Pause, Now, and Consider . . .
the Mass Perversion Called Porno-Violence
by Tom Wolfe
Keeps His Mom-in-law in Chains, meet Kills Son and Feeds Corpse to Pigs. Pleased to meet you. Teenager Twists Off Corpse's Head To Get Gold Teeth, meet Strangles Girl Friend, then Chops Her to Pieces. Likewise, I'm sure. Nurse's Aide Sees Fingers Chopped Off in Meat Grinder, meet....In ten years of journalism I have covered more conventions than I care to remember. Podiatrists, theosophists. Professional Budget Finance dentists, oyster farmers, mathematicians, truckers, dry cleaners, stamp collectors, Esperantists, nudists and newspaper editors—I have seen them all, together, in vast assemblies, slouching through the wall-to-wall of a thousand hotel lobbies (the nudists excepted) in their shimmering grey-metal suits and Nicey Short Collar, white shirts with white Plasti-Coat name cards on their chests, and I have sat through their speeches and seminars (the nudists included) and attentively endured ear baths such as you wouldn't believe. And yet some of the truly instructive conventions of our times I seem to have missed altogether. One, for example, I only heard about from one of the many anonymous men who have labored in ... a curious field. This was a convention of the stringers for The National Enquirer.
The Enquirer is a weekly newspaper that is probably known by sight to millions more than know it by name. In fact, no one who ever came face-to-face with The Enquirer on a newsstand in its wildest days is likely to have forgotten the sight: a tabloid with great inky shocks of type all over the front page saying something on the order of Gouges Out Wife's Eyes to Make Her Ugly, Dad Hurls Hot Grease in Daughter's Face, Wife Commits Suicide After 2 Years of Poisoning Fails to Kill Husband . . .
The stories themselves were supplied largely by stringers, i.e., correspondents, from all over the country, the world, for that matter, mostly copy editors and reporters on local newspapers. Every so often they would come upon a story, usually via the police beat, that was so grotesque the local sheet would discard it or run it in a highly glossed form rather than offend or perplex its readers. The stringers would preserve them for The Enquirer, which always rewarded them well and respectfully.
In fact, one year The Enquirer convened and feted them at a hotel in Manhattan. It was a success in every way. The only awkward moment was at the outset when the stringers all pulled in. None of them knew each other. Their hosts got around the problem by introducing them by the stories they had supplied. The introductions, I am told, went like this:
"Harry, I want you to meet Frank here. Frank did that story, you remember that story, Midget Murderer Throws Girl Off Cliff After She Refuses To Dance With Him.
"Pleased to meet you. That was some story."
"And Harry did the one about I Spent Three Days Trapped at Bottom of Forty-foot deep Mine Shaft and Was Saved by a Swarm of Flies."
"Likewise, I'm sure."
And Midget Murderer Throws Girl Off Cliff shakes hands with I Spent Three Days Trapped at Bottom of Forty-foot-deep Mine Shaft, and Buries Her Baby Alive shakes hands with Boy, Twelve, Strangles Two-year-old Girl and Kills Son and Feeds Corpse to Pigs shakes hands with He Strangles Old Woman and Smears Corpse with Syrup, Ketchup and Oatmeal. . . and....
. . . There was a great deal of esprit about the whole thing. These men were, in fact, the avant-garde of a new genre that since then has become institutionalized throughout the nation without anyone knowing its proper name. I speak of the new pornography, the pornography of violence.
Pornography comes from the Greek word porne, meaning harlot, and pornography is literally the depiction of the acts of harlots. In the new pornography the theme is not sex. The new pornography depicts practitioners acting out another, murkier drive: people staving teeth in, ripping guts open, blowing brains out and getting even with all those bastards....
The success of The Enquirer prompted many imitators to enter the field, Midnight, The Star Chronicle, The National Insider, Inside News, The National Close-Up, The National Tattler, The National Examiner. A truly competitive free press evolved, and soon a reader could go to the newspaper of his choice for Kill the Retarded! (Won't You Join My Movement?) and Unfaithful Wife? Burn Her Bed!, Harem Master's Mistress Chops Him with Machete, Babe Bites Off Boy's Tongue, and Cuts Buddy's Face to Piece for Stealing His Business and Fiancée.
