Your choice: sex or violence?

And someone says, both.

But seriously, folks. MLight had an idea to post about why ordinary Americans might be less offended by violence in movies, or by sex, and I'm pouncing on that one.

First, for me. I am somewhat embarrassed by sex in movies, but I'm much more okay with it than I am with graphic violence. For my take on that, see my post on the movie 300.

I would also much rather my kids see movies that err on the sexy side rather than on the graphically violent, even where the violence is appropriate, such as in Pan's Labyrinth.

My conviction comes from personal queasiness,  but also from a conviction that all violence, whether simulated or real, dehumanizes and objectifies, unless one is participating in simulated violence, such as in a game of war in a vacant lot, and you are dying as often as you are killing.

Now sex can be violent and dehumanizing as well, which is why in Greek Mythology the goddess Aphrodite (of sex) and the god Ares (of war) hook up in an adulterous affair. The Greeks knew that sex and violence can be two sides of the same coin. They are, so to speak, coupled, intimately related.

Sex can also be a sacrament, however: that is, a visible sign of God's invisible grace. The natural sacrament of marriage is sex, for example. (In the Christian universe there is no such thing as premarital sex, because as soon as you have sex, you are married, in a natural sacramental way, if not officially.) So in my world, sex can be good in a way that violence cannot be.

But enough about me.

For most people, a good story has a subtle and appropriate mixture of elements with which the audience can identify and, equally, for which the audience can say, "That's not me."

Seeing events and characters like oneself and one's life creates closeness and a fear for oneself, which is kind of fun.

Seeing events and characters unlike oneself creates a distance, and a sense of comfort.

So good stories create risk and let adrenaline flow, while reassuring an audience that they are ultimately safe, and that suffering is happening to someone else.

In mythology class, I often call this The Rush Without The Risk.

Under this model, more people would be okay with violence in a story, because it is not part of their everyday lives. Even when it is graphic, it doesn't seem real, because there is no possibility of the violence happening to the audience.

Sex, on the other hand, is an everyday presence in most people's lives-- if not the reality of it, then the yearning for it. Sex is more viscerally a part of everyone's psyche than is violence, at least in, say, a suburban setting, and is more stirring of what we might term disturbing feelings.

So sex in a movie might violate this idea of Rush Without Risk. You turn to your neighbor and must deal with the question, do I desire him or her? It is an uncomfortable situation. Most people deflect and deny, making the movie sex even more embarrassing.

But with violence-- with guns, with swords, with bombs, whatever-- you turn to your neighbor and you shrug your shoulders. I'm going to blow you away with a machine gun? I don't think so. Murderous rage is not nearly as much in the front of our psyche as is lust.

Which means, possibly, that those of us who don't like violence in movies may be of this opinion because we see a dark side in ourselves that is capable of killing, whereas perhaps we have made something of a peace with our sexual sides.

Dangerous to even speculate.

This is an enormous topic, and so I leave it to commenters to bring up that to which I have been blind. But if you find yourself especially repulsed by either sex or violence in movies,  you might want to ask yourself what is going on in your own psyche.

The ancient Athenians delved deep into both sides in stories, using tragedy for violence and comedy for sex, but they reserved the strongest visual and poetic iterations of these elements for festivals. Not always would you tax your psyche with an Ajax, for example, where the hero commits suicide, or Lysistrata, whose sex talk puts movies like 40 Year Old Virgin to shame.

Today, we can be exposed to graphic violence and sex 24/7/365 through TV, movies, and the Internet. Regardless of what we are repulsed by, there is something completely out of whack with that kind of system.

Comments

[loafingcactus]

Hmmmm.

The vicarious nature of on-screen sexuality seems clear to me: it is very easy for it to stimulate a sexual experience in oneself.

Violence is much more complicated. For me, violence is an expression of rage (I'm not called upon ever to express violence in a rational way, such as a police officer or a soldier might be.). Very rarely does a movie adequately illustrate rage, and when it does it has to be a rage that I could connect with. The example that comes to mind is the movie Domino, where a very self-contained and sexy woman eventually -in only a moment- expresses rage in response to her self being put secondary to a cheap psychobabble about her femaleness.

More generally, I connect to violence in movies as a rational expression of power, such as Die Hard, and I'm a great fan of shoot-em-ups. But the point of shoot-em-ups is to contain the experience of violence, the blood-n-guts side. Because what makes me most uncomfortable about violence in movies is the reminder that I can be physically damaged. I could be in a car accident tomorrow, be in great pain, have a long recovery. The thought of something like that happening makes me sick.

So, there we are: my personality laid bare? Hmmmmm, again.

[M Light]

Interesting. I agree with violence being dehumanizing and with your final paragraph. I also have less trouble with sex than violence in movies, but for very different reasons. I wrote a post about that, but it turned out to be very personal so I'm going to think about it more before deciding whether or not to post it.

I find the ideas about story and identification also very interesting, even though I don't find them true for me

[M Light]

I did end up posting my thoughts.