June 9, 2014

Wholesome and lurid themes in pop culture — separated or mixed together

Despite the trend toward increasingly squeaky-clean pop culture, where half of the top 10 movies at the box office for the year are kiddie crap, there's a counter-movement toward ever more lurid trash outside of the respectable mainstream — serial dramas about serial killers on TV, torture porn movies, and gory voyeuristic video games. Nothing is found in between that mixes wholesome and dark themes. There's a bunch of inoffensive kiddie stuff over here, and a pile of lurid filth way over there.

It's not so different from the climate of the Midcentury, where horror comic books, pulp novels, and the sleazier tiers of film noir stood out in stark contrast to the squeaky-clean world of Father Knows Best, Shirley Temple, and "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?"

In between those periods, pop culture shifted toward a more even spread of wholesome and dark themes. This reached its peak in the '80s and early '90s, when every week one of the mainstream, fit-for-the-whole-family sit-coms ran "a very special episode" about death and grieving, suicide, drug addiction, divorce, teenage pregnancy, teenage runaways, and so on. On the other side of the spectrum, the slasher horror movies portrayed teenagers who were wholesome and basically sympathetic — not brats whose death you'll be cheering along, and not flat cut-outs for puppet-like use in a concern-trolling melodrama like Law & Order: SVU.

Although I haven't seen them, the plot summaries of many hit movies from the Jazz Age sound a lot like "very special episodes" from the '80s — Flaming Youth, Children of Divorce, and so on. Horror classics like Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and King Kong show victims who are basically likable and respectable — not faceless crowds a la the "attack of the giant ants" flicks from the Midcentury, or victims who are randomly abducted without having time to establish their basic likability, a la the comic books reviewed in Seduction of the Innocent, or 21st-century torture porn.

The examples from falling-crime times reveal a cocooning mindset — sure, there's this whole other world of sick perverted crap, but as long as we quarantine ourselves from it, everything will be all hunky-dory. "That kind of thing could never happen here." Or, "We'd never allow our children to..." What begins as an impulse for greater security leads to an ignorant and arrogant attitude about how vulnerable their neck of the woods is to dark forces.

In rising-crime times, pop culture reflects the more streetwise and humble attitude that it can happen here, and that parents or adults in general cannot put up a magic force-field around young people, if the dark forces want to get to them bad enough. Being more out-and-about, and the rising-crime climate that follows along with it, is a humbling experience.

Looking into the texture of pop culture thus allows us keener insight into the popular mind when it comes to a trait as important as hubris vs. humility, which we could not tell from grosser measures like, say, church attendance (butts in seats). Nothing wrong with coarse measures to begin with, but it's striking how much you can learn about people from other times and places by what kinds of culture resonate with them.

11 comments:

  1. Lots of serial killer novels come from good liberal guys who've spent a lot of time around feminists. They are PC to their bones. They are obviously respectable. They are mysteriously inspired to write about serial killers who whack assertive women. They are John Sandford and a bunch of imitators. They are the overlap.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The Universal horror classics begin around 1931 (King Kong from RKO in 1933), early in the falling crime era. "Night of the Hunter", one of my favorites, is instead from the 50s and not a monster movie. Although I believe it has a child-friendly MPAA rating (and the protagonists are young children), it may not be considered "wholesome".

    One connection I'm surprised you didn't make is the divergence of media intended for male vs female audiences. Or maybe you did on a previous post about targeting different age demographics.

    "outside of the respectable mainstream — serial dramas about serial killers on TV"
    Not sure about that outside the respectable mainstream bit, Matthew McConaughey is regarded as likely to get an Emmy for True Detective, and the show as a whole also got a lot of respect. I've mentioned "Hannibal" before, but it's been lauded by some of the same critics who used to complain about audiences not tuning into the inaccessible & high-minded prestige dramedy* "Enlightened". Being "dark & gritty", as well as having dislikable protagonists, became something of a marker of seriousness on post-Sopranos TV. It's just that the signal became so successful that it resulted in many lesser imitators.
    *Comedies not necessarily being funny became another marker of seriousness. Louie only sometimes aims for laughter, and while I only saw some of the first season I've heard Shameless got really depressing. Never seen Nurse Jackie or Girls, but both have that kind of reputation.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Culture critics at the time considered the slasher and gore films, now affectionately/then despairingly, known as "Dead Teenager Movies," as lurid trash.
    80s film culture seemed more segregated. You had movies for children, teens, families and adults. Now those lines are almost completely blurred so that what should be kept away from children has been stylized in such a way as to seem not harmful. PG-13 used to mean something, so did NC-17 and X, now it might as well all be the same.

    I do think you are onto something interesting in regards to the way humanity is now dealt with and how it might mirror mid century junk movies. This year's Godzilla was an almost faceless epic and its detractors noted the lack of any characters you could sympathize with. That might not be a fault of the film but more a reflection of the times.

    ReplyDelete
  4. "Now those lines are almost completely blurred so that what should be kept away from children has been stylized in such a way as to seem not harmful. PG-13 used to mean something, so did NC-17 and X, now it might as well all be the same."

    Not exactly, there is much less actual nudity in movies than there was in the 80s. But that said, the tone of modern movies do seem to have become lurid in a way they weren't.

