In the wake of the murder of elementary school students and their teachers, as well as the mother of the shooter, Nancy Lanza, in Newtown, Connecticut on Friday, Hollywood has struggled to demonstrate sensitivity in its programming and premieres. The Weinstein Company cancelled the Los Angeles premiere of Quentin Tarantino’s characteristically violent revenge period drama Django Unchained, which ends with a bloody gun battle at a slaveholding plantation. Though its finale depicted an act of terrorism rather than gun violence (though such violence was threatened, but did not emerge), Homeland put up a title card before the episode began that warned that some images in the show might be disturbing in light of the Newtown massacre. And shows from Family Guy to Best Funeral Ever have postponed episodes until later dates. It’s one thing for networks and studios to observe a mourning period. But the more interesting question is whether the massacre will prompt longer-term changes in the kind of material Hollywood considers both marketable and appropriate.

In a series of Tweets, Time television critic James Poniewozik laid out the problem with these short-term measures. “THR: TLC delaying BEST FUNERAL EVER bc of Newtown shootings. Apparently becomes appropriate again Jan 6,” he wrote in a series of messages. “This recurrent thing, postponing shows bc of sensitivities–I get it. But resist the idea that something is ‘inappropriate’ for like 2 weeks…Either it’s inappropriate in general or it’s not.” There’s something sadly perceptive in the cynicism of that proscribed period of sensitivity. Hollywood’s acting on the recognition that after these increasingly-common tragedies, the members of their audience not directly affected by the deaths are hyper-cautious for a brief period, call for changes in all sorts of culture and policy, and then return to their preexisting level of sensitivity and allow those demands for a different path to peter out. The studios that have pulled or labeled programming or cancelled events are acting like savvy marketers, rather than like moral agents.

This is, of course, their prerogative and purpose as large companies. But just as it appears that President Obama and members of Congress are, for the first time in political memory, renewing the push for gun control legislation, I’m wondering whether some networks may decide to change where the line is for what they’re interested in airing.

It’s been a period of intense cruelty to children on television. On Sons of Anarchy, the children of the main character, Jax Teller, have been kidnapped and in car accidents. This season of Breaking Bad reached a turning point when Todd, a newcomer to the meth cooking operation run by Walter White and Jesse Pinkman, shot a young boy who happened upon the men in the aftermath of a train robbery, though there was little evidence that the child understood what little he had witnessed. When children aren’t the victims of extreme violence, they are often being enlisted in those acts themselves. On Game of Thrones, while Sansa Stark is beaten by grown men and threatened with sexual assault, her sister Arya, on the run and disguised as a boy, kills another child to escape from King’s Landing, and must fight in battle to protect herself. And this season on The Walking Dead, Carl Grimes both witnessed his mother’s own impromptu caesarean section and then killed her to prevent her from turning into a zombie.
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Coming to the end of my day of writing on Monday, I realized something: I was exhausted by my last several days of watching television. It’s not just that Sunday has become so jam-packed with strong, interesting shows that my weekends feel more like a build-up to my craziest work day than a chance to relax, or the fact that I’m in the middle of a barrage of mid-season finales. It’s that that almost all television now, particularly in drama, seems to be operating in a sphere so intense that it’s impossible to relax—and sometimes impossible to watch, or even to follow what’s happening on-screen. Every show has a conspiracy. Shocking violence has become the norm, and seems to be escalating quickly. The stakes are constantly so high in every episode of television that plot is often swamping strong character dynamics. It made me wonder if our television needs to take a chill pill for a while, if only so we can start thinking more carefully about what kinds of storytelling tools are most effective.

