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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 182 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 182, January 1995.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Sabby Sagall’s humourless review of Quentin Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction (December SR) was a crude caricature of the attitude socialists should take towards cinema and the arts more generally.
Of course we have a political preference for Francis Coppola’s treatment of the violence of organised crime, but to compare Pulp Fiction with the Godfather films is more than a little disingenuous. In saying that Tarantino’s films ‘risk reinforcing current fears of contemporary urban violence stoked up in the popular media’, Sabby not only hugely overstates the case but misses the point as well.
Pulp Fiction is not primarily a film about organised crime in America, it is concerned with the mass media’s portrayal of gangland violence. Tarantino has produced a very funny, very human film which caricatures US society by holding a slightly distorted mirror up to its cinema and television industries.
Probably the best thing about Pulp Fiction is its absolute rejection of the still prevalent right wing idea of inherent evil. Tarantino’s gangland killers are utter lowlifes, but nevertheless their humour and their loyalty to their somewhat warped value systems reflect a basic humanity common to us all, no matter how much capitalist society might pervert that humanity.
Violence has always been used in a humorous way in cinema, and this is not necessarily a bad thing. A comic murder is funny precisely because it seems so far removed from ordinary life – and people still feel that it is, despite the ‘crime wave’ hysteria.
The Belgian black comedy Man Bites Dog, which included a comic murder and a rape scene, was much more problematic than Pulp Fiction. Audiences laughed at the murder, fell silent at the rape. This is obviously because the reality of rape cannot be abstracted and made funny.
Of course Quentin Tarantino offers no deep, revolutionary analysis of US society, but in saying that he therefore ‘has nothing significant to say about contemporary America’ Sabby Sagall risks sounding like a left wing version of Mary Whitehouse.
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