NYPress.com “We could make a series out of it. ‘Suicide of the Week.’ Hell, why limit ourselves? ‘Execution of the Week—the Madame Defarge Show’! Every Sunday night, bring your knitting and watch somebody get guillotined, hung, electrocuted, gassed. For a logo, we'll have some brute with a black hood over his head. Think of the spin-offs.”
–from Paddy Chayefsky’s Network
In 1976, when Network (the story of suicidal anchorman Howard Beale and his ratings-mad network) swept the Oscars, the above bit of dialogue was considered utter satire. “Happy Days” and its spin-off, “Laverne & Shirley,” were the top two shows. Vietnam was over and the only reality-based televised injuries to be found occurred during “Monday Night Football” or the occasional unfortunate episode of “American Bandstand.”
Thirty years later, the nearly wholesome brutality of the Fonz and Lenny & Squiggy has given way to a significantly darker line-up of violence. Both cable and commercial channels overflow with murderers and their marks. The local news broadcasts home videos of kids beating each other senseless. Our computer and television screens even brought home—not only masked terrorists slashing the throats of kidnapped Americans—but also the fulfillment of Chayefsky’s bleakest vision: Sadaam Hussein, amid a swarm of black hooded hangmen, falling through the gallows’ trap door in the ultimate rockin’ farewell to 2006.
We did not shut our eyes. Indeed, at last count, searching the phrase “Hussein hanging” on YouTube resulted in over 800 copies of the video, with something like 4 million page views of just the first 25. When it comes to humans being damaged, there has never been a bigger audience nor a larger menu of atrocity from which to choose. From the war in Iraq to depraved reality shows to game shows based on humiliation, to hyper-violent dramas, we tune in, turn on and care not whether the victim is real, fictional or somewhere in between.
Is it mere coincidence that lately, the most endearing primetime protagonists are also the most brutalized? Certainly we need Jack Bauer to save the country from nuclear devastation on “24,” but we pull for him all the more when the bare wires are put to his chest and he absorbs a large dose of high voltage or when a knife slices into his thoroughly scarred torso. We drool for the return of Tony Soprano because we’re fairly sure his time is due and no way will it be pretty. And “Dexter,” the most-watched original series to appear on Showtime in years, could not say it any plainer. There is nothing more lovable than a blood-obsessed sociopathic serial killer who excels in his craft, especially if he was lucky enough to see his mother dismembered by a chainsaw in his youth.
Granted, our huge appetite for human suffering is hardly new. Nothing filled the Roman Colosseum faster than a gladiator battle where you the audience, and a celebrity judge (known then as an emperor), voted on who got the thumb’s-down verdict-of-death. Public hangings were family entertainment for centuries, and continued in the United States until the 1930s. But there are two big differences between how our ancestor’s bloodlust was sated and how we go about feeding our own inner beasts.
First, we can do it in the shame-free comfort of our own high-tech caves, alone in the warm glow of LCD or with only the knowing glare of our significant others to cause us a pang of guilt. We can slow-mo and rewind the naughty bits and fast-forward through the dull stuff. To feel moral, we might post a blog entry on the appropriateness of broadcasting a slaying, but really there is no sacrifice on our part, no chance that accidental eye contact will be made, no mob to put a little fear in the gut. And even if fear or shame somehow did make itself manifest, we need only hit mute or click over to an episode of “Law and Order” to gain reprieve. And as for the network execs, they have come up with perhaps the most cynical solution ever for maintaining their sense of public decency: Graphic scenes will not be televised, they tell us. Instead, they will be freely available on network websites where Mommy won’t see it but where any 10-year-old could find the bloodshed in a heartbeat.
The other difference in our compulsive hunt for hurt is that, for the first time since Howard Beale promised his audience he’d put a bullet in his head, there are hoards of famous, near-famous and complete strangers who are more than willing to put a metaphorical noose around their own necks for no apparent reason other than our own enjoyment. Self-destruction has become the new self-fulfillment, and all the better if exhibitionism is thrown into the mix. Celebrity abhors a vacuum and with 700 channels and the infinite Internet, there’s a lot of space to fill for the willing who crave attention and who are just juiced enough to open up a vein for the benefit of the viewer.