The shows that got me thinking about this phenomenon were Scandal and Homeland, two shows that purport to operate in very different environments, network and cable, soap and anti-hero drama, but this week had a plot element in common. It’s not as if political assassination attempts are taboo on television: West Wing shot President Bartlet in its “In The Shadow Of Two Gunmen” episode, though the show made clear relatively quickly that the President himself would survive, and drew much of its drama from the grave threat to the life of one of his chief aides. But in that case, it felt like assassination was reserved for a moment of extreme gravity in the narrative arc of the show. In four days last week, we had two shows that had as their plot points attempts to kill a high official of the United States government. On last Thursday’s episode of Scandal, President Fitzgerald Grant was shot on the way to his birthday party, in what seems to have been a plot set in motion by his wife—it was the presidency as soap opera subject. And then on Sunday’s episode of Homeland, former prisoner of war Nicholas Brody, who has declined to murder a bunker full of government officials, got a chance to kill just one, the Vice President of the United States, the man responsible for the drone strike that killed Brody’s surrogate son and the biological son of the super-terrorist Abu Nazir. Last year, Brody’s decision not to commit an assassination was one of the most exciting episodes of television on any network.

It’s not only that more than one show is now fantasizing about killing high officials, a highly sensitive subject, that diminished the power of Homeland. It’s that the conspiracy around Brody has gotten significantly more complex. There are more people in play on the ground, journalist Roya Hamad, a munitions expert and his team, Abu Nazir himself, who seems to have strolled over the border. The scheme is grander, an attack on a welcome home ceremony for Marines, in front of Roya’s camera crew. The shock of Brody’s true nature would be even bigger now that he’s a Congressman. All of these elements amp up the magnitude of the plot against America. But they also introduce the possibility of inconsistency, implausibility, of error, and of emotional discontinuity, or losing track of characterization. And yet people continually seem to think these sorts of escalations are worth it, to believe that plausible character development and the emotional stakes that come along with being a human in a high-pressure situation aren’t actually enough to sustain our interest, and there has to be a giant conspiracy (as was the case with Lost Resort and remains the case with Revenge) or mystery or the promise of bloody destruction to keep us in our seats. It’s too bad, because some of my favorite shows—Sons of Anarchy with the cartels and the Irish, Homeland with Nazir, and Revenge with its shadowy initiative—have spent a lot more time on conspiracies that seem like they must eventually be dissolved or dismantled than on their main characters emotions, and have done so at moments when the actors on each shows are hitting high-water marks.

And it’s not just complicated serialized storytelling that can be getting in the way of experiencing genuine emotion on shows. One of the things that’s marked the search for increased intensity in our television watching is increasingly escalating violence, disgustingness as a signpost of how serious a situation. In 18 hours yesterday, I saw two of the grossest things I’ve ever watched on television, Glenn yanking an arm bone out of a zombie’s rotting flesh on the mid-season finale of The Walking Dead (I couldn’t make it through the rest of the episode) and a scene from an upcoming episode of television that was much more viscerally upsetting for taking place in a non-genre setting. This is not to say that grotesque violence can’t be powerful signposting: the latter incident is so powerful and so keeping in character that I’m still having a physical reaction to my revulsion hours later. And for those of you who know what’s coming in the Song of Fire and Ice universe, I’m bracing myself for some truly horrific things coming down the pike in Game of Thrones that will literally test my ability to keep my eyes on the screen as they occur. But I’m curious about the extent to which it’s actually necessary to holding mass interest.
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This post discusses plot points from the October 9 episode of Sons of Anarchy.

“You’re unbelievable,” Jacob Hale tells Jax towards the end of this episode of Sons of Anarchy as he agreed to Jax’s proposal to blackmail a member of City Council to get him to vote through approval on Charming Heights in exchange for Jacob agreeing to rent one of his properties to Nero so Nero and the Sons can restart his companion business. “Oh, I’m just getting started, Jake,” Jax tells him. It’s a fitting epigraph for an episode that began the necessary process of separating Jax’s conception of himself from objective reality. There may be part of him left that’s still the little boy who drinks milk from the carton. But more and more, he’s a man who writes letters to his son about trying to avoid caving to his hate while taking delivery of a woman’s breast and finger in an ice chest delivered by his mother.