    ReplyDelete
  5. "The Universal horror classics begin around 1931 (King Kong from RKO in 1933), early in the falling crime era."

    The homicide rate rose toward a peak in '33; falling-crime lasts from '34 to '58.

    "You had movies for children, teens, families and adults. Now those lines are almost completely blurred so that what should be kept away from children has been stylized in such a way as to seem not harmful."

    Right, the audience demographics are all swirled into one these days, since parents refuse to let there be an autonomous youth culture.

    When I say segregated, I mean the themes that are bright and dark. I don't mean "dark" just as in gritty, but as in "downer" material -- a sincere treatment of kids coping with their parents' divorce and destabilized family structure. You don't see that anymore. It's either kept out altogether, or it's treated in such caricatured emo terms that it doesn't feel real and leaves no real impact on the audience.

    ReplyDelete
  6. "Not exactly, there is much less actual nudity in movies than there was in the 80s. But that said, the tone of modern movies do seem to have become lurid in a way they weren't."

    Right. There is also less graphic violence but Hollywood only cares about reaching a large audience. It is rather amazing to think that a film like The Lost Boys was released with an R rating when so much of it appeals to 13 year old boys. It is also interesting to note a film like The Hunger Games could be considered a family friendly blockbuster for millennials.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Back in the '80s, an R rating was informational only -- it told you what to expect inside -- not a method of restricting access to seeing it.

    A 13 year-old boy could easily see an R movie in the theaters (maybe with the help of an older-looking friend or sibling, maybe if the teenage dudes working at the theater just didn't give a crap that day).

    And of course there was the second life of movies on video. No ID required for those. I used to regularly check out Night of the Living Dead and Aliens from the local public library when I was in about 2nd grade. Somewhat older guys could also help out too, like when our high school aged babysitter let us watch The Terminator and The Secret of My Success.

    That was a much better way to sample movies that were targeted at a range of age groups -- let the 2nd-graders watch cartoons and kids' movies, but also let them watch adolescent and adult movies, if they wanted to. (We wanted to.)

    That let you peer into all of those different worlds for real, whereas in the fun-for-all-ages movies today, each world has 80% of it amputated, and they cobble together five pieces that are only 20% real, and that come from barely-overlapping ecosystems.

    It's like going to the zoo and seeing polar bears and horses within a tree-filled setting meant for monkeys. None of the pieces mesh with the others, and the slapdash fakeness takes you out of the experience.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I suspect the accessibility to R rated films in the 80s depended on many factors, the most important being region. If you lived near a theater that happened to not enforce a rating policy (think urban) or video lender that did not enforce restrictions, then you were set. I remember my local video store having to phone a parent (guardian) if I wanted to rent something R.

    I agree, today's films are strange amalgamations of our worst instincts. Faked values placed over neutered violence and sexuality so that it's all action and no consequence. Are anyone's desires met with these films? This zoo is built to frustrate and confuse.

    ReplyDelete
  9. BTW, it wasn't just gory or violent stuff that small children used to sample from the culture of older age groups. My favorite movie in kindergarten, that I checked out every week from the library, was The Elephant Man.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Yeah, there is a really marked preponderance of these dark television serials, which often specifically hark back to the Falling Crime eras you discuss - neo-Penny Dreadful Penny Dreadful (complete with neo-Grand Guignol), neo-noir Fargo and True Detective (to be fair, both much more palatable to me than the Scando-equivalents), neo-Western Deadwood. Not even mentioning the Game of Thrones (does that model onto a falling violence medieval era?). Detective dramas focus on these alienated, asocial genius characters (True Tec', Sherlock, itself a callback to the Victorian Sherlock Holmes) rather than everymen trying to do their job in a hard situation. Not something I would've noticed before but hard to stop seeing it everywhere after reading this blog...

    (Superficial question but, do you reckon Boardwalk Empire nails the 1920s, by the way?).

    Again, like with crime, I do wonder how much the age demographics play into this though. There aren't that many teens around proportionately, compared to the 1960s-1980s era, particularly among Whites, so not as much dedicated teen focused entertainment (especially White American teen entertainment, rather than relatively brainless fare for Mexs and Aframs). And what does exist is oriented towards older and younger folks as well to cover all bases. A flat age pyramid leads to "fun for all ages", whereas a rugged topology to your age pyramid leads to generational clash and segregation (with less bland results).

    http://populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/ - This only goes back to the 1950s, but you can see the changes over time, the homogenisation of the age distribution following the Baby Boom.

    http://hrblog.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451c94169e2014e60fe9c9a970c-800wi - For 1901 usa.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18854073 - the UK over the Twen Cen, the 1930s and 1940s series are missing but you can see the teenage and young person age bracket beginning relative decline in the 1920s and then flexing out again by the 1960s.

    ReplyDelete
  11. You're right, crime starts going down after Prohibition ends. The stock market crashes in 29, but it's not until a few years later when tax revenues are short and Hoover is out that it gets repealed.

    ReplyDelete

You MUST enter a nickname with the "Name/URL" option if you're not signed in. We can't follow who is saying what if everyone is "Anonymous."