At first it was hard to confront the foul existing toilet blocks in the camp without revulsion.
"Such is the revulsion against detention without charge or trial, such is this country's attachment to habeas corpus, that the right to liberty ordinarily trumps even the interests of national security," he declared this week.
But slowly and surely he has been formulating an aesthetic genre of his own: art that is impossible to experience without physical revulsion and moral embarrassment.
In a sense, by calling a crime against humanity "banal", she was trying to point to the way in which the crime had become for the criminals accepted, routinised, and implemented without moral revulsion and political indignation and resistance.
His revulsion is critical, because without it he wouldn't be as likable — character likability is a creative imperative as much in Sundance as in Hollywood — which makes him more like a person and less like a screenwriting conceit.
You will never again understand "Hamlet" the same way or think of the brooding prince without a shudder of revulsion.
Whatever revulsion there was at the crackdown, without it, many people now say, China could not have marshalled the will to throw itself into a full-blown modernisation of the economy.
I also refuse to believe that anyone in the world could use the term "organic plastic surgeon" without expecting anything but revulsion from the people that hear it.
"Niagara, Niagara," which opens today at the Village East, dares you to gaze steadily at its hapless characters without laughing or flinching in revulsion.
The movie's violence is filmed frankly but without sensationalism, conveying a moral revulsion that replicates the Wayuu's taboo of blood and of corpses, which, with their near-priestly status, they must shun.
