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I know you are going to think of me as an old fossil. And perhaps you are right: I just got on to Facebook barely a couple of weeks ago. Necessity drew me there because somebody I had been trying to interview invited me to join. And this was as good a way as any to procure the interview. However, this column is not about Facebook. It’s about what I found was exercising some of the younger minds I had connected to perchance, out there in the friendly ether.

There was an intense discussion going on about Revolutionary Road, the gut-socking film based on the brilliant novel of the same name by Richard Yates and incarnated on screen by an incandescent Kate Winslet and a finely-tuned Leonardo Di Caprio.

Desi Facebookies — twenty-somethings, thirty-somethings and beyond — had been altered, however, briefly by their two hour immersion in Sam Mendes’s rather depressing film about suburban America in the 50s, marriage and the pursuit of happiness. Make that the pursuit of individual fulfilment and the stifling long arm of societal norms and niceties.

What delivers the knock-out punch is the brutally honest manner in which the screen marriage of the beautiful couple has been portrayed. Literally, no holds barred and truth served raw and uncensored — unflinchingly with close-ups and none of the schmaltzy music to transport you into the realm of melodrama. Obviously, this cinematic depiction of marriage and traditional gender roles struck a chord with many viewers, with some seeing in it parallels with either their own marriage, or that of their parents.

It isn’t just the depiction of a marriage up-close: We have been here before, so tellingly, in Edward Albee’s play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, that had a deafeningly loud cinematic avatar of a marriage marinated in bile with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor bringing elements of their own volatile marriage into play. Rather, it’s the porous line that separates us from how we appear to others (even to ourselves) from what we actually are, or may become when provoked. That part of us that sometimes surfaces unbidden and accompanied by demons that lie within us.

These demons that spring up through the cracks of marriage and family ties seem to be having a field day in the US, where I am now for a brief spell. Whether it is the stage, the screen or cable television, the camera is increasingly probing what lies behind carefully cultivated proper behaviour and political correctness. God of Carnage, the new four-hander play by the piquant French author Yasmina Reza (her play Art ran for over eight years in London) that just opened on Broadway rips apart the two apparently liberal and pretentious upper middle class couples who meet to discuss their sons’ brawl in a park. The smiles and poses of this set of designer-parents soon vanish and the rapid descent into barbarism and mayhem begins. The adults soon metamorphose into uncontrollable children. Rage rises like a truant genie on the small screen as well.

Popular sitcoms like Desperate Housewives have worked recession and the economic crisis into their storylines: nothing better than hard times to bring out our inner beasts. It’s not the slide into barbarism alone — perhaps Lord of the Flies terrain would be more apt — that set off alarm bells in my brain. What has me worried is that safety mechanisms have begun to snap: filial and marital bonds, family ties, self-control, respect for elders, social boundaries and loyalty, amidst much else, no longer restrain people from losing it.

In India that line between barbarity and civilised behaviour has become perilously thin. Yet our cinema and TV series still don’t truly mirror this. Life on the streets and behind curtains is far more brutal: road rage is reaching epidemic proportions, a little argument can turn into murder; sons are killing fathers, and fathers their sons, not to speak of spouses and lovers killing each other. And, yes, our filmmakers have yet to dissect marriages with the candour of a Sam Mendes.