13. Homicide At Home
Television and the Child
"They dare not devise good for man's estate. And yet they know not that they do not dare."
-- Shelley
To lump all mass media of entertainment together as if they were equal is often both erroneous and misleading. Of course they have many similarities, but they also have fundamental differences. That is very correctly recognized by the law, as in the decision of the United States Supreme Court in voiding the ban of a movie: "Nor does it follow that motion pictures are necessarily subject to the precise rules governing any other particular method of expression. Each method tends to present its own peculiar problems." A commodity like crime comics which is not a legitimate medium of entertainment for children can only profit if it is discussed not for what it is, but under the general name of mass media. It is true that some crime movies are as brutal as comic books, but these movies are not specifically merchandised for children. You can almost recognize a comic-book publicist by the frequency with which he speaks of "mass media," "mass media of communication," etc., when he is really just defending comic books. To class comic books in terms of mass media is to class starlings as songbirds. Of course songbirds and starlings are all birds.
A committee of the National Education Association, after studying "The Effects of Mass Media upon Children and the School Program," reported that "mass media including radio, television, motion pictures, comic books, current periodicals, and other communication means which have become an integral part of modern life affect human behavior to such an extent that it is the responsibility not only of the teacher and the parent, but also of all other community agencies to build a higher level of what we might call 'taste' on the part of the consumer." This is much too general and superficial to be of any use. Lumping all the media together has done some of them an injustice, while serving as a protective screen for crime comics. Legitimate methods of control of one may not apply to the other. Some media have done themselves considerable harm by making common cause with crime comics in opposing control of them. They feared, of course, that any control would spread to them. What does happen is that if the crime comics industry continues to lead a charmed life, the other media will be more exposed to the very censorship which they want to avoid. Pocket books are facing the danger of this creeping censorship right now. It is not censorship of children's crime comics, but its complete absence that threatens other media with unwanted controls. Quite apart from the fear of censorship, the defense of comic books stems from the inverted snobbishness of some who defend the right of what they consider the lower orders to read any trash sold to them.
In our studies we found marked differences between the media in their effect on children. The passivity is greatest in reading comic books, perhaps a little less with television, if only because often other people are present in the audience. In both, the entertainment flows over the child. Passivity is least in going to movies, where others are always present. The media have their maximum appeal at different ages. Movies seem to have the greatest appeal from eleven to twenty-one, television roughly from the ages of four to twelve. The time spent with different media varies, too. Comic books have the greatest hold on many children. Once in the Hookey Club when crime shows on television were discussed, an eleven-year-old boy said: "Television is bad, but it doesn't stay with you like a comic book." The mother of an eight-year-old girl said to me: "Television is not half so bad. It is the comic books. They are handy. They are ten cents. They are always around. They don't just read them once, they read and re-read them, from the bathroom to the kitchen and back." Children literally live with comic books.
What is said of one medium may be totally untrue of another. I know many people, children and adults, who have turned to read the original book after seeing an adaptation in the movies. The examples include such authors as Henry James, Tolstoy, Bernard Shaw, Jules Verne, Theodore Dreiser, Hawthorne, Emily Bronte. In all these years we have not found a single child who turned from a comic-book adaptation to the original. And yet experts for the defense of comic books, mixing together the media whenever possible, make this one of their chief claims.
Radio, movies and television are considered worthy of regular serious critiques in newspapers. Nothing like this exists for comic books. Nor is it even possible, for the few critics who have written about them find them subjects for toxicology rather than criticism.
Yet the different media are not mutually exclusive. Some of them blend very well; when they blend with comic books it is always in their worst aspects. There are radio comic books, TV comic books and movie comic books. But the great inroads that television was expected to make -- and for a short time seemed to have made -- have not materialized. The movies killed the dime novel, but television did not even wound the comic-book industry. The low order of literacy of television fitted in well with the almost total illiteracy of crime comics.
