Panelists:
M.C. Gensheimer
Shawn Clerkin
Michael DeSanctis
Presentation – April 30, 1999 2:30 Palumbo
 
 
 
 
 
 

Paper Outline:
I. Introduction.
II. History of Quentin Tarantino
III. Sam Peckinpah – The Wild Bunch
A. Storyline
B. Critics views on violence in this film
IV. Stanley Kubrick – A Clockwork Orange
A. Storyline
B. Critics views on violence in this film
V. Martin Scorsese – Taxi Driver
A. Storyline
B. Critics views on violence in this film
VI. Quentin Tarantino
A. Reservoir Dogs
1. Storyline
2. Critics views on violence in this film
B. Pulp Fiction
1. Storyline
2. Critics views on violence in this film
VII.  Conclusion
 
 

PULP/’polp/n.  1.   A soft, moist, shapeless mass of matter.
2. A magazine or book containing lurid subject matter and being characteristically printed on rough, unfinished paper.

    The resurgence of violence in pulp films is being justified as the consequence of violence in previous pulp films and the man who is leading the way is Quentin Tarantino. Quentin Tarantino’s 90’s style of movies is a product of the past with references to the present pop-culture.
    The definition at the top of the page is seen at the opening of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and both definitions hold true for this genre of movies.  The first definition talks of shapeless masses of matter and in a sense Tarantino’s works are just that.  With his abnormal twists and turns of plots it leaves the illusion that the outcome is unpredictable and the feeling that his movies are (at least for the most part of each movie) shapeless masses of matter because of their unpredictability.  The other definition refers to “lurid subject matter”, which is exactly what each of Tarantino’s movies contain.  In this world of “lurid crime fiction”, as Tarantino calls it, the separation between straight and twisted isn’t just tainted, it’s non-existent.
History of Quentin Tarantino
     Quentin Tarantino was born on March 27,1963 in Knoxville, Tennessee.  He was then the son of a 16-year-old nursing student, Connie and a 21-year-old law student and aspiring actor Tony.  When Quentin was 2, they moved to South Los Angeles, which is where Quentin grew up.  His mother took him to the cinema from an early age.  He saw Carnal Knowledge at the age of 8 and Deliverance at the age of 9.  From this early introduction Tarantino fell in love with the cinema and went at every opportunity.
    At the age of 22, he landed a job for what is widely considered as one of the best video stores in the world, Manhattan Beach’s Video Archives in California (Harrigan, 2).  This is where he was introduced to the westerns of Sam Peckinpah, the futuristic style of Stanley Kubrick, and the mobster movies of Martin Scorsese.  Video Archives was where Quentin and Roger Avery, who helped Quentin write Pulp Fiction, spent all day watching, discussing, and recommending videos.  He made his first film (which was never finished) in 1986, My Best Friend’s Birthday, written with acting class friend Craig Hamann.  He then followed My Best Friend’s Birthday by writing his first script, True Romance, a year later.  By 1988, Tarantino had written his second script, Natural Born Killers.  Natural Born Killers was directed by Oliver Stone who has expressed his admiration of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.  Actually, Natural Born Killers is a variation of A Clockwork Orange on the theme: criminal mind exposed to media as treatment here, becomes criminal mind exposed to media criminal (Kagan, 15).  In 1990, Tarantino sold the script for True Romance for $50,000.  He decide to use this money to make his third script, called Reservoir Dogs on 16mm and in black and white with his friends in the leading roles.  It was around this point that Tarantino left the video store to do rewrites for CineTel, a small Hollywood production company.  Tarantino then met Lawrence Bender, who was attending acting classes with Peter Flood, who knew Harvey Keitel from the Actors Studio.  Keitel saw the script for Reservoir Dogs and was impressed enough to raise some more finance, act in the film and help Tarantino cast main roles like Keitel as Mr. White, Steve Buschemi as Mr. Pink, Tim Roth as Mr. Orange, and Michael Madsen as Mr. Blonde.
     In 1991, Tarantino filmed some scenes at the Sundance Film Festival with himself playing the role of Mr. White and Steve Buschemi playing Mr. Pink.  These scenes were shown to various film people to comment on and the group was particularly impressed.  Reservoir Dogs finally premiered at Sundance ‘92 before appearing at various film festivals around the World.  Although Reservoir Dogs did not fare well at Sundance ‘92 it was picked up by Miramax for distribution and was released in the U.S. later in 1992, and in the U.K. on January 8, 1993.  Tarantino traveled around to various festivals promoting his film and writing his next script, Pulp Fiction.
