Biff, Bam, Bang, Bang!

I remember so vividly the moment in The Long Goodbye when someone rakes Elliott Gould’s cheek with the jagged end of a Coca-Cola bottle.  It was shocking, and what struck me at the time, was that the gesture was gratuitous; it did not explain the action or advance the plot, it was only there to churn the spectator’s stomach. Gratuitous violence seemed to me thereafter to be more and more a fundamental of Hollywood studio films, culminating in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction which I despised for what everyone else loved about it, the stylized violence delivered as some kind of witty ballet.  So much filmed violence truly upsets me whereas I am supposed to see it as brilliant parody, or allusive, oh, there are numbers of critical words to describe these films.  All I see is “violent.”  My son begged me to see The Sopranos and it wasn’t until I was convalescing from surgery in its second year that I asked my husband to go to the video shop and bring home some it.  We were instantly hooked--the acting was so brilliant--, and watched it year after year until that baffling ending, although I have to say that somewhere along the line, I felt as Odysseus who can say in the Iliad sometimes warriors get their fill of killing and have to take a break. After that I could never look at anyone killing another person again, nor punching them  out, not look at cruel, ugly behavior.  Everyone I know loved The Wire, but I could only  take a few episodes.  I have become such a nervous weakling that I cannot even revisit films I once loved, Klute, for instance, I get too frightened just thinking about the menace in that film.  And so it goes.  I could name a dozen others. I do not want to be complicit in the sadism, the violence, the sexual relish of killing. My husband sits in another room with his own television watching Dexter.  I don’t even want to watch Homeland.  I don’t care about somebody who is bi-polar. Twenty years ago it must be by now I did sit through in horror and terror watching that horrendous rape scene in Boys Don’t Cry, but I did that as an act of bearing witness for the historical figure Brandon Teena who chose to be a man and was punished for it by the males in her life when they discovered she was a woman.  A terrifying film, but so important, like the nightmare films of the Holocaust. But I know that I have cracked somehow.  The other day we were at the cineplex, we sat through an endless series of advertisements for some upcoming television shows, plus a vast number of previews of coming films.  I was struck dumb by the fact that what passed before our eyes was one after another stabbing, shooting, slugging, women knocked to the ground, cars driven into the ditch and catching on fire, men keeling over in some kind of pain or another.  Let me out of here I kept thinking.  Then to wait for the commuter train in Boston’s South Station where giant television screens rehearse the dangers in every moment from the neglected bag, the suspicious person, the negligent cop, and on and on.  They should be handing out Valium is all I can say.