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Savage Pastimes, by Harold Schechter |
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Pastimes, by Harold Schechter is, as it calls itself, "A
cultural history of violent entertainment."
This is the tag line, and it sums up the book very well. Schechter is a university professor in New York, and a prolific author, historian, and researcher. He's published several books about serial killers in history, and written several novels starring a fictionalized young Edgar Allen Poe. The man knows his stuff, when it comes to how and why people died in past centuries in America and Western Europe, and he's also a cultural historian, one who thinks the frequent outbursts of neo-Puritanism and fits of "blaming all evils on popular entertainment" we see in modern America are woefully misguided. To quote from the end of the first chapter:
That's the premise of the book, and while Schechter doesn't spend that much time actually describing just how violent life was in the past, he does a very thorough job on the other premise. After reading his extensively-researched (and endnoted) writing, I have no doubt that various old and stuffy representatives of every generation, for at least the past 150 or 200 years, were entirely convinced that whatever the kids of their day were reading/listening to/watching was far, far more violent and sexual than what they themselves had enjoyed in their youth, decades earlier. And they were also quite sure that whatever the kids were enjoying was going to turn them (the kids) into savage, violent, vicious animals. Those kids then grew up, turned out fine, had kids of their own, saw their entertainment, and freaked out all over again. The fact that the promises of violent entertainment-fueled anarchy
and doom have been wrong every single time, which of course has done
nothing to slow down our current generation of politicians and
self-appointed moralists in their frantic denunciations of computer
games, gangster rap, death metal, reality TV, pornography, and so on. Savage Pastimes, by Harold SchechterThe book isn't great, but it basically accomplishes what it sets out to accomplish. Schechter's main contention is that people have always and will always want violence in their entertainment. It's an integral aspect of human nature, as evidenced by the fact that almost all boys naturally pretend to play with guns or swords, even if they have to use dolls or just their fingers as props. Humans enjoy violence, it's far better that people read about it or watch it on TV than engage in it themselves, and there's no proven long term detrimental effects to children who watch reasonable amounts of TV or video games. Sure, some kids go too far and do crazy violent things, but that's always been the case. The murder rate today is a fraction of what it was decades or centuries ago, and anyway, children were constantly exposed to every sort of real violence then, something they are largely sheltered from in today's world. The book has some weaknesses; it doesn't go into enough detail about the eras, it cherry picks examples and isn't always honest about the context in which the violent acts are presented, it doesn't present enough statistics about crime, total population, total books sold/TV programs watched, etc, and so on. Basically it's very thorough in some areas, while skimming or skipping others entirely, and it could certainly have been much larger in scope and much longer in length. It's only 163 pages, with another 30 of endnotes and citations, and it's actually rather redundant, with too many examples of the same thing given in each chapter. Schechter often quotes long passages from several books, showing us just how gory and gruesome they were, while not mentioning any other popular forms of entertainment of that era, or estimating what percentage of the comic books, or dime novels, or radio programs, etc actually had that sort of violence in them. The book is divided into eight chapters, of which the first basically serves as an introduction. Two continues the introduction while quickly hitting on the very high prevalence of very violent radio and TV programming in the so-called golden era of the 1950s. It's in chapters three through eight that the book hits its stride, and each off those chapters has a rather similar form. They jump around in time, covering every era since about the 1860s, with a few bits about medieval Europe, but mostly concentrate on the past century and a half, presenting their arguments thusly: They open with a brief summary of the era and the forms of entertainment popular in it, then state how common violence was in it, then quote several long examples of the violent fare, before concluding with several quotes from the moralists of that day as they decry this new travesty and predict dire consequences for the youth growing up exposed to it. The fact that this happens like clockwork every 15 or 20 years, and that every generation invariably looks back on whatever they grew up with as wholesome while thinking the modern stuff is horrible, is largely left for the reader to observe and extrapolate forwards through time. I think the argument is pretty compelling, if less wide-ranging than Schechter wants it to be. It's irrefutable that there has been public debate about the newly popular forms of entertainment for the last century and more, and it's indisputable that most of them have been condemned by many in the older generation. It's also clear that every generation has thought the new stuff was uniquely horrible and dangerous for children to grow up with, and it's also irrefutable that our society