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... which I almost titled, "How many dumb things did ol' Freddy-boy say, anyway?"
I suppose if I had a blog, I'd put these musings there, but I don't. Anyway, it's come to my attention that there's some effort being made to rehabilitate the reputation of Wertham, though I doubt anyone cares about his contributions to culture except comics-fans (ironically enough). So I decided to re-read SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT, which I once read once before and still remember as a godawful tissue of assumptions, half-truths & demagoguery.
When I read, I like to annotate. Thus the thought struck me, "Why not annotate the reading on Comicon, so that others can weigh the negatives (and the positives, however rare) of this famed work?"
Make no mistake: I plan to be adversarial but, I think, fair and accurate. I have heard that Wertham supplied some bibliographic references that his publisher did not use, but I think it likely that a lot of his omissions are not likely to have been supported by any real-world references. Everything is from the 1954 Rinehart edition.
page 2-- Wertham begins with a metaphor that compares raising children with gardening. I don't know how many parents would have bought the metaphor overall, but I'm sure that they were emotionally won over by his picture of plants & children being mutually endangered by "blight." He asks, "Can we help the plant w/o attending to the garden?"
p 2-3-- Wertham claims that he visited some unnamed boys' reformatory, where W. observes that despite the cleanliness of the institution, all the boys interviewed want to "go home." From this W. observes that "To replace a home one needs more than a landscape gardener and a psychiatrist." Oddly, it would seem he's contradicting his earlier point-- one moment he's recommending that parents be good gardeners, and in the next, finding fault with the reformatory for being nothing more than a beautiful garden. I assume that in W.'s mind the crucial difference is that the ideal parents are those who will listen to his message and apply it to their gardening activities.
p.3-4-- first mention of child delinquency laws, and how they were originally meant for rather minor offenses
p. 4-- first mention of a comic book, which is supposedly a chief source from which one can learn that minors do not pay the same price for crimes as adults. W. cites dialogue from a crime comic, in which a 17-year-old woman commits murder but can't be charged with anything but "juvenile delinquency." On the same page W. introduces the notion that youths need to be protected from the "blight" of "comic books" and their advertisements of "knives and... guns."
p. 5-10-- W. introduces Willie, a black youth accused of a sniper-murder, who was sent to a reformatory even though there was no proof against him. Because Willie was obsessed with comic books, Willie is somehow indirect proof of W.'s theory of "monkey see-monkey do" violence, EVEN THOUGH W. does not seem convinced that Willie committed the murder.
p.8-- a scantily-clad woman threatened by a hood in one of Willie's crime comics is described as being in "pre-rape position," though W. does not claim that she is sexually assaulted. Probably the threat of her being killed is more or less identical in W.'s mind, and one may surmise that he loaded his description so that his readers would jump to the same conclusion.
p. 9-- W. mentions another comic in which a white adventurer is "shooting colored natives," but at this point W. is concerned only with the violence, not racial depiction.
Posts: 5910 | From: Houston, TX | Registered: Sep 1999
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Nice idea, Gene. Should be an interesting project, if you can keep it up until the end.
Posts: 5152 | From: Not Applicable, USA | Registered: Jun 2002
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I probably will only do this once or twice a week...
p. 11-14-- these pages are devoted to W.'s noble battle against the forces of ignorance or opposition. He claims on one hand that many adults think comics are mostly about funny animals (as does an unnamed civic leader who has only "heard" that there are other types) and yet they also think that they are mostly reprints from comic strips. Since W. later says that comic strips are mostly read by an adult audience, it's hard to conceive as to how the two interpretations could dovetail, as I doubt that there has been any time that American comic strips have been dominated by funny animals. Logically an adult who believed in the comic-strip theory would have to assume that the funnybooks reprinted things like Tarzan and Flash Gordon, which of course they did, from the origins of the medium in the late 30s through the period when W. wrote SOTI.