First, there’s Jax’s dealings with Jacob. It’s a smart move for the show to translate manipulating votes around the table in the SAMCRO clubhouse to Charming politics—I’m only surprised it’s taken the show longer to do so, and I hope it does more, something that Damon Pope’s model of leadership would suggest for the Sons’ future. “I know how important Charming Heights is to you, to this town,” Jax tells him smoothly even as he proposes an ugly campaign of blackmail. “We’re going to make your dream come true.” The promise to Jacob, and to the club, is much prettier than the reality. Bobby may dream of a future that’s “pink, wet, and tastes like sunshine,” with Tig singing the glories of “Pussy. Or Italian ice.” But it’s going to take ugly work to accomplish, and the home invasions by the Nomads sworn into the charter may sink the Sons’ credibility for good. It’s not much fun listening to Clay these days, but he’s right that “the hate swings that far out, it may not swing back.”

It’s also worth considering how Jax’s plan to blackmail City Councilmen will pay off for the club in the long run. This was a tricky sequence, and I know not everyone in the audience thought Sons of Anarchy pulled it off, in particular because of the casting of Walton Goggins to play a transgender woman. The debate about whether male actors should play trans women is an important one, and I think worth separating from the discussion of this particular episode, but to me, Goggins’ turn as Venus was bravura and funny. There’s no question that Jax’s plan, to knock out a key swing vote and stage pictures of him engaged in a raunchy session with Venus, is a form of sexual assault, and I thought the show did a decent job of making that clear, particularly as Jax moved smoothly into blackmailing the man’s stepson, offering him oral sex with Venus and then telling him “How’d you like these bad boys blowing up your Facebook page?” The plot is a nasty one, and if I have a quibble with it, the plan seems too sophisticated for the Sons. But I did think that the show managed to walk a delicate line between articulating the ugliness of what the Sons were doing and its portrayal of Venus herself, who came across as self-aware about what she was participating in, and determined to extract every penny she could from the Sons. Jax may have thought he was presenting himself as liberal-minded (or at least putting up a good front for the scheme) when he told the teenager he was talking into sex with Venus “Doesn’t mean you’re gay, man. We’ve all been there.” But I appreciated the kiss Venus planted on him on the way out the door—Jax may be willing to hire a transgender sex worker, but he’s not as comfortable with her as he pretends to be.
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When teenage Chicago rapper JoJo was shot to death last week, his murder set off two separate online convulsions. The first was an alarming string of celebratory tweets from other Chicago teens who were glad of the killing. The second was a less-local burst of essays from hiphop writers on the relationship (or lack thereof) between the “drill” music that bubbles up from Chicago streets and the violence that fills them. Potholes In My Blog honcho Andrew Martin voiced the sickened, sorrowful feeling the response to JoJo’s murder inspired, and asked rap bloggers to reconsider how they talk about the drill scene. Lloyd Miller at Mostly Junk Food took the opposite approach, asking “Would any of the many other non-rapping young men and women in Chicago be in any more danger if they were to pick up a mic?”

This conversation misses a lot, but I share the sense of unease that sparked it. From Tipper Gore to Bill Bennett to suburban PTA meetings, nearly everyone who’s ever called for curbing the cultural output of the American ghetto has ended up looking out of touch or authoritarian. Yet while real-life violence never dinted my affection for emcees like Ice Cube, Big L, or Freddie Gibbs, reading about Chicago’s insanely violent summer has dredged up an internal conflict I’ve somehow dodged through a dozen years of hiphop fandom. It’s worth considering what our responsibility as listeners is; if you like drill, and you introduce a friend to a Chief Keef track, is it incumbent on you to mention the context in which the music’s produced? But surely it’s foolishness to get uncritically caught up thinking that the horrifying new normal in Chicago is in fact novel.