     After Pulp Fiction was completed it premiered in 1994 at the Cannes film festival where it won the Palme D’Or, which is virtually equal to the Best Picture at the Academy Awards (www.us.imdb.com).  Pulp Fiction opened in the U.S. on October 21, 1994.  Pulp Fiction went on to become one of the most highly acclaimed movies of 1994, grossing over 200 million dollars worldwide.
     In 1995, Tarnatino directed one fourth of the anthology Four Rooms with friends and fellow directors Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriquez, and Allison Aners.  Four Rooms was released on December 25th of that year in the United States.  In 1996, Tarantino followed Four Rooms by helping Robert Rodriquez create From Dusk ‘til Dawn, a crime/vampire film that Tarantino wrote and co-starred with George Clooney.  And in 1997 Tarantino released his fourth movie as a director called Jackie Brown.

C. Sam Peckinpah – The Wild Bunch
    “Listen, killing is no fun,” director Sam Peckinpah declared.  “I was trying to show what the hell it’s like to get shot.” (Knight, 1)  The film Peckinpah is referring to here is his controversial and ultraviolent western The Wild Bunch (1969).  It was shocking because it was so innovative in technique, especially in the way Peckinpah choreographed the action sequences; shots were repeated, and scenes were filmed at different speeds (Fine, 5).  But most of all, just as in Pulp Fiction, A Clockwork Orange, Taxi Driver, and Reservoir Dogs, what was shocking about The Wild Bunch was that the bad guys were the heroes.
    The Wild Bunch opens as five ruffians dressed as U.S. Cavalrymen enter a small Texas border town, circa 1913.  Pike Bishop (William Holden) is the leader, followed by Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine), the Gorch brothers, Lyle (Warren Oates) and Tector (Ben Johnson), Crazy Lee (Bo Hopkins), and Angel (Jaime Sanchez.)  As the group enters the railroad building, a ring of gunmen perched on the rooftops prepares to shoot.  These men are working for railroad executive Pat Harrigan (Albert Dekker) and his lieutenant, Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), who is under the constant threat from Harrigan that he’ll be returned to jail if he doesn’t follow orders.  Pike and his wild bunch realize that they’re surrounded, and the violence begins.  Everyone ignores Harrigan and Thornton’s order to stop shooting, and as the slaughter escalates, Pike and most of his men ride out of town with the railroad company’s moneybags.
     What’s left of the bunch (two have died) gathers at a small ranchero run by an old gunslinger named Sykes (Edmond O’Brien), only to realize that the bags they stole were filled with worthless washers.  With the bounty hunters at their heels, the bunch hooks up with Mapache (Emilio Fernandez), a bandit who has stolen Angel’s girlfriend.  When Angel shoots his ex-girlfriend, Mapache thinks he tried to assassinate him.  Pike fortunately intervenes and saves Angel’s life.  The argument settles, and Mapache offers Pike a job; he wants the bunch to hijack a munitions train for gold.  Pike accepts; not only does he succeed, he manages to elude Thornton and Deke’s bounty hunters each time they close in on him.  It turns out there’s more to this hunt; it’s also a personal vendetta.  Pike and Deke were once friends, and during an ambush, Deke got caught, but Pike managed to escape.
     Pike soon discovers that Mapache wants the ammunitions without compensation, and he threatens to blow up the convoy; Mapache is amused by this and agrees to pay.  The bandit-general invites the bunch for a celebration during which Pike wants to make a move to free Angel; the general slashes his throat, and a bloodbath begins.  Everyone is slaughtered.  Thornton rides in with his bounty hunters and collects the bodies of the men the railroad wants.  The bounty hunters ride off to claim their reward and Thornton stays behind.  All along, Sykes and Thornton had been silent partners.
 This final bloodbath sequence set new standards in film violence.  According to special-effects specialist and property master Phil Ankrum (Warga), more (blank) ammunition was used for the battle sequence-some ninety thousand rounds-than was used during the entire Mexican revolution of 1913!  One of the reasons for this excessive use of firearms and bullets was the presence of “Brownie,” a 1909 machine gun rented from a Hollywood prop house for the film’s production.  For that final sequence, special-effects men also used over three thousand squibs.