Of course, the self-inflicted damage need not always come with physical scars. Witness the most blemish-free and most perverse of the necro-celebs: the wannabes of “American Idol.” “Idol” is really two separate shows. The season’s second half is an enjoyable talent show, harmless enough for the fans who can withstand the music of Barry Manilow and Abba. But the first weeks are a sharpening stone for those wishing to perform cultural hara-kiri.
This year’s first two audition episodes produced some of the biggest ratings in FOX history, with 37 million viewers tuning in each night. In both Minneapolis and Seattle, about 100,000 fame mongers auditioned and less than 20 were chosen. This perhaps explains why Paula Abdul seemed punch drunk 90 percent of the time, but what does it say about someone like 22-year-old Trista Giese, for example?
Here is a plump but not unattractive, intelligent and very religious girl (judging from her MySpace page) who apparently was born without the embarrassment gene. Sporting a frumpy outfit and pigtails, she got up in front of America and sang, intentionally, in the exact vibrato of the Cowardly Lion from the Wizard of Oz.
Paula laughed uncontrollably, the other judges made it known that hers was one of the worst auditions ever. On Trista’s blog she writes that her experience was “one of my best times ever in my entire life.”
Her effort and the hundreds of other equally off-key renditions sung by the horrendously misguided, the freakish looking and even the mentally impaired, are not just cute ideas that didn’t work. They are sweet little snuff films for the masses. Pornographic in their willingness to self-humiliate as well as to be harangued by Simon Cowell (who called one contestant a “bush baby” this season), they compulsively give us this gift, and we lovingly accept.
Meanwhile, down in the depths of cable hell, there is a land called VH1 wherein lurks the king of the death wish celebrities, Danny Bonaduce. Child stars, as we know, are notoriously cursed, but most at least have the courtesy to shoot up or kill themselves off camera. This freckle faced, former “Partridge Family” member feels no such need. In fact, his path twisted to the degree that, at one point, starring in his reality show, “Breaking Bonaduce,” was the only thing keeping him alive.
Season One found Danny way off the wagon, chock full of vodka and steroids, and obsessed with a wife who would no longer have sex with him. It was brutal enough that he let us watch his downward spiral, but he truly earned his crown when he attempted suicide. The deed was not filmed, but we were eventually treated to his bandaged wrists and the sight of him lying to his children, telling them that he had accidentally cut himself. The producers courteously stopped production after the slashing, but the star convinced them that only through the public display of his own immolation would he truly be happy. Ratings soared and a second season of fights, rehab and otherwise private pillow talk poured forth.
VH1 could not conjure a “Breaking Bonaduce” spin-off, so they devised the next best thing: the equally alliterative “Shooting Sizemore.” Tom Sizemore was a better than average film actor on a solid career path (Black Hawk Down, Saving Private Ryan) until he decided to hook up with the Hollywood Madam, Heidi Fleiss, and ingest most of the crystal meth in the greater L.A. area.
Now he is out of rehab, in and out of court and trying for a fresh start. When not throwing tantrums or being consumed with insecurity, we are treated to black and white footage of him when he was doped up and in a paranoid rage since, as he put it: “In my warped state, I decided to document my own downfall.” Warped like a fox.
It takes a truly gifted basket case to have the forethought (when stoned out of his mind) to conclude, “Hey, I bet if I smoke me some heroin on camera, someday I can televise it so everyone can enjoy sharing in what a disaster I have become.”
Poor Howard Beale never got the chance to shoot himself. (The network had him assassinated because his ratings tanked.) But the die, so to speak, was cast, so to speak. Earlier this month, reporters and bloggers at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas lined up for the opportunity to be Tasered on-air. Thus we can now surf to Abcnews.com and watch the sexy Amanda Congdon convulse in overwhelming pain.
It’s a good time-killer while we await the next television spectacular. What shall it be? Flagellating Flavor Flav? Die Like Princess Di? Everything transcends satire now that actor and amateur alike have easy access to the three ingredients that lead to any crime against humanity: means (low budget cable shows and the web), motive (“Look at me, look at me!”) and opportunity (us, wanting more).
- Stan Friedman
January 24, 2007
