Editor's note: The day Mickey Rooney held his anti-"crush video" conference, telephones started ringing in every room of A.S. Hamrah's apartment. This, our readers knew, was one of those moments: the glossy porn magazine which is Western civilization had arrived with its plain wrapper torn, and some terrible truth was peeking out. But what, exactly, was that truth? Clearly, Hamrah's exegetical brinksmanship—as displayed in his reviews of the Melrose Place novelizations (issue #11/12) and Ray Manzarek's autobiography (issue #15)—was needed in this matter. He accepted the challenge, and in September 1999 he wrote the following essay; it's never been published before. Why not? Because instead of giving it to Hermenaut, he sold it to a Web site devoted to "thoughtful hedonism." After sitting on, even crushing, "A Better Mousetrap" for almost six months, the editors of that site decided Hamrah's take on the subject was either too thoughtful, or not hedonistic enough, and killed it. Hamrah was upset, but it made us happy, because now we get to publish it. Here it is!

A Better Mousetrap

A. S. Hamrah

What was deservedly an obscure fetish—the desire to see small, defenseless animals crushed under women's heels—is underground no more. Whether it will remain long in the collective consciousness is another question, but ever since 79 year-old actor and animal-activist Mickey Rooney appeared at a press conference in southern California late this August to denounce it, the "crush video" has been in the news. Punch line or urban legend in the making, convenient example of all that is depraved in humanity or brand-new scare tactic to illustrate what happens to actresses who don't make it in L.A. (That was you in those red stiletto heels! I recognized the sunflower tattoo on your ankle! You're not my daughter anymore!), videos that feature the fetish so lame psychology doesn't even have a term for it (murocalcareia, anyone?—from the Latin for mouse and stomp?) have now even played before Congress. Rep. Elton Gallegly (R.—Calif.) has worked himself into a legislative lather on behalf of that part of his constituency who are crush video's victims—mice, frogs, and crickets—vowing to make illegal something that is already illegal: the torture and killing of animals not done by huge corporations in the name of science.

In the rush to get more News of the Weird-style filler into family newspapers, everybody forgot to ask one question about crush videos: why? Why are some people (men, presumably) turned on by watching what one paper described without comment as "scantily clad women crushing animals beneath their feet"? It's as if this didn't even need to be explained, so obvious is it to a populace ready to believe that if Man can imagine it and it has even the most tenuous connection with sex, someone will get off on it, someone else will do it in front of a video camera, and still someone else will not only run that video camera but remove the tape, check it for flaws, generate titles, and put it up for sale on the Internet. It's now the natural order of things that it should be that way. Only the animal cruelty angle made it newsworthy.

Trying to explain the extremely limited appeal of the genre, crush video detractors (would anyone admit to being anything else?) have shrugged their shoulders and vaguely alluded to such close-at-hand concepts as "dominance and control." Whether Rep. Gallegly is right that crush videos are Lesson One in the set of instructional tapes for sex killers, it's hard to imagine—in these days of videos like the Faces of Death series and cineplex fodder like 8MM—a substitute for snuff films more low-grade. Sure, they reek of desperation, but their primary characteristic is how utterly pathetic they are, how irremediably moronic. Therein, perhaps, lies their appeal. That and the fact that at least something is really getting killed, even if it's only a bug.

Leaving aside what must be the main audience for any fetish video—people who claim not to be perverts themselves but want to keep up with the latest in pervert aesthetics (Shouldn't there be a name for that perversion, too? Somehow "slumming" doesn't cut it anymore.)—who, exactly, is aroused by crush tapes? Surely they have a core audience, but if you collared the thousand people worldwide one crush video director claims for his fan-base and grilled them Kinsey-style, what data would emerge? Unpleasant anecdotes relating the first time the fetishist was moved to you-know-what by watching a little animal get crushed; the sudden, messy incident that empowered a particular woman after the crush-response kicked in—what would these things show? What kind of childhood makes one person feel remorse when he hits an animal with his car and another make a fist, pump his elbow downward, and shout Yes!?

Cruelty to animals has become increasingly taboo in our society, but it's still only semi-taboo; it's only in certain situations that cruelty to animals is criminal. Today, however, violating even a semi-taboo can yield a micro-phenomenon. Since killing animals is a profession for some people (such as exterminators) and since we've all set the trap with cheese one time or another ourselves, it's hard to see crush videos as a substitute for the mythological snuff film, a genre that supposedly violates the biggest moving-picture taboo of all: the real-time depiction of actual homicide.

Instead, crush videos are a child's version of snuff films, but made by adults. They are less than snuff films because animals are being killed and not people, but they're more than snuff films because they actually exist. They're not as bad as snuff films; still, they're worse. They exploit the same primal fears, but in a way that is more contemptible because of how puny it is. It's a 6 year-old pulling the wings off a fly made into bottom-of-the-barrel pornography for grown-ups. Central to the nihilistic mythology of the snuff film is the idea that life is sacred and that by taking it you are indeed being very, very evil; crush videos are about how insignificant life is. The stupid-cool outlaw glamour of porn producers (think Burt Reynolds in Boogie Nights) is trashed by crush videos. Far from being the worst people alive, refugees from a John Waters movie, the people who make crush videos can only be mundane. Their silliness mitigates their vileness. Women in high heels crushing mice? It's idiotic. Mechanical porn-sex has more drama. This is porn for babies.