     The final shoot-out was known among the crew and cast members as the “Battle of the Bloody Porch” because it required that they “kill” so many people.  The shooting of this sequence took eleven days.  At first, Peckinpah had no clue as to how he was going to film the climatic ending, so he decided to shoot each shot from all possible angles.  The editing of this scene was crucial, and Peckinpah, by using slow motion and repeating certain shots, broke new ground in the depiction of screen violence (Warga).  There are approximately thirty-seven hundred editing cuts in The Wild Bunch, more than in any other film shot in Technicolor.
     The Wild Bunch is awe-aspiring, something that transcends the normal levels and reaches a virtually unheard of stage that many call “beautiful” and is even referred to as a “blood ballet”.  But Peckinpah never intended for the violence in The Wild Bunch to be seen as “beautiful.”  He wanted it to be as horrifying and gruesome as true violence is.  According to Peckinpah, violence is “ugly, brutalizing, and bloody fucking awful.  It’s not fun and games and cowboys and Indians.  It’s a terrible, ugly thing.  And yet there’s a certain response that you get from it, an excitement, because we’re all violent people, we have violence within us...I think everybody will be a little sickened by it (The Wild Bunch), at least I hope so, or a little dismayed, at least dismayed--which is the affect that I’m trying for.” (Horton, 5)
     The most heated debate over the violence in The Wild Bunch took place during a near-raucous press conference.  After a particular screening, the press became violent about the film’s violence.  During the conference, the movie’s creators met with the critics to discuss and justify their intentions, since at that particular time in Hollywood history, The Wild Bunch had gained the reputation as the most violent American movie ever made.  Producer Phil Feldman (Gilliat, 24) defended the film: “We tend to look away from our violence, as we look away from hunger in America.  But these things must be looked at squarely.”  “But do the ends justify the means?” someone asked.  “Truth is not beautiful,” Feldman replied. “The entertainment industry has the right and duty to depict reality as it is.  If audiences react against the reality that is shown, it may prove therapeutic.”  Peckinpah, who showed up when the press conference had already started, made a very short statement and declared he didn’t even want to be there.  “I think we deserve an answer to the simple question as to whether Mr. Peckinpah enjoys violence,” one voice asked.  Peckinpah, reluctantly, answered: “Alright-my idea was that it would have a cathartic effect.  No, I don’t like violence.  In fact, when I look at the film myself, I find it unbearable.  I don’t think I’ll be able to see it again for five years…I tried to emphasize the sense of horror and agony that violence provides.  Violence is no game.”

D. Stanley Kubrick –A Clockwork Orange
     Set in England in the future, the film is about a young delinquent, Alex Delarge (Malcolm McDowell), whose “principal interests are rape, ultraviolence, and Beethoven”-or Ludwig van, as Alex likes to refer to him.  We follow Alex and his droogs through a night of crime, which includes an assault on a bum, a fight with a rival gang, and the savage rape of a woman in front of her husband, a writer and politician named M.Alexander (Patrick Magee), whom Alex brutalizes while chanting “Singin’ in the Rain.”
     Alex still lives with his folks, and the following morning, he is visited by P.R. Deltoid (Aubrey Morris), a social worker who keeps a close eye on him and who warns him that his droogs are going to get him into trouble.  Later, Alex has a quick orgy, some good old “in-out, in-out,” as he calls it, with two girls he has picked up at a record store.  That day, Alex’s droogs rebel against him; they’re not sure they want him as their leader anymore.  However, he beats them up as a fast way to end the argument.  In the evening, Alex breaks into the house of a woman (Miriam Karlin) who raises cats and collects sculptures.  He attacks her and smashes her face with one of her artworks.  On his way out, his droogs smash a bottle of milk in his face and run away, leaving Alex to deal with the cops.  The cat lady dies, and Alex is sent to prison for murder.     There he volunteers to become a guinea pig for the Ludivico Technique, a behavioristic barrage of electrical impulses and snuff films that cripples him with nausea at the thought of sex, violence, or the sound of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that accompanies the treatment (Bishop, 57).  Alex ultimately is sent back into the real world, transformed into a “clockwork orange” (an expression derived from old Cockney slang: “Queer as a clockwork orange”) with no free will of his own and described now “as decent a lad as you would meet on a May morning” by the minister of the interior (Anthony Sharp) who, to win an upcoming election, becomes an advocate of the Luovico Technique.
