University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: June 14, 2007

By KEVIN FRYLING
Reporter Staff Writer

A specialist in American popular culture reflected upon "our longstanding national obsession with murderous entertainment" in "Why is Murder So Entertaining?" the inaugural lecture of the 2007 UBThisSummer lecture series.

From the crowds of colonists who turned out at public hangings in the 17th century to the millions who watch hits shows like "The Sopranos" and "CSI" in the 21st, David Schmid, associate professor in the Department of English, College of Arts and Science, and author of "Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture," traced a path of violence and murder through the American popular imagination before an audience of nearly 250 last week in the Natural Sciences Complex.

"Homicide has been an integral part of the American popular culture since the Puritan period," Schmid said. "[It] is a way for us to acknowledge that violence has played an extraordinarily complicated and important role in our history, but at the same time...allows us to take that fact on board without it being too damaging, controversial or disturbing."

Puritan preachers introduced murder to American readers in the 1600s, said Schmid, releasing religious sermons as tracts before public executions. The religious lessons behind depicting condemned individuals as "representative sinners" fell off, however, as writers started using the techniques of fiction, such as realistic detail and characterization, to encourage sympathetic interest in specific criminals. By the 18th century, Schmid said, anthologies filled with sensational criminal biographies, last words and dying confessions started to appear on the market.

"What we're seeing," he explained, "is an interest in the criminals' lives themselves."

Surprisingly, Schmid said, newspapers were late to the game in terms of crime reporting. "Believe it or not," he joked, "back then newspapers were constrained by a sense of delicacy and civic responsibility." However, the explosion of the "penny press" in the mid-1830s changed everything, he noted, explaining that crime reports enabled readers "to have their cake and eat it too" by portraying sensational tales of violence as an important tactic in educating the public on the danger inherent in rapid urban development.

"Consumers got the thrills and excitement that accompanied graphic representations of violence and murder," Schmid said, "but they also got to feel that their reasons for enjoying these thrills were impeccably moral."

Soon a whole new genre in which to depict violence appeared on the scene—the first "dime novel" came out in 1860 with the publication of "Malaeska," a sensational tale about a Native American widow's struggle to survive. It took close to 100 years for this form of fiction to reach its peak, Schmid said, pointing to the 1947 publication of "I, the Jury," a lurid and violent detective story by Mickey Spillane.

So popular were works featuring Spillane's brutal detective Mike Hammer that seven of the 15 best-selling books of all time were at one point written by Spillane, Schmid said.

"[Spillane's] work illustrates, I think, more than that of most other artists, that nothing succeeds in American pop culture like extreme homicidal violence," he added, "and the fact that it did so for the most part in the 1950s...should give us some real food for thought. How can we explain the success of Spillane's homicidal fantasies of revenge during the decade of June Clever and 'Father Knows Best'?"

Schmid concluded the lecture with a review of the myriad modern movies, music, television and video game franchises that market in violence. He also pointed to recent outcries against the broadcast of O.J. Simpson's "If I Did It" television special and images and video by the student responsible for the Virginia Tech shootings to suggest that America's fascination with murder and violence might be approaching a tipping point.

"One of the most shocking aspects of [Virginia Tech] was that Cho Seung-Hui tried to package what he did for consumption by the mass media," Schmid said. "I would argue, however, that Cho's...inspiration to do so was that our country routinely turns homicide into a form of entertainment.

"American society is not the only one to be fascinated by homicidal pop culture," he added, "but the scale of interest in it in this society is very different from anywhere else."