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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 181 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 181, December 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Pulp Fiction
Dir: Quentin Tarantino
The films of Hollywood whizz kid Quentin Tarantino have revitalised the ongoing debate about screen violence. His latest, Pulp Fiction, has divided the critics, as did his Reservoir Dogs. Some have argued that with the unabashed portrayal of routine gangland violence and the elevation of hitmen and hoodlums into heroes, the films degrade human life and betray traditional values. Others have hailed them as authentic portrayals of contemporary life in the raw, against the background of social decay.
The two hitmen in Pulp Fiction are for most of the film ruthless killers, yet they are portrayed as rather dashing figures. The films rely overwhelmingly on inner city atmosphere and fast moving, admittedly brilliant, dialogue. But the danger of over-reliance on street dialogue is that the mobsters become glamorised. Certain scenes descend to the level of farce, such as when they have to clean a car flooded with blood following an accidental shooting in which the head of a third man has been blown off. Here Tarantino is guilty of trivialising violence.
His characters, both here and in Reservoir Dogs, are not explored in any depth. There is little attempt to arouse our interest in or sympathy with them, except in the most superficial way. When one (John Travolta) gets his come uppance it is conveyed in the spirit of ‘you win some, you lose some’. And when the second (Samuel Jackson) experiences a religious crisis it is simply not believable. Ultimately, because it is difficult to really care about the characters, the films risk ending up simply reinforcing current fears of contemporary urban violence stoked up in the popular media. They are in danger of becoming fodder for the law and order lobby.
By contrast, films on a similar subject by directors such as Francis Coppola or Martin Scorsese have created rounded characters that help us grasp what made America the kind of society it is. Such films are able to both move and shock through their portrayal of a world of brutality and corruption where aping the rich and powerful has always been seen as an option.
In The Godfather Part I Coppola offers us two views of the Corleone family: from the inside we see them as real, even charismatic personalities, with their own motives and conflicts; from the outside they are depicted as steeped in a moral code based on greed and violence, a microcosm of American capitalism. The Godfather Part II transformed our perception of organised crime, suggesting parallels between the Mafia and any profit oriented corporation.
Scorsese’s Mean Streets shows small time hoods embedded in the Italian community living on the edge of the American dream as they aspire to make it either in business or crime. In his Goodfellas the brutality of the main character was shaped by a childhood of systematic deprivation and violent abuse from a father ground down by poverty and chronic insecurity.
In the film of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, detective Philip Marlowe’s crackling dialogue expresses a hardboiled cynicism that exposes the connections between the Californian upper class and lower level gangsterism.
Tarantino has nothing significant to say about contemporary America, other than that its inner cities have become cesspits of violence – hardly a challenging notion in the 1990s.
He ends up giving us glitzy films whose violence is not related to its social roots. We don’t understand, and he is apparently not really interested in, what made his mobsters the kind of men they are, or how the mob is part of a wider social world.
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