 Rejected by his family, Alex wanders the streets and is attacked by the same bum he once beat up.  He is rescued by two of his former droogs, who’ve since become cops.  They decide to teach him a lesson and torture him.  Beaten and battered, Alex reaches the house of M. Alexander, who was left a crippled widower since the night he and his wife were attacked.  Alexander realizes who his unexpected guest is and decides to use him to overthrow the government making him a victim of the Ludovico Technique.  When his host blasts Beethoven from his stereo, Alex tries to commit suicide.  His “victim status” brings him full circle, and he is recovered from the Ludovico Technique and returned to a life of ultraviolence with the blessing of the minister of the interior himself.
     A Clockwork Orange was based on a 1962 novel by Anthony Burgess.  Actually, to be more exact, the film is based on the American edition of the book.  It did not include the last chapter of the British edition, which showed Alex bored with senseless violence and deciding to become a father rather than destroy.  “The book isn’t really about violence,” Burgess declared (Christopher, 31).  “It’s about the curing of violence.  That’s what the title suggests: a mechanical, inflexible system imposed on a juicy, organic whole.  It’s about the danger of taking over and using regressive Pavlovian techniques in order to burn violence out.”  Readers of the book and film audiences alike did not quite catch that the story was about free will and about the necessity to be free even if freedom means breaking the moral law.  Stanley Kubrick, who wrote the script, followed closely the structure of the novel, although, again, he decided to ignore the final chapter, which he read when he was already far into the production of his film.  He admitted being shocked at Burgess’s tacked-on “happy ending,” which he felt did not even have the same satiric tone as the rest of the novel and which he suspected had been written under pressure from the publisher. (Christopher, 32)
     Like The Wild Bunch, Taxi Driver, Reservoir Dogs, and Pulp Fiction, Kubrick’s film was told from the point of view of the antihero.  To make matters worse, Alex narrates the story directly to the audience, calling for sympathy toward his most brutal actions.  In a sense, and as Kubrick has said many times, Alex is like Richard III (“Kubrick’s version of Clockwork Orange”).  He is a character you like and fear at the same time; you’re repulsed and attracted to him, like John Travolta in Pulp Fiction.  “Alex’s adventures are a kind of psychological myth,” Kubrick said.  “Our subconscious finds release in Alex, just as it finds release in dreams.  It resents Alex being stifled and repressed by authority, however mush of our conscious mind recognizes the necessity of doing this.” (“Kubrick’s version of Clockwork Orange”)  He explained that Alex is the symbol of the natural man in the state in which he is born, unlimited and unrepressed.  The Ludovico treatment symbolizes the conflict between the structures imposed by our society and our primal natures.  “This is why we feel exhilarated when Alex is ‘cured’ in the final scene,” Kubrick said.  The director’s philosophy assumes that man is born bad and society makes him worse and that human nature is closer to an animal’s instinct.
The Ludovico Technique is yet another fascinating aspect of A Clockwork Orange.  It uses film clips to permanently produce in Alex disgust for ultraviolence and sex.  He is forced to watch newsreel footage of Nazi’s, films of a woman being raped, and clips of a men being beaten up.  “So far, the first film was a very good professional piece of sinny, like it was done in Hollywood,” Alex comments in a voice-over narration (A Clockwork Orange).  “The sounds were real horror show.  You could slooshy the screams and moans very realistic, and you could even get the heavy breathing and panting of tolchoking malchicks (boys) at the same time.”  Later, Alex concludes: “It was beautiful.  It’s funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen.”  Ironically, what Kubrick is saying is that the more we, the audience, are exposed to screen violence, the more we’ll be disgusted by it.  Like Alex, we might enjoy it at first because it only seems real: but the more we watch, the more it begins to resemble reality.  Curiously, the movie had the opposite effect on many people who saw it.  In fact, certain violence occurring in society began to be related back to A Clockwork Orange.
In Indianapolis, gangs of four, dressed in the manner of A Clockwork Orange, raped nuns and pummeled senior citizens.  In England, within weeks of the film’s release, youth gangs, on the prowl, dressed like Alex and his droogs, wearing bowler hats, white overalls, and combat boots and sporting long false eyelashes on one eye.  In one case, a young woman was raped by a teen gang who sang “Singin’ in the Rain,” just as Alex and his droogs did in the movie.  In another case, a sixteen-year-old wearing a droog-like costume was convicted of a savage beating.  Every outbreak of juvenile delinquency was dubbed as “A Clockwork Orange-style incident.”  Anthony Burgess said: “From the film of A Clockwork Orange youth did not learn aggression: It was aggressive already.  What it did learn was a style of aggression, a mode of dressing violence up in a new way, a piquant sauce to season the raw meat of kicks, biffs, and razor slashings.” (Christopher, 31)
At that point, Kubrick began receiving death threats and decided to pull the film out of distribution in England.  As late as 1993, A Clockwork Orange was still forbidden in England.  When interviewed in 1993 about A Clockwork Orange, Burgess said that with the amount of ultraviolence he was seeing in films and especially on TV, he believed that art could be dangerous.  (“There are no human beings in American detective series, merely cops and killers,” he once wrote().)  Similar to what Peckinpah had once said, Kubrick replied, “Man isn’t a noble savage.  He is irrational, brutal, weak, unable to be objective about anything, where his own interests are involved…and any attempt to create social institutions to a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure.”