p.11-12-- W. introduces his 2nd "bad boy made bad by comic books," in trouble for threatening a teacher with a switchblade. W. interviews the boy, admires his intelligence, and deduces that since the boy is "superior" rather than "inferior" (remember, this comes from someone who will associate comics-publishers with Nazism), it must be that he is a "seduced child." Here we get the justification for W.'s title, which is a roundabout way of saying that children who read violent and/or sexy comics are having their innocence violated.
p. 12-- the civic leader opines that modern comics are probably no worse than predecessors like "dime novels." I'm going to guess that this is the last time we'll read that comparison in SOTI.
p. 14-15-- W. expatiates upon the fact that comic strips have censorship rules and that newspapers reject anything inappropriate (one wonders if W. ever encountered DICK TRACY!), whereas comic books have no censorship and, in reprinting comic strips, may even "add a semipornographic story." I suppose it's remotely possible that a publisher here or there may have printed an unexpurgated sequence from some comic strip but the likelihood that comic-book publishers would "add" anything is pretty much nil. There is, of course, no concrete example cited.
p. 15-- after making a Don Quixote reference W. opines that "I was fighting not windmills but paper mills." I guess occasional bursts of genuine wit must have helped him sell the book to middle America...
p. 15-- 1st mention that comics expouse a "superman philosophy," which is "an offshoot of Nietzsche's superman who said, 'When you go to women, don't forget the whip!'" Actually, the character who says this in N.'s THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA is an old woman, and while N. might have meant many things by this maxim, it's far from a clear expousal of N.'s supposed "superman philosophy," which isn't much like anything from American comic books anyway. Of course, at the time W. wrote this most Americans probably thought N. was a Nazi.
p. 15-16-- Poor, persecuted Wertham talks about how he was satirized in comics for his positions. Though W. provides no citations, some later fan-scholars have opined that he may have been remembering a sequence in a comic strip, LI'L ABNER, though possibly W. saw it in reprinted comic book form.
posted
Y'know, I've never even seen a copy of "Seduction of the Innocent," much less read it. Where did you find a copy?
I get the impression from your Chapter One summary that Dr. Wertham had some issues with sex, race and child-rearing, and he brought those issues to what he was reading. BATMAN was about gay sex between a dominating father and his son ... because the good doctor had gay sex on his mind. EC's horror comics were more than any child could handle because they were more than the good doctor could handle.
Hey, I bring my prejudices to what I read, too. I just don't expect Congress to hold hearings on my interpretation so I can help destroy an industry.
Posts: 6249 | From: Lexington, Ky. | Registered: Nov 2002
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quote:Originally posted by Lawson: Y'know, I've never even seen a copy of "Seduction of the Innocent," much less read it. Where did you find a copy?
I get the impression from your Chapter One summary that Dr. Wertham had some issues with sex, race and child-rearing, and he brought those issues to what he was reading. BATMAN was about gay sex between a dominating father and his son ... because the good doctor had gay sex on his mind. EC's horror comics were more than any child could handle because they were more than the good doctor could handle.
Hey, I bring my prejudices to what I read, too. I just don't expect Congress to hold hearings on my interpretation so I can help destroy an industry.
One pretty much has to order SOTI through interlibrary loan, though I've heard a new edition may come out, maybe in response to the rehabilitation effort(s).
What I hate most about Wertham is that he doesn't even consider that his interpretation may be just that, an interpretation.
I can't wait to get to the real gay-baiting part of SOTI; it makes the Batman & Robin thing look like nothing.
Posts: 5910 | From: Houston, TX | Registered: Sep 1999
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The sad part is he actually did some good once upon a time. His testimony in Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka was very helpful in the outcome of that case.
Gene, if you have a scanner, can you put up some of the pics included? I'd love to "see" the one with the woman's genetailia again.
"I think ChrisW is the funniest man in entertainment still alive..." -- the perceptive Tom Spurgeon Posts: 8602 | From: Lincoln, Nebraska USA | Registered: Nov 2000
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quote:Originally posted by ChrisW: The sad part is he actually did some good once upon a time. His testimony in Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka was very helpful in the outcome of that case.
