. Throughout this episodic tale of danger and adventure, Jerry is repeatedly shown to be a worthy hero, his antagonist depicted as more cowardly and less effective. Jerry has the opportunity to kill Bill Tredegar when the outlaw falls, unconscious, into Jerry’s hiding place. Jerry proves himself to be morally superior to the moonshiner when he cocks his revolver and goes to Bill’s supine form: “‘No, I won’t,’ said Jerry, rising. ‘It would be a coward’s act. It would be murder and nothing less’” (17). The novel is rife with instances of violence, and Jerry’s general approach to detection, like that of many hardboiled heroes, is to get involved in physical altercations and see what happens, all while saving the damsel in distress. In the end, Jerry remains a stalwart champion in a complicated moral landscape, concluding that Bob Warner, moonshiner, is worthy of release, while Bill can be captured but not shot in an unfair fight. The femme fatale is still a few years away, but the episodic violence and the reliance upon hand-to-hand combat and gunfights presages the violence of hardboiled crime fiction that is being codified within dime novels in the late nineteenth century.

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The Police Detective and the Forced Marriage: Race, Gender, and Violence in Phebe Paullin’s Fate Phebe Paullin is little more than a symbol in the novel that bears her name. Phebe Paullin’s Fate (by Police Captain Howard, 1884) tells the story of Young Sleuth, a famous New York City detective who appears in numerous dime novels, and his relentless pursuit of a ruffian, Big Bill, his mulatta wife Miriam, and his mulatto stepson Soft Sam. The novel opens with Young Sleuth just back to New York from his successful pursuit of a forger into the West. He has a few days of leisure, and decides to devote them to investigating a famous case surely familiar to the reader: the brutal murder and probable rape of Phebe Paullin, described as “a most prepossessing girl of not quite seventeen. She was no prude, but a healthy, mirth-loving mountain girl, yet no breath of slander had ever touched her fair name, and all who knew her regarded her with affection and respect” (2). The narrative’s momentum quickly turns away from Phebe, however, as Young Sleuth happens to spot a shadowy scene in which a young woman is placed in a coffin. As a result, he investigates the case of Grace Lucas, an heiress who has been kidnapped and whose evil cousin is attempting to force her into marriage. After numerous adventures that highlight Young Sleuth’s physical and mental prowess, the detective finally rescues Grace, with the help of a visiting Pinkerton operative, and returns her to safety. Phebe Paullin, in the meantime, is not entirely forgotten. The last few paragraphs of the novel are devoted to Young Sleuth’s frustration that he is unable to solve this case as he is being sent to the West once more, where an important case awaits his expertise. The novel ends on a different version of the standard summary of the detective’s solution of a case: “Still he has not yet relinquished the idea of further investigating the Jersey tragedy, and should nothing new have been discovered by then, perhaps when he has brought the case on which he is now engaged to a successful termination, the mystery of Phebe Paullin’s Fate may be solved, and her assassins Tracked by Young Sleuth” (28). Why this odd frame? It previews twentieth-century developments in the police procedural in revealing that police work is not made up of fascinating episodic adventures, but rather of various ongoing investigations that include physical threats as well as moral ones, as when Young Sleuth meets with a career criminal named Blister Bill, “as big a villain as ever went unhung,” for information. The police, we are told, allow Bill’s criminal activity to go virtually unchecked because he is willing to inform on other criminals (12). The frame of this novel also introduces the sexual element to the murder of young women that is often hinted at in the dime novels, but displaces

The Coy, the Graphic, and the Ugly: Violence in Dime Novels 

the actual rape of a female body onto a lower-class woman who appears in the novel only briefly as a corpse tossed alongside a road, in contrast to Grace Lucas, an heiress who is initially placed in a coffin but is in fact only unconscious and ends up being a powerful female character whose virtue remains unscathed. Grace is kidnapped by ruffians in her cousin’s employ and threatened with forced marriage. The rape threat is overtly sanitized when the kidnapper’s lawyer meets the heiress’s fiancé and the two sign a contract for a ransom payment, a contract on which the lawyer (of course) immediately reneges. The threat of sexual violence to Grace, issued directly by her male relative and indirectly by a female mulatto in his employ, is never carried out. Young Sleuth saves Grace’s virtue and her life—since she has decided she will kill herself when she knows her lover is safe—in a dramatic interruption of the wedding that involves gunfire and the ruffian choosing to end his own life with poison rather than submit to arrest. The kidnapped heiress plot includes far more threats of violence than actual depictions of violence, as Grace Lucas undergoes none of the torture and abuse of Helen Dilts from the 1883 novel, Shadow, also written under the house name of Police Captain Howard. The entwined plot of Young Sleuth’s investigation, though, does depict several physical altercations, mostly between the detective and two criminals: Big Bill, his main suspect in the kidnapping of Phebe Paullin, and Soft Sam, Bill’s dimwitted mulatto stepson. Young Sleuth exchanges a few shots and blows, but remains morally uncontaminated in this novel: Grace Lucas’s evil cousin ends up killing Bill and Sam. Our examination of violence in Phebe Paullin’s Fate highlights the still uncodified nature of the police procedural in 1884. Several chapters are devoted to the victim’s plight, not a convention of the police procedural, and Young Sleuth undergoes a series of episodic brushes with death that include a gothic adventure in which he ends up in a dungeon and must dig his way out with a human bone (21). Fundamentally, though, the depictions of violence and of detective work are typical of the police procedural in its nascent form. Young Sleuth responds to physical attacks with less than deadly force, thus preserving his moral superiority. The ongoing violence in the novel—as in this subgenre—is presented as a part of the detective’s dangerous but exciting life rather than as a threat to his moral fiber (as in the hardboiled) or as part of an intellectual exercise (as in the classical mystery). Like many police detectives, Young Sleuth must manage several simultaneous criminal investigations, he gets assistance from other detectives as needed, and he is deployed on a higher-profile case before he can conclude his investigation of Phebe Paullin’s murder. This

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rather conventional dime novel, then, showcases several formulas of the police procedural, including its nuanced depiction of violence.

Conclusions Against the backdrop of public debate and controversy about the threat embodied in dime novels, publishers of these early mass-produced books were faced with the rhetorical challenge of presenting their products as wholesome entertainment at the same time as they tried to take advantage of the notion that violence sells. They often did this by including tag lines on dime novel covers about family entertainment or suitability for young boys alongside clear statements about the interchangeability of the product. Inside, though, we find a high degree of variety in how violence and violation are depicted. Many dime novels within the genre of crime fiction provide stark portrayals of gunfights and brawls, using clear, descriptive language in narrating criminals and detectives alike shooting at each other and/ or engaging in hand-to-hand combat, sometimes to the death. Depictions of torture—whether of a captured detective, a kidnapped heiress, or a wayward criminal—are often viscerally rendered, sometimes even going to the second person and inviting the reader to imagine the torture alongside the victim, the torturer, or a spectator. The dime novels, then, use the techniques of sensational writing at the same time as they develop the major subgenres of crime fiction. Scenes of violence abound in these texts, and they include many of the images and scenarios central to crime fiction to follow: the sanitized corpse that serves only as the impetus for investigation (in the classical mystery tradition), the brutally tortured—but not sexually violated—body of the female kidnap victim who stands at once for the virgin and the seductress (a trope of the hardboiled), and the police detective who can negotiate the violence of the criminal underworld with the instincts of a lawbreaker but who usually manages to avoid actually killing anyone (as in the police procedural). Any study of the dime novels leads back to a central observation: The matching covers of these serial books obscure an enormous diversity of representations of all manner of sociopolitical issues, including violence.

Suggestions for Further Reading The dime novels provide a wealth of narratives fascinating to scholars of popular culture and American literature alike. The first order of business for anyone interested in this huge corpus is to find and read some dime novels. A few are available in scholarly editions and are well worth a read;

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I would especially recommend J. Randolph Cox’s Dashing Diamond Dick and Other Dime Novels for a sampling of texts across genres, Marlena Bremseth’s Who Was Guilty? for two dime novels written by African Americans, and the collection Old Sleuth’s Freaky Female Detectives (edited and introduced by Garyn Roberts, Gary Hoppenstand, and Ray Browne) for several stories featuring female dime novel detectives. Many other dime novels are now available online in full text, with Stanford and Villanova at the forefront of this digitization effort. The most comprehensive guide in providing scholars with basic information about the various characters and series is J. Randolph Cox’s impressive The Dime Novel Companion: A Source Book. The scholarship on dime novels is surprisingly sparse. A single journal is devoted to the study of these texts: The Dime Novel Round-Up, a bimonthly publication containing scholarly articles, book reviews, and news for collectors. Fascinating early monographs include Edmund Pearson’s Dime Novels; or, Following an Old Trail in Popular Literature (1929) and Quentin Reynolds’ The Fiction Factory: or, From Pulp Row to Quality Street (1955), both of which provide useful histories of the dime novel industry. More recently, Lydia Schurman and Deidre Johnson provide a detailed look at the material conditions of production of dime novels and other cheap American literature in Scorned Literature (2002). The most theoretically complex examination of dime novels is surely found in Michael Denning’s acclaimed Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (1987), which argues that dime novels form a contested terrain of extreme ideological importance in understanding nineteenth-century literature and history. Hopefully my own recent monograph, Dime Novels and the Roots of American Detective Fiction (2013), also adds depth to our ongoing understanding of dime novels. Monographs that devote an excellent chapter or two to dime novels include Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950) and Richard Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (1992), both crucial texts for any scholar of nineteenth-century America. These monographs, along with a small set of excellent journal articles, provide a solid basis for scholars entering the highly under-studied area of American dime novels.

Notes 1.  These examples are taken from real dime novels. The tortured girl is from Police Captain Howard’s Shadow, The Mysterious Detective (1883), the detective on a spit is from D. W. Stevens’s The James Boys and Pinkerton (1890), the ritualized violence for gang control is from William Ward’s Jesse James’ Nemesis (1908), and the “forced marriage” plot appears in too many dime novels to name, though a few

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interesting examples include Police Captain Howard’s The Broken Button (1883), Allan Arnold’s A Diamond Ear-ring (1888), and Police Captain Howard’s Old Bullion, The Banker Detective (1888). Given the enormous number of dime novels and their often repetitive nature, we can imagine that many similar plots can be found in other series or in other novels in the same series.  2.  These were Beadle and Adams, Frank Tousey, The Munro Brothers, and the Street & Smith Company.  3.  Although the term was originally a brand name (as in Beadle’s Dime Novels, which ran from 1860-74), “dime novel” was used in the nineteenth century to refer to any cheap publication appearing in serial form, as it still is in the scholarship today. For finer distinctions between dime novels and other popular forms, see the introduction of Cox’s The Dime Novel Companion: A Source Book.  4.  Several writers might contribute novels under a single house name; for example, thirty-seven writers contributed to the 1,465 Nick Carter detective novels published in the dime novels under the house name “Nicholas Carter” (Cox, “Nick Carter Stories” 132).  5.  See, for example, any number of articles in the New York Times, including “The Morality of our Detective Police System” (April 8, 1866), “Our Special Spies: The Private Detective System and Its Abuses” (May 19, 1869), “Detection of Detectives” (November 11, 1873), and “Bungling Policemen” ( July 16, 1875).  6.  According to Robert Bremner, editor of the 1967 reprint of Traps for the Young, Comstock was responsible for the arrest of more than 3,600 people, starting in 1872 (xi).  7.  See Bedore, “Constructions of Readerly Pleasure in Detective-Outlaw Dime Novels” and Dime Novels and the Roots of American Detective Fiction, especially 108–114.  8.  This is a central argument of Dime Novels and the Roots of American Detective Fiction.  9.  For more on detective characters who die in the New York Detective Library, see chapter 2 of Dime Novels and the Roots of Detective Fiction. 10.  See Bedore, Dime Novels and the Roots of American Detective Fiction, especially 51–58. 11.  Detective Davis; or, The Moonshiner’s Terror, an 1888 novel in The New York Detective Library series, overtly questions the ethics of making moonshine illegal, going so far as to have moonshiners murder the title detective at novel’s end, a crime that ultimately remains unsolved. For a detailed reading of this fascinating novel, see Bedore, 70–75.

Bibliography Primary Sources Arnold, Allan. A Diamond Ear-ring; or, Nina the Female Detective. New York Detective Library 1.298. New York: F. Tousey, 1888.

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Howard, Police Captain. The Broken Button. New York Detective Library 1.8, New York: F. Tousey, 1883. Howard, Police Captain. Old Bullion, The Banker Detective. New York Detective Library 1.317. New York: F. Tousey, 1888. Howard, Police Captain. Phebe Paullin’s Fate; or, Tracked by Young Sleuth. New York Detective Library 1.77. New York: F. Tousey, 1884. Howard, Police Captain. Shadow, The Mysterious Detective. New York Detective Library 1.70. New York: F. Tousey, 1883. Maynard, Robert. Jerry Owens among the Moonshiners; or, Pinkerton’s Little Detective in Tennessee. New York Detective Library 1.477. New York: F. Tousey, 1892. New York Detective, A. Old King Brady’s Great Reward; or, The Haselhurst Secret. New York Detective Library. 1.162. New York: F. Tousey, 1886. Stevens, D. W. The James Boys and Pinkerton; or, Frank and Jesse as Detectives. New York: F. Tousey. The New York Detective Library 396, 1890. U.S. Detective, A. Detective Davis; or, The Moonshiners’ Terror. New York Detective Library 1.305. New York: F. Tousey, 1888. Ward, William. Jesse James’ Nemesis; or, The Pinkerton Oath. Adventure Series 15. Cleveland: A. Westbrook, 1908. Secondary Sources Bedore, Pamela. “Constructions of Readerly Pleasure in Detective-Outlaw Dime Novels; Or, the Awful Atonement of Doughnut Jack.” Dime Novel Round-Up 77, no. 2 (2008): 40–46. Bedore, Pamela. Dime Novels and the Roots of American Detective Fiction. New York: Palgrave, 2013. Bok, Edward. “Literary Factories,” Publisher’s Weekly 42 (1892): 231. Bremner, Robert. “Introduction.” In Traps for the Young, ed. Anthony Comstock. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967. Bremseth, Marlena. Who Was Guilty: Two Dime Novels by Philip S. Warne and Howard W. Macy. Norfolk, VA: Crippen & Landru, 2005. Comstock, Anthony. Traps for the Young. Ed. Robert Bremner. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967/1883. Cox, J. Randolph. The Dime Novel Companion: A Source Book. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Cox, J. Randolph. “The Nick Carter Stories.” In Mystery and Suspense Writers: The Literature of Crime, Detective, and Espionage, ed. Robin W. Winks and Maureen Corrigan, 2 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1998. Cox, J. Randolph, ed. Dashing Diamond Dick and Other Classic Dime Novels. New York: Penguin, 2007. Denning, Michael. Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America. London, UK: Verso, 1987. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

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Pearson, Edmund. Dime Novels; or, Following an Old Trail in Popular Literature. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company, 1929. Reynolds, Quentin. The Fiction Factory: or, From Pulp Row to Quality Street. New York: Random House, 1955. Roberts, Garyn G., Gary Hoppenstand, and Ray B. Browne. Old Sleuth’s Freaky Female Detectives. Bowling Green, KY: Bowling Green University Press, 1990. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Introduction.” In The Question, ed. Henri Alleg. New York: George Braziller, 1958, Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: Making and Unmaking the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Schurman, Lydia Cushman, and Deidre Johnson. Scorned Literature: Essays on the History and Criticism of Popular Mass-Produced Fiction in America. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002. Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Atheneum, 1992. Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950.

CHAPTER FOUR

“She Decided to Kill Her Husband”: Housewives in Contemporary American Fictions of Crime Charlotte Beyer

Examining Housewife Violence This essay examines representations of violence in contemporary American women’s writing by using selected examples to focus on the figure of the housewife as murderer and perpetrator of violence in the domestic sphere.1 In exploring this topic, I investigate the portrayal of housewives, violence, and gender, demonstrating how, rather than being cast as victims of crime or domestic violence, these stories explore what happens when the housewife character is the protagonist and perpetrator of violence. My discussion also looks at suburban settings and the American values they represent, and how violent housewife figures are used to problematize these. The quotation used in the title of my chapter, “she decided to kill her husband,” is taken from Nevada Barr’s crime short story “GDMFSOB.” This phrase implicitly addresses wider issues involved in representing transgression in the private and public spheres by interrogating the gender–political dimensions of crime and justice. These texts offer contradictions and ambiguities, drawing attention to language and representation and thereby challenging one-dimensional mainstream cultural depictions of gender. My thinking about the topic for this chapter was influenced, among other things, by the 2006 book Deadly Housewives. This collection

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of short stories by contemporary women crime writers treats the topic of violence through the lens of housewife characters. The theme reflects a wider preoccupation in American popular culture with the housewife and the suburban landscape she inhabits. As Sharp points out: “The image of the conflicted housewife and troubled domestic sphere appears at a time when ideas about housewifery and family are being questioned and even transformed.”2 The chapter develops these ideas further in a study of representations of violence and transgression, employing the housewife figure as a prism for this convergence of issues of desire, excess, secrecy, and self-expression. The narratives to be considered in this essay examine two central dimensions of the representation of housewives and violence in contemporary American culture—namely, comedy and the confessional. These dimensions are central to the portrayal of housewife characters and violence in popular American culture. I argue that these modes self-consciously expose the cultural ambivalence inherent in stereotyped constructions of housewives, femininity, and violence but also indicate the possibility of disrupting those stereotypes.

Locating Violent Housewives As we shall see, portrayals of housewives and violence in contemporary American culture pose a number of important gender-political and representational questions. These debates are timely, according to Sharp, who states that recent years have witnessed a revival of interest in and fascination with the housewife and domestic drama.3 Furthermore, new literary and popular fiction subgenres have emerged that are centered on housewife characters and their existence, variously reproducing or questioning stereotyped images and assumptions. These texts are based primarily around domestic settings, suburban environments, featuring prominent female characters and a range of activities, settings, and tropes conventionally associated with housewives and domesticity. Additionally, however, these texts frequently feature elements of suspense, crime, and violence, and it is this element that plays a central role in questioning or destabilizing constructions of the housewife figure and her surroundings. My discussion of the housewife figure and violence is embedded within a wider contemporary American cultural context of critical and creative preoccupation with and fascination for the housewife figure. Betty Friedan described the powerful and seductive nature of this idea: “Millions of women lived their lives in the image of those pretty pictures of the American suburban housewife.”4 The preoccupation with the American

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housewife has been evident ever since Friedan’s groundbreaking analysis of “the feminine mystique,” and the figure has been reimagined in popular culture numerous times, from the novel and film adaptations of The Stepford Wives5 to television series such as Desperate Housewives and domestic reality show The Real Housewives of Orange County. These representations problematize the tendency to dismiss the housewife as bored and boring, consumed by trivia and minutiae (Thiersch), but also lacking in stimulation and therefore vulnerable to mental illness or depression (Friedan). According to Jurca, the portrayal of the housewife in The Stepford Wives “suggests that the only contented housewife is a robotic housewife, and the only contented husband and children, the ones who live with the robot.”6 This phenomenon invites an assessment of the persistent appeal of the 1950s housewife myth and the stereotypes surrounding it. Leonard Cassuto comments on this myth: The 1950s stereotype of a housewife who brims with both mother-love and romantic attraction to her husband conflated two separate myths that existed in different times in American history: the mid-nineteenth-century maternal ideal that underwrites sentimentalism; and the 1920s vision of the romantic, sexually receptive wife. The postwar housewife and mother thus embodies not one but two demanding domestic ideals.7

Further describing the suburban American housewife, Friedan states: She was the dream image of young American women and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world. The American housewife—freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth and the illnesses of her grandmother. She was healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned only about her husband, her children, her home. She had found true feminine fulfilment.8

Such expectations of women have been critiqued in recent popular cultural depictions of housewives, as evident in the fiction hereafter discussed. Friedan describes the American housewife as a “dream image,” a woman who has achieved “true feminine fulfilment.” However, the texts to be discussed in this chapter explore the hidden dimensions of the housewife and expose the dark underside of that shiny dream image. Levison reflects on those negative dimensions, describing stereotyped perceptions of the post–World War II American housewife as consumed by housework and childcare, at best having only part-time careers, or falling into “idleness,”9 concluding, “It is this group that has become the butt of the cartoonists

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and of critical social commentators.”10 In their article on the postwar housewife and melodrama, Johnson and Lloyd reflect on the depiction of conventional housewife existence: Her daily life [was] characterised as being about repetition rather than progress; her association with cleaning, child-rearing, and dreary routines of shopping made her a worker who produced no product; and her spatial confinement to the home placed her crucially outside the urban and public world of mass culture and the dynamics of spectacular changes and developments in modernity.11

Portraying the housewife as a figure of violence and instability perpetrating acts of brutality poses particular challenges for writers because of the passivity and compliance associated with this figure. A number of literary texts by contemporary women writers have focused on this troubling dimension of the housewife figure, indicating its enduring appeal in American popular culture and its potential to trouble and expose the hidden and silenced aspects of domesticity and femininity. The stories by Barr and Oates discussed here dispute “true feminine fulfilment” for housewives, depicting instead the anguish and the hidden and forbidden impulses of aggression and rebelliousness that motivate their actions.12 Examining the use of the suburban settings so often associated with the American housewife forms a central part of my exploration of violence.13 The housewife figure is closely associated with suburban landscapes and the conservative values signified by these locations or settings. Recent critical discussions of the suburbs have focused on the housewife as a representation of conformity in gender, racial, and sexual terms and how current portrayals of housewives and suburbia challenge notions of conformity, or “the myths and stereotypes that have arisen around suburban culture.”14 Webster elaborates on predominant perceptions of suburbia as “a surface where the mundane and monotony prevail, consumerism and commodification determine lifestyles and time and space are reduced to the garden or television screen.”15 I argue that these literary depictions of symbolic and real violence enacted by transgressing housewives can be seen as manifestations of the fault lines in that dream of “American perfectibility.”16 The pressure to conform and the attending manifestations of violence reflect the contrast between the idealized dream of what Gill terms “American perfectibility,” and the actuality of a conflicted contemporary American society with a troubled legacy of internal confrontations and contradictions. In Barr’s and Oates’s fictions, the suburbs become the locus for the interrogation of these contradictions. Neroni says:

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Our simultaneous condemnation of and fascination with the violent woman stems from this disruptive position that she occupies. On the one hand, we want to preserve our society against the threat of the violent woman, but, on the other hand, her threat excites us because it involves overturning the ideological structures (most especially those involving gender) that regulate our experiences.17

This is exactly the contradiction on which the stories I discuss also turn. In fact, suburban settings exacerbate this dimension, according to Webster: “The superficial myth of homogeneity can mask a range of tendencies from the discordant and bizarre to the comic and tragic, as repeated portrayals of suburban life have stressed.”18 As Lloyd and Johnson argue, in melodramatic representations of violent housewives,19 there is often a “focus on transgressive content.”20 The texts referred to in this chapter self-consciously highlight their own intertextual relationship to these and other representations of American housewives, such as those seen in confessional writing by writers such as Sylvia Plath who explored “their families as the primary object of an autobiographical study,”21 thereby “examining gender roles, particularly in the context of families.”22,23 Violent housewives challenge and threaten to destabilize conventional American values typified by suburban environments through strategies such as rebellion and subterfuge that allow the female characters to appear inconspicuous and operate “under cover.” The suburban settings are central to this camouflage and to the stability of domestic space. The suburban domestic space suggests a private shelter in which the housewife’s “secret” or violent self can be acted out. Even though the stereotypical image of the housewife has its roots in postwar ideological representations, the figure continues to compel. As we have seen, in relation to critical investigations of housewife representations in popular American television shows and other media, it is apparent that the housewife figure continues to embody and present certain enduring issues and questions that are complicated and not readily resolved. The housewife stereotype is instantly recognizable, but despite that familiarity, in Barr and Oates, the figure is open to destabilization, revision, and subversion. They explore how the housewife has come to embody the social and cultural suppression of female anger and violence which her character represents. Additionally, they focus on the process and activity of writing and use this focus to explore female violence and agency and their articulation within American popular culture. Thus their narratives foreground the complex meanings of the violent housewife in American popular culture.

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Comedy Violence This part of my discussion concerns itself with investigating uses of comedy and fantasy in portraying the violent housewife figure. The short story that forms the focus for my inquiry is “GDMFSOB,” by Nevada Barr (2006). This text is part of the anthology Deadly Housewives, which explores the theme of housewife characters and their use of violence. My examination of portrayals of the housewife and violence focuses on the use of comedy violence sugarcoating the dark undercurrent in the text.24 Comedy is central to the subversive dimension of women’s writing and portrayals of violence, Maggie Andrews argues:25 “Comedy has potentially a unique ability to be political in that it operates so frequently by transgressing boundaries.”26 The preface to Deadly Housewives, “Dear Christine,” contains satirical takes on a staple feature of women’s magazines, the “problems page” or agony aunt feature. It features fictional letters to an agony aunt (of the same name as the book’s editor) relating a variety of problems faced by housewives, and the answers and suggestions proposed. This provides a conceptual link between popular representations of housewives seeking help from agony aunts and magazine advice pages, and the assumption that the problems for which they seek help and advice are of a trivial nature. Comedy serves as a strategy for questioning those assumptions and for laughing at the oppressors’ expense. In “GDMFSOB,” comedy serves as the conduit through which violence infiltrates the story and its characters. Narrated in the third person, “GDMFSOB” generates a degree of distance between the reader and narrator which the use of fantasy violence underlines. In “GDMFSOB,” the female protagonist Jeannie has had enough of being married to Rich, her lazy Internet porn–obsessed neglectful husband. Although they have no children, she feels unable to divorce her husband for legal and financial reasons;27 however, her dependency on him clearly reaches beyond that, leaving her disoriented and confronting a mixture of emotions. At the story’s opening, Jeannie has impulsively purchased a notebook, in which she goes on to obsessively record her thoughts at great speed, only to then censor those same thoughts and destroy the pages she has just written. She continues writing in secret, using the notebook as a coping strategy. Jeannie is driven to write down her violent thoughts and fantasies throughout the day. She depicts how the activity of writing starts to infiltrate her home space and the kitchen. To begin with, a local cafe provides a neutral space in which she can write safely, away from her domestic suburban setting and conventional self. Gradually the writing takes over this other dimension of her life and interferes with her cooking of meals for her husband

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Rich each night. The kitchen setting is central to conventional perceptions of housewives and their activities, and the incompatibility of the notebook and the writings in it with her housewifely cooking activities have startling consequences. Rather than destroy the pages she has written by other means, she feeds them to her husband in his dinner, thus giving him constipation, which finally kills him. These depictions pose interesting questions in relation to the housewife figure and violence, domestic space, writing, and voice. Further intertextual references made within the story to familiar popular crime texts, such as The Man in the Iron Mask and The Silence of the Lambs,28 establish a narrative connection between violence, orality, and female agency. Jeannie’s character engenders more nuanced definitions of the term “housewife,” because although cast as a housewife character, she also works in a self-employed capacity as an artist. This would initially appear to contradict or create tension with traditional conceptions of the housewife as “[a] married woman whose main occupation is caring for her family, managing household affairs, and doing housework.”29 However, as Nathanson also notes,30 we increasingly see representations of housewife characters with “sideline” projects or employment in addition to their traditional role in the home. In the reality television series Real Housewives of Orange County, several female characters in the “housewife” cast pursue projects or employment.31 “GDMFSOB” and other recent texts thus acknowledge twenty-first-century developments and expectations for women, where references to careers and professional aspirations are seen as part of feminine identity, yet still the term “housewife” remains deeply loaded. This suggests that the definition of “housewife” is changing and that the term’s essence is related more to the perceived triviality of outlook and “problems” than employment status.32 However, the persistence of the term and stereotype also underlines the power it holds in the popular imagination. In Barr’s story, the symbolic links to the traditional housewife role are established through the suburban setting and invested in the division of domains within the home along stereotypical gender lines. These divisions between the garage as a male domain and the kitchen as a female domain are echoed in computer and Internet access as a male sphere and the notebook and writing/creativity as a female sphere. These divisions reinforce the perceptions of relative significance or insignificance associated with those domains and activities, such as cooking or tinkering with the motorbike. The division, or perhaps fragmentation, of the marital suburban home reflects Jurca’s assertion that contemporary American fiction marks “the systematic erosion of the suburban house as a privileged site of emotional connection and stability.”33 On the contrary, in Barr’s story,

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the home and its various interior domains serve as constant reminders of the profound emotional disconnection of the characters living within it. Despite these twenty-first-century shifts, the locations and activities are indicative of the continued symbolic and cultural investment in the traditional construction of the housewife character as an embodiment of compliant domesticated femininity. Jeannie uses her subversive humor to resist patriarchal attempts to impose silence and submission on her as a housewife. Gina Barecca quotes Nancy Walker’s book A Very Serious Thing and her comments on how “women’s political and domestic humour has always been an effective challenge to long-held and oppressive ideas.”34,35 Walker argues, according to Barecca, that “what appears to be submission to the stereotypes of mother, housewife, or bimbo is often a thinly veiled indictment of the society that trivializes a woman’s life.”36 Barecca concludes that comedy for women can provide a means of solidarity and a common bond.37 The use of the housewife figure and motifs of domesticity and violence have gained popularity, resulting in the emergence of new literary subgenres. Recent works of fiction, such as Jill Churchill’s 1989 Grime and Punishment: A Jane Jeffry Mystery, and Jonnie Jacobs’s 1994 Murder among Neighbors, can be seen as examples of this emerging popular trend within crime fiction depicting domestic settings and motifs centered on a housewife character. Another example of the comedic hard-boiled approach38 to narrating the housewife and violence can be seen in Beth McMullen’s figure Sally Sin (also known as Lucy Parks Hamilton), the narrator and protagonist of her 2011 novel Original Sin. Here the main female character is described as a “wife. Mother. Retired spy,”39 mixing the suspense of the thriller plot with comic episodes and her reminiscences from domestic life and her experiences as a new mother. A further example from crime fiction can be seen in Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series. Her 1994 novel One for the Money was the first in the series, successfully using comedy violence to explore the gap between the conventional domestic housewife role represented by the maternal generation and the thrill-seeking and determinedly single daughter negotiating her own existence.40 Such portrayals of women breaking away from housewife entrapment using subversive humor and violence have been commercially successful because they negotiate the balancing act between nonconformity and mainstream expectations. Barr’s short story differs from both McMullen and Evanovich in that protagonist Jeannie is the murderer and perpetrator of criminal violence, rather than the spy or detective or law enforcement agent. Nevertheless, comedy constitutes the discursive and structural link between the domestic realm of the housewife and violent transgression.

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Language and the act of writing are central themes in “GDMFSOB.” The title of the story is inscribed within the opening page of the text and turns out to be an abbreviated form of a new word Jeannie has created, “Goddamn­ motherfuckingsonofabitch.”41 This emphasis on linguistic playfulness and subversive implicit violence is highlighted throughout the text and is central to its function. The rebellion and anger that the term “GDMFSOB” reflects are unacceptable and thus must be veiled in a suggestive code that makes sense only to the narrator. The concealment of aggression behind a code mirrors the housewife’s employment of a cover of compliant femininity and suburban existence as a hiding place for an unacceptable self.42 The phrase “GDMFSOB” is one of the forbidden thoughts that the protagonist Jeannie is writing down in her newly acquired notebook. The story centers on the therapeutic aspects of the activity of Jeannie’s writing and her articulation of rage against the “pomposity”43 and lazy self-regard of her husband Rich. Along with the expletive, Jeannie also writes down her plans to get away from Rich, “a dedicated philandering deadbeat pornographer.”44 In her writing, Jeannie charts the various ways in which people can die, ranging from poisoning and motorcycle crash to death by “boredom.”45 When Jeannie revises her own text from “divorce” to “Kill Rich,” she initially panics and literally eats her own words as she stuffs the taboo-laden writing paper into her mouth and washes it down with wine at a café. As “GDMFSOB” continues, Jeannie’s writing changes direction from her despair and list-format scribbling to a more extended exploratory trance-like writing of her murderous thoughts: “Words flew across the tiny cramped pages.”46 Jeannie’s first fantasy narrative of Rich’s murder involves him riding his motorbike down the freeway, only to have a deadly accident as a truck speeds towards him. This is the cutoff point of Jeannie’s narrative, so we never actually see her fantasy narrative fulfilled: Rich interrupts her flow of thought and writing. When threatened with the discovery of her transgressive narrative, she transforms the pages into food, this time running the paper through the food processor and adding it to Rich’s pasta bake.47 As her murderous plans take shape, the coded phrase GDMFSOB becomes Jeannie’s “shorthand” or code word for her husband within the narrative. Jeannie’s housewifely duty of preparing food is subverted into a means of ridding herself of the evidence of her writing and the rebellious thoughts it contains. Equally, her fantasy of poisoning Rich with botulism plays with the idea of challenging and subverting gender-coded domestic responsibilities. The conventional outlet of housewifely creativity, cooking and food, is thus repurposed. A delicious piece of salmon is transformed into a deadly delight in Jeannie’s reveries.48 As the days go by and Jeannie frantically scribbles, only to dump her incriminating fantasies into the

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food processor as she cooks for Rich, he survives every attempt she makes at taking his life through her cooking with a resounding “happy tummy.”49 Finally worn down, Jeannie decides to take an overdose, only to discover that despite all her ingenious attempts at murdering her husband, in the end it is the act of literally eating her words that kills him. As the coroner tells Jeannie that her Rich succumbed to an “impacted bowel,”50 brought on by stuffing himself on her food (and her writing), “GDMFSOB” foregrounds the role of words and language in shaping and destabilizing reality. As a character Jeannie resists the reader’s sympathy and identification, an aspect on which Schechter comments: “I had problems with some of the plots. . . . It’s hard to respect someone who marries a selfish whiny amoral slug—sorry but it is. And stays married to him. And it’s a bit tough to believe that divorce isn’t an option in some situations.”51 However, I argue that Barr creates a story in which the focus is not on the reader’s emotional identification with the character, but rather on language and the activity of writing, which in turn gives attention to the articulation of women’s violent and transgressive fantasies and to the function of comedy. Barr’s approach is not unproblematic, as the comedy runs the risk of compromising or undoing the subversive potential of the figure. But “GDMFSOB” also differs from television shows such as Desperate Housewives that tend to “confirm dominant cultural beliefs about traditional gender roles as they ridicule housewives for their perfectionism and ambivalence about motherhood and domesticity.”52 Barr’s “GDMFSOB” does not rely on realist representation but on comedy moments and fantasy violence to subvert the idea of marriage—though the problems it depicts are realist enough: despair, addiction, suicidal thoughts, entrapment, and violent fantasies. Barr’s story foregrounds the taboo of female violence by examining the narrative shift from Jeannie’s self-destructive act of swallowing the pages she has written to directing those energies against her husband, who in turns ingests her words, which literally kill him. The subversive use of language and comedy in “GDMFSOB” thus threatens conventional representations of compliant femininity and the submissive housewife. The code “GDMFSOB” and the subversive meanings it conceals also provides the key to reading Barr’s text, not dismissing it as “shrill” or “annoying,”53 but reading the over-the-top tone and style as part of the code masking the violence within the text.

“True Crime” and Confessional Discourses Having examined the use of comedy in Barr’s narrative, I now want to focus on the use of “true crime” motifs and the housewife as perpetrator

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of violence. This section discusses Joyce Carol Oates’s short story “Dear Husband,” the title story from her 2009 collection of stories, which captures essential dimensions of representing violence and the housewife in American writing. As manifestations of trauma and mental anguish replace fantasy or comedy violence, so, too, the nature of my enquiry changes. “Dear Husband” explores the tension between female agency and violence and interrogates the assumptions critiqued by Maggie Andrews: “women’s identity and pleasure being gained from their success in looking after the physical and emotional welfare of their family.”54 Oates uses narrative strategy to expose and interrogate these expectations through an epistolary mode emphasizing the confessional dimensions of storytelling.55 “Dear Husband” is written in the form of a letter from the protagonist, Lauri Lynn, to her husband after her murder of their five young children. In the letter she attempts to explain her motivations for murdering them, her intent to take her own life, and also her depression. Lauri Lynn’s anxieties revolve around feelings of inadequacy that she is unable to live up to the expectations of a good mother, wife, and Christian: “For it was my failure as a wife and the mother of your children that is my true crime.”56 In its use of the epistolary mode, “Dear Husband” facilitates, in Palmer’s words, an “exploration of personal consciousness and intense preoccupation with niceties or moral conduct.”57 Oates’s narrator problematizes constructions of gender and American identity, exposing the cracks in the idealized housewife veneer perpetuated by popular cultural representations of feminine conformity. On the surface, Lauri Lynn appears to present the ideal American housewife—devout, dutiful, family-oriented. However, the story challenges these values by revealing a murkier, more complex reality of repression and fear. Benfey argues that in its treatment of violence, Oates’s story illustrates the point that “American family life, especially of the upscale white suburban variety, is no protection against the horrors that lurk a block, a click, a letter, a phone call away.”58 It is this dark underside of suburban idyll and heterosexual marriage that is central in “Dear Husband.” Thus, alongside child murder, Oates’s story also hints at domestic violence59 and questions the marginalization of both crimes within mainstream popular culture and crime fiction. However, rather than describing these crimes and the violent acts committed in detail, the text foregrounds the concealment necessary to sustain the illusion of the happy marriage. Oates’s narrative interrogates patriarchal power embodied by the husband and, as an extension of that power, God as the ultimate authority. “Dear Husband” establishes its connection with American popular culture through allusions to “true crime” and the employment of a confessional discourse: “I am confessing this crime only to you, dear husband

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for it is you I have wronged.”60 As James Patrick notes, Oates’s narrative is based on a real-life tragedy: “in “Dear Husband” . . . Oates has retold the story of Andrea Yates, a Christian fundamentalist housewife who drowned her children because she feared that she was an unfit mother, and that their souls were in peril because of her.”61 Reflecting on the ethical dimensions of criminal justice and the case of Andrea Yates, Jocelyn Pollock explains that In a deep depression after the birth of her last child, she came to believe that she was a terrible mother and that some great harm would come to them if she didn’t commit them to God’s care. . . . [I]s it possible to imagine that a mother who, by all accounts, was a loving mother when she wasn’t suffering from depression or psychosis, could commit such a horrible act rationally?62

The confessional mode used in the story is central to both the story’s affective power as well as the reader’s response. These matters are especially pertinent in questions of maternal crime and infanticide or violence against children.63 Although the story doesn’t dwell in a gratuitous way on the individual murders and violent acts, it provides sufficient vivid detail in its description to distress the reader. Commenting on the confessional mode and its tactics, Gill states: “Confession [is] a ritualized technique for producing truth.”64 Through its use of an unreliable and emotionally fraught narrative voice, “Dear Husband” challenges the idea of “truth” in confessional discourses. Oates employs the confessional first-person mode to draw attention to the issue of hearing women’s voices and perspectives—and taking them seriously—in American popular culture. By engaging with true crime, “Dear Husband” draws attention to the blurred boundaries between fiction and reality, and the problems of representation. Like many other contemporary short stories, Oates’s narrative employs a hybrid form which echoes different genres. “Dear Husband” draws on elements of “true crime” in its exploration of the first person narrative voice and the confessional, but it also reflects dimensions of literary fiction. Oates’s employment of this hybrid mode thus allows her to complicate the narrative and its portrayals. As critics have pointed out, Oates has drawn on true crime or reallife events and characters in other works: ““Dear Husband” is yet another companion to Oates’s novels  Blonde  and  My Sister, My Love, channeling the story of child-murdering mother Andrea Yates into a fulsome autobiographical letter.”65 Jay McDonald further adds the 1992 text Black Water as an example of Oates’s creative engagement with true crime.66 Another

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recent crime text inspired by true crime67 and involving a housewife character is Megan Abbott’s novel 2009 Bury Me Deep, set in the 1930s.68,69 Thus, by engaging with the representation of female violence in American popular culture though the prism of true crime, “Dear Husband” reflects American popular culture’s preoccupation with femininity and transgression in the housewife figure. “Dear Husband” foregrounds the housewife and her concealed inner self. Lauri Lynn’s letter tells of self-sacrificing femininity lived out in an attempt at feminine perfection and fulfilment: “All of my life here in Meridian City has been our family, dear husband.”70 This effacement of the self and the pressure for perfection felt by Lauri Lynn both add to her feelings of failure. The very things in her life that she has been taught mean the most—namely, her husband, family, and her home—are destroyed through her desperate and self-destructive actions. As James Patrick states: Oates creates an astounding portrait of a woman who is pushed to the edge by her husband, her pastor, her children and herself. . . . Oates masterfully employs all of these emotions so that we feel an almost uncomfortable sympathy for this woman who has lost control.71

Lauri Lynn’s plaintive cry at her husband that he “will not abandon [her] in [her] hour of need”72 foregrounds the religious overtones of her discourse and the blurring of the boundaries between divine and patriarchal authority it reflects. Jo Gill’s reading of American suburbia can be related to “Dear Husband,” as Gill argues that this setting also represents: all kinds of other aspirations—to satisfying and well-paid work, to material prosperity, to companionate marriage, to the raising of well-adjusted children, to a meaningful civic life, and to full participation in a thriving consumer economy. A great deal—perhaps too much—was invested in these tightly entwined ideals.73

Lauri Lynn refers to this symbolic investment in the respectability of suburban dwelling by contrasting those values with her own house and the infamy it conceals: “of all the ‘Colonials’ in New Meridian Estates, you would not believe that this is the house of shame.”74 Lauri Lynn’s actions turn the suburban ideal into its antithesis. In contrast to the well-functioning social arrangements described by Gill, Oates’s text reveals that “[h]ousewifery, motherhood and domesticity can be exhausting, empty and unfulfilling.”75 The symbolic and real violence enacted by transgressing housewives is a manifestation of the fault lines of that dream

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of “American perfectibility”76 between the constructed vision and the stark actuality of American existence. Alienated by the dominant discourse of perfection-driven and successobsessed America, Lauri Lynn in “Dear Husband” regards her husband’s engagement with the world of professional work and the public sphere as “a foreign language”77 from which she is excluded. In contrast, her own language and expression remains unheard and disregarded until her final desperate acts of violence and the confessional letter that verbalizes the thoughts and reasoning behind her deeds. Lauri Lynn’s letter explains her struggles to cope with the children and to maintain a tidy house,78 her destructive fantasies and suicidal dreams of crashing the car with the children in it. These unarticulated visions of extreme violence emerge as manifestations of the collapse of her sense of self. This collapse is exacerbated by the lack of sisterhood and shared female bonds. Her motherin-law appears overly critical and unsympathetic, making snide remarks: “Can’t you control these children, Lauri Lynn?”79 The story posits a stereotypical (and conventional) conflict between the two women over housewifely accomplishment. The mother-in-law is reported as a faultless model housewife80 who sits in judgment of her struggling daughter-in-law. This ambivalent relationship of female competition between mother-in-law and narrator suggests that women in patriarchy are taught to regard one another with suspicion as rivals.81 The story uses the idea of perfection to draw attention to the hidden shame and taboo disallowed by suburban perfection. When Lauri Lynn refers to something shameful hidden beneath the cellar steps, a psychoanalytic association to the unconscious seems an obvious allusion. In the end, rather than harboring some unspeakable horror, the reader is presented with the pathetic revelation that the shameful thing hidden was a burned saucepan that could not be cleaned. However, the shame is exacerbated because the expensive pan was a gift from her mother-in-law. This echoes Sharp’s point that domestic reality television shows thrive on “humiliat[ing] housewives and others with the exposure of bad housekeeping.”82 Lauri Lynn is adamant in her refusal to be reduced to one of those “TV women”83 and the “tabloid hell”84 they inhabit, who tell all about their private lives and problems and confess their secrets to strangers. Paradoxically, however, her letter to her “dear husband” provides an opportunity for confessional discourse in a situation of personal breakdown. Sharp explains how in the television show Desperate Housewives breakdowns and personal crises provide an opportunity for sisterhood and the sharing of experiences.85 However, in “Dear Husband,” this dimension is absent from the narrator’s life, leaving her feeling alone and isolated,

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judged by her family and community and considered a failure as a housewife and mother. Lauri Lynn’s feelings of marginalization are symptomatic of a maleoriented culture that denigrates and belittles women. She describes the “scorn of the male,”86 which she sees as a response to her maternal body and identity. The hidden shameful aspects of the self extend to her marriage as she reveals that her husband has been abusive toward her.87 This point is highlighted by Benfey: “Dear Husband,” her attempt (reminiscent of Eudora Welty’s “Where Is the Voice Coming From?”) to get inside the head of Andrea Yates, who killed her children in a much-publicized case in Texas. The narrator’s ramblings are a predictable mishmash, evidence of battered wife syndrome and bornagain lunacy.88

However, though Benfey’s reading of “Dear Husband” and its narrator appears somewhat dismissive, I found the story’s attempt to articulate a silenced and neglected woman’s perspective compelling. As in Nevada Barr’s “GDMFSOB,” the exaggerated tone employed in the text is intended to make the reader feel discomfort, in part because of the aggression it conceals. Lauri Lynn insists on an elevation of patriarchal authority and control to check and impose boundaries on the violent part of her identity. The mother’s act of killing her children is described in catharsis-like terms: “In Heaven, the children will be at peace. They will no longer be dirty, and squabbling, but they will perfect,”89 suggesting the act is rationalized both in terms of divine will and healing, but also as a manifestation of the mother’s hidden and forbidden aggression towards her children and their perceived imperfections. Lauri Lynn asks for her husband’s forgiveness, but—paradoxically, as Gill notes—“[m]odern confessional writing’s acute awareness of the volatility of its (necessary) audience generates a profound scepticism about the likelihood of forgiveness or reintegration.”90 In treating real-life crime, Oates’s story critically examines those aspects of American society and culture underpinning the norms and values that structure perceptions of “housewife,” “home,” and “Americanness.” In a recent interview, Jean Murley said of “true crime”: Trivialized because it is popular, true crime has been marginalized as “trash” because of its subject matter, that of tabloid-worthy subjects and topics. But it does serious and important cultural work, and even in its worst, most sensationalistic iterations, true crime is always asking “why?”91

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We have seen how texts featuring housewives as agents of violence may challenge social and cultural norms of femininity and American identity by making us ask “why.” As violence seeps through the cracks in these texts—cracks facilitated by the over-the-top tone of their discursive strategies—those fault lines allow us to reassess normative understandings of the housewife figure. By connecting with a “true crime” story that has been widely debated in popular culture and academic contexts and that foregrounds some of the most problematic aspects of female violence, Oates articulates a critique of popular representations of housewife figures, the family, religious faith, and maternal affect.

Conclusion: Violent American Housewives This essay has explored counter-representations to the stereotype of the vacuous, bored, and passive housewives of American popular imagination by examining their violence and agency. As we have seen, the works of fiction discussed here challenge how the housewife has conventionally been understood but also remain reluctant to relinquish the stereotype. Barr and Oates have used contrasting literary strategies to foreground the gap between the fictional linguistic constructions of violence and housewives and the reality of housewife existence. As these texts reflect, the housewife image is pervasive in contemporary American popular culture. However, as Andrews points out, this image is constructed through an idealized notion of white, middle-class domesticated femininity: Many women felt themselves marginalised from the discourse of this model, either by class, race, region, sexuality, family structure, work or other factors. However, this model of the ideal housewife pervaded the consciousness of all women, in that they interacted with it, or internalised it and judged themselves by it, whilst also struggling against and re-negotiating such an image.92

The problematic mismatch between the image and reality of the housewife identity and existence is highlighted through the focus on the hidden and silenced aspects in the stories discussed here. Commenting on this in their assessment of portrayals of housewives in contemporary American popular culture, Olsen and Morgan use Desperate Housewives as an example. Here, “five ‘housewives’ (two are divorced) attempt to deal with hidden issues and circumstances behind the seemingly idyllic life in affluent suburbia on ‘Wisteria Lane.’”93 As we have seen, those hidden issues and circumstances involve violence and other complex emotions and acts deemed taboo in the idealized

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image of the American housewife. In Barr’s “GDMFSOB,” the quest for housewifely perfection at first appears to be easily achieved for Jeannie, through compliant behavior, adhering to the gendered “zones” within the suburban home, and the regular production of satisfying meals from the well-equipped kitchen. This arrangement furthermore allows for Jeannie to indulge in the “hobby” of creating valuable sculptures and a degree of artistic fulfilment, an important dimension that reflects other twenty-firstcentury reimaginings of the traditional housewife figure to include issues of employment and careers. However, her work is trivialized by her husband and her compliance exploited. For Jeannie, comedic subversion and fantasy violence become an escape, but also a way of articulating her anger. In contrast, for Oates’s narrator Lauri Lynn in “Dear Husband,” perfecting the housewife role seems unachievable. She perceives this as entirely her fault, although implicitly—and the reader sees this—her surroundings are equally responsible for her depression and lack of self-assertion. Lauri Lynn is a victim of domestic abuse,94 and her extreme actions are a kind of self-destruction to “protect” her children from harm and realize a new self without children. That the endings of both these short stories differ from the conventional closure expected from traditional fictions of crime further highlights the mismatch between ideal and reality foregrounded by the housewife motif. Both “GDMFSOB” and “Dear Husband” highlight the problems of identifying femininity with reproduction and/or domesticity in accordance with social and cultural expectations. Barr and Oates present their violence as an inevitable response of self-preservation and rage. These individual responses are intrinsically linked to a collective experience of oppression in the domestic sphere, as Sharp notes: “These representations of the housewife are particularly notable in the way they offer a feminine perspective on the domestic sphere and the contradictions of lived female experience.”95 Sharp suggests that second-wave feminism endeavored to get women out of their restricted domestic existence.96 I have shown that these contemporary texts have “return[ed] women to the home”97 in order to foreground and magnify the unresolved and enduring problems in that domain, related to gender, domesticity, and violence within American popular culture. We have also seen how the texts draw on American popular traditions, such as comedy, fantasy violence, and “true crime,” to articulate violent thoughts and actions otherwise considered taboo in the housewife. Barr’s and Oates’s stories examine and challenge the violence inherent in gender roles and stereotyped constructions of the housewife. Their narratives foreground the limited or restricted means of resistance and rebellion available to women who are defined and circumscribed by those roles

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and stereotypes. However, the literary language and discursive modes employed in these two narratives point to the cracks in those gender constructions through which resistance may be formulated. The recent emergence of crime fiction subgenres and television shows centered on housewife figures foregrounds the fascination with and cultural discomfort around feminine domesticity. The anti-heroine character of the housewife, and her engagement with and enactment of violence, offer the opportunity to reimagine gender and domesticity in American popular culture. Her violent attacks on the pillars of traditional America—patriarchal authority, heterosexual marriage, and the nuclear family—fundamentally shake our assumptions about gender and identity.

Notes   1.  The quote in the title of my chapter is taken from Nevada Barr’s “GDMFSOB,” 31  2. Sharp, 486.  3. Sharp, 482.  4. Friedan, 102.  5. Jurca, 167.  6. Jurca, 167.  7. Cassuto, 106.  8. Friedan, 102.  9. Levison, 302. 10.  Levison, 303. 11.  Johnson and Lloyd, 10. 12.  This point is echoed in Neroni, 160. Neroni’s discussion here revolves around a specific film, The Long Kiss Goodnight, but the point she makes is also valuable to my discussion of literary texts. 13.  Peach argues that “American writers have used crime fiction to reconfigure suburbia and to highlight its contradictions and paradoxes” (109). 14.  Webster, 1. 15.  Webster, 2. 16.  Gill, 319. 17.  Neroni, x. 18.  Webster, 2. 19.  Although their reference point is the postwar period and Hollywood film depictions of the housewife, I suggest that this dimension of transgression remains central in twenty-first-century texts. 20.  Johnson and Lloyd, 11. 21.  Rangno, 44. 22.  Rangno, 44–45.

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23.  Interestingly, Plath is also cited in the Introduction to Deadly Housewives, ix. 24.  Robinson also discusses the use of comedy and violence (71). 25.  Although Andrews refers mainly to British comedy, she also makes reference to the American TV show “Roseanne” (50). 26.  Andrews, 51. 27.  The legal complications are discussed in Barr, 30. 28.  Barr, 33. 29.  Oxford Dictionaries. 30.  Nathanson, 4. 31.  Deery discusses the employment of one of the show’s characters in relation to cosmetic surgery (164). 32.  This point is supported by Johnson and Lloyd, who comment on the postwar shift “from housewifery as a form of work, to housewifery as identity. While one can stop doing housework, the identity of the housewife is harder to cast off” (22). Though they are referring to an earlier historical point than the texts I discuss, in my view their point remains highly valid to the issues explored—in Barr especially. 33.  Jurca, 4. 34.  Barecca, 185. 35.  Walker, n.p. 36.  Barecca, 185. 37.  Barecca, 186. 38.  Robinson also discusses the feature of “hardboiled screwball” (60). 39. McMullen. 40.  Robinson, 59, 65, 68, 71. 41.  Barr, 29. 42.  See also Peach: “the idea of the split self is a recurring trope in suburban crime fiction” (118). 43.  Barr, 30. 44.  Barr, 32. 45.  Barr, 32. 46.  Barr, 33. 47.  Barr, 34. 48.  Barr, 35. 49.  Barr, 35. 50.  Barr, 37. 51. Schechter. 52.  Sharp, 482. 53. Schechter. 54.  Andrews, 55. 55.  Confession is also discussed as part of an investigation of the American housewife figure in “Desperate Housewives”; see Gillis and Waters. 56.  Oates, 316.

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57.  Palmer, 53. 58. Benfey. 59.  Lauri Lynn, in remembering her husband’s anger, reflects: “Never would you strike a woman. My jaw still hurts, but it’s a good hurt. A waking-up hurt” (320). 60.  Oates, 316. 61. Patrick. 62.  Pollock, 131. 63.  See Beyer for a discussion of this topic and its mediatization. 64.  Gill 2006, 4. 65. Kirkus. 66.  Jay McDonald. 67.  Abbott, author website. 68.  Abbott, cover blurb. 69.  Powell, 17. 70.  Oates, 317. 71.  James Patrick. 72.  Oates, 316. 73.  Gill 2013, 51. 74.  Oates, 319. 75.  Sharp, 482. 76.  Gill 2013, 319. 77.  Oates, 317. 78.  Oates, 319. 79.  Oates, 318. 80.  Oates, 319. 81.  Palmer, 155. 82.  Sharp, 481. 83.  Oates, 324. 84. McDonald. 85.  Sharp, 481. 86.  Oates, 322. 87.  Oates, 320. 88. Benfey. 89.  Oates, 325. 90.  Gill, “Introduction,” 7. 91. Murley. 92.  Andrews, 55. 93.  Olsen and Morgan, 330. 94.  See my earlier discussion of this in note 54. 95.  Sharp, 481. 96.  Sharp, 483. 97.  Sharp, 483.

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Bibliography Abbott, Megan. Bury Me Deep. London, UK: Pocket Books, 2009. Andrews, Maggie. “Butterflies and Caustic Asides: Housewives, Comedy and the Feminist Movement.” In Because I Tell a Joke or Two: Comedy, Politics and Social Difference, ed. Stephen Wagg, 50–64. London, UK: Routledge, 1998. Barr, Nevada. “GDMFSOB.” In Deadly Housewives, ed. Christine Matthews, 29–37. New York: Harper Collins, 2006. Barreca, Gina. They Used to Call Me Snow White . . . but I Drifted. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2013/1991. Benfey, Christopher. “Hard-Knock Lives.” In The New York Times Sunday Book Review. April 3, 2009. www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/books/review/Benfey-t .html?_r=2&. Beyer, Charlotte. “Mediatization and Mothers Accused of Murder in Sophie Hannah’s Crime Novel A Room Swept White (2010).” Northern Lights: Film and Media Studies Yearbook 9 (2011): 79–94. Cassuto, Leonard. Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Churchill, Jill. Grime and Punishment: A Jane Jeffry Mystery. New York: Avon Books, 1989. Deery, June. Consuming Reality:  The Commercialization of Factual Entertainment. New York: Palgrave, 2012. Desperate Housewives. TV series, 2004–2012. Evanovich, Janet. One For the Money. London, UK: Penguin Books, 1994. Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. London, UK: Penguin, 2010/1963. Gallagher, Leigh. The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving. New York: Penguin, 2013. Gill, Jo. The Poetics of the American Suburbs. London, UK: Palgrave, 2013. Gill, Jo. “Introduction.” In Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays, ed. Jo Gill, 1–10. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2006. Gillis, Stacy, and Waters, Melanie. “Mother, Home and Heaven: Nostalgia, Confession and Motherhood in Desperate Housewives.” In Reading “Desperate Housewives”: Beyond the White Picket Fence, ed. Janet McCabe and Kim Akiss, 190–205. London, UK: I.B. Tauris, 2006. Jacobs, Jonnie. Murder among Neighbors. New York: Kensington Books, 1994. Jurca, Catherine. White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. “Dear Husband, Stories by Joyce Carol Oates.” Kirkus Review. May 20, 2010. https:// www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/joyce-carol-oates/dear-husband/. Levin, Ira. The Stepford Wives. New York: Random House, 1972. Levison, Frances. “American Woman’s Dilemma.” In Images of Women in American Popular Culture, ed. Angela G. Dorenkamp, John F. McClymer, Mary M. Moynihan, Arlene C. Vadum, 300–303. London, UK: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1995/1985. Originally published in Life, June 16, 1947: 101.

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Lloyd, Justine, and Johnson, Lesley. “The Three Faces of Eve: The Post-war Housewife, Melodrama, and Home.” Feminist Media Studies 3, iss. 1 (2003): 7–25. Matthews, Christine. “Introduction: Dear Christine.” In Deadly Housewives, ed. Christine Matthews, vii–x. New York: Harper Collins, 2006. McDonald, Jay. “Joyce Carol Oates: Joyce Carol Oates Takes Readers through Tabloid Hell.” July 2008. http://bookpage.com/interviews/8462-joyce-carol -oates#.VAOmb8VdXTo. McMullen, Beth. 2011. Original Sin: A Sally Sin Adventure. New York: Hyperion. Megan Abbott. 2014. http://www.meganabbott.com/bury.html. Murley, Jean. “Jean Murley Interviewed by David McWilliam.” Twisted Tales, May 31, 2014. http://twistedtalesevents.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/jean-murley-interviewed -by-david_31.html#. Nathanson, Elizabeth. Television and Postfeminist Housekeeping: No Time for Mother. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2012. Neroni, Hilary. 2012. Violent Woman: Femininity, Narrative, and Violence in Contemporary American Cinema. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Oates, Joyce Carol. “Dear Husband.” In Dear Husband: Stories, Joyce Carol Oates, 316–326. New York: Harper Collins, 2009. Oates, Joyce Carol. Blonde. New York: Echo Press, 1999. Oates, Joyce Carol. My Sister, My Love. London, UK: Fourth Estate, 2008. Olsen, Richard K., and Julie W. Morgan. “Desperate for Redemption? Desperate Housewives  as Redemptive Media.” The Journal of Popular Culture 43,  iss. 2 (2010): 330–347. Oxford Dictionaries. 2014. www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/house wife. Palmer, Paulina. Contemporary Women’s Fiction: Narrative Practice and Feminist Theory. London, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989. Patrick, James. “‘Dear Husband’ by Joyce Carol Oates.” Common Sense 2: A Journal of Progressive Thought, August 2009. http://commonsense2.com/2009/08/ book-reviews/dear-husband-by-joyce-carol-oates/. Peach, Linden. “An Incident in the Neighbourhood: Crime, Contemporary Fiction and Suburbia.” In Expanding Suburbia: Reviewing Suburban Narratives, ed. Roger Webster, 109–125. New York: Berghahn Books, 2000. Pollock, Jocelyn M. Ethical Dilemmas and Decisions in Criminal Justice. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Cengage Learning, 2007. Powell, Diana. “Megan Abbott.” In 100 American Crime Writers, ed. Steven Powell, 16–17. London, UK: Palgrave, 2012. Rangno, Erik V. R. Contemporary American Literature, 1945–Present. New York: DWJ Books, 2006. Real Housewives of Orange County. Television reality series. 2006–. Robinson, Caroline. 2012. “Hard-Boiled Screwball: Genre and Gender in the Crime Fiction of Janet Evanovich.” In Cross-Cultural Connections in Crime Fictions, ed. Vivien Miller and Helen Oakley, 59–75. London, UK: Palgrave.

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Schechter, Andi. “Review: Deadly Housewives.” Reviewing the Evidence, May 2006. www.reviewingtheevidence.com/review.html?id=5873. Sharp, Sharon. “Disciplining the Housewife in Desperate Housewives and Domestic Reality Television.” In Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Critical Reader, ed. Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez, 481–486. London, UK: Sage, 2011. Originally published in Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, Reading “Desperate Housewives”: Beyond the White Picket Fence, 119–128. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006. The Stepford Wives. 1975. Film, directed by Bryan Forbes. Columbia Pictures. Thiersch, Antje. The Reality B(ey)ond: Triviality and Profundity in the Novels of Joan Barfoot. Cambridge, MA: Galda und Wilch, 2002. Webster Roger. “Introduction: Suburbia Inside Out.” In Expanding Suburbia: Reviewing Suburban Narratives, ed. Roger Webster, 1–13. New York: Berghahn Books, 2000.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Hard-Boiled Detectives and the Roman Noir Tradition Rachel Franks

Dangerous dames, good guys, and murderous men dominate the many short stories and novels that detail the cases of hard-boiled detectives. The characters of these works are, traditionally, superimposed on environments that focus on the ugly underbelly of a place: one in which bootlegging, bribery, corruption, embezzlement, graft, intimidation, racketeering, theft—and, of course, murder—bubble and fester just below the surfaces of neat towns and sparkling metropolises. At the center of each hard-boiled case is the detective, who is often presented as an idealized figure, a knight of romance relocated onto “mean streets”:1 a man who, though not without his flaws, “is not himself mean”2 but is rather a “secular form of the divinely sanctioned knight errant on a quest for metaphysical justice.”3 Roman noir stories take on similar subject matters in similar settings yet, in sharp contrast to the hard-boiled conventions, these stories routinely fail to provide a hero. As Otto Penzler has explained: “Look, noir is about losers. The characters in these existential, nihilistic tales are doomed.”4 Perhaps the most distinctive feature of these two types of crime fiction is not who these people are—if they are good men in bad situations or bad men doing bad things—or the problems they face but what they say and how they say it. Indeed, the vocabulary of hard-boiled heroes and roman noir losers serves to reflect, as well as to reinforce, a national narrative of violence and “the belief that America is the natural milieu for murder.”5

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The clipped, sharp dialogue that drives the short stories and full-length novels of writers including Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler is full of “rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.”6 Similarly, the works of James M. Cain reveal, often in staccato lines, how crime fiction can occupy “an uneasy space between the academy and the street corner,”7 demonstrating that both of these popular forms of crime fiction present “grimly realistic depictions of crime and urban life.”8 The most important difference between these two subgenres is that readers want the chain-smoking, heavy drinking, hardboiled detective to win, or at least come as close to winning as his world will allow; for the men and women of the roman noir we know, even before we begin reading, how their story will end, and we do not really care. Many words have already been dedicated to describing and unpacking these subgenres of crime fiction, yet an examination of the hard-boiled and the roman noir cannot be overlooked in any survey of violence in American popular culture. This chapter focuses on the more violent components of the works of hard-boiled writers Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler in addition to looking at the works of James M. Cain who, writing roman noir, completes a triumvirate that changed the face of crime fiction in America and around the world. In particular, this chapter demonstrates how violence is gendered, glamorized, and normalized in such works, thus not only re-imagining violence for a new generation of readers, but also entrenching such violence within the crime fiction canon.

The Emergence of the Hard-Boiled and Roman Noir It is often assumed that the hard-boiled and roman noir traditions arose fully formed like a phoenix from the ashes of the Great War and an America that was grappling with the changes in legislation—at federal and local levels—referred to collectively as Prohibition. The period from the early 1920s to the early 1930s witnessed a radical surge of lawlessness of an unprecedented scale and scope: from the establishment of homebased distilleries to the corruption of public officials and the widespread activities of organized crime that saw gangsters take “control of cities with coercion and violence.”9 Various law enforcement authorities had faced a systematic rise in violent crime across the United States from the 1840s. Crime-fighting agencies were well funded and well resourced, in comparison to other countries, but were unable to control violent crime as it continued to escalate into the late 1930s.10 It could be argued that the hard-boiled and noir narratives of the early twentieth century were merely the result of writers responding to various

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social changes. That the arrival of two subgenres of crime fiction, with such violent content, coincided so neatly with one of the more violent periods of American history certainly supports this view. This argument is further bolstered by the accepted convention that crime fiction “follows rather than parallels social reality”11 and that these novels reflect, rather than construct, our attitudes to a vast array of social issues including crime, gender, and violence. Such an argument, however, does not take into account the many American innovations to the crime fiction genre that predated the 1920s, including the literary inventions of Edgar Allan Poe; the work of those who produced frontier fiction; the men who dominated, in many genres, the dime novel era; and those who established the pulp magazines and entrenched crime fiction in popular culture. All of these efforts served, in some way, as prototypes for the hard-boiled and roman noir stories that would dominate the crime fiction scene in America in the years that followed the end of World War I. So, in much the same way that British authors of crime fiction owe a debt to their predecessors, including those who produced Newgate Novels and sensation stories, American crime fiction writers owe much to the authors who went before them. Edgar Allan Poe re-imagined and ultimately re-invented crime ­fiction. Born in Boston in 1809, he would die just four decades later, in mysterious circumstances, in Baltimore. A gifted writer, Poe produced many newspaper articles and pieces of literary criticism and wrote beautiful poetry, elegant essays, and stunning crime fiction. Poe’s contributions to what is today the world’s most popular genre were so important that in her essay for The Omnibus of Crime Dorothy L. Sayers wrote that of his crime writing corpus there were five stories—“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842), “The Gold Bug” (1843), “The ­Purloined Letter” (1844) and “Thou Art the Man” (1844)—“in which the general principles of the detective-story were laid down for ever.”12 Superimposed upon literary devices that would go on to define the modern crime novel were representations of violence and viciousness. There was, for example, the notion “to offer violence to its own nature—to do wrong for the wrong’s sake only,”13 as well as the description of corpses, including those that were still “quite warm” and that, upon examination, were found mutilated “no doubt occasioned by the violence with which [they] had been thrust up and disengaged.”14 Poe articulated these ideas— violence for the sake of violence and the torn bodies that result from violent acts—in a new, almost clinical, way that would become commonplace in the work of the writers who f­ollowed him.