Martin Scorsese – Taxi Driver
    In Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) is a loner, an alienated, uncommunicative Vietnam veteran who has insomnia and decides to take a job as a taxi driver on the night shift.  He takes his passengers anywhere; he doesn’t care: “It don’t make no difference to me.” (Taxi Driver) He occasionally joins other cabbies, including Wizard (Peter Boyle), and discusses his experiences.  One day, he catches sight of Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), an attractive young campaign worker for presidential candidate George Palantine (Leonard Harris).  He stares at Betsy from the street, but drives away when he spots Tom (Albert Brooks), her coworker.  Later, he acquires a gun, rationalizing that it’s for self-protection.
 Travis begins pursuing Betsy and goes as far as volunteering his help for the campaign.  He’s turned down but gets a date with Betsy, who is cautious and intrigued by him.  Travis takes her to a porn theater, then Betsy gets disgusted and storms out.  His attempts to see her again are worthless.  The rejection contributes to his belief that the world is ugly and corrupt, so he buys more guns.  He writes to his parents that he is on a secret mission for the government and is dating Betsy.
     One night, Travis finds himself in the midst of a holdup.  He pulls out a gun and shoots the robber; the act earns him the nickname “killer” among his fellow cabbies.  He then becomes involved with a fourteen-year-old hooker, Iris (Jodie Foster), and wants to save her from her pimp, Sport (Harvey Keitel), and from the old man (Murray Moston) who works with him.  Travis shows up at a Palantine rally sporting a Mohawk haircut and with the intention of shooting the presidential candidate.  He is spotted by Secret Service men but manages to escape.  He finally snaps and goes on a wild shooting spree.  He guns down Sport and a cop who is with Iris.  He tries to shoot himself but he’s run out of bullets.  Travis is hailed a hero in the press, and Iris is reunited with her parents.  Back on the job one night, Travis finds Betsy jumping into his cab but this time she shows him respect.
     As with most controversial films, critics were split on Taxi Driver.  Many reviews acknowledged Scorsese’s talents as well as De Niro’s in his portrayal of Travis Bickle, but many were disturbed by the violence.  Some found it “beautiful” and adequate, while others thought the violence-especially the final bloodbath-was gratuitous and exploitative: “Unfortunately, social comment does not come easily to him (Scorsese),” wrote Richard Schickel in Life magazine (Schickel, 64), “and the strain shows.  It is a conflict he can resolve only in a violence that seems forced and –coming after so much dreariness-ridiculously pyrotechnical.”  John Simon of New York magazine took his argument even further (Simon, 72): “The concluding violence (though Scorsese toned it down to avoid an X rating) is perhaps not so much excessively gruesome as lingered over with excessive enjoyment of the gruesomeness.  Its almost slobberingly repetitive and protracted rehashing of images of blood and horror is ghoulish…”
     The strongest criticism of the film’s violence came from writer Thomas Thompson in a Los Angeles Times article he entitled “Worse Yet, the Audience Cheered.  An Outburst of Gratuitous Movie Gore.” (Thompson)  At the beginning of his article, he recalled walking out on Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and then switching the TV off when his  teenage sons were watching Magnum Force (1973), the second Dirty Harry movie, and how his son argued that, as a Writer, he should oppose censorship.  When Thompson walked out on Taxi Driver, he declared that what truly horrified him most was that the audience seemed to enjoy the film’s violence: “When the De Niro character first assumed a menacing karate stance early in the film, many yelled support.  Then, as he played with guns and embraced them as lovers, there was laughter.  Not derision, mind you, laughter.  And, unless I am very wrong it was the laughter of understanding and approval.  Indeed, when the taxi driver began his slaughter in the whorehouse, the theatre erupted in applause and cheering.”
