Horrors!

Regarding my last entry, it's hot, and I don't think very well in my hibernation season when I have to force myself outdoors.  So obviously I forgot one huge area that has always influenced American culture, comic books, and a new mutation, the graphic novel.  We have had TV and movie series for Superman, Batman, now Spiderman.  We have gone through several Batmans recently--Adam West, Val Kilmer, Michael Keaton, George Clooney, my pick being the latest, Christian Bale, in the gloomy Batman Returns.  Major stars played the cartoon villains, Danny DeVito as the Penguin, Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman, Jack Nicholson aptly as The Joker, Jim Carey as the Riddler.   The newest superhero always generates headlines, as with Iowan Brandon Routh in Superman Returns and shortly the sequel, and Heroes, the TV series, is a major hit. As we all know, the accountants love sequels for any successful movie, despite few sequels equal to the originals.  TV cartoons also become movies, of course, and have since Disney's Steamboat Willie and the debut of Mickey Mouse in 1928. The list includes The Simpsons, The Flintstones, Scooby Doo, major movies for Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, not just shorts.  As the comic books and TV series grew darker, we got Mutant X, Blade: The Series, Marvel Comics and DC Comics providing many of these with such artist-authors as Frank Miller, Batman:  The Dark Knight Returns, Elektra, Daredevil, and, undoubtedly the most notable movie translation of Miller's graphic novels, Sin City, brilliantly designed and relentlessly gory, with an all-star cast.

Frank Miller is one of many creating a hybrid called a graphic novel, often in hardback, often dark and violent.  He made his version of the famous Spartan stand against the Persian invaders with The 300, the movie makers stepping up the gore and violence.  I have Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan:  The Smartest Kid on Earth and Daniel Clowes' Ice Haven.  It's too easy to call them books for people who hate books.  They are book-length comic books with complicated plots, adult themes and language, the most famous of which is probably Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale, based on his father's Holocaust experiences, winning a 1992 Pulitzer Prize.  I've also noticed how the group of anime manga versions keeps expanding at Borders and, curious, listened to two teenagers arguing over the merits of which to buy.  Anime, a Japanese word for animation, is a drawing style of streamlined futuristic large-eyed characters, reminding me of a Sixties craze for Margaret Keane's huge-eyed children.  Manga is Japanese for comics or cartoons.  It isn't difficult to separate the American from the Japanese. 

Nor is it difficult to see the youthful orientation of all that and the money generated.  We come to another area I'm very uncomfortable with.  I need to deal with horror, having dutifully watched Dark Shadows in the Sixties, more recently Charmed, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Forever Knight, sometimes Night Stalker, familiar with vampire movies from Bela Lugosi's Dracula (1931) forward, including Murnau's silent Nosferatu (1922) and Werner Herzog's scary 1979 remake, both German.  The same goes for werewolves, from Lon Chaney's The Wolf Man (1941) to An American Werewolf in London/Paris, The Howling, Silver Bullet, and, most notably, Wolfen, which I watch every time I surf onto it, fascinated with the eerie plotline, special effects, and beautiful wolves, almost the same oddly true for Blade:  Trinity, which I apparently like for the smart-ass dialogue and zippy cast.  As an American saturated in popular culture, I have the same familiarity with zombies, witches, and ghosts.  My favorite for the latter is the hilarious Topper comedy series, smartly begun in 1937 with Cary Grant and Constance Bennett as the ghostly sophisticated Kerbys tormenting Roland Young and Billy Burke as Cosmo and Clara Topper, more famous as a series from the Forties into the Fifties with Robert Sterling and Anne Jeffreys giving Leo G. Carroll fits, the catch being that only Cosmo Topper could see and hear the Kerbys in their ghostly mischief.

That all said, I don't really like horror and generally avoid Stephen King or the latest in the Halloween/Friday the 13th/Nightmare on Elm Street series (after seeing the first two or so of each) or anything similar, not believing in most supernatural horror, knowing, for instance, that British authors Bram Stoker invented Dracula and Mary Shelley Frankenstein (Lord Byron is sometimes credited with creating the vampire idea).  Despite George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) and all subsequent imitations, including 28 Days and the comic Shaun of the Dead (both of which I've seen), it's fairly well known now since the 1985 The Serpent and the Rainbow book that the so-called zombie state was/is created in Caribbean voodoo by very powerful toxic drugs, e.g., tetrodotoxin and hallucinogens, no real dead involved but a kind of eerie drugged slavery.  Men have often wrongly blamed wolves for evil deeds, but wolves are among my favorite creatures, the highly intelligent and highly wary ancestor of dogs, after all.  So folklore lycanthropes are more base superstition.

Let me jump to video games, justly accused of fostering raging violence.  I can still remember being appalled at the arcade versions played by my nephews, beheadings, spurting blood, large body counts, killing being the way to winning.  (I'll steer clear of the sexuality, the inclusion of naked women, whores, even a game in which Custer rapes a naked Native American woman.)  Studies have amply demonstrated perverse influence on children and teenagers.  I think the games have led to torture porn, joining with horror films for the hybrid psychotic series of Saw, The Hills Have Eyes, and Hostel.  In an essay by a survivor of Northern Ireland violence, Jenny McCartney, writing in the August 3 The Week, she says "these films depict rape, evisceration, and protracted torture in . . . gloating, graphic detail."  One features "a topless cheerleader bouncing on a trampoline, until she suddenly descends on a carving knife through the vulva."  In Captivity a shower head spurts acid, melting a girl's face.  In Hostel:  Part II a "young girl [is] bound and hung naked and upside down" while a "woman slowly slashes her to death."  The original Hostel featured "rich American businessmen pay[ing] to torture captured American backpackers . . . abducted from a Slovakian hostel."   Supposedly the main target audience is young males.  The films have grossed--apt word--millions worldwide.

What all this does to young minds and what the rest of us have to deal with accordingly is beyond my solution, but defending such profiteering is, clearly to me, indefensible and prime reason for my fussing about youth having taken the cultural reins and throwing money in these directions.  Culture is serious business, light or dark or anywhere between.