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To make an obvious point, violence in America was not confined to the world of storytelling. With this said, although lawlessness and violence were easily identified they were not, perhaps, as pervasive as we might assume. Thomas J. DiLorenzo cites research that asserts “American violence today reflects our frontier heritage”15 but rejects this finding, suggesting that it has merely been assumed “that violence was pervasive.”16 The reality, DiLorenzo argues, was quite different, and “actual history concludes that the civil society of the American West in the nineteenth century was not very violent”17 noting that the Western frontier “was a far more civilized, more peaceful and safer place than American society today.”18 Yet the assumption of a violent West demanded that this image be reproduced in Western fiction. For fiction based on the frontier, from as early as the 1830s, was required to meet two essential criteria: “conventional expectations of the particular genres and forms in which Westerns are produced, and the popular cultural demand for imitative “authenticity,” or faithfulness to the “real West.”19 For many writers, and their readers, that demanded a certain level of violence. The bulk of frontier fiction is easily recognized within what would become known as the dime novel with many Western titles filling the catalogs of these mass-produced works. A cursory examination reveals the genealogical link between the Western and the world of the hard-boiled and noir, as James D. Hart notes: Dime novels of shootings in the Wild West had led to the subject of banditry, and tales of frontier lawlessness in turn led to ones about the more sophisticated crimes of Broadway and the Bowery . . . and the dime novel plunged into a world of detectives and card sharps, of opium dens and abductions.”20

And murder. It is important to note that dime novels also presented opportunities for women writers. Included in these ranks was Metta Fuller Victor. The well-connected Victor was “married to the editor of the powerful dime novel publishing house, Beadle and Adams”21 and, though often writing under a pseudonym, Victor wrote dozens of novels in several genres, also producing a number of titles under her own name. In exploring these novels through the lens of popular culture, one of the most significant aspects of these works is, perhaps, a reversal of the argument cited above. That is, instead of crime fiction that “follows rather than parallels social reality,”22 this type of fiction actually not only reflects

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but also reinforces sociological trends, including violence. The argument that violent fiction, films, and video games encourage violent acts in the real world is common today. This line of thought was also explored as early as the late 1800s: In April 1875, well-known Boston publisher and editor, James Ticknor Fields, visited a Boston jail cell where a fifteen-year-old boy was waiting to learn whether he would be executed or spend the rest of his life in the state penitentiary.23

The young boy’s name was Jesse Pomeroy: the torturer of seven small children and the murderer of two others. As a nation struggled for answers, the young killer accounted for the violence by saying he just “had to do it.”24 Clearly these four words would always be considered an insufficient justification. Various explanations were offered for the string of premeditated, violent, and seemingly unprovoked acts, including one rationale that was of great interest to Fields—that the boy had been “incited to violence by his reading of dime novels.”25 Joel Shrock has concluded that Pomeroy, with his “alleged insatiable appetite for dime novels” and his “unhealthy connection with Indians . . . and their use of torture,”26 fulfills anxieties about social issues “bred by cheap literature”27 but that “[i]t is rather unlikely that dime novels or sensational literature actually caused any of these problems.”28 Out of the successes, and the controversies, of cheap novels on cheap paper came the pulp magazines, which first appeared in the late 1890s and were published up until the 1950s. It was within these slim volumes that the specific styles of the hard-boiled and the noir were born. Many of the more famous novels belonging to these subgenres of crime fiction were, in fact, originally serialized or published as short stories in these magazines. This type of writing presented a particular combination of character, language, and story in addition to offering readers a setting that produced “a state of being, [but] not a state that any sane tourist would want to pass through on holiday.”29 Chandler’s “mean streets” had appeared and were already crowded with bad guys, good guys, and those too lazy to make a choice. Guys up against the [c]riminals [who] populate the hard-boiled world. Some of these offenders take secret oaths in felonious societies while others wear badges, army uniforms or hold the seal of state. Some are billionaires while others don’t have two nickels to rub together. But they are all cut from the same moth-eaten fabric, breathing the same air of corruption.30

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This environment would be neatly packaged and distributed to readers who were simultaneously excited by, and frightened of, a world in which the crooks were clearly in control. Readers who were “probably office or factory girls, soldiers, sailors, miners, dockworkers, ranchers, and others who worked with their hands”31 and were, predominantly, young, although pulp publisher Harold Hersey pointed out “juvenile” was “anywhere from sixteen to sixty.”32 There are, of course, always variations in reader profiles but at the height of pulp fiction’s popularity, nobody brought violence into the homes of mostly ordinary, mostly working-class, mostly young, American readers better than Hammett, Chandler, and Cain.

Dashiell Hammett Samuel Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961) is a name that is synonymous with American crime fiction. Hammett defined the type of dialogue that would move these stories along, often at a dizzying pace and, through clipped, tough words, was instrumental in establishing the form of the hard-boiled story and paving the way for the ongoing success of this style of fiction. As those who worked to imitate this type of writing quickly discovered, just adding “gumshoe” and “gangster” to a murder mystery was not enough. Each word is important. Each must be deployed deliberately. Hammett knew this, as he was “very much aware of the limits and dangers of language.”33 He was a man who knew how to write. He was also a man who knew what to write about. The first of Hammett’s novels, Red Harvest, had been serialized across four issues of Black Mask magazine at the end of 1927 and the beginning of 1928, before appearing in a single volume early in 1929. This work is the story of an operative, working for the Continental Detective Agency, who has traveled from San Francisco to Personville to work a case. Within just a few pages of the novel’s opening, the following exchange takes place: “Who shot him?” I asked. The grey man scratched the back of his neck and said: “Somebody with a gun.”34

In many ways this single line—“Somebody with a gun”—defines the hardboiled narrative. As Chandler would write of Hammett, over twenty years after the first publication of Red Harvest, he was the man who “gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish.”35 More importantly, in these stories, there

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was no closed circle of suspects neatly sequestered in a country house: Somebody really could be anybody. A sense of anonymity added to the already dramatic nature of murder. For the first victim in Red Harvest was seen “lying on the sidewalk. A man and a woman were bending over him. The street was too dark for anyone to see anybody or anything clearly.”36 The street was similar to thousands of others across the country in that it was, after all, “dark with something more than night.”37 Red Harvest has been described as a “wave of bloodshed”38 and an “orgy of bloodletting.”39 Hammett, who knew what he was doing, knew this, advising his editor in a letter that: The middle of the book, as it now stands, undoubtedly is more than somewhat cluttered up with violence. . . . In the enclosed revised pages I have cut out the dynamiting of police headquarters (page 134); have cut out the attack on Reno’s house (page 176), which shouldn’t have been put in in the first place; and have changed the dynamiting of Yard’s house (page 149) to simple shooting off-stage. These changes will, I think relieve some of the congestion quite a bit.40

This level of violence was not, however, entirely out of place and was definitely not outside the imaginative limits of Hammett’s readers. Crime, and perhaps more crucially the fear of crime, was very real. Within weeks of the 1929 publication of Red Harvest, Herbert C. Hoover, the thirty-first president of the United States, gave his inaugural address: The strong man must at all times be alert to the attack of insidious disease.  .  . . The most malign of all these dangers today is disregard and disobedience of law. Crime is increasing. Confidence in rigid and speedy justice is decreasing. I am not prepared to believe that this indicates any decay in the moral fiber of the American people. . . . To consider these evils, to find their remedy, is the most sore necessity of our times.41

This “sore necessity”—the fear crime inspired in ordinary citizens and the urgency with which governments attempted to deal with the crisis— is reflected in Hammett’s writings. Indeed, one of Hammett’s most significant works, The Maltese Falcon, first serialized in Black Mask in 1929 and first published as a novel in 1930, serves to provide the “rigid and speedy justice”42 craved by so many. The central problem of the tale is “composed just as skilfully as those in an orthodox detective story, but in the best of Hammett, they are the beginning and not the end of the book’s interest.”43 For private detective Sam Spade, violent death is a

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common, almost expected, occurrence. Even the death of his partner, Miles Archer, fails to elicit an emotional response: “Hello . . . Yes, speaking . . . Dead? . . . Yes . . . Fifteen minutes. Thanks.”44 When Spade arrives at the scene Archer is there, “on his back.”45 The cop Tom Polhaus is there, too, explaining how it went down. He pokes “his own left breast with a dirty finger. ‘Got him right through the pump—with this.’ He took a fat revolver from his coat-pocket and held it out to Spade.”46 Of course the wielder of the fat revolver was a woman. The beautiful, compulsive liar, introduced as Ruth Wonderly before being revealed as Brigid O’Shaughnessy. Spade is not afraid to call her on her lies: For example, he easily “slapped her shoulder. He said: ‘That’s a lie.’”47 He easily did other things to her, too. The concept of the femme fatale was not new in the 1920s but Hammett’s treatment presented her in a new way. For Hammett she was not merely a protagonist, not simply there to flesh out the action on a page or to just help push the plot along. She was an active player. She manipulated others to commit violent acts on her behalf, and she both delivered and endured violence: Brigid O’Shaughnessy jumped up from her chair. . . . She took two quick steps towards Cairo. He started to rise. Her right hand went out and cracked sharply against his cheek, leaving the imprint of fingers there. Cairo grunted and slapped her cheek, staggering her sidewise, bringing from her mouth a brief muffled scream.48

The violence here also symbolizes a disinterest in the victim. Nobody mourns Miles Archer. Even Sam Spade, his partner of many years, is quick to note the benefits of his passing: “Yes, with ten thousand insurance, no children, and a wife who didn’t like him.”49 The law took a more traditional view as evidenced when the police question Spade on what he knows about the shooting of Archer: “You’ll tell it to me or you’ll tell it in court,” Dundy said hotly. “This is murder and don’t you forget it.” “Maybe. And here’s something for you to not forget, sweetheart. I’ll tell it or not as I damned please. It’s a long while since I burst out crying because policemen didn’t like me.”50

This overt resistance to authority positions Spade, and those created to imitate him, as a custodian of violence. In a place where the demarcation between law-abiding and law-offending was clear the hard-boiled detective had, effectively and efficiently, negotiated a middle-ground. Men (and

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eventually women) such as Spade had become self-appointed arbiters of right and wrong. In a quagmire of violent ends for increasingly dubious means it was the private detective, or private eye, that often determined what acts were justifiable, and therefore quietly filed away in a repository of secrets, and those acts that would be dealt with by an open and transparent justice system. Ultimately it is decided that O’Shaughnessy will be handed over to the police. Spade justifies his decision for a number of reasons, concluding: “I won’t play the sap for you.”51 This type of decision making—who gets punished for their crimes and who is allowed to get away with their wrongdoings—and the idea that personal gain, in this case having the girl, should be set aside contributed to the setting of a new standard for tough. Toughness was now associated with the power to make determinations around right and wrong and self-sacrifice. Toughness also consisted not just of the ability to be violent but also to be calm, almost cool, in the face of violent confrontation: Spade did not look at the pistol. He raised his arms, and leaning back in his chair, intertwined the fingers of his two hands behind his head. His eyes, holding no particular expression, remained focused on Cairo’s dark face.52

In true hard-boiled style Spade does not flinch when threatened by the Levantine and is equally composed when he strikes Cairo’s face, “covering for a moment one side of his chin, a corner of his mouth, and most of his cheek between cheek-bone and jaw-bone. Cairo shut his eyes and was unconscious.”53 Just as confident as the Continental Op and Sam Spade was another of Hammett’s creations: Nick Charles. The Thin Man (1934) would be Hammett’s last novel (though the first of six films featuring Nick and Nora Charles). This story of a mad, then missing, inventor is exceptional for two reasons. First, this work highlights Hammett’s storytelling powers and second it provides an essential insight into the crime fiction reading community’s wide-scale acceptance of violence. Suddenly, violence had become such a standard component of the American story that it could, much like many other aspects of daily life, be treated with humor. Violence was so normal that it could make us fearful, but it could also make us laugh. Nick and Nora Charles would not only normalize violence within popular culture, but they would also make it a glamorous enterprise and in doing so they provide an interesting commentary on gender. Nora is brave, smart, and very rich. Nick is a perfect partner and one not afraid to feign fear:

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. . . Nora was shaking me and a man with a gun in his hand was standing in the bedroom doorway. . . . I looked at Nora. She was excited, but apparently not frightened: she might have been watching a horse she had a bet on coming down the stretch with a nose lead. I said: “All right, talk, but do you mind putting the gun away? My wife doesn’t care, but I’m pregnant and I don’t want the child to be born with—”54

The characters spend most of their time getting shot at, getting a drink, or giving a party. Even the dog, Asta, has a good time: She’s had a swell afternoon—knocked over a table of toys at Lord & Taylor’s, scared a fat woman silly by licking her leg in Saks’s, and’s been patted by three policemen.55

Beneath the beautiful women, handsome men, a few police officers in illfitting suits, the obligatory array of crooks and thugs, and the slick oneliners there is something particularly disturbing about the portrayal of violence within this work—its accessibility. Violence is everywhere and anyone can use it to (try and) get what they want. Even a young girl. “Where’d you get the gun, Dorothy?” “From a man—I told you.” “What man?” “I told you—a man in a speakeasy.”56

Somebody with a gun really was, now, anybody with a gun. In the search for Clyde Wynant and the killer who left the bullet-riddled body of his secretary, Julia Wolf, in her apartment,57 violence is not merely tolerated it is accepted as part of the everyday. Even the outcome of violence borders on the routine when Nora challenges an injured Nick: “All right, hard guy, get up and bleed on the rugs.”58 Nick is just as flippant with Lieutenant Guild when, having just slugged the murderer, he demands: “What do you want me to do? . . . Put him in cellophane for you?”59 It is fascinating that this, Hammett’s well-regarded but light-hearted treatment of violence, provides one of his most profound comments on the matter of murder when, in the novel’s final page Nick tells Nora that “[m]urder doesn’t round out anybody’s life except the murdered’s and sometimes the murderer’s.”60 In a violent landscape murder can be perceived as an element of a daily routine: an acceptable, perhaps inevitable outcome of conflict between those who have situated themselves on

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opposite sides of the law. Murder is not, however, as Nick Charles points out, an outcome that facilitates the widespread resolution of entrenched social problems. The immediate impact of the crime is felt by the killer and the victim but the longer-term impact of this most violent of acts is felt by many more; from those with intimate knowledge of the case to those who merely peruse banner headlines of local presses. Murder, more than any other form of violence, generates fear of crime.

Raymond Chandler Raymond Thornton Chandler (1888–1959) is another name that is synonymous with the type of crime fiction known as hard-boiled. Julian Symons has written that Chandler “had a very fine feeling for the sound and value of words and added to it a very sharp eye for places, things, people, and the wisecracks that in their tone and timing are almost always perfect.”61 Chandler liked words. Lots of them. His prose is littered with description and “trademark outlandish similes”62 such as: “He wore a blue uniform coat that fitted him the way a stall fits a horse”;63 “It was early evening when I reached Puma Point and I was as empty as a gutted fish”;64 and “The Super Chief was on time, as it almost always is, and the subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket.”65 Like Hammett, Chandler was very conscious about the power of language, reflecting on writing style within his critical and his creative work: “He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel.”66 One of Chandler’s better-known novels The Big Sleep (1939), the first to feature the famous private detective Philip Marlowe, is a complicated story revolving around blackmail, drugs, pornography, and murder. The tale of Marlowe and the Sternwood family is so convoluted that, in a note to his publisher Hamish Hamilton, Chandler wrote: I remember several years ago when Howard Hawks was making The Big Sleep, the movie, he and [Humphrey] Bogart got into an argument as to whether one of the characters was murdered or committed suicide. They sent me a wire asking me, and dammit I didn’t know either.67

The novel that introduced Philip Marlowe, despite having a plot that is not easy to follow, captured the imaginations of contemporary readers and remains popular today. It is within this work that Chandler presents violence as part of a package, a can-do approach, to achieving what you want. Marlowe reassures his client, claiming, very casually, that “I can take this Geiger off your back, General, if that’s what you want.”68 This attitude,

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which focuses on bringing about a successful resolution for the client, sees Marlowe make his way through some of the sleazier parts of the City of Angels. Much like Hammett’s Spade, Chandler’s most famous creation accepts violence as part of the job. In Chandler’s writing the concept of violence is integrated into every aspect of storytelling. It is not merely part of the story; it is every part of the story. Even descriptions of something as simple as the weather have a violent edge: “Rain filled the gutters and splashed knee-high off the pavement. Big cops in slickers that shone like gun barrels had a lot of fun carrying giggling girls across the bad places.”69 In an almost immediate literary reversal, violence is then compared to the weather: “At seven-twenty a single flash of hard white light shot out of Geiger’s house like a wave of summer lightning.”70 Chandler’s stories are full of detail yet he is able to consistently return to one of the hallmarks of the hard-boiled, that very matter-of-fact quality about the text. For example: “Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.”71 The dialog is also sharp, almost knifelike, in the way it puts key messages across: “You think he sent that loogan after you?” “What’s a loogan?” “A guy with a gun.” “Are you a loogan?” “Sure,” I laughed. “But strictly speaking a loogan is on the wrong side of the fence.”72

Again, the guy with the gun is, just as easily, the girl with the gun: The door buzzer stopped humming and a quick impatient rapping on the wood followed it. Brody put his hand in his pocket, on his gun, and walked over to the door and opened it with his left hand. Carmen Sternwood pushed him back into the room by putting a little revolver against his lean brown lips.73

For the most part, however, crime fiction’s violence remains gendered, as we see when even women with this level of agency are subjected to an almost obligatory slapping around. Marlowe, the hero, “slapped her around a little more,” suggesting that “[s]he didn’t mind the slaps.”74 Apparently Marlowe does not mind doing the slapping, as a little later he “slid off the desk and stepped up close to her and gave her a smack on

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the side of the face.”75 Women, too, bear the brunt of losses that come out of violent altercations—“She said bitterly: ‘Did you have to kill him?’”— but are often powerless to enact their own, violent, revenge: “‘Yes,’ she said softly. ‘I suppose you did.’”76 There will always be a point, within the hard-boiled, where gender is irrelevant. Chandler’s famous commentary on death, from which the book takes its title, can be read without any reference to what is male or female: “You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.”77 Violence would remain central to Chandler’s writing throughout his career. In The Long Goodbye (1953), the gun is there,78 as routine as Marlowe playing chess (a “war without blood”79), and is responded to with equanimity: “Very methodical guy, Marlowe. Nothing must interfere with his coffee technique. Not even a gun in the hand of a desperate character.”80 Of course every hero has his limits and, when being interviewed about the disappearance of Terry Lennox, Marlowe becomes impatient: Maybe I was tired and irritable. Maybe I felt a little guilty. I could learn to hate this guy without even knowing him. I could just look at him across the width of a cafeteria and want to kick his teeth in.81

One of the intriguing aspects of this novel is the continuum of violent behavior. At one end, violence is merely entertainment, and not always very good entertainment: When I got home I turned on the TV set and looked at the fights. They were no good, just a bunch of dancing masters who ought to have been working for Arthur Murray. All they did was jab and bob up and down and feint one another off balance. Not one of them could hit hard enough to wake his grandmother out of a light doze.82

At the other end, much attention is paid to violence as a serious domestic and social issue that is extremely difficult to understand.83 Usually, however, the dichotomy between bad guys and good guys is clear. The bad guys enjoy their work: “Some people like it.”84 For Marlowe, who is offered to readers as a white knight in a dirty place, he merely tolerates violence as part of the job: “You don’t get rich,” he explains, “you don’t often have much fun. Sometimes you get beaten up or shot at or tossed into the jailhouse. Once in a long while you get dead.”85 Marlowe takes it in his stride and accepts the violence as an integral part of “the big, sordid, dirty, crooked city”86 preferring this place, with the guns and brass knuckles and a wide range of other faults, to a quieter life out in the suburbs.

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In Playback (1958), the last novel that Chandler would complete, there is more of the same. More crooks, more dames, more of everything that Chandler is known for. This slim volume makes a noteworthy contribution to the idea of violence within popular culture. Early in the story, Marlowe goes to a hotel to ask some questions and the young man responding to his inquiry is hesitant: “I’m sympathetic,” the young guy said. “But you know how it is Mr Marlowe. A hotel has to be very careful. These situations can lead to anything—even shootings.”87

Violence is now out in the open; the mean streets were now every street, private homes, and hotel lobbies. The ubiquity of violence does not, however, make it more acceptable. Marlowe is careful to point out that “‘[g]uns never settle anything’. . . . ‘They are just a fast curtain to a bad second act.’”88 Marlowe is older in this story, his fighting skills not as good or as strong as they used to be. “He hit me somewhere but it wasn’t important. Mine was the better punch, but it didn’t win the wristwatch, because at that moment an army mule kicked square on the back of my brain.”89 Chandler is also more sentimental in Playback. One of the most popular protagonists of the hard-boiled canon not only recovers from the fight but also ends up, for a few pages at least, deliriously happy. The sound of gunshots and of men thumping each other had been replaced by air that “was full of music.”90 In a dramatic contrast to the resolution of the bulk of hardboiled stories seen in Chandler’s time, the private investigator—the man who is traditionally marked as a loner, as the guy who occasionally considers giving it all up for a “sensible occupation”91 only to remain in his drab office waiting for his next client—not only gets the bad guy but he also, this time, gets the girl. Such a romantic ending continues to be unusual within hard-boiled tales produced today and is never seen in noir.

James M. Cain James Mallahan Cain (1892–1977) took the style of the hard-boiled, with its shades of grey, and added a layer of black or noir, a darkness that systematically destroys those who appear on the pages of his short stories and novels. Cain was born “at the opposite end of the American psychic topography from southern California, in Colonial Annapolis, Maryland”92 but it would be on the West Coast where Cain would establish himself as a writer. Cain’s efforts resulted in the refining of one of the key characteristics that saw the noir novel become characterized by “an overwhelming

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sense of fatalism and bleakness, and a socio-political critique that yields nothing and goes nowhere.”93 In Cain’s works there is only one certainty: Nobody wins. The men and women in his fiction, developing and deploying their doomed plans, “couldn’t find the exit from their personal highway to hell if flashing neon lights pointed to a town named Hope. It is their own lack of morality that blindly drives them to ruin.”94 The popularity of these works does not make a lot of sense. Perhaps we marvel at, or even revel in, the selfishness and stupidity of others. Or perhaps we read roman noir because we want to read about lives that are worse than our own. Whatever the reason, each of the three novels discussed below were very successful when published and enjoyed critical acclaim and popular success on the big screen. One of Cain’s most successful works is his novel The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) set at the Twin Oaks Tavern, a place that “was nothing but a roadside sandwich joint, like a million others in California.”95 Frank Chambers drifts into the tavern, owned by Nick and Cora Papadakis, and takes a job as a mechanic in the attached garage. The attraction, and the violence, are almost immediate. Within a few pages of the novel’s opening lines, Cain writes: She started for the lunchroom again, but I stopped her. “Let’s—leave it locked.” “Nobody can get in if it’s locked. I got some cooking to do. I’ll wash up this plate.” I took her in my arms and mashed my mouth up against hers. . . . “Bite me! Bite me!” I bit her. I sunk my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth. It was running down her neck when I carried her upstairs.96

From this point on it is obvious that murder is inevitable. So too, is the series of double-crossings that follow. Murder in Cain’s works does not take the form of straightforward shootings, as depicted by Hammett and Chandler, instead, murder is a domestic affair, in both setting and staging, to make homicide look like an accident. There is also something about the violence within this particular work that differentiates it from many other noir novels, namely, its motivation. Cora’s is clear; she wants “to be something.”97 Frank’s is a bit more ambiguous, as he “neither seems to want to usurp Nick’s position as a petit-bourgeois businessman nor marry and settle down with Cora.”98 Roman noir dictates that there will not be a satisfying resolution. With Cora’s death, even though the car crash was an accident and not a deliberate attempt to kill Cora, comes Frank’s undoing.

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“The jury was out five minutes.”99 Frank will be executed. If hard-boiled stories focus on the detective or, occasionally, the police officer, roman noir tales focus on the criminal, suspect, or victim—such as Frank Chambers, who manages to be all three. Another man who ticks all the boxes is Walter Huff in Cain’s Double Indemnity. This story of an insurance salesman who falls for Phyllis Nirdlinger was first published, in serial form, in 1936 in Liberty Magazine before being presented in book form, with two other stories, in Three of a Kind in 1943. Cain wrote of the work that it “really belongs to the Depression, rather than the War, and makes an interesting footnote to an era”100 and of how he “strove for a rising coefficient of intensity, and even hoped that somewhere along the line [he] would graze passion.”101 It is common to associate noir with lust but Cain was adamant: “If you shoot at passion and miss by ever so little, you hit lust, which isn’t pretty, or even interesting.”102 There is some lust within Double Indemnity, a fact acknowledged when Walter admits he loved Phyllis like “a rabbit loves a rattlesnake.”103 There is also, in this book, a more traditional motivation for murder: money. Phyllis wants it and has killed for it before. Walter wants it too and is prepared to kill for it now, though he attempts to excuse his actions by distancing himself from the realities of crime. “I had seen so many houses burned down,” he explains, “so many cars wrecked, so many corpses with blue holes in their temples, so many awful things that people had pulled . . . that that stuff didn’t seem real to me any more.”104 Murder is very real. It is also very clinical. When Walter decides on a course of action, he is quite specific: “‘Get this, Phyllis. There’s three essential elements to a successful murder.’”105 First, you need help: “‘It takes more than one.’” Second, you need a plan: “‘[T]he time, the place, the way, all known in advance.’” Third, you need audacity: “‘That’s the one that all amateur murderers forget.’”106 Phyllis, who has something in her that loves death, accepts Walter’s three points for success in her stride. She also twists the logic supporting the motive for murder, tailoring it to her needs. Telling herself that she is not really bad for plotting to kill her husband to claim an insurance payout, she tries to convince Walter: “I know this is terrible. I tell myself it’s terrible. But to me, it doesn’t seem terrible. It seems as though I’m doing something—that’s really best for him, if he only knew it.”107 Phyllis plays her part in the scheme, but it is Walter who has to be hands-on when the time comes to implement their plan. “I won’t tell you what I did then.” Walter says, “But in two seconds he was curled down on the seat with a broken neck.”108 The noir novel is rarely satisfied with just one death, and it is not long before Walter admits:

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“I don’t know when I decided to kill Phyllis. It seemed to me that ever since that night, somewhere in the back of my head I had known I would have to kill her, for what she knew about me, and because the world isn’t big enough for two people once they’ve got something like that on each other.”109

Of course, Phyllis knows this too and tries to beat him to it.110 Ultimately, just like Frank and Cora, Walter and Phyllis end up the same way as their victims: subjected to a violent death. In explaining his characters, and their demise, Cain drew from his father’s writings and his idea that it was the “force of circumstances driving the protagonists to the commission of a dreadful act.”111 As the dreadful act is predictable within this form of fiction, so too, is the punishment—either legal or poetic—of the perpetrators. In another one of Cain’s classics, Mildred Pierce (1941), violence changes. In this tale of the toxic relationship between Mildred Pierce and her daughter Veda, violence takes on the shape of a battle of women’s wills in the family home, rather than a more traditional battle between tough guys in a back street. The tools to deliver violence are also different from the other examples listed here but the end result is much the same. There is no coffin and no funeral, but something dies in Mildred Pierce. As Mildred develops an increasingly disturbing devotion to her daughter, Veda sets about the task of methodically demolishing her mother’s home life, finances, and self-esteem. It is Veda’s singing teacher, Mr Treviso, who describes the child best: “You go to a zoo, hey? See little snake? Is come from India, is all red, yellow, black, ver” pretty little snake. You take “ome, hey? Make little pet, like puppy dog? No—you got more sense. I tell you, is same wit” dees Veda. You buy ticket, you look at a little snake, but you no take home. No.” “Are you insinuating that my daughter is a snake?” “No—is a coloratura soprano, is much worse.”112

The violence within this work is very unsettling. There is no blood, but there are still victims. The main focus is Veda’s sustained campaign of emotional attacks against Mildred in her insatiable desire for enough money to leave her mother. “[W]ith enough money,” Veda says, I can get away from you, you poor, half-witted mope. From you, and your pie wagon, and your chickens, and your waffles, and your kitchens, and everything that smells of grease. And from this shack. . . . And from Glendale, and its dollar days, and its furniture factories, and its women that wear uniforms and its men that wear smocks. From every rotten, stinking thing that even reminds me of the place—or you.113

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Mildred, after many attempts at reconciliation and the predictable scenes that left her “beaten, humiliated, and hurt”114 finally realizes that she has lost everything—including the one who had “turned on her repeatedly, with tooth and fang”115—and that there was nothing left but to say: “To hell with her!”116 and to get drunk. Violence has claimed another victim, not in a darkened alleyway of a small town that looks like any other small town but in a sundrenched suburb of Los Angeles. The perpetrator had not even needed a gun.

Conclusion It is often assumed that the American traditions of the hard-boiled and roman noir short stories and novels appeared in response to a nation recovering from World War I as well as the effects of Prohibition and the Great Depression. It is sometimes asserted that these tales were written in reaction to British traditions of crime fiction. Yet both the hard-boiled and the roman noir have a much longer lineage, tracing their origins back through the pulp magazine, the dime novel, frontier fiction, and the father of the modern detective story, Edgar Allan Poe. These short stories and novels are “usually about murder and hence [lack] the element of uplift”117 but are, today, considered a vital chapter in the history of American crime fiction. Raymond Chandler wrote: “All literary movements are like this; some one individual is picked out to represent the whole movement.”118 Chandler, alongside Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain, are the three men that have come to personify the ideas of the hard-boiled and the roman noir. The consideration of these two subgenres of crime fiction, filled with scenes of bad men slugging it out, good men attempting to restore justice, lousy drunks beating beautiful wives, and lovers turning on the world and, finally, on each other, is crucial to any discussion of violence in American popular culture. In a nation where personal achievement is so important, how far will individual Americans go to achieve their dreams? As these novels clearly attest, many Americans are prepared to—or at least fantasize about—going all the way. Crime fiction has always had the capacity to represent “cultural anxieties”119 and to address those things that disturb us the most. For those who read hard-boiled and roman noir, it is violence, raw and savage, in many different forms, that frightens and also fascinates us. “This is murder and don’t you forget it.”120 We won’t.

Notes 1.  John Scaggs, 62. 2.  Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder, 18.

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  3.  Susan Roland, 139.   4.  Otto Penzler, online.  5. David Schmid, 49.  6. Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder, 18.   7.  Andrew Pepper, 60.   8.  Sean McCann, 43.   9.  Laura Beshears, 199. 10.  Megan Sasinoski, online. 11.  Kathleen Gregory Klein, 1. 12.  Dorothy L. Sayers, 72. 13.  Edgar Allan Poe, “The Black Cat,” 225. 14.  Edgar Allan Poe, “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” 148. 15.  Joe Franz in Thomas J. DiLorenzo, 227. 16.  Thomas J. DiLorenzo, 227. 17. Ibid. 18.  Eugene Hollon in Thomas J. DiLorenzo, 227. 19.  Jefferson D. Slagle, 121. 20.  James D. Hart, 156. 21.  Catherine Ross Nickerson, 32. 22.  Kathleen Gregory Klein, 1. 23.  Dawn Keetley, 673. 24.  Jesse Pomeroy in Dawn Keetley, 673. 25.  Dawn Keetley, 674. 26.  Joel Shrock in Dawn Keetley, 675. 27.  Dawn Keetley, 675. 28.  Joel Shrock in Dawn Keetley, 675. 29.  Walter Mosley, 598. 30. Ibid. 31.  Erin A. Smith, 12. 32.  Harold Hersey in Erin A. Smith, 24. 33.  Josephine Hammett Marshall, vii. 34.  Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest, 4–5. 35.  Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder, 14. 36.  Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest, 10. 37.  Raymond Chandler in Sean McCann, 42. 38.  Sean McCann, 50. 39.  Andrew Pepper, 60. 40.  Dashiell Hammett, “Letter to Blanche Knopf,” 45–46. 41.  Herbert C. Hoover, online. 42. Ibid. 43.  Julian Symons, 147. 44.  Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon, 13. 45.  Ibid., 15. 46.  Ibid., 16.

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47.  Ibid., 217. 48.  Ibid., 71. 49.  Ibid., 36. 50.  Ibid., 21–22. 51.  Ibid., 223. 52.  Ibid., 47. 53.  Ibid., 48. 54.  Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man, 258. 55.  Ibid., 232. 56.  Ibid., 247. 57.  Ibid., 237. 58.  Ibid., 265. 59.  Ibid., 423. 60.  Ibid., 432. 61.  Julian Symons, 152. 62.  Sean McCann, 54. 63.  Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, 166. 64.  Raymond Chandler, “No Crime in the Mountains,” 369. 65.  Raymond Chandler, Playback, 10. 66.  Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye, 71. 67.  Raymond Chandler, “Letter to Hamish Hamilton,” 221. 68.  Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, 19. 69.  Ibid., 35. 70.  Ibid., 37. 71.  Ibid., 38. 72.  Ibid., 144. 73.  Ibid., 86. 74.  Ibid., 41. 75.  Ibid., 68. 76.  Ibid., 195. 77.  Ibid., 220. 78.  Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye, 26. 79.  Ibid., 159. 80.  Ibid., 25. 81.  Ibid., 34. 82.  Ibid., 85. 83.  Ibid., 88–90, 151, 210. 84.  Ibid., 168. 85.  Ibid., 135. 86.  Ibid., 211. 87.  Raymond Chandler, Playback, 20. 88.  Ibid., 29. 89.  Ibid., 34. 90.  Ibid., 156–158.

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 91. Ibid., 135.   92.  Robert Polito, xi–xii.   93.  Andrew Pepper, 58.   94.  Otto Penzler, online.   95.  James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice, 3.  96. Ibid., 10.  97. Ibid., 82.   98.  Andrew Pepper, 63.   99.  James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice, 104. 100.  James M. Cain, “Introduction,” Double Indemnity, 5. 101.  Ibid., 10. 102.  Ibid., 11. 103.  James M. Cain, Double Indemnity, 80. 104.  Ibid., 35. 105.  Ibid., 31. 106. Ibid. 107.  Ibid., 30. 108.  Ibid., 54. 109.  Ibid., 95. 110.  Ibid., 103. 111.  James M. Cain, “Introduction,” Double Indemnity, 10. 112.  James M. Cain, Mildred Pierce, 250. 113.  Ibid., 238–239. 114.  Ibid., 237. 115.  Ibid., 297. 116.  Ibid., 298. 117.  Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder, 2. 118.  Ibid., 13. 119.  Lyn Pykett, 19. 120.  Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon, 21.

Bibliography Beshears, Laura. “Honorable Style in Dishonorable Times: American Gangsters of the 1920s and 1930s.” The Journal of American Culture 33, no. 3 (2010): 197–206. Cain, James M. The Postman Always Rings Twice. New York: Everyman’s Library, 1934/2003. Cain, James M. “Introduction.” Double Indemnity. London, UK: Pan Books, 1983. Cain, James M. Double Indemnity. London, UK: Pan Books, 1936/1983. Cain, James M. Mildred Pierce. New York: Vintage Crime, 1941/1989. Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep. London, UK: Penguin Books, 1939/1970. Chandler, Raymond. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage Crime, 1950/1988.

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Chandler, Raymond. The Long Goodbye. London, UK: Penguin Books, 1953/1959. Chandler, Raymond. Playback. London, UK: Penguin Books, 1958/1961. Chandler, Raymond. “No Crime in the Mountains.” Killer in the Rain. London, UK: Penguin Books, 1941/1966. Chandler, Raymond. “Letter to Hamish Hamilton: 21 March 1949.” Raymond Chandler Speaking, ed. Dorothy Gardiner and Kathrine Sorley Walker. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962/1997. DiLorenzo, Thomas J. “The Culture of Violence in the American West: Myth versus Reality.” The Independent Review 15, no. 2 (2010): 227–239. Hammett, Dashiell. “Letter to Blanche Knopf: 20 March 1928,” in Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett: 1921–1960, ed. Richard Layman with Julie M. Rivett. Washington DC: Counterpoint, 2001. Hammett, Dashiell. Red Harvest. London: Orion Books, 1929/2012. Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Falcon. New York: Everyman’s Library, 1930/2000. Hammett, Dashiell. The Thin Man. New York, Everyman’s Library, 1934/2000. Hammett Marshall, Josephine. “Foreword.” In Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett: 1921–1960, ed. Richard Layman with Julie M. Rivett, vii–xi. Washington DC: Counterpoint, 2001. Hart, James D. The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950. Hoover, Herbert C. “Inaugural Address: March 4, 1929.” The Avalon Project: Yale Law School. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hoover.asp. Keetley, Dawn. “The Injuries of Reading: Jesse Pomeroy and the Dire Effects of Dime Novels.” Journal of American Studies 47, no. 3 (2013): 673–697. Klein, Kathleen Gregory. The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998/1995. McCann, Sean. “The Hard-Boiled Novel.” In The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction, ed. Catherine Ross Nickerson, 42–57. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010/2011. Mosley, Walter. “Poisonville.” In A New Literary History of America, ed. Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, 598–602. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Nickerson, Catherine Ross. “Women Writers before 1960.” In The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction, ed. Catherine Ross Nickerson, 29–41. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010/2011. Penzler, Otto. “Noir Is about Losers, Not Private Eyes.” The Huffington Post, August 10, 2010. www.huffingtonpost.com/otto-penzler/noir-fiction-is-about -los_b_676200.html. Pepper, Andrew. “The American Roman Noir.” In The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction, ed. Catherine Ross Nickerson, 58–71. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010/2011. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, 141–168. New York: Vintage Books, 1841/1975.

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Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Black Cat.” Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, 223–230. New York: Vintage Books, 1843/1975. Polito, Robert. “Introduction.” In The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce and Selected Stories, James M. Cain. New York: Everyman’s Library, 2003. Pykett, Lyn. “The Newgate Novel and Sensation Fiction, 1830–1868.” In The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, ed. Martin Priestman, 19–39. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003/2006. Roland, Susan. From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction. London, UK: Palgrave, 2001. Sasinoski, Megan. “Homicide Trends in America: 1850–1950.” Dietrich College Honors Theses. Paper 138. 2011. http://repository.cmu.edu/hsshonors/138. Sayers, Dorothy L. “The Omnibus of Crime.” In The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Howard Haycraft, 71–109. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1928/1947. Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction: The New Critical Idiom. London, UK: Routledge Press, 2005. Schmid, David. Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005/2006. Slagle, Jefferson D. “The Heirs of Buffalo Bill: Performing Authenticity in the Dime Novel.” Canadian Review of American Studies 23, no. 2 (2009): 120–138. Smith, Erin A. “Dressed to Kill: Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction, Working-Class Consumers, and Pulp Magazines.” Colby Quarterly 36, no. 1 (March 2000): 11–28. Smith, Erin A. Hard-Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2000. Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel, 3rd rev. ed. New York: The Mysterious Press, 1993.

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CHAPTER SIX

Violence, the Production Code, and Film Noir Homer B. Pettey

The accidental nature of these instances emphasizes the oddness of chimpanzees and humans, with their deliberate searches for victims, their killing and mutilation of a helpless neighbor despite his appeals for mercy. Only for those two species is the loser’s death part of the plan. So in this important way chimpanzees and humans are exceptional when compared to the extended group of primates. However, if we ignore most of the primates and restrict our comparison just to the great apes, in some ways our patterns of violence are not so odd. It’s still true that only chimpanzees and humans regularly kill adults of their own kind. Chimpanzees and humans also share other evils: political murders, beatings, and rape. It seems remarkable, therefore, to learn that rape is an ordinary act among orangutans, whereas it is unknown among most species of primates and other animals. And there’s other violence to be found in the lives of apes. Male gorillas kill infants so often that the threat of violent death shapes the very core of their society. These patterns are not unique to the apes, but the intensity and range of violence makes us wonder: Is there something about the apes that specifically predisposes them to violence? Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Demonic Males1

Primate behavior indicates a penchant for violence, and in contemporary popular culture, the spectacle of violence appears to fulfill a primordial need. Film history chronicles brutal acts of political violence, beatings, and rape from the silent era through the pre-Code years to film noir. Popular

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imagination of criminality in cinema often associates violence with gangland massacres, close-up shots of intense brutality, and scenes of threatened and actual gender assault, the very acts that anthropologists ascribe to primates. Although the Production Code restricted the types of violence allowable in American cinema, film noir used inventive strategies to get around those limitations. In the process, an aesthetic of violence became part of the noir style, even though the art of violence rarely finds its way into scholarly discussions of this popular genre. The development of this aesthetic began with crime and gangster films from the silent era into the early 1930s. Initially, noir techniques of chiaroscuro, high-contrast lighting, the effective use of shadow, and oblique angles were employed in order to present violence as a kind of distortion of human behavior. Noirs relied upon sonic distortions and melodramatic musical scores to represent the emotional sensation of violence. Additionally, anti-domesticity scenes of aggression carried over from the gangster films into film noir. With the imposing of the Production Code and the overseeing of scripts and even dailies by the Breen Office, violence on screen became more and more psychological, both in terms of pathologies and effects upon the audience. The history of cinematic violence in American popular culture, then, coincides with the development of and appreciation for the aesthetics of violence in film noir. Homo sapiens may well be genetically encoded for violence, as much as they seem innately fascinated with the visual experience of witnessing violence. In cinema, there is a direct appeal to a palpable sensation of the visualization of violence, to the physical excitation of brutality, which includes being disgusted and fearful of it, and to the primordial need for this all-too-human feeling. As Steven Shaviro contends, cinema affects “violently, viscerally” by means of the “shock and surprise” of experiencing a rawness of existence: Cinematic perception is primordial to the very extent that is monstrously prosthetic. It is composed, one might say, of the unconscious epiphenomena of sensory experience. . . . And this is how film crosses the threshold of a new kind of perception, one that is below or above the human. This new perception is multiple and anarchic, nonintentional and asubjective; it is no longer subordinated to the requirements of representation and idealization, recognition and designation.2

In short, cinema, especially violence in cinema, recalls a perceptual experience that feels as though it were an unnameable, yet all-too-familiar part of being human. It is precisely that ineffable, overwhelming sensation of

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cinema that attracts audiences, that primal urge that demanded from the directors and studios repeated satisfaction. Like photography itself, the very basis of cinema, as Susie Linfield has so admirably argued, the visual image of violence in particular offers “an immediate, viscerally emotional connection to the world”: “They—we—turn to photography for other things: for a glimpse of what cruelty, or strangeness, or beauty, or agony, or love, or disease, or natural wonder, or artistic creation, or depraved violence, looks like. And we turn to photography to discover what our intuitive reactions to such otherness—and to such others—might be.”3 In some respects, the Production Code came into being to curtail these natural, intuitive tendencies toward the fascination with acts of cruelty and brutality. As primitive impulse, then, violence recalls that anarchic and irreducible predisposition to human origins. Violence remains the most taboo topic in our current debates about popular culture, not for lack of sociopolitical, racial–gender hypotheses for its pervasive existence in our culture, but because it remains the forbidden topic of our innate fascination and pleasure. Pleasure and violence would seem antithetical among the barrage of both liberal and neoconservative political and op-ed rhetoric denouncing them. To dismiss violence from the human condition as an aberration is to deny what fundamentally makes us human beings. Treating violence as cinema-spectacle of wonder, fascination, and mimetic desire only opens up, rather than closes off, the cultural, natural, and genetic imperative that homo sapiens engage in, seek out, and enjoy watching violence. Even accepting so many of Konrad Lorenz’s fundamentally sound and persuasive views on human aggression, it is difficult to view the past two decades of worldwide terrorism and assassinations, rises in social and domestic violence, and seemingly unstoppable sexual mutilation and slavery without considering his remarks on general warfare as being utopian and hopeful, but ultimately naive: “I could not agree more with Dr. Marmor when he discussed the psychological obstacles to the elimination of war as a social institution and counts among them the insidious effect of military toys and war games and violence.”4 Of note here is Lorenz’s inclusion of popular entertainment along with a generalized notion of violence, as though there exists not only a cause– effect relationship between the two, but also a deleterious interconnection for human beings. If current animal behavioralists and physical and social anthropologists are correct in claiming a genetic propensity toward violence in human beings, then Lorenz, for all of his admirable work, offers only wish fulfillment for, not the reality of, human existence. In fact, more evidence from the past several decades indicates that chimpanzee sexual aggression, for example, cannot be classified simply as aberrant or

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male-hierarchical aggression, but rather innate coercive behavior.5 Moreover, there may well be beneficial, prosocial results from understanding the experience of violence instead of dismissing it as an aberration or stemming from pathology, as part of the complex dynamics that have always been part of human culture.6 In the same vein, to dismiss violence in cinematic art is to dismiss the earliest aesthetic forms of visual culture and their significance to the creation of civilization. In Anatolia around the seventh millennium B.C., the Neolithic art of Çatal Hüyük, as with much of this epoch’s cave paintings, depicts scenes of violence, establishing an early human connection between the visual and the violent. Numerous monochromatic deer hunting scenes reveal an active visual culture and the plurality of wild bull designs, horn benches, and bull’s head and ram’s head reliefs leave the impression “of tremendous male power[,] and it may be surmised that this was a shrine devoted to the cult of the male deity.”7 This culture, however, also included goddess figures who represented life as much as they did violence and death, as Mellaart contends: “symbols of death, vultures, frequently represented in early shrines . . . finds plastic expression in mother’s breasts which incorporate skulls of vultures, fox, and weasel or lower jaws of boars with enormous tusks, eminently symbolic of the scavengers which thrive on death” (183). Early popular religion emphasizes a sensory connection between life and death, between violence and civilization, and between male and female symbols of the power of death. Clearly, visual culture for human beings developed out of a necrophilic desire, one that embraced a natural tendency in human kind toward the veneration of violence. Evidence of visual violence as a basis for culture pervades this period. In the sierras of the Spanish Levant, many of the rock shelters yield battle scenes, such as the dramatic conflict between bands of archers at Torcal de las Bojadillas and the fierce battling groups depicted at Cueva del Civil.8 It is tempting to call movies the new cave art, the new stage violence—the medium is the massacre. Indeed, visual display and fascination with violence as a medium has as long a history as warfare, murder, and assault do in literature from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia through Hebrew culture to the Greeks and Romans. In the history of cinema, especially in crime films, three major visual depictions of violence recur: mob retributive killing, excessive brutality, and sexual gender assault. These forms find representation beginning in the silent era. D. W. Griffith’s The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) for Biograph dealt with organized crime for the first time on screen, with the underworld as part of the ethnic community of the metropolis. The Lower East Side ghetto and its location shooting provide realism for this first

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gangster film, with street images almost directly from Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives. From the outset, the audience attains an ideological distance from this brand of working-class violence but still experiences the exhilaration of the spectacle of physical threats, the sexually imperiled female, and the shootout in the alley, as Miriam Hansen contends: “At the same time he offers the viewer a way back into the film, by setting into play mechanisms of identification—with individual characters, with the narrating gaze—that point toward the illusionist voyeurism of classical cinema.”9 The oblique angles produced by the actors slinking along walls toward the camera, the darkened stairway, the uncertainty of potential violence produced by Griffith’s reliance upon deep field shots of the alley—all signal pre-noir aesthetics that render tension and moments of violence as exciting, experimental spectacle. Prior to the newly established Production Code Administration enforcement of 1934, the nickelodeons had by the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century come under attack for their effects on the community’s health, delinquency, and, of course, increased presence of criminal behavior.10 From its inception, then, film has been viewed as a reflection of human conditions; yet, such a comparison very rarely extends to the dynamic and positive social actions and reactions of human culture. Instead, hegemonic, corruptive, and immoral accusations have emerged from 1895 to the present day, shifting from sexual choice to being emphatically against visual representations of violence on screen. The popularity of boxing films, especially the Jack Johnson 1910 bout with James J. Jeffries, was only one among several associated with his fights, as well as with the public clamor for such films since Edison’s first early 1890 pugilist films. The cranked-turn filmic space and the viewfinder of the Edison kinetoscope revamping of the 1891 slot machine provides an intimacy of thrill and experience that rivaled the communal exhilaration of the Lumière brothers’ cinématographe and the later American nickelodeon theatres. The physical contact with the visual was lost in the development of projected cinema, thereby imposing a vista experience to film that did not detach the viewer so much as it transformed recognizable sensation into grander romantic feelings of awe and the sublime. What happened to violence in cinema was not so much its increase, though it did increase, but its lack of immediate sensual immediacy, and consequently, Hollywood has endeavored ever since to reproduce, through Cinemascope, IMAX, to new reinventing ventures with 3D, that ever-so-common-and-tactile, alltoo-human crank-it-yourself sensation of innate human violence. What the gangster cycle and film noir revived, then, was that empathetic aesthetic of violence that had been lost through time and censorship.

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During the pre-Code enforcement period (1930–1934), the initial inroads to relieve censorship can be attributed to violence on film once again, initially in cartoons. Disney’s Cannibal Capers (1930) with its racist and violent content and The Gorilla Mystery (1930) with its rape subtext of the primate abducting Minnie Mouse, which followed the Ub Iwerks caricaturing of demented physicality and stereotypes, both conclude by saving the victim and poetically justifying revenge upon the perpetrators. These types of Silly Symphonies were replaced by the sedate versions of humor, still mixed with violence, as Walt Disney himself admitted to the New York Times in 1934: “Human distress exemplified by animals is sure-fire. A bird that jumps after swallowing a grasshopper is a ‘natural.’”11 Laughter reduces tension, animated violence rarely translates at the moment to the real world, and it is a safe medium for experiencing and relishing moments of violence, even more so than the silent comedies of the absurd Keystone Kops. Laughter also deflects violence. By the early 1930s, Will Hays, Presbyterian president of Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) since 1922 after resigning as postmaster general, deemed censorship necessary to promote clean, inoffensive films and targeted a crackdown on male aggressive attitudes among studio heads to “put bad boys in their places.”12 Like its predecessor in the industry, the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry (NAMPI) of 1916, the initial function of MPPDA was as a self-regulatory agency to forestall governmental intrusion.13 In 1934, Joseph Breen, a Catholic layman, was appointed to run the Production Code Administration (PCA), later referred to as the “Breen Office.” The liberal sensuality and overt brutality of 1920s and 1930s cinema, both American and French, led ultimately to this bizarre Counter-Reformation of Catholic Church doctrine reinforced by Protestant moral outage aimed at stemming the increase in film depravity.14 The Catholic Legion of Decency urged a purging of objectionable content from films, as did various Protestant groups. The Hays 1927 list of Don’ts and Be Carefuls was divided between eleven cinema “Shall-nots,” which dealt primarily with sexual issues including nudity, white slavery, miscegenation, and children’s sexual organs, as well as twenty-five special care conditions that dealt primarily with violence issues, among them arson, use of firearms, theft, brutality and gruesome depictions, murder, third-degree methods of interrogation, actual hangings, cruelty to children and animals, branding people or animals, rape and attempted rape, and sympathy toward criminals. The hierarchy of the list is incomprehensible, with the third degree and branding occurring before rape. From this list, Stephen Prince posits that the later Production Code also accepted “not just the place of

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violence in motion picture entertainment, but also a broad spectrum of imaginable violent behaviors from which no single behavior was deemed reprehensible enough to exclude.”15 Prince, however, positions this argument to justify stylistic violence in later films. Although the objections to screen brutality, sadism, and bloodshed did force filmmakers to find new methods for incorporating violence, those gruesome moments were not lost upon audiences. Much of the commendation against violence began with America’s fixation upon Prohibition gangsters and the blood reprisals by urban mobsters, such as Al Capone’s 1929 St. Valentine’s Day massacre against Bugs Moran’s North Side Chicago mob. The gangster film cycle of early 1930s studios, beginning with the gun violence of The Doorway to Hell (1930) and Little Caesar (1930), reached its violent peak with Public Enemy (1931) and particularly the graphic machine-gunning of the eponymous protagonist in Scarface (1932). States also joined in on the censorship front. For 1930–1931, in Bill no. 384, the Kansas State Senate extended the right to examine and to censor films and advertisements for subtitles, dialogue, songs, and even “sounds” that contained “cruel, obscene, indecent or immoral” language.16 Of note is the first assertion of “cruel” language, which conforms to the notion that violence underlies much of the view of censorship and that it was linked to sexuality. Astonishing as it may seem, the industry self-regulating Studio Relations Committee (SRC), created by Hays in 1927, issued a January 1931 report of Universal’s Dracula that dismissed the obvious sexuality of the vampire and his brides, as well as scenes of fulfilling his bloodlust, and went so far as to deem it a “family picture.”17 As a rule violence, like sexuality, could be permitted so long as vice lost out in the end. Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) afforded Michael Curtiz the cinematic opportunity to sneak “gambling, girls, and guns” past Joseph Breen, although Warner Brothers executives were negotiating with the censorship office because they knew just how much violence the script and rushes allowed.18 Part of the success of the Production Code’s implementation was simple historical serendipity. Most studio executives in the late 1920s ignored cries for Don’ts and Be Carefuls in film content from those self-proclaimed censors Will Hays and former War Department public relations officer Colonel Jason Joy—until, that is, their profits were hit and hit twice. First in early 1929, civic organizations, ladies’ clubs, Catholic groups, and especially the numerous state and local censorship boards had begun campaigns to delete films from distribution, “over two thousand for crime and violence alone.”19 Of note is the first assault on violence and depictions of criminal behavior from local boards. By the time the MPPDA was revamping the Code for enforcement throughout the industry, both Labor and

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Justice Departments had attacked the top-grossing gangster films in particular as leading to corruption of youth. Even Al Capone, in what must have been a moment of self-parodic irony, complained about the deleterious effect of gangster films: “Now, you take all these youngsters who go to the movies. Well, these gang movies are making a lot of kids want to be tough guys and they don’t serve any useful purpose.”20 Cinematic art and license fall far below the profit margin line in terms of studio interests. Losing money in distribution and exhibition was then coupled with the economic catastrophe of the bank collapses of October 1929 and radical economic decline afterward. By 1930 the bottom had fallen out of movie theater attendance to the tune of nearly 30 million fewer viewers each week, which meant that the studios sought out sensationalism to draw crowds back with overt sexuality in the voluptuous form of Mae West, whose comedies, She Done Him Wrong (1933) and I’m No Angel (1934), attracted over 40 million viewers.21 Moral disapproval of West’s openly obscene innuendoes and suggestive double entendres did impose restrictions on the sexual content of other productions, particularly serious films, and left studios searching for another form of sensationalism. They found it in the violence of gangster films, whose popularity followed a similar ascent and quick decline in the early 1930s, due to campaigns by religious pressure groups and successfully targeted theater boycotts, especially in major urban areas, aimed at persuading the several hundred censorship boards around the country to adopt stricter enforcement. Faced with mounting pressures from federal, state, county, and municipal authorities to censor their own film productions, studio financial officers understood that salacious content, which had been so lucrative in the previous decade, now meant substantial risk in the marketplace. Few aspects of American culture can sway Hollywood—not religion, not politics, not morality—so much as economic necessity and sustained profitability can. Still, Hollywood understood that making violence taboo would also increase profits so long as its sensationalism could be diverted by means of film aesthetics. Constitutionally, by the 1930s movies had few protections from prior restraint, unlike newspapers, which enjoyed the benefits of the Supreme Court’s 5–4 ruling in Near v. Minnesota (1931) that effectively diminished gag laws, injunctions, and censorship for general public decency, not protection against obscenity, through an extension of the Fourteenth Amendment to the states. Of course, the Near decision did not impose any constitutional demands upon civic ordinances against film content. The court upheld the Chicago’s board of censors’ demand to review films before exhibition in Times Film Corporation v. Chicago (1961) citing Near, but reversed that decision four years later in Freedman v. Maryland (1965),

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citing Near once again to protect against prior restraint, and then used Near once more in Young v. American Mini Theatres (1976) to uphold “the constitutionality of cities’ use of zoning laws to control the proliferation of pornography.”22 During this pre-Code and Production Code period, the Supreme Court routinely took a more favorable position toward verbal as opposed to visual license, as demonstrated in Lovell v. Griffin (1938), Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v Wilson (1951), and Hannegan v. Esquire, Inc. (1946).23 The paradoxical Priapic and Puritanical mindsets of American culture often forget that violence in cinema, although diverted, often off-screen, and visually discreet, allowed for the easing of Production Code restrictions, long before obscenity and pornography were causes célèbres in the news media and court cases. This aesthetic of violence confronts the Code, beginning with the gangster cycle. William Wellman’s iconic The Public Enemy (1930) begins with a justification of its social aim, which is “to honestly depict an environment that exists today in a certain strata of American life, rather than glorify the hoodlum or the criminal.” This disclaimer remains somewhat disingenuous as bootlegging mobster Tom Powers ( James Cagney) rises to a high life of tuxedos, night clubs and fast women while his patriotic brother, Mike (Donald Cook), who fought in World War I, suffers from shell shock and struggles thereafter to support their mother with meager wages. Sexuality and violence coexist for Tom, who, since childhood, has had a sadomasochistic relationship with the opposite sex, from tripping his roller skating neighbor to the now famous anti-domesticity scene of smashing a grapefruit into his girlfriend Kitty’s (Mae Clark) face at the breakfast table. This scene of male aggression toward women repeats itself in the film and in the history of gangster portrayals in film noir. Violence against women, though certainly curtailed by the enforcement of the Production Code, did occur in film noir, but with greater intensity. In Anthony Mann’s Raw Deal (1948), the pyromaniac, sadistic mob boss Rick Coyle (Raymond Burr) celebrates his birthday by adding extra Courvoisier to a dessert in a chafing dish, setting it ablaze, and fixating upon its heat and beauty. All the while, Coyle ignores the feminine beauty of his tight evening dress–clad girlfriend dancing behind him. When he learns that the odds of his capturing Joe Sullivan (Dennis O’Keefe) are a million to one, he reacts by throwing the flaming dessert into her face— off-screen, of course, and out of camera frame—but the screams are real enough. In Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953), Vince Stone (Lee Marvin) confronts his girlfriend Debbie (Gloria Grahame) for having spent time with the police detective Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford), who has recently humiliated Stone in front of a barroom of patrons. Pulling her away from

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her narcissistic ritual in the living room mirror, Vince brutally interrogates her as she screams her objections. Tossing her out of camera frame, in his fury Vince looks around and discovers a carafe of boiling coffee, which he tosses into Debbie’s face, permanently disfiguring her. Nicholas Ray’s In A Lonely Place, a noir psychological study of male rage, is punctuated with scenes of gender violence, including a re-enactment of a brutal murder in which Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart) directs his policeman friend, Brub (Frank Lovejoy), so persuasively that Brub nearly strangles his own wife, Sylvia ( Jeff Donnell), in the process. All the more chilling and compelling is the peculiar underlighting of Dixon’s face that gives him a satanic expression as he describes the thrill and satisfaction derived from strangulation. In A Lonely Place also concludes with Dixon violently strangling his fiancée, Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), almost to the point of death, because he suspects her of betrayal. Rick Coyle, Vince Stone, and Dixon Steele’s horrible gender abuses have their roots in Tom Powers’s psychosexual rejection of feminine sexuality, empowerment, and domesticity in The Public Enemy. In fact, a convention of film noir remains the inability of domesticity to succeed as a retreat or reward for the protagonist, whether a hard-boiled detective, police sergeant, or even gangland criminal. Examples of killing women, necessitated by narratives of real or supposed betrayals, are numerous and serve as the brutal culmination of male–female relationships in film noir: the kiss, then retaliatory shooting of Phyllis (Barbara Stanwyck) in Double Indemnity (1944); the death by car accident of Cora (Lana Turner) in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946); the gunshots in the house of mirrors that kill Elsa (Rita Hayworth) in The Lady from Shanghai (1947); the police machine-gunning Kathie ( Jane Greer) in Out of the Past (1947); the car crash that ends the murderous, duplicitous life of Cora (Lisbeth Scott) in Dead Reckoning (1947); the murder–suicide enacted by Diane ( Jean Simmons) in Angel Face (1952); and a bedroom gunshot for Sherry (Marie Windsor) in The Killing (1956). When Tom Powers meets flapper Gwen Allen ( Jean Harlow), his masculine bravado becomes a kind of impotence before Gwen’s sexual empowerment. At the moment Gwen seduces Tommy, physically dominating him on a loveseat, a knock on the door provides a coitus nearly interruptus. Cagney, in a physical gesture that quite surprisingly the censors missed, stands and adjusts his trousers, as though hiding his erection. News at the door from his partner, Matt (Edward Woods), relates that their mob boss, Nails Nathan (Leslie Fenton) has died in a horseback riding accident. From this moment, Tom exchanges one type of phallic pleasure for another, as gun slaughter increases almost exponentially

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in the remaining scenes. Of course, they shoot the horse in its stall. As gangland warfare breaks out, Paddy Ryan (Robert O’Connor) convinces the gang to hide out with his moll, Jane (Mia Marvin), where he strips them of their guns. Weakened by alcohol and without his gun, Tom becomes the sexual target of Jane, who overpowers him in bed. The next morning, Jane stands over Tom at the breakfast table and teases him about their night together, but when the hung-over Tom realizes what occurred, he slaps her face. Tom’s rejection of both Gwen, to whom he never returns, and Jane has as much to do with their perversely maternal coaxing of him sexually as it does with his violent rejection of what Kitty represents—domesticity.24 Disgusted, Tom flees the hideout with Matt pursuing him as rival gang snipers await them from a second-story window across the street. Wellman uses a long shot from behind the snipers and through the window to frame the two hoodlums on the street below, which also affords a voyeuristic sensation of participatory violence. The camera pans with the pair as Matt is gunned down in a hail of bullets, with Cagney and Woods tripping in staccato steps that mimic the rhythm of gunplay. It is certainly overkill, since they use two Vickers .303 Mark 1, tripod mounted, 250-round beltfed machine guns, with 7.7 mm bullets that pierce the building’s concrete corner, nearly hitting Tom. Displaced by his own mob and barely avoiding assassination, Tom seeks revenge. In a pre-noir night scene of lamplight, shadows, and rain, Tom tracks down the rival gang and with two newly stolen pistols goes after them in their Western Chemical Company hideout. A close-up of Cagney’s face reveals the self-satisfied, vicious smile of the revenge-killer. In classic gangster film style, Cagney marches inside and then nearly twenty shots echo off-screen, and a very disturbing animalistic moan resounds as Tom, now bent over after being shot, struggles back into the street. His last defiant act is to throw his two revolvers through the windows before he collapses, fittingly, in the gutter. In a reverse close-up that began Tom’s murderous campaign, with blood pouring down one side of his face, that maniacal smile now a grimace, Tom proclaims to a dead urban world, “I ain’t so tough.” Awakening in the hospital, Tom is surrounded by his family, but his happy return to his loving mother and forgiving brother never occurs. Mike answers a knock on the family’s front door, which Wellman captures from a severe low angle so that as the door opens a bound and dead Tom collapses face down in midframe. This gruesome scene concludes the film’s action as the superimposed intertitle reads: “‘The Public Enemy’ is not a man, nor is it a character—it is a problem that sooner or later WE, the public, must solve.”

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The gangster’s violent, poetically justified end also met with considerable censorship. Howard Hawks’s Scarface (1932) concludes with Tony Camonte (Paul Muni) dying a coward’s death, as the censors demanded in their changes to the original ending. After firing endless rounds with Model 1921 Thompson submachine guns through the windows of his fortified gangster apartment at the police encircling the building, Tony discovers that his not-so-disguised incestuous sister, Cesca (Ann Dvorak), has taken a bullet. Teargas fills the room and Tony tries to escape, but the police shoot him in the arm, forcing him to drop his revolver. As he is led down the stairs by police, Tony pathetically and hysterically pleads for his life, breaks free of the officers, and runs out the door, only to be met by two long blasts from police firing, ironically, Tommy guns. With incredible physicality, Muni contorts his body in a grim, monstrous display of pain before collapsing in the street. Above this death scene and the excited, almost gleeful voices of witnesses, the camera moves to a lighted sign that advertises: “The World Is Yours.” The alternative ending of Scarface has Tony being led to the gallows in state prison. A shocking shot up through the gallows floor reveals officers testing the rope with a simulated weighted bundle. The sound of the trap door opening and the weight dropping also concludes the film, when, after the warden pronounces Tony’s death sentence, these are the only sounds before the fade to black. Machine gun violence was hardly restricted to Scarface. In fact, although Hawks’s film was the most notorious of the gangster cycle films, both Archie Mayo’s The Doorway to Hell (1930) and George W. Hill’s The Secret 6 (1931) employ equally graphic depictions of automatic weapons and both are significantly more violent in their content. The Doorway to Hell begins with Mileaway ( James Cagney) whispering to well-dressed pool-playing hood, Monk (Fred Argus), who follows Mileaway’s orders by requesting at the tobacco stand: “Hey, gimme my violin case, will you?” Of course, the case contains a Tommy gun. Outside another hood’s brownstone, a car with the hood and another well-dressed gangster await gun moll Jane to tell her boyfriend Whitey Eckhart to come down and speak with them. As Jane retrieves Whitey, the hoods open the violin case and assemble the Model 1921 Thompson submachine gun. Shot from behind the gangsters in the car and through their side window, Whitey’s death occurs from a blast of four automatic shots. His body tumbles headlong and bounces down the stairs. The action cuts to a police station where detective O’Grady (Robert Elliott) confronts a nattily dressed Louie Ricarno (Lew Ayres), the “Napoleon of the Underworld,” who runs a portion of the beer brewing racket in Chicago. The film’s central conflict remains not the gangland killings, but

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the rivalry between law and underworld, represented by these two figures. Louie organizes the mobs in the city and redistributes the gangs according to districts, but when one mobster threatens him with a Colt .45 at a meeting of the various crews, Mileaway pulls up a window shade to reveal two thugs with submachine guns pointed at the “sucker,” and Louie’s admonition about the pistol: “Go on, put that toy away. It’s too small.” After successfully organizing the crime syndicate, Louie marries Doris (Dorothy Mathews), who is still in love with Mileaway, and retires to Florida, but not for long. When violence breaks out among the mobs, Louis returns to settle scores, with the ubiquitous violin case in hand. His murderous exploits land him in jail, along with Mileaway, who has copped a plea to killing the Midget (Erwin Argus) in order to save Louie’s neck. Louie escapes from the jail, but O’Grady catches up with him in the film’s final scene, at a tenement apartment hideaway. O’Grady informs Louie that he was only able to escape because the Midget and Rocco’s (Noel Madison) gang members want “to get the kick of bumping” off Louie themselves. Louie asks O’Grady to take him back to jail, where he was safe, but O’Grady refuses, claiming political and civil exigency: “What’s the use? We know you’re guilty, but we couldn’t get a conviction. You’re a menace to society and this is the easiest way of getting rid of you.” As O’Grady leaves the hideaway, he stops before a frame portrait of Napoleon. Disgusted, he turns back to Louie, who responds: “Just another mug who tried to break out of his racket!” In the end, Louie walks out the door, but not before grinning at Napoleon on the wall. The intertitle reads about this “Doorway to Hell” which leads to “not retribution—no plea for further clemency,” while twenty chilling seconds of machine gun fire can be heard, with an additional five seconds after the fade to black. The Secret 6 chronicles the rise and fall of Louie Scorpio (Wallace Beery), a Chicago-style Capone-figure, whose life is punctuated with scenes of violence. At the stockyards, the camera cuts from a long shot to a medium close-up of Louie sledgehammering cattle in the abattoir. He joins up with slick Johnny Franks (Ralph Bellamy) and Mizoski, the Gouger (Paul Hurst), henchmen for dipsomaniac, yet sophisticated attorney, Newton’s (Lewis Stone) gang. To strengthen their position in illegal alcohol concessions, the trio enters rival mobster, Colimo’s ( John Milgan) speakeasy, who sends his own button-men to stop them from muscling in. When the lights go out, in a failed subterfuge raid by Colimo’s gang, the trio mows down his younger brother in a hail of Tommy gun blasts. Then, in a minute-long sequence of twenty shots, a fast-paced car chase scene takes place with POV shots of head-on weaving through actual city traffic, going around a trolley car, nearly hitting an oncoming automobile, and rear projection

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reversal of frantically dodging cars through the front windshield. Shots cut between actual POV mounted camera footage of careering around corners and rear projection of the city’s bustling traffic and sidewalks full of pedestrians, with the occasional feminine screams echoing the sounds of squealing tires. As Climo’s gang catches up, a hood leans out from the shotgun seat with a Model 1921 Thompson and opens up on the fleeing trio, who, after their rear window is shot out, return Thompson fire with reciprocal vengeance. The trio succeeds in killing the driver, who falls out of the car, and in a real-time POV shot from the front of the car, the camera captures the car’s impact into a storefront window, with the sounds of the collision and women’s screams. For the 1931 audience, the simultaneous tension, excitement, and horror of viewing such rapid, multiple cuts must have been an overwhelming sensation. Gangsters’ antipathy against the police and the law also found its expression in the lone hero of film noir forced, often by chance or unforeseen circumstances, to become a fugitive from justice.25 This narrative structure afforded studios the same marginalized figure as the gangster, but one who resorts to violence as a means of self-preservation, often against crooked cops, graft-taking politicos, and even gangsters who have framed the protagonist. Of course, this formula applies to the economically-challenged, morally liminal, hard-boiled detective. For example, Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell) threatens violence as often as he gets knocked out and falls into that “dark pool” of unconsciousness in Edward Dmytryk’s Murder, My Sweet (1945). In the end, Marlowe, in an attempt to stop a murder, graphically has his eyeballs scorched by the expelled gunpowder of a Colt .32 automatic. To simulate the immediate POV sensation of being slugged, the camera jostles erratically from side-to-side when Lieutenant DeGarmot (Lloyd Nolan) hits Marlowe (Robert Montgomery) in The Lady in the Lake (1947). The ordinary citizen confronting and participating in criminal violence is not always so easily classified as innocent in the subversive irony of film noir. In Delmer Daves’s Dark Passage (1947), the falsely accused of murder and now escaped convict Vincent Parry (Humphrey Bogart) uses physical assault and verbal intimidation to seek out the true murderer of his wife. In the process, this innocent man causes the spectacularly visual lethal falls of the blackmailing Baker (Clifton Young) and the vituperative Madge (Agnes Moorehead), who is the actual murderer. Vengeance killings were hardly restricted to gangster assassination or retribution in film noir; rather, visual displays of political killings were part of this period’s cinema violence, especially lynchings. In her admirable work on fin-de-siècle to mid-century spectacles of American violence, Amy Louise Wood’s work on lynching proposes both an alternative view to

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the causes of violence being urban modernity and mob-mentality. Instead, she seeks to trace the sensationalism of the spectacle of violence, its consumption in modern culture, and its participation in the complex, yet ever-increasing forms of everyday acceptance of violence in the workplace. In particular, she discusses how photography and film turned lynchings into a local, personal experience: Rather, white southerners produced and received these most modern lynching representations through very personal and local terms. Through them, they rehearsed narratives of crime and punishment, of sin and retribution, that they already understood through the practices of public executions and from their religious traditions.26

Of course, Wood indicts evangelical Calvinism as one source of this noxious amusement by lynching much as she shrewdly does visual representation in photography and Hollywood cinema, both by proponents and opponents of this form of cultural violence. Wood provides ample evidence that state execution films in the early years of the twentieth century in the South produced a kind of “detachment that allowed spectators to view subjects they would consider unbearable or unacceptable to witness live” (126). Even granting Wood’s point, it is clear that the audiences are still witnessing the violent event and that screen distance hardly separated or abstracted the incident from their consciousness. To regard screen violence as somehow a detachment is to fall prey to arguments about the perpetuation of violence due to the detachment by screen violence. The Lumière brothers’ L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895) caused audiences to duck as the locomotive moved diagonally toward them on the screen. Wood, for conventional, current cultural reasons, ignores the physical, emotional, and psychological thrill, if not enjoyment, of this kind of vicious, violent spectacle of human death. Tracked by Bloodhounds, or, A Lynching in Cripple Creek (William N. Selig, 1904) represents the first crime–to–mob lynching narrative in film. With a running time of just over four minutes and only twelve shots, the film displays all of the cultural paranoia and vengeance of the lynching period. The basic story is melodrama, action packed, and concludes with a spectacle of violence. An itinerant tramp (Chris Lane), with dark complexion and beard, arrives and is welcomed to a plate of food by an aproned woman. He dashes the plate to the floor, demands money from her, and then, upon her refusal, dashes her to the floor and strangles her. The young daughter, dressed like Elsie Dinsmore, arrives to find her mother dead and in the process interrupts the tramp’s search of the mother’s belongings. With

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her hands clasped to her breasts she rushes toward her mother, while the tramp escapes out the door. The farmer father arrives to find his daughter kneeling over his dead wife and he responds by grabbing his rifle. In the next wide shot, men, boys, and bloodhounds arrive and the hunt begins with a long, tracking shot of the smiling men and boys rushing past the camera. The tramp hears their approach and runs off into the woody hillside; bloodhounds discover his scent and the chase resumes, with one of the straggling men swinging a rope over his head as he runs. The chase, in a few long shots, continues as rifle and pistol shots raise white smoke across the screen. One man fights with the tramp, and his gun goes off with a burst of white smoke, before they both roll down the hill. Soon, other men and dogs arrive and pursue. The tramp, now with a gun, fires at the men, before he falls from a hillside ropeway into a creek, where another man jumps him, subdues him, and drags him out to men and dogs waiting on shore. Men’s hands are raised and cheers, evident. A long, low-angle shot tracks to a central pine tree with a lone, stub branch visible on the trunk, very much like a natural gibbet, as men approach with their captive and encircle a tree. With a noose around the victim’s neck, they pull him dramatically upward. The last shot is literally a rifle going off in the direction of the hanged man. Significantly, although no trace of blackface or any other stereotypical physical signs marking the tramp appear in the film, newspaper accounts assumed the tramp was black. The Washington Post in January 1906 reported that an all-black Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia, of nearly two thousand viewed this film and at the final scene of the hanging “the entire audience of colored people arose and applauded.”27 As a form of political justification for mob violence against intraracial sexual assault, this article, most likely contrived, attests to the culture of lynching in the South, as well as the film industry’s capitalization upon the structured narrative spectacle of crime—chase—and mob retribution and its apparent appeal to moviegoers. As a lynching film, Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936) serves as a perfect example of the new treatment of violence in the early years of the Production Code. Like film noir, Fury not only reveals a dark side to human nature, but also the very institutions of society—marriage, law, the courts—are called into question. Fury begins with Joe Wilson (Spencer Tracy) and his intended, Catherine (Sylvia Sidney), staring at a bedroom set of twin beds, “the embodiment of bourgeois happiness,” as Lotte Eisner frames this scene.28 This moment is significant for Joe’s eventual transformation, even more so because it is bourgeois complacency that is the target of Lang’s social critique. That ineffectual, solipsistic acceptance of the status quo, of the powers that be, relates to the Nazi Germany that Lang fled.