 Thompson declared that writers and directors should be concerned by what comes before and after a violent act, not with the act itself.  He concluded his venomous article by quoting Jodie Foster, who supposedly had told a reporter that she “thought that the violence was fun” and that it was her favorite part of the film.  Thompson seemed to be missing the whole point of the movie simply by comparing Taxi Driver to Magnum Force.  Maybe the fact that audiences were cheering at the violence in the film was showing just how valid and accurate the movie was.
     “I was shocked by the way audiences took the violence,” declared Scorsese (Thompson, 149).  “Previously, I’d been surprised by audience reaction to The Wild Bunch, which I first saw in a Warner Bros. Screening room with a friend and loved it.  But a week later I took some friends to see it in a theater, and it was as if the violence became an extension of the audience and vice versa.  I saw Taxi Driver once in a theater, on the opening night, I think, and everyone was yelling and screaming at the shoot-out.  When I made it, I didn’t intend to have the audience react with that feeling. ‘Yes, do it!  Let’s go out and kill.’  The idea was to create a violent catharsis so that they’d find themselves saying, ‘Yes, kill’; and then afterwards realize, ‘My God, no’-like some strange Californian therapy session.  That was the instinct I went with, but it’s scary to hear what happens with the audience.”  Scorsese saw the final bloodbath as Travis’s attempt to stop these people once and for all.  For Paul Schrader, it was a kind of Samurai death with honor.  If Schrader had directed that final sequence, Scorsese revealed, he would have wanted even more blood to give the scene a more surrealistic effect (Thompson, 78).  “What I wanted,” Scorsese explained, “was a Daily News situation, the sort you read about everyday:  three men killed by lone man, who saves young girl from them.”

Quentin Tarantino-Reservoir Dogs
    In 1992 a new film era began when a movie fanatic named Quentin Tarantino made Reservoir Dogs.  Clearly influenced by Martin Scorsese, and more specifically, by The Killing, Stanley Kubrick’s 1956 heist movie, Reservoir Dogs is a striking, disturbing, and violent piece of filmmaking. It is filmed in real time with the exception of a few flashbacks.  The story is about Joe Cabot (Lawrence Tierney) and his son Nice Guy Eddie (Chris Penn), who hire six men with experience to pull a heist at a Los Angeles jewelry store.  The men are assigned color-themed names so that no one will know the other’s identity: Mr. White (Harvey Keitel), Mr. Orange (Tim Roth), Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi), Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen), Mr. Brown (writer-director Quentin Tarantino), and Mr. Blue (Eddie Bunker).
     The heist goes wrong, and it becomes obvious that the cops have been tipped off.  Two of the robbers and a couple of cops are killed, and the gang gets separated in the heat of the moment.  Mr. White brings the injured Mr. Orange to a warehouse (incidentally, a former mortuary in real life); they are joined by Mr. Pink and psycho Mr. Blonde, who shows up with a hostage, a cop.  Left alone with a bleeding Mr. Orange and the cop, Mr. Blonde tortures his hostage by slicing off the man’s ear with a straight razor.  Ultimately, Joe Cabot and Nice Guy Eddie arrive to identify the rat.  There’s a shoot-out.   Mr. Pink tries to flee with the loot but is caught by the police.  Mr. White finds out that Mr. Orange was an undercover cop and kills him.  The cops walk in and gun down Mr. White.
     “I wanted Reservoir Dogs to feel like a book, with chapter headings for the various back-and-forth scenes,” Quentin Tarantino declared (Smith, 40).  “There are separate stories as to how each character may or may not get away from the scene of the crime.  As the men are previously unknown to each other and there’s no clue as to who betrayed them, using different chapters was the only way to show the whole story.  The men have generic code names, and they are all dressed alike, but as the chapters unfold, you gain an understanding and insight into each character.”  Although Reservoir Dogs has a structure that has been used before, it definitely gave the film a rhythm that appealed to audiences.  The structure itself created suspense and tension, as you quickly realized that you could not predict when violence was going to occur.  The flashbacks also guaranteed Tarantino that the viewers wouldn’t get bored; it might have been otherwise if the story had been told chronologically.  Also evident was the gritty, often offensive, racist, and sexist dialogue; these men are certainly no angels, and while they deserve what’s coming to them, the audience has fun listening to their obscene expressions and to their raunchy interpretation of Madonna’s song “Like a Virgin.”  Not since Scorsese, had bad language been used so stylishly (McGregor, 23).  In addition to the film’s narrative structure and its dialogue, Reservoir Dogs has astonishing cinematography by Polish director of photography Andrzej Sekula and a startling soundtrack of seventies pop tunes which blend perfectly to the violence (McGregor, 23).