I'd forgotten that. I read a biography of Thurgood Marshall a few years ago. Marshall led the NAACP legal team that argued Brown (which actually was four separate lawsuits) before the Supreme Court. They had the excellent idea to use psychological evidence that would show how segregated schools, which in no way were equal, damaged the psyches of black children. They demonstrated this with dolls of different colors, if I remember correctly.
And also IIRC, Dr. Wertham was an expert witness for the plaintiffs.
So ... that's a lot of good karma there. I'll leave it to others to decide if what he did to the comics industry wiped that out or not.
Posts: 6249 | From: Lexington, Ky. | Registered: Nov 2002
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Wertham was a very liberal, indeed left-wing sort, quite unlike the junior henchman of Joe McCarthy people seem to have the impression he was. I read "Seduction" some years ago. He reproduced a lot of very lurid and nasty images from contemporary comics. The shock from those probably had more to do with the book's influence than what he actually said in the text.
I read it expecting something totally ludicrous, but on the strength of those illustrations I have to say I can fully understand why parents of the time were worried about comics. He did indeed say some awfully silly things in the text, and not just the famous Batman and Robin comments. He couldn't help it. He was a Freudian, after all!
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Evan Dorkin did a great strip about how Wertham's hatred for comics actually stemmed from submitting work and having it rejected by the publishers.
"I think ChrisW is the funniest man in entertainment still alive..." -- the perceptive Tom Spurgeon Posts: 8602 | From: Lincoln, Nebraska USA | Registered: Nov 2000
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I came to the conclusion a long time ago that Wertham was a decent man who was genuingly concerned about the mental health of children for most of his adult life. Unfortunatly he picked comics for his target and proceeded to build up a case against the medium that was from his perspective totally plausible. As comics fans we tend to hold him in disdain because of what happened to EC in particular and the comics field in general but in actuality he just got the proverbial ball rolling down the hillside of public opinion. There was also the inevitable cadre of concerned parents groups and various politicians in both the Senate and the House who were desperatly looking for a cause for juvenile delinquency. Plus the general tenor of the times led to a lot paranoid hand wringing. Ultimatly a great deal of blame has to be put at the doorstep of the comics industry itself. Bill Gaines's well meaning but devastating testimony before the Senate was a big nail in comics coffin. After that the medium pretty much caved in and the comics code was born.
Ironically Dr. Wertham would later become become a convert of sorts to comics fandom. In the 60's various comic book fans started to write Wertham letters and would send him copies of their fanzines. Wertham was evidently fasinated by these fanzines and he would reply with long letters defending his views. Dwight Decker began a regular correspondence with Dr. Wertham that resulted in probably the only interview with Wertham that was conducted by a comics fan. The result of all of this was a mostly positive book written by Dr. Wertham entitled, "The World of Fanzines". So one of the very first mainstream examinations of comics fandom was conducted by the mediums very own boogey man. Who says life isn't strange?
Posts: 1938 | From: U.S.A. | Registered: May 2000
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I left out one detail in my discussion of the case of W.'s 1st example, Willie, in that though the evidence against him was circumstantial, one of the things that helped the judge decide against Willie was that he was arrested with a number of guns in his possession, because evil comic books had made Willie into a gun nut. One assumes (given no input from W.) that none of the guns matched the sniper's bullet(s), but that Willie's possessing guns as a minor was enough to have him sent to the reformatory. In other words W. has it both ways: there's a possibility Willie was totally innocent, in which case his gun-mania, a major factor in his unjust conviction, was brought on by comic books, but if he really did it, it was again because of comic books' glorification of violence.
Which brings me to one note I omitted from page 11: where the good doctor baldly (and without any reasoning process, at least in Chapter 1) that "I do not believe in the philosophy that children have instinctive agressive urges to commit such acts." This seems rather incredible for a Freudian to say, since Freud's main thesis that humans, or at least those that have reached the "oedipal stage," constantly bottle up the sexual and aggressive tensions of the "ego" and reveal them only under pressure or via the famed "Freudian slip." I don't consider W. smart enough to have formulated this anti-aggression philosophy on his own, so I must assume he's parroting some author he admires. Rousseau comes to mind, but there's no evidence for it yet.
