t's become a quadrennial political ritual: the excoriation of Hollywood.
Last week, it was Democrats Al Gore and Joe Lieberman and Republicans Lynne Cheney and John McCain castigating the entertainment industry for marketing violence to teenagers.
In 1996, it was Republican Bob Dole accusing the film industry of polluting American culture with movies like ''Natural Born Killers'' and ''Pulp Fiction.''
As long ago as 1961, Newton Norman Minow, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, told broadcasters that television had become ''a vast wasteland.'' That same year, a particularly gory episode of ABC's ''Bus Stop'' - in which teen idol Fabian, playing a psychopath, took an ax and gave an old man 40 whacks - triggered a congressional investigation into violence on TV.
The very duration of that concern speaks to the complexity of the issue. Certainly politicians - even if they are pandering - mirror some parental concerns when they say excessively violent entertainment should not be marketed to children.
And it's true that American entertainment fairly drips with blood. Still, watching ''Attack on Tinseltown: The Sequel,'' it's hard not to think this year's cultural custodians, like Dole before them, have mistaken celluloid symptom for cultural cause.
Left unspoken is a reality less given to facile campaign-trail jawboning: the deep-rooted place violence and murder hold in the human imagination.
As far back as the story of Cain and Abel, murder has served as a cornerstone of plot. Primal, final, visceral, it's a crime that catches and captivates, an event that makes a film or a novel immediately command attention.
Indeed, the most horrible of crimes remains so central to our imaginative experience that in entire genres of fiction, we take it as a given that the life of the story depends on the violent death of a character.
With ''The Murders in the Rue Morgue,'' Edgar Allen Poe invented the detective story, and the genre has made murder its metier ever since. Human slaughter is just as central to another distinctly American genre, the Western. If detective novels almost invariably start with a cooling corpse, frontier tales usually end with one or more bullet-riddled characters.
''If America has a national genre, it is crime fiction,'' says cultural critic Steven Stark, author of ''Glued to the Set,'' a book about television. ''And the whole cowboy story is the same kind of thing.''
But if we're a nation possessed of a murderous imagination, we didn't start the bloodletting. Look at Shakespeare, colossus of the Western canon. His plays are written in blood.
(And for those who protest that Shakespeare is serious literature rather than entertainment, it's instructive to remember he wasn't always considered that way. In the 18th century, writes cultural historian Jacques Barzun, the Yale library kept a folio of Shakespeare's plays only for the light diversion of scholars taking a break from weightier study. In France it was only in the early 19th century that Shakespeare, theretofore considered too vulgar, was introduced into the curriculum.)
Murder has long enjoyed an important place in serious novels.
Whether driven by a burst of bitter despair, as with Thomas Hardy's fallen Tess; greed, like Dickens's Jonas Chuzzlewit; need, as with Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov; or the connivance of lovers to eliminate an inconvenient third, as in Zola's ''Therese Raquin,'' the snuffing of a life has long proved central to the advancing of plot.
Either in contemplation, commission, or consequence, murder enjoys just as prominent a place in modern writing, and not just in the hundreds of thrillers penned each year, but in serious work, from Faulkner's ''Light in August'' to Dreiser's ''An American Tragedy'' to Capote's ''In Cold Blood'' and Mailer's ''The Executioner's Song.''
To cite just a few recent novels, murder or murderous intent figures prominently in Jane Smiley's ''A Thousand Acres'' (winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize), Ian McEwan's ''Amsterdam'' (winner of the 1998 Booker Prize), Sue Miller's ''While I Was Gone,'' and Janet Fitch's ''White Oleander.''
What makes murder so compelling as fictive afflatus? Perhaps Goethe had a fundamental insight when he said there was no crime so horrid that he couldn't imagine himself committing it.
For authors, killing a character serves a protean purpose, offering an endlessly revealing prism through which to view character and advance a storyline.
''It allows you, as a writer, to go in so many different directions,'' says Charles Kenney, author of two well-received crime novels. ''That's why it's so alluring: It raises wonderful questions that help you ... develop character and plot.''
Sometimes the point of murder is to turn established notions of morality on their head. In ''Tess of the D'Urbervilles,'' Hardy, like Melville in ''Billy Budd,'' makes the reader feel the injustice of executing a person pushed by ill use to murderous attack.
Other times, literary murder is needed to arrest attention.
Certainly without an imaginary slaying, there could be no detective fiction.
''You have to have a murder or people don't care enough about solving the crime,'' notes Kate Mattes, proprietor of Kate's Mystery Books, the Cambridge mystery mecca. ''If somebody steals $5,000, you aren't going to want to read 250 pages trying to figure out who it was.''
In the Victorian novel, even imaginary murder and sexuality had its risk. So adverse was the reaction to ''Tess of the D'Urbervilles'' (and ''Jude the Obscure'') that Hardy abandoned fiction in favor of poetry.
No more. As far as fiction goes, it's hard to think of a novel other than Bret Easton Ellis's ''American Psycho'' where carnage has incited any sort of critical backlash - and even that has been made into a film.
Mattes thinks part of the enormous appeal of detective fiction is a desire to see murder punished, and perhaps there's something to that notion; Canadian author and critic Robertson Davies argued that 19th-century audiences liked melodramas because they indulged the instinct for violence but with a resolution that ultimately upheld the social order.
Melodrama long ago ran afoul of an artistic aversion to sentimental storylines, of course. But even today, it's the odd, gratuitous, unpunished violence of, say, Quentin Tarantino's films that seems most threatening to mainstream America.
Although the concept is the same, others see a key difference between an imaginary murder that occurs in print and one that takes place in gory detail on a movie screen.
But even there, distinctions are difficult to draw, for it's not just the summer slice-and-dice movies that have made murder their medium. Three examples:
''American Beauty,'' which won five Academy Awards this year, is swept along on the knowledge that Kevin Spacey's character is soon to die - and it's his graphic murder at movie's end that forces a viewer to confront the film as something beyond comedy.
Hilary Swank, meanwhile, won her best actress Oscar for her role in ''Boys Don't Cry,'' a true story about a Nebraska murder, the violence of which is exceedingly hard to watch.
And ''The Talented Mr. Ripley,'' another much-admired and talked-about film, features three murders, two of them fairly gruesome slayings.
Another ultra-violent offering helps highlight the contradiction of a culture that decries the very violence it finds so entertaining. Last spring, before the Columbine High School slayings, Gore was praising ''The Matrix,'' a sci-fi film almost fetishistic in its loving treatment of deadly gunfights.
Meanwhile, where would TV be without the murderous plots that power the police, detective, and Mafia dramas of prime time?
''Certainly if people gave low ratings to shows that are violent, we wouldn't hear an outcry, because the shows would have gone off the air,'' says Alex McNeil, author of ''Total Television.'' ''Nobody would say, I am going to keep those shows on the air despite low ratings because they are extremely violent, and there is a place for violence.''
All of which leaves Washington and Hollywood trying to draw - or rework - hazy distinctions about what sort of violence is necessary for a story and what level of carnage seems excessive, or to set and enforce difficult-to-define standards about what sort of violence is appropriate for various ages.
It's a discussion made even thornier because of legitimate First Amendment concerns. ''What this is about is the use of the bully pulpit to try to force people to censor themselves,'' contends civil libertarian Harvey Silverglate.
It would be a discussion made more honest by acknowledging the hold, powerful as it is disquieting, that murder has upon the human imagination.
