There are columns that you ruminate on for a week, but then they fade away when you face the screen.
In a world that forces us to express our certainties immediately, embracing any doubt is a last stronghold of freedom of thought.
A few months ago I was preparing to write an article about
Mantícora
, the film by Carlos Vermut, that man who today appears in all the media not for his work but for having exercised, according to the testimony of three women, sexual violence against them.
Vermut himself explained it by stating that he has always practiced rough sex.
Inflicting pain causes pleasure in some people, as much as being beaten or humiliated causes others, there is old literature about it, but the sadist must find someone who feels pleasure in suffering, if not, what occurs is clearly a crime.
It seems obvious but it shouldn't be so obvious when the University of Virginia, which has had to respond to so many accusations of sexual abuse, has published a protocol to establish consensual limits on violence that can get out of hand.
It is already known that in the American universe the existence of written rules calms the soul of a systemically distrustful society.
But in addition, violent porn has made suffocating pressure on women's necks popular, something that certain men already practiced in masturbation, but which has become a common practice, so much so that in a surprising news item from
The Guardian
in 2019 reported on a woman killed by strangulation in Britain every two weeks at the hands of a sexual partner.
Reading the report about the violence with which Vermut displayed in his sexual encounters caused me deep discomfort;
Manticore
came to mind again
, that story of a young successful video game author, who calms his secret sexual drive by creating an avatar of a child in the image and likeness of the one who lives in his own home.
The creator does not look for real pedophile images that abound on the Internet to satisfy his desire, but rather creates the image of that child whose attraction tortures him.
We sense a hint of guilt in this man who keeps his perversion contained in the realm of virtuality.
But then it happens that the company discovers his disgusting creation and expels him from the studio.
Inevitably, we feel pity for the monster;
His fantasy is dirty but so far he has not committed any crime other than getting excited in the realm of fiction.
Of course, when that murky desire threatens to make the leap to reality, it is the monster itself that punishes itself.
The story provoked many moral doubts in me, something unusual in a cinema that tends towards forged conclusions: Is an aberrant desire always a premonition of what can happen in reality or is it possible to keep our cruel impulses at bay thanks to the enjoyment of “a fiction"?
Will someone who masturbates to a child's avatar end up being a rapist?
These are questions that need answers in a virtual world in which we can access any aberrant fantasy.
What I thought and what I expressed one afternoon at the Film Academy to his director was that he had put on the table something as unpleasant as it was necessary for debate.
Now the film has a dark foreboding air.
I was surprised that some media outlets reproached film workers for having responded timidly to this sordid story.
It seems that prudence has become the great sin of our time.
The point is that in an environment that has given so much space to the whim, even to the cruelty of geniuses, there is an entire system to air.
If we reduce the problem to sexual violence, we will let those who have so casually humiliated, ignored or harassed their subordinates in a thousand perverse ways get away with it.
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