On a personal note: w/o subscribing to Freudianism, does anyone here sincerly believe that kids don't have "instinctive aggressive urges" from their earliest years? I'd be curious to know whether anyone here still favors the "media poisoned my child" excuse.
Posts: 5910 | From: Houston, TX | Registered: Sep 1999
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quote:Originally posted by ChrisW: The sad part is he actually did some good once upon a time. His testimony in Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka was very helpful in the outcome of that case.
I'd forgotten that. I read a biography of Thurgood Marshall a few years ago. Marshall led the NAACP legal team that argued Brown (which actually was four separate lawsuits) before the Supreme Court. They had the excellent idea to use psychological evidence that would show how segregated schools, which in no way were equal, damaged the psyches of black children. They demonstrated this with dolls of different colors, if I remember correctly.
And also IIRC, Dr. Wertham was an expert witness for the plaintiffs.
So ... that's a lot of good karma there. I'll leave it to others to decide if what he did to the comics industry wiped that out or not.
I agree that W. gets some good karma for both his work for the NAACP and for his work with the poor in his psychiatric clinic. If he'd done nothing more with his life, he would be remembered more favorably than he is today, though probably only by a tiny handful of historians.
As for his negative deeds, the most positive spin I can put on them is that if it hadn't been him, some other demagogue would've gone after the crime & horror books. Of course, there's also a school of thought which says that eventually those genres would have taken a downswing, so that the less reputable publishers who were in it purely for the money would've deserted those genres for greener pastures. Certainly a number of companies had already started to leave the comics-business altogether even before SOTI came out, even the mostly squeaky-clean Fawcett.
Posts: 5910 | From: Houston, TX | Registered: Sep 1999
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quote:Which brings me to one note I omitted from page 11: where the good doctor baldly (and without any reasoning process, at least in Chapter 1) that "I do not believe in the philosophy that children have instinctive agressive urges to commit such acts." This seems rather incredible for a Freudian to say, since Freud's main thesis that humans, or at least those that have reached the "oedipal stage," constantly bottle up the sexual and aggressive tensions of the "ego" and reveal them only under pressure or via the famed "Freudian slip." I don't consider W. smart enough to have formulated this anti-aggression philosophy on his own, so I must assume he's parroting some author he admires. Rousseau comes to mind, but there's no evidence for it yet.
W. wasn't a strict Freudian, believing Freud was too concerned with the individual. It sounds to me like he was more of an Adlerian, but I've never heard any definite confirmation of this.
It's also interesting to note, as Beaty does in his book, that W. used the same arguments against segregation as he did for comics.
quote:In other words W. has it both ways: there's a possibility Willie was totally innocent, in which case his gun-mania, a major factor in his unjust conviction, was brought on by comic books, but if he really did it, it was again because of comic books' glorification of violence.
I don't get what you're saying here. In both possibilities, the gunmania was brought on by comics, but happens to have been carried a bit further in one.
quote:does anyone here sincerly believe that kids don't have "instinctive aggressive urges" from their earliest years? I'd be curious to know whether anyone here still favors the "media poisoned my child" excuse.
I don't subscribe to either of these views.
-------------------- The Gospel, wherein much Truth is written. Posts: 7122 | From: us of fuckin' a | Registered: Aug 1999
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"I don't get what you're saying here. In both possibilities, the gunmania was brought on by comics, but happens to have been carried a bit further in one."
The etiology of the gunmania is the same; the "having it both ways" refers to the way comics are to blame for Willie's predicament whether he's guilty or wrongfully accused; a question which W. himself raises, however obliquely.
"It's also interesting to note, as Beaty does in his book, that W. used the same arguments against segregation as he did for comics."
