We’ve been having a ridiculously extended discussion about soap operas, Quentin Tarantino, violence and other subjects at this thread. I really enjoyed this comment by Katherine Wirick, so thought I would give it it’s own post.
I grew up watching ALL MY CHILDREN, ONE LIFE TO LIVE and GENERAL HOSPITAL with my mother. Three hours a day, five days a week, every week.
So I speak from experience when I say that TV soap operas are violent. Spousal abuse, child abuse, murder, rape… I’m pretty sure I learned what rape *was* from a soap opera. They depict those acts of violence less graphically than Tarantino does, but they’re limited by network content restrictions. The part violence plays in soap opera narratives, however, is just as base and exploitative as any Tarantino film could be argued to be: it’s there to titillate you. It’s there to sell ad time. It’s there to make you tune in tomorrow.
In RESERVOIR DOGS, a man is shot in the gut and spends most of the next ninety minutes writhing and screaming in pain. I am a pacifist, and I have been a victim of violence, and I find the extended agony of Mr. Orange more palatable and more morally acceptable than any of the multiple rapes and countless murders I saw in a decade of soap opera viewership. If violence is going to be entertainment, as it presently is in both male- and female-coded genres, I’d rather have the act and its consequences onscreen in all their ugliness than have them sanitized for “general audiences.” (In a different genre but along the same lines, I was far more offended by the clean, kid-friendly warfare in PRINCE CASPIAN than I was by anything in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS.) In real life there is no editor to cut mercifully away from the extremity of your pain.
Soap operas, it’s also worth remembering, have a history of turning rapists into romantic heroes. (Two examples come immediately to mind: Luke on GH and on OLTL. There may be more.) These shows do not stand firmly on the moral, humanistic, life-affirming side of any binary question about violence.
Part of the reason I’m posting here is that I wanted to be a female voice in Tarantino’s defense, since, as far as I can tell, there haven’t yet been any. I’ve always been drawn to genres that commonly employ graphic violence (cop shows, war movies, adventure stories and so on). These genres are culturally coded male, and they are privileged over genres that are coded female, but their appeal is certainly not exclusively male; I don’t think it’s even *primarily* male.
The talk about Tarantino as an exponent of some fraudulent “realism” is a bit baffling to me; in my perception, each successive film since RESERVOIR DOGS has been *less* realistic, more mannered, more self-conscious, more stylized. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS never once allowed me to forget that what I was watching was a construct. I have mixed feelings about that. The fundamental draw of RESERVOIR DOGS, for me–the draw his films have lost since PULP FICTION (although I haven’t seen JACKIE BROWN or DEATH PROOF)–was an *emotional* realism. That movie is a love story. I engaged with it on that level, and it rewarded me.
And what the hey; I’ll reprint this comment from Katherine too, in conversation with Caroline Small.
Caro: “And I think we’ve gotten so absorbed in the violence questions we’ve lost sight of the realism one.”
Well, for my part, I’ve lost sight of what you mean, specifically, when you say “realism,” or argue against it. (See above re: my attention span.) For me, when realism is as mannered as INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS or KILL BILL it entirely ceases to be realism. I’d describe Tarantino’s recent work as, well, cinematic mannerism, as distant from my perception of “the real” as the Madonna with the Long Neck.
Caro: “I know that it’s because the Tarantino thread is happening on the soap opera post, but you (and others) have sort of implied that I’m saying that soap operas aren’t violent, and I’m not.”
I apologize for misconstruing your argument. But–as I perceive it, and my perception may be incorrect–you’ve been taking a moral stand against the representation of violence as entertainment (your distinction about *graphic* violence was lost on me until your most recent comment), identifying it as a feature of male-coded genres, and praising female-coded genres such as soaps in the same thread. Therefore, I made the assumption that you would argue that female-gendered genres do not rely on violence to provide entertainment.
Caro: “The “rapist love interest” is a feature of both soaps and romance, but there isn’t a lot of it after the ’70s and ’80s.”
Todd raped Marty on OLTL in the early ’90s, and was redeemed later in the decade. I wasn’t around for Luke and Laura, but I was around for Todd. To be fair, there was controversy–the actor who played Todd actually quit in protest–but, still, the fact that they did it at all…
They had their pleasures, but I don’t really miss those shows. Neither does my mother, who cut down on her soap-watching after she started working part-time, and finally dropped AMC about five years ago. Our TV-mediated mother-daughter bonding experiences are focused on PROJECT RUNWAY and SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE now. Looking back, I’m grateful that she’s a feminist, and could provide a feminist critique of what we were watching when it was needed (which it frequently was).
Caro: “It’s not my experience that the violence in soaps (or fanfiction) was particularly entertainment, certainly not in any voyeuristic or indulgent sense.”
Oh, my. How much fanfiction have you read? I’ve seen violence (more graphic and much more sexualized than Tarantino’s, and portrayed in greater detail) used as entertainment in fanfiction over and over and *over.* It’s one of the most common tropes. Yes, most of the time there’s some kind of narrative purpose for the violence–it’s usually a device to break down one character so that another can rebuild him–but the violence quite often happens onscreen, and quite often happens in graphic, sensuous, loving detail. When the brakes come off, as they do on the internet, there’s an awful lot of blood and torture in my gender’s collective imagination.
Caro: “they examine it obliquely through conversation and narration, they don’t present it directly through graphic representation.”
This *is* mostly true of soaps, but, like I said, one of the things fanfiction does, regularly, is present violence directly through graphic representation.
Back to soaps: is the portrayal of a rape or a murder on a soap entertainment, in a “voyeuristic or indulgent sense”? You’re right that, because soaps don’t present graphic violence (for whatever reason), their approach to violence is more about “motivations and structures,” more about the telling and retelling of an event. And yet: that event is still present. It’s there. Its specter looms over the narrative; the specter of a corpse, the specter of an abused body. And those specters provide a frisson for the audience. Violent plotlines on soaps–especially the frequent serial-killer stories–were heavily advertised, which leads me to suspect that they were a reliable ratings boost. I don’t really find that any more acceptable, despite the lack of onscreen blood, than the directly presented violence that drives the plot of RESERVOIR DOGS. Of course, I respect that your response is different.
For contrast: the last Cronenberg I saw was VIDEODROME (I had to watch it for a class; I wasn’t previously familiar with Cronenberg’s work), and I had a very difficult time with the early scene where the woman is tortured–so much so that, later in the film, I found myself thinking, “Yeah, people who would watch *that* for pleasure do kind of deserve to die,” and then being a little shocked that I’d had that thought. As always, the answers to all these questions are powerfully subjective.
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Update: This is part of an impromptu roundtable on Jaime and his critics.
TV soap operas are violent. Spousal abuse, child abuse, murder, rape… I’m pretty sure I learned what rape *was* from a soap opera. They depict those acts of violence less graphically than Tarantino does, but they’re limited by network content restrictions. The part violence plays in soap opera narratives, however, is just as base and exploitative as any Tarantino film could be argued to be: it’s there to titillate you. It’s there to sell ad time. It’s there to make you tune in tomorrow.
Yes, yes, but.
I don’t object to Tarantino’s use of violence because it’s base and exploitative. What pisses me off about it is that it’s so completely divorced from the experience of violence in life outside of media depictions. Violence is an abstraction for him, a toy for him to play with, like a box of Legos or something. What makes that use of it objectionable is that he is so committed to depicting the physical verisimilitude of it as well. And my reaction to that verisimilitude completely undermines my engagement with whatever intellectual point he is trying to make.