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Lang will return to this image near the film’s conclusion when Joe, isolated from all of society, including Catherine and his two brothers, wanders the city at night, alone in his seething anger and vengeance. He pauses before a store window that displays a bedroom set. The sight transforms Joe, with his first moments of resurrection from a death-in-life existence, as he hears Catherine’s disembodied voice echoing the promise from their past. Later that same night, Joe stops before a florist shop. Lang frames Joe in the window as he superimposes the faces of those on trial. This visual device, combining the sensations of sight and sound, Lang employs several times as analogies to the cinema viewing experience. Again, it is the aural that Lang uses to reveal Joe’s anxiety, as he walks along a desert street he feels the presence, indicated by the sound of footsteps, of his own victims pursuing him. Joe is caught in a circular dilemma of vengeance, whereby he, victim turned avenger, now becomes avenger turned victim by his own conscience. In Fury, Joe Wilson finds his belief in the American Dream of freedom and opportunity transformed into a nightmare. He, too, metamorphoses from an American Everyman into a malicious, if justified, avenger. The crucial moment of the film occurs when Joe is detained, then arrested by a deputy just outside the town of Strand, site of a gruesome child abduction and murder. This crime is similar to the thematic content of Lang’s M (1931) but, as Anton Kaes suggests, with its own revaluation of the criminal’s existence: Fury reworks M in American terms. Both films deal with men who become marked as forces dangerous to the community, forces that need to be identified and eliminated. Both films also examine the emergence and brutal practices of a vigilante mob. But the differences are telling: while Peter Lorre’s character is set apart from others by his physique and voice, Spencer Tracy’s Joe epitomizes the common man. While the criminal’s court in M mockingly upholds the rule of law, the upright citizens of the small town of Strand burn down a jail and intend to kill the alleged perpetrator.29

While Joe remains in jail, the town takes on a fascist mob mentality as men, women, and children rush along the street in a twisted carnivalesque frenzy of that indigenous American activity of violence—the lynching. What is so striking about Fury is Lang’s concentration on the visual excitation of violence, the eyes of the mob in particular. Lang uses newsreel cameramen as a self-reflexive commentary on the desire for visual violence in American popular culture. This footage will become the primary evidence in the prosecution’s case against members of

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the lynch mob, who are accused of Joe’s murder. Moreover, it represents the desire to visualize violence, in this case, not the mob’s scopophilic need to see Joe die, but now the courtroom audience’s need to view the violence of the mob, thereby condemning them. Reynold Humphries draws the analogy between the footage shown in court and the two audiences who view it, in the courtroom and in the theatre: “We, the subjects of the enunciation, relive that night in the same way as the people in the courtroom, for the simple reason that the cinema screen brought into the court fills the cinema screen we are watching, that of Fury itself.”30 Of course, the problem is that Joe did not perish in the fire started by members on mob now on trial, which makes the newsreel evidence as false as the charges against Joe Wilson. What the projecting of the footage does reveal, however, is the desire to view violence, to re-experience moments of violence at a visceral level, and, in the case of both false accusations, to accept the visual as the real. Thomas Leitch concludes that Fury implicates the audience in the culpability of vigilantism, “a collective identity that reduces them to a lawless mob,” or personal vendetta, “an individual identity as equally lawless vigilante.”31 Fury, however, complicates this dichotomy even further, since both culpabilities rely upon the audience’s visual and visceral satisfaction being fulfilled through images and sounds of violence. Fury not only reduces American morality to a primitive level, but it also makes its audience uncomfortably aware of its own desire for violent vengeance as an unconscious element of its democratic principles. Moreover, Fury appears to be Lang’s dual attack on American complacency with underlying totalitarian movements and on the sanctimonious morality of the Production Code, which would curtail his film’s social commentary. Lynchings were not restricted to the South, since in the West during the late nineteenth century, mobs killed 447 whites and 38 blacks. Lang, however, sets his film in the modern South, because the history of lynchings in that region far exceeded any other region of the United States, with an “estimated 723 whites and 3,220 blacks lynched in the South between 1880 and 1930.”32 The dates here are significant for framing the lynching era in the American South. Moreover, that period revealed not only white-on-black lynchings, but also intraracial public violence, with white-on-white and black-on-black lynch mobs in the South.33 Lang’s Fury is not so much a white victim substituting for an African American, but an indictment of the penchant for mob-ruled violence in the South. An astonishing number of photographs record American lynchings, often with crowds witnessing the event or its aftermath. There were even commemorative postcards of lynchings! Among the most famous was a postcard depicting the August 17, 1915, Marietta, Georgia, public

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murder of Leo Frank, whose hanged body in the tree is surrounded by men and boys passively looking toward the camera, as though aware of their visual presence as part of the ritual of violence. Frank was found guilty of the murder of a 13-year-old girl, Mary Phagan, but the court case included allegations that he raped Phagan, a crime not dissimilar to the one Joe Wilson is charged with. The photograph for sale reveals much about scopophilia and enticement of the spectacle of violence. In the Frank case, the charges of sexual perversion against virginity added to the fetishistic desires of imagined unnatural acts and to hostile antiSemitism.34 That those sexual assaults were conjured in the minds of the townsfolk plays into the perverse off-screen violence and sexuality that the Production Code forced into films. The kidnap and murder of 22-year-old Brooke Harte in San Jose on November 1933, which resulted in the lynching and burning of two white men, Thomas Thurmond and Jack Holmes, in the city park on November 26, also resembles the narrative of Fury; moreover, the reliance upon photographing violence reflects the grisly American desire to visualize such acts.35 Universal Newspaper Newsreel reported for theatergoers “Kidnapers lynched by enraged crowd after jail battle,” a short film in which the governor of California James Rolph condones, if not outright praises, the mob’s action. In a special edition, the Oakland Post Enquirer ran a front page story of photographs of the hanged bodies of two accused men. Thurmond’s pants were ripped off, and Holmes had been stripped naked. Newspaper reporters, later newsreel men, captured the lynching in numerous photographs, which were “made into postcards, and several were compiled in a ‘souvenir booklet’ of the lynching, along with quotes from Governor Rolph’s inflammatory defense of the mob.”36 That infamous San Jose case became the basis for a film noir that culminates in a brutal lynching, Cy Endfield’s Try and Get Me (1950), based upon Jo Pagano’s 1947 novel The Condemned. The film begins with a fanatical, blind Protestant street preacher prophetically questioning the on-lookers, “How much is each of you guilty for the evil in the world?” Down-and-out World War II vet Howard Tyler (Frank Lovejoy) teams up with veteran criminal Jerry Slocum (Lloyd Bridges) for a gas station robbery. Soon their crimes escalate to a nighttime kidnapping for ransom of a young well-todo man, Donald Miller (Carl Kent). The pair take him to a gravel quarry, where Slocum binds his hands and legs and rolls him into the rock pit, as they follow after his body. The cascading stones foreshadow the town’s citizenry pursing them. Slocum brutally bludgeons the victim with a large rock, while Tyler, in an extreme close-up, shuts his eyes and cringes at the sounds behind him. Of course, Tyler’s blindness, like the street preacher’s,

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represents not a lack of vision, but an intensity of visual sensation, the theatre audience’s witnessing of brutality. Slocum convinces Tyler to join him on a double date. As voluptuous as she is tempestuous, Velma (Adele Jergens) reacts violently to Slocum’s mistreating of her after she snatches a letter he tries to hand off to Tyler. While mailing the letter for Slocum at a post box, Tyler encounters a new father, who is proudly sending out announcements to relatives and chattering away about his baby boy, even offering Tyler a cigar. This paternal love induces for Tyler a memory of the crime, which is a flashback superimposed over a close-up of his eyes, again with the emphasis on his shut eyes. Unlike the murder scene, the flashback shows Slocum’s repeated bashing with the stone, twelve times, in fact. At the nightclub, Tyler experiences continual dizzy spells from alcohol and reliving the murder. Arriving the next morning at his blind date, Hazel’s (Katherine Locke) apartment, Tyler drinks even more, slumbers, but then awakens to Hazel reading the headlines about the search for Miller’s killers. As she settles him down on the couch, Hazel discovers a tie clip with the initials DM and questions Tyler about it, who erupts in a paranoid rage, blurting out a confession, and then nearly strangling her to forestall her calling the police. Eyes shut, Tyler cries out to his wife, Judy (Kathleen Ryan) that he swears he did not know Slocum would kill, while Hazel escapes. Captured and held in custody, Slocum rages through the bars of his cell that he will kill Tyler, as an enormous crowd of hundreds forms outside the jail. As in Lang’s Fury, sensational journalism feeds upon the crime and whips the town into a frenzy of vigilante vengeance. The mob storms through police tear gas with a fire hose, knocking a policeman down the steps of the courthouse, whose body rolls in a similar manner to Miller’s on the night of the murder. With ropes through the door handles, men and college boys heave them to the ground, storm the cells, grab the fighting Slocum and Tyler, and carry them out to the awaiting mob. Instead of seeing the lynchings, the sheriff and newspapermen hear two roars from the crowd, as though they were experiencing a college football victory. The concluding voiceover, in a distinct European accent, proclaims the film’s message: “Violence is a disease caused by moral and social breakdown. That is the real problem and it must be solved by reasoning, not emotion, with understanding, not hate.” Yet, like the gangster films of the 1930s, the prologues and epilogues of films from pre-Code through film noir are paradoxical and ultimately ironic. Though dismissing the violence portrayed, the filmmakers understood the necessity for offering political murder, beatings, and sexual, gender assault as a kind of unsettling fulfillment of visual (and aural) satisfaction for the

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audience. By the time of the Cold War era of film noir, experiments with the aesthetic of violence became an integral part of these films. Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955) begins with Christina (Cloris Leachman), wearing only a trenchcoat, running barefoot down a two-lane highway trying to flag down any passing vehicle. She places herself in the path of Mike Hammer’s (Ralph Meeker) sportscar, forcing him off the road. He begrudgingly helps her, not aware that she has escaped from the clutches of vicious foreign agents, who then run them off the road. In one of film noir’s most gripping moments of violence, the frame contains only the bare, dangling legs of Christina, as her piercing, off-screen screams indicate brutal sexual torture. The scene is a horrific political crucifixion, the feminine screams of agony are relentless, the sensation of violence is visceral, and through it all, we cannot look away.

Notes 1.  Wrangham and Dale Peterson, 131–132. 2.  Shaviro, 31, 32, and 30. Shaviro rejects psychoanalytical film theory that denies Vertov’s multiplicity of efficacy by associating “visual pleasure almost exclusively with the illusion of a stable and centered subject” (41). Indeed, for Shaviro, cinema “produces real effects in the viewer, rather than merely presenting phantasmic reflections to the viewer” (50).   3.  Linfield, 7, 22.  4. Lorenz, 275.   5.  Muller, Sonya M. Kahlenberg, and Richard W. Wrangham, 197. Additionally, for an understanding of the conventional fallacies when discarding rape as an evolutionary explanation in favor of a general cultural or psychopathological explanation of human behavior, see the elucidating discussion in Thompson, 346–374.   6.  For an examination of primate violence, both threatened and actual, as having “pro-social outcomes,” see Silverberg and J. Patrick Gray, 1–36.  7. Mellaart, 118.   8.  Guilaine and Jean Zammit, 103–111, passim.  9. Hansen, 75. 10.  For discussions of advocates against nickelodeons as well as advocates for progressive use of films, see Lindstrom, 90–112. As Lindstrom points out in detail, against censorship efforts Jane Addams advocated for nickelodeons, particularly as an outlet for urban youth, in her The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909), even suggesting that “the most appalling crime narrative may offer an account of the self-reliant individual attempting to take control of a situation and obtain a rough justice” (97). 11.  Barrier, 121. 12.  Regester, 119.

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13.  Grieveson, 205. 14.  For a detailed history of Catholic and Protestant organizations’ efforts to censor films and to curtail distribution and exhibition before 1930, see Couvares, 584–616. Couvares’s conclusion points out the irony of such religious censorship efforts: “An industry largely financed by Protestant bankers, operated by Jewish studio executives, and policed by Catholic bureaucrats, all the while claiming to represent grass-roots America, resists either heroic or demystifying narrative treatment” (610). 15.  Prince, 20. Prince provides the 1938 adopted amendments to the Production Code that included mass violence, excessive brutality, and various restrictions on guns, especially machine guns and particularly these automatic weapons in the hands of gangsters, clearly a reaction to the films of the early 1930s. Such amendments, however, meant that a film could “satisfy the letter of the policy on crime while subverting it stylistically” (117). 16. Butters Jr., 186. While still viewing censorship of the time as pointed primarily toward sex, Butters does include violence in his estimation of why films were banned: “Certainly, the violence, gunplay, and fast living of Girls Gone Wild were much more exciting than anything happening in small-town Kansas, and the censors were fearful that such pictures might lead adolescents to engage in such behavior” (196). 17.  Edwards, 27, who quotes SRC reviewer James Fischer as concluding that Dracula “is not really a human being, so he cannot conceivably cause any trouble.” 18.  Ferraro, 76. Ferraro does relate the script change that redeemed the gangster Rocky ( James Cagney) from being a vicious monster: “In the original script the victim gunned down in the phone booth was . . . a pregnant woman. The censors would not condone the murder of a pregnant woman even to signify deep immorality” (76). 19.  Leff and Jerold L. Simmons, 8. Leff and Simmons’s deft analysis and essential historical details of this period of United States censorship relate not only to sexual censorship, but also to violence: “In 1930–31, however, the New York censors alone made 468 cuts for indecency, 243 for inhuman acts, 1,129 for incitement to crime, and 1, 165 for moral corruption” (15). 20.  Doherty, 157. 21.  Black, 173. 22.  Gossett and Juliet Dee, 77. 23.  Dreschel, 153. 24.  For a discussion of the maternal women in Tom Power’s life, see Shadoian, 56–7. 25.  For a detailed account of this thematic and narrative formula in film noir and later films and television, see Broe, 22–41. Broe estimates that between 1945– 1950, “the sympathetic fugitive” accounted “for over 40% of all crime films” (27). For the falsely accused citizen in film noir, see also Fluck, 379–408. 26.  Wood, 13. 27.  As quoted in Olsson, 271.

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28.  Eisner, 166. 29.  Kaes, 47–48. 30.  Humphries, 58. Humphries reveals the problematic relationship of this footage to the viewer: “Both moving and frozen images are put in question for having been contextualized in an enunciative strategy that contains them both. The desired homogeneity and neutrality break down, for both what we have seen and how we have seen it are revealed to be partial. The fixed ego goes up in smoke (like the prison)” (59). 31.  Leitch, 102. 32.  Brundage, “Introduction,” 4. 33.  Beck and Stewart E. Tolnay, 150. Beck and Tolnay conclude that mob violence was as common among blacks as it was among whites: “the black and white communities alike endorsed mob violence as an acceptable method of social control. Vigilantism, then, must have had rather broad legitimacy within southern society” (150). 34.  MacLean, 176, who cites accusations against “Hebrew libertines,” as well as the depravity of Jews. 35.  Mennel, 209. Mennel makes the case for the San Jose lynchings serving as the narrative model for the treatment “Mob Rule,” which Lang knew: “‘Mob Rule” parallels the San Jose lynching case because race was not a motivating factor in the kidnapping or in the lynching. Also, in the final film version the presence of the newspaper photographers at the lynching and the storming of the jail seem to be staged according to photographs taken at the San Jose case . . .” (209). 36.  Wood, 214. Wood reports that major, mainstream newspapers printed the photographs of the lynched bodies of Thurmond and Holmes: “Since the lynching was announced beforehand, a number of news photographers were at the scene to document the entire event on film, despite that some members of the mob tried to stop them. Pictures of the crowds in the park where Holmes and Thurmond were hanged were emblazoned across the pages of almost every major newspaper in the country” (214).

Bibliography Barrier, Michael. Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999. Beck, E. M., and Stewart E. Tolnay. “When Race Didn’t Matter: Black and White Mob Violence against Their Own Color.” Under Sentence of Death—Lynching in the South, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Black, Gregory D. “Hollywood Censored: The Production Code Administration and the Hollywood Film Industry, 1930–1940,” Film History 3, no. 3 (1989): 167–189. Broe, Dennis. “Class, Crime, and Film Noir: Labor, the Fugitive Outsider, and the Anti Authoritarian Tradition.” Social Justice 30, no. 1 (2003): 22–41.

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Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. “Introduction.” In Under Sentence of Death—Lynching in the South, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Butters, Gerald R. Jr. Banned in Kansas: Motion Picture Censorship, 1915–1966. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007. Couvares, Francis G. “Hollywood, Main Street, and the Church: Trying to Censor the Movies before the Production Code.” American Quarterly 44, no. 4 (December 1992): 584–616. Doherty, Thomas. Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Dreschel, Robert E. “Censorship.” In The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States, ed. Kermit L. Hall. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Edwards, Kyle. “Morals, Markets, and ‘Horror Pictures’: The Rise of Universal Pictures and the Hollywood Production Code.” Film and History 42, no. 2 (fall 2012): 23–37. Eisner, Lotte. Fritz Lang. New York: Da Capo, 1976. Ferraro, Thomas J. “Boys to Men: Angels with Dirty Faces (1938).” In Catholics in the Movies, ed. Colleen McDannell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Fluck, Winfried. “Crime, Guilt, and Subjectivity in Film Noir.” Amerikastudien/ American Studies 46, no. 3 (2001): 379–408. Gossett, John S., and Juliet Dee. “Near v. Minnesota.” In Free Speech on Trial: Communication Perspectives on Landmark Supreme Court Decisions, ed. Richard A. Parker. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003. Grieveson, Lee. Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early Twentieth-Century America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Guilaine, Jean, and Jean Zammit. The Origins of War—Violence in Prehistory. Trans. Melaine Hersey. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge, UK: Harvard University Press, 1991. Humphries, Reynold. Fritz Lang: Genre and Representation in His American Films. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Kaes, Anton. “A Stranger in the House: Fritz Lang’s Fury and the Cinema of Exile.” New German Critique: An Interdisciplinary Journal of German Studies 89 (spring– summer, 2003): 33–58. Leff, Leonard J., and Jerold L. Simmons. The Dame in the Kimono—Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code. Louisville: University Press of Kentucky, 2001. Leitch, Thomas. Crime Films. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Lindstrom, J. A. “‘Almost Worse than the Restrictive Measures’: Chicago Reformers and the Nickelodeons.” Cinema Journal 39, no. 1 (fall 1999): 90–112. Linfield, Susie. The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Lorenz, Konrad. On Aggression. Trans. Marjorie Kerr Wilson. London, UK: Routledge, 1966.

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MacLean, Nancy. “The Leo Frank Case Revisited.” Under Sentence of Death— Lynching in the South, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Mellaart, James. Çatal Hüyük, A Neolithic Town in Anatolia. New York: McGrawHill, 1967. Mennel, Barbara. “White Law and the Missing Black Body in Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936).” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 20, no. 3 (2003): 203–223. Muller, Martin N., Sonya M. Kahlenberg, and Richard W. Wrangham. “Male Aggression against Females and Sexual Coercion in Chimpanzees.” In Sexual Coercion in Primates and Humans: An Evolutionary Perspective on Male Aggression against Females, ed. Martin N. Muller and Richard W. Wrangham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Olsson, Jan. “Modernity Stops at Nothing: The American Chase Film and the Specter of Lynching.” In A Companion to Early Cinema, ed. André Gaudreault, Nicolas Dulac, and Santiago Hidalgo. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Prince, Stephen. Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1968. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Regester, Charlotte. “1934: Movies and the Marginalized.” In American Cinema of the 1930s—Themes and Variations, ed. Ina Rae Hark. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007. Shadoian, Jack. Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster Film. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003. Shaviro, Steven. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Silverberg, James, and J. Patrick Gray. “Violence and Peacefulness as Behavioral Potentialities of Primates.” In Aggression and Peacefulness in Human and Other Primates, ed. James Silverberg and J. Patrick Gray. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Thompson, Melissa Emery. “Human Rape: Revising Evolutionary Perspectives.” In Sexual Coercion in Primates and Humans: An Evolutionary Perspective on Male Aggression against Females, ed. Martin N. Muller and Richard W. Wrangham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Wood, Amy Louise. Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Wrangham, Richard, and Dale Peterson. Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

From Knights to Knights-Errant: The Evolution of Westerns through Portrayals of Violence Nathan Wuertenberg

As a number of scholars have noted, many modern Westerns have attempted to at least partially critique the social hierarchies that have characterized so much of American history.1 Such attempts are rooted in the gradual evolution of the Western genre over the course of what I would classify as three broad eras in cinematic history. For much of the first era (the early twentieth century), violence in Westerns was differentiated along gendered and racial lines to construct an image of nineteenthcentury frontiersmen as paragons of American exceptionalist excellence, “knights in fringed leather” that defended white “civilization” from nonwhite “savagery” through selective acts of “noble” violence. Often, such “knights” occupied positions of authority as local sheriffs, marshals, rangers, deputies, and soldiers, reflecting an established faith among the general American populace in the importance of the United States government in maintaining law, order, and “justice” in the nation. Beginning in the 1960s, however, the social and political changes brought about by the civil rights and women’s rights movements and the Vietnam War made such interpretations of American history increasingly tenuous. Over the course of this period, filmmakers came more and more frequently to critique portrayals of violence, gender, race, and government

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authority in Westerns just when many Americans were starting to challenge the role of such factors in the development of their nation. In this era, government officials increasingly came to be portrayed as malevolent figures, rigidly adhering to a set of outdated beliefs that typically drove them to wrongly persecute nonwhite characters. At the same time, such officials’ rigid maintenance of these moral codes managed to frustrate the desires of self-interested “condotierri”-like figures attempting to secure their own success and survival regardless of the cost to others. By the latter half of the twentieth century, a sort of synthesis was beginning to be reached between the “knights” of the early twentieth century and the “condotierri” of the 1960s and 1970s: the antihero, a “knighterrant”–like figure operating outside of the established status quo. From the 1990s to the 2010s, this synthesis hit its stride, and antiheroes have increasingly come to the fore of Western films just as they have in other genres.2 These “knights-errant” of present-day Westerns continue to defend the values they hold most dear through acts of “noble” violence. Whereas in the early twentieth century such figures stood as representatives of law and order, however, the protagonists of present-day Westerns often stand in direct opposition to figures of authority as they work to defend their own personal moral codes. So although the character and motivations of such figures has evolved considerably since the Westerns of the early twentieth century, their methods remain largely unchanged. In the end, then, I argue that although the cultural definition of what makes a Western hero “heroic” has changed over the years, the behavior expected of them has not. At its most fundamental level, the popular portrait of heroism in the American West was originally founded upon notions of white “civilization” and nonwhite “savagery” that arose in the earliest years of contact between Europeans and “others” such as Indians and Africans. As historian Bernard Sheehan notes in his book Savagism and Civility, many Europeans believed that the indigenous peoples they encountered in the Americas and elsewhere belonged to “savage” cultures that were inherently inferior and diametrically opposed to their own presumably “civilized” one.3 The idea of violence was key to such conceptions. Because Europeans considered “other” cultures inherently “savage,” they by extension believed them to be more prone to acts of “extreme” and “irrational” violence. Attacks by groups such as American Indians against Europeans only seemed to confirm this suspicion in the white mindset and fed a growing fear among white Americans of the supposed capacity of nonwhite “others” for overwhelmingly destructive violence.

From Knights to Knights-Errant

According to anthropologist Roy Harvey Pearce in his book The Savages of America (later titled Savagism and Civilization), this fear continued to inform a considerable portion of race relations throughout U.S. history.4 Indeed, attempts to “civilize” groups such as the Indians of North America by forcing them to adopt European cultural practices (in the hopes of mitigating their presumed tendency toward violence) continued as official government policies well into the nineteenth century. Frequently, such attempts were enforced through violence, an enforcement carried out by the U.S. military itself in actions such as the Indian Wars that took place in the West between the end of the Civil War and the more or less official closing of the frontier in 1890. Typically, such violence on the part of official representatives of the United States government was excused as the price necessary for “subduing” the “savages” and bringing “civilization” to the continent. Ultimately, as historian Richard Slotkin has argued in books like Regeneration through Violence and Gunfighter Nation, this sort of violence came to be a celebrated facet of American history and culture.5 According to Slotkin, many Americans came to believe that violent acts committed in the name of “civilizing” North America possessed a “cleansing,” “regenerative” quality. Such violence removed the “stain” of “savagery” from newly “conquered” territory and allowed white American “civilization” to “progress” unhindered and “untainted” as it advanced westward. This celebration of “civilized” violence then fed into an evolving mythology of the “Wild West,” a “savage” land that “noble heroes” such as Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and General George Armstrong Custer “tamed” in the name of “progress.” According to Stanley Corkin in Cowboys as Cold Warriors, this conception gained new importance in the twentieth century in light of the Cold War.6 Indeed, Western mythology became of paramount importance in a presumably ideological conflict between capitalism (a system driven by “rugged individualists” such as the frontier heroes of yore) and communism (a new other whose potential for “irrational” violence rivaled that of the nonwhite cultures that had fought to restrict the advance of the American nation westward). So, just as the white “heroes” of the nineteenth century had fought to “cleanse” the continent of “savage” nonwhite influences, so too would those of the twentieth rid the world of communist ones. As a result, retellings of the history of the American West became just as much about racial fears as they did political ones. The ever-present yet often unseen danger of attacks by nonwhite groups in Westerns from this period thus reflected old fears of “savage” nonwhite violence just as much as they did new ones of nuclear attack from distant locations in the Soviet Union.

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Fears of racial “others” like American Indians are readily apparent in classic Westerns like John Ford’s 1939 film Stagecoach.7 Throughout the narrative of the film, American Indians under the famed Apache leader Geronimo remain an ever-present threat, though seen only once, as the film’s protagonists travel by stagecoach from Tonto, Arizona Territory, to Lordsburg, New Mexico Territory, in 1880. The possible violence of an Indian attack stands in direct contraposition to the looming conflict between one of the passengers—the “Ringo Kid” ( John Wayne)—and Luke Plummer (Tom Tyler), the man responsible for the death of the “Kid’s” brother and father. Both potential episodes of violence are reserved for the final scenes of the film. Just before the stagecoach carrying the “Kid” and his companions reaches Lordsburg, Geronimo and his warriors launch a surprise attack. It is the only scene in which Indian characters are featured in the film. They are given no dialogue to explain their decision to attack the stagecoach or its occupants. Instead, they are featured as “unreasoning” aggressors capable only of firing weapons and loosing war whoops. The “Kid,” on the other hand, is given ample time to explain his motives. Indeed, his efforts to avenge the deaths of his family members are considered so “just” that by the end of the film the local United States Marshal Curley Wilcox (George Bancroft) chooses to tacitly condone them (thus giving them the air of acts having official legal standing). Early in the film, Wilcox listens thoughtfully to the words of the stagecoach driver Buck (Andy Devine), who advises him to allow the “Kid” to exact his vengeance. “If I was you I’d let them shoot it out,” Buck tells Wilcox, after all “there would be a lot more peace in this territory if that Luke Plummer had so many holes in him he couldn’t hold his liquor.” Upon reaching Lordsburg, Wilcox follows Buck’s advice, doing little to restrain the “Kid” as he escapes from the marshal’s custody in search of his foe. After the “Kid” emerges victorious from the climactic shootout—which occurs off-screen, leaving Geronimo’s Indians the only visible aggressors in the entire film—the marshal goes one step further, releasing the “Kid” from his custody and allowing him to escape into the wilderness with his love interest Dallas (Claire Trevor) at his side. Whereas the “savage” and “unreasoning” violence of nonwhite Indians is resoundingly condemned, then, the regenerative violence used by white “knights” such as the “Kid” in his efforts to “cleanse” the West of “negative” influences like Geronimo and Luke Plummer is not only accepted, it is celebrated and very nearly officially sanctioned by government authority. The supposedly violent character of nonwhite influences is even more fully explored in cinematic features such as King Vidor’s 1946 film Duel in the Sun.8 Duel in the Sun follows the tale of Pearl Chavez ( Jennifer Jones), a

From Knights to Knights-Errant

half-Indian, half-white teenager who is orphaned after her father (Herbert Marshall) kills her mother (Tilly Losch) and her mother’s lover (Sidney Blackmer). Before his execution, Pearl’s father arranges for his daughter to be sent to live with his second cousin Laura Belle (Lillian Gish) and her family on their Texas ranch, “Spanish Bit.” Once there, Pearl quickly finds herself torn between the competing loves of Laura’s two sons: the staid, responsible Jesse ( Joseph Cotten) and the aggressive, libidinous Lewt (Gregory Peck). As the narrative progresses, it quickly becomes apparent that the two brothers stand as both symbols of Pearl’s competing heritages as half-white and half-nonwhite and as representatives of the competing forces of “civilization” and “savagery” presumed to accompany those heritages (a “white knight” and “black knight,” respectively). By the end of the film, the competition between these two forces— played out in the two brothers’ rivalry for Pearl’s affections—reaches a fevered pitch. Confronting his brother outside of the local saloon, Jesse (by the film’s latter half a rising political star and married man interested only in “selflessly” protecting Pearl from Lewt’s possessive advances) demands that Lewt leave “Spanish Bit” forever. In response, Lewt fires his revolver at Jesse and leaves him for dead in the street. Upon discovering that his brother survived the attack, Lewt—now a wanted man—swears that he will soon return to finish the job once and for all. Hoping to avoid this eventuality, Pearl agrees to meet Lewt in the nearby desert and accompany him into exile. Instead, upon arriving at their rendezvous, Pearl opens fire on her former lover, fatally wounding him. Before she can escape, however, Lewt fires a shot in retaliation, fatally wounding her as well. In her last moments Pearl crawls into Lewt’s arms, thereby embracing the symbol of her half-Indian heritage’s presumed “savagery” (Lewt) while simultaneously dying a martyr on the altar of “civilization” by protecting the symbol of her half-white heritage ( Jesse) through an act of “regenerative” violence that “cleanses” the West of Lewt’s “savage” influence. Like Duel in the Sun, John Ford’s 1956 film The Searchers similarly explores the presumably competing forces of nonwhite “savagery” and white American “civilization.”9 The film follows the exploits of Confederate veteran Ethan Edwards ( John Wayne) and his half-Indian adoptive nephew Martin Pawley ( Jeffrey Hunter) as they search for Ethan’s niece Debbie (Lana and Natalie Wood) after Comanches led by a man named Scar (Henry Brandon) kidnap her from her family’s Texas ranch in 1868. Over the course of five long years, Ethan and Martin (both hastily sworn in as Texas Rangers in order to complete their task) traverse the length and breadth of Texas and neighboring New Mexico hoping to find the long lost young woman. With every passing year, Ethan grows increasingly cruel and

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ruthless, willing to stop at nothing to save Debbie (who may—if a series of small, contextual clues throughout the film are to be taken seriously—in fact be Ethan’s daughter from a love affair with his brother’s wife). From the very outset of the film, Ethan is revealed to entertain a deep, abiding hatred for American Indians in general and Comanches in particular, most likely because—as a tombstone reveals partway through the movie—that group had attacked and killed his mother in the spring of 1852. This hatred serves as the foundation for the slow “darkening” of Ethan’s character. Early in the film, Ethan reveals his inner “darkness” by choosing to desecrate the body of a Comanche warrior he encounters, explaining grimly to his companions that “what that Comanche believes, [if he] ain’t got no eyes, he can’t enter the spirit-land” and “has to wander forever between the winds.” As the narrative progresses, Ethan’s acts of cruelty grow exponentially, causing those around him to fear the worst. “Do you know what Ethan will do if he has a chance?” Martin’s sweetheart Laurie Jorgensen muses to her beloved, “he’ll put a bullet in her [Debbie’s] brain.” After all, she tells him, at this point Ethan would consider her tainted: “the leavings a Comanche buck sold time and again to the highest bidder, with savage brats of her own.” For his own part, Martin responds to this possibility by declaring that Ethan could do so “only if I’m dead.” Indeed, in the end, it is he who manages to dissuade Ethan from ending Debbie’s life. Throughout the film Martin stands as the foil to Ethan’s gradual descent into “darkness” as he presumably becomes more and more like the very Indians he hunts. In some ways, it would seem that Martin’s half-Indian heritage has morally “inoculated” him against the “corrupting” influence of nonwhiteness in the same way that exposure to a mild infection can physically inoculate those in danger of succumbing to a more serious disease. This “inoculation” allows Martin to stand as a man in between worlds, half-white and half-nonwhite, and serve as the fulcrum between Ethan’s originally heroic intentions and the “corrupting” influence represented by the Indian leader Scar (who himself symbolizes Ethan’s alter-ego, the “scar” on the “hero’s” soul). In some ways, Ethan resembles the sort of anti-heroic “knight-errant” that would become more widely popular in the twenty-first century than he does the “knights” that were popular in the early twentieth. Throughout the film, he routinely crosses the line between what is considered “moral” and “immoral” behavior to achieve his goals. He shoots men in the back, robs them, and routinely displays extreme cynicism toward religious belief. Even more important for the genre, perhaps, he threatens to kill women and children in the course of his undertaking rather than endeavoring to protect them as a more “typical” Western “knight” might. In this way,

From Knights to Knights-Errant

The Searchers is a much more complex endeavor than might have been considered “traditional” for the genre. As some, like Arthur M. Eckstein, have pointed out, The Searchers can even be seen as a cinematic foray into the fields of antiracism, arguing that “commentators on The Searchers have not been reading anything dark into Ethan and the film that [director] John Ford did not wish them to see” and that Ford intended Ethan to be a “psychologically damaged, tragic figure” rather than a necessarily “heroic” one.10 Indeed, Eckstein notes, Ford himself claimed that he had deliberately intended the film as a “psychological epic” that explores the influence of the “untamed” environment of the American West on the character of otherwise “civilized” men and the adverse effects of the “typically” resultant racial hatred on a man’s soul.11 Still, despite such assertions and Ford’s presumably good intentions, The Searchers continues in many ways to rely on the racial assumptions so popular to Westerns from that era. Figures of authority (Ethan and Martin, both Texas Rangers) remain as the positive forces in the narrative, whereas nonwhite figures continue as mere foils to the character development of white men. Furthermore, the “devolution” of white characters like Ethan is attributed to the “savagery” of nonwhite influences and the environment they have created rather than any sort of presumed “inherent” racial “flaw” in white culture. Perhaps even more importantly, that “savagery” is “cleansed” from Ethan’s soul by an act of “regenerative” violence—the death of Scar—thus allowing Ethan to reintegrate into “civilized” white society as Western heroes had been doing for eons. However much The Searchers can be viewed as an anti-racist endeavor, then, it can also be seen as a representation of enduring white fears of racial “contamination” that remained prevalent in the genre for a full decade after the film’s release. As the century progressed into the 1960s, however, the representation of these fears became increasingly complicated. During this period, the Western genre proved its capacity for evolution and revision. New generations of films in the latter half of the twentieth century worked to challenge the portrayals of racialized violence found in predecessors such as Stagecoach, Duel in the Sun, and The Searchers. Such challenges were often rooted in and took advantage of contemporary events that drove changes in sociocultural and political norms. It was only through the relaxation of MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) censorship protocols in the mid-twentieth century as societal norms changed that, for example, the graphic bloodshed of cinematic ventures such as Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone’s “Dollars Trilogy” were made possible.12 Although the trilogy began with A Fistful of Dollars in 1964 and continued with A Few Dollars More in 1965, the final installment (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, released

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in 1966) is perhaps the most well known for the international success it brought to rising star Clint Eastwood.13 Leone is considered the father of spaghetti Westerns, Westerns produced and directed by Italian and European filmmakers and often filmed in Italy or elsewhere in Europe to cut down on production costs. His work is often characterized by the juxtaposition of extreme close-up shots with extended long shots that force the audience to view the action of the film from the perspective of its characters, self-interested men of short words and shorter tempers. Such figures are driven by pure, amoral avarice and lash out with an overwhelming level of violence at all who oppose them. This is especially true of the characters featured in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, whose narrative is driven by a series of gunfights between the film’s main characters (Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach respectively) as they search for a treasure trove of buried Confederate gold over the course of the years before, during, and after the American Civil War. Almost every encounter between the film’s titular characters and those who cross their paths ends in overwhelming violence. Indeed, some of the film’s earliest moments feature the strains of a mournful martial melody interspersed with flashes of “Angel Eyes” (Van Cleef )—the “Bad”—graphically torturing and killing his employer as he searches for the location of the buried Confederate gold. According to Leone, his reliance on gut-wrenching displays of violence is intended to recapture the “reality” of Western life, a “reality” that earlier films had largely minimized in favor of maintaining the myth of the gentleman cowboy, the “knightly” defender of white “civilization.” “All the killings in my films are exaggerated because I wanted to make a tongue-in-cheek satire on run-of-the-mill westerns,” Leone told an interviewer. The “cowboy picture has got lost in psychology,” he continued (perhaps referring to “psychological epics” such as the films of John Ford), but the “truth” is that “the West was made by violent uncomplicated men.” “It is this strength and simplicity that I try to recapture in my pictures,” he concluded.14 It was this particular approach to filmmaking that opened the way for a new focus on the role of self-interest in the shaping of the American West, which in turn drove filmmakers to feature an increasing level of violence in their films. Only a few short years after the release of Leone’s “Dollars Trilogy,” the theme of self-interested violence was further explored in Sam Peckinpah’s infamous 1969 film The Wild Bunch.15 The film, which follows a band of early twentieth-century outlaws as they struggle to survive in the wake of the closing of the “Old” West by pulling off one last heist, is perhaps the most famously violent film in the genre. It holds the dubious honor of boasting the highest body count up to that point in the genre’s

From Knights to Knights-Errant

history (twenty-two deaths in the opening sequence and 112 in the climactic shootout). It was so violent, in fact, that a rough cut of it reportedly caused several audience members at a May 1, 1969, test screening in Kansas City to rush into a nearby alley to vomit, and approximately thirty more left the theater entirely.16 According to Peckinpah, the level of violence in The Wild Bunch was meant in part as a critique of portrayals of conflict in “traditional” Western films. “The point of the film is to take this façade of movie violence and open it up,” Peckinpah recounted, to “get people involved in it . . . and then twist it so that it’s not fun anymore, just a wave of sickness in the gut.” The “Wild West” found in The Wild Bunch is “ugly, brutalizing, and bloody awful,” he continued, “it’s not fun and games and cowboys and Indians” as was the case in earlier Westerns. Instead, he concluded, the “Wild West” of The Wild Bunch is a “terrible, ugly thing” that forces audiences to confront a brutal Darwinian landscape shaped not by Indian violence but by the conflicts of self-interested “condotierri”like figures that are almost the complete opposite of “knights” such as the “Ringo Kid.”17 Events such as the civil rights and women’s rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s were of similar importance to such portrayals. In those years, Westerns became considerably more circumspect about their portrayals of violence toward and by women and people of color, and a shift toward a preference for “knight-errant”-like figures becomes more apparent. This is particularly true of comedy Westerns such as the 1965 film Cat Ballou and the 1974 film Blazing Saddles, both of which did their best to lampoon the role of nonmale or nonwhite characters in traditional Western films.18 The plot of Elliot Silverstein’s Cat Ballou, for example, is driven forward primarily by the actions of the titular protagonist ( Jane Fonda), a woman seeking to succeed where the men in her life have otherwise failed. Throughout the film Cat routinely subverts societal norms, eschewing stereotypically passive feminine behavior in favor of protecting those for whom she cares. In one of the early scenes of the movie, for example, a fight breaks out at a local dance after Cat chooses to partner with her father’s Indian ranch hand Jackson Two-Bears (Tom Nardini). Rather than leave her male counterpart to his own devices and retreat to safety, Cat leaps into the fray with a series of blunt objects to defend her friend from harm. Meanwhile, another woman (Gail Bonney) comes to the aid of Cat’s flagging father, Frankie ( John Marley), knocking a man unconscious with her bare hands when just moments earlier he had been about to do the same to his male opponent. Later, in an attempt to save her father’s farm from financial ruin at the hands of the local sheriff ( Jay C. Flippen) and his sponsor Sir Harry Percival

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(Reginald Denny) (owner of the malevolent Wolf City Development Corporation), Cat gathers together a gang of bandits that includes the famed “Kid” Sheleen (Lee Marvin), a semi-retired gunslinger who has managed to drink himself into oblivion since the closing of the “Old” West years earlier. After inspiring the “Kid” to confront his demons, Cat leads her gang on a series of daring heists that culminates in the robbery of a Wolf City payroll train and—shortly thereafter—the assassination of Percival, the man she holds responsible for her father’s downfall. Rather than sit idly by and hope that the actions of men will improve her circumstances (as women had done in earlier Westerns), Cat Ballou strikes out on her own to uphold her own personal moral code through a self-interested use of violence that might otherwise be considered traditionally masculine.19 Jackson Two-Bears provides similar opportunities for critiquing portrayals of historical circumstance in earlier Western films. Rather than speaking in pidgin English and conducting himself in an almost exclusively violent manner (as Indian characters had in earlier films such as The Searchers), Jackson speaks in educated prose and typically refers to his culture’s historical circumstances in a heavily ironic tone. Just before the fight scene discussed earlier, for example, Jackson approaches the impending conflict with considerable aplomb, wryly characterizing his situation as “Custer’s Last Stand all over . . . with me in the middle.” A few short moments later, Jackson cleverly parodies white popular culture’s mythologization of his own culture’s practice of scalping by seizing the toupee of another man and dancing gleefully away with a few exaggerated war whoops. Similarly, throughout the movie Jackson seems to approach acts of violence with a considerable degree of humor, making sure to explain his infrequent outbursts of aggression in as sarcastic a fashion as possible. For instance, in a later fight scene, Jackson makes sure to explain his decision to strike another man by calmly stating that he has the “right to share in the fun without regard to race, creed or color according to the Fourteenth Amendment.” Rather than appearing as a figure capable only of violence (as many Indian characters had in earlier Westerns), then, Jackson serves as a highly intelligent, scathingly insightful counterpoint to white prejudice in traditional Western films. Like Cat Ballou, Mel Brooks’s 1974 film Blazing Saddles serves in part as a rousing indictment of the Western genre’s efforts to whitewash the bigotry of the late nineteenth-century American frontier. Perhaps most important, the film features a nonwhite protagonist: Sheriff “Black” Bart (Cleavon Little). Throughout the film Bart struggles to earn the trust of the predominantly white townspeople in time to foil the malevolent machinations of State Attorney General Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman), a conniving

From Knights to Knights-Errant

ne’er-do-well who hopes to pave over the town with a new railroad and line his own pockets in the process. In order to achieve his goals, Lamarr gathers together a small army of Ku Klux Klan members, Nazis, horse thieves, and bank robbers, all intent on finding and killing Bart posthaste. Rather than resorting to violence to defend himself, however, Bart uses his wits and guile to outsmart his opponents and save the town. With a call of “where the white women at,” Bart and his less-than-sober companion Jim (Gene Wilder) play upon the racial prejudices and fears of two members of the Ku Klux Klan in order to lead them into an ambush and subsequently sneak into the enemy encampment cloaked in their captives’ infamous white robes.20 Later, Bart convinces the townspeople to construct a series of facades designed to resemble their town just enough to lure Lamarr’s army away from the actual town and into an ambush from which they cannot escape. By relying upon clever ruses rather than brute force, Bart works to subvert the sort of racial stereotypes found in earlier Westerns that might otherwise dictate that he and other nonwhite actors communicate only through acts of violence. Beyond the characterization of its nonwhite protagonist, the film is perhaps most famous for its liberal use of racial slurs. “I saw it immediately as a great opportunity to get even with racial prejudice,” the film’s creator Mel Brooks later stated in a series of interviews for the film’s fortieth anniversary in 2014, primarily by “getting back at the rednecks” that had been featured so prominently in earlier Westerns by revealing what he saw as their “true” nature as “agents of oppression.”21 Indeed, according to Brooks, by relying on an overwhelming use of racial epithets he was able to deliberately invert the traditional racial narrative found in the Western genre and reopen wounds laid bare by the recent upheavals of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, wounds that white audiences might otherwise have been hoping to ignore. “Lots of white people got upset,” Brooks recalled, “but never any blacks.”22 “They knew it (n*****) was used correctly . . . to show racial prejudice,” he explained, “and we didn’t show it from good people, but from bad people who didn’t know any better.”23 Indeed, he got so many complaints from white audiences that he began to—somewhat jokingly—fear for his own safety. “I envisioned a race riot,” Brooks recounted, “I thought everybody would come after me and kill me for what I said about the Chinese, and the blacks, and the Jews.”24 White audiences’ reaction to Brooks’s characterization of race relations in the “Old” West is most likely reflective of a growing reluctance among many white Americans to wholeheartedly celebrate their nation’s historical legacies in the years following the advances of the Civil Rights movement.

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As a result, Western films from this era were considerably more circumspect in their memorialization of “traditional” American “heroes,” including figures of government authority like General George Armstrong Custer. This is especially true of Arthur Penn’s 1970 film Little Big Man, which follows the exploits of a white man living among American Indians during the rise of the reservation system in the late nineteenth century.25 Like many of its contemporaries, Penn’s film presents a much more sympathetic portrayal of American Indians, who fight to preserve their cultures and independence in the face of growing pressures from American expansion westward. Perhaps more notably, however, the film includes what is perhaps the most dramatic example of the transformation of the portrayal of General George Armstrong Custer in popular culture. Almost from the very moment of his death at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876, General Custer was mythologized in white American popular culture as a martyr on the altar of “Manifest Destiny.”26 Perhaps the most famous of these early attempts was artist John Mulvany’s 1881 oil painting, Custer’s Last Rally, which toured the country for almost seventeen years after its release. Beyond the canvas, tales of the “Boy General of the Golden Locks” found their way into dime novels and “Wild West” shows, traversing both the continent and the broader Western world in a few short decades. With the rise of the silver screen, Custer’s martyrdom was further cemented in the public imagination. Since the inception of film Custer has been portrayed by various actors well over two dozen times, and more than a dozen more have portrayed him on television.27 Of the earliest depictions, Errol Flynn’s portrayal of the general in the 1941 film They Died with Their Boots On is perhaps most characteristic.28 In the film, Custer is shown as a sympathetic and heroic figure forced to defend the United States against Indians with whom he otherwise sympathizes as worthy opponents and fellow warriors. “Against us are ranged thousands of the finest light cavalry on Earth,” Flynn’s Custer explains to his audience while describing his Indian opponents. But, he concludes, the “greater the odds, the greater the glory.” In Flynn’s portrayal of the famed general, the “glory” of American expansion comes to the fore, refined only by his character’s “magnanimous” sympathy for the “noble” yet “inevitably doomed” Indians he faces. In Little Big Man, on the other hand, a drunken Custer devotes his final moments to a bout of madness, calling for “Christian America” to strike back against the “savages” before turning to address his dying troops as “honored members of the Senate.”29 In this depiction, Custer is transformed from a “glorious” defender of “civilization” to a debauched, paranoid, racist madman obsessed with fulfilling the misguided prophecies of “Manifest Destiny” at the expense of his own men’s lives.

From Knights to Knights-Errant

Taken within the context of the period in which the film was released (at the height of the Vietnam War), Custer’s antics in Little Big Man reflect the American public’s growing mistrust of a presumably ineffective United States government. In this context, the audiences that viewed Little Big Man—many of whom were coming to doubt the advisability of ideologically driven military interventions like Custer’s “Last Stand” and the war in Vietnam—almost certainly proved receptive to the film’s sympathetic portrayal of the Indian resistance efforts. With the revelations of the Pentagon Papers (which hinted at the systemic mismanagement of the Vietnam War effort by the United States military) and the uncovering of the Watergate scandal only a few years later, the American public’s faith in its own government all but evaporated, opening the way for both the antigovernment, conservative revolution of the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan and yet another evolution in depictions of violence in Westerns.30 This evolution is perhaps most apparent in the 1992 film Unforgiven, the famously conservative actor Clint Eastwood’s directorial debut.31 In Unforgiven, Eastwood deliberately critiques the characteristic violence of the Westerns in which he first made his name (like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly). Unforgiven, which is dedicated to the memory of Sergio Leone, follows a pair of retired gunslingers as they are drawn back into the violence of their youths by the allure of a substantial reward offered for the deaths of two men responsible for the mutilation of a young prostitute. Throughout the film, the protagonist Bill Munny (Eastwood) seems almost the complete obverse of characters like Eastwood’s “Blondie”—the “Good”—from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Whereas “Blondie” spoke only infrequently and almost always in a gruff, menacing tone, Eastwood’s Munny spends much of his time mourning the loss of his wife, at length, expounding upon her role in his moral reformation, and expressing regret for his past sins. “I ain’t the same,” he tells his former partner in crime Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) as they travel in search of their targets, “Claudia [his wife], she straightened me up, cleared me of drinkin’ whiskey and all” and “just’cause we’re goin’ on this killing, that don’t mean I’m gonna go back to bein’ the way I was.” “You remember that drover I shot through the mouth and his teeth came out the back of his head?” he asks Ned, “I think about him now and again” and “he didn’t do anything to deserve to get shot, at least nothin’ I could remember when I sobered up.” For Munny, then, the violence of his youth holds no “glory,” only regret. This is a “fact” Munny makes sure to impart to the third of his traveling companions, an inexperienced, nearsighted young gunslinger ( Jaimz Woolvett) who insists upon being called the “Schofield Kid” for his choice of revolver. Throughout the first half of the film’s narrative, the “Kid”

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refuses to acknowledge the gruesome reality of the task at hand. When the time comes, however, and the “Kid” is confronted with the anguished, protracted cries of his first “victim” (Rob Campbell) as he lies dying, his blustering facade vanishes. Whereas before he had insisted that he was a “damn killer” that had shot five men, afterwards he confesses to Munny in a drunken stupor that the man he had just killed was in fact his first and muses that “it don’t seem real . . . how he [his victim] ain’t gonna never breathe again, ever . . . all on account of pulling a trigger.” Then, a few short scenes later, the “Kid” surrenders his share of the reward money and his prized Schofield revolver to Munny, officially divorcing himself from his former persona and the act of violence he has just committed. Still, despite the film’s attempts to emphasize the brutality of the “Wild West,” a tinge of nostalgia can be detected for acts of violence driven by ideological—or, at the very least, individually moral—codes of conduct. While intended as a critique of portrayals of violence in traditional Westerns, Eastwood’s Unforgiven maintains a subtle celebration of characters that insist upon upholding their own particular code of honor through violence when necessary. Whereas the single-minded and rigidly unreasoning violence of government officials such as the antagonist, Sheriff “Little” Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman), is resoundingly condemned, the choice of the film’s protagonists to uphold their individual codes through acts of violence remains for the most part untarnished. This is especially true of the film’s climactic scenes, when Munny discovers that the Sheriff had captured, tortured, and killed his partner Logan in retaliation for the shootout. Upon receiving this news, Munny silently seizes a bottle of whisky from the drunken “Kid” and proceeds to transform himself in a manner worthy of the Incredible Hulk. In a few short moments, Munny becomes the man he once was, a character deliberately reminiscent of those from Eastwood’s earlier films such as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. This version of Munny is gruff, brutal, and effective and in short order singlehandedly wreaks havoc among the half-dozen men under Sheriff Daggett’s command in retribution for his partner’s death. His last words to the men that remain (his final lines in the film) are short, simple, and threatening in a manner worthy of “Blondie” himself: “You better bury Ned right,” he warns them, and you “better not cut up, nor otherwise harm no whores . . . or I’ll come back and kill every one of you sons of bitches.” In those final moments of the film, Eastwood becomes the man his fans from over the years have come to love most: the “Dirty Harry” of the West, a man certain of his moral code that possesses the willingness and wherewithal to see that code maintained by whatever means necessary. In that single “cleansing” hail of gunfire, an American public whose faith in

From Knights to Knights-Errant

authority had all but evaporated in the years after the Vietnam War and Watergate scandal was able to reassure itself that—though the government and its officials had proven themselves incapable of doing so—there remained individuals capable of using “regenerative” acts of violence to mete out “justice” and defend those unable to defend themselves in a way reminiscent of the heroes of yore. In the process, the efforts of such films’ protagonists to uphold their own personal moral code through violence begin to seem like not-so-distant echoes of earlier Westerns such as the 1952 film High Noon and the 1953 film Shane, both of which focus on protagonists who stand alone against the tide of “injustice.”32 In both of these films, however, the hero occupies a position of authority. In High Noon, retired U.S. Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) is the only resident of Hadleyville, New Mexico Territory, who is willing to stand against the nefarious Miller gang, explaining to his wife “I’m not trying to be a hero” but “I’ve got to” be. Meanwhile, in Shane, the titular protagonist (Alan Ladd)—a retired gunslinger—becomes the de facto lawman for a group of Wyoming homesteaders as the only having with the experience necessary to resist the rapacity of nearby rancher Rufus Ryker (Emile Meyer) and his small army of cowhands. Both, like Eastwood’s Munny, use regenerative acts of violence to reestablish a sense of “justice” for those in their lives for whom they care. Though Kane and Shane do so as representatives of their communities, however, Munny does so out of a more personal sense of “morality” driven by individual notions of “justice” that are resoundingly rejected by the figures of authority like Daggett that oppose them. This would seem to indicate that though the popular celebration of regenerative acts of violence has returned full force to the silver screen, the motives behind those acts have evolved into something new. This evolution is especially apparent in the changes made to the narrative of the film True Grit between the original 1969 version by Henry Hathaway and the 2010 remake by Joel and Ethan Coen.33 In the original version, the character of Rooster Cogburn (a gruff, debauched U.S. Deputy Marshal portrayed by John Wayne) is very much the protagonist. Much of the narrative of the film focuses on the gradual reformation of Cogburn’s character as his exposure to the positive influence of 14-year-old Mattie Ross (Kim Darby)—who hires him to avenge the death of her father Frank ( John Pickard) at the hands of the villainous Tom Chaney ( Jeff Corey)—inspires him to stop drinking and become what might be considered a more “traditionally heroic” figure. This transformation is completed in the climactic shootout, when Cogburn uses a “regenerative” act of violence—the killing of Chaney—to once and for all “cleanse” his “darkened” spirit of the “savagery” of the West and reintegrate himself back into “civilized” white society.

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The 2010 remake, on the other hand, was more closely based on the 1968 novel by Charles Portis than the 1969 version had been (which was considerably altered from its source material to accommodate John Wayne’s more conservative, “traditional” legacy as a Western star).34 Rather than focusing on the heroicization of Cogburn ( Jeff Bridges), the 2010 Coen brothers venture is narrated from the point of view of the young Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld), who struggles over the course of the film to achieve her ends—the avenging of her father’s death—despite the men who stand in her way. Among these men are numbered Cogburn himself—who refers to Mattie as a “harpie in trousers”—and Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (Matt Damon)—who at one point physically punishes Mattie for disobeying his directive to stay behind rather than accompany the men on their quest to find Chaney ( Josh Brolin). In the end, however, it is Mattie who saves the day, rather than Cogburn. As opposed to the 1969 version—where Cogburn “cleanses” his soul by ending Chaney’s life—in the 2010 remake Mattie saves the lives of her male companions by shooting Chaney in the chest with a rifle after Cogburn is trapped under a wounded horse and LaBoeuf is knocked unconscious by Chaney with a large rock. By doing so, Mattie manages to uphold her own personal moral code rather than waiting for the figures of male authority in her life to reinstate law and “order” through a “regenerative” act of violence. In the process, the 2010 remake helps to unveil the evolution of the Western genre from the early twentieth century to the early twenty-first from glorifications of authoritative “knights” maintaining law and “order” in the “Wild” West to celebrations of non-“traditional” anti-heroic “knightserrant” upholding their own personal moral codes. This evolution is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the 2012 film Django Unchained, which follows the efforts of a former slave named Django ( Jamie Foxx) to free his wife Broomhilda von Shaft (Kerry Washington) from the clutches of the capriciously vindictive plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) with the help of a German bounty hunter named Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) a few years before the American Civil War.35 Unlike other nonwhite characters from the Westerns of the early twentieth century, Django does not exist merely to contribute to the development of a white character or to serve as a symbol of the forces of “savagery” against which the “civilized” white protagonist must stand. Instead, Django is driven by motivations that exist independently from the white characters around him. Indeed, rather than Django serving the purposes of those characters, it is they who contribute to the attainment of his goals. Early in the film Dr. Schultz purchases and frees Django to serve his own purposes. (Django

From Knights to Knights-Errant

is familiar with and can recognize Schultz’s current targets, because they once served as his overseers.) Within the span of a few scenes, however, the relationship quickly reverses. Soon, Dr. Schultz agrees to train Django as a gunslinger and assist him in rescuing his wife. It is also Schultz who helps Django come to grips with the violent lifestyle of a bounty hunter. “You want to save your wife by doing what I do?” Schultz asks Django after he hesitates to kill his first target with the man’s son nearby. “[T]his is what I do . . . I kill people and sell their corpses for money.” “His corpse is worth 7,000 dollars,” he continues, because “he wanted to rob stagecoaches, and he didn’t mind killing people to do it.” In a few short sentences, then, Schultz is able to establish that Django’s actions are justified because they both serve his self-interest and uphold a code of behavior he has established as moral. Later, when Schultz is killed after ending the antagonist Calvin Candie’s life, Django uses the training and moral reasoning his mentor has passed on to him to finally achieve his goals. After being captured in the wake of Schultz’s death and transported to the LeQuint Dickey Mining Company, Django manages to convince his jailors that a valuable bounty target is hiding on Candie’s plantation. After his captors agree to loose him from his bonds and accompany him to “Candieland” in search of the bounty, Django quickly dispatches the men and continues back to the plantation on his own. Once there, he ends the lives of every one of Candie’s henchmen in rapid, well-trained succession. Then, he allows all but one of Candie’s slaves to run free. The last, Candie’s personal servant Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), had consistently encouraged and assisted in the bouts of cruel whimsy his master directed at the large majority of his servants. Rather than allowing him to run free and perhaps continue his cruelties elsewhere, Django mortally wounds Stephen and leaves him to die in the plantation house (which Django had rigged with explosives just before the final shootout). Through these actions, Django demonstrates a complex understanding of a well-developed personal moral code. Those such as the large majority of Candie’s servants who had suffered at their master’s hands were, in Django’s eyes, “innocents” who deserved to continue living and, hopefully, gain their freedom. Those such as Stephen who had supported the brutal enforcement of white authority, on the other hand, were considered complicit in the maintenance of an unjust system and thus deserved only death. Over the course of its run in theaters, Django Unchained earned over $425 million dollars in profits and went on to be nominated for five Academy Awards, earning two: Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Christoph Waltz) and Best Original Screenplay (Quentin Tarantino). The

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overwhelming success of Django Unchained stands in stark contrast to the underwhelming failure of another blockbuster Western released the next year: the Disney Corporation’s reboot of the classic Western franchise The Lone Ranger under the direction of Gore Verbinski.36 From its very outset, the film was plagued with controversy. This was particularly true after Disney’s announcement in 2008 that the iconic role of Tonto—the Lone Ranger’s (Armie Hammer) American Indian companion—would be played by white actor Johnny Depp (a casting choice that, though acceptable in the early twentieth century, has become considerably less so since the advances of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s). This controversy only increased after an unfortunate interview Depp gave in 2011. In this interview, Depp revealed that his interest in playing the character of Tonto stemmed from his supposed Indian ancestry. “I guess I have some Native American somewhere down the line,” he told his interviewer Anthony Breznican, so “I started thinking about Tonto and what could be done in my own small way [to] try to . . . reinvent the relationship, to attempt to take some of the ugliness thrown on the Native Americans, not only in The Lone Ranger, but the way Indians were treated throughout history of cinema, and turn it on its head.” Depp’s good intentions were somewhat mitigated, however, by his assertion that “if you find out you’ve got Native American blood . . . you think about where it comes from and go back and read the great books, Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee or [John Ehle’s] Trail of Tears, you have to think, somewhere along the line, I’m the product of some horrific rape. You just have that little sliver in your chemical makeup.”37 Such statements did little to endear the film to critics or the broader American public. Given the film’s content, however, it is unclear whether or not Depp’s misguided and historically inaccurate attempt at cultural sensitivity was the true death knell of the film’s box office aspirations. The film itself was a confused amalgam of half-hearted attempts to placate postcivil rights era demands for a well rounded multicultural perspective in the entertainment industry and the perennial concerns of catering to a consumer base that has continued on some level to celebrate some notion of American exceptionalism. It should be said that the film’s quick repartee and even quicker action sequences might have served as the basis of a successful rejuvenation of the franchise. Unfortunately, its considerable potential for entertainment value was lost behind a wall of one-dimensional “noble” Comanche “savages” bemoaning their victimization at the hands of the “inevitable progress of American civilization” in stilted pidgin English. This lopsided characterization of race relations in the American West is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in one of the film’s most

From Knights to Knights-Errant

spectacular episodes of violence. In one of the film’s many high-octane action sequences, a band of Comanche warriors attack a detachment of U.S. cavalrymen defending a portion of the transcontinental railroad running parallel to a small creek. In short order, the cavalrymen form a firing line, unveil a series of hidden Gatling guns, and quickly transform the charging Comanches into a mound of moaning bodies. Throughout the scene, the creek serves as a literal barrier between the white American “progress” symbolized by the guns and railroad and the film’s “sympathetic yet ultimately necessary victims”: the “savage” and seminude Comanche warriors that continue to “illogically” charge to their deaths with little regard to the apparent inadvisability of such an action. In a film that frequently attempts to address the idea of white American “progress” with a sort of heavy-handed irony, such a scene serves as a literally visible confirmation of the very notion the filmmakers seem to have been attempting to critique. When placed against the success of Django Unchained, the reasons for The Lone Ranger’s ultimate failure in 2013 may in fact hint at the evolution of the Western genre over the course of the twentieth century. In many ways, the reboot had much of what it seems to take for a Western to succeed in the twenty-first century. At the very least, it featured a “knighterrant”—like anti-hero as its protagonist, a man using “regenerative” acts of violence to uphold his own personal moral code. The film’s attempts to address racial inequities in American history, however, may have spelled its doom. Perhaps, had the film’s characterization of American history been somewhat subtler, it is possible that a viewership increasingly aware of its nation’s constantly changing social milieu might have been able to ignore it. If it had (as Django Unchained did) attempted to address the checkered racial past of the United States in an honest, unflinching way rather than in a condescending, half-hearted one (or perhaps acknowledged that nonwhite characters could be driven by motivations independent of the needs of their white counterparts) the film might have ended up as the blockbuster it was intended to be. Unfortunately for Disney’s profit margins, however, The Lone Ranger’s portrayal of the American West was anything but subtle. As a result, the corporation’s attempts to jumpstart a new era in Western franchising history were mercifully mothballed. The Lone Ranger’s collapse in the box office can serve as a warning to any filmmakers hoping to dance delicately across the tightrope that has been established in the Western genre by the internal conflict that resulted from the political and social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Twentyfirst-century Westerns must be able to simultaneously tap into American audiences’ perennial nostalgia for their nation’s past while acknowledging

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the ever-changing character of its future. The result has been “knighterrant”—like figures such as Jamie Foxx’s Django: a man who challenges everything that the “knights in fringed leather” such as John Wayne’s “Ringo Kid” stood for—while managing to seem “comfortingly” familiar to audiences. While the actions of men like Django and the “Ringo Kid” are rooted in very different motivations, both rely on “regenerative” acts of violence to sustain a moral code that is recognizable to their respective audiences. So although the faces, occupations, and motivations of the protagonists in Western films may have changed, the glorification of such characters’ “noble,” yet violent methods have not. On the whole, the plots of many Westerns continue to revolve around the “noble” acts of violence celebrated by the films of the early twentieth century. It would seem, then, that the violent defense of values like “truth” and “justice” remains an important pillar of national identity. It is this defense, perhaps more than anything else, which has separated and continues to separate presumably “civilized” Americans from the supposed “savagery” of “others” in the national mindset, regardless of who those “others” might be at any given time.

