John Rogers tells it sorta like it is
Mar. 31st, 2010 08:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficIn response to someone criticizing the show Leverage for making a serial killer joke.
Cruise through the thick airport best-sellers and you find a parade of cunning rapists, insane serial killers and mocking pedophiles with a tendency toward baroque clue construction. The CSI shows are rape/murdertastic, and the original CSI in particular basically equates anything outside total heteronormativity with perversion deserving of a horrible death, after which sincere CSI squares cluck their tongues and solve your murder that, hey, you kinda brought on yourself anyway.
Now, those dudes are writing crime thrillers, those are the streets they walk. I'm a big fan of those shows (I actually prefer L&O: Criminal Intent, but you know), and accept that they are working withing those bounds. And although it wins Emmys, it was L&O: Rape Exploitation Unit that gave us the famous "sodomized with a violin bow." For God's sake, Harper's Island opened with a dude tied alive to a boat propeller, forced to watch as it turned on and chopped him up alive, and then for a second death they cut Harry Hamlin in half -- in fucking half on-screen-- during the pilot.
ON CBS.
Now, the nature of Harper's Island was also to a great degree parody, but I'm dubious that's how it came across to most of the CBS audience. And they were fine with it, because of a steady dose of Momcore.
Momcore. The casual mainstreaming of gory/sexual violence used to give a frisson of horror to mass culture. We don't do it, we were mocking it, and the whole show was conceived as a rejection of those boogiemen in a quest to go after some actual villains doing big-time damage to people's lives. As Downey said, back when we were developing the show: "I think everybody else on TV has got serial killers covered."
We exploit pain and misery too, parasites of culture that we are, but at least it's in going after villains everybody else seems to be ignoring.
(NOTE: There should be a Mark Millar slam in here too, but I can't work it in organically. Assume you read it.)
I felt it worth repeating just for the Mark Millar name-drop, and I should note that "Momcore" goes hand-in-hand with the dulling down of formerly adult franchises to PG-13land, to the point where the Video Nasties of the 1980s are being grave-robbed and turned into inauthentic, bloodless, pointless teen-oriented remakes. When a Die Hard movie is rated PG-13 and Twilight is considered a horror movie, the cultural discourse has effectively fucked itself. What's worse than lowest common denominator sex and violence? Lowest common denominator sex and violence for the whole family.
The next generation will never have nightmares about velociraptors, the poor bastards.
Cruise through the thick airport best-sellers and you find a parade of cunning rapists, insane serial killers and mocking pedophiles with a tendency toward baroque clue construction. The CSI shows are rape/murdertastic, and the original CSI in particular basically equates anything outside total heteronormativity with perversion deserving of a horrible death, after which sincere CSI squares cluck their tongues and solve your murder that, hey, you kinda brought on yourself anyway.
Now, those dudes are writing crime thrillers, those are the streets they walk. I'm a big fan of those shows (I actually prefer L&O: Criminal Intent, but you know), and accept that they are working withing those bounds. And although it wins Emmys, it was L&O: Rape Exploitation Unit that gave us the famous "sodomized with a violin bow." For God's sake, Harper's Island opened with a dude tied alive to a boat propeller, forced to watch as it turned on and chopped him up alive, and then for a second death they cut Harry Hamlin in half -- in fucking half on-screen-- during the pilot.
ON CBS.
Now, the nature of Harper's Island was also to a great degree parody, but I'm dubious that's how it came across to most of the CBS audience. And they were fine with it, because of a steady dose of Momcore.
Momcore. The casual mainstreaming of gory/sexual violence used to give a frisson of horror to mass culture. We don't do it, we were mocking it, and the whole show was conceived as a rejection of those boogiemen in a quest to go after some actual villains doing big-time damage to people's lives. As Downey said, back when we were developing the show: "I think everybody else on TV has got serial killers covered."
We exploit pain and misery too, parasites of culture that we are, but at least it's in going after villains everybody else seems to be ignoring.
(NOTE: There should be a Mark Millar slam in here too, but I can't work it in organically. Assume you read it.)
I felt it worth repeating just for the Mark Millar name-drop, and I should note that "Momcore" goes hand-in-hand with the dulling down of formerly adult franchises to PG-13land, to the point where the Video Nasties of the 1980s are being grave-robbed and turned into inauthentic, bloodless, pointless teen-oriented remakes. When a Die Hard movie is rated PG-13 and Twilight is considered a horror movie, the cultural discourse has effectively fucked itself. What's worse than lowest common denominator sex and violence? Lowest common denominator sex and violence for the whole family.
The next generation will never have nightmares about velociraptors, the poor bastards.
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no subject
Date: 2010-04-01 02:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-01 03:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-01 02:43 pm (UTC)>The next generation will never have nightmares about velociraptors, the poor bastards.
Not if I have anything to say about it.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-01 03:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-03 05:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-05 09:48 pm (UTC)