Escalating Danger in Contemporary Legends

I am not saying that the newer legends, with their escalated style and content, are totally replacing their older analogues. The older forms persist even as new ones arise. The individuals in a group each have their own sensibilities, whether moral or aesthetic, and along with those a range of preferences and needs. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to document all the legends told within a group in order to track exactly the appearance and disappearance of motifs and legend variants. Nonetheless, even with the small sample provided by my students, there are noticeable trends and one trend is escalating danger.

Escalation of danger is carried out in a two-fold pattern, with the two parts responding to different aspects of culture. The legends in which the "sin" grows more outrageous while the punishment remains the same reflect changing moral values; the legends in which the "sin" remains the same but the punishment escalates reflect an evolving aesthetic. Moreover, the escalation of punishment is accelerating faster than the escalation of punishable behaviors. Legendary malefactions may be changing now in decades rather than centuries, but the punishments have begun escalating in increments of just months. I conjecture that the accelerating escalation is not a simple matter of updating legends, of keeping them current with new technologies, mores, or fashions, but also has to do with changed demands of narrative, comparable to the bigger, better thrills of sex and violence required in movies and television, not just in the matter of car crashes or gun battles, but also in the increasingly extreme dangers and obstacles encountered by televised "survivors," and the increasingly extravagantly tasteless escapades shown on the "Fear Factor" and similar reality shows of the networks and MTV. When a gross-out movie such as "American Pie" shows one character masturbate with an apple pie and another drink a beer glass of ejaculate, how much further must legends go to get a response? In order to catch the attention of a quickly bored and blase audience, the narrative must be heightened. Moreover, the increased penalty acts as a booster shot, re-shocking people into paying attention to the legend's implicit warning. For example, for a number of years young women have been warned never to accept a drink from another's hand nor leave a drink unattended lest they be given the rape drug Rohypnol, which causes unconsciousness and amnesia, but familiarity with the threat has dulled the warning. In the late 1990s, warnings started appearing about a new drug, Progesterex, which adds irreversible sterility to unconsciousness and amnesia. Rohypnol is a real drug; Progesterex is not, but its threat of permanent physical harm, which is directed most particularly and essentially at the woman's reproductive ability, does re-alert women to the need to be careful. As familiarity desensitizes people to a particular horror (as, for example, with children seeing images of gun shot victims), bigger and bigger stimuli are required to get any rise out of them. In order that their messages not fade into the background noise of warnings, bulletins, and alerts, legends are pushed beyond old limits, re-startling the audience into paying attention. Perhaps all of this is most clearly and succinctly expressed in the answers to one imaginary set of riddles: What's gross? A contemporary legend. What's grosser than gross? An updated legend.8