Notes   1.  See, for example, Walker, Westerns: Films through History; and Loy, Westerns in a Changing America.  2. For an examination of the rise of the anti-hero in various genres, see Hayes, “The Rough Beast’s Hour.”  3. Sheehan, Savagism and Civility.  4. Pearce, Savagism and Civilization.  5. Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence; and Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation.  6. Corkin, Cowboys as Cold Warriors.  7. Stagecoach, directed by Ford.  8. Duel in the Sun, directed by Vidor.  9. The Searchers, directed by Ford. 10.  Eckstein, “Darkening Ethan,” 5, 17. 11.  Eckstein, 5. 12.  For an examination of the evolution of MPAA ratings standards, see Prince, Classical Film Violence. 13.  A Fistful of Dollars, directed by Leone; For a Few Dollars More, directed by Leone; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, directed by Leone. 14.  Cited in Flint, “Sergio Leone.” 15.  The Wild Bunch, directed by Peckinpah. 16. Seydor, Peckinpah, 138–139. 17. Weddle, If They Move—Kill’em!, 334. 18.  Cat Ballou, directed by Silverstein; Blazing Saddles, directed by Brooks.

From Knights to Knights-Errant

19.  For an examination of portrayals of masculinity in films in general, see Hatty, Masculinities, Violence and Culture. For an analysis of portrayals of masculinity in Westerns in particular, see Mitchell, Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film. 20.  Blazing Saddles, directed by Brooks. 21.  Labrecque, “Blazing Saddles 40 Years Later.” 22.  Cited in Davis, “Mindhole Blowers.” 23.  See Davis, “Mindhole Blowers.” 24.  Gilchrist, “Mel Brooks on Blazing Saddles.” 25.  Little Big Man, directed by Penn. 26.  For an account of the mythologization of General Custer, see Robbins, The Real Custer. 27.  For examinations of the various depictions of Custer in portraiture, literature, film, television, and popular culture in general, see Hutton, The Custer Reader. 28.  They Died with Their Boots On, directed by Walsh. 29.  Little Big Man, directed by Penn. 30. For an examination of this conservative revolution, termed the “New Right,” see McGirr, Suburban Warriors. 31.  Unforgiven, directed by Eastwood. 32.  High Noon, directed by Zinnemann; Shane, directed by Stevens. 33.  True Grit, directed by Hathaway; True Grit, directed by Coen. 34. Portis, True Grit. 35.  Django Unchained, directed by Tarantino. 36.  The Lone Ranger, directed by Verbinski. 37.  Cited in Breznican, “Johnny Depp.”

Bibliography Primary Blazing Saddles. Directed by Mel Brooks. Performed by Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder. Warner Bros., 1974. Breznican, Anthony. “Johnny Depp Wants The Lone Ranger to Back off Tonto: Why Is the F-ing Lone Ranger Telling Tonto What to Do?” EW.com. May 8, 2011. http://insidemovies.ew.com/2011/05/08/johnny-depp-tonto-lone-ranger/. Cat Ballou. Directed by Elliott Silverstein. Performed by Jane Fonda and Lee Marvin. Swank, 1965. Davis, Cindy. “Mindhole Blowers: 20 Facts about Blazing Saddles That Might Leave Your Mind Aglow with Whirling, Transient Nodes of Thought Careening Through a Cosmic Vapor of Invention.” Pajiba.com. March 19, 2012. www.pajiba.com/seriously_random_lists/mindhole-blowers-20-facts-about -blazing-saddles-that-might-leave-your-mind-aglow-with-whirling-transient -nodes-of-thought-careening-through-a-cosmic-vapor-of-invention-.php.

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Django Unchained. Directed by Quentin Tarantino. Performed by Jamie Foxx and Leonardo DiCaprio. Columbia Pictures, 2012. Duel in the Sun. Directed by King Vidor. Performed by Gregory Peck, Joseph Cotten, and Jennifer Jones. American Broadcasting Corporation, 1946. Fistful of Dollars, A. Directed by Sergio Leone. Performed by Clint Eastwood. Constantin Film Produktion, 1964. Flint, Peter B. “Sergio Leone, 67, Italian Director Who Revitalized Westerns, Dies.” The New York Times. April 30, 1989. www.nytimes.com/1989/05/01/obituar ies/sergio-leone-67-italian-director-who-revitalized-westerns-dies.html. For a Few Dollars More. Directed by Sergio Leone. Performed by Clint Eastwood. P.E.A., 1965. Gilchrist, Todd. “Mel Brooks on Blazing Saddles, Madeline Kahn’s Gams, and Never Saying No to the N-Word.” Forbes Magazine, May 16, 2014. www.forbes.com/ sites/toddgilchrist/2014/05/16/mel-brooks-on-blazing-saddles-madeline -kahns-gams-and-never-saying-no-to-the-n-word/. Good, the Bad and the Ugly, The. Directed by Sergio Leone. Performed by Clint Eastwood. United Artists Corporation, 1966. High Noon. Directed by Fred Zinnemann. Performed by Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly. United States: United Artists Corporation, 1952. Labrecque, Jeff. “Blazing Saddles 40 Years Later: A Conversation with Mel Brooks.” Entertainment Weekly, May 1, 2014. http://insidemovies.ew.com/2014/05/01/ blazing-saddles-mel-brooks/. Little Big Man. Directed by Arthur Penn. Performed by Dustin Hoffman. National General, 1970. Lone Ranger, The. Directed by Gore Verbinski. Performed by Armie Hammer and Johnny Depp. The Walt Disney Company, 2013. McGirr, Lisa. Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Portis, Charles. True Grit. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968. Searchers, The. Directed by John Ford. Performed by John Wayne. Warner Bros., 1956. Shane. Directed by George Stevens. Performed by Alan Ladd, Jean Arthur, Van Heflin, Brandon De Wilde, and Jack Palance. Paramount Pictures, 1953. Stagecoach. Directed by John Ford. Performed by John Wayne and Claire Trevor. Walter Wanger Productions, 1939. They Died with Their Boots On. Directed by Raoul Walsh. Performed by Errol Flynn. Warner Bros., 1941. True Grit. Directed by Henry Hathaway. Performed by John Wayne, Kim Darby, and Glen Campbell. Paramount Pictures, 1969. True Grit. Directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen. Performed by Hailee Steinfeld, Jeff Bridges, and Matt Damon. Paramount Pictures, 2010. Unforgiven. Directed by Clint Eastwood. Performed by Clint Eastwood. Warner Bros., 1992. Wild Bunch, The. Directed by Sam Peckinpah. Performed by William Holden and Ernest Borgnine. Warner Bros., 1969.

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Secondary Bold, Christine. The Frontier Club: Popular Westerns and Cultural Power, 1880–1924. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Cawelti, John G. Mystery, Violence, and Popular Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Cawelti, John G. The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999. Corkin, Stanley. Cowboys as Cold Warriors: The Western and U.S. History. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2004. Eckstein, Arthur M. “Darkening Ethan: John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) from Novel to Screenplay to Screen.” Cinema Journal, 1st ser., 38 (autumn 1998): 3–24. Hatty, Suzanne. Masculinities, Violence and Culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2000. Hayes, Tyler Raymond. “The Rough Beast’s Hour: The Rise of the Anti-hero.” Master’s thesis, San Francisco State University, 2007. Hutton, Paul Andrew. The Custer Reader. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Loy, R. Philip. Westerns in a Changing America, 1955–2000. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004. Madsen, Deborah L. American Exceptionalism. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Mitchell, Lee Clark. Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Pearce, Roy Harvey. Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Prince, Stephen. Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1968. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Robbins, James S. The Real Custer: From Boy General to Tragic Hero. Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2014. Seydor, Paul. Peckinpah: The Western Films: A Reconsideration. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Sheehan, Bernard W. Savagism and Civility: Indians and Englishmen in Colonial Virginia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-century America. New York: Atheneum, 1992. Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973. Tompkins, Jane P. West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Walker, Janet. Westerns: Films through History. New York: Routledge, 2001. Wallmann, Jeffrey M. The Western: Parables of the American Dream. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1999. Weddle, David. If They Move—Kill’em!: The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah. New York: Grove Press, 1994.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Modus Operandi: Continuity and Change in Television Crime Drama at the Forensic Turn Jules Odendahl-James

By the mid-twentieth century, the television crime drama landscape was dominated by the police procedural, whose narrative formula provided thrill and comfort as it dramatized the forces of logic and rationality in an increasingly chaotic modern world. Some series challenged viewers’ expectations, varying either the delivery system (from male detective to female cop, from big-city precinct to government agency) or the visual framing (from studio set to on location filming to increasing use of Steadicam), or even the timing of the criminal’s revelation (from concluding to opening moments). For nearly fifty years, however, the police procedural delivered the intricate details of crime solving in visual and verbal language that was concise and credible because of its asserted verisimilitude with and vetting by current law enforcement professionals and protocols. Even in the 1980s and 1990s when a range of programs depicted the police squad as a hotbed of personal dysfunction and romance, the centrality of violence, the pursuit and apprehension of the criminal, and the restoration of order for victims and society as a whole, continued to provide the narrative spine that articulated the criminal investigator as a unique force for public justice.

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The turn of the millennium found a public consciousness newly shocked by terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and primed by almost a decade of true crime television magazine and crime documentary programming on basic cable. This was an audience ready to embrace a shift from the police procedural to the forensic procedural. These programs presented forensic investigators as protagonists with scientific expertise supplemented by law enforcement techniques already familiar to the crime story viewer. The key feature of the forensic procedural is the high-tech visual language—both the tools and mechanisms of forensic analysis itself and the televisual techniques used to render those mechanisms visible to the audience—used to display violence and its aftermath. The continuity of narrative drive helps the forensic procedural appear to break new boundaries in explicit depictions of illicit activity and perpetrators while maintaining the genre’s longstanding rhetorical stance that criminals can be known, apprehended, and punished and that systems of law and order are fundamentally equitable and objective—or, if susceptible to corruption or inaccuracies, that these are isolated features produced by flawed individuals, not evidence of an inherently flawed system. In this chapter, I traverse the shift from the police procedural to the forensic procedural,1 paying particular attention to how the domains of crime fiction and true crime have historically exerted particular influence on each other. I center my analysis on the moment of what Lindsay Steenberg, among others, identifies as the “forensic turn,”2 a moment “in which a mediated version of forensic science has embedded itself in American culture’s foundational views about truth, criminality, professionalism, and victimhood” marking a “shift in the way it defines what is (to use loaded terms) civilized, heroic, and enlightened in the face of a society believed to be increasingly chaotic and dangerous.”3 After spending some time charting the connected maturation of the forensic procedural in fiction and nonfiction television, I conclude by examining another potential shift in programming, a shift that is facilitated by the blurred boundaries between the now accepted rendering of forensic realism within a fictional construct and the restaging of lived events that have been part of an adjudicated court case. In this new moment for crime dramas (true crime titles such as Final Witness and fiction serials such as The Forgotten), the ultimate arbiter of guilt or innocence is neither the police detective nor the forensic investigator, but instead the crime victim him or herself. By combining the central narrative features of a crime mystery with the scientifically inflected visual language of forensics and the interview and voiceover conventions from documentary film, these first-person procedurals literalize the crime story convention that the dead

Modus Operandi

(body) can speak. Certainly, the dead’s version conveniently corroborates the work of living investigators; however, turning primary point-of-view over to the victim signals an intriguing blur between the physical and metaphysical worlds of crime investigation and prosecution. This blur has haunted the shadows of these stories back to the gothic era, when the common understanding of humanity’s inherent sinfulness was replaced with Enlightenment notions of innate rationality and moral judgment that still had to explain why criminal violence happened.4 Ultimately, the limited popularity of these new shows might signal less a whole-scale refusal of the forensic imagination5 and more evidence of the ways in which moral transcendence is only available to certain crime victims and their champions. The voice of the dead directs and demands justice in ways that discourage attributions of humanity to known or suspected perpetrators. Such a redirection answers criticisms of forensic procedurals as texts that glorify violence and reify the criminal figure as a character of thrill and desire. This otherworldly narration, however, also subtly integrates “rituals of mourning and bereavement” into the rituals of punishment and execution6 as the primacy of the victim’s voice becomes ever more key in illustrating the moral chasm between those who kill and those who die.

Veracity, Verisimilitude, and Valor: Mid–Twentieth-Century Police Procedurals Ladies and Gentlemen, what you’re about to see is real. The names have been changed to protect the innocent. Voiceover narration, Dragnet (1951)

From television’s early days of Dragnet (1951–1959), Highway Patrol (1955–1959), The F.B.I. (1965–1974), and Adam-12 (1968–1975), police procedurals have always walked the thin (blue) line between accounts of real-life crimes built from the detectives and suspects who lived them and a wholly imagined world of criminal activity where both perpetrators and their pursuers are drawn larger than life, making depravity even more degrading and heroics even more herculean. Though Detective Joe Friday might have never uttered the exact phrase “Just the facts, ma’am,” police procedurals such as Dragnet enshrine the public’s long-standing faith in the detective’s objective eye and meticulous work that produces results as devoid of outside influence as they are teeming with detail and rigor. As Ronald Thomas argues in Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science, “detective literature both reinforces and resists the disciplinary regime it represents, preserving the capacity to criticize the system in which it also

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functions as an integral part.”7 Thomas’s analysis of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century crime narratives centers on the appearance of devices “aimed at making the body write or speak for itself” (e.g., the lie detector, the mug shot, the fingerprint). Their integration into detective writing echoed emerging real-life procedures of policing, prosecution, and punishment. For Thomas, the Victorian era’s penchant for creating “institutions and rituals for monitoring, policing, treating, and even confessing the activity of the body” informed the literary techniques that would become staples in the burgeoning genre of detective fiction (particularly the influence of photography on narrative voice and description).8 At the turn of the previous century, ceding “the authority to tell the secret story of the individual suspect to a designated expert” reflects an aesthetic and political choice that “corresponds historically to the insistent rise of professional police forces, scientific theories of criminality, and the transformation of the nation into the modern bureaucratic state.”9 By the mid-twentieth century, after years of interaction with ostensibly nonfiction police writing such as The National Police Gazette in the United States (original series in print from 1845–1935) and the UK’s Illustrated Police News (1864–1938) and crime fiction from authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Raymond Chandler, the public was primed to understand characters such as Sergeant Friday, Officer Pete Malloy, or Inspector Lewis Erskine as both embodying and wielding forensic “devices of truth” as part of their role and authority as public crime fighters. The structure and content of the police procedural continued the transformation of criminal bodies into “legible texts” to be read, recorded, and reprimanded by a team of experts whose own identities were often synonymous with the isolating, often violent, and dangerous work they undertook.10 While the investigator provides the dominant perspective from which a viewer sees the world of crime, their domestic worlds and emotional attachments exist on the periphery of the story. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, police procedurals such as Police Story, Cagney & Lacey, and Hill Street Blues reflected the influence of soap operas, with long character arcs pulling the private lives of investigators into the central plot to contrast or reinforce their approach to deduction and policing. Simultaneously, from its rougher roots in 1940s film and 1950s pulp novels, a more soft-boiled private eye enjoyed a resurgence in the 1980s with Magnum PI, Simon & Simon, Remington Steele, and Angela Lansbury’s Jessica Fletcher, who brought the small town, amateur sleuth of Agatha Christie’s imagination to the American small screen in Murder, She Wrote. In these shows, the investigator-for-hire displays his charms against the window dressing of criminal activity. Though violence is the catalyst

Modus Operandi

that calls these protagonists into action, the comedic and romantic threads that tie the plot together mute its threat. The plots pay due deference to the painstaking process of investigatory work, but the carefully crafted verisimilitude that educated as well as excited the Dragnet audience takes a backseat to the emotional dynamics between private eyes and their clients. Because the television landscape is restricted to only three major networks, the landscape of crime stories is also restricted to narrative structures, plots, and characters that executives can sell reliably to advertisers.

New Channels for New, Non-Fiction Crime Stories Although inspired in part by a true incident, the following story is fictional and does not depict any actual person or event. Textual disclaimer that appears at the beginning of Law & Order episodes (1990–2010).

In the early 1990s, two events precipitate a shift in the locus of crime story programming on the major networks and across basic cable. The first is Operation Desert Storm, a conflict captured and framed by twenty-fourhour news coverage. Though tightly controlled and censored by the Pentagon, the constant stream of footage gives viewers the illusion of direct and immediate sensory access to the unfolding war.11 Though already an influence on the content of crime narrative, the visual culture of news reshapes the look of crime shows, particularly NBC’s Law & Order, which starts its twenty-season run in 1990 sporting a shaky-cam, man-on-the-street televisual style more commonly associated with contemporary photojournalism and documentary cinema. From its inception, Law & Order capitalized on viewers’ enduring tabloid news tastes, which in the declining age of print had shifted off the page and onto the television screen. The series also extended the long tradition of New York City as the nation’s urban simulacrum, continually mined for criminal narrative gold. In addition, Law & Order appeared to offer narrative balance: an equal focus on the city’s investigative (order) and juridical (law) systems that illustrated the often thorny relationships between the pursuit and prosecution of criminals. As with previous police procedurals, viewers’ allegiances are sutured to those of the officers of the justice system. We see first-hand the limitations of achieving justice in the face of duplicitous criminals and their manipulative attorneys. Law & Order also provides an opportunity for viewers to revise history. Its “ripped from the headlines” plotlines form a thinly veiled counterreality in which more desired or devastating outcomes offer salve or horror to its audience. As the years go on and the Law & Order franchise

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expands, the series’ narrative twists press the boundaries of plausibility in search of ever more unexpected and shocking examples of human depravity to whet its audiences’ appetites. The second event that influences crime story programming is the mainstream success of Jonathan Demme’s Oscar-winning adaptation of Thomas Harris’s novel The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and the centrality of forensic profiling to this tensely plotted crime/horror film. Around this time, the major networks and fledgling cable channels such as Court TV, A&E, and the Discovery Channel took tentative steps to bring the previously printbound arena of true crime to the small screen. News magazines such as 48 Hours, Dateline NBC, and Investigative Reports offer condensed versions of recent criminal trials, some concluded, some under appeal, but all under public scrutiny. In the tradition of other true crime narratives that immerse a spectator in a mood of threat and dread, these news magazines blur the boundaries between information and sensation. As Jean Murley observes in The Rise of True Crime: Twentieth Century Murder and American Popular Culture, “true-crime TV allows a glimpse into the lives of others, both reflecting back middle-class mores and lifestyles and holding a flashlight into more darkened corners of American life.” Television intensifies the intimacy available in true crime books by “domesticat[ing] true crime and mak[ing] it prosaic and commonplace” by way of programs that fall under the larger umbrella of “entertainment” like soap operas, game shows, or sitcoms.12 A&E’s Investigative Reports is one of cable television’s first entries into the television news magazine genre. Intermittent episodes are devoted to reporting developments in previously unsolved cases. In many ways, these “Cold Case Files” special reports are unremarkable television, comprising primarily recycled news footage from local television affiliates and newspapers and low-budget reenactments accompanied by the gravitas laden narration of host Bill Kurtis. The discovery of new evidence or the retesting of old evidence, however, requires a new expert: the forensic scientist. The arc of storytelling thus sutures the process of scientific discovery, testing, and classification to the unfolding and successful conclusion of the mystery narrative. Even though these cold cases are told in retrospect, their tone and pacing implies that events are unfolding before the viewers’ eyes. This kind of hindsight is a mainstay of true crime narrative. Historian Karen Halttunen traces the beginnings of the murder narrative’s causal unfolding to late eighteenth-century trial reports in which the contradictory and complex details of a case were published after the trial’s conclusion and organized in ways that both heightened and managed the mystery and uncertainty of crime, particularly murder.13 “Cold” cases are unique in that they often reach a hiatus before they reach a conclusion.

Modus Operandi

They are two-tiered mysteries with the classic “Whodunit?” structure supplemented by “Howdunit?” and “How they almost got away with it” story elements. To manage these temporally bound twists and turns, Investigative Reports’ “cold case” specials reach backward and forward across time and space with programs often divided into two halves. The first depicts the death, the victim’s biography, the initial investigation, and identification of a suspect. The second focuses on the lost or unexplained evidence and its new/successful forensic analysis, the (re)capture and conviction of the suspect, and bringing closure to the victim’s family. On the major networks, programs such as 48 Hours and Dateline NBC tend toward the journalistic. The shows employ a mix of direct cinema and cinema vérité documentary styles. They keep their own film crews outside the frame while displaying other newscasters and reporters whose raw footage is integrated into a case’s back-story. An individual “character’s” dialogue and actions are not scripted, but investigator and witness testimony follow expected storylines. The shows treat viewers as armchair jurors but also over-determine their conclusions through editing and narration. The burden of proof of innocence rests squarely on the defendant, upending the basic tenets of the American criminal justice system. The reporter functions as an interlocutor between the decisions and limitations of the court of law and the unfettered access now provided to the court of public opinion. The news frame, coupled with scheduling on the edges of primetime hours, allows producers greater freedom to depict graphic details of particularly horrific crimes (e.g., child abuse, sexual torture, serial murder). Though their content might push the boundaries of acceptability for primetime programming, the visual forensic terrain remains decidedly low-tech: still photographs or exterior shots of scientific tools such as microscopes and centrifuges. Though the trace evidence the forensic scientist analyzes is the centerpiece of the investigation’s successful conclusions, he or she is strictly a secondary player, an invaluable assistant to dedicated law enforcement professionals. The scientist is not yet the story’s protagonist. A significant turning point for the forensic-detective in popular culture comes with the 1995 O.J. Simpson murder trial often billed as the battle of a celebrity’s brilliant and well compensated defense attorneys and experts versus a dysfunctional prosecutorial team and forensic investigators under fire for sloppy and potentially biased evidence collection and analytic techniques.14 Millions of viewers are mesmerized by the trial’s almost twenty-four-hour live multinetwork coverage, which transforms CourtTV into a central player in cable crime reporting. Under the camera’s unblinking eye, Americans were introduced to complex forensic testimony that

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appeared as fallible and contradictory as it seemed dense and impenetrable. Larger issues of structural racism in the American criminal justice system loomed large over the trial, its verdict, and its media coverage, but for the purposes of the forensic procedural, Simpson’s acquittal illustrated the gap between the forensic expert’s specialized language and methodologies and the general public’s understanding of the science involved in criminal investigations. Despite this less than optimal framing, the trial brought new visibility to the collection and explanation of forensic evidence and ultimately offered new characters and plotlines that would transform a new era of television crime dramas. Also in 1995, the Discovery Channel crowns forensic scientists the new detectives with a nonfiction show of the same name. In a shift away from the strict police procedural mold, the detectives of the show’s title are scientists who work like detectives to solve criminal mysteries. Though this program takes into account new tensions and anxieties that connect the world of medicine and science and the world of criminal investigation, Halttunen argues that even in eighteenth-century trial reports, “dead bodies spoke in medical forensics.” In those emerging crime stories, readers were encouraged to follow alongside the expert via the published trial narrative and use their own “powers of detection” to “track the violence through the silent witness of the victim’s body.”15 The idea that the corpse is mute but not wordless is a staple plot point of The New Detectives. Although police investigators can interrogate and manipulate eyewitnesses and suspects, these “new” detectives take the word of victims literally. Corpses cannot lie or hide evidence, because it is etched on their forms. Previously incompatible ideas of respect for the dead and the necessary dissection of the corpse unite under the rhetorical frame of body as silent witness.16 Such a suturing necessitates the spectacularization of the wounded body, for it is the primary means by which these witnesses’ testimony can be “heard” by experts, jurors, and, by extension, viewers. In 1996, the Learning Channel (TLC) began offering viewers Medical Detectives, a show expanding the terrain of forensic expertise from crime to accidents, epidemics, and other catastrophic events that threaten the human community. Turning the spotlight onto less conventional domains of scientific inquiry requires a change in presentation. Both The New Detectives and Medical Detectives offer the usual talking-head interviews and displays of crime scene and autopsy footage, now with reenactments serving as a means of clinical problem solving. As a forensic expert asserts a hypothesis of the crime, the scene shifts, and we see the story’s major players (cast realistically) dramatize that hypothesis. In the early seasons, these replays are in black and white to further distinguish them as a mental

Modus Operandi

“rehearsal” of events. In later seasons, the scenes regain their color but lose their focus. Edges are blurred, as if cheesecloth were draped over the lens. This fuzzy vision literalizes the expert’s mind’s eye. Only when a hypothesis can account for all critical evidence does the reenactment sharpen and resolve, finally confirmed as fact. Although the forensic investigator frames how and what to see, forensic matter is on its way to becoming an actor in its own right. Unlike a duplicitous human agent, this physical evidence cannot lie. It can be misquoted, taken out of context, ignored, and even destroyed, but that fallibility exists outside the bounds of scientific inquiry.

The Terror of Trauma: Forensic Procedurals of the New Millennium We’ll find out who killed him, Booth. We’ve got Hamid’s body. You can always count on the dead. Dr. Temperance “Bones” Brenan, “The Man in the SUV,” episode 2 of Bones (FOX)

As the millennium approached, the forensic procedural found a solid footing in the realm of nonfiction programming. Cold Case Files was a standalone series for A&E. Medical Detectives left disease and disaster behind, becoming Forensic Files, a centerpiece of programming on CourtTV.17 Although the late 1990s primetime networks featured crime dramas that balance police work with inside looks at the legal domains of prosecutors and defense attorneys (e.g., Law & Order, NYPD Blue, Homicide: Life on the Street, Murder One, New York Undercover), there are glimpses of a new focus on forensic expertise in low-rated series with cult followings such as Profiler and The X-Files.18 For the 2000–2001 season, CBS, whose primetime ratings place it third among the now four major networks, takes a calculated risk on forensic programming with CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, a series set in Las Vegas County’s high tech crime laboratory. It receives a modest roll out when it premieres in September 2000 but by the end of the season it stands at #10 in the Nielsen ratings. Its popularity capitalizes on new mainstream attention to the science of crime investigation, attention facilitated by work done by true crime series during the latter half of the 1990s. That popularity grows exponentially as the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 transform American’s relationship with law enforcement and forensic evidence. I do not wish to overstate the influence of 9/11 on the twenty-first century’s forensic turn, a turn that has been in subtle motion as far back as the eighteenth century. I concur, however, with Steenberg that 9/11 is a “key traumatic event” that solidifies key narrative

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components of forensic television’s “wound culture” and its “hierarchical mediation of human remains.”19 Forensic procedurals reenact graphic violence in serial and methodical ways that feed the viewer’s voyeuristic “compulsion to look” under the guise of educating that same viewer on the affective and material labor required for justice.20 Since 2001, the law enforcement world that viewers experience through both network and cable crime programming has been equal parts whirring centrifuges, grotesquely damaged bodies, and high-tech machinery—as much as it has been search warrants, swift pursuits, and suspect interrogations. As a uniquely trained expert, the scientist–detective can assert the unwavering objectivity of scientific analysis and its ability to uncover the truth behind the crime: “[T]he locus of truth in CSI resides in expert applications of scientific technologies that organize and produce inscriptions, without troubling with problems of interpretation.”21 In such an imaginary, the bodies of victims and the violence they experience bear unique visual importance. Throughout the first decade of the new millennium, forensic procedurals of a wide variety of foci (see Table 8.1) expend significant energy creating reenactments (both live-action and virtual) to illustrate minute details of bodily injury. Frequently, these reenactments also serve as a way for the scientist–detective to test a hypothesis about the crime, thus playing out and dismissing counterarguments before a defendant or defense attorney can level them in court. In her article, “Dead Famous and Dead Sexy: Popular Culture, Forensics and the Rise of the Corpse,” Jacque Lynn Foltyn notes how popular culture treatments of horror, crime, and contagion like CSI reflect viewers’ paradoxical attraction/repulsion to the corpse, a paradox made variably manifest by Americans’ anxieties about death.22 She reflects nostalgically on Quincy, M.E. (1976–1983), a show in which the corpse enjoyed greater privacy, where methods of murder were narrated without accompanying visual details, and in which criminal death was signified by a toe-tagged foot or a fully human form draped in a white sheet sanitized for our protection. By contrast, CSI’s commitment to verisimilitude in every facet of investigation seems avowedly traumatizing yet resolutely clinical.23 Foltyn asserts that the “pornography of death” imbues even nonsexualized crimes on shows like CSI.24 The corpse in the forensic procedural is simultaneously sacred and profane. Even as the level of physical trauma expressed on victim bodies has increased exponentially over CSI’s now fourteen seasons, the postmortem techniques used to collect evidence have remained relatively fixed. As in their true-crime predecessors, corpses in forensic procedurals often appear in their previous, whole state via other visual/aural mediums: photographs, videotapes, audio messages.

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Table 8.1  Forensic Procedurals, 2001–2014 Fiction

Nonfiction

2001 2002 2003 2004

Crossing Jordan CSI: Miami Cold Case, NCIS CSI: NY, Medical Investigation

2005 2006 2007

Bones, Numb3rs, Criminal Minds,   Killer Instinct, The Inside The Evidence Women’s Murder Club

Cold Case Files Body of Evidence History Detectives Dr. G. Medical Examiner, The First48, Investigating History, Seconds from Disaster Accident Investigator

2008

Bone Detectives Eleventh Hour

2011 2012

NCIS: Los Angeles, The Forgotten Body of Proof, Detroit 187, Rizzoli & Isles, Sherlock The Killing Elementary

2013

The Following, Hannibal

2014

Killer Women, Those Who Kill, NCIS: New Orleans

2009 2010

LA Forensics Diagnosis X, Murder, Dead Men Talking, Extreme Forensics, Crime 360, Solved, CSI University Forensics: You Decide

Final Witness, Stolen Voices, Buried Secrets Cold Justice, Whodunnit, I Was Murdered

Note: I have limited this list to network offerings (CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX, the CW) and cable programming available without a premium subscription. I omit a host of programs for their focus on the paranormal (Medium; The Ghost Whisperer, Threshold, Fringe, Paranormal Cops, The Dresden Files, Paranormal State, Ghost Hunters, Dead Tenants, Door to the Dead, Ghost Lab, Grimm, Restless Souls) or on perceptual/human behavioral aspects of criminal investigation (Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Mind Games, Perception, The Mentalist, Castle, Psych, Unforgettable, Monk, Lie to Me, Motive, The Closer, Major Crimes). The short-lived 2007 series Raines, starring Jeff Goldblum, fell in between paranormal and perceptual detectives. A previous version of this list appeared in my paper “‘Differential Diagnosis, People!’: How Forensic-Focused Dramas and Reality Television Programs Meet and Mutate, Producing the Forensic Imagination,” included in the CD proceedings of the 2008 Film & History Conference: Film & Science.

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Though in one scene they are shown pre-injury, engaged in a variety of everyday activities (some of which may lead to their deaths), in the next they are distilled to their biological or chemical essences or digitized into discrete and disembodied segments by the forensic protagonist, thus intensifying the need for scientific interpretation of the dead’s special language. In the forensic procedural, computer-aided graphic effects are on par with those found in mainstream cinema. Sue Tait labels CSI’s viewer perspective, with its ability to pierce physical boundaries, as “autoptic vision.”25 This all-seeing eye is exemplified by devices like the fictional “Angelator” on FOX’s Bones and the real-world technology of the Deltasphere SceneVision™-3D scanner featured on A&E’s Crime 360, which captures a panorama of the scene used to stage various scenarios of the crime until the final, true story is deduced. These technological devices draw the viewer into the crime scene but most importantly into the victim’s body itself. Deborah Jermyn identifies this internal point of view as the “CSI shot,” a visual trait so named by the show’s producers for its ability to connect the viewer’s perspective with that of the forensic investigator so that both travel inside the dead body. This fantastic voyage26 denies familiar referential points of the traditional crime scene photograph and replaces them with depictions of the body’s inner space in ways that are dislocating only to be reoriented as true and fixed by the anatomical and medico-legal dialogue of the scientist. Jermyn places CSI on a continuum of crime dramas starting in the early 1990s that ushered in a new era of “forensic realism,” which “forever shifted audience expectations, and television’s evocation of realism and the representation of the body in the [crime] genre.”27 For Jermyn, the show’s narrative of “authentic scientific progress and inquiry” is counterbalanced by the extensive imaginative, even speculative, means by which the body’s interior is depicted.28 This tension provides CSI and other forensic procedurals with a way to advance a conservative vision of crime and punishment by punctuating those perspectives with innovative spectacularization of the human body. Though the pathologist or forensic investigator narrates the anatomical specifics, viewers participate in the necessary (re)wounding of the corpse by following the scalpel blade into and beyond the flesh. The accompanying soundtrack of bone crunches, muscle slices, bullet or knife shaft impacts help mask the shift from photorealism to animation. By reducing the viewers’ field of vision to a decontextualized segment of an internal organ or system, forensic procedurals mitigate charges of obscenity even as their storylines probe the outer edges of technology and human morality. As viewers travel inside both a victim’s day-to-day

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existence and their secret anatomical world, “the dead speak” rhetoric that permeates forensic procedurals is made both physically manifest and narratively dramatic. Both fictional and true-crime procedurals secure an empathetic connection to the dead by illustrating, literally, the importance of forensic investigators in identifying and capturing criminals. Scientific processes animate the forensic procedural’s cause, function, and purpose. The crime mystery’s dramaturgical structure is organized around the victim body/witness who is made visible by scientific protocols and made understandable by forensic investigators who can translate science into a plausible (i.e., true) story.

“With Better Light Let in By Death”: Forensic Procedurals as Mourning Rituals29 This program is based on events that occurred in Springfield, Illinois between 1994 and 2002. It contains actual crime scene photos, home movies and interviews with the real people involved. From this material, producers have created scenes and dialogue performed by actors. On-screen captions for the opening of “The Devil You Know,” Final Witness (ABC)

Almost fifteen years after the new millennium’s forensic turn culminated in a wave of forensic procedural programming, there are signs of change afoot. As of this writing, the CSI franchise has shrunk from three shows back to one as the NCIS (Naval Criminal Investigative Service) franchise has expanded to three. Other shows where more obscure scientific methods were foregrounded (such as Numb3rs), or that centered on a medical examiner protagonist (e.g., Crossing Jordan, Body of Proof ), have been cancelled or, like Bones, have turned their attention away from procedure and into the personal lives and dynamics between the forensic scientist and traditional law enforcement officers/agencies. Whether this signals a backlash regarding the so-called “CSI effect,”30 an increasing awareness of the fallibility of forensic investigators and lack of consistent regulation and accreditation of such professionals,31 or simply viewers’ exhausted interests, forensic procedurals show some movement away from prioritizing the investigator’s and by extension the viewer’s autoptic gaze towards articulating a more otherworldly relationship with the dead. As I have argued in the previous section of this chapter, crime narratives have always dramatized how the dead body can speak through assistive devices of detection that turn the body into a text that can be read by those experts who know its language. Now shows such as Investigation Discovery’s Stolen Voices, Buried Secrets and ABC’s Final Witness and The Forgotten

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give voice, literally, to the corpse. Ostensibly freed from the reliance upon a scientific “medium” to commune with the dead, these shows offer a first-person account of the crime through the victim’s direct address from beyond the grave. In a very real way, they invoke a pre-Gothic notion of horror as inextricably linked to a murderer’s guilty conscience fully aware of its depth of sinfulness32 but with that realization attached to and articulated by an innocent victim whose death brings a clarity of perspective on human behavior and who can reassure the public that the identification, capture, and successful prosecution/execution of a murderer is the only conclusion that can bring peace to a restless spirit. Aspects of this narrative structure are foreshadowed by CBS’s longrunning drama Cold Case (2003–2010), which focuses on a fictionalized Philadelphia cold case investigatory unit. In Cold Case, the tension between the then of the crime’s event and the now of its solution, oftentimes decades apart, presented flashback reenactments not as hypothesis testing of different theories of the crime, but as the dramatization of previously unheard witness testimony. In this way, these scenes deepen viewers’ identification with the victim and potentially intensify outrage at the concealment of evidence by witnesses and killers. Unlike the wounding and rewounding of the bodies in other forensic procedurals, Cold Case withholds the reenactment of violence until the moment of the perpetrator’s full confession toward the episode’s end, after every other detail of the victim’s life has been laid bare. In a move reiterated in future programs, after the circumstances of death are known, the lead investigators and/or devoted family members or friends catch a glimpse of the victim’s spirit as he or she looked before death, reiterating the message that only when a case achieves a satisfactory conclusion (almost always with the confession and arrest of a murderer) can the dead rest. The short-lived first-person fiction forensic procedural The Forgotten, created by CSI producer Jerry Bruckheimer, debuted just months before Peter Jackson’s feature film adaptation of Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones.33 Unlike The Lovely Bones, the protagonists/victims of The Forgotten are unknown. When the voiceover addresses viewers in the show’s opening moments, beyond an assumed gender based on tone and pitch, we have little context for its identity beyond the assertion that its story could just as easily be our own: “I was like you and then this happened to me. Now I’m here, in the dark. Nameless. Waiting. Forgotten.”34 The rest of the episode fulfills many of the expectations of the procedural as it follows a group of citizen amateurs who chase down leads in a stalled investigation. Each interview and the reenactment of its details connect another piece in the puzzle of our protagonist’s life and death. Similarly to

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Cold Case, after the identity of both the victim and killer is confirmed the protagonist’s voiceover conveys a sense of relief and release. This is a peace that is possible even if justice in the human realm remains delayed: “Now someone knows my story. And maybe what happened can’t be proved today, but it will be. Because one day my sister will wake up, and she’ll tell you everything. She’ll tell you how I died, but more than that, she’ll tell you how we lived.”35 More recent first-person, nonfiction forensic procedurals such as Stolen Voices, Buried Secrets and Final Witness are no longer content to construct a victim’s life from the testimony of others. Like The Forgotten, these shows adopt a staple of true crime writing: the victim’s fictionalized consciousness built largely from personal documents, correspondence, photographs, and videos. “That’s me lying there.”36 “That’s me they’re digging up.”37 These pronouncements accompany the first moments of Final Witness as viewers see the protagonist/victim either experiencing his or her final breaths in the killer’s presence or the discovery of his or her decomposing body by investigators. Immediately, we are linked with the victim’s consciousness; we receive his or her direction for how and what to feel about what we will see. Stolen Voices, Buried Secrets episodes, titled with the name of their protagonist/victim, begin in a similar fashion with the voiceover focusing on geographic location and how that place informed our speaker’s life and death: “This is Conway, South Carolina. I was born here. Went to school here. And I was murdered here.”38 “Like every California girl, when the sun was out so was I. The beach was my backyard. . . . But when I was twenty-three years old, I left California for good.”39 “When I was little I always imagined that these Texas hills were filled with ghosts. I just never thought I’d become one of them.”40 These teaser moments are brought full circle at the program’s end after we see a killer identified, captured, and convicted. In the concluding moments, family members pick up the narration and reveal their sense of communion with the dead now that the case is definitely concluded: “I feel she is around,” “I know she’s watching,” “I’ve had dreams where she’s communicated with me,” “she’s a happy angel.”41 In a surprising refusal of forensic realism, these programs focus their attention on reenactments in ways that assert the show’s officially sanctioned connection with its real-life subjects while also intensifying and blurring the line between public and private, justice and revenge, memorialization and sensationalism. In her analysis of the British series Crimewatch and its reconstructions, Deborah Jermyn argues that personal photographs and home videos “plac[e] victims within familial formations” in ways that “emphasis[es] their worth and the significance of their loss, perpetuates

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the notion that is primary through their roles within the conventional family unit that individuals can be positioned, identified, and legitimized.”42 As these first-person procedurals build reenactments from private, often domestic materials, they raise what Tanya Horeck calls the “affective stakes of the visual consumption of crime.”43 The end credit sequence of Final Witness illustrates the pinnacle of this affective experience. Each of the actors sits in the same neutral setting where interviews with real-life investigators and surviving family members and friends have been filmed. They appear in costume, wordlessly holding a framed portrait of their doppelgänger. Sometimes they glance down at the image and then back to the camera in a gesture that seems to request the viewer’s confirmation of their performance’s authenticity. The final individual we see is the one who has portrayed the victim. It is an eerie moment of both self-conscious theatricality and solemn memorialization. Home video footage is sometimes interspersed in these closing sequences in another intriguing refusal of the spectacularization of the victim’s body. Such a choice conveys the devastation of crime not through the graphic display of its violence but in the display of the personal and domestic harmony that has been forever shattered. Reenactment provides a performative return to that state of innocence but only for a moment. Through its fictionalized narration and transparent acknowledgment of the constructed nature of true crime, Final Witness offers viewers a space of public mourning for victims but, more importantly, for the sense of security that the personal nature of their loss makes relevant to our own lives. Or at least as we are encouraged to imagine our lives.

Over My Dead Body For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak/With most miraculous organ. Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2

It is worth noting that the Final Witness credit sequences include the actors who portray the killers. Although the narrative framing of violence remains firmly attached to the victim’s point of view, this gesture implies that the perpetrator can be provisionally recuperated into the public body if only as someone who once was good. Popular culture is rampant with texts that romanticize certain kinds of violent offenders. In reality, most criminals forfeit their subjectivity from the moment they are arrested; the more horrific the crime, the greater the need to dehumanize the criminal. In his analysis of the “lethal theater” enacted through the rituals of capital punishment Dwight Conquergood argues that

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contemporary execution rituals work their magic and derive their efficacy from the effusive power of the effigy. . . . An effigy is the fusion of image and body, symbol and source, the figurative and the physical. Because a jury will never vote to kill a human being, the fundamental task of the prosecutor is to turn the accused into an effigy composed of his or her worst parts and bad deeds.44

In first-person procedurals, reenactments and the victim’s narration function as effigies, constructing distinct figures of good and evil and offering viewers a clear indication of whose death to mourn and whose death to demand. Just as the police procedural offers a chance for the public to learn and trust the process of investigation and the forensic procedural illuminates physical matter itself so the viewer can see the truth that the investigator sees, the first-person procedural locates both forensic and affective legibility in its most logical source: the voice of the victim. In doing so it literalizes the notion of the dead as the only infallible eyewitness. It imbues forensic investigation with a kind of mysticism that seems both antithetical to scientific accuracy and yet always already implied by the uncanny ability of detectives to see what others cannot. Finally, it expands the function of the crime story beyond the solution to a mystery and the delivery of justice to become the final, essential step in a once private mourning process, now productively cathartic because it is communal and public.

Notes 1.  Steenberg, 9. Steenberg uses the term “tabloid forensic science” to describe contemporary popular culture texts, including television programs, that offer the viewer “a distinct mixture of sensation, realism, nostalgia and the grotesque.” 2.  Ibid., 10. Unlike Steenberg, I pay less attention to the “gendered nature of mediated forensics,” but my analysis of the forensic procedural echoes her observation about how such programs aestheticize the corpse, particularly the female corpse, and “provid[e] a narrative excuse for looking at the female body” in ways that are prurient yet necessary “in an urban reality that is dangerous for women.” 3.  Ibid., 1. 4.  Halttunen, 4. 5. In Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, Matthew Kirschenbaum employs this term in his examination of the material inscription practices and processes that infuse new media and computer technologies. This is an imagination inspired by texts that appear to be ephemeral but that leave trace evidence throughout electronic, digital, and social networks. In this essay, I invoke a similar understanding of forensic imagination as a space that relies upon the

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reciprocal work of viewers, creators, and medicolegal professionals to visualize and assert the existence of a world where violence and risk are managed by a team of dedicated criminalists who employ the definitive methodologies of science and produce facts that are synonymous with truth and produce justice that is synonymous with punishment. I concur with Kirschenbaum’s assertion that the forensic imagination thrives in cases where evidence exists primarily in trace forms (e.g., fluids, fibers, remnants, remains, computer code). Such tendrils inspire mystery and necessitate the appearance of technology and its diagnosticians to magnify and weave those pieces together into a coherent narrative. The forensic imagination provides the appearance of certainty at a time and in instances where things appear to be the most uncertain, the most known in the face of the unknown.  6. Conquergood, 341.  7. Thomas, 14.  8. Ibid., 17  9. Ibid., 289. 10.  Ibid., 289–290. 11.  Jeffords and Rabinovitz provide a detailed look at media coverage of the first Gulf War. 12.  Murley, 110. 13. Halttunen, Murder Most Foul, 91–134. 14. See “For His Defense, Simpson Assembles Legal ‘Dream Team’ Series;” Bolden; Newton and Ford; “Trial Reshapes Image of Criminalists in the O.J. Simpson Case” a Specialist Seemed to Be Less Than a Scientific Sleuth;” “Blood Evidence May Bore Jury—Pace of Trial Works in Simpson’s Favor.” 15. Halttunen, Murder Most Foul, 119. 16.  Because the etymological root of forensic unifies speech and physical matter, it is no surprise that the rhetorical thrust of most forensic media reiterates and extends such a link with phrases such as “Hope lives because evidence never dies” (Cold Case, CBS) and “Focus on the only thing that cannot lie: the evidence” (CSI, Pilot episode, CBS). 17.  Forensic Files was one of the few forensic crime programs to survive CourtTV’s transformation to truTV. In 2009, the show was syndicated on TNT as a nonfiction companion program to TNT’s lineup of syndicated fiction forensic programming, including Bones, Cold Case, and CSI: New York. Forensic Files is produced by MedStar Television, whose website describes the program as “a pioneer in fact-based, high-tech, dramatic storytelling,” “a new spin on the “whodunit” genre” that allows the viewer to “follow law enforcement officers, medical examiners, prosecutors and defense attorneys, and forensic science experts as they seek solutions to puzzling, often baffling cases” (www.medstar.com/ about.asp). 18.  Despite a mid-series Nielsen rating rank just outside the top ten television programs from 1996 to 1999, averaging about 18.5 million viewers, the X-Files started and ended its run with a much smaller, though devoted, viewership. The ninth (and final) season saw the show tying its second-season Nielsen ranking of 63.

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19.  Steenberg, 176, 76. 20.  Ibid., 11. 21.  Gever, 456. 22.  Foltyn, 164. 23.  Ibid., 155. 24.  Ibid., 167. 25.  Tait, 49–52. 26.  In many ways, CSI dramatizes advances in postmortem imaging or virtopsy, a technology under development since 2000, the year of the show’s premiere. The University of Bern, Switzerland is at the forefront of this innovation (www.virtopsy. com). At the National Library of Medicine’s 2006 exhibit Visible Proofs, visitors could interact with a demo virtopsy suite. As a case’s details were narrated on a mounted computer screen, a screen/gurney offered an outline of the human form where damaged sections would be illuminated. The smaller screen isolated and focused on particular organs affected by the violence. 27.  Jermyn, “Body,” 85, 79. 28.  Ibid., 86 29.  From Robert Browning’s 1835 dramatic poem “Paracelsus.” 30.  In his 2004 article “‘CSI Effect’ Has Juries Wanting More Evidence” for USA Today, reporter Richard Willing asserts that this term is becoming commonplace among jury consultants, legal analysts, and both prosecutors and defense attorneys. It refers to jury expectation regarding physical evidence and forensic analysis necessary at trial to convict for even misdemeanor offenses. This belief in the infallibility of forensic evidence can work in favor of and against defendants, depending on the case. See also Goehner; Mann; Podlas; Byers and Johnson. 31.  See “Post Mortem: Death Investigation in America,” from ProPublica.org and PBS Frontline. 32. Halttunen, Murder Most Foul, 29–32. 33.  A surprise best-seller when it was published in 2002, The Lovely Bones is narrated by its dead protagonist, Susie, who follows and even subtly influences her family and her killer as they cope with the aftermath of her rape and murder. 34.  The Forgotten. “Pilot.” ABC Network. September 22, 2009. 35.  The Forgotten. “Railroad Jane.” ABC Network. November 3, 2009. 36.  Final Witness. “The Devil You Know,” YouTube video, 41:33, from a performance televised by ABC on July 25, 2012, posted by Bevel Gardner, September 18, 2012, http://youtu.be/P3Qkg653nFE. 37.  Final Witness. “Vixen’s Elixir.” ABC Network. July 18, 2012. 38.  Stolen Voices. Buried Secrets. “Crystal Faye Todd, Conway, SC,” YouTube video, 21:19, from a performance televised by Investigation Discovery (ID) on February 28, 2011, posted by krysti virginia, March 2, 2011, http://youtu .be/m__AlUALQvg. When episodes are rebroadcast or packaged in DVD form or for download the titles are changed to reflect expected true crime language, such as “Killer Instinct,” the title given the Crystal Todd episode on Amazon Instant Video.

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39.  “Cold as Ice: Denise Huber,” Stolen Voices. Buried Secrets, Season 1 episode, Amazon Prime, downloaded March 15, 2014 from Amazon Instant Video. www .amazon.com/gp/product/B004KKL3DE/ref=dv_dp_ep3. 40. “La Muerta: Sophia Martinez,” Stolen Voices. Buried Secrets, Season 1, downloaded March 15, 2014 from Amazon Instant Video. www.amazon.com/gp/ product/B008EYB9GI/ref=dv_dp_ep5. 41.  These quotations are from the same three episodes already listed in the endnotes. 42. Jermyn, Crime, 83. 43.  Horeck, 153. 44.  Conquergood, 353.

Bibliography Associated Press. “Blood Evidence May Bore Jury—Pace of Trial Works in Simpson’s Favor.” The Cincinnati Post, May 1, 1995, Metro Edition: 5A. NewsBank. Bartos, Leah. “No Forensic Background? No Problem,” ProPublica.org, April 17, 2012. Corrected April 19, 2012. www.propublica.org/article/no-forensic-background -no-problem. Bolden, James. “A Week Later, Dream Team Critics Becoming Believers.” Los Angeles Sentinel, October 12, 1995. ProQuest. Bones. Season 1. DVD. 20th Century Fox. 2006. Byers, Michele, and Val Marie Johnson, eds. The CSI Effect: Television, Crime, and Governance. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009. Conquergood, Lorne Dwight. “Lethal Theatre: Performance, Punishment, and the Death Penalty.” Theatre Journal 54, no. 3 (2002): 339–367. doi 10.1353/ tj.2002.0077. Court TV: Forensic Files. DVD. Goldhill Home Media, 2004. Crime 360. Season 1. DVD. A&E Home Video, 2008. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Season 1. DVD. Paramount, 2008. Dragnet. Collector’s edition. Eclectic DVD, 2001. Final Witness. Season 1. Various dates. June-August, 2012. Author’s personal DVR recordings. Foltyn, Jacque Lynn. “Dead Famous and Dead Sexy: Popular Culture, Forensics, and the Rise of the Corpse.” Mortality 13, no. 2 (2008): 153–173. doi: 10.1080/13576270801954468. “For His Defense, Simpson Assembles Legal ‘Dream Team’ Series.” The Christian Science Monitor Jul 22, 1994. ProQuest. The Forgotten. ABC Network. Season 1. Various dates. September 2009–July 2010. Author’s personal DVR recordings. Gever, Martha. “The Spectacle of Crime, Digitized: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and Social Anatomy.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 8, no. 4 (2005): 445– 463. doi: 10.1177/1367549405051847.

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Goehner A, Lina Lofano and Kate Novak. “Where CSI Meets Real Law and Order.” Time November 8, 2004. 71. EBSCO. Halttunen, Karen. Murder Most Foul: The Killer in the American Gothic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Horeck, Tanya. “‘A Film That Will Rock You to Your Core’: Emotion and Affect in Dear Zachary and the Real Crime Documentary.” Crime Media Culture 10, no. 2 (2014): 151–167. doi: 10.1177/1741659014540293. Jeffords, Susan and Lauren Rabinovitz. Seeing through the Media: The Persian Gulf War. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994. Jermyn, Deborah. “Body Matters: Realism, Spectacle and the Corpse in CSI.” In Reading CSI: Crime TV under the Microscope, ed. Michael Allen, 79–89. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007. Jermyn, Deborah. Crime Watching: Investigating Real Crime TV. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Kessenich, Tom. Examinations: An Unauthorized Look at Seasons 6–9 of The X-Files. Victoria, Canada: Trafford, 2002. Kirschenbaum, Michael. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2008. Law & Order—The First Year. DVD. Universal. 2002. Mann, Michael. “The ‘CSI Effect’: Better Jurors through Television and Science?” Buffalo Public Interest Law Journal 24 (2005–2006): 211–237. HeinOnline. Murley, Jean. The Rise of True Crime: Twentieth Century Murder and American Popular Culture. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008. New Detectives, The. Seasons 1–2. DVD. Timeless Media Group. 2009. Newton, Jim, and Andrea Ford. “THE O.J. SIMPSON MURDER TRIAL—Simpson Defense Presses Police Conspiracy Claim Courts: Lawyer Focuses on Alleged Missing Blood, but Chief Forensic Chemist Says Amount is Exaggerated.” Los Angeles Times May 5, 1995, Home Edition: 1. ProQuest. Podlas, Kimberlianne, “‘The CSI Effect’: Exposing the Media Myth,” Fordham Intellectual Property, Media & Entertainment Law Journal 429 (2005–2006): 429–465. “Post Mortem: Death Investigation in America,” ProPublica.org. www.propublica .org/series/post-mortem. Rubble, Raymond S. Round up the Usual Suspects: Criminal Investigation in Law & Order, Cold Case, and CSI. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009. Sebold, Alice. The Lovely Bones. Boston, MA: Little Brown, 2002. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. London, UK: Thomson Learning, 2006. Snauffer, Douglas M. Crime Television. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006. Steenberg, Lindsay. Forensic Science in Contemporary American Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 2013. Stolen Voices. Buried Secrets. Season 1. Amazon Instant Video. 2011. www.amazon.com. Stratmann, Linda. Cruel Deeds and Dreadful Calamities: The Illustrated Police News, 1864–1938. London, UK: British Library, 2011.

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Tait, Sue. “Autoptic Vision and the Necrophilic Imagination in CSI.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (2006): 45–62. doi: 10.1177/1367877906061164. Thomas, Ronald R. Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Thompson, A. C., Mosi Secret, Lowell Bergman, and Sandra Bartlett, “The Real CSI: How America’s Patchwork System of Death Investigations Puts the Living at Risk,” ProPublica.org, February 1, 2011, www.propublica.org/article/ the-real-csi-americas-patchwork-system-of-death-investigation. “Trial Reshapes Image of Criminalists in the O.J. Simpson Case: A Specialist Seemed to Be Less Than a Scientific Sleuth.” The Philadelphia Inquirer. April 11, 1995. LexisNexis. Willing, Richard. “‘CSI Effect’ Has Juries Wanting More Evidence.” USA Today. August 5, 2004: A.01. Biography in Context: GALE.

CHAPTER NINE

Documenting Murder before In Cold Blood : The 1950s Origins of True-Crime Jean Murley

It is axiomatic in the history of the true-crime genre and modern murder narratives that Truman Capote’s 1966 book In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences ushered in the modern era of formulaic true-crime, with its focus on portraying the contexts of murder, simultaneous distancing from and identification with the killer, four-part narrative structure of crime–backgrounds–trial–punishment, the creation of narrative tension and interest using techniques from fiction, a mixture of fictional aspects with facts, a narrator insider, a preoccupation with similar types of killers, killings, and victims, and an overriding sense of the inevitability of evil. There is no doubt that with In Cold Blood, Capote brought together the conventions of modern murder narration that have been endlessly copied and reproduced and that taken together make up one major contemporary popular culture response to violent crime. Since Capote, true-crime in popular culture is a finely tuned machine that churns out murder narratives in neat little packages, with an ironclad set of rules, tropes, and conventions shaping our comprehension of violent crime. As a response to a frightening and seemingly out of control rise in violent crime during the 1960s and 1970s in America, true-crime provided an organizing framework that controlled the wild and terrifying disorder of murder and

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that metaphorically tamed the snarling beast that is human violence with the whips of rigid narrative rules. As American society seemed to spin out of control and into a vortex of criminality and chaos, the narrative response that is the true-crime genre was shaped by a cadre of writers who followed Capote’s lead with In Cold Blood, crafting such seminal works as Helter Skelter, The Boston Strangler, The Onion Field, and The Stranger beside Me. But Capote’s book did not spring forth sui generis, and there were some significant 1950s precursors—texts such as Joel Bartlow Martin’s 1952 Why Did They Kill?, Lucy Freeman’s 1955 “Before I Kill More . . .,” and Meyer Levin’s 1956 treatment of the infamous 1924 Leopold and Loeb case, Compulsion. Highly influential magazine writing, particularly that appearing in the pages of True Detective magazine, also contributed to the richly evolving techniques of murder narration in American popular culture. Another competing impulse in 1950s murder narratives attempted to apply the techniques of social science to the problem of murder, and in books such as Stuart Palmer’s A Study of Murder, Walter Bromberg’s The Mold of Murder, and Fredric Wertham’s Dark Legend: A Study in Murder, the authors present various case studies and analyze murder through a psychological or sociological lens. When these 1950s texts are examined together, a different story emerges, one that offers a fuller picture of the origins and pop-culture location of In Cold Blood, and a more comprehensive understanding of the cultural work that text did—and does. Although Capote was certainly the first to gather all the conventions of true-crime narration together to tell the story of murder in blockbuster textual form, he didn’t invent the genre out of thin air, but rather chose from a rich array of techniques that other writers were already using. Crime of the 1950s itself and the murder narratives from that period provided the rich soil out of which In Cold Blood grew. Murder narratives have a long history, of course, but one truth about any story of murder is that it reflects various aspects of the society that produces it. These texts do not appear out of nowhere, nor are they unattached to economic and market concerns. In capitalist societies, murder narrative forms that survive and thrive are the ones that appeal to the greatest numbers of people and gather the largest number of readers. The pages of murder narratives reveal cultural and social anxieties that resonate with readers, beliefs and fears about crime and criminality, varying kinds of legal and ethical issues, and facts about the workings of the legal system. As the culture and society changes, so do its murder stories. Although the fact of murder remains stable—Subject X shot/stabbed/poisoned Subject Y—narrative styles evolve, societal and cultural concerns change, and genres come and go.

Documenting Murder before In Cold Blood

Looking at the history of murder narration, certain trends and methods of representation become clear. From seventeenth-century execution sermons to nineteenth-century penny press accounts through to early magazine crime writing into the modern true-crime era, murder narratives follow a trajectory of viewing murderers and murder events very differently, as representational strategies shifted and evolved. From common sinner to gothic monster to environmentally warped subject to psychopath, murderers in true-crime narratives have shifted shape in response to cultural and social forces and emerging understandings of human psychology and deviance. In the decades leading up to the 1950s, competing modes of murder narration included the sardonic, cynical, and cool-voiced accounts penned by the British writer William Roughead and by American Edmund Pearson, magazine and newspaper articles that presented murder stories with an early scientific and forensics-minded style, psychological and sociological perspectives on crime, and noir-inflected narratives of real murder. Most significantly, the early to mid-twentieth centuries amassed a mixture of differing styles of murder narration, and it wasn’t until after Capote that true-crime as we know it came into being. The most important early twentieth-century writer whose work forms a bridge between the nineteenth-century gothic or scientific sensibility in murder narration and the modern true-crime style is Edmund Lester Pearson, who wrote “fact-crime” stories prolifically between 1924 and 1936. Pearson was a librarian, court reporter, journalist, and essayist, and he published countless articles and six books about both contemporary and older British and American murder cases. Pearson’s work is significant within the genre for his total elimination of gothic horror conventions and sentimentality and the introduction of irony into the American murder narrative. With his detached, cool, urbane tone, Mencken-esque attacks on the follies and foibles of modern man, his witticisms and snide remarks about the failings of American jurisprudence, and his selection of cases— he was particularly enamored of the Lizzie Borden case, returning to it again and again throughout his true-crime career—Pearson crafted a new response to murder. In his major collections, Studies in Murder (1924) and More Studies in Murder (1936), Pearson does to death any notion of murder as isolated, romanticized gothic evil, instead offering a cynical view of homicide as a snappy and efficient way to solve a problem, eliminate a domestic difficulty, or elevate one’s position in the world. For him, the story of murder always arose out of a social context, and he was one of the first major crime writers to draw details about homicide at a level that twenty-first-century readers would recognize. At the same time, Pearson never lost his grip on a strong moralism that guided his depictions and

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that prevented his work from sliding into the queasy and sordid glorification of murderers through an awed emphasis on their personalities. Chief among Pearson’s virtues was his talent for drawing engaging depictions of contexts, attendants, auxiliaries, precedents, and antecedents to the crimes he wrote about. His accounts were full of details, comparisons with earlier cases, observations about the character and personality of his subjects, and a careful attention to the humdrum and more mundane aspects of any murder event. His powers of observation and his writing abilities were great, shown in this passage from 1924’s “The Borden Case” where he describes Lizzie Borden’s uncle, John Vinnicum Morse, returning to the murder house on the morning of the crimes, before he is aware of what has taken place: He went through the side yard, to the rear of the house, picked up two or three pears, and began to eat them. Pears enter this case more than once, and to all who are familiar with the region and the time of year, they suggest the atmosphere of an old New England garden in August. Perhaps Mr. Morse, as he thought of dinner, foresaw a recurrence of the mutton-soup and was fortifying himself against the blow, but in any event we should not begrudge him his pears, nor the two or three peaceful moments he spent with them, before he went into the house. It was to be a long time before he was to know peace again, or go mooning about Fall River and its vicinity upon his innocent errands.1

These four sentences do much work: They both describe and create a moment and a mood while bringing the reader face to face with the juxtaposition of the mundane and the horrible, always a fascinating feature in the murder narrative. The use of “we” in the third sentence forces the reader to observe the scene right along with Pearson, forging an amiable intimacy with the writer. We are there with Pearson the expert, watching the unfortunate actor in this play imbibe his last innocent pleasure, as the dramaturge bestows a wonderfully light touch of dramatic irony on this peaceful domestic scene; not until Capote would there be as much art put into such a description. Pearson, in the words of scholar Roger Lane, “anticipated Truman Capote and Norman Mailer in bringing a touch of class to a form that needed it.”2 That “touch of class,” befitting the Jazz Age mentality, also appears in the early true-crime magazine writing of the same period. From the Pearson period until the 1950s, true-crime in books consisted of warmed-over collections of old and tired cases, and murder narration outside of the magazines stagnated. But in the magazines, writers presented a rich array

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of murder narratives using a variety of techniques and styles, never settling on one but instead giving the reader a smorgasbord of stylized crime. One standard technique, heavily used in the magazines since the 1920s, was to frame murder under the rubric of mystery—story titles from the June 1947 table of contents of True Detective magazine (the major true-crime publication during this period) read like a list of Nancy Drew or Agatha Christie books: “Case of the Beckoning Finger,” “Will Murder Out?”, “Secret of the Posthumous Letter,” “The Clue in the Sand,” and “Mystery of the Waiting Car.” The stories themselves are deeply focused on the process of detection and are styled like classic “whodunits.” Details of evidence are emphasized from the very first sentences, the police—not the killers—are the major characters, and detectives carry the narrative weight. “The Lipstick Murder” by Albert E. Brager from the April 1947 issue of True Detective is illustrative, opening with “the bedside telephone in the home of Chief J. Carr Elliott, of the Gastonia, North Carolina, Police Department, rang at 12:40 on the morning of March 7th, 1946. He switched on the light, lifted the receiver, and said hello.”3 Thus begins a murder story that highlights the heroic intelligence of Elliott and his detectives as they eventually solve the case, with the help of such clues as a monogrammed lipstick case, a peculiarly knotted handkerchief, and two Payaso Habana cigars left at the scene by the killer. Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot couldn’t have done any better! In addition to drawing on techniques from classical mystery fiction, fact-crime magazine writers also employed a hardboiled noir sensibility, borrowed from the private-eye stories of such writers as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Mickey Spillane. The story “Born A Killer,” from September 1955’s True Detective, bears this subtitle: “His mentor was a murderer, his best friend died in the chair.” The story begins with the birth of the killer: At noon on April 10th, 1930, an obstetrician in Baltimore’s General Hospital lifted George Heroux, Jr. by his ankles and slapped him across the buttocks. George Heroux howled, which was his way of announcing that from here on in, when slapping around was called for, George Heroux would be dishing it out himself.4

The noir-patterned informal speech, use of colloquialisms, and short, snappy sentences filled with similes appear throughout the story—here’s a sentence describing one of Heroux’s criminal mentors: “He was about 40 years old and had a record as long as an elephant’s memory.” Although unevenly applied, private-eye storytelling techniques reverberate throughout

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these narratives, lending them a certain cachet with readers and marking them as definitively belonging to an older era in murder narration. Stories from 1950s True Detective magazine contain a mixture of such styles, as well as a clear indication of some societal shifts taking place. One clear shift that began to occur in the 50s was a growing emphasis on contemporary homicides, accounted for partially by fears about the postwar crime wave, particularly juvenile crime characterized by a seemingly unprecedented level of brutality and carelessness. Epitomized by the actions of spree killer Charles Starkweather, whose two-state murder-and-robbery jaunt with girlfriend Caril Fugate grabbed headlines in 1957 and 1958, public fear about the emergence of a chilling new type of killer—young, callous, and ultraviolent—grew during this period, and was reflected in the larger number of murder narratives that dealt with crimes happening right now. The urgency of the present gradually began to replace the desire to look back at and reflect on earlier murders as society struggled to both understand and respond to the growing threat within its midst. This anxiety is clearly articulated in the pages of True Detective, in both the kinds of crimes covered and the representational strategies used, as well as in ancillary material such as special reports about crime rates from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, coverage of Senate hearings on juvenile delinquency and the “pornography racket,” and even pieces penned by J. Edgar Hoover himself. As early as 1946, True Detective was publicizing the threat of increased crime associated with the masses of returning war veterans and the children who lived through the war period. In a column from the March 1946 edition entitled “America’s Costliest CRIME WAVE,” John Wooster Martin writes that “The post-war period of outlawry is upon us. As these words were written, it appeared certain official records would show that crime in all categories throughout the nation increased at least 15 percent in 1945 over 1944. When all the figures are in, the percentage may climb to 25 or higher.”5 The postwar crime menace would become more pronounced as the 1950s dawned, and the magazines preemptively trumpeted a frightening rise in rates of violent crime, particularly sex crimes. The 1950s magazines also reflected the rise of automobile culture and the ensuing mobility of American life, which corresponded neatly with the perceived social restlessness and anonymity thought to contribute to crime. Coverage in the magazines during the period upped the ante on terror, fear of violence, and the rhetoric of gothic horror, and the 1950s ushered in the modern true-crime period in myriad ways. A February 1952 story in True Detective exemplifies the strategies of representation the magazine used in depicting the juvenile threat. “Jerry the Wildcat” opens with two full-length black-and-white photos of the

Documenting Murder before In Cold Blood

teenaged perpetrators, Evelyn Williams Donges (“Jerry the Wildcat”) and Tom LaFave. “Jerry” is the girl, blue-jean-clad, unsmiling and smoking a cigarette, with the caption “‘I’ve seen a lot of tough people in my life, but she’s the worst,’ said veteran crime investigator,” while Tom sports an innocent half-smile, with the caption “Life was very boring—till he helped knock off a drunk and finance the getaway with a few holdups.” The story is fairly typical for the period: Jerry, Tom, and two teenaged friends, bored with their lives in slowpoke Miles City, Montana, rolled a drunk and stole his wallet, beating him to death in the process. The foursome then embarked on a western interstate journey that included several stolen cars, knocking off a gas station, and a dash of prostitution. Three of the kids are 16, one is 15, and they did not intend to kill their victim; in fact, they didn’t realize they were wanted for murder until they were arrested. Bad kids, but something less than the “murderous gang” depicted in the blaring headlines of the narrative. The story is a mashup of stereotypes and titillation, skillfully deployed shock value, and exploitation of certain key facts. Jerry fills the role of disarmingly and provocatively tough young woman, with “flaming red hair and a mule skinner’s vocabulary.” Sexually attractive and experienced—she was married to a soldier in service overseas—she also “had a juvenile record of more than a dozen arrests and had, again and again, proved her extraordinary capacity for violence and invective,” though we don’t get any details about her past transgressions. Tom is the smirking sidekick, masculine but overshadowed by the “Wildcat,” even though he and the other male juvenile proved to be the actual killers. Together, they exemplify the restless boredom that defined the dark side of teenaged life in the 1950s, as the catalyst to their crime spree was a conversation about “their mutual dissatisfaction with their dull and boring life in Miles City.” Looking for adventure, they cook up a plan to make a cross-country tour and embark on the crimes to finance their fun. One aspect of depictions of killers that would come into prominence during this period is their lack of conscience, usually understood and represented as a facet of the psychopathic or sociopathic personality. In this story, Jerry the Wildcat/psychopath embodies the conflicting qualities of fascination and horror that would make the psychopath a fixture of true-crime, with the added thrill of sexual titillation because she is a young woman. The narrative focus rests with Jerry, and the story pops with fascination about her. She is portrayed as the mastermind behind the crime spree, and is brutal, cold-hearted, and sexual: “the Wildcat had no difficulty in luring the 38-year-old ranch hand to a dark street.” Her clothing is a subject of great interest—she is seen in “levis and a plaid shirt,”

