D. J. David B. Spins Comics-Tunes: Gotham Meets Wertham!
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The stated purpose of this blog is to celebrate the nexus of comics and records, that wonderful place where two of my hobbies intersect. Songs relating to comic characters. How fun is that? But today I’m getting on my soapbox to editorialize a bit. (Don’t worry, there’s a record coming up later.)
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I’ve been watching Gotham, the new Fox TV series that makes The Dark Night look like a day at the beach. It’s not just violent, it’s the kind of ultraviolence that got A Clockwork Orange an X rating. And it’s on television. At 8:00 pm. Gotham is the kind of show you’d expect to see on HBO after 11pm. But it airs during “the family hour” on a broadcast network. It’s easy to believe that Fox would sink so low, but I’m surprised at DC Comics and Warner Brothers. They should know better.
The Penguin with the least amount of blood on his face I could find.
Anyone in the comic book business knows that when violence goes too far, people get riled up and put a stop to it. Ever hear of Fredric Wertham? In Wertham’s book Seduction of the Innocent, the doctor pointed out to parents how violent comics had become and it just about killed the entire comic book industry. You can’t blame Freddy. Comics were horrifically violent at that time. Although they’re just “lines on paper,” those lines crossed the line, so to speak. Arguably, movies and TV shows have the potential to be worse since they show actual people being hurt, not just cartoon drawings.
One of Wertham’s pet peeves was the injury to the eye motif. Here’s an example:
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Given how horrible that image is, why did the creators of Gotham do THE EXACT SAME THING on this week’s episode? In fact, they went even further, actually showing people being killed by having a spike shoved into their eyeballs. Is this really necessary?
If this level of explicit, disgusting violence continues on Gotham, are we headed for another crackdown? Will a new Fredric Wertham arise to try to curtail injury to the eye, being burned alive, and other graphic horrors? Will I be that person?
Classic injury to the eye motif
Also available on a totebag
It’s too much for me. I think it’s unnecessary to show so much bloodletting and torture in order to tell a compelling story. You people should be ashamed. I’m talking to you, DC Comics! If you’re putting your name on this show you’re asking for the same thing that happened in the 1950’s. Think about it.
Click the link below and listen to a more innocent, non-violent Penguin.
— DJ David B.
Pappy will disagree (dragging out Wertham’s corpse to dance on it is a favorite pastime of his), but I feel ya.
But let’s not kid ourselves; DC’s been heavy on sick ultraviolence for years now, and the ante has to be constantly raised. The animated “Flashpoint Paradox” and “Assault on Arkham” are so grotesquely hateful and bloody that I was unable to watch either one to the end; one can only imagine where the rumored “dark” JL reboot by Bruce Timm will go.
Well stated, David; thank you. The saddest part of this is that there most likely WON’T be a massive uprising, or even a minor commotion. Horrific images have been a staple of network broadcast television now for almost a generation-check even the earliest episodes of CSI, and the multitude of spin-offs and copycats it spawned. It seems there is no more real art in the world: Just as everyone with a computer today thinks he is an artist (let’s see what today’s computer “artist” could do with just a pencil!),likewise film makers think that just because any digital image is possible, it should be displayed, without any thought given to the much more powerful “seduction” of the mind that could be achieved through artful suggestion. Contrast today’s images with Hitchcock’s use of cut-aways during Janet Leigh’s shower slasher scene. Alfred’s effect is masterfully terrifying, not sophomoric/disgusting. A person seeing any single one of these modern, graphically violent scenes in real life would likely require trauma counselling; but we (and our children) are subjected to many such images in any given night of “family” TV viewing-and we apparently take it with hardly a whimper. The world is indeed in a sorry state. As a recent viral email waxed: “In the 60′s, people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird, and people take Prozac to make it normal.”