The following anecdote came up in conversation with Valen and Valentina one night they came over to have dinner at ours. I hadn’t heard it before so I assume Yael came out with this on some occasion when I wasn’t present because had I heard him say what I’m told he said I would have remembered it clearly. As I understand, within the context of a conversation that must have steered all  those who were present on that occasion towards the topic of how explicit sexuality and gratuitous violence are ever present these days in the media, in film, on TV, and not only, Yael casually took the stand at some point, in the middle of a heated debate amongst friends, and asked the following rhetorical question: what fundamentally is worse, Rocco or Rambo? What I understood he was implying is that violence, in all its forms, whether implicit or explicit, in the manner that it is so casually and constantly doled out to us on television and in film, has become so commonplace and banal almost to the point of making us largely indifferent to it when we see it. Accustomed to it, we have accepted it as forming a significant part of what we understand to be entertainment. The subliminal message that this deeply disturbing glamorization of weapons and violence sends out to the public at large I believe is nothing short of toxic and is fundamentally destructive; socially, psychologically, spiritually, morally. In my opinion it is wrong of us as a society to have accepted that the morbid and constant depiction of violence is nothing to be concerned about. Most people probably won’t bat an eyelid at watching the graphic depiction of a murder on TV, yet should some scene alluding to sex or a bit too much skin be shown before the watershed, all the armchair moralists immediately jump on their phones in droves to tele-terrorize the channel in question with their self-righteous expressions of astonishment and utter disgust. So much for Rambo.

When mentioning Rocco, Yael inadvertently invoked the porn industry (I’m no apologist for this murky  underworld, with its dark and grubby corners and nasty undercurants, although I have to laugh when I remember Mark Mollet saying to me many years ago, not so tongue in cheek, that in his opinion pornography was one of the highest forms of contemporary entertainment). I don’t believe that the point Yael was trying to make was to condone pornography and elevate it in stark contrast to the intrinsic wickedness of  gratuitous violence as a form of entertainment. His choice of words – the label he came up with – was clearly intended as a witty tag to contrast violence on the one hand, which is largely accepted, and sexuality and nudity on the other, which in many ways are still considered to be taboo.

It was 1982 and we as a family had only just arrived in Lisbon after moving there from Paris. I think in actual fact the film premiered in many other places the previous year, but for some reason I remember that, that summer, several cinemas in Lisbon were showing “A Quest for Fire”; a film that tells the story of various members of a paleolithic tribe of early homo sapiens and their search for fire and the knowledge of how to make it themselves. I’ve since watched it a number of times again and it is quite an interesting film. Desmond Morris was very much involved as an adviser to assist with recreating the gestures and the body language of these early humans and Anthony Burgess was the person tasked with recreating the language they spoke. There is a scene towards the end of the film – if I recall –  where a male and a female, who have become emotionally involved throughout the story, lie down to have sex and instead of doing it doggy-style (previous scenes in the film had suggested that that was common practice amongst them) they adopt the missionary position. I suppose that this of course was meant to symbolize a moment in the evolution of man and, to be honest, I don’t think there was anything particularly explicit or racy in the scene. I remember, however, overhearing my mother and some other mothers of my friends discussing the film in the carpark of our school, I think as they waited for us all to come out of classes. I remember some of these ladies saying that that they would not permit their children to see the film on account of the sex scene. I remember my mother replying that she had no problem with us, her children, seeing the film or that scene, particularly when there was nothing lewd about the scene, it was a perfectly natural and healthy act and it formed part of the narrative. Moreover, she went on to say, she would sooner we saw a scene of two adults making love than scenes of people shooting each other dead. Amen! Well said, my Mother! I don’t recall what happened next but I’d like to think that those silly other mothers had nothing to reply to that.