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fancy “ranch-style clothing,” and “flashy cowboy outfits.” A description narrated from the victim’s perspective reads, “Her dude ranch outfit contrasted oddly with her feminine seductiveness.” Most chilling, however, is her utter lack of conscience, completely at odds with “normal” female qualities of nurturance and care. Jerry is a new kind of woman, utterly cold-blooded and conscienceless, fearsome and terrifying to men and women alike (when incarcerated, her female cellmates request that she be removed to a private cell).6 The setting of this particular story—rural Montana—is typical of magazine coverage in the 1950s. In this period, the larger cities—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles—are no longer the unquestioned and reigning sites of American violence; rather, the smaller cities and suburbs are depicted more often and with increasing regularity. The 1950s predated the vaunted “white flight” from American cities into the suburbs that exploded in the 1960s and 1970s, but postwar suburban expansion shows up in the true-crime magazines as a shifting focus onto unfamiliar and burgeoning places. The true-crime magazines offered unexpected and useful geography lessons about unfamiliar American locales and the contours of small communities. With the passage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, the expanding interstate highway system increased possibilities for more comfortable long-distance automobile travel, and people wanted to learn about unknown and unexplored American villages, towns, and cities. The compendium of place names is endless, and no town is safe from random violence, from Roanoke to Billings to Pensacola. There is a curious emphasis on desert locations and rural, outdoor sites, where grisly discoveries give rise to such stock phrases as “bleached bones” and photos of detectives or criminals pointing out the vegetation-tangled site of a shallow grave. As a geographical guide, 1950s true-crime is extraordinary and richly detailed, and the country emerges as a murder-studded map. As in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, written in 1951 and published in 1957, the country itself is a character, capable of sustaining multiple interpretations and nurturing conflicting impulses. If certain time periods are preoccupied with representations of certain types of killers, then the 1950s was the era of the teenaged “thrill killer,” a fascination reflected in three major murder narratives of the time. Martin, Freeman, and Levin all chose to write about teenaged killers; Martin’s case was contemporary, as was Freeman’s, but Levin dredged up the Leopold and Loeb case and shaped it for a 1950s reading public. The crimes treated in these three texts were each stunningly random and meaningless, aptly called “thrill killings.” The fascination with random violence would show up in true-crime in the 1960s and 1970s, for those texts would almost

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exclusively treat so-called “stranger killings,” murder between people who don’t know one another. Murder narratives from the 1950s and 1960s would also often focus on two or more killers—Martin, Levin, and Capote each chose cases which featured either pairs or multiple killers, enabling the writers to explore from different perspectives the impulse to kill, and simultaneously to suggest more than one way to view a killer. The multilayered, multivalent nature of the true-crime text was emerging in nascent form in the 1950s. In Why Did They Kill?, the reporter Joel Bartlow Martin reports and attempts to explain the random killing of a nurse by three juvenile delinquents in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1951. The structure and focus of this text are crucial: It begins with the murder and unfolds by narrating the childhoods of the killers and by exploring the psychosocial forces that shaped their personalities. The context within which murder occurs is drawn in great detail by focusing on the killers; the story of murder becomes the story of how killers are made. The answer to the question that is the title—why did these kids kill this nurse, a stranger to them?—is contained at the very heart of the book. The events of the night of the murder are revealed only after detailed portraits of the killers have been drawn, and the killers are allowed to describe their actions, introducing the killers’ voices into the text. The book resembles a classic detective story puzzler, only the puzzle is not “whodunit?” but “how and why did they do it?” Martin also relates the capture and punishment of the killers, how they felt about being in prison, and how they behaved while there, an element of murder narration that would become very prominent in true-crime. In the epilogue to Why Did They Kill?, Martin refers to another of these characteristics in a statement about the type of non-fiction crime writing that he practiced, and that was beginning to emerge as typical: Some years back I got the idea that most crime writing of the traditional sort seemed to assume that crime happened in a vacuum. It seemed to me that crimes don’t just happen by blind chance—that something causes them. Sometimes the matrix is social, sometimes psychological, most often both. Writing about an individual criminal case, then, offers also an opportunity to write about a whole society: Crime-in-context.7

The notion of murder narration as “crime-in-context” is one of the defining characteristics of true-crime and was clearly becoming an important goal for nonfiction crime writers during this period. True-crime does much more than simply sketch out the gruesome details of an act of murder—it contextualizes the crime by drawing a “thick description” of the conditions

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leading up to it. Further evidence that this trope was growing in importance is present in anecdotal form about the origins of In Cold Blood. In George Plimpton’s biography of Capote, Brendan Gill says that “I think Shawn [William, then editor of The New Yorker] told Truman that he was interested in seeing the effect of a murder—a story of a small Midwestern town responding to an unprecedented catastrophe in their midst.”8 These statements are significant because they show a growing desire to contextualize murder. The impulse to present murder in a social context by focusing on how and why the killers came to be, instead of simply presenting facts, would shape the genre irrevocably. Martin’s position as a reporter, the special perspective on and access to materials that being a professional reporter gave him, is another way that his work portends the coming changes in murder narration. The convention of the writer being close to the killer—emotionally, through close lengthy contact, by conducting extensive interviews, by participating in his trial, by witnessing his execution—would become an important defining characteristic of true-crime. This new closeness of the writer to the subject produced a shift in the depiction of murderous deeds and minds, a shift that would in turn forge an intense ambiguity in the way evil would be configured and understood in true-crime. Again in the epilogue, Martin writes about the difficulty of doing the interviews and research for his book: I think it was probably the most difficult story I ever worked on. Not in a technical writing sense but in a more personal way. I have children of my own. I know a lot of other kids not very different from Bill Morey [the killer]. I know a lot of parents not very different from his parents. When I was Bill Morey’s age, I, and my friends, did a lot of the things he did. There were so many points of recognition [emphasis mine]. The story rather frightened me, I think.9

Martin’s struggle to distance himself from these teenaged killers, his efforts to see himself as different from people with whom he identified deeply, the fear he expresses about the horror of murder amid the normalcy of middle-class suburban life—all would become dominant themes and ruling preoccupations within true-crime. This in turn would significantly affect the depiction of murder and the underlying assumptions and beliefs about evil that guided those representations. From the 1950s onward, killers were being depicted as not so very different from the average person, the average reporter, the average reader. The reader’s ambiguous identification with the killer via the unique position of the writer would become a

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hallmark of true-crime. The intimacy that would mark the writer/reader/ killer triad had its roots in the 1950s in the shock of recognition that writers such as Martin felt when they looked at these real murderers and their contexts too closely. Although Why Did They Kill? contains some similarities to later truecrime, it is also rooted in its own time. Martin was in essence a journalist with little interest in the literary quality of his work, and though he may personally have felt a sense of unsettling identification with the killers, that does not come through in his text. The authorial presence in Why Did They Kill?, although objective, is heavy; one never forgets that the narrator is interviewing the principals, sorting the material, and imposing his vision onto the raw facts of the case. The result is a deeply detached perspective on the killers. Martin never guides the reader into the kind of identification with his principals that later true-crime writers would, because he doesn’t turn his subjects into literary characters. We never forget that these are real people who committed a very real atrocious act; we are not consistently encouraged to see them as ordinary boys with ordinary emotions, just like ours. There is no free indirect discourse, no attempt made at even light fictionalization of events. The account of the murder reads like a newspaper report: Sentences such as “Bill was wearing moccasins. He stepped along behind the nurse. She did not hear him. The moon was full and bright, the foliage thick” and “‘I could not see him from the chest up and he was making swinging motions’” typify the flat documentary reporting style of Martin’s prose. The accretion of details about the killer’s family life, his friends, descriptions of his daily existence before the murders, and the organization of his personality and psyche, his likes and dislikes, motives pure and impure, take up most of the text. Because there are three principal actors involved in this crime, there is more material to cover, but the text is essentially a thin and artless piece of reportage. Lucy Freeman’s 1955 “Before I Kill More . . .” is a narrative treatment of the infamous Chicago “lipstick killer,” William George Heirens. The 17-year-old Heirens killed two women and one young girl between June 1945 and January 1946; he was caught and his confession, induced by sodium pentothal, led to life imprisonment. If not for his young age and his unbalanced mental state, he would probably have been sent to the electric chair. Freeman was an amateur psychoanalyst as well as a journalist, and her text is one of the first instances in nonfiction murder narration of the use of Freudian depth psychology to understand a murderer. Freeman took the title of her book from the note that Heirens scrawled in lipstick on the wall of his second victim’s apartment, which read “For heavens sake catch me before I kill more I cannot control myself.” “Before

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I Kill More . . .” is an interesting hybrid of novelistic techniques, contextualization of the murders, psychological study of the murderer, and additional documentary materials, including a transcript of Heirens’s full confession, a photograph of the lipstick-scrawled note on the wall, photos of the detectives who apprehended him, Heirens’s childhood home, and even a shot of Freeman interviewing Heirens. These elements show an emerging documentary impulse, and they support Freeman’s psychoanalytic approach to her subject. Including photographs and evidentiary documents allows Freeman to frame the killer within a subtle and more psychologically sophisticated understanding of madness, for the reader gets to see how essentially “normal-looking” Heirens is, while also viewing his unconscious handiwork in the form of his scrawled plea for help. In Freeman’s text, Heirens is portrayed as a mentally ill individual, and the horror of his crimes is subsumed by the representation of the new concept of psychopathy. “Before I Kill More . . .” opens like a novel, with the writer outside the narrative and a strange character on the stage: “He paced up and down the small, narrow room trying to quell the familiar, exciting urge as it started to possess his body.” 10 This character is Heirens, and he’s out the door committing a heinous crime in the next paragraph. The text moves quickly, and Freeman does not linger on details of the murders. Within thirty pages, he’s been apprehended and is confessing under the influence of sodium pentothal, or “truth serum.” The four-part narrative structure of crime–pursuit–trial–punishment that would be clear in later true-crime is compressed here, not yet fully formed. Most of the text is given over to accounts of Freeman’s interviews with Heirens in prison, as well as interviews with his parents about his upbringing. Apart from her interviews, much of Freeman’s information is gleaned from the official psychiatric report, which had been ordered by the courts to determine Heirens’s ability to stand trial. Freeman admits that “if any one thing may be said to have inspired this book, it was that report,” and in her characterization of Heirens she relies heavily on the information obtained by the trained psychiatric professionals who wrote the report.11 Freeman’s reportorial style is akin to Martin’s—she is a detached and professionally observant outsider, a journalist writing a book about this boy murderer. Also like Martin, she uses first-person narration and writes herself into the text. But her Freudian perspective creates a new representation of the killer, for Freeman gains access to Heirens’s innermost thoughts and feelings using psychoanalytic techniques of questioning, examination of his dreams, and interpretation of his experiences.

Documenting Murder before In Cold Blood

This perspective contains within it an understanding of the killer as a sick and troubled person, but a person nonetheless. Throughout the text, Heirens is variously categorized by law enforcement personnel, psychiatrists, and Freeman herself as “emotionally insensitive within,” “put together wrong,” a “disassociated psychotic schizophrenic,” and a “sane psycho.”12 Most of the narrative space and force is devoted to trying to understand Heirens as an ill human being, and he is never categorized as a baffling and hideous monster, even though he has committed the most monstrous deeds. One element of his insanity is noteworthy, for it would have huge implications for true-crime—Heirens is characterized as lacking a conscience, that intrinsic ability to empathize with others and feel the wrongness of his crimes. The police question Heirens about his actions and thoughts in the aftermath of the murders, and they ask him “How did you feel when you read about it?” [in the papers] Heirens replies “Just like anything else in the paper. It did not bother me.” The policeman asks “Feel any remorse?” and Heirens answers “No.” When asked about the murder of the 6-year-old girl, Heirens reports that he felt “Nothing at all.” Policeman: “No emotion, no feeling that you have done wrong?” Heirens: “No.” Policeman: “Do you feel that you have done wrong now?” Heirens: “I do, yes. I’m in [jail], but I don’t feel anything about the whole matter. I never did.” Policeman: “But when it was done, you did?” Heirens: “I had a realization of what had happened.” Policeman: “But no feeling any more than chewing a piece of chewing gum?” Heirens: “No.”13

Bill Heirens exhibits the symptoms of what we now recognize as sociopathy—the inability to feel remorse or regret about hurting others. Heirens feels sad and sorry for himself but not for the people he has so profoundly hurt. Freeman does not dwell on Heirens’s lack of conscience, but she writes extensively about his ability, honed since childhood, to repress his own feelings. This mechanism is so well developed in Heirens that he is immune even to physical pain, never crying out when the psychiatrists prick his body with pins as part of their examination. But instead of characterizing Heirens’s lack of feeling as super- or nonhuman, as later truecrime writers would do, Freeman suggests that this ability is born out of his own pain: “[H]e buried his feelings so no one could know of the resentment unless they penetrated the mask or Bill decided to cast it off for the moment. Those who glimpsed the fury underneath were not allowed

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to live.”14 Detached from the horror that his pain brought into the world in the form of his ghastly deeds—Heirens dismembered the 6-year-old girl’s corpse and threw the parts in various sewer grates—Freeman represents Heirens as a frightened child, wracked with psychological anguish and unable to control himself. Through the application of newly popularized psychiatric concepts, Freeman presents a killer who elicits a great degree of sympathy from the reader. The reader views the pain that his emotional disturbance causes to Heirens himself—at different points in the text we see him crying, in great physical and emotional pain, and struggling to understand himself as he speaks openly with Freeman and allows her to psychoanalyze him. Freeman writes: “However terrible the crimes, that much greater the terror inside Bill.” 15 Sympathy for the killer here competes with the hideousness of the murders he has committed, as Freeman educates the reader about a Freudian understanding of homicidal insanity. The apotheosis of the text is a chapter entitled “Murder Is Madness,” in which Freeman waxes philosophical about the current state of the American criminal justice system. Like Martin, she argues that understanding the killer is crucial. Unlike Martin, she suggests that a new understanding of killers should lead to an overhaul of the system of punishment and that the legal definition of insanity should be changed. Freeman’s text contains a strong call for reform; if murder is a form of madness, then prevention of such crimes is possible with the recognition and treatment of mental disorders. Freeman’s understanding of Freudian psychology shapes her representation of the murderer and her portrayal of murder, but “Before I Kill More . . .” is not entirely unique among 1950s murder narratives. The reform impulse, overt in this text, was present in many 1950s representations of murder and killers. The growing popularity of and knowledge about psychotherapy brought with it optimism about the ability of psychiatry to cure social, as well as individual, ills. Freeman suggests that if the killer could be diagnosed and treated before he acted, the world would be a much safer place.16 Similarly, Martin writes about a murder largely to understand why kids go bad, what role parents have in shaping their children’s psyches, and how that knowledge can prevent more people from becoming killers. Freeman is a journalist–crusader, and because of her reformist impulse, she remains detached from the killer even as she presents the most personal details about his personality and psychology. Heirens may be presented sympathetically, but it is with a political end in mind—Freeman uses him to issue an indictment of the criminal justice system as presently (in the 1950s) organized. The reader

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may have sympathy for Heirens, but there is no identification with him, because for Freeman, he is simply a tool for social change. Meyer Levin’s 1956 text Compulsion contains the same impulse to understand the motivations of killers. But Levin is not a reformer, or a psychoanalyst, so there is no call for reform or change in how killers are treated by the judicial system. Because Levin isn’t making an overt political statement, he doesn’t present his killers in the detached and journalistic style of Martin and Freeman. Rather, his Leopold and Loeb are fully fleshed-out characters, and the reader is invited to identify with them. Levin does this by playing on the trope of the intimate connection between reporter and killer. Unlike the books previously discussed, this text is heavily fictionalized, and Levin does not claim that Compulsion is anything but fact-based fiction. Levin is freer to create characters, and he does so in the figure of his youthful journalist–narrator, a character who becomes an integral part of the story. In the real Leopold and Loeb case two novice journalists did help to solve the crime by matching some letters that Richard Loeb had written to the typewriter used to write the ransom note, and Levin’s narrator is a combination of those two real people.17 But his choice of narrator, his use of the reporter as way in to the innate truth of the story, shows a certain fascination with the role of the reporter as a crime writer, an author of crime. In the early 1950s, the role of the writer of crime fiction was shifting from reporter of crime into that of the killer’s confidante, as seen in embryonic form in Why Did They Kill? and “Before I Kill More. . . .” The writer was becoming not just a reporter of facts, but a participant in the events that he was writing about, a shaper of both the event and the narrative with his own actions. Levin’s fictional journalist–narrator, Sid, takes on many of these roles— he is a journalist who happens to have been college classmates with the killers Judd Steiner and Artie Straus (Levin’s fictional Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb) and who later finds the epistolary evidence that links Steiner to the murder. This narrator simultaneously helps write the story of the murder for the local newspaper, helps the police gather the evidence that will indict his friends, and testifies against them in court. Then, thirty-odd years later, he “writes” this book, Compulsion, with the following introduction: I was, for a most personal reason, in the very centre of the case. I partly identified myself with Judd, so that I sometimes felt I could see not only into the texture of events that had taken place without my presence but into his very thoughts . . . Because of this identification, it sometimes becomes difficult to tell exactly where my imagination fills in what were gaps in the

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documents and in the personal revelations. . . . [T]here is no finite reality; our idea of actuality always has to come through someone, and this is the reality through me.18

This is a most peculiar series of statements, for through the figure of his narrator, Levin here outlines some of the tropes that would define truecrime twenty years later. The reporter identifies with the killer, he has a unique ability to see and interpret events, and he admits that his imagination fills in the blanks left by lack of information in telling the story of a real crime. Furthermore, this journalist-narrator says that “finite reality” doesn’t really exist, that reality changes depending upon who narrates events—a remarkable admission considering the subject matter: a real murder. These ideas about what a murder narrative is, spoken by a fictional reporter–narrator in a hybrid true-crime text, pave the way for true-crime, beginning with Capote’s narrative style in In Cold Blood. With Compulsion, Meyer Levin was simultaneously narrating a murder and outlining the contours of a new relationship between the crime writer and his material, a shifting relationship that would become a convention of true-crime. One element that has completely disappeared from true-crime is the reform impulse so prominent in some of these texts. True-crime doesn’t want to reform killers—it wants to punish and execute them. A trio of mid-century books that look at murder through a psychological or sociological perspective offer insight into a time when murder was being conceived of as a social problem, one having a solution that could be imagined with the right kind of interventions (interestingly, this view is becoming current again with criminologists and some doctors viewing certain types of homicide, mostly inner-city gun violence among young men, as a public health threat). The renowned psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, best known for his crusade against cartoon horror and violence in comic books with his 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, published a case study of a matricide in 1941 called Dark Legend: A Study in Murder. Framed by excerpts from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy, and Euripides’s Orestes, Wertham presents the case of Gino, an Italian American youth living on New York’s Lower East Side who stabbed his mother to death to avenge the honor of his family (his mother had taken up with other men after Gino’s father died). With this curious and engaging book, Wertham seeks to understand Gino psychologically, to comprehend his motives and contextualize him not within his physical or cultural environment, but within literature, history, and psychological theories of behavior that were current at the time, most of them Freudian.

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Wertham’s thesis—that we can unravel the mystery of murder by looking closely at individual psychology—was eclipsed by the sociological view fairly quickly, and writers began looking at murder within its social contexts. Stuart Palmer’s 1960 A Study of Murder is an ethnographic study of several New England murderers and their families, particularly their mothers and (nonkiller) brothers. Palmer writes that “This book tells of a study of fifty-one men convicted of murder, of their early life experiences, and of how those experiences led each of them to kill one or more of their fellow human beings.” 19 Through the interviews of killers and their families, Palmer formulates his thesis that early frustration—owing to factors such as childhood injuries and illnesses, lower socioeconomic circumstances, and destructive care by unhappy mothers—can lead to murder. The book puts forward a classic “blame the mother” argument, as Palmer links such subjects as toilet training and mothers’ attitudes about early sexual behavior to frustration and later murderous aggression in the sons. However, the book does show 1950s attitudes and beliefs about murder: It was seen in some circles as an almost inexorable result of bad mothering and negative childhood experiences. Walter Bromberg’s The Mold of Murder, published in 1961, melds the two approaches—the psychological and the sociological—and contains a very early and lengthy discussion of psychopathy. Contemporary discussions about murder in the 1950s, in such books and in the magazines, certainly influenced Capote and show up in the conventions of true-crime that he would bring together with In Cold Blood. Capote does his own pop-psychological analysis of the killer Perry Smith, for instance, and the emphasis on the individual emotional and mental makeup of the killer would find a vogue again in later true-crime with the notion of forensic psychology and profiling murderers. Understanding the place of mid-century murder narratives is crucial in any analysis of true-crime in the larger spectrum of the genre; Capote’s genius was to bring the conventions together that could already be found in the many differing treatments of murder and murderers in current writing. Marked by a distinct variation of forms, especially when compared to the rigid formula true-crime would become after Capote, 1950s murder narratives didn’t have any regular contours or formulaic rules; rather, the different texts took varying approaches to understanding violent crime, partly in response to the society itself. Murder rates were just beginning to change during this period, and to enter a time of rapid increase that would occur during the 1960s and 1970s. Sexually motivated murders were also on the rise, and the homicide clearance rate (essentially, the rate at which murder is solved) was dipping. A worrying and unstable pattern was starting to form, as American society appeared to be in the grips of a chaotic

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crime wave. Writers of murder narratives would respond to this frightful chaos with the formula and rigidity of true-crime. I was recently asked why I think that true-crime deals almost exclusively with murders considering the great variety of serious crimes that could be covered in the genre. The answer to that question lies at least partly within the proportions and facts of the genre itself, for true-crime is a rigid and codified way of narrating a messy, chaotic, and uncontrollable reality. Truecrime is a perfectly ordered counter to the threat of disorder that murder represents, allowing for at least some comprehension of the incomprehensible. But more than that, true-crime is a boundary around something knowable, for murder is a thing that presents solid fact—something definitive and horrible happened to Subject X, and Subject Y is responsible. True-crime crystallizes murder, frames it in the always-ever-happening present moment in many ways, and posits solution and punishment as the repair of a ripped social fabric. Murder itself presents something that is seemingly “knowable” and from an epistemological perspective seems to be one of the only truly “knowable” elements of post-modern life. In our slippery modern existence, in which everything is contingent and mediated and knowledge itself is questioned, murder and true-crime are islands of seeming stability, albeit gruesome, brutal, and awful.

Notes  1. Pearson, 28–29.  2. Lane, ix–x.  3. True Detective, April 1947, 12.  4. True Detective, September 1955, 20.  5. True Detective, March 1946, 49.  6. True Detective, February 1952, 62–64, 73–75.  7. Martin, epilogue.  8. Plimpton, 166.  9. Martin, epilogue. 10.  Freeman, 9. 11.  Freeman, 65. 12.  Freeman, 65, 71, 241. 13.  Freeman, 195–196. 14. Freeman, 221. Compare this with Ann Rule’s portrayal of Ted Bundy, especially when he shows his rage one day in court and she sees underneath his mask for the first time. 15.  Freeman, 216. 16.  See chapter 3 in Sara L. Knox for a good overview of the mid-century interest in psychiatry as a “cure” for murder.

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17.  Nash, 384. 18.  Levin, 14 19.  Palmer, 1.

Bibliography Bromberg, Walter. The Mold of Murder: A Psychiatric Study of Homicide. New York: Greenwood Press, 1961. Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences. New York: Random House, 1965. Cleckley, Hervey M. The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues about the So-Called Psychopathic Personality. St. Louis, MO: Mosby, 1941. Freeman, Lucy. “Before I Kill More . . .” New York: Crown Publishers, 1955. Knox, Sara L. Murder: A Tale of Modern American Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 1998. Lane, Roger. “Introduction.” In Studies in Murder, Edmund Pearson. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999. Levin, Meyer. Compulsion. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956. Martin, Joel Bartlow. Why Did They Kill? New York: Bantam Books, 1953. Miller, Neil. Sex Crime Panic: A Journey to the Paranoid Heart of the 1950s. New York: Alyson Books, 2002. Nash, Jay Robert. Bloodletters and Badmen. New York: M. Evans & Company, 1995. Palmer, Stuart Hunter. A Study of Murder. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1960. Pearson, Edmund. “The Borden Case.” In Studies in Murder. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999. Plimpton, George. Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career. New York: Anchor Books, 1997. True Detective Mysteries Magazine. Various editions. Wertham, Fredric. Dark Legend: A Study in Murder. New York: Duell, Sloane, and Pearce, 1941.

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CHAPTER TEN

Capote’s Children: Patterns of Violence in Contemporary American True-Crime Narratives1 David Schmid

The death of true crime has been pronounced more often than for any other form of American popular culture that deals with violence. Ever since the genre assumed its modern form with the publication of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood in 1965, true crime’s demise has been predicted at regular intervals. One gets the impression that these predictions are as much a product of wishful thinking as they are an accurate assessment of the state of the industry. In a 1991 New York Times Book Review article, journalist Marilyn Stasio quotes Liz Perl, chief publicist for Avon books, on this issue: “Publishers are always saying that true crime has peaked, because, let’s face it, these books do not represent the industry’s shining hour.”2 Although it is true that sales have declined somewhat in recent years from their peak in the 1980s, largely because the market became glutted, in general true crime continues to sell well, partly because it has always found a way to adapt and identify new markets and partly because certain types of true crime, such as books on Jack the Ripper and modernday serial killers, have been reliable sellers for decades. In her study of true-crime stories, Anita Biressi has noted the importance of the antecedents of modern true crime, arguing that such antecedents are “evidence that modern true crime . . . consists of codes and

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conventions whose appearance is explicable, not only in terms of current knowledges and practices, but also in terms of the traces they bear of earlier knowledges and practices.”3 Jean Murley’s essay in this volume discusses the antecedents to the modern form of American true crime, whether in the work of Edmund Pearson, or the true crime magazines of the 1950s, culminating in the publication of In Cold Blood. In this essay, I will discuss the genre-defining influence of Capote’s work in more detail before going on to show how that influence shapes aspects of three of the most important examples of American true crime writing in the second half of the twentieth-century: Joseph Wambaugh’s The Onion Field (1973), Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter (1974), and Ann Rule’s The Stranger beside Me (1980). Although all of these books demonstrate Jean Murley’s point that “[t]rue-crime depictions appeal to many different people, for reasons ranging from vicarious and perhaps prurient interests in the untimely demise of ‘innocents’ to the genuine desire to understand a mysterious and sometimes tragic death,” we will see that these books satisfy reader curiosity about violence in a number of different ways.4 Every study of true-crime narratives acknowledges the fundamental importance of In Cold Blood to the genre. In a 1990 Publishers Weekly article detailing the healthy state of true crime, Rosemary Herbert quotes Neil Nyren, vice-president and publisher at Putnam, as saying that “there may already have been some true crime books, but Capote’s marked a watershed. It was the first one to make the genre really respectable.”5 Capote made true crime controversial and at the same time, not coincidentally, enormously profitable. Although a writer of Capote’s stature had never written true crime before, this was not the most controversial aspect of In Cold Blood. Far more controversial was Capote’s claim that his study of the murder of the Clutter family in their farmhouse in Holcomb, Kansas, in 1959 constituted a new genre: the nonfiction novel. This claim provoked heated debate among a wide range of critics and was largely responsible for the book’s huge sales and the enormous amount of publicity that surrounded its publication. Capote’s claim that In Cold Blood was the first example of a new genre begs the question of what exactly was new, if anything, about Capote’s text compared with earlier true-crime narratives. Looked at from this point of view, one aspect of In Cold Blood that jumps out immediately is that although Capote spoke at length about his relationship with the Clutter family’s killers in interviews, the formal structure of the text itself hides this engagement. By inventing the “nonfiction novel,” which supposedly scrupulously removes every trace of his presence from the text, Capote claimed to have written a completely objective account of the case.

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Not surprisingly, this claim attracted a lot of critical attention, most of it negative, but the sympathetic interviewer George Plimpton gave Capote a chance to explain his decision to leave himself out of In Cold Blood: “My feeling is that for the non-fiction novel form to be entirely successful, the author should not appear in the work. Ideally. Once the author does appear, he has to appear throughout, all the way down the line, and the I-I-I intrudes when it really shouldn’t. I think the single most difficult thing in my book, technically, was to write it without ever appearing myself, and yet, at the same time, create total credibility.”6 Even though Capote spent nearly six years gathering information on, researching, and living with the case, he appears nowhere in the book, and the word ‘I’ is never used. Although Capote supposedly made this decision in the interests of objectivity—an objectivity that he believed was crucial if the book was to be successful—many critics felt that it was precisely his decision to remove himself from the text that accounted for the failure of In Cold Blood. Hilton Kramer, for instance, writing in the New Leader not long after the book’s publication, complained that “so successful has the author been in keeping himself ‘out’ of the tale that one closes the book mentally searching him out, suspecting at last that there is a far more revealing story to be told in his own involvement with the characters and events whose fate is so icily recounted.”7 Kramer’s observation suggests that although Capote assumed that readers want the writer to hide in a true-crime narrative, perhaps in fact they want the writer to be visible, actively discussing, speculating, and judging, thereby helping readers understand and evaluate what they are reading. Far more serious than such complaints about Capote’s absence, however, were the repeated aspersions cast on the supposed factuality of the book; critics pointed to numerous examples of dialogue between characters that Capote could not possibility have known about to argue that there was a good deal more fiction in Capote’s book than he admitted. Perhaps the most egregious example of this aspect of the book is its closing episode, which consists of a conversation between Alvin Dewey, the local FBI agent who supervised the murder investigation, and Sue Kidwell, a friend of Nancy Clutter, one of the murder victims. This conversation takes place some four years after the main events of the book, and there is no indication of how Capote could have reproduced this conversation in such detail. Capote indicates, in a cursory preface to In Cold Blood, that all conversations he did not hear personally were verified for him by reliable sources. Not surprisingly, this assurance was regarded as inadequate by many of Capote’s readers, especially as the final paragraph of the book

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suggests that Capote was doing something other than giving the reader an objective account of events: “‘And nice to have seen you, Sue. Good luck,’ he called after her as she disappeared down the path, a pretty girl in a hurry, her smooth hair swinging, shining-just such a young woman as Nancy might have been. Then, starting home, he walked toward the trees, and under them, leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voice in the wind-bent wheat.”8 It is hard to see how this artfully written paragraph, with its poetic evocations of poignant loss and the possibility of regeneration, can be said to be “nonfiction” in any meaningful sense. Although Capote vehemently denied inventing any of the information in In Cold Blood, in his interview with George Plimpton he did comment on the fact that keeping himself out of his narrative did not necessarily mean that he gave up all control over how to present the events: “I make my own comment by what I choose to tell and how I choose to tell it. It is true that an author is more in control of fictional characters because he can do anything he wants with them as long as they stay credible. But in the nonfiction novel one can also manipulate: if I put something in which I don’t agree about I can always set it in a context of qualification without having to step into the story myself to set the reader straight.”9 One can see just why Capote was so excited about his “invention” of the nonfiction novel: The form allowed him to claim objectivity and authorial invisibility while at the same time relinquishing none of his control over the shaping and presenting of events. The pretense of objectivity was necessary to make one’s interest in crime respectably nonsensationalist, but the ability of the author to manipulate the facts, often in frankly fictional ways, allowed for the construction of an exciting, dramatic, and, yes, sensationalist narrative. Interestingly, the aspect of In Cold Blood that attracted the most criticism upon its initial appearance has had a profound influence on the subsequent development of the true crime genre. Although critics objected vehemently to the concept of the “invisible” author in Capote’s work, such invisibility has now become a standard feature of true-crime narratives, allowing a writer such as Ann Rule an enormous amount of leeway in how she presents her facts. I am not suggesting that Rule distorts the facts, but she is able to enhance those facts with passages that read as if they come from popular fictional genres, such as the romance novel: “As 1981 arrived and the crowd whooped and whistled, Janis Miranda was already half in love. Inwardly she marveled at that; she was the woman who didn’t trust men. She had been bruised in the wars of love too many times. But this man was different. Somehow special. When Randy Roth asked if he might call her, she agreed enthusiastically.”10 Although Rule could not possibly

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know the exact thoughts that went through Miranda’s head at this moment, the contemporary true-crime reader does not care; the incident and the way it is recounted ring true, and that is what matters. That contemporary true-crime writers such as Rule do not need to apologize for the presence of fictional elements or to defend the veracity of their narratives suggests that the true-crime reader of today has a very different understanding of what the “true” in “true crime” means than the reader of an earlier writer in the genre such as Edmund Pearson. In Pearson’s time, “true” crime meant sticking to the facts as closely as possible, struggling to write what Pearson once referred to as “painfully veracious histories.”11 Now the truth of true crime means getting to the heart of the matter; emotional truth is prized far more than literal truth, and it is this emotional truth that writers such as Ann Rule give their readers. Moreover, the contemporary true-crime reader never thinks to protest about the invisible author of true-crime narratives because, thanks to Truman Capote, the author of contemporary true-crime narratives is not really invisible at all. In the midst of the avalanche of success enjoyed by In Cold Blood, no one seemed to notice the absurdity of Capote’s boasting, on the one hand, about how scrupulous he had been about keeping himself out of his account and yet, on the other hand, being more than happy to ride the tidal wave of publicity generated by the book. Rather than an inconsistency, however, this combination of invisibility and relentless self-publicizing is probably In Cold Blood’s most profound influence on contemporary true-crime narratives. Capote showed true-crime writers how to participate in the culture of celebrity that had grown up around criminals; indeed, in many ways Capote set the stage for writers of truecrime narratives to become even more famous than their subjects. But for all of In Cold Blood’s undoubtedly widespread influence on the true crime genre, there is one important aspect of Capote’s work that has generally not been adopted by later writers in the genre, and that is Capote’s degree of engagement with the subjects of his narrative compared to that of earlier writers of true crime. Bruce Bawer has described Capote’s relationship with Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, the two convicted murderers who are the subject of In Cold Blood: “Capote developed a warm friendship with the murderers during his years of research; at the end, he accompanied them to the scaffold, wept for days over their deaths, and even paid for their grave markers.”12 It is hard to imagine earlier true crime writers entering into such a relationship with convicted murderers for the very simple reason that in earlier true crime writing, such killers were by and large portrayed as monstrous inhuman aberrations, to be condemned rather than identified with.

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A significant part of Capote’s intimate relationship with Smith and Hickock was an attempt to generate public sympathy for them by arguing that they may not have been legally responsible for their crimes because they were suffering from temporary insanity. Capote spends a significant part of In Cold Blood discussing what he sees as the shortcomings of the McNaghten rules for determining criminal insanity, and he even includes a detailed discussion of a 1960 article published in the American Journal of Psychiatry on “murder without apparent motive” to support his claim that the death penalty may not have been merited in this case. Capote’s sympathy for the criminals, his attempt to argue that they were also victimized by their crimes, was another feature of In Cold Blood that was heavily criticized on the book’s publication. For various reasons, not the least of which is the increasingly harsh and punitive approach to law and order issues that began to emerge in the United States during the 1970s and that intensified rapidly and dramatically during the two Reagan administrations, few truecrime writers have followed Capote’s close relationship with the murderers about whom they write (although we will see a partial exception to this rule when we discuss Ann Rule’s relationship with Ted Bundy later in this essay). Instead, most true-crime writers who acknowledge Capote’s influence on their work usually politely ignore his sympathy for Smith and Hickock, largely because that sympathy is now to all intents and purposes completely absent from contemporary true crime, which illustrates the complicated relationship between earlier forms of discourse about crime and contemporary true-crime narratives. A good example of Capote’s selective influence on later true crime writers can be found in The Onion Field, Joseph Wambaugh’s best-selling account of the 1963 abduction of two LAPD officers by Gregory Powell and Jimmy Smith and the subsequent murder of Officer Ian Campbell. Some of this influence is stylistic. Capote begins his account of the Clutter murders in In Cold Blood by cross-cutting between the ordinary activities of the Clutter family on what would prove to be the last day of their lives and Smith and Hickock’s preparations for their murder spree, including their traveling to the Clutter farm. Wambaugh mimics this technique as he follows both the police officers and the future killers as they drive their separate paths around Hollywood on the night of March 9, 1963: “The partners in the four-door Plymouth and the partners in the little Ford coupe were both battling traffic at that moment.”13 Not only is this a very effective way of generating suspense, but it also allows Wambaugh to both contrast the normality of the police officers against the deviance of the criminals and imply that their meeting, although accidental, is in another sense fated: “And they drove toward Hollywood. Through the night. To their destiny.”14

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As a former police officer, Wambaugh has no interest in sympathizing with the criminals, and in this respect his work is very different from that of Capote. Tellingly, Wambaugh’s focalizing character is Pierce Brooks, whom he describes as a “a single-minded archetypal homicide detective,”15 and this choice influences how Wambaugh portrays the criminal duo of Smith and Powell, who are presented to the reader from Brooks’s perspective as conscienceless sociopaths in a tone that could come straight from a noir crime novel: “It was Powell’s ignorance of the law which killed the young officer. Punks. Stupid, stupid punks, thought Pierce Brooks. Then he walked through the doorway into the squad room.”16 But because The Onion Field has no sympathy for the criminals, this does not mean that the book is completely devoid of sympathy—indeed, quite the contrary. If we think of every true-crime narrative as being focused on the triangular relationship between killer, victim, and detective, one of the significant features of The Onion Field is the amount of attention it gives to the victim, who is usually the bit player in the aforementioned triangle. In Cold Blood, for example, very effectively re-creates the lives and characters of the Clutter family so that their eventual deaths affect the reader, but after they are dead, they largely disappear from the narrative and Capote then focuses more and more on the killers. By contrast, although Wambaugh continues to follow the progress of Smith and Powell’s case through the legal system (partly in order to provide a sense of closure for his readers) he focuses most of his attention on the victim—not Ian Campbell, the slain officer, but rather the surviving officer, Campbell’s partner, Karl Hettinger. Why does Wambaugh devote so much attention to Hettinger? Partly because of another influential aspect of In Cold Blood. Although it went relatively unnoticed at the time, the amount of attention Capote paid to developing members of law enforcement as major characters to provide a counterbalance to his emphasis on Smith and Hickock proved hugely influential on other true crime writers. Even though Hettinger survived kidnapping and attempted murder, he was severely traumatized by these experiences, and Wambaugh has unambiguously said that this trauma was intensified by how the brass and his colleagues in the LAPD treated him after Campbell’s death. By implying that Hettinger was a coward who had surrendered his weapon to Smith and Powell for no good reason and who had thereby in effect condemned his partner to death, Hettinger’s nightmarish experience was made even worse, and in many ways, Wambaugh presents Hettinger as Smith and Powell’s main victim: “By now Karl was sure that almost all policemen were critical of his behavior that night. The way they looked at him in the Hollywood coffee room and especially in the

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police building cafeteria. The way so many heads turned as he entered. He was sure there were whispers.”17 In its criticism of the LAPD, The Onion Field reflects the complexity of contemporary true crime’s relationship to law enforcement institutions. Although on the whole the genre is strongly supportive of members of law enforcement, using them as the heroes against whom the villainy of the criminals can be highlighted, true crime texts are frequently critical of the bureaucratic inefficiency and callousness of law enforcement institutions. So for example, when Hettinger is basically hounded out of the police force and has to appeal to be given a pension, Wambaugh writes, “One man connected with the granting of the pension ironically observed, after reading all of the psychiatric reports, that the police hierarchy was in a sense much like the two condemned men who started the misery. He said the archetypal police mentality and the psychopathic mind were both utterly unable to identify with their victim in this case.”18 With this context in mind, the character of Pierce Brooks assumes an even more important place in The Onion Field: he is the lone individual who represents the true meaning of ethical and effective police work. His stubborn individualism and commitment to the truth are meant to serve as beacons to the reader who is concerned that justice may be in danger of not being done. Vincent Bugliosi uses a very similar technique in his epic account of the Charles Manson murders, Helter Skelter, but in his case the principled character is Bugliosi himself. With a disarming absence of modesty, Bugliosi presents himself as the personification of justice, there to make sure that Manson and the members of his family are punished for their outrageous crimes despite the best efforts of incompetent police officers, unscrupulous defense attorneys—and, of course, Manson himself—to make sure that justice is not served. The incompetence of many of the police officers is a theme that Bugliosi refers to early and to which he often returns throughout Helter Skelter. Commenting on both the Tate and La Bianca killings, Bugliosi writes: “But this time at least a partial pattern was discernible, in the similarities: Los Angeles, California; consecutive nights; multiple murders; victims affluent Caucasians; multiple stab wounds; incredible savagery; absence of a conventional motive; no evidence of ransacking or robbery; ropes around the neck of two Tate victims, cords around the necks of both LaBiancas. And the bloody printing. Yet within twenty-four hours the police would decide there was no connection between the two sets of murders.”19 Even late in the book, during the trial, Bugliosi cannot resist taking a jab at the police every now and then: “As much as possible, I tried to avoid embarrassing LAPD. It wasn’t always possible.”20

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By contrast, when Bugliosi introduces himself, he does so garbed in the cloak of the people’s champion: “Though in criminal trials one tends to focus on the defense attorney and his client the accused, the prosecutor is also a lawyer, and he too has a client: the People. And the People are equally entitled to their day in court, to a fair and impartial trial, and to justice.”21 There is much more going on here than Bugliosi’s tendency to denigrate others and take the lion’s share of the credit for himself (although that is definitely a factor). Just as Capote develops law enforcement figures such as Alvin Dewey as a counterbalance to the murderers, a move that Wambaugh follows in the role he gives to Pierce Brooks in his narrative, so Bugliosi offers himself as a counterbalance to the figure of Charles Manson. If Bugliosi’s self-presentation inclines toward grandiosity, one might argue that this failing is a necessity given Bugliosi’s tendency to present Manson in equally grandiose terms: “I believe Charles Manson is unique. He is certainly one of the most fascinating criminals in American history, and it appears unlikely that there will ever be another mass murderer quite like him.”22 The accuracy or inaccuracy of this claim is beside the point; rather, the point is that Bugliosi presents the Manson killings as so heinous, so unprecedented that a practically superhuman counterforce to Manson’s evil becomes a matter of necessity. There is another significant consequence to Bugliosi’s decision to present the story of the Manson killings as a Manichean struggle between good and evil, and it is one with significant implications for contemporary true-crime narratives. In an afterword to Helter Skelter written to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Manson killings, Bugliosi reflects on the various attempts to explain the true meaning of Charles Manson, and at one point he alludes to what we might describe as “societal” explanations of Manson: “A view that’s enjoyed some currency is that the murders represent a watershed moment in the evolving social structure of our society. This view holds that the Manson case was the ‘end of innocence’ (the ’60s mantra of love, peace, and sharing) in our country, and sounded the death knell for hippies and all they symbolically represented.”23 Bugliosi’s dismissal of this line of thinking is terse: “All of these hypotheses seem to be devoid of supporting empirical evidence.”24 What is Bugliosi’s alternative explanation for the continuing appeal of the Manson case? “I believe the main reason for the continuing fascination with it at such a late date is that the Manson murder case is almost assuredly the most bizarre mass murder case in the recorded annals of crime. And for whatever reason, people are magnetically fascinated by things that are strange and bizarre.”25 Whether or not one is persuaded by Bugliosi’s explanation, it is clear that it is explicitly intended to disallow interpretations of Manson (and by extension, of

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murder as a whole) as a sociological phenomenon that can be explained by referring to the social context that produces such crimes. Instead, Bugliosi prefers to rely upon explanations of Manson that maintain, rather than diminish, his exceptional, even mythical, status. Although it is possible that part of Bugliosi’s motivation in doing so is to burnish his own reputation as the man who put Manson away, it is just as true to say that the readers of true crime seem to prefer their murderers to remain mythic monsters rather than human beings. Jean Murley has commented on the tendency for many true-crime narratives to combine “a sharp emphasis on law enforcement and apprehension of criminals with an equally strong but opposing impulse to sensationalize crime and make it more interesting to readers” and although this process did not begin with Capote, one can argue that he presented this combination in a way that was particularly appealing to a wide reading audience.26 If we gauge the popularity of true crime writers by their ability to combine these opposing (perhaps even contradictory) elements in their narratives, then it is clear that Ann Rule, easily the most popular and best-selling true crime author of modern times, exemplifies the complex inheritance of earlier forms of true-crime narrative, including the influence of Capote, better than any of her peers. Rule has stated that “I was very impressed by Capote’s In Cold Blood . . . and used to wish that I could someday, somehow, get into a killer’s mind and write about it.”27 Although Rule would eventually get her wish, her route to publishing true crime was very different from that of Capote’s. After graduating from the University of Washington with a degree in creative writing, Rule trained to be an officer with the Seattle police department until she was forced to leave after the discovery of her severe nearsightedness. Although she never worked as a police officer, Rule formed a number of friendships that would serve her well as information sources when she began writing true crime. More important, her time with the Seattle police inclined Rule, like Wambaugh and Bugliosi, to look at the criminal world from the point of view of law enforcement. Although Rule began trying to sell true-crime work in 1963, she did not get her break until 1968, when Al Govoni, editor of the national publication True Detective Magazine, offered Rule the position of northwest stringer for the magazine. Over the next ten years, Rule wrote literally hundreds of true-crime articles, soon breaking out of the true-crime magazine ghetto and publishing with magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook, and Good Housekeeping. Rule was by now an established figure in true crime, but the publication of her first book, The Stranger beside Me, in 1980 took her career and the genre of true crime to a new level.

Capote’s Children

The success of Stranger, which told the story of serial killer Ted Bundy, was a watershed for the genre of true crime in several ways. It established that books about serial killers could be bestsellers. Although the market quickly became flooded by a tidal wave of books about famous and wouldbe-famous serial killers of the past and present, Rule’s book maintained its place at the head of the pack, having gone through thirty printings by 1994. In the process, Stranger was instrumental in turning Ted Bundy into the world’s best-known serial killer, ensuring Bundy a definitional status among serial killers rivaled only by that of Jack the Ripper. A large part of Rule’s success is thanks to a feature of her work that recalls Capote, albeit in a very different way. By considering the possibility that Smith and Hickock may have been temporarily insane when they killed the Clutter family, and by critiquing the legal definition of insanity, Capote attempted to give the true crime genre both an ethical dimension and a pedagogical function. In their own ways, both Wambaugh and Bugliosi follow Capote’s cue in this regard. Although Karl Hettinger’s decision to turn over his weapon to Smith and Powell led to national changes in police procedure, Wambaugh is critical of both these changes and, as we have seen, the police treatment of a man who was clearly suffering from what we would now diagnose as PTSD. In a similar vein, Bugliosi uses Helter Skelter to, among other things, provide the reader with a crash course in legal procedure, both to give the reader a reassuring sense that the system works and to demonstrate that Manson and his co-defendants received a fair trial and that justice was done. Ann Rule also gives her true-crime narratives an ethical dimension and in doing so stresses their social utility. Rule’s ethical take on the genre comes through in the way her work frequently articulates a “pro-woman” emphasis, an emphasis that takes several forms, including Rule’s habit of dedicating her books to the victims of crime. The preface to her 1993 book A Rose for Her Grave is typical: “This book is dedicated to women, to the friends I cherish and to the friends I will never know. Too many times I have to write about the tragedies that befall my sisters. A Rose for Her Grave is no exception. I am continually amazed at the strength women have shown in the face of catastrophe, particularly the survivors who pick up their lives and go on after losing a child to a conscienceless killer. I salute all women who have had dreams, for themselves, for their children and for those they love.”28 By emphasizing the fact that women are overwhelmingly the victims in the cases she writes about, Rule makes a seemingly obvious point, and yet it is a point rarely mentioned by other true-crime writers. In some instances, Rule even implies that all women share a bond with female victims that joins them together in their opposition to the criminal: “So many

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women would remember Randy Woodfield, remember dates and places and things he’d said. In the end, it would be women who would help to trap him, women who could place him in areas where it was dangerous for him to have been remembered.”29 In a similar vein, Rule frequently writes about her work with victims’ rights groups, claiming that these groups keep her focused on the victim rather than the criminal. Finally, Rule has often argued that true-crime narratives have educational value and that the duty of the true-crime writer to educate the reader means the writer should eschew sensationalism: “I have always believed that true crime writing should not only absorb its readers but also educate them. There is no need to embroider spectacular cases; human behavior is in and of itself more fascinating than anything found in fiction. Those who have read my work before know that I do not stress blood and gore and grotesque details; I focus my research on the whys of murder more than on the how.”30 It is easy to dismiss Rule’s presentation of true crime as an ethical and utilitarian genre as a cynically self-serving attempt to distract our attention from its exploitative elements. We must also acknowledge, however, that Rule’s claims are, by and large, accurate descriptions of her work. Rule is relatively uninterested in the physical details of homicide, preferring instead to concentrate on what these acts of violence tell us about the complexities of the human heart. What Rule says about Randy Roth, the subject of one of her true-crime narratives, could be applied to Rule herself: “He had learned that he could make more money with roses and sweet talk and promises he never intended to keep than he ever could with a knife and a mask.”31 That one could win a wider audience for true-crime work by not using gore did not occur to Rule at the start of her career. Rather, it was the product of the later stage of her career, when she made a conscious and deliberate effort to diversify her true-crime product by ceasing to write about serial killers. In turning to a discussion of The Stranger beside Me, therefore, one must acknowledge both that Rule has attempted to move beyond her association with the serial killer true-crime narrative established by the success of Stranger and that without the success of Stranger, Rule’s career would doubtless have looked very different. How much of Capote can we find in Rule’s best-known work? To some extent, all of the narratives I discuss in this essay, including Rule’s work, share what Murley has described as the definitional characteristics of the true crime genre, characteristics that have largely been bequeathed to later writers by the success of In Cold Blood: “the depiction of one murder event, a narrative focus on the killer through exploring his or her history, motivations, and unique psychological makeup, some degree of fictionalizing or speculating about events, and

Capote’s Children

a great deal of tension between emotional identification with and distancing from the killer.”32 Although The Stranger beside Me shares many of these characteristics, Rule’s work also contains other features not included in this list, features largely responsible for her phenomenal success. The first of these differences concerns Rule’s treatment of violence. Contrary to what many would assume, true crime’s treatment of violence is actually quite nuanced and complex, not least in that it does not necessarily assume a central place in the narrative. To take In Cold Blood as an example, though Capote delays his description of the Clutter family’s deaths partly to generate suspense, this delay also reflects the fact that Capote is interested in many subjects other than homicidal violence. In a similar vein, although when Capote does describe the deaths of the Clutter family he does so explicitly, so as not to sugarcoat the brutality of Smith and Hickock’s actions, as In Cold Blood draws to a close with a detailed account of the killer’s executions, the reader cannot help but feel (because Capote clearly believes as much) that the state’s murder of these two men is another example of brutal violence rather than of justice at work. Wambaugh and Bugliosi also exhibit a somewhat restrained attitude in their representation of homicidal violence. Although Wambaugh gives a vivid description of the moment of Ian Campbell’s death, he spends much more time in The Onion Field describing the emotional trauma that that moment caused Karl Hettinger. In this sense, one could argue that emotional rather than physical violence receives the lion’s share of attention in Wambaugh’s work. For his part, although Bugliosi is not above using extreme, even gothic, language to describe the Manson killings (especially in his summation to the jury, when he describes the killings in the following terms: “What resulted was perhaps the most inhuman, nightmarish, horror-filled hour of savage murder and human slaughter in the recorded annals of crime. As the helpless, defenseless victims begged and screamed out into the night for their lives, their lifeblood gushed out of their bodies, forming rivers of gore”33), the vast majority of Bugliosi’s very lengthy book dwells not on the violence itself but on his efforts to convict the perpetrators of these acts and to explain the motives behind these acts. In this respect, Bugliosi’s work, along with that of Capote and Wambaugh, is less sensationalistic than many readers might expect. With all this said, Capote, Wambaugh, and Bugliosi are all aided in their desire to write somewhat nonsensationalistic treatments of violence because although the crimes they deal with are atrocious, they are over relatively quickly. Rule, by contrast, in discussing serial murders committed by Ted Bundy over a number of years and in a number of different states, necessarily has to way a find of narrating and representing that violence

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in a way that is neither overwhelming nor numbing to the reader. The following passage from Stranger illustrates Rule’s awareness of this problem: “When I began writing fact-detective stories, I promised myself that I would always remember I was writing about the loss of human beings, that I was never to forget that. I hoped that the work I did might somehow save other victims, might warn them of the danger. I never wanted to become tough, to seek out the sensational and the gory, and I never have.”34 To Rule’s credit, Stranger cannot be described as either sensationalistic or gory. The murders are described, but they are not lingered over. Instead, Rule devotes much more attention to such subjects as Bundy’s personal history and psychological makeup, as well as the long and eventually successful law enforcement effort to apprehend and convict him. But despite the amount of time and space she gives to such subjects, Rule never allows her reader to lose sight of the enormous amount of damage that has been done by Bundy’s homicidal actions. This is Rule’s consistent focus throughout Stranger, and yet that is not quite the whole story. If Rule is more or less successful in not sensationalizing the violence committed by the subject of her narrative, it is much more difficult for her to achieve a consistent feature of the other texts discussed in this essay: a counterbalance to the dominating presence of the killer. Again, because of the serial, temporally extended, and geographically dispersed nature of the crimes Rules discusses in Stranger, Ted Bundy dominates the narrative to a far greater degree than Smith and Hickock, Smith and Powell, or even Charles Manson. This is true even though in writing Stranger, Rule has an advantage available to none of the other writers we have discussed— namely, a perfectly legitimate reason to inject herself into the narrative. That Ann Rule was a friend of Ted Bundy’s before he was arrested or even suspected of any crimes obviously presents Rule with a golden opportunity in terms of how she presents her narrative. In particular, it gives her a ready-made way to develop precisely what Stranger in fact lacks: a character who can challenge Bundy for the dominant role in the text. Ironically, although Rule does indeed play a major role in Stranger, she does not act as an effective counterbalance to Bundy, because Rule is so honest about the difficulty she has in believing that Bundy could be guilty of the crimes with which he was charged. Even when Bundy is on trial, Rule still feels ambivalent about the possibility of his guilt, because she cannot help but be struck by the difference between the public image of a rampaging serial killer and the Ted Bundy she knows. Rule’s continuing doubt about, or refusal to admit the reality of, Bundy’s guilt means that Stranger cannot duplicate the Manichean binary of good versus evil that is such a prominent feature of a book such as Helter Skelter.

Capote’s Children

Although Rule’s honesty makes Stranger a more engaging and nuanced treatment of the case than a straightforward demonization of Bundy would be, it also means that Bundy dominates this narrative in a way unprecedented in contemporary true-crime narratives (but that in fact would become a standard feature of serial killer true-crime narratives). That The Stranger beside Me is also one of the best-selling true-crime narratives ever published obviously suggests that the criminal’s domination of the genre does not scare readers away. Indeed, there is an inevitable sense in which Rule’s knowledge of Bundy and his starring status in her narrative gives the reader the impression of unprecedented access to the “truth” about the killer. Contrary to Capote’s In Cold Blood, perhaps the lasting significance of The Stranger beside Me is that it represents a text in which the author and the subject of a true-crime narrative coexist in a synergistic relationship that proved to be enormously appealing to the genre’s fans.

Notes   1.  Some portions of this essay are reprinted from “True Crime” by David Schmid, originally printed in A Companion to Crime Fiction, ed. Charles J. Rzepka and Lee Horsely, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd except for editorial material and organization © 2010 Charles J. Rzepka and Lee Horsley. Reprinted with permission.  2. Stasio, 46.  3. Biressi, 41.  4. Murley, 3.  5. Herbert, 33.   6.  Quoted in Plimpton, 38.   7.  Quoted in Malin, 68.  8. Capote, 410.   9.  Quoted in Plimpton, 38. 10. Rule, Rose, 10. 11.  Pearson, 300. 12.  Bawer, 42. 13.  Wambaugh, 62. 14.  Ibid., 146. 15.  Ibid., 192. 16.  Ibid., 208. 17.  Ibid., 252. 18.  Ibid., 372. 19.  Bugliosi, 73–74. 20.  Ibid., 408. 21.  Ibid., 158–159. 22.  Ibid., 581.

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23.  Ibid., 588. 24. Ibid. 25.  Ibid., 589. 26.  Murley, 23. 27.  Rule, email. 28. Rule, Rose, n.p. 29. Rule, I-5, 116. 30. Rule, Rose, xi. 31.  Ibid., 267. 32.  Murley, 5. 33.  Bugliosi, 484. 34. Rule, Stranger, 77.

Bibliography Bawer, Bruce. “Capote’s Children.” New Criterion, June 1985, 39–43. Biressi, Anita. Crime, Fear, and the Law in True Crime Stories. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Bugliosi, Vincent. Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders. New York: Norton, 1994. Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences. New York: Signet, 1965. Herbert, Rosemary. “Publishers Agree: True Crime Does Pay.” Publishers Weekly, June 1, 1990, 33–36. Kramer, Hilton. “Real Gardens with Real Toads.” In Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood: A Critical Handbook, ed. Irving Malin. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1968, 65–68. Malin, Irving, ed. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood: A Critical Handbook. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1968. Murley, Jean. The Rise of True Crime: 20th-century Murder and American Popular Culture. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008. Pearson, Edmund. “Scenery by Currier & Ives.” In More Studies in Murder, 295–300. New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1936. Plimpton, George. “The Story behind a Nonfiction Novel.” New York Times Book Review, January 16, 1966. www.nytimes.com/books/97/12/28/home/capote -interview.html. Rule, Ann. The I-5 Killer. New York: Signet, 1988. Rule, Ann. “Re: Truman Capote.” Message to the author. October 1, 1996. E-mail. Rule, Ann. A Rose for Her Grave and Other True Cases. New York: Pocket Books, 1993. Rule, Ann. The Stranger beside Me. New York: Signet Books, 1980. Stasio, Marilyn. “The Killers Next Door: We Can’t Get Enough of Them.” New York Times Book Review, October 20, 1991, 46–47. Wambaugh, Joseph. The Onion Field. New York: Delta, 2007.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“I’m Not Prepared to Die”: Murdered-Girl Tunes in Appalachia Courtney Brooks

There have always been significant efforts devoted to studying music’s violent lyrical content. Scholars and practitioners alike have reached deep into the canon of popular music to uncover insidious mechanisms of oppression, with the most frequent connections made between violence and gender.1 The exploration of violence and gender in music demonstrates how overt and covert political and social inferences exhibit a consistent focus on masculinity, crime, and violence that turn inward and are inflicted upon members of various communities.2 As a genre, murder ballads have been of particular interest to scholars because they are based on real, sensational events, many of which feature the murder of a young girl, and in so doing they bring up social taboos about subjects such as premarital sexual activity, pregnancy, and illegitimate children. Murder ballads appear frequently within ballad collections of Appalachia, a place associated with extraordinary levels of violence—behavior widely believed to be part of the tradition and accepted by the region’s people. There have been many theories offered for why violence allegedly occurs at higher rates and yet is culturally accepted within both Appalachia and the South as a whole. The Appalachian region is identified through the 200,000-square-mile area of the Appalachian Mountains comprising 410 counties and 23 million inhabitants within all of West Virginia and parts of Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia.3

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The southern Appalachian region—where the history, culture, economy, and mountains are the strongest, according to the Encyclopedia of Appalachia, includes northern Georgia, eastern Kentucky, western North Carolina, east Tennessee, southwest Virginia, and West Virginia.4 The Appalachian Regional Commission identifies 42 percent of the region’s population as rural, compared with 20 percent of the national population.5 The region’s rural geography, coupled with commentary from local colorists, missionaries, educators, social reformers, and industrialists between 1870 and 1920, has claimed a constant space in the imagination of outsiders as an isolated and savage land, an image continually replicated in news, politics, television, film, and music. Music in Appalachia has captivated the attention of many for hundreds of years because it is often seen as a shelter from “urban noise and confusion” and an escape into “somewhat exotic rural sounds and modal melodies that can conjure up images of a simpler and more authentic era and place.”6 Interest in narrative songs, including ballads, found in Appalachia raises critical political and social questions regarding deeply held myths and traditions about the region and its people, particularly in relation to gender. The representation of women in these songs has been used to infer cultural norms that regulate gender and violence as central facets of mountain culture, due in part to the passive voice ascribed to women in song narratives. Appalachia is an important place to consider the intersections of music, gender, and narrative voice, because so many stereotypes exist about the region and its people and music. Building on the need to capture the essence of identity and tradition, ballads became a category of music that attracted attention because of both their aesthetic appeal and their take on human experience. Ballads in Appalachia have long been of interest to scholars, particularly thanks to their connection to British ballads, inspiring their collection in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Efforts to capture and catalog English and Scottish folk songs as well as newly emerging native American ballads that were maintained within southern Appalachia were headed by Cecil Sharp, Francis Child, G. Malcolm Laws, and others in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which led to the publication of several collections of ballads from the region. More recently, films such as Songcatcher, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and Cold Mountain featured songs from the era of the early ballad collectors. Ballads have been seen as a way to access the past, and Appalachian ballads have served as a gold mine for researchers. Ted Olson argues that few would question that Appalachian music remains “the most widely known manifestation of Appalachian culture, both within and outside the

“I’m Not Prepared to Die”: Murdered-Girl Tunes in Appalachia

region.”7 Although music within Appalachia has often been used to craft the image of a monolithic, whitewashed region, it also serves as a form of popular culture in which, building on a body of work by local color writers, Appalachia is positioned a place of “otherness.” Quoting Hurst, Viviana Andreescu and J. Eagle Shutt note, “‘Appalachia has been identified as constituting not only a separate subculture, but a status group that has been consciously ranked as being low in prestige.’”8 One rationale for the region’s otherness and association with violence is based on “compensation,” due to the region’s loss in the Civil War, a wound that is still being tended to and made up for with higher rates of male aggression.9 Another rationale is the existence of a “culture of honor,” as part of which males engaged in lethal protection of land and other property, seen as justified because of a duty to protect their families.10 Now infamous stories of irrational and rampant bloodshed, feuds, and lethal aggression shaped the perception of the region, particularly Kentucky, which became known as “‘one of the few dark spots on the map of the United States.’”11 National attitudes toward violence maintained that such behavior in general was deplorable, but once an instance of violence was affiliated with Appalachia, there was a response of equal fascination and repulsion whereby the origin of such behavior “came to be seen as ‘personal, cultural, or even genetic.’”12 To read local color writing on feuds was to believe that bloodshed was a pastime in the mountains, and it is quite easy to assume that in the midst of that violence, where masculinity and honor were perceived as central to male identity, violence against women would be just as “natural.” Though interpersonal violence is a global issue, it is considered to occur at significantly higher rates in the mountains. Statistically, rates of family violence in Appalachia do not in fact vary significantly from national rates.13 Andreescu and Shutt also note that no comparative data has been collected on rates of violence in Appalachia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.14 However, there remains the perception that violence against women is rampant in Appalachia. The region is a place associated with patriarchy, or male dominance, where social norms allegedly promote women’s inferiority to men. Additionally, the cultural value of familialism, or loyalty to family, which is synonymous with many cultures and regions, including Appalachia, is seen as a source of strength and tradition in the region, but is also perceived as a risk to victims, who stay with abusive partners or protect the privacy of family. Assumptions about culturally condoned gender-based violence bringing no consequences for male perpetrators of violence naturally filter into music in Appalachia. Music in Appalachia has been and remains an emblem of tradition in its purest form. Benjamin Filene notes, “one might therefore imagine terms

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like ‘folk’ and ‘pure’ as ciphers waiting to be filled: people imbue them with meanings that have cultural relevance and power to them.”15 D. K. Wilgus claims that “hillbilly music” is a phenomenon solely of the South that is, “a myth in the best sense of the word,” while G. Malcolm Laws argues that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the rural South contained an impressive number of both ballads and ballad singers, and probably for that reason, songs from the region have thrived and become widespread.16 This “traditional” music was perceived as synonymous with the traditional way of life in Appalachia, and so ballad collectors naturally placed value on “only the oldest songs as preserved in non-instrumental domestic tradition,” because of the popular belief that the people of Appalachia were isolated from any other tradition. Collecting ballads from Appalachia has also been a way to align the region’s people with the songs, to help support the notion of plain, simple people maintaining songs with rich history. For example, in 1939, Jean Thomas published a collection of songs called Ballad Makin’ in the Mountains of Kentucky. Thomas’s work focused on the creation and circulation of recently written native American ballads, which included the lives of ballad singers and reproduced their patterns of speech. Murder ballads are a large subset of Child’s British ballad collection and Laws also classified ballads that fit this genre. Both British and native American ballads show sympathy for victims of murder crimes, especially when the victims are women. Laws notes that although action is central to native American ballads, murder ballads do not possess graphic descriptions of murder but instead focus on the tragic aspects of the crimes committed. Laws argues that one distinct difference is that British ballads consider killing as “a matter of course” and native American ballads treat murder “as the shocking deed that it is.”17 The sentimentality synonymous with native American ballads is a crucial element to keep in mind when examining the texts of murder ballads in Laws’s collection. Ballads in which women are the victims of real crimes have more commonly been called “murdered-girl tunes,” to differentiate the type of murder that occurs within that subset of ballads. Anne Cohen presents a “murdered-girl formula” for such tunes, specifically in white murder ballads, in which each plot includes a standard series of events: The events of the murdered-girl formula are the following: wooing of trusting girl by artful man; luring of girl to lonely spot; murder of girl, who offers little resistance; abandonment of girl’s body. Occasionally a fifth element— regret—is added, in which the murderer is sorry for his deed . . . the crime described in the murdered-girl formula is a particularly shocking one— trust betrayed by one whom, above all others, one should be able to trust.18

“I’m Not Prepared to Die”: Murdered-Girl Tunes in Appalachia

Cohen argues this plot formula is a construct that existed in the minds of people who composed murdered-girl ballads, which influences their perception of events and how those events are framed into narratives. As a result, there exists a constant tension between fact and formula. Daniel Cohen describes a similar cultural motif called the “beautiful female murder victim,” a theme that emerges in both literature and music.19 In this motif, the crime is a courtship–murder, where a beautiful, innocent girl’s life is ended at the hands of her suitor. Cohen questions why the cultural motif of the female murder victim became so popular in the United States, asserting that there is no hard evidence of any native American courtship–murder ballads before the beginning of the nineteenth century. He credits the increase in literacy rates as well as the increase of published newspaper stories, trial reports, and biographies of murderers and their victims as the reason for the growing preoccupation with this theme. Cohen also suggests an increase in the incidence of violence against women committed by men around the turn of the nineteenth century, as well as changes in sexual behavior, demonstrated by a gradual increase in premarital pregnancies. Similarly, in murdered girl tunes, romance between women and men is identified through courtships, which often result in premarital pregnancies. Uncovering the “truth” behind songs is not as significant as uncovering the message within lyrics. Symbolic and emotional codes may identify underlying messages of moral behavior for both men and women and potentially uncover incidents where violence in music is blamed on gender. However, an analysis of murdered-girl tunes from Appalachia must be approached with an awareness of assumptions about the region and employ forms of analysis that safeguard the region’s musical tradition. Some scholars argue that songs with courtship murders are stern warnings to females stressing the dangers of becoming romantically involved with men.20 Others argue that the murder of these women implies that sexual behavior leads to sin and, ultimately, death.21 Rus Dowda describes women appearing in these songs with “surprising frequency,” dying at the hands of male figures close to them, such as a lover or family member.22 Coffin and Laws argue that ballads survive because they are sensational and embody reactions to dramatic situations. When considered in the context of the “murdered-girl” formula, male violence against women becomes the sensation to which audiences and singers are attracted. Jennings also asserts that murder ballads offer “depictions of anti-female violence” that reflect a fascination with the “degradation and subjugation of women.”23 The narrative themes in murdered-girl tunes include the lack of movement and choice assigned to women. Dowda identifies women in

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murder ballads as perfect victims, as they remain silent and “stay lady like and quiet in word and deed,” never attempting to escape their fate.24 Similarly, Wollstadt describes the portrayal of women in ballads as “pathetic victims or heartless hussies,” and the content of these songs “not only deal with a woman’s lack of control over her own life, but they demonstrate by example ways of circumventing that lack.”25 Jennings argues that these so-called love ballads are actually “descriptions of a man’s brutal attack against a woman he claims to ‘love’”; and while the stories vary, the imposition of silence on the victim is a common thread that these songs share.26 The victim’s voices are rarely heard, with the exception of their pleas for their lives to be spared, or the declaration that they are not prepared to die. According to Abrahams, “dramatic conflict and consequent murder are generally the elements of greatest interest; the punishment is of secondary importance.”27 In cases of actual murders, victims have no choice about their fate—it has already been decided. Perhaps one of the reasons the murdered-girls are given passive voices is to accentuate the sentimentality of the song, to position the victim as a sympathetic character, as she is lured and murdered at the hands of her lover. For example, in several murdered-girl songs, the murder is either avenged or the murderer penalized, often by public execution, which was, according to Daniel Patterson, “the ultimate statement of society’s codes and power,” and their inclusion in ballads is significant, as it demonstrates a call for justice for victimized women in Appalachia.28 However, most murdered-girl tunes are named after the victim, a reminder for the reason for the song as well as to commemorate the fallen girl’s memory. The murder ballads discussed in this essay are based on actual murders that occurred in Appalachia. The background information for each ballad comes primarily from published sources. All of the ballads retell an actual murder of a female by her male partner. The ballads included for examination were intentionally selected from a variety of sources. What all of these ballads share is the maintenance of patriarchal sexuality, patriarchal culture, and male violence, and they all follow the “murder-girl formula” presented by Cohen. While the creation of these ballads is obviously meant to memorialize the tragic deaths of the victims, their stories also reveal intersections of oppression that continued to silence the voices of the women who died.