I don’t think film is a good medium for abstract explorations of violence, if the artist is committed to explicit verisimilitude as well. The explicitness always gets in the way. Violence is basically good for two things in movies: building tension and evoking catharsis. If the filmmaker is using graphic violence (or the threat of it) as a central element in a scene that’s supposed to be about something else–like the restaurant scene in Pulp Fiction–the violence is going to distract from and ultimately overwhelm the scene’s meaning.
For me and many others, that scene isn’t about the weak and the tyranny of evil or shepherds and sheep or redemption and second chances or whatever the hell else Jackson’s speech is about; it’s about watching a person terrorize another with a gun. I look at it and I think Tarantino is just too callow to understand this.
Soap operas of course use violent content as story hooks. Narratives need conflict to be effective, and violence is so perfect a trope for conflict that they’re practically synonymous. The question isn’t that there’s violence, the question is how it’s used. And because soaps are fettered by content restrictions (they also don’t have the budgets for elaborate stunt and FX work), they have to use violence in a way that requires them to explore the context of it, which leads to the context becoming the point. When it’s done well, that’s a hell of a lot more interesting to me than Tarantino’s nonsense.
Luke’s rape of Laura is a good example. (If you can get past the poor picture quality and out-of-sync sound, click here for the scene.) There’s nothing hyperbolic or titillating about it: no real or implied nudity, and the riper action all happens off-camera. It dramatizes how a generally decent man can rape a woman he cares about. All it takes is a little alcohol, a lot of self-pity, and the fantasy that comfort’s going to be found in the sex. And Laura isn’t depicted as having enjoyed the rape; she’s obviously terrified of him in the aftermath. It’s clear from his body language that he’s full of remorse and disgust with himself when it’s over. According to the accounts online, the show spent months exploring the emotional effects of what happened with the characters. (Laura never filed charges against him.) It’s a lot more responsible and sophisticated (and true-to-life) than depicting rape in the traditional way, which is to treat the assailant as some outside evil attacker, and the woman as a victim to be avenged.
I do think the show’s producers went terribly wrong in having Laura ultimately fall in love with Luke. It’s extremely unrealistic, if nothing else. If I have to guess why, it was a concession to the character’s popularity. Caro and I have both noted that the introduction of adventure- and crime-fiction elements were what was so fresh about GH during the period. Luke was very much a part of that; he was the sort of lowlife, straddling-both-sides-of-the-law hero that you’d find in a Jim Thompson novel. That kind of character was new to the soap milieu, and it made him exciting to watch. After months of him agonizing over the horrible wrong he did to the person he cared about most, I guess the producers figured the most satisfying narrative twist would be for Laura to forgive him and fall in love in return. If you’re a fan of a character, I suppose you want to see him redeemed as much as possible. The show did try to leave the rape storyline completely behind once it was over. I don’t remember a single reference to it during the “Ice Princess” storyline when I came on board a couple of years later.
You’re not actually disagreeing with Katherine, though. She says that she wants violence to be upsetting because violence is upsetting, and you should feel that. You’re saying that you dislike the violence because it’s upsetting and that’s all you can feel.
I think you’re downplaying the extent to which Tarantino thinks about and addresses the context of violence and the effect of it. That scene in the restaurant with Jules is terrifying…and it’s about how violence is terrifying, and you should walk away from it. I don’t really see how the theme and the use of violence are in conflict there.
And…I haven’t seen the soap, but it seems like if the violence of the rape was as upsetting as the violence in Tarnatino is, they would have been hard pressed to essentially forgive and forget it.
I disagree with her that soaps sanitize the violence because they can’t depict it explicitly. And I disagree that the explicitness of it in Tarantino’s films helps him make his points.
My response about the restaurant scene is that you don’t appreciate that, for me and others, Tarantino is using it to terrorize the viewer to a good degree. If one is being terrorized, one focuses on the instrument of the terrorization to the exclusion of all else. Any theme is beside the point in that circumstance.
No argument from me that the GH producers screwed up. If they wanted to redeem Luke, they needed to find another way. It wasn’t like the chemistry between the characters was all that compelling. Laura wasn’t anywhere as dynamic or interesting as Felicia or Anna Devane or even Holly, who was Luke’s love interest after the actress who played Laura left the show. Laura was a really dull character.
I do appreciate what you’re saying. My point is that that’s not at all discontinuous with the point of the scene, which is in large part about the evils of violence. And as Katherine says, if you make the violence more comfortable, you’re making the violence more comfortable, which enables storylines (and there are many, many, many examples in many mediums, from soap operas to cozies to Bond films) where violence is treated as a plot point which can be glossed over, rather than as important and problematic in its own right.
To me, anyway, you’re essentially saying, “violence can’t be depicted as intensely upsetting, because that’s callous.” But violence really is intensely upsetting, and I think you could argue that to *not* treat it that way is callous.
Not that every movie needs to be a Tarantino film, at all. And I like lots of media that treats violence in an offhand way (like Agatha Christie or Bond films, for example.) But I don’t think that treating violence as disturbing is immoral or out of bounds, though I certainly see why it’s not something that everyone is necessarily going to want to watch.
The issue, though, Noah, that you seem to keep missing in Robert’s point, is that the equation isn’t “offscreen violence = comfortable” versus “non-stop graphic violence = uncomfortable.”
The offscreen violence isn’t comfortable, and there are many many degrees of uncomfortably graphic violence before you get to the level present in Tarantino.
I think I said this somewhere on the other thread, but I think the question of the quantity and continuousness of the violence is still mostly unanswered. You said that there are things that the film can deal with through extremes that it couldn’t deal with otherwise, but I don’t know what those things are — the message you get from the diner scene surely isn’t something that couldn’t be conveyed effectively but differently…
I agree with everything Robert said, for the record, and would like to add that I found Luke a pretty repulsive character even coming in after the rape. He was just creepy. Especially when he was in the same scene as Scorpio.
This article from the Washington City Paper is a pretty well-done article on the “rapist love interest” device in romance.
And I think it ties into the question about violence in fanfiction — and highights a disagreement I have with Katherine about the way soaps are consumed, or at least were consumed in the ’80s and earlier. Like I said in the original post, the entertainment value came from the investigation of the motivations of the characters, that psychological intimacy — and the gossip about them that accompanied it. Fanfiction’s the same way (so is romance).
I have read a lot of fanfiction, over about a 15-20 year period, and fanfiction discussion groups as well (although I’m not a huge fan of them because they are, ultimately, fan communities). And while I didn’t mean that there is not violence in fanfiction and romance any more than I meant that soap operas weren’t violent, I think it’s both innaccurate and limiting to think of violence in any of those genres as “entertainment” in the voyeuristic or indulgent sense, where the pleasure comes from watching it happen and experiencing some kind of emotionally realist connection to it. That’s not what it’s there for. A voyeuristic gaze is really non-native to the romance genre. That’s why violence is so often offscreen – because you’re not supposed to take voyeuristic pleasure in it; you’re supposed to take pleasure instead in thinking about it, analyzing it, figuring out why it happened and why it made people feel the way they felt about it and about its aftermath. The violence isn’t depicted graphically because the pleasure comes in mastering the violence, not experiencing it.
I think that was part of the logic, dangerous and twisted as it was, of the rapist love interest: it symbolized “mastery” by the heroine, “catching” the rapist in marriage. It followed the same logic as taming a committment-phobic man, which was and is a much much more common plotline. But the problems with that phantasy I imagine are really obvious…it’s a sensible phantasy, though, to think of getting married as getting something over on the guy, for women in an era who had so few options for mastery and dominance outside of marriage.
The violence really isn’t continuous in Tarantino, is the thing. Like I said, Jackie Brown isn’t all that violent; none of his stuff is really as continually violent as slashers; most of it isn’t particularly violent compared to other action dramas. It’s not awfully violent compared to James Bond films. I suspect if you did a body count, most of his films would be much lower than most comparable genre fodder (Kill Bill is an exception, I think.)