One can often learn about one medium from observation of another. My conclusion that children reading crime comic books often identify themselves with the powerful villain has often been challenged by wishful thinkers. It was borne out by a brilliant review of the television show "Senate Crime Investigation" by Fern Marja. This review was some of the best reporting of that memorable performance when for the first time organized crime was made a drawing card in a show with the criminals themselves and their prosecutors as the chief stars. "It is difficult to tell," she wrote, "whether the secret of the legislators' popularity is their identification with good or their necessary contact with evil. And Frank Costello is beginning to threaten the supremacy of Hopalong Cassidy as a TV attraction. . . . Is the racketeering boss hero or villain to the general public?" And later when the district attorneys were testifying she noted: "Imperceptibly, at first, the mood of the chamber changes. Here and there a yawn is visible. Mr. X and Mr. Y [the district attorneys] are men of good will, but they lack Costello's drawing-power. It is almost impossible to escape the conclusion that honesty bores the gallery.... A spectator stirs restlessly. 'Listen,' he says to an attendant, 'when's Costello coming back? That's what I want to see!''' If true of adults, why not of children? Others made similar observations. John Crosby, the New York Herald Tribune's radio and television critic, reported that it had been noted that "large segments of the population showed a tendency to sympathize with the witnesses, no matter how shady their past." And a newspaper editorial at the time wondered "whether these exhibitions will (not) add to the glamor of crime in many people's imaginations."
The study of comic books is indispensable for understanding what happens in less overt form in other media. If one has studied comic books one recognizes sadism for sadism's sake even if it is embellished with psychological thrills, as in some movies, radio and TV programs.
The mass media have power for good or ill, on society and on the individual. No amount of facile theorizing can explain that away. They present a new ethical problem. And if at present they do so much harm, the industries themselves by their own momentum evidently cannot remedy that. This became especially clear to me when I heard a high television-executive say that if all violence and horror were removed from comic books and television everything in the world would remain the same. That unethical type of argument has been made at every step of progress mankind has ever made, be it aseptics, vaccination or meat inspection.
One thing true of all the media is that many people glibly discount their influence on children. But they have a continuous impact on masses of children that would have been unheard-of in former times and they really mediate between the child and his environment. For example, in the most lurid crime stories the final defeat of the villain is supposed to cancel out his previous triumphs and achievements. That is psychologically naive. The lesson these stories usually convey to children is not that the villain should have been better, but that he should have been shrewder. In other media, especially in television, this extolling of the villain exists, too, although it is seldom as raw as in comic books.
The race ridicule and nationality stereotypes of comic books is also spread to some extent through other media. The mayor of the city of New York has commented severely on the race prejudice shown in television murder mysteries. (He did not mention the race prejudice in comic books which is much more widespread and harmful and about which he could do something, since they are sold on newsstands on city property.) The excuses for not interfering with this are the same for all media.
Whenever the question of the harm done by mass media is raised, the easy retort is that it is all up to the family. But the family itself is invaded with an all-round amphibious offensive. Take a peaceful American family on a quiet evening. Papa rests from his work and is reading Mickey Spillane. Junior has just come home from a movie with a "DOUBLE-SHOCK SHOW: The Vanishing Body and The Missing Head." He settles down to look at one of those good crime television shows where a man is beaten up so mercilessly that he is blinded for life. His older sister, just this side of puberty, is engrossed in the comic book Reform School Girl!, which blends sex, violence and torture in its context. (The advertisements in comic books have been worrying her about her development and she has just discovered the secret solution, the "BULGE-MASTER" [$5.98], advertised in this book.) Mama had been invited for the evening to see an avant-garde film. But when she read the title of the program, "Meditation on Violence," she decided to stay home instead and use the evening to keep abreast of the latest in child psychology. Recently she had attended the Illinois Congress for Parents and Teachers and heard the director of the Association for Family Living propound: "Hostility is one of the basic emotions and has to be expressed someplace. Home is the best place to do it." So she got herself two recent books on psychology. One has the title Children Who Hate, the other is a psychological textbook with twenty-five chapters in which the only psychological subject to which a whole chapter is devoted is "Hostility."
