Sex and violence in the Wild West Indies

It is easy to fall into the trap of regarding what we grew up with as the norm, and dismissing the standards of successive generations as being slack, immoral and tasteless, yet most of us are swept along with the tide and imperceptibly seduced by it.

Sex features in so many films because it is a fact of life: everybody does it, has done it or is looking forward to doing it, and since it is a guilty pleasure to so many, the filmmakers will slip some in for us.

Increasingly they’re doing so right at the start of the film, presumably to convince us immediately that there is going to be an earthy element in this visual entertainment, because as we’re always hearing, our attention span is getting shorter all the time and if we don’t get what we want pretty quickly we’re liable to look for it somewhere else.

One amusing way of looking at sex scenes is to try to work out what went on at the contract-signing stage, where the director said to the actress, “Your character is going to be getting her rocks off a bit.

Are you happy with that?” The lady’s response can probably be gauged by the amount of actual nudity that appears. If her answer was “You’re not filming me without underwear,” we may end up with one of those scenes where the couple come to the sweaty end of a romp only to tumble out of bed wearing things that would have made their supposed interaction impossible. So the term, “leave it to your imagination” proves to be still alive and kicking.

On the other hand, over the Christmas period I came across several family films in which the kids (actors) witnessed some adult private time and weren’t shocked or appalled at all.

Then we started watching a TV series, The Affair, in which the sex is apparently designed to raise eyebrows, from unlikely outdoor locations such as suburban driveways to anatomically implausible couplings. I’m just waiting for the one later in the run where they do it while riding a bicycle.

The artist’s desire to shock is as old as the creative process itself, and it is one of the mantras of the 21st century that we should “push boundaries”. Film-makers have certainly done that with violence – almost nothing is considered too vile for us to see these days, to the extent that we are left to self-censor.

I read recently that Wes Craven, director of Nightmare on Elm Street and other scary numbers, had actually walked out of a screening of Reservoir Dogs because he couldn’t take the violence. The film’s director and writer Quentin Tarantino was vastly amused, and it has to be said that most of the violence in his films, and indeed most shoot-emup movies, is done in an unrealistically casual way. Whether that is a good or a bad thing is open to discussion.

Anyone who grew up on a filmic diet of westerns in which everybody had a gun and wasn’t afraid to use it will probably agree that it didn’t do them any harm, and that the poor, misguided souls who actually use guns to settle scores in real life are driven by something other than the desire to imitate what they see on the screen.

This is a serious issue in Trinidad, which is like a modern Wild West, but in a grimly real way, rather than through the softening lens of history and fictionalization.

If life really does imitate art, we can only hope that gun and knife crime on screen will eventually go the way of sexual violence, which in the mainstream entertainment world is no longer tolerated or regarded as mere titillation. You only have to go back as far as Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns in the 1960s and 70s to see how necessary the change was. In some of these the mysterious stranger would ride into town, lonely and frustrated after days in the saddle, and blithely force himself on a woman. And he was still regarded as a hero.

Nowadays, for all the casual depictions of sex, at least they are consensual, and anything that isn’t that way is clearly shown as wrong.

It may be unrealistic and even undesirable to expect the world to return to the innocence and primness of Victorian times, but a sudden burst of collective compassion would not go amiss.