The remains of the Paseo dinner crowd who came to my house for the movie were treated to a few minutes of a Spanish language film, “Love’s a bitch”, but we couldn’t watch it because it started out with Mexico City dogfights to the death and we collectively couldn’t handle the animal cruelty it portrayed.  We stopped the movie and switched to a 1960s black and white film, “Darling”, starring Julie Christie.

That’s kind of odd, isn’t it?

I mean, it’s commonplace for us to watch movies in which people are injured and killed, but we couldn’t handle the cruelty to these dogs.

In “Darling”, Julie Christie’s character tortures and kills a couple of goldfish.  That seemed OK and no one objected.

I wouldn’t even go see Mel Gibson’s “Passion” because I didn’t want the images of torture that were portrayed as part of Christ’s final hours in my mind.  I also will never again watch Gibson’s “Braveheart” because of the final moments of that film, depicting a torture and castration of the Gibson character.

Sex?  That’s different.  Bring on the nudity and full bore porn.

Violence?  Turns my belly.

Except not always.

“Kill Bill”, either the first or the second, is full of lots of gore and dismemberment and it didn’t bother me in the least.  Cartoonish in many ways.  Same for, say, Antonio Bandaras in “El Mariachi”.  Blow away a couple dozen bad guys?  Not a problem.

I also won’t go see the Freddy/Jason/whatever “slasher” movies, no matter how cartoonish, and don’t even ask about films like “Saw” and “Hostel”.  No way.

Could I get my fill of sex in movies?  Hmmm.  Don’t know.  Porn itself doesn’t bother me, but the porn industry is boring.  The utter lack of plot and character and dialogue leave me cold and enough raw sex on screen actually lowers my libido rather than raise it.

When I go past film to other genres or media, it seems the same.  I’ve seen some very erotic photographs, but a glossy “cum shot” pic just seems silly, boring and stupid and not sexy at all.  How do we compare the sex in, say, D.H. Lawrence or Henry Miller, to the sex in those Grove and Evergreen Press lurid whackoff books?

Whether sex or violence, doesn’t less seem more?  Can’t you recall films where a simple slap in the face seemed shockingly violent within the context of the movie?  I can — Roy Schneider’s character getting slapped by the distraught mother in “Jaws”, for example.  I know that the moment in “The Girl with the Pearl Earring” when the main characters’ fingers touch seems deliciously sexy, but there’s nothing like nudity no matter how much I may long to see Ms. Johanssen’s bare body.

Of course, a lot of what this is all about is a matter of taste and sensibilities, not to mention context. 

Art and life imitate each other as well.  There have certainly been those kisses in my life that were better than some of the actual sex I’ve had when the kiss was stolen and the sex was routine and “medicinal”.

As a young reporter, there were moments that stand out vividly of car wrecks and murder scenes, but they seem less relevant, somehow, than the time I walked out of a courtroom with a client who turned to her estranged husband’s new girlfriend and wordlessly slapped the shit out of her and calmly walked away.   

I think it may also be like millions, billions and trillions.  I can understand $10.  That’s real to me.  $1 Trillion in federal deficit spending?  I have no concept.  I can understand a slap in the face or a punch in the stomach.  The genocide of millions by Pol Pot or Hitler is just out of my ken.

This is not a brief to ban either porn or violence from art.  I think the fact that we have such rules makes breaking the rules seem like fun.  In fact, I would have NO rules whatsoever about sex or violence.

On the other hand, I’d say if you don’t like bad porn and/or excessive violence, let your money do your talking.  Don’t go to those movies and spend your money on movies that don’t make you queasy.

However, my queasiness with allowing children to see Gibson’s “Passion” sure makes me want to be the guy who can draw the lines and set the rules.  The parents who let that movie put those images in their children’s heads committed child abuse, in my view, and the notion that it’s religious and that makes it all right is sheer poppycock as far as I’m concerned. 

We now return you to your regular programming.