Confession. I just talked to a couple of friends who watched the movie of <em>The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. </em>They liked it. Had I watched it, they asked?

Well, kind of. I turned it on during my recent travels on a plane. I was enjoying it a lot. Then I got a bit uncomfortable about the first brutal episode of sexual assault. Then we got to the bit with the handcuffs and the beatings and the… No. Sorry. I couldn’t get past that. I’m sure it’s a great movie. But I did not want to watch a fictional actress going through that kind of humiliation, even though I know she gets her own back later on.

Would I have felt that way ten, twenty years ago? I don’t know and I wish I did. My own writing has become less graphic and less reliant on shock over the years. Is that age, acquiescence, a hardening of the spiritual arteries or just me trying to make the same point but through more subtle and less graphic means?

Possibly all or a bit of all those things. But I suspect the truth is I simply find explicit scenes of any kind rather tiresome these days. There was nothing in that movie that wasn’t in Kubrick’s <em>A Clockwork Orange. </em>But that was forty years ago and genuinely shocking. Now I find myself confronted with these scenes and thinking, ‘Yes, I <em>know</em> it’s like that. Your point is what exactly?’

It’s a writer’s duty to shock from time to time. But to do that do we have to be shocking ourselves? Sometimes I guess. Not always.