Power And Violence

My husband wants us to watch "The Godfather " Part Two this evening and I am resisting.  A few days ago I brought out a rather weak Ivory-Merchant film of a Jean Rhys novel called "Quartette" about a sadistic rapist (only in the twenties they called it a rich man having his way with one of his young friends), his constantly tortured compliant wife, and the young girl who at least as the film depicts her is both repelled and fascinated by what they used to call the cad until she finally kills herself as did his previous victim.  The film is static, I agree with its critics, but of course beautifully made and beautifully acted.  But we were both bored by it, and I was intimidated by hubby's disdain and we turned the monitor off.  Next night he got me to watch the first part of the Godfather trilogy.  I really did not want to.  I am tired of brutality, don't want to watch "The Sopranos" ever again, I think.  I cannot get out of my mind, Tony strangling the informer when he and Meadow are visiting a college in Maine, will never forget Drea being dragged across the ground to her death, the strangling of Christopher, and these images are there along with a lot I have manufactured from reading The Kindly Ones, naked Jewish women being forced to run as the SS soldiers shot at them, or maybe I have seen that in a movie--naked women running uphill in a cattle run. Of course, I saw all those black and white news reels when the camps were first liberated.  I  know I saw the video clip of the American Army helicopter with the boys shooting down at a family in Iraq out on the street, killing the kids among others, on the very vague suspicion that they were all harboring weapons, and saying when told that they had just blasted a couple of kids along with the adults "Well, hell, they shouldn't a brought their kids along."  I have that in my head.  Now my husband wants me to see the film "Sniper" but I saw the clip in Coming Attractions yesterday, blowing away the Muslim woman and her child .  I've read descriptions of torture at Guantanamo and I've heard Cheney say he'd do it all over again, watched the bombs falling on the people in the Gaza strip, and I'm one of those people it doesn't go out of my head.  I think of a student who'd been in some invasion we had in the Dominican Republic a long time ago and when I oh, so stupidly asked if he had ever killed anyone described picking guys off a distant ridge running along in silhouette and say it was like a shooting gallery, in his memory forever.  And I can never forget the women who have described to me being gang raped, friends, brave ladies, nor the student prisoner I had when I volunteered in teaching in prison who quietly told me quite unbidden in detail how he had surprised a woman at a bus stop dragged her somewhere nearby and raped her.  I was classified 4F so I have never served in the army, led a very cushy life, protected in every way, really.  My husband can't get enough of violence and brutality on the silver screen, well, he's at one with everyone else in America.  Maybe if I just drank more when those films come on.  Last night I stared in disbelief at Diane Keaton playing Michael Corleone's wife; she was in "Annie Hall" and is still here such a strong, well-mannered principled WASP lady; never would she have married him, certainly never would she have submitted to the demands of his world, never would she have sat around with his vulgar relatives, never would her parents or her brother allow such an environment for her or her issue.  Puzo, Coppola, clearly have never emerged from their own ghetto long enough to see how the other half lives.