Blood, Tits and Scowling

Hey, did you see that swords-and-swordplay drama on HBO? The one with all the violence and nudity?

You mean Rome?

That was like six years ago. I mean the recent one! With all the political scheming.

You mean The Borgias?

No, that was on Showtime. I mean the one with witches and magic wolves and prophecies.

You mean Camelot?

That was on Starz! I mean the one with Peter Dinklage.

Peter Dinklage wasn’t in The Tudors.

ARRRGH!

Screwball comedy aside, you’d be forgiven for confusing the many, many period dramas that have aired on premium cable in the last six years. A short list includes Rome, The Tudors, Deadwood, Spartacus, Boardwalk Empire, The Borgias, Camelot, Game of Thrones and doubtless several that I’m missing. The historical eras depicted by these films span thousands of years – and even enter the realm of fantasy – and several continents. But they all share one genre. In this genre, familiar stories are retold with an emphasis on violence, sex and dishonest scheming.

If there’s not a better name for this genre, I’m calling it Blood, Tits and Scowling.

Blood

As the first element of the genre, people have to die onscreen. And it’s got to be messy.

(video SFW, but with plenty of CGI splatter)

Even in stories where death is frequent, a death never has to be depicted onscreen. Several of Shakespeare’s most violent plays contain just as many offstage deaths as on. And even if it is depicted onscreen, a death never has to be bloody. Years of Westerns and war movies have conditioned us to the bark of a gunshot, the nameless henchman doubling over, and immediate stillness.

This is common sense, but I bring it up here just as a reminder. It’s easier to film a bloodless death than a bloody one. It’s hard to make fake blood, apply it at the right moment, and edit a series of frames together to make sure the blood appears after the loser has been stabbed and not before. So to wallow in gore as much as Spartacus, Game of Thrones and Rome do is a conscious choice. The producers set aside a portion of the budget for blood. Why? What is this in aid of?

Tits

Of course, if we have all death and no sex, it’s just The Seventh Seal. If critics of pop culture have taught us anything over the last hundred years, it’s that violence and sex must be intertwined in a confusing display. Our heroes must be equally capable of both dispatching armies of goons and of seducing the ingenue. Only once the sexification of violence (or the adrenalizing of pornography, either/or) is complete will Hollywood’s work be done.

The draw of sex is a big part of premium cable. Since HBO, Showtime and the other premium channels don’t rely on sponsors for revenue, they don’t have to worry about turning off any skittish marketing departments. Plus, in an era where a basic cable subscription will get you 70 channels for free, producers have to come up with reasons for viewers to shell out an additional $20 a month. Two pale, firm, bouncing reasons.

(Or one thick, dangling reason, but that’s pretty clearly an afterthought)

Scowling

Lest critics write your period drama off as an exploitative display of sex and violence, however, you need some intrigue. People need to scheme against each other. You need a lot of whispered conferences in rooms with vaulted ceilings. Documents need to be obtained and passed along. Blackmail, espionage and deceit are the orders of the day.

The presence of political intrigue in these dramas should draw our attention for three reasons. First, scheming is typically considered a function of reason (higher level), while sex and violence are considered baser instincts (lower level). Perfumers are experts in blending top and bottom scents to create a complex olfactory experience. The producers of these shows are equally good at blending higher level intrigue and lower level carnality.

(Is the sex and violence a means to attract people to the intrigue? Or is the intrigue a gloss for the sex and violence? That’s one for the comment thread)

Second, scheming isn’t a necessary part of the genre. It doesn’t go hand in hand with violence and sex. You could depict a troop of 14th-century mercenaries screwing and slaughtering their way across France without adding in a lot of scheming. Or, for a less depressing visual, you could depict a bunch of sexy super-spies who jet around the globe stopping terrorists. Either way! The point is, there’s nothing inherent in sex and violence that requires intrigue.

Also, note that the genre requires not just scheming, but scowling. We can’t have heroes who are surrounded by dishonorable curs. We have to have plotters who are constantly angry at the ineptitude of their subordinates. Nucky Thompson is a 20th century Al Swearingen, who is a Wild West analogue of Tywin Lannister, who would love to be as powerful as Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI, whose Catholic corruption paved the way for Henry VIII. These men are the centers of their universes. They’re fascinating to watch, but they’re anti-heroes at best.

Of course, they don’t have to be men. Recent years have brought us Morgan in Camelot, Cersei Lannister in Game of Thrones and Atia in Rome. But whatever their gender, they need to scowl. The only joy they can show is, to quote Orwell, the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy.

A Delicious Cycle

The beauty of Blood, Tits and Scowling as a genre is that, when you put them all together, it creates a perpetual engine for drama. A competent showrunner and a good production team should never run out of episode ideas.

Start things off with forbidden love. Two handsome young people fight against their attraction but eventually succumb (tits). When her father / brother / husband find out, there will be hell to pay (blood). Meanwhile, his indiscretion can be used as leverage against him by a sinister manipulator (scowling). How will our lovers escape from this quandary? Either through violence (blood) or intrigue (scowling). Then there will be a temporary reprieve (tits) before the cycle begins anew.

