Let’s settle once and for all the two biggest questions that the media have been obsessed with this year and practically every year before:
1. Is there too much violence in the movies?
2. Is there too much sex in the movies?
It surprises me that people don’t know the answers by now.
The moment that a movie such as “Reservoir Dogs” comes out, critics start screaming, “It has too much violence in it! It doesn’t reflect reality!” Then along comes a movie such as “Poison Ivy” and the critics yelp “It has too much sex in it! It doesn’t reflect reality!”
You can guess what they said about “Basic Instinct” — “It has too much sex, violence and killer lesbians! It doesn’t reflect reality!”
Let’s get real here.
According to a recent report by the World Health Organization, an estimated 100 million sex acts are performed around the globe daily, resulting in an estimated 910,000 pregnancies. I’m not sure how the World Health Organization researched this figure. I’m not sure I wanna know, either.
But if the organization’s numbers are remotely close to correct, that means that during any given hour around the clock, there are about 4,166,666 cases of hanky panky going on. That’s more than four million dances of the wild bunny being performed per 60-minute interval. Or to put it another way, 69,444 getting-to-know-you-intimately sessions per minute.
Do we really want Hollywood movies to reflect this kind of reality? In the words of Macaulay Culkin, I don’t think so.
Let’s look at the issue of violence.
Back in 1981 America, a murder was committed every 24 minutes. A house was burgled every 10 seconds. A woman was raped every seven minutes. Things haven’t gotten any better. FBI stats from 1991 say that a murder is committed every 21 minutes, a house gets burgled every 10 seconds and a woman gets raped every five minutes.
Not even a cop series on the Fox network packs this much action.
In fact, if you keep up with current events, you know about the heinous things done to people in Somalia and in Sarajevo. If you watch a lot of movies, you already know how inadequate they are when it comes to dramatizing the true horror of an organized genocidal program such as the Holocaust in Nazi Germany or the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror in Southeast Asia.
No matter how good a movie is — the excellent “The Killing Fields” comes to mind — it can only suggest the scope of the carnage and dehumanization that actually occurs.
Hollywood learned a long time ago that audiences don’t mind watching millions of people being killed before their very eyes, as long as they don’t have to watch body parts being detached or witness any suffering by the detachees.
Remember “Star Wars” with its blaster gunfights and light-saber battles? Is that science-fantasy action classic, Darth Vader employs the Death Star to blow up Princess Leia’s home planet, thereby slaughtering untold numbers of innocent citizens in an entertaining shower of fire and light. It’s PG-rated entertainment.
But show a movie such as Martin Scorsese’s “Cape Fear” in which the rape and disfigurement of a young woman is unflinchingly depicted as an ugly and revolting act, it becomes bothersome to some viewers and critics, as it should. The violence has become too real. But this instance of violence happened only once during an entire movie, not every five minutes.
So when I hear critics belly-aching about too much sex and violence in the media and how the movies don’t reflect reality, I usually just shrug my shoulders and say one word.
“Good.”
–Originally published Dec. 8, 1992