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shamanicshayminBolding is mine.
What it is, of course, is what George Clayton Johnson, the videowriter, said it was, at a recent brouhaha thrown by the Writers Guild of America, West. He said it was "gratuitous" violence. Let me hit that again: gratuitous violence. And what is that, gentle readers? It is a death onscreen that no one cares about.
If you've traveled through forty minutes of teleplay with a kindly old man who helps crippled children, and you see him shot to death on the steps of the altar where he is telling his beads, you care. You cry for that death. You feel like you have lost someone.
If, on the other hand, Little Joe Cartwright shoots down seventeen faceless hardcases trying to prevent him from snipping that bob'wire on the South Forty, you don't give a shit. They were extras. They fell and they lay there and that's that. (And the grossest debasement of the human condition of all, practiced regulary in TV series, is the scene in which someone has been murdered and lies there all through the shot while the remaining actors talk over what they'll do next. Have you ever been in the same room with a corpse? No? Try it some time, and try carrying on polite conversation while the stiff's blood and brains seep into the carpet.)
It is the difference between our being stunned as though struck by a ball-peen hammer when we saw Bobby Kennedy get hit on-camera, or continuing to munch our potato chips through all those newsreel footages of massacres in the Congo. We knew him; whether we dug him or not, he was real, he mattered.
So what IS gratuitous violence really? At the end of the chapter:
And if they decide that all violence must go, I suggest that they start not with the innocuous banalities of combat demonstrated on the half-wit series like The Outsider or Mannix but with the affectionate handling of freeway decapitations, sniper slayings, race riots and random brutalities delivered blow-by-blow in close close CLOSEUP by the ghouls on the Channel 7 news every night.
Or doesn't it disturb anyone to see a video newsman shoving his hand-mike down the gullet of a grieving widow on her knees before the burned body of her seven-year-old son?
What it is, of course, is what George Clayton Johnson, the videowriter, said it was, at a recent brouhaha thrown by the Writers Guild of America, West. He said it was "gratuitous" violence. Let me hit that again: gratuitous violence. And what is that, gentle readers? It is a death onscreen that no one cares about.
If you've traveled through forty minutes of teleplay with a kindly old man who helps crippled children, and you see him shot to death on the steps of the altar where he is telling his beads, you care. You cry for that death. You feel like you have lost someone.
If, on the other hand, Little Joe Cartwright shoots down seventeen faceless hardcases trying to prevent him from snipping that bob'wire on the South Forty, you don't give a shit. They were extras. They fell and they lay there and that's that. (And the grossest debasement of the human condition of all, practiced regulary in TV series, is the scene in which someone has been murdered and lies there all through the shot while the remaining actors talk over what they'll do next. Have you ever been in the same room with a corpse? No? Try it some time, and try carrying on polite conversation while the stiff's blood and brains seep into the carpet.)
It is the difference between our being stunned as though struck by a ball-peen hammer when we saw Bobby Kennedy get hit on-camera, or continuing to munch our potato chips through all those newsreel footages of massacres in the Congo. We knew him; whether we dug him or not, he was real, he mattered.
So what IS gratuitous violence really? At the end of the chapter:
And if they decide that all violence must go, I suggest that they start not with the innocuous banalities of combat demonstrated on the half-wit series like The Outsider or Mannix but with the affectionate handling of freeway decapitations, sniper slayings, race riots and random brutalities delivered blow-by-blow in close close CLOSEUP by the ghouls on the Channel 7 news every night.
Or doesn't it disturb anyone to see a video newsman shoving his hand-mike down the gullet of a grieving widow on her knees before the burned body of her seven-year-old son?
