In the essay SADISM OF THE CASUALKIND, I pointed out that writers like Legman and Wertham viewed every apparent act of fictional sadism to be deeply revelatory of how messed up the audiences were. In this the two authors followed the example of Sigmund Freud, who, despite his disavowals to the contrary, hardly ever met a cigar he didn’t deem a phallic symbol.
I’ve pointed out various salient differences between Wertham and Legman, but historically they’re on the same page insofar as both men believed that American popular entertainment offered far too much sex and violence for a healthy culture. At times both authors slanted their arguments to apply to the effects of such unwholesome diversions upon children, but both also caviled at the effects of bad books and movies on adults as well. Neither of them seemed capable of imagining that for the majority of consumers, the depiction of excessive sex and violence, even those configured into sadistic actions, provided little more than “casual” entertainment, temporary respite from the dull round of the workaday world.
Instead, for these worthies, everything in popular entertainment—the muscles of comic book superheroes, the “bitch-heroines” of paperback thrillers—denoted something deep and syndromic in American culture. Wertham in particular expressed the belief that children could be bent into deviance as easily as the proverbial twig, as if psychological syndromes sprang out of some “monkey see, monkey do” impulse. By saying this, I don’t deny that some individuals may have psychological syndromes that are brought to the fore by their encounters with various types of art. But this phenomenon certainly isn’t confined to encounters with popular entertainment. One of the most famous syndromic avatars of literary sadism was the Eton-educated Algernon Charles Swinburne, who didn’t need crime novels (or crime comic books) to write such odes to sadistic women as “Anactoria” and “Faustine.”
I should further note in some cases an author may repeatedly use transgressive materials not because they express some syndromic aspect of the author’s psychology, but simply as an avenue of captivating a large audience. Though I considered most of Gershon Legman’s identifications of sadistic entertainments to be fatuous, I agreed with him to some extent regarding Chic Young’s newspaper comic BLONDIE. Still, when I read a collection of the original BLONDIE strips from 1930, I found barely any such sadisterotic motifs there. The early strips are all over the place, even writing Dagwood out of the story for a time. The feature didn’t enjoy sustained success until Blondie became a hausfrau and Dagwood a harried victim of the middle-class rat-race. This suggests to me that Young may have happened on his formula — “torture the husband”—by sheer accident, and that he and others who followed the formula did so simply to make a buck. I would not even argue that a syndromic consciousness was behind the one BLONDIE episode that I’ve thus far identified as mythically concrescent, a two-page comic book story signed (but probably not produced) by Young.
Legman’s argument was that BLONDIE was important to American audiences because it showed an American housewife temporarily getting the better of her husband, though in theory she would always have to return to a condition of subservience. I have no way of knowing what BLONDIE strips Legman saw at the time he penned the essays in LOVE AND DEATH. Yet I tend to doubt that Young ever varied his act by much, so in all likelihood the only “subservience” Blondie ever suffered was having to cook Dagwood’s meals—though, as I showed in the analysis of “Shaved and Clipped,” she seems to have no problems telling him that she can cut off his meals any time she pleases.
I’ve also differed with Legman on the sadistic content of teen humor comics, for reasons I detailed in the BLONDIE essay and won’t repeat here. But because Legman made the assertion, I have at times sought to test his hypothesis, perhaps more rigorously than he did—as I will show in the ensuing “near myth” essay.
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