And yet the last time I surveyed the Violence press, I noticed a curious thing. These pioneering journals seem to have pulled back. They seem to be regressing to what is by now the Redi-Mix staple of literate Americans, plain old lust-o-lech sex. Ecstasy and Me (By Hedy Lamarr), says The National Enquirer. I Run a Sex Art Gallery, says The National Insider. What has happened, I think, is something that has happened to avant-gardes in many fields, from William Morris and the Craftsmen to the Bauhaus group. Namely, their discoveries have been preempted by the Establishment and so thoroughly dissolved into the mainstream they no longer look original.
Robert Harrison, the former publisher of Confidential and later publisher of the aforementioned Inside News, was perhaps the first person to see it coming. I was interviewing Harrison early in January of 1964 for a story in Esquire about six weeks after the assassination of Kennedy, and we were in a cab in the West Fifties in Manhattan, at a stoplight, by a newsstand, and Harrison suddenly pointed at the newsstand and said, "Look at that. They're doing the same thing The Enquirer does."
There on the stand was a row of slick-paper, magazine-size publications, known in the trade as one-shots, with titles like Four Days That Shook the World, Death of a President, An American Tragedy or just John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1921-1963). "You want to know why people buy those things?" said Harrison. "People buy those things to see a man get his head blown off."
And, of course, he was right. Only now the publishers were in many cases the pillars of the American press. Invariably, these "special coverages" of the assassination bore introductions piously commemorating the fallen President, exhorting the American people to strength and unity in a time of crisis, urging greater vigilance and safeguards for the new President, and even raising the nice metaphysical question of collective guilt in "an age of violence."
In the three and a half years since then, of course, there has been an incessant replay, in every recoverable clinical detail, of those less than five seconds in which a man got his head blown off. And throughout this deluge of words, pictures and film frames, I have been intrigued with one thing. The point of view, the vantage point, is almost never that of the victim, riding in the Presidential Lincoln Continental. What you get is ... the view from Oswald's rifle. You can step right up here and look point-blank right through the very hairline cross in Lee Harvey Oswald's Optics Ordinance four-power Japanese telescopic sight and watch, frame by frame by frame by frame by frame, as that man there's head comes apart. Just a little History there before your very eyes.
The television networks have schooled us in the view from Oswald's rifle and made it seem a normal pastime. The TV viewpoint is nearly always that of the man who is going to strike. The last time I watched Gunsmoke, which was not known as a very violent Western in TV terms, the action went like this: The Wellington agents and the stagecoach driver pull guns on the badlands gang-leader's daughter and Kitty, the heart-of-gold saloonkeeper, and kidnap them. Then the badlands gang shoots two Wellington agents. Then they tie up five more and talk about shooting them. Then they desist because they might not be able to get a hotel room in the next town if the word got around. Then one badlands gang gunslinger attempts to rape Kitty while the gang leader's younger daughter looks on. Then Kitty resists so he slugs her one in the jaw. Then the gang leader slugs him. Then the gang leader slugs Kitty. Then Kitty throws hot stew in a gang member's face and hits him over the back of the head with a revolver. Then he knocks her down with a rock. Then the gang sticks up a bank. Here comes the sheriff, Matt Dillon. He shoots a gang member and breaks it up. Then the gang leader shoots the guy who was guarding his daughter and the woman. Then the sheriff shoots the gang leader. The final exploding bullet signals The End.
It is not the accumulated slayings and bone-crushings that make this porno-violence, however. What makes it porno-violence is that in almost every case the camera angle, therefore the viewer, is with the gun, the fist, the rock. The pornography of violence has no point of view in the old sense that novels do. You do not live the action through the hero's eyes. You live with the aggressor, whoever he may be. One moment you are the hero. The next, you are the villain. No matter whose side you may be on consciously, you are in fact with the muscle, and it is you who disintegrate all comers, villains, lawmen, women, anybody. On the rare occasions in which the gun is emptied into the camera — i.e., into your face — the effect is so startling that the pornography of violence all but loses its fantasy charm. There are not nearly so many masochists as sadists among those little devils whispering into your ears.
