372
JOHN FRASER
the truth, it must be admitted, is that there are very few violent en–
tertainments (to borrow Graham Greene's term) that are violent
in
truly
shocking ways - shocking,
I
mean, in the sort of way that
Peter Watkins'
Culloden
or Franju's
Le Sang des Betes
or the suicide
near the end of Caine's
Mort
a
Credit
or the blinding of Glouces–
ter in
Lear
are shocking. One almost never has to avert one's
eyes from the screen or struggle not to lay the book down; rather,
one waits with fascination for what is coming next, and one
is
entertained. The whole genre is one in which there is a particularly
strong pull away from the physical in some respects and a blanking
out of the really unpleasant; and for all the violences, it tends to
promote a sense of security and invulnerability in the reader. And
this
is so whether the hero
is
Spillane's Mike Hammer or Mac–
Donald's Travis McGee.
I
wish to suggest that a very important
way in which certain violences
do
shock, and a very important reason
why they .are salutary, is that they work to undermine precisely that
yearning for invulnerability that violent "entertainments" cater to.
At its crudest, of course, such a yearning is gratified by simply
refraining from looking at certain possibilities. The moviegoer or TV
watcher can give himself up to dreams of violent glory in a way
that eminently invites the tart comment in one of MacDonald's
books that "the
gutsy
dramas of the mass media tend to make us
forget that the average male is so unaccustomed to sudden pain that
if you mash his nose flat he'll be nause.ated for hours, spend two
days
in
bed, and be shaky for the rest of the week." The author of
Histoire d'O
can genteelly ignore the question of what it would
be
like being ravished while one had a bad headache or a cold or cys–
titis. A French admirer of Sade can announce blandly that "il
est
indispensible d'ajouter que Ie vrai sadique considere Ie constrainte,
non comme un instrument d'injustice au d'oppression, mais comrne
un epreuve de caracteres. . . . II lui est impossible, par example,
sauf par une erreur fatale, de soumettre des esprits libres comme Ie
sien; il en deviendrait
a
son tour la victime." And one could go on
multiplying examples indicative of a craving for changes
in
the rules
of violence that would help to make engaging in violences oneself, at
least in imagination, a pleasurable matter (Sade himself, of course,
being the supreme exemplar of such a craving). However, it
is
a
rather more complex kind of protection from consequences that I
have in mind, especially where movies are concerned.