The murder rate in NWA-era Los Angeles was similarly jaw-dropping; 738 Angelinos were killed the year “Straight Outta Compton” came out, and over the next six years the population-adjusted murder rate would jump from about 21 killings per 100,000 people to over 30 in 1992-93. When Big L was killed in Harlem in 1999, the Giuliani administration’s authoritarianism had already lowered New York’s murder rate from its absurd early-90s highs, but he was one of 664 New Yorkers murdered that year. Freddie Gibbs is from Gary, IN (the one thing he has in common with my father), and Gary’s a perennial candidate for Murder Capital of America. Since the early ‘90s, “the Guts” has registered a much higher per-capita murder rate than New York, LA, Atlanta, Chicago, or Houston. (These statistics all come from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics, a system that’s vulnerable to stat juking by local PDs, to be sure, but murders are tough to hide. I’m no criminologist, but while murder rates have dropped precipitously, hundreds are still killed each year in our most violent cities.)

Current-ness biases us. It’s easy to mistake things that are happening right now for much worse or much better than similar things that happened years ago. Like Poot said in season 4 of The Wire, “Man every year everybody’s like, ‘yeah these kids out here, they’re a new breed! I ain’t never seen nothing like this before! This the end of the world now!’”

(It’s worth noting, too, that Poot is one of the very few members of the original terrace crew from season 1 who makes it out of the life. He’s as much lucky as anything else, and ultimately his escape involves some pride-swallowing; in season five, he’s working at a Foot Locker. But while all this may have some relevance, The Wire isn’t a good enough stopping place here.)

Three obvious possibilities for why I’m reacting differently to drill than I do to the above-referenced trio of hardcore rhymers: I see thoughtfulness and artistic merit in L’s, Cube’s, and Gibbs’ output that is lacking from the drill rappers I’ve heard; I’m getting old; or the people dying in the home of the drill scene this summer are so likely to be children that there really is a meaningful difference.

Either way, it’s important that we be honest about why this conversation is happening now, and what it really is. We’re not talking about this because there have been over 150 murders in Chicago this summer. We’re not talking about this because nearly a third of those killed have been minors. We’re not talking about it because the conversation about violent culture and actual violence recurs, cicada-like, at fixed intervals.

People are positing or refuting links between Chicago’s drill scene and its bloody summer because the kid who got killed last week left behind an online footprint that provides the raw materials for a conversation about rap and violence. And it’s much, much easier to get lost in arguments about these kids’ lifestyles than it is to grapple with the systemic failure that’s producing such a staggering volume of young, dead brown bodies.

The critical conversation around drill music and real-life murders is a way to avoid talking about how Chicago came to be a place that produces both of those things. Drill isn’t causing killings, the dead-end trap of urban poverty is. Today’s landscape was produced by some combination of failures in education, public infrastructure, social policy, and economic opportunity. (For smart sociology on how the evaporation of blue-collar jobs from urban centers and disparities in social capital helped constrain the ambitions of East Harlem natives, read “In Search Of Respect: Selling Crack In El Barrio” by Phillippe Bourgois.) If we don’t find ways to remedy those failures, likely with policies that will look more like revolution than reform, we’ll continue to see generation after generation of American youth stay stuck and get dead. It won’t be because of the music they listen to. It’ll be because we haven’t done enough to expand the pathways by which social and economic capital flow between the burbs and the block.

Lawless, John Hillcoat’s new flick about Prohibition-era bootleggers and the government officials seeking to leech off their profitable flouting of the ban on alcohol, has all the elements of a good American crime story. It’s got two distinct criminal syndicates, one reclusive, taciturn, and reluctant to use violence, and the other deliberately transgressive. It’s got a suitably disgusting officialdom more interested in self-enrichment and control than in the law. It’s got a pair of female characters wriggling out of patriarchy. But unfortunately, somebody — maybe Hillcoat, or screenwriter Nick Cave (yes, that Nick Cave), or whoever decided Shia LaBeouf should have more lines than Tom Hardy and Gary Oldman combined — slapped those ingredients together in a sloppy, unambitious way. The souffle never rises.