And of course it’s not offscreen violence vs. onscreen violence that’s the issue. A lot of Tarantino’s violence is offscreen. In that diner scene Robert references, nobody dies (if I’m remembering correctly.) The unusual thing about it in terms of genre isn’t that it’s so violent — it’s that it’s *not* violent. The violence that’s advertised is not delivered. And since it’s a scene *about rejecting violence*, and since the rejection of violence is explicitly why there is no killing, it seems to me that the insistence on thematic incoherence is not especially logical.
And if the issue is just, “well, he could have made it less uncomfortable” — sure. And then it would have been more palatable and easier to fit into the kind of action narrative where the bad guys get shot in bunches and nobody really cares because it’s fun. This is what actually happens to his films when other people direct them, as near as I can tell. (Maybe not the Natural Born Killers; I haven’t seen that.) But that’s not what Tarantino wants to do. Instead he consistently presents violence as uncomfortable — not as a little bit uncomfortable, but as really uncomfortable.
The difference isn’t in quantity; it’s not in continuousness. It’s in the way the violence is treated. You notice the violence in a way you don’t in most other films because Tarantino is careful to make you notice it. And you insist that in doing so he’s immoral. And I find that argument really unconvincing.
I don’t need anybody to like it. I don’t need anybody to want to watch it. But the contention that the affect you have when watching it is the morally right affect to have, and that it is in itself wrong to produce that affect in anyone, seems crazy to me. If you think violence should never be shown in media, okay. But if you think that some violence is okay, it’s not clear to me why undisturbing violence, or moderately disturbing violence, or violence that is quite disturbing but not so disturbing that you in particular find it distracting, is okay, but disturbing violence is not okay.
As for the claim that there’s nothing thematically interesting going on in that scene with Jules; that’s really not my experience of it. It’s reversing genre conventions and undermining genre roles in a bunch of ways, not least in allowing/encouraging the gangster who wants to get out of the game to actually get out of the game. That’s going directly against the way the narrative is supposed to work, and is a real and moving statement of faith…in the explicit context of acknowledging that statements of faith are often bullshit, and that you make them not by what you say, but by what you do, and also in the context of insisting that your role — good, evil, criminal, honorable man — is defined not by your place in the narrative, but specifically by your act of faith, which comes from outside the narrative and breaks it. That break is traumatic, and I think Tarantino uses the threat of violence (which is rejected) as an indication of that traum. The fact that the film is organized around that act of faith rather than around conventional time is telling here also I think. Admittedly, Derrida and Barthes probably wouldn’t give a shit about any of that. But Badiou would.
The graphic violence vs. regular violence distinction — I don’t really buy it. Some of my problems with it are:, (a) there’s every reason for pacifists and those who are against violence to want to have people see graphic violence (as Katherine points out) ; (b) Tarantino’s violence is fairly graphic, but by no means off-the-charts graphic, and (c) many of the things you’re objecting to (like the scene with Jules,) aren’t graphic at all in the normal sense of the word.
Caro–
I don’t think the issue is the quantity and continuousness of the violence so much as it is the way that particular scene is designed. I felt like Tarantino was going out of his way to make me a voyeur to something I really don’t want to watch in a way I don’t want to watch it, and in a way I find immoral besides. I had similar reactions to the almost-rape scene in Schindler’s List and the execution scene in Changeling. In each instance, I wanted to go up to Tarantino or Spielberg or Eastwood and ask, what kind of asshole are you that you want me to watch that in the way you’re showing it? I think Tarantino’s intentions are more complex than either Spielberg’s or Eastwood’s, but more’s the pity. He’s working at cross-purposes and undercutting himself.
Did I say it was immoral? I thought I said it was cruel and mean. I do think that’s unethical, but I also said this:
Your take on that scene is so positive that you give the impression of ignoring or discounting the things in the scene that aren’t, the things Robert and I object to.
In the next paragraph I point out that I think Tarantino is smart enough (despite not being as smart as you) to realize that a lot of people will have this reaction. If he’s as smart as you say he is, then what’s he doing with that specific effect that Robert and I are reporting?
Robert — I think the quantity and continuousness is the bit that’s the signature of Tarantino, in particular, though. As you point out, other directors do what you’re describing; what sets Tarantino apart is doing it to you over and over and over, continuously throughout the film.
The group-shower scene in Schindler’s List qualifies, too. I wanted to puke when I saw how Terrence Rafferty praised that in his review.
The unusual thing about it in terms of genre isn’t that it’s so violent — it’s that it’s *not* violent. The violence that’s advertised is not delivered.
It’s very violent. The build-up is the same whether the scene ends in climax or anti-climax. The scene is still about waiting for the actor to pull out and ejaculate on the actress. Spielberg didn’t have the characters getting poison-gassed in the group-shower scene, either. He’s still working on you in a way that’s thoroughly obnoxious. As was Tarantino.
Yeah, Noah, I have trouble with the idea that psychological torture isn’t violence.
So much so that, seriously, from experience, I’d rather have my teeth drilled to the nub and a crown put on without novocaine in real life than watch Tarantino. Really.
Noah: “And since it’s a scene *about rejecting violence*, and since the rejection of violence is explicitly why there is no killing, it seems to me that the insistence on thematic incoherence is not especially logical.”
I think you’re fighting a losing battle trying to make Tarantino out to be the most thoughtful purveyor of screen violence in America. Focusing on the diner scene is fine but what about the rest of the movie? What about the rape-revenge homage to Deliverance in the basement scene with Bruce Willis and Ving Rhames? One could say that it posits violence as a means of redemption and male bonding. I’m sure both are true but that’s about as thoughtful as Saving Private Ryan. I’m sure he gets a kick out of out all that inner city hillbilly nonsense as well, just like Frank Miller.
There’s my problem: I think offscreen violence *is* comfortable. More comfortable, at least, in the same way that a report of how many people died in Iraq today is more comfortable than a slideshow of their corpses. The kids and parents who saw PRINCE CASPIAN got a comfortable war. If I had to choose between showing a ten-year-old that film and showing him INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, I’d pick Tarantino.
But, in the end, I don’t really want to argue anyone out of hating him, even if it were possible–hell, I don’t even like most of his movies that much. I just wanted to stand up and be counted; to demonstrate with my presence that appreciation of his work, and the genres he toys with, isn’t solely a guy thing.
Noah says:
I don’t think this is true, certainly not in comparison with ’60s/’70s Bond which is what most people think of, and the difference (which I also brought up on the other thread) is that in between the graphic physical violence, Tarantino inflicts psychological torture on his victims, ahem, audience by making them sit in tense anticipation (see Robert’s description for details.) So the tension of the violence never breaks.
But also, I’d really class Bond films as action-thriller, and I think they get that from the thriller genre, which tends to have periods of sustained quiet and calm.
I got mugged once, actually, and had a gun pointed at me. It felt pretty violent, actually. So I just don’t buy that the scene isn’t violent.
Is this really that uncommon? I mean, a gangster coming out of retirement to right some injustice — that’s all over the place. Isn’t retirement “getting out of the game?” And those guys often win. It’s completely ambiguous whether that type of thing is in Jules’ future. I sort of assumed it was — I took that part of it not as some inversion of genre but as backstory for that trope. The idea that gangsters burn out is pretty par for the course. I think the original Get Carter (which I actually like a lot, probably because Michael Caine is my favorite actor, to get at Robert’s point about Tony Stark…) is probably more rigorously moral on the turf of gangsters questioning their society. It doesn’t illustrate that they “get out of the game” but it definitely illustrates the disillusionment…
I’m far from a Tarantino apologist (I hated Kill Bill for reasons that have little to do with violence) but I wonder how this discussion would play out if purely subjective affective responses were acknowledged, then put on the shelf. I understand being repulsed by the high tension of Pulp Fiction’s last scene, but I also understand NOT being repulsed by it, because I wasn’t, and I’m terribly upset by he slightest hint of violence. And by violence I mean violence, not the “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” violence of the movies.
