Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard King

That sentence does two jobs at once: it’s a defense of craft and a preemptive strike against criticism. By saying he’s "never seen a connection", Richard King frames the debate as an empirical question only he’s qualified to adjudicate, then conveniently answers it with personal testimony. The move is rhetorically clever because it sounds modest (just one man’s observation) while functioning like a blanket exemption: if he hasn’t witnessed a causal chain, the chain doesn’t matter.

The subtext is industry-familiar. Directors are routinely asked to account for what their images might normalize, eroticize, or excuse. King’s phrasing sidesteps that moral ledger by narrowing "connection" to direct, provable causation. It ignores the more uncomfortable argument critics usually make: that cinema doesn’t instruct people to commit violence so much as it trains audiences in what to tolerate, what to laugh off, what to see as plot fuel. In other words, the cultural effect is ambient, cumulative, and hard to litigate with a lab-coat standard of proof.

Context matters, too: violence against women on screen has historically been aestheticized, narratively instrumentalized, and frequently detached from female interiority. When a director insists there’s no societal linkage, he’s also asserting creative sovereignty over interpretive responsibility, a classic auteur posture. It’s less a neutral claim than a boundary line: don’t ask me to answer for the world my images enter. The irony is that cinema’s power is precisely that it enters anyway.