Knifing Someone Somehow Doesn't Work When I Am Eating My Popcorn In A Darkened Theater

Recently we have been watching "The Honorable Woman," an English miniseries made for television which features relentless murder and other forms of savage maltreatment by Israelis, Arabs, and anyone else who seems fated to enter the plot.  My husband is enchanted, but then he loved "Dexter," and a host of other made for TV dramas that feature the lavish shedding of blood.  In the absence of our customary diet of Netflix fllms of my choice--high minded, sometimes stupefyingly boring films of major critical importance, where more often than not you have to read the subtitles to get the dialogue--he has filled the gap with some of his recent purchases.  He promised to start us on "West Wing" tonight but confessed to immense fatigue and so went off to bed early.  I liked "West Wing" a lot when we first watched it, at least until that preposterous plot turn involving the kidnapping of the president's daughter as I remember it, at which point I stopped.  I sort of don't mind looking at the early episodes again, it's just that I yearn for the aesthetics of a ninety minute narrative.  I can't seem to get that message through to him; we are looking for different things in our evening's entertainment, he and I, that's clear enough.  He loves episodes of series, I am dissecting the narrative arc.  I don't understand why he loves blood and guts so much, or people in space ships, or action based on situations entirely fantastical.  I know that I derive from nineteenth century psychological/sociological novels, that I want to witness family relations, class relations, sexual relations set into towns, estates, or on steamships, or colonial East Asian rubber plantations.  I want history, geography, and society that I know parsed for me in a new way toward a new understanding or substantiation of what I had already believed.  Watching persons strangled, shot messily, mangled corpses dumped, all the  paraphernalia of the crime films requires me to participate in, assent to that behavior as an acceptable mode of action.  My husband heartily disagrees; it's entertainment.  I well remember the hideous, brutal rape scene toward the end of "Boys Don't Cry" when the true sex of the girl, Tina Brandon, disguised as a male teenager, calling himself Brandon Teena, was discovered  by some would be male friends who in their betrayal took it upon themselves to strip her and rape her savagely.  I was sick, but stayed in my seat as others left the theater, because I felt I had to bear witness to the historical truth of the agony--I think of it almost as the word associated with saints--of this tragic teenaged person.