When I was in college I was in a play about an Australian prison colony (Our Country’s Good by Timberlake Wertenbaker. Check it out) and Act One ended with a convict getting whipped onstage. In Act Two he showed the audience his back, which looked like ripped pork. This always got gasps from the audience. But as I was in the show, I was down in the dressing room with that actor during intermission, and I saw him laugh and flirt with the girl who did the makeup for his seemingly abused back. I’ve never looked at presentational narrative “violence” the same way since.
That doesn’t make me better or worse than anyone, I think; just better able to watch Pulp Fiction without getting distressed. Robert and Caro’s emotional distress in the face of Pulp Fiction is perfectly legit as a response, but Tarantino’s not torturing anyone.
Ng Suat Tong wrote:
I’m sure he gets a kick out of out all that inner city hillbilly nonsense as well, just like Frank Miller.
Come to Birmingham, Alabama, and I will show you authentic inner city hillbillies. They are a real phenomenon.
Oh, I’m sure they exist and great to make fun of to boot.
As a B’ham native I’m not one to make fun of inner-city hillbillies. Actually I live in Kannapolis, NC now, and when my sis-in-law came to visit. she declared after a trip to the local grocery: “I was getting a very Winter’s Bone vibe off some customers there,” and I got offended even as I nodded in agreement.
I don’t think offscreen violence is comfortable at all. Eastwood passing the corpse on the horse in “A Fistful of Dollars” sets the stage for the rest of the film. The firing squad scene in Army of Shadows, which like the diner scene in PF does not actually end in violence, is IMO the most powerful statement of the horror of war ever filmed. I think that whole movie, which has very little graphic violence although it doesn’t really turn away, is an incredibly powerful statement about the effects of violence on individuals, vastly more so than any of Tarantino’s caricature. It’s extraordinary. (If all realism were like that, I’d like realism. Of course, Melville said “with one exception — the German occupation — I excluded all realism,” so perhaps that is why…)
Also, I can’t see the word “Antietam” on the roadsign without tearing up.
Compare the last scene of Failsafe with all the shitty movies showing mushroom clouds.
Oh, and compare the torture scene in the Battle of Algiers with the one in Reservoir Dogs. Can you really say his shaking emaciated body, and his eyes when they pull that cap onto his head, are comfortable images? It’s obviously a different kind of discomfort, because as Robert says, you’re not being psycholgoically tortured by the director. But it’s far from sanitized.
Offscreen violence obviously doesn’t provoke the same TYPE of discomfort as onscreen, but I don’t really accept that the best way to create sensitivity to violence is to show the violence itself to people; the best way to create sensitivity to violence is to show them its effects.
I’m curious for Katherine and Noah — how do you react to violence in prose books? I think Cormac McCarthy is guilty of the same sins of overstuffing his work with violence as Tarantino (contradicting my own comment to Robert earlier there); does it play differently for you in prose and on film?
I think Tarantino’s very smart, which is not the same thing as saying he’s infallible. I think the hillbilly deliverance section of pulp fiction, along with Bruce Willis (an actor I generally can’t stand) were misfires.
Caro, the scene with Jules is one in which everybody’s armed. It’s very tense, but Jules isn’t torturing the guy deliberately to harm him; he’s trying to get everybody out of there without getting hurt. It is *not* like the rape scene in Schindler’s list, where you are made to voyeuristically watch a rape just to essentially show that yes, the bad guy is a bad guy. It’s not even like the scene in Reservoir Dogs where people are actually tortured.
And I have actually given multiple reasons as to why the affect there is what it is. It’s a scene about the renunciation of violence, so the threat of violence as an actual, physical, frightening presence is very appropriate. It’s a scene about transformation and rupture, so again, trauma makes sense. What I’m hearing from you and Robert is that there is *nothing* that would make it okay to have a scene this tense…which I’m just finding a little hard to swallow when we’re talking about a scene that doesn’t actually have any violence in it.
Re: James Bond. The 60s/70s Bonds are quite brutal. Lots of people die in horrible ways, and the horrible ways are part of the fun. It’s a lot closer to torture porn in that way than anything Tarantino does, I think. The guy in the Bond film who is tied up underwater and you watch him realise he can’t escape and thrash around before he finally dies is especially nice, I think. That death is completely a throw away, too; it’s just there to let you know how evil the bad guy is, and because it’s a James Bond film and it’s cool to see the bad guy murder people in horrible ways. It’s certainly as gratuitous as anything in a Tarantino film, and much more gratuitous — in the sense of being unthematized, amoral, unnecessary, and graphic — than most of his work.
The difference is, as you say, this:
“Tarantino inflicts psychological torture on his victims, ahem, audience by making them sit in tense anticipation (see Robert’s description for details.) So the tension of the violence never breaks. ”
In short, the difference is the suspense. It’s not about violence at all (which again, Bond has higher body counts, I’m pretty sure); it’s about anticipation and actually worrying about what’s going to happen to the victims. I mean, you’re basically saying again that it’s worse because you don’t get a release — and my question to you is, why is it more moral to provide a satisfying narrative release from violence? Bond villains are killed quickly and efficiently so it all feels like a game and who the hell cares about that guy who got drowned, since he was a creep anyway? Why is that better, though? Because it makes the cold war more palatable? Or what?
I think it’s interesting that the violence you’re worried about isn’t anything represented on screen; your complaint is really that the experience of suspense is psychological torture in itself. I have something of the same experience watching bad sitcoms, actually; I find the grinding onslaught of social embarrassment physically painful. But I think it’s a leap to go from that to accusing the creators of the sitcoms of actually planning to torture me.
I think it’s also worth noting that the investment in the films that you are rejecting is *not* sadistic investment. It’s masochistic investment — which is how suspense works. Masochistic investment is also, against your claims, very much tied into narrative. And it’s also, of course, not about wanting to inflict violence on other people, nor really about enjoying inflicting violence on others. Sometimes it loops around and is tied into vengeance for Tarantino, definitely, though often in interesting ways (as in Death Proof, where it’s tied to feminism, or Kill Bill, where there’s an ambivalence about the righteousness in many cases.) But sometimes, as with Jules, it’s tied to a rejection of violence, or (in various places) to a mockery and denigration of those who use violence.
Re the diner scene; the usual trope in these cases is that the bad guy tries to get out of the game after one more heist, and of course the heist goes awry and he never does. I’d be interested to hear, though, of a genre film in which getting out of the game is related in such a qualified but still heartfelt way to spiritual transformation, and in which that transformation is seen as transcending narrative as well as being specifically tied to narrative rupture. It could be out there; Tarantino rips stuff off all the time, obviously, and the whole situation could be a clever lift. Even if he took it from somewhere else, though, I still find it moving.
Jeez; can’t even finish a comment before three more pop up.
I really dislike Cormac McCarthy, but that’s because of his crappy I-want-to-be-Hemingway-no-Faulker-no-Hemingway prose rather than because of the violence in his writing.
I like Stephen King, sometimes a lot. I’m re-reading the Hunger Games, which is really ridiculously, hyperbolically violent, but again the prose is the more painful bit. There’s obviously something more visceral about violence onscreen, and much more visceral about suspense (which I’m thinking more and more is the real issue here), since with prose you can always skip ahead.
I think in Tarantino in a lot of ways the suspense is more important than the violence; the violence is there because you need it for the suspense, but the suspense is actually the thing. and again, suspense is narrative, which I think gets at the thing that you and Robert tend to gloss over, which is that the narratives are really important in the films — way more than in James Bond or most genre action stuff.