So few genres contain this perpetual motion machine. Action movies depict a hero triumphing against overwhelming odds. What happens in the sequel, or the next season? How do you raise the stakes? Romantic dramas keep the hero and heroine at arm’s length to maximize the sexual tension. What happens when they consummate their passion? How do you keep viewers tuning in?

Here’s at least one reason why the Blood, Tits and Scowling genre has taken such a firm hold. The ingredients create instant drama. You either have higher-level reason taking advantage of the baser passions, or you have carnal desires undermining the works of reason. Either way, the structure keeps getting upset. Change is not only plausible, it’s constant. The story never has to end.

However, I want to focus our attention on period dramas in particular. Blood, Tits and Scowling aren’t necessarily historical tropes. You can have contemporary dramas with plenty of the above (see The Sopranos; see True Blood). So why spend the extra budget on Renaissance costumes? Why the interest in history?

To get into this, we need to explore why we love historical fiction. Why do the stories of real people in fictional situations appeal to us? Why didn’t we get enough in history class?

I Am From … History!

If you want to understand a historical text, you need to understand not only the time period it depicts but the time at which the text itself was written. A story about the Vietnam War told in 1968 (The Green Berets) will differ from one told in 1978 (Go Tell the Spartans) or 1987 (Full Metal Jacket) or 2002 (We Were Soldiers). The events of the war itself haven’t changed, but the tone with which the authors approach it does.

This change of tone happens because (to quote Orwell once more) who controls the past controls the future. The past is a lens through which we evaluate ourselves and our choices. We give the events of the past higher esteem because they’re a complete tableau. We can look back on them and see a beginning, middle and end. In coming from historical events, and not mere fiction, we take them as “real.” The lessons of history, therefore, are lessons taught by reality. We ignore the past at our own peril.

There’s a Santayana quote I don’t feel doomed to repeat here; you see what I’m getting at.

Between 2005 and 2011 we have a wealth of period dramas which examine historical eras through the lens of Blood, Tits and Scowling. Our stories of the American West come to us through John Wayne and Audie Murphy films. Our stories of the Roman Empire, the Tudor dynasty and Prohibition come to us from history class. Why would we want to return to these well-trod eras after so long? The past hasn’t changed. What’s the new angle?

The Birth of Tragedy

In 1872, shortly before Al Swearingen opened the Gem, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote The Birth of Tragedy From the Spirit of Music, a philosophical theory of art and drama. Nietzsche wanted to explore why the Greeks, still considered by many the founders of civilization, had developed the unique form of tragedy that they had.

Understanding Nietzsche’s argument requires that you understand his theory of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Most people translate the Apollonian as “order” and the Dionysian as “chaos,” and that’s a good enough rubric for our purposes. The Apollonian aesthetic is a world dominated by forms, precision and beauty (realistic murals or sculptures of athletes), while the Dionysian aesthetic is a world dominated by formlessness and sensation (music or drunken orgies).

The Greeks, as founders of civilization (and even if they weren’t, that’s what scholars thought of them as in the 1870s), invented many of the tools and forms that enabled ancient humans to master nature. From them we get cartography, coinage, plumbing, gears, central heating and the gimbal. We also credit them with the formal methods of reasoning and rhetoric as laid down by Socrates and Aristotle. The Greeks made sense of the world around them, using reason to triumph over nature.

And yet the Greeks were surrounded by pagan cultures and the thousand religious cults of Mediterranean civilization. These cults made use of music, wild festivals and (possibly) psychotropic drugs. The abandonment that resulted was part of their religious and social experience, just as the sculpted columns and fine murals of Greek temples were a part of theirs.

(Again, I’m recounting Greek civilization as understood by Nietzsche and his contemporaries, not Greek civilization as it may have been)

Nietzsche describes Greek tragedy, particularly the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, as the synthesis of Apollonian and Dionysian aesthetics. A hero tries to make sense of the world, but is ultimately overcome by fate. Oedipus investigates the murder of the last king of Thebes, only to find that he himself is the murderer and that he’s been sleeping with his mother. Agamemnon tries to avoid angering the gods as he returns from Troy, only to be punished for sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia ten years earlier. The protagonist tries to make sense of the world and fails; the chorus, in turn, makes sense of the protagonist’s failure. The Apollonian and the Dionysian weave together in a constant cycle.

The metaphysical consolation, which as I have already indicated, true tragedy leaves us, that at the bottom of everything, in spite of all the transformations in phenomena, life is indestructibly power and delightful, this consolation appears in lively clarity as the chorus of satyrs, the chorus of natural beings, who live, as it were, behind civilization, who cannot disappear, and who, in spite of all the changes in generations and a people’s history, always remain the same. With this chorus, the profound Greek, capable of the most delicate and the most severe suffering, consoled himself, the man who looked around with a daring gaze in the middle of the terrifying destructive instincts of so-called world history and equally into the cruelty of nature […]. Art saves him, and through art life saves him.

– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music

The Weight of Experience

One last point to recall about Greek tragedy: the periods depicted in Oedipus Rex and the Oresteia were just as ancient and fantastic to the Greeks as the periods depicted in Rome, The Tudors and Game of Thrones are to us. We may lump them all together as being part of the “toga era,” but the myths of the Trojan War were distant legends to Aeschylus and his audience.

Why did Aeschylus set his best and most beloved plays in an era that was ancient even to the ancient Greeks? Because (as mentioned above) the weight of history lends credibility to a story. It means that the moral of the story is not just a casual observation, but a lesson that thunders down the centuries. His contemporary plays, like The Persians, were meant to cheer on the Greek state. His tragedies were meant for something else.

And what do Greek tragedies tell us? They blend together the interplay of Apollonian and Dionysian aesthetics. A figure of legend – Oedipus, King of Thebes; Agamemnon, patriarch of the house of Atreus – attempts to put off the fate that the universe has in store for him. He creates Apollonian forms: proper obedience to protocol, the weight of ritual. But Dionysian sensation catches up to him. He surrenders to or is overcome by impulse: gouging his eyes out in horror, or falling victim to his wife’s rage. The survivors comment on his downfall, thereby lending form once more to a formless chaos. And so the cycle continues.

There Are No Men Like Me. There’s Only Me

The genre of Blood, Tits and Scowling blends the Apollonian and the Dionysian just as well as, if not better than, Greek tragedy. It depicts selfish men of power, scheming to build empires. Then it shows the impulses of sex and violence that lead their best-laid plans awry. Neither Nucky Thompson, Al Swearengen or Robert Baratheon can build a world that blood and tits can’t overturn. But neither can blood and tits survive for long in Bacchanalian innocence without someone scowling in the background.

The most famous examples of this genre all take place in historical epochs: Renaissance England, the decline of the Roman Republic, the Wild West, the Roaring Twenties or fantastic empires such as Camelot or Westeros. There are a few contemporary examples, such as True Blood or The Sopranos. But the former takes place in a world of dark urban fantasy that we can’t identify with. And the latter takes place in a world which America has so mythologized – the world of organized crime – that it might as well be set in Kings Landing, NJ.

(That’d be a show, eh? Robert Baratheon as an aging capo, Ned Stark as his reluctant lieutenant, Varys and Littlefinger as his scheming enforcers. The rival families drawing in at the scent of blood)

Why are there so few Blood, Tits and Scowling shows about contemporary men of power? Why isn’t the upcoming Kennedys mini-series (starring Greg Kinnear, Katie Holmes, Barry Pepper and Tom Wilkinson) about Jack Kennedy the philanderer and Lyndon Johnson the bloodthirsty warmonger? Why are there miniseries depicting John Adams as a crotchety patriot, but none depicting Ben Franklin as a schemer and sex fiend? Because these figures of legend are too recent and too prominent for Americans to revisit. The current American “story,” if you will, is too tied up in the classroom notions of these men.

But Henry VIII? That’s like, what, five centuries ago? Who cares what we say about him?

If you want to say that a historical figure was a skirt-chaser, a murderer or a conspirator, you either need substantial proof or you need to wait until even his descendants’ scholars are dead. Better yet, pick someone obscure. Boardwalk Empire depicts the corruption and degeneracy of Nucky Thompson, treasurer for Atlantic City in the 1920s. It doesn’t depict the corruption, xenophobia and callousness of Woodrow Wilson, President only a few years earlier. Deadwood takes on Wild West figures no one has heard of, like Al Swearengen. And Game of Thrones is about a continent full of people who never existed!

Picking targets that no one will complain about gives you license to revel in the Blood, Tits and Scowling that the genre demands. You can portray your heroes as anti-heroes: cunning masters of their circumstances, manipulating their peers into position. You can also play up the baser instincts that led to their downfall: the violence, the sex and the commingling of the two. Say that Ronald Reagan was a cunning manipulator and you’ll get legions of conservative protesters falling on your head. Say the same thing of the young Octavian, though, and who will care?

So the Blood, Tits and Scowling genre requires an era that’s either historically distant (Rome, Deadwood, The Tudors, Boardwalk Empire) or so fantastic that it might as well be another world (Game of Thrones, Camelot, Spartacus). It cannot be grappled with in the present era, just as the Greeks of antiquity couldn’t depict tragedies with contemporary figures.

But there’s one question left unanswered: why now? Why has this genre emerged – or re-emerged – on premium cable in the 21st century? Why not ten years from now, or ten years earlier? Why do producers find a need to tell us tales of historical figures behaving badly? And why do audiences keep eating it up?

I leave this question as an exercise for the comments thread, partly because I don’t have an answer myself. Greek tragedies emerged from a period when Greece was emerging from the rule of a tyrant and under threat from the Persian armies. It’s possible that this blend of domestic unrest and foreign paranoia left many Greeks wondering if their Apollonian forms could sustain the buffets of Dionysian fate.

But I’m just guessing. What do you think? Why has the Blood, Tits and Scowling genre emerged in this century? And what does it portend for the future?