The much-maligned talk show host is guilty of tackiness and insensitivity, but not of murder.
By DAVID FUTRELLE
once upon a time, not so long ago, a movie ruined my life—a miserably depressing flick titled "Enemies: A Love Story" , which told the tale of a morally challenged Holocaust survivor with an excess of wives. Perhaps you saw it; perhaps you even enjoyed it. I wish the movie had never entered my life.You see, I attended the movie with a female, er, friend — though the exact parameters of our relationship were a matter of some dispute. I was in love with her — or perhaps simply obsessed. She was not in love with me. We attended the film at a rather fragile point in our peculiar friendship, both of us in lousy moods. We left the theater feeling worse than ever. Shortly afterwards, we got into an argument, and, after leaving a final angry message on my answering machine the next day, she stopped talking to me altogether. I immediately plunged into a state of despair, from which it took nearly a year to recover.
What's gotten me thinking about this rather sorry episode from my past is the verdict yesterday in what has been called the "Talk Show Murder Case." The verdict, I thought, was a sensible enough one: the jury convicted Jonathan Schmitz of second-degree murder in the shotgun death of Scott Amedure — who a few days before the killing had revealed his "secret crush" on Schmitz at a taping of "The Jenny Jones Show." The jury took into consideration Schmitz' less-than-stable "state of mind" at the time of the killing — but they rejected his lawyer's claims that Jenny was the real culprit in the murder.
But the case is far from over, and poor Ms. Jones is not yet off the hook. The family of the victim plans to pursue a $25 million lawsuit against the show itself, its perpetually perky host, and Telepicture Productions, the division of Warner Brothers responsible for producing the show. (In one of those truth-is-stranger-than-fiction coincidences that seem to surround high-profile cases, the family has decided to hire Jack Kevorkian's lawyer, Geoffrey Fieger, to represent them.)
I understand their pain (if not their choice of legal counsel). And they are probably right to conclude that their son would still be alive had it not been for Jenny Jones. Does that make her liable in his death? No more so than Paul Mazursky, the director of "Enemies," is responsible for what happened to me after viewing his film. Yes, the Jenny Jones show left Schmitz angry and upset — as, presumably, did the sexually explicit notes Amadure apparently left on Schmitz's doorstep. But the Jones show is not responsible for his extreme, violent reaction; and his anger hardly gave him license to kill.
The misery I felt after the "Enemies" incident was very real. But I never considered suing anyone over it. Besides, who could I sue? Mazursky, for directing such a misery-inducing film? The estate of the late Isaac Bashevis Singer, since he wrote the book on which the screenplay was based? Ron Silver, for his convincing portrayal of the morally-challenged polygamist Herman? Roger Ebert, for recommending the film?
Perhaps one of the reasons I didn't consider (and couldn't have even possibly conceived of) suing was that the film was, by all accounts, a very good one — ably directed, with a fine cast, and based on a book by a Nobel prize winner. "The Jenny Jones Show," by comparison, is an embarrassing piece of schlock — one of the tawdriest of the daytime talk shows that everyone (as they say) loves to hate. It's sordid; it's despicable; it's exploitative. Smug hipsters can sneer at the ludicrous clips from the show shown nightly on cable's Talk Soup, while cultural conservatives can profess to be shocked, shocked, by it all. I can't even bring myself to watch it — well, to watch it more than two or three times a week.
When we look upon Art, we do so with awe — even if its subject matter is as squalid as anything on "Geraldo" or "Jenny Jones." Sophocles wrote about incest; Shakespeare wrote about lust, jealousy, murder — much of it taking place within some highly dysfunctional families. But when cultural critics attempt to ban such high art, they're ridiculed as hopeless boors and yahoos. (You may recall the reaction, several years back, when a Penn State professor accused a Goya painting of "harassing" her.)
When critics take on movie violence, rap music and TV talk shows, by contrast, even the most liberal-minded tend to sniff and shuffle and mumble that they "see the problem" — even if, they sometimes go on to say, "censorship isn't the answer."
It's similar when the issue is "influence." When serial killer Ted Bundy claimed to have been motivated to murder by the evils of pornography (a pretty transparent attempt to get himself off the hook for his own vicious deeds), anti-porn activists ate it up. But when well-armed "patriots" claim simply to be acting out the Original Intent of the U.S. Constitution, no one suggests banning that pernicious document — which, I hear, you can even find freely distributed on the Internet.
Oddly enough, most people today up in arms about the evil powers of popular culture claim to be immune to these powers themselves. And even the most hardened moralist is likely to overlook a little violence here and there if the message of a particular piece of culture is to his or her liking. In his mammoth "Book of Virtues," for example, William Bennett includes selections from Shakespeare's "Henry V" and Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" — fine literature, to be sure, but both of them as violent as anything you'll find on a typical rap CD. And you're as unlikely to hear a Republican criticize the violent movies of Arnold Schwarzenegger as you are likely to hear a Democrat say a good thing about Rush Limbaugh.
Despite all of the talk about media "responsibility," the assault on popular culture is simply another way of avoiding the real issues. To blame words or images for problems that are clearly social in origin is the ultimate kind of irresponsibility. As comic book publisher William Gaines told a Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency in the '50s, "Delinquency is the product of the real environment in which the child lives and not of the fiction he reads." It's telling that we have to turn to Gaines, the founder and publisher of Mad Magazine, to inject a little sanity into a debate that long ago ceased to make any sense at all.
David Futrelle is a regular contributor to Salon.
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