48 — Fictional homicides per week on CBS in prime time during February sweeps (Feb. 1-28), according to Entertainment Weekly. The average would have been higher, of course, without the hours devoted to documentary, reality and other ‘non-fiction’ programming, also to comedies and dramas that do not involve killing, if any.
22 — Hours per week of prime time (the extra hour is on Sunday).

Most other network violations of the flesh are either surgical or forensic, though there is also a certain amount of (un)pretty explicit torture. Just down the dial into cable/satellite digits, however, even genre series have been retooled to up the yuck factor. TV sci-fi doesn’t get much richer (or darker) than Battlestar Galactica; TV westerns have never been more sadistic than Deadwood was; and the ne plush ultra of historical fiction is the gorgeously gory, naked-fleshy grimness that was Rome. But all three shared a finely calibrated moral compass.

Now the decks are clear for the Mob to rule. This week marks the beginning of the end of The Sopranos. Season 6B is the coda to David Chase’s edgy depiction of the immorality of Family life in New Jersey. The first episode is a reminder of how much the series has changed television. It is multilayered, tautly written and directed, a marvel of naturalistic acting, and excruciating even when the tension is contained, which this time is mostly. You might want to treat yourself to a drive-by shoot of the story so far by clicking on the best video I’ve ever seen on YouTube — fast, artful, funny, surprisingly complete and acutely aware —The 7-Minute Sopranos. (Headphones recommended. Pause the tube to let the video load if you’re not on highspeed.)

*****

How can film compete?

FOR THOSE WHO THINK MOVIES
HAVE GONE AS FAR AS THEY CAN GO,
WE HAVE TWO WORDS :
TARANTINO. RODRIGUEZ.
— weekend ad for Grindhouse

If you don’t take this as a warning, you probably take it as a challenge: Can I survive new extremes of cinematic violence? Will I feel less numb?

Quentin Tarantino wrote the story for Natural Born Killers, Oliver Stone’s anti-violence polemic, which was shockingly gory in 1994, but seems tame now, partly thanks to Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill Volumes I & II, which made ultra-violence painfully tongue-in-chic, and partly thanks to pal Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi, From Dusk Till Dawn, and Sin City (Volumes II & III are in post-production), which made ultra-violence gleeful.

Grindhouse, a self-consciously retro double-feature with gratuitous trailers, is probably both too sleazy and too post-modern to rack up really big bucks, though it has cult written all over it. But last week I did brave 300, the young year’s biggest film to date.

Heartily touted and heavily trailered, 300 is the animation of a graphic novel by Frank Miller, best known for his film-noirish contributions to the Daredevil, Batman, Robocop and Sin City series of what used to be called comics. The movie faithfully expands on Miller’s ‘storyboard’ for the legend of how a team of 300 hypermasculine warrior volunteers defended Sparta against effeminate Persian invaders driving a vast army of mercenaries, conscripts, slaves and beasts, dying so that reason, honor, justice, democracy, and the good folks back home might live.

I went anyway because two friends were in town to see this made-in-Montreal confection in IMAX. [Yvone was my first astrology teacher, and the ‘flower girl’ at my wedding, now teaches troubled kids and questing adults; her online incarnation is Saraswati Davies. Guy Letourneau, her no less versatile colleague and now my friend too, was a senator in the movie; the ActorGuy website mentions his directing and writing, samples his composing and design, but doesn’t even hint at his metaphysical, therapeutic, teaching, and business skills. All Quebec actors need other weapons in their arsenal; Guy has more than most.)

High-res and low hope made the movie a surprisingly satisfying sensory experience. Everything — not just the violence — was grandly, gorgeously over-the-top. Everything from the gleam of the fine hairs on a naked woman’s back to the flickering of the fires of yet more enemy reinforcements in the impossible distance was meticulously rendered.

The humorless bombast I had expected — most of the dialogue came sheathed in balloons — but not the romance-novel tenderness, not the mythic might of the storytelling, not the exotic loveliness of the music. The violence I had foresawn, but not how balletic it was, how grand-operatic, how heavy-metallic. It required no thought, only surrender to the beauty of superheroic action, and acceptance of the Romantic convention that beauty is the natural manifestation of goodness. Rendered realistically, this faux-Western would have been suffocating, but epic exaggeration bought it room to breathe.

Nonetheless, 300 still seems a minor exception to a major rule. Why are so many of the movies in general release these days so juvenile — especially outside of Oscar’s October-to-December sweeps?

Blame television. Now that dramatic series are satisfying more demanding tastes (and appetites for violence and sex), and now that audiovisual technology is offering home delivery of cinema-quality experience, grownups and children alike have less incentive to go out for so passive a purpose as a movie The quick cheap plenty of DVDs reinforces this trend — parents can be patient enough; kids have to. It is juveniles who want to get out of the house anyway, who most want to be primi inter pares, and who get the biggest kick out of vicarious violence. They are Hollywood’s target audience. And nobody ever lost points by enlarging the bulls-eye.