In fact, the scale of adulthood may be the implicit subject of crush videos. Their nearest mainstream corollary isn't play-acted violent sex but something like Starship Troopers, where über-babe Denise Richards (huge eyes and large breasts on a stick that ends in big boots) pointlessly, repetitively, and endlessly pulverizes giant bugs. That film, however, had things in it either unnecessary (narrative elements) or antithetical (the bugs were fake) to crush videos, and it had the girl-to-bug size ratio backwards. Over the years, movies have given us enormous insects, monstrous amphibians, and immense rodents. They've indulged our fantasies of becoming giants and our fears of being shrunk down to doll-size. These giantess-doll fetishes can be traced back to one man, director Bert I. Gordon, who in the 1950s provided moviegoers with fare like The Amazing Colossal Man and Attack of the Puppet People. So identified is he with the genre that the fetish should properly be called Gordonism.

In Gordon's ugly-ish films and the countless imitations they've spawned, we've been treated to giant critters killing normal-sized humans; normal-sized critters killing shrunken humans; and normal-sized critters banding together to kill normal-sized humans. Crush videos represent the next phase: normal-sized humans killing normal-sized critters. It's the revenge of the small on the smaller. Traditionally, pornography has been grandiose and featured largeness as somebody's idea of perfection. Crush videos reverse that. Crush is porn for losers, depictions that literalize low self-esteem. Crush videos are quite literally for the downtrodden. Petty cruelty and grossness are their thematic concerns.

Which brings us back to Mickey Rooney, the shriveled, diminutive star of The Private Lives of Adam and Eve and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini. The sight of him standing before a huge frame-blowup of a heel crushing a mouse begs an obvious question: if you were as close to a mouse in the class Mammalia as Rooney is, wouldn't you be nervous, too? This is after all the guy for whom Walt Disney supposedly named his signature rodent. Today they're making videos of mice being crushed to sexually gratify perverts; tomorrow, who knows?—maybe it'll be tiny senior citizens getting the stiletto treatment. There's no measuring people's disregard for lives not their own, and a cricket—another once-Disneyfied crush-vid fave—may be pretty low on the snuff-film scale, but it's still on the scale. You don't have to be a Republican congressman to guess where animal-torture pornography could lead. As the anti-crush brigade is very quick to point out, some of our more noteworthy serial killers started out on animals, working their way up to humans only after they'd built-up their confidence with the furry crowd.

But with whom do crush video enthusiasts identify, the crusher or the crushed? On the one hand, adherents of the genre must want to put themselves in a childhood position where Mommy's big heel looms as a threat, but the ultimate thrill must come from the crunch of the shoe on its victim. Do they overidentify with the small and hate them for it? Is it about a self-perceived low-ness, a feeling of being already crushed that's relieved only by the violent elimination of the life force? Is it a punishment for the very condition of existence, which, perceived as inherently weak, must be thoroughly trampled, only to be preserved on tape as reminder of it's pusillanimity? The mere condition of life is made into a problem in crush videos. Through them an amorphous identification with everything in the frame indicates an inability to separate the role of crusher from crushed while still remaining totally separate and alienated from both. It's about the savage desire to make that complete separation coupled with a complete inability to achieve it. It's empathy for small, defenseless creatures turned inside-out—destruction of the weak as the only recourse for those too cowardly to destroy themselves.

At another level, crush videos present a second type of revenge fantasy: the revenge of the uncute on the cute. If mice, frogs, and crickets can be Disneyfied as emblems of childhood, their destruction can be explained as a rejection of that childhood and a movement, however perverted, toward adulthood. As childhood in our society is increasingly sexualized and adulthood desexualized, the ability to invoke the reality principle gets pushed further into the margins. Crush videos represent that: a longing for adulthood from the vantage point of inescapable childhood. Whap! It's over. Crushing little animals for real is about as anti-childhood as you can get, yet you wouldn't exactly describe it as mature. Portrayals of adulthood have become so infantile in our culture and the values of childhood are carried so far into an adulthood where they don't belong that this revenge from early adolescence—pitched at exactly the level of someone going through that ugly transitional stage out of kiddie cuteness—would make sense, if it weren't adults doing it. The fact that a 35 year-old woman in southern California faces up to nine years in jail for appearing in the crusher role in one of the videos is far more disturbing than finding out it was all a stunt perpetrated by bored teenagers that somehow trickled up to Congress.

