An In Movies comment on Quentin Tarantino, notes how his first movie, Reservoir Dogs, set a new standard for on-screen realism in brutality. It recalls:
One scene audiences found particularly disturbing was that in which Michael Madsen’s character, Mr. Blonde, gleefully dances to ‘Stuck in the Middle With You’ by Stealers Wheel while torturing Marvin Nash (Kirk Baltz) and cutting off his ear with a straight razor. During a screening of the movie at a Film Festival in Barcelona, fifteen people walked out, including renowned Horror film Director Wes Craven. Craven later told ReallyScary.com, ‘The reason I walked out of Reservoir Dogs was I felt like the filmmaker was enjoying the torture.’
Tarantino makes no bones about the fact that he personally enjoys to see extreme violence. Indeed he commented in a speech he presented at the British Academy of Film and Televison:
If a guy gets shot in the stomach and he\’s bleeding like a stuck pig then that’s what I want to see — not a man with a stomach ache and a little red dot on his belly.
Extreme violence has been a characteristic feature of other successful movies, including Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds. Rachel Thorpe astutely observes,
The increasing extremity of the horror genre is an attempt to re-awaken the technologically dulled emotions of an audience programmed to ‘switch off’ in front of the big screen.
Indeed, during the same speech referred to above, Tarantino boasted about how he manipulated people through his use of extreme violence, saying,
I feel like a conductor and the audience’s feelings are my instruments. I will be like, Laugh, laugh, now be horrified.
As Rachel Thorpe observes, many such films “no longer depict a desperate struggle between good and evil”, but rather “erode any sense of such moral categories, instead pitting good against chaos.” She finds “[the] effect is utterly dehumanising.”
However one might personally enjoy such movies we must be concerned at the underlying attack on ethical foundations that is often involved.
Posted October 15, 2010
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