A Sign of the Times: When Only Entertainment Has Value : Culture: The Menendez trial typifies this age that is beyond shock. Lurid tales once confined to pulp novels are now on the evening news.

In his recent social history of the 1950s, David Halberstam devotes nearly 18 pages to Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, the quintessentially American couple whose situation comedy ran for 14 years on television. Why so much on the Nelsons? Because, writes Halberstam, they “reflected--and refined--much of the social conformity of the period.” In the Nelsons’ antiseptic world, “There was no divorce. There was no serious sickness, particularly mental illness. Families liked each other.” They were perfectly unexceptional folk, but “being ordinary was being better.”

Nearly 40 years later, the Nelsons seem not just from another generation but another eon. Today, the family most likely to reflect our own period may well be the Menendezes, the Beverly Hills brothers on trial for having blasted their millionaire parents to death with shotguns, because, they say, their father sexually abused them.

Like the Nelsons in their time, the Menendezes could well be an archetype for ours. They demonstrate that what was once the province of lurid pulp fiction--dysfunctional families, terrible secrets, alcoholism, infidelity, abuse and sexual perversion--is now the staple of real-life drama. Every day, we are inundated with new tales of horror that exceed fiction: a Virginia bride slicing off her husband’s penis after he allegedly raped her; two young boys killing their father for having abused their young sister; Long Island teen-ager Amy Fisher shooting Mary Jo Buttafuoco, the wife of her lover; the sons and daughters in Washington state accusing their father and mother of forcing them to engage in satanic sexual rites; the routine reports of abuse at day-care centers. The list goes on and on and on.

One is tempted to blame the media for exploiting these stories. Certainly, the media are bolder and more irresponsible than in Ozzie Nelson’s day, but it is also likely they are slaking a thirst rather than creating one--and the thirst is ours.

Americans seem to love these stories, which is why they become running sagas, viewers settling in with a bowl of popcorn to watch the latest installment of the Menendezes on Court TV--the way one might watch a new episode of a favorite show. It is not hard to figure out why. By any measure, this stuff is great entertainment--even better for being real.

But if real-life stories like the Menendezes’ are coming to supplant fiction by providing more thrills, these stories are also performing the functions that fiction has traditionally served. Fiction, even sitcom fiction, expresses values, satisfies psychological needs and purveys themes. Now that the news itself offers continuing narratives--like endless soap operas--it can do the same thing fiction did. So the best way of understanding how the Menendezes or Amy Fisher shunted aside a more benign vision of America may be to treat them as if they were characters and their lives “literature”--encoded with meaning the way novels are.

Using this approach, how can one interpret the Menendez case? One approach was raised by the Menendez brothers themselves, when they offered a defense accusing their father of child abuse. There is almost always some such absolution in these Grand Guignol tales. It is a basic theme that picks up a popular theme in the culture generally: No one is really responsible anymore. If we are unhappy, if our lives seem unfulfilled, if we fail to function as we would like, we have merely to ransack the past for an excuse--just as the Menendez brothers did. The past shall set us free.

Another interpretation is that the chickens are coming home to roost. Deep down in our Calvinist souls, we realize that the social and financial excesses of the ‘80s have to be punished the way those scandalous novels of the ‘50s--for example, “Peyton Place”--felt hypocrisy had to be punished. In this view, aberration becomes the obverse of success, our way of saying we didn’t get away with it--though the Menendez brothers and others have to enact the parable for us. They are the ritual sacrifice.

There seems something honest about the constant revelations of aberration, too. While Americans have always projected homespun values and a basic sense of decency, there has been a literary tradition--running form Edgar Lee Masters in “Spoon River Anthology” through Sherwood Anderson in “Winesburg, Ohio” to David Lynch in “Blue Velvet”--that has sought to expose the Rockwellian image as a fraud, as a mask hiding America’s disfigured face.

This epidemic of lurid tales is in that same tradition of things not being what they seem. Amy Fisher seemed like a typical suburban teen. Jose Menendez seemed like a typical rich businessman. As the “media adviser” of Lorena Bobbitt, the woman who sliced off her husband’s penis, said, Bobbitt’s is a story that should make Americans ashamed that “reality falls so far short of her ideal.”

But whatever these individual narratives convey--and they are all variations on a theme--together they congeal into a cosmology that supersedes our desire for absolution, our hunger for punishment and our need for honesty. In the ‘50s, when perversion was largely restricted to fiction, aberrant behavior could shock because most of us had certain expectations of deportment, especially middle-class deportment. The rich could be sybaritic, the poor barbaric, but not us.

As the decades of assassination, war, sexual revolution and aesthetic liberation have eaten away at those expectations, they have also eaten away at the shock. Writer Dominick Dunne, covering the Menendez trial, wrote, apropos of Los Angeles, “Out here, nothing shocks. Everything is accepted.” He needn’t have restricted his comment to Los Angeles. We all have become so inured that it takes ever more to elicit a shudder or a thrill. It takes a Menendez trial.

But those old conventions were not simply a function of morality. They incorporated an idea of how the world operated. Perversion hadn’t been democratized because the center still held. There was a sense that life was still under our control, even if a handful of our fellow citizens were out of control

It was only when that conviction began to change that the new narratives of mayhem were loosed. Together, these narratives constantly convey--and reinforce--how little sense of order, purpose or control many Americans now feel. They convey chaos and moral anomie, so that, in exploiting the narratives, the sensationalist press is appealing not only to our voyeurism but to our conception of the world. Menendez, Fisher, Bobbitt are the metaphors for that conception.

A world gone mad. A world beyond shock. A world swirling in a moral void. These are hardly terms of comfort--and yet there is something reassuring about our brave new world of tabloid excess. It suits us. It fits us as snugly as Ozzie and Harriet fit the ‘50s.

If Ozzie and Harriet could go to bed feeling all was right with the world, we can go to bed knowing all is wrong. There is nothing we cannot imagine, no narrative frontier that won’t ultimately be crossed. Unshockable, we wait for the next saga, reducing it to entertainment because that is all there is.