You'll have to enlarge on this if you want the statement to make any sense. How can W's arguments against (not "for") comics apply to segregation? Did he suggest that customs of segregation should be reviewed by a censorship board, as he did in his comic book-comic strip comparison? Or are you referencing something in my statement about his anti-aggression attitude?
"I don't subscribe to either of these views."
I have no idea what you're saying here, either, since the two views I summarized are covalent: believing that children don't have instinctive aggressive urges is in W.'s system covalent with saying that if children do wrong it's because the media poisoned their innocent minds. Or as Cartman put it, "They broke my fragile little mind!"
Posts: 5910 | From: Houston, TX | Registered: Sep 1999
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You worded it in such a way that it read like you were questioning whether anyone could doubt that kids have instinctive aggressive urges, so I thought you were asking about 2 views with the separate questions, not 1. Anyway, I don't hold either of the views mentioned (purely natural or purely nurtured).
-------------------- The Gospel, wherein much Truth is written. Posts: 7122 | From: us of fuckin' a | Registered: Aug 1999
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p. 18-22-- W. continues his attack on "crime comics," which for him includes also horror, jungle-adventure, superheroes-- in short, very nearly everything except the funny-animals. He also evinces a selective reticence about what he can and can't identify his sources. He can tell readers that one crime comic with 12 "brutal near-rape scenes" was published "vintage autumn 1950," but he can't tell readers the title. He makes one halfway-valid point in saying that many publishers in the crime-comics genre (or what today's readers would recognize as that genre) merely used the "crime does not pay" theme as a sop to morality; however, his attempt to extend that fault to all comics containing "crime" is patently absurd.
p. 25-- first mention of drugs, and of "child drug addicts," who are all "inveterate comic-book readers." I believe Eclipse ultimately reprinted the one book W. identifies here: the winsomely-titled TEENAGE DOPE SLAVES.
p. 28-- W. refers to two kid-comics, one of them SUPER DUCK, as "harmless," though he will change his mind later in the chapter
p. 30-- 1st mention of the injury-to-the-eye motif
p. 30-32-- W. makes an unconvincing attempt to paint westerns as hyper-sadistic crime comics, and a rather more successful case against jungle comics. However, as his example against the jungle genre, he chooses not one of the rough-and-racy Fiction House works, but a story from Fawcett's mild NYOKA THE JUNGLE GIRL. I think I read the story referenced a long time ago, and in any case have seen enough Nyokas of that period to say that they're pretty tame. Also, even though almost every jungle-heroine ever published sports a revealing skin-bikini, somehow W. forgets to mention that his chosen example, Nyoka, is one who doesn't, usually being clad in a khaki shirt and shorts. And again, he can mention the heroine's name in a quote but somehow can't mention the actual title of the comic, just calling it, "a jungle book with the subtitle, 'The Jungle Girl.'" He also charges all jungle comics with being racist, which remains arguable.
p. 33-36-- his rather incoherent attack on superheroes, which do not share the structure of crime comics with their last-minute "crime does not pay" theme, but which he still attacks for their use of force. He attacks as fascist a Wonder Woman story about a "green shirt movement" as if the villains were the heroes of the story, rather than the ones who get soundly defeated and sermonized against. WW is called "the exact opposite of what girls are supposed to want to be;" there is of course no justification for this opinion. And finally, SUPER DUCK, which was harmless a few pages back, comes in for the same sadism charge as the human-looking superheroes.
p. 37-42-- a confused diatribe against the "love-confession" comics which W. seems to imply replaced or overshadowed crime comics for a time, though they remain poisoned with the same heapings of sex and violence (as were the earlier teenage comics, which were "in large part about humiliations, a disguised kind of psychological sadism.")
p. 43-- W. gets peeved at depictions of psychiatrists in comics, even when they're not him.