Pearl Bryan Pearl Bryan’s namesake ballad tells the story of the 23-year-old woman’s brutal death in Fort Thomas, Kentucky, in 1896. Cohen, whose research

“I’m Not Prepared to Die”: Murdered-Girl Tunes in Appalachia

on this ballad is the most in-depth, indicates that Pearl, who was originally from Greencastle, Indiana, had traveled to Cincinnati, Ohio, for an abortion. Two male dental students, Scott Jackson and Alonzo Walling, were eventually convicted and hanged on March 20, 1897, for Pearl’s death. There are many rumors that surrounded Pearl’s relationship with Jackson and Walling. Dowda claims that Jackson and Walling gave Pearl medical attention when she arrived in the city, whereas W. K. McNeil asserts that the dental students were attempting to perform an abortion on Pearl, but when their efforts failed, they cut her head off. The most common rumor is that Scott Jackson and Pearl Bryan had been in a relationship, and after Scott realized Pearl was pregnant, he plotted her murder with Alonzo’s help. Although the events that led up to Pearl’s death are unclear, what is known is that on February 1, 1896, a young boy found Pearl Bryan’s body in a field near Fort Thomas, Kentucky.29 Pearl’s head was never found. What was interesting about Pearl’s case, according to Cohen, was how the murder case was reported in the local newspapers, which reveals how intersections of class and gender, as part of a larger patriarchal culture, played into the silence forced upon Pearl’s story. Prior to discovering Pearl’s identity, the Cincinnati Enquirer described the young woman as “‘a woman of the town,’” whose clothing was what “‘a woman of the lower class would wear indoors, and, covered with a cloak, on the street.’”30 Certainly the newspapers depicted Pearl’s fate as one that she brought upon herself, perhaps even deserved, from her low-class appearance and ultimately, her low-class behavior. After the coroner’s report revealed that the murdered woman had been five months pregnant, the newspapers changed their representation of Pearl to “‘a young and trusting girl, whose only offense was having loved too well.’”31 The newspapers interviewed Pearl’s parents, ironically including a story about the clothing they had criticized, clothing that her mother wept over as she identified it as belonging to her daughter. Pearl’s story had suddenly become one deserving of pity as a young innocent woman who had died at the hands of deceptive men. Cohen also notes how newspapers emphasized Pearl’s girlish innocence: This is the story of the greatest crime of the century. It is the story of a tragedy that had its inception in the whispered words and sweet caresses of love far away from the noise and smoke of the city in the quaint old country town of Greencastle, Ind.; a tragedy that ended for a beautiful, trusting girl amid the bleak hills of the Kentucky Highlands.32

The ballad selected for consideration is included in McNeil’s collection of ballads. This version of “Pearl Bryan,” which is called “Pearl Bryant,”

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was collected in 1977 by Burt Feintuch from Gladys Pace, Summer Shade, Kentucky. This version depicts Pearl’s murderer as a jealous lover, and obviously excludes Walling from his involvement in the crime. In traditional ballad format, Pearl is wooed by Jackson. Jackson takes Pearl out on a moonlight walk, with promises to talk about their wedding day. Rather than discuss their future, Jackson cruelly describes her fate and tells her she will die that night. Jackson is the perfect villain—he both controls Pearl’s fate and takes her from friends and family, denying them any closure for their loss. The ballad also includes Pearl pleading for her life, and then allows her to speak directly to her murderer. She asks Jackson what wrong she has done to cause him to wish to hurt her and assures him of her love for him and her desire to be his wife. Pearl’s plea to her murderer reminds those who are aware of Pearl’s predicament that the unspoken victim in this ballad is Pearl’s unborn child, who could have been raised in a nuclear family had Jackson wed Pearl. In this version, Jackson never responds to Pearl, which makes him a more sinister villain. Although Pearl is given more space than usual in ballads to speak, and even to question Scott Jackson, she is still rendered immobile and helpless to resist the fate Jackson has chosen for her.

Omie Wise Naomi Wise was an orphan who worked as a servant and field hand for a local family in Randolph County, North Carolina, and who died in 1808. Jonathan Lewis’s relationship to Naomi is unclear; some stories indicate that they were engaged but that his mother found a better match for him; others say that Naomi became pregnant by Lewis. What each version of the story agrees on is that Lewis persuaded Naomi to come out at night under the pretense that they would get married, but instead Lewis took Naomi to the river and held her under water with his foot until she drowned. According to Naomi Wise’s gravestone in Randolph County, she was 19 years old at the time of her death. Lewis was arrested for Naomi’s murder. Again, Lewis’s fate is unclear, as some versions indicate that he escaped from jail, while others indicate that there was not enough proof to convict him, so he was released.33 “Omie Wise,” a version collected by Josiah Combs in Wise County, Virginia, points out that John Lewis “deluded” Omie with lies by promising to marry and provide for her. Lewis takes Omie to the river, where he tells her “my mind is to drown you and leave you behind,” to which Omie replies, “‘O Lewis, pray spare me my life/And I will deny you, nor I won’t be your wife.’” Omie’s murder is very brief, but impactful. Jackson brutally kicks,

“I’m Not Prepared to Die”: Murdered-Girl Tunes in Appalachia

stomps, and throws Omie down, and as he rides away, he can still hear her screams. The inclusion of Omie’s murder breaks with the tradition of the typical ballad formula, perhaps to bring attention to the horror of Lewis’s action by sensationalizing Omie’s death. In this version of the ballad, the town realizes Omie is missing and begins a search. Omie’s body is found while a young boy fishes. What is also unique to this version is that Lewis is forced to look on Omie Wise’s dead body, after which he immediately confesses to the crime, is sent to prison, and the last stanza of the ballad includes Lewis confessing his deed.

Lula Viers In October 1917, when John Coyer returned home to Floyd County, Kentucky on leave from the Army during World War I, he discovered that Lula Viers was pregnant with his child. Coyer persuaded Lula to take a local train to Elkhorn City, where “he tied her up with a piece of steel and threw her weighted body in the Big Sandy River.”34 When Lula’s body was found in Ohio several months later, Coyer was arrested, but Army authorities were able to procure his release before his trial; Coyer returned to the Army, and did not return to Floyd County, so he could not be tried for the crime. “Lula Viers” is a version collected by Jean Thomas. The ballad begins by indicating that Lula and Coyer were engaged, but that John led Lula to the river, where he tells her he will kill her. This version grants Lula an incredible amount of space for her to plead for her life, bargaining with Coyer to let her return back to her mother in return for her silence. This ballad version is unique in that Lula offers an alternative to her death—to return home, presumably never to speak of the event again, if Coyer will spare her life. However, Coyer denies her request, and her community realizes her absence. Lula’s murder, like Omie Wise’s, is very quick, as he ties a piece of railroad steel around her waist and throws her in the river. John Coyer immediately leaves the area, but Lula’s body is discovered, and the song notes that the steel around her waist “weighed over thirty pounds.” In this version, Lula’s body is difficult to identify, so newspaper reporters cover the murder in hopes of discovering Lula’s identity. Lula’s mother travels to where Lula’s body was found, identifies the body, and John Coyer is arrested, affirming the sense of loss felt by Lula’s family. In this version, Coyer joins the Army, presumably to escape his actions. The military has always been associated with heroism and protection—traits Coyer clearly does not possess. However, this version of the ballad indicates the Army prevented Coyer being brought to justice, as he was called to serve in France and was not brought to trial.

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Tom Dula What is significant about “Tom Dula” is that the ballad is named after the murderer, not the woman who was murdered. Dula returned to Statesville, North Carolina, after the Civil War and began a relationship with Laura Foster. Dula then ended this relationship to begin seeing Ann Melton. Some versions of the story indicate that Foster realized he had caught a disease from Laura Foster; others say that Dula realized that Laura Foster was pregnant.35 Dula convinced Foster to meet him on a hillside, where he had dug a grave earlier. Foster was killed and placed in the grave, where her body was found several weeks later. Both Tom Dula and Ann Melton were arrested for the murder; some believe that Melton helped Dula plot Laura Foster’s murder and was even the one who killed her by stabbing her in the stomach, but Dula always denied her involvement, and Melton received a shorter sentence, whereas Dula was hanged for the crime.36 The ballad that retells Laura Foster’s fate is unique in that Tom Dula’s (or often, Dooley) guilt, and the ballad’s call for his shame and tears, are consistently reinforced through the tune. Additionally, Laura’s murder is described in detail, where she is led to a hillside, stabbed to death, and left in a shallow grave. Tom Dula’s voice is heard in this ballad, where he denies his guilt. Although Laura Foster’s presence and voice is absent in the song, she is not forgotten. The song speaks directly to Dula, reminding listeners of his crime, with lyrics that continue to hold him responsible by the repeated lines about his shame and guilt regarding Laura’s murder.

Contemporary Murder Ballads Cohen argues that murder ballads inspired by real murders show how “stereotypes, models, or formulae affect interpretation of events.”37 Similarly, S. C. Cook and J. S. Tsou argue that although balladry may appear to be equally accessible to men and women, it has “been largely a maledominated form of discourse that privileged the male voices and experiences of the community while muting, or even silencing its women.”38 Appalachian women have sought to usurp the murdered-girl formula in several ways to end the silence imposed upon female singers and subjects of ballads and to redefine the role of women in Appalachian music. The decision facing women who embark on this path is to disconnect from their Appalachian roots, either by their own accord or at the hands of others. Hamessley, who has done significant research in how contemporary women can resist violence in music while still recognizing their Appalachian roots, asks: “How much more powerful it is to resist the violence and remain Appalachian?”39

“I’m Not Prepared to Die”: Murdered-Girl Tunes in Appalachia

One way that women’s roles in Appalachian music have been transformed is by their publicly singing ballads. Obviously, Appalachian women participated in the continuance and transference of ballads, as they sang with their friends and families. Yet women’s roles as ballad singers in the public sphere evolved quite slowly, and women were not typically sanctioned to sing in public. Women who did eventually gain public access as singers or ballad keepers recognized the significance of their stage presence and used their newfound public space to formulate their own approach to the ballad. Hamessley argues, “the most powerful and effective resisting performance of a ballad . . . are those in which many of the songs’ traditional or original elements are retained, in a sense taking on the violence on its own terms and in its own context.”40 Appalachian women have learned to use the public sphere to exert control over song selections in performance, creating a new space within which to speak about violence and even utilize choice in how ballads are presented, or even left out altogether. Hamessley reveals the importance of such space and argues that “the possibility for real resistance and dialogue emerges when a performer explicitly works within the reality that the song reflects and within the context from which the song comes.”41 Lily Mae Ledford certainly demonstrates this through her anecdotes prior to singing a traditional ballad that features violence against women. Ledford, a musician from Kentucky, would offer an anecdote about the ballad, explaining that it was one of the songs her mother would let her sing, unlike tunes like “Wild Bill Jones,” which had references to drinking alcohol. Ledford describes her mother calling “Polly” “‘a good love song,’” to which Ledford replied “‘Mama, ‘Pretty Polly’ has got a murder in it. That man killed Pretty Polly. Is it better to kill somebody or to drink?’” Ledford says her mother’s response was, “‘I think it’s better to kill somebody. . . . He probably wouldn’t a killed her if he hadn’t been drunk.’”42 Ledford’s public challenge of familial and cultural standards toward violence demonstrates a new type of oral history: the transference of Appalachian ballads and culture, while simultaneously challenging the very song and culture that would impose silence upon women. Amelia Riddle is another example of a woman who became publicly known for her ability to sing ballads, yet who also refused to sing certain ballads because she believed they were too violent.43 Contemporary Appalachian female artists, including Dolly Parton and Reel World String Band, have written original tunes that call upon the murdered-girl formula and position young women as heroines instead of helpless victims. Parton’s songs have depicted stories, some autobiographical, of women’s experiences with gender, labor, family, and romance. She has written songs that depict her “poor but proud” sentiment of home

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and also tackled bigger issues, including “suicide, adultery, insanity, drugs, illegitimacy, and other dark topics.”44 While influenced by ballad traditions in Appalachia, the women in Parton’s songs do not stand helpless and immobile, nor do they demonstrate reactions that are extraordinary or unrelatable. Parton’s songs are grounded in events that do not necessarily reflect real-life events but that depict real-life situations, and as a result, her characters demonstrate a practical response to their circumstances. Parton wrote “Walter Henry Hagan,” a song she performed live in 1995, from her theme park, Dollywood. The song is written as a first-person account of a Tennessee girl who meets and marries a young man with Irish roots from Boston. After moving to Boston and having a child, the young bride realizes that her partner is ignoring his family responsibilities. A murdered-girl tune with the story line Parton presents would undoubtedly have Walter Henry Hagan lead Parton’s female character to her doom, but Parton’s song establishes a new pattern or formula for mistreated young women. Parton’s female lead describes their love not as part of her plea, but as a way to hold him accountable for a promise he once made to her: “You know that I believed you/When you swore we’d never part.” Parton’s female lead also speaks to the behaviors that have lead to the disruption of their family, including drinking, gambling, and cheating. Instead of standing by her man, the Tennessee girl returns home, advising her husband to become sober before they reunite. Cohen argues that Appalachian ballads such as “Pearl Bryan” draw clear distinctions between “good” and “bad” characters and reflect a social order perceived “in terms of the wholesome but simple (in both senses) country pitted against the clever but unscrupulous city.”45 Parton’s song draws on similar themes but advances the female lead into the present. Instead of the would-be perpetrator’s not only controlling his victim but also dominating the action, Parton’s song powerfully speaks from the perspective of the mistreated young bride, unlike the “pathetic victim” of her ballad counterparts; she acknowledges her love for Hagan but chooses self-reliance and self-respect instead of being burdened by her wedding vows. She possesses choice and gives her partner choice as well. Her actions are not only remarkable, they are also inspiring, especially because they mirror experiences and decisions women face both inside and outside Appalachia. Reel World String Band is an all-female band comprising five members: Bev Futrell on guitar, Karen Jones on fiddle, Sue Massek on banjo, Sharon Ruble on bass, and Elise Melrood on keyboards. Formed in 1977, amid social and political change, the band aligned its music to social justice and activism. In an interview Massek said, “I think the thing that has kept us together is that we have a purpose in addition to the music. And this

“I’m Not Prepared to Die”: Murdered-Girl Tunes in Appalachia

social-justice purpose has brought us together again and again and again, and it keeps us together now.”46 Another band member notes, “It was the 1970s . . . we didn’t know of another all-woman band, so we were breaking barriers right there by becoming a band of five women. All of the people around us, especially women, were taking control of their lives, like opening a Bluegrass Rape Crisis Center.”47 Reel World felt both obligated and inspired to support such activism, noting, “We got swept up in that and became a part of it and decided that we needed to support these groups, and the best way we could think to do it would be with our music.”48 The band has played across the world and on picket lines, earning the label of the “essence of Appalachian grit.”49 In discussing a career that has lasted more than thirty-five years, Melrood notes, “The time is ripe for us just to keep on playing as long as we can play and as long as we have an audience. I don’t think our message is in the past tense.” When they received the 2011 Lauren K. Weinberg Humanitarian Award, their introduction summarized their personal and professional commitment: “They walk the walk. They don’t just talk about social justice, they do social justice.”50 One of the social justice commitments of the band is not only to represent women in positive, nonviolent circumstances, but also to speak back to the history of songs where so many women have met their doom. Perhaps the best example of this is their song “Little Omie’s Done Got Wise.” In the introduction to the song, one of the band members talks about murdered-girl tunes: “You know what happened in all of those songs? The lady dies  .  .  . all of the time, at the hands of their former lover. Well, I couldn’t stand that. We couldn’t do those songs.”51 Instead, they wrote a song that memorializes female victims in murder tunes. One lyric references the tune “Darlin’ Corey,” the song about a banjo-playing, gun-wielding, moonshine-making woman whose wild lifestyle causes her death. Another lyric addresses the murdered-girl song “Pretty Polly,” which tells the story of a young woman lured into the forest, where she is killed by Willie, her lover, and left in a shallow grave. The chorus of the song pays tribute to Naomi Wise, a young woman who was murdered by Jonathan Lewis in North Carolina in 1808. The song ends with a change to the first line of the chorus, making clear the intent of creating a song where women are not murdered. Reel World String Band demonstrates how Appalachian women have learned to use the public sphere to exert control over song selections in performance, creating a new space within which to speak about violence and even use choice in how ballads are presented. Though the members of Reel World String Band may not perform murdered-girl tunes, this does not mean they are unable or unwilling to speak to the incidence of violence

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affecting women in their work. Reel World String band repositions Corey, Polly, and Omie out of the grave and into the present as women who are alive and enjoying their lives free from interpersonal violence and fear. Contemporary artists outside Appalachia have continued to draw on the murdered-girl tune formula and create new stories. Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds released “Murder Ballads” in 1996, which featured a collection of traditional as well as newly written ballads, all based around the loss of love and of one’s life. Country Music’s Jim Lauderdale released “Old Time Angels” in 2013, which speaks of the spirits of murdered girls returning to earth to revel in the justice brought to their murderers. The chorus simultaneously warns and welcomes listeners to beware of those murdered girls, now convened as angels, and ready to settle the score for their death. Hurray for the Riff Raff’s 2014 release of “Small Town Heroes” also features songs that address violence against women. The most notable song, “The Body Electric,” addresses the epidemic of violence against women, in reality and in song, noting when it comes to murdered girls, audiences sing along without realizing the incredible violence in the lyrics. The song ends by asking whether violence will be handled with more violence. Gillian Welch and David Rawlings penned one of the most notable responses to murder ballads, “Caleb Meyer.” The song is an incredible demonstration of resistance and reclamation of woman’s space within balladry. The song is written from the first-person perspective of Nellie Kane, a Bowling Green, Kentucky woman who Meyer tries to sexually assault when he realizes her husband is away. Meyer is stopped when Nellie, his would-be victim, calls upon God to give her strength as she fights back during his assault, which results in Meyer’s death. Nellie does not regret her actions, as they were clearly in self-defense, but rather continues to address Meyer’s spirit for his wrongdoings with the song’s refrain. “Caleb Meyer” draws upon the murdered-girl tune but empowers Nellie by granting her space to move, to speak, and, ultimately, to fight back against her assailant. Although Nellie Kane undoubtedly kills Caleb Meyer, it is clear her actions are in self-defense, and she feels no remorse for saving her own life. The growing number of musical efforts to unlock the stories of murdered girls extends beyond the mountains of Appalachia and has become part of public discourse. Similarly, as women continue to reclassify the space allotted to them in both song and stage, a new space is created for a feminist Appalachian scholarship where Appalachia is not, as Hamessley contends, “automatically a place where violence and misogyny are accepted.”52 Their songs demonstrate a clear shift in women’s representation in music, which also reflects the changing sociocultural landscape of interpersonal violence.

“I’m Not Prepared to Die”: Murdered-Girl Tunes in Appalachia

Notes   1.  Cloonan and Johnson, Cook and Tsou, Cusick, Gussow, Hutson, Lawrence and Joyner, Rich et al., Suarez-Orozco and Robben.  2. Kurbin.   3.  Appalachian Regional Commission, Abramson and Haskell.   4.  Abramson and Haskell.   5.  Appalachian Regional Commission.  6. Hamessley, 180.  7. Olson, 1109.   8.  Andreescu and Shutt, 62.   9.  Andreescu and Shutt. 10. Ibid. 11.  Billings and Blee, 330. 12. Ibid. 13.  Cantrell and Fish. 14.  Andreescu and Shutt. 15.  Filene, 3. 16.  Wilgus, 196. 17.  Laws, 31. 18.  Cohen, 102–103. 19.  Cohen, 102. 20.  Abrahams, Dowda, Jennings, Woolstadt. 21. Abrahams. 22.  Dowda, 4. 23.  Jennings, 21. 24.  Dowda, 7–8. 25.  Wollstadt, 295. 26.  Jennings, 21. 27.  Abrahams, 450–451. 28.  Patterson, 67. 29. McNeil. 30.  Cohen, 11. 31.  McNeil, Cohen, 19. 32.  Cohen, 21. 33. Lomax. 34.  McNeil, 8. 35. Lomax. 36. Lomax. 37.  Cohen, 102. 38.  Cook and Tsou, 205. 39.  Hamessley, 34. 40.  Ibid., 33. 41.  Ibid., 33–34.

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42.  Ibid., 22. 43. Cook. 44.  Bufwack and Oermann, 368. 45.  Cohen, 6. 46. Kocher. 47. The Bluegrass Rape Crisis center was formed in 1971 by a group of women in Lexington, Kentucky, under the original name The Women’s Center of Lexington, Kentucky. The Bluegrass Rape Crisis Center was a formation from The Women’s Center in 1974 and in 1977 received external grant funding for operation. 48.  Reel World String Band. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52.  Hamessley, 34.

Bibliography Abrahams, Rudy. “Patterns of Structure and Role Relationships in the Child Ballad in the United States.” The Journal of American Folklore 79 (1966): 448–462. Appalachian Regional Commission. “The Appalachian Region,” 2008. Batteau, Allen W. “The Invention of Appalachia,” Now and Then (1990): 36–38. Biggers, Jeff. The United States of Appalachia. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press, 2007. Billings, Dwight B., and Kathleen M. Blee. The Road to Poverty. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Billings, Dwight B., Gurney Norman, and Katherine Ledford. Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1999. Bufwack, Mary A., and Robert K. Oerrmann. Finding Her Voice: The Illustrated History of Women in Country Music. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1993. Cantrell, Peggy, and Roy Fish. “Domestic Violence.” In The Encyclopedia of Appalachia, ed. J. Abramson and J. Haskell, 167–169. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006. Cloonan, Martin, and Bruce Johnson. “Killing Me Softly with His Song: An Initial Investigation into the Use of Popular Music as a Tool of Oppression.” Popular Music 21, no. 1 (2002): 27–39. Cloonan, Martin, and Bruce Johnson. Dark Side of the Tune: Popular Music and Violence. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008. Coffin, T. “‘Mary Hamilton’ and the Anglo-American Ballad as an Art Form.” The Journal of American Folklore 70 (1957): 208–214. Cohen, Anne B. Poor Pearl, Poor Girl! The Murdered-Girl Stereotype in Ballad and Newspaper. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973. Cohen, Daniel. “The Beautiful Female Murder Victim: Literary Genres and Courtship Practices in the Origins of a Cultural Motif, 1590–1850.” Journal of Social History 31, no. 2 (1997): 277–306.

“I’m Not Prepared to Die”: Murdered-Girl Tunes in Appalachia

Cook, S. C., and Tsou, J. S. “‘Cursed Was She’: Gender and Power in American Balladry.” In Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Music, ed. Susan C. Cook and Judy S. Tsou, 202–224. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Cusick, Suzanne. “Music as Torture/Music as Weapon.” Revista Transcultural de Musica/Transcultural Music Review 10 (2006): 1–18. Dowda, R. “He Took Her by the Golden Curls and Throwed Her Round and Round: Appalachian Women in the 19th Century and Their Image in the Murder Ballads of the Time.” Special Collections, Hutchins Library: Berea College, 1978. Filene, Benjamin. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Gussow, Adam. Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Voices and the Blues Tradition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Hamessley, Lydia. “A Resisting Performance of an Appalachian Traditional Murder Ballad Giving Voice to ‘Pretty Polly.’” Women and Music 9 (2004): 13–36. Hurray for the Riff Raff. “The Body Electric.” In Small Town Heroes. ATO Records, 2014. Hutson, C. “‘Whackety Whack, Don’t Talk Back’: The Glorification of Violence against Females and the Subjugation of Women Nineteenth-century Southern Folk Music.” Journal of Women’s History 8, no. 3 (1996): 114–142. Jennings, R. “Celtic Women and White Guilt.” MELUS 28 (2003): 17–37. Kocher, Greg. “Reel World String Band Fills Its Musical Life with Purpose.” Lexington Herald Leader, 2012. Lawrence, Janet, and Doris Joyner. “The Effects of Sexually Violent Rock Music on Males’ Acceptance of Violence against Women.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 15 (1991): 49–63. Laws, G. Malcolm Jr. Native American Balladry: A Descriptive Study and a Bibliographical Syllabus. Philadelphia, PA: The American Folklore Society, 1964. Lomax, Alan. “The Folk Songs of North America,” 1960. McNeil, W. K. “Southern Folk Ballads,” 1988, 2. Olson, Ted. “Music.” In The Encyclopedia of Appalachia, 1109. 2006. “Omie Wise.” In Josiah Combs Papers. Berea, KY: Berea College Special Collections and Archives. Parton, Dolly. “Walter Henry Hagan.” In Heartsongs—Live from Dollywood. Music Mill, 2005. Patterson, Daniel. “The Ballad and Legend of Frankie Silver: A Search for the Woman’s Voice.” North Carolina Folklore Journal 47 (2006): 62–71. “Pearl Bryant.” In Southern Folk Ballads, vol. 2, ed. W. K. McNeil, 85. Berea, KY: Berea College Special Collection. Reel World String Band. “Biography.” Reel World String Band. “Omie’s Done Got Wise.” In The Coast Is Clear. Rich, Michael, Elizabeth Woods, Elizabeth Goodman, S. Jean Emans, and Robert DuRant. “Aggressors or Victims: Gender and Race in Music Video Violence.” Pediatrics 101, no. 4 (April 1998): 669–674.

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Shutt, Viviana Andreescu, and J. Eagle. “Violent Appalachia: The Media’s Role in the Creation and Perpetuation of an American Myth.” Journal of the Institute of Justice and International Studies 9 (2009): 62–75. Straw, Richard A., and Blethen, H. Tyler, eds. High Mountains Rising: Appalachia in Time and Place. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Suarez-Orozco, Marcelo, and Antonius C. G. M. Robbin. “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Violence and Trauma.” In Culture under Siege: Collective Violence and Trauma, ed. Antonius C. G. M. Robben and Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, 1–43. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Thomas, J. “Lula Viers.” In Ballad Makin’ in the Mountains of Kentucky, ed. J. Thomas, 144–146. New York: Holt and Company, 1939. Welch, Gillian. “Caleb Meyer.” In Hell among the Yearlings: Acony Records, 2001. Whisnant, David E. All That Is Native and Fine. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1983. Wilgus, D. K. “An Introduction to the Study of Hillbilly Music.” The Journal of American Folklore 78, no. 309 (1965): 195–203. Woolstadt, L. “Controlling Women: Reading Gender in the Ballads Scottish Women Sang.” Western Folklore 61 (2002): 295–317.

CHAPTER TWELVE

AmeriKKKa’s Human Sacrifice: Blackness, Gangsta Rap, and Authentic Villainy Seth Cosimini

In 1991, the magnanimous, sugared cereal–scarfing, and historically respected human beatbox and rapper Marcel “Biz Markie” Hall was referred to the U.S. Attorney for criminal prosecution by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. No criminal charges were filed against the rapper, but the landmark ruling of Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records Inc. criminalized the entire genre of rap music and, by extension, hip-hop culture by marking one of the ostensibly least dangerous and violent rappers as a violator of the law—copyright law, that is. The details of the case are widely available, and its effect on hip-hop has been thoroughly discussed: The criminalization of sampling1 as “akin to theft”2 both vilified and radically altered how rap music was produced. An art form founded on the manipulation of commercially distributed materials—hip-hop DJs would “misuse” records by bucking the prescriptive method of listening to recorded music to extend break beats for dancers to enjoy—was made criminal. Rap music often occupies an uncomfortable position within American popular culture. Representing the violence America loves to consume, rap music is often accused of being guilty of misogyny, homophobia, and the glorification of gangs, drugs, and senseless violence. From the academy

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to politicians to concerned parents, these conversations about rap music are shot through with conceptions of blackness in the American cultural imagination. The criminal black American subject, exemplified in the subgenre of gangsta rap, has captured America both as a hero and as the deviant container for all of America’s “ills.”3 This essay will draw connections between the pathologizing of black Americans as deviant criminals and the popularity of rap music, especially gangsta rap. In his comprehensive study of the subgenre and subculture of gangsta rap, Eithne Quinn asks why we should pay attention to gangsta rap at all. His answer is full and insightful: “[T]he social ills that resulted from deindustrialization and destructive government policies—poverty, chronic unemployment, political disaffection, and (particularly in the LA area) police repression, the drug trade, and gang activity—shaped the sounds and themes of gangsta rap.”4 More important for this essay, however, is Quinn’s observation that “commercially, gangsta [rap] was extraordinarily successful, and consequently of great significance for the cultural industries. LA hardcore rap albums of the late 1980s often went ‘gold’ (at least 500,000 copies sold) or ‘platinum’ (one million sales). . . . By the mid1990s, once gangsta became mass-distributed, many albums went ‘multiplatinum’ (two million-plus sales).”5 Gangsta rap captured the American imagination and became a pillar of popular culture in the United States. In her latest book on rap music, foundational hip-hop scholar Tricia Rose identifies gangsta rap as a piece of the black “gangsta–pimp–ho trinity” that dominates the popular production and consumption of hip-hop.6 Rose finds this widely popular, widely distributed tripartite representation of black Americans disturbing and dangerous, because it drives our national discussion about race through the refracted debate over hip-hop’s merits and dangers. Rose writes: “[T]his conversation has become a powerful vehicle for the channeling of broader public discussion about race, class, and the value of black culture’s role in society. Debates about hip hop have become a means for defining poor, young black people and thus for interpreting the context and reasons for their clearly disadvantaged lives. This is what we talk about when we talk about hip hop.”7 I would push Rose’s comments even further to suggest that this conversation includes the value of black life in America. Hip-hop production, consumption, and criticism (academic or otherwise) is a conversation about the deeply historical constructions and roles of blackness in the United States—it is a conversation about the value of black peoples’ oppression, suffering, and death to support America’s reproduction of itself ideologically and materially. The abundance of multiplatinum album sales suggests not just a “means for defining poor, young black people and thus for interpreting

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the context and reasons for their clearly disadvantaged lives,”8 but also the deep desire to reproduce these representations of disadvantaged black American life within our popular culture. Violence—especially this multifaceted schema of race-based, anti-black violence—is central to American popular culture because it is how we talk about our national identity, our history, and ourselves. Whether that talk supports and reproduces types of violence that are foundational to America, such as white supremacy, or rewrites or even resists that foundational violence, the production and consumption of popular culture is one of the more profound means of communication about ourselves. This history of violence is what we talk about when we talk about hip-hop, gangsta rap, and American popular culture.

Authentic Gangsters and Black Criminality in the American Imagination Quinn’s study offers a useful set of qualities that listeners may use to understand the formal elements of gangsta rap. Providing an excellent reading of a verse from Ice Cube’s “A Bird in the Hand,” Quinn notes that it is a “quintessential gangsta track: rich, dramatic storytelling in the first person (unlike Public Enemy’s third-person proclamations); an ethic of survivalist individualism; potent social commentary (Cube rejects white Republicans and even black Democrats); and—not to be forgotten—playful, robust humor.”9 All these elements come together, as Quinn understands it, to support Ice Cube’s “keepin’ it real” image: He is an authentic criminal of South Central LA who speaks truth to power and is relatable through his storytelling and humor. Through a series of rhetorical and performative gestures, gangstas must be “real.” Most important for this essay is the idea of authenticity—that is, of “realness.” Quinn’s incisive study notes the way gangsta rappers play with the idea of realness as both artists and businesspeople. Authenticity is a complex idea in hip-hop. The contradictory drive is to be both authentically a gangster, though not actually if a rapper is pursuing a career in artistic expression, and to be intelligible as a black gangster to the American imaginary—that is, to integrate seamlessly into the historical racebased violence of seeing the black body as a criminal body—a body rarely protected by the law and almost always in violation of the law. This question of authenticity raises questions about audience: For whom do these artists perform representations of the lives of nonwhite gangsters in the United States? The popularity of gangsta rap in American culture, and especially the popular response to the subgenre that has made it such a visible and controversial form in our popular culture,

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demonstrates the relevance of and desire for authentic black villains— authentic insofar as they are intelligible to the popular imaginary. The “realness” of the gangsta rapper is a paradox because, most often, the “real” gangsta rapper is a reproduction of the black criminal stereotype already known to consumers. Though deeper questions surrounding authenticity circulate in hip-hop scholarship—black American culture versus hybridity (most egregiously erasing Latinos and Latinas from the history), working poor urban realities versus Hollywood representations, counterhegemonic critique versus sensationalized violence, and so on—one of the more significant questions of authenticity in gangsta rap forces us to consider the authenticity of rappers’ criminal status. In his 2004 essay “The Rap on Rap: The ‘Black Music’ That Isn’t Either,” David Samuels argues: “Rap’s appeal to whites rested in its evocation of an age-old image of blackness: a foreign, sexually charged, and criminal underworld against which the norms of white society are defined, and, by extension, through which they may be defied.”10 Thanks to the appeal of this “age-old image of blackness,” Samuels writes, “the more rappers were packaged as violent black criminals, the bigger their white audiences became.”11 The popularity of gangsta rap demonstrates the particular kind of violence America craves: ideological violence against the black body. Rap encourages, and perpetuates, the authenticity of this representation through material violence. Gangsta rap became a reductive way to reproduce images of black violence, and thus criminalize black people, to maintain mythologies of black peoples as nonhuman: that is, as violent sexual beasts or as commodities for exchange and circulation. Giving historical context to this “age-old image of blackness,” Saidiya V. Hartman’s study of nineteenth-century black self-making provides an insightful analysis of the relationship between criminal and human status in the law for slaves. Writing mainly of slave women and the legal protection of rape as an institution within slavery, Hartman argues that the “dual invocation of the slave as property and person was an effort to wed reciprocity and submission, intimacy and domination, and the legitimacy of violence and the necessity of protection. By the same token, the law’s selective recognition of slave humanity nullified the captive’s ability to give consent or act as agent and, at the same time, acknowledged the intentionality and agency of the slave but only as it assumed the form of criminality.”12 Slave humanity was only legally permitted in the realm of criminality; otherwise, the black body was merely a piece of property— that is, without agency. Such terms kept the slave body captive under the total domination of slave owners. Furthermore, these terms protected the perverse moral grounds of the institution of slavery: Any permitted

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evidence of black peoples’ humanity only illuminated their essential deviance and criminality. In the national legal imagination, black people were either bestial villains or not people at all. In the postbellum United States, the tyrannical tactic of lynching produced the mythology of the black male rapist to pathologize black men and solidify their place within the American imaginary as excessive, deviant, and requiring discipline. These spectacular lynchings of black peoples demonstrated black powerlessness and white supremacy in the aftermath of the cultural rupture of emancipation. In the crisis of national identity, citizenship, and even western civilization marked by the end of slavery, blackness was changed from a mark of possession—that is, an object to be owned and enjoyed—to an object of criminality to be owned and enjoyed. If we look at contemporary scholarship on hip-hop culture, we can find evidence of engagement with black masculinity represented as criminal, wholly corporeal, and pervasively misogynist, but no explicitly drawn comparisons between post–Civil War violence and the performances of black masculinity found on hip-hop records. In her 1994 article “Rap Music and the Demonization of Young Black Males,” Rose argues that criticism that treats hip-hop as uncritical reproductions of raced patriarchal violence risks reproducing the equation of black masculinity with criminality. She notes that racism lies at the root of these potentially shallow readings of misogyny in hip-hop. Rose asserts: “The aesthetic complexity of some of the lyrics by prominent hardcore (some say gangsta) rappers . . . and the genius of some of the best music that accompanies it, almost always are overlooked completely in the attacks on rap . . . in part because exploring these facets of rap’s lure would damage the process of creating easily identifiable and expendable villains.”13 The necessity for representations of “easily identifiable and expendable villains” trumps both what Rose mourns as the “aesthetic complexity” of these rappers’ performances as well as the recognition of hip-hop performance as a site of ideological contestation. A criminological focus has often characterized the contemporary study of rap. In his important study of the role of crack cocaine in rap music, Dimitri A. Bogazianos articulates a major shift in America’s structure of feeling with the rise of crack, incarceration rates, and policing of black peoples. Bogazianos writes: “[T]he American experience of crack cocaine represents the lethal core of a larger criminological structure of feeling that has risen to dominance in public life during the past thirty-plus years. . . . I call the crack era, the period in question, the lethal core of this structure for one primary reason: during this time, between the mid-1980s and early 1990s, the national homicide rate rose from 8 to 10 per 100,000, and, in those neighborhoods hit hardest, to as high as 129 per 100,000, reflecting a

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national death toll of nearly 25,000 people per year.”14 The rise of gangsta rap to prominence in American popular culture accompanied the rise of the national homicide rate, the spreading use of crack cocaine, and what Bogazianos calls the “criminological structure of feeling.” 15 For him, this structure of feeling manifests in several largely race-based experiences: The multiple overlapping experiences, then, of crime and punishment in the United States have come to suffuse the daily lives of ever-increasing numbers of Americans, saturating their senses and perceptions, and affecting the ways in which they interpret the world. These experiences now include a whole range of related elements: (a) all known and unknown offenses and victimizations; (b) police stops, searches, seizures, and arrests; (c) bookings, arraignments, pleas, and, more rarely, trials; (d) time, in jails, prisons, and the various forms of supervised release that, by turns, have grown and fallen in professional favor; and (e) the endless representations of crime and punishment that inundate public and private life through everchanging media delivery systems.16

This sense of crime and punishment invaded the national imaginary, influencing and making room for the mixture of race-based repression, crime, and punishment that was, and continues to be, gangsta rap.

Criminality and Gangsta Rap’s Beginnings Histories of hip-hop demonstrate the centrality of black criminality to the development of the culture and the art form of rap. The deindustrialized New York City landscape, the perceived failures of the civil rights movement, the highly diverse and volatile populations of immigrants (especially from Jamaica and Puerto Rico), America’s foundational racist ideologies, and many other factors make the “origin” of hip-hop culture impossible to chart neatly. Despite this complex history and context, hip-hop’s “origins” are usually boiled down to a specific event: South Bronx Jamaican immigrant Clive “DJ Kool Herc” Campbell’s “Merry-Go-Round” trick of extending a break beat using two copies of the same record. Undeniably a foundational moment for the development of the culture and the art form, Herc’s innovation also demonstrates the significance of Jamaican reggae, dub, and dancehall cultures to the development of hip-hop. And, by extension, his DJ method demonstrates the role of criminality and gangster culture in hip-hop. Reggae and sound system cultures were a large part of the culture of young Jamaicans who were disenfranchised and living criminal lifestyles.

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In his 1977 study of Jamaican music culture, Reggae Bloodlines, music journalist Stephen Davis explains: In Jamaica in the late Sixties most of the younger, up-and-coming reggae performers sprang out of the “Rude Boy” phenomenon. Rudies were young men, aged anywhere between fourteen and thirty (most Jamaican youths leave school at fourteen if not earlier), who had joined the migration from country to Kingston. With no skills and Jamaica’s chronic 35-per-cent unemployment rate, the Rudies redefined street life (hanging out, flicking deadly German ratchet knives, trolly-hopping, purse snatching, occasional muggings, petty theft, rum, insolence, ganja, singing, and general hooliganism) into lifetime careers, most of which ended very early.17

Reggae was music for the disenfranchised youth of Jamaica in the late 1960s. In the “beginning reggae was slum music and was disdained by all but the lower classes of black society”18 and represented the experience of lower class black life in ways hip-hop would come to represent it in America. As a child, DJ Kool Herc witnessed the sound system culture, yards filling up with young gangsters dancing to rumbling speakers playing American R&B, and Jamaican roots reggae and dub records. Herc remembers, “I was too young to go in. . . . We just stay outside like everybody else, you know, pointing at the gangsters as they come up, all the famous people. And at the time they had the little motorcycles, Triumphs and Hondas. Rudeboys used to have those souped up. They used to come up four and five six deep, with them likkle ratchet knife.”19 Herc’s experiences on the outside of these yard parties would echo in the South Bronx much later when he would DJ. Though the gangster culture of Jamaica did not directly influence the gang and hip-hop cultures of New York, the culture in which hip-hop grew was most certainly related. As journalist and music critic Jeff Chang writes: “Hip-hop was close to the underground economy because, more often than not, it was being made by youths who were not exploitable, but expendable.”20 Despite the violent conditions out of which hip-hop was born in the South Bronx, it was largely an alternative to and an outspoken opponent of gang culture. In 1973, ex–Black Spades gang leader Afrika Bambaataa formed the Universal Zulu Nation, a hip-hop organization that taught its members to survive life. To be open-minded dealing with all walks of life upon this planet Earth and to teach [each] other truth (Knowledge, Wisdom, and Understanding.) To respect those who respect them, to never be the aggressor

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or oppressor. To be at peace with self and others, but if or when attacked by others who don’t wish peace with the Zulus, then the Zulus are ordered in the name of ALLAH, Jehovah to fight those who fight against you.21

Certainly the last sentence of self-preservation resonates with the tenets of gangsta rap, but with a different approach to aggression that favored a peaceful, noncriminal life. In the early 1980s, South Bronx DJ-ing pioneer Joseph “Grandmaster Flash” Saddler, and his rapping accompaniment the Furious Five, released music urging youth to stay away from dangerous, criminal activity. In 1982, their song “The Message” offered one of the first commercial hip-hop releases criticizing the conditions in which poor urban youths of color lived and decrying the criminal lifestyles that seemed like the only options available. Their 1983 single “White Lines (Don’t Don’t Do It)” explicitly condemns the dangerous lifestyles attached to the dealing and using of cocaine. Even proto–gangsta rapper Lawrence “KRS-One” Parker came to criticize the genre and completely reinvent his image after his friend and DJ, Scott “Scott La Rock” Sterling, the other half of their group Boogie Down Productions, was shot dead in 1987. In 1987, KRS-One rapped of ruthlessly gunning down crack dealers;22 in 1989 he gathered a number of popular rappers to make antiviolence releases under the name Stop the Violence Movement. The conditions that created gang life in New York were the same that produced hip-hop culture, but the two were not identical. As hip-hop was moving from what is generally understood as the “old school” to the “golden age” in the mid-1980s, gangsta rap was beginning to come into its own as a subgenre, and a popular one at that. This movement also represented a geographic reorientation of hip-hop culture on a national level. As Chang aptly puts it, “[w]hat the South Bronx had been to the 1970s, South Central would be for the 1980s. It was the epitome of a growing number of inner-city nexuses where deindustrialization, devolution, Cold War adventurism, the drug trade, gang structures and rivalries, arms profiteering, and police brutality were combining to destabilize poor communities and alienate massive numbers of youths.”23 Certainly, New York would not drop out of the hip-hop community, but the geographical landscape of hip-hop was being remade. Los Angeles became a new locus for hip-hop and radically changed it in the process. A pioneer in west coast gangsta rap, Tracy “Ice-T” Marrow’s explicit raps about gangster life in LA enabled him to move from the early-1980s LA electro scene with Uncle Jamm’s Army to a solo career that blueprinted the subgenre. As has been outlined in other studies of rap history,24 “6 in

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the Mornin’,” the B-side to Ice-T’s 1986 single “Dog’n the Wax,” marks his rapping persona as a gangster and his influence on the development of gangsta rap. In an interview with Brian Cross, Ice-T explains: “That song [“6 in the Mornin’”] turned out to be my identity. Everybody’s like, there it is. It was the first record to be heard about havin’ a gun, bein’ chased by the cops, killed niggas at the end, um. . . . I was like you know, fuck it, if that’s what muthafuckas want I can do that, that’s easy for me to do that shit. That’s my life.”25 This identity is probably best characterized by his aggressive nihilism, which is often complemented by the shallowest of drives—money, sex, violence, drugs, and alcohol—that mostly stand to emphasize the emptiness of his experience.26 Ice-T’s raps in “6 in the Mornin’” lay the groundwork for the signifiers of the black gangster in hip-hop: a young man in the streets with his gun in hand, money in his pocket, and an ostentatious gold necklace.27 Caught up in these stereotypical signifiers, however, are Ice-T’s observations about the confusion and contradiction that accompany this identity and gangster life in LA, a life he both embraces and resents. For example, he raps that his gangster persona is simultaneously a monstrosity of his own making and the product of rap music’s influence.28 This contradiction he lives of being both in control of himself and hypnotized by the music, while also being consistently harassed by the police, could be the root of his aggressive frustration with his life of urban poverty.29 His raps in this song also suggest that hip-hop controls the streets, which would be at odds with the hard truth that the police seem to be the ones controlling the streets, or at least harassing those on them.30 And Ice-T’s lyrical response appears to be the performance of a nihilistic monstrosity that he can use to at least protect himself and get some wealth: a strong depiction of the oppressive conditions and the individual struggle to overcome them. Chang offers a reading of gangsta rap’s response to these conditions when he writes: “These South Central rap songs were like the new blues. But the Mississippi blues culture had developed under the conditions of back-breaking oppressive work, the toil of building a modern nation. Hiphop culture, whether in the South Bronx or South Central, had developed under alienated play, as solid jobs evaporated into the airy buzz and flow of a network society.”31 “Alienated play” is perhaps the best phrase to describe Ice-T’s monstrosity. When employment, health care, housing, education, and social programming are neglected and the state heavily invests in prisons and police enforcement, Ice-T could not care less about what anyone else wants. He will be just the monster he wants to be, pleasure-seeking and without allegiances.

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The police and other state oppressors, however, are not the only targets of this monstrous play. Also essential to the subgenre, the misogyny of “6 in the Mornin’” must be considered. In one verse, Ice-T calmly describes a violent episode wherein he mercilessly beats a woman who snubs his sexual advances and mocks his displays of confidence. Imani Perry offers a study of black masculinity in hip-hop that helps to connect this verse on gender-based violence with the previous verse on street monstrosity. She writes: “Black male hip hop artists do not simply assert power over women’s bodies in a kind of effort to create imaginative patriarchy; they also use black women as a kind of commodity expression of wealth and sexual power in the face of racialized economic powerlessness.”32 Ice-T complements his displays of violent power and wealth with his ability to accumulate women in place of capital. And so he falls back on physical violence to reassert patriarchy in order to protect himself if a woman refuses to be used. In the perverse terms of poor urban life represented in gangsta rap, black women asserting self-worth threaten the self-worth of black men. In her 1994 essay “Gangsta Culture—Sexism, Misogyny: Who Will Take the Rap?” however, bell hooks reminds us that this opposition is a lie of patriarchy. Complicating the relationship of black feminism to gangsta rap, hooks finds gangsta rap to be a moment for critique of hegemonic American culture. She writes: “The sexist, misogynist, patriarchal ways of thinking and behaving that are glorified in gangsta rap are a reflection of the prevailing values in our society, values created and sustained by white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”33 Gangsta rap reveals yet another ostensible contradiction thrust upon black American life: the support of patriarchy to combat racism. A recurrent issue in black nationalist movements, patriarchy rears its head in gangsta rap to reveal the contradictions of villainous rebellion. hooks urges that the “feminist critiques of sexism and misogyny in gangsta rap” must be “bold and fierce” without forgetting that the “revolutionary work is to transform white supremacist capitalist patriarchy in the multiple areas of our lives where it is made manifest, whether in gangsta rap, the black church, or in the Clinton administration.”34 Unfortunately, the extremity of the misogyny in gangsta rap would only increase exponentially. And this violence was continually condemned as it was linked to the exponential increase in violent state race- and gender-based repression in LA.

Police Violence and Gangsta Rap’s Golden Age The year 1988 was a turning point in gangsta rap and the new image of blackness in American popular culture. LA’s “War on Gangs” launched its

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first failed assault in early 1988, a failure that served as a national model. Police Chief Darryl Gates’s Operation Hammer was a failure insofar as it did nothing to intervene in the gang violence that existed throughout LA; it was a success insofar as LA’s people of color, especially youth of color, were exponentially criminalized, displaced, and brutalized. Chang writes: “The math of the Hammer did not add up. By 1992, the city was paying out $11 million annually in brutality settlements while allocating less than $2 million to gang intervention programs, and almost half of all young Black males living in South Central were in the gang database.”35 Fantasies of black criminality became reality in the official record, and LA’s poor youths of color paid the price. Hip-hop artists struck back, most notably Niggaz With Attitude (N.W.A.) on their 1988 tour-de-force Straight Outta Compton. N.W.A., a super-group of local LA hip-hop artists, made their debut in the 1987 solo track from the group’s manager-turned-rapper, ex–drug dealer Eric “Eazy-E” Wright, “Boyz-N-The Hood.” Penned by the group’s premier lyricist, O’Shea “Ice Cube” Jackson, and produced by the soonto-be superstar Andre “Dr. Dre” Young, “Boyz-N-The Hood” tells a similar story to “6 in the Mornin’”: a day in the life of a bored, alienated, violent youth—that is, Eazy-E. The major difference, which was taken even further on the group release a year later, was the extremity. The nihilism, the substance abuse, the violence, and the misogyny were excessive. The basic narrative of “Boyz-N-The-Hood” goes as follows: With nothing better to do, Eazy drinks with his friends, one of whom he murders for trying to rob him; picks up a woman to sleep with, who he ends up beating without reason (and whose father he also beats for trying to defend his daughter); and relates the story of a friend beating an undercover cop, then attempting to shoot up his own trial (ending up in prison).36 And Eazy summarizes his attitude toward the lifestyle with his commitment to preserving his reputation as violent and remorseless, never complying with or speaking to the police, brutally murdering anyone who might question him or his lifestyle.37 His aggression accounts for the fundamental contradiction in these declarations: The song itself is him openly admitting his criminal lifestyle (as if a full confession of guilt) to prove his legitimacy as a gangster. And the declaration of his gangster legitimacy is the only purpose of living, but he certainly won’t snitch on himself or others and does not consider this lyrical confession to be snitching. But if anyone else speaks negatively of him or snitches to the police, they will be punished. In the rapper’s performance of gangster authenticity, speech always exists on the cusp of violence, and the authenticity of living up to one’s words to commit violence and not snitch is life’s only purpose.

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The 1988 release of Straight Outta Compton continued this aggression and garnered both attention and opposition because of the violence directed toward law enforcement. The group’s most notable song, “Fuck tha Police,” offered a clear protest of police abuse of power and the threat of retaliation from the people of color harassed every day in LA. Ice Cube’s opening verse offers a litany of reasons why he hates the police: racial profiling, brutality, unlawful searches, and the ostensible right to murder people of color. And so he offers a righteous, if hyperbolic, response in his raps, claiming that the LAPD fear him and fear the gruesome, bloody vengeance he and other young black men seek.38 Threatening to respond to police brutality with bloodshed, fellow N.W.A. rapper Lorenzo “MC Ren” Patterson offers a similar verse to Ice Cube’s. MC Ren raps of his anger and willingness to become violent with the police, or anyone who makes him feel threatened.39 Definitely villainous, Ice Cube and MC Ren are dangerous to the LAPD or anyone else they identify as an enemy. Rather than let representatives of racist state repression attack them, they let their anger take over and turn LA into a blood-drenched warzone. Though their lyrics obviously present images of extreme violence, listeners can easily hear the protest that drives the villainy. Eazy-E’s verse, however, presents him as violent first, even without the threat of the police. Wondering why the police are always stopping him, he raps that he only incidentally commits homicide while he has fun with his guns.40 As his tongue-in-cheek logic suggests, Eazy-E murders without purpose and without remorse; homicide is merely an accident. As a consequence, or beyond his nihilistic play with murder, Eazy-E raps that the police can distribute his image without any description of his criminal activity, and everyone who sees it will immediately know that he is dangerous.41 Eazy-E needs no explanation. A picture of him does all of the work required to communicate to the police and anyone tapped into the American imaginary that he is a violent criminal. Chang connects the hardcore nature of N.W.A.’s lyrics with the impatience felt by the children of the civil rights movement. He writes: “Reaganism had eliminated youth programs while bombarding youths with messages to desist and abstain; it was all about tough love and denial and getting used to having nothing. Even the East Coast utopians like Rakim [of Eric B. & Rakim] and Chuck [D of Public Enemy] talked control and discipline. By contrast, excess was the essence of N.W.A.’s appeal. These poems celebrated pushers, played bitches, killed enemies, and assassinated police. Fuck delayed gratification, they said, take it all now.”42 Extreme times called for extreme measures. And what is restraint when there is no reason to live but to accumulate wealth43 and when these rappers’ black

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bodies signify nothing beyond violence and criminality to the American imagination?44 Chang further clarifies: “If the thing was protest, they would toss the ideology and go straight to the riot. If the thing was sex, they would chuck the seduction and go straight to the fuck. Forget knowledge of self or empowering the race. This was about, as Eazy would put it, the strength of street knowledge.”45 The “strength of street knowledge” 46 perhaps suggests the power of the act of violence first, then the purpose. Although providing context for N.W.A.’s project offers useful insight into its complex and aggressively challenging protest, it is important to note the massive boycotts of N.W.A. within the hip-hop community at the time of their exploding popularity. Chang writes: To the hip-hop progressives, the true believers who embraced rap as the voice of their generation, N.W.A. sounded militantly incoherent. Their music drew new lines over issues of misogyny, homophobia, and violence. N.W.A. had stepped up rap’s dialogics; reaction was the point. They anticipated criticisms, but silenced them by shouting them down. Defiant and confident, [DJ] Yella [of N.W.A.] even disclosed the in-joke, scratching in a female voice, “Hope all you sophisticated motherfuckers hear what I have to say.”47

The rate at which gangsta rap, especially the work of N.W.A., sold suggests that it sounded militantly coherent to many, both white people and people of color. “Just as the blues had for a generation of white baby boomers, these tall tales populated with drunken, high, rowdy, irresponsible, criminal, murderous niggas with attitude seemed to be just what the masses of their generation wanted. Even more disconcerting, they lined up all the right enemies: the Christian right, the FBI, baby boomer demagogues.”48 And while the hip-hop community wrestled with questions of violence and authenticity in representing (and protesting the conditions of) life for poor urban youths of color, and by extension wrestling with the ghosts of an unfulfilled demand for civil rights and dignity, the mainstream American audience saw no demons or ghosts to wrestle: Little has changed in the national image of black people as criminal, violent, and hypersexual—in a word, abject. In this analysis, it is important to not conflate “mainstream” with “white” when discussing audiences and record sales. More important than the identity politics of consuming gangsta rap is the national fantasy and pleasure taken in consuming representations of criminal, suffering, abject black bodies. This national imaginary is the manifestation of the white supremacist ideology foundational to the United States and helps explain the popularity of some forms of popular culture.

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Using Soundscan data, Quinn explains that by the early 1990s, “audience statistics showing a 65 percent white market share for hardcore [gangsta] rap were being reported, representing an extraordinary story of crossover success for a genre initially conceived for and targeted at black youth.”49 Robin D. G. Kelley’s brilliant critique of social scientists’ search for an “authentic” urban black American experience echoes this desire for an “authentic” gangsta rap in American popular culture, specifically by white audiences. Kelley writes: “Hip Hop, particularly gangsta rap, also attracts listeners for whom the ‘ghetto’ is a place of adventure, unbridled violence, erotic fantasy, and/or an imaginary alternative to suburban boredom.  .  . . This kind of voyeurism partly explains N.W.A.’s huge white following and why their album Efil4zaggin shot to the top of the charts as soon as it was released.”50 Less a “kind of voyeurism,” popular white consumption operates as a kind of “adventure” into the “fantasy” of “ghetto” life. The historical accuracy of N.W.A.’s work was secondary to their apparent authenticity and “realness.” Whether or not their raps about “killing cops, smoking hos, filling quiet nights with a flurry of senseless buckshot”51 truly depicted life in Compton, gangsta rap’s popularity was about white America’s fantasies of “authentic” blackness. Ice Cube’s post-N.W.A. solo work drew out, and explicitly politicized, the implications of the popularity of an “authentic gangsta.” Even the title of his explosive 1990 solo debut, AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, offered an aggressive attack on the context in which gangsta rap’s popularity grew: America loves Ice Cube because it hates him, and it hates him because he is black. As much “America’s most wanted” in terms of record sales as in criminal status, Ice Cube offers no subtlety in respelling “America” to include the Ku Klux Klan as a part of the nation. The “shocking,” explicit, incisive critique continues throughout the album. After the album’s introduction, the first song, “The Nigga Ya Love to Hate,” bears out Ice Cube’s status as the abject criminal of the American imagination and the pleasure taken in fulfilling the fantasy of imagining him to be the villain. During the song’s chorus, an ambiguous audience gleefully shouts obscenities at Ice Cube while he responds to the refrain by laughingly identifying himself as the subject of the song’s title: “The Nigga Ya Love to Hate.”52 In a complex and contradictory act of defiance, Ice Cube takes on this persona as both a revolutionary move and a farce—standing defiantly against the law and culture of hate while also laughing at the act of playing the part of America’s favorite villain. The complex chaos of Cube’s commentary is complemented by the musical production of the Bomb Squad. The production group famous for crafting the dissonant and sample-heavy sound of Public Enemy, the

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Bomb Squad not only gave AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted a more traditional east coast sound but also a more explicitly political atmosphere than gangsta rap had had up to that point. The Bomb Squad’s production style was famous for the overwhelming layering of samples: dozens of sound clips taken from music history, newscasts, and hip-hop history, their beats always feel as though they are on the verge of unraveling, seemingly glued together by aggression and force of will alone. Backing Public Enemy, their production style perfectly complemented Carlton “Chuck D” Ridenhour’s booming social critique. With their army fatigues, plastic Uzis, and calls for black peoples to retaliate against police brutality, Public Enemy’s music and image played as a counterpoint to the representations of violence in the growing west coast subgenre of gangsta rap. Chang documents the creation of the landmark group in a new concept for a rap act: founding member and Def Jam employee Bill Stephney wanted to make “every track political  .  .  . Statements, manifestoes, the whole nine.”53 Chuck D had his reservations about the difficulty of centering their performance on an explicit, focused political dissent, saying: “It was impossible to put that shit in your rhymes. It was like, you better rock the fucking crowd. You could throw in a line or two, like ‘Reagan is bullshit.’ Mutherfuckers be like, ‘Yeah, okay.’”54 A few short years later and Chuck D’s political statements and manifestoes, alongside the Bomb Squad’s unrelenting rebellious production and William “Flavor Flav” Drayton Jr.’s comic personality, was rocking crowds, campuses, and Billboard charts. And they were aware that this massive success made them public enemies. Like all rap performers, PE’s relationship to violence was complicated. Rather than tapping into America’s fear of the black male thug as gangsta rap did, however, PE inhabited the frightening challenge to white supremacy with the adoption of the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam as their spiritual and political leader. The group’s black nationalist ideology and performance of militancy extended and reconfigured the image of violent black masculinity in the American imagination: not the fear of a black sexual beast raping a white woman, but instead a fear of the organized black radical killing white men for the centuries of institutionalized rape of black women during and after slavery. As cultural critic Greg Tate describes their 1988 classic It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, “[I]t is a declaration of war on the federal government, and on that unholy trinity—black radio programmers, crack dealers, and rock critics.”55 This new black militancy was born of hiphop and was declaring war. Unlike their west coast contemporaries, N.W.A., Public Enemy’s declaration of war received less ambivalent support from the hip-hop community,

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though they were still forced to offer endless explanations for their representations of militarized resistance. In an interview with cultural critic Mark Dery, Chuck D explains the role of violence in the group’s call for a less violent America: Now, as far as us using plastic Uzis in our stage show, you gotta understand that there’s a certain way of how America approaches the black situation, and that’s with force. The system of white world supremacy is dominated by a white male mindset and structure. The only way to defeat this most of the time is to convince people [by] using the same methods. What the Uzis represent, as explained many times in interviews, is that the gun was used by Europeans to abduct black people out of their peaceful setting in Africa, dragging them around the world for capitalist exploitative purposes. Black people today are still controlled by weapons. In black communities, the police are looked upon as terrorists; that uniform is a part of a bigger structure. Historically, black people have looked at police as no different from the first people who put the slaves on ships and took them to America.56

Chuck D offers a historically minded explanation of the performance, one that black nationalists had to make before him on the use of force in the resistance to white supremacy. PE’s representations of violence were not new and were birthed from American white supremacy. Like their gangsta rap contemporaries and the black nationalist organizations that made Public Enemy possible, however, the group was guilty of other types of violence—misogyny, homophobia, anti-Semitism—that damaged their political force and reproduced dangerous performances of masculinity. Moving from an early champion to a disappointed skeptic, Tate writes of the group’s 1990 album Fear of a Black Planet: “Since PE show sound reasoning when they focus on racism as a tool of the U.S. power structure, they should be intelligent enough to realize that dehumanizing gays, women, and Jews isn’t going to set black people free.”57 Though certainly motivated by a political aim for justice rather than a deep individualistic nihilism, Public Enemy’s performance of masculinity had more in common with gangsta rappers than they were willing to admit. Though Biz Markie’s 1991 trial made the rebellious, sample-heavy production of PE’s Bomb Squad illegal, Dr. Dre’s 1992 post-N.W.A. solo work, The Chronic, produced the iconic sound of gangsta rap—what became known as “G-Funk.” And, as the name implies, the production style inspired more pleasure than rebellion. Wide, slow drum beats; fat, low-end bass lines; and the easy whine of spacy keyboards define the “G-Funk” sound and pair perfectly with the slow drawl of raps from Dr. Dre and his then

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young protégée Calvin “Snoop Doggy Dogg” Broadus Jr. If AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted made gangsta rap sound chaotic and aggressively defiant, The Chronic made it sound as easy to inhabit as a head nod. Drenched in Dre’s slow funk production, violence was harmonious, not a breaking point. And while Dr. Dre’s production defined the sound of G-Funk, the real star rapper of the album was Snoop Dogg, and his 1993 debut solo album, Doggystyle, is arguably the crowning achievement of G-Funk. But it was more than Dre’s flawlessly funky beats and Snoop’s astounding facility with language that made Doggystyle so popular and legendary. Quinn writes: “Months before Doggystyle’s release, Snoop had been charged with accessory to murder—an event that instigated a new wave of protests about gangsta rap that far exceeded the music’s earlier moral panics.”58 More than moral panics, Snoop’s legal troubles also supported $63 million in retail sales for Doggystyle.59 The authenticity of Snoop’s gangsta persona could not be separated from his success as a commercial artist. As Newsweek wrote of Snoop: “His album hits the top of the charts this week. Last week he was indicted for murder.”60

Two More Murders and the Aftermath Both inside and outside the hip-hop community, the fantasy of black criminality turns into a violent reality. The deaths of legendary rappers Tupac Shakur and Christopher “The Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace, in 1996 and 1997 respectively, marked a rupture in the industry. The familiar details of their tragic murders are less important than the material consequences of the representations of black criminality. Constructed feuds between the United States’ west and east coasts transformed the hip-hop community, and the coasts, into an arena of imagined gang warfare. Tupac and Biggie also became symbols of a rivalry that overshadowed their humanizing and politically charged (if highly personal) representations of the material struggles of poor youths of color in urban centers. Bogazianos describes the feud: “As the public icons of two powerful, black-owned record labels, B.I.G. and Tupac were instrumental in creating a public image of the rap industry as a business environment run like criminal cartels and street gangs.”61 The imagined rivalry achieved its most visceral reality in their deaths. Driving the production of popular rap music, the east coast–versus–west coast rivalry represented another fantasy of black criminality fueling America’s popular culture. In their murders, Tupac and Biggie were human sacrifices to the American white supremacist imagination. The musical responses to this violence were nothing new in hip-hop. From the works of Grandmaster Flash and KRS-One onward, there have

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always been rappers decrying violence in hip-hop. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, and other groups that collectively made up the Native Tongues Posse emphasized silly humor rather than nihilistic jokes, Afrocentric militancy rather than militarized gang violence. The mid-1990s were full of spiritual mystics across the three coasts who were more concerned with chakras than Glocks, such as the Fugees from New Jersey, Hieroglyphics from the Bay Area, and OutKast from Atlanta. And what became known as the “backpack” or “conscious” rap of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Tupac and Biggie’s deaths, however, seemed like a turning point. In their 1998 backpacker hip-hop anthem “Definition,” rap super-duo Black Star (comprised of MCs Dante “Mos Def” Smith and Talib Kweli) speak disparagingly of the violence that pervades rap music and leads to the deaths of hip-hop artists.62 Rather than speculating about who actually murdered Tupac and Biggie, Black Star instead suggest that it was the culture that led to their deaths.63 Every rapper, just like every black person, in America is in danger of being shot to fulfill prophesies about black criminality and suffering in the popular imagination. These sentiments, and even the murders, did little to stop the representational and material violence in hip-hop. Platinum-selling gangsta rappers throughout the 2000s constructed their images around having been shot. New York rapper Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson was shot nine times in 2000; his 2003 debut studio album Get Rich or Die Tryin’ has sold more than 11 million copies.64 LA rapper Jayceon “The Game” Taylor was shot five times in 2001;65 his 2005 debut studio album The Documentary sold more than 500,000 copies in its first week.66 Multi-platinum–selling Harlem rapper, and de facto leader of the Harlem rap group the Diplomats, Cameron “Cam’ron” Giles was shot three times in an attempted carjacking in 2005.67 New Orleans hip-hop artist, mogul, and superstar Dwayne “Lil’ Wayne” Carter accidentally shot himself in the chest at age 12;68 his 2008 album Tha Carter III sold more than 1 million copies in its first week.69 This list could go on and on. The consequences of these “authentic” representations of gangster life are real. Bogazianos deftly observes: While [Panamanian-American journalist and news analyst] Juan Williams has complained that “violent, oversexed gangstas” brag about “how many times they’ve been shot,” the issue of rap-related violence, it seems, lies less in rappers bragging about being shot than in the fact that so many rappers have been shot in the first place. Perhaps more to the point, though, is this: getting shot has become a part of the work of rap. In other words, lethal violence has become a central element in a multi-billion-dollar global entertainment industry.70

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This authenticity kills. And it is what America craves. Our popular culture demands injured, criminal, and, ultimately, deceased black bodies. Contemporary LA hip-hop superstar Kendrick Lamar engages with this precise pain, this precise danger. Not necessarily a gangsta rapper, Lamar raps of the madness and agony of life within the violent world that produced gangsta rap. Lamar’s highly anticipated 2012 major label debut, good kid, m.A.A.d city, tells the first-person, nonlinear story of a Compton teenager, Kendrick, finding himself caught in the world of his gang-ridden community and losing a friend to the violence in the process. Pieced together from Lamar’s raps and the acted sketches between songs, the basic narrative is as follows: Young Kendrick borrows his mother’s minivan to pick up his love interest, Sherane, and on his way there, her brother, a gangbanger, and some of his fellow gang members scare him off. Kendrick tells his friends, who are not gangsters but are petty criminals attempting to navigate the violent world of Los Angeles, and they decide to get some payback. Taking Kendrick’s mother’s car, they drive up to the gangbangers who sent Kendrick away and shoot at them. The gangsters return fire and kill one of Kendrick’s friends. The album ends with the confusion of how to retaliate, options ranging from another volley of violence to religious conversion. Kendrick, an aspiring rapper, disappears, and it is suggested that this album is his response. The triumph of good kid, m.A.A.d city is its representation of nonvillains within a world constructed by the American imagination. Kendrick, the good kid, is as much Compton’s human sacrifice as he is America’s.71 One half of the title track, “Good Kid” offers a clear view of the pressures under which Kendrick the character and the artist make their lives and produce their raps. The lyrics present a rather explicit critique of American culture beyond the choices of individuals—a “good kid”—or the direct environment in which individuals live—the “m.A.A.d city” of Compton—and artistically fill out the context of gangsta rap with police brutality, drug use, and the American acceptance of this violent lifestyle as naturally black and, thus, without need for change. The other half of the title track, “m.A.A.d city,” reflects on the consequences of such living conditions, introducing the song with a half-sung speculation that the entire city of Los Angeles is trying to kill him, and, if rival gangs would be willing to put aside their differences, that they would accomplish the job.72 Rapping as though he is out of breath, including performative cracks in his voice, Lamar expresses fear and exasperation in his rhymes throughout the song. He describes terrifying and terrified youths drowning in alcohol and lit aflame by drugs, murdering and stealing as if collecting spiritual dues for the low-income housing institutions.73 Lamar

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also offers his hopes that these Compton youths can sleep with dreams of a different and better life—though his tone suggests that this hope, though sincere, is perhaps in vain.74 While Lamar lovingly refers to Compton as his home throughout the album, and celebrates the people and possibilities of this place, he makes perfectly clear that surviving it is a difficult task, that it is the city that made him “m.A.A.d.”75 Around the country, gangsta rap is alive and well. Many genres and artists continue to represent the creativity and artistry to be drawn from gangsta rap (and our national thirst for these cultural productions): drill music from Chicago, notably Chief Keef; trap music from the south (particularly Atlanta), notably Gucci Mane and Waka Flocka Flame; and the current iterations of cocaine/Mafioso rap up and down the east coast, notably Rick Ross and Pusha T. That Lamar is seemingly the face of LA in our contemporary moment, however, represents a shift in gangsta rap’s image. The change obviously does not stem from a decline in gang presence in LA: the LAPD verified 491 gang-related homicides from 2010 to 2013.76 Instead, Lamar’s music may alert listeners to the lack of material change in the everyday lives of the black working poor of LA despite the explicit figure of the black gangsta constructed in and through gangsta rap and the many structural–cultural changes that have taken place over the past twenty years (since Biggie and Tupac’s murders). good kid, m.A.A.d city suggests that gangsta rap was not necessarily a revolutionary phenomenon in American popular culture—despite its apocalyptic tenor and representation in the mid-1990s—but another moment in the historical struggle to make sense of the criminality projected onto black bodies. We can hope that Lamar’s raps help change the way we talk about hip-hop and this history of American violence within our popular culture, but the responsibility of facing and changing the violence endemic to our national imagination, which is what we talk about when we talk about gangsta rap, really falls on the relations of artists, producers, critics, and consumers of hip-hop.

