Tuesday, 31st October 2006.

Blood not-so-simple

Earlier this evening, my darling wife wrote in her own diary that she couldn't understand my viewing habits. Specifically: Dog Soldiers, tonight's Halloween film. I laughed at the gore; she was squirming in her seat. A lot of it was my fault - having reassured her that "there was only one really gory scene", I'd promptly forgotten about the six or seven others of similar unpleasantness dashed throughout the hundred minutes of run-time. Emily said that she couldn't understand how I could watch that without even flinching, considering that I have to leave the room whenever Holby City is on.

I don't know, to be honest, but I think that part of it is simple disassociation. I can't relate to swordplay. When Lucy Liu loses her head (well, a bit of it) at the end of Kill Bill, it's pretty grim, but I have no idea what it would feel like, and I've never seen it happen in real life. Because I have no concept of this sort of pain, I am more or less numb to it, and therefore I don't really care. The same applies to stabbings, gunshots, and animal bites - it's generally not a big deal to me.

Show me someone injecting a needle, on the other hand, and I have to leave the room because they terrify me. I can sit through all manner of unpleasantness in Trainspotting - the dead baby, the toilet scene and the bit with the sheets - but when Renton takes his last hit before overdosing (sinking into the floor as he does so) and we follow the needle sinking into his vein in slow motion, my instinctive reaction is to scrunch the cushion in front of my face - much like I do whenever I hear Celine Dion open her mouth to sing. It's simply because I can relate to a needle, whereas I can't relate to a decapitation: it's much easier to care about it if it brings back a few memories.

Simple cuts and grazes are another thing - we've all been there. And don't get me started on the papercut scene in Jackass - I spent five minutes with my hands covering my face, something I hadn't done since the trailer for Eight Legged Freaks. Stuff like Casualty and Holby, on the other hand, is a mixed bag - sometimes I'll be appalled at what goes on in the theatre ("Please! This is pre-watershed, for crying out loud!") and sometimes I'll merely shrug. There's no real pattern to it - Sean Pertwee, for example, gets his guts removed in Dog Soldiers in a manner reminiscent of scenes from the Living Dead films. I'm OK with both, but the film later features open heart (well, open gut) surgery in an upper room, and that's a scene I can't watch. So perhaps the pattern is medical - a fear of doctors, of hospitals, of being opened up. It does seem to have got a bit better since I saw Emily give birth: once you've witnessed the sight of a placenta, glistening and moist in a plastic bowl on the nearby trolley, there's a part of you that never looks back (although I will not touch liver as long as I still have my teeth).

Certain things *do* make my skin crawl, even if they're ones that I can't relate to. Most of them happened in The Krays, or The Fly. I vividly remember the first time I watched the latter all the way through - I'd already stomached the first part, but Jeff Goldblum breaking the pub wrestler's arm made me reach for the off-switch. It was Ewan who persuaded me that in order to get the full Fly Experience (his words) I really ought to sit through the film in its entirety.

So there we are, in the middle of his lounge, and Jeff Goldblum (who is now almost completely fly) is shuffling around the wooden space that serves as his laboratory, while bits of him trail all over the floor. And then all of a sudden he's vomiting white fluid all over John Getz, and it seems to be dissolving his limbs on contact. I sit there, entrenched in horror and morbid fascination, finally understanding what it's like to witness a car crash - you're appalled but you can't tear your head away. I'm just about making it through Jeff's bullimic episode without doing a spot of vomiting myself - and this is the moment that Ewan (who knows I am squeamish) decides to put his head round the door, with an empty glass in one hand and two pints of semi skimmed in the other, greeting me with the words "James, do you want some milk?". I swear, he's lucky he's still alive.