The trashy UPN show Maximum Exposure delights in airing shocking 'home video': the following clip could well be a 'home video' from the most dysfunctional family in Greek myth, the house of Atreus. Compare the rampaging housewife in the clip below to Clytemnestra's shriek of fury after she has stabbed her husband Agamemnon to death:
Twice I struck him, and with two groans 1385 his limbs relaxed. Once he had fallen, I dealt him yet a third stroke as a prayer of gratitude [kharis] to the infernal Zeus, the savior [sôtêr] of the dead. Fallen thus, he gasped away his thûmos, and as he breathed forth quick spurts of blood, 1390 he struck me with dark drops of gory dew....
What's effective about the video--besides its creepy overdubbed horror film soundtrack--is the martial fury of the injured housewife: this is a horrifying scene, and certainly enough to rouse Aristotelian fear and pity. Intriguingly, this particular vignette ends not in tragedy, but quasi comedy. After the husband displays his domestic battle scars, we learn that he declines to press charges even when he had recourse to external dikê: there is an arrest, but no trial. Compare this to the end of the Oresteia, in which murder follows upon murder until only a jury can stop the cycle.
Lastly, notice the hideous metaphor employed by the Max Ex narrator: that the husband remains 'the most whipped man in the America' (the implication is that though the physical knifing has stopped, the wife continues her gender-based psychological whipping).