Oh, and the violence in the spaghetti westerns is tons more comfortable than the violence in Tarantino. I love those movies, but they’re utterly unperturbing bad-ass body count films; the anti-war themes in the Good the Bad and the Ugly are totally there for the sweeping melodrama, not because Leone gives a crap about pacifism, or intends to pause and think anything even remotely intelligent about violence.
Haven’t seen Battle of Algiers. I agree with Robert that the rape scene in Schindler’s List is pretty unforgivable, though, even compared to the rest of that crappy film.
I think you’re misunderstanding me if you think what I’m saying is that nothing would make it ok to have a scene as tense as the diner scene. The firing squad scene in Army of Shadows is arguably more tense. I like suspense fine when it isn’t either violent or awkward. When it’s that uncomfortable, it becomes anxiety, because you’re protecting yourself from experiencing something that is past a threshhold of uncomfortable. There is no way that Tarantino is unaware of how his films push the boundaries of that threshhold.
I not sure what I said that made you think I reject the idea that masochistic investment is tied to narrative – that’s not the way I’d put it, but I don’t think what you’re suggesting I think.
I do, however, think having a sado-masochistic economy forced on me in a film makes that film less smart and more aggressive. I especially don’t like having sado-masochism forced on me by a male director, using a fetishistic male gaze. The reasons for that should be astoundingly obvious from the verb “forced.”
And because of that, because the film’s libidinal economy is aggressive and threatening, the “tense anticipation” is anxiety, not suspense. You don’t feel suspense when you’re being threatened. The experience of psychological torture isn’t suspensful. So when you say “it’s suspense, and you treat that as torture,” (to paraphrase), you’re ignoring the ways in which the torturousness of it is built into the scene – by asking the viewer to enjoy guarding him or herself against something violent. You might enjoy that, but I don’t. And your reading should take both of us into account.
Do you think the feeling I described on the other thread of being in a bank hostage situation is “suspense”? ‘Cause that’s the feeling that scene gives me, and I guess you can call it suspense, but the tension isn’t from curiousity or even tension about what’s going to happen next, it’s from anxiety about how long it’s going to take to be over. At the very most I’d call that FAILED suspense.
The problem is that anxiety is part of the film, and your reading doesn’t deal with anxiety – only pleasure. Pretending the anxiety is equivalent to suspense or masochism doesn’t solve that problem.
You say this: “It’s a scene about the renunciation of violence, so the threat of violence as an actual, physical, frightening presence is very appropriate.”
but I don’t think it’s a scene about the renunciation of violence, at least not in the sense that you are claiming. I think it matters, crucially, that once Jules makes that decision to leave, the narrative leaves him and follows Vincent. Once he is redeemed, he is no longer part of the narrative.
Cutting up the scenes — putting that one at the end gives you the illusion that the whole movie is about abandoning violence. But that’s just a formalist nod to the conventional moralizing endings that usually accompany gangster films. Breaking up the narrative is a trick to set up that illusion. But the actual narrative leaves Jules behind. Chronologically, once Jules stops being a gangster, he disappears from the storyline. The narrative that film tells is a narrative where redeemed characters, all individuals who will not participate in the violent, sado-masochistic libidinal economy, are excluded — just like Jules.
So the narrative itself is not about redemption. Redemption is its supplement – it is metacommentary about the exclusion of redemption from the gangster narrative at its limit.
But so is every other film about gangsters, because they never get redeemed. All Tarantino did was displace the conventional narrative onto the metatextual plane and fill the textual plane with fetishized violence. But the metatextual narrative is exactly the same as the one in all the films he is citing.
Pulp Fiction is intensely metatextual. There’s no doubt about that. But it’s not adding anything to the conversation about those themes, and it exacts a very high price for that metatext — a less fetishistic director could have accomplished the exact same thing with significantly less violence. It would have just required some characterization and less fetish.
I wasn’t really responding to “is offscreen violence as uncomfortable as onscreen violence?” It clearly isn’t. I was responding to “offscreen violence is comfortable.” It’s the active-ness of “comfortable” that seems wrong. Not “less uncomfortable” – of course it’s less uncomfortable. But unless you’re just completely repressing what the effects of the violence mean, it’s not comfortable.
If I thought about it for awhile I could probably parse the meta-text in PF a little more comprehensively. I think it’s very controlled, too — it’s not the really fluid kind, it’s more like Pynchon than Godard. I think it ends up emphasizing the ways in which the subject position of the audience for a gangster film is the subject position of the gangsters, which…that’s not really that excitingly insightful, is it?
Here’s the way I think I want to say this (just so there’ll be three posts for you):
The fragmentation of the narrative in Pulp Fiction is a symbol of the way that conventional gangster genre narratives destroy both the realities of actual gangster experience and the potential representational power of fictionalized gangster experience; Tarantino’s assertion is that the “true” narrative of the gangster is distorted by the conventional genre formulation, which both papers over the violence of that experience and the pathology of fascination with it. The film ramps that pathology up to 11, forcing the audience to confront the reality of gangster violence through noise, tension, graphic violence, blood, and the accompanying anxiety. Performatively, the film pushes the libidinal pleasures of the gangster narrative to the limit, putting the receptive audience into the gangster’s own subject position, finding an anxious enjoyment in the violence, while reminding the repulsed audience that the artificiality of the conventional gangster genre narrative is, indeed, no substitute or simulacrum of the real thing.
That’s, of course, also why I say it is realist at its core…
Well, that’s why I said, “More comfortable, at least…”
I was talking about the type of violence soap operas are full of. Murders on soap operas do not bear their own weight. They do not, for the most part, depict the terror of the victim (because they’re usually whodunits, so the murder itself can only be depicted obliquely if at all), and they do not engage with the physical reality of the corpse. You never hear, “My husband’s been killed, and now I have to spend all day on my knees scrubbing his blood out of the goddamn living room rug” on a soap.
The accidental killing of Marvin in PULP FICTION is frequently referenced as needless, sadistic violence, and I don’t reject that argument out of hand, but I have a certain respect for Tarantino’s presentation of that scene. Vincent shoots Marvin; there’s a moment of excitement, of thrill or horror, but after that moment passes, Vincent and Jules are stuck with a car with a corpse in it, and there begins the tedious work of getting Marvin out of the upholstery. That’s what’s so “graphic” about that scene, and that’s what I appreciate; the acknowledgement that, after the thrill of action is gone, a body remains, a wound remains, physicality remains. What offends me about the rote use of violence in fiction is the reduction of the act of violence to the moment of thrill, or, as in soaps and other non-“graphic” genres, that moment received thirdhand. Do those genres depict the effects of violence on psychology, on emotion, on interpersonal relationships? Yes, and sometimes they do it very well. But the physical facts aren’t there, and to me, the physical body matters.
I haven’t seen THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS. But the torture scene in RESERVOIR DOGS is, technically, offscreen violence; Tarantino pans away when Mr. Blonde puts the razor to Marvin’s ear. Almost everything Tarantino shows during that scene is threat, not act. How do I feel about that? Not that positive, really. I’d honestly rather have the camera hold on Mr. Blonde and Marvin. If you’re going to raise the specter of torture in my imagination, I’d rather you force me to look at it (inasmuch as any director can force me to look at anything; I’m not undergoing the Ludovico Treatment) than do me the kindness of panning away. But the torture scene isn’t the most memorable part of RESERVOIR DOGS, for me; I think it’s one of the weaker moments in the film.
