Like porno, violence in the movies makes men feel good, and like porno, men feeling good is something that society cannot currently abide. V G. Legman, dirty limerick collector and analyzer of blue humor, theorized that Americans prefer violence over love and sex both in their art and in their lives. Thus it is interesting to observe the audience of a violent movie when the love scene materializes. In Desperado , Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek eventually get around to making love. The audience, which has been laughing, gasping, and perhaps even cheering at the elaborate, Hong Kong action film-influenced physical pyrotechnics of guns and men, bullets and angles, suddenly grows still.
Violence is intimacy without the embarrassment, free of ambiguities and disappointed hopes.
VI Violence can be portrayed in film in a manner that evokes the gladly somber pieties of concerned liberals. Sheridan's fistfight in The Field , is presented with such authenticity one recoils from the concept of violence, as one does from the graphic images of the L.A. riots. And it is true that as one watches a bad, repetitiously violent film one wonders just what it is that people are getting out of the succession of bland battles. The rote fight scenes, the predictable reversals of fortune - it is as if the cretins in the audience will accept anything as long as it has the patina of aggression. That Rocks the Cradle that play and perhaps expiate maternal fears, offer violence and aggression of a much more subtle and psychological nature.