In other words, papa, mama, and the two children are all subjected to the impact of the same current fashion, the extolling of hostility and violence.
It is essential to recognize that the various media have an influence on one another although that is not generally realized. The newer medium may influence the older. It is well known that the movies have influenced the theater. We speak of a television-level melodrama in the movies and a comic-book-level show on television. The paradox is this: All the mass media together have influence on the child, but each follows separate laws. And the lowest medium, the only illegitimate one as far as children are concerned, the crime comic has in fact the greatest influence on all the other media.
In the last half-decade or so crime comics have influenced all the media in some degree. In that sense one can speak of a comic-book culture, especially for children. Comic books have been in competition with the other media not only with regard to money but with regard to children's minds as well. I have not found, as many would have us believe, that the good influence of the legitimate media makes comic books better, or restricts their circulation. On the contrary, comic books make the other media worse. It is true, as is always pointed out by comic-book defenders, that crime and horror shows existed long before comic books. But there is a new special touch -- blatant, crude and shameless -- that the other media now have to absorb, imitate and rival in order to be able to compete with the comic-book industry. Children's minds have been molded to strong sadistic fare. If he does not slap the girl around, what kind of a he-man is the hero? If he does not strangle her or poison her, where is the excitement? And if there is no murder, where is the plot? So it is not possible to improve children's shows on television or radio as long as crime comic books are left the way they are.
Some time ago I saw a Western movie in which the villain shoots the sheriff straight in the face. It was a children's matinee and at that point the children first laughed and then loudly applauded. This was not the so-called natural cruelty of children that adults like to speak about. This particular type of response was inculcated in these children by the most persistent conditioning in habits of hate ever given to children in the world's history.
There is at present in all the media, especially as they affect children, a pattern of violence, brutality, sadism, blood-lust, shrewdness, callous disregard for human life and an ever-renewed search for subhuman victims, criminal, racial, national, feminine, political, terrestrial, supernatural and interplanetary. Brutality is the keynote. It is self-understood that such a pattern in a mass medium does not come from nothing. There must be clues in real life as to why violence is in the air.
Children need proper food, vitamins, fresh air, games and schooling and love. Nowadays there is a dogma that they also need stories about violence and crime. Formerly hostility was concealed. Psychiatrists in those times would not admit that an ordinary boy could hate his father or a daughter, her mother. Bernard Shaw wrote about that, but the psychiatrists didn't. Now the pendulum has swung the other way. The same type of dogmatic person who formerly saw only sweetness and light and physical or hereditary causes now says that knowing about violence and sadism adjusts children to the world. What kind of a world, and what kind of an adjustment?
The quantity of violence in all the media is stupendous. It has become almost a national pastime for committees of women's clubs to count the murders in children's programs during a week. But quantity alone does not give the real picture. Hamlet is not just a play about violence. It has a plot, poetry, character development, philosophy, psychology. And yet, in the course of the play Hamlet kills five people. It is the context that counts, not the quantity.
Granted that this cult of violence originates somewhere in our social life, there is a dynamic reciprocal relationship between the audience and the creators of mass entertainment. The same influences come to bear on both producers and audience. Gradually, through constant reiteration, brutality is accepted and the producers can say that this is what the children (and adults) wanted in the first place. In speaking of children they use the refinement of a false argument by saying that this is what children need. The audience, on the other hand, feels that this is what it is supposed to like, in order to be virile and up-to-date. So there is a vicious circle, with normal business needing morbid audiences and healthy audiences spoiling normal business. The aberration becomes the norm and the norm creates the aberration.