p.44-- strangely enough, despite all his fulminations against jungle comics, W. seems to exhibit a weird reference for the father of the genre when he says, "surely, I thought, the adventures of Tarzan are harmless enough for juveniles of any age." His main concern here is with a comic mislabelled Tarzan (or which he misread) when it was actually another sadistic crime comic, but the reverence for the first jungle-hero is bizarre, given that in the books and comic-strips Tarzan makes no bones about killing his enemies with arrows or a knife, and that his adventures are usually chock full of scantily-clad damsels. Perhaps W. only saw some of movie Tarzans without much sex or violence?
posted
Kind of tough to get anything out of a point-by-point commentary if you haven't read the text being commented upon. It's like Mystery Science Theater 3000 w/out the movie, just w/ the little robot and spaceman trying to be funny by themselves. So, given how much fans care about the hated Wertham, it's too bad we can't find his book more easily. If you're going to have opinions about someone, you might as well read what he has to say.
I'm working my way thru Bart Beaty's Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture, the book referenced by Mr. Reece up above. Beaty has a certain respect for Wertham, who comes across as wrong but certainly not a quack or a fool.
The good doctor's arguments regarding segregation and comic books come down to this. Certain social practices (treating children differently according to race, selling children comics that feature violence and cruelty) produce conditions that foster neuroses. Of course people remain individuals, so not everyone exposed to these conditions will develop the neuroses. But the neuroses and resulting harmful behavior will still be widespread.
In discussing both comics and segregation, Wertham used the parallel of tuberculosis germs. Not everyone exposed to the germs develops the disease, but many people will. So society does its utmost to make sure we are not exposed to the germs.
Similar reasoning underlies Wertham's metaphor of the garden (mocked by Mad Magazine, Daniel Clowes, and now a bemused Gene Phillips). Flowers don't exist by themselves; they grow out of something, namely soil. Pollute the soil and you get stunted, unhealthy flowers. The publishing industry, in Wertham's view of things, polluted the conditions under which all American children grew up because it distributed millions of units of product that celebrated force, cruelty, and racism.
The result, he believed, was an epidemic of emotionally malformed and socially disruptive young Americans, otherwise known as juvenile delinquents. Many kids who read comics turned out more or less all right; the ones who went bad didn't do so simply because of comics. But society had far more blighted children because of comics and similar conditions produced by adults who cared about personal gain rather than the collective good.
Such, anyway, was Wertham's argument.
Posts: 81 | Registered: Dec 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Blend: Kind of tough to get anything out of a point-by-point commentary if you haven't read the text being commented upon. It's like Mystery Science Theater 3000 w/out the movie, just w/ the little robot and spaceman trying to be funny by themselves. So, given how much fans care about the hated Wertham, it's too bad we can't find his book more easily. If you're going to have opinions about someone, you might as well read what he has to say.
I'm working my way thru Bart Beaty's Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture, the book referenced by Mr. Reece up above. Beaty has a certain respect for Wertham, who comes across as wrong but certainly not a quack or a fool.
The good doctor's arguments regarding segregation and comic books come down to this. Certain social practices (treating children differently according to race, selling children comics that feature violence and cruelty) produce conditions that foster neuroses. Of course people remain individuals, so not everyone exposed to these conditions will develop the neuroses. But the neuroses and resulting harmful behavior will still be widespread.
In discussing both comics and segregation, Wertham used the parallel of tuberculosis germs. Not everyone exposed to the germs develops the disease, but many people will. So society does its utmost to make sure we are not exposed to the germs.
Similar reasoning underlies Wertham's metaphor of the garden (mocked by Mad Magazine, Daniel Clowes, and now a bemused Gene Phillips). Flowers don't exist by themselves; they grow out of something, namely soil. Pollute the soil and you get stunted, unhealthy flowers. The publishing industry, in Wertham's view of things, polluted the conditions under which all American children grew up because it distributed millions of units of product that celebrated force, cruelty, and racism.
The result, he believed, was an epidemic of emotionally malformed and socially disruptive young Americans, otherwise known as juvenile delinquents. Many kids who read comics turned out more or less all right; the ones who went bad didn't do so simply because of comics. But society had far more blighted children because of comics and similar conditions produced by adults who cared about personal gain rather than the collective good.