Obviously, I have to note that, as Caro said, there are levels of graphic violence, and onscreen-offscreen is a continuum, not a binary. To say “offscreen violence is comfortable” will not accurately describe every moment of violence suggested in film but not seen. But “offscreen violence is more comfortable than onscreen violence” is a generalization I’m willing to make.
I’ll get to violence in novels tomorrow–maybe; I’m going to visit my parents so I’ll be busy.
Finally, Caro, I am really sorry that you had to teach a film you hate. If I had to teach, say, the first episode of DOLLHOUSE I’d be clawing at the walls by the end of the first class. You have my sincere admiration for your professional forbearance.
Katherine said: “You never hear, ‘My husband’s been killed, and now I have to spend all day on my knees scrubbing his blood out of the goddamn living room rug’ on a soap.”
That’s true, for both this and cleaning the car. But it’s not because they soaps are whitewashing; it’s because they’re rarely from the vantage point of extremely violent criminals. The only reason the characters in PF are doing that is because they’re criminals who need to cover up evidence. I don’t see people “dealing with the physical body” — I see criminals covering up evidence.
If someone in your car was shot, say in a drive by shooting, and there was gore all over your car, you would not have to clean it — it would be impounded by the police as evidence and totaled by your insurance company.
If someone died violently in your house, you would not have to clean that either — you, or your insurance, would bring in people to do it.
If the point of that scene was that the people were innocent and too poor to have insurance to help them or something, or if we were seeing the has-to-be-miserable routines of the people the insurance company hires to clean this stuff, then I could see it as being about the violence. But it’s not. It’s about the costs of crime. It’s part of Tarantino’s drawing equivalences between the audience and the gangsters, related to Hitchcock’s point that Domingos brought up.
It’t not just about the cost of crime. It’s about the cost of violence.
I talked about why I think Jules’ transformation breaks the narrative. I don’t think it’s simply to reference other gangster narratives; it’s also to question them and open them up. Certainly Tarantino is saying, “redemption is not in these narratives…” but that’s in part because redemption transcends narratives (a la Badiou). It’s a rupture. And the rupture *is not* realism. The point is not that “actual gangsters are redeemed,” surely.
I think there is a sense in his movies that violence is often banal and stupid…but it’s rarely addressed in anything like a purely realist vein. And, in any case, I”m pretty okay with a movie suggesting against it’s genre tropes that violence is banal and stupid.
I actually find your reading quite interesting though, and would argue that it is quite complicated and thematically layered.
“using a fetishistic male gaze.”
I don’t see this in Tarantino especially. Not compared to Hitchcock, not compared to Cronenberg, not compared to standard Hollywood action films especially, even. The gaze is usually referred to in a gendered sense; most of the scenes we’re talking about involve men. I’d be interested to hear why you think the restaurant scene is an example of a fetishized male gaze.
Last…you keep talking about Tarantino using force on you, and even using psychological torture on you. I’m presuming there’s some metaphorical distance there, but it really doesn’t feel like there’s as much as there should be. Insisting that Tarantino’s films are actual psychological torture or actual force seems pretty problematic, inasmuch as psychological torture and force do exist, and this is not that.
No, it’s about the cost of violent crime. The noun is still crime. Those acts of violence would have very different costs for the people connected to the victims who aren’t in this film – Vincent’s estranged sister, Marvin’s grandmother, Jules’ child from his first marriage.
I think the ways in which the torture and force gets out of the film and is acted on the audience is part of the performativity of the film. I think it’s completely intentional. In many respects, it’s the smartest thing he does, critiquing the contract with the audience like that. But it’s also the most problematic choice.
Mulvey’s got two kinds of male gaze – voyeuristic and fetishistic. Hitchcock and Cronenberg are both voyeuristic. I think the restaurant scene is a fetishized gaze for the same reasons I thought it on the previous post…
I’m not sure what else to say about the redemption narrative you’re seeing. Your textual evidence is really selective and omits anything that challenges the way you view it. That’s what I’ve been saying all along about the reading — you like the film so you’re crafting a reading that papers over the aspects of it that undermine what you’re saying.
The problem is two fold: I don’t see any evidence, internal or comparative, that Jules’ tranformation (such as it is) questions gangster narratives. It’s standard gangster trope.
Also, you’re making the claim a la Badiou that the act of narrating a character choosing a redeemed path throws the rest of the narrative into some suspect place.
But Badiou’s point refers to “breaking narrative” in the more Lacanian sense: redemption as a logical possibility — the innocence of Christ — is ‘of the Real’ which is what makes it powerful; it ruptures, not “stories”, but the narrative fabric of the Symbolic order.
Here is Badiou:
You can’t jump from philosophy to literature unproblematically, because literature is as fully of the Symbolic as redemption is of the Real. Badiou doesn’t mean that any narration of redemption is disruptive – he means that redemption can’t really get purchase in a narrative in the first place. He rejects the redemption at the end of the Ring; I think he would likewise reject the idea that Jules’ redemption is properly so. I can’t find the essay on Wagner but here is Zizek’s take:
Your argument is that the redemption not only gets purchase, but gets so much purchase that nothing else happening in the scene, or the film, ultimately matters. You’re reading the whole film as a redemption story on the basis of a redemptive turn at the very end. All you’re doing is taking an axiom — “redemption transcends narratives” — and interpreting it to mean that as long as there is a redemption in the narrative, the rest of the narrative takes on the character of a critique.
But that’s the conventional function of narrative redemption, that it creates a sense of wrongness via contrast, creating a moral message. If Jules’s redemption “breaks” the narrative — it breaks it in exactly the same way that it is broken in a conventional moral crime story where a wicked character repents and is redeemed, and honestly, I think Tarantino is more original than THAT. He’s fetishistic and perverse and completely obsessed with conventional narratives, but he does legitimately pervert them, he doesn’t just replicate them.
Is your insistence on this redemption narrative because that’s really your experience of the film or are you just trying to make me see it as more moral?
I mean, I have this image of your Jules, Pastor Jules, fat and happy in his coffin after dying of natural causes at the age of 103, with hundreds of people crying at his wake and the Congressional medal of honor pinned to his chest for all the amazing heroic things he did for America after he got redemption and left the life of crime for a life of Christian service.
You really don’t think we’re supposed to have ANY suspicions at all about how well getting out works for him? It just plays like complete gangster trope to me.
“Your textual evidence is really selective and omits anything that challenges the way you view it. That’s what I’ve been saying all along about the reading”
Pot, kettle….
The trick is, in the gangster narratives, the gangsters aren’t redeemed. The moral message at the end of gangster films is generally that evildoers get theirs. Again, I ask; which gangster films are these where the villain is redeemed exactly, and where that redemption is linked both to faith and narrative rupture? Not Scorcese or Coppola. Not Superfly. Not Riffi. Not Bonnie and Clyde, Standard Hollywood crime dramas with a happy ending (I just saw one coming out tomorrow) aren’t about redemption, but about the characters being good all along usually.
I think what you’re missing in my discussion of Badiou and Tarantino is the way that the film enacts narrative rupture. It isn’t just that there’s a moral tacked on the end; it’s that the moral and the faith are figured quite deliberately as being outside the narrative economy of the film, and as rupturing that economy. I don’t think that’s the only message of the film, but it seems like a fairly important one. And the fact that Jules’ redemption is not narrativized in the symbolic seems fairly important too, yes? As well as the way that Jules tries to work through the issues of violence and faith and redemption in a specifically textual context (with a biblical passage, right?) as a problem essentially of mapping the symbolic onto the real. It seems to me that Tarantino is fairly consciously exploring the issues Badiou and Zizek raise. He doesn’t jump unproblematically from narrative to redemption, as Zizek accuses Wagner of doing. Rather, he raises redemption as a possibility which pulls the narrative out of true, and ultimately escapes from it, leaving behind elliptical traces.