What all media need at present is a rollback of sadism. What they do to children is that they make them confuse violence with strength, sadism with sex, low necklines with femininity, racial prejudice with patriotism and crime with heroism.
If one studies this phenomenon carefully, one will see that in this orchestra of violence the comic-book industry has set the tone and the rhythm. For a while, before 1945, it seemed that the crime-comic-book industry had a monopoly on the brutalization of children. Now it has some competition from television and the other media. So children may get the idea that violence is natural from any or all of the media, as well as from other children exposed to these media too. In the Hookey Club a boy once described a movie where the hero strangled the girl. "Why did he have to strangle her?" I asked. The answer was "Well, there has to be some adventure in the world." The story is told of the two little boys who had gone to see a romantic movie. "It was boring," said one. "Not to me," said the other. "I didn't mind. Whenever they kissed I closed my eyes and pretended he was choking her."
In a competitive way the media influence each other in the direction of the ritual of violence. Crime comic books influence television and radio, both of them influence the movies.
In all this consideration of other media one should never lose sight of the fact that, in complete contrast to comic books, movies -- and radio as well -- are an enormous educational influence, that they have given us unforgettable artistic experiences and that they are indispensable instruments of what could be best in our culture. To some extent this is also beginning to be true of television.
To trace the influence of one medium upon the other is as difficult as tracing influences in the history of literature. But there are clear indications which can be unearthed. Pocket-size books for adults have become a mass medium, too. Excellent books have been published in this form -- novels, stories, non-fiction, detective stories, etc. But here too a pattern of crudest sadism on the level of comic books is discernible. This is the announcement of one of these pocket-size books:
_____ was having trouble with women. The first one was dead -- strangled in her bed as she waited for her businessman-lover to come out of the shower. The second had a lovely name, a lovely face and an even lovelier bosom. The third was a frustrated widow. Her alcoholic strip tease in X's apartment left him cold -- but she was much colder later on, with a bullet through her heart ... a tasty dish for those who like their crime stories rough, tough and sexy.
Sounds like a children's book! Certainly it is a book for adolescent-minded readers brought up on crime comics.
Some pocket-size books express nothing but the pornography of violence, which derives from crime comics directly or indirectly. Some of the worst are to be found in places where juveniles buy candy and sodas and find large displays of the worst crime comic books. What do the publishers of these specimens do to justify them? They follow the trail blazed by the comic-book industry and have their most questionable products endorsed by a psychiatrist. In the book-publishing trade that is something new. It is a direct lesson from psychiatrist-endorsed comic books. One such pocket-size book has a brief endorsement by a "Renowned New York Psychiatrist." He writes that the book is "an authentic picture of nymphomania," it is "educational," it gives "a true picture of nymphomania," it is "clinically accurate" and "certainly the wider the knowledge of man's ills, whether they be of the mind or body, the greater the progress toward the cure."
The high point of the book is the detailed description of the heroine poisoning her lover. He is in horrible agony, shakes, falls and gets a series of convulsions. She watches all this with ecstatic joy. Every convulsion of the dying man is "like a virile thrust to her. Her own body twitched and moved spasmodically." When he finally dies, "... she reached her own paroxysm."
This is no isolated example. There are others offered to adolescents in which the obscenity is also as much in the endorsement as in the book. Here is one endorsed by an "Internationally Famed Psychiatrist." The endorsement says that this book also is an "educational experience," that it shows a disease "medically known as satyriasis ... based on one or more emotional traumas occurring in early life" and that such a person "will stop at nothing to gain his ends, not even murder." (Even medically that is entirely false.) In this book, girls are murdered, but the high point here is when the hero beats the heroine. She "enjoys the blows." "It was like the time she had watched the Negro being beaten and stoned and what she had felt then she was experiencing again." Sadism (or masochism) as sexual fulfillment -- that is the "educational experience" in these books.
