And Michael Moore is still out there wondering why America is so violent.

Rating: Null/10 (24 October 2003)

For more than thirty years all important American films (and I include musicals and comedies) have been preoccupied with the realistic depiction of the gangster lifestyle and the glorification of greed, violence, sadism, firearms, cars, dismemberment and disembowelling as modes of self-expression or a way of life. This thirty year period of continuous lowering of moral, aesthetic and human standards had to culminate somewhere and it did in the personality of a terminally adolescent movie geek forever fixated on his masturbatory fantasies of celluloid sadomasochism. Quentin Tarantino has misspent his youth cosily sheltered from real life, in dank movie houses, obsessing over the kind of ultra-violent and ultra-nerdy cinema cranked out for the planet's social rejects and epsilons. He is now considered mainstream and the darling of Western intellectuals. When he crawled back under the rock from whence he first emerged, his fans worried. When he finally came out bearing a new opus, like Moses bearing the tablets of the law, it was nothing less than the ultimate legal snuff film for the Grand Theft Auto and MTV generation of immature and imperfectly-socialized twits and a triumph with critics and at the box-office. Nobody seems to mind that, like all his previous films and scripts, his last one is a soul-destroying and gene-altering abomination, not to mention a major rip in the space-time continuum, as long as the teenagers - who are not legally permitted to watch his movies - can get their jollies watching uniformed criminal-type chicks lopping off each other's body parts while blood spurts every which way. But this is considered OK in polite circles because (1) it is well done, (2) it is funny in a kind of mindless, slack-jawed, socially irresponsible way and (3) this type of violence refers to an existing nerdy sub-genre of adolescent fantasy (kung fu movies, triad movies, what have you), which makes it a bona fide cultural artefact worthy of anthropological study. No one seems to mind either that, reportedly, irony and decadence have been pronounced dead after September 11, 2001. Nothing hinders art's progress, after all. Tarantino would still be popular - and probably more so - if he admitted to having single-handedly warped the minds of all of America's youth and his responsibility for society's widespread desensitization to gore, murder, violence and the suffering of others.