Notes 1.  Sampling is the creative practice of reusing a piece of recorded music to make a different song. 2.  Bogazianos, 57. 3. Rose, The Hip Hop Wars, 5. 4.  Quinn, 11. 5.  Ibid., 11–12. 6. Rose, The Hip Hop Wars, 5.

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 7. Ibid.  8. Ibid.  9. Quinn, 6. 10.  Samuels, 147–148. 11.  Ibid., 147. 12.  Hartman, 80. 13.  Rose, “Rap Music and the Demonization of Young Black Males,” 154. 14.  Bogazianos, 7. 15.  Bogazianos borrows the term “structure of feeling” from Raymond Williams and offers the following definition: “A structure of feeling, Williams wrote, is ‘a particular quality of social experience and relationship’ that reflects ‘meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt,’ which gives the ‘sense of a generation or of a period,’” ibid. 16.  Ibid., 9. 17.  Davis and Simon, 17. 18.  Ibid., 18. 19.  Chang, 68. 20.  Ibid., 316–317. 21.  Ibid., 101. 22.  Boogie Down Productions, “9mm Goes Bang.” 23.  Chang, 315. 24.  See Chang, Cross, and Quinn. 25.  Cross, 184. 26.  Ice-T, “6 in the Mornin’.” 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31.  Chang, 316. 32.  Perry, 127. 33.  hooks, 116. 34.  Ibid., 123. 35.  Chang, 323–324. 36.  Eazy-E, “Boyz-N-the-Hood.” 37. Ibid. 38.  N.W.A., “Fuck tha Police.” 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42.  Chang, 319. 43.  Ice-T, “6 in the Mornin’.” 44.  N.W.A., “Fuck tha Police.” 45.  Chang, 318. 46. Ibid.

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47.  Ibid., 327. 48. Ibid. 49.  Quinn, 82–83. 50.  Kelley, 130. 51. Ibid. 52.  Ice Cube, “The Nigga Ya Love to Hate.” 53.  Chang, 247. 54. Ibid. 55.  Tate, 125. 56.  Dery, 416–417. 57.  Tate, 125. 58.  Quinn, 142. 59.  Ibid., 162. 60.  Ibid., 155. 61.  Bogazianos, 6. 62.  Mos Def and Talib Kweli, “Definition.” 63. Ibid. 64.  Bogazianos, 7. 65.  David Drake, Edwin Ortiz, and Insanul Ahmed, “A History of Rappers Getting Shot and Surviving.” 66.  “The Game’s ‘Documentary’ Blasts Off at No. 1.” 67. Drake, Ortiz, and Ahmed, “A History of Rappers Getting Shot and Surviving.” 68. Ibid. 69.  “Lil Wayne Cracks 1 Million with ‘Tha Carter III.’” 70.  Bogazianos, 63. 71.  Kendrick Lamar, “m.A.A.d City.” 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid. 75.  Kendrick Lamar has offered several explanations of this acronym, which may also simply be understood as “mad” or “madness,” in interviews and within the lyrics of the album. In a 2012 interview with radio DJs the Los Angeles Leakers, Lamar gave one of the most widely understood meanings as “my angel’s on angel dust,” referring to his traumatic childhood experience of smoking marijuana he did not know was laced with phencyclidine, a recreational drug commonly known as “angel dust.” 76. “Gangs.”

Bibliography Bogazianos, Dimitri A. 5 Grams: Crack Cocaine, Rap Music, and the War on Drugs. New York: New York University Press, 2012. Boogie Down Productions. “9mm Goes Bang.” In Criminal Minded. Compact Disc. B-Boy Records. 1987.

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Chang, Jeff. Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005. Cross, Brian. It’s Not about a Salary: Rap, Race and Resistance in Los Angeles. New York: Verso Books, 1993. Davis, Stephen, and Peter Simon. Reggae Bloodlines: In Search of the Music and Culture of Jamaica. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1977. Dery, Mark. “Public Enemy: Confrontation.” In That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, ed. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal, 407–420. New York: Routledge, 2004. Drake, David, Edwin Ortiz, and Insanul Ahmed. “A History of Rappers Getting Shot and Surviving.” Complex (  January 2013). www.complex.com/ music/2013/01/a-history-of-rappers-getting-shot-and-surviving/. Eazy-E. “Boyz-N-the-Hood.” In “Boyz-N-the-Hood” single. Vinyl. Ruthless Records. 1987. “The Game’s ‘Documentary’ Blasts Off at No. 1.” Billboard ( January 2005). www.bill board.com/articles/news/64382/the-games-documentary-blasts-off-at-no-1. “Gangs.” Official Website of the Los Angeles Police Department. www.lapdonline.org/ get_informed/content_basic_view/1396. Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in NineteenthCentury America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. hooks, bell. “Gangsta Culture—Sexism and Misogyny: Who Will Take the Rap?” In Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, 115–123. New York: Routledge, 1994. Ice Cube. “The Nigga Ya Love to Hate.” In AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted. Compact Disc. Priority Records. 1990. Ice-T. “6 in the Mornin’.” In “Dog’n the Wax” single. Vinyl. Techno Hop Records. 1986. Kelley, Robin D. G. “Looking for the ‘Real’ Nigga: Social Scientists Construct the Ghetto.” In That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, ed. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal, 119–136. New York: Routledge, 2004. Lamar, Kendrick. “Kendrick Lamar Breaks Down the Acronym in ‘good kid, m.A.A.d city’ w/ the L.A. Leakers (Video).” Interviewed by DJ Sour Milk and Justin Credible. The Los Angeles Leakers (October 2012). http://losangelesleak ers.com/2012/10/kendrick-lamar-breaks-down-the-meaning-behind-good -kid-m-a-a-d-city-w-the-l-a-leakers-video/. Lamar, Kendrick. “m.A.A.d City.” In good kid, m.A.A.d city. Compact Disc. Top Dawg Entertainment. 2012. “Lil Wayne Cracks 1 Million with ‘Tha Carter III.’” Billboard ( June 2008). www.billboard .com/articles/news/1045048/lil-wayne-cracks-1-million-with-tha-carter-iii. Mos Def and Talib Kweli. “Definition.” In Black Star. Compact Disc. Rawkus Records. 1998. N.W.A., “Fuck tha Police.” In Straight Outta Compton. Compact Disc. Ruthless Records. 1988. Perry, Imani. Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics of Hip Hop. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

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Quinn, Eithne. Nuthin’ but a “G” Thang: The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Rose, Tricia. The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk about When We Talk about Hip Hop— and Why It Matters. New York: Basic Books, 2008. Rose, Tricia. “Rap Music and the Demonization of Young Black Males.” In Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art, ed. Thelma Goldman, 149–157. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994. Samuels, David. “The Rap on Rap: The ‘Black Music That Isn’t Either.” In That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, ed. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal, 147–154. New York: Routledge, 2004. Tate, Greg. “The Devil Made’Em Do It: Public Enemy.” In Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America, 120–127. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“Violent Lives”: The Representation of Violence in American Comics Jesús Jiménez-Varea and Antonio Pineda

With their immediate origins in Europe, comics are nevertheless considered one of the most distinctive forms of American culture,1 having served as vehicles for all kinds of popular narratives, very often including substantial doses of violence. In that sense, an important part of the content of comics belongs to a lineage that dates back to the beginning of European settlement in the territories of North America, a period when English literary fashions mixed with new and strange surroundings to inspire tales populated by exotic beasts, witches, pirates, and, most fascinating of all, the American natives, in a domain where fact and fable mingled without definite borders. Narratives of captivity at the hands of the ferocious Indians were the “the first coherent myth-literature developed in America for American audiences. . . . [T]hey completely dominate the list of frontier narratives published in America between 1680 and 1716.”2 In these chronicles, supposedly authored by survivors, the clash of cultures was added to moral abuses and physical vexations to constitute veritable parables of the martyrdom and suffering to which Christian prisoners were submitted by the impious savages. The truculent tone of these tales provided the foundation for later literary genres, such as the gothic tale in its American form, and, above all, the frontier–Indian novel, which introduced the figure of the frontiersman, whose skills enabled him to move competently in the wilderness, and frequently deliver brutal revenge against the natives, turning the traditional

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captivity stories into the victimizing preliminaries for a main narrative of violent retributions. Perhaps the best example of this category is Robert Montgomery Bird’s novel Nick of the Woods, which has been described as “one of the first tales of heroic vigilantism in American literature,”3 and his protagonist, the providentially named Nathan Slaughter, as a “Batman in buckskins,”4 placing it as a direct ancestor of the quintessential genre of American comic books: the superhero. The legacy of Nick of the Woods can be seen in the dime-novel Western heroes of such influential authors as Joseph Holt Ingraham, who transformed the landscape of American juvenile literature in the mid-nineteenth century. Also in the dime novels, this vigilante archetype evolved into the avenger–detective figure, best exemplified by the character Nick Carter, a de facto mentally, ethically, and physically superhuman justice maker whose huge popularity announced the coming of a plethora of pulp-magazine heroes within a broad range delimited by the paradigmatic cases of Doc Savage and The Shadow. The latter, along with other examples such as the gruesome Spider, represent crime-fighters who, in a rather sadistic way, deliver their private brand of justice with their own blazing guns and with little regard for the legal system to irredeemable delinquents borrowed from the field of the weirdmenace tales. With the addition of a few science-fictional and melodramatic ingredients, the pulp avengers are the direct progenitors of the superheroes that throng comic books, a genre that made a booming industry out of a precarious initiative to recycle newspaper strips, and ultimately took off thanks to the unprecedented success of Jerry Siegel’s and Joe Shuster’s creation of the Superman character, who has been described as “the supernaturally endowed hero who was judge, jury, and executioner, the crimefighting god disguised, omnipotent, triumphant.”5 In this regard, years before Richard Slotkin started his reflection on “regeneration through violence,”6 folklorist Gershon Legman related superheroes to that essential phenomenon of American culture: Superman glorifies the “right” of the individual to take law into his own hands . . . a philosophy of “hooded justice” . . . Americans . . . have killed off the original population of the country in which they live . . . a national bad conscience had to be stilled by inventing the type-myth of the “bad Injun” . . . in striking the first and only blow we were acting simply in self-defense.7

Legman’s book Love and Death is a critique of American permissiveness toward portrayals of violent acts in the media, which stands in stark contrast to the systematic censorship of sexual contents. As expressed in the

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quote above, Legman attributed this attitude to an attempt to ease collective remorse about the slaughter of American natives through narratives, such as the adventures of Superman, that legitimize the exercise of private violent justice against evil wrongdoers. Thus, the superhero genre is an ideal way to explore and catalogue the representation of violence in American comics, both because it is central to the comic book industry and because it is based on the violent resolution of conflicts, most often in the form of aggressive payback for equally brutal transgressions of law and/ or morality. Although there have been—and still are—many other comic genres, such as crime and horror, in which violence is widespread, superhero narratives have demonstrated an enduring capacity to both draw upon and integrate these other genres into the figure of the superhero.

Violence in American Comics The field of comic books provides quite interesting examples that fit the topic of violence in American popular culture. Chronologically, the first genre—or maybe we should call it a macro-genre—in American comics was humor, as comical cartoons evolved into sequential gags in the Sunday supplements of the newspapers in the late nineteenth century. This type of humor derived from vaudeville, but cartoonists elevated the pratfalls, slaps, and other resources of physical comedy to hyperbolic levels of violence that only drawings could make possible. Thus, in Bringing Up Father (George McManus, 1913), every time Jiggs frustrates his wife’s ambition to interact with high society, Maggie punishes him with a veritable broadside of kitchenware. Likewise, in the first successful daily strip, Mutt and Jeff (Bud Fisher, 1908), the former punches the latter with a brick for ruining his plans to get rich; later, the lyrical series Krazy Kat (George Herriman, 1913) would offer endless gags around this same act of violence, erroneously interpreted by the eponymous character as an expression of love from his aggressor, Ignatz the mouse. Whether in newspaper comics or comic books, humor adopted many forms and strategies, from the animated cartoon–inspired funny animals to the parodies of Mad, with violence as a lingua franca, albeit with a comical intention. Approaches to violence changed as the American comics of the 1920s experienced “the emergence of the adventure strip . . . [a] new breed of comic, one that added the element of physical danger to storytelling.”8 Although the turn was gestated in such series as Little Orphan Annie (Harold Gray, 1924), the macro-genre of adventure ultimately entered the realm of comic strips in January 1929 with the series Tarzan (Hal Foster) and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century AD (Philip Nowlan and Dick Calkins),

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both of which started on January 7, 1929. Tarzan was a direct adaptation from Edgar Rice Burroughs’s work, whereas Buck Rogers was clearly derivative of this same author’s science-fiction saga starring John Carter of Mars. Revealingly, in his review of the persistence of “regeneration through violence” in American culture, Slotkin considers “Burroughs’ work . . . the best place to see how the new pulp genres used the mythic traditions of the dime novel and red-blooded fiction in creating a new kind of mythic space for twentieth-century formula fiction”; and his basic theme was “the White man’s adventures in the wilderness and his struggle to master savage nature and savage men—the theme of the Myth of the Frontier.”9 It is interesting that Slotkin highlights the importance of such contents in Burroughs’s narratives, because these constitute the genetic core of adventure comic strips, which in turn are at the roots of the superhero genre. During this period, some comic strips that had been running for years incorporated action heroes that overshadowed older characters to the point of reorienting their respective series and becoming their protagonists. One of them was Popeye, who debuted in E. C. Segar’s Thimble Theatre (1919) in January 1929. Since his inception in Thimble Theatre, many story arcs in the series built toward climactic slugfests against all kinds of hulking monsters, both human and inhuman, and even against a hundred fighters at the same time. According to Robert C. Harvey, readerly enjoyment of these battles “derives from two aspects of the strip: the nature of the bad guys and the nature of the avenging hero. Elementary: the bad guys deserve what they get. They are invariably self-seeking and heartless. Brutal and inhuman, their very excesses are exaggerated to the point of comic caricature.”10 One cartoonist who applied this principle to less comical effect was Chester Gould, the creator of Dick Tracy (1931). He conceived the hook-nosed detective as the answer to the crime wave of the Prohibition Age, “a symbol of law and order who could ‘dish it out’ to the underworld exactly as they dished it out—only better. An individual who could toss the hot iron back at them along with a smack on the jaw thrown in for good measure.”11 The early adventure strips were so popular with readers that they inspired a veritable boom in the field. Whether it was jungle action (The Phantom), medieval adventures (Prince Valiant), Western (Red Ryder), space opera (Flash Gordon), or detection tales (Secret Agent X-9), the one thing these comics all had in common was violence: from the daring deeds of the heroes to the perverse machinations of the villains to the tortures experienced by the damsels in distress. Nevertheless, rarely did any of the other strips approach the heights of graphic luridness that Dick Tracy had reached, because newspaper syndicates “gradually adopted a code of

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self-censorship.”12 As for the recently born industry of comic books, it borrowed heavily from the pulp-inspired adventure strips but lacked any regulation of its contents. For that reason, Paul Lopes observed that “[t] he sexuality, violence, and gore of pulps . . . never made it into the more respectable comic strip; that translation of the pulp tradition into comic art was left to the comic book.”13 The first great success in comic books was Superman, which inspired a legion of outlandishly costumed crime-fighters whom we will discuss in detail later this chapter. Superheroes served as the main engine of the industry till the end of World War II, when readers began to prefer other genres, especially the gun-oriented ones such as the traditional Western and true crime. “True” accounts of crimes had already appeared in both comic strip form (War on Crime) and in comic books (Crime Does Not Pay), but they boomed in the late 1940s. They dedicated most of their space to explicit representations of brutal crimes and only in the last few panels provided equally violent retribution to the offenders. Freed from any claims of authenticity, the crime genre flourished in comics around 1948 but was quickly replaced by the even more graphic genre of horror comics. The recrudescence of the grand-guignolesque ingredients that already existed in crime comics led to the first apotheosis of the horror genre in comic books of the early 1950s, epitomized by the likes of EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt. In a call for plots in a 1954 issue of Writer’s Digest, EC publisher, William M. Gaines, summed up their preferences: “We tolerate vampires and werewolves . . . We love walking corpse stories. We’ll accept an occasional zombie or mummy. And we relish the contes cruels story . . . Virtue doesn’t always have to triumph.”14 Neither their tongue-in-cheek treatment of dismemberments, eviscerations, and rotten living dead, nor the sense of poetic justice in the O. Henry endings of their stories, could prevent the development of a massive wave of moral panic that resulted in the eradication of such content from comic books for several decades. In fact, Dr. Fredric Wertham’s controversial book The Seduction of the Innocent (1954) regarded comics as a direct cause of delinquency and aggressive tendencies among young people. As a consequence, the comic book industry adopted a self-regulation code that specifically proscribed “[s]cenes of excessive violence  .  .  . [s]cenes of brutal torture, excessive and unnecessary knife and gun play, physical agony, gory and gruesome crime . . . All scenes of horror, excessive bloodshed, gory or gruesome crimes, depravity, lust, sadism, masochism.”15 But horror comics, along with their characteristic doses of violence and gore, continued their existence in the black-and-white pages of magazines such as James Warren’s Creepy (1964), Eerie (1966) or Vampirella (1969), whose

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different publishing format liberated them from the self-regulation system that the comic book industry had imposed upon itself. Also free from the censorship of mainstream comic books, the underground comix of the 1960s made frequent and extreme use of violence in their struggle to criticize the status quo and the conventions of the American way of life. Successive relaxations of the Comics Code since the 1970s, culminating in its virtual disappearance in recent years, have allowed for a growing incidence of criminal and horrific elements in comic books, especially in their most violent varieties. Crime, noir, and hard-boiled continue to be important generic lines within the comic book field, with their evolution characterized by the ever growing occurrence of violence, as best exemplified by Frank Miller’s highly popular Sin City, which portrays a perpetually dark universe in which postmodern descendants of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer deliver vicious, ultraviolent revenge against depraved criminals and corrupt politicians. Sin City transplants to a fictional contemporary setting the most violent aspects of the sword-and-sorcery subgenre that had emerged in comic books in the 1970s, led by Marvel Comics’ version of pulp writer Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian. This paradigmatic antihero progressed in an almost lawless world before recorded history thanks, in part, to his cunning, but, above all, to his sheer brutality: Pictures of a muscle-bound, sword-wielding warrior, with a nearly naked woman at his feet, standing on top of a mountain made up of the corpses of his fallen enemies appealed to individualistic fantasies of aggression and conquest. Probably the ultimate fantasy of committing acts of violence in the nearly complete absence of social rules drives the phenomenal success of the zombie subgenre, which has proved remarkably persistent. Robert Kirkman’s comic book series The Walking Dead (2004) represents a return to the violent justice of the Wild West, where the most basic rule of coexistence between human survivors is “You kill. You die.” In the same generic vein of survival adventure in a post-apocalyptic world where a plague turns humans into monsters—not zombies in this case, but absolute degenerates: cannibals, rapists, torturers—Garth Ennis’s Crossed (2008) proposes a devastating narrative that has no place for heroics and in which violence—both physical and psychological—reaches unprecedented levels of explicitness and imaginative wickedness. It is the absence of any sense of justice that leaves the reader of Crossed and recent similar narratives devoid of a moral reference point, since it breaks with the almost fundamental equation of violence and retribution—effected either by providence, or most often by human agents—so dear to American comics and—we dare say—popular culture in general. Crossed achieves this through its overtly pessimistic tone

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and the lack of any figure we can identify as positively heroic, and therefore endowed with the authority to exert justice. Also, whereas traditional zombies are dangerous but mindless menaces, the infected in Crossed are genuinely evil, and readers are moved to suspect that, rather than spawning such malice, the disease simply releases the repressed instincts lurking within all human beings.

Superhero Comics and Violence Among the many genres found in the comics medium, superheroes stand out as a quintessentially American innovation. In their treatise on comics, Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith clearly state that “[t]he superhero is recognized as a particularly American creation and is often seen as an embodiment of American ideology.”16 In this context, violence is a characteristic of the superhero figure17 as well as a key narrative framework and a basic tenet of the genre. After all, the superhero mythos relies on a very simple idea: super-powered individuals who fight criminals or other public menaces by resorting to violence. As British critic Roz Kaveney has argued: “The struggle between good and evil tends, of course, to take the form of violent struggle, because that is the way that, since the beginning, comics have chosen to stylize moral contention.”18 Superhero violence has also been symbolically interpreted in relation to American culture. Kristine Kathryn Rusch, for example, has argued that Batman, “like most iconic American heroes,” is a violent character, and his often violent way of doing things mirrors a trait of American culture: “Our nation was born in war. We slaughtered our way across this continent, conquering natives as we went. We created frontier justice—which was essentially the rule of the strongest.”19 Rusch insists on the association between violence and justice in American culture, and directly inscribes the superhero genre within the lineage of narratives generated by this phenomenon dating back to the formative years of the nation. Following this interpretation, violence in the superhero genre could be seen as a reflection of certain societal traditions, hence highlighting the potential of popular culture to reflect the world that surrounds it. Specifically, the kind of violence depicted in superhero comics may be classified as severe violence, which is designated by features such as threats, physical coercion, crimes against property, or murder.20 In this regard, the genre is mostly based on the idea that threats—which more often than not imply aggressive acts—should be appropriately handled through violence: As the Fantastic Four’s The Thing claims in his well-known battle cry, “It’s clobberin’ time!” In other words, superhero comics rely on a “formulaic

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narrative of the status quo where the hero is never proactive, but as a rule only reacts to the threat posed by the villain, thus justifying his use of extralegal violence as means of defense.”21 Hence the opening scenes of a standard superhero comic typically depict a villain threatening people or property, or musing about world-conquering; consequently the superhero intervenes to restore order. Aside from the problem-solving quality that violence acquires in the genre, aggressive behavior is also instrumental in order to characterize the superhero’s enemies, as far as it enhances the perceived threats fought by champions of justice. For instance, Gustavo Adrián Ferrari and Verónica Toyos Grinschpun have comparatively analyzed an early Thor story, “The Mighty Thor vs. The Executioner” (September 1962), and a left-wing Argentinian comic, Vida del Che, and point out that the story featuring the Nordic-god-turned-superhero presents an image of revolutionary activity defined by unbound fratricidal violence, among other elements.22 By depicting Thor’s enemies as ruthless and brutal, Thor’s own violent acts are justified, thus indicating a basic tenet of the genre: the use of retaliatory force against damaging, intolerable evil. Brutality not only works as an ingredient of sociopolitical menaces: The psychopathic violence of evildoers such as the Joker, Sabretooth, or Nazi leader Red Skull is a feature that makes them frightening characters. Comic book violence, in other words, is a trait that helps comic creators to delineate the menacing dimensions of villains, as well as a rationale for the activities of costumed heroes. In this regard, it should be noted that characters such as Spider-Man and Batman started their careers after experiencing violent crime. One interesting feature of the role played by violence in the superhero genre is the typological variety of acts and situations. To begin with, some superhero comics depict a fantastical violence, as in the work of Jack Kirby, an author whose unparalleled effects on the genre were conveyed through a bombastic style and larger-than-life stories populated with acrobatic superheroes, alien worlds, and cosmic menaces. However, the result of violent acts in Kirby’s stories is often innocuous: For instance, there is neither gore nor visible physical suffering in the depiction of an apocalyptic end of the world in The Mighty Thor #127 (April 1966). This approach contrasts with the realistic approach to violence that became a trademark of Frank Miller, another influential author whose stories are much more explicit about the effects of violence in sordid urban contexts. For example, Daredevil #232 ( July 1986), written by Miller, shows a massacre in Nicaragua, a man repeatedly beaten in the face with a revolver, and the devastating effects of the attack of a superhuman soldier on the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood in New York City.

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On the other hand, the violent means used by heroes to stop crime and preserve the social system are also diverse, ranging from Spider-Man’s barehand punches to Iron Man’s high-tech weaponry to the Hulk’s devastating, boundless strength. In this regard, it is noteworthy that superhero comics are filled with weapons of different sorts—Green Lantern’s ring, Thor’s hammer, Hawkeye’s arrows, Wolverine’s claws, Hawkman’s mace, Ka-Zar’s knife—though it should be kept in mind that firearm violence in particular has been a traditional device of villains such as Crime-Master or Scourge. Most iconic superheroes, from Superman to Batman to Spider-Man, do not use firearms, and what is more, there is an enduring critical view in the genre toward this kind of weapon. This attitude was adopted early in the evolution of superheroes: The first adventures of Batman would depict him shooting and machine-gunning criminals—and generally dispatching them in lethal ways—but soon the editors at DC “decided that it was a mistake to have a gun-toting Batman, since Batman’s parents were killed by a criminal with a handgun.”23 Another iconic hero, Captain America, has also faced the gun issue: After having shot a criminal who was firing into a crowd, the patriotic hero profoundly regrets having done so and states that he still believes killing is morally wrong in Captain America #323 (November 1986, 22). More recently, progressive writer Ann Nocenti approached the firearm issue in the Batman/Catwoman: Trail of the Gun two-part special (August and September 2004), showing the devastating effects of firearm violence and advocating gun control. In addition to the types of violence used by both villains and heroes, the sources of violence also vary widely in the superhero genre. Some heroes, such as Nick Fury, embody governmental–political violence, since the aim of his S.H.I.E.L.D. organization—the name itself is war-related—is to fight global terrorist menaces like the neo-Nazi organization Hydra. In this context, it is worth pointing out that many heroes and superheroes have a military background, and have taken part in violent conflicts and wars. Marvel Comics’ catalogue, for instance, is full of soldiers: Captain America, Colonel Nick Fury, Wolverine, Moon Knight, John Steele, James Rhodes, and Bucky Barnes, just to name a few. In other cases, the use of physical force as a response comes from characters who seek some kind of personal revenge, like the Batman, who started his war on crime after his parents were murdered by a thief. Retaliatory force is the drive behind other crime-fighters, as with morally righteous vigilantes such as Mr. A or The Question. As far as villains are concerned, the causes of violent behavior are also quite diverse, ranging from the Joker’s pure madness to Baron Strucker’s world-domination schemes to Nuke’s bellicose jingoism. The desire to commit mass murder also drives supervillains, as was shown in

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a 2009 Fantastic Four storyline featuring a genocidal killer who systematically exterminates whole populations. In other cases, violent behavior is a consequence of criminal acts such as theft, as with the first battles between Spider-Man and villains such as The Vulture or Sandman (The Amazing Spider-Man #2 and 4, May and September 1963). Finally, personal hate and revenge are the driving forces behind the acts of aggression performed by supercriminals such as the Green Goblin. With regard to the degree of violence displayed, there is a gradation of aggressive acts performed by both superheroes and supervillains. On the one hand, there are tame supermen and vigilantes who are not supposed to kill, and their response to evil is decidedly much less savage than the acts committed by wrongdoers. As a matter of fact, from the 1950s to the 1970s, the representation of violence in superhero comic books was constrained by the Comics Code. For example, Captain America would routinely fight genocidal menaces such as the Red Skull without equaling the cruelty of his enemies. Hence, “the prohibition of guns and firearms, and the rehabilitation or punishment of the villain rather than his destruction” was included among the genre’s rules.24 These rules fit what we could call the “soft” approach to violence in the genre, embodied by characters such as Spider-Man, Batman, or Daredevil. These heroes take the law into their own hands, but they draw a line and do not kill. In fact, these three characters are among the ones included by Jeph Loeb and Tom Morris in the category of self-restrained superheroes: “The superheroes give us examples of good people who are able to use force when it’s necessary, even sometimes taking violent actions, within limits, to defeat and subdue otherwise unstoppable evil, but . . . are careful to draw a line they will not cross.”25 On the other hand, superhero universes also give us examples of darker, harsher “heroic” characters whose moral lines are much more blurred. These “heroes” use the kinds of violent responses that have traditionally characterized “villains,” thereby exemplifying a “hard” approach to violence in the genre. One of the most extreme violent solutions to a perceived threat is performed by a central character in writer Alan Moore’s and artist Dave Gibbons’s renowned series Watchmen: Crime fighter Ozymandias resorts to genocidal measures to stop an impending nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. The degrees of violence represented when dealing with dark heroes also provide some interesting insights into the psychology of certain characters and approaches to the genre: The Spectre shows how the punishment of crime may be accompanied by sadistic overtones, whereas the popular Wolverine (from the X-Men) was originally a “homicidal maniac,” in the words of artist John Byrne.26

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In this regard, it is noticeable that the depiction of violence in the genre has evolved over time. As Mervi Miettinen points out, “the Golden and Silver Age superhero comics often portrayed violence as a sort of play, a predetermined performance with very little visible effects.”27 For instance, in the 1960s the representation of superpowered fights seemed to have almost innocuous effects. The event that turned Spider-Man into a crimefighter, the murder of his uncle Ben, was not even shown in the seminal “Spider-Man” story (Amazing Fantasy #15, August 1962). And no matter how cataclysmic the clash between Good and Evil would be, comics from the Silver Age (a period in comic book history running from 1956 to the late 1960s/early 1970s) used to get away with the undesirable consequences of violence. It was not until the 1980s that the Silver Age tradition of a muted, innocent, and fantastical violence gave way to the full emergence of aggressive, nihilistic, and realistic heroes.28 In this regard, the comic book series Miracleman epitomizes how much further the genre could go in taking a realistic approach to the impact of violence. Issues 14 and 15 of the series (April and November 1988) show what would happen were a cruel and amoral psychopathic übermensch, endowed with Superman-like powers, freed from human inhibitions. The result is a nightmarish scenario in which the sadistic Kid Miracleman devastates London and performs a wide array of acts of extremely gory violence before he is killed by other superhuman beings.

Violence and the Road to Grim’n’Gritty The trend that led the superhero genre towards a more explicit depiction of violence had to do with two intertwined factors: the popularization of hardcore vigilantes and the effects of authors such as Moore and Frank Miller on the genre. As we pointed out in our historical introduction, superheroes are related to the phenomenon of vigilantes, which are deeply rooted in American popular culture. In the realm of comic books, some superheroes may be officially sanctioned by governments as crime fighters, such as the Avengers. However, other heroes have had difficult relationships with public law enforcement, as in the case of the early Spider-Man, who was chased by the police for years. In this context, vigilante heroes add another type of violence to the genre: illegitimate violence, which contrasts with the state-sanctioned violence performed by patriotic-themed characters such as The Shield (the first comic book hero to be dressed with the American flag). Vigilante justice has been regarded as “the genre’s core principle.”29 In fact, many characters are actually empowered private individuals who

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decide that they can act as judges and juries. This concept is depicted in its purest form through one of the best-known comic book vigilantes: The Punisher, an ex-marine who has carried on a merciless one-man war on crime since mobsters murdered his family. Aside from embodying the privatization of violence, The Punisher represents an extreme response to crime and a “hard” approach to vigilante violence, insofar as he kills criminals without remorse. Not by coincidence, it has been pointed out that the character’s violent acts are depicted graphically, to the extent that there is “an almost pornographic aspect to many Punisher stories.”30 Thus, vigilantism as represented in comics is also interesting because it provides us with some radical forms of violence: Although the potential consequences of the actions performed by extremely super-powered beings such as Superman or Thor could be devastating, the darkest and most brutal examples of physical attacks are usually found in the adventures of urban vigilantes.31 The “hard” approach to comic book vigilante violence was boosted by the influential and highly acclaimed Watchmen, a rationalist critique and demythification of the superhero archetype, as well as an anti-Reagan political manifesto. Among its vast, rich implications, this work depicts an extreme form of vigilantism incarnated in Rorschach, a character modeled after Steve Ditko’s trenchcoat crime fighters The Question and Mr. A, who in turn directly borrow from Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism.32 Thus the rationale behind Rorschach’s extreme violence relies on a Rand-inspired moral philosophy infusing the character with a black-andwhite worldview. Consequently, the hero is understood as a moral absolute when facing evil, and acts accordingly: Throughout the tale, Rorschach burns alive a child murderer, kills a rapist, and routinely uses torture to get information from the underworld. After he is arrested and imprisoned, Rorschach murders several inmates, one of them a man who tries to kill him, leading Rorschach to burn the man with hot cooking oil. Additionally, violence is rife in Rorschach’s background: His mother was murdered by being forced to ingest cleaning fluid, and some flashback scenes show Rorschach as an abused child and prey of street bullies—in fact, he leaves partially blind one of the youngsters who insult him. Later, Rorschach decides to become a crime fighter after reading about the rape, torture, and murder of Kitty Genovese—a horrific prelude to the gruesome crime that transforms him into an extreme, merciless vigilante: the abduction, killing, and butchering of a little girl. Violence is also present in Rorschach’s worldview. After masked adventurer The Comedian is murdered, Rorschach reflects on the drives and nature of costumed heroes: “Violent lives . . . [s]ome animal urge to fight

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and struggle, making us what we are?” (Watchmen, Chapter II, 26). As a matter of fact, through Rorschach, Moore establishes a parallelism between vigilante superheroes and serial killers, insofar as they share such features as a double identity, a distinctive alias, abnormal psychology, or a peculiar modus operandi, to name just a few. Specifically, Rorschach was partly inspired by American serial killer David Berkowitz (aka “Son of Sam”). As Moore himself has stated, the influences were Steve Ditko’s Mr. A and Son of Sam. Mr. A was this marvelous Ayn Randian character who was utterly merciless with any form of evil and was unable to see any shades of grey in terms of morality. . . . I put this character into a physically unpleasant body and combined it with the sort of mad, crack poetry of the Son of Sam notes talking about the cracks in the sidewalk and the blood in the cracks and the ants that fed upon the blood.33

Besides Rorschach’s deeds, Watchmen is saturated by violence, from the killing of several main characters to street unrest to the murder of millions of New Yorkers. Doctor Manhattan (the only superhuman being in the strip) disintegrates Rorschach at the end of the series, The Comedian shoots a pregnant woman, and the reader is told that masked adventurers Dollar Bill and The Silhouette have been murdered. Furthermore, the approach to violence in Watchmen has political and philosophical implications: as Tony Spanakos has argued, characters such as Rorschach and Ozymandias represent different brands of illegitimate violence not sanctioned by the state, to the extent that superheroes pose “the threat of violence”; additionally, “the encounter between the masked and the unmasked does not bring risk and violence simply to the latter, but to the former as well.”34 Consequently, Watchmen may be understood not only as a step forward in the depiction of radical vigilante violence, but also as a reflection on the political implications of the acts carried out by private justice enforcers. The popularity of Rorschach and Watchmen led to a radical shift in the representation of violence in the superhero genre. So much so, that the decade after the original publication of Watchmen came to be known as the “grim’n’gritty” age of comic books. Another renowned comics author that was instrumental in the birth of this grim’n’gritty age was Frank Miller. In particular, his much-praised revision of the Batman mythos The Dark Knight Returns (hereafter TDKR) has been considered “responsible for a host of ‘serious’ imitators who took from the book only violence and ‘adult’ themes, resulting in a lot of pretentious nonsense, comics whose main characters were grim figures in trench coats in the rain reciting monologues to themselves and quoting Nietzsche.”35 Even though TDKR lacks

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the critical edge of Watchmen—Miller’s work is actually a paean to the figure of the libertarian vigilante—both works are filled with acts of violence. For instance, the series depicts “an ultraviolent street gang called The Mutants,”36 and despite not reaching Rorschach’s extreme levels of violence, Batman hurts and wounds criminals. He is also stabbed by his archenemy, the Joker—who, by the way, is shown as a hideous mass murderer and child-killer. Similarly, both works depict state-sponsored violence: Watchmen’s Dr. Manhattan helps the U.S. government win the Vietnam War and terrorizes the Vietnamese, and TDKR features Superman as an undercover government operative who destroys planes, tanks, and ships on the battlefield. Aside from groundbreaking works such as Watchmen and TDKR, the grim’n’gritty era was also influenced by—and/or resulted in—the huge popularity of The Punisher,37 whose rise has been seen as an example of the new sensibility.38 Thus it should not come as a surprise that the grim’n’gritty approach to superhero comics spawned a wave of dark, violent heroes who bordered on the psychopathic. In 1989, an article in The Comics Journal stated: Clearly, maniacs are popular. And it seems the more vicious they are, the more psychotic their behavior, the stronger their grip on the public. . . . This popular predilection for homicidal heroes has, of course, not gone unnoticed by the editorial boards of the major comics publishers.  .  . . Clearly, the public was ready, and asking, for more. Batman was quietly divorced from his eternally pubescent hanger-on and given a crash course in ruthlessness.39

One feature of this age of aggressive “heroes” is the renewed popularity enjoyed by antiheroes such as the aforementioned Wolverine, whose solo debut, along with his characteristic motto—“I’m the best there is at what I do, but what I do best isn’t very nice”—was coauthored by Miller himself (Wolverine limited series, 1982). Thirteen months after the end of Watchmen, already in the midst of the grim’n’gritty boom, Marvel released the first issue (November 1988) of a regular series devoted to the clawed mutant, with a cover that showed him standing over a pile of massacred bodies. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that Wolverine’s popularity has proven perennial—the character has starred or costarred in dozens of regular series, limited series, one-shots, graphic novels, and even prose novels—unlike that of most of the rampaging homicidal characters who proliferated during those particularly violent years of superhero comics. As for rival company DC, perhaps its most popular contribution to this

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new generation of characters was Lobo, an extraterrestrial mercenary who debuted in the early 1980s (Omega Men #3, June 1983) and became a cosmic parody of Wolverine—and to some point his whole lineage of vicious antiheroes. As strong as Superman and fond of guns and knives, Lobo’s murderous exploits through its many series, one-shots, and gueststar appearances during the 1990s and early 2000s included the decapitation of Santa Claus himself (The Lobo Paramilitary Christmas Special, December 1991). In addition to excessively violent superheroes, another feature of the grim’n’gritty trend was the emergence of more implacable counterparts to classical superheroes. Thus in 1986 the American government assigned the identity and costume of Captain America to John Walker (Captain America vol. 1, #322, November 1986), who had previously appeared as the Super-Patriot to represent a more jingoistic aspect of patriotism. Walker served as Captain America for more than twenty issues, in the course of which he even beat supervillain Professor Power to death (Captain America vol. 1, #338, February 1988). When Steve Rogers, the genuine Captain America, regained his title, Walker became the U.S. Agent, a literally and metaphorically darker version of the so-called Sentinel of Liberty (Captain America vol. 1, #354, June 1989). Not even the “friendly neighborhood” Spider-Man was free from this phenomenon, as several dark doppelgangers of his debuted: The most popular of them all was Venom, a symbiotic creature made up of a human being and a superpowered extraterrestrial life form (The Amazing Spider-Man #299, April 1988); in turn, Venom spawned the supervillain Carnage, another symbiotic entity whose human host is a serial killer (The Amazing Spider-Man #361, April 1992). Finally, the grim’n’gritty age is characterized by a rise in levels of violence, in a context where the moral distinctions between heroes and villains tend to blur. This turn was acknowledged by none other than Alan Moore in a 1993 interview about comics, in which he addressed the contemporary “attitude towards violence. In 1963, not even the villains killed. They certainly didn’t break people’s backs and cripple like Jim Valentino’s Shadowhawk does regularly. Things have changed. A character like Shadowhawk would have been the foulest villain of all in the 1963 comics that we are talking about—characters like Spawn—all of these characters.”40 Both Shadowhawk and Spawn were part of the new generation of ultraviolent antiheroes published by the then brand new independent comics company Image. In this context, the evolution of the approach to firearms in the genre stands out as a revealing element. As mentioned above, superheroes traditionally rejected guns; however, the new grim “heroes” of the 1990s seemed to show less scruples about the use of firepower. For

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instance, the covers of Image’s books used to feature superheroes with high-caliber guns in their hands, the cover of Codename: Strykeforce #1 ( January 1994) being just one example among many others. Marvel’s War Machine (introduced in Iron Man #282, July 1992) is also interesting in this regard, since the massive machine-guns added to his armor were not present in the original design of his template, Iron Man. Although some comics from the post-Watchmen era depict a gory violence that would have been unthinkable in the 1960s—see for instance the 1994 Violator limited series—the 1990s grim superhero comics were a mere prelude to the way writers like Garth Ennis approached classical Marvel characters such as The Punisher and Nick Fury in the 2000s. It is not by coincidence that some of these strips were published in the MAX Comics imprint, where the reader would find “[s]ome harsh language, intense violence, perhaps even some partial nudity,” as Marvel Comics’ marketing communications manager Bill Rosemann announced.41 Being one of the strongest—and most talented—proponents of violent content in comics during the last two decades, Ennis’s eight-year run as the main writer of The Punisher titles demonstrated that even this symbol of 1980s and 1990s grimness could be amped up. For instance, in the first pages of The Punisher: War Zone #1 (March 1992)—still under the Comics Code—the vigilante executes a criminal, but no details pertaining to the violent effects of the shooting are shown. In contrast, the first issue in the Punisher series under the MAX imprint devotes several panels to the machine-gunning of over forty people by the eponymous character, whose high-caliber bullets pierce and blow up human bodies. The conclusion to that same story arc culminates with a bloody duel between the Punisher and a mafia enforcer, who mercilessly hit, stab, and break each others’ bones until finally the crime-fighter throws his enemy out of a window, impales him on pointed railings, and still has to shoot him point-blank in the face; a close-up panel shows the remains of the hood’s head, his body still standing (The Punisher vol. 6, #1–6, 2001–2002). Nick Fury—a veteran of World War II recycled into a James Bond–esque secret agent—stars in the 2001–2002 Fury limited series. In the sixth and final issue ( June 2002), Fury eviscerates one of his enemies and strangles him with his own bowels. Hence it should not come as a surprise that Stan Lee (one of the creators of the Marvel Universe in general, and of Nick Fury in particular) criticized the series: “I don’t know why they’re doing that. I don’t think that I would do those kinds of stories.”42 Lee’s statement may be interpreted as a summary of the evolution of violence in comic books, insofar as the kind of stories that are being published at the beginning of the twentieth century seems unpalatable to the 1960s writers and artists.

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Conclusion From horror to crime to underground comix, violence is a pervasive part of the comics medium. In particular, superhero comics—an influential American popular culture creation—stand out as an interesting example of a genre structurally based on violent behavior. Superhero stories also depict different forms of aggressive acts (soft/hard, fantastical/realistic violence, for instance), vigilante violence being one of them. The hardcore vigilantism that characterizes The Punisher and other extreme law enforcers like Watchmen’s Rorschach has influenced the genre’s approach to violence, as well as the grim’n’gritty turn. Whereas the 1960s comics were not particularly violence-laden, the 1980s represented the dawn of a new age of dark and more violent characters whose methods can hardly be differentiated from those of villains. The 1980s were also a turning point regarding the depiction of violence and its effects. These same trends endure today, in a context where the restrictions of the Comics Code are a thing of the past, and gory scenes can be found in current mainstream superhero stories. Perhaps not surprisingly, the turn in the depiction of comic book violence mirrors socio-cultural transformations. Superhero comics’ portrayal of the grim and gritty side of urban life has been read as a reflection of a conservative approach to crime in the late 1970s and 1980s.43 In the same vein, the grim’n’gritty era “does seem to be a direct result of the rampant fears about violence and drugs that dominated criminal justice-related news during the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s and 1990s.”44 Similarly, the rise of violent superheroes in “1980s America has been read as symptomatic of the 1980s’ political and cultural climate of neo-conservatism and mass culture.”45 More specifically, characters such as The Punisher are interpreted as evidence of a rightward movement in political culture, as he “was indeed incubated in the ‘backlash culture’ of the 1970s and 1980s, and his modus operandi offers an implicit rebuke to countercultural fantasies concerning peace, love, and brotherhood.”46 Worcester also points out that aside from the 1970s backlash politics, the Punisher “gained momentum from . . . the 1984 subway shootings of Bernie Goetz, and the militia movement of the 1990s. More than any other superhero, the Punisher has benefited from the so-called ‘right turn’ of recent decades.”47 Other variables could be added to the historical framework that helps explain the significance of violence in a comic such as Watchmen, including the tradition of pulp masked avengers, hard-boiled detectives, and urban vigilantes, as well as the sociopolitical context of Reaganism, which was preceded by a wave of right-wing libertarianism in the 1970s.48 Rather than evidence of

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mere escapism, it could be argued that the depiction of violence in superhero comics is a reflection of political changes in the twentieth-century United States.

Notes   1.  Nye, 236; Inge, 73.  2. Slotkin, Regeneration, 95.  3. Hoppenstand, 51.  4. Coogan, 150.  5. Nye, 238.  6. Slotkin, Regeneration.  7. Legman, 41.  8. Walker, 121.  9. Slotkin, Gunfighter, 195, 198. 10.  Harvey, 165. 11.  Chester Gould, interview by Sheridan, 121–122. 12.  Walker, 117. 13.  Lopes, 5. 14.  William M. Gaines, quoted in Von Bernewitz and Geissman, 192. 15.  Quoted in Kiste Nyberg, 166–167. 16.  Duncan and Smith, 243. 17.  Miettinen, 160. 18.  Kaveney, 14. 19.  Rusch, 198. 20.  Edelstein and Nelson, 356. 21.  Miettinen, 166–167. 22.  Ferrari and Toyos Grinschpun, 9. 23.  Cotta Vaz, 12. 24.  Round, 8. 25.  Loeb and Morris, 18. 26.  John Byrne, interview by Cooke and Nolen-Weathington, 34. 27.  Miettinen, 162. 28.  Ibid., 161–162. 29.  Klock, 38. 30.  Worcester, 346. 31.  Nonetheless, superhero comics depict vigilante violence in different ways. Not every comic book vigilante resorts to the extremism of The Punisher, and the genre is rife with “soft” vigilantes such as Daredevil or Spider-Man. Interestingly enough, Daredevil and The Punisher have fought each other several times, with the right-to-kill issue underlying their clash in Daredevil #257 ( July 1988). 32.  Bell, 110–111. 33.  Alan Moore, interview in Berlatsky, 49. 34.  Spanakos, 43.

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35.  Klock, 40. 36.  Dubose, 919. 37.  Adkinson, 257. 38.  Worcester, 332. 39.  Dagilis, 89. 40.  Moore, 45. 1963 is the name of a series written by Moore that tries to recapture the innocence and fun of the superhero comics he read as a kid. To some extent, the series aimed to strike a contrast with the gloomy superheroes published by Image Comics in the 1990s (Moore, 45). 41. Rosemann. 42.  Stan Lee, quoted in Craven. 43.  Adkinson, 249. 44.  Ibid., 257. 45.  Miettinen, 179. 46.  Worcester, 339. 47.  Ibid., 346. 48.  Doherty, 368–369.

Bibliography Adkinson, Cary D. “The Amazing Spider-Man and the Evolution of the Comics Code: A Case Study in Cultural Criminology,” Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture 15, no. 3 (2008). Bell, Blake. Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics, 2008. Berlatsky, Eric L. Alan Moore: Conversations. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. Coogan, Peter. Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre. Austin, TX: MonkeyBrain Books, 2006. Cooke, Jon B., and Nolen-Weathington, Eric. Modern Masters, vol. 7: John Byrne. Raleigh, NC: TwoMorrows, 2007. Cotta Vaz, Mark. Tales of the Dark Knight: Batman’s First Fifty Years: 1939–1989. New York: Ballantine, 1989. Craven, Lol. “Garth Ennis’ Punisher Ruins Other Superheroes Best Marvel Runs,” Sound on Sight, November 21, 2013., www.soundonsight.org/ best-marvel-runs-garth-ennis-punisher/. Dagilis, Andrew. “Siren Song of Blood: The Rise of Bloodthirsty Vigilantes in Comics,” The Comics Journal #133, December 1989. Doherty, Brian. Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement. New York: PublicAffairs, 2007. Dubose, Mike S. “Holding Out for a Hero: Reaganism, Comic Book Vigilantes, and Captain America,” The Journal of Popular Culture 40, no. 6 (2007). Duncan, Randy, and Smith, Matthew J. The Power of Comics: History, Form, and Culture. New York: Continuum, 2009.

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Edelstein Alex S., and Nelson, Jerome L. “Violence in the Comic Cartoon,” Journalism Quarterly 46, no. 2 (1969). Ferrari, Gustavo Adrián, and Toyos Grinschpun, Verónica. “Revoluciones de papel. Estados Unidos, América Latina y las visiones sobre la guerrilla a través de la historieta,” Diálogos de la comunicación Nº78 ( January–July 2009). Harvey, Robert C. The Art of the Funnies: An Aesthetic History. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Hoppenstand, Gary. “Justified Bloodshed: Robert Montgomery Bird’s Nick of the Woods and the Origins of the Vigilante Hero in American Literature and Culture,” Journal of American Culture 15, no. 2 (1992). Inge, M. Thomas. “Comic Art.” In Concise Histories of American Popular Culture, ed. M. Thomas Inge. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982. Kaveney, Roz. Superheroes! Capes and Crusaders in Comics and Films. London, UK: I.B. Tauris, 2008. Kiste Nyberg, Amy. Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Klock, Geoff. “Frank Miller’s New Batman and the Grotesque.” In Batman Unauthorized: Vigilantes, Jokers, and Heroes in Gotham City, ed. Dennis O’Neil with Leah Wilson. Dallas, Texas: Benbella Books, Inc., 2008. Legman, Gershon. Love and Death: A Study in Censorship. New York: Breaking Point, 1949. Loeb, Jeph, and Morris, Tom. “Heroes and Superheroes.” In Superheroes and Philosophy: Truth, Justice, and the Socratic Way, ed. Tom Morris and Matt Morris. Chicago & La Salle, IL: Open Court, 2005. Lopes, Paul. Demanding Respect: The Evolution of the American Comic Book. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2009. Miettinen, Mervi. “Truth, Justice, and the American Way? The Popular Geopolitics of American Identity in Contemporary Superhero Comics.” Academic Diss., University of Tampere, Finland, 2012. Moore, Alan. “The Unexplored Medium. Alan Moore Speaks on What Makes Working as a Comic Writer so Appealing.” Interview by William A. Christensen and Mark Seifert, Wizard #27, November 1993. Nye, Russell B. The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America. New York: The Dial Press, 1970. Rosemann, Bill. “Marvel’s New Rating System  .  .  . Explained!” Official press release. Comic Book Resources, July 5, 2001. www.comicbookresources. com/?page=article&id=24. Round, Julia. ““Can I Call You Mommy?” Myths of the Feminine and Superheroic in Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s Black Orchid.” In Debating the Difference: Gender, Representation and Self-Representation—Proceedings of the Interdisciplinary Conference held Wednesday 5th and Thursday 6th September 2007. Dundee, Scotland: Duncan of Jordanstone College, University of Dundee, 2007, 1–18. www.scottishwordimage.org/debatingdifference/ROUND.pdf.

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Rusch, Kristine Kathryn. “Batman in the Real World.” In Batman Unauthorized: Vigilantes, Jokers, and Heroes in Gotham City, ed. Dennis O’Neil with Leah Wilson. Dallas, Texas: Benbella Books, Inc., 2008. Sheridan, Martin. Comics and Their Creators: Life Stories of American Cartoonists. Boston, MA: Hale, Cushman & Flint, 1942. Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973. Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-century America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1992. Spanakos, Tony. “Super-Vigilantes and the Keene Act,” Watchmen and Philosophy: A Rorschach Test, ed. Mark K. White. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2009. Von Bernewitz, Fred, and Geissman, Grant. Tales of Terror: The EC Companion. Timonium, MD/Seattle, WA: Gemstone & Fantagraphics, 2000. Walker, Brian. The Comics before 1945. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004. Worcester, Kent. “The Punisher and the Politics of Retributive Justice,” Law Text Culture 16, iss. 1 (2012).

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“Command and Conquer”: Video Games and Violence Jennifer Jenson, Milena Droumeva, and Suzanne de Castell

Video games are, when compared with novels, film, and comics, a relatively “young” medium, and one that has evolved very rapidly over the past three decades, making even the term “video games” sound dated. With the rise of mobile games, Facebook games, and alternative game delivery platforms such as Valve’s Steam (a distribution platform for PCbased games), the term “video game” doesn’t begin to do justice to either the medium or its global player base that has catapulted digital games to the top-grossing product in the entertainment industry (ESRB).1 For the purposes of this essay, “video games” will refer both to console- and PCbased games such as the Grand Theft Auto, God of War, Gears of War and the Assassin’s Creed series, largely produced by large “AAA” companies for a narrow primarily male player demographic,2 as well as to the myriad of other digital games such as Angry Birds, Farmville, or Candy Crush and their far more diverse target audiences.3 Despite this wide-ranging consumer market for video games, however, their player and fan bases have been and indeed remain “suspect,” in part for their near-celebrity status as a “violent” and “violence-producing” medium. Tracing the history of video games is not the purpose of this essay, but we do want to begin by sketching out the trajectory by which video games have become the flashpoint for and in some cases have literally been designated the cause of extreme

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real-world violence, starting with the first of many violent incidents in which video games have been publicly called to account for their graphically violent content and in-game actions. We then trace the main lines of representative critiques and responses by the academic and scientific community to allegations of the violent “media effects” of video games, and in this light we build on and offer some guidelines toward a more nuanced understanding of violence in games, and the less-well recognized real-world violence within gaming industry and culture.

A Short History of Video Game “Violence” Discourse Unlike other screen-based media, video games uniquely position their players in active roles as perpetrators of violent behaviors in-game; players have control over considerable indisputably violent action within games, and playing such games typically means enacting violent means of engagement with in-game characters and environments to “level up” through the game. Amid growing concerns over media portrayals and, in video games, player enactment of violence, discourses around the consequences of playing violent video games can broadly be divided into two “camps”: the “media effects” argument and the “sociocultural context” argument. The “effects” discourse presumes that playing violent video games leads (cause/ effect-style) to forms of real-world violence and is operationalized in psychological terms as an effect of “desensitization” to violence, promoting “aggressive behavior” and reducing “prosocial behavior.” Games are studied for their “effects.” The “sociocultural context” discourse posits that real-world violence happens in a wider sociocultural and economic context where video games are only one aspect of a player’s experience among much more important factors such as socialization, home and school environment, and other emotional, psychological, and social dimensions that affect young people. The “context” discourse also brings much needed attention to the classification of different forms and depictions of violence in video games as qualitatively different—e.g., cartoon violence versus fantasy-based or realistic violence. Such qualitative differences also extend to the nature of direct action/interactions in which a player engages through the character of a game. A game’s effect, from this point of view, is in its textual and contextual meanings. Some researchers4 have argued that “active” engagement with violence (instead of merely “viewing”) produces violence-related “effects” on players. That said, whether or not it is the activity of the player’s engagement with violent media that produces either temporary or longer-term violent

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effects, a number of psychologists have documented cognitive, behavioral, or affective changes as a causal relationship between viewing/playing with violent media content and induced violent effects.5 This causal relationship has been well rehearsed in the popular press, as McWilliam in this volume recounts: The school shooting in 1999 in Columbine, Colorado marked the beginning of a symbolic threat of “random violence” in suburban America, and for the first time video games were blamed as a contributing factor in the violent attack. At that time, video games became a subject and object of interrogation, as both school shooters had spent significant amounts of time playing the first-person shooter (FPS) games Duke Nukem and Quake. Writing on the Columbine tragedy from a sociocultural perspective, Mark Tappan and Becca Kita persuasively argue that rather than focusing solely on the shooters’ musical and video game tastes, a more holistic approach should be taken to better understand how and why these kinds of tragedies happen: By focusing on the cultural tools/mediational means that Harris and Klebold used to plan and carry out their attack, we highlight material realities that can be seen and understood by parents, teachers, administrators, and others who live and work with young people. Understanding the power of these mediational means, not only in Harris and Klebold’s lives, but in the lives of other young men and women, provides a way to intervene and interrupt the (possible) negative effects of these cultural tools. If parents, teachers, and others make an attempt to understand and even master some of the mediational means that are so important in young persons’ lives (computer games, videos, music, ideology, etc.) then a place for conversation is established, and dialogue can occur in ways that mitigate the harmful effects of some of these things. (n.p.)

In the same vein, Michael Moore’s award-winning documentary Bowling for Columbine draws much-needed attention to the socioeconomic realities of not only the two boys, but also of entire communities in the area, highlighting factors such as bullying, neglect, racial tensions, and class disparity as powerful potential motivators for the school shooting. Still, this documentary, along with Tappan and Kita’s balanced and still relevant approach to analyzing that tragedy, tend to be drowned out by the sensationalist and sensationalizing media attention after the fact, which focused on the kinds of video games the shooters were playing (and what music they were listening to). That intense media attention led to Senate hearings on violent video games,6 and to the games industry’s “out in front” proposition that they had been (since 1994) committed to indicating, much as

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the film industry does, “adult” content and “age-appropriate” ratings. This regulatory arm for video game rating systems, the Entertainment Software Review Board (ESRB), is not federally mandated in the United States, but it has demonstrated that its ratings (including M-Mature and A-Adult Only) have resulted in fewer age-inappropriate purchases.7 With that said, the ESRB has and continues to come under considerable criticism as video games are continually reported in the media as a contributing factor in and to mass (school) shootings. Since Columbine, and without listing every one (small or large), for a number of prominent mass shooting incidents video games have been identified as possible “contributing factors,”8 including those at Virginia Tech; Oslo, Norway; and Sandy Hook Elementary, among others. The point here is that video games are cited more frequently in these accounts than watching movies, sports, or television (Bergstrom, Fisher and Jenson, forthcoming), despite the relatively limited evidence to support that position—which, as we will show in the next sections, has recently been well critiqued.

Video Game “Effects”: Violent Video Games = Violent Behaviors With respect to aggression, violent video game effects literature has successfully demonstrated that there is a causal link between playing violent video games and the inducement and reinforcement of aggressive feelings and behaviors. Most of this work is quantitative, experimental, and lab-based, and effects observed are typically immediate and short-term. A review of the “violence effects” literature by Barlett, Anderson, and Swing divides the wide range of research available on the topic into three categories: aggressive cognition, aggressive behavior, and prosocial behavior. Aggressive cognition studies have demonstrated that there is indeed a relationship between violent video game playing and “aggressive priming, activation of aggressive scripts and knowledge structures and a hostile attribution bias compared to non-violent video game exposure.”9 For example, a lab-based study sought to examine violence desensitization and its potential increase in aggressive behavior. It set out lab-based sequential tasks in which participants were asked to play a violent or non-violent video game and brain activity was measured; following that, aggression was measured by how often they chose to “attack” an opponent with noise blasts.10 The study found that violence desensitization leads to greater aggression, supporting claims that a causal link exists between playing video games and violent actions. On the second point, and related to the above, aggressive behavior has been measured using a variety of methods and tools including observations, self-reports, standard laboratory tests, and questionnaires, and has

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shown, through numerous comprehensive reviews, that violent video game exposure leads to increased aggressive behavior.11 Over time, the suggestion is that video games might contribute to aggressive thoughts and actions. Willoughby, Adachi, and Good lend even more support on this point, stating: “Each violent video game episode may reinforce the notion that aggression is an effective and appropriate way to deal with conflict and anger.”12 Indeed, in virtually all “violent” video games, aggressive and violent action leads to effective and successful resolution to the game itself. Finally, regarding prosocial behavior, which includes empathy and the helping or rewarding of others, researchers have also demonstrated a decrease in prosocial behavior on the part of players with exposure to violent video games.13 In a 2010 metareview on violence and video games, Anderson et al. cite studies that examine video games and prosocial behaviors, where “prosocial behaviour” is operationalized through the donation of jelly beans or money to other players or helping someone, including self-reports of helping behaviors. In these studies, researchers found that regardless of research design or analyses, exposure to violent video games correlated with reduced prosocial behaviors in players regardless of time spent playing the game and the sex of the player. In addition to aggression, other researchers have examined the effects of video game playing on “moral behavior.” In particular, they have found that playing violent video games can lead to immoral behavior.14 For instance, in a study with 172 Italian high school students, researchers found that playing violent video games was correlated with “increased cheating and decreased self control” on the part of the students. Meta-analytic reviews of studies have continued to show that regardless of the design of the research (experimental, cross-sectional, or longitudinal) it is possible to correlate exposure to/ playing of violent video games to real-world aggressive behavior, hostile affect, psychological arousal, and decreases in prosocial behaviors. Additional studies have shown that playing violent video games desensitizes players to representations of violence in terms of their psychophysiological responses, including heart rate, blood pressure, and brain activity.15 What is clear in this literature, and especially significant for the purposes of this essay, is that demarcating a causal relationship between playing violent video games and aggressive, real world thoughts and behaviors is, despite almost thirty years of research in the area, hotly contested. As Ferguson and Kilburn put it in their 2010 response to Anderson, et al.’s meta-analytical review, there might well be “much ado about nothing,” and, more significant, they argue that an “exaggerated focus” (by psychologists) on violent video games and their effects “distracts society from much more important causes of aggression,

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including poverty, peer influences, bullying, depression, family violence, and Gen X environment interactions.”16

Critiques of Violent Video Game Playing = Violent Behavior As the above quote suggests, there has been considerable debate over the past three decades over violent video games and whether they are a contributing factor to real-world aggression and societal violence. Although the aforementioned—and many other—studies argue that violent video games trigger behavioral aggression, other studies have found their effect on aggression minimal.17 As Henry Jenkins cautioned some time ago in his 1999 “Congressional Testimony on Media Violence” after the Columbine shootings, the methodologies employed almost exclusively by the experimental and lab-based studies cited above tend “to bracket from consideration issues about media content, context, and form as beyond its purview. Empirical researchers can only work with simple variables. Consequently, they offer only crude insights into the actual consequences of consuming violent media within specific real world contexts” (n.p.). Instead, Jenkins argues, we need to examine video games, much as Tappan and Kita put it above, as just one node in the lives of youth that include family, friends, school, wider cultural setting, and the consumption of other media, among other things. For Jenkins, this also means understanding video games as a form of popular media and thus a cultural paradigm that “hails” different people differently. He states: “Cultural artifacts are not simple chemical agents like carcinogens that produce predictable results upon those who consume them. They are complex bundles of often contradictory meanings that can yield an enormous range of different responses from the people who consume them” (n.p.). Viewed from a sociocultural perspective, in which video games are one of many artifacts and media that populate the lives of players, it is much more difficult to claim definitively a causal relationship between playing violent video games and behaving aggressively and violently in the world. A 2013 study by Ferguson and Olson found that even when research subjects were considered some of the most “vulnerable” (children with preexisting mental health issues), playing violent video games had minimal effects. Written after the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting, where the shooter was reported to have been an avid and frequent player of violent video games, the authors state: “Our research contributes to the field of youth and media by providing evidence that a timely, policy-relevant, and seeming reasonable hypothesis—that mentally vulnerable children may be particularly influenced by violent video games—does not appear

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to be well supported.”18 They go on to argue, much as Jenkins did almost fifteen years before, that more research is needed that is driven by “user” (i.e., player) experience and not simply by video game content. To add to the complexity of this issue and the nuances of research that attempt to examine it, some recent studies claim a positive effect from playing violent video games. Such contemporary studies focus not on the behavioral after-effects of playing violent video games but on features of the brain, pointing to increased gray matter in the prefrontal cortex and an increased volume of the striatum.19 However, duration of play has been raised as a strong factor, with youth playing an hour or less of (violent) video games per day showing overall positive effect, while youth who play three or more hours display long-term negative effects. Cited in a recent Globe and Mail article,20 Douglas Gentile, a psychology professor at Iowa State University, suggests that, in fact, the positive and negative effects of violent video games (and games in general) are not mutually exclusive— these effects are often competing and are likely to happen at the same time. Whatever the arguments for and against violent video games and their effects on aggression, it is clear that the paradigmatic approaches taken to date can neither sufficiently measure nor account for the range of possible ways that players uptake and experience violent video game content. Of interest to the debate is the fact that as violent video games have increased in popularity in North America and elsewhere, violent crime among youth and adults has actually decreased to levels not seen since the 1960s: As the sale of violent video games has increased, actual violent real-world crime has decreased. As psychology professor Patrick Markey notes in a popular blog post titled “In Defense of Violent Video Games,” 97 percent of adolescents play video games, yet less than 9 percent of violent crime is perpetrated by youth. In this sense, says Markey, the relationship between violent video games and real-world violence is tenuous at best: “It could similarly be argued that bread consumption predicts school shootings, because most school shooters likely consumed a bread product within 24 hours before their violent attacks.”21 In the next section of the essay, and following on the claim that we need to understand players in context, we examine the scant literature to date that explores violent video games through that lens, and use that literature as a transition point into our own example of two “violent” video games, one a notoriously violent game series, God of War and the other a massively multiplayer online roleplaying (MMORPG) game, Guild Wars. Our account of these games is meant to serve as one possible way of demonstrating discursively the ways in which a player enacts (or does not) the programmed “violence” in the games.

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Putting Violence in Context What the “media effects” discourse does not really address, and the “sociocultural context” discourse mostly just hints at, is the way people actually experience and conceive of “violence” in relation to games as media texts. In other words, how does the depiction of different types of violence relate to the constructs of game text and player positionality,22 as well as to the moral schemata/conditioning that players already bring to the experience? Much as in other accounts of the sociocultural context of gameplay,23 Kontour uses the concept of “player positionality” to denote the kind of immersion and identification that a player can experience with a game avatar, including both intentionally designed positionality (as in FPS games), and individually enacted identification (as in third-person games). High-resolution 3D graphics, a realistic physics engine, and positional audio are all designed to contribute to positionality by immersing the player as the actor in a believable world; by contrast, anime-style and other fantasy-based games use stylized action sequences, environment, and movements to immerse the player in a fantasy world. Writing on games as media texts, Henry Jenkins’s commentary on how violence is operationalized in gameplay remains critically important. Although the argument for games’ interactivity is used to supplement the thesis that violent video games produce real-world aggression, considered from another perspective, game violence is a core and repetitive mechanic, rarely the objective of the story; rather it is “what you have to do” in order to progress within the narrative world of the game and reach the conclusion of the storyline. This, in a sense, might render the “effects” of violent video games less dramatic than, say, a violent scene in a movie—cinema being a medium that exploits our emotions on a physiological level notoriously well. Before we begin to approach these questions or offer any directions for the future treatment of violence in video games, it is important to demarcate, if only in a cursory fashion, the qualities of different types of game “violence.” Although past accounts often polarize violence in terms of “cartoon” and “realistic” action, we want to add the intermediary category of “fantasy” violence. To invoke some illustrative examples, games such as Super Mario Bros. and older portable versions of the Final Fantasy and Zelda series would fall into the “cartoon” violence category; a wide spectrum of titles including massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) such as World of Warcraft, Rift, Lord of the Rings and RPG titles such as Dragon Age, would qualify as “fantasy” violence; finally, FPS games such as Counter-Strike, Call of Duty, and the Fallout series represent “realistic” violence.

