Over the years, I’ve always rolled my eyes whenever people bring up media violence being too extreme. I grew up during The Matrix/Natural Born Killers/Doom era where anyone and everyone seemed like a potential school shooter if they enjoyed a Terminator film. All of it seemed overblown to say the least. So I never thought it would happen to me, but I actually questioned media violence while watching this Monday’s episode of Fox’s The Following.
What happened? The entire episode seemed to be a psychotic fantasy where serial killers have like-minded and loving friends, sexy girls falling all over them, and even the FBI isn’t safe from retribution…when they’re not being wholly incompetent and letting a master killer escape twice. BUT perhaps the pivotal “man, can this be a good thing?” moment was when Joe Carroll (played by James Purefoy as a cross between Dracula and a really good looking Charles Manson) had a flashback to when he was “training” his first young killer in slaughtering a totally innocent college co-ed.
The co-ed (played by the gorgeous Camille St. James) doesn’t get a line of dialogue. She doesn’t have a backstory. She doesn’t even have a name, being listed as “college co-ed” on the show’s credits and “sorority girl” on the imdb. The beautiful woman is nothing but cattle for the killers to slaughter, tied up on a table struggling to get away as Joe kills her slow. This is disturbing in and of itself, but the fact that the show depicts this in such an empathy-less way, and then abruptly cuts away so that we never see the real pain the victim suffers is something close to heinous.
Not many of the victims in The Following have been portrayed as real people, and the show treats the kills in a disturbingly smooth way. The broadcast network rules on violence may actually make the show more psychologically terrible, as the murders are made to look very simple and easy to move on from. It’s violence without the blood…or the pain…or the after-thought of “What would that college co-ed become? How senseless is it to cut her life short just for kicks?”
BUT the show remains stubbornly unthoughtful. Joe kills. His people kill. Joe has sex with his people after a kill. His people have sex with each other after a kill. And the FBI is completely incompetent in stopping them, when they’re not on the chopping block themselves.
The glibness of the violence is matched by the unrealistic nature of it. In The Following’s world the killers have military-grade equipment, logistics, and organization. They can infiltrate the police with ease, get a hold of a helicopter, and they make a repeated laughing stock out of the FBI. To portray serial killers over and over and over again is one thing (there are now more serial killers on TV than real life), but to portray them as superheroes?
Because what else can you consider Joe Carrol? Breaking Bad’s Walter White and The Sopranos’s Tony Soprano may be many things (to me, they are likable anti-heroes…I told you I’m not generally against media violence, and I know I would rather watch a crime drama than a cooking show) but they’re not sexy. Joe Carroll is supposed to be, in addition to extremely smart and in control of a small army (literally) of psychopaths. I can’t be completely alone in thinking that some on-the-bubble types might see this wholly unrealistic psycho——–who has friends, girls, and has it all because he’s killing people——–and think “gee…maybe the FBI wouldn’t catch me either.” And maybe that’s the scariest thing about the show.
When a show is too dark for me, that is saying something. Following is just not my cup of tea.