The S and V Syndrome: May Be Time for a Change

In revealing the other day that my wife’s and my evenings are devoted almost entirely to sex and violence on television, I’m afraid I gave the wrong signal to some of my readers.

I was especially distressed by the reaction reported by Robert E. Jenkinson Sr., of Newbury Park, but fortunately it turned out to be only temporary, a misinterpretation occasioned by an untimely interruption.

Mr. Jenkinson happened to be eating breakfast while he was reading my column, and just as he finished the phrase, “Our evenings are devoted almost entirely to sex and violence” his toast popped up. Mr. Jenkinson immediately retrieved the toast and began to butter it, meanwhile thinking wildly that my wife would skin me alive when she read that revelation. He hadn’t thought I was the kind of person who would mix sex with violence.

“When I came back to the table,” he writes, “I finished the line . . . ‘on television.’ Of course, this gave the sentence an entirely different meaning. My toaster very nearly wrecked my very good opinion of you.”

Mel Kells reports that he read straight through that sentence but found it ambiguous. He wrote a letter to the editor saying, “I wanted to ask Jack Smith, who wrote that he and his wife’s evenings ‘are devoted almost entirely to sex and violence on television,’ if he was referring to two different activities or a single one.”

I do see that my sentence might permit such uncertainty, and without revealing any secrets, I must say that I am flattered by Mr. Kells’ question. Of course I did mean that we watch television movies that contain both sex and violence.

That, I realize, is a dismal confession. It means that, instead of working on my lifetime list of 100 Great Books, I am wasting my hours away on movies that are aimed at the lowest popular taste.

Why do we do this? One reason, of course, is that most prime-time movies are about sex and violence. We usually eat dinner at about 8 or 9 o’clock, when the movies are starting. We can not eat at the dining room table, since it is permanently covered to a height of at least six inches with bills, letters, catalogues, magazines, books and articles I can describe only as junk. Consequently, we eat at TV tables, and when you’re eating at a TV table, it’s only natural to watch TV.

It might be argued that one can always find something educational or intellectually stimulating on TV, but I am not much entertained by those nature films of beavers mating or storks wading in an estuary, and I’d rather read the paper than listen to those pompous political commentaries. I have also had it with those crisp drawing-room dramas from the BBC.

Even when you turn on a movie that doesn’t sound as if it would be full of sex and violence, nine times out of 10 it turns out to be. The other night we watched a movie called “Resurrection,” with Ellen Burstyn and Sam Shepard. I had looked it up in Leonard Maltin’s 1990 TV Movies and Video Guide, which is usually very reliable, and found it described as “a beautifully realized story about a woman who returns from the brink of death with amazing healing powers.”

I am skeptical of faith healing, and I do not believe in resurrection at all. However, I like Burstyn, and Shepard has a lot of raw male power. He turns out to be the son of a Bible-thumping wowser; he easily seduces the lonely widow (whose husband was killed in the auto accident that almost took her life) and then turns violent on her because of her sinfulness.

The sex scenes are routinely sensuous and the violence is mad and brutal. So we thought we were going to see an uplifting movie about resurrection and healing and it turns out to be another S and V. Is that our fault?

S and V movies are so full of cliches that I think that when I retire I will try to write them from memory. We always see a man and a woman writhing in bed with bare shoulders, but when we saw them pop into bed they had their underwear on. It seems anomalous.

There is always a car chase. Almost invariably cars go shooting through parking garages and under railroad trestles and crash into numerous other cars, including at least six police cars. Usually the getaway car crashes into an abutment or goes over a cliff and blows up.

Then there is the foot chase, which invariably finds our hero chasing the villain up a fire escape to a rooftop and down a stairway to the street where both continue running at top speed, like a couple of quarter-milers, in their clothes and street shoes, knocking over ashcans and never running out of breath. The one in front keeps looking over his shoulder, which of course should slow him down, but doesn’t.

Maybe I’ll just give up S and V and go back to reading Will Durant’s “Story of Civilization.” It’s time I got out of the Renaissance.