has grown steadily more divorced from actual violence and death, that the crime rate has steadily dropped for at least the last half century, and that this has done nothing to stop each generation of adults from thinking the kids are going to hell in a hand basket. Whatever you think of Schechter's arguments, there are tons of interesting tidbits about violence and entertainment through the ages. I was unaware that many of the most popular early films were violent and gory, and wildly popular because of it. The first special effect ever was used to recreate the beheading of a Queen of England. The first movie made with anything resembling a plot was a film depicting a train robbery, which was pretty much non-stop violence and death from beginning to end. In the early days of Hollywood, when Westerns were king, many of the spectacular horse falls were real; they simply strung wires across the path and ran horses into them at a full gallop, endangering the stunt riders and almost invariably breaking the legs of the horses. Schechter humorously contrasts this to modern films, where every movie gets approval from the Humane Society, and even the deaths of insects, or fish in a fishing movie, have to be performed with special effects and fake fish. I did know that modern society is almost unbelievably less violent than it was in the old days, but when he cites dozens of examples of the vastly higher crime rates decades and centuries ago, mentions the lower life expectancy and regular deaths children saw in the streets due to disease, lack of law and order, and accidents, and the fact that public torture and execution was by far the most popular form of mass entertainment through most of human history, it's hard to believe that people now are worried about some angry lyrics in a rap song, or some boobs visible in a video game. As a recent article discussed, car jacking incidents are down sharply over the past five or ten years, even as one cultural puritan after another stands up to condemn Grand Theft Auto for creating a new generation of murdering car jackers. To stress the point about public execution; they were enormously popular. Entire towns would turn out to see notorious murderers killed, and if you think the killings were clean and neat, you are woefully misinformed. Towns in medieval Europe used to compete with one another for the right to hold executions of wanted men, and the way to win the event for your town was to dream up the most painful and savage torture method. Flogging, breaking on the wheel, torture with heated irons, crushing, dismemberment, and on and on. People loved it, the more gruesome the better, and they would travel for many miles and bring their kids to see the fun. And people today condemn Jerry Springer and Fear Factor? Another interesting point he makes is how perceptions of new technology change. To the modern viewer, those old, jerky, black and white films with their handlebar-mustachioed villains seem hopelessly quaint. Yet to the kids watching them at the time, they were more impressive than iMax 3D is today. Imagine going from seeing nothing but puppet shows, or comic books, to actual moving images on a screen? People used to faint and run screaming from theaters when trains seemed to run straight into the camera, and it was thought dangerous to view images taken from moving vehicles, that viewers might lean forwards or backwards and fall right over. I don't think anyone even considered the things some people worry about today, like children perhaps having some nightmares after seeing something scary on the screen. In 1925, when people first viewed The Lost World, many intelligent adults, including the publisher of the New York Times, were so amazed by the (to us) laughably primitive stop motion special effects that they seriously believed the film to be a miracle, and thought the makers had somehow gotten footage of actual prehistoric beasts. Imagine what kids thought, having never seen any sort of special effects in their lives? Going back before films, the technology issue still existed, if you can believe it. Moral crusaders currently argue that special effects and video games are dangerous because they are so realistic and show everything of the violence and let the viewer control it. Precisely the opposite argument was made in the past, when moralists crusaded against early radio shows, classics like The Lone Ranger and Flash Gordon and so on, for exactly the opposite reason. Back then they said those programs were dangerous since the radio enabled children to so vividly picture the images in their heads that they would get carried away by the imagery. And the same argument is sometimes made about fiction today, and it can comfortably co-exist right beside the "they look too real so they're dangerous" argument, illogical as that seems to any rational person. People were even blaming books and films for violence back then, just like they do today. In 1912, The Great Train Robbery was blamed for inspiring a murder near a train track, in which the killer waited for a train whistle to shoot a man, so no one would hear the shot. Nevermind that no such scene exists in the film. Remind you of that Beavis and Butthead hysteria, when some kid lit his mobile home on fire and his mom blamed the show, until investigation showed that she didn't have cable, that the kid had never actually seen the show, and that Beavis and Butthead had never engaged in any arson in the first place? There are tons more examples, plenty to make the book worth a read, even if you just want to know how ridiculously history repeats itself.
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