I mean, I think it’s important that Jules’ redemption comes in basically allowing two crooks to steal a bunch of money from everybody without killing them. It’s not exactly a case of good triumphing unproblematically, or of a moralistic Hollywood ending. The moral force really is the renunciation of violence, not the reestablishment of moral order. That’s pretty unusual, and quite smart I think.
And yeah, I found the ending scene powerful and moving, as I found Vince’s end tragic in its banal ridiculousness. I could insist that you have to have to have to take that into account or you’re not giving a full reading of the film I guess….
Anyway, it seems like you’re not willing to really qualify your claim that Tarantino is actually torturing you, which puts us at something of an impasse. You insist that I’m bordering on morally culpable if I don’t account for the fact that Tarantino is torturing you, and I feel pretty strongly that treating what he’s doing as torture is morally really dicey. I don’t think that’s really a reconcilable gap…so I may try to stop yammering on about this and do some work today!
Oh, and just in response to your last…practitioners of nonviolence very often don’t end up happy and fat in their coffins. Renouncing violence doesn’t end violence, and redemption doesn’t guarantee a happy ending.
Well, I intentionally set up that reading to emphasize the tension between the narrative you’re describing and the narrative Robert and I are seeing. It’s not ignoring what you’re saying is happening, except with regards to the parts I’m still trying to get a handle on which mostly involve the way you think the redemption piece of the narrative works. I can’t incorporate that when it still doesn’t make sense to me!
Also, I still don’t understand why you keep ignoring this statement: “Like in that last scene of Pulp Fiction — I don’t think it is a moral failing to read it as about non-brutishness. I think it is a critical failing for a reading not to take into account the emotional affect of the amped-up tension in parsing that.”
I say outright that it’s not a moral failing, and yet you say that I “insist” you’re “bordering on morally culpable.” I’m not sure what to do about that other than giving up…but giving up puts me in the position of never understanding what it is about the film that makes you see the redemption working the way you do, and that prevents me from dealing thoroughly with your first item. I’m nicely boxed in there!
You say the possibility of redemption “pulls the narrative out of true, and ultimately escapes from it, leaving behind elliptical traces.” Elliptical traces of what? What does “pulled out of true” mean?
What’s your evidence that Jules is actually redeemed, for real? As you point out, it isn’t exactly a full-on redemption, but you’re claiming it’s full-on Antigonean Ate, capable of an intervention into the symbolic tapestry of the narrative. What’s the evidence for this redemption — which is really mostly reform with some spiritual text wrapped around it — being THAT KIND of redemption. What makes it more “for real” than the typical gangster-movie guy who once-upon-a time said he was getting out, but then gets drawn back in for morally understandable reasons (like the murder of a brother or something)? Just because PF is set at the moment of “once upon a time” doesn’t automatically make the conventional contours of the narrative suddenly evaporate, especially when he’s so concerned with campily miming them. And just because it was emotionally affecting — it was supposed to be — doesn’t mean that emotional affect trumps everything else. It’s not a linear film – it doesn’t reach a linear climax. But you’re giving thematic precedence to the linear ending — why?
The answer I’m coming up with right now to your question about other redeemed gangsters is “Guys and Dolls,” which is based on the humorous gangster stories of Damon Runyon. Sky Masterson is reformed by falling in love with a Salvation Army missionary, but it’s Nicely Nicely who more closely fits what you’re describing for Jules — he’s so moved by the sermon that he gives up gambling (and drinking and all the other completely non violent gangster vices in the film) and joins the salvation army himself. Watch Nicely here. It’s obviously a musical comedy, but…
There were a whole spate of movies in the 1940s about gangsters who were reformed by patriotism and Love of Country during the war; it’s not as directly Christian as the musical, but it’s not that dissimilar. This Gun for Hire is probably the best example, but I believe at least a couple of Bogart’s tough-guy characters had gangster backgrounds. “Angel on my Shoulder” is pretty explicitly religious – the gangster dies and is sent back to earth as a good guy to make up for his sins, and gets reformed in the process.
Most of the serious, non-comical, examples of reformed gangsters do involve their going back into the world of crime to avenge some legitimate moral wrong or their getting sucked back in because they’re inherently corrupted by their knowledge of the underworld. But there’s nothing in the film to foreclose the possibility of this happening to Jules, too, so I think these films are also predecessors. It’s not like reformed gangsters are unusual…there was one in the lead male role in that God awful Playboy Club TV show, although it definitely wasn’t religion that reformed him. Also, traditionally, gangsters weren’t seen as lacking religion but as being Catholic.
At this point I honestly think your emphasis on this redemption stuff makes the film seem LESS smart than it actually is. You’re about to convince me it’s even worse than I thought it was! Don’t do that!
I’m not saying I disagree that Tarantino is deliberately interested, in the Jules character, in faith and reform. He definitely and deliberately shows you the positive moment of getting out and the search for redemption that precedes it. But it’s a note; it’s not the tonality of the whole film. And it’s effect isn’t to transform the entire film into a redemption narrative. It’s simply that he makes sure redemption is included in the narrative, because it’s an interesting flavor of reformed gangster.
To me, your reading answers the question of what it means that the scene was moved to the end — it doesn’t answer the question of why he didn’t make the end align chronologically with the last of the narrative. I mean, what’s your take on why he created a film where the narrative is so fragmented temporally instead of a chronological one culminating in the same type of redemption? It’s not like Quentin Tarantino is such an inept screenwriter that he wasn’t remotely capable of writing a straight linear narrative about a gangster finding spirituality.
I think it’s more like the trick in Mary Reilly, showing you directly something that’s always been there but is usually set aside. He fills in all the things, like the moment of redemption and cleaning the rugs, that are left out of the standard gangster narrative, and the narrative collapses under its own weight. He doesn’t “break” it through some kind of redemptive Ate as in Antigone.
At least, I don’t see any textual evidence for that…obviously you do, somewhere, but I’m not seeing it from what you’ve said so far.
Your reading, as it currently stands, asserts that kind of disruptive Ate – it depends on the gangster genre’s standard narrative being weaker than this one scene, reading this scene as “breaking” the standard narrative. But why do you see that, instead of, say, having the scene complicate or double it in some problematizing way where the filled-in narrative co-exists right alongside the conventional gangster story. Perhaps you’re trying to see the film just as slasher, where the redemption is much rarer, and ignoring gangster narrative, but I think it’s clearly just as much a gangster film, if not more, and I think the latter, the doubling, the overweighting of the conventional genre narrative with all it’s blindspots by all the “real” details and implications he can pack in, is what Tarantino is doing.
The narrative is broken in that it’s not linear, yes? It’s fractured around Jules’ redemption. And it’s also broken in the sense that Jules’s redemption escapes the narrative; it isn’t narrativized. He is redeemed, and he disappears.
This has been the point of my reading all along, so I’m somewhat stumped by your contention that I don’t answer the question of why the narrative isn’t linear. If it’s a linear narrative, it does what Zizek says; that is, it tacks on a moral which is then supposed to moralize the whole. In this version, though, it echoes back and forth through the narrative. That doesn’t necessarily clean everything up at all…in fact, you can see Jules as responsible for Vince’s death, since he probably wouldn’t have died if he’d had a partner. But it points to redemption being outside narrative, and therefore as refiguring narrative. It’s an event, and the narrative crystallizes around the event, not the other way around.
Good examples of redeemed gangsters! Haven’t seen most of those; Guys and Dolls is pretty different though, in that it’s about the civilizing process of romance (if I remember aright.) Jules’ redemption comes out of nowhere…which like I said is a thing I like about it.
