"That would be the masturbation scene. But I generally dislike sex scenes (especially in audio, for some reason), so it's not like this story was an outlier in that regard."
- I can do without sex scenes too, but this one struck a chord with me.
It reminded me of a night when my cousins and I had moved my uncle, who was in his last days with us due to his cancer, to a bedroom in his house. When we brought him home from the hospital, he wanted a bed to be set up in his den so he could easily visit with the groups of people who wanted to come and see him or to say their final goodbyes. Having suffered a stroke, he couldn't get in or out of bed without help, so we took turns bringing him bedpans, changing his sheets, helping him to eat, and the like. Basically staying up with him during the nights caring for him. So one night he asked if we would move him to a bedroom, where he could spend one night alone with his wife. With all the things we were helping to do for him at the time, I never really gave much thought to THAT.
But privacy is privacy, whatever it may consist of. And is still one of those human needs too.
I guess that's why I really didn't mind the scene that much.
To me it showed a very human thing, actually a wonderfully human thing. The things we do in private, and the things we do in private when we think it may be the last time we get to do them. I think about my uncle and about how weak he was in those last days, and about how Steve in the story was kind of in the same boat. I think about how they just wanted to share something with the people they loved, and how the people they loved wanted to share something with them too. Something just for the two of them.
"Just remember what ol' Jack Burton does when the earth quakes, and the poison arrows fall from the sky, and the pillars of Heaven shake. Yeah, Jack Burton just looks that big ol' storm right square in the eye and he says, "Give me your best shot, pal. I can take it."