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Taking into consideration the constructs of player positionality, game text (games as text), and a player’s internal moral schemata, we illustrate, using two case studies, a way of “reading” the texts of “violent” video games in terms of how violence is experienced by the player and its position in relation to the story world. The case studies are reflective researcher accounts of a player’s experience using auto-ethnographic analysis to compare two game titles, both of which could be categorized as containing “fantasy” violence as a core game mechanic and dominant imagery. Each case study addresses questions of player positionality, identification, and immersion, as well as the narrative purpose of violence in the story world of the games, also highlighting the ethical/moral conditioning that a player might already bring to the gaming experience.

God of War Series God of War is an M-rated action-adventure game series for the PlayStation. The player view is third-person and the action takes place in Ancient Greece, making use of mythological content for the story world. The game’s avatar, Kratos, is a violent war veteran bent on revenge. Although the player controls Kratos, the game maintains a separation between player and avatar by disclosing his story in pieces and presenting him as a tormented, morally unsettled character. The violence has a “fantasy” quality and is not realistic in imagery; nevertheless, the fighting action sequences evoke violence in a powerful way—e.g., Kratos can use his bare hands to rip out an enemy’s arm and kill with it; he can pull heads out and throw foes up in the air to have them collapse on the floor; he kills flying Gorgons by tearing their wings and ripping the Gorgons to pieces. In essence, though not realistic, the violence is graphic, deeply stomach-turning, and ethically disturbing—which is part of the game story as we get to know Kratos. In a sense, the game creates a context in which violence is unsettling and brought to light as an objectionable necessity: e.g., in some cases, the player is forced to knowingly sacrifice a foe to pass through an area and continue the game. The ethical dilemmas are meant to illustrate what it is like to be Kratos, someone who is battling his violent past but who feels cheated by, and blames, the Greek Gods for the death of his wife and child. Thinking of God of War as a media text, violence here has a context not only within the specific genre of actionadventure, but it also has a moral context within the individual story itself. Depending on how it is presented and enacted (i.e., the kind of ethical and moral schemata that the player brings to this gaming experience) the violence can be unquestioned, frivolous, and superfluous—or an ethically

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uncomfortable and disturbing way of constantly referring to the moral plight of the protagonist Kratos. So a nuanced understanding of this game would entail not only the material qualities of the violence enacted as part of playing—which has earned God of War an M rating for violence—but also reading the violence in terms of player positionality and game text, where violence has a meaningful purpose in the story world and in the experience of playing.

Guild Wars Series The Guild Wars series, a massively multiplayer online fantasy role-playing game, is rated T for mild language and some violence. Although the fighting sequences performed are stylized and “fantasy”-oriented in quality, killing environmental creatures and foes is still one of the primary mechanics for advancing in the game and collaborating with others. The screen viewpoint is third-person, adjustable to reveal more or less of the setting, but the protagonist is essentially “you” the player by design, a customizable character. Particularly in the second installment of the series, Guild Wars 2, personal ethics and morality are deliberately infused into the avatar through a “personal storyline” that involves moral choices. In the general context of the game, the avatar is neither good nor bad; instead, there is a sense of neutrality at the onset of the gameplay. If you think you’re a good person, then you behave as a good person would. If you want to play the role of a “troll” (or you want to be mean) then that’s how you behave in the game. Aside from the personal story wherein the protagonist has to battle foes to advance a storyline, the majority of violent interactions—fighting scenes—are staged in the arena of the multiplayer game world (the environment).24 The violence itself is “fantasy”- based in terms of imagery, represented through the use of magic and spells; even for the “tank” character classes the action is very stylized in terms of graphic violence. In this sense, compared with the God of War series, this game is much less violent. However, built into the gameplay mechanic of Guild Wars is the persistent and repetitive killing of environmental creatures, many of which are non-aggressive (i.e., they won’t attack the player unless provoked first). The only goal in MMOGs is to “level up” and gain various types of status for your character, primarily achieved by killing foes. Not only is there no narrative purpose to this violence other than the player’s own quest to “level up,” but also there is no context or moral behind it in terms of the personal worldview of one’s avatar. In fact, the system rewards you for killing frivolously by awarding experience points (XP) for “daily quests.”

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There is a kind of environmental creature found everywhere—usually rabbits, frogs, or crabs, who are far weaker than all other creatures and do not defend themselves at all—they are usually killed in one blow. Observing players in the game suggests that although some behave as if it is unethical to kill these creatures because they pose no threat or give you any XP, others behave as “equal opportunity” killers, terminating every environmental foe for daily quest counts and experience.

Violence Doesn’t Always Sell: The Rise of Indie and Mobile Gaming Until quite recently, the mainstream, console and PC-based gaming market evidenced a phenomenal growth rate, becoming, in well under two decades, a globally preeminent entertainment medium. Today, in the mainstream sector of console and PC-based digital games we can see the first clear indication of the industry’s potential stagnation and decline.25 The nontraditional, more diverse sector of the industry, however, which includes mobile, casual, haptic, “indie,” and “family” games,26 continues to grow, with projections of over $78 billion worldwide by 2015.27 The significance of that decline for our purposes is that most violent video games, and nearly all mature-rated games are developed by mainstream game companies and include graphically realistic content and violence that require equally sophisticated, not to mention expensive, hardware. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that their player base is niche at best. In contrast, mobile and other games, including those designed by smaller teams of people (indie games) are far from graphically realistic (e.g., Angry Birds) and are typically far from violent (e.g., Farmville); often when they are violent, the imagery is “cartoon” or stylized artistic in quality (e.g., Swords and Sorcery, Machinarium, Badlands, Limbo). This trend in game player culture and corresponding patterns of consumption signal a move away from violence-oriented titles like Halo and Gears of War, produced serially for a specific niche audience, and toward more widely appealing mobile, socially interactive games and casual puzzle games such as Candy Crush, Plants vs Zombies, or Temple Run, games that feature stylized artistic imagery, unique and intuitive movement-based interactions, and limited game mechanics delivered directly to platforms of everyday use. Interestingly, this trend has been seen, particularly by the dedicated audiences of AAA violent video game titles, as a direct affront to the status and definition of “gamer”—something recent game critics Dan Golding and Leigh Alexander have proclaimed “dead” as an exclusive male-dominated, blockbuster console-oriented identity.28 An anonymous group of self-identified “hardcore gamers” has recently expressed their

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outrage at what they consider the “watering-down” of the definition and identity of “gamer” through an organized collective conspicuously named “Gamergate.” This phenomenon enables the consideration of violence in video games in a sense rarely discussed in either media effects or sociocultural work: the specifically gendered concentration of real-world violence, including violent and threatening discourse and action, that inhabits the everyday/every night conditions of video games at work and play.

Concluding Thoughts: Gamergate as Real-World Violence By way of a conclusion, and to connect this chapter to current events in the realm of video games, we discuss briefly the real-world harassment and violent threats being made against female journalists, critics, makers, and scholars. As we have already demonstrated, violent video games, particularly multiplayer FPS games such as Counter-Strike, Halo, Gears of War and the like involve representational violence. The brunt of the current public instantiation of this violence is directed at female players. A popular media criticism blog Fat, Ugly or Slutty29 has been documenting for a number of years now “everyday” instances of verbal violence directed to women—typically sexualized and misogynistic taunts, threats, and insults. In addition, the work of popular culture critic Anita Sarkeesian (Feminist Frequency) has gained attention for her web-series Tropes vs Women30 in which she analyzes and critiques typical representations of women in (mostly blockbuster violent AAA) games. Her public criticism of games has provoked not only online harassment of Sarkeesian and fellow feminist bloggers, but also violent real-life threats, including her public “doxing”31 on Twitter. Many of Sarkeesian’s critics have expressed the view that she is attacking the “sanctity” of the “hardcore gamer,” and that view is inextricably connected to a very narrow definition of what a “game” is. Sarkeesian’s online attackers, for example, frequently express outrage that her work is trying to obliterate the games they know and love—namely, violent action video games. Sarkeesian, among many others, notably almost all female (Brenda Wu, game designer; Zoe Quinn, game designer; Leigh Alexander, game journalist; Jenn Frank, game journalist) have been directly targeted by “Gamergate.” Defining itself as a movement dedicated to ethics in game reporting, Gamergate denounces “feminist propaganda,” which it sees as invading games and potentially influencing the major game industries and “pressuring” them to diminish explicit and violent game experiences.

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Allegations of “feminazi” conspiracies that aim to destroy gaming have also recently resulted in Gamergate’s “list of demands for DiGRA” (DiGRA is of the largest and most influential digital games research associations). In this list, Gamergate articulates concerns over a “leftist” slant in game scholarship, ending with the vague plea for both academics and, presumably, large game companies, to “withhold any attempts to make an end to hard-core gamers.” In the context of the Gamergate controversy, women (critics, gameplayers, gamemakers, and journalists) have received threats that, as games journalist Auerbach puts it, are “so egregious” that a prominent female journalist ( Jenn Frank) publicly announced that she would no longer be writing on games.32 As a result of death and rape threats, several women have been driven to leave their homes and file police reports, and in some cases the FBI has launched investigations. Most recently, a written threat of a school “massacre” forced games critic Anita Sarkeesian to cancel a public address at the University of Utah.33 Ironically, this threat brings us full circle to the threat of a mass school shooting, the original reason for public alarm over violence in video games. We argue that the public threats posted online daily and directed specifically at women in the latter half of 2014 by Gamergate supporters are a very different kind of “effect”—one that looks much more like old-school misogyny and gatekeeping on the part of public male gamers. Viewed through this lens, it becomes clear that there is much more to violence and video games than the psychological effects literature we cite above can account for. Playing violent video games is undeniably part of the picture in the cases we have discussed. But the truth is, the medium is so new, the realities of real and virtual that it bridges are so differently yet no less powerfully part of “real life” nowadays, that we simply cannot yet say what part they play, nor what the rest of the picture may be. The lines of inquiry, however, are clearly set, and the need to better understand the complex character and consequences of violence in video games appears increasingly urgent as games come to play an ever greater role in individual, social, and vocational life.

Notes 1. Infographic available at www.esrb.org/about/video-game-industry-statis tics.jsp/ 2.  See Chambers and Meer. 3.  See Dickey and Phillips.

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  4.  Anderson, Carnagey, Flanagan, Benjamin, Eubanks, and Valentine, 199–249; Anderson, Gentile, and Dill, 249–272.   5.  Anderson, Berkowitz, Donnerstein, Huesmann, Johnson, Linz, Wartella, and Malamuth, 81–110; Anderson and Bushman, 353–359.  6. Vitelli.  7. www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2013/03/ftc-undercovershopper-survey-entertainment-ratings-enforcement.  8. Jaccarino.   9.  Barlett, Anderson, and Swing, 382. 10.  Engelhardt, Bartholow, Kerr, and Bushman, 1033–1036. 11. Anderson and Bushman, 353–359; Barlett, Anderson, and Swing, 337–403. 12.  Willoughby, Adachi, and Good, 2. 13.  Craig and Bushman, 353–359; Funk, Baldacci, Pasold, and Baumgardner, 23–39. 14. See Chory, Goodboy, Hixson, and Baker. www.allacademic.com/meta/ p188138_index.html; Cicchirillo and Chory-Assad, 435–449; Eastin, 351–372; Tamborini, Eastin, Skalski, Lachlan, Fediuk, and Brady, 450. 15.  Bartholow, Bushman, and Sestir, 532–539; Weber, Ritterfeld, and Mathiak, 39–60. 16.  Ferguson and Kilburn, 177. 17. Ferguson, 377–391; Puri and Pugliese 345–352; von Salisch, Vogelgesang, Kristen, and Oppl, 233–258; Ybarra, Diener-West, Markow, Leaf, Hamburger, and Boxer, 929–937. 18.  Ferguson and Olson, 134. 19.  See Marshall. 20. Ibid. 21.  Markey, 82–91. 22.  Kontour, 5–30. 23.  Thayer, 25–29. 24.  Excluded here are the PvP and WvW modes, which involve strategic wars between guilds. 25. www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_EF_2014.pdf. 26. “Casual” games include games such as Angry Birds and the Facebook game Farmville, though they are not necessarily played casually at all. “Haptic” games give physical feedback to players through vibrations and/or touch sensitivity. “Indie” games are those that are developed by small game development companies, no larger than 25–30 people, and often are developed by a single programmer/designer. 27. Nayak. 28.  See Golding; see Leigh. 29.  See www.fatuglyorslutty.com 30. http://feministfrequency.com; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5i_RP r9DwMA.

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31.  Publicly broadcasting someone’s personally identifiable contact information online, including home address and/or phone number, for the purposes of intimidation or humiliation. 32. Auerbach. 33. Robertson.

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articles/2014-04-15/violent-video-games-dont-make-you-aggressive-but -tetris-might. Bartholow, Bruce, Brad Bushman, and Marc Sestir. “Chronic Violent Video Game Exposure and Desensitization to Violence: Behavioral and Event-Related Brain Potential Data.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 42 (2006): 532–539. doi: 10.1016/j.jesp.2005.08.006. Bushman, Brad J., and Craig A. Anderson. “Comfortably Numb: Desensitizing Effects of Violent Media on Helping Others.” Psychological Science 20, no. 3 (2009): 273–277. Carnagey, Nicholas L., Craig A. Anderson, and Brad J. Bushman. “The Effect of Video Game Violence on Physiological Desensitization to Real-Life Violence.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 43 (2007): 489–496. doi:10.1016/j .jesp.2006.05.003. Chambers, Becky. “Why Games with Female Protagonists Don’t Sell, and What That Says about the Industry.” Blog. The Mary Sue. November 23, 2012. www .themarysue.com/why-games-with-female-protagonists-dont-sell-and-what -it-says-about-the-industry/. Chory, Rebecca M., Alan Goodboy, Nathaniel Hixson, and Sarah Baker. (November 2007). “Emotion-Based Traits as Moderators of the Violent Video Game Play–Aggression Relationship: The Roles of Affective Orientation and Empathy.” NCA 93rd Annual Convention. November 15, 2007. Paper presented at the annual meeting, TBA, Chicago, IL. Abstract retrieved from www.allacademic .com/meta/p188138_index.html. Cicchirillo, Vincent, and Rebecca M. Chory-Assad. (2005). “Effects of Affective Orientation and Video Game Play on Aggressive Thoughts and Behaviors.” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 49, no. 4 (2005): 435–449. doi: 10.1207/s15506878jobem4904_5. Dickey, Megan R. “Insanely Popular Game Candy Crush Is Bringing in an Estimated $633,000 a Day.” Business Insider. July 8, 2013. www.businessinsider .com/candy-crush-saga-daily-revenue-2013-7. Eastin, Matthew S. “Video Game Violence and the Female Game Player: Selfand Opponent Gender Effects on Presence and Aggressive Thoughts.” Human Communication Research 32, no. 3 (2006): 351–372. doi: 10.1111/ j. 1468-2958.2006.00279.x. Engelhardt, Christopher, Bruce Bartholow, Geoffrey Kerr, and Brad Bushman. “This Is Your Brain on Violent Video Games: Neural Desensitization to Violence Predicts Increased Aggression Following Violent Video Game Exposure.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 47, no. 5 (2011): 1033–1036. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2011.03.027. Ferguson, Christopher J., and John Kilburn. “Much Ado about Nothing: The Misestimation and Overinterpretation of Violent Video Game Effects in Eastern and Western Nations: Comment on Anderson et al. (2010).” Psychological Bulletin 136, no. 2 (2010): 174–178. doi: 10.1037/a0018566.

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Ferguson, Christopher. “Video Games and Youth Violence: A Prospective Analysis in Adolescents.” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 40, no. 4 (2011): 377–391. doi: 10.1007/s10964-010-9610-x. Fraser, Ashley M., Laura M. Padilla-Walker, Sarah M. Coyne, Larry J. Nelson, and Laura A. Stockdale. “Associations between Violent Video Gaming, Empathic Concern and Prosocial Behavior toward Strangers, Friends, and Family Members.” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 41, no. 5 (2012): 636–649. doi: 10.1007/ s10964-012-9742-2. Funk, Jeanne, Heidi Baldacci, Tracie Pasold, and Jennifer Baumgardner. “Violence Exposure in Real-Life, Video Games, Television, Movies and the Internet: Is There Desensitization?” Journal of Adolescence 27, no. 1 (2004): 23–39. doi:10.1016/j.adolescence.2003.10.005. Funk, Jeanne, Geysa Flores, Debra Buchman, and Julie Germann. “Rating Electronic Games: Violence Is in the Eye of the Beholder.” Youth and Society 30, no. 3 (1999): 283–312. doi: 10.1177/0044118X99030003002. http://yas.sage pub.com/content/30/3/283.short. Gabbiadini, A., L. Andrighetto, and C. Volpato. “Brief Report: Does Exposure to Violent Video Games Increase Moral Disengagement among Adolescents?” Journal of Adolescence 35, no. 5 (2012): 1403–1406. doi: 10.1016/j.adolescence.2012.06.001. Gewirtz, David. “Game Changer: Consoles, Steam Boxes, and the Future of Gaming.” ZD Net. January 10, 2014. www.zdnet.com/game-changer-consoles -steam-boxes-and-the-future-of-gaming-7000025038/. Golding, Don. “The End of Gamers.” Don Golding-Tumblr. August 28, 2014. http:// dangolding.tumblr.com. Jaccarino, Mike. “‘Training Simulation’: Mass Killers Often Share Obsession with Violent Video Games.” Article. Fox News, September 12, 2013. www.foxnews .com/tech/2013/09/12/training-simulation-mass-killers-often-share-obsession -with-violent-video-games/. Jenkins, Henry. “Reality Bytes: Eight Myths about Video Games Debunked.” The Video Game Revolution. www.pbs.org/kcts/videogamerevolution/impact/myths.html. Kontour, Kyle. “Revisiting Violent Videogames Research: Game Studies Perspectives on Aggression, Violence, Immersion, Interaction, and Textual Analysis.” Digital Culture and Education Online 1, no. 2 (2009): 5–30. www.digitalculture andeducation.com/uncategorized/kontour-2009-html/. Layton, Julia. “Do Violent Video Games Lead to Real Violence?” How Stuff Works, March 24, 2008. http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/video-game-violence.htm. Markey, Patrick. “In Defense of Violent Video Games.” U.S. News & World Report. April 29, 2013. www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2013/04/29/no-link-between -violent-video-games-effects-and-school-shootings. Marshall, Lee. “Violent Video Games for Kids Have a Surprising Upside.” Blog. The Globe and Mail. September 7, 2014. www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health -and-fitness/health/why-blowing-stuff-upin-gamesis-goodfor-your/ article20370728/.

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Meer, Alec. “Yes All Men: Assassin’s Creed Bro-op Controversy Continues.” Blog. Rockpapershotgun. June 12, 2014. www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/06/12/ assassins-creed-unity-characters/. Nayak, Malathi. “Women Pry Open Door to Video Game Industry’s Boys’ Club.” Reuters. January 13, 2013. http://in.reuters.com/article/2013/01/13/ videogames-women-idINDEE90C05G20130113. Phillips, Tom. “After Five Years, Apple Reveals the Best Selling iOS Games.” Eurogamer. September 7, 2013. www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-07-09-after-five -years-apple-reveals-the-all-time-best-selling-ios-games. Przybylski, Andrew, Edward Deci, Scott Rigby, and Richard Ryan. “CompetenceImpeding Electronic Games and Players’ Aggressive Feelings, Thoughts, and Behaviours.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 106, no. 3 (2014): 441–457. doi: 10.1037/a0034820. Puri, Kunal, and Rudy Pugliese. “Sex, Lies and Video Games: Moral Panics or Uses and Gratifications.” Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society 32, no. 5 (2012): 345–352. doi: 10.1177/0270467612463799. Robertson, Adi. “What’s Happening in GamerGate?” Blog. The Verge. October 6, 2014. www.theverge.com/2014/10/6/6901013/whats-happening-in-gamergate. Tamborini, Ron, Matthew S. Eastin, Paul Skalski, Kenneth Lachlan, Thomas A. Fediuk, and Robert Brady. “Violent Virtual Video Games and Hostile Thoughts.” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 48, no. 3 (2004): 335–357. Tappan, Mark, and Becca Kita. “The Columbine Tragedy: A Sociocultural Perspective.” Association for Moral Education. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1999. Thayer, Alexander. “Analyzing Sociocultural Perspectives on Violence in Digital Games.” Conference on Future Play (2007): 23–29. Vitelli, Romeo. “Can Video Games Cause Violence?” Blog. Psychology Today. April 1, 2013. www.psychologytoday.com/blog/media-spotlight/201304/ can-video-games-cause-violence. von Salisch, Maria, Jens Vogelgesang, Astrid Kristen, and Caroline Oppl. “Preference for Violent Electronic Games and Aggressive Behavior among Children: The Beginning of the Downward Spiral?” Media Psychology 14, no. 3 (2011): 233–258. doi: 10.1080/15213269.2011.596468. Walsh, David, Ph.D. “Video Game Violence and Public Policy.” National Institute on Media and the Family. www.soc.iastate.edu/sapp/videogames2.pdf. Ward, Mark. “Columbine Families Sue Computer Game Makers.” BBC. May 1, 2001 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1295920.stm. Weber, Rene, Ute Ritterfeld, and Klaus Mathiak. “Does Playing Violent Video Games Induce Aggression? Empirical Evidence of a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study.” Media Psychology 8, no. 1(2006): 39–60. doi: 10.1207/ S1532785XMEP0801_4 Rene; www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/ S1532785XMEP0801_4#.VHJU-4vF-yc. Willoughby, Teena, Paul J. C. Adachi, and Marie Good. “A Longitudinal Study of the Association between Violent Videogame Play and Aggression among

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Adolescents.” Developmental Psychology 48, no. 5 (2012): 1044–1057. doi: 10.1037/a0026046. Ybarra, Michele, Marie Diener-West, Dana Markow, Philip Leaf, Merle Hamburger, and Paul Boxer. “Linkages between Internet and Other Media Violence with Seriously Violent Behavior by Youth.” Pediatrics 122, no. 5 (2008): 929–937. doi: 10.1542/peds.2007-3377.

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About the Editor and Contributors

The Editor David Schmid is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University at Buffalo, where he teaches courses in British and American fiction, cultural studies, and popular culture. He has published on a variety of subjects, including the nonfiction novel, celebrity, film adaptation, Dracula, and crime fiction, and he is the author of Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2005. He is currently co-editing a forthcoming collection of essays, Globalization and the State in Contemporary Crime Fiction: A World of Crime, and completing a book manuscript entitled From the Locked Room to the Globe: Space in Crime Fiction.

The Contributors Pamela Bedore is associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut, where she is an award-winning teacher of American literature and popular culture. She is author of Dime Novels and the Roots of American Detective Fiction (Palgrave, 2013) in addition to several articles on detective fiction, science fiction, and writing program administration. Daniel Belczak  is a PhD candidate in history at Case Western Reserve University, where he studies crime and popular culture in early America. He received his B.A. in history and anthropology from Canisius College in 2009 and his M.A. in history from Duquesne University in 2011. He is currently working on an article derived from his recent paper presentation at SHEAR, entitled “Calculated Murders of Intimate Partners in Early Nineteenth-Century Ballads.” His dissertation, tentatively titled “‘When

312

About the Editor and Contributors

the Last Gallows Will Be Thrown Down’: Capital Punishment, Imprisonment, and Criminal Law Reform in Antebellum Wisconsin,” explores the political, religious, and ideological landscape of antebellum Wisconsin as it underwent a process of fundamental criminal justice reform, including the construction of the state’s first penitentiary and the abolition of capital punishment. Mark Bernhardt is an associate professor in the Department of History and Philosophy at Jackson State University. He received his PhD in history from the University of California, Riverside. His research examines the press coverage of crime and war in the nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury United States. Charlotte Beyer is senior lecturer in English studies at the University of Gloucestershire in Britain. She has published on contemporary literature, including a number of articles and book chapters on crime and spy fiction, and has also published on children’s literature. Dr. Beyer is on the steering committee for the Crime Studies Network, as well as on the editorial board for the journal American, British and Canadian Studies. Courtney Brooks, a native of Appalachia, has worked as an advocate and trainer in violence prevention and has also taught Appalachian and Gender Studies. Courtney is a doctoral candidate in the sociology program at the University of Kentucky, researching women’s representation, resistance, and reclamation as subjects and performers in music from Appalachia. Suzanne de Castell  is professor and dean of the faculty of education at UOIT. Her research has involved multimodal analyses of educational interactions and design-based digital games theory, research and development. She has published extensively on educational history, philosophy and theory, literacy and new media studies and technology, gender, and digital game studies. Seth Cosimini is a PhD student in the English Department at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. His research engages with literature and culture of the African diaspora, American poetry, and performance studies. He has presented papers on hip-hop and sexuality at PCA/ACA and the Buffalo State College Women’s and Gender Studies Symposium. He is also an editorial assistant at the New York Quarterly and writes book reviews for Full Stop. Milena Droumeva recently completed her PhD in education and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at York University working with Dr. Jennifer Jenson on an instructional design project that uses game construction as a way to bring computational literacy to public school. Milena’s work

About the Editor and Contributors

spans game studies, sound studies, and sensory ethnography and explores how we use mobile technologies to produce media artifacts that curate our everyday lives. Milena has worked on a variety of game-related projects, including extensive online game ethnographies in partnership with Stanford Research International, educational game projects, and social activism around feminist gaming. Rachel Franks is a Conjoint Fellow at the University of Newcastle (Australia). Her PhD explored class, gender, and ethics in Australian crime fiction. Her research—across many areas of popular culture, including crime fiction, food studies, and information science—has been presented at numerous conferences and can be found in a wide variety of books, journals, and magazines, as well as on social media. Rachel is area chair for biography and life writing and area chair for fiction for the Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand. She is a member of the NSW Readers’ Advisory Services Working Group and serves on several boards and committees. Jennifer Jenson is professor of pedagogy and technology in the faculty of education and director of the Institute for Research on Digital Learning at York University, Canada. Dr. Jenson has published articles on games, gender, and technologies in journals such as Feminist Media Studies, Simulation and Gaming, and Gender and Education. She also has published and spoken on violence and video games, technology and education, and games and learning. Currently, she is the president of the Canadian Game Studies Association and co-editor of its journal, Loading. Jesús Jiménez-Varea  (M.S. in physics, PhD in media and communication) is an associate professor at the Department of Audiovisual Communication, Advertising, and Literature in the University of Seville (Spain). His area of expertise is the intersection of popular culture, narratives, and image theory, particularly comics, along with genres such as horror and superheroes across media. He has taught and presented papers about these subjects in Brazil, Britain, Italy, Spain, and the United States. His texts have appeared in a number of international publications, such as the International Journal of Comic Art and Journal of Popular Culture. In recent times he has contributed to volumes published by Intellect, McFarland, Praeger, and Routledge dealing with subjects including Alan Moore, James Bond, Green Arrow, violence, vigilantism, ideology, and Thai western films. Jean Murley  is an associate professor of English at Queensborough Community College of the City University of New York.  She teaches classes in writing, American literature, and crime fiction. Her first book,

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About the Editor and Contributors

The Rise of True Crime: 20th Century Murder and American Popular Culture, was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Critical/Biographical Book of 2008. She is currently working on another book about the experiences of relatives of people who have been wrongfully convicted of serious crimes. Jules Odendahl-James is currently the program director for humanities advising at Duke University. A professional director and dramaturg who has over thirty productions to her credit, she teaches and writes about crime stories that focus on the relationship between documentary performance and forensic narratives. Her work has appeared in Crime Media Culture, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, SAGE’s Social History of Crime and Punishment in America, The  Encyclopedia of Documentary Film (Routledge), the multimodal site In Media Res, and Woman on Trial: Gender and the Accused Woman in Plays from Ancient Greece to the Contemporary Stage (Teneo Press). Homer B. Pettey  is associate professor of literature and film in the Department of English, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Arizona. With R. Barton Palmer, he co-edited two published volumes on film noir for Edinburgh University Press (November 2014): Film Noir and International Noir. Also with Palmer, he is co-editor of Hitchcock and the Moral of the Story for SUNY Press (forthcoming 2015) and another contracted volume on Biopics and British National Identity. He has several forthcoming chapters, including one on Wyatt Earp biopics for Invented Lives, Imagined Communities: Biopics and American National Identity, co-edited by William Epstein and R. Barton Palmer (SUNY Press), and one on class in Hitchcock’s American noirs for Jonathan Freedman’s Cambridge Companion to Alfred Hitchcock. His most recent project is a book on Transnational Silent Film, contracted with Edinburgh University Press. Antonio Pineda  is an associate professor in the Department of Audiovisual Communication, Advertising, and Literature (University of Seville, Spain). He has published a variety of papers and book chapters on propaganda, advertising, and the relationships between ideology and the media. His work has appeared in the Journal of Popular Culture, among others. In 2006, he published the book Elementos para una teoría comunicacional de la propaganda, where he develops a communicational and semiotic theory of propaganda. He is the director of the Research Group on Political Communication, Ideology, and Propaganda (IDECO).

About the Editor and Contributors

Harold Schechter is a professor of American literature at Queens College, the City University of New York. His essays on crime, psychopathology, and media violence have appeared in many newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and International Herald Tribune. Among his more than thirty published books are a series of historical true-crime narratives about America’s most infamous serial killers, several encyclopedic works (The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers, The Serial Killers Files, Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of), and an anthology of American true-crime writing published by the Library of America. Nathan Wuertenberg  is currently a doctoral student at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He previously completed an undergraduate honors thesis at McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland, on the role of the American Revolution in the evolution of Quaker gender relations and reform movements in the early American republic and a master’s thesis at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, on the influence of national identity in shaping U.S. Indian policies before and after the American Revolution. He has presented research on a number of topics at the 2014 Society for Military History Conference, the 2014 and 2015 PCA/ACA Conference, the 2015 Southern Labor Studies Association Conference, the 2015 Mid-Atlantic Conference on British Studies, and the 2015 Society for History in the Federal Government Conference. He will also be contributing a chapter to the upcoming volume The Making of the Trans-Appalachian West, entitled “Relics of Barbarism: Memories of Frontier Violence in the Trans-Appalachian West and the Indian Removal Act of 1830.”

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Index

Abbott, Megan: Bury Me Deep, 83 A&E: Crime 360, 180’ Investigative Reports, 174–75 ABC: Final Witness, 170, 181, 183, 184; The Forgotten, 170, 181, 182, 183 Abrahams, Rudy, 232 Adachi, Paul J. C., 295 Adams, Samuel, 35 Adam-12, 171 Addams, Jane: The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, 139 Alcott, Louisa May, 51 Aldrich, Robert: Kiss Me Deadly, 139 Alexander, Leigh, 301 Allen, John, 4 “America’s Army,” xxii Andreescu, Viviana, 229 Andrews, Maggie, 76, 81, 86, 89n25 Angry Birds, 291, 301, 304n26 Appalachian Mountains, 227–28 Appalachian music, 227–44; contemporary murder ballads, 236–40; Lula Viers, 235; Omie Wise, 234–35; Pearl Bryan, 232–34; Tom Dula, 236 Archer, John, 19n34, 20n35 Argus, Erwin: The Doorway to Hell, 131 Argus, Fred: The Doorway to Hell, 130 Armstrong, Nancy, xvi, xxiiin6 Ayres, Lew: The Doorway to Hell, 130 Bald-Eagle Bob, the Boy Buccaneer, ix Baldwin, Thomas: The Danger of Living without the fear of God, 20n35

Bambaataa, Afrika, 251 Bancroft, George: Stagecoach, 148 Barr, Nevada, 74, 75, 89n32; “GDMFSOB,” 71, 76, 77–78, 80, 85, 87 Barrick, Richard, 5 Bawer, Bruce, 215 Beach, Moses Yale, 40, 41; “Glorious Victory,” 39 Beadle and Adams, 98 Beck, E. M., 141n33 Beery, Wallace: The Secret 6, 131 Bennett, James Gordon, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 38, 39, 43n7, 43n10, 44n14 Berkowitz, David, 281 Bird, Robert Montgomery: Nick of the Woods, 270 Biressi, Anita, 211 Blackmer, Sidney: Duel in the Sun, 149 Black Mask, 100, 101 Blackwell, Elizabeth, ix Bluegrass Rape Crisis Center, 239, 242n47 Bly, John, 21n52 Bogart, Humphrey: The Big Sleep, 105; Dark Passage, 132; In A Lonely Place, 128 Bok, Edward, 51 Bomb Squad, 258–59, 260 Bones, 177, 180, 181, 186 Borden, Lizzie, 193, 194 Boston Globe, ix Boston News-Letter, 4, 17n14, 19n30 The Boston Strangler, 192 Brager, Albert E.: “The Lipstick Murder,” 195

318Index Brandon, Henry: The Searchers, 149 Breen, Joseph, 124, 125 Breen Office, 120, 124 Bremner, Robert, 68n6 Bremseth, Marlena: Who Was Guilty? 67 Breznican, Anthony, 162 Bridges, Jeff: True Grit, 160 Bridges, Lloyd: Try and Get Me, 137 Broadus, Calvin “Snoop Doggy Dogg,” Jr.: Doggystyle, 261 Broe, Dennis, 140n25 Brolin, Josh: True Grit, 160 Brontë, Charlotte: Jane Eyre, 61 Brooks, Mel: Blazing Saddles, 154–55 Brown, Dee: Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, 162 Browne, Ray: Old Sleuth’s Freaky Female Detectives, 67 Browning, Robert: “Paracelsus,” 187n29 Brownson, Orestes A., 22n54 Bruckheimer, Jerry: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, 177, 178, 180, 181, 182, 187 Bryan, Pearl: “Pearl Bryan,” 232–34, 238 Buck Rogers in the 25th Century AD, 271–72 Bugliosi, Vincent: Helter Skelter, 192, 212, 218–20, 221, 223, 224 Burr, Raymond: Raw Deal, 127 Burroughs, Edgar Rice: Tarzan, 272 Bush, George H. W., xx–xxi Butler, Judith: Precarious Life, xxi Butters, Gerald R., Jr., 140n16 Cagney, James: Angels with Dirty Faces, 140n18; The Doorway to Hell, 130; The Public Enemy, 127–29 Cagney & Lacey, 172 Cain, James M., 96, 100, 108–12; Double Indemnity, 110–11, 128; Mildred Pierce, 111–12; The Postman Always Rings Twice, 109, 128; Three of a Kind, 110 Calkins, Dick: Buck Rogers in the 25th Century AD, 271–72 Callogharne, Margaret, 9–10, 18n28, 19n30, 19n34 Campbell, Clive “DJ Kool Herc”: “MerryGo-Round,” 250 Campbell, Ian, 216, 217, 223

Campbell, John, 4, 20n39 Candy Crush, 291, 301 Capone, Al, 126; St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, 125 Capote, Truman: In Cold Blood, 191–92, 193, 194, 199, 200, 206, 207, 211, 212–16, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 225 Carter, Dwayne “Lil’ Wayne”: Tha Carter III, 262 Carter, Horace, 6, 16, 21n50 Carter, John: Buck Rogers, 272 Carter, Nick (Nicholas), 51, 68n4 Cassuto, Leonard, 73 Cavarero, Adriana, xxiiin6 censorship: comic books, 274; dime novels, 49, 50–53, 56; films, 123, 124, 125–26, 128, 130, 139n10, 140n14, 140n16, 140nn18–19, 151; Pentagon, 173; self-, 273 Chamblitt, Rebeckah, 10, 11, 12, 18n28 Chandler, Raymond, 96, 99, 100, 105–8, 109, 112, 172, 195; The Big Sleep, 105–7; The Long Goodbye, 107; Playback, 108 Chang, Jeff, 251, 252, 253, 255, 256, 257, 259 Chauncy, Charles, 12–13, 22n56 Chief Keef, 264 Chisholm, William, 12 Christie, Agatha, 172, 195 Churchill, Jill: Grime and Punishment, 78 Clark, Guy C., 22n54 Clark, Mae: The Public Enemy, 127 cocaine, 249–50, 252, 264 Coen, Ethan: True Grit, 159–60 Coen, Joel: True Grit, 159–60 Coffin, T., l231 Cohen, Anne, 230–31 Cohen, Daniel A., 21n53, 231, 232–33, 236, 238 Cold Mountain, 228 Cold War, 139, 147, 252 Cole, Samuel, 19n34, 20n35 Colman, Benjamin, 15, 17n14, 19nn33–34; The Divine Compassions Declar’d and Magnified, 9–10, 18n28, 19n30; The Hainous Nature of the Sin of Murder, 19n31; It is a fearful thing to fall

Index into the Hands of the Living God, 19n31, 20n35 Colt, John, 35 Columbine High School, xvii, 293, 294, 296 Combs, Josiah, 234 comics, x, xi, 40, 75, 78, 206, 269–89; American 271–75; censorship 274; road to grim ‘n’ gritty, 279–84; superhero, 275–79 Comics Code, 274, 278, 284, 285 Comstock, Anthony, 60, 61; Traps for the Young, 52–53, 68n6 confessional writing, 75, 80–86, 89n55 Conquergood, Dwight, 184–85 Cook, Donald: The Public Enemy, 127 Cook, S. C., 236 Cooper, Gary: High Noon, 159 Cooper, James Fenimore, xix–xx Corey, Jeff: High Noon, 159 Corkin, Stanley: Cowboys as Cold Warriors, 147 Corrigan, John, 19n33 Cotton, Joseph: Duel in the Sun, 149 Couvares, Francis G., 140n14 Cox, J. Randolph: Dashing Diamond Dick and Other Dime Novels, 68; The Dime Novel Companion, 67, 68n3 Coyer, John, 235 Crime Does Not Pay, 273 Crockett, Davy, 147 Crockett Almanac, ix, xiin9 Croton aqueduct strike, 30, 31, 36, 38 CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, 177, 178, 180, 181, 182, 187 CSI: New York, 186n17 Custer, George Armstrong, 147, 156 Damon, Matt: True Grit, 160 Dana, James: The Intent of Capital Punishment, 14, 21nn51–52 Danforth, Samuel, 1–2, 15; The Cry of Sodom Enquired Into, 2, 6, 10 “Darlin’ Corey,” 239 Dateline NBC, 174, 175 Daves, Delmer: Dark Passage, 132 Davis, David Brion: Homicide in American Fiction, 1798–1860, xv

319 Davis, Stephen: Reggae Bloodlines, 251 Day, Benjamin, 31, 32, 33, 34, 38, 43n7, 43n10 Deadly Housewives, 71–72, 76, 89n23 Deery, June, 89n31 De La Soul, 262 Demme, Jonathan: The Silence of the Lambs, 174 Denning, Michael, 51; Mechanic Accents, 67 Denny, Reginald: Cat Ballou, 152–53 Depp, Johnny: The Lone Ranger, 162 Detective Davis; or, The Moonshiner’s Terror, 68n11 detective, outlaw, and damsel in distress dime novels, 62–63 deviant individuals, 17n4, 246 Devine, Andy: Stagecoach, 148 DiCaprio, Leonardo: Django Unchained, 160 Dick Tracy, x, 272 DiLorenzo, Thomas, 98 The Dime Novel Round-Up, 67 dime novels, 49–70; censorship, 49, 50–53, 56; contested ideological territory, 50–53; conventions of crime fiction, 59–60; detectives, outlaws, and damsel in distress, 62–63; drawingroom mystery, 60–62; genre, 59–60; hardboiled, 62–63; Phebe Paullin’s Fate, 64–66; police detective and the forced marriage, 64–66; sensation, 54–59; shifting reader identification, 54–59 Discovery Channel, 174, 176 Disney, xi; Cannibal Capers, 124; The Gorilla Mystery, 124; The Lone Ranger, 162–64 Disney, Walt, 124 Ditko, Steve, 280, 281 DJ Kool Herc, 250, 251 Dmytryk, Edward: Murder, My Sweet, 132 Dowda, Rus, 231–32, 233 Dragnet, 171, 173 drawing-room mystery dime novels, 59, 60–62 Drayton, William “Flavor Flav,” 259 Dreiser, Theodore, 51 Driver, Robert, 2, 16n3 Duke Nukem, 293

320Index Dula, Tom, 236 Dunbar, Moses, 13–14 Duncan, Randy, 275 Eastwood, Clint: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, 151–52, 158; Unforgiven, 157, 158 EC Comics: Tales from the Crypt, 273 Ehle, John: Trail of Tears, 162 Elliott, Robert: The Doorway to Hell, 130 Emerson, Elizabeth, 4, 18 Endfield, Cy: Try and Get Me, 137 Ennis, Garth: Crossed, 274–75 Entertainment Software Review Board, 294 Eric B & Rakim, 256 Essex Journal, 5 Evanovich, Janet: One for the Money, 78; Stephanie Plum series, 78 execution sermons, 1–28, 193 Fairbanks, Jason, 15, 22n56 Faludi, Susan: The Terror Dream, xxi Fanon, Frantz, 54 Farmville, 291, 301, 304n26 Feavour, Nicholas, 2, 16n3 Feintuch, Burt, 234 Feldberg, Michael, 36, 37 female literacy, 3, 17n6 Fenton, Leslie: The Public Enemy, 128 Ferguson, Christopher J., 295, 296 Ferrari, Gustavo Adrián, 276 Ferraro, Thomas J., 140n18 Fiedler, Leslie, xii Filene, Benjamin, 229–30 film noir and Production Code 119–43; censorship, 123, 124, 125–26, 128, 130, 139n10, 140n14, 140n16, 140nn18–19, 151 first-person procedurals, 170, 184, 185 Fischer, James, 140n17 Fisher, Bud: Mutt and Jeff, 271 Flash Gordon, x, 272 Fleet, Samuel, 5 Fleet, Thomas, 5 Fleet, Timothy, 4 Flippen, Jay C.: Cat Ballou, 152 Fly, William, 19n34, 20n35

Flynn, Errol: They Died with Their Boots On, 156 Foltyn, Jacque Lynn: “Dead Famous and Dead Sexy,” 178 Fonda, Jane: Cat Ballou, 152 Ford, Glenn: The Big Heat, 127 Ford, John, 152; Stagecoach, 148; The Searchers, 149–51 Forensic Files, 177, 186n17 48 Hours, 174, 175 Foster, Hal: Tarzan, 271 Foster, Laura, 236 Foucault, Michel, 16 Foxcroft, Thomas: “An Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murdering of Bastard Children,” 11; Lessons of Caution to Young Sinners, 10–12, 18n28, 19n33 Fox Network: Bones, 177, 180, 181, 186 Foxx, Jamie: Django Unchained, 160–64 Frank, Jenn, 302, 303 Frederick, Francis, 20n35 Freedman, Jonathan: Cambridge Companion to Alfred Hitchcock, 314; Transnational Silent Film, 314 Freedman v. Maryland, 126 Freeman, Lucy: “Before I Kill More . . .,” 192, 198, 201–5 Freeman, Morgan: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, 157 Friday the 13th, xi Furious Five: “The Message,” 252; “White Lines (Don’t Don’t Do It),” 252 Fury limited series, 284 Futrell, Bev, 238 Gaines, William M., 273 Gamergate, 302–3 Gang Busters, x Gates, Darryl, 255 Gentile, Douglas, 297 G-Funk, 260–61 Gibbons, Dave: Watchmen, 278, 280–82, 284, 385 Gill, Brendan, 200 Gill, Jo, 74, 82, 83, 85 Gish, Lillian: Duel in the Sun, 149 Goad, Benjamin, 1–2, 16n2

Index God of War, 291, 297, 299–300 Going, Jonathan: A Discourse, Delivered at Worcester, Dec. 11, 1825, The Sabbeth after the Execution of Horace Carter, 6, 16, 21n50 “The Gold Bug,” 97 Golding, Dan, 301 Good, Marie, 295 Good Housekeeping, x, 220 Gottschall, Jonathan: The Storytelling Animal, 59 Gould, Chester: Dick Tracy, x, 272 Grace, Negress, 4, 18n28 Grahame, Gloria: The Big Heat, 127; In A Lonely Place, 128 Grand Theft Auto, xi, 291 Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records Inc. 245 Gray, Harold: Little Orphan Annie, 271 Great Awakening, 12, 19n29, 21n47 Green, Bartholomew, 4 Greenville, Henry, 19n34, 20n35 Greer, Jane: Out of the Past, 128 Griffith, D. W.: The Musketeers of Pig Alley, 122, 123 Grinschpun, Verónica Toyos, 276 Guild Wars, 297, 300–301 Gunsmoke, xi Hall, Marcel “Biz Markie,” 245, 260 Halloween, xi Halo, 301, 302 Halttunen, Karen, 32, 174, 176 Hamessley, Lydia, 236, 237, 240 Hamilton, Hamish, 105 Hamilton, Lucy Parks. See McMullen, Beth Hammer, Armie: The Lone Ranger, 162 Hammett, Dashiell, 96, 100–5, 106, 109, 112, 195; The Maltese Falcon, 101; Red Harvest, 100–101; The Thin Man, 103–5 Hannegan v. Esquire, Inc., 127 Hanno, Joseph, 19n34 hard-boiled detectives and the roman noir tradition, 95–117; Dashiell Hammett, 100–5; emergence 96–100; James M. Cain, 108–12; Raymond Chandler, 105–8

321 hardboiled dime novels, 62–63 Harlow, Jean: The Public Enemy, 128 Harris, Eric, xvii, 293 Harris, Sharon M., 18n27 Harris, Thaddeus Mason, 22n56 Harris, Thomas: The Silence of the Lambs, 77, 174 Hart, James D., 98 Harte, Bret, 51 Harte, Brooke, 137 Hartman, Saidiya V., 248 Harvey, Robert C., 272 Hathaway, Henry: True Grit, 159–60 Have Gun Will Travel, xi Hawks, Howard: The Big Sleep, 105; Scarface, 125, 130 Hays, Will, 125; Don’ts and Be Carefuls, 124, 125 Hayworth, Rita: The Lady from Shanghai, 128 Hearn, Daniel Allen, 16n3 Hearst, William Randolph, 42 Heirens, William George, 201–5 Herbert, Rosemary, 212 Herriman, George: Krazy Kat, x, 271 Hickock, Richard, 215, 216, 217, 221, 223, 224 Hicks, Bill, xviii–xix Highway Patrol, 171 Hill, George W.: The Secret 6, 130 Hilliard, Timothy, 5; Paradise Promised, By a Dying Saviour, to the Penitent Thief on the Cross, 18n16 Hill Street Blues, 172 Hitchcock, Alfred: Shadow of A Doubt?, xxii Holmes, Jack, 137, 141 Holmes, Sherlock, 60 hooks, bell: “Gangsta Culture—Sexism, Misogny,” 254 Hoover, Herbert C., 101 Horeck, Tanya, 184 horrorism, xxiiin6 Houseman, John, x housewives in contemporary American fictions of crime, 71–93; comedy violence, 76–80; examining housewife violence, 71–72; locating violent housewives, 72–75; “true crime” and confessional discourses, 80–86

322Index Howard, Police Captain: The Broken Button, 67n1; Old Bullion, The Banker Detective, 67n1; Phebe Paullin’s Fate, 64–66; Shadow, The Mysterious Detective, 56, 57, 59, 65, 67n1 Howard, Robert E., 274 Howe, David Walker, 36 How to Become an Inventor, 51 How to Become a Scientist, 51 How to Flirt, 51 How to Write Love Letters, 51 Humphries, Reynold, 136, 141n30 Hunter, Donna Denise, 21n53 Hunter, Jeffrey: The Searchers, 149 Hurray for the Riff Raff: “Small Town Heroes,” 240 Hurst, Paul: The Secret 6, 131 Hüyük, Çatal, 122 Ice Cube, 255, 256; AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, 258, 259; “A Bird in the Hand,” 247; “The Nigga Ya Love to Hate,” 258 Illustrated Police News, 172 Indie games, 301–3, 304n26 Jackson, Curtis “50 Cent”: Get Rich or Die Tryin’, 262 Jackson, O’Shea “Ice Cube”: Straight Outta Compton, 255 Jackson, Peter: The Lovely Bones, 182 Jackson, Samuel L.: Django Unchained, 161 Jackson, Scott, 233–34 Jacobs, Jonnie: Murder among Neighbors, 78 James, Jesse, 54–56 James, William, xii James brothers, 56 Jeffries, James J., 123 Jenkins, Henry: “Congressional Testimony on Media Violence,” 296–97, 298 Jergens, Adele: Try and Get Me, 137 Jermyn, Deborah, 180, 183 Jewett, Helen, 30, 31, 32–33, 34–35, 36, 44n12 Johnson, Deidre: Scorned Literature, 67 Johnson, Jack, 123 Johnson, Joseph, 12 Johnson, Lesley, 74, 75, 89n32 Jones, Jennifer: Duel in the Sun, 148

Jones, Karen, 238 Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson, 127 Joy, Jason, 125 Kelley, Robin D. G., 258 Kent, Carl: Try and Get Me, 137 Kerouac, Jack: On the Road, 198 Kilburn, John, 295 Kirby, Jack, 276 Kirkman, Robert: The Walking Dead, 274 Kirschenbaum, Matthew: Mechanisms, 185n5 Kita, Becca, 293, 296 Klebold, Dylan, xvii, 293 Kneeland, Samuel, 4 Korman, Harvey: Blazing Saddles, 154 Kramer, Hilton, 213 Krazy Kat, x, 271 Ku Klux Klan, 155, 258 Ladd, Alan: Shane, 159 The Ladies Home Journal, x Lamar, Kendrick, 266n75; good kid, m.A.A.d city, 263–64 Lambert, John, 20n35 Lane, Chris: Tracked by Bloodhounds, or, A Lynching in Cripple Creek, 133 Lang, Fritz: The Big Heat, 127–28; Fury, 134–37, 138 Lansbury, Angela: Murder, She Wrote, 172–73 Lauderdale, Jim: “Old Time Angels,” 240 Law & Order, 173–74, 177 Lawrence, D. H: Studies in Classic American Literature, xv, xix–xx Laws, G. Malcolm, 230, 231 The Learning Channel: Medical Detectives, 176¸177; The New Detectives, 176 Ledeen, Michael: Tocqueville on American Character, xviii Ledford, Lily Mae, 237 Leff, Leonard J., 140n19 Legman, Gershon: Love and Death, xi, 270–71 Leitch, Thomas, 136 Leone, Sergio, 157; “Dollars Trilogy,” 151–52; A Fistful of Dollars, 151; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 151

Index Leopold, Nathan, 198, 205 Levin, Meyer: Compulsion, 192, 198, 199, 205–6 Lewis, Jonathan, 234–35, 239 Leys, Colin: “Violence Today,” xvi Lights Out, x Li’l Abner, x Lindstrom, J. A., 139n10 Linfield, Susie, 121 Little, Cleavon: Blazing Saddles, 154 Little Caesar, xi, 125 Little Orphan Annie, 271 Lloyd, Justine, 74, 75, 89n32 Locke, John, 13, 20n44 Locke, Katherine: Try and Get Me, 138 Lockridge, Kenneth, 17nn5–6 Loeb, Jeph, 278 Loeb, Leopold, 198, 205 The Long Kiss Goodnight, 88n12 Lopez, Paul, 273 Lorenz, Konrad, 121 Losch, Tilly: Duel in the Sun, 149 Lovejoy, Frank: In A Lonely Place, 128; Try and Get Me, 137 Lovell v. Griffin, 127 “Lula Viers,” 235 Lumière brothers, 123; L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, 133 Mad, 271 Madison, Noel: The Doorway to Hell, 130 Magnum PI, 172 Mailer, Norman, 194 Manifest Destiny, 41, 156 The Man in the Iron Mask, 77 Mann, Anthony: Raw Deal, 127 Markey, Patrick: “In Defense of Violent Video Games,” 297 Marley, John: Cat Ballou, 152 Marrow, Tracy “Ice-T,” 252; “Dog’n the Wax,” 253; “6 in the Mornin’,” 252–53 Marshall, Herbert: Duel in the Sun, 149 Martin, Joel Bartlow: Why Did They Kill? 192, 198, 199–201, 202, 204, 205 Martin, John Wooster: “America’s Costliest CRIME WAVE,” 196

323 Marvin, Lee: The Big Heat, 127–28; Cat Ballou, 154 Marvin, Mia: The Public Enemy, 129 masculinity, 54, 165n19, 229, 249, 260; black, 254, 259 Massek, Sue, 238–39 Mather, Cotton, 3–4, 12, 13, 17n9, 19n30, 19n31, 19n33; The Call of the Gospel, 17n11; The Converted Sinner, 19n34, 20n35; Faithful Warnings to prevent Fearful Judgments, 20n35; Febrifugium, 19n34; Pillars of Salt, 1, 8, 18n27; The Sad Effects of Sin, 19n33; A Sorrowful Spectacle, 18n28, 19n33; Tremenda, 19n34; The Valley of Hinnom, 17n8, 19n34; The Vial Poured out upon the Sea, 19n31, 19n34; Warnings from the Dead, 18n28 Mather, Increase, 4, 9, 12; The Folly of Sinning, 8, 17n13; A Sermon, 17n11; The Wicked Mans Portion, 2, 16n3 Mathews, Dorothy: The Doorway to Hell, 130 Matthews, Brander, ix–x Maynard, Robert: Jerry Owens among the Moonshiners; or Pinkerton’s Little Detective in Tennessee, 62–63 Mayo, Archie: The Doorway to Hell, 125, 130, 131 McDonald, Jay, 82 McManus, George: Bringing Up Father, 271 McMullen, Beth (Lucy Parks Hamilton): Original Sin, 78 McNeil, W. K., 233–34 Mellaart, James, 122 Melrood, Elise, 238, 239 Mennel, Barbara: “Mob Rule,” 141 Mexican–American War, 30, 31, 38–39 Milgan, John: The Secret 6: 131 Miller, Frank, 279; Daredevil #232, 276; The Dark Knight Returns, 281–82; Sin City, 274; Watchmen, 282; Wolverine, 282 Miller, John, 20n35 Miller gang, 159 Miracleman, 279 Mohawk Nat, ix Montgomery, Robert: The Lady in the Lake, 132 Moody, Joshua, 4, 12

324Index Moore, Alan, 279, 281, 283; 1963, 287n40; Watchmen, 278 Moore, Michael: Bowling for Columbine, 293 Moorehead, Agnes: Dark Passage, 132 moral deviance, 1–28 Morgan, James, 4, 12, 13 Morgan, Julie W., 86 Morse, John Vinnicum, 194 Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), 124, 125 Mountain, Joseph, 14, 15, 21n50 MPPDA. See Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America Mulvany, John: Custer’s Last Rally, 156 Muni, Paul: Scarface, 130 “Murderauction,” xxii murder ballads, 227, 230, 231–32, 236–40 Murray, John: The Origin of Evil, 5, 18n16 Mutt and Jeff, 271 “Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” 97 Nardini, Tom: Cat Ballou, 152 National Association of the Motion Picture Industry, 124 The National Police Gazette, 172 Near v. Minnesota, 126 NBC: Dateline NBC, 174, 175 Neroni, Hilary, 74–75, 88n12 New Journalism, 42, 43n10 New York: homicides, 44n13 A New York Detective: Old King Brady’s Great Reward; or, The Haselhurst Secret, 51, 60–62 New York Detective Library, 50, 52, 53, 60, 68n9; New York Herald, 30, 31, 37 New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, 52 Detective Davis; or, The Moonshiner’s Terror, 68n11 New York Sun, 30, 31, 33, 37 New York Tribune, 30, 41 Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds: “Murder Ballads,” 240 Niggaz With Attitude (N.W.A.), 256, 257, 258, 259, 260; Straight Outta Compton, 255, 256 9/11, xviii, xxi, 177 Nocenti, Ann: Batman/Catwoman, 277 Nolan, Lloyd: The Lady in the Lake, 132

Nowlan, Philip: Buck Rogers in the 25th Century AD, 271–72 Numb3rs, 181 N.W.A. See Niggaz With Attitude Nyren, Neil, 212 Oakland Post Enquirer, 137 Oates, Joyce Carol, 74, 75: Black Water, 82; Blonde, 82; “Dear Husband,” 81–87; My Sister, My Love, 82 Occom, Samson, 17n12, 17n14; A Sermon, Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian, 4, 5 O’Connor, Robert: The Public Enemy, 128 O’Keefe, Dennis: Raw Deal, 127 Olson, Ted, 228–29 “Omie Wise,” 234–35 Pace, Gladys, 234 Pagano, Jo: The Condemned, 137 Palmer, Paulina, 81 Palmer, Stuart: A Study of Murder, 192, 207 Panic of 1837, 36 Panitch, Leo: “Violence Today,” xvi Panofsky, Erwin, xii Parker, Lawrence “KRS-One,” 252, 261 Parton, Dolly, 237–38; “Walter Henry Hagan,” 238 Patrick, James, 82, 83 Patterson, Daniel, 232 Patterson, Lorenzo “MC Ren,” 256 Paul, Moses, 4, 5, 17n12 Peach, Linden, 88n13, 89n42 Pearce, Roy Harvey: The Savages of America/Savagism and Civilization, 147 “Pearl Bryan(t),” 232–34, 238 Pearson, Edmund, 193–94, 212, 215; Dime Novels; or, Following an Old Trail in Popular Literature, 67; More Studies in Murder, 193; Studies in Murder, 193 Peck, Gregory: Duel in the Sun, 149 Peckinpah, Sam: The Wild Bunch, 152–53 Peterson, Dale: Demonic Males, 119 Peterson, Erasmus, 20n35 Penn, Arthur: Little Big Man, 156–57 Penny Press and the purpose of making violence news, 29–48, 193 Perlmann, Joel, 17n6

Index The Phantom, 272 Phebe Paullin’s Fate, 64–66 Phoenix, Jeremiah, 17n8, 19n34 Plath, Sylvia, 75, 89n23 Plimpton, George, 200, 213 Poe, Edgar Allan, 97, 112, 172; “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” 34, 97; “The Purloined Letter,” xv, 97 Pogo, x police detective and the forced marriage dime novels, 64–66 Police Story, 172 police violence and gangsta rap’s golden age, 254–61 Pomeroy, Jesse Harding, ix, 99 Portis, Charles: True Grit, 160 Prince, Stephen, 124–25, 140n15 Prince Valiant, 272 Production Code Administration, 123, 124 Production Code and film noir, 119–43 Profiler, 177 Public Enemy, 247, 256, 258–60; Fear of a Black Planet, 260 Public Enemy, xi, 125, 127, 128 Pulitzer, Joseph, 42 Pulitzer and Hearst, 42 Puritanism, 6, 9, 16n2, 17n4, 18n18, 127 Quake, 293 Quelch, John, 20n35 Quincy, M.E., 178 Quinn, Eithne, 246, 247–48, 261 Quinn, Zoe, 302 Rakim, 256 Rand, Ayn, 280, 281 rap music, 245–68; authentic gangsters and black criminality, 247–50; criminality and gangsta rap’s beginnings, 250–54; deaths of rappers, 261–64; police violence and gangsta rap’s golden age, 254–61 rape, 21n50, 21nn52–53, 56, 64, 65, 119, 124, 139n5, 162, 187n33, 248, 259, 280, 303; forced marriage, 49 Rawlings, David: “Caleb Meyer,” 240 Ray, Nicholas: In A Lonely Place, 128 The Real Housewives of Orange County, 73, 77 Red Ryder, 272

325 Reel World String Band, 237, 238, 239–40 religious pluralism, 6, 9–11, 15, 19n34 Remington Steele, 172 Reynolds, Quentin: The Fiction Factory; or, From Pulp Row to Quality Street, 67 Ridenhour, Carlton “Chuck D,” 256, 259, 260 The Rifleman, xi Riis, Jacob: How the Other Half Lives, 123 Roach, Peter 20n35 Robinson, Caroline, 89n24, 89n38 Robinson, Richard, 33, 35, 44n14 Rodgers, Esther, 6–7, 8, 9, 18nn19–20 Rogers, John: Death, The Certain Wages of Sin to the Impenitent, 7, 18n19 Rogg, John, 20n35 Rose, Charles, 21n52 Rose, Tricia, 246; “Rap Music and the Demonization of Young Black Males,” 249–50 Roseanne, 89n25 Rosemann, Bill, 284 Roth, Randy, 214, 222 Roughead, William, 193 Ruble, Sharon, 238 Rule, Ann, 208n14, 214–15, 216, 220–21; A Rose for Her Grave, 221–22; The Stranger beside Me, 192, 212, 220, 222–23, 225 Rusch, Kristine Kathryn, 275 Saddler, Joseph “Grandmaster Flash,” 252, 261 Samuels, David: “The Rap on Rap,” 248 San Francisco Chronicle, 42 San Francisco Examiner, 42 Sarkeesian, Anita: Feminist Frequency, 302–3 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 54 Sayers, Dorothy L.: The Omnibus of Crime, 97 Scarry, Elaine, 54, 55 Schechter, Andi, 80 Schneider, John C., 36 Schurman, Lydia, 51; Scorned Literature, 67 Scott, Lisbeth: Dead Reckoning, 128 Scudamore, Christopher, 20n35 second death, 2, 3, 9, 16n3 Secret Agent X-9, 272 secularization, 10–11

326Index Segar, E. C.: Thimble Theatre, 272 Selig, William N.: Tracked by Bloodhounds, or, A Lynching in Cripple Creek, 133 September 11, xviii, xxi, 177–78 serial killers, ix, xxii, 211, 221, 222, 224, 225, 281, 283 sexual violence, 50, 53, 65 The Shadow, x Shadow; or, The Mysterious Detective, 56–59, 65 Sharp, Cecil, 228 Sharp, Sharon, 72, 84, 87 Shaviro, Steven, 120, 139n2 Shaw, Donald, 43n4, 43n10 Sheehan, Bernard: Savagism and Civility, 146 Shirley, Dennis, 17n6 Shrock, Joel, 99 Shutt, J. Eagle, 229 Sidney, Sylvia: Fury, 134 “The Siege of Monterey,” 40 The Silence of the Lambs, 77, 174 Silly Symphonies, 124 Silverstein, Elliot: Cat Ballou, 152–54 Simmons, Jean: Angel Face, 128 Simmons, Jerold L., 140n19 Simon & Simon, 172 Simpson, O. J., 175–76 Sinclair, Upton, 51 six-cent papers, 43n10, 44n12 Slater, John, 43n10 Slotkin, Richard, 21n53, 270, 272; The Fatal Environment, xx; Gunfighter Nation, xx–xxi, 67, 147; Regeneration through Violence, xx, 147 Smith, Dante “Mos Def”: “Definition,” 262 Smith, Henry Nash: Virgin Land, 67 Smith, Jimmy, 216, 217, 221, 223, 224 Smith, Matthew, J., 275 Smith, Perry, 215, 216, 217, 221, 223, 224 Smith, Sarah, 7–8 Socialist Register, xvi Spanish-American War, 42 Spring, Samuel, 5; Christian Knowledge, and Christian Confidence Inseparable, 18 Stanwyck, Barbara: Double Indemnity, 128 Starkweather, Charles, 196 Steenberg, Lindsay, 170, 185nn1–2

The Stepford Wives, 73 Stephney, Bill, 259 Sterling, Scott “Scott La Rock,” 252 Stolen Voices, Buried Secrets, 181, 183 Stop the Violence Movement, 252 Street & Smith, 51, 68n2 Strong, Nathan, 13–15, 21n47; The Reasons and Design of Public Punishments, 14 Studio Relations Committee, 125 A Study in Scarlet, 60 Sullivan, John, 5 “Super Columbine Massacre,” xxii superhero comics, 275–79, 282, 284, 285, 286, 286n31, 287n40 Super Mario Bros., 298 “Supernaught,” xxii Tait, Sue, 180 Tales from the Crypt, 273 Tappan, Mark, 293, 296 Tarantino, Quentin: Django Unchained, 160–64 Tarzan, 271–72 Tate, Greg: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, 259, 260 television crime drama, 169–90; forensic procedurals of the new millennium, 177–81; mid-twentieth-century police procedurals, 171–3; new channels for new, non-fiction crime stories, 173–7; over my dead body, 184–85 Tennenhouse, Leonard, xvi Thatcher, Thomas, 15–16, 22n56 Thimble Theatre, 272 Thomas, Jean: Ballad Makin’ in the Mountains of Kentucky, 230; “Lula Viers,” 235 Thomas, Ronald: Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science, 171–72 “Thou Art the Man,” 97 Threeneedles, Sarah, 4, 7, 8, 17n13, 18n27 Thurmond, Thomas, 137 Times Film Corporation v. Chicago, 126 Tolnay, Stewart E., 141n33 “Tom Dula,” 236 Townsend, Rosina, 32 Tracy, Spencer: Fury, 134 Trevor, Claire: Stagecoach, 148

Index A Tribe Called Quest, 262 true-crime narratives: with 1950s origins, 191–209; patterns of violence, 211–26. See also Capote, Truman True Detective, 192, 195, 196, 220 Tsou, J. S., 236 Tucher, Andie, 31 Turner, Lana: The Postman Always Rings Twice, 128 Tyler, Tom: Stagecoach, 148 Uncle Jamm’s Army, 252 Universal: Dracula, 125 Universal Newspaper Newsreel, 137 Universal Zulu Nation, 251 U.S. Detective: Detective Davis; or, The Moonshiner’s Terror, 68n11 Van Cleef, Lee: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, 152 Verbinski, Gore: The Lone Ranger, 162–63 video games, 291–309; behaviors, 294–96; critiques of playing and behavior, 296–97; “effects,” 294–96; God of War, 299–300; Guild Wars, 300–301; history, 292–94; indie and mobile gaming, 301–2; violence in context, 298–301 Vidor, King: Duel in the Sun, 148–49, 151 Viers, Lula, 235 Vietnam War, 145, 157, 159, 282 Walker, Nancy: A Very Serious Thing, 78 Wallace, Christopher “The Notorious B.I.G.,” 261 Walling, Alonzo, 233–34 Waltz, Christoph: Django Unchained, 160, 161 Wambaugh, Joseph: The Onion Field, 192, 212, 216, 217–18, 223 War on Gangs, 254–55 Warrens, James: Creepy, 273; Eerie, 273; Vampirella, 273 Wayne, John: The Searchers, 149; Stagecoach, 148; True Grit, 159–60, 164 Ward, William: Jesse James’ Nemesis; or, The Pinkerton Oath, 54, 56, 67n1 War on Crime, 273 Washington, Kerry: Django Unchained, 160

327 Welch, Gillian: “Caleb Meyer,” 240 Wellman, William, 129; The Public Enemy, 127, 128 Wertham, Fredric: Dark Legend, 192, 206–7; Seduction of the Innocent, 206, 273 West, Mae: I’m No Angel, 126; She Done Him Wrong, 126 West, Stephen, 21n52 Westerns, 145–67 White, Alexander, 5 White, William, 19n34, 20n35, 20n39 Wieer, William, 12–13 “Wild Bill Jones,” 237 Wilder, Gene: Blazing Saddles, 154 Wilgus, D. K., 230 Willard, Samuel: Impenitent Sinners Warned, 8 Williams, Daniel E., 21n53 Williams, John, 7–8, 20n35 Williams, Juan, 262 Williams, Raymond, 265n15 Willing, Richard: “CSI Effect’ Has Juries Wanting More Evidence,” 187n30 Willoughby, Teena, 295 Windsor, Marie: The Killing, 128 Wise, Naomi/Omie, 234–35, 239 Wood, Amy Louise, 132–33, 141n36 Wood, James, 35 Wood, Lana: The Searchers, 149 Wood, Natalie: The Searchers, 149 Woodbridge, Joseph, 6 Woodfield, Randy, 222 Woods, Edward: The Public Enemy, 128, 129 World Trade Center, 170 Wrangham, Richard: Demonic Males, 119 Wright, Eric “Eazy-E,” 256; “Boyz-N-The Hood,” 255 X-Files, 177, 186 Yellow Journalism, 42 Young, Andre “Dr. Dre,” 260; “Boyz-N-The Hood,” 255; The Chronic, 260 Young v. American Mini Theatres, 127 Zelda, 298 Zinnemann, Fred: High Noon, 159 Žižek, Slavoj: Violence, xv, xvi, xxiiin5