Sex 'n Violence

A winning combination, sex and violence, used in dramas over the centuries: Romeo and Juliet, Cecil B. de-Mille films (with a dash, or rather a big splash, of religion thrown in), Psycho, Killing Them Softly. The last mentioned I saw last week and even I, inured over the years to the effects on my constitution of violence in films, even I found some of the scenes in this film painful to watch. OK, you can always tell yourself that the scenes aren't actually taking place, as you can when two people are in bed supposedly "having it away" on screen, but just the same when presented so realistically as it was here in "Killing Them Softly" it rather brought out the Mary Whitehouse in me: should they really be descending to such low levels in order to entertain or to make money - though when I was at the cinema watching he film there were only four other people there which says something about the attraction of the "sex n' violence" formula. Actually there was very little sex in the film, well, not visible activity, only a hooker being paid after the event.
Strangely coincidental I have been reading Somserset Maugham's book called "Ten Novels and their Authors" which, by the way is excellent in all respects but especially so for budding writers who would like to know something about novel writing and short story writing, the differences in the genres chiefly. In one passage of Maugham's introduction to the book, he draws attention to the prevalence of sex in modern literature and he writes thus: "Owing to the invention of  contraceptives, the high value that was once placed on chastity no longer obtains. Novelists have not been slow to notice the difference in the relation of the sexes and so, whenever they feel something must be done to sustain the reader's flagging interest, they cause their characters to indulge in copulation. I am not sure they are well-advised. Of sexual intercourse Lord Chesterfield said that the pleasure was momentary, the position ridiculous and the expense damnable; if he had lived to read modern fiction he might have added that there is a monotony about the act that renders reiterated narration of it excessively tedious."