I purchased the DVD and watched A Scanner Darkly this last week. My sister gave up on it: too many fucks and shits. She hears such language more than enough while teaching at a correctional institution.

As for me, these do not bother me. And I found the film a successful adaptation of Philip K. Dick's great novel, a fine transmutation from prose fiction to rotoscoped film animation. It is the first film of a Dick story that I've watched that keeps Dick's characteristic dark comedy.

But I understand my sister's reluctance to watch the film. I could not read the novel in my '20s; I had to wait until my '30s to down this black comedy. And it was for similar reasons. I have little interest in the lives of addicts. I don't want to be around them in person. And art about them? Well, it took me a while to let the frame of the novel shield me from the distaste of their lives.

The comedy helps. One empathizes with the poor bastards. But still, it helps to be able to laugh at them. For they are risible.

Addicts usually are. When I was young, one of the few reasons I could find to go to bars was to go there to make fun of the drunks.

But it does interest me that people (including me) can watch thousands of deaths in TV and cinematic fiction per year, and not flinch. It is droll when those same people cannot abide by a little swearing.

For me, most of the the time, art's frame takes away the connection to immediate reality that would make me cringe from dealings with the characters and incidents of comedy and drama.

The double standard, allowing murder and death and violence, but not allowing sex and swearing, is interesting, and well worth extensive study. If you understand why this double standard, you will probably understand the real nature of conservativism. Or today's religions.

But there are times when I, too, cannot manage to establish that frame.

As I've mentiond before, TV news shows make it hard for me. There's no artistic frame there, and I actually find it hard not to judge many stories intrusive. My right to know, so to speak (there is no such right, of course), does not entail a right for a cameraman to stick a lens in front of a grieving mother and ask her how she feels. That's just indecent. I don't want to see such grief.

It's too personal.

Just the same, I don't want to see my friends and relatives engaging in sexual acts. Not my business.

But seeing actors go through grief and sex is no problem for me.

And yet . . . I could not watch The Squid and the Whale. The film's characters, particularly of the father and the oldest son, were so disgusting to me that I could not watch the film. I sent it back to NetFlix with only having viewed the first 20 minutes or so. And it took me nearly three weeks to view those 20 minues, in minute-or-so installments. I would view a scene, find something so unbearably contemptible or embarrassing that I had to push Pause, and would then pick up a book.

So it's not violence that sends me away from film. Or profanity. Or sex. It is assholery. I can only take certain kinds of assholery. When people I would normally like as characters and as people engage in assholery, my sensibilities revolt.

In The Squid and the Whale, the characters should be of the kind I'd like: college professionals; smart students.

But they are all, almost to a man, disgusting in the early part of the film, at least. I turned it off.

I'll rewatch the numbskull losers of A Scanner Darkly a second or a third time before I try The Squid and the Whale, again.

This is not a critical review, of course. It is a psychological confession. Everybody has their limits. I've found mine, at least in film.

Other films I've walked out of? Or turned off?

• Romero's Martin
• Fellini's La Strada
• Weitz's American Pie
• Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player

And literally hundreds of standard Hollywood fodder.