Defending to the Death a Lust for Sex, Violence on TV

Several readers have expressed concern over my confession that my wife and I have become addicted to sex and violence movies on TV.

“What I don’t understand,” writes George Tarwater of La Jolla, “is how you, a literate man, choose to watch sex and violence every night, as you say you do.”

Actually, I get fed up with sex and violence; well, at least with violence. Sex is hard to turn off. But there isn’t much else to watch. PBS does have some educational films, but one gets tired of seeing geese spawn in the Arctic wastes, or whatever it is that geese do. Most of the situation comedies are gross. Every human confrontation is reduced to slapstick.

At least in sex and violence films the motivations are believable: greed, lust, hate, revenge. Almost always the villain is a psychopath, but that is about the percentage of psychopaths in real life.

Of course the violence is always overdone. People with automatic rifles seem to shatter the furniture and make lace out of cars without hitting anyone. Inevitably, though, they manage to shoot enough innocent people to create a few bloody scenes for the cops.

In almost every sex and violence movie either the hero chases the villain up a winding staircase, usually to a roof, or the villain chases the hero down one. This seems absolutely unavoidable.

This perpendicular chase either follows a car chase or leads to one. The car chases involve such wanton stunts as crashing at high speed through outdoor markets, leaping over opening drawbridges, racing through school playgrounds, causing multi-car intersection crashes and causing numerous police cars to collide with one another. Usually, the runaway car overturns and catches fire, its occupants escaping to run down alleys and climb over fences.

Those chases do get a little tiresome, but they are frequently interrupted by sex scenes in which a man and a woman clasp one another passionately while engaging in deep tongue kissing. This inevitably leads to a peeling off of clothing and a fall into bed with much huffing and simulated coitus. One always wonders whether the women in these impromptu liaisons ever get pregnant, but we never find out. Now, I suppose one must also wonder whether they ever get AIDS.

Seeing these extravagant movies every night, one does develop a sort of immunity. One is no longer shocked. Consequently, the producers have to make them ever more violent and licentious or their viewers will get bored and turn to watching situation comedies or movies of tarantulas mating.

Tarwater quotes the columnist Charles Krauthammer as saying that by the time they are 18 years old, American kids have seen 10,000 killings on TV. “Is it any wonder,” Krauthammer asks, “that a growing number might like to commit just one.”

Tarwater agrees with Krauthammer that “culture has consequences,” and asks if I am not worried about the safety of my grandchildren in a world exposed to television violence.

Yes, I worry about my grandchildren, but I suspect that TV reflects the violence of our society more than it causes it. Americans have always been a violent people.

Tarwater suggests that the relatively violence-free “Murder She Wrote” is popular because it involves the unraveling of a puzzle rather than violence, though of course there is always a dead body and a murderer to be exposed.

Yes, that is one of the reasons that I watch “Murder She Wrote.” It is so old-fashioned, in the manner of Agatha Christie. Except that somebody gets bumped off early on, there is little violence. Every sequence, however, has a fatal flaw. The killer is almost always brought to bay by Jessica Fletcher (Angela Lansbury) through observation and deduction. You will notice, however, that the villain, though caught only in a web of flimsy circumstantial evidence that would never stand up in court, invariably makes a complete confession.

I don’t think that our problem is that we watch sex and violence but that we watch television at all. I believe, at our age, that we are immune to sex and violence. But we are not immune to brain damage. And I suspect that two to four hours of TV every night is damaging our brains.

Darcy Carroll writes that she and her husband have gone cold turkey on TV for one week. They watched “CBS Sunday Morning” with Charles Kuralt and then swore off until the following Sunday, same show.

“Even though we hadn’t spoken of it aloud,” she says, “we were both feeling uncomfortable with our increased dull-eyed sofa time. . . . Is there life after television? What are we doing to pass the long hours? I don’t know about my husband but so far I have written a letter. . . . “

We’re going to go cold turkey too, right after “Murder She Wrote.”