Saturday Night Live is known for its topical humor, but the weekend before last, it sparked debate by wading into theological controversy. In what Hero Complex suggested was the “most blasphemous skit in ‘SNL’ history,” the show drew fire for airing a skit that satirized Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained by using a premise that is possibly even more controversial than Tarantino’s original: What if Jesus Christ rose from the dead…To exact revenge? As a thumping big-budget soundtrack rocks in the background, a voiceover touts the film as “A less violent ‘Passion of the Christ’” and quips “He’s risen from the dead … and he’s preaching anything but forgiveness.”

The studio audience seemed to love the skit, but, as happens with many of SNL’s forays into religious satire, the skit sparked a firestorm of criticism from conservative Christians. Twitter and SNL’s website immediately lit up with complaints about the segment, with commenters decrying it as “blasphemous,” “offensive,” and “just wrong.” The Catholic League was also quick to weigh in, calling the skit “vicious” and “uncharacteristically bloody”. Conservative televangelist Pat Robertson, for his part, reviled the whole thing “anti-Christian bigotry that is just disgusting.”

But there is something peculiar about the outcry over the “DJesus Uncrossed”: Most of the complaints aren’t emanating from the progressive Christian pacifists. Instead, much of the criticism is coming from hyper-conservative Christian circles, a world that, oddly enough, includes voices that preach a vision of Jesus eerily similar to SNL’s gun-toting Messiah.

Though the image of Jesus mowing down victims with a machine gun horrifies many Christians—and rightfully so—others, like Patheos blogger David R. Henson, have pointed out that hidden in SNL’s bloody humor is a powerful satire of an overly-violent, hyper-masculine subculture that has begun to influence not just our popular culture, also multiple strains of Christian theology. Influential mega-pastor Mark Driscoll, for example, has become famous for saying that he believes in a Jesus who has a “commitment to make someone bleed.” He reportedly refuses to believe in a “hippie, diaper, halo Christ” because, as he puts it, “I cannot worship a guy I can beat up.” Meanwhile, churches across America have started creating “Fight Club” groups for men, and several Christian communities are even basing services around Mixed Martial Arts fighting.
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Jack Jenkins is a writer and researcher for the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative at the Center for American Progress.

I did not particularly like Fox’s The Following, Fox’s new drama, which stars Kevin Bacon as an alcoholic former FBI agent who comes out of retirement to hunt down James Purefoy, the pretentious, Edgar Allen Poe-quoting serial killer, who has escaped from prison and trained a whole bunch of other serial killers to fulfill their own dark fantasies and enhance his own legend. The whole thing struck me as a slick but empty excuse to put extraordinarily grotesque violence on television in an attempt to compete with cable, as if violence itself, rather than the things that lead up to violence, were what make cable dramas sophisticated. Over at Vulture, however, Matt Zoller Seitz has a theory about what the show’s really about:

Once you become attuned to the show’s anti-logic, the mix of gnawing dread and random mayhem might trigger the gloomy adrenaline rush of the 2001–2004 period. Hijackings, collapsing skyscrapers, subway explosions, shoe bombers, anthrax attacks, terror alerts, weapons of mass destruction: The Following evokes an alternate-world version of that horrendous time. Watch the skies. Sleep with the lights on. Trust no one. Those co-workers or next-door neighbors or smiling security guards that you deal with each day could be in cahoots with an ice-veined genius-madman. Portions of the first few episodes reminded me less of The Silence of the Lambs or Se7en than a zombie or body-snatchers picture, one in which every character but the lead could secretly be, or potentially become, a monster. Parts of The Following feel like 24 with serial killers instead of terrorists. It’s an apocalypse story as long-form nightmare. The whole world is losing its mind.

It’s an idea that that actually makes me like The Following even less.
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President Obama’s proposal, in his gun control package, that Congress allocate $10 million to study “the relationship between video games, media images, and violence,” is hardly the most damaging policy suggestion to come out of our current debate about gun violence, but it ignores the fact that this is a question that’s been studied before, to no particularly conclusive result. Ralph Nader’s declaration that video games are “electronic child molesters” is vastly more hysterical. Democratic Rep. Jim Matheson’s proposed legislation to require identification for the sale of video games much in the same way as tobacco or alcohol would disrupt both the voluntary ratings system that the gaming industry already has in place, and impose new requirements on brick-and-mortar retailers and online outlets.

What all of these reactions have in common, however, is that they cater to the public’s anxieties about violent media rather than trying to handle them in a rational fashion. And in doing so, they’re conflating three debates that ought to be handled separately: parents’ ability to control the media their children consume, the public policy question of whether media has an impact in the real world, and the creative question of whether violence in media remains narratively and thematically rich. We have an interest in making sure parents can make the right decisions for our families, that we’re evaluating risk factors for gun violence in ways that will make for rigorous and effective policy, and preserving creative freedom for artists to do their best work. Conflating those interests, particularly if we’re doing so to make one seem more serious, runs the risk that we won’t find the solutions that will best serve any of these concerns.