In fact, sex — "sadomasochism" — is only part of the pornography of violence. Violence is much more wrapped up, simply, with status. Violence is the simple, ultimate solution for problems of status competition, just as gambling is the simple, ultimate solution for economic competition. The old pornography was the fantasy of easy sexual delights in a world where sex was kept unavailable. The new pornography is the fantasy of easy triumph in a world where status competition has become so complicated and frustrating.
Already the old pornography is losing its kick because of overexposure. In the late Thirties, Nathanael West published his last and best regarded novel, The Day of the Locust, and it was a terribly flop commercially, and his publisher said if he ever published another book about Hollywood it would "have to be My Thirty-nine Ways of Making Love by Hedy Lamarr." Ecstasy and Me is not quite that . . . but maybe it is. I stopped counting. I know her account begins: "The men in my life have ranged from a classic case history of impotence, to a whip-brandishing sadist who enjoyed sex only after he tied my arms behind me with the sash of his robe. There was another man who took his pleasure with a girl in my own bed, while he thought I was asleep in it."
Yawns all around. The sin itself is wearing out. Pornography cannot exist without a certified taboo to violate. And today Lust, like the rest of the Seven Deadly Sins — Pride, Sloth, Envy, Greed, Anger and Gluttony — is becoming a rather minor vice. The Seven Deadly Sings, after all, are only sins against the self. Theologically, the idea of Lust — well, the idea is that if you seduce some poor girl from Akron, it is not a sin because you are ruining her, but because you are wasting your time and your energies and damaging your own spirit. This goes back to the old work ethic, when the idea was to keep every able-bodied man's shoulder to the wheel. In an age of riches for all, the ethic becomes more nearly: Let him do anything he pleases, as long as he doesn't get in my way. And if he does get in my way, or even if he doesn't . . . well . . . we have new fantasies for that. Put hair on the walls.
Hair on the walls is the invisible subtitle of Truman Capote's book, In Cold Blood. The book is neither a who-done-it nor a will-they-be-caught, since the answers to both questions are known from the outset. It does ask why-did-they-do-it, but the answer is soon as clear as it is going to be. Instead, the book's suspense is based largely on a totally new idea in detective stories: the promise of gory details, and the withholding of them until the end. Early in the game one of the two murderers, Dick, starts promising to put "plenty of hair on them-those walls" with a shotgun. So read on, gentle readers, and on and on, you are led up to the moment before the crime on page 60—yet the specifics, what happened, the gory details, are kept out of sight, in grisly dangle, until page 244.
But Dick and Perry, Capote's killers, are only a couple of lower-class bums. With James Bond the new pornography has already reached dead center, the bureaucratic middle class. The appeal of Bond has been explained as the appeal of the lone man who can solve enormously complicated, even world problems through his own bravery and initiative. But Bond is not a lone man at all, of course. He is not the Lone Ranger. He is much easier to identify than that. He is a salaried functionary in a bureaucracy. He is a sport, but a believable one; not a millionaire, but a bureaucrat on expense account. He is not even a high-level bureaucrat. He is an operative. This point is carefully and repeatedly made by having his superiors dress him down for violations of standard operating procedure. Bond, like the Lone Ranger, solves problems with guns and fists. When it is over, however, the Lone Ranger leaves a silver bullet. Bond, like the rest of us, fills out a report in triplicate.
Marshall McLuhan says we are in a period in which it will become harder and harder to stimulate lust through words and pictures—i.e., the old pornography. In an age of electronic circuitry, he says, people crave tactile, all-involving experiences. The same thing may very well happen to the new pornography of violence. Even such able craftsmen as Truman Capote, Ian Fleming, NBC and CBS may not suffice. Fortunately, there are historical models to rescue us from this frustration. In the latter days of the Roman Empire, the Emperor Commodus became jealous of the celebrity of the great gladiators. He took to the arena himself, with his sword, and began dispatching suitably screened cripples and hobbled fighters. Audience participation became so popular that soon various illuminati of the Commodus Set, various boys and girls of the year, were out there, suited up, gaily cutting a sequence of dwarves and feebles down to short ribs. Ah, swinging generations, what new delights await?
First published in Esquire Magazine, July 1967. Used here with the editors' permission.
Principles of Composition