9/11 And Your TV

Why are we so drawn to the gory details of crime and violence? Who knows?In his latest Against the Grain commentary, CBSNews.com's Dick Meyer says this isn't a good sign, post 9/11.

I am confused by last week's Nielsen ratings.

The No. 1 show by far was the two-hour documentary film "9/11." (It happened to air right here on CBS.) Some 39 million watched and that's no surprise. It was remarkable, it was inspiring and it was unlike anything anyone has seen before.

Number two was "Friends." No surprise there.

Just a nano-viewer behind in third came "C.S.I.", the forensic crime and action-autopsy show. (It happened to air right here on CBS.). A good 26.7 million people tuned in. Only 26.3 million viewers saw "Friends" but it had a higher share of the audience so it nabbed second place. But it's not ratings intricacies that have me stumped.

What I can't understand is why viewers would be drawn to both "9/11" and "C.S.I." To me, they seem like mutually exclusive tastes. After the events of 9/11, the morbid, gross parts of "C.S.I" struck me as especially unentertaining. And after watching "9/11" I can't imagine watching "C.S.I.", no offense to my corporate masters.

My guess is that some would argue that people watched "9/11" out of the same ghoulish fascination that makes "C.S.I" a hit. I don't think so. "9/11" was history, pretty raw. And for whatever reasons viewers tuned in, they left very powerfully and philosophically affected.

"C.S.I." is not especially violent by comparison to other shows, though there's no possible way it could have been on TV when I was a kid either. It's smart, exotic, full of science and the characters are cool. The good guys win.

It's the near obsession with the grisly details of crime, cruelty, autopsies, coroner's reports and crime solving that baffles me more than the more general love of violent entertainment. "C.S.I" has a massive legion of gorier and more ghoulish cousins in mass-marketed culture. The long-running serial killer phenomenon epitomizes both the appetite for minute detail and extreme, sick violence.

I confess to going through a brief Hannibal Lechter phase. I read all of Thomas Harris' books and a few of Patricia Cornwell's. I even read a book by a former FBI profiler. I couldn't put it down until the moment when I couldn't pick it up again, when I sort of looked in the mirror and said, "This is pretty sick." I'm not prudish and I've never been accused of being sensitive. I like war movies and novels. But honing my amateur profiler skills was over the top.

If you doubt the broad appeal of, say, serial killer lore, type "serial killer" into your favorite search engine. I dare you to go to some of the sites (but make sure there are no kids around).

Search "serial killer(s)" on Amazon.com. "Murder Most Rare: The Female Serial Killer." "Fiend: The Shocking True Story of America's Youngest Serial Killer." "Final Truth: The Autobiography of a Serial Killer." "Blood Lust: Portrait of a Serial Sex Killer." "Sleep My Little Dead: The True Story of the Zodiac Killer." "I: The Creation of a Serial Killer." "The Widow Killer. Depraved: The Shocking True Story of America's First Serial Killer." And the ultra-classy, " Please Don't Kill Mommy!" (Why must all these titles have colons?)

One of the book's that comes up is a scholarly one, "Serial Killer: Death and Life in America's Wound Culture" by Mark Seltzer, a professor of English at Cornell University. "The convening of the public around scenes of violence…has come to make up a wound culture: the public fascination with torn and open bodies and torn and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound," he writes. Great minds are at work on figuring this cultural pathology. My guess is it's challenging work.

A common sociological take is that we are attracted to tales and graphic portraits of violence for the same reason that kids like monsters. The world is a scary place and staring at the scariest stuff is natural. It may even be "useful" in jading us, conditioning us to ignore the dark frights.

Could be. But I don't know any parents who thoughtfully encourage their kids to rent slasher movies to help them conquer their fears. I do know plenty of parents who thoughtlessly allow their kids to watch them.

Oddly, a deep wariness of popular culture – its violence and its sexual content – is something the Religious Right and holdover Lefties have very much in common. Talk to a Christian parents who home-school or Birkenstock-wearing parents at pick-up time in any city about TV and movies and you'll find surprising common ground.

Politically, we generally pay attention to violence in popular culture only after tragedies like Columbine. Unless there is a blatant cause-and-effect (Ernie saw "High School Death Zombie" and bought a gun that day), we dismiss the relationship of violent entertainment and violence. Cultural criticism is a rather un-American activity and the impulse toward it usually passes quickly and painlessly.

After 9/11, there were knee-jerk predictions that pop culture would be changed forever, made kindler and gentler. The new Arnold Schwarzenegger movie was shelved – for a few months.

There has been no retreat from violent and hyper-graphic entertainment since 9/11. Unfortunately.

Dick Meyer, a veteran political and investigative producer for CBS News, is Editorial Director of CBSNews.com based in Washington.

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Against the Grain

By Dick Meyer