A CBS-New York Times poll released last week found that that 42 percent of Republicans and 43 percent of Democrats said that violence in movies and video games contribute to gun violence a lot, and 41 percent of Republicans and 32 percent of Democrats said that media makes at least some contribution to gun violence. Those are strikingly high numbers for a belief that isn’t backed by conclusive evidence.

I can understand certain parental concerns about the ability to control what their children consume, something that ends when their children leave the house either temporarily or permanently. John Landgraf, the president of FX, spoke to some of those worries at the Television Critics Association press tour when he talked about his own approach with his children children, who have grown up without gaming consoles in the house and without access to first-person shooters. “If you ask my 15 year old, who has played a lot of it at other friends’ houses and stuff, he says, ‘Well, it’s kind of disturbing because you’re not hunting. You’re not hunting for food. You’re in a first person context, and you’re killing everything in sight,’” he explained. As someone who hasn’t yet raised children of my own, I can imagine how unsettling it would be to send them out into the world worried that they’d encounter media they haven’t been prepared for or that they might find upsetting.
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(L to R) Rebel soldier Mira, lovers Agron and Nasir, Spartacus, Oenomaus, and Crixus.

Spartacus, a retelling of the famous slave rebellion currently airing on Starz, somehow never seems to get mentioned in conversations about “prestige television.” While a few critics (and a decently sized audience) champion the show, the premiere of its final season this Friday isn’t being greeted with anything close to the fanfare accompanying, say, Game of Thrones, the show’s most natural peer.

That’s a shame. Over the course of its past three seasons, Spartacus creator Steven S. DeKnight (of Buffy and Angel fame) and his team have developed one of the most insightful progressive social critiques on television, blending a bone-chilling depiction of the effects of structural oppression on individual lives a society with a quietly egalitarian take on gender and sexual orientation.

Spartacus’ basic approach is that gladiators aren’t, aside from their combat skills, all that special: they’re one type of slave in a society constructed around human bondage and class oppression. As one Roman puts it, Spartacus is “admired as a gladiator, yet despised as a slave” — someone whose bloody exploits are to be celebrated but, when push comes to shove, exists to be used and abused in the same way as any other kind of slave.

The systematic abuse inflicted on slaves motivates the main plot arc, the gladiator revolt and its growth into a real military challenge to the might of Rome. But the show’s dynamic isn’t as simple as “Romans are evil, hence slaves rebel.” Each of the main rebel characters is vividly drawn, fighting despite hopeless odds for their own reasons — reasons that are themselves provided by machiavellian Romans.

In a twisted way, the Roman oppressors are as, if not more, interesting than the gladiators and other slaves. Roman society is depicted as an unending quest for social standing, where those lower on the totem pole are targets of constant abuse by their so-called betters. While not subject to the routine, legally sanctioned murder and rape that marks the lives of the show’s slaves, wealthy Romans experience everything from petty social humiliation to the extra-judicial slaughter of their entire households by a rival for power. In Spartacus‘ Rome, standing is worth everything – up to and including your life.

In that world, cruel abuse of slaves is made brutally rational. Because currying favor and building alliances with Romans who can secure your standing can make-or-break your family’s fortunes, it makes sense (from the point of view of the Romans) to use every tool at your disposal to do so. Slaves are unique in that they are human, and hence can be used to put on glorious, bloody spectacles or to satisfy the most depraved sexual desires without any legal recourse. So when powerful Roman Varis asks that gladiator Oenomaus’ best friend (Gannicus) and wife (Melitta) have sex, the Roman who owns them, Batiatus, has little choice but to accept, as doing otherwise would lose him the favor of a social better. Even if Batiatus cared that he was forcing his slaves to rape each other (though he probably didn’t), the class structure of Roman society forced his hand.

By treating oppression as something that’s basically structural, rather than a thing inflicted by individual bad apples, Spartacus gives flesh to a core progressive insight about the power and character of social oppression. Progressives often speak about racism, sexism, and classism as impersonal forces, things that exist in the world independent of how individual people think about them. It can sometimes be hard to connect concrete acts of discrimination and violence to this airier description. But Spartacus is a vivid illustration of how a system founded on a particular form of classism directly, inevitably leads to individual acts of brutality. The social logic of Rome corrupts people’s incentives, giving even Romans capable of extending sympathy to slaves (like Batiatus’ wife Lucretia) cause to treat them in the most inhuman fashion imaginable.