A medium influenced by crime comics and rivaling them in viciousness is bubble-gum cards. Children collect them and they are widely distributed. I have quite a collection myself, contributed mostly by young children. They seem to have escaped the notice of child experts. Here are some sample pictures on bubble-gum cards:
1) A baby sleeps peacefully in his crib and an enormous serpent hovers over his head. There is also a dark-skinned native brandishing a big knife.
2) A card entitled "Desperation and Death" shows a huge exotic bird clawing at the middle section of a native. Of course you are shown blood where the skin is torn.
3) A man is bound to a kind of pillory, his hands tied and stretched out in front of him. Another man with raised sword is about to cut off his hands.
4) A man is kicked, his shirt is torn and there is blood on his forehead.
To influence children's parents, bubble-gum makers use the same methods that the crime-comics industry uses. There is a little magazine for juvenile card collectors. One number announces a new "Wild Man" series. At the masthead it says: "Dedicated to Child, Church, Home, School, Community." It is reported that bubble-gum manufacturers have more than $10,000,000 annual profits.
To some extent children's toys are a medium, too, and here the influence of comic books and other media is demonstrable. Toys are fitted into the school-for-violence pattern of child entertainment. For example, a central toy firm supplies many stores with toys. Its catalog has an elaborate chart showing what each toy "will contribute to development: mentally, physically, socially, vocationally." This is all tabulated for age and sex. If you look under "age group 2 to 4 years" you find holsters and guns, and more holsters and guns, some of which apparently contribute to the development of the child mentally, physically and socially, but not vocationally. One does not contribute at all, so evidently there are refinements in the education of children aged two to four which are not readily apparent. There used to be only about ten companies manufacturing toy pistols, knives and other such weapons for children. Since the boom of television, however, there are almost three hundred of them.
In the playroom we have often observed children delighted to get a chance to play with different types of blocks and construction sets. When we ask them if they have ever done this before they say No. When we ask what toys they usually play with they customarily answer: guns.
The fight against violent toys by mothers (and grandmothers) is an old one. When Goethe in 1795 heard that a miniature guillotine was being exhibited at the Frankfurt fair he asked his mother to buy one for his six-year-old son August. But she wrote him:
All that I can do for you I like to do and it gives me pleasure. But to buy such an infamous murder machine -- that I won't do for anything! To let children play with something so awful -- to put in their hands instruments for murder and bloodshed -- no, that won't be done.
What would the old lady have said about the present armament program for American children? Toys not only satisfy the child's imagination, they direct it. If we are really concerned about the growth of children's social feelings, we need a disarmament program for the nursery.
The violence which movies have been showing since the middle forties differs in quantity, quality and emphasis from the Jack London two-fistedness of the twenties. Canadian-provincial censors at a national convention have had the courage to say that sex in movies is a relatively minor problem, but crime and brutality is nowadays a major one. In some advertisements of movies the comic-book influence is noticeable.
The movie "Problem Girls" is advertised with the slogan "Nothing Can Tame Them!" There is a drawing beside the title showing a voluptuous girl hanging from her wrists which are tied together in typical comic-book fashion. She has long streaming hair, is barefoot and seems to be clad in a clinging nightgown. Next to her is a woman who is punishing her with a water hose. The whole setting has nothing to do with punishment or correction. It is strictly a perverse, sexually sadistic scene, of the type sold surreptitiously as obscene photographs.
Some time ago I saw a movie which had this episode: A young woman was nursing her baby; a man tears the baby away from her, throws it to the ground and kicks it away, then he hits the young mother over the head with a fence paling, knocking her over, and kicks her off the scene.
Sometimes children pattern their behavior after movies plus comic books. I saw a ten-year-old boy in the Clinic who had a long list of misdoings in school. He had pushed a little girl down an entire flight of stairs, which he got from the movies, and he twisted little girls' arms behind their backs, which he got from comic books. He did not tell me that as an excuse. He felt as guilty about his fantasies as about his acts.
