How much is too much?

A few nights ago I watched ‘Chloe’, the latest Atom Egoyan film.  It’s a thriller about a wife who suspects her husband of infidelity, and who hires a prostitute to test his fidelity.  There’s a significant amount of sex in the film, most of it verbally described by the actress Amanda Seyfried.  Her acting is so good, the verbal description is more disturbing than a straightforward image.  Wanting to learn more about the film, I looked it up on Wikipedia.  There I discovered that it belongs to a previously unknown (to me) sub-genre, the erotic thriller.

Why, in the 21st century, do we have a sub-genre for a thriller with sex as a strong plot and character device?  My British publisher’s assistant editor, a young literary man recently down from Oxford or Cambridge, complained when reading the manuscript of my political thriller The End of the Monsoon that it contained too much sex.  My first reaction was: how is that possible?

What’s the history of sex and the thriller?  Does it mirror popular literature in general?  Has popular writing become sexier, or more sexless?

Eric Ambler was one of the most important thriller writers from the 1930s to the ’50s; I’ve read most of his novels and I cannot recall a single sex scene.  I think this was typical of popular, mainline fiction.  A good example of the period is Nevil Shute’s treatment of sex in his No Highway (’48).  The story of the narrator’s courtship is limited to half a paragraph:

‘In the fourth year of the war she was sent to Boscombe Down to work in the drawing office; she had her desk and drawing board just outside my little glass cubicle, so that every time I looked up from my calculations I saw her auburn head bent over her tracing, which didn’t help the calculations.  I stood it for a year, high-minded, thinking that one shouldn’t make passes at the girls in the office.  Then we started to behave very badly, and got engaged.’

The exceptions must have stood out: D.H. Lawrence; Henry Miller; during my undergraduate days, a feminist take by Erica Jong.  Were there exceptions in the political thriller genre?  I’m unaware of them.  Ludlum certainly was not known for his sex scenes.

Has it begun to change?  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo uses graphically sadistic, violent, incestuous and murderous sex scenes, partly to establish character motivation, but partly also to place the story’s villains beyond the pale.  The result is a new high (or low) in violent sex within the political thriller.  I found it offensive.  In The End of the Monsoon I tried to use sex to show how a relationship could develop from carnality to love.  The relationship may not start admirably, it may not proceed typically, but I’m certain it is common.  The sex scenes show character development and help move the plot forward.  They add what Maugham called verisimilitude.  They are neither euphemistic nor underwritten, nor sadistic, violent and incestuous.  They are realistic.

and karma as inspiration for The End of the Monsoon

It was in a bookstore in the old Hong Kong airport in the mid ’90s that I picked up the first book I read by Aung San Suu Kyi.  I have it still.  It is called The Voice of Hope, and is a collection of conversations she had with Alan Clements. 

Suu Kyi has put Burma on the map, and when I needed a prisoner of conscience for the plot of The End of the Monsoon (I was living in Cambodia), I naturally thought of her.  In the end I invented a politically active, British-educated Burmese monk, but I had her writings in mind when I tried to develop, in my novel’s final chapters, a little of his character.

I also had in mind my late wife’s beliefs.  She was a western Canadian Buddhist, intellectual, spiritual, also skeptical, with an emphasis on intention and works.  I’m certain Suu Kyi’s writings resonated with her.  Although Suu Kyi is Burmese, her thoughts below on the importance of metta, of a questioning attitude, on right intention and on works represent to me the refined western approach to Buddhism of which I am familiar.

Excerpts from chapter 10 of The Voice of Hope:

Suu Kyi:  …as time went on, like a lot of others who’ve been incarcerated, we have discovered the value of loving-kindness.  We’ve found that it’s one’s own feeling of hostility that generates fear.  I never felt frightened when I was surrounded by all those hostile troops.  That is because I never felt hostility towards them.  As Burmese Buddhists, we put a great emphasis on metta.  It’s the same idea as in the biblical quotation: ‘Perfect love casts out fear’.  While I cannot claim to have discovered ‘perfect love’, I think it’s a fact that you are not frightened of people whom you do not hate.  Of course, I did get angry occasionally with some of the things they did, but anger as a passing emotion is quite different from the feeling of sustained hatred or hostility.

Clements:  What is the core quality at the centre of your movement?

Suu Kyi:  Inner strength.  It’s the spiritual steadiness that comes from the belief that what you are doing is right, even if it doesn’t bring you immediate concrete benefits.  It’s the fact that you are doing something that helps to shore up your spiritual powers.  It’s very powerful.

Suu Kyi:  …complacency is very dangerous.  What we want to do is to free people from feeling complacent.  Actually, with a lot of people it’s not a sense of complacency either.  I think that many people just accept things out of either fear or inertia.  This readiness to accept without question has to be removed.  And it’s very un-Buddhist.  After all, the Buddha did not accept the status quo without questioning it.

Clements:  Yes, he radically questioned.  It’s the basis of his teachings.

Suu Kyi:  Yes, absolutely.  In Buddhism, you know the four ingredients of success or victory: chanda–desire, or will; citta–the right attitude; viriya or perseverance; and panna–wisdom.  We feel that you have got to cultivate these four qualities in order to succeed.  And the step prior even to these four steps, is questioning.  From that you discover your real desires.  Then you have got to develop chanda.  Chanda is not really desire.  How would you describe it?

Clements:  Chanda is normally translated as the ‘wish to do’ or intention.  Every action begins with it.  Where there is a will there is a way.

Suu Kyi:  Yes.  You must develop the intention to do something about the situation.  From there you’ve got to develop the right attitude and then persevere with wisdom.  Only then will there be success in your endeavour.  Of course, the five basic moral precepts are essential, to keep you from straying as it were.  With these we will get where we want to.  We don’t need anything else.

Clements:  So what you’re doing is fostering a sense of individual courage to question, to analyse….

Suu Kyi:  And to act.  I remind the people that karma is actually doing.  It’s not just sitting back.  Some people think of karma as destiny or fate and that there’s nothing they can do about it.  It’s simply what is going to happen because of their past deeds.  This is the way in which karma is often interpreted in Burma.  But karma is not that at all.  It’s doing, it’s action.  So you are creating your own karma all the time.  Buddhism is a very dynamic philosophy and it’s a great pity that some people forget that aspect of our religion.