     If there is one scene that will be singled out as the most memorable moment, it has to be the ear-slicing scene.  Although the camera pans away as Michael Madsen starts cutting off the cop’s right ear, the scene remains almost unbearable to watch.  What you don’t see is sometimes more devastating than what you do see.  As the camera pulls back, you can still see Madsen’s arm going up and down, which leaves no confusion as to what’s happening to the cop.  You see the cop, tied to a chair with blood pouring out of his wound.  Then you see Madsen walk toward the camera, holding the poor fellow’s ear.  The victim is then showered with gasoline.  “There’s nobody who ever got a traffic ticket who’s not going to enjoy that scene someplace in their mind,” actor Madsen declared (Ansen, 32).

Pulp Fiction
     Pulp Fiction opens in a coffee shop where Honey Bunny (Amanda Plummer) and Pumpkin (Tim Roth) are having breakfast.  They’re in love and discussing a career move; they’re tired of robbing liquor stores.  It’s time to get more ambitious and start sticking up restaurants.  They kiss and stand up, holding guns and announcing to the other customers to get their wallets ready if they want to live.
     In a segment entitled “Vincent Vega and Marcellus Wallace’s Wife,” we meet Marcellus (Ving Rhames), a mobster and Jules and Vincent’s boss.  Vincent is asked by Marcellus to take care of his wife, Mia (Uma Thurman), while he’s away.  Vincent and Mia enjoy a nice dinner at Jack Rabbit Slim’s and then they return home.  Vincent uses Mia’s bathroom and when he returns to the living room, Mia has overdosed on his heroin.  He takes her to the home of his dealer, Lance (Eric Stoltz), and with the help of Lance’s wife (Rosanna Arquette), they plunge a giant hypodermic needle of adrenaline into Mia’s chest which brings her back to life.
     In another segment, “The Good Watch,” we’re introduced to prizefighter Butch Coolidge (Bruce Willis), who has been paid by Marcellus to throw a bout.  He decides to double-cross the mob boss and runs away with Fabienne (Maria De Medeiros), his French girlfriend.  But Butch discovers that Fabienne forgot to pack the watch that was given to him as a kid by Koons (Christopher Walken), his dead father’s Vietnam platoon leader.  In his apartment to retrieve it Butch finds himself face-to-face with Vincent.  Without a blink, Butch shoots him and flees.  On the way back to their motel to pick up Fabienne, he literally runs into Marcellus Wallace; a chase begins, and the two men end up beating each other up in a pawnshop run by a southerner, who is into heavy S and M.  He hits Butch (who has knocked out Marcellus) with the butt of a shotgun, ties up Butch and Marcellus, gags them, and invites his brother Zed over to join the party.  While the brothers sodomize Marcellus, Butch is guarded by “the Gimp,” a slave dressed in full S and M gear, complete with zippered mask.  Butch frees himself, kills one of the brothers, and Marcellus shoots the surviving rapist in the genitals.  Marcellus and Butch are now even.  Butch takes off while Marcellus says he’s gonna go “medieval” on the rapist’s ass.
 In the last segment, “Jules, Vincent, Jimmie & the Wolf,” we actually go back in time and rejoin Jules and Vincent on their assignment in the apartment of the double-crossers.  They kill two men and take Marvin, Marcellus’s informant, with them.  A fourth emerges from the bathroom and fires at them point-blank before he is himself killed.  Jules cannot believe that he and Vincent are still alive; he thinks he just witnessed a miracle and vows to give up his life of crime.  But right now the pair must deliver the briefcase and Marvin, whom Vincent accidentally shoots in the car, splattering the inside of it with blood in broad daylight.  They stop at the home of Jimmie (Quentin Tarantino), Jules’s friend, and get the mess cleaned up under expert supervision and help from the Wolf (Harvey Keitel).
     The film comes full circle as Vincent and Jules are having breakfast at the same coffee shop which Pumpkin and Honey Bunny are holding up.  After a convincing speech about his newfound spirituality, Jules and Vincent walk away with the mysterious briefcase and return it to Marcellus.