Hollywood has been surprised that abroad some of its movies based on good books have been banned for minors. That happened, for example, in Sweden, despite the famous titles of the books. Of course it all depends on the ingredients of the movie. Swedish parents objected to too much violence (plus sex) for their children. Great Britain, Australia and other countries followed suit in attempts to keep movie violence and sadism away from their children. Recently a conference of British and American exchange teachers took place in the American Embassy in London, to discuss the effects of American movies on children. The headmaster of a London school spoke of the bad values these films taught his pupils. An American teacher made the typical defensive argument that the children could distinguish between entertainment and truth. This fallacious argument is heard frequently. Fiction and fact are not totally separated; there is a dynamic relationship between them. In this instance a British teacher answered that even many adults in England felt that the values in the movies applied to American life in general. All such criticism of American mass media is played down or goes unreported in the American press. It would be important for the public to know about it.
Some movie writers look in crime comic books for new tricks. For instance the producer of the movie serial "Atom Man vs. Superman," which was shown in about half the movie theaters of the country, is said to be "an avid reader of the comics, from which he gets many of his ideas."
Frequently different critical standards are used when people criticize media. Parents Magazine, whose publisher and some of whose advisory editors have been so defensive about comic books, says in a movie review: "A brutal whipping-scene prevents this from being a film for the children." In comic books this is a standard ingredient.
All the media have one characteristic in common: The mothers are fighting a losing battle with the experts. Many experts, self-styled and otherwise, say that children laugh all this off, or, if they don't, there must be something wrong with the children (not, of course, with the media). The book "Parents' Questions and Helpful Answers" by the Child Study Association of America gives the same stereotyped fallacies about radio programs that have been used to defend crime comic books: Eight-year-olds can take "a good deal of blood and thunder without any ill effects," it serves "as emotional outlet" and if a child is frightened by a program it is not the program that is at fault but "something more deeply personal." To a parent who asks about "trash on the radio" this book gives the helpful answer that it is like "folk and fairy tales." All this bad advice comes from the fundamental error that "the final judgment of values" is up to the child. That, of course, leaves it all to the child and then leaves the child helpless against adult seduction.
Quite apart from the mail I have received, I have polled hundreds of mothers on this and unless they repeat what experts have told them in lectures or over the radio or in articles, they feel the way Mrs. Walter Ferguson expressed it in her column "A Woman's View": "Every thinking mother knows how these outside forces (comics, movies, radio and TV) have influenced her family.... Today most children use their leisure to look at Westerns in movie theaters, to pore over unfunny comics which picture criminal activities or to listen to the same sort of thing over the radio. When television becomes as widespread as radio we can expect it to make a profound impression upon American children .... None of the women I have talked with believe these things are good for children. They only hope the impressions left will not be too deep." The more the pattern of violence becomes violent, the more experts are quoted to defend it.
Unfortunately psychiatry -- or rather, some of its modern practitioners -- has taken a defensive attitude about crime and sadism in the various media. They have provided a rationalization for that which they should help to prevent. There are three reasons for that. One is that hardly ever are these pronouncements made on the basis of actual study or even knowledge of what is going on. The same psychiatrists who will spend three years and hundreds of hours with an individual neurotic patient will pronounce on what happens to children from a ten-minute inspection of comic books (if that) or pronounce on children's movie programs without ever having been to a Saturday matinee with a child audience and with children's programs. Like educators, teachers and clergymen, psychiatrists were unprepared and not adjusted to the new impact of mass media on children, and as a result they have made themselves part of the education for violence.
The second reason is an over-individualistic outlook. On the basis of what they know of individual cases, psychiatrists pronounce largely on crime, delinquency, war, social organization and world peace, leaving out all mass-conditioning and all historical, social and economic forces.
The third reason is that the psychiatrist, despite his formal training, still remains a member of the society in which he moves and, as the whole crime comics issue has shown, is not so immune from the social pattern as he may think.