You did say that it’s a critical failing, not a moral failing. However…I’m pretty far from convinced that critical failings are not morally inflected in this case. Especially in a situation where you’re basically saying that my critical failing is refusing to acknowledge torture. Refusing to acknowledge torture is a moral act, no matter how you look at it, I think. That’s the impasse; you’re accusing me of refusing to acknowledge torture, and I really do refuse to acknowledge that what Tarantino is doing is torture. So I think we’re stuck.
I’ve provided a fair bit of textual and theoretical evidence I think; the issue isn’t so much that there haven’t been enough words spilled as that you just don’t buy it. Which is okay; these things happen. I haven’t seen Pulp Fiction in quite some time, either, so this might inspire me to rewatch and reassess. I can write something about it and perhaps that’ll be clearer, or more annoying, depending.
You keep insisting that Tarantino is contrasting the gangster narrative with *reality*. I don’t think that’s what’s happening. He contrasts the gangster narratives with other genres (sit-com in the most notable moment, but also with the horror of deliverance.) The effect is to question and undermine the genre tropes, but not necessarily in the interest of reality as such — though I think there are questions and implications about real world violence.
Let me just stick with this redemption question until we get it sorted: You said “It’s fractured around Jules’ redemption,” and that helps ’cause that’s the part I don’t get.
The stories of Vincent and Mia and the various Butch stories are also interspersed, also fragmented and broken up and out of order, How is the fracturing of those narratives organized “around Jules’ redemption”?
I could be forgetting, but I believe the film opens with a scene from the diner, right, and then ends back there? It seems to me like that’s the anchor of the film (or an anchor, anyway.) It bookends everything else; it starts there and comes around to end there. Those scenes are also (Wikipedia helpfully tells me!) chronologically the middle of the film. Given all that, I don’t think it’s crazy to see that scene(s) central, or to see the fracturing of the narrative as split around it. It inflects the action in many of the other scenes, and is perhaps mirrored/refracted in the scene with Bruce Willis, which is also organized narratively around the substitution of reconciliation for revenge (though obviously not sans violence…and I’d prefer that reconciliation not be achieved through mutual loathing of poor people and gay people. But like I said, not everything works.)
OK I get it now. And yes, for the constructed narrative, the one that’s all out of order, I agree that the Jules narrative gets all the privileged places.
But there’s also the chronological narrative, where those scenes with Jules are all at the beginning – clustered at the beginning of the story, taking up about 1/3 of total story time. So the Jules narrative is much less central in the chronological narrative; in that version you have three clusters – the Jules storyline, the Vincent and Mia storyline, and the Butch storyline. Chronologically the film ends with Butch and Fabian driving off into the sunset on his motorcycle, if I remember right.
I think the disjunct is that you’re treating the fractured narrative as definitive and reading the fracturing as a symbol for the way redemption “breaks” narrative, and I’m reading the fracturing as a very overt metatext that keeps both the broken narrative and the chronological narrative in play as doubles of each other in order to comment on the experience and conventions of gangster film. Your reading takes the fragmentation as an erasure of the chronological narrative. But the chronology isn’t gone; it’s just obscured. Once you’ve seen it 12 times, what happens when in real time is pretty easy to see.
I don’t think I’m erasing the chronological narrative exactly. I’m focusing on it because I think it calls into question your insistence that the violence is gratuitous and/or the idea that the film has no moral vision.
I think you’re right that the narratives double and comment on each other. Vincent’s death is in some way negated by the out of chronology resurrection at a scene of redemption — but at the same time, Jules’ renunciation of violence is complicated by the knowledge that that renunciation results in Vincent’s death.
The place where I think we part company is that you see the doubling as a way to undermine the gangster narrative in the interest of reality. The conventions fall apart and what you’re left with is the sordid truth of Hobbesian violence. Gangster narratives cancel, and what you’re left with is the evil, brutal truth.
I don’t think that’s what’s happening. Rather, I think the narratives intersect and erase and double not in the interest of showing the real brutal truth, but in the interest of offering possibilities — not a cancellation of the symbolic in favor of the real, but a conversation between the two. A lot of that conversation is around violence — it’s attraction, it’s banality, the possibility of escaping it and the impossibility of escaping it. There’s certainly the possibility that Jules is full of shit in various ways. There’s also the possibility that he isn’t.
I do need to see the film again. I also need to finish the essay I’m supposed to be working on, damn it….
I am so peeved that I didn’t know this thread had taken off! Aw man…..
As you two know, I’ve been busy on the other thread annoying Mike by making a pretty (to me) straightforward claim that stories relate to history as well as to subjective categories. So anyhow, the idea that “it’s not because they soaps are whitewashing; it’s because they’re rarely from the vantage point of extremely violent criminals,” to me, reads like privileging a psychological response, not relatively but absolutely, over the economic dilemma that any Mexican standoff implies. How does anyone feed themselves without having to wipe not their enemies’ but their friends’ (and random bystanders’) guts out of the upholstery?
And that’s also sort of the “virtual” economic that Zizek talks about being outside of the “actual” economic, in which the Real is sublimated back into language– through, as Noah says, none of us escaping judgment as criminals, as well as victims. The Imaginary (which is pretty closely aligned with the visual) is where that can happen, in a somewhat unique way. The Symbolic part can be too much thinking for some people, and the Imaginary part can be too much imagining for others, but it’s still a worthwhile, if perverse, aesthetic gesture.
One way of restating Noah’s point is that Caro may have zero trust in appropriation-style art, that any point is just transparently ironic farcical bullshit. Which was how I used to look at “cool” (not in the MacLuhan sense) contemporary culture, but for a while now I’ve gone on the assumption that all art appropriates, and there’s no more reason to second-guess a story, even if it’s brutal, when it’s telling you it’s about something. Here’s Noah and I on the remake of Funny Games versus She Spits On Your Grave: http://darkshapesrefer.blogspot.com/2010/10/black-beacon-in-blinding-storm-or.html
If there’s an outside to Pulp Fiction, it’s not a viewer terrified petrified and abused by discourse, or Jules living his life after the narrative, it’s the racial and religious and social narratives that create gangster fiction. I will refrain from talking at length about Tupac.
I am certainly not dismissing anyone’s anxiety in the presence of art, though. But that needs its own discussion, in terms of chickens and eggs.
It’s “I Spit on Your Grave.” Important difference in who you’re identifying with there!
Here’s a response I offered when you talked about justified violence in terms of Niebuhr. I invoked Weil and said: “Brutality just projects itself, it’s always spilling over. Which absolutely doesn’t excuse anyone– rather, it convicts everyone. It can only be tricked, as it’s a function of desire.”
But yeah– I got “She Spits” from Bloom County– I always confuse it, and I shouldn’t.
And we talked about Tarantino (relative to Funny Games) too (not that anyone cares anymore). I said:
“I think it’s worth bringing in Quentin Tarantino here. His movies are full of consciously aesthicized brutality that comments on aestheticized brutality, and he takes a lot of flak for it. But his end result is humor, not horror. Not that I object, quite the opposite. But he uses humor, as well as the righteous vengeance fantasy, so that probably makes him more palatable.”
And you said:
“Tarantino is very interested in reasons, though, and in individuals. His characters are never just supercompetent avatars of evil; on the contrary, his evil characters tend to be doofuses and fuck-ups. He has a sense of karma, too; not just vengeance — that is, one’s actions tend to have an effect. You get what you do.”
True. This, however–
Someone who, say, throws her twin sister down a well in order to impersonate her is, to my mind, an extremely violent criminal. Soap opera scripts would be a lot shorter without sociopaths. Soaps always have large, varied, rotating casts, so they do present a variety of perspectives, but they also routinely put the viewer in a criminal’s place.
Bert:
Why? I want to hear about Tupac.
Yeah, actually…you should write at length about Tupac and then I could print it as a post, Bert.