Spartacus‘ critique isn’t just limited to class. The show’s Rome is unmistakably gendered: Roman women, denied prestigious posts in the military and the Senate, can only exercise power indirectly, participating in the struggle for social power through behind-the-scenes politicking. These Roman women are by no means helpless damsels — perhaps the two most effective, intelligent operators on the show are Lucretia and the high-born Illythia — but when they attempt to assert equality in familial or political decisions, they run up against the limits of what Roman society will allow them to do. And while slaves male and female are both subject to sexual abuse by Romans, there’s no doubt that female slaves bear by far the worst of it. One of the clearest markers of the rebels’ moral superiority, by contrast, is their comparatively egalitarian approach to gender. The season 3 relationship between rebel gladiator Crixus and Naevia, a survivor of repeated sexual assaults, is an honest, touching depiction of a supportive partnership. The rebel army also allows women to serve as equals in combat, to deadly effect.

The show’s method of challenging other sexual norms is more indirect. Two of the most formidable gladiators we meet, Barca and Agron, are in what are almost certainly the most consensual, loving relationships ever to show up on the screen — with other men. In Barca’s case, at least, it’s clearly depicted as an orientation. But no one on the show treats this as wrong or strange; LGBT relationships are treated in the same fashion as heterosexual ones. That homosexual partnerships are seen as unproblematic in Roman times serves to point out how arbitrary the elevation of heterosexuality as morally unique in some contemporary circles really is.

That’s not to say the show doesn’t have its rough spots. The pervasive, graphic violence and nudity — really, it makes Game of Thrones look like Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood — arguably undermines the show’s critique of deriving pleasure from the pain and humiliation of others, especially in the first few episodes where that theme wasn’t particularly well developed. But there’s an equally persuasive case in the reverse. Spartacus is, in my view, asking its audience to reflect on why it likes seeing sex and violence packaged together, and what the relationship is between today’s television viewer and the vicious Romans they’re ostensibly rooting against. That one of the second season’s most emotionally satisfying moments involves the destruction of a gladiatorial arena, with spectators lining the stands, sharpens the point.

So Spartacus doesn’t deserve the 300-lite reputation it has in some circles. It’s one of the most deftly executed, socially conscious shows on television. And it’s certainly worth your time.

The good folks at GamePolitics report that a planned effort to get Connecticut residents to turn in their violent video games has been cancelled:

Last week SouthingtonSOS, a group comprised of Southington, Connecticut community organizations announced a violent videogame buyback program, where citizens could deposit violent games into what basically amounted to a trash bin for a gift certificate provided by local merchants. Those game discs would be snapped and tossed in the trash…

The idea of the program was to get parents and children to throw away their violent video games – which some in the small Connecticut town felt were a factor in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in December. The program had plenty of support locally including the Southington chamber of commerce, the local YMCA, the board of education, fire department, a number of the town’s officials, the United Way and local clergy.

But in the days following the announcement of the program some experts were critical of the idea; the parenting editor at Common Sense Media likened the collection and destruction of video games to censorship, and Texas A&M International University researcher Christopher J. Ferguson wrote the group warning them that their efforts might cause more harm than good. Many editorial writers and advocates saw the buyback program as the equivalent of an old time book burning. With all that pressure, the group decided that they would not host the Buyback program after all this week.

It doesn’t surprise me that someone would propose an event to destroy video games. The idea that violent media is to blame for real-world violence in general or mass shootings in particular crops up after every spree killing, and it’s been helped along in this case by the National Rifle Association, which has throw popular culture into the debate in the hopes that it’ll be distracting chum to piranhas hungry for scapegoats but reluctant to fight difficult battles to make America safer. And there’s always someone willing to burn books, or melt down records, or snap discs in half in response to a slight.

What disappoints me more is the businesses and other organizations who threw in behind the plan. I understand that people want to do something. But there are more substantive, and creative, ways to help. How about offering those gift certificates to the families of Newtown police officers, or offering counseling, or to raise money for counseling, or offer pastoral care to the families of children were, or still are, students at Sandy Hook Elementary? Blaming the media isn’t just a dodge from meaningful policy solutions. In this case, it’s sad to think of businesses and community organizations focusing their efforts on a showy video game buyback plan instead of finding ways to be of direct service to the families and communities who were harmed by actual violence.

I wrote yesterday about how darkly, sickly hilarious it is that National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre decided to try to divert calls for gun control by blaming decades-old pop culture ephemera like Mortal Combat and American Psycho for recent mass gun killings. And after I hit publish on that post, the Hollywood Reporter pointed out an even more pointed hypocrisy: the NRA may hope that everyone blames media violence for inspiring killings, rather than guns for being the instruments of them, but it’s had multiple exhibits celebrating famous movie weapons at its National Firearms Museum, and apparently has no immediate plans to take the current one down.