Such, anyway, was Wertham's argument.
I don't necessarily think W. was a quack or a fool, but I don't think he made any attempt to reason out his prejudices, and part of my purpose here is to note all the times that he even contradicted his own arguments. Even an earlier critic like Sterling North made clear what he wanted kids to read instead of comic books. But W., just as he would later when he tried to rouse the rabble against motion pictures, did not seem to have any concept as to what role violence might legitimately play in a kid's leisure reading. It seemed bad to him, so it was bad, end of story.
I understood the setup of the garden metaphor, and why it might appeal to parents, but the fact remains that kids aren't garden plants and IMO it would be a pretty bad parent who wanted his kids to be raised as if in a well-manicured garden. W. never raises or answers the question, "How much is too much? When is it OK to take a vacation from reality with a crime or horror story?" The implicit answers would seem to be, "It's always too much" and "Never," but I'll be surprised if I ever find W. address this point.
Just to follow up on Reece's conjecture: as yet I don't see much of Adler in W. However, the guy who wrote the film-study LAUGHING, SCREAMING opined that during the American popularization of Freud there came to be a subspecies of Freudian who diverged from the Master and seemed to promise that one could circumvent many of Freud's complexes with a little societal or psychological tinkering. "Pop-Freudians" one might call them. Possibly one might see some of this attitude in a film like the 50s REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE. What's causing James Dean to act out? Well, gee willikers, it's because he's got a dominating mother and a weak father. Obviously that's what causes juvenile delinquency: bossy moms. But at the end of RWAC Mom gets told off, and so it looks like Dean and his family are on the road to normalcy. Just like American youth would have been if W. had had his way.
Posts: 5910 | From: Houston, TX | Registered: Sep 1999
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In the early 1990s some guy in Orange County California claimed he was writing an update of SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT based entirely on modern comics, and taking the position that comics were worse than ever when it came to sex and violence. Did this ever go anywhere? I haven't heard anything about this guy's crusade in more than ten years.
-------------------- James Van Hise Posts: 254 | From: Yucca Valley, CA | Registered: Feb 2002
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Quick correction: the book I was paraphrasing was Ed Sikov's LAUGHING HYSTERICALLY. An excellent book on film comedy, by the bye.
Posts: 5910 | From: Houston, TX | Registered: Sep 1999
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Chapters 3 and 4 are not as interesting as some of the more rabble-rousing stuff, since they tend to deal with W.'s methodology. However, though SOTI badly needs a precise outlining of that methodology, W.'s explanations lack the rigor to explain why methods like Rorshach tests or play therapy cannot have the same pitfalls for analysis as those methods he decries, like the "questionnaire method." He pretty much assumes that the value of the Rorshach is a given. Were one to be as uncharitable toward W. as he is toward the comics-purveyors of his time, one might say that his attitude suggests a contempt for the laymen to whom he is directing the book, and a belief that laymen should listen to him purely because he is the Accredited Expert.
p. 48-- W. claims that it is not "scientifically sound to narrow down the problem to whether the influence of comic books is just 'good' or 'bad.'" This is just window-dressing by which W. gives himself the illusion of having been a detached scientific inquirer, since he never establishes his criteria for good and bad.
Posts: 5910 | From: Houston, TX | Registered: Sep 1999
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I meant to get back here but forgot. Thanks to Blend for completing my prior post.
As for Adler: I was mainly thinking of W's decentering of the family as the primary cause of a child's character development. He switches it much more to the social interactions, which reminded me of Adler, but it's been a good long while since I've read him or about him. This isn't pop-Freudianism, as W. would've critiqued the individualist "analysis" in something like REBEL.
-------------------- The Gospel, wherein much Truth is written. Posts: 7122 | From: us of fuckin' a | Registered: Aug 1999
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quote:Originally posted by Charles Reece: I meant to get back here but forgot. Thanks to Blend for completing my prior post.
