Abstract
Violent criminality, now more than ever, occupies a weirdly central and centralizing place in American cultural life. Blockbuster media—from cable news reports on school shootings, serial slaughters, and husbands-gone-wild, to the endlessly proliferating crime narratives that appear now on everything from Spike TV to the National Geographic Network to the Women’s Entertainment channel—bring mass audiences together in consideration of trauma and outrage. World War II press reports apparently coined the term ‘‘blockbuster bomb’’ for a device explosive enough to destroy whole neighbourhoods. Contemporary blockbusters, some of which you may take home from your local Blockbuster, offer a related sort of communal participation in annihilation and suffering, however vicarious.
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