The basic conflict of the movie isn’t between Hardy’s clan of bootlegging Bondurants and Guy Pearce’s vicious, greedy Chicago lawman. It’s between de facto leader Forrest Bondurant (Hardy) and his little brother Jack (LaBeouf). Where Forrest uses his local-legend status and massive bulk as quiet guarantors of stability, Jack is ambitious, image-obsessed, and self-deceived about his criminal successes. (Think of Breaking Bad’s Walter White, with more hair and less brains.)

There are lots of little problems: Pearce’s hardboiled lawman probably wouldn’t cringe and close his eyes when he shoots his pistol, and violent scenes rely as much on sound effects as any kung fu movie you’ve ever seen. But the big problem with Lawless is that the rural bootlegger protagonists feel every bit as synthetic and unoriginal as the baddies. Nearly every character is a cardboard cutout who blunders in predictable ways at the right moments to move the story through obvious beats. None of them ever feel like real people (despite good work from Pearce, Jessica Chastain, and Hardy). Some characters simply disappear from the story. There’s not a surprising moment in the whole two hours, but plenty of implausible ones.

These failures are all the more frustrating because the movie’s setup implies some interesting themes: organizational coercion, the contrasts between internal and external motivations for criminals, the difference between violence and power and the consequences of conflating the two. In its messy failure to say anything about those ideas, Lawless got me thinking about two crime stories that take a more deft touch to similar stuff.

2000’s Way of the Gun centers on two kidnappers willing to do violence to innocents in pursuit of their goals, but far more interested in the pot of gold than the rainbow they paint getting to it. The movie’s best scene has kidnapper Benicio del Toro and bagman James Caan talking shop in a bar. They deride the self-important jargon of corporate security and law enforcement types, before the subject turns to their own side of the lawbreaking street: “These days they wanna be criminals more than they wanna commit crime,” del Toro says. “That’s not just crime, that’s the way of the world,” Caan retorts. del Toro and his partner may be unconscionably quick to violence, but they are also businesslike, professional criminals. Like Caan, they are who they are because they’re good at it and it’s a living, not because of status symbols or adrenaline.

When HBO pulled the plug on David Milch’s Deadwood, TV lost one of its most thoughtful shows about violence. The titular goldmining camp’s uncertain future in the expanding United States drives the show’s plot, but the lack of law does not mean there’s a power vacuum. Saloon boss Al Swearengen is the camp’s capo at the show’s outset, and has his control tested first by a new saloon/brothel, and later by the organized might of George Hearst (implicitly backed by the legal forces that previously ignored the camp). Over the course of the show’s three seasons, Swearengen metes out violence in increasingly calculated ways. But even at the outset, when he uses his fists and Dan Dority’s knife to consolidate his holdings, the show makes clear that he understands violence is not power. Violence becomes necessary only in response to erosions of Swearengen’s power; its use is evidence of weakness, not strength. His minimally violent chess match with Hearst in the final season shows he’s internalized that lesson.

Deadwood’s other main character, reluctant sheriff Seth Bullock, follows a similar learning curve with regard to violence. But Bullock’s motivation is never power, and his violence is born of temper rather than calculation. Swearengen’s long game for the camp’s survival and his own enrichment stands in contrast to Bullock’s situational, morally-driven choices about violence. His abortive first-season friendship with Wild Bill Hickock seemed to reinvigorate his sense of righteousness, without imparting any of Bill’s weariness from a lifetime of killing. As the show goes on Bullock works to control his temper, but his desire to imprint rightness on every situation he encounters never flags. Swearengen becomes deliberate with his violence because that’s what his machinations require, but Bullock restrains himself (or tries to) out of a more internal conflict over what kind of person he wants to be.

Before it ever made the New Cult Canon, Way of the Gun lost $8 million at the box office. Deadwood pulled a couple million viewers a night but was always more beloved of critics than seen by non-critic humans. It shouldn’t be hard for Lawless to prove a greater success in business terms, but if it does Hollywood will continue to learn the wrong lessons about how to make violence interesting.