As for Adler: I was mainly thinking of W's decentering of the family as the primary cause of a child's character development. He switches it much more to the social interactions, which reminded me of Adler, but it's been a good long while since I've read him or about him. This isn't pop-Freudianism, as W. would've critiqued the individualist "analysis" in something like REBEL.
Well, REBEL had a kind of pop-Freudian feel, but it seems to me (from what I recall of the film) that it was extending its argument for "the why of j.d." from the specific family of the Dean character to society at large, which might have been just hunky-dory with Adler. Adler's theories do take into account some family factors, such as order of birth among siblings (Adler was a third sibling).
Possibly the least Freudian aspect of Adler was one that the two men clashed over early on: what AA called an "aggression instinct" in children. Freud mainly wanted to concentrate on sex, allegedly. Later Freud came up with diverse theories on violence and the "death instinct," but Adler seems to have kept some ideas about aggression all along. W.'s foursquare rejection of "aggression instincts" suggests to me that he would never be in overall sympathy with A.'s approach, though I did find one section where I think W. adapted an Adleresque concept into a Freudian matrix. I'll get to that soon.
Posts: 5910 | From: Houston, TX | Registered: Sep 1999
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p. 51-- though most of the allegedly-verbatim testimonies of the children interviewed by W. become very monotonous very quickly, W. does give us an early look at what Gerard Jones and others would later term "geek culture." An adult acquaintance of W. complains of her sister's boy: "He lives in one of those dream worlds... He doesn't even go out to play ball."
Sound familiar? Yes, more than the comics-polluted j.d. type on which W. is trying to sell us, I think most everyone here has personally encountered people who fit the geek/social misfit stereotype, lost in a world of dreams. W.'s probably not the first to recognize the type, given the earlier promulgation of the "sci-fi geek" nurtured by American sf magazines, but he may be the first comics-critic to articulate it, for comics.
W. doesn't quote his acquaintance as specifying what books the sister's son read, but one would assume it was the "crime comics," since W. then says "I have never heard such a complaint about harmless animal comics." (Hmm, he's already forgotten the SUPER DUCK condemnation.) Of course, to me the logical conclusion is that, though the fantasies of the crime comics may be no better than those of children's animal comics, the latter are specifically intended for children and therefore, as W. himself notes, are not objects of temptation for kids as they get older, in large part because they don't deal with fantasies of adult control and empowerment.
Posts: 5910 | From: Houston, TX | Registered: Sep 1999
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quote:Possibly the least Freudian aspect of Adler was one that the two men clashed over early on: what AA called an "aggression instinct" in children.
I've never read Adler (and probably never will), but if he believed in an "aggression instinct" he was a long way off from Wertham.
Going by Beaty's account, Wertham did not believe aggression was part of human nature. Instead aggressive behavior was produced in humans by a tangle of outside circumstances that happened to be contiguous with all of human history. Thus he believed that violent entertainment couldn't provide a release for its audience because there had been no violent impulses in the audience's head until the entertainment put them there. Pretty wild.
Of course I may have got something wrong. I found Beaty a pretty difficult read.
Posts: 81 | Registered: Dec 2005
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quote:Possibly the least Freudian aspect of Adler was one that the two men clashed over early on: what AA called an "aggression instinct" in children.
I've never read Adler (and probably never will), but if he believed in an "aggression instinct" he was a long way off from Wertham.
Going by Beaty's account, Wertham did not believe aggression was part of human nature. Instead aggressive behavior was produced in humans by a tangle of outside circumstances that happened to be contiguous with all of human history. Thus he believed that violent entertainment couldn't provide a release for its audience because there had been no violent impulses in the audience's head until the entertainment put them there. Pretty wild.
Of course I may have got something wrong. I found Beaty a pretty difficult read.
Given the use of the term "mass culture" in the title, I anticipate that at some point Beaty will provide a negative take on mass culture, even if he finds W. wrong in his approach. I suppose I'll read it some time after compiling my notes on SOTI.
Posts: 5910 | From: Houston, TX | Registered: Sep 1999
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