     As the title implies, Pulp Fiction takes its inspiration from the popular, and often grisly, cheaply printed-and illustrated-crime fiction of the thirties and forties.  After the success of Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino decided to return to an old idea he’d had about writing three different stories, using the same characters, moving them in and out of these stories, and to have it all work together in one movie.  “The idea behind Pulp Fiction,” said Tarantino, “was to take the oldest situations in the book, the one’s you’ve seen a zillion times-the boxer who’s supposed to throw a fight and doesn’t, the mob guy who’s supposed to take the boss’s wife out for the evening.  The third story, ‘The Wolf,’ is basically the first five minutes of every Joel Silver movie.  Two hit men come and kill these guys, and then cut to Arnold Schwarzenegger a hundred miles away, and eventually the other stories converge.” (“The redemption of pulp”)
     As in Reservoir Dogs, there is a sort of timelessness about the look and feel of the film; putting aside pop-cultural references, the story could have easily taken place in any era.  It’s that peculiar style (as well as the narrative structure, the offbeat dialogue, and the dark humor) that makes Pulp Fiction enjoyable despite the nonstop violence (Kroll, 72).  The challenge with Pulp Fiction was to top Reservoir Dogs but also not to disappoint the audience’s expectation.  Tarantino was in the same position as Martin Scorsese was after Taxi Driver.  Also of concern was the level of violence in the film, which, by the time it was released, had become a publicist’s play for getting everyone to see the film.  For Tarantino, the dilemma was “Do I relish it (the violence) and want to go even further in that direction?  Or do I say, I’m gonna show you what I can do with a bedroom comedy-same kind of dialogue, same basic movie, but without the violence?  Well I think you’re kind of a fool going with either of those things.”  (Maheshwari)
 Pulp Fiction was well received, even by critics who had felt comfortable with Reservoir Dogs.  “When he offsets violent events with unexpected laughter,” Janet Maslin writes in the New York Times, “the contrast of moods becomes liberating, calling attention to the real choices the characters make.  Far from amoral or cavalier, these tactics force the viewer to abandon all preconceptions while under the film’s spell.”(Maslin)  David Ansen of Newsweek agreed that Pulp Fiction not only was a visual masterpiece but also had great depth of character: “It’s not just the plot twists that surprise, or the startling outbursts of violence, or the deft way that the most grisly scene can explode into black humor.  This is one crime movie that revels in the quotidian details of character.” (Ansen, 32)

Conclusion
     Whether it’s on the streets or on the news, violence is everywhere.  While few except criminals and psychopaths enjoy violence, many of us love it on films.  Although most people are not of the violent nature, it’s fair to say that most people have thought about using a bit of the “good old ultraviolence” on some of their enemies.  So it’s safe to agree with some psychiatrists who claim that watching violent movies can be a cathartic experience.  Of course, there is also the possibility that screen violence might have a reverse effect on certain individuals and inspire them to act out in real life some of the mayhem seen in movies.  Films take us to worlds we would never imagine.  In order to be commercially successful, they offer sensations that we don’t necessarily experience in our everyday life.  Watching violence in the safety of a theater or of our own homes can be as thrilling as a roller-coaster ride.  Through movies, we test our ability to face certain fears.
The approach may be new but the story remains the same.  Tarantino continues to give us the same blood and gore that previous ultraviolent directors have given us.  And with so much violence going on in movies today, you have to ask the question: Does violence add an aesthetic quality to films?  Tarantino would have to answer – it depends on it purpose.  Roger Shattuck of The Los Angeles Times writes, “ Art has best fulfilled a double purpose for centuries: to instruct and to delight.  Today, however, a third factor—art for art’s sake—complicates the picture.”(Shattuck, 6)  In movies like The Wild Bunch, A Clockwork Orange, Taxi Driver, Reservoir Dogs, and Pulp Fiction the violence is shown for violence’s sake.  It’s not meant to be pleasing or beautiful.  It’s meant to be violent-blood and guts.  Some critics still can not get over the fact that these are only movies not intended to promote violence but only to make their situations as real as possible.  These critics believe that there is no justification for this style of violence in film and that it brings nothing aesthetically pleasing to the eye.  Therefore, the directors who promote this violence should not be considered artists and have done nothing but fail the human race in our march towards a more peaceful world (Dargis, 8).   Tarantino said it best when he jokingly responded, “I don’t think these comments are anything to be afraid of.  Failure brings great rewards – in the life of an artist.”

Works Cited
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Fine, Marshall.  “Bloody Sam: The life and times of Sam Peckinpah.”  New York:  1991.
Gilliat, Penelope.  “The Wild Bunch.”  New Yorker.  July 5, 1969.
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Thompson, David and Ian Christie, eds.  “Scorsese on Scorsese.”  London:  Faber &
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