Beheading Child Murder TV Fiction

We are preparing a publisher’s biography of Joe Weider, a former pulp publisher who died this past weekend. This will be our next planned post. After that, we will follow up on the themes of the past few months. March was the Wonderblog’s best month ever and I thank all of you for stopping by. Our posting activity has been a little limited as of late due to the onset of several time suck projects.

While I was typing away at these other fine projects, my television suddenly became a go-to source for fictional beheadings, fictional child murders and much Nazi-like first person perspective behavior. I am, of course, talking about Cable TV sensations The Bible, Game of Thrones and Vikings.

On the first episodes of both Game of Thrones and Vikings, young boys were invited to watch a beheading—without turning their heads away. And both shows featured the murder of a young boy—three on Vikings, although done off camera and one on Game of Thrones, done on camera and fairly much for comedic effect. Vikings later came up to speed with an on camera boy murder and several girl rape scenes and near rape scenes thrown in.

When coupled with The Bible, my television has become a thorough 1937 era Shudder Pulp experience. I am not entirely sure what is going on here, but I will attempt to parse it out. Perhaps it is the basketball gods’ vengeance against me for not watching March Madness—which suddenly became grizzly on its own last night. (A real college student’s legs was smashed to pieces.) If all of this is a trend, I am hoping it is a short one.

The Bible finished last night, so I will start with it. Touted as nothing short of the most amazing and best produced version ever done on the subject, this program spewed out in stages overdubbed with ‘Context’ of the type last seen in episodes of Rocky & Bullwinkle, but done straight, movie serial style. It’s actually not the Bible nor a story about incidents drawn from the Bible, but rather an American Evangelical fast forward showing the flow of events as they lead to Jesus and then briefly leading from Jesus. In short, it was pure Fundy Propaganda.

No, I didn’t like it.  Moreover, it was offensive in what it showed and almost entirely misinformed. The voice over was specifically spewing gibberish. In true Fundy form, it has no sex but just tons of blood. There was a PC twist on casting, making Book of Judges strongman Samson black, for example, and including Mary M as one of Christ’s core followers. It otherwise clung to some rather dated and discredited notions throughout.

I’m not here to pick nits. The thing was terrible. The production values were standard for an episode of Smallville or, more accurately, Touched By An Angel. That it was put together by the same team as Touched By An Angel was fairly clear. Now that I know what theology they believe in, I believe them less. Anyone who drew inspiration from this nonsense is practicing a faith other than Christianity.

Not that Christianity requires accurate inspiration, but this didn’t help.

Only American Evangelicals believe in this Bingo Jesus.  In all seriousness, the show was the most compelling case for atheism I have come across in a long time. And I’m no atheist. If I went on nothing more than this television show, I would be convinced that all people of faith were raving lunatics. Paranoids, at that, since all they ever seem to say to each other is “It’s a trap!” I would also be convinced that Paul started his persecution of Christians fifty days after the resurrection (it was more like 25 years) and that Christ’s actual apostles wrote the Bible—or even the letters of Paul. So on top of being stupid about the faith, it’s also historically wrong. 

All that said, I was enjoying the light show until the last installment. Prior to this it was bad acting, made for TV effects and dialog which dragged between plops of lifted verse. If I wasn’t certain that the producers had a 10 year old’s grasp of their subject matter before then, the last Holy Crap We Are Running Out of Time slab sold it for me. Let’s linger on non entities such as Saint Stephan and omit entirely Constantine—the person who is said to have actually created the Bible and who demonstrably converted more people than all of the others combined.

I give it an F.

Not much better on the TV scale was the sensational Game of Thrones. Being kind of a fantasy fan I was interested in seeing what all of the fuss was about. So I booted me up a copy of the first episode, provided for me on demand by Comcast.

It was a one and done for me. Good kingdom verses bad kingdom. Fine. The first episode starts with some border guards being assailed by what turns out to be a known type of supernatural monster. One guard survives the attack and runs home. He is promptly arrested for abandoning his post. When he tells his tale of woe-of coming upon a monster he was in no way prepared to fend off—our good king promptly lops off his head. He declares that the monster is no longer around and thus this idiot is just a deserter. Seems odd that a deserter would run away to the capital—the locust of authority—but this is not taken into consideration. Nor is the fact that magic and monsters are sort of common in these parts. Nope. Off with his head, in full view of the 10 year old prince. Then there’s a bawdy dwarf, some fat king pal of the beheading fat king and a lot of hushed words and then some blondie woman who can’t act her way out of a wet sack who is just there to get sworn at and appear nude. All of the good guys are Nordic types with English trappings and the bad guys are all blacks and Arabs and are led by a too thin albino. For bonus points, the young prince who saw the beheading is hurled to his apparent death after accidentally coming across some adulterers. Because this isn’t Prince Valiant, no sir. (Or Star Trek with Wesley Crusher.) No young kiddies here. Just beheading and nudity and cuss words by the score. I don’t know this for sure, but I am guessing the plot would be shortened up by deadly proportions if the supposedly good king actually believed his border guard and went to investigate then and there. I will never know.

Slightly less implausible or historically inaccurate is The Bible’s stable-mate,Vikings. This is rather an amusing show, almost despite itself. Everybody involved is far too pretty to be a real Viking. This is, however, TV so I let it pass. The premise is that being a Viking basically sucks. You’re poor and you live in a failed state. Robbers and rapists rove the countryside at whim. The only governmental authority that exists is on the model of your typical third world type dictatorship. The ruler is just a big thief, murderer and rapist himself. One’s only real freedom to pick up an extra buck is to go on raids where the big crime boss tells you to.

As our story opens, the raiding pickings have gotten a bit thin. As Ragnar, the male lead, states “Some of these people are as poor as we are.” And this year doesn’t look any better. The rather one dimensionally bad guy earl of this corner of Dumpopolis has ordered yet another raid into the Baltic areas and maybe, just maybe, Russia. Like these slavs have something. Ragnar then pipes up that he has somehow heard of some place west called England to raid. The earl forbids his boats to go there. So Ragnar makes his own boat and sails off. That’s the basic conflict.

Vikings might have potential, if it leads to the actual Norman Conquests. If not, it’s just another one of three popular shows with truly one-dimensional bad guys. I’m all for evil being evil, but I would like a little bit more depth of motivation thrown in. That the Earl from Vikings, the High Priest from The Bible and the Albino from Game of Thrones all seem to be family members is curious as far as TV trends go. Without much modification in dialog or scenery, all three shows could be taking place in the same world. Having both Game of Thrones and Vikings use the exact same scene seems to disclose something in the water, in TV Land if not the culture more broadly.

The last outbreak of beheadings in popular escape vehicles really did not foreshadow anything. A certain degree of splatter lust is always there. The heads on sticks scene eventually loses its shock value, especially when it gets done to death. I think we are reaching the far swing of the pendulum. In the end, a resort to splatter shlock is not so much done for shock value as it is to cover up deficiencies in the material presented. People will get sick of this.