Media Matters for America, jumping on the case, grabbed an amazing video of Phil Schreier, the curator of the NRA Museum, talking about the exhibit, which has since been deleted from the NRA’s YouTube feed:

Notably, he doesn’t exactly draw a distinction between the guns employed by good, law-abiding citizens, and badass, deeply transgressive villains: guns used for mayhem against innocent civilians are apparently just as awesome as guns used by law-abiding citizens in self-defense or officers of the peace in pursuit of criminals. “We have the Joker’s shotgun, the one that Heath Ledger used in The Dark Knight, a role that he won the academy award for,” Schreier says. “And speaking of Academy Awards, we have the silent shotgun that Javier Bardem used in No Country For Old Men.”

Now, maybe the NRA has reversed itself and decided that it no longer wants to be seen expressing enthusiasm for the Joker’s gun and his deployment of it the week before the preliminary hearings in the trial of alleged Aurora shooter James Holmes, who reportedly drew inspiration from Ledger’s depiction of the Joker for his attack on the audience of a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises. Maybe it’s going to pull the exhibit in accordance with its new principals, and stop selling the catalogue of it, Hollywood Guns, for $14.95 in the museum gift shop. Maybe the NRA’s member companies will have a massive change of heart, and stop licensing images of their products for use in films and video games, on the grounds that no one should see a gun being used to commit violence against innocent people or authority figures who are portrayed as duplicitous in a way that’s framed as admirable, lest they be inspired to commit bad acts of their own in the real world.

Or maybe they’ll ultimately conclude that it’s worth more money to them to keep people showing up at the museums to look at outlaws’ weapons, to keep raking in those licensing fees, and to stop talking about how deplorable pop culture violence is. I’d bet on the latter, more because the NRA likes money than it likes a sober, common-sense assessment of risk.

When the Motion Picture Association of America on December 20 came out in support of President Obama’s efforts on gun control in the wake of the Newtown, the organization simultaneously aligned itself with the productive side of a national conversation and set up a strategic trap that the National Rifle Association walked into the very next day. In a shocking and incoherent press conference that attempted to shift the conversation away from regulation of gun and ammunition purchasing and ownership, NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre blamed pop culture that was, in some cases, decades old, for America’s mass gun killings.

“There exists in this country, sadly, a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and stows violence against its own people. Through vicious, violent video games with names like ‘Bullet Storm,’ ‘Grand Theft Auto,’ ‘Mortal Combat,’ and ‘Splatterhouse,’” he said. “I mean we have blood-soaked films out there, like ‘American Psycho,’ ‘Natural Born Killers.’ They’re aired like propaganda loops on Splatterdays and every single day.”

The absence of any evidence that Adam Lanza, the alleged Sandy Hook shooter, had consumed any of the cultural artifacts LaPierre brought up would have been enough to render LaPierre’s assertions ludicrous and diversionary. And that’s without taking into account in the question of what impact media consumption does and doesn’t have on the general public’s actions and social attitudes, rather than on people who are mentally ill or who might be predisposed to violence, a subject nicely and soberly summed-up by the media scholar Jason Mittell. But there’s a difference between suggesting that it makes more sense to regulate mass culture than to regulate our access to the weapons that make it possible to translate violent plans into mass killings, and talking about what it would take to shift our mass culture away from violence as a major subject and as a primary way of demonstrating competence and heroism. But the people who try to hide behind the former argument are almost uniformly uninterested in the policies and shifts in the market it would take to accomplish the latter without regulation or abridgment of freedom of speech.

1. Increase funding for public broadcasting: If you want to see more non-violent television on the airwaves, it makes more sense to treat it like an emerging product, like solar energy, that needs to be significantly subsidized until it can build the market that allows it to be self-sustaining. I imagine the NRA and other conservatives who spring to blame violent popular culture for American violence would never get behind massively expanding funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but that, rather than trying to regulate Sons of Anarchy and Game of Thrones, is probably the quickest way to make non-violent popular culture more competitive in the overall marketplace. What about funding levels that would allow PBS to start an HBO-like movie channel, buying the rights to buzzy, relevant films like Margin Call and producing features like Too Big To Fail? How about funding that would support the purchase of more British shows like Downton Abbey, letting PBS take on BBC America, or a foreign language network that would broadcast subtitled shows from Israel, like Hatufim, or Scandinavian noir shows that have become part of the competitive advantage for services like Hulu or networks like Link TV? Or simply funding that would let PBS advertise more of its programming more heavily, building the kinds of audiences that networks can with in-company ad slots? This will never, ever happen. But that it won’t shows how unserious conservative media critics are about building credible, mass-market alternatives to successful, and violent, commercial programming.
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