In Film, Conflict and Violence Belong : Movies: Courteous talk and rational behavior are boring as drama.

Must movies marinate in sex?

No, but many, probably most--including some of the best films ever made--are positively saturated with sensuality and eroticism.

What about violence? Call it conflict if you like, emotional tension or stress, but the fact remains that many good movies are violent. They are more than merely that, of course, but inevitably they are that, too. Enlightened, intelligent, reasonable, rational behavior, combined with courteous agreement, is for the streets--for real, not reel life. Reasonable, affirmative discourse has its place to be sure, but in dramatic expression it’s boring.

This does not require that movie armies perpetually beat out each others’ brains. Neither does it insist on endless looting and shooting. But extreme, strident, vigorous, violent emotion and action must be integrated into each and every frame of each and every scene of virtually each and every worthy movie.

Like it or not, film artists come to merit the attention of audiences largely through the skillful shaping and wielding of violence. There’s other stuff, too, but all of it pales by comparison.

Is this a cynical, brooding view? Not at all. It is simply a practical, bare-knuckles confrontation with the practical, bare-knuckles enterprise that is film.

Its roots are firmly established in theater. Oedipus kills his father and beds his mother. Here is the story of a fellow who, on different occasions during his lifetime, journeys in both directions through the same birth canal. Then, as if Sophocles feared audiences might find that all too tame, the protagonist pokes out his own eyes with jagged metal stakes.

Medea, in a jealous rage, kills her own children, cooks them for dinner and feeds them to their faithless father. “Hamlet,” for all its poetry and grace, is a tale of sex, greed, death. By final curtain, the stage is awash with blood, littered with corpses. Bodies are run through on swords, others are poisoned.

What about children’s fare? Bambi’s mother is shot before the fawn’s very eyes; the orphan barely escapes death by conflagration in a forest fire. In “101 Dalmatians” a witch abducts cute, cuddly puppies in order to skin them alive and wear their pelts as a coat.

But do not sociopaths and psychopaths imitate the violence they view on screen?

It may well seem so, but seem is the operative word. Studies establishing causal relations between media and violence win grants from foundations and tenure from university committees. Generally, however, they tend to be flawed. Like algebra, they start with the answer and then make up the equation that fits. Behavioral studies are by nature uniquely difficult; conclusions drawn derive too often from the logical fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc-- “after this, therefore because of this.”

Lofty, pious protests aside, violence is a natural and unavoidable quality of public, popular expression. To take movies to task for violence is like denigrating rivers for flowing downstream.

Notwithstanding the best intentions of the highest-minded practitioners and critics, violence is a natural, necessary ingredient in movies. Movie makers need apologize to no one for soaking their pictures with toe-to-toe, eyeball-to-eyeball conflict.

Aircraft that land safely do not make the news. Nobody goes to the theater to view a movie called “The Village of the Happy Nice People.”