Crush videos signal that it's time to acknowledge something that no one wants to acknowledge anymore: there's something inescapably perverted about adulthood simply because people have sex in adulthood and not in childhood, and adulthood should be resexualized and not made into the unsexy chore Republican congressmen wish it to be. The difference between childhood and adulthood that our culture seems to have forgotten is not that adults have mundane responsibilities that children don't have, it's that adults have sex. This is why children are spooked when they find out their parents are trying to crush each other, and it's this fear that crush videos play out over and over again by bringing it home in the most blunt and disgusting way. The hypersexuality of our culture is phony; it's something that mostly happens between alien-looking adolescent dolls. The truth is in the abject, and what could be more abject than crush videos? Expect more such abjection to fling the truth in our faces like monkeys in a zoo cage as long as we live in a culture where teenagers are strip-mined for their sexuality by adults dressed in track suits that make them look like babies.

Every aesthetic form has its nadir. In literature, it's novelizations of TV shows or the verse found in greeting cards. In sculpture, it's Precious Moments figurines. In movies, Forrest Gump. Crush videos are the low point of pornography. They are depravity made pathetic, insignificance as shock effect. They're so abject that they confound analysis. They're the degraded form of a genre—videotape pornography—that is popularly assumed to be about degradation itself. This outer reach of pornography, disturbing in its petty sickness and banality, is so far below the level of anything that could be considered culture that it can barely be made to mean; it can only stand there as a reproach to whatever ideas we have about humanity.

What form of cultural production is below crush videos? This is where the form implodes and sucks itself into negativity and collapses. This is where people stop being interested in pornography because it's not doing what it's supposed to do anymore. For a while now cultural investigators have looked to pornography for the political and psychological truth about our society. Will anyone ever study crush videos? It's hard to imagine even the most dedicated Foucauldian popping one into the VCR.

Most people have experienced the pleasurable sensation of having another person's full weight on top of them. The lead x-ray vest at the dentist's office creates a similar feeling. It's nice for a little while, but make everyone wear those lead vests all day long and see what happens. That's how our culture works: everything is a potential fetish waiting to be exploited and then pressed down on us. Expect videos of nude girls being fitted for lead dental vests to be banned in your state soon. Crush videos are what happen when that sensation gets all confused; when it gets pushed to the wall in a climate where if someone thought he could sell the videos, he'd put up a Web site called Xtreme Oatmeal Sexxx and then wait for all the free publicity from the sober defenders of the warm breakfast to start the credit card numbers rolling in.

In this spirit of commodification I present what I call crushies—"safe," or "dry," crush videos—inspired partly by a Web site I saw while conducting research for this article. It featured a woman squashing a banana on a glass table with her butt, and there was another one where they had a girl running over a teddy bear in a car. No animals hurt here, only sensibilities. Those are examples of early-stage crush video commodification, and they were even more pointless than the real thing. Mine reflect the élan vital of our times, where people want degradation, yes, but they want it to be meaningful in way that academics can write about without embarrassment—and let's not forget somebody has to make a buck on it, too. There's gold in safe crush videos, and if these offerings don't extract it nothing will. All are guaranteed both ASPCA- and HBO-friendly.

The most obvious next step for the crush video would be expansion into feature-length and the addition of a story. An actress who kind of looks like a legitimate star and a double entendre title would be where most people would go with this, say a variation on Groundhog Day (get it?) featuring an Andie MacDowell look-alike. That's not where the form is headed, in my opinion. Think music video. This is short-form all the way. The crushie can't support the three-act structure.

We've established that part of being an adult is being a pervert and that crush videos are the fetishized destruction of childhood by adult drives. The crushie acknowledges these facts with a more direct attack on the emblems of contemporary childhood. Instead of live animals, in crushies the must-have plush-toys of the Christmas rush will be smashed underfoot. Furthermore, the women in crushies won't be ex-hookers in $12 red stilettos from Payless. They'll be the well-shod fetish girls of corporate capitalism. They don't even have to be "scantily clad." Their clothes can just be tight.

Set against stylized backgrounds depicting the environments in which these fantasy women spend their days, crushies will present short and to-the-point scenarios of low-angle action: the Vice-President of Development grinding the heel of her Blahnik into a Beanie Baby; the Starbucks barista smashing Arthur beneath her John Fluevog angel sole on a perforated rubber floor mat; the therapist in flannel clogs who puts down her pad, takes off her glasses, and comes down hard on Winnie the Pooh; the airline ticket-counter girl in blue Bandolino pumps mangling Pikachu on a suitcase treadmill; the soccer mom stepping out of an SUV and "accidentally" landing on a Cabbage Patch Kid with the nubbies of her suede driving loafer; the chain-restaurant bar manageress in Candies silencing Furby's prerecorded protests once and for all; the copy editrix crushing Curious George underneath Kenneth Cole as she determinedly inserts a third comma; the J. Crew model decimating a Teletubby with her Urban Mary Jane as she waves around a canoe paddle and laughs; the echo of the crack as a real estate agent in Prada nails Tickle Me Elmo on an empty apartment's hardwood floor.

Unlike crush videos, not only are crushies hot, they also demonstrate that commodity fetishism and fetishism aren't two different things. Eventually, every fetish will be commodified and every commodity will be fetishized. It may be unlikely that mainstream culture will ever co-opt crush, but the crush Weltschmerz is already with us. Either that or it's just a new form of shoe advertising. You didn't think those things walked out of the store on their own, did you?