Al's cabinet of shame

I have long maintained a section in the bottom corner of my DVD shelves for movies that I want to keep around, but am embarrassed to be associated with or seen with. For instance: I have all four Rambo films, the first because it's an interesting piece of cinema from a Canadian director, and filmed in my hometown; the second because I revisited it in preparing to interview the director's son; the third because it has a plot that involves US relations with the mujahadeen in Afghanistan, decades before 9/11 - which makes it a historical curiosity at the very least;  and the fourth because it's such a bloody, brutal, ridiculously intense exploitation film that it shocked the heck out of me on first viewing and I think I'd like to get around to it again sometime, just to see if it's as vicious as I recall ("Rambo goes splatter"). I also have - don't tell anyone - various DVDs involving Bruce Willis, Clint Eastwood,  Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Mel Gibson, none of whom I am keen to be associated with as a cinephile, even though I have reasons for keeping all around - including, in some cases, that I have genuine fondness for the film in question, guilty pleasure or no. I mean, the director's cut of Payback is one of the most successful attempts to put a Parker novel on screen, in my opinion - not that it's the best film made from a Parker book, which would obviously be Point Blank, but it's by far the most "Parker" of them...

Anyhow, tonight I came up with a novel solution, while reorganizing my shelves: put the ones I don't want to be known by in the closed cabinet where I keep my porn! (I have a few porn DVDs, what can I say). As I was doing it, a deep sense of the rightness of my action came to me, because, after all, most of the output of Mel Gibson, Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Clint Eastwood IS a sort of pornography - a validation of the male ego, a phallus-worshipping variation on themes of "the-man-is-always-right/ nobody-understands-me-but-I'm-really-a-hero" ego gratification, which is in a way its own form of masturbation. Die Hard is porn for the male ego; Beverly Hills Cox is porn for a lower organ. I am suddenly very pleased with my cabinet of